“I’ve been reading your tour blog on the html website www.BrightestYoungThings.com,” a debonair young man informed me. I had just finished rocking the Black Cat, my hometown’s premier venue for the performance of indie-rock and/or Cure-related dance nights. “For a blog nominally about sex, I found it curiously unsexy,” he continued.

“Well,” I replied. “There’s no accounting for taste.”

“The blog was, occasionally, humorous,” the young buck continued. “Very occasionally, if I may be frank. Though you are an individual who boasts of your intimacy with many men, I wonder if you really ever had sex with one.”

“Well,” I replied. “You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

“In fact,” my questioner continued, “Your blog was so thoroughly unsexy that it made me wonder whether you’d ever had sex with anyone, anywhere, anytime, ever.”

“If we shadows have offended,” I replied. “Think but this, and all is mended/That you have but slumber’d here/While these visions did appear.”

“Your reply is cribbed from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” my questioner observed. “Act V, Scene I.”

“Well,” I replied. “To each his own. In other words, take want you want and leave the rest. Or, alternately, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Or, alternately -”

“You seem to be a master of the non-answer,” my challenger challenged. “I ask you a question, and you reply with an inane non-sequitur, or offer a pithy quotation.”

“Well, I am a singer,” I replied, “but I sing an unusual song. ‘One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,/Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.’”

“Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’” my beau replied. “I wonder – do you wear a mask, or a face?”

I considered the innumberable answers I could supply. A universe of uninformative, irrelevant responses beckoned but, for once, I chose an honest answer.

“I’ve forgotten,” I said.

Previously on…