Three Zero Nine: Catalog

 I'm on the mailing list at several high-end sex toy boutiques. I've used their catalogs to buy gifts and accessories for young companions. Well, I use a couple of old-school equestrian shops to buy riding whips, but I suppose many such shops stay in business because of s/m far more than dressage. 

I'm had young companions thank me for the gifts I've bought them. And I've had FaceTime conversations with lovely young companions who were shopping in high-end sex toy boutiques in distant cities. I'm glad that the gifts were appreciated (and, yes, sometimes used together), but I remain out of the loop when girls tell me that they've been online shopping for sex toys or that they have a whole drawer in a bedroom dresser devoted to vibrators and dildos. I like the idea of accompanying a lovely girl while she shops for dildos, but there's something very alien about that. It's not something I could ever do on my own. I've seen lovely twenty-somethings earnestly consulting with sex boutique clerks over designs, colours, brand names. I can't imagine asking a clerk for advice in even the most gentrified sex boutique. That's not something straight males can do. My leggy posh blonde friend Jill in New Zealand lives in Wellington, where there's a rather famous sex toy boutique that delivers--- that has its own cadre of uniformed young women who deliver elegantly-wrapped sex toys to posh customers late into the night. I'd be far too afraid to open the door.

Over last weekend I found all the catalogs I had from sex toy suppliers and threw them away. They somehow seemed...pointless. I won't be ordering on line any longer. That really does seem pointless. There's no one in my life currently to buy bedroom gifts for, and I'm...worried that someone might find the catalogs and think that I used them to shop for myself. 

A male buying sex toys is seen as pathetic at best, creepy and disgusting at worst. And always a figure of mockery. I have no problem using toys on young companions, but I can't imagine using any myself. Girls in the past--- Levin, Liberty, my NZ friend, a certain lovely girl in the Home Counties, a Juilliard girl who was once a pro domme and who's now with the Vienna Philharmonic ---have asked to use toys on me. I've always refused--- gently, firmly, clearly. But you'd love it, they've told me. Just give yourself over to the sensations, give yourself to pleasure. No. No. That's not something I can do. There's always the fear that I'd be hearing the derisive laughter of the invisible audience in my head.

Sex toys are for lovely girls. Sex toys are ways they can find  pleasure or amplify it. I can't do that. Pleasure isn't something for straight males, and certainly not straight males of a certain age. Pleasure isn't something I can understand, and it's certainly not something I deserve.  Asking for pleasure, and especially asking for aids to pleasure, is a terrifying thing. I hate my own fears, but they're there.  Levin called across the boutique to the girl at the counter: do you have this in other colours? do you have ones that are shaped like uncut cock? uncut and with balls?  I of course froze and tried to will myself into invisibility. 

I can imagine talking about blindfolds and riding whips; I can imagine talking about candle wax and nipple clamps. I cannot imagine talking about any of the sex toys "for him" in the catalogs or at the upscale websites. Any sex aids for men seem designed to humiliate, to make the male user into an object of derision. And yet I feel envious of lovely young companions who can blithely buy toys to help them with orgasm. I've seen a girl look at a half-empty Corona bottle and suddenly laugh. This! she said. I so have to try this!  There's no male equivalent of that laugh. There's no male equivalent of the look that says that something is worth trying for fun. 

Well, the new year, the Year Twenty-One, is almost here. I won't be getting the sex boutique catalogs any more. No one to buy gifts for, of course. And it's impossible to think that I could ever be part of a world where using sex toys--- even with a lover I trusted ---would be safe. Pleasure isn't something that I can ask for, let alone seek on my own. There's nothing in the marketing plans of sex toy manufacturers for someone like me. Not this year, and not any other.

Three Zero Eight: Lessons

 I'd thought that I might be writing tonight about sex in hotels, but I decided in the end to write about what I'd learned in my life from porn. I suppose we can include written erotica in that.

I've been reading things on line about people's sexual problems, and one of the recurring themes in the comments is that people--- meaning of course cis straight white males ---have to stop learning about sex from porn. That immediately sent me to PornHub to do a random tour of categories. I spent a while looking through PornHub clips and trying to recall what I'd learned from porn.

I know that I learned some things. Though in my long-ago youth, it was harder to do. That was before the web, of course, long before there was anything like PornHub or its sister sites. To see porn in my youth I had to sneak into actual backstreet cinemas to watch movies. I was probably in my twenties before I saw porn on satellite channels, and I never had much of a porn collection on either videotape or DVD.  But I did learn things from porn. 

That makes sense for me, of course. I learned about so much in my life from books and films.  Novels and films shaped who I am. I read books to learn about what to wear, which wines to drink, how to behave at dinner parties. So why not porn?

I learned from porn (yes, from a book first, from "Story of O") that there were beautiful girls who didn't wear underwear. I learned that there were girls there in the ordinary world who were deliciously bare under skirts or shorts. I learned that I could suggest to lovers that they be panty-free. I learned that I could whisper to a lovely girl and tell her to wear nothing at all beneath a sundress while she walked with me down a beach or a city street--- learned that this could be an adventure. And it has become a signature thing for me--- asking girls with whom I'm involved to give up underwear, at least while out with me.

I learned that there were beautiful girls who slept naked.  I may--- may ---have learned that first from the early James Bond films, but certainly it was porn where I found that sleeping naked was something beautiful girls seemed to do everywhere. I watched that and knew--- even in my early teens ---that this was something I'd be asking lovers to do lifelong. 

Porn showed me new positions to try. Porn showed me new places for risky and thrilling encounters. Porn showed me that, yes, oral and anal did happen...and showed me how to do both. And the same is true for various kinds of s/m. Until I read about something, until I see it on a screen, it isn't real. 

Porn gave me an incentive to try things, to think that certain kinds of adventures were possible. It gave me the courage to offer up ideas and suggestions to lovers. Were the things that I asked about or found fascinating "unrealistic"?  Maybe. Or even probably. But "realistic" has never been what I was after. 

Porn offered me raw material that I could shape into things I could share, things that I use as guides to adventures and to creating stories for myself and a lover. Porn showed me what I could like, showed me things that I didn't know I'd like. 

I never thought that porn was a guide to what a girl looked or sounded like while having orgasms. I never thought that porn showed how large or how hard a male was supposed to be, or how often a male could perform. But then I wasn't interested in those things anyway.  I did think that porn showed me how sex should be lit, and how bodies can be posed for maximum visual effect. Porn taught me how sex could look. And I'll always be grateful to certain porn directors (e.g., Andrew Blake) for that.

Three Zero Seven: Permission

 As this grim and sullen year counts down to a close, I am wondering about the cartography of desire. I've been writing about this for a while, but the questions remain.  What are we still allowed to desire? What fantasies are we still allowed to have?

I have spent much of my life inside books (and not only erotica) looking for worlds where I'd like to live, looking for adventures and experiences I'd like to have. I've spent much of my life constructing fantasies--- about cities,  about lovers, about new lives. And I am increasingly worried about those things. Social media has made us all aware that we live at others' mercy. It's made us aware that anything we say or think or feel can be mocked and derided by strangers, that the disdain of total strangers can cost us jobs, respect, social standing. We've all had to become aware that the aether is haunted by people looking for excuses to be outraged, for excuses to attack and humiliate.

When I first began reading blogs--- twenty years ago, now ---the blogging world felt safe, felt like a place for building friendships and communities, felt like a place where you could talk about your thoughts, hopes, dreams, fantasies, desires and feel safe. Back in those days, I'd imagine blogging as being like sitting in a PurePod or some Wm. Gibson converted shipping container somewhere in the high desert, broadcasting out into the night. I imagined talking late into the night, telling stories, interviewing people by phone, getting emails and phone calls from distant cities.  It's all so much riskier now--- you're so much more vulnerable just for having thoughts and hopes and preferences.

I'm thinking that the time of blogs about sex is past. Given everything we've been through in the last few years, writing about sexual fantasies seems wretchedly self-centered and pointless. In a time of global pandemic, in a time when the American republic seems to have only very narrowly escaped a descent into right-populist authoritarian rule, sexual fantasies seem to be a dangerous distraction. And in an age of gender wars, desire (especially straight male desire) seems to be the enemy of social justice.  Sex, as any good revolutionary will tell you, is a distraction from important work. Sex is irrational, or at least a-rational, and fantasy worlds often embody images and tropes that represent parts of the current order that need to be swept away. As someone who subscribes to much of Marxism, I can't even disagree with that reasoning. 

But I will miss sex blogs and escort blogs if they vanish. I will miss knowing about adventures, costumes, scenarios, and  skills out there in the world. I'll miss checklists of what escorts have in their purses. I'll miss tales of which hotels in major cities are best for affairs and encounters. I'll miss reading tales of romantic and sexual adventures and learning about what's possible, learning about things worth trying with lovers in my own life. I'll miss knowing what beautiful Young Companions out over the aether have done in their lives and what they might (in some alternate timeline) do with me. I'll miss stories. I'll absolutely miss stories. And I'll miss sharing fantasies with lovely correspondents. I'll miss feeling like my own fantasies are worth something to someone. I'll miss feeling like I'm allowed to have fantasies at all.

These days... These days, whenever I think about erotica and fantasies, I find myself freezing up. I find myself paralyzed by fears that any fantasies I have are either repetitive and boring  and/or politically wrong. I can't imagine any fantasy as being judged only by a Young Companion with whom I'm sharing things. I can only imagine fantasies as being dissected and deconstructed by an invisible and hostile audience. I imagine harsh despotic voices telling me that I'm not allowed, now or ever, to want those things. It's not just the Freudian superego, either. It's the babble of voices out on the aether, telling me inside my head that I should be ashamed, that what I want unfits me for being part of any society. 

The days when fantasies and scenarios and fetishes could be offered up to lovers and would-be lovers as gifts and enticements, when you could share dark dreams with someone over drinks--- those days are gone.

I no longer know what thoughts I'm allowed to have, I know that in an age of "authenticity" and gender identity and  power analysis we're no longer encouraged or expected to experiment with sex and its components. Experimentation is looked down on as sharply as ever it was seventy years ago. It's been years now since strike the pose was a valid idea. It's been years since it's been seen as permissible to ask anyone to try anything new. I do know that I'm terrified of being cast out of the social pods where I live, and that kind of shame and fear is something new to me. I didn't have any of those feelings twenty years ago. But right now I'm totally paralyzed by them.

Three Zero Six: Requests

Once upon a time, I recalled something my friend Liberty said about the older men in her life and past:

Liberty told me that what she liked about affairs with Older Men was that they all had kinks and obsessions that they'd rarely (if ever) been able to talk about with anyone. She was always willing to listen and learn...and not mock them. 

That meant a lot to me once upon a time, hearing a lovely strawberry-blonde girl say that she wouldn't mock the things I like. That's something I've been agonizing over.

Back in another age, I had no problem asking girls for the things I liked in bed. I had no problem telling someone what gave me pleasure...and asking what they liked. Even ten years ago--- maybe even five ---I had no problem with just asking for things. I took it as a given that that was what an affair was about. You told a lover or potential lover about the things that gave you pleasure, and the two of you shared that knowledge. In all the years since I was fifteen or sixteen I'd felt perfectly safe doing that. An affair, a relationship, was about learning what obsessions and kinks a lover had...and learning something from trying them out. Back a dozen years, and I had no problem just saying, This is something I like. Have you ever tried it? I'd had girls laugh with me about those things--- the bright laughter of someone thrilled or intrigued or amused ---but no one had ever laughed at me about the things I liked. No one had ever recoiled in horror or disgust. But here in the third decade of the not-quite-so-new century, I don't feel safe any more. Not at all. 

Last evening I watched a brief video clip of a rather lovely porn actress who calls herself Ashley Lane. She's apparently a fairly well-known bondage and fetish model, and she does more standard porn as well. Lovely girl, by the way. Long light brown hair, high cheekbones, that lithe and slender look I like. Anyway...the clip was simple enough. She was sitting naked on a countertop, giving a foot job to some random male scene partner. She was smirking a bit, and obviously confident in her skills. I watched the clip and sighed. Ms. Lane herself was very attractive, and what she was doing looked fun and just wicked enough to seem worth trying in some risky place. And...it's not something I would ever ask a girl to do. I'd be far too afraid to ask.

If the girl offered, of course I'd accept. But I could never ask. Asking for that would be too close to the foot fetish world, and that world is always considered pathetic and risible these days. As a male of a certain age, I certainly couldn't ask for anything either specific or non-vanilla. To be a male of a certain age here in the brave new world is to be regarded as inherently creepy and disgusting. You're not allowed by the Arbitrary Social Rules to admit to anything non-vanilla...or to admit to any sexual preferences at all. 

There was a time when I had no problem looking at a girl across a table and telling her that I'd love to do the blindfold and candle wax thing with her, or to introduce her to a riding crop. Nowadays I won't even hold someone's hand.I'd never spend an evening talking about films or books while running a finger along a long, slender bare leg. If a girl asked me what I like, or what turns me on, I'll never tell her. I"ll respond to a direct offer, but I will never admit to having any preferences. I will never ask if someone might be interested in something. That's not mine to do. 

Nothing I might like, nothing that gives me pleasure, is anything I can admit to, no matter what it is. And I'm equally forbidden to offer some way to give a lovely partner pleasure.  In any case, it would be taken as a given that I'm incapable of giving pleasure--- or at least I'd take it as a given. Anything I might want to do or try is inherently pathetic or creepy. Any skill I might offer up is insufficient, and my thought that I might have a skill is a sign of toxic narcissism. 

We've reached a place where lust, adventure, and exploration are all regarded as sad and pathetic, if not abusive. The Age of the Windowless Monads, I suppose we can call it. Communication used to be the panacea for all things--- communicate with your partner! Not these days, mind you, Opening up to a partner is as unwelcome as an actual phone call. 

Three Zero Five: Sheets

 I was looking at a video clip with Kenna James and Skye Blue, two of the girls I do crush on at PornHiub. The clip opens with Kenna waking up naked in a strange bed. That's an opening image that I did like. 

Oh, there's more to it, of course. Skye Blue comes upstairs with carry-out cups of coffee (one cream, one sugar) and a bag of fresh croissants. It seems that she's stolen Kenna away from her own bachelorette party. Their interaction there on the bed is languid and gentle and very, very romantic. And what makes it work for me is the coffee and the croissants, the two girls talking before they begin to kiss and make love.

I've always said that beautiful girls should sleep naked. I've been saying that since I was a boy, since I was barely old enough to grasp sex as a concept. It was James Bond who gave me the idea, of course. When I was very young, there were magazines whose Entertainment sections had lots of pictures of Bond Girls. The classic image was a Bond Girl stretched across a bed naked, with crisp new sheets draped strategically over herself. I suppose I took it for granted that in some later, better world, beautiful girls would sleep like that in hotel rooms or penthouse apartments with me. I still cling to that hope.

The French fashion blogger Garance Doré noted in passing once that "all top models sleep naked, of course", a sentence that instantly caught my eye. I wanted that to be true, especially for Ms. Kloss and Ms. Rubik and Mlle. Valade. I wanted it to be true for the lovely long-legged undergraduate girls who ripple through the downtown in my city in black leggings and zippered hoodies. 

Liberty had slept naked since her early teens. Levin, too. For Liberty it was I think something she barely thought about, some mixture of comfort and presenting herself as a hippie girl in the Rockies. For Levin it was a fashion choice. Sleeping naked was something an art-world girl might do as a marker for being "European" and "decadent".  They both knew instinctively how to strike poses naked in late-afternoon sunlight or on late night balconies. Levin stretched out naked in the sun always looked like she should have a copy of something by Lawrence Durrell to read...which she often did. 

I'm male and older. Sleeping naked on my own is not something I'd do. With a lover, certainly. But not on my own. My body is not something I'm comfortable with.  Males sleeping naked on their own always call up thoughts of...well...skidmarked sheets. In the Ian Fleming novels, Bond slept naked as a young man, but then discovered the short Japanese sleep robes I can recall seeing sold in "novelty" menswear catalogs (yes, the kind that also sold cocktail sets and golf-themed joke ashtrays) when I was young. Is it a happi coat that Bond slept in? I will admit that I've had Young Companions sit up naked in bed and ask with some concern if I was okay, since they were sleeping naked and I was in a t-shrt and gym shorts. Well, being male and of a certain age comes with its own set of rules. 

If James Bond--- or at least the early Bond films ---taught me that all beautiful girls should sleep naked, it was Pauline Reage's "Story of O" that taught me that beautiful girls should avoid underwear whenever possible. I do remember reading "Story of O" at maybe fifteen and instantly accepting what the rules at Roissy tell O.--- no underwear. That's something I've tried to edge lovely young companions toward since high school. It's my particular obsession and something I always tell girls is a dress code thing if they're involved with me. 

I'm thinking of the gallery owner who had the major foot fetish thing with Liberty. My whole thing for having my lovely young companions panty-free under short skirts or skinny jeans or faded denim shorts is probably no less an obsession. It's certainly been with me lifelong. Not that I'd give it up, mind you. I love having a girl aware of her own body, aware of a certain kind of vulnerability to strangers' eyes. And it's certainly a signature thing for me, something that was always part of my reputation once upon a clubland time.

I do encourage lovely girls to sleep naked, to experience crisp fresh linen sheets again bare skin, to stretch out atop a duvet and do long phone calls not so much about phone sex as about books and politics and film...all while having a secret at their end of the phone. And...there is always something very, very kissable about bare shoulders (or hipbones, or ankles) just above the sheets. Always that.

Three Zero Four: Balconies

 I still have my crushes, even at my own advanced age. 

Last time I spoke about Kenna James and Kristin Scott and the crushes I've developed on the two of them from watching their interviews on YouTube as much as their video clips on PornHub. 

Right now I'm listening to Duran Duran do "Come Undone", which seems like a lovely song to listen to on an October night while you're thinking about crushes on distant girls.

Every crush has its speculative side, of course. You sit at night with a drink and you wonder how the crush would play out in real life. How would you meet? How would you interact? How would you make the transition to flirtation and seduction? What would you say afterwards?

Somehow my visions of all that always involve balconies. Somehow the initial meeting is random enough. Usually we turn out to be neighbors whose apartments had adjoining balconies, and we end up talking to one another in the afternoons. Eventually one of my crushes will come next door and we'll get used to spending time on my balcony with tea or a glass of wine. We'll...talk. It always comes down to talking. She--- Kenna or Kristin ---will tell me that I should be in a good mood, that an actual porn star is knocking on my door to come hang out. And we'll laugh about that. 

There are apologies involved, of course.  When in my visions there is flirtation and kissing involved, I'm usually apologizing for my age and my looks. There's no way around that. In real life, I'd be doing exactly that. What I can't decide is whether either girl would be amused or a bit exasperated by my apologies. I'd like to think that the girl would put a finger to my lips and tell me to hush, that she'd made a decision and was well aware of my age and looks and wasn't really bothered by either. 

I'd like to believe that could happen. In my own life here these last few years, I've had girls tell me that there was nothing wrong with me. I've never believed them, but I have been grateful to them for saying that.  

I've always said that the two hardest genres to write in are biography and erotica.  To do biography well, you have to know not just your subject but the whole world around him, the world that produced him. And erotica...? Well, you have to know how to present a set of fantasies that don't devolve into either slapstick or obvious narcissistic wish-fulfillment. That last part worries me. The best I can do is imagine that the girl chose me because the things I said were interesting or that she had her own wishes and fantasies and just found me...potentially useful. I still have to parse out what "useful" might mean. Ambiguous and dangerous word, really.

My fear with either Kristin or Kenna wouldn't necessarily be fear of systems failure, fear of performance. It would be fear of trying to talk to either girl and making a fool of myself. I'd like to think that I can carry on a conversation, that I have things to say. Having that come crashing down would be far worse than systems failure.

Three Zero Three: Crushing

 Here in the time of the Red Death,  so much of erotic life has been restricted to the web. I haven't been doing cam experiences or FaceTiming with lovely Young Companions. Life, alas, doesn't work like that.

But I have been listlessly sitting up at night looking at clips on PornHub and its kindred. I feel almost ashamed of that. I'm not one to spend time looking at online porn. The implication of indulging in the Solitary Vice does make me ashamed. The Solitary Vice is not something males can engage in without being held up to mockery. Autoerotic adventures are for women only. 

I'm not bitter about that, really. I understand the politics of self-pleasure, There's a large industry out there over the aether devoted to empowering women sexually, to allowing them to find pleasure on their own terms. Those are good things. But I do have to sigh and note that there's nothing like Good Vibrations or its kindred boutiques for men. Self-pleasure for men is regarded as creepy, pathetic, and aesthetically displeasing. I've said it before here--- once you've heard the word "wank" you can't really be male (or maybe only straight male) and indulge in the Solitary Vice without feeling ashamed and sad.

Nonetheless, I do sit at my work desk and search out PornHub clips. I'm impressed with how niche some of the clips are, and even more impressed with the sheer numbers of things even the most arcane search terms bring up. It probably took less than a month before there were scores of Covid-19 porn videos, with masked scene partners and storylines about Red Death quarantine bringing the most disparate and unlikely couples together (lots of step-siblings, a surprising number of Hot MILF and stepdaughter clips). I'm socially aware enough to wear a mask every day if I go into stores or shops or amongst crowds, but I do have to wonder what sex in a mask would be like. I'd probably start gasping for breath early on, alas.

I have found porn actresses to crush on. However not? I discovered a lovely long-legged blonde who calls herself Kenna James and a petite garconne who calls herself Kristin Scott. They've done a couple of scenes with each other, including some non-sex scenes in a story-driven  coming-out film called "Teenage Lesbian". Both very lovely, both very hot. 

My crushes on both are sexual, of course, but I think that it's their interviews that have fed the crushes. Both have several interviews on YouTube about their lives and careers, and they each have very good long interviews on Holly Randall's podcast. Ms. Randall, by the way, is the daughter of Suze Randall, one of the great glamour photographers (and female porn directors) of the Seventies and Eighties.  Both Ms. James and Ms. Scott are clever, funny, thoughtful, and well-spoken. So my usual track is to look for scenes each has done on PornHub and then see what interviews I  can find at YouTube. 

I do like it that porn actresses are giving interviews.  I like the idea of hearing about their lives in their own voices.  It says something about me that any fantasies I've ever constructed in my head about either Kristin Scott or Kenna James are largely about flirtations and conversations, They're both very lovely girls, and I expect that they'd be good--- adventurous, experimental, kind, open ---in bed...even with a male partner. Maybe--- maybe ---even with an older male partner. Still, now...all my fantasies begin with conversations and explanations by both me and a potential partner. 

I can't imagine sex without talking. I can't imagine sex that doesn't happen in the head long before it happens in the flesh.  I can't imagine sex that isn't about telling stories, about creating stories with a partner.

Three Zero Two: Organization

The other day I found a wonderful blog--- TheOrganisedEscortBlog.com. It's a delight. It's one of those random discoveries that can make your whole morning. So...The Organised Escort Blog is exactly that. It's a blog by an escort working in Australia about, well, professional issues. She says that she began her career working in legal brothels in the Australian states that have legalized sex work, and that's she now both a fairly high-end escort and a business coach for other sex workers. Her blog is filled with entries that are Lists, and...who doesn't love a List? I immediately sent links to some of the better entries there to Jill in WLG. I'd love her comments on the Lists.

The Organised Escort--- Amelia, she calls herself ---introduces herself this way:

I’m a sex worker, just like you.

I inspire and educate sex workers who are looking to grow their business with unique marketing tools and proven strategies. I understand the struggle of trying to build a business as a sex worker, so I deliver resources that will help you live more and work less. 

Sex work is hard. 

I’m here to make it easier for you.

I like the whole TED Talk atmosphere at her blog. And I like her Lists--- e.g., My Escorting Capsule Wardrobe, My Tour Packing List: Essentials You Need, How I Prepare For An Escort Client, or 3 Surprising Items You Need In Your Escort Kit. I sent links to all of those to my friend Jill in Wellington. The brands Amelia recommends are pretty much all Australian, and I do want Jill to let me know what she thinks of the brand selections. She seems to spend time flying off to Melbourne or the Gold Coast, and she has access in NZ to Australian brands as well.

In case you're wondering, the "3 Surprising Items" are--- a tongue scraper (bad breath is totally a disaster if you're an escort); boric acid pessaries (okay, I had to look up "pessaries", too); and...hemorrhoid cream. On that last one--- it's not for what you think it is. It's for closing up any small vaginal tears, which does reduce the risk of STIs. And, too...you can use it under your eyes to reduce puffiness. That's an old beauty pageant trick, in case you're wondering.

There's also an entry that's My In-Call Essentials You Need To Know About and one that's What’s In My Outcall Bag--- two entries that immediately appealed to my whole obsession with Lists and Kits. I love the idea of planning and organization, and I love the image in my head of a lovely girl in her apartment, assembling a kit for her weekends as a part-time escort, or just as a party girl. Jill in Wellington tells me that over the years a few men have paid her, or at least mistaken her for a working girl there at WLG or Auckland bars, and that the idea of an envelope of cash on the bedside table is exciting. I do love to think of what she might take with her on nights when she thinks she might be doing hotel sex or at least sleeping in a bed yet to be determined. 

If you're reading this, do go by the Organized Escort blog and let me know what you think. If any of you have your own Kits, either personal or professional, please do let me know. Send me Lists if you can. I'd love to read about what you take with you on Adventure nights in cities out over the aether.

Three Zero One: Kits

 Once upon a time, back in the later Noughts, I went mad one summer. That's easy enough to say now, and it would make a good opening for a story or a Spalding Gray kind of performance monologue. I wish I could be telling a lovely young companion about the story tonight, but this is the best I can do.

I went mad that summer--- a small bit of high drama. And what it was about was simple enough. It started off with travel toothbrushes.  Girls had written me about their Morning-After Kits, about the things they put in their purses before going out on Friday or Saturday nights, about the things they took with them just in case, just in case they ended up sleeping over with a handsome stranger. A travel toothbrush was key to everyone's list. Girls sent lists of items, but not one of them wrote to say that she'd bring a toothbrush or a change of clothes on a date with me just in case. None of them indicated at all that I was worth bringing a toothbrush for--- which may have been the one thing I think I wanted or needed. Make a list of cities--- NYC, Atlanta, SE Texas, Oregon, Baltimore, Montreal, Seattle: no one thought to say that to me. Not any of the girls I have longed for and cared about. Which told me all I needed to know. 

That summer I wrote that:

I will be checking purses in the doorway. If there's no toothbrush, no little vial of deodorant, no change of clothes...she doesn't get in the doorway. I will toss the purse or backpack onto the upper walkway and slam the door in her face. No toothbrush, no Mornings-After Kit, and I don't want her around me.

Be clear--- I don't necessarily expect her to use the toothbrush or the change of clothes. I don't necessarily expect her to stay over. That isn't the point. Not at all. The point is that she'd have the toothbrush with her--- just in case. Whether or not she stayed over, I'd want her to have the kit with her. Just in case. If she didn't toss the toothbrush into her purse, it means that I'm not Valuable enough even for the possibility of a first-date morning-after. It means that she'd already decided that I wasn't fuckable. So I will check for a toothbrush and slam the door in her face if it isn't there. 

It was that kind of summer. And that summer I bought two small travel toothbrushes and kept them on my work desk as magical items. I believed that if just had the two toothbrushes--- the kind that lovely co-eds would keep in a Morning-After kit,  then somehow, magically, girls would want to take Morning-After supplies with them when were with me. 

I still have travel toothbrushes with me-- I think that now I have a total of eleven travel toothbrushes, pristine and unopened. They have multiplied over the years. They're still here as magical items. Each of them is a talisman of some kind, a small futile frozen invocation of hope. Girls still haven't brought Morning-After Kits with them when they've gone out with me. 

Again, it's not the idea of the girl staying over and needing the Kit. It's the idea that she'd bring the Kit just in case,  bring it because I was Valuable enough to be someone she might need it for. The toothbrushes mean a lot--- they're still here as magical items, as ways to pray to be just-in-case Valuable.  I wish now, a dozen or so years later, that I'd never asked anyone about Morning-After Kits and what lovely twenty-something girls brought with them in case they hooked up with someone.

Three Zero Zero: Debriefing

 I wrote here earlier in the summer that:

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)... or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things... but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

I'd love to see Liberty's journal and its "Older Men" chapter. She always saw affairs as learning experiences, and she was very earnest about that. It mattered to her that each lover, male or female, left her with more knowledge about the world. And, yes, I'd love to know what all those things were. I'd love to know what categories she put experiences into. I think I'd especially like to read the very early entries, to read the entries were Liberty was deciding what she wanted to learn and what avenues she wanted to explore.

I wrote this, too--

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

I do wish I knew how each of them defined "experience". The stories Levin and Liberty and my NZ friend Jill told me were often extremely hot, but what I'd like to do is get at the underlying structures, to get at the decisions each of them made to seek out and be open to experiences. Why this particular lover, this particular thing? I'd very much like to know what Liberty's chapter on Older Men says--- what makes someone worth/not worth being a learning experience. I'd like to go through her checklist of things she did to manage Older Lovers, to properly utilize them. 

Backstories matter, just as details matter. The why of something is as important as the thing itself. 

I'd also like to read the letters another friend has been sending out during the season of the Red Death. You know the backstory:

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do. 

I'd love to read those letters, to read what she thanked them for teaching her. One of the letters I know would be to the much older man who told her when she was sixteen that she needed to stop being afraid and actually make the effort to be admitted to Oxford. That affair re-shaped her life, and I'm taking it for granted that she wrote to tell him that. She told me once that what she has now--- a business of her own, a resume that includes political consultancy, a couple of terms as a town councilor ---owes so much to the older lovers who told her that she was capable of doing anything, who took her to bed and talked about the world. I'd very much love to read those letters with her memories. Yes...I wish I was a recipient of one of those letters. I do envy anyone who was worldly and knowledgeable enough to be chosen as one of her mentors. 

Bildungsroman, Erziehungsroman... and whatever those things are called in French. I'd like to know how Levin and Liberty and Jill constructed the tales of their lives--- my friends in Montreal and Edinburgh, too. How have they structured what Older Lovers taught them? What things in particular did they want to learn, what things did they learn, what checklists and outlines have they drafted...? 

Experiences have to be crafted into stories, into essays, That's always key for me: taking experience and trying to make it mean something. Liberty's journal, maybe whatever was in Levin's Pentalic sketchbooks and notebooks--- those are all things I'd love to know.

Two Nine Nine: Tasks

 Tonight is a midsummer night where I feel a sense of foreboding and a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness. There are things in my daily life that are going very badly this summer--- even beyond this endless Red Death season of quarantines and limbo ---and there's also a sense of impending mortality. 

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about preludes, about wondering how affairs and encounters and adventures begin. Those things have always intrigued me--- how and when people make the decision to have sex, or to have a particular kind of sex, or to have sex with a particular person. I've lost any real sense of those things. I've no sense any longer of how these things happen, and it gets harder and harder to imagine being part of those decisions.

I can't recall tonight whether it was Sophocles or Aeschylus who gave thanks to the gods for freeing him from desire--- a cruel taskmaster ---in old age. Sophocles, I think. You're free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think it was Sophocles.  I'm not sure tonight what to make of the saying. Desire can be a cruel master, no question about that. And it's ever more cruel as one grows older and watches desire fade.

At some point, desire becomes a mockery. You know that you're no longer thought of as entitled to feel desire, let alone find any satisfaction. At some point, acting on desire, even feeling desire, makes you an object of derision. 

It's easy tonight to think that I've run out of time for desire, run out of time to have desires. 

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do.

I keep thinking that my usual haunts have less and less appeal for me. There seems to be less and less reason to be out. Certainly flirting with lovely girls at small bistros seems to be something I have less and less social standing to do. And I can't really decide whether that's based on fear of being mocked or treated with derision or on fear of being seen to fail at desire. 

I do walk through downtown on summer evening--- properly masked, mind you, here in the time of the Red Death ---and think of myself as a ghost. I will not, now or ever after, look at myself in a mirror or allow myself to be photographed. I certainly won't look any photos of myself.  I walk along not looking into shop windows, not going in to any of the few places open, and knowing that I'm less and less likely to be speaking to anyone again. I've spent my life telling stories, flirting, trying to be an interesting figure there on the edge of things. Those parts of the story seem to have come to an end.

Desire drives, desire obsesses. We know that. But seeing desire fade away is a cruel set of moments.

Two Nine Eight: Preludes

My friend in NZ sent me this back in the spring of 2012--- a memory of an adventure she had in 2002 with two slightly older boys. The full story is in a May 2018 post here, a post called "Two One Zero: Lookout". I printed off her original email and had it bound into a collection of emails and blog posts I'd assembled. It's something I want to keep, something I want to remember.

It says something about me that what fascinates here is the Range Rover. It matters to me that this all happened in a Range Rover, in a particular kind of vehicle. It matters, too, that it happened at a lookout up above the city.  Posh teens in a posh car, looking down on one of the wealthier suburbs--- the stage set mattered:

They were water polo boys... I think I was 15, they were 16 or 17. We were driving round aimlessly in a Range Rover, parked up at the waterfront for a while, then drove up to the lookout.  We passed cans of RTD bourbon around. One of them rolled a joint. I was in the front seat, bare feet up on the dash. Jake, who was in the driver's seat, started kissing me & putting his hands down my top. Hadleigh was in the back. They were both blond, swimmers' bodies-- lean & muscular. Hadleigh was just on the verge of being drunk, Jake hadn't had too much to drink. I remember Jake leading my hands down to his cock, which felt so hard through his jeans. I undid his fly and took him out of his jeans. Hadleigh was watching everything from the backseat. I leaned over and started sucking Jake. He was running his fingers through my hair, gently guiding my head. Jake came in my mouth, and as I sat up and swallowed his cum with a mouthful of bourbon, I could see Hadleigh with his cock in his hands. He was so big and so hard. He pulled my arm and I climbed over to the back seat. I sucked Hadleigh's cock and swallowed his cum as it shot down my throat. I still remember Jake watching from the front seat.

Jake rolled another joint and climbed over and joined us in the backseat. Metallica was on the radio, we had a few more bourbons. There were always a few gay rumors floating around school about Hadleigh. I sat on Jake's lap and put my bare feet on Hadleigh's lap. Then some three way kissing just...started. I was just...filled with pure delight and amazement when Jake & Hadleigh first kissed. The way they looked at each other. Jake had his fingers in my cunt at the time, but I could tell they'd never kissed before.  Things progressed, and I watched fascinated as Hadleigh sucked Jake's cock. Jake had his fingers intertwined with mine, and he squeezed my hand so hard as he moaned and thrust and came. They kissed afterwards, then there was a moment when Jake and Hadleigh were looking at me. I thought I knew what Jake wanted, so I took Hadleigh's cock out and slowly started sucking. He was already hard. I sucked him, my eyes on Jake, until after a few minutes Jake leant down and kissed me, then took Hadleigh in his mouth. I sat back and watched again, so wet. It was incredibly hot. I had never experienced this before, and it was beautiful. Hadleigh came hard. Jake didn't swallow, the cum trickled out of his mouth, then he leaned and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. 

I was like, gagging for some attention by this point. I climbed on top of Jake and rode him on the backseat (17 year old boys do have some good points...they recharge fast!) I finally got my orgasm too. They had both been fingering my cunt during the night, but I wasn't quite there quite yet. It was my first three way, and I fucking loved it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally had two cocks in me at the same time, which was a game changer. But I will always think fondly of my night with the water polo boys.

Reading the story now, thinking of it as a story, I wouldn't have had Metallica playing. I'm no fan of heavy metal. There is that. But I do love it that it all happened in a Range Rover. And I love the image of Jill in the front seat, inevitably in tiny cut-off denim shorts, bare feet on the dash. There's something so deliciously alluring about that. Tanned legs, bare feet, tiny faded shorts... I have to wonder what she was thinking. She was in the front seat with Jake, so she would've counted as his date. Did she want a three-way to develop? Was she wondering why Jake had brought another boy along? Was she just indifferent to having Hadleigh watch her with Jake? In their circle, when kids made out or hooked up at parties, did anyone worry (on beaches, in spa pools, on sailboat decks) about being seen?

Did she know that he was driving her up to the lookout to have sex with? Was it a decision that she made before or after they parked and the RTD bourbons went round? When she climbed into the Range Rover that evening, was she expecting that at least one of the boys would fuck her? That does matter to me--- knowing when the decisions were made, knowing whether she'd done any planning, knowing whether she'd done anything with either of them before. Jill at fifteen or sixteen still (sometimes) wore underwear but rarely bothered with birth control until she was at university. What planning was she doing? Or was she just utterly passive, and waiting for bourbon and a joint to make the decision for her. Bare feet on the dash--- was she flexing cute, dark-tanned toes with impatience during the drive, or just as a distraction to the boys? How did Hadleigh in the backseat decide to take the risk and stroke himself while watching Jill with Jake? Had he wanted Jill before?

The story itself isn't entirely implausible. I'd be suspicious of how easily the two boys experimented with each other--- even in NZ, even in a city that prides itself on being a hippie town, even years and years after my own teens, that's hard for me to imagine. I did find a website for her school and scrolled back through their years of sports teams to find that there was a water polo boy named Hadleigh who graduated the year before Jill--- a boy who went on to be some sort of developer in the city. So at least that one point has some plausibility

No...not entirely implausible with rich, bored, drunk kids. But what does interest me is the prelude to it all. Or preludes. What interests me is what each person in the Range Rover was thinking, and what each person thought would happen. The actual events are hot, yes. But what I'd like to know is whether it just happened or whether any or all of them planned it.

Any thoughts out there over the aether?

Two Nine Seven: Markers

Not so very long ago--- a week or two ---there was something called International Non-Binary Day. There  were announcements on Twitter and Non-Binary flags flown in some hip neighborhoods and at the protests we're experiencing nationwide here in the summer of the Red Death.

I will have to admit that I don't understand the whole Non-Binary (NB, enbee) idea. I'll read about the concept and have trouble distinguishing "non-binary" from simply 'bisexual' or 'androgynous'.

Now I can craft an argument that divides non-binary from bisexual. Bisexual is the ability to be sexually attracted to either sex, to be sexually attracted to both (or either) male and female. That seems simple enough, though I do fear that the argument may already be outmoded. My current understanding is that sexual attraction is being downplayed these days, and that attraction must be based on gender, not sex.  "Non-binary" remains an ambiguous usage here. Is it the ability to be attracted to more than one (or two...or more) genders, to multiple social presentations? Or is it presenting oneself as performing more than one (or two...or more) genders? Does it include what we once thought of as 'androgyny' or does it go beyond that?

Non Binary seems to be linked to the idea of 'pansexual'. From what I've been reading, 'pansexual' is the new ideal, the new gold standard for sexual orientation. I've seen articles and Twitter posts that assert (sometimes violently) that 'pansexual' is the only moral or ethical sexual orientation, that any other orientation (straight, gay, lesbian, bi) is immoral--- bigoted and exclusionary. To some degree, that seems to be special pleading by trans women, who are busy building an argument that any refusal to have sex with someone on the grounds of body and anatomy is 'transphobic', reactionary, and evil. That argument seems to come down to saying both that bodies don't matter and that anyone who won't have sex with them is a Bad Person.

I've seen assertions on line that being Non-Binary is purely internal, that someone can be a 'man' or a 'woman' at any time, at will, even without social presentation. All identity, they're arguing is internal. You can change identity without having to do anything or look like anything. That's an argument I have trouble with. I can see that it's not altogether aligned with trans views of identity, since it rejects the idea of a real or authentic identity. I also take for granted that social presentation matters. An identity has to be recognized by the world around you to have any meaning at all. Saying, for example, that your inner identity is "woman" while sending out signals (dress, body language, beard) that your particular culture reads as "male" is a pointless exercise.

So there are the Non Binary flags, true...but what are the social markers for being Non Binary? There's an IG girl whose account I follow, a girl in the Pacific Northwest, who did a long series of posts about being Non Binary. Yet to my eye...I have no idea what she means. That she's bisexual is obvious and trivially easy. She's tall, lanky, lovely eyes and face, with hair shaved down to USMC boot camp length. She works as an alt-model, and her photos can be anything from haute fashion sexy to punk erotica. I read her as androgynous in a kind of Eighties art-school style--- an assumed boyishness used to enhance obvious femininity. Her social presentation remains "female" to my eye. I have no idea what she thinks when she looks in a mirror or sees herself in photos, and I do read her as  female-hot.

What are the social markers for being Non Binary? It says something about me that I assume that there must be social markers. As far as I know, every group develops its own internal symbolic language of identifiers--- whether that's late-Victorian gay men with a green carnation or Nineties lesbians in Birkenstocks. I grew up reading "The Official Preppy Handbook" and "The Sloane Ranger Handbook" and "The Official Yuppie Handbook". I take it as a given that there are social markers, whether that's finance bros wearing micro fleece vests or old-school preps wearing Nantucket Reds. After all...checklists are everything. But I don't know how Non Binary people perform an identity.

Any identity must be something the external world can read. How else can they react to you as what you assert that you "really are"? Any identity has its external symbols and poses. Nothing is more human than constructing stories to explain ourselves, whether verbally or in symbols.

Right now, though, I can't quite explain what Non Binary is, or how it's enacted in public. What does it mean? How is it announced? Who out there over the aether can tell me? Be specific, as I always told my students--- be specific and give examples.

Two Nine Six: Poster

I've probably written about this before, but today one of my social media accounts sent me a notice that a girl I'd corresponded with for a bit back in the Long Ago was having a birthday. She must be thirty-two or thirty-three now. She's in London Town now, highly successful in her field and quite married.

What I'm remembering about her tonight is that she once had a blog where she posted a photo of a poster reading "REMEMBER: You Are Someone's Reason To Masturbate". That would've been in her early or mid twenties, when she'd just moved to London. She was a gym rat girl in those days, and a party girl with an eating disorder.  I remember seeing the photo of the poster and grimacing. Depressing thought, really.

It's not hard to intuit that she was using the poster as inspiration to hit the gym more, to run and stretch and pump weights. An inspiration to starve more, too. But it was all an attitude that was so alien to me.

I'll note that another expat girl I knew in London Town in those days laughed when I told her about the poster. She waved a hand and said blithely that Everyone is someone's Reason. Well, yes...for her, that was (and is) true. She has a long list of conquests--- always older, inevitably distinguished, often married, usually moneyed. She's been used to being in the upper demimonde since her late teens.  She can take it for granted that she's always been someone's Reason. Being part of admirers' fantasies is something she takes for granted.

Again--- that's utterly alien to me. I can't imagine ever being someone's Reason. I can't imagine that in the past, and I certainly can't imagine it now. I find it increasingly difficult and shameful to admit to having any fantasies of my own, and it seems highly, highly unlikely that I could ever be anyone's Reason.

My blonde friend down in NZ told me once that of course she'd fantasized about me. I looked at the screen and felt an odd rush of disbelief and anger. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to make her lie to me or why she'd want to tell me such an obvious lie.

I can sit and listen to lovely young companions tell me stories of their adventures and encounters. My life is constructed of stories, not atoms--- you know that saying. But I have so very little to offer them in return these days.  I'm not foolish enough to think that I have anything physical about me that would inspire fantasies, and I can't imagine having stories of any value these days.

I could never put that poster on a wall in my rooms. It's not something anyone male could do, really. Put something like that up and you'd be open to both derision and political attacks. And you'd have no defenses. None.

And...even if you were someone's Reason, you'd have no control over who that someone might be. I can't escape the belief that having someone themselves unattractive fancy you or fantasize about you means that you have done something wrong. Let's always make a note of that.

There's no chance that I can identify with either of the two girls in London Town about the thought in that poster. There's no chance that here in these latter days I could ever tell a girl that she was my Reason--- even we were in a very sexual relationship and I was offering her a compliment. There's no way to say that to a girl these days, and there's certainly no way that any girl would take me as a Reason.

I'm a very good listener, and I used to be a good storyteller. I used to be good at crafting stories and bringing lovely bookish girls into fantasies.  But I'm of no value whatsoever at being part of anyone's fantasies as a player.

Two Nine Five: Leather

Tonight I'm thinking again about my posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud, about Jill down in NZ.

I'm thinking about the stories she told me about the rich older man she fancied back maybe five or six years ago. She may have known him longer than that, but memory says that it was in 2015 and early 2016 that she was last involved with him. I know very little about the older man himself--- in his mid or late fifties, I think. Maybe sixty now. Jill always did have a taste for older men, a taste I have to approve of. She always called him "the businessman" and hinted that he spent his time "owning companies". That could mean all sorts of things, really. She never did tell me how she met him, or how old she was when she did, or what their early encounters were like. She hadn't seen him for a while when they ran into each other by accident in an Auckland bar in 2015. They had a drink and (of course) ended up in bed in his hotel suite.

She did tell me that he was rich even by her family's standards. Once, later, she wrote me to say that she felt guilty and ashamed because  one night off Cuba St. in Wellington she'd given a blowjob in a parked pickup truck to someone she described as a "bankrupt builder". Pickup truck in Kiwi is ute...a ute. For utility truck, I guess. She was ashamed that she'd given a drunken blowjob to the Bankrupt Builder and was cheating on The Businessman. How could she do that, she asked, how could she cheat on someone who had ten million dollars?  (My question-- $10 million NZ or in USD?)

What Jill loved best about being with The Businessman was that he collected expensive cars. He collected Aston-Martins and was a member of the NZ Aston-Martin Owners Club. He'd take her to meets and road rallies. I don't know how many of the cars he's owned over the years, or exactly what he owned when she was sleeping with him. She enthused once about having been in a V12 Vanquish, so that may have been his ride when she was with him in 2015/16.  I did Google the car, and I'd like to know if she'd been in one with him.

I think you know where this is going. Jill always hinted that she'd had sex in an Aston-Martin...maybe in more than one. She laughed about the make of the car, since she had been a major fan of the early 007 movies. Easy enough to imagine her in a parked Aston-Martin Vantage outside some posh restaurant like The Grove off St. Patricks Square, short cocktail dress up around her hips, straddling The Businessman. Let's note how my mind works here. I can see her in detail, tell you what colour and fabric her dress is, tell you that she's dark-tanned and obviously not wearing underwear (she rarely does). I can see the expression on her face as she rides him. I can't tell you a thing about him, though. Not looks, not expression, not suit. He's irrelevant as a person. It's Jill and the car that matter.

A V12 Vanquish would be a perfect stage set for a posh blonde party girl like Jill. I'm not especially interested in fast cars or sports cars, but an Aston-Martin is a stage set that I can see.

I can't get past the vision of Jill naked in an Aston-Martin. I can imagine her in her classic Ray-Bans, pulling off her cashmere pullover and cut-off denim shorts and leaning back naked while her Older Admirer drives through Grey Lynn in Auckland. I can imagine her laugh as she puts her bare feet up on the dash and turns up the music.

I can imagine her naked on open highway as well, the car at speed, Jill's sundress tossed into the back. If I had her here tonight, I ask all the questions that would help me turn the image into a story. How hard was it to get a sundress off in the passenger seat of the Vanquish? Harder than peeling off skinny jeans or leggings? Windows up or down? Wind in her hair or not? Would she curl up in the seat or lean back and put her feet up? Would she caress herself while the car accelerated or lean across to give the driver road head? Were the windows and windscreen dark-tinted or was she thrilled by the thought of performing for passing truckers and teen boys? What did it feel like, being naked at speed? What did the leather of the seats feel like against bare skin? That's something I do think about: Jill's hair in the wind, sunlight on her freckles, nipples hard, the North Island landscape rushing past.

Now of course she's been naked in parked cars since her early teens; let's take that as a given. But being naked in a Vantage V12--- a car that costs something above $US 175,000 ---or a $US 300,000 Vanquish V12...that has a very special erotic energy. I can't imagine her not always feeling obligated to sit in one of those with the back of her skirt flipped up so that she'd always have bare flesh on the leather seat.

In some better world, she'd call me late at night and tell me about textures and sensations, about the sound of the V12 engine while she gave head or fingered herself at high speed down a coastal highway. These days, my own selection of stage sets is deeply limited, and I'm unlikely ever to have new ones. But beautiful, leggy, posh girls in expensive sports cars--- there's an image I can like. I just wish I had more details and more accounts of adventures from young ladies with a taste for speed and transgression.

Two Nine Four: Masks

I've been thinking about desire and enticements, about what we see in what we desire.

I've been reading about the Los Angeles club scene in the 1960s, reading books by Eve Babitz, who was the chronicler of that world. I've liked Babitz's stories and memoirs for a long time. Her "Slow Days, Fast Company", "L.A. Woman", and "Sex & Rage" have been favorites of mine since my days in grad school. She was always a better It Girl than any of the Manhattan scenesters. The Warhol girls may have been cool, but none of them got naked to play chess with Marcel Duchamp.

I suppose it was a combination of things that made me want to re-read Babitz. I'd seen the new documentary about Joan Didion and I'd just read Taylor Jenkins Reid's "Daisy Jones and the Six". And I'd seen "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". All of that made me want to go back and re-read Eve Babitz, especially "Slow Days, Fast Company". Lovely short pieces, a lovely invocation of a Los Angeles I'll never see. Please call this a recommendation. Let me know what you think of Ms. Babitz.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fantasizing about the young Jane Birkin and the young Francoise Hardy-- two of my key Sixties Girls. I suppose reading "Slow Days, Fast Company" and "Daisy Jones and the Six" has made me fantasize about mid-Sixties California girls. I don't know what that means, and of course I haven't given up my dreams of being in Paris and London 1965 with Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy. But I am going through a phase of L.A. girls in miniskirts and big sunglasses as images for desire.

How do desires and fetishes change? There are underlying points in all my fantasies; that much is always true. A certain age, long legs, a disdain for underwear, dark tans. a certain height and angular slender build. Those things are part of the definition of desire for me. But if some things are necessary for me to feel desire, periods and costumes and styles do change. Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy are leggy Sixties girls, but they're not quite girls you can imagine partying with Eve Babitz at a party in Malibu. The trick, I suppose, is to find out what's behind the shifts in the precise forms of desire. And let's be  clear--- it's all as much about sets and settings as it is about the girls themselves.

Yesterday I walked from my office to a small burger joint to lunch. While I was waiting for my order I noticed a girl standing on line to pick up a take-away. I was struck very much coup de foudre with her.

Probably nineteen or twenty, tallish, slender. Streaked light-brown hair to her shoulders, light eyes, a seriously dark tan, perfect legs. A very tiny khaki miniskirt--- a look I haven't seen much of this spring and summer ---and cute sandals. And...a mask. She had on a black face mask. Somehow the mask made it all work. Somehow the mask made her desperately desirable. It is the season of the Red Death, and we're still in the midst of the pandemic. The mask may be the new normal for the rest of the year. After all, I was wearing one myself. But the mask and the miniskirt were a trigger for serious desire. I may have imagined her in the mask, those long legs over my shoulders. I may have imagined her gasping in orgasm through the mask.  I may have imagined those things, but I have no idea why they came to mind.  I'll certainly never know who she was, but it was the combination of mask and miniskirt that instantly made her a fantasy girl. So I suppose that Red Death face masks will become a fetish for me, the same way that ankle bracelets on lovely girls once did.

I've always needed the idea of sets and settings--- places, architecture, lighting, fashion ---for any fantasies to work. Right now it seems that I need the image of a certain kind of Sixties scene...and I may need lovely girls to wear face masks and tiny skirts. Or just the face mask.

But in any case, I have no idea where these images and fetishes come from.  I have no idea when and how they'll mutate or shift.  I'd still love to take the girl in the mask to a party at Ms. Babitz's house in the Canyons in some imaginary 1967, though.

Two Nine Three: Lessons

Last night I watched "Altered States"--- a film from c.1981 that I've always rather liked.  If you haven't seen the film, I will recommend it.

There's a moment in "Altered States" where Wm. Hurt has the first physical symptoms of regressing into some kind of archaic hominid. He's in bed with one of his students at the time (she calls him "Dr. Jessup" when he leaves bed and dashes to the bathroom to look at his transformation in the mirror). The actress is named Ora Rubinstein; her character is billed only as "Young Medical Student". I like that...and wonder if you'd still still have that character if you re-did the film in the Year Twenty. Could you still have Dr. Jessup sleeping with one of his students? The film takes it for granted that he'll have affairs with students, and one of his senior med school colleagues says off-handedly earlier in the film that he has to go, that he has a date with one of his students,

Which once again takes us back to Levin and her painting professor. That affair was something that happened long ago, and certainly long before #MeToo. Levin had no objection to sleeping with her professor, and no particular thought that she was being exploited. She found some of his stories pretentious and self-involved, but that just went with being in the art world. What I'd like to know is the full backstory. At what point did she sense that his interest in her was a seduction? How did she react to the discovery--- surprise, amusement, excitement? Did she ever think she was being exploited or used (in a bad way)? Did she laugh at how cliched it all was--- art student and her professor? Did she decide to sleep with him early on, or did she make a quick decision that night in the studio when he asked why she wasn't naked yet?

I asked her once when she made that decision about me, and she shrugged and told me she'd decided early on, when I was telling her what films and books I liked. Just seemed like you'd be interesting, she said. I mean, I'll take that as a compliment and a perfectly valid reason. But I did wonder when she'd made a decision and what criteria she was using. 

Levin was a fine arts major. I do wonder how her criteria compare to Liberty's.'s criteria. Liberty was a coastal ecology major--- a science girl, albeit in what was regarded as a "hippie science". From what I could infer, all the "soft" sciences--- the ecology programs, anthropology, biology ---were very sexually active. Funny thing--- "Altered States" gives the same impression, that the physical anthropology students and faculty are more sexually active than the hard sciences or even the liberal arts. I need to look into the accepted mores of various academic departments. 

I of course was a History major--- a department not noted for carnality. Fine Arts and Comparative Lit were of course notorious for both ambisexuality and teacher-student affairs. Neither Levin nor Liberty ever seemed to find sleeping with faculty to be anything out of the ordinary, mind you. And both seemed to have accepted bisexuality as perfectly ordinary since their teens. Okay, yes, great--- I'm now thinking about a survey and analysis on sexual criteria by academic major back to the Sixties. Somebody get me a research grant and a Netflix deal.

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

Though I suppose it's possible that they wanted the idea of "experience" more than any particular concrete experience. Levin was part of the art world, and there's still a strong master-pupil attitude there, the idea of learning by transmission from some older figure with talent. That may be part of it all.  Levin and Liberty (and my friend in Montreal) liked the idea of having experiences,  of collecting experiences that they could use to form themselves. I suppose I felt the same way in my own late teens and undergraduate days. The idea was to be able to say that, yes, I did this, or that I'd read that, that I had a range of experiences (all approved in novels or films) that I could use to become (or become seen as) the sort of character I wanted to portray.

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)...or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things...but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

Two Nine Two: Procedures

I was looking through Alexander Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" yesterday evening--- a rather powerful teacher-student romance. Yes, I know, we're not supposed to read those any more, or consider teacher-student romances as anything other than nonconsensual and exploitative. I rather like the genre, or at least the possibilities in the genre. I've been fortunate, too, in knowing girls who've been attracted to the same set of fantasies and have been willing to construct scenes in the genre with me.

My lovely friend in Montreal always told me that she'd gone to McGill as an undergraduate specifically to have affairs with older and knowledgeable men. She wanted to be someone's dangerous muse. The problem, she told me, was that she didn't know the procedures involved.  If she found an older admirer, how was the affair supposed to progress? Who was supposed to make the first move? What were the recognized ways in which she could make it clear that she was available as muse and mentee and bedmate? What she needed, she said, was a checklist. Or at least access to a covey (coven?) of co-eds who shared her tastes and could impart secret knowledge to her.  She showed me her notebooks with drafts of checklists she'd assembled, largely based on novels like Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" and lots of memoirs by young female French writers who had tales of affairs with teachers and professors. She was--- and is ---like me in some things: checklists and rituals always matter.

Levin told me that the affair with her painting instructor had opened exactly like she'd expected it to--- lots of long conversations about art, lots of tales over coffee at the student union about the man's past in the art world, eventually a flask of vodka in the painting studio one night. She said that she was used to boys at school who never knew how to ask anything directly, and when her professor looked at her that first night and casually asked, "Why aren't you naked yet?" she just laughed and pulled off her singlet.  What she liked, she said, was that he had a whole checklist of his own in his head: things to do with and to her, places to do things in, a list of things to show her. She liked it when he asked her to model for him--- that was so very clearly supposed to be a sign that he wanted her for more than just a night or two ---and she knew that it was a sign that she was doing well.

Liberty was always a direct girl, and her procedure was to just ask for whatever she wanted.  She ended up in that sleeping bag with her instructor on that kayak trip by just asking, by putting down the joint she was smoking by the campfire and asking him if he wanted her to ride him or wanted her on bottom. That's the same kind of directness she'd used at sixteen with the kayak store owner. I admired her directness--- admired her ability to just be direct. Her own set of procedures worked on me, mind you. I liked watching her take charge of starting the affair. That first night at the oyster bar when we met, we'd talked for a while and then she very casually asked if she'd be sleeping over at my flat after she got off.

Sometimes these days I think that I've lost my own ability to work through a checklist or even know where I am among the items. I miss the sense of self-confidence that Liberty had, and I miss thinking that I had the ability to craft the checklist points and guide a young companion down the list: places, positions, discussions, games. I miss the idea that a lovely girl could intuit the key checklist points and enjoy the idea of ritual and procedure.

One night during their affair, her painting instructor painted on Levin herself--- outlining her areolae and nipples in blue, tracing red along the sharp lines of her hipbones. She told me that she'd had a hard time not laughing--- that he was willing to be playful rather than simply mentor-mentee with her meant that he trusted in her not to mock him after he'd put some of his authority aside. I do like that image.

Liberty I'm sure knew that I wanted to do certain things in certain places with lovers, and she was willing to work my list with me so long as I understood that she was someone who liked simple, direct questions and straightforward answers.

I suppose I could leave examples of a checklist here, but somehow I don't feel quite comfortable or safe doing that.  Lists tell others what you want, what you desire, what you think you need. That's information that's never safe to have lying about.  It's so easy to be mocked for those things, whatever they might be.  And it's just no longer simple to ask anyone to work through a list with you, even if you're more than willing to work through hers with her.

I suppose it's harder, too, to know what you should put on the list--- harder to know what you actually do want.

Two Nine One: Stage Sets 2

Stage sets matter.

I said that last time, and I'll stand by it.

I can't do a vacation or a trip of any kind without a lovely Young Companion at my side. There's no point in travel to new cities, new locales, without someone who'll use those places to create stories of adventurous or risky or well-crafted sex.

There is a question, though--- what kinds of places make the best stage sets?  What kinds of places would you want to be having sex in? There's always something to be said for hotel beds, since hotel sex has something wonderfully louche about it. But...where else?

My friend Marta in Houston had the gym of that cruise ship off Alaska.

I'd love to be with Jill in a Pure Pod somewhere in the Otago hills. There's something very sci-fi film set about Pure Pods--- great architecture that suggests waking up in a film set c. 2035. I need to ask Jill about that, about what sex in a Pure Pod calls up in her mind's eye.

I suspect that for Jill, sex in a Vancouver hotel elevator with her faux-uncle ("second cousin once removed") is a stage-set memory that she does treasure. Or maybe her favourite locale was the backseat of that Range Rover with the two water-polo boys when she was sixteen.  Both would make very good sets for a film version of her adventures.

For Liberty, the kayak shop always mattered. I do imagine her there often...and imagine her on that field trip where she hooked up with her professor, imagine her naked on the dock, a sleeping bag draped round her, watching the lights of boats in the distance.

For Marsha, maybe the hills above Thessaloniki, there in the parked MG convertible with the Greek boy.

For Levin, her painting professor's studio. Or a shadowed bedroom in Charleston.

I have my guesses about Miss Ginny, but she was always very canny about how much of the details of her past she revealed.

For a girl named Morgan, one of the bartendrix girls I flirted with a couple of years ago.... Maybe an Amtrak sleeper car, or maybe (oh, yes) the catacombs in Paris. She told me once that the cost of the flight would be worth it if she could have sex in the catacombs.

Well...if you're reading this, tell me about your own favourite locale-based stories. Tell about the cities and buildings and hotels and sailboats and rooftop bars where you've arranged encounters.

I won't say anything about my own past and the places that have meant something to me. After all, I'm a gentleman of a certain age. Males don't get to tell stories like that. Accounts of adventures and locales are either taken as pathetic bragging or pathetic lies. All I will say is that there are places I'd love to have as stage sets--- places I'd keep on a list, however unlikely it is these days that I'll be checking anything off it.

One of the Pure Pods? Oh, certainly. I can go to the website and find a favourite.  One of the two remaining sleeper trains in Japan? Again, certainly. Though surely there's a way to do something on a shinkansen from Tokyo to Hokkaido...yes? A seaview villa in Rabat? A cabin on the Skeleton Coast? Yes, of course.

But I suspect I won't be adding any new places to the list I've kept in my paper journal all these years.  I have visions, but no time or money or energy--- let alone a Young Companion. So I'll just keep a list of what-should-be places. And hope that you'll send me your own lists of places where your encounters and adventures were amplified, valorized, shaped by architecture and decor.

Two Nine Zero: Stage Sets

Someone asked me yesterday why I'm not taking vacation time this summer. I told them that the Red Death had ruined everyone's vacation plans, so that I might wait 'til fall. I think I also implied that my finances weren't up to a vacation right now. That last part is certainly true, but it's not the key reason why I'm not going anywhere this year.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age, yes. A vacation for me would require certain amenities. At my age, I'm not going camping or whitewater rafting or rock-climbing. I'm usually bored at the beach, and I have no interest in any place like, say, Las Vegas.

My idea of a vacation can be urban. It can be about spending a week wandering streets in Manhattan or Montreal. Or I suppose it could be about renting something like one of the Pure Pod cabins my friend in New Zealand told me about. It could even be about sailing somewhere, though it could never be about being on a cruise. But whatever sort of vacation it would be, it would require  a lovely young companion to be with me.

I have been on vacations alone. I've ridden trains alone across Central Europe and wandered solo through towns in Slovenia and Hungary. Those things happened long ago, and while they're good memories, these days I have no interest in vacationing or traveling alone. I need a young companion to be there with me. I see no purpose, no purpose at all, in travel without a lover.

A vacation of any kind is expensive, and I live in genteel poverty. But a vacation should also be a romantic adventure, a time spent together with someone with whom you share passion and wickedness and dreams of creating stories. Right now I have no one in my life, and I have no destination in mind.

A city, a Pure Pod, a sailboat... Those things mean nothing to me in and of themselves. They're settings--- stage settings ---only. A hotel rooftop pool,  a sailboat deck at twilight, a Pure Pod deck--- those things have value as stage sets for sex and romance. Settings matter. Settings are the stuff underlying stories--- sneaking into the alleyway behind the bistro, watching a lovely companion swim naked off a moored sailboat, watching the city skyline from a hotel bed. The settings matter. You might think that you can have amazing sex in any ordinary bed in any ordinary room in any banal town or city. But it's not the physical act itself that matters. It's the setting, it's doing it in someplace out of the ordinary, it's collecting stories to be remembered years later.

I can't begin to imagine going anywhere without a lovely young companion who'll help me christen locations and create stories for later. I can't go anywhere without adventures and encounters that will match or out-point things girlfriends have done in their lives before me.  I want to be able to say that the stories and locations and adventures they're having with me are as good as those they've had with other men.

Financial limits are always are good excuse. Right now I can't afford an extended weekend in Savannah or Vancouver. But the real difficulty is that I have no lover in my life right now. And I'm not going any place where we won't be christening risky or stylish or amazingly visual spots together. I can't travel without a leggy, literary girl who'll see a vacation as a chance to create erotica together.

Two Eight Nine: Disclosures

I was sitting outside with a lovely neighbour here at the lakeside flat the other night, talking and working our way through a bottle of Belvedere vodka with iced tea. How Deepest South is that, do you think? I'll note that we were in separate deck chairs on the upper deck, and that we were properly socially-distanced. This is the time of the Red Death, and I've been socially-distanced and properly masked throughout. My neighbour herself is a lovely girl. She's been here in my apartment complex for almost four years now. She has long, toned legs, a mass of reddish hair, and is something of a party girl, though she's no one's fool. The night itself was good. Cool for the season here, with the scent of earlier rain still in the air.

At some point she confided in me that she was and always had been "a total sexual deviant". I hadn't heard the word "deviant" in twenty years, and I was immediately intrigued.  She reached out one arm and tapped her glass on mine and drunkenly repeated that she was "such a deviant". Of course I asked. How could I not ask? She told me that she'd lost track of how many people she'd had sex with, and asked me if I remembered my own body count number. I do, of course, but that's because I've always written such things down, all the way back into my teens. Everything is written down, everything is annotated. I did become a trained historian, after all. I didn't ask whether she didn't know her own number because it was so large or simply because many of her encounters had been drunken couplings that she barely remembered. Please note that I'm not imposing any moral judgment here, and I never would.  She's lovely and probably thirty or thirty-one. I can make a guess at what the number might be, but the only significance it would have is if she and I laid bets on whose was higher at her current age.

She then told me that she felt like a deviant, too, because she'd had girls in her past. She'd always loved girls, she told me, though she hadn't had the nerve to hook up with more than a few--- which of course is very much like my friend Jill in NZ.  How odd that she finds being at least occasionally bi to be so wicked that she can only admit it after several large vodkas.

She looked at me and shook a finger and told me that she just knew I was someone who tied girls up and whipped them. I had to laugh at that. Good guess, I told her. Very good guess. But of course I do love playing with blindfolds and silk scarves and riding crops and candle wax with lovely young companions. My neighbour told me that I was just so obvious, that that was something all men my age who had "all those bookshelves" liked. I did shrug and tell her that with age you learned to rely to technique and style rather than raw physicality. That was all okay, she said. Older men came up with interesting things to do. And you, she said, I'll bet you're really good at doing scenes and telling stories with girls. That's something I was proud to hear.

This does not--- let me emphasize that ---end with the two of us in bed, or with her on my couch being whipped. It doesn't. It ended with us clinking glasses and just talking until two or three in the morning.  In a non-plague year, it would've ended with a long hug and maybe--- maybe ---a goodnight kiss.  But it wasn't a night that was going to end in bed. It didn't need to, and while I love flirting shamelessly with her, I'm not going to step outside any bounds.

But it did make me think. During the night out on the deck, we talked about our respective experiences and pasts. I've usually been someone to whom strangers in bars or on trains confide their secrets, and my neighbour found me to be a good listener and a safe confidant. I'm glad that she does. Importantly, she hasn't been embarrassed or nervous around me since. That matters, too.

Nonetheless, it is an odd thing. She told me that she hasn't had anyone who'd understand about her secrets in years. I've been feeling the same thing lately. Confidantes are hard to find lately. Certainly harder than when I was, say, twenty-five or thirty. It seems much less safe these days to admit anything to anyone. In the time of the gender wars, admitting anything to anyone seems like putting a weight on their shoulders or, worse, like some kind of demand or threat.

I've always loved the whole experience of drunkenly telling one another secrets, about disclosing one's past and interests and fancies. There's a delight in that, in the sharing. Sharing fancies and obsessions is very often better than sex-in-the-flesh. Mutual surprise, the moment of laughing with someone at shared things, the electricity of being on the borderline between flirtation and seduction--- all those things make disclosures fun.

Yet it feels less safe now. Not just because the other person might be turned off, but that they might be angered. I'm less and less sure these days about such things. It's hard to offer up compliments, of course, although my neighbour is fine with my obviously appreciating her legs. But it is harder to tell the stories girls and I would've talked about twenty years ago, or maybe even ten. The world has changed around me and sometimes I haven't followed along with it.

Two Eight Eight: Compliments

Well, I am still afraid to be seen on a dance floor, and I'm still afraid to use the pool where I live. But tonight's worry is about compliments.

Yesterday evening I was down in the courtyard talking to one of my neighbours, a lovely red-haired girl who's been here for almost four years now. She had friends over to use the pool, including one girl whom I'd seen before and was very hot indeed. My neighbour told me that she'd an awkward conversation with our property manager about the girl.

The property manager had been talking to my neighbour when the visiting girl climbed out of the pool. The manager looked at her and commented that the girl had "really come into her own". My neighbour shut the conversation down by crisply saying that, yes, the girl had become a grown woman at some point in her life. She told me yesterday evening that she found the comment "creepy and inappropriate".

I had to partially agree with her, at least on general principles. I'm not sure I'd go as far as "creepy", but it was an awkward and very odd comment. "Come into her own" sounds just a bit too much like saying "well, she's in her prime breeding years". I suppose it also sounds like "well, she's finally inherited that five million from her rich uncle", but that's really not any less odd and awkward,

Now, yes, the girl is very attractive. Late twenties, maybe five-seven, very slender, long light brown hair, lithe and lissome in a very high-cut maillot. I've exchanged a few words with her in passing. I know her first name, and that she works (I think) at Sephora. That's all I know, really. She doesn't have a local accent,  but I know nothing about her origins or life.  She's certainly attractive, and she's been pleasant to me. I told my neighbour that if I wanted to compliment the girl, I'd just say that she was very attractive and let it go at that. My neighbour assured me that saying that would've been fine, but the whole breeding-years implication wasn't.

Now my neighbour has been someone I've chatted with and had courtyard drinks with these last few years, I'm sure that I've walked by her, raised a red Solo cup or a wineglass, and said something like, "God, girl, you have long legs!" or just said, "Great legs, girl!" when I've seen her in short shorts on her balcony. She's always just smiled, raised her own drink, and nodded her thanks. We're on good terms, and she's never been annoyed by anything I said. I've always made any compliments part of my persona as an aging roué, and she's responded to the persona. I may be lucky in that she and I are born natives of a region where that particular persona still has some currency. We both know how the ritual works.

I'm no longer sure what I'd do in terms of complimenting a lovely girl in, say, Manhattan or Wellington. Tonight I'm thinking that it's like being on a dance floor. At some point you lose the belief that you have any skills, that you might have something to do or say that would make you feel like you're doing things right. Offering up compliments is always a risky thing, but I think I've lost the ability to do it any place that isn't...here in this city or this downtown.