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.