I'm going to a hotel in Montreal later this week to hook up with a man I met on the internet.

    (I am trying to imagine the sound that the jaws of both my loyal readers made when they hit the ground.)

    *Marn does her best to look slutty, batting her eyelashes provocatively.*

    She quickly realizes:

    a) everyone assumes she has something in her eye

    b) talking in the third person is probably an irrefutable sign of mental breakdown.

    Siiigggghhhh.

    Oh, alright.

    While I'm in town doing all the boring Marn things I always do--visit bookstores, eat foreign food, take in some movies, drive my daughter crazy--I'm also going to pop over and visit Queerscribe who's coming in to Montreal on business.

    You can just start praying for me now, 'kay?

    I doubt I will ever be quite the same.

    I've hooked up before in Montreal with other Diarylanders and one or two folks who have stumbled into my diary through a URL gone terribly, terribly wrong. It's been both great fun (because they're people I've admired) and an ordeal because I am a very shy person in real life.

    I don't write about these encounters because they're simple moments shared over a cup of tea or a meal. I quietly confirm that yes, the other person is every bit as smart and cool as they appear in their diary or e-mail, and they quietly confirm that yes, I am every bit as dorky as they imagined.

    I'm thinking this visit might stray a bit from the usual genteel pattern. For one thing, Queerscribe is the first person who's kidded about lending me a dildo to put in my underwear so we could cruise the bathhouses together, eh.

    .:Cough:.

    (Just between you and me, I think there are some situations better imagined than experienced, and I would put a middle-aged woman with a dildo in her underwear cruising in a gay guy's bathhouse right up there in my top ten.)

    But that's just me, eh.

    So Queerscribe, my darling, the weather looks good so consider this confirmation that I'll be coming into town.

    Be gentle with me, 'kay?