Healing at Hot Dog.

I ran into an ex at a party. Here's how it went.

Hot Dog is a queer dance party thrown every Sunday in Silver Lake by Mario Diaz.

I spent the past weekend in LA and it was a nice break from the solitude of my cabin, where I’ve been since January 3. It’s fine up here, things have definitely improved as I'm no longer in the insanely busy work period that was the last six weeks of 2024. The night before I headed down to LA, I started to feel really lonely. “This feels bleak. Thank god I'm going to town tomorrow,” I thought to myself.

The trip to LA was a bit surreal. The drive into town was uneventful and I saw no evidence of fires, which felt weird given that I’d spent the last weeks reading news about them and staring at the grim photographs. There are whole sections of the city that are gone, but because I wasn’t there in the thick of it, I had no sense anything had happened at all. That was a bad feeling to hold as I know how much devastation has happened in different parts of town.

The trip, much like this year so far, was busy but not in a bad way. Satie was staying with my ex Michael in the Fairfax district. I stayed with Kelly (who has some elder cats that prevented Satie from being able to stay there). So there was a lot of shuffling around. But it was nice to be back in town and to see people. I weirdly feel like this situation - me living alone in the woods and coming to town from time to time - might lead to me socializing more than I did when I lived full time in LA. I got to spend a lot of late nights chatting with Kelly. And I even made time to go out.

There’s a fun gay party in Silver Lake called Hot Dog. And I met up with my friend Matthew there. For once, I was feeling really confident and I liked my outfit, so I was fine hanging out with the friends I came with as well as wandering around by myself. The party itself is pretty amazing. The organizers basically transform a family Mexican restaurant in the middle of town into a multilevel gay dance club. Through the use of a beautiful, impressively convincing lighting scheme, it really doesn’t feel like a restaurant at all.

This year, I’m trying to enter a self-confidence era. It started with all the ambiguity about what’s going on with my house (still working to keep it out of foreclosure). My feeling is that it’s just not going to help me to question that I’m going to save it, so I’m going in with confidence that I will. That’s sort of spilling into the rest of my life, as I’m realizing having negative thoughts about my appearance or career isn’t doing me any favors.

Michael, the ex who cared for my dog while I was in town (he’s basically her favorite person because he has puppy energy and she’s known him since she was a puppy herself) is a very confident guy. And we’ve spent a decent amount of time together over the past year. As someone seeking to make a lot of changes in my life, I’ve studied his psychology quite closely. To some, his confidence might come off as arrogance. But if you told him that he wouldn’t care, because he seemingly doesn’t care what other people think (something I’m taking notes on, not a bad way to be). What I’ve learned from watching him is confidence that works. When you go into a situation expecting to get what you want, you’re more likely to get what you want. Being around him has been a huge help in terms of learning how to be more confident.

Sadly, it feels like we’re entering into an era of male arrogance. Starting with the “It” in the White House, that vibe seems to be permeating all over the place. So it’s necessary decent guys push back against that arrogance and that women, especially, get a lot pushier about their needs and desires.

I entered the evening at Hot Dog with a good deal of self-confidence.

Normally I’m afraid to be alone at parties, but because I was feeling comfortable and confident, I was fine wandering around on my own. There was a DJ playing on a stage, so if I ever felt like I didn’t know what to do, I’d just go over and watch and listen. It was a show, after all, so why not observe? I don’t know that I’ve ever felt like this going out. So it was kind of a breakthrough for me to not feel self-conscious to be alone.

On one of my walk arounds, I ran into an ex. But not just any ex, the ex that dumped me right before I wrote my book, completely changing its tone. The ex that led me to create the concept for my HGTV show.

To summarize that relationship, I met this ex, Ludovic, in 2013. We moved in together into his condo in Silver Lake, I designed and oversaw a gut renovation of the whole thing and covered it on social media. Soon after it was finished he dumped me, right as the startup I was working at laid me off. Needless to say, it was a hopeless time in which everything seemed to be going wrong.

During that time, the only thing that seemed to be bringing me joy was designing the cute little West Hollywood apartment I moved into. And that feeling of positive forward thinking was something I wanted to gift to other people, which was the kernel that led to my show, “Unspouse My House.”

Anyway, back to Hot Dog and running into Ludovic. At some point over the last few years, I realized that I was kinda good with all my exes. I saw Luigi (first ex, architect) at an opening for Douglas Friedman’s photography a few years ago. And I felt nothing. And that made me realize I could probably totally have a conversation with him and be fine. Luigi is cool. He has good taste in music, good taste in art (or at least he did when we were together). He’s generally the kind of creative person that I find fun to be around. I have no idea what he’s up to now because my friends have been well-trained not to tell me anything about my exes.

I don’t run into Luigi very often, but I do run into Ludovic from time to time. And the last few times I’ve seen him I’ve tried to make gestures to show that we were good (kiss, on the cheek, half hug, etc). But at Hot Dog, I really wanted to clear the air. So when I saw him from afar, I made a point of going over to him.