This Friday I thought I’d go to the local gay shop and rent some porn. We have two good shops in Rochester, each filled with all the porn a man could want. Well, not that much, but at least enough to keep *me* supplied with adequate-to-good porn for months. And new porn is coming in all the time. Apparently there is no shortage of boys willing to share their sex with the insatiable gay male public, a fact that ought to make us all thankful. With this supply one oughtn’t to have to repeat a selection. So why do I regularly rent a video only to realize, when I get it home, slip in the video and sit down, eager for fresh boys mounting slippery behinds, that for Christ’s sake, I’ve just rented it weeks ago! My memory for porn, or rather for the porn video covers that line the back walls of the stores, grouped according to the highly refined demographics and sexual idiosyncracies of the gays to which they appeal, is poor. You’d think I’d remember, given how carefully one tends to scrutinize the covers, trying, on the basis of a few photos and some descriptive text, to discern the closest matches to one’s own sexual profile. There’s so little to go on, so the processes of choosing a video is arduous. Are the boys in this video cuter than in that one? Are there more bodies? (There’s safety in numbers, you know—amongst all the boys, surely one will please.) How long is it—the video, that is. Does it seem to focus on particular acts or body parts? After going through this, you’d think I’d remember the damn thing the next time. I don’t. Not even a twinge of déjà vu, not the faintest suggestion of familiarity. This time around I got home, only to realize it was the very same video I’d rented, not months ago, not several visits before, but the very same video I rented the last time I was there! What is really funny is how predictable my preferences are, how reliable they are at choosing the very same sexual pleasures out of a multitude of options. Out of the hundreds to choose from, I hone in on the very same video.

Tomorrow it the gay pride picnic. Last year AIDS Rochester was performing their usual “polling” of random attendees about sexual practices, opinions, and knowledge of safe sex practices and STDs, and knowing that the reward was a large bottle of lube, I readily agreed to participate. The contents, today, a year later, are barely depleted.

[The guy exiting the door to the outside chairs, returning my stare with the look of piqued interest, thinks I’m lusting after his body, when what I really want is the generous slice of carrot cake with the fork sticking out of the top of it.]

I promised to lay off Proust for a while, but I can’t. Time Regained is excellent. I thought perhaps, this volume, being his last, published posthumously from a disjointed and fragmentary text, would be off the standard of the earlier volumes, but it’s wonderful, full of his thoughts on writing, on aging and the passing of time. Time is not regained exactly--its passing is rendered painfully obvious, as he returns to his cast of characters after having retreated from society years earlier (to write). He finds old age. “So different was she to look at from the woman I had known that one was tempted to think of her as a creature condemned, like a character in a pantomime, to appear first as a young girl, then as a stout matron, with no doubt a final appearance still to come as a quavering, bent old crone. Like a swimmer in difficulties almost out of sight of the shore, she seemed with infinite effort scarcely to move through the waves of time which beat upon her and threatened to submerge her.”