"Bulls are getting more and more bulldozier ..."

Spring is getting springier (in the words of Blossom Dearie) in San Francisco, and my loins are beginning to gird themselves for the season. In the Castro on Sunday to meet with Jaxon, who's helping me with my movie script, I saw an unusually large number of frisky, goodlooking men. And last night again at the gym, and afterwards over dinner with Cecilia at Pasta Pomodoro, I noticed a distinct perkiness about my own interest in the darker sex.

As usual, however, my eye-flutters were in vain. Consequently, I've decided to resort to advertising once again. No, not on my website, but on someone else's - Classifieds 2000, to be precise. If you search carefully through the San Francisco listings, you'll probably find a familiar figure.

I've long had a problem in just looking for sex. Sex doesn't come so easily to me that I can just enjoy a quick leap in the hay. Which means that a conventional sex ad is not really going to work for me. The alternative of a dating ad is out of the question, for me, considering my current feelings about getting involved in anything longer term. So what to do?

I hit upon the answer over the weekend, when I thought of a way of wording an ad which might conceivably lead to the kind of encounter I'm hoping for. I headlined the ad with the words "Looking for hot guys who like to cuddle." I did think of starting the ad with "Are there any cuddlers left in the gay community?", meaning it as an ironic reflection of some of the more pathetic and bitter come-on lines you see heading up many classifieds ads. But I was worried that most people wouldn't get the irony, so I settled on the more straight forward approach. And I suppose we'll see what happens.

I had a complete stroke of luck yesterday with the car issue. I decided to send out an email around the office asking if anybody else had experience in returning a car at the end of a lease. I didn't get much of a useful response. But Donna, the head of HR, stopped by to alert me to the fact that Larry, the new salesperson, who was starting just that very day, was fresh from a ten-year stint in the auto industry! In fact, not only could he answer all my questions, but he was on first-name terms with the senior staff and even the owners of many of the local dealerships! So Larry just picked up the phone, called the local dealership for the car I'm interested in, and set me up with the sales manager.

When I arrived later in the afternoon for the test-drive, I was treated with an inordinate amount of respect, and I managed to get out of there later on without having had to engage in even a minute of haggling. I haven't bought the car yet, since I have to return today with my Jeep so they can decide if they'll take over the lease from me as a trade-in, but the whole experience was as pleasant as car-shopping can ever be. So hats off to Larry, and I take back every nasty thing I've ever said about our salespeople :)