Charlie

Don't forget that Guy has a birthday coming up.

I forgot: what was the topic of this thread?

I don't pay a lot of attention to grocery prices, since my collection of products, at several different supermarkets, differs so much from one shopping to the next . However, I have noticed an increase in prices for the same items at Total Wine, where I purchase all my alcohol every two weeks. I assume that has more to do with the terrible fires over the last two years in California wine country than with the pandemic.

Margo Channing in All About Eve. I loved Bette in that role.

It's a good thing he says he has tattoos--I would never have noticed.

I thought I hit the bottom of the slope at about 50, and since then it's been mostly cross-country skiing.

Wordsworth: "....nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass."

Happy Birthday!?

I don't have a collection any longer. I just log on here.

It depends on what certain milestones mean to individuals. To me, 30 was an anxiety-inducing milestone birthday, because I thought of it as the end of my youth and the beginning of middle age, the last chance to have some adventurous life. My 40th birthday was also a problem, because my friends and acquaintances were starting to die of an apparently sexually transmitted mysterious disease, so that part of my life seemed to be over. The 60th, on the other hand, was a wonderful release: I felt I no longer had anything to prove, and could relax and enjoy doing whatever I wanted. At 75, I finally felt justified to stop doing any kind of work that I didn't want to do. Other people, in different circumstances and with different expectations, experience milestones differently.

Philadelphia was originally a city within Philadelphia county, but they eventually became co-terminous. Virginia is an unusual state in that it has independent cities that are not a part of any county. When my parents moved to Virginia Beach, it was a city within Princess Anne County, but eventually the independent city took over the entire county, which ceased to exist as a separate entity.

Jan. 1, 2100, is still the 21st century. The 22nd century doesn't start until Jan. 1, 2101.

Michael Delfino, the craziest escort I ever met--and I mean that literally: according to a mutual acquaintance, he ended up in an institution for the the criminally insane.

I would have expected Guy Fawkes to post this quote. (I still remember kids in London asking, "A penny for the Guy!")

"Been in" is ambiguous. When I was a child, I went with my father to Sing Sing to pick up a neighbor who was being released.

Although I may have made it sound like we worked everything out right at the beginning of our relationship, it was not really true. The first ten years were the most difficult, as both of us learned to adjust to our expectations of one another and of ourselves. I learned, for instance that he experienced more jealousy than either of us expected from him, and I wanted more freedom than I thought I would. We actually separated for one year and lived in different countries, although we continued to own a home together, and each of us had a serious relationship with another person while we were separated. Yet at the end of that year, we both re-committed to our primary relationship, and after that avoided romantic entanglements with other men. There were two other occasions that we lived apart for an extended period during the following two decades, yet each of those times we agreed ahead of time that it would be a temporary separation, and we both felt confident that was true. Every decade has been somewhat different, because people change as they develop, and no relationship is totally stable forever. Sex itself became a less important issue for both of us over the years, as I think it does with most people--gay or straight--and certainly wasn't the foundation of our informal or eventual legal marriage. After the first 45 years, we knew it was "till death do us part," so we made it official. That doesn't necessarily mean a happy ending: as he slips away into Alzheimer's dementia, I realize that at some point he may no longer understand what our relationship is, but it will still be there.

Monogamous gay relationships can work if that is what both partners want, just as with male/female relationships. However, most men are sexually attracted to multiple other men, and the factors that encourage monogamy in straight relationships are weak or non-existent in most gay relationships. Until recently, gay men didn't have the legal ties of marriage to complicate their relationships. They also didn't have the social pressures, from either the general public or the gay community, to be sexually "faithful" to their partners that a male/female couple have. Until fairly recently, they also didn't have children to complicate their formal or informal relationships (and didn't have to be concerned about getting casual sex partners pregnant). The social normalization of gay couplehood is probably pushing more gay men to act like straight couples, or feel they should act like straight couples, but sexual promiscuity will probably always be more common in gay relationships than straight ones. My spouse and I met back in the dark ages when it was illegal to engage in homosexual relations with anyone, and the relationship between two men was usually knowledge shared only with close friends. We were monogamous for about two weeks, after which we both admitted that we wanted to be free to indulge our lusts for other men, because monogamy felt unnatural for us. We also agreed that if one of us became emotionally attached to someone else, the other would step back and let that relationship develop however it did. Each of us had a few passionate affairs with other men over the years, but always concluded that our relationship with one another was more important to us than any other, and we ended the affair without regrets. And we had lots of just casual sex with others. It worked for us--it might not have worked the same way for another couple. I have known couples who evolved into "thruples," but they have always been awkward situations that usually ended with one person leaving or being pushed out, or at least being unhappy with the situation.

Full disclosure: I was young and skinny, and I wasn't able to do more than get in in my mouth briefly.

He is properly masked for a rally.

Back when Premier in Philly was still in business, I was feeling bored, and some porn I saw stimulated a desire to try something new. I called Premier and told them I wanted to hire someone for a role play in which he would be completely naked when I arrived in a suit and tie, and I would fuck him. The appointment went as planned, but they failed to tell the escort the scenario, other than that he would be naked on the bed when I arrived. I arrived wearing a business suit, white shirt and tie, and took off my shoes. He started to undress me, but I stopped him, pushed him down on his knees to unzip me, fucked his mouth, then flipped him over and fucked him. He never even got hard, and afterwards I complimented him on how well he played his role. Then he told me that he didn't know what was supposed to happen, and he was actually frightened that I was some kind of weirdo; the only reason he didn't resist was because he knew that he was probably safe there in the Premier house. It was the only time I ever did that scene. BTW, shouldn't this whole thread be in the Fetish Forum?

What do you think: is he contacting an escort, a client or a friend? This is a wonderful stimulus for a fantasy.

"Did I hear a train whistle?"

When I was young, I wanted to be a demographer, then a psychologist, then a weatherman, then an opera reviewer, but I ended up as a professor of English and history. If I could start over again--at about age 10--I would like to have been a pro tennis player, which would have combined my love of the game with my love of travel.

In the 19th century, "passionate" friendships between men, who often wrote of their "love" for one another, were generally considered marks of a high-toned "pure" character. Our smutty 20th century minds interpret it differently.

Young men in all-male communities, like the military, frequently form a strong bond with one comrade which is not necessarily homosexual. Even gay men usually form similar non-sexual friendships with one another. When photography became common, such male comrades frequently had joint portraits taken together, to send back home (a) to reassure their families that they weren't lonely, and (b) to reassure their girlfriends that they weren't spending their free time with another girl. I'm sure that very few of them would have taken such photos if they thought it would be interpreted as evidence of a romantic relationship.