Charlie

A rare advertiser who uses the "map me" function to show where he actually lives rather the default location at City Hall. (BTW, if you are unfamiliar with Philly, it is a safe neighborhood)

I shop twice per week on my way home from my morning tennis match, because the Von's supermarket near my tennis club (which is 8 miles from my home) has its own gas station, and if you have a Von's/Safeway account, your purchases get you a discount on gas (sometimes as much as 60cents/gallon), which I can do when I leave the store. I do all the food shopping for my household, and since we are pretty regular in what we eat--and we almost never eat out anymore--I buy pretty much the same staples every time. I don't pay much attention to price--I buy what I want, and the bill at check-out doesn't vary much from one shopping to the next. If I am bored and want to get something different, I may stop first at the Trader Joe's near the Von's to pick up a couple of special items. If I discover between shoppings that there is something else I forgot or need, I go to the supermarkets (Albertson's or Stater Brothers) closest to my house (1/2 mile) to buy it. I bring my own shopping bags/containers, and do most of the bagging myself, but I don't do the self-checkout. There was an interesting article in a local paper recently about the fact that older people (that's me!) prefer personal interaction with the checkers to the impersonal checkout machines.

The cock certainly looks larger in some photos than in others--any photoshopping going in in the ones where he is laughing?

Things like height, weight and cock size can be quickly checked upon meeting; age is more problematic. I don't mind if someone shaves a couple of years off his advertised age, but when a "27" turns up looking like 45, or vice versa, it is bound to be disappointing for the client, who usually hires with certain fantasies he expects to satisfy, and they almost always include the age demographic of the provider.

When I was a young man, I was told by my first partner that he was taught by a French chef that green salads should always be tossed with the maker's bare hands; he never said anything about washing the hands. (Of course, this was before scientists had discovered the existence of germs.) We have a green side salad with dinner every night, and I always rip apart the ingredients with my bare hands, but usually remember to wash my hands first. BTW, how many people actually wash the ingredients first?

I managed to see the first two sets of the Medvedev/Alcaraz semi-final yesterday. I will go out on a limb and predict that Medvedev will beat Djokovic in tomorrow's final; after all, he was the last player to beat Djokovic at the US Open, and that was also in the final.

I haven't used the tub since I was a child, except when I wanted to relax my muscles in a jetted tub, rather than take a bath to clean myself. I need the shower anyway to wash my hair, and using both the shower and the tub seems like a waste of water, especially during our endless drought in SoCal.

I was given my first dog, a little black terrier mix, when I was 9 years old. She was an unclaimed stray, picked up by my father's cousin, the official dogcatcher in a small New England town, whom we happened to be visiting. We took her home and had had her for only a couple of weeks, when we realized she was pregnant; one night she gave birth to a litter of six puppies, underneath my bed. None of the pups looked like the mother, and within a month one of the surviving pups was bigger than she was. That began a stretch for me of seven decades of living with dogs. I have owned all kinds of dogs, from purebred showdogs, purchased from top breeders in the dog show world, to mutts with unknown histories, adopted from a variety of public and private shelters. Their images ranged from a brace of sleek 75 lb. Greyhounds, to a blind old 10 lb Miniature Poodle. Their colors ranged from solid black to solid white, and all kinds of variations in between. I acquired them at various stages of their lives, from puppyhood to one 9 year old, whose elderly owners had died. No two had exactly the same temperament, but they all had their own lovable characteristics. They were as diverse as the men I have slept with. Some dogs prefer their own beds, others would rather share yours. At one point I had to have a bed built to accommodate my partner and myself, and two adult Greyhounds, who liked the warmth of human companions on cold nights. My partner and I now sleep in separate rooms. During the day, our current canine companion usually positions himself somewhere he can keep track of both of us as we settle down or move around in the house, to make sure one of us can't leave without him knowing it. At night, he always starts the night in one of our beds, but at some time during the night he usually leaves and goes to the other's bed, and occasionally returns eventually to the first bed. We have never figured out how he decides where to start and when to move, because he has no discernible pattern, and never shows any particular favoritism to one of us or the other, except at mealtime (I feed him). One of our elderly neighbors recently passed away suddenly, leaving a sweet old dog. Luckily, he had a friend who was willing to take her. Unfortunately, we are finally reaching the age when my spouse or both of us will probably end up in an assisted living facility (perhaps in the sky), so if he passes before then, I would be reluctant to get another dog. If we go first, however, we have nice younger gay neighbors who love our dog and would be happy to take him, so we have given them power of attorney to do so. If you have a loved companion animal, it is something that is worth thinking about when you are making legal arrangements.

South Philly

His interests are basically "one note Johnny," and he has only one photo, that reveals very little. Perhaps "upscale" is meant to suggest the Marquis deSade.

"And our next contestant in the obedience trials is...."

Because of the unlimited tie-break between Spectrum and Disney, I have not been able to watch any of this. Cute as Ben is, and much as I like his father, I still would be unlikely to bet against the Djoker, since up to now Ben has been basically only a two tournament wonder.

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.