Some assembly required.

I walked out of the shower in Hennessy's apartment this morning and stepped into his bedroom. The clothes I wore to Burkhart's last night were folded neatly on his bed, and, on top of them, he'd written me a note. His name, phone number and e-mail address.

As I got dressed, he came in and asked me how I liked my coffee.

"Cream and sugar," I said, smiling.

He likes cream - or milk, as it was - and sugar in his coffee, too.

*****

I was walking past the booths in Piedmont Park when I heard someone call my name.

Crocker, sporting a shorter haircut, was selling water for an AIDS Memorial Quilt fundraiser display. He was wearing a T-shirt that said "I Leave Bite Marks."

The T-shirt I was wearing said "Some Assembly Required." I got it a couple weeks ago at THE STEPFORD WIVES screening. (My shorter haircut, incidentally, is accented by blond highlights.)

"You don't leave bite marks," I said to Crocker in front of other volunteers.

"I do sometimes," Crocker said.

"Maybe I'm just unlucky," I said, walking away. And I smiled again, though I don't know if Crocker appreciated my joke.

*****
One of the political posters carried by a woman in the parade said "Dykes for Licking Bush."

One local candidate for circuit court judge went the length of the parade route shirtless, muscled and tanned, waving at people from the sunroof of a BMW. The man knows his constituency.

*****

Nick the Cute Waiter stopped me as I crossed Piedmont.

"What, you don't say hello anymore?" he asked me, smiling.

"Oh my God, how are you?" I asked, hugging him.

He pointed out his boyfriend in a crowd of guys, told me they'd had a fight, then asked me if I thought he could do better.

I said he could.

*****

Mark was a representative for the Georgia Gay Rodeo Association in the parade.

Seeing him in the "starring position" on their float, I broke away from the crowd and said hello.

He told me hello, blew me a kiss and asked me to stop by the GGRA booth later.

Heading back to the table where I was technically sitting with Larry and his friends, I said, "Did you see my friend? He was the one on top of the paper-mache pony."

*****

Ian, a friend from trivia, broke away from the crowd at Project Open Hand he was walking with and gave me a hug, wrapping me in a rainbow-colored feather boa.

As I walked away from him and back to the crowd, a cute lesbian read my shirt and said, "'Some assembly required?' That could mean any number of things."

"Well, think of it like this," I said cheesily. "To celebrate, we had to assemble. That's, essentially, what this is about."

I should've said something about getting someone to insert parts into me. But, oh well, she was a lesbian.

*****

I was walking to see my friends Wes and Travis when the thunderstorm hit hardest.

It was a cloudburst.

The soaking rain either felt, if you look at it melodramatically, like some sort of angry sign from God. Or a baptism.

Of course, if you looked at it in the vein of Streisand, it was just rain on our parade.

Getting back to Larry's friends, who were inside The Vortex at that point, one of them asked me if I'd been in a wet T-shirt contest.

I called the bookstore and told them that the weather was going to make me late for work.

One of Larry's friends drove me through traffic back to my car at the Amsterdam Walk parking lot so that I'd make it to work in a reasonable time.

But driving my car proved difficult because my driver's side windshield wiper blade was gone.

I drove two blocks to a gas station. I went inside and told them that someone had taken my wiper, probably because of the rainstorm.

The clerk at the gas station pointed me at the wiper fluid, even though I distinctly said "stolen wiper" to her. They didn't have wiper blades. I didn't understand the clerk's grasp of reason. How and why would someone steal wiper fluid???? I mean, I kinda understood the stolen blade. I mean, someone could've needed one and taken it. Or, worse, they wanted me to vandalize my windshield.

*****

Sitting on my second break at the bookstore and unable to replace the wiper blade myself - with the rain still pouring down, I went down the list of people in my cell phone memory.

Larry and David are still jet-lagged and unpacking. Ron was at the park. Kacoon wasn't answering. CJ wasn't available. Vic was unable to drive.

My brother Dan answered his cell phone on the third ring.

He told me he'd head to Wal-mart and bring a replacement wiper blade to my store.

Dan showed up five minutes after the store closed and called me on my cell phone.

"I don't think your blade was stolen," he said. "I think it just fell off."

"But I would've noticed that," I said. "It would've happened when the blades were moving."

"Well, your wiper blade is here on your car," he said on the phone.

"You're at my car?" I asked him.

"Yeah, and the wiper blade just looks like it fell off," he said. "Nobody stole it."

Walking outside, I saw Dan and his fiancee Samantha, whom I haven't seen since they got engaged, standing next to my messy, dingy Saturn. Samantha was cradling her small, cute puppy in a towel in her arms. The puppy, of course, growled at me.

Dan reattached the old blade, then asked me what I wanted him to do with the new one that he'd brought.

"May as well replace the old one anyway," he said. "I mean, since the old one did fall off."

I agreed, and, while he worked at snapping the various parts together, I walked with Samantha to the ATM to get cash to pay Dan back. I got my first up-close look at the engagement ring, and I talked to her about their meeting yesterday with a priest.

I thanked her for coming to help me.

She told me that's what family's for.

Before going back in the bookstore, I hugged Samantha and, more importantly, I hugged my brother.