Three Eight Five: Fears

 This isn't a podcast, and so I don't have guests to interview. That may or may not be a good thing. I'm not sure how I'd go about acquiring guests for a podcast, and I'm too far away from any major metropolis to have a deep pool of potential guests in any case. I can't think that any FMTY girls would be willing to be an interview subject, and of course the same holds true for any authors or scholars.

I have however been having long conversations with an old (and older) friend. We've known each other for decades now, and I've come to be the person he goes to when he needs a listener. What he's really longing for is the chance to be a classical Freudian analysand, but that's too expensive a thing, and these days classical Freudian analysts are hard to come by. He would, he says, settle for a Lacanian analyst, but those are only found in Paris and Buenos Aires, and he hates to travel.

My friend signs all his letters (and he is a devotee of the dying art of letter writing) as "Sir Francis Meerkat"-- a wonderful name, but one whose semiotics I haven't unpacked. I'll call him "Sir Francis", though. I sign my own letters with my actual name, by the way...though these days the closing of my letters is always the Targaryen "Fire and Blood". And why not? 

In any case, Sir Francis has had a recent birthday, and he's been agonizing over it for months. It was a zero-year birthday, and Sir Francis is terrified. He doesn't, he says, know how to be a septuagenarian. There's no checklist, no set of rules for him to follow. I can understand that. Life is always better with a checklist. I've stood in front of classes and improvised ninety-minute lectures, but I'm a post-modernist of the old school, and having a list (no matter how random the bullet points seem) is a key part of life. So I can understand Sir Francis' fear about that...and, yes, about age and mortality as well. That's all understandable.

He's afraid of women, mind you, and he's become something of a misogynist over the years, even though he despises incels on aesthetic and political grounds. Years of reading semi-scholarly books on evolutionary psychology and anthropology have given him distinctly misogynist tendencies. I've told him that he's walking disproof of the old saying that no one was ever ruined by a book. He loves classical Freudianism for its Oedipal structures and he wants to do a Freudian analysis, but he reads lots and lots of Jung (and far too much Lacan), and reading Jung is as dangerous for someone like Sir Francis as reading Nietzsche is for undergraduate males.

He and I have long phone conversations where he calls to tell me that his flat is in an area populated by what he always calls "beautiful lesbian vampires" who are waiting to tear out his soul...and this has nothing to do with either writing a screenplay or creating awkward metaphors. It's a literal belief and a literal fear.

He does tell me over and over about how bitter he is over his lack of sexual success when he was in high school...which must be fifty-odd years ago now. Sexual success in high school would've meant that he had some social status. It would've meant that even if he wasn't given status for anything academic, he'd still have had status among his male peers. 

I'm never quite sure how to take that. My own high school years weren't pleasant, and I didn't have a great deal of sexual success-- there was some, but not a lot. Status among other males might've been useful, but I spent four years in high school planning and striving to go to university far, far away from my hometown. Whatever I was looking for would be found a thousand miles away, and I knew that. Where I grew up meant very, very little to me. That suburb still means very, very little to me. I'm not about to agonize over things that happened long ago and far away.

Sir Francis Meerkat also tells me that he's given up on any physical contact with women. He's terrified of being seen naked, and he's terrified of, well, gastric upsets. He's utterly terrified of being with a woman and realizing while undressing that he's had...problems. Does he have something like Crohn's Disease? No-- not to my knowledge. But he says he won't go to dinner with a date in case-- just in case--he has to dash to the bathroom. He obsesses over eating cartons of steamed white rice in an effort to seal such problems away.  

I can understand body fear. I'm not especially comfortable having my body seen by a lover. There are easy and obvious things I can be judged on. But I tell myself that by the time we've reached the point where we're undressing, a young companion knows what I'm like and what I very probably look like under my clothes. No girl in all these years has ever pointed and laughed or made a face in disgust. That does mean something. I tell myself that, and it does provide comfort. Sir Francis, though...Sir Francis tells me that he'd rather stay home in the dark than have a woman see him and judge him. It's all, he says, about assortative mating and sexual hierarchy. I'm becoming very, very tired of the term "assortative mating". 

He hasn't reached the Red Pill level yet. Even if his disdain for incels and Manosphere types is based purely on aesthetics, that has at least kept him from doing Red Pill things. 

Nonetheless, I can sympathize with his fears. They do derive from fear of age and mortality, and we all fear those things.  Of course...sympathy isn't agreement, and I do find his constant agonizing and bitterness exhausting. 

If I did have a podcast, I'd be telling lots of stories about Sir Francis. I'd probably read out passages from Jung or Lacan or some evo-psych monograph (maybe even from "The Red Lamp of Incest", one of his longstanding favorites) and ask him to comment and just let him go. He'd spin out hours of tales and rants. Hours, yes. Many hours.

I do have my own fears, but I tell myself that at least I'm not Sir Francis. Which is rather comforting to know.

Three Three Zero: Complications

We've talked about this before, but I'll just note that I've always distrusted the idea of authenticity or the idea of an essential self. One of the things that makes me distrustful of the whole current idea of being trans is the idea that there is some kind of essential self, a "real" self that can come out of hiding or finally break free of social impositions. I'm old-school postmodern, and I believe in the idea of reinvention, the idea of  transformation, the idea of becoming someone or something new. Needless to say, I'm always a fan of literary impostors and of people who've gone off to new cities and new worlds to reinvent themselves.

Right now I'm watching someone tangle himself up in that-- or watching two people tangle themselves up. I know both of them, though I know her better than I know him. They're not a couple, or not yet, though I think they'd both like to at least have an ongoing, off-and-on affair. They're both in their early thirties, educated, hip, articulate, successful. Members of the meritocratic class. 

As best I can tell, here's what's happening. He is trying desperately to tell her that he's bisexual, or gender-fluid, or whatever. Watching from the outside, I'm not altogether sure that he actually is. He may well be, although she tells me that sometimes she thinks his hints are very much like some haute-bourgeois sorority girl announcing that she's "spicy straight", whatever that is. 

She is very bisexual, and very open about it all. Let's take that part as a given. She's also very lovely and adventurous. She tells me that he's been trying to tell her that he's bi and femme at heart. He won't come out and say it, though. He hints and talks about things in the abstract and dances around actually admitting anything. What he wants, she tells me, is to have her ask the direct questions and ask for stories. He wants her to do the work. Her instinct, she says, is to tease and withdraw, to entice-- or force --him into saying the things he's trying to say, to make him admit to whatever past and preferences he has. 

I know her better than I know him, and I'm not about to just ask him what he's doing. I'm not about to ask him about his past. That's not something that I can do as a cishet male. She tells me that she's not sure he's even bi at all. She wonders if he's creating a bi persona and past  just to entice her into bed.  Which makes her consider the option of seeing how far she could push him into being a femme bottom. She'd quite like that, I think.

 She wants to encourage him to tell her stories, true or not, because they'd feed her fantasies just as much as they feed his. Last week she raised a gin & tonic at the bar and told me she'd like to take him to bed, but that it's much more fun just to see what she can get him to say or do. He might well like to go to bed with her as a femme bottom or dressed up as a girl. She'd be up for either. Or for sleeping with him as a cishet male. She's confused about what he wants. As much as she'd like listening to whatever fantasies he's creating-- or memories he wants to recount --she's unsure what role to play: confidante, domme, garçonne,  girl-boy to his boy-girl. She's unsure whether she's dealing with someone coming out or someone who's developed a really intricate seduction plot or a complex kink? Whether or not autogynephilia exists for political purposes, she has no problem with the idea of it as a kink in men with whom she has Encounters. 

The issue here is how she should handle this. She'd be okay with whatever persona he's creating or revealing. The only question is how to coax him into taking the last step, into actually saying what he wants and who he wants to be when the two of them do finally hook up.

Two Four Nine: Belief

I've been presenting stories here, stories by friends and young companions over the years. The stories are things I've saved in my archives, things I want to keep. The stories are things I can read more than once, things I'll want to read again or cite from. Yet there's always the question of belief, of whether others' stories and memories are real.

My friend in London Town recounted what her friend there had told her, and then, after a couple of years of believing what he'd told her, found out (but how?) that the whole secret gay life her friend had revealed was made up. She still hasn't been able to talk to him, and she doesn't know what his reasons may have been. For me, the second issue is more interesting than his life--- what made him create this fake life, and especially this particular fake autobiography?

Friends and young companions have told me things about their past Adventures, and this afternoon I've been wondering about what to believe, and what levels of belief to assign the stories. Some stories--- Marta on the cruise ship, the girl in the kayak shop, the girl at SXSW ---are ones I've known for a while, and I have some faith in the girls' truthfulness. There's at least verisimilitude there, and I can imagine each of those girls seeking out new experiences and pushing limits. It may be only that if a girl has been involved with me, I take it as a given that they're willing to break certain social norms. But I do believe them.

Now I do have a friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud that I can't believe about things. She's told me about a new affair she's having, about being willing to follow her new man anywhere, and about how eager she is to follow him all over the Pacific on adventures. According to her, they went to Bangkok and Pattaya last October for ten days. And all over the South Island of New Zealand (Queenstown, central Otago) on hiking trips over the new year. She says that she went to Tokyo and Osaka with her brother at Easter, and will go back there with her new man at year's end to climb up Mount Fuji and ski in Hokkaido. She's supposed to have gone to Maui for a week in the spring. Her stories include going to Moorea this summer and then taking a boat to Pitcairn Island for a week. She tells me she's booked for Buenos Aires in late September, and that she's making reservations for Singapore. She says she and her man will go to Shanghai and take the high-speed train to Lhasa, then visit Everest Base Camp. She talks about making reservations to visit the Okavango River delta in Botswana and go on safari to Kilimanjaro. She assures me that she's been sitting up nights booking tickets and hotels.

I don't believe this. I don't believe it at all. Bangkok and the Tokyo visit I might believe, but not the rest. She's a successful professional, but the money does add up. More, the time adds up. Corporate life doesn't allow for random ten-day or two-week vacations, and her stories of 2019 add up to a long time away from the office. Her man is supposed to be moneyed, but is he paying for all of this? Is she a sugar baby now? Did she inherit a million or two she hasn't talked about? Even in a country that offers paid annual vacations, how does she maintain a job if she's not in her office for ten days at a time?  There are no blog posts of any of her purported journeys, and no photos or postcards.  That may be (at least for me) the most suspicious thing. Had I gone to some exotic locale, I'd have sent out postcards to friends and written up a travel memoir when I got back. There's no way I wouldn't have traveler's tales to tell.

Her stories from her teen and early twenties are wonderful. She has lots of Slutty Party Girl tales to tell of growing up in an upper-middle class NZ family. But she's stopped telling those, and while she tells me she's gone to Pitcairn Island and will be going to Buenos Aires and Lhasa, she's sent nothing that passes for evidence.

I was taught to do both History and Law, and looking at her emails as texts, looking with a critical eye, I can't believe her stories at all. What she's constructing it seems is a world as imaginary as the haut-gay life my London friend's acquaintance created. I do wish I knew what she was doing, and why.

Two Three Five: Identities

Now's here's a complicated and odd tale I heard today--- a long email from an old friend in a distant city. She has a long-term friend there, someone male, someone of a certain age, someone whom she's known professionally and quasi-romantically for years. Quasi-romantically meaning that she's slept with him a few times over he years. I've never met him, though I've heard her mention his name before.

She'd written me about him back a couple of years ago to say that she was amazed, that her friend had taken her to a very expensive restaurant, ordered the kind of wine I'll never be able to afford, looked at her with grave intensity, and told her that all the time he'd known her, all the way back to high school, he'd had a Secret Life. She was amazed. She prides herself on her gaydar, and while the circles she moves in socially have a substantial number of gay men, she'd never guessed that her friend was among them. Well, he told her about all the byzantine details of his Secret Life: adventures, encounters, older (and moneyed) lovers when he was quite young, haut-gay clubs and parties. She didn't know the name, but I'd have said it was all very like early Andrew Holleran, very "Dancer From The Dance" (the Seventies novel that was tagged as "The Gay Gatsby"). Great stories, apparently. She was entranced by it all, and spent hours on the phone late at night listening to his memories, commiserating with him about older men he'd loved and lost as a boy, sighing over his memories of a time thirty-odd years ago when being gay still had an air of the forbidden.

There was just one small thing, she told me. She'd found out this week that...well...he'd been lying all along, that he'd never had a life amongst the gay demimonde. She wasn't clear that he'd ever been gay or had a gay (or bi) life at all. As best she could tell, it was all a complete imposture.

The question she had was...why? Why had he done it? Was he hoping she'd introduce him to a chic gay world he'd been too afraid to join on his own? Was it some ploy to get her (or other girls) to sleep with him to, well, reclaim him for the Home Team?

My own understanding is that he's gone to ground: blocked her number, vanished from social media, disappeared from the places she thought she might find him. That's almost as strange as the imposture. My friend and I have both known people who pretended to be rich, or Ivy-educated, or British, or artists. We've certainly known gay men who pretended (even now, in the Year Nineteen) to be straight. But this was new.  I'd known girls who pretended to be lesbians to ward off unwelcome male advances, but that's only tactical and temporary, not like creating a whole life, complete with named lovers. And I'd never run across anyone male pretending to be gay when they weren't, even in the here-and-now.

I've always been a fan of literary impostors (Fr. Rolfe, Kurban Said, Sir Edmund Backhouse), but I don't understand quite what his pay-off would've been. Party invitations? He already had those professionally. Entree to chic events? He had those, too. A baroque way to leverage presumed gayness to get girls? That would just be awfully complicated. Some weird fetish about imaginary gay sex? That would be even more complicated, although he did spend lots of time telling her all about the details of encounters and adventures back into his early teens. Maybe it was just boredom and frustration with a  haut-bourgeois life edging its way into his fifties.

Maybe--- maybe ---it was a life he'd longed for, or one that he'd created and come to believe. That happens, I suppose, with lots of complex impostures.  There's a question--- how far did he take the imposture? Did he ever take a male lover? Was there ever someone on his arm--- and if so, did his companion know or suspect what was happening?

My friend told me that she thought I could tell her something, that all those biographies and thriller novels I read about people who've taken up masks and new lives would give me some clue as to why her friend had done this. She's hurt as much as anything else, hurt and puzzled and halfway afraid that her friend is having some sort of dissociative breakdown.

My own questions here are probably self-evident. How did he craft the stories? Where was he getting the names and places? And, too...how did my friend find out? How and when did she see through the imposture? I'd really like to know that. Did he tell her? Did she find out on his own? Did friends of them both reveal something to her? What gave the game away?

I am perplexed  by it all, and saddened for my friend. If you're out there anywhere over the aether, read this and tell me what you think. Why this imposture? What does it mean? What would the backstory be? I'm hoping someone out there has thoughts on this.

Two Three Three: Characters

A lovely friend in the Upper Midwest wrote this a few days ago:

rambling thoughts, now that I’m off vyvanse. Feel more clever, creative, but also difficult to channel this energy.

heading to Denver at the end of the month for a work conference. it’s fine.

falling hard for a boy who’s probably terrible for me- but the way he nuzzles my neck in bed, whispering how beautiful I am! the way he slings his arm around my shoulders and gazed at me with soft eyes. he’s gorgeous, can keep up with my brain, but we enable each other. “Do you want to go to the bathroom?” “I’ve already cheated at this point, so let’s just take our clothes off”. I’m riled up just thinking about his nearness.

I want to consume him, wrestle my fingers into his hair, feel his thighs intertwined with mine. it’s a lost cause, this craving. Nothing good will come of it. 

we stay up till dawn, listening to Russian synth pop, trading key bumps and tequila shots. his lips next to my ear, urging us to be better, to not keep going. But I always want to engage and go further.

this yearning is doomed: everyone tells me to be careful, to not get too close. I am willful and powerful and never say no. just try me, tempt me with a good time. I never say no to a dare.

I want a love the eats at me, a love unfurling in my lap. something dangerous to others but satisfies my wicked energy. 

I’m sitting in my office (door ajar, legs apart), thinking about him and only him. right now we could be dancing in darkened rooms, hipbones interlocked and mouths pressed firmly. I am obsessive, I’m possessive I know. but don’t I look good with my ripped fishnets and fading lipstick? Does he not want me like I need him? 

I despise the tuttering of others, their hushed judgments. Let me run wild with this boy, it’s all I’m capable of right now.

I read that and sighed. It's been a long time since a girl has written something like that about me.  I'm trying to decide whether what I feel is jealousy or envy. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to draw a distinction between those two things.

I know that I do feel empty and useless when I read her message. Girls have written things about me in the past. At least one made me a character in a short story she wrote where her surrogate has a teen affair with an older lover one Baltimore spring. I haven't been to Baltimore in a thousand years, but I was flattered, and I loved the description of the two characters sitting outside at a table by the harbor, the girl trying so hard to look sophisticated and open to seduction at sixteen or seventeen, the older man trying to introduce her to Thai food. I felt thrilled that she'd put me inside a story ,that she'd created, a story that was so obviously about things she wished she'd done.  I remember that when she read me a draft of the story we argued about whether "seducible" was a word. If it wasn't, she said, it should be. She remembered walking through Baltimore when she was sixteen or seventeen aching to be thought someone who could be, should be seduced.

One other girl wrote about me--- again, so long ago now. She quoted something I'd said to her one night, something about how her body was something I wanted to explore, about how her body was like a map to an unknown country. She quoted that at her blog and then asked, Why has no man ever said that about me before? I read that in my office the next day and I sat there at my desk, thinking that here was a beautiful girl who thought I was worth writing about, who thought what I could say had value.

Those things don't happen any more, and haven't for a long time.  Growing up, I'd always thought I'd be a character in at least a few stories or novels. That was vanity, true, but it was also something else. I think that in my younger days I took it for granted that if you knew literary people you'd end up as a character in their stories, that you'd be in at least a couple of short stories by age thirty or thirty-five.

I'd like to think that I was valuable enough--- or at least interesting enough ---for a lovely girl to write about.  It's been a long time since I could look into the mirror and imagine being someone a girl could think of as worth writing about.  It's been too long since I was able to imagine having any sort of effect on a lovely girl at all.

I'd like to inspire doomed yearnings, to inspire hunger.  Those days are likely enough gone, though. I'm not someone who'll be a character in any lovely girl's stories or fantasies. Here we are though, the hopeless and barely-reliable narrator of my own story,

Two Two Eight: Kiss

Rainy nights in late winter are a time for watching ghosts in the mirror. On rainy nights here I can look out to the river and feel melancholy wash over me.

I was thinking about kisses today. A kiss is a simple thing, and sharing kisses is how most of us first began to learn to be a lover.  A kiss is a first step in the dance, a first touch of flesh and breath. It's easy to think about kisses tonight, to think about places where I've kissed lovers for the first time. A parked car, the terrace of a bar, the rooftop of a residence hall at university. Walking hand-in-hand through a street of small, hip shops. In the doorway of a Long Island Railroad car.  At an arrivals gate at an aerodrome. Each kiss is a gateway to stories, to pieces of my life, to the faces of lost loves in the mirror.

I remember a girl turning to me in that train car doorway and kissing me hard and saying, I love you...or something.

I remember a rooftop bar on a late-September night, with Talking Heads' "The Lady Don't Mind" playing on the sound system--- looking out at the city lights and then half-turning to kiss the girl who was pressed against me.

I can remember those things tonight. But tonight I am feeling my age, and I'm feeling aware of how time runs out. I'd love to hear that Talking Heads song again. The rains are coming in from the north and west and it does occur to me how long it's been since I kissed anyone. What's going through my mind is that I've forgotten how to kiss.

Once upon  a time, a Young Companion kissed me for a while in a doorway and told me that she'd never been kissed like that, and that she understood why girls liked older men, why girls she knew liked kissing me. That was a long time ago now, and I lived off that one compliment for years and years.

I may just talk about kisses for a bit. There are ways to talk about kisses without feeling ghosts in the air, and I have to find those ways.

Let's just admit that I've always liked kisses hard and deep. I've liked sharing breath and wetness in  a kiss. I've loved the games of passing an ice cube back and forth in a kiss 'til it melts. I've liked sharing a mouthful of champagne in a kiss.

Long, long ago, far back in another century, I first read about sharing wetness in a kiss. I didn't hear the old term "swapping spit" until I went off to university. But I do recall reading about characters in novels sharing saliva in a kiss. I know that a couple of years ago there was a whole thing in porn videos of characters spitting in one another's faces or into each other's open mouths. That's a more deliberate thing, and it traffics in the idea of humiliation more than domination. But what I was thinking of tonight was a particular book, a novelization of an Italo-French erotic film from the early 1970s, something not-quite-hardcore called "Female Animal". I can't recall where I found the novel, though it was almost certainly in some used-paperback store, the kind of place that had its shelves and tables stuffed with yellowing mass-market paperbacks for twenty-five cents each. I don't recall if ever I saw the film version of "Female Animal", though I may have. I remember the "novelization", though. The cover was white--- I remember that ---with the image of a topless girl, her breasts hidden by long, straight hair. She was holding a large cat to herself and trying to look sultry.  The cover was taken from the poster from the film. I have no clue at all who the actress was. I suppose she'd be in her sixties now--- a memento mori thing to realize.

The plot of the film (and its novelization) was simple enough. It was set on the Italian Riviera, and the heroine was a village girl of seventeen or eighteen who was desperate to leave poverty and boredom behind and go off to the bright lights and high life. I suspect that it was called "Female Animal" because there was a fairly brief passage where she's alone in bed and unable to bring herself to orgasm and coaxes her cat into licking her. I have no idea how that was handled in the film.  What I do recall is that the author always describes her sharing saliva when she kisses anyone.

I read that, read about the character's kisses, and resolved to try that with someone very soon. The first girl I did do that with squirmed and made a face when I passed saliva into her mouth, then passed her own back to me very deliberately and intensely. I remember how it felt, and how amazing it was when I was young.

These days, though, I find myself freezing up with worry that I've forgotten how to kiss, that I've lost whatever sense of timing, pressure, rhythm, use of lips and tongue I may ever have known. It's Carnevale season here in my city, and it's a time for masks and kissing strangers on parade-filled streets, and I can't imagine kissing anyone this season. I really do think I'd be afraid to kiss anyone, afraid to try, afraid of not being able to kiss to any effect, afraid of no longer what to do.

I suppose it's the rain that makes me think of these things.

Two Zero Two: Events

Now, then... my ex-Bloomsbury friend wrote me from London Town today to say that:

When I was an undergrad, I had an enormous crush on one of my classics professors. An ancient historian, he was about thirty and good-looking, as well as funny, brilliant, and charismatic. I often thought about trying to seduce him, but I was inexperienced (an 18-year-old virgin when I met him) and I wouldn't have known how to begin.

Finally slept with him--nearly two decades later. He arranged to give a talk in the UK to see me. Apparently, he had a crush on me back then as well, and he's been sexually obsessed with me ever since. He had lots of photos of me on his phone, including ones that I hadn't realized he took when I spoke at BU several years ago. How funny. Anyway, I can highly recommend decades of sexual tension as an aphrodisiac.

Spent last night in a suite at the Ritz with a different lover.  We went down to the private club and casino in the basement just to check it out, but it is horribly tacky so we left and went to Brooks's around the corner for champagne in chilled silver tankards. I have a serious thing for champagne in chilled silver tankards. We actually forgot to pay on the way out (though it's a club and they have his info so it's not really that big a deal because they can bill him later) but he popped into today to pay only to find out that some old codger had paid for our champagne on the basis that he thought we were so sweet and young and in love and it reminded him of his courtship back in the day. His eyesight must be truly terrible. If only he had known that he was watching a middle-aged married man with his mistress who is 17 years his junior. Anyway, we had a lovely four-course meal in the Ritz dining room, with a truffle course, and I picked a fantastic Amarone. Jacob Rees-Mogg was dining at the table next to us and he and his companion had crepes suzette for desert. Fun to watch.

This lover has been approached for a rather high office, which he doesn't think he wants, though he did say he would take it if I would be willing to marry him and be Lady X. I don't think I am, though.

And I didn't mention that I spent the night before that with a different lover/friend: the 76-year-old retired senior judge I've known for eight years. I tell him about all the other lovers. He actually managed to come twice in under an hour (without any pharmaceutical aid). Mind you, the Ritz man managed NINE times between 4PM and 10AM...he says it's never been like that with anyone else. I'm deeply relieved that I have two nights off before my next date on Friday, which is with a well-known architectural critic.

The retired judge approves of this one because he's not married, not especially gay, and age-appropriate and would fit in with my social circle (in fact we have quite a few friends in common). 

I'm reasonably sure she's telling the absolute truth here.

I've known her since...well...since she probably was eighteen or nineteen. I don't doubt that some older faculty person could be sexually obsessed with her for eighteen years. That seems to be something she could induce. Mind you, I'm not jealous here. No jealousy. But there's no small amount of envy regarding the social circles she moves in. I mean...I'd like to go to Brooks's (they'd never let me through the door), and I'm seriously, painfully envious of the whole chilled-silver-tankard-of-champagne thing. Though I might've used a silver tankard to bash Jacob Rees-Mogg in the head just on antifa principle. Or aesthetic principle. Jacob Rees-Mogg really is ruining all my Oxbridge fantasies. Aloysius the Bear would certainly not approve of him.

One Six Eight: Graph Lines

When I began writing here, I positioned myself as a Gentleman of a Certain Age, an aging roué, someone of certain old-guard attitudes. I'm still all those things. I do look in the mirror in the mornings and list the things that go into how I define myself, and those things are always there. What else? Well, having grown up one of the older cities in America, one with its own very carefully-curated personality.  Having left here to go to university at a place in New England that trades on its own carefully-curated image. Being a native of a region that habitually inspires a complicated and often painful relationship to its culture and past. Being someone who has lived his life inside books. Having spent so many years in academia, I define myself by that. And by being someone who tells stories. Being a raconteur is a key part of being a roué.

I told you at the beginning, I live in genteel poverty in a flat on the edge of a lake, in a bohemian neighborhood in a city on a river. I define myself in part by memories of cities where I've lived, by memories of downtown streets and shopfront reflections.

What I've been wondering tonight is about how my life can be graphed. I'm not sure what axes I need to be plotting, though. Wealth and career success? I won't fare too well on those. Cultural capital? Well, a bit better.

I'd like to graph factors of attractiveness, of course. The result might well be very disheartening, but on any seriously complex graph I might be able to find enough axes to move along to shift myself into desirable regions. The question remains--- what to graph? What are the factors to be graphing for attractiveness as a male? And how are they to be balanced against one another? How do you compare, say, age versus cultural capital versus social status?

Here in the new year, sitting alone in my flat, with Carnivale season beginning, I do wonder what the factors should be for the graph. If you're reading this, I'm open to thoughts. What are the factors for male attractiveness here in the new year? What are their exchange rates and relative buying power? What should be part of my graph, and how should I read it?

Sixteen: The Reverse Of The Medal

A phone call inbound tonight from a young friend at Savannah. She called to ask me for literary advice, though there was something of the interview in it as well. Imagine, she said, that you were out on a date with someone my age. What drink would you order for them? That's not hard to answer. Jameson's on ice on a first date. But if the girl was someone I found truly compelling, then a good single-malt Scotch. There was bright laughter on the other end of the phone. Thought you'd say that, she said. That's always a thing older lovers do, isn't it: teach girls like me about Scotch. I had to laugh at that, though it is true. It is something I do. Something gentlemen of a certain age do.

I need to know that, she said. I'm writing about someone like you. I need to know what goes into being an older lover. I could imagine her sitting cross-legged on her bed with her new MacBook Air and her iPhone, glasses pushed up onto her forehead. It's complicated, isn't it, being an older lover?

She's probably right about that. That's something that does bear thinking about. There across a table, I'm the one who's the target of the gaze. I'm the one who's performing, the one with the established role. The young companion is the one reading me, determining what I am. I know what I'm looking for when I see a lovely girl. But there's always the mystery of what my young companion sees there on a first night.

That's a question I'll have to pose to young companions. It has to be separated from vanity; I think that's a clear thing to be wary of. But the gaze runs both ways. I want to read my lovely interlocutor's story when she's done with it. And I'd like very much to know how she reads the character of the older lover she's put into her story. I will be thinking about that, and probably writing about it here: what do I look like, what are my codes and semiotics from the other side of the table...?