What they don't tell you about eyeglass chains ...

I finally gave in and bought eyeglass chains the other day (AKA "granny" chains), since I'm getting tired of constantly finding myself in a different part of the house having left my reading glasses in the other room. For the last year or two, I've compensated for that by leaving cheap reading glasses here there and everywhere. But now I've been admonished by my optician that this habit may be contributing to the precipitous decline in my reading eyesight.

The thing is that I also have progressive lenses now, for doing everything that doesn't involve close-up reading, and I pretty much wear these full time, even around the house. So it was, the other day, I found myself at Rite Aid choosing two pairs of eyeglass holders. In fact, there was no choice, since they only had one each of two different types. One of them looked sort of like a rosary, and, in fact, large letters (for those with eye problems) on the packaging proclaimed that they could also be used as necklace!

So far so good. Ben was away on business, coming back yesterday evening, so I spent the day with two pairs of eyeglasses dangling, one on a necklace type thing, the other on more conventional straps. I was looking forward to Ben coming home and having a good laugh at my new grandmotherly appearance.

So far so good. Except there were all kinds of problems! First, these eyeglass chains are designed for average people, not for the ginormous races. So they don't dangle low enough down from my face, and are difficult, in consequence, to put on. Second, they get tangled up, one with another. Third, the damed loops around the eyeglass arms won't say on, so I'm left with one or more of the eyeglasses dangling perilously by one strap. Also, since I wouldn't be seen dead wearing them outside the house, I have to detach and reattach them all the time.

I suppose one option is to really go all out and wear chains that are so exotic they constitute a fashion statement.

But the thing they really don't tell you about is how uncomfortable it is to have either a rosary like necklace, or a faux leather strap dangling against your ear while you're wearing them. And another thing. If you at least either use various glasses scattered around the house, or carry them in a good Christian case, you can have ready access to a cloth for cleaning the lenses. In the absence of the case, what are you supposed to do? I looked for something at the drug store to carry an eyeglass cleaning cloth on a chain around your neck, but apparently that hasn't been invented.

I recently had to replace the lenses on both glasses. The reading glasses were covered by my health plan, but I had to shell out over $600 for the latest superduper progressive lenses with anti-glare coating, and a transitional reaction to sunlight. The reading glasses proved to be a problem: I couldn't use them at my computer (which is where I use them for the vast majority of the time.) Yes. It turns out I now need two pairs of reading glasses: one set for the computer (since, I'm so tall, that the monitor has to be 29 inches from my eyes if I'm to accommodate enough space for typing), and one pair for reading (mostly in bed, where the distance is 17-23 inches depending on which of my two reading positions (which, you'll be glad to know, I won't detail) I move into.

So now I'm in the market for some kind of combination accessory which can hold three pairs of glasses at a time, with easy attachability, not too high up my chest, and accommodate a cleaning cloth (and preferably cleaning spray.) I would say I'd have to invent this, but I just realized it's called a man bag.

Mahler in the Morning

Ben is away, so my ear plugs didn't prevent our big old St. Bernard, Indira, from waking me up this morning, as she scratched at the gate which is supposed - theoretically - to keep her far away enough from me in the night that her various sound violations - including thunderous snoring - won't wake me.

English summer - taken in the deep countryside in Oxfordshire about ten years ago.

(Ben always complains that he's the one that has to get up in the middle of the night to tend to her Highness' needs, but seems not to have thought of the idea of hiding my ear plugs. Unless ... hmm. I've noticed that if I leave my wax ear-plugs on the bedside table in the morning, they're usually gone soon afterwards. Since, on at least two occasions, our little dog, D'artagnan has subsequently thrown up waxy messes, I'd assumed he'd been the culprit, but now I wonder.)

It was another in a long line of noble Southern California mornings, and, at 7.15, the sun was filling up the living room with a gleaming sunflower glow. I struggled into my ill-fitting bathrobe (all bathrobes are ill-fitting at my height) against the morning chill, and went downstairs, listening to Indira delicately mincing down the steps behind me. (At her age, her eyesight isn't what it was, and she can't seem to clearly see the dark stairs; I'm sorry to say she's descended the last few steps with less than delicate rapidity at least a couple of times.)

My hair in the mirrors lining one wall downstairs (exactly not like Versailles) showed a man in his mid-to-late forties, his hair sticking in all directions, eyes hooded. It takes a lot of work, not to mention coffee, to restore the facade these days. Outside, I joined Indira, in peeing in the bushes. Not clear why, but it's easier than going to the toilet. It looked like being a fine day.

Upstairs I collapsed back onto the bed, hoping to get a little more sleep. But the little one had other ideas. He's a long-haired miniature dachshund, and as I saw him crawling towards me with a look of eager anticipation on his unintelligent face, he reminded me once again of a some big, hairy slug. His idea of heaven is to lie between Ben and me in the morning, deep in the bedclothes, and have his stomach rubbed while making little ecstatic snuffling noises. He had to make do with me this morning, but that didn't seem to noticeably diminish his ecstasy.

I got up. Oh ... too quick. Dizzy. Tried again, this time successfully, and, as has happened every morning for several weeks now, Mahler flooded my brain. We've just completed seeing a series of six Mahler symphonies, accompanies by variousm good friends, as part of Gustavo Dudamel's Mahler Project, with the LA Phil, and the Simon Bolivar. Mahler has been one of the most important and meaningful occupants of my internal orchestra since my early twenties when Mahler's 1st was the first classical music record I rented at the local library. And, although I've taken Ben to see Mahler before, there's never been an opportunity to share my passion with Ben and friends like this before.

As I walked through the sunlit living room, I thought with a lot of pleasure this morning about how much Ben had fallen for Mahler's 1st (you can get a taste for some of its excitement here, and its sunniness here.) And that's why, if you'd been walking past our house at 7.30 this morning would have heard a huge din eminating from our house at 7.30 this morning, competing with the song-birds for attention.

I've been meaning to write about the concerts themselves, but I've been in the midst of a very bad cycle of depression. Before meeting Ben and friends downtown for each of the concerts, I've been worried that not even Mahler would be enough to allow me to feel something. I've (mostly) been wrong, thankfully. But I really can't overstate how horrible depression is, and how it robs you have all vitality. The mornings where I wake up and my heart is moving are rare. But as I listen now to the bubbling winds in the middle of the finale to Mahler's 1st, I wonder if early Mahler shouldn't be bottled up as the next miracle anti-depressant.

Does it Have a Pulse

I'm a bit of a Mahler nut, to put it mildly. I know all of his symphonies, most of them intimately, particularly the 1st three, then 5th, 7th and 9th. I've seen them all live several times each, particularly the 1st and the 5th which are the most frequently performed. But I've never had the opportunity to get all the Mahler I can eat. Yet over the next five weeks, Gustavo Dudamel will lead the LA Phil and a visiting orchestra through all ten symphonies, and I've tickets to my six favorites, and will be accompanied by Ben, and, for some of them, a couple of friends.

The question is, will I feel anything. Or is even live Mahler not enough to put some velocity into my sodden neurons?

I was tempted just to end this blog right there, but that would be a little self-indulgent. The reason I haven't been writing my blog is because I'm flat out of inspiration and motivation. I'm still in the long depression that began .. let's see .. about 30 months ago. It cycles up and down, over six week periods, give or take, and I've been on a down draft since mid December. I get on with my life, I work, I read, I force myself to go to the gym, I read the New York Times, I meet with friends, I eat chocolate. I even laugh sometimes. The first new episode of Absolutely Fabulous got me going, the other day, particularly when Edina was dreaming about the original Danish version of AMC's The Killing, and burbling made-up Danish.

But overall, this depression thing is getting old. Really, really, really, really old.

Happy Holidays from Keith and Ben in Hollywood



Do you Hear Voices: Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind Revisited

What I like most about reading stimulating books like Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness:Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, is that they're ... well ... stimulating. They make you explore ideas, and come to your own conclusions and flights of fancy. If you're a writer, they also make for great ideas on which to base a story. Unfortunately, I'm not that kind of writer. I have a ton of ideas that I think would make great novels, but I don't appear to have what it takes to write creative literature. Believe me. I've tried. The closest I came to writing anything viable was a screenplay which took the idea of a man conceiving a baby seriously. I just reread it recently, and it was the sort of thing that if I saw it on screen I'd be complaining to Ben about absurd coincidences, and ripe melodrama.

What I don't like about this book is the cheesy cover. If I saw somebody reading a book with a cover like this I'd think they were gullible fantasists whose next read would be about crop circles. 

 
But at least it was based on ideas. The minute you start taking a concept like that seriously, all kind of interesting things pop out. I had the affair brew into a massive religious conflict, with the Christian Right calling it an abomination and being in the unusual situation of calling for a forced abortion. As the plot approaches the climax, everything hangs on whether Congress will pass an act outlawing men from giving birth. Exciting stuff, huh?

Well maybe not, but finishing the "Reflections" book, a belated follow-up to Jayne's notorious 1976  The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, I'm happy to tell you that I came away with more ideas for screenplays.

It's difficult to sum up Jayne's arguments in anything other than a full book review, because of the breadth of scope both of what he's trying to prove, and the subject matter from which he draws his arguments. There are excruciating chapters on the importance of the development of metaphors to language, a rather irritating chapter in which he shows why consciousness isn't necessary for learning, speech or even thought, then hundreds of pages of anthropological analysis of the role of statues and God images in early early civilizations up to around 2000 B.C.

But the gist of it is that consciousness - when defined narrowly to mean awareness of yourself as a free actor in mind and physical space, able to self assemble your life into a narrative - is a recent development, not much more than 4,000 years old; and that the ancient Egyptians, for instance, managed to build the pyramids without being what we would call conscious.He draws together a lot of evidence that, in place of consciousness, the people of early civilizations depended on voices in their head coming from the right-hand side of the brain, to make decisions for them; and that these voices were very real to them, and were associated with the God statues and figurines that were dominant features of these early societies. He believed schizophrenics were throwbacks to the "bicameral" mind.

I don't want to dwell too much on his arguments because it wouldn't leave any space for my own diversions. The thing that people find hardest to accept about Jaynes' theory is that if consciousness is only 4,000 years old, then how can it be an evolutionary trait? There just hasn't been enough time for such a phenomenon to evolve. Which means that consciousness is learned. He shows convincingly that very young children are clearly not conscious (by the narrow definition), but that parents unknowingly (and often imperfectly) teach their children how to be consciousness.

This got me to thinking about how you could attempt to prove this, which led in turn to my science-fiction fantasies of a horribly unethical experiment. On a remote island, completely cut off from human activity, human babies would be raised by trained workers who behaved like unconscious robots. The culture in which the children grew up would be made to resemble small, early societies based on idol worship; they'd be given a rudimentary language. Once the children were old enough to fend for themselves, the workers would withdraw to become hidden observers, the goal being to see what kind of society they developed. Over generations, we'd see how they grew into decision-making; would they hear voices in their heads; would somebody invent consciousness eventually? Their brains would be remotely imaged in real time (by some technology as yet to be invented), and monitored for activities that indicated the sort of free associations that take place in modern minds.

But then you start to think that it would actually be pretty cool to do the experiment in reality, and forget about science fiction. Of course, it's not possible to do it with babies, but could we develop the minds of, say, Orangutans, by breeding them for ever larger brain mass? Could their minds reach a point where they'd have the capacity to develop true language? If so, then, could you then run your experiment on the desert island? Or is even that unethical? Perhaps in giving apes language we'd really be turning them into persons; is it our humanity that makes the real experiment with human babies unethical; or is it that we;d perhaps be limiting their opportunities to develop into persons?

This naturally gets you going back to your screenplay: the scientists had indeed used Orangutans, not babies, but news somehow gets out that sentient apes had been developed, and - ignoring the possibility of Planet of the Apes scenarios - you could have your huge religious controversy again, with the religious nuts calling the conscious apes abominations, la di da.

It's hard to say which screenplay idea is the most far-fetched; men bearing children, or apes writing a book review of Julian Jaynes.

Yearning and Memories in Washington DC

It's the first time I've been in a conservative sex shop, I thought to myself. But that's Washington.

I've been once again in Raleigh, on business, for two weeks. On Friday morning, I was working out in my hotel gym, listening to one of my all time favorite songs, Left to my Own Devices, by the Pet Shop Boys. As music is wont to do, it whipped me through a time wormhole, taking me back to the summer of 1989. I'm on a gay dance club on a Sunday afternoon; the daylight is streaming in from open doors, and I'm lost in the music - the long remixed version of "Devices". Half of my heart though is wrapped up in the man beside me, Shaun, my first love - the man I'd abruptly fallen for the previous year, at the tender age of twenty three. Unlike me, he's a great dancer, and he's hunky. He has his shirt off, and I stare greedily at his torso on each revolution of the dance floor. I'm far too skinny to take my shirt off, and am probably wearing a paisley shirt (my memory isn't clear on this important point.) But it's a shaft of light in my memories that always sinks me into tenderness when I recall it.

Lord, I'd forgotten how handsome Shaun was. Oh ... and still is! I'm 23, and Shaun 27. I think the look on my face speaks volumes.

Ultimately, our relationship never worked out. I was too young and unformed to have enough self-respect to be loved (at least, this is my subsequent analysis); I couldn't be myself with Shaun, and I don't blame him that he never truly shared my feelings for him. We both really enjoyed our couple of years together, but it was always in imbalance because of the density of my need for him.

Shaun lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania about two hours away by Amtrak from my apartment in Center City, Philadelphia. One of us would make that trip most weekends. On my turns, each time I settled into my seat on the Keystone line out of 30th Street Station, with a hot chicken-breast croissant and a cheese danish (both surprisingly and consistently good) from the restaurant car, I'd be in a state of anticipation not unlike what I used to feel on the night of Christmas Eve as a kid, when my brother Neil and I would lie awake, breathlessly, late at night, hearing my dad getting our Christmas presents out of his wardrobe and arraying them (always unwrapped) in the living room. (I'd better state for the benefit of Americans that my dad was not plucking toys from his sports coat: a wardrobe in England is a big, free-standing closet for clothes. I'd use the word "armoir", but my spell- checker insists on saying there's no such word, even if I add an "e" at the end.)

Shaun worked on an army base as a helicopter technician, and would frequently have to work for part of the weekend. I'd stay in his apartment and listen to music. Then, when it was time for him to come home, I'd go "take a nap". I was so in need of affection, that I'd strip naked, bury myself in his bed, and pretend to be asleep, waiting for the sound of the front-door unlocking, and the feel of Shaun creeping on top of me in bed, wrapping me in his long, muscular arms, kissing me on the back of my neck. He's actually the only person who's ever been able to cocoon me in that way. At the time, although I was 6'6, I was painfully - concentration camp like - skinny (see photo). Since starting to work out in my late twenties, it's gradually become infeasible for me to be anything other than the cocooner rather than cocoonee. Now, at 225 lbs, it's me that wraps Ben protectively in my arms. It subtly changes the nature of your relationships. But you know, us big guys sometimes want to be protected too, sigh.

The next summer, we took our first weekend away together, in Rehoboth Beach, Maryland, the 3rd most popular gay beach destination in the North East, after Provincetown and Fire Island. Actually, I suppose it was really the gay destination for people from secondary cities who didn't feel they measured up to the tonier destinations of the more chic urbanites from New York and Boston. And this is where that moment occurred in the dance club, the moment that I was now reliving, in the month where I'm turning 47, in the basement of a Raleigh Marriott hotel in 2011. I look at myself in the gym mirror and smile remembering how young I was. The face that stares back at me is no longer young. But the naive, romantic young man of deep feelings is still deep inside, and unashamed.

Why not, I suddenly thought to myself, thinking of Shaun? The prospect of another weekend in sleepy Raleigh offers little excitement. What if I can get to DC for the weekend, and see Shaun (who moved to Maryland many years ago now.) I immediately texted him to find out if he was around this weekend. This was probably my first communication with Shaun in two years. But it never matters how rarely we speak. Ever since I "grew up", and dispensed with my intense neediness, I've been able to relax into myself, be myself with Shaun, and he and I have become very close friends over the years. We both acknowledge having a special and rare affection for each other (a feeling different, obviously, than what I feel for Ben, but still different from how I feel about anyone else), and I smile again, as I write this blog, sitting in a Starbucks in Dupont Circle, knowing that I'll be seeing him in a couple of hours.

Because: on Friday morning, after texting him, I realized that - Shaun being Shaun - I was unlikely to hear from him in time to book travel. So I decided, what the hell, I'll escape to DC anyway, even if I don't get to see Shaun. I got a steal on hotel, airfare, and rental car, packed light, and headed to Raleigh-Durham airport early Friday evening with such a feeling of freedom and adventure. I've not been able to do spontaneous travel by myself much in the last few years.

Everything worked like a dream. I'd planned on spending a couple of hours in the Admirals Club waiting for my flight around 9.00 when I noticed there was a 7.45 flight boarding immediately. I've never flown standby before, because there's no guarantee I'll get a seat I can fit my enormous frame into. But I literally waltzed on board, and got the only comfortable seat in the tiny plane - the front row single seat abaft the entry door. In the terminal's book store, I'd bought this great new book on dark matter and energy which, according to the sales clerk, they'd put on the shelves for the first time not half an hour ago. On the flight, the Nigerian stewardess was sociability and smiles, the flight took off on time, landing at Reagan 43 minutes later, an airport which is amongst the most convenient of any large city anywhere in its proximity to the center. Everything seemed to be going perfectly.

I said I traveled light. And my tough, carbon fiber rolling mini suit-case was indeed lacking in heft, and eminently stowable as carry-on. But I had way too many fluids for that to be possible; not just the array of sprays and gels to keep "the hair" respectable, but also my medium-sized travel night medicine (otherwise known as a bottle of vodka.) Having never traveled standby before, the thought that "hey, my checked baggage will not accompany me" on the flight I'd so airily boarded after arriving at the airport, had never occurred to me. So it was after 10.00 before I finally left the airport with my luggage, in a huge, surprisingly ancient, black Grand Victoria - which looked like a senior police detective's wagon from 00's - from Avis. (Still, with my Priceline deal, it was only $20 a night.) My good spirits returned, though, as I coasted to the immaculate, stylish Washington Hilton, just a few blocks up Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle. I'd gotten my room, at the same time as the car, for $79 a night, and it turned out to be classy, luxurious even, especially compared to the bland, identical Marriotts I've been used to in the last few years on business trips.

I'd finally heard from Shaun, in the afternoon, and it looked like we'd be able to get together for a few hours either Saturday or Sunday to catch up. He invited me to a piano recital of a friend of a friend, no doubt in one of the beautiful restored mansions in the Dupont neighborhood. I was very disappointed that I'd not be able to go, because of the timing of my return flight. But it got me thinking about how much had changed in Shaun's life since his days in Harrisburg. When we knew each other back then, I had the more culture-filled life, and was more experienced in high art and music. But Shaun took up acting a few years ago, and is becoming quite successful at it. Every time I see postings of his on Facebook, it sounds like he's hanging out with arty types, in the sort of cultural milieu I've always longed to be a part of. Once again, not for the first time in recent months, I thought sadly of Los Angeles. There, everything revolves so much around "the industry", that there's really very little in the way of high culture that isn't based on the ambition to ascend into the realm of klieg lights, rather than in the love of the life of the mind. I'm beginning to feel, with increasing fervour, a distaste for my adopted home, and a desire to get the hell out of there.

This feeling was confirmed today, as I walked about the neighborhood, or listened to conversations in Starbucks. So close to Embassy Row, you see and hear people from all over the world; they're far less concerned about their appearances, and they're having conversation - real conversation. You get the vivid sense of being amongst curious minds, something that's next to impossible to imagining sensing in Los Angeles.

Every city has its oddities, though, and this is the city which is so starchily conservative that many of the things you wouldn't even cast a second eye at in cities like San Francisco, and, yes, Los Angeles, raise eyebrows of surprise and disdain here. You see scarcely a single person who's prepared to stand out with iconoclasm of dress. However, you do see people who've taken conservatism to such a surprisingly determined length that they really would stand out, and draw comment even in Los Angeles. For instance, a man in his mid-thirties I saw last night, in a long belted rain-coat, gloves, scarf and trilby. And he clearly wasn't so dressed in an attempt at irony. (The man seated next to me in Starbucks is wearing felt wing-tips.)

It was on my way down Connecticut Avenue to this Starbucks, earlier, that I stepped into the sex shop. No, I wasn't looking for dildos. I have an affectation for a big leather watch-strap with metal studs. The one I stole from Ben years ago, finally wore out a few months ago, and I recently bought another one on Melrose Avenue (a street which at least has the merit of being funky.) But it's quirky. It's this very long thing you sort of have to double wrap about your wrist and secure with a stud. And it's driving me crazy because it keeps coming unraveled.

The sex shop looked like the sort of store you see on Hollywood Boulevard which might sell things like studded watch straps, along with lace panties, and sequined halter tops. So I stepped in, and asked the dignified, stiff postured,, black owner if he sold watch straps. He pointed me across the street to a jeweler's store. So I showed him my problematic watch strap as an example of what I was looking for, and asked if he knew where I could get something like that. His lips pursed, and he shook his head. saying "Not around here". I asked him if there was anywhere in DC where I could get something like that, and before I'd even finished asking, he was shaking his head again, this time dismissively.

I'm positive the guy in the sex shop was wrong: even here, there must be a "funky" neighborhood; but that a guy working in a sex shop couldn't imagine it, speaks a lot. In this city, you're just not encouraged to stand out. I thought of the John Galliano shirt I'd brought with me that I was going to wear if I went clubbing tonight, and realized I'd probably look like a freak in the eyes of the locals. Not that I care, but it just feels odd that something that would be seen as fun and adventurous in LA would be a black mark here. (Incidentally, I just asked the young Starbucks barista, who looked vaguely "alternative", if there was a funky neighborhood, and he came up blank too.)

I realize, of course, that my seven years in Los Angeles have changed me. I've seen this in myself on many occasions when I've traveled. My style of dress, the concern for superficialities like what kind of car you drive, the brash self-assertiveness, even flogging my book on this blog: things that seem like virtues in LA, just don't fit in elsewhere. My blond highlights probably don't help either.  Now I wonder how much Shaun has changed since his life took a diversion into art and theater, in the penumbra of Washington. He was always somebody who determinedly had his own look (even if it included a Grace Jones flattop haircut in the 80s.) The single quality of his that always most endeared him to me was an unaffected air of innocence and wonder at anything that was new or different to him. I hope he hasn't lost that, and gone all conservative on me. I'll find out in an hour or so when we meet at JRs, and old-time gay bar in Dupont. (He's off to rehearsals right after that.)

The Set of the Shoulders

Do you strut, or do you slink? Do you smirk, or slump? Do you occupy the sidewalk, or hide in the trees?

How you present yourself in public - how you carry yourself: this, to me, is a fascinating question, capable of telling you a lot about yourself just as easily leading you into making terribly wrong assumptions about others. In this area, my primary pondering has been about men (since I'm pathologically homosexual, you know); but there's a definite corollary between the way some man hold themselves and the female gait and self-representation - and I'm not specifically talking about effeminacy here.

(That WeHo pose. Although I must confess I actually took this photo in San Francisco recently.)

Living and working in Hollywood, and its western sister (otherwise known as "WeHo"), I'm accustomed to count to possibly the highest possible average score (outside of Brazil) on the hotmeter when rating the men I see around me. Spend a half afternoon at WeHo Starbucks Central, and you'll see up to 50 model-quality young (mostly gay) men stream in or past. The thing is, though: a large percentage of them are not only streaming, they're also strutting or smirking (with a tiny minority merely steaming.) And it's a real turn-off.

In my (admittedly tiny) research of Cosmopolitan Magazine surveys, women seem to like their men self-confident and even borderline cocky. (However, it's possible that only the women who read Cosmo feel this way.) Is it only me, though, or is cockiness mostly obnoxious, self-involved, and, ultimately, a harbinger of insecurity? If a man is truly confident in who he is, then why would he have the need to demonstrate it by his posture, affect, and stance? If a man is very goodlooking, then surely his nobler response is to be grateful, rather than to exist to be looked at?

I may be being unfair, but this is what I see: very goodlooking young men carrying themselves in such a way that projects "I'm constantly aware of how goodlooking I am and I just know that everybody is staring at me." It can get even worse: I know several such men by site, from the gym and elsewhere, that are never seen without a self-satisfied smirk. And I kid you not: there are even a few who actually, physically walk along with their nose in the air. It's absolutely true.

Apart from this being not sexy, it makes me wonder many things. I've often been tempted to plan a blog based on interviewing men that I see behaving this way. The thing is, I'm not quite sure how to couch the questions in such a way that they'll get honest responses, and won't cause offense. "Are you constantly aware of how goodlooking you are?" "Are you really as self-confident as you look?" "Gosh, what's it like being you?"

Amongst all men, I believe, there's something else going on which makes it almost impossible to walk past another man, along on the street, without feeling some sort of discomfort, and finding it almost impossible to know what to do with your eyes. I know it's not just me. I've recently begun to steel myself into not doing this. But it's difficult. It seems a little rude and invasive to make eye contact with everybody, and you run the risk - at my age at least - of being thought of as a pervert, at least in WeHo.

I do believe that there are people who measure low on the consciousness scale and don't worry about these sort of things, because there's precious little introspection going on in there. Perhaps they're lucky souls.

Inevitably, I'm going to bring this back to myself. As a preface, let me say I'm just finishing David Deutsch's impressive recent book, The Beginning of Infinity,  about the nature, meaning and purpose of knowledge, and I've found it heavily influencing my thought processes. One thing that took easy root was his condemnation of taboo, and his explanation for this attitude, through incredibly lucid prose based on innovative thinking. Here's the sequence of ideas, greatly simplified:

• Knowledge cannot help but be infinite, since humans are inherently creative. Knowledge growth is therefore limitless, bound only by the laws of physics.
• This will lead to an ever more perfect society (that will never be perfect, obviously.) You can see this in the inevitable stretching of what a full human being is. Gays are beginning to be included; in the future (or so I believe), those with serious mental illness will be drawn in too.
• Knowledge advances in the same way as science: an explanation for something is posed, and that explanation is exposed to critique; eventually one explanation wins out (e.g. gay relationships are every bit as valid as straight ones.)
• There are obstacles to knowledge growth, however, and these include taboos. A taboo is effectively a constraint upon what is exposed to critical thinking. This is most obvious in religion, where, for instance, some Fundamentalist Christians believe the earth is 6,000 years old not because this explanation has survived critique, but, instead, because they were told so by an inviolable source: the supposed word of God. This is exactly the same as a parent telling a child to do something because "I say so."

A bit of a diversion, granted, but it's all leading up to justifying what I'm about to say: there's a taboo about honestly appraising your virtues and physical attributes. This taboo is crouched in the form of a virtue: modesty. But it's nevertheless a limit on what can be discussed, and therefore explained. So I'm going to temporarily move past this taboo. (This is all a very long-winded way of saying "... leaving modesty aside ...")

I'm goodlooking. There is such a taboo about saying that. You may think that it instantly ranks me amongst those I was criticising earlier: good-looking gay guys in WeHo with their nose in the air. Now, I don't normally see this "goodlookingness" with my own eyes. I look in the mirror and I see the blue rings under my eyes, the deep clefts beside my mouth; a somber face, an incipient double-chin. But I've been told it so frequently, and continue to be told, and have had so much independent evidence that didn't require speech, that I've accepted it, grudgingly. I am, or was at least, even striking. I'm 6'6, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, muscular with full head of non-greying hair. People notice me as I walk into a room.

So how do I carry myself, and why? I wouldn't be able to add this bit of knowledge to this essay if I hadn't just broken the taboo. I think that I carry myself with modesty, mostly a lack of sense that people are finding me attractive, and I think that I fall into projecting so effectively the exact opposite of feeling full of yourself, that it works against me. I see this in clubs. When I'm feeling great; self-confident, uninhibited, and full of bonhomie, I get a lot of attention, even now, three years short of being 50. It continues to baffle me, but there it is. Yet I can be wearing exactly the same clothing, and feel invisible. It's all about what I'm projecting. You see, I'm SO concerned with not assuming I'm goodlooking, and SO concerned with not appearing full-of-myself, that I go out of my way to make myself look diffident. And it doesn't serve. What I most enjoy about being in a public environment where people are having fun, is to have fun myself, and meet interesting and fun people. Moping around with my poker face will not encourage that to happen. So why do I do it?

I turn to David Deutsch again. I place constraints upon my behavior, and this inhibits the full flow of knowledge, creativity and life. And these constraints are voluntary, and are partly associated with my distaste at seeing those WeHo guys smirking their way along Santa Monica Boulevard. But more than anything, this comes from an unshakable self-doubt in my kernel of kernels. I'm still a 155 lb, lanky, skinny, gap-toothed, basin haircutted, shy teenager with huge feet, and ill-fitting clothes.

So this is what I'd really like to ask if I ever did my blog interviews with WeHo guys: don't you have any doubt?