Charlie

Palm Springs is hotter than anywhere today: the temperature in my backyard is 118.

But what would she do with all those books and papers?

I called Philly home for much of the time between 1964 and 2004 , and I still remember it fondly, but I moved to Palm Springs when I retired. Although I occasionally have a sentimental urge to return, it is not the same place, and I am not the same person who lived there then. Ditto for New York, where I also spent much of my younger days. As I sink into my dotage, the thought of dealing with city life no longer appeals to me.

This is a topic that hits close to home, because I am looking at my bookshelves, which are overloaded to the breaking point. I find it hard to get rid of a book, even one I read once and will never read again. I still have textbooks from my college years, catalogs from schools I taught at, yearbooks from schools I attended, old appointment books, directories, magazines, etc., etc. I have large expensive picture books that I haven't looked at in years--I always tell myself that I will some day, but I never do. An enormous supply of maps, even though I no longer need them to travel anywhere. A full set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (25 hard-bound volumes) that is a half century old, which I hardly have occasion to consult. I have a shelf full of cookbooks, although I subsist on frozen microwavable food. What to do with it all?

What a beautiful mouth!

The guy in those photos doesn't look as old as 39. If he is "Caribbean" and speaks Portuguese, he is probably originally from Brazil. Mechanicsburg is a strange place from which to conduct an escort career, but his phone number does have a central PA area code.

Herpes was the #1 fear in gay sex when I was young; I got it when I was in my early 20s. Over the years the symptoms would recur periodically, but it has been years since the last appearance--I used to keep a supply of Acyclovir in the refrigerator at all times. Most people seemed to stop thinking about herpes after HIV came along, because herpes was unpleasant but not deadly.

Since I have been a member of the site for almost a quarter century, when the late Hooboy was the owner, and have attended almost every Palm Springs Weekend, I have a pretty good idea of who the regular posters are, but I couldn't say who reads it but doesn't participate. I suspect that there are a lot of providers among the latter, as well as occasional buyers. If we are only talking about those who are active on the site for any length of time, I would say that @Jose Soplanucas's analysis above is pretty accurate.

Have you ever been to New Orleans? How about Philadelphia? Direct flights to either one are fairly short, and weather is still reasonable in November. You can probably see most of the well-known tourist sites in three days.

I suppose it is natural, if you have nothing else going for you, to want to be remembered as somehow important for having had an intimate relationship with someone who was remembered as important in some way. If he can't still sell his body any longer, he can at least sell his story.

The only person I have ever known with the first name "Markku" was from Finland.

Wellington, NZ?

If he is in Manchester, why does he call himself CharlieLondon?

When I was in my mid 20s, I was invited to a sex party at an apartment in Baltimore. There were about a dozen guys, and everyone was moving around, either having sex or watching someone else throughout the couple of hours that it lasted. One attractive blond appeared to be getting gang fucked, and enjoying it, so I joined the line to fuck him. Later, as the party was drawing to a close, we started a conversation, and I discovered to my amazement that he had shared a hospital room in San Antonio with my best friend a couple of years earlier when they were in the Air Force! I asked him if he had had any recent contact with my friend Richard, and he said that he wanted to, but he didn't know how to contact him, so I gave him Richard's phone number in New York. A couple of weeks later, Ricard called to tell me that Glenn had called and had been staying in his Manhattan apartment with him as a guest, but Richard did not thank me for giving Glenn his phone number: Richard had to evict him because Glenn kept dragging numbers in from off the street for spontaneous orgies.

It is worth noting that these couples are not typical native-born Americans expats. Fawcett's wife appears to be a Spaniard who works there, and therefore is already at home in that culture (her mother and grown children live there, too). Sweeney's husband was born in Hungary and left as a child, but probably had already developed some native facility in the language. Hungarian is a very difficult language to learn, especially for an elderly person, because it is unrelated to any other language that an American is likely to have been exposed to (unless one grew up in a Finnish-American community in the upper Midwest).

One only has to read the news to see how the environment can be filled with "nonstop political stuff from all sides" in many parts of the world. However, as a foreigner, you also have no influence over decisions that may affect your own life there (like the American couple in the post above who have retired to Hungary).

He's got his daddy's eyes

We rented an AirBNB house in Portland, OR, one July, and I was surprised to discover it had no a/c. The owner said, "Don't worry: there's a portable fan up in the attic."

But it was a dry heat!🙄

I also have had a Citizen Eco-Drive for several years, and have been very happy with it. As long as I leave it out in daylight, it never stops running.

Funny that this thread should pop up again just now. I took my partner watch-shopping yesterday, because his expensive old Olympus needs a new battery, but he can no longer read the small face (with no numerals) because his eyesight is so bad. So I persuaded him it was time to buy a cheap new watch that he can actually read. We went to the Mall and stopped first at Macy's. I said we were looking for a cheap watch, and the salesperson said they sold no watch for less than $100. We ended up at J.C. Penney, which was having a sale on Timex watches. We found a watch with a large white face, black hands, and large black numerals, for $49. He loves it.

People in SoCal use abbreviations for almost everywhere. LA is always Los Angeles, OC is standard for Orange County, and SD is usually San Diego.

Reminds me of a provider I hired in Manhattan many years ago who had a barber's chair in his living room for just such scenes.

Nothing disrupts the equilibrium in a friendship or a romantic relationship more than one party having money and the other party wanting/needing it. That's why prenuptial agreements exist. Your relationship started as an agreed-upon commercial exchange (not slavery), and if you expect it to morph into something different, he has to be willing to discuss the subject dispassionately. His unwillingness to do that should be a red flag for you, because although your original image of him has changed, his conception of you may not have changed. As a somewhat comparable situation, when my partner and I met, there was a big difference in our ages and incomes. Before we agreed to settle down together, we had frank discussions about how we felt about those differences, how money and expenses would be shared, and who would be responsible for what. As time went by and conditions changed, we always revisited those topics to be sure both of us were comfortable with our original decisions and to change them when it seemed appropriate (e.g., he bought our first house, but we shared the cost of subsequent homes equally). You and your "friend" need to have the same kinds of conversations.

Thanks for reminding me of the historical reason why the friezes were not being properly maintained at the time that Elgin made his argument for removing them to London.. Of course, Elgin did not know what the Greeks would do after they won their war of independence from the Turks, so the British Museum felt that technically they had a right to keep artwork that they had gone to considerable trouble to obtain. As I said, attitudes have changed over the years toward art that many people now considered to have been "stolen" from the "rightful owners." Museums are now facing the same pressures to return anthropological holdings, such as corpses, to the descendants of the cultural groups from which they were taken.