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.