"only connecting" seems ever more important after 9/11/01 in New York City, but writing about my steadfast pursuit is trivialized by the daily biographies of the dead in the Times where, among the photos of the hunky young firemen, i have searched in vain for news of a same sex lover left behind or a favorite uncle whose survivors recalled his wit and Peter Pan behavior . . . if god were indeed as wrathful as Jerry Falwell would have us believe, then surely a gay man or woman would have been among the 5,000 who perished . . . two days after the collapse of the Twin Towers i visited the Ramble in Central Park where even cruising, the most ruthless of activities, somehow seemed tender . . . embracing a young man, the first person i had touched sinced my home became a battlefield, gave me a powerful rush of relief . . . crying seemed a more appropriate release than orgasm but i soldiered on, savoring every second of the encounter and both of us silently smelling the acrid smoke that occassionally wafted north from Ground Zero . . . a day or two later i hooked up with Bttm2Pk@aol.com who worked for Prudential Insurance. . . if i see one more widow on television sobbing about the last cell phone conversation she had with her husband, i'm going to puke he said during the obligatory small talk, observing that victims of many other tragedies had not commanded nearly as much sympathetic media attention . . . i guess we really do become our jobs to a certain degree . . . he explained that his company, which had underwritten only a small percentage of the coverage that would be affected by the attack, had decided to take the high road and waive the exclusions for acts of terrorism because it would cost them little and might conceivably bankrupt their competitors . . . back to business--and in my case--sex as usual in less than a week after our world has changed forever . . . enough time has passed that i now have begun to appreciate the new realities . . . among the people in the ICU windows who recently filled my computer screen were a US Marine with a buzz cut in front of the stars and stripes and a hunky Arab with a pierced nipple . . . was it unpatriotic to jerk off with the latter? . . . i can't decide if sex in the flesh or conversation motivated me to email SFHairyArab as soon as i got to San Francisco this week . . . i invited Joey to my hotel room one night where he offered more evidence in support of my theory that HIV positive men are much better at sex than the rest of us . . . i knew he preferred it raw and he recognized my limits but the attraction between us was powerful enough to keep Joey in my room a couple of hours longer than LeanDevil, who, the night before, proved my theory that AOL Man4Man chatrooms offer mostly slim pickins no matter where u are . . . a native of Qatar, home base of al-Jazeera, Joey insisted he hadn't been discriminated against except on-line, where he had been flamed once or twice because of his explicit Arab identification . . . it's too hard to be a Muslim he observed not long after he told me he was Catholic when i asked . . . who has time to pray five times a day?. . . we had a lot to talk about but aside from tasting my first snowball, i can't say i learned much except to be reminded how much we each live in our own realities . . . an HIV-positive Arab who overstayed his student visa 14 years ago actually believes he still will be granted political asylum by the US Immigration Service in the aftermath of 9/11 . . . just like i'm going to find rapture.