Charlie

He used to advertise under another name, but I don't remember what it was. I suspect that he has shaved a few years off his age.

For those of us old enough to remember the ads in the pink pages of The Advocate, the category used for those ads at one time was "Models." When I lived in England a half century ago, the commonly used term there was "rentboy." "Hustler" now seems to be used only for the amateurs who work the streets.

Since the San Andreas is in our backyard, we do have earthquake insurance.

I grew up in a small town in NJ. I knew I was gay when I was in high school, and my best friend there came out to me just before we graduated. We knew of only one classmate who might have been gay. More than six decades later, many of our classmates still live in our hometown or in neighboring towns. The three of us left as soon as we graduated and never returned to NJ. We all moved to large cities where it was easy to be part of an active gay community. Of course, the world has changed since we were young and gay--it would have been virtually impossible to be openly gay in almost any small town in America in those days, when persecution of gays was not only socially acceptable but actually legal. The pressure that gays feel in socially and politically conservative areas now is more subtle, but can still feel just as threatening, especially where legal changes with unknown consequences are proposed. There still are parts of this country where I would not consider living, solely because of my sexual orientation.

Ironically, we just had the first hurricane in Palm Springs--and no one was prepared for the damage.

When we were looking for places to retire, we toured Wilton Manors with a gay realtor. What gave us pause was that every house we looked at had hurricane shutters.

BTW, during the Vietnam War, my uncle left his wife and children at home in Michigan when he left for Saigon to work for the US government. His wife decided to move the family to Hawaii to be closer to my uncle. However, in Saigon my uncle fell in love with a young Vietnamese woman. When the war ended, did he go back to Michigan, or to his family in Hawaii? Of course not: he and his Vietnamese girlfriend moved to--where else?--San Francisco.

In a course on Victorian literature, a professor of mine once mentioned that Bruckner does the same thing in his symphonies, and now I can't help hearing that pattern every time I listen to Bruckner.

If I remember correctly, when Reece left NYC he moved to Santa Barbara and stopped escorting.

It actually sounds to me like something written by a chatbot, linking rhetorical fragments from a variety of sources.

That's because we're worth it🤩

Like most old retirees, I tend to stay home and avoid travel on holiday weekends. As a tennis fanatic, I was hoping to binge-watch the US Open, but Spectrum and Disney are battling over negotiations, so Disney has pulled ESPN off the air on Spectrum as of yesterday evening. Unless they come to a quick agreement, I guess I will read a book. (I didn't even know that Disney owns ESPN.)

The other side of the story is the way some places became more desirable for gays in the first place. The classic case was San Francisco. Many closeted gays in the military during World War II spent time in SF before being shipped off to the Pacific war, and experienced more social freedom there; when the war was over, they decided to return to SF rather than to the small towns in the Mid-west and the South where they had been raised. The influx of gays made California more liberal, and their exodus from their original homes made the states they left behind more conservative.

Fresh&Easy was the one I was thinking of, too. I shopped there a number of times when they came to Palm Springs, because they has some things that I remembered I used to buy when I lived in London.

He has only been on RM for one week, already has one review and a busy (and somewhat odd) travel schedule that looks like he travels for some other kind of business. Va. Beach is an unusual base for an escort--is there some military connection?

"Where did you say you put those condoms?"

Fido looks skeptical about where this photo-shoot is going.

Strange logic. Therefore, an escort should be open to anything a client suggests?

A number of years ago I bought the Golden Age Passport, which gives free entrance to the holder (and anyone else in their vehicle) to all the National Parks and anyplace else in the government net (Fish and Wildlfe, Forest Service, etc.), because I visited parks so often. It is good for life, but one has to be age 62 or over to purchase it. I have used it all over the country, from Acadia to the Everglades to the Badlands to Olympic to Joshua Tree, and many in between. It's particularly useful if you have visitors whom you want to take to see a park near you.

How old is this photo? No one has played with that kind of racquet for decades!

I seem to remember a few other European grocery chains that entered the US market with a big bang (British ones especially), but decided they had made an economic mistake and pulled out completely after a couple of years. I wonder if Aldi and Lidl will do the same.

I have been in the Aldi in Palm Springs a couple of time, but there is something about the odor of the store that I find unpleasant (it smells like rotting vegetables).

My biggest challenge with this summer's heat is probably the electric bill. Even with the thermostat set at 82 for the a/c, the bill for the past month was almost $500. A typical bill for a month without a/c is under $100.

Our dog was born and bred in the desert. He doesn't understand the necessity of going out to walk in rain and snow the way his east coast brethren do. It's been a traumatic day for him.

No danger of water in the house (I think). However, the intense downbursts of rain have returned, accompanied by higher wind speeds. Oh, and the good news in all of this? The blistering temperatures of the past two months have suddenly been replaced by temps in the 70s.