Following are some random thoughts collected over the last couple of weeks.

I haven’t been motivated to write anything for quite a while. But I thought recently that I’d just begin writing some lists, since I’ve always enjoyed listing things. It’s a way to clear the mind, of ridding the mind of clutter, instead of mining the mind, which is painful. (My mother always used the phrase “ridding up” to mean cleaning up, as in ridding one’s room. I thought it was no worse than Ann’s “neatening up,” which I was certain was not a real word until I checked a dictionary and indeed found it.)

Anyway, here’s a list of things I do nearly every day—things of no particular significance.

• I remove from the refrigerator my lunch parts and assemble them into a little brown paper bag tower—everyday the same things.
  
• I avoid pigeon shit as I step down the top flights of the parking garage, and I avoid conversation in the elevator up to my office floor. Please don’t make me talk in the morning.
  
• Upon reaching my cube, I immediately turn on my computer and wait until it boots to a login prompt. I log in and take my lunch and my coffee cup to the kitchen, placing the lunch in the refrigerator, cleaning out my coffee mug, and filling it with strong coffee. We have one pot of regular, one pot of “strong,” and one pot of decaf. I often have to make a pot of strong. For me, strong means using two packets of coffee; others often use one and a part of another. This parceling of packets is irritating to me. The partial packet will often be sitting beside the coffee machine for the next person to make strong coffee. Usually I ignore the open packet and use two full packets. Why must I adopt their nervous parsing of such insignificant differences, the uptight twits. If they’ve already broached the divide between regular coffee drinkers and the greedy others who need more, then why bother to acknowledge the difference between 1.6 and 2 packets? Just throw the damned coffee in there and stop this nonsense of partial packets.
  
• When I arrive at the gym after work and find a locker, I mentally review a list of items I’ll need to pull from my gym bag before putting the bag in the locker. The items rarely change, but about half the time I forget something and have to reopen the locker door.
  
• When I arrive home from the gym, I pull from the gym bag my work shoes, my wet gym shirt stuffed in a corner and out of the way of other things, my work clothes folded on top, my leather work belt coiled inside my thick rawhide weight-lifting belt, and my work socks placed haphazardly anywhere inside. About a third of the time I forget my work socks. From my work bag, which hangs from my shoulder and carries my lunch and other junk papers I never seem to throw out, I pull my paper lunch bag, the spoon I’ve used that day, and the bowl which in the morning contained my rice and tuna mix. I place the bowl in the sink to soak, its inside crusted with the day’s food and the smell of day-old tuna.
  
• I’ve grown tired of this.
  

For the last several days I’ve been listening to nothing but Cherubini’s Requiem, over and over again. I particularly like its quiet, solemn ending, but the entire piece is a gem. I wonder why it’s not performed more often, given that it’s relatively short and requires no soloists. Instead, chorus’ around the country continue to force feed their audiences the Mozart and, for Christ’s sake, the Rutter requiems, ad nauseam.

A list of Latin phrases or words I like:

• Above all, mutatis mutandis. I have never found an occasion to use in which I don’t seem incredibly pretentious, but I like it.
• Sine qua non. Not as pretentious to use.
• None others come immediately to mind

I’ve been noticing that of the topics that I’m drawn to write about, the gym comes up much more than it warrants. I can go through long periods of eventful topics—including getting married, changing jobs, taking up new hobbies, etc.—but I never write about them. However, I do often write about the quirks of gym people. (I’ve been reading a biography of Samuel Beckett recently, and in it the biographer notes that James Joyce believed that poetry should be personal and particular—that is, written about what you know, and about the details of one’s life, not about big ideas. I absolutely agree.) Yesterday, a rather large young man was working out near me, a man in his mid-20s, with long straggly brown hair, a square jaw, and extra pounds around his belly. I hadn’t seen him before. He had the look of a football player, truly a rugged type, big, athletic, unquestionably strong, with a beefiness that I’m never really attracted to. But he did have a narrow ass for his big frame, tucked tightly into nylon shorts. He was doing push-ups, his feet elevated on a bench, which I suppose adds difficulty to the exercise. I haven’t done push-ups since I was a kid, and my impression is that no one who knows anything about body building would waste his time doing push-ups. So, I thought, he must be one of those who comes to the gym once every month or so, for an hour. I’d already dismissed him as not a serious gymer. Still, his physique suggested otherwise. Anyway, at some point he asked me to place a 25lb plate on his back while he did push-ups. Of course I would, I said, and of course I did. He got into position, hands on the floor, legs outstretched. And I laid the plate delicately onto his back and stood over him. In an odd way it was sort of sexy. Maybe it was just being that close. And so he began to lower himself, his hands splayed out on the floor from the weight of the plate, and then to push up, again and again, up and down, and I watched that the weight didn’t fall. But mostly I was watching his ass held tight to his nylon shorts, thinking to myself how very nice it was, this beefy guy’s ass, which I wouldn’t have given a second look at had I seen him passing on the street. And I wondered afterward, if I had been free to pull down his shorts and look (or lick) at his ass, would it have been a nasty white jiggly mound of tofu, or the deliciously hairy and muscular ass of an athlete that I had imagined. Maybe I’ll see him in the shower one day. Either way, it’s surprising to me that my tastes extend to larger, more manly (and older) men with fuller bodies. A good thing, I think.

Speaking of beefier men, just last night I walked into the locker room, placed my bag on the bench and looked around quickly to survey the room, not to look for pleasant scenery, but just to get my bearings as I would when entering any room. And there, turning the corner to enter the public shower, was another man, perhaps 30 years old, with golden, Mediterranean skin and dark hair, and a wonderfully rounded ass, hairy and full like the other man I had helped earlier in the week. This man had a full beard, which you don’t see much these days. I didn’t mind it, once provided with a visual of his butt. All things can be overlooked with such an image. I got dressed for my workout and necessarily passed by the shower room again on my way out, hoping to get another glimpse. And I did—a quick, fleeting glance. It seemed , though I wouldn’t swear to it, that he had the start of an erection. A shrunken dick (as one might expect after a strenuous workout) that was just popping outward a bit as if he’d just begun to get aroused. At least that was my fantasy reading of the scene. Probably it was nothing. But it reminded me of another image that’s remained with me for years now. I was in a bathhouse in Toronto once a few years ago, and had just entered the public shower area where there were perhaps 6 or 8 shower heads lined up. Standing about half way down, all alone and with his hands on his head shampooing his long dark head of hair, was a man in his early 30s, about 6 feet tall, very fit, hairy with a tanned complexion. No reason for this to stick in my mind except that he stood there with a full and impressive erection. The visual was stunning--mostly because there was no one else around, and he wasn’t touching himself. There was no stimulate for his arousal except his own fantasies, which, my god, was sexy. He was probably turned on by being naked in public, where other men could watch and examine him. I looked discretely, and showered beside him as if nothing was unusual. And frankly, in the bathhouse, this was not so notable. In that setting little is out of bounds and nothing is unexpected… well, except that I was surprised just then. The sexually explicit is not surprising there, but the sexy still often is.

I really dislike all those people who bring their toothbrushes to work and brush dutifully in the restroom after lunch, their little plastic toothbrush holders and tubes of toothpaste, and sometimes even a little toiletry bag, lying on the sink beside them. Can’t we keep our personal hygiene habits confined to the home? Why is this so necessary? Neither do I want to see people clipping their nails in the gym locker room, or even shaving. You can apply deoderant and comb your hair. That's all. At the office, you may wash your hands, look in the mirror and adjust your hair... with your fingers. No combs or brushes. These rules apply only to men. I don't know what you ladies do in there, and I don't need to know.

Earlier this week I had an eye exam. The receptionist, optician and optometrist are all women, each very pleasant and friendly. The same is true of my dentist’s office, but for some reason I always find the eye exam somewhat erotic, or not exactly erotic, but serenely pleasing in the way a non-sexual massage can be. I often have the same sort of sensation in the office, or in other settings where hushed voices are talking in controlled tones and volumes. There’s something about subdued voices talking that can make my hairs stand on end, which is a sensation I love. In fact, often in the afternoon, when I’m bored with my work or in need of a diversion, I’ll hone in on a quiet conversation among the cubes, or on a telephone call across the way, and let the voices wash over me without listening to the content. I can almost invoke on demand this odd primordial pleasure, like goose pimples without the accompanying chill. Anyway, my eye exam was much like this. The doctor or optician would talk to me in the darkened office with calming tones about medical tests and issues of the eye, while introducing bright green and white lights into my eyes, or positioning my head this way and then that, or lifting my eye lids and placing droplets into my eyes, blurring my vision and caused the external world to recede further from me, or me to inwardly withdraw into a silky, solipsistic cocoon. It was well worth the co-pay price of admission.

On a totally different subject, I was thinking recently about the phenomenon we’ve all experienced. We hear some music that we haven’t heard in a while, and it suddenly evokes a vivid memory or sensation from the past. That’s occurred to me a couple of times recently, songs that brought back powerful memories of my childhood. I don’t have many memories of my early childhood, which makes it all that more remarkable when this happens to me. They were good feelings, though. They made me think, my god, I was alive back then, but yet it was another life. At the time, I meant to make a note of the song and of the memory, but I’ve forgotten them. I suppose it’s just as well. Otherwise the association in my mind of the memory and of the song might be muddled, and it wouldn’t happen again. I was reminded of these recent episodes when I was poking around my computer at work looking for something different to listen to. (I have a bunch of music files on the hard drive.) I found David Diamond’s balcony scene from his music for Romeo and Juliet, which I’ve written about before. Such gorgeous, satisfying music. For me, this music will always be saturated with memories of Ann and me during Thanksgiving, as I worked on a piece of glass, and of our wedding last year. Tendor feelings that one only feels for one's lover and life-time partner, memories that run deep to what it means to share a life with someone. I had really wanted to work the music into our wedding, since the other music was American, and since I was wearing Diamond’s suit! But it didn’t work out. No one would have really heard it anyway, as it turned out. Nor would they have felt what I feel when I hear it. Ann wouldn't either, for that matter, so it's a private thing between me and the music.

Note to self: Things to write about, maybe for next time.

• One small change I’ve noticed about my life with an SO (now wife).
• How difficult it seemed to get laid when I really wanted gay sex back in the day. The yearning. I hadn’t a clue.
• My first gay sex. Not THAT notable, but it’s worth a paragraph or two.