I spent the 4th of July sitting in Ryan's apartment in Brooklyn watching him clean his bedroom through the doorway as I lounged on the couch with his dog, Brody. Brody is my love monkey and I had his head propped up against my thigh so that I would look like the hardcore muthafukka that I feel like on the inside, with a Pit bull draped precariously close to my groin.

It's fun to watch Ryan clean because he'll be going at a good pace until something shiny distracts him, or he'll find an interesting porn magazine that had been stuffed somewhere exciting and he'll get totally distracted for the next 20minutes. At one point he shrieked in horror and came running over to show me what I am assuming used to be a favored pair of man-clogs (oh, how I long to have a pair of man-clogs of my very own), however they were in a sorry state. They looked as though they had been set upon by an army of militant dust bunnies and left for dead. One of the clogs suffered further horrors and looked as though one of the bunnies had chewed out it's innards.

Ryan shook the clogs at me and screamed "MICE! AIIIEEEE!!!" for a moment I thought he was trying to tell me that the man-clogs were mice and I should climb atop a chair to scream and flail my arms about like a 50's housewife. But then I figured out that he was blaming mice for the destruction done to the shoes. "Mice did this!" he wailed "Nicotine Infected Mice!!" I asked why they were nicotine infected and he told me that when they had had a mouse problem a group of mice had eaten a carton of Jon's cigarettes and thusly become "infected".

"Wouldn't that just have killed them?" I asked, but he shot me a look that told me I was incredibly stupid for underestimating the sheer might of these small furry creatures.

"No" he said, drawing out the "o" so that I would further grasp how truly insipid my question had been. "They would eat though the cigarettes like this." he dropped the mangled man-clogs to the floor, perched his hands in front of him like they were small paws, and proceeded to imitate a small rodent nibbling through something. "And then they'd eat the nicotine, and then they'd become......INFECTED!" he then leapt to his feet, squeaked a mighty nicotine infected mouse squeak and, with arms akimbo, ran from the room. A few minutes later he returned with a glass of soda in hand, looked about the room as if he couldn't remember why he'd walked in there, and then wandered away to check his email. I like to pretend sometimes that Ryan's on a lot more drugs than he admits and that there is a very easy reason as to why he's such a strange young man.

However there is a reason as to why I headed over to Ryan's for the 4th. (a) Ryan and his boyfriend Jon and their roommate TheJew were going too have a cookout on the roof. I sure do love me some cookouts on roofs. (b) TheJew would be there and the only thing I love more than cookouts on the roof, is TheJew...to the point that I drew a picture: Yo Amo ElJew (c) You have a really damn good view of the city from the roof (click here for a good example). So from that vantage point I was able to watch the Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan fireworks...and a few of the brighter ones from New Jersey. (d) There were jell-o shots.

So I had a fine time and went home with my tummy filled with Nathan's Hot dogs and my firework-lust satiated. It was a lovely weekend and I had a marvelous time...which is really all that matters