I stopped at the grocery store after coffee tonight, 11PM. When I left to return to my car, it had begun to rain. It's raining now, starting and stopping, fits of summer rain. What could be finer?

Answer this: Why does the grocery store block entrance to the aisles late at night, forcing shoppers to walk through the register aisle and around? What could explain this silliness? I have never been able to think through this mystery to any satisfying explanation, so every time face the situation I find myself utterly exasperated by it. Why!?

As I walked down the aisle looking for orange juice concentrate, I caught sight of myself in the reflection of the frozen foods freezer glass doors. I liked what I saw.

Java's tonight ... I overheard that it's not Java Joe's, but Java's. Ok. I sat at an outside table with two chairs before someone came pleading for the extra. At the table in front of me was Matt, talking with a boy of perhaps 18, a handsome boy. Matt likes the boys. I studied; I listened to the people around me, mostly kids, students. They're almost uniformly boring. Although I couldn't hear the conversation, I'm certain Matt's conversation with the boy was boring as well. I heard the owner explaining to someone that yes, they sell coffee and drinks, but mostly it's a place where people hang out. And it's true. That's what it is. And it's good.

The owner employs some goon to stand outside the entrance and keep order, or at least that's what I surmise. Mostly he engages customers and those passing by in unwanted and intractable conversation--ravings and monologs which need so little encouragement to sustain themselves. I imagine him loaded with topics, as if a tired juke box sitting in the corner waiting to be called into renewed service. Any interaction with him seems fraught with danger, as any innocent, passing remark may unwittingly queue up by a dormant topic, which once launched, cannot be recalled. He'll proceed through his litnany of points, repeating generously. All one can do is turn with regular frequency away from the others in your party and nod knowingly, in total agreement. "Yep, I know what you mean." Ocassionally he'll bark across the street some profanities to a panhandler, hushing the crowd. One wonders if the medicine the owner means to dispense with his goon is worse than the disease.

I didn't see or hear much of anything that intrigued me. Well, bodies, the slim bodies of young men never fail to elicit desire. But I kept remembering the impression I had earlier today while I was sitting outside of another coffee shop. I was there to study, and a good thing it was, because there was also nothing there of interest. While looking around as I do, for things of interest, my eyes locked on the red brick of the front facade, and the canopy stretched over the row of tables beneath it. Perhaps it was feeling of authenticity that sometimes comes from mortar and bricks, or the sun cast just right between the walls of this and the adjacent building as the wind moved the empty chairs beside me, but it felt for an instance like Paris, distant and exotic Paris. And that was not boring.

I could sit there on the sidewalk, rocking my chair on its rear legs as I cradle a book, reach for another sip of warm coffee, and imagine that just around the corner is the bustle of a busy St. Germaine cafe. There I might order a caraffe of wine, open my book again, but without conviction, and watch the crowd as I ease into the summer evening with the pleasant drunkenness that will soon carry me home and into early sleep.

I came out to my mother tonight, quietly and without fanfare, as I figured I'd do someday, as I could only do. It seems like a good day's work. So I think I'll leave it at that.

I have two topics to cover tonight but not enough patience to cover them both adequately, I suspect. First, I'm giddy with excitement, as if I'm in the first weeks of a new romance, but my lover is one of Rochester's oldest coffee houses, Java Joe's. It's not as if I haven't been to Java Joe's before. I have, a handful of times. Yet I guess it never caught the sparkle in my eye, or something, because until recently I never really wanted to make it one of my regular hangouts. Perhaps it was all of that live music, or what seemed, in my advancing age, to be hordes and hordes of young kids apparently overtaking it. Or was it that its location seemed out of reach, just beyond the limits of where I wanted to travel. Maybe it was because it seemed unwelcoming of outsiders, or too self-consciously hip. Whatever it was, I've overcome it. And now I love the place. There's no doubt that it's a little heavy on the ambience and a little light on product and service, but it's perfect for me, or at least for some moods and needs.

It has a greater mix of people than I originally thought. Of course it has its share of hipsters slouched against windows reading in a fog of oblivion, the tittering high school boys and girls contributing mostly to the noise levels, the earnest but unemployed pseudo intellectuals yaking on and on about deconstructionism in the modern age, the old timers, the regulars, the faithful and the drifters all gathered around the usual table wondering what happened to that record shop around the corner, and the leather-clad bikers wondering if, hope against hope, the cute blond boy approaching from across the street is not straight, even though the thin, lovely girl in attendence at his side suggests otherwise. There are all of these, to be sure, but much more. There are still the fine and proper elderly couples ducking in for coffee after the symphony, the blind daters, the nondescript graduate students studying medical texts, but Java Joe's has real diversity, or at least a greater number of those types that I do not see at other shops. Most notably, it draws the less affluent, although not the less intellectually equipped. It seems to have its own little community, but neither welcoming nor exclusionary. It's a rougher crowd, but worth the extra effort. I'll be going there a lot, I think.

I'll save the other topic for next time. I'm too restless to sit any longer.

First, a brief sidenote. I was in the locker room tonight at the gym, toweling off after a good workout. Some guy of about my age was also preparing to leave. An old Paul Simon song came on the radio... god, what is its title .... "When I was just boy (When I was just boy), my mother would call my name. She said now who do, who do you think you're fooling... Anyway, it'll come to me. But immediately as the song began the guy looked up at me with a big, wide grin and spontaneously exclaimed to me, "What a great old tune." I smiled back in appreciation. and then he turned to his friend who had just come in and said the same to him.

That's nice... to be just surprised by a wonderful song you haven't heard in a long time, and to be moved in spontaneous, well, joy, to tell a total stranger. I know what he felt. I'm often surprised in the very same way. I was especially glad that it was Paul Simon, because a few of his songs have had the same effect on me. Everytime I hear "Kodachrome" I think was a fucking good song that is. And I remember when that song was popular and being played on the radio--I hated it, thought it was stupid--what is Kodochrome, the name for a film? Well, what did I know as a stupid kid. But to my point, if there is one... I liked that he was so moved. I'm not sure why, but to me it suggests he's not vacuous, that perhaps he has something of an inner life, that he can recognize beautiful things and appreciate them with excitement. Too often I'm pessimistic about such things--I think people are only interested in hanging out with their friends, talking on their cell phones, and watching "The Bachelor." I wonder, though, if I'd taken his excitement as evidence of an inner life, if it had been an old Zepplin song. Probably not. No, in that case, more evidence of the utter vacuity of today's populous, the world going to hell in a hand bag, etc.

Anyway.... Well, first, there's a hot guy, a stranger, outside my door hanging onto the fire escape on the house next door, apparently doing chin ups? I don't know. Who is that? What the hell.

So, I wanted to take a moment and comment about some remarks I read recently about gay porn. At the time I thought I had some comments. Now I think I mostly agree. Maybe I have just a few thoughts. First, one should always be suspect of anyone who says anything like, "Why do you think X back in the day was so much better than it is today." Ah... it's not. You're just getting old and nostalgic, you old fart. hahah Well, surely it's different and even better in some ways, but maybe the newer stuff is better in others. But certainly the younger generation will one day say about their own porn, "Why do you think we did it so much better than the boys today?"

My other, more pervasive, impression, really, more than a well developed thought, is a discomfort with how gay culture has elevated porn and sex. It's not only how we get off. It's become fodder for intellectualizing, aesthetic discussions, etc., which is all fine, and actually good. I just worry a little that we--gay America--have become lazy, content to spin theories on the latest sexual trends. Maybe there's nothing to this. Maybe I'm simply not comfortable about engaging in serious discussions about porn when I'd rather just jerk off to some hot boys getting it on and then go read Proust by a sidewalk cafe, if I can be such a snob just this one time... ok, maybe not JUST this once, but at least once ... again.

Well, and I have concerns... (Joys and Concerns) .... about how apparently shallow and self-absorbed the gay population is today. But that's not new. And surely there ARE differences, important ones, between art and porn. And I can't yet decide if I like that gays know the intimate details of each other's sex lives within 5 minutes of meeting, or if this is yet more evidence of the ill plaguing the soul of gay America. I don't know. It comes down to me worrying about people being lazy and stupid. But right now I just want to go do something else with my time, so off I go.

For the last two consecutive nights I've dreamt that I was dying. But I wasn't dying a normal death, as if from a debilitating disease, perhaps cancer or some other such disease. I was dying at a specified time, as if being put to death. It didn't seem like I was being executed, exactly, but it had the same certainty and foreknowledge. I was lying on a table, perhaps a surgical table, covered with a white sheet. There was sadness around me, a funereal feel to the occasion. I sensed my mother there with me, and at a distance, my sister, perhaps, though the identity of that presense was less certain. I don't have a clear recollection of what was going through my head, but there was anticipation, a sense of a countdown. I had that same wonder and awe, a facination and a fear, that I always get when someone I know, someone who was alive one moment, and then dead, gone the next moment. There is something profoundly mysterious about that phenomenon--being one moment and the next moment not being.

I enjoyed the dream in some ways... perhaps the excitement generated by such a personally apocalyptic event, but of course I felt real fear, or rather not fear, but dread mixed with an uncertainty and regret, perhaps, but above all an inability to fathom it. After all, how can one fathom one's own nonexistence. It makes no sense. Well, there's existential dread of the highest order. The phenomonologists, and later the existentialists, believed, and I agree, that intentionality is fundamental to human consciousness. Consciousness is fundamentally a projection into the future, intending, planning, becoming. Not being, but nothingness. And the sure knowledge that there will be no more becoming is, I suppose, an anathema to it. Maybe that's the source of the dread, of the inability to fathom. I wonder what the existentialists have written on death and dying. Anyway, I didn't mean to jump into such musings. My only point here is that I thought it was peculiar that I dreamt it twice, especially since I so seldom ever remember dreaming at all. The other thing I thought noteworthy was how I felt my mother with me. It was so nice to have her there, even though she couldn't really help me. My mother doesn't know what's going on inside my head most of the time now that I'm an adult. Others know me better now, in that respect. But there isn't another soul on the planet I'd rather have with me at such a time.