I'm old. I know. Old, old, old. And gay, gay, gay.

Having been around a while—getting older and gayer with each passing year—I've watched a lot of cute boys from rural Washington/Idaho/Wyoming/Montana wash up on Capitol Hill, leverage their good looks to get jobs making coffee/burritos/drinks/whatever, and then over the course of a year or two throw those good looks away with the assistance of cigarettes, drugs, tattoo artists and professional piercers. I get it: nothing stays the same, all things die, it's the circle jerk of life, man.

But there's this one waiter/barista/bartender/whatever—I'm not going to say exactly what he does—who, having already gone in for full tattoo sleeves on both arms, now has those plugs-that-look-like-tire-rims in both his earlobes. His plugs are still moderately sized but I worry that they're going to get bigger and bigger until this boy—who's just lovely (even the sleeves look good on him)—winds up with long and dangly earlabia where his earlobes used to be.

They're his ears, I realize, and he can do what he likes with 'em. And he didn't put those rims in 'em to earn social currency/credibility with me or to attract my attention. (Hell, he may have put 'em in expressly to repel the attentions of dudes like me.) But I'm hoping this particular boy doesn't go in for bigger plugs. Those moderately-sized ear plugs, like those sleeve tattoos, look good on him. But earlabia don't look good on anybody.