One of those days that I find hard to explain. My friend Cynthia left an e-mail this morning saying that she'd be spending the morning of her 35th birthday driving along the Florida coast looking for the perfect key lime pie. I like that image: Ms. Gralla in a too-short sundress and celeb-girl sunglasses, there in a convertible on A1A looking for key lime pie. Not a bad thing to go searching for. So I did stop in at the little corner grocery/deli at the top of the hill and picked up a couple of slices of key lime pie for myself. Not a bad breakfast.

I ran off before 0900 to restock my wine supplies for the weekend. I'll be watching "Circle of Deceit" (German-made, set in Beirut in the early '80s) and maybe "Caterina in the City" tonight. I don't do the bbq thing, but I brought home Chinese spare ribs: call that my holiday dinner.

Lots of Tiger and Asahi beer this afternoon--- a long Deepest South heat siesta (Cynthia tells me she was going to take one in Florida) and then lots of reading. I finished de Villiers' "Timbuktu" and I've been alternating Peter Andreas' "Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations" and Mohsin Hamid's "Moth Smoke". And of course I've been reading Natalie MacLean's wine essays in "Red, White, and Drunk All Over". I like MacLean's wine journalism--- always fun to read about traveling to the Rhone or Argentina to drink expensive wines. And, yes: because of her, I did buy a bottle of something called Critique of Pure Riesling, complete with Ralph Steadman label.

I love one moment early on, when MacLean goes to meet the vintner at Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, an elegant man who might be Sean Connery's younger brother: "Ah, Madame MacLean, welcome," he says in a soft voice that makes women thirty years younger consider the many virtues of Older Men. She gets serious points for that line.

That line goes with something I do want to pass on to Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo and to Libet at aeka . I picked up a copy of Cathy Coote's "Innocents" on Miss Ginny's recommendation. "Innocents" is one of a whole list of Troubled Teen-and-Older-Lover novels Miss Ginny read one summer late in high school. Cathy Coote published it when she was nineteen; the story is that she left high school in Australia at sixteen to write it. The story is simple enough: lovely but predatory schoolgirl writing a long letter to the mid-thirties teacher she's seduced and destroyed. She's writing about something she found in his diary after she runs away from school and family to live with him:

'I disgust myself,' you wrote in your diary. 'It's perverted. It's unnatural. Anyone would agree that it's wrong. But so help me God, I can't overcome it.'

I never cease to be amazed at the way you castigated yourself about your feelings for me. I know it really isn't the done thing for a man in his mid-thirties to fancy a schoolgirl. But the way you beat yourself up about such an innocent, justifiable passion!

Well, I'll tell Miss Ginny what I did tell Lacey long ago, and Libet and Britt-Nicole much later. I'll go with 'perverted' for my own tastes--- which is what they were hoping for, after all. But while my passions are probably never justifiable, and far too mediated ever to be innocent, I've never castigated myself for them, and I've never disgusted myself over them.

Libet told me once that, just about the time she and I became friends, she'd acquired another Older Admirer. She told me that he was about my age, and that he spent a great deal of time sending her e-mail and notes warning her about me. She sent me quotes from his e-mails--- things he told her I probably wanted to do to her. Libet and I agreed that the first part of his list was pretty much dead on...and had excellent checklist potential. The second half of the list was...hmmm...well. Let's just say that someone spends way too much time watching Lifetime Channel...and cheap teen slasher films. He was also a fervent Christian and wanted to...Save...Libet. Libet summed up the difference bewteen me and the other Older Admirer: Eduardo-kun, you're wonderfully dangerous, but he's just creepy. I liked that rather a lot. Though I do have to ask her about that...since not so very long ago, Libet told me that one of the reasons I made a good male friend for married girls was that I was "almost dangerous". I need to explore that. I assume what she means is that I'll sit over drinks and talk and flirt, but that I won't take it too far. But I'm not sure at all how I feel about that "almost".

I've known Miss Ginny since...the end of the Year Four or early in the Year Five. She'd have been not quite twenty when I first found her journal at ginny_mccoo. I must ask her...in all the years she and I have exchanged notes and messages and mail, did I ever strike her as "dangerous"? If so--- is that a Good Thing or not?

Dear Charlotte J. Nolan... Well, she was right: Loscil is perfect music for writing. And for reading about international criminal law.

This afternoon, mid-siesta, I did stretch out on the worn velvet couch and watch Lindsay Lohan in "I Know Who Killed Me" on one of the cable channels. I know that Ms. Lohan turned twenty-three a few days ago, and of course Britt-Nicole always said that she and I were just like Lindsay and Samantha. (Okay, I do have Lindsay singing "Edge of Seventeen" on my iPod. Don't ask.) But actually watching one of her films...and that film in particular--- that may be the part of the afternoon I really do find hard to explain.

Oh...second heat siesta film. Strange little indie dark comedy called "Careless". Not just every film has its hapless hero trying to hook up with the girl of his dreams by saying, "Excuse me, but I think I found your severed finger on my kitchen floor..."

Well, chilled white wine tonight during DVDs. And gin before bed. I must thank both Gillian at coco__ and Alessandra at bel_ebat about recommending Tanqueray-and-tonic as a perfect ending to a summer's evening.