I need a tan.

This may or may not be my ass, but either way, I'm white. Very, very white.

Jink and I had a quiet, relaxing afternoon. The temperature was nearly 70 degrees and the sun was shining. We picked up ice cream at Mary's Dairy--the best ice cream on the planet, in the author's humble opinion. The West Village was quiet in the lull before the weekend migration in from Long Island and New Jersey, when straight people by the tens of thousands will take their grandparents to shows and restaurants, vainly attempting to assure themselves that it's "okay" that they've settled down to suburban life. Because, you know, the city is just a bridge or tunnel away. Having dodged strollers on countless beautiful Saturdays in the Village, I found the quiet, good weather combination to be a delectable, albeit a tad eerie, treat. I savored it.

Struck by inspiration, I convinced Jink to take the short jaunt West to the Christopher Street Pier park. We found two empty chairs begging for us to sit in the sun and breeze. The conversation wandered from silly to serious and kept coming back to one topic: Summer. New Jersey looked beautiful from those chairs and tugboats dragging barges laden with huge cranes looked stately in the still-sharply-angled sun of late afternoon. Summer was undeniable this afternoon.

Of course, Jink and I made plans. That's what we do. Had we a calendar we would have been blocking out weekends. There will be the Jersey Shore. There will be Fire Island. There will be leather--judiciously and minimally applied. There will be trips to giant New Jersey supermarkets that cost half of what we'd spend in the city, and there will be meals cooked for friends who never knew we could do it so well. I confessed to a childhood filled with camping hundreds of miles away from civilization--preempting my own prissy complaints about fully-equipped gay campsites and a professed inability to live without room service.

This Summer I plan to get a tan the old fashioned way.