Cristina Branco is playing here in my living room--- her "Sensus" CD. One of the best things Stella at stelladellasera and Caitlin at kissmecaitlin ever recommended to me. Beautiful, deeply sexy, haunting--- and in wonderful liquid Portuguese.

Lissy at emigree and the most-pettable little K-dot at citydress both keep movies on their laptops. I recall once playing a CD on my first laptop--- "Grosse Pointe Blank", actually. But I've never downloaded a film to watch later. I suppose it's because I really do have this major fear of somehow filling the Tare Panda Laptop's memory up. And of course I'm afraid of not being able to download correctly. I live in mortal fear of being tagged as a rube if I fail at something Web 2.0. It's safer not to risk the learning curve.

Last night someone at university in Vermont said that she heard a "slight drawl" in my voice. I've spent the day speaking only in clipped monosyllables. I'm desperate to have a flat, accentless, affectless voice. I don't want to be thought of as coming from anywhere (especially the Deepest South) or being attached to any particular place. I'd even pass over accents I've always liked--- Oxbridge and Jamaica ---if I could just be...unattached and reasonably anonymous. I've never quite recovered from hearing the contempt in thelaurenator's voice when she said I had a "slight" regional accent. I will never, never forgive her for making me self-conscious and ashamed of my voice.

"Shepherd Girls of Estrela"--- my favourite Cristina Branco song ---is playing there behind me. It's wonderfully romantic and Arcadian. I do listen to it and imagine Stella kissing her Lucia in a Lisbon fado bar some spring night.

A question... Lissy at emigree loaded her laptop with films when she went off on her romantic week with her soldier-lover. Mostly unwatched, mind you. They had better things to do in bed than watch films. But the question remains: what did she load? What films did she bring on a romantic vacation?

"My Blueberry Nights" arrived from Netflix today. I do need to watch it and then discuss it with Ginny at ginny_mccoo. I want to get her thoughts on it--- and on "2046".

In the days before I took counsel of my fears, in the days when I could still travel, I liked traveling alone. I liked exploring new cities and new places alone, without distractions. I liked losing myself in strange cities and streets. I liked being alone in Venice and watching it snow. I liked sitting by myself and looking at the water off the Connecticut coast. But then I became increasingly glum about not having someone to talk to, about not being able to share new places. And I realised as well that a single male just isn't welcome most of the time.

Okay--- let's be honest here. I always see travel as a romance thing, as something that always has sexual and romantic potential. One takes girls to new cities and new countries to have sex there, to have Adventures. If you're Stella or Lissy or DRL or Umi at ivich it's possible to have Encounters with strangers in distant lands--- always the vur' best kind of Adventure. Strangers Have The Best Candy--- and that's even more true about Strangers in exotic places. Travel has always had erotic possibilities, and quite honestly I want lovely girls to come with me to Tallinn or Hakodate or Lisbon or Ulan Bataar so that there can be seductions and sex in hotel beds and under foreign bridges. Having sex in a new city, a new country, is like having sex in a new house: an act of possession. Once you've made love--- or had deliciously wicked no-names-please sex ---in a new city, it's yours. The experience is yours. Tara at MidnightHope did that in Mongolia; Ms. Flox at besideserato did in a dozen cities.

I'd take a girl to Tokyo and insist that we do two key things--- sex in a suite at the Imperial and sex in the most bizarre love hotel we could find. The love hotel thing would be the more important of the two. I'm still envy-ridden about Umi at ivich going with an older, married lover to a love hotel in Kagoshima.

Not that I can travel anyway--- fear of flying, fear of airport security, poverty. But I do know that one thing that makes travel seem useless is that I'll never again have a girl who'd travel with me as a lover. And sexual failure in a foreign land would be...well, nothing I could ever recover from.

I've always said that phonesex was far, far better than sex-in-the-flesh for any number of reasons, that phonesex played to my strengths and concealed my weaknesses. (It's the only kind--- the last kind ---of sex I'm still able to do.) And I've said that fax sex was more brilliant still--- hastily scribbling erotica down with Sharpies and feeding the pages into the fax. But last Sunday's "Family Guy" episode introduced telegraph sex. And that is a steampunk-erotica moment. There was a Victorian gent at the telegraph key, tapping away to a Victorian miss somewhere down the wires. And when the reply came--- ditditditdahdahditdah ---he moaned in delight: "Oh, you dirty girl...what a dirty slut..." Yes--- telegraph sex is the key image in steampunk erotica. And let's note--- Victorian telegraphers all carried individual keys with them, the way some sex blog girl now has her custom-selected Magic Wand. So--- Morse Code erotica. That may be a brilliant steampunk moment.

Some absurdly Grown Up Person at Ms. Flox's journal commented that he thought it sad and pathetic when people are described as "lovers". He wrote that he finds himself being contemptuous of any girl who describes the male with whom she's involved as "my lover". Just some sad co-ed trying to be all cool and older, he sniffed. Needless to say--- he's tagged for the Rolled-Up Newspaper Treatment: a solid smackdown with a copy of the Asahi Shimbum. No girl has described herself as my lover in years. No girl has been willing to see herself as my lover--- let alone have others think she might be having sex with someone like me. I'd give a lot to have some girl proud to be with me, to be proud enough of being involved with me to call herself my lover.

I remember an episode in the second "Emmanuelle" novel--- Emmanuelle is with her husband at a party in Bangkok for the diplomatic corps and the foreign community and has sex in the garden with a middle-aged diplomat. They're walking back into the party and she's straightening her dress and feeling the wetness run down her thighs and the man assures her of his discretion, assures her that he'll never tell anyone. Emmanuelle looks at him with indignation and asks, "Why? Are you ashamed of me? Ashamed of having sex with me?" I've always liked the line. I think when I quoted it to Lissy at emigree she was impressed--- and told me that she knew that someday, somewhere, she'd use that same line on someone. It is a vur' good line. I've never had sex with a girl I was ashamed of. I was always vur' proud that some lovely wicked clever panty-free girl found me worthwhile enough to take to bed. I wanted to think that I could be of value to a beautiful girl. What I know now is that no girl is ever likely again to be proud of me, proud of having been with me, proud to introduce me to her friends as her lover.

Make a note... I've never been ashamed of any of the things I've done with girls. Or at least I wasn't. These days, I know--- and I've known ever since the Evil Dana-Lynn ---that girls look at me with barely-suppressed contempt for my looks, my life, my skills. I've lost the ability to think that a girl could be proud of me, the ability to think that a girl might find me sexually valuable.

(I've learned all the code phrases, too--- learned how "you're so smart..." means "...but not fuckable".)

No girl is thinking of seeing Shanghai or Tallinn or St.-Petersburg or Vienna with me. No girl dreams of having sex in hotel beds in foreign cities with me, or walking naked out of a hotel pool for champagne and poolside sex after midnight. And without that--- without having a lover to take for Adventures ---all the exotica factor and the sense of wicked delight bleeds out of cities and places.

Stella at stelladellasera writes in her description of the s/m ritual she performed with her gay younger brother and his boyfriend of standing there with a wineglass and stroking her brother's "big handsome cock". Yes, I know--- "big handsome cock" sounds like some eighteenth-century slang, some description for a raffish hero in Smollett or Fielding. It's the kind of thing someone would say deadpan about Jack Aubrey--- who wouldn't get the double entendre at all. But I read Stella's description and just...sighed. "Big handsome cock" is not a phrase that's ever been applied to me--- not in the Smollett way, and not in Stella's meaning, either. It's not likely to be applied, either.

One thing I've learned from reading the sex blogs--- Debauchette, Provocateuse, BeautifulAndDepraved ---is that I lack any of the requirements for being sexually valuable to a lovely girl. I meet none of the criteria for being seen as potential lover by girls like, e.g., Ms. Flox at besideserato or warmscars or Ms. Chang or OftenAbsent at D-Land or salvetevirgenes. I don't ever think I expected a girl to append "big handsome cock" to a description of me. I just always assumed that I was...functional. Functional and sufficient. I always took that for granted. But that was before "Sex and the City". That was before the sex blog girls made me realise that I would never be good enough to be considered as a potential lover--- and that I probably never had been of any value as a lover to any girl I'd ever been with. After the sex blog girls and SATC, after the Evil Dana-Lynn, I do take it for granted that everything I ever did with girls left them filled with disgust and contempt for me.

Stella can be thrilled and pleased at her gay younger brother's "big handsome cock". Debauchette can write at length (oh, dear God) about her Gabriel's "voracious" cock. Ms. Flox can reminisce about the "iron-hard cocks" of various lovers in her past. No girl is going to do anything like that for me. And there's no point at all in allowing any girl to treat me with contempt and public derision for my lack of looks, money, success, youth, status, and endowment.

Beautiful legs, beautiful hipbones and collarbones, beautiful eyes, a deliciously kissable long bare back--- I've always said those things to girls. I've always meant them. But there's no feature that I might have--- no endowment or skill ---that any girl is likely to find alluring. No girl looks at me and wonders what it would be like to kiss me.

Imogen Heap is singing in the background--- "Let Go". It's a favourite song. The Frou Frou album is a late-night favourite.

I'm trying to think--- how do I like to be touched? It's been forever since a girl ran her fingers along my cheekbones or traced a fingertip over my lips. I used to like those things. They were film-in-the-head gestures. I'm usually uncomfortable and uneasy when I'm touched. I'm not used to physical contact any more. But a girl's fingertip grazing over my lips or cheekbones--- I did like that. It was something a wicked and seductive girl would do in a film or a novel. I really have forgotten what it's like, though. Just as I've forgotten how to hold hands, how to keep a hand on a girl's thigh while driving. I have no memory of how to kiss a girl--- and I'd never trust my body, never trust to instinct. My body is waiting to betray me, to leave me open to derision and contempt.

There's a Berlin song called "Touch". I always liked it. Danced to it more than a few nights. Made love to Lacey or the Evil Dana-Lynn or Elizabeth-Claire while it played. I can't listen to it tonight. And I can't recall how to touch a lover. I can't remember what it was like to be touched. And I know that no girl will want my touch ever again--- will think of my touch without disgust.