Rod Hagen

When it's a friend or family and you can afford it, gift, don't loan. Loans create problems and seething resentments between the best of us. If they are proud and push back against the gift, promising to pay you back in time, try to come up with some bullshit compensation that isn't money, but is of value to both of you.

Very sorry to hear that 's happening for you. Great for the rest of us that that's a rare reaction, but again sorry it's complicated for you.

More people are claiming to be more fluid. That's not necessarily the same thing. Additionally, I push back against the change being a sign of progression, just as I would push against someone one else who'd claim it's a regression. If the shift is happening, It's simply change, neither good nor bad.

It's a great book. But I've heard from enough people whom I trust that the movie is just cruel and, most importantly, not good. Not going to watch it.

I HATE this stuff. BORING. But, whoever recommended The Elements of Investing. Thank you, it's a great book.

It's funny/awful now because we are scrutinizing each other's bodies as if we're back to the KS days! I'm not saying we shouldn't, I'm just saying it sucks. (Let's wait till this rash goes away. It's not a rash, I don't know what the fuck it is, but it's been there for 63 years. Ok, let's just wait anyway.!!)

I've talked about it before, but I am a big fan of children's liquid benadryl. Because it's liquid, it works quickly, and I don't notice much of a hangover in the morning (some do, but you can lower the dose). I also like being able to control the dose easily, since it's liquid. If I feel like I need a lot of help, or my sleep needs to be very condensed, I'll take a lot. If I'm having reflux and I want to be able to fall back asleep quickly if reflux wakes me up at night, I'll take a small amount before bed. There is a possible link b/w anticholinergics and dementia, but I've read the studies, talked to my Doctor, and we aren't particularly concerned. I'm also a big fan of Ambien, when needed. Also, I highly recommend daily Melatonin if you have difficulty sleeping. Melatonin is not, what I would consider, a hypnotic, it will not put you to sleep the way antihistamines and prescription medicine will, but it may aid your falling asleep and falling back to sleep if you wake up. Of course, Melatonin supplements are not regulated, so there are no guarantees, efficacy or safety wise. Some people report super fucked up dreams from these supplements, and Melatonin Supps can also cause headaches, but the good news is there are many brands, so you should be able to find one brand and one dose that works for you. I like RemFresh; they claim it's time released. Most important to good sleep is improving your sleep hygiene. Keep your apartment cool, do not eat after 8, keep a urinal next to the bed so you don't have to get out of bed to pee which makes falling back asleep more difficult and is, as you get older, quite dangerous, ear plugs, eyemask and/or black out curtains, read from a paper book for a bit before you go to sleep. If you suffer from reflux, raise the head of your bed by 6" (there are reflux pillows, but they are controversial, raising your bed is universally accepted as best option). If you have an anxious mind, you can keep pen and paper next to your bed so that if you think of something, you can write it down and then put it out of your mind, because you know you will deal with it when you wake. If you feel lonely you can buy body pillows to hold all night (sadly, there are no pillows that will hold you). If you are anxious, consider a heavy anxiety blanket. And MOST importantly keep that fucking phone out of your bedroom. Sleep well.

So all weekend I've been hearing and reading that Bros is "Unrealistic", and one or two ppl in this thread echoed that. What I don't understand is what's "Unrealistic" about the movie?

Saw it last night at The Grove. Was packed, mostly gay or gay-aligned crowd. It's very good. It's much less a "Romantic Comedy", those movies are a pretty low bar, and more a Judd Aptow comedy (he's a producer) that happens to be gay. Although popular on the coasts, it was not so in Middle America and it performed poorly this weekend, which is too bad. I recommend going out to see it, you'll have a good night.

Did anyone see this when it was making the festival rounds? I've reached out via their contact page and also on twitter to find out if it's available anywhere, and they never got back to me. There are clips on youtube, looks interesting. Movie

This book was amazing. Just finished it. I've never been a bar person, but one of the many things I think he did a fantastic job of was clarifying for me my disconnect with millenials and especially Zillenials: “The kids today, it turns out, want rules. They need a provisional constitution for what their new spaces will be,” he writes. “We did not go out to be safe. I didn’t, anyway,” he says. “I went out to take risks.” There was another great quote, summarized here: Jeremy and his friends and the generation before them looked to older gays for guidance. However, today's gay youth are not apprentices, they are disrupters. I love that. Highly recommend the book.

That's a sexy hole he's got!

The "interesting and fresh" approach to resistance training is fitness industry bullshit. If you keep your sets consistent, short, and simply build the resistance regularly and in small (1/4 pound or 1/2 pound) increments, you will have best results. (you can use an old school paper and pencil to record, and build on, your progress.) When individuals crave variety, I encourage them to stick with short, consistent 2x/weekly resistance routine, but mix in actual sports. Climbing, Yoga, Mountain Biking, Snowboarding, Swimming, Biking. Even those awful ball sports will do, in a pinch. Unless you are training for competition, tracking any of that shit, except the resistance training, isn't particularly helpful.

Is that thing real? I wouldn't be able to shit for a month were I forced/to use that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lucas_(director) Sorry, spelled it wrong.

Any man who runs his own business can charge as little or as much as he likes. My knee-jerk reaction to anyone charging several times the market rate is that he doesn't enjoy his work, charging a lot of $ is a tactic in the strategy of avoiding the work. I suppose that's because, nearly 24 years later I still enjoy what I do. But, so? When he was already a multimillionaire from his porn company, I know that when Lukas would occasionally dip his toe back into the escort pool he always loved swimming in, he would employ two tactics, charge $500/hour, twice the market rate at the time (10 years ago), to keep away the masses, but keep the rate reasonable (he was a star after all and could charge more, hot as ever into his 40s and 50s, and certainly did not need the money) so he could actually do the work. I have no idea who Maddox is, and my instinct is probably wrong since his reviews, if you use a proxy server to read them, are excellent. I guess, maybe, wealthier clients are more fun? More reliable? Whatever, it's all up to him.

Friend and I met up with him in 2006 and had a good time. Hope he's well.

Happy Happy Happy Birthday you wonderful man!

Clever :-)

He didn't plan to publish it as a book. Last year he told the story on his Patreon (he's a very good narrator), and reddit was blowing up weekly with people wondering wether or not it was really real or just sorta real. If you look on reddit you can see pictures of the girl BEE dated then, daughter of a famous closeted director who did die of AIDS. You can also see real yearbook pictures of some of the other characters, names changed of course, from the "story". So part of the fun was tuning in weekly and asking ourselves, is this real? Was this real? Why can't I find anything online about "The Trawler"? :-) The goal was to bring more subscribers to BEE's Patreon, and The Shards accomplished exactly that. But, when the story finished, his publisher pushed hard on BEE to publish it as a book. So, he edited it down; I know, at 600 pages it's hard to believe it's been edited at all, but as serial I remember him saying it was longer. Glad you liked it. This, being BEE, and California, there's talk of adapting it for film. It'd make a very good, nostalgic, violent, sex-filled movie. And yes, I love how he was so honest about masturbating regularly. :-) If you like, if anyone here likes, Bret Easton Ellis, I highly recommend subscribing to his Patreon, he's an enjoyably discursive interviewer. https://www.patreon.com/breteastonellispodcast/posts

I could only see American Gigolo at the houses of friends who had HBO. Richard Gere in that movie absolutely transfixed me as a pre-teen.

I listened to The Shards last year when he first told the story on his Patreon. Amazing. Light on style, compared to his other work, and heavy on structure, especially compared to his other work. VERY good story, enjoy!

I use TextFree/Pinger (I know tech savvy people don't like escorts/clients using free numbers because they're too anonymous, but I'm not changing it). In case TextFree/Pinger ever folds, suddenly, I want to be able to archive all my conversations and the numbers. TextFree/Pinger recommends I copy my thousands of text chains one by one and paste them into Word. No thanks. Any ideas on how I could semi-easily send all the text chains to separate text files or even, less desirably, one giant text file? I can't screen shot how text free displays on a dsktop browser cause you'd see everyone's numbers, but you can imagine how it looks. One page where the most recent numbers are on the left and when you select a number, you can read the text chain going all the way back to the beginning. If you scroll down on the left, you all the older text numbers become available. I'd love to be able to do this, because if textfree ever stops support, I'll lose everything. THANKS! -RH

Oh my god I miss the days when we could do that. Also, nobody makes fun of old escorts like me anymore. Why is everyone so fucking nice these days? What the fuck? Seriously.

My dick won't get hard because "I came earlier today" is a difficulty to which every man can relate, which is why a top with a reputation for hardness and enthusiasm deploys that cliche when said dick droops. The truth****, a poor night's sleep, yesterday's leg day was bit too intense, seems bizarre to a client, and without the lie, the client will take the droopy dick personally, which isn't something either man wants him to feel. So, yes, a top who's hard 99% of the time, may not be hard with you. Erections fail the best of us. It's absolutely disappointing, TO BOTH men, I promise. Well, explanations are cold comfort to you if you shelled out money, I get it. But, to protect yourself mentally and emotionally, just remember there are a million reasons it could have happened, and there's no reason for you to go down the insecure slope thinking it's because you're unattractive to him. Now, a person with a reputation for kissing who won't kiss you is something different. Something's off. Dicks can fail us, lips don't fail us. Ask him about that immediately, don't fucking just let it slide. ****it could also be that they are seeing too many clients that day/night which is not cool.