Charlie

Well, actually some of us knew about AIDS dementia years ago. But dementia has also increased because people are living longer, and therefore not dying of the causes that used to kill them before they could develop diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's dementia.

There are middle-aged gay men now who grew up in a world in which AIDS was a given, so aside from activists, it really is only those of us who were actively gay adults in the 1980s, and lived through the period when it was something new and frightening, who think about it very often. Like other diseases that people take for granted, it is mostly those who are personally affected who are still paying much attention to the subject. In the 1980s and 90s I was constantly reminded because people I knew were dying regularly all around me, but it has been a long time since anyone I know has died of AIDS rather than of something else that may only be aggravated by longtime HIV status. Young gay men seem to think of HIV as as simply a nuisance, the same way my generation felt about other STDs.

"Whose hands these are I do not know..."

I have had bone-grafting and implants, and the individual appointments usually didn't last any longer than a serious cleaning. Since the main danger from the virus is inhaling it into the lungs rather than injecting it into the blood stream, I'm not sure that there is greater risk during extraction, bone-grafting and implanting than there is during a cleaning. The main concern is how comfortable you feel about the people who are working on you during the process.

He was a better singer than escort.

Because like many of us, he had a CD player, and he ended up listening to only the CDs.

An old friend of mine met his first partner at the funeral of a professional colleague, at which both had been chosen as pallbearers. He said that the moment their eyes met over the coffin, he knew what would happen after they left the cemetery.

A cautionary note about saving old technology which you are still attached to. When a friend of mine retired and decided to move from the big old Victorian house that he and his late partner had lived in for 20 years in Philadelphia, to a cottage on the coast of Oregon, he decided not to move anything but personal items. One of those items turned out to be his collection of LP records. We rented a small U-Haul truck, and packed it with things like clothing and china, but the heaviest items were those damn boxes full of records. We drove the truck across the country, and unloaded everything into the cottage; the records were placed on shelves he purchased for that purpose. But he had neglected to bring a record player. When he died in that cottage almost 30 years later, the records were still on those same shelves, untouched, just taking up space and gathering dust.

That's the way I usually do it.

We have owned five houses, and never lived longer than 13 years in a house. The first three were actually within walking distance of one another, so the moving process was pretty easy, and could be done in stages. But when it came time to move from the east coast to the west coast, we realized that we had to simplify what got moved. We found a dealer who would buy furniture and other items that we really didn't want to spend the money to move 2500 miles, and we gave some things to the local Salvation Army resale store. The biggest problem was the books--we both have a hard time giving up a book, so we had a collection that went back to college days, some 4000 volumes in all. There were bookshelves on every floor of our three-story townhouse, not to mention on the shelves in the basement. We realized that we had to be ruthless: no one wants out-of-date textbooks or things that are falling apart, so they went literally into the trash (except for the ones we kept for sentimental reasons, like books written by people we knew). Public and school libraries were happy to get some of the good ones, and there was a book exchange we belonged to, that took books that other members might like, and we took none in return. We thought that no one would want old cookbooks, but were surprised to discover that re-sellers always have a market for them. We finally managed to get the collection down to 1200 items, which we boxed and put on the moving van. In the new house we were much more conservative: for one thing, we learned to borrow books from the public library instead of always buying and keeping them. Even so, by the time we were ready to move again, the collection had crept back up to almost 1800 volumes, so once again we pruned, but still ended up moving about the same number we had moved before. Of course, I still find myself looking for a book, only to realize that it was one of the books that I thought was expendable a few years ago, and now wish I still had.

Is that a tattoo of the First Lady on his arm?

Shouldn't there be a winking face emoji in the title of this thread?

I did hire an escort years ago, and realized that I had seen him in a live opera performance at the Met.

It depends on whether you consider the classic Boys in the Sand a movie.

Socially distanced game at the nudist camp.

I was 35. The full story is post #36 in the thread mentioned.

I have used an insurance broker for years for all my insurance policies.

Did you get a visit from authorities to confirm that you were a reliable source of financial support for him?

And thanks for reminding me what a terrific musical Hair! is.

No kissing!

I sent for a Charles Atlas booklet on bodybuilding when I was an adolescent, because I wanted to hang around guys who looked like him when I grew older. My parents were bemused by my sudden interest in the subject.

?

I was lucky enough to retire from an employer who agreed to keep retirees in the institution's group insurance plan with a supplemental payment that is so reasonable (currently $89/mo) that I have never paid any attention to the other options. It covers dental, prescription drugs and eye care, and gym membership. My spouse, on the other hand, has a supplemental PPO policy with Anthem that doesn't cover dental, but costs almost as much per month as our mortgage. Luckily, we have both had reasonably good health over the many years we have been in Medicare, so we haven't really had to test any differences between our coverage, but we have been equally satisfied with both so far. If I were to lose my ability to participate in the group policy, however, I would certainly look first at the new Advantage plans.

Many years ago in Amsterdam, I went home from a bar with a guy from Leiden, a chemist who made his own amyl nitrate. He would soak pieces of cloth in it, and we put them over our faces. I expected to have a real headache later, but was surprised that I had no unpleasant aftereffect.

Any photo I take with my phone shows up shortly afterwards on my iPad as well. However, if I delete it on my phone, it also immediately disappears from my iPad, too.