The following are some things I wrote over the course of a few days, but didn’t post until now.

I have never been too concerned about compromising images of me floating around out there on the Internet and available for public consumption. After all, I have lots of photos of me, naked me, available on a web site I created a while back. But those photos are at least somehow tasteful to me, or rather, they have a deliberateness about them which I believe doesn’t suggest that I created them in a rush of horniness to exchange with equally horny people for the purpose of getting off. It’s not me being naked that embarrasses me—it’s me being reduced to a horny creature wanking off in some seamy exchange with a stranger that I don’t want to expose… though of course I am that person too. I’ve always made it a rule to never display a photo of me with an erection—that is, me indisputably horned up. I’m not so sure that I’d mind now, provided the photos had some other merit. I’d want to control which photos people saw, though. But with video chat, emailing friends explicit photos, and other exchanges, there is a real risk that embarrassing photos of me will be publicly traded, that cheap web cam photos of me -- dick in hand, an odd grimace cast over my asymmetrical face – will find their place on the hard drives of indiscriminating older men who save any image that contains a dick – for whom good porn means mounds of porn, the kinds of guys who need to get off while cranking their flaccid dicks tirelessly to the rolling visual waves of erupting dicks, muscled fucking, and tongues lapping at the deepest recesses of a raunchy and waiting crotch. I’m not sure it would matter if my pictures were on the hard drives of cute college boys who need only the slightest encouragement, but somehow it’s a little less unsettling. Nevertheless, I don’t really want those photos on the public exchange circuit.

Over the Christmas holidays I sent a handful of photos to a friend who’s visiting his parents. I thought he’d enjoy them, bored as he is there in the sterile environment of his parents’ home. But then I thought about the details of the email. He’d be using his parents’ computer, so he’d probably open the email and then open the photos directly. A copy of the photos would be written to the hard drive and the files wouldn’t get cleaned off. I don’t really want the photos to be discovered one day as his mother or father is poking around. It’s … well, wrong.

Well, when I put the pot of eggs in water on the stove to boil a few hours ago, I KNEW that I’d forget it. I knew that, but of course I still did it. What am I to do, not make eggs? I should have done as Ann suggested and take the timer into my room, but it didn’t occur to me. I first discovered that eggs, left to dry up over a stove, will eventually explode violently. I was just a kid when I found that out, when eggs exploded all over my mother’s kitchen. It’s funny how tuned into that possibility I am now. I can sit in my study across the other side of the house as eggs dry up and begin to burn, crack and pop. The second I hear a popping noise from the kitchen I bolt upright and dash to the kitchen because I know instantly what has happened. I could hear the same sound at another time when I didn’t have eggs on the stove and I wouldn’t think anything of it. I’m clearly aware of the eggs. Yet I forget about them.

A few days ago I went with a friend to see the movie “Guys and Dolls.” I’m completely averse to musicals, so I only went to hang out with the friend. But it wasn’t too bad. Actually, as I was watching a few of the songs I thought how perfectly they were crafted and choreographed. It’s quite an art to put together such a thing. Those grand old Broadway musicals of the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s were so perfectly written and performed. I was really distracted by the dialog in Guys and Dolls, though—the actors didn’t use contractions—“I cannot tell a lie”, etc. I’m told that the stereotypical gangster talks like that. Maybe so, but it seemed a bit too much. It was a jarring distraction to my ears.

Lately I’ve been seeing a young man at my gym regularly on the weekends. Our eyes keep meeting much more than they would without something going on. I think he could be straight, but as much as I catch him eying me, I’m becoming more and more persuaded that he’s interested in some way. I don’t imagine that he’s interested in bedding me; I do imagine that he’s attracted to me in some way but would never act upon it. That’s what I imagine. Of course it’s no mystery why my eyes are drawn to him, but I don’t quite understand why he’s always looking at me. If he’s not straight, I sense that he’s not exactly openly gay. He’s in his early 20s, tall, maybe 6 feet. He’s got long dark brown hair with some curl, the sort of hair Ann always says she likes—the 70’s retro style, his stubbled face framed by locks of hair which hang to his shoulders. He always wears a pair of long, black basketball shorts and a white sleeveless nylon shirt which easily rides up when he lifts his arms or bends over. With his long waist, the crack of his ass seems to start in the middle of his back. The most notable thing about him for me is the way he walks. He has a gait whose stride seems shorter than it ought to be, lending him just a touch of effeminacy. I like the slightly effeminate mannerism, but only, as with him, when it’s attached to an attractive and otherwise masculine figure. I’ve been seeing another man at the gym lately, a man in his late 20s, a brutish sort of muscled figure, his shirt always damp and his dirty blond hair always dripping with workout sweat, leaving a spotty trail on the black mats as he walks. Until he moves you’d think he was a foul-mouthed rugby player with hands to fondle every girl within reach, but then you see his tiny stride, the swing of his hips, and the bitchy expression, and you burst out laughing. My boy doesn’t have that--just a slightly abbreviated stride suggesting his ankles are shackled.

I read Edmund White’s “A Boy’s Own Story” this week, and I really liked it. He’s an excellent writer. One of the comments on the back (from the NY Times Book Review) claims that the book is a cross between J.D. Salinger and Oscar Wilde, and others invoke its universality. I’m not so sure. It seems to me more like Edmund White’s story, and his alone. I wonder about the audience for such a book. Kids and teenagers are out, given its explicit sexual content. And it seems to me very tightly bound to its gay audience. But even that audience is questionable. Little of it seemed to speak to my experiences as a kid. But it doesn’t matter—it was well written and thoroughly enjoyable.

Proust claiming that gays have greater sensitivity to art: “It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, shameful, execrated, that is the only true form, the only true form that corresponds in one and the same person to an intensification of the intellectual qualities.”

And Proust on the bonds between lovers: “A man may give his fortune and even his life for a woman, and yet know quite well that in ten years’ time, more or less, he would refuse her the fortune, prefer to keep his life. For then that woman would be detached from him, alone, that is to say non-existent. What attaches us to people are the countless roots, the innumerable threads which are our memories of last night, our hopes for tomorrow morning, the continuous weft of habit from which we can never free ourselves. Just as there are misers who hoard from generosity, so we are spendthrifts who spend from avarice, and it is not so much to a person that we sacrifice our life as to everything of ours that may have become attached to that person, all those hours and days, all those things compared with which the life we have not yet lived, our life in the relative future, seems to us more remote, more detached, less intimate, less our own. What we need is to extricate ourselves from these bonds which are so much more important than the person, but they have the effect of creating in us temporary obligations which mean that we dare, for, detached from us, that person would no longer be part of us, and because in reality we create obligations (even if, by an apparent contradiction, they should lead to suicide) towards ourselves alone.”

I saw a play recently called “The Crumple Zone.” It was OK. It didn’t have any big ideas, which I think is good. Big ideas rarely make good drama, or at least, only a truly great writer can pull off something that is both good drama and has big ideas. This play was mostly about the lives and relationships of four gay guys on Staten Island. But even this playwright understands that although the play doesn’t have to have big ideas, there must be something more to it than just a four guys working out their problems. Without more it’s just soap opera.

I think it’s best to introduce a theme early on and come back to it now and again, but this play simply let one of the characters recite a life lesson in the final scene. It wasn’t exactly heavy handed, but it did seem a little lazy or inelegant. Nevertheless, I’m always overly deferential to words of wisdom spouted by writers through their characters, especially in plays. There’s something about being directly confronted by characters and their drama, the solemnity of the affair, that brings a moral weight to the wisdom being peddled—as if now we’ve come to the heart of the matter and it’s time for the alter call, all truths revealed. I want to hear words of wisdom—I feel like I need them. And for some reason I seem to believe that writers know more than the rest of us. Still, I’m a little distrustful of wisdom because it all sounds so credible and wise when stated. I’ve noticed occasionally that directly contradictory statements, when declaimed separately, seem true and profound — “Winners make their own success,” and “X was at the right place at the right time.” Which of these is true? My point is … well, if you’re writing a play, have ideas in mind but don’t be obvious in stating them, and in life, beware of plausible-sounding advice, because most anything can sound plausible if stated properly.

I went to my company’s Christmas party. After the fun had wound down, someone said how much they enjoyed office parties, and I immediately thought, “Oh, god, not me.” But then I thought, “Well, I DO enjoy them sometimes”. And this party was fun, mostly because I always enjoy the pithy remarks and observations people make when they’re making an effort to be fun. I’m not fun, and I don’t try to be. I’m way too serious and earnest to be lighthearted at an office party. It’s funny how I never find a kindred spirit at work. I look around and think to myself how, although these people are nice and all, I really wouldn’t want to hang out with any of them. The very thought of spending an hour or two with any of them sends me into a panic. Ok, that might be overstating it a bit, but I don’t want to socialize with any of these people.

I’ve started to read Gide’s “The Counterfeiters,” which I quite like. There are lots of characters, so I’ll need to read it through quickly or it’ll be difficult to put it down for a while without returning, utterly lost. His writing has an odd feeling to it, which may simply be a reflection of the time when it was written. The ideas and themes seem modern, but the setting, the world, seems a bit Dickensian. The writing of Proust, who wrote nearly contemporaneously, feels a little more congruous—the salon society of Paris is never assaulted with modernist notions. Proust was always looking to the past. Gide’s writing, with its rough edges and modernist streaks, feels as if it’s at a fault line between the old world and modernism. It’s very odd how this novel, written in 1925, is essentially a queer novel, with gay and bisexual characters and story lines. It’s not exactly explicit in its queer themes, but queerness permeates the book, or rather, such distinctions as straight and gay aren’t recognized. Characters and passions seem to move seamlessly between the sexes, so that people don’t seem straight or gay. I like it.

Early in the book there’s a section in which a young man of 18 or so abandons his home and his family, arriving at his friend’s room to stay the night. Instead of sleeping on the floor, his friend allows him to share his bed. Nothing explicitly refers to a homosexual relationship, but the scene is dripping with homoerotic tenderness. The run-away boy removes all but his shirt, crawling beside his friend under the covers, and falling asleep, kept warm by the body beside him. He wakes up early to find his friend still asleep, the boy’s arm draped over his torso. And I read it and sighed with a school girl’s longing. Hehe So nice, and so effective. When the boy gets up he notes, “I don’t know if everyone is like me, but as soon as I am awake, I like despising the people who are asleep.” I like that too.

It’s funny to contrast this novel with Proust, who seems very conflicted about gays. Nowhere in Proust is a gay character loved. Gays live as if members of a secret society, casting looks of recognition at each other as they pass on the street, but never looks of fraternity, empathy or compassion. For them, recognition breeds mistrust, fear, and self-loathing. I keep thinking they’re like vampires walking the streets in an Anne Rice novel—they see each other as only a vampire can recognize another vampire, but instead of taking comfort in their brotherhood, each fears what the other can do to expose and harm him.

Well, with extra time on my hands lately, I’ve been doing a fair amount of online chatting, even meeting a few people. It’s addictive. There’s great lure in meeting new people, and the tantalizing possibility of sex. But the potential rarely blossoms. I find myself hyper-sexualized by it all, but if I had other things to occupy me, like work, it wouldn’t be so. In the end what I really want is some nice moments, such as that depicted by Gide. All of the down-and-dirty-lube-it-up-and bend-over-fucking sex that one can get caught up in is not so satisfying. I just want some nice tenderness with a cute guy on a fairly regular basis, and then to come home to Ann afterward. Is that too much to ask? Well, many think it is. Ann seems remarkably tolerant of my chatting, etc. I’ve been struck lately by how surprised guys are about my situation--the incredulity when I tell them that my girlfriend knows about my dalliances with young men.

Let’s see. A recent inventory:

There was the Italian boy, a student of something or other at the university, and a nice guy all around, dark hair, handsome face, big dick. We met quite late one Sunday evening. There was little reason not to be completely overwhelmed by lust. And I might have been, except that things didn’t go as well as they should have. As a general rule, I don’t do these quick encounters. They never fail to disappoint.

The pharmaceuticals salesman, a 24-year-old guy who seems older than his years, mature, intelligent, engaging, at times playful. He’s partnered to an older guy, and they’ve just moved into a new house. We chat as much about career issues as about our more personal lives. I have a photo, but we’ve never met. I’d like to, as he has potential to be a good friend.

The coy, ex-army young man, 21-years old, and maybe a nice guy. He thought I was cute. I thought he was too. His ex-boyfriend is a casual acquaintance of mine. They broke up four months ago. He needs to be in a relationship or he’s not happy. We were to meet, but I doubt if it will happen. To what end? He knows I’m not looking for a bf, so that leaves… well, perhaps just to be chummy.

On video chat I’ve been chatting with a very fun, 24-year old Canadian customer service rep, or purser, who works on a cruise ship, a gay cruise ship. He’s leaving for Central America for 6 months. He’s very outgoing, effusive, and sweet. I would enjoy meeting him, though I’m far too quiet and inwardly drawn for him. But I may be able to keep up with him for short-term outings. But Vancouver is a nearly insurmountable distance.

Again on video chat there was a Puerto Rican guy of 24 (that seems to be the magic age), sultry, humorless, but sexy. We’re utterly incompatible; I could never meet him. He’s one of those serious men completely focused on the task at hand, incapable of diversion or whimsy. I become a little nervous around such people, especially when engaged in sex. He’d chat in awkward conversation for a few moments, as though fulfilling an obligatory but, to his mind, unnecessary introduction, and then quickly move to sex, the main feature. And throughout that he’d be overtaken in his own sphere of lust, uncommunicative except to convey certain directions, and I’d be intimidated, feeling pressure to measure up to such seriousness. No thank you. I can’t do it.

I chatted briefly the other day with a 24 year old (again, unless that is the in-vogue age to claim these days), another pharmaceuticals salesman who was terribly closeted and terribly horny. No photos were exchanged for the obvious reasons (what if he were outed!). We chatted (well, he whispered surreptitiously) on the phone briefly too. I believe he was screening me—to make sure I was no queen, which of course he would be able to discern by the tell-tale fairy lisp and homo intonation. He wants a “buddy” for occasional sex. This would work for me, except that I’ve no idea what he looks like, and he has roommates, which makes it impossible to meet at his place. Well, this may not be over. Stay tuned.

My Syracuse boy, such a nice gay boy, and such fun to play with, has finally met a boy he likes and is in the early stages of a relationship. I hope it works out for him. I imagine he’ll be good at the relationship thing.

My teacher friend remains, as enthusiastic and as likeable as ever.

Gide — “If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one’s youth, one’s greatest indignation would be for what one has become.”

The other day at work I sat beside a woman I had never seen before. I had an immediate and negative reaction against her. She was a woman of perhaps 50, poorly dressed in jeans and a t-shirt of some kind covered by a larger frock which she would take off when she got warm. Her hair was draped from her head like a clump of tangled weeds pulled from the field by earth and roots--long, unstyled strands of dark hair which was beginning to gray, still wet from her morning shower. She was overweight, but not greatly overweight, with much of her extra weight gathered around her lower abdomen and hips. With a gruff voice signaling a cigarette habit, she spoke on the phone to women friends regarding a mix of work concerns and personal matters, and then turned to visit web sites which she probably read each morning. I don’t know exactly what I didn’t like about her. Maybe it was that I put her so easily into the category of women, single and proudly independent, who are unconcerned about their appearance and the impressions of others, and who have settled into a life without challenge. But it was unfair. Later in the day I spoke with her, and we shared stories about gyms, workout routines, and road trips across New York, and I liked her. But I think what made her likable to me finally was her concern for her extra weight and her waning workout effort.

Then earlier this week I was at a coffee shop and two women sat down at a table beside me. One was a younger woman of about 35 years old, significantly overweight and dressed in a brown business suit, all put together and ready for the office. She was married. The other was older, perhaps 50, and also dressed for the office, though without the power persona. The younger woman prattled on about office politics—clashes with colleagues at meetings, mentoring strategies and interpersonal dynamics with her manager—this while the other listened dutifully, and apparently with interest. As they were leaving the older woman had a chance to mention that she was undergoing training to be a “life coach.” Again I felt instant contempt for these women. I think it was their self-assuredness. Maybe it was what I perceived to be a shallowness? But I wondered if I found women less sympathetic in some ways than men.

There may be something to that, but then later that same day, more antagonism, but this time the target was a man. I visited the Wegmans grocery store in Pittsford, with all its well-feed, well-behaved, well-educated citizenry, those people who listen attentively to public radio in the morning, chat on the phone with friends as they hold the phone with their shoulder and grip a cup of coffee with both hands, who shuttle their kids to hockey practice in the evening and fuss about property taxes in bed with their spouses. I don’t tend to like these people in the abstract either. I saw a thin middle-aged man in jeans and sleeveless fleece vest pull his minivan into a spot beside me. His nervous young girls hopped out and raced to keep up with their humorless father, striding all-too purposefully to the store entrance. There’s no reason I should dislike these people, yet everywhere I turn, I see nothing but people I don’t like. I’m sure I’d like them if I got to know them, but for now, I don’t like these people. I’m not filled with the milk of human kindness. I’ve become a grumpy old man, I’m afraid. Maybe I just don’t like strangers.

I received my Cocteau lithograph today. Now I want to receive such a package every day.

I simply cannot stop picking at my hands, running the finger tips of one hand over the ends of my fingers on the other, over the calluses on the palms and around the thumbs, looking for raised edges, the flakes of dried skin, any unevenness that might be smoothened by removing skin. I like the smoothness of new skin, and the dull pain at the fingertips, the repetitive rubbing of one finger over the cuticle of the next. The sensation of a raised cuticle is irresistible. I want the demarcations of skin and nail to be sharp. There mustn’t be excess skin, yet there is. On the insides of my cheeks too. Once started, I cannot stop biting the insides of my cheeks until I’m satisfied that there is no more excess to be removed. I enjoy biting a bit of cheek and feeling the loose strand with my tongue, maybe even feeling the hallow center of a loop of cheek skin that I can feel with the tip of my tongue.

Today at the gym I was sitting at the preacher curl rack minding my own business when a guy (a complete stranger) on the cables machine turned to me and asked, “Have you ever seen the movie ‘Dodge Ball’?” I had, so I said so. Then he said, “Doesn’t that guy getting a drink at the fountain look like the Ben Stiller character?” He did, dressed in black gym pantaloons with gray tiger stripes, shiny new cross-training shoes, and a gray turtle neck long sleeve shirt which clung tightly to his torso to accent a chest that did not warrant attention. The look wouldn’t have brought to mind Ben Stiller, though, except for the bushy handlebar mustache grown to the edge of his lower jaw as if he’d just pulled his mouth away from a bowl of thick Indian ink. It was completely inappropriate to point and laugh at this guy’s appearance, except that it *was* funny, and he *did* look like the very caricature of a middle-aged man enamored of his macho persona, drawn to his own image in the mirrors and to the attention he imagines he draws from the young women in the gym. Understand this: You’re never quite what you seem to yourself in the mirror, good or bad. Well, I laughed almost reflexively with the guy poking fun at the mustached man, of course unbeknownst him, as I always embrace the feeling of being invited to partake in a private joke. I felt guilty about it, but a big handlebar mustache … Come on.

I’ve finished two books in the last couple of days—“The Married Man” by Edmund White, and Proust’s “Sodom and Gomorrah.” I’ve just moved onto “The Captive,” the 5th volume of Proust’s 7-volume masterpiece. I enjoy how Proust begins and ends the volumes. So little actually happens throughout the hundreds of pages of any volume, the events being almost inconsequential. The transitions between volumes could almost pass unnoticed by the reader except for the need to shift to a different book, new binding with a new cover. The reader is given little assistance in becoming reacquainting with characters or situations. Things simply carry on. But each ending does attempt to set the tone or theme for the new volume. And each beginning is structured with a deliberateness, setting a theme which Proust hopes to explore in the volume. But the tone of the beginning, the well-intended discipline, quickly dissipates as the reader scrambles to assemble in some order the cast of characters and the sequence of events. Proust slides comfortably back into his familiar discourse on man’s place in French society, on art and on the culture of the beautiful, all expounded by the disembodied omniscience of the narrator. It’s funny how the narrator seems somehow larger than the young man at the center of the novels.

The Edmund White novel I just finished was good, but I thought if it had a flaw, it was that the narrator at times seemed to be Austin himself, the main character, or at least the narrator should have been Austin. A shifting third person / first person thing going on at times. Maybe it was just me.

Lately I’ve been out of work. Every day I worry about my next job, worry about what I should do. Yet I can’t bear to begin looking. I despise job searches. I don’t want to face the consequences of a new job. I would rather chat online. I start at the computer with good intentions, but it’s not long before I begin a dialog with some guy, hoping for some lanky boy with a sweaty crotch. Those boys are elusive. I don’t really mind. I do mind not working.

Twice in the same day, at different cafes, I’ve walked up to the counter and ordered a coffee: “A grande coffee to go,” which was immediately followed by “For here or to go?”

The missing page of Sodom and Gomorrah has shown up later in the volume, actually about 15 pages, most duplicates of earlier pages already read, placed out of order, as if to emphasize their importance.

Yesterday I was in the Pride Connection, a gay video and gift shop nearby. One of the patrons was chatting to the clerk about how horny gays always are. I wonder if that’s true. Are gay men more horny than straight men? I don’t know. I almost always notice good-looking guys, even lusting after them discretely, but is that being horny? On the chat lines guys are often introducing themselves by saying something like: “Hi. Horny here” or “Looking,” which I loathe. I don’t mind that they’re horny or looking, but could they please not so instantly introduce their horniness to me. What could be more overwhelmingly unappealing than to be presented with someone else’s horniness?

Speaking of exaggerating gay sexual desires, I recently read something about that in Proust. Baron M. de Charlus is a notorious closeted gay in the Proust novels, as are all gays in Proust’s fiction—a product of the times. Although Charlus believes it’s his little secret, known only by the few men he entices to share it with, everyone around him knows. At one point Charlus grasps the hand of a doctor friend of his, Dr. Cottard. “But Cottard, who had never allowed the Baron to see that he had so much as heard the vaguest rumours as to his morals, but nevertheless regarded him in his hearts of hearts as belonging to the category of ‘abnormals’, persons of whom he had little personal experience, imagined that this stroking of his hand was the immediate prelude to an act of rape for the accomplishment of which, the duel being a mere pretext, he had been enticed into a trap and led by the Baron into this remote apartment where he was about to be forcibly outraged. Not daring to leave his chair, to which fear kept him glued, he rolled his eyes in terror, as though he had fallen into the hands of a savage who, for all he knew, fed upon human flesh.”

"Forcibly outraged". . . I'll have to remember that one. "May I outrage you?" "Ohhh, please just bend me over your bed and outrage me!"

Java’s on Saturdays is always swamped by young kids with their parents awaiting their music lessons at the Eastman School of Music. I adore all of these boys and girls clutching their instruments as they clumsily rattle their tables and spill their hot chocolate. Their parents are good parents. They must be so to make the effort to do this for their children. But they always seem a little doltish, or rather unimaginative 9-to-5er clods who haven’t artistic abilities themselves, and perhaps don’t even really believe their kids do either, but are guided by their sense of duty and good parenting to support and nurture their kids’ potential, however fruitless it will all turn out. It’s completely unfounded, I’m sure. I think I’m just always focused on the contrast between the nervous energy of the child, the darting eyes, jittering body, and distant inattention, with the bored steadfastness of the parent. Energy, evidence of talent and artistic pursuits always win over steadfast nurturing, at least in my mind.

Proust —
“It sometimes happened too, however, that the habits which bound me were suddenly abolished, generally when some former self, full of the desire to live an exhilarating life, momentarily took the place of my present self. I felt this longing to escape especially strongly one day when … I had gone on horseback to call on the Verdurins and had taken an unfrequented path through the woods the beauty of which they had extolled to me. Hugging the contours of the cliff, it alternately climbed and then, hemmed in by dense woods on either side, dived into wild gorges. For a moment the barren rocks by which I was surrounded, and the sea that was visible through their jagged gaps, swam before my eyes like fragments of another universe. . . Suddenly, my horse reared: he had heard a strange sound; it was all I could do to hold him and remain in the saddle; then I raised my tear-filled eyes in the direction from which the sound seemed to come and saw, not two hundred feet above my head, against the sun, between two great wings of flashing metal which were bearing him aloft, a creature whose indistinct face appeared to me to resemble that of a man. . . I wept — for I had been ready to weep the moment I realized that the sound came from above my head . . . at the thought that what I was going to see for the first time was an aeroplane. … Meanwhile the airman seemed to be uncertain of his course; I felt that there lay open before him — before me, had not habit made me a prisoner — all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction that was the reverse of gravity, as though returning to his native element, with a slight adjustment of his golden wings he headed straight up into the sky.”

Who writes more beautifully than Proust?

What caught my attention in this passage was the comment about a former self, full of the desire to live an exhilarating life, momentarily taking the place of the present self. I wouldn’t say that I desire an exhilarating life—in fact, I prefer a slow and contemplative life at this point. But I do sometimes experience the sensation of being overtaken with thoughts of alternatives, the other job I might have, the other place I might live. Often, in the morning hours of work, with a warm cup of coffee in hand and a mild weariness with the tedium on the computer monitor before me, I conjure a true optimism imagining all the routes of life which I believe, perhaps falsely, are available for me, not just jobs and locations, but things I want to learn and places I want to discover. So for a few hours, say between 9:30 and 11 AM, it IS possible to be happy, if only fleetingly.

I’m missing pages 589-590 of Sodom and Gomorrah. Those pages are simply missing from my copy.

Last weekend I was driving east toward Albany on the NYS thruway. It was Friday evening, around 8:00 PM, and we were passing through a populated area, one of the towns between Utica and Schenectady. This entire region of upstate New York, from Buffalo to Utica and beyond is disparagingly called the rust belt of New York. In many ways it *is* a rust belt. You can see and feel the decay as you drive through Syracuse and points south. Life has passed from these cities and towns. To be sure, there are beautiful rural passages throughout much of the thruway drive southward. Despite the urbanization of much of America, the farmlands in upstate New York seem pure in their remoteness from change, untouched or untainted. But these rust belt towns seem somehow to have failed. They may hold a curiosity appeal and charm for passersby who romanticize the decaying aged small towns of the early 20th century, but these towns have truly been left behind. They *have* failed, or faded. But I wonder about all the people left in those towns? Who wants to live in a place which is rotting? It seems a waste of one’s life—plodding along paths which most others have abandoned as lifeless. And it makes me wonder about remaining in Rochester.

At one such rust belt town we passed by an apartment complex on the right-hand side, and I peered into the open windows of the apartments, as I like to do, wondering what the inhabitants were doing on a Friday night, and how did their plans compare with mine. Most windows were covered and dark, or flickering with the lights from television sets. Most of the building façade was checkered by dim kitchen lights and drawn bedroom window draperies, the sort of life signs that suggest the tired end of a hard work week. On the fourth floor of this six-floor complex was one open window into a room otherwise dark except for the sharply illuminated deep blue computer screen and a small reading lamp. No one was in sight, but clearly someone was home and settled in for an evening online. It made me think of Friday evenings when I was younger. After a suffocating week of school or work, the late afternoon on Friday always seemed wide open and exciting. It was a time to retreat into my private world and play alone online, chatting and connecting with strangers, or venturing into the city to see a movie alone, rent some porn, or indulge in some other secret fun. Friday evenings seemed to be a venting time for sexual energy, seediness, and private releases. At its best, it was a time to be alone with my own desires. I didn’t want friends to obstruct my urges because for me they never knew of nor shared them. I never had the sense of retreating into the night, into trouble, and away from the week’s business, with friends. It was always my time alone.

I loved these nights and these times. I remember savoring them especially when I was new to an area. During the week I often felt a little anxious, alone, and insecure, worrying about school or my job, my inadequacies, my future, about what I felt was a freakish double life of dark desires for young men. But on Friday night I indulged myself. The constant presence of mild loneliness that followed me throughout much of my young adulthood sweetened on Friday nights into a license. But it wasn’t all rooted in sexual desires. It was often just a time to connect spuriously with people in a way I never could manage in more personal and permanent ways. The online world in particular seemed to be populated with strangers like me who revealed dimensions of themselves that I liked far more than what I encountered in normal interactions during the week. I think above all the darkened room illuminated by a computer monitor on a Friday evening suggests to me all that was good and liberating about the otherwise anxious dread of being alone and unmoored in a strange place. I miss that feeling or being unmoored, though I think its loss is an inevitable part of getting older and becoming more comfortable and secure in the world.

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I was at a dinner party last night. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything like that with my friends. Hearing and seeing what your friends have been up to often awakens and energizes me. It feels like I’ve been a little complacent lately. Maybe I have been, maybe not. When you see what activities, jobs, and hobbies people are pursuing with passion, it’s a reminder to keep things moving yourself, keep the feet shuffling.

After the dinner party I went to a film at the gay film festival. It was an Italian film. I don’t even want to get into the story line or other details. It wasn’t a good film. What I disliked about it more than anything was the more-of-the-same ploys gay films use to entertain audiences. We’re continually asked to laugh at vapid young queens behaving with outrageous audacity before gasping straight people . . . the lusty gay with the cute smile and bleached hair bent over the couch taking it up the ass with lusty abandon as his matronly aunt walks into the room, shrieks in horror, and faints in the doorway. I want none of this. It’s not funny, I’m bored, and these films are stupid. Gay cinema seems to have a lower percentage of quality films than mainstream Hollywood. I want quirky, intelligent films with odd story lines and engaging dialog, but I think much of the gay film audience wants films that romp through gay clichés. Whoever said gays were more intelligent?

I’m always amazed at what films get made. I’m guessing that well over a majority of the gay films I see are very poorly written. Maybe I’m underestimating how difficult it is to write a screenplay, but I think that for many of these films, you could get a better screenplay by giving the writing duties to any amateur writer. The films that get made are those conjured by people with ambition and friends who can support the considerable undertaking of making a film. These are often not the same people who can write. Gay films are usually small films championed by one person performing multiple roles—writer, director, actor, producer. But so few people have all of these talents.

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I believe John Kerry will loose the election. I’m often disappointed at the American electorate, but I don’t really want to write much on politics in this blog. I will just say this. The war in Iraq was wrong, profoundly wrong. I believed this and said so at the time. I believe many political leaders also believed the same at the time, including Kerry. They didn’t say so because they were cowards. They feared being labeled as un-American and unpatriotic--a death blow to any politician. It was a difficult time, but it is at precisely these times when courageous leadership is most needed. They remained silent, and at the time they felt compelled to give their unenthusiastic support to the war, if not their rhetoric. Now, when the political climate has changed, they feel more comfortable voicing opposition and their true beliefs on the matter. They’ve been caught in their double speak and their duplicity, now painstakingly trying to rationalize their dissonant positions of support yet disapproval. They will loose the election, and they deserver to loose.

I've noticed some things about my work habits and writing/editing style lately. I've been thinking about these things as I've worked on different writing projects and have interviewed a bit for various jobs, answering questions regarding my strengths and weaknesses. Above all, I enjoy the broad efforts of clarifying complex topics, ideas, and software. I believe this is the real challenge in technical writing and for expository writing in general. The actual craft of writing and editing is secondary. I believe this is the way it should be. So often people get caught up in parsing sentences, editing with great precision, and following various "important" standards, guidelines, and rules. This is what so many people out there believe technical writing to be all about. It’s not. Those things are fine after you’ve done the hard work of understanding and then carefully explaining the subject matter, but it comes well afterwards. I enjoy and am pretty good at the hard part. I tend to get a little lazy in the second part—the editing part. Oh, I believe I'm a very good editor when editing the writing of others. I'm careful, detail-oriented, and thorough. But with my own writing I'm lazy. Writing new material is hard. I tend to expend great energy getting my head around the subject and thoroughly understanding what I’m writing about. Then I write about it. Having done this, I don’t really want to go back and edit the writing and put it into a polished form. Reviewing stuff I've written is tedious and dull.

Even in the second part of the writing process—the editing—I've noticed that people don’t really do the important things. They review for grammar, consistency, and style, fussing about minutia. What they don’t do is a structural review—is the information, are the ideas, organized and structured in a clear way. It strikes me that people are intellectually lazy. They don’t want to think too much. Grammar and style are easy; ideas and argumentation are not. I like hard things.

Of course, this applies only to expository writing. More creative forms of writing are different beasts entirely. I think writing poetry is the most difficult form of creative writing. If done well, it should be highly concentrated inspiration or creativity. I really have no interest in reading poetry. It bores me. But writing poetry is appealing in some ways. Lately I've been hearing poems read on public radio as I drive to work in the morning. I groan with displeasure every time it's introduced. Who wants to hear the sort of prosaic musings on scampering squirrels and tufts of autumn winds which the public broadcasting folks believe we clamor to hear? I tend to dismiss large segments of poetry out of hand. So much poetry is simply prose strung into short lines of text. I believe if poetry can be read as prose, with sentences conveying ideas, then it's not doing what poetry should do. Just my opinion. Poetry should not be about ideas; it should be about words, language, and images. Perhaps I'm drawing fine lines, but ... well, I don’t want a poem to read like an essay.

I've been obsessed lately with buying original drawings by Cocteau, first-edition books and signed copies, original music scores, etc. I think I've caught the collector’s bug, but unfortunately, my tastes outsize my bank account. Collecting is an odd enterprise. Why do we collect? There are those who believe they are investing. They imagine, perhaps, that the $55 which the unopened Star Wars figurine will fetch in 25 years will somehow make all the difference in their retirement years. At least I hold no illusions on that count, though I do believe that a Cocteau piece will at least not loose value—I would not be throwing away my money. My impulse to collect comes from a love of the pieces and their associations, together with a snooty "look how cultured I am" attitude. I've always been critical of those who get autographs, mostly because I can't think how such things could be valued—that signature of a dim-witted ball player or the foppish pop singer. In 5 years who will cares? But if it's Steve Reich... a different matter entirely. Clearly I value mementos of things that I hold in high esteem. But at least there is some implicit valuation. Some people cling to anything that has fame or notoriety. These are the truly contemptible people.

I read that if you want to be a collector, you should focus on one area. This may be good advice if you’re interested in creating a body of work, but for what? To increase the value of the things? Isn’t that back to the old investment idea, which I reject? If you like it, why not get it? But I do think focusing a collection might be a good idea simply because you become an expert in the area. Developing expertise is always a good thing. Maybe I will. It’s odd that my interests seem to be developing for art, though. I've always been very non-visual in my interests.

An apt quote from Proust: "One can no longer face the strain of keeping up with the young. Too bad if carnal desire increases instead of languishing!" I'm not sure that desire actually increases, though. Maybe because as we age, the hope (and likelihood) of sating the desire wanes, we image our desire increases when in fact it just remains, cruelly. In another passage of Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust first acknowledges the possibility of bisexuality: "The idea of Albertine’s having relations with women seemed no longer possible since the occasion, forty-eight hours earlier, when the advances she had made to Saint-Loup had excited in me a new jealousy which had made me forget the old [that she desired other women]. I was innocent enough to believe that one taste necessarily excludes another."

Edmund White, in his book "The Married Man," writes of a gay man who falls for a bisexual married man. The lead character, the gay man, came to age during the gay revolution of the 70's in New York, a time which had a blind spot for all shades of gray. When acceptance of gays was at issue, the last thing that was needed was nuance to complicate the message. But by 2000, when the novel was published, the main character begins to realizes that it might be time to update his thinking and attitudes. I haven't gotten very far in the novel, but I hope he does justice to the subject. I've been enjoying the writing of White lately. He's writing importantly about being gay in these decades, I think. One gets a broader view of the landscape from his writings, how attitudes of gays change with passing eras and the advance of age. Maybe I'm feeling a little bit of kinship when he writes about getting older in the gay world. His character falls for a bi-sexual married man 20 years younger than him. "He wasn't like his contemporaries who felt they could reduce the [age] gap by doing three hundred sit-ups every day until their thickened waists and slack skin looked like melted chocolate bars, the hot flesh oozing over the lines between the tablets. He didn't want to dance all night on drugs, his steps an anthology of four decades of approximated wriggling." The character once lied about his age, was chastised for it, and then felt ashamed, having learned a valuable lesson: "You always look your age, down to the last minute, and friends who say otherwise are deceived or deceiving."

This week I'm having a complete physical. I haven't had one in perhaps 5 years. I believe I’m the picture of health for someone my age. We'll see. Ann has suggested that I might want to get a gay doctor. I'm thinking she may be right. When I think of physicals these days, though, all my mental images arise from porn vignettes featuring a middle-aged male doctor in pressed slacks and a silk tie presenting a rubber-gloved hand to a boy bent over a table inviting a roughly probing finger for his hungry ass. I can't decide which role I want to play.

Last week I read a review of a new production of Wagner's Parsifal at Bayreuth. It was Pierre Boulez' return to Bayreuth after his celebrated Ring production in the 70's. The stage director was also returning after the same Ring production. Apparently the new Parsifal was quite a spectacle, employing non sequitur video, odd cultural references, and other unconventional theatrics which led to much controversy. The reviewer thought it was alarming and inspiring at the same time, one of the most moving theater experiences he'd seen. The Europeans have a knack for doing very experimental things with standard repertoire operas. I'm all for it. What caught my attention was that Boulez, who is nearly 80, now a living legend and an icon of 20th century music, has once again created a great piece of art. He's been responsible for so much high art of the last 50 years. What he does matters. Why must I toil over writing instructions for lame Xerox scanning software? The gap between Boulez' work and my own work seems ... well, vast, at the very least.

I’ve taken nearly two months off from blogging. I’ve been busy moving, painting, arranging, and fussing. And of course there have been vacations, weekend trips, and general enjoyment of the summer. Sharing living quarters also inevitably draws time away from solitary activities like writing. And more recently there’s been a week-long bout with some nasty strep throat. During my hiatus I’ve thought of a million things to write about. None of it got written. It’s gone forever. But I’m picking it up again.

Incidentally, I have another pet peeve: I hate when someone begins a sentence with “Too, …” or even “and too, …” Is it me, or has this become a hip new turn of phrase which, due to its widespread adoption, we’ll soon all be forced to use, much like when FORmidable became forMIDable due to (I think) rather sudden etymological forces. Christ, such an irritating affectation.

Speaking of pretension . . . I picked up a used book of modern plays a few weekends ago at Ann’s parents’ house. I read the first play in the volume—Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” I loved the play. I can’t say I yet have a grip upon it, or even thoughts about it—It would take another reading or two, I think. But I liked its oddity. And I liked the language. (It was Beckett’s own translation from the French, for those pretentious enough to be concerned with such matters (I recently encountered one such person who expressed concern about the translation.) Here’s a sample that I liked, spoken by the character Vladimir:

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He’s sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause) I can’t go on! (Pause) What have I said?

Today things seemed to be in rare harmony. Actually, over the last couple of days this has been true. Yesterday, as I was driving home, three different drivers either cut in front of me or made other reckless maneuvers, and then realizing their errors, each waved his hand generously, signaling his apology. One sees that so rarely. Today I worked quietly all day, beginning early and being productive all day. I was engaged and not bored. I did not become hopelessly sleepy in the early afternoon. I did not surf the Internet and find a thousand other distractions. Even the very difficult music I was listening to—Ligeti concertos—seemed to come into focus. I could use more days like this.

I must post this and move on.

Lately I've been unusually motivated to write, all the more unusual because I've not been motivated for anything else. This blog being a sort of diary, and me reading Rorem's diary, together make me wish I could write as engagingly as Rorem. I'd allow him his charmed and famous life, brimming as it is with the artistic elite of the times, if only I could write as well.

I spent the early afternoon sitting out at a table at Cibon reading the Rorem diaries. Lately I've been spending more time there, especially during the day. I've noticed that nearly every day in the afternoon I see the same guy take a table. He's always dressed for work, a dress shirt, tie, nice pants, brown shoes, and a book bag hung over his shoulder. He might be attractive except that he has a disconcerting skunk-like white streak in his hair at the center of his forehead, this on a guy in his twenties. I like him, though, simply from what I observe. (I sense he's entirely straight, to eliminate that dimension straightway...) He'll sit down, order a coffee or some other drink, and read the paper, or occasionally play chess or just talk with a friend. Today I saw him arrive with a bakery bag. From the bag he pulled out a wonderful little loaf of bread and a carton of soup and then began dipping the bread into the soup as he read the NY Times. I left to do some things at 4 PM. Hours later, at about 7:30, I happened to pass by Cibon and looked at the crowd sitting outside. He was still there, leaning against the wall at a corner table, reading! Freshly baked goods and soup, coffee at a café, idle chat with friends, and hours of reading alone in between... what could be finer?

Lately I've had the unsupportable urge to paint—canvases and oils. I have no talent, and seldom even care much about the visual arts. It's a passing fancy, one I won’t indulge. But I would like to work on something.

Rorem is constantly complaining about writing or text being too "arch" or having too much "arch." I have no idea what he means.

Rorem: "To be continually obsessed with sex, except during the act, when the mind wanders." So true, at least with the more casual sex I've had with men. For days I'm focused upon it, until I'm in the midst of it. Then it's an internal dialog with myself substituting for the necessary familiarity that makes for good sex.

In the later diaries Rorem repeatedly riles against the hysteria surrounding child molestation, recalling fondly that at the age of 14 he was *arranging* to be molested. I have mixed feelings about it.

Days later...

I must write more things about Rorem’s diaries, even though I think no one who might read this is interested in Rorem or his diaries. Nevertheless, I am, so ...

I'm enjoying them more than I have any book I've read in quite a while. And I think I was too hasty to complain of his dour tone in the last diary. It IS dour, but he retains a sense of humor, and I so enjoy reading his opinions and unrelated thoughts. I think I love this Rorem, the older Rorem.

A fan in 1994 sent him a picture of a moment in Madonna’s book "Truth or Dare" in which Madonna is flipping through his Rorem’s Paris Diary. To this he says, "It's downhill all the way for me now." I think he was not entirely joking here, which I love. He loves his notoriety, his fame, accepted gladly from all quarters.

Rorem occasionally remarks about great persons or art that he doesn't much care for. Beethoven, for example. On Frank Lloyd Wright: "His architecture has always struck me as frigid, un-homey, pretentious, simple, dangerously jagged." Amen to this. Wright's a sacred cow I could do without. More than the sacred cows, though, I enjoy his so very regular jabs and strikes against Elliot Carter. I'm utterly sympathetic, of course. He regularly strikes out at Boulez too, but without the good-natured eye-rolling that he gives Carter. He respects Boulez too much for that; with Carter the sarcasm is thick, and funny. He chides a NY Times columnist for regularly working Carter's name into every column, as if Carter were the standard for all things. Rorem suggests that the columnist should rename his column "On Elliot Carter and Other Matters." Lol I love that sort of jealously.

In 1991 he wrote that he had been 8 years without sex with another person, though he masturbated regularly as per his doctor's instructions (no doubt to help his ailing prostate—it's best to keep the prostate empty of seminal fluid). His enduring fantasy whilst masturbating? "A person kneels (is it me? Yet I'm also always observing) before the crotch of a very male unshaven but otherwise shadowy form wearing what the French call salopettes. Pungent aroma, sweat, smegma, locker room. One-sided blow job.... As a youth, I'd be getting fucked, and am forever a 'bottom.' But the image blurs with the years into something impersonal yet awfully erotic..." I have NO fantasy upon which to draw. I have no fantasy life at all, none. But for the abundance of porn on the web (and on my hard drive... for my hard-on), where would my masturbation practices be? What if I became blind? How to lust when one is blind?

Rorem didn't see "Planet of the Apes" until 1989. Having finally seen it, he says, aptly, that it is "unwatchable with Heston's tomcat smirk robbed from Gable, and the sophomoric script." Is it perhaps Heston that is unwatchable?

At least three times Rorem mentions the type of gay male that repels him. It's not the "madly effeminate nor the comically macho;" It's the "tight-lipped, smart, bossy, humorless, teacherly brand—'One of those mean ones,' as Ben Weber used to say." God, yes. I've just begun the fourth volume of Proust—"Sodom and Gomorrah." It begins with the narrator's realization that a mean old man is gay. He's not quite the sort that Rorem describes, but what can be meaner than a mean gay? Rorem claims the same breed can be found also among fringe heterosexuals such as married parsons, congressmen, and even William Buckley.

Here's one for Ann. On a visit to Virgil Thomson, Rorem presented Thomson with a cucumber soap, to which Thomson responded, "Just imagine, someone recently gave me some tangerine soap, which I never use." It was Rorem who had given him the tangerine soap. Haha I think I'd enjoy both soaps.

Rorem is not a shopper, apparently. "The horror of buying clothes.... After procrastinating for a year I'll enter the store, buy anything expensive, then leave in three minutes."

For all the gay men who've wasted countless hours looking for sex (and who among us does not do that ... repeatedly?): "No outsider knows the unthinkably time-consuming rigors of cruising." Yes, rigors!

Tonight I watched a special 1.5 hour show on the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra playing the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas (aka MTT) conducting (and hosting). MTT is in his mid 50s by now, no longer the young Wunder Kind that he once was. He's even reached the level of one of America's great conductors, and to be sure, he's at his peak, and he gets a great sound from the orchestra. But he seems small and imitative compared to the greats of the past. To me he suggests the smallness of the era. Or am I just revering previous generations and inflating their stature at the expense of today's?

Should I make my A&F pants into shorts?

Every morning I wake up and can scarcely get out of bed. Only breakfast motivates me. After a brief nap, I cast about for a plan for the day. I form one but don't follow it. I reach a low by late morning, depressed, unhappy, but mostly devoid of care. I want nothing to obligate me. I want no chores, no duties, no job. I don't even want communication with people. I want to be left alone. I want to read and nap all day. One might think I'm depressed because I'm unemployed, and yes, that must be it. But my worst fear is that a job will come along and interrupt my pleasant summer day. (Mostly I fear a dull job, a more-of-the-same-sort-of-crap job.) By mid-afternoon I'm full of motivation, mostly for creative things. Evenings are fine. My days already feel full, no room for a job.

Authors to read: Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide, the novels of Sartre, check out Paul Goodman.

Music to examine or re-examine: The Rake's Progress, the Bartok string quartets, the music of Bill Flanagan, Marc Blitzstein, and Paul Bowles. More Milhaud and Les Six.

Rorem cites "profound embarrassment (guilt) at the profound enjoyment of sugar, Ravel, and of being 'bottom man.'" He alludes at other places to being a pushy bottom—I insist you rape me now. Yet if there’s a dominant complaint about his health throughout his diaries, it's his hemorrhoids. Even throughout his early diaries (late 20s and his 30s) he's constantly complaining about piles. In the later diaries they get mentioned, but are overshadowed by his flaming urethra, herpes, eye troubles, etc. How does a bottom negotiate sex with hemorrhoids?

Rorem is unrepentant about speaking with a Leonard Bernstein biographer about Bernstein’s sex life. He reports that he and Bernstein, in 1943, had sex; Bernstein was 24 and Rorem 19. "We did what young people do," he said, and "Had I been a girl would anyone think twice?" Apparently David Diamond also spoke of Bernstein's sex life to the same biographer; both were chastised by friends.

A preponderance of America's great composers are or were gay: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, David Diamond, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Gian Carlo Menotti, John Cage, Lou Harrison, David Del Tredici, John Corigliano, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Marc Blitzstein. None of the major minimalist composers, though.

Gay volleyball tonight—the first of the season. It was fun, though a bit swampy.

I'm now reading the later diaries of Rorem, 1986-1999. He's in his sixties and seventies. His writing is more prosaic. There's more recollection and less reflection. He's become more stridently political, which I don't like—I liked the Rorem who proclaimed how he cared not at all for politics. He's also lost his endearing self-doubt. There's much discussion of physical ailments. In short, he's become a cranky old man. In some ways he reminds me of Diamond in some of the taped interviews I have of him. But I'm enjoying this volume even more than the others. I actually enjoy reading about the details of his life, the daily events AND the ailments. As reading, it's quite interesting. But as for Rorem the person, the older man, he's less likeable (though perhaps I've caught him at a bad time—the mid-80s). His life seems far more settled. Where is the vulnerability, the admiration of others?

Well, I read the diaries out of order, going from the Paris and New York Diaries directly to the later diaries. Where once he wrote of encounters with Les Six (lunches with Poulenc and Milhaud), now he writes of television shows, Reagan policies, and pets. The AIDS epidemic has politicized him, I think, which one can hardly find fault with.

It's funny to look back on the time period from a perspective just slightly removed in time. I don’t like the tone of the 80s, on either side of the political spectrum. AIDS politicized the gay population, for better and for worse. In some way it was the impetus which has advanced gays socially, even politically. But it also became the face of gay culture. I don't mean to suggest that we should marginalize the still grave AIDS epidemic, or that we should be glad that the disease has spread to other populations, but I'm glad it is no longer synonymous with gay culture.

More striking than anything, really, when comparing the early diaries and the later diaries is just how crass modern life seems to have become, striking even in the life of a great artist like Rorem. Television intrudes, and pop culture. Perhaps it's more a factor of what was NOT included in the earlier diaries rather than what is in the later ones.

Before I leave the early diaries behind, a few last notes. Rorem writes a little paragraph about some drag queens, remarking that the dream of one of them is to be fucked by the unknown soldier. Funny.

He notes in June of 1959 that he missed part of the rehearsal with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic of the world premier of his Third Symphony because he had an interview for his unemployment insurance renewal. He speaks fondly of his weekly check of $45.

He writes a couple of engaging pages on the bathhouse experience. I must come back to this sometime. It's rich stuff.

About diary writing: "Anecdotes are a diary's heart's blood. Yet their annotation requires more skill and patience than philosophic musings." He’s so right.

On sexual intercourse: "Think of it, obsessing the heart, dominating logic, teasing nights, wasting whole days! Isn't it really—well—rather silly, or at least senseless: two clumsy positions rubbing like washboards with ugly grunts and an ultimate thump that rhymes with nothing, except maybe 'Go away'—when two minutes earlier, for some wild reason, it was almost 'I love you'? For that we walk the streets fifty-two weeks a year!"

A few nights ago I met a young guy for coffee, having chatted with him earlier online. He approached me online, not I him, so I thought I was in the driver's seat. I guess I was in some respects, but not entirely. We chatted for a little while about our daily pursuits, the sort of breezy chatter that one forgets immediately, as I have by now, and then he suggested we meet later for coffee. As we were exchanging parting words he asked for my cell phone number because, as he proceeded to explain, when he arrives at the coffee shop, he will park the car and then phone me as to my location in the shop. He didn't seem to like the uncertainty of looking for a stranger. I gave him my number—he was cute enough for that. Then he continued with the following: "When we meet don't say 'Nice to meet you,' 'You look different than your pic,' or 'What was your sc? [screen name, for the uninitiated]'" He didn't want anyone to get the impression that we had met online, which of course we had. Funny that he was concerned about this. Aren't we all, especially the young, as he was (oh, soooo young), comfortably settled into the online world? Why the bashfulness? I replied with something like, "So many rules. I'm stymied by all these rules." I mentioned something about the tests he was putting me through. He said that I had passed them comfortably, though more were to follow. And then something was said about other examinations he’d like to give me. I said there’d be opportunity for those later. Well, we chatted over coffee (or tea for me, and a creamy cold coffee drink for him), and we sat and sat until I (yes, I!) got tired of sitting and suggested we leave. We walked to our cars, having parked on the same side street. I walked him to his, and then, standing by his car, we began the awkward talk that covers the nervousness of two minds wondering whether something is going to happen next. This talk continued endlessly. Ultimately I moved closer to him and kissed him. He kissed me back, and we kissed for a moment or two. We then moved back into more nervous, silly talk. I asked him home, and he coyly said it was not a good idea on a first meeting. He's right, of course. More chatter. I kissed him again, and we kissed a while longer until I told him to go home and do the work that he had earlier mentioned awaited him. It was nice. He was cute. And I liked kissing him on the street. Of course it was dark, but we turned at least a few heads. The only reason I mention it now, for it wasn't my intention to write about it tonight, here at the very same coffee shop... the reason is that as I entered the shop just 45 minutes ago, there he was sitting outside with some other guy. We exchanged some words, and I left him to his friend. I'm not sure if I feel guilty for not having called him, or jealous that he's with his friend. It's silly either way. He was just a fun encounter, perhaps one I'll renew sometime. Enough about that.

I intended to write about my unemployment situation. Yes, I'm unemployed. It's so dull to write about such things. In fact, on second thought, I won't. I’m bored with it before I begin. More Rorem. In 1958 he wrote this: "Often composers compose like what they think they are not. Look at the uncomplicatedly sensitive but basically joyous work of David Diamond during his flagrantly disordered war years, and now that he’s stabilized in a Florentine villa his music's grown knotty, complex, and sad." He's right about the change in Diamond's music from the 1940s to the 1950s, though I'm not sure it's for the reason Rorem cites. It may be nothing but the inevitable change of any good composer. You can't go on composing the same thing. Diamond himself explained that his music grew more chromatic because he felt he had said all that he could in the modal music of the 1940s.

Here’s Rorem on casual sex: "No sex.... I grow confounded by the intimacy of such acts where two bodies strive so tragically to be one, and the empty-stranger post-orgasm abyss. It happened last night: the frenzied pathetic joy of a child before his birthday cake, followed by the tears of abandonment when the last guest is gone. I'm ready for the calm assurance of a single person, the thatched hut, a cabbage batch." I recognize these things. I feel them myself, but the tears of abandonment aren't so bad. I think of Ann, and of our thatched hut. Is that wrong? There IS something to my friend's claim that bisexuals are selfish. Well, I AM selfish, but it seems to be working.

Rorem on getting older: "Yes, now I can see the years and how the past drags like a peacock's tail ever longer which yet erects a luminous fan blowing and hiding and sweeping the traces and helping what might come."

I've been bogged down all evening in Rorem's agonizingly long (40 pages!), self-indulgent woe-is-me letter to his lover, who, it seems, broke up with him unexpectedly and left him in considerable pain. But the moaning of the recently dumped, though inspiring sometimes poetic fulminations, quickly grows tiresome. Christ, Ned, pull it together and move on. Rorem's a first-rate writer, even a great writer, but in this case he could have used an editor.

I had a few things to write about tonight, but that was before I picked through much of the contents of my bedroom closet, which hasn't been touched in the nine years since I moved in. It's like opening Tutankhamen's tomb, breaking the seal that holds back a thousand years—well, in Tut's case, much more even than that. I haven't gone through some of this stuff in decades. I brought some of it from my mother’s attic, a few years ago, when by chance I was visiting her and happened to be in the attic where I stumbled upon familiar boxes. Before it was lost forever, I quickly grabbed some of it and put it into my car. But I never really went through it.

Well, first, I found many of my old undergraduate papers! Very exciting. I wrote some interesting things, I think—philosophy papers for Paul Guyer, who's become one of the world's top Kantian scholars (check out the section on Kant in the philosophy section of any good bookstore and you'll find his books), papers for Deidre Bair, who wrote biographies of Samuel Beckett, Anais Nin, and Simone de Beauvoir, and some decent papers on Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and others. Well, I won't really go back and read them, except for the comments. It's quite an impressive stack. Here's a sampling:

About my paper on King Lear, the professor wrote, "Interesting reading of the play's 'philosophy.' It reveals original thinking. At times your writing is 'unfocused' but your points are always [??? can't read her writing here] well." Yes, I was always unfocused in my writing because I was reasoning it out as I wrote. It's the only way I can think even now. In the same class, on a different paper on Coriolanus, the teaching assistant wrote this: "Although the points you make in this paper are very intelligent and perceptive, your writing continually obtrudes and gets in the way of your argument." In a paper on Wittgenstein the professor writes, "Very interesting piece of work. Your conclusion is highly suggestive. Understanding your argumentation is rather rough going." Hehe

In the course I took with Guyer on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," we were assigned to read Guyer's own book on the Kant classic— Guyer was in the final stages of writing the book, so we were reading a version before it was printed, which was cool. I read almost none of it, however. Very lazy as an undergrad. His comment on my paper is funny: "It is certainly bold to depart from the dogma I've been asserting [I didn't know his dogma because I hadn't read it nor listened in class! hahah], and I have no objection to that, but you don't provide textual evidence of the key to your argument??? [can’t read his writing].... You are clearly itching for originality, which is laudable, but also need to constrain your imagination more ??? by the text. Nevertheless, as the most ambition undergraduate paper: A-." This was a graduate-level course. The most interesting part about the comment is that in pencil, which he erased, though not completely, he gave me an A—"A ...as the most ambitious undergraduate paper." I guess upon second thought, it was less than an A.

Deidre Bair wrote of my paper on Forster's "Howard's End:" "A very thorough treatment of a difficult topic. You are right to acknowledge a certain audience and proceed with your analysis from that angle. You are also right to not try to cover up the polemical nature of the argument in the book. Nice job. A" Of my paper on Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter" she agrees with the teaching assistant's comment that it was an ambitious paper but looks like a first draft to get ideas sorted out. [No doubt it was.] She says, "Too bad you were not able to give it the extra attention this good paper deserves. B." She scratched out the minus from the B- that the teaching assistant had given me.

I also found a cigar box with treasures from my very early years. There are a few cool match box cars, ones that I especially valued. There is a bag of arrow heads, none too exciting. There is a bracelet with my name on it which I made in metal shop. It's tiny. There are also some cheap necklace chains, a few cassette tapes, lots of Planet of the Apes trading cards, and a few stacks of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cards (notable among them are a Roberto Clemente card, Willie Stargell, a Bill Mazeroski, and a few others). Tucked away at the bottom of the box was a carefully folded piece of paper with some writing on it, not in my hand. I couldn't figure out whose handwriting it was until I read the contents. It was folded several times, and on the top was written "Mom, Read this I wanted to tell you this in a letter."

The contents read: "Dear mom, I wasn't going to tell you this but I think I should. Ok, when you're working on Tues. & Thurs Ed [our stepfather at the time] comes home at about 4:00. The reason why I'm always saying I don't want him around is because when nobody is around he feels me out. He gets in my pants and inside my shirt. And I say don't he says come here. Even when he's tickling me on your bed on Saturdays like we did sometimes when you leave the room he starts. I just wanted to tell you I didn't want it to be a secret to you. Love, Bub [my sister's nickname at the time] Please don't tell Ed I said this to you. Don't say anything to the boys so they will think Ed’s ??? [can't read her writing here] I thought the best time to tell you is when Ed's not around."

I remember the event vividly. My mother came home, read this, and became hysterical. I couldn't imagine what had happened. Somehow I finally got the letter and read it. The actual artifact of the letter became incidental in the ensuing chaos of the household. Everyone forgot about it. Something possessed me to keep it, though. I remember this now, though I’d forgotten about keeping it until finding it tonight. Yikes. It hits you like a bolt of lightning, still.

I've been cleaning out my apartment in anticipation of moving at the end of the month. In the sifting through of junk I've found a few interesting things which I'll share here in lieu of actually writing something. (I'm tired... and lazy.)

First, here are a few personal ads which I put in the local City paper years ago. I met many people through these.

Reticent, jeans-and-t-shirt SWM, 32, seeks mature SF, 25-35, post-punkster, neo-60’s flower child, Eurotrash, groovy professional, or just the slightly freaky. Must have a wickedly sharp mind and the energy to drag me places. Aimless drifters welcome. Into writing fiction a plus.

SWPM, 33, 5’6”, 140lbs, into fitness, dancing, biking, writing, music, email, cultural things, and new things ISO SF for aforesaid. Should be bright, open-minded, fun, headstrong, hopefully creative, maybe eccentric.

And here’s a little note I got from one of my authors when I was an editor and had decided to take a new job. It was a nice note, one which you rarely get during a career.

Dear Dan — It was with a heavy heart that I read your letter of 12/11/98 that you would be changing jobs. You have been the finest person and editor I've had in about 30 years of dealing with the publishers. You were always there when I needed your advice, judgment and common sense. You supported me in all my ideas except when there were good reasons not to, which you explained in detail. I sincerely hope that your job change is a promotion to the top as you are needed there! If I can support you in any way, I'd be thrilled to do so. I hate to lose you as a sounding board for my thoughts and hope we can continue to work together! I fee like I've lost a good friend and I will miss you! Best Regards.

That's all for tonight.

There are several things concerning the Rorem diaries that I want to mention. Perhaps they’re of interest to me alone, but nevertheless, I want to write them down.

In 1970 Rorem writes about caustic references to "fags" on the same page of the Village Voice as a compassionate report of a "Gay-In," whatever that was. He also writes about reading comments of distaste regarding Andre Gide’s "buggery," and he sets the record straight, which I enjoyed. "For the record, those who would know maintain that Gide was not at all impelled to the act of buggery. His sexuality, when not simply vicarious, was no more 'responsible' or 'sophisticated' than anonymous masturbation of little boys in darkened movie theaters. Mauriac... publicly lamented his colleague's wicked ways. During the war an anecdote circulated about Gide's making love with an Algerian youth. Gide tells the boy, 'You've just slept with France's greatest author.' 'Yeah? What's your name?' 'Francois Mauriac.'"

Writing further about the Gay-In, Rorem says that gays remain the last group subject to derision... from all classes, including presumably tolerant intellectuals, noting a "beaming reference by Norman Mailer, on the Dick Cavett show, to Sade as a faggot," which got a "nervous laugh—nervous only because people wonder who Sade is." lol I wonder too. Well, we should not be surprised at derisive comments from Mailer.

At a dinner with Gore Vidal in Italy Rorem recalls how excited Vidal was that he'd seen Sartre in town that very day. Vidal observed Sartre waiting patiently in line at the bank for an hour. Vidal seems to be a talker, and Rorem noted, "We are silenced only by those we admire..." He goes on, "Gore is American in seeing greatness as an aspiration rather than as a fait accompli..., but he's French in that small talk becomes big, nothing's unimportant, there's little letup, guests must all be alert." God, just reading about it makes me sleepy. I haven't the energy for it.

Rorem writes on a few occasions in the first few years of the 1970s about the women's liberation movement, and all the attendant ideology. "Cunt is no more insulting for a woman than Prick for a man. What about man-as-object? [This has been my point for years—person-as-object is the essence of lust, and so no more harmful than our own innate desires.] To homosexuals rough-trade is an object though his role is hardly passive: he does the work, ramming the twitching lips, and is paid off without a word … But who's to prove he's a 'thing' without knowing what goes on behind the scenes of all concerned? That 'passive' homosexual deals the cards, purchases the merchandise (I command you to dominate me!), writes the sonnet, ends up literarily if not literally on top. Yet the trade, when he murders his client, does so for having been sucked off or sucked into, verbs indicating passivity. Meanwhile, everyone knows that some snatches have snapping teeth while others, like blotters or quicksand, are capable of absorbing whole human bodies. That aggressive cramp a twat inflicts might kill a man, and Wagner's not the only one to have died in flagrante." I'm not sure what he's referring to with the Wagner mention, but I like Rorem's use of the gay perspective to comment on, and to cast doubt upon, the prevailing dogma of the women's lib movement of the time. Do gay men stand in a better position to comment on women's issues than heterosexual men? I tend to think so, though I'm certain the keepers of the faith have by now absorbed and neutralized gay men into their overall ideology. I think Rorem can't decide whether to dislike Mailer for his hostility towards gays or embrace him for his confrontation of dogmatic women's libbers. At one point he says of Mailer: "...I found him quite cute. Mailer: speaks before he thinks and writes it down afterward." Lol On the same page Rorem uses the term "bull dyke"—one of my current favorites, though I was under the impression that it had only in the last few years entered common parlance. Not so.

In June of 1971 Rorem named a few new friends he'd recently made, among them a Robert Lucid, this during some discussion of Mailer. I'm certain this Robert Lucid is the same Robert Lucid who was the master of Hill House when I was at Penn living in that dorm my freshman year. Lucid was a professor of English at Penn, and a friend of Mailer. When I was living in Hill House, Lucid, as master of the house, brought Mailer to stay in the dorm for a few days. I met Mailer there and served him dinner. So this is my three degrees of separation from Rorem. Dan – Lucid – Rorem.

Also in 1971 Rorem met Anais Nin at a book signing. Rorem went to Gotham Book Mart at which Nin was signing books. Rorem got her to sign her newest diary. He doesn't seem to think much of her, though. They are both renowned diarists. It seemed noteworthy

Here's a funny simile from Rorem: "twinkling like crab lice in a massive black vagina."

Who does Rorem admire? Actually, more than you might imagine. He seems to have a good dose of vulnerability and doubt about his own value, and to harbor a (suppressed, to advance his own stature, it seems—reasonable) healthy admiration for many of the greats. He mentions meeting Messiaen in 1972, and writes, "I'm intimidated for the first time in years." That's nice, and he's right to be intimidated. He of course writes respectfully of Stravinsky. How can one not? He defends Cocteau with genuine affection and respect. And he says that Bach was the greatest composer to ever walk the planet. He's right again.

The term "flaming faggot," Rorem writes, "originates from the auto da fe which could produce flames foul enough to consume a witch only by tying homosexuals into bundles of kindling." It seems like something spun by zealously defensive gays.

It's funny that Rorem writes at one point about how he values the artifacts of correspondence he's had with certain luminaries, just as I value my things of David Diamond. "Letters from geniuses scribbled or maltyped n'importe comment, I value as things, as microscopes focused on my being, like those ten or twelve Cocteau (now irremediably glued in yellowing scrapbooks rather than singly breathing between cool museum folders) or the one from Gide, Gide who knew Wilde who knew Victoria who could have known Schubert..."

Here's a little bit on aging, applicable to me as well. Rorem had dinner with a few old friends he hadn't seen in years. "They hadn't changed much, except for the cobweb masks worn by everyone over forty. Their build and physiognomy seemed the same as fifteen or twenty years ago. The same, with the urgent difference that although they spoke of sexuality they no longer exuded any. How locate this invisible switch? Like trees in late afternoon, identical to their morning selves but without the direct sunlight. Shadows flutter in the evening, waving at their real selves so recently lost. I am embarrassed. But not until later do I direct the embarrassment at myself, for I feel so physically good."

Rorem on the Last Tango (the Marlon Brando movie): "Now the guiding fantasy of Last Tango is a male-homosexual one. The obligatory anonymous encounter is far less germane to heterosexuality, even in brothels, than to men among themselves who mutely endow their partner—who just may be a ribbon clerk—with the attributes of a gladiator." Perhaps, but I for one certainly have little interest in gladiators.

Another interesting bit re David Diamond: "In the twenty-nine years of our up-and-down friendship I've received twice that number of letters from David; rereading them this morning made my very body reexperience the flux of temperature he continually underwent; but he was nothing if not committed. If he's difficult, am I less so?"

I got done nothing that I regard as productive tonight. I felt compelled to write down these little Rorem notables, and so now am free to ... move on to the earlier Paris and New York Diaries. Tomorrow I'll try to go through some junk and pack away some things. I have a long list of things I want to do. Rorem at one point wrote something like "Life has become a series of lists." For me too.

Ann is gone for the weekend, a change of pace for us both. I imagined dozens of things I might do, things I should do. Mostly they are things I don't do alone much anymore. I thought of going to a movie alone, going to the market and wandering through the fruit stands alone, going dancing, renting some porn, spending a stretch of time going through accumulated junk in my apartment, inviting a stranger into my bedroom — I did none of these things, but I've had a pleasant time, nevertheless, being alone. I love time alone, yet when the time is presented to me, I meet it as though it were an impossible burden to be filled with countless activities. I'm glad it's an event for me, made possible only by her otherwise abiding presence in my life.

Lately my mind has been foggy. I've been unfocused and inarticulate. Ann called me this evening, and I could do nothing but stammer in confused, choppy phrases. I've been like this lately. I imagine she is tolerant of it, but wishes it would go away. If mental states are like basements, I want a mind sparsely inhabited by only the most valued stored possessions, and otherwise bare, clean floors, walls freshly painted with glossy white sealant. Instead I have dusty card-boarded clutter, bare light bulbs swinging from electrical wire, and decades worth of cob webs due to dryers which are not vented to the outside.

Rorem wrote this: "So impending are deadlines... that I grow hysterical. Reasoned essays to complete, piano practice for three recitals, music to be composed—all waited for, all expected to be of my 'usual caliber.' Toward what does such panic impel me, beyond writing this useless paragraph? Passed the morning moronically studding an orange with a thousand cloves." I do such moronic things all the time. And write (truly) useless paragraphs.

Rorem at multiple points throughout the diary notes that his standard of productivity in a year is about an hour's worth of music. This strikes me as meaningful. In some significant way the year for him is measured by that hour of composed music. All else is filler, the daily stir of activities, people, and talk, and of course, moronic nonsense. I have much the same attitude about most of my daily activities and duties, but without the hour's worth of artistic output to show at the end. What I care about are the things I'm listening to, the things I'm reading—recently read passages of Proust, the emotionally satisfying third movement of the newly recorded piece for two pianos by John Adams, the Rorem diaries, newly discovered details about David Diamond—these are the things I care about. But such attitudes are the luxury of artists. The rest of us must care about our daily grind, I'm afraid. I don't, and it's a problem. It's cliché to say that we must keep our eye on life's essentials, the things that really matter. I think I have the opposite problem. Not that I'm always thinking about love, friends, and family. Not at all. But I am always thinking about things utterly unrelated to and far removed from my daily life.

Rorem wrote this too. "'A bas Sartre, a bas Boulez, a bas Couperin,' one hears the French kids cry. One doesn't hear American kids cry 'Down with Goodman, down with Cage, down with Gottschalk,' because they've never heard of these men, much less Sartre, Boulez, or Couperin. Which is not to boast the superiority of French culture. The humblest French concierge knows the names, if not the works, of his country's cultural heroes for two thousand years, and is proud, while we, in a pinch, may know the names of Hemingway or Mailer (though not their works), but strictly as folk heroes." After reading this again, though, I'm not sure there's much to it. Still, am I just getting old and stodgy in wishing that we Americans knew and cared more about our cultural icons. In music at least, Americans know next to nothing about their heritage.

Rorem notes that Mahler met Charles Ives on a visit to America in the early 1900s. That seems bizarre for some reason.

The day was not exactly productive. It's good that I have no work to do, because I have no desire for work. I suppose I have no desire because I have no work. Anyway, much of the day was passed shopping and fantasizing. The first, and really only, accomplishment of the day was to buy shoe strings for my sneakers. The current strings won't last another week. (I've been saying that for weeks now.) I then bought a book on Windows security—a book I have no desire to read and a subject in which I have even less interest. Nevertheless, there is good reason to invest a few bucks in the book, if only for a long shot. Never mind this cryptic reference. I also bought another volume of the Rorem diary (the last volume, dating through 1999), and some CDs. I spent part of the day researching how one can buy an apartment in Paris. There are services which find apartments for foreigners (mostly English-speaking people), manage the renting of them, etc. It's an option, one I'll likely not seriously pursue, but an option which will occupy far too much of my inner fantasy life.

Somewhere today I read a blurb that mentioned something being "out of sink." No. "Out of synch," people. Please.

Tonight I saw the premier of a short movie made in Rochester. A few friends had roles in the movie, and it was fun just to see them act and sing on screen. The quality of the movie was remarkably good, that is, the camera work, lighting, music, editing, etc. The performances were also good. It could hold its own with nearly any short film I've seen at the gay and lesbian film festival here. Its shortcoming was really its faulty "scaffolding," as Rorem likes to speak of structure in a composition. Well, actually the problem was not so much its structure as it was something equally fundamental—the basic story line was convoluted, and more importantly, dull. The story was hung upon silly Greek mythological references, in, I suppose, a bit of needless pretension. Mixed in was a good dose of clichéd gender-bending farce and several musical numbers, in an inevitably failed attempt to be all gay things to all gays... in 45 minutes. A romping gay time, it was not. It was not bad. It's just that I watched how much effort and talent were brought to bear on what was a fundamentally flawed idea, and it seemed a waste. If the story had been good, perhaps a simple little meaningless story, without attempts at more, the excellent directing, music, editing, etc. could have made this a wonderful little film. It made me wonder how the same thing happens on a much larger scale in Hollywood. So often millions of dollars are spent making a movie when the basic story and script are crap. How does that happen? In this case the script was not bad, or rather the spoken words weren't bad—the story was. Too bad. Keep it simple. It's so hard to do.

Add to my to-do list: Take 5 minutes to write a synopsis of a story that might make a good short film. Don't think about it; just write it.

After the movie I went out for coffee with Gerry and Brian. We had a good time. I always have lots of fun talking with them at coffee shops, talking about people, meeting the people Gerry knows. I could sit talking with them for hours. So much fun.

I haven't any ideas worthy of the time I might spend writing them out, nor of the time spent reading them. So I'll invoke the thoughts of others.

This was funny, I thought. Rorem gives his estimates of "homoerotics in the male sex." Among composers in the '40s, 75% he believes are gay (and three of the top four). Surely he counts himself among the top four. Composers of the '60s: 50%. Pianists, about 50%. Organists: 90% (due to their "sissified Protestant background, though in France it's otherwise"). Harpsichordists: 95%. Violinists, no more than 10%. (This is surely grossly underestimated.) Orchestra players, 99% heterosexual. Also underestimated. Harpists—fewer than you think. Abstract expressionists of yesterday: almost none. Pop artists of today: almost all. (Here he surely means Warhol, spoken of several times throughout this section of the diary. Rorem seems to think more of him than I do.) Rorem speaks of having a wet dream in September of 1966. It seems unusual. I can't remember when I last had a wet dream. Decades ago. I think to have a wet dream as a mature (and aging) man, you have to have no ejaculations for weeks and weeks. By then the semen has a lumpy yellow consistency suggestive of tapioca pudding. It's not the sort of thing to celebrate, in my mind.

I read this passage of Proust yesterday. I thought it notable simply because he rarely casts his characters as so categorically unlikable. It's funny.
Prince d'Agrigente's name "had always appeared to me like a transparent sheet of coloured glass through which I beheld, struck by the slanting rays of a golden sun, on the shore of the violet sea, the pink marble cubes of an ancient city of which I had not the least doubt that the Prince—who happened by some brief miracle to be passing through Paris—was himself, as luminously Sicilian and as gloriously weathered, the absolute sovereign. Alas, the vulgar drone to whom I was introduced, and who wheeled round to bid me good evening with a ponderous nonchalance which he considered elegant, was as independent of his name as of a work of art that he owned without betraying in his person any reflexion of it, without, perhaps, ever having looked at it. The Prince d'Agrigente was so entirely devoid of anything princely, anything remotely reminiscent of Agrigente, that one was led to suppose that his name, entirely distinct from himself, bound by no ties to his person, had had the power of attracting to itself every iota of vague poetry that there might have been in this man, as in any other, and enclosed it, after this operation, in the enchanted syllables. If any such operation had been performed, it had certainly been done most efficiently, for there remained not an atom of charm to be drawn from this kinsman of the Guermantes."

As I was sitting outside yesterday on the sidewalk of a café in mid-afternoon, I watched a group of four men, clearly gay men, hop into a Honda Element as if at the start of a grand day shopping and strutting up and down the crowded streets of P-town. A few were young; a few were graying. All were thin. Each wore the self-consciously fashionable casual summer wear that signifies hipster gaydom, their dark wrap-around sun glasses covering their wandering eyes (and their crows' feet). I loathed them. I still loathe them. What explains my antagonism?

Ned Rorem spent the summer of 1967 at Yaddo in Saratogo Springs, NY. (I checked out Yaddo's web site at yaddo.org, and Ned is pictured in the 2000 group photo, looking pretty good.) Diamond spent some time there as well. He speaks about it in taped interviews I have of him. He was there after the war, in the latter 1940s, I believe he said. I'm not sure of that though—I'd have to go back and listen again. He's listed on Yaddo's guest book, without specific dates. (The list covers 1927-present. It's a who's who of America's great artists. The list of writers far exceeds the list of composers. When Ann was with me in Diamond's basement she found a wooden crate that was addressed to Diamond from Yaddo. Pretty cool.) Anyway, on Labor Day, 1967, Ned notes in his diary that he returned that day from Yaddo, flew to the liquor store (he was an alcoholic), picked up a carrot cake, and "gave a wet party for Virgil [Thomson], the Phelpses, David Diamond, my parents, Arlene Heyman and her boyfriend." "In one day," Ned continues, "I lost my suntan, posture, non-smoking resolutions and, fortunately, virginity." I wonder if he lost his summer-long virginity to Diamond? Probably not, but it's fun to speculate. I'm sure, if asked, he'd say. Ned's not at all secretive about such things, at least in his diary. A biographer of Jean Cocteau once asked him if he had ever slept with Cocteau and he said no. Truthfully, I'm sure. I need to read the Paris Diary. That's where all the juicy stuff is, I believe. Yaddo suddenly fascinates me, as does all of early 20th century American cultural history. So many luminaries, such a fascinating time. I'm sure much has been written, but this still seems fertile ground for more research. Diamond wrote a yet unpublished biography which was removed from his house. He speaks of it in interviews. I want to read it. That summer of 1967 Rorem claims to have read all of Proust in French.

Rorem "cannot abide" the word 'delicious' as it is applied to edibles, which seems odd to me. "In a pinch," he writes, "it works for clothes or clouds, or when meaning 'delightful' as the French use delicieux. While eating dinner at a plaza a lady next to him, "relishing a bleeding cherry cobbler," uttered the word 'delicious.'" "Really delicious," she repeated, "the adjective oozing gooily off her tongue like the pastry itself." With that he could eat no more. Hahah I like to use the word myself, mostly in the context of describing a body or indeed an entire boy I think is attractive. Ann thinks it sounds a little gay. Maybe she's right. It never occurred to me. But it sounds right for the unrefined wave of lust, and the imagined sexual satisfaction from the delicious body. Beautiful bodies are consumable. I've had a taste for one lately.

I've spent the better part of the evening swatting at the most oversized, lethargic fly imaginable, yet unbelievably I can't seem to kill it. I bat it to the ground, thinking I have it, but then I loose it, only to hear it take flight jeeringly just beyond my reach. What are these monstrosities that appear in doors now and again? They're like the undead of the fly world. Are they the retarded and discarded of their species?

Having just checked out Ian's blog again, he's killing me with the regularity of his writing. I can't keep up. He's indefatigable. And it's interesting stuff. Fucking stop so I look better. hehe

I have my own tell-tale heart growing more pronounced every day within my bathroom. My tub cold water facet is leaking badly. The sound is driving me crazy. I can't escape it. Am I going to have to begin sleeping downstairs on the couch? Christ, it's the frickin' Niagara Falls in there. Actually, it sounds like someone is dropping pebbles into a ceramic bowl, or maybe golf balls into plastic tubing. My light switch in the adjacent room also recently broke, so I moved a lamp into the room. My apartment is crumbling before my feet. The only thing left to do is abandon the place to its own disrepair. I have to leave.