Charlie

Grigor Dimitrov is certainly one of the prettiest faces on the ATP tour--no wonder Sharapova kept him as her boytoy for awhile. Kyle Edmund is also very cute if you like the pale blond English-type.

We rarely use our dishwasher, since I like to wash things as soon as I have used them, and it takes us a long time to accumulate enough things to justify running a machine. We recently had dinner guests and used a lot of the best china, so we decided to run the washer for only the second time since we have lived in this house (six months). It is a GE Profile, and I suspect it is the same age as the house--8 years--but I don't know how much the previous owners used it (they were a male couple, an interior decorator and an artist). I thought the machine did a much better cleaning job than any other dishwasher we have owned over the years. In our last house the original washer was OK--I don't remember the make--but when we replaced all the old appliances with stainless steel, we bought an LG that took twice as long as this GE to do a normal load, and everything still came out looking less clean than if I had washed it by hand.

If he had a photo of me when I was 13 that he jacked off to, he was a sicko.

Elvis. I was 13 years old and he was a new rock star (he hadn't made any movies yet), and I was able to buy one of the little fanzines, which had a black and white photo of him shirtless. I think it was the first time I ever jacked off to a photo.

Harry Pitts. Peter Licker.

Pugin's fake gothic!

I can't match it any British gothic cathedral that I am familiar with. I thought it might be someplace like King's College Chapel at Cambridge, but it doesn't seem to match that either. There are indications that it is British and somewhat urban, but I can't think of anyplace that really fits.

I often offer things for others to use, but I always hesitate when someone asks to use something I haven't offered, especially if it is something of value. I understand your reaction.

I've only seen the promos, but he does look good.

Sometime in my early 20s, I made a list of all the men I had sex with whom I could remember. There were 168 names or descriptions on the list (I still have it). When I turned 30, I started to keep a daily journal of my activities, which of course included the men I had sex with, including those whose names I didn't catch. I have never tried to count them, but occasionally I go back to read those narratives, and sometimes I can't even remember the ones with whom I apparently had lengthy relationships!

"To give" and "to gift" do not mean the same thing. The first simply describes a physical act, while the latter implies a motive for the act. "Affect" and "effect" are particularly complicated, because each one can be either a noun or a verb, with a total of four different meanings.

I suspect that "hep" is a typo for "herpes."

I thought I did not get chicken pox as a child, but I probably had such a mild case that I wasn't diagnosed, because I did get shingles after I turned 60--twice. The first time was awful, and I didn't know what it was, until I went to my dermatologist. The second time the symptoms were so different, and in a different place, that I didn't realize it was a recurrence until my doctor saw it.

When I was young--and maybe it is still true--there was no federal drinking age: each state set its own age. In New York State, you could drink at 18, but you couldn't vote until you were 21. Now the qualifications have been reversed.

I remember how all the kids in the neighborhood came running when they heard the Good Humor man driving slowly through. My favorite was an orange ice popsicle with vanilla ice cream center.

Don't forget to bring the pooper scooper on his walk.

I hardly ever eat fast food except when I am on the road and want to stop for a quick lunch. I don't find any chain absolutely reliable; e.g., Wendy's is usually OK, but I ate at an awful one recently. I think Subway is the most consistent from one location to another, and I like the fact that I can get something other than fried fat there (although I like fried fat at times). If I stop at a highway interchange that contains a pizza place as well as a couple of burger places, I will choose the pizza.

I hired an escort one evening, with whom I had a wonderful time, and we seemed to have great social rapport. The very next day, I ran into him as we were both preparing to cross the street at a red light, and I greeted him in a casually friendly way. He was alone, but his reaction was very cold; he appeared uneasy about being acknowledged in public, and moved away as quickly as possible. So I don't think there is one tried and true answer to the question of how to approach an escort in public.

I was never very impressed by their stable of escorts, but they were easy to use and very reasonably priced.

I know at least one poster here who is 82, and I suspect there are others.

Damn! I logged on too late, because I recognized Positano the instant I saw the photo.

+1

I think I would have made a good father, but my partner of almost 50 years did not like kids and would have made a terrible parent, so I am glad it wasn't a serious possibility when we were young. Instead, we have had several dogs and a cat over the years, and I have managed to exercise my parenting impulses on them. I think about children more now that I am old, because the advantage of having children and grandchildren, if they are the right kind, is that one can finally depend on them for care rather than vice versa. I am lucky that I am somewhat close to a niece and nephew of my partner, because without them we would have no one of a younger generation to look to for support.

There were no sex education classes in my public schools, and my parents never talked to me about sex. I was a rather shy only child with few male friends, so I was in my teens before I learned how babies were made--I thought the male somehow inserted his penis into the woman's belly button. At 13, I realized from a Raymond Chandler novel I found at my grandmother's house that a man could put his penis in another man's mouth, but I never imagined anal sex was an option until my first adventure with another male at age 17. I went away to college a few months later, and between 17 and 18 I devoured every book I could find about sex, especially gay sex, so I could understand my life to come. At 19, having already had sex with numerous men, I sat my parents down and told them that I was gay. They looked at one another in puzzled silence for a moment, and then my mother said, "But, how do you know?"

Our dog got a birthday email from his vet yesterday, but it was just an arbitrarily chosen date, because it was the anniversary of his initial examination by the vet. We don't know his real birthday, because he was a stray whom we adopted from the county shelter, and the first two vets who examined him couldn't even agree on his probable age. He just got an extra treat at lunchtime. I have owned animals whose exact birthday was known (one dog was born on the tenth anniversary of the death of another beloved dog, which was a little spooky), and sometimes we would go for a special romp in a park, but otherwise we don't do anything special--hell, we don't even do much to celebrate our own birthdays, unless they end in a zero or a five.