You're Not One of Those Judgmental Fags...

...but the State of New York tends to think otherwise since they have called you for *gasp* Jury Duty. So somehow you wake up early enough to get to the downtown Courthouse at 100 Centre Street by 8:45am, and you are absolutely shocked by the amount of people that are not only awake, but are actually out and about at that horrid hour. And as if Jury Duty wasn't bad enough, to add insult to injury, some lovely Civil Servant just had to go ahead and schedule your call immediately after Daylight Savings just stole an hour of your sleep-time! Talk about Cruel and Unusual Punishment.

Luckily a lot has changed since the last time you were called for your Civic Duty. Like the fact that you only need to serve two days unless, God forbid, you end up on a jury. And they have also installed free WiFi so you get to surf gay porn on the Internet using the tax-payers' dime! However, instead of surfing porn, you decide that you'd much rather be looking at Blonde Beard's smiling mug so you surf on over to Match.com to look up your boy's profile. Only when you search for his username you get this annoying message, "Oops! Was that username spelled correctly? Try again, and if you still receive this message, the member you're searching for may have a hidden profile or new username." So you do a search because you may have messed up the spelling since it's been a long time since you've been on this irritating website. You search by age and location and sort through all of the Beardless photos for your Hairy Boy's smiling mug. Only it isn't there... And then, after a moment or two of being both dumbfounded as well as just plain dumb, you realize that Blonde Beard must have hid or possibly even removed his profile! You, of course, hid yours soon after you met, but that had more to do with hating the entire irritating process of online dating than with thinking you had met Mr. Right. Even though, just about now, you are actually wondering if maybe you have met him? And the fact that Blonde Beard has recently pulled his profile makes you wonder if Mr. Might-Be-Right could be thinking the same thing about you?

And thanks to the free WiFi, that's when an email from Blonde Beard arrives in your inbox: "i just got a notice that YAZ is going to be performing in July in the city. want to go? i know that's a long way away, but alison moyet!" And forget the fact that you would cut off your right arm to see Yaz perform live twenty-five years after they broke up to form Erasure! Your jaw slackens while your heart simultaneously warms from Blonde Beard's confidence and assuredness that the two of you will still be together four months from now. Hell, during the past several years you haven't even dated anyone for more than three months! And had the tables been turned and you noticed that Yaz was reuniting for a tour before Blonde Beard did, you probably would have played it much safer and bought two tickets and waited till the time got closer to invite him. After all, you know from experience that there could be a lot of boys wandering through your slutty revolving doors between now and July! But you are duly impressed, so you accept his magnanimous offer (which is especially generous in spirit) with the full expectation that you will be together in July. And that's when they call your name to report to a Courtroom for fucking Jury Selection.

However, when Judge Judy starts describing the case you begin to have the full expectation that if you get selected for this case then you might actually miss the Yaz concert because you may still be sitting on this damn jury in July. Apparently some Rapper from the Bronx named Remy Ma has been accused of shooting her childhood friend in the Meatpacking District and then leaving her to bleed to death on 14th Street. Then (as if that wasn't enough) Ms. Ma has also been accused of threatening the witnesses about a month or so later. Judge Judy explains that this case should last about a month, and then she asks if anybody has any medical issues that would prevent them from being a Juror so your hand immediately goes up and luckily you are excused without question.

After Jury Duty you end up meeting Blonde Beard at the Rouge Bar, downstairs at Paris Commune, which seems awfully close to the scene of Ms. Ma's Attempt at Murder, so you make a bee-line to the bar to order a Gay Cocktail to calm your judicially frazzled nerves. Only when you walk into the bar you are accosted by just about everyone in the bar because they all seem to know, and love, Blonde Beard. For a moment you feel like you are in some parallel Gay YOUniverse so you begin looking around the gay Cheers for slimmer, bitchier versions of Cliff and Norm. Only Blonde Beard's friends aren't bitchy. At all. They all seem to be as thrilled to be meeting you as you are to meet them. But more importantly, they all seem not to be drug addicts.

When you finally make it downstairs and order your Gay Cocktail, you ask Blonde Beard how he knows absolutely everybody? And he explains that he is friends with the man who painted the amazing Moulin Rouge-y mural that surrounds you. Blonde Beard starts pointing out the famous caricatures of Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs along with other Fashionistas and one of the Lounge Singers who used to work at the bar. When you ask him why he knows so much about the mural he explains that he assisted the artist who painted it. And that's when he points out one of the characters in the mural and says, "Recognize him?" It takes you a moment, but you quickly realize that the Hot Hustler painted on the wall behind Blonde Beard is, in actuality, a beardless Blonde Beard!

After a few Gay Cocktails you end up closing your tab (which Blonde Beard insists on paying for) and you head down the block to grab some Chinese. Since you drank cocktails through the proper dinner hour, you are the only two boys in the entire restaurant, but it's nice because a) you're drunk, and b) nobody is breathing down your neck to hurry up so they can turn-over the table. Somehow you get onto the topic of ex-boyfriends and Blonde Beard starts talking about a really, really messy break-up. This, of course, piques your interest and you begin playing Twenty Questions. "Why was it so bad? Why did you break up?" And when Blonde Beard answers, "Drugs," you quickly find yourself smack in the middle of the conversation that you've been dying to have but were too terrified to broach. And for once in your life you decide to shut your trap and just listen. Blonde Beard explains, without any prodding from you, that the ex-boyfriend was a big Crystal user and he was the one who initially got Blonde Beard to try the drug because he wanted to share the experience with him. And although he doesn't give you the gory details about the downward spiral, Blonde Beard definitely offers up the fact that it got bad enough that they had the discussion about "quitting" together. Apparently they kept trying to stop, but the Ex wasn't able to. Eventually Blonde Beard was basically presented with an all or nothing situation and, four years ago, he chose to walk away from both the drugs as well as the relationship.

You end up spending the night and, the next morning, thanks to your never-ending Jet Lag, you wake up about an hour before the alarm goes off for your second day of Jury Duty. But instead of being annoyed by your lack of sleep, you end up savoring every moment as you hold on tightly to Blonde Beard and continually kiss the nape of his neck. For the first time since you met, the jury is finally out and you finally feel like you can trust your heart and move forward with your feelings instead of being bogged down by the fear of falling in love with a drug addict. Anyway...