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.”