♛We both love to people-watch.

Now that I think of it, almost everything we do revolves around that. We go out to performances to watch people play music or act, we go to cafes to watch people argue and flirt with each other, we go to museums and galleries to watch people admire art and we look at the people depicted in the art. Louis and I both prefer portraiture to abstract art, but there is still something captivating and innately human about the pulsing color blocks of a huge Rothko or the confident brush strokes and warm sunlight suffusing Jim Monagle’s landscapes… But I’m getting off-track here.

You want to know superficially what we’re looking at, and which one of us, and why. Okay.

Louis and I greet the early evening with a good long walk, and I barely conceal my interest in people we pass by. I’ll nod at a beautiful tattooed genderfluid youth across the street, break away from Louis to drop some money in their battered guitar case as we go along. Joining up with Louis again, I’ll slip my arm around his waist where he’s stopped to watch someone closing up their jewelry shop, and find that he’s admiring their hands more than any of the gems.

In general though, I make a more obvious display that I’m looking, and Louis keeps it more to himself. He might lean over and whisper to me about someone who catches his eye. Louis appreciates the beauty of women over men, the way they’ve chosen to display – or not – their décolletage is of particular interest to him. When he takes the Little Drink, he’s almost always snaked his hand up to that tender area, subconsciously. Kneading it like a cat. It’s very arousing to see. 

I’m intrigued by all ages, but older men, well, they’re my favorite.

Something about wisdom accrued over time, showing the signs of authentic living, the crow’s feet, the beards, the weathered skin, it all speaks of experience. I like to take them for a Little Drink to glimpse the depth of their souls. Am I looking for a father figure? I’ll leave that up to you to over-analyze.

This people-watching has changed over time. Vastly improved.

In the beginning, I could barely drag Louis out of the house to people-watch; he lived in a kind of terror that he would find someone’s gesture, their voice, so worthy of Life itself that I’d choose that very creature to strike down like the Devil incarnate, just to torture him. Absolutely not my intention. What he couldn’t understand at that time is that people-watching is one of the greatest pleasures we have, mortal or immortal, and not just as a buffet on parade. I tried to teach him that, but it’s something he finally absorbed when he had to set a good example for our daughter.

Back then, I steered us to derelict neighborhoods, looking for the worst among men, so that killing those kinds of people would ease his fragile conscience, but Louis’s gift is his curse in that he finds beauty to an even greater extent that I do, even in the most awful beings. The stench of rats on his breath at the time was proof enough of that.