Cocktails, Katie and My Naked Ass

M. and I were in Garden City on Saturday, meeting up with my parents for drinks in between their friend's son's wedding ceremony and reception. I was unexpectedly nervous as we sat there sipping our beers and nibbling on our fried calamari, waiting for my parents to meet us at the hotel bar (note: the Garden City Hotel is lovely, if a bit overzealous in its attempts at creating what one might call a hip decor, if one lived under a rock or managed a hotel in suburban Long Island). Mainly nervous about my dad, as we hadn't spoken more than once - and even then, fleetingly and fluffily - since M. and I made the Big Announcement, other than his mean email about not wanting to hear or read or talk about It anymore. Once my parents arrived with fourteen of their friends, the nerves pretty much disappeared and I spent most of my time catching up with the Ladies and talking to my mom and complimenting her on yet another c-u-t-e wedding outfit (this is one of the many areas in which she excels). Other than the one friend who came over and gushed to my mother about how nice it must be to have "us both" in Manhattan (i.e. mistaken presumption that M. was my brother, not my bf - - quickly rectified when I slid under the table to fellate him in front of the lot), it was just your average New England late afternoon cocktail hour, and M. and I were just another couple among many at a very long table in a very ill-conceived hotel bar. My mom also chose to drop a bomb two minutes before we left that she'd been diagnosed with "multiple PVC's", which is basically a weird and potentially deadly heart murmur, but of course don't worry about it, it's nothing (which ended up being true, as she called me yesterday to update me after speaking with her doctor) - - so other than the misguided friend, the misguided decor and the poorly timed sharing of health-related concerns, all in all it was a very normal three hours.

Katie Holmes has officially embraced Scientology.

As I was pulling up my shorts under my beach towel yesterday at Jones Beach - or was it pulling down my sunga - I couldn't help but notice, aided by the eagle-eyed vision of my friend MB, a man thirty feet away from us, stuffing his zoom-lens camera into his knapsack as he stared nonchalantly in our direction and raised his eyebrows as if to say What the fuck are you gonna do about it?

The presence of all of the above - M. and I seamlessly blending in with the everyday average 60+ cocktail set, Joey Potter's swift and headlong rush into the fiery pits of hell, nude photos of me eventually winding up on the internet (ok, technically not a first, but the first to be posted with face visible) - leads me to believe that The End is Nigh.