| Last night, with Darling in tow, I went to a 60th birthday party for the friend I've known the longest, a guy with whom I played in the sandbox when we were two. He's about three months younger than I, and -- aside from my father, who's still alive and kicking -- this is the human I've known the longest.
We've seen each other through numerous girlfriends over those decades, and several marriages. Several years back I served as best man at his marriage to his present wife, to whom he's devoted -- an event I remember with considerable fondness because there were some fetching unattached women there.
None this time. Not only did no one there strike me as attractive, but the atmosphere struck me as positively geriatric. Aside from the offspring from the previous marriages of my friend and his loving spouse, and Darling herself, I saw no one under our age, and most of those in attendance had at least a few years on us.
"Who are all these old people?" I whispered in his ear at one juncture. He told me that they were friends and colleagues from specific circles in which he travels professionally -- too complicated to explain in detail, but it did make some sense in context. Yet it still struck me as strange, even unnerving.
In the circles in which I travel, personally and professionally, there are many people older than I am. I have quite a few good friends who predate me. My previous girlfriend, quite a sexpot, was a year older than I. So I have no ageist prejudice.
But the circles in which I travel also, as a matter of course, include people roughly my own age, and people younger than I, often considerably so. So it's rare to find myself in a group where I'm on the youngest end of the scale. And where no one strikes me as particularly sexy.
I didn't know most of these folks, but I had met a few of them before, at various events involving my friend (including his wedding). The ones I met for the first time last night seemed perfectly nice, with one weird exception. But I have to say that, excepting my friend and his wife and myself and Darling, I didn't feel a single spark of erotic energy in that apartment between stepping through the door on my way in and hugging my friend goodbye.
No doubt some of those folks have active sex lives. (I know that my friend and his wife do.) But I read people in part through the sexual energy they radiate, and if anyone there had any libidinal juice flowing they kept it well under wraps.
I couldn't wait to get out.
"Don't worry, honey," Darling told me when we got home. "I know your real age." And proceeded to fuck us both into insensibility.
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