I was right about the last entry I posted: I'm only a ghost voice out there on the aether in the high desert. No one is reading, no one really comments--- and certainly not the specific girls I'd hoped would comment and raise issues.

I did quote extracts from Keith Gessen's "All The Sad Young Literary Men" a few entries ago. No one commented on the book, or on what I posted. No one had anything to say about how Gessen's novel relates to me, or the ruins of my own life. No one--- certainly not the girls I'd hoped ---ever bothered.

But I'll try one more selection from the novel:

There was something about [Mark]--- in his vicinity, women seemed constantly to decide to exercise their virtue, to try it on. They always emerged from relationships for whose moral shortcomings and sexual frenzy they now wished to compensate, somehow, with Mark. "Every guy I've dated since I got here turned out to be a major asshole," Leslie Davendorf told him just the other day as they drove home from a History Department potluck, with Mark (fairly drunk) wondering if he should try to kiss her. "Just fucking, fucking, fucking," Leslie went on, talking of the guys. "But that's over now." Mark shook his head, amazed, and did not try to kiss her.

I understand that all-too-well. Girls around me are always repudiating sluthood and taking up Morality and Monogamy. And of course they take up Morality and Monogamy just as I decide that I like them, or that I'd want to pursue something with them--- or even just when I'd be next in line for making out at parties or on trains or doing hotel sex.

Monogamy has never worked in my favour. It's always been a weapon used against me. Girls always find boys to be monogamous with who aren't me--- they find boys with whom they can do things they'd never do with me. No girl has ever, ever turned down Other Offers to be with me. No girl has even ignored a call on another line to keep talking to me. Facebook pages go instantly to "In A Relationship" whenever I express any interest in a girl. And of course any girl who takes up Morality and Monogamy edits me out of her Past--- even as a Theme Park Thrill Ride, I'm now something shameful. No girl would ever have Ex Sex with me if she found herself alone and restless one night when her boyfriend was out of town.

Ms. Chang told me today that she wasn't going to let her husband ruin her trip to Russia the way her boyfriend senior year ruined her prom. Her boyfriend that May had been some appalling soul-patched Canuckian indie-rock boy who told her that he'd had a lousy time at his own prom and refused to come down for hers...and badgered her into not going, either. Looking back, Ms. Chang wrote, she should've gone to the prom in her most elegantly slutty dress and done blow jobs with multiple strangers in dark corners and sent the Canuckian camera phone pics and a "see what you missed?" message. I was about to tell her that things like that were what she had to expect from Canuckian indie-rockers--- and for breaking her usual teen habit of dating men at least twenty years older ---when a new e-mail arrived. I should've gone with you, Libet wrote. You'd have been the perfect prom date. This was at eight in the morning. I was just...stricken. No one says things like that to me. All I could think of was how honoured I'd have been, and how I'd have tried as hard as I could to be the darkly elegant and wicked and massively transgressive/inappropriate escort she wanted.

I do wonder if Ginny at ginny_mccoo went to her prom...or what Stella at stelladellasera and Caitlin at kissmecaitlin were like at their prom. Lacey's prom dress was backless and hip-slit and worn with nothing at all underneath. I'd love to take someone to a prom again--- to be older than some of the chaperones. Ginny and Ms. Chang would understand. Of course--- I don't even get to take girls to Barristers' Ball. I didn't anyway--- not all three years. I think I told Lissy at emigree once that I wanted her to bring a prom dress if ever she came to visit me. I'd have loved to be her Transgressive/Inappropriate prom date--- both at a high school in PA and on an Imaginary Prom Date here. And I'd want Kim at cataplexis to do the same. (Did Kelsey at clush go to her prom?)

I'd have starved myself for months to be Ms. Chang's prom date--- just so I could wear the most austerely-tailored, classic black tie outfit I could find and be all edges and angles and intensity. I'd have done anything to make her wet with how close I could approximate her Jeremy Irons fantasy.

Gekkeikan sake tonight, on ice, with lime. I do recommend that to PondLife. And to Kelsey at clush.

I wish I knew if Lissy at emigree has a new issue of her 'zine out. I always love her stories and pieces in "Revolver, Dauphin"... If there's a new issue out, I'd send her a check for a couple of copies. I just don't know if she's reading this at all...and I can't really just ask if she's done an issue of "Revolver, Dauphin" this spring...

Kelsey at clush is reading Philips' "Prague"--- I'm glad she liked my recommendation. And she's been reading "The English Patient"--- an old favourite. Something that the Lost Liz Farrell sent me to read. I'd seen the film, of course, but I'd never read the novel 'til Liz and I talked about it. I wanted to be Count Almassy, of course. I even bought a new copy of Herodotus to re-read because of the novel and film. In the film, Almassy has a copy of a menu from Demel's in Vienna wedged into his Herodotus. The best pastry in the known universe--- oh, yes. Someplace I would take Ms. Chang or Kelsey or Lissy or Delighted from Diaryland or Umi at ivich. I like my girls a little starved, but Demel's is always worth making an exception.

Kim at cataplexis and Ms. jourdannex both find my fear of flying incomprehensible. What use is being terrified? Ms. cataplexis asked. Besides, Ms. jourdannex wrote, it would all be quick. No, it wouldn't. Falling from thirty thousand feet takes a long time. You'd know what was happening. So--- not that I could I ever get to Vienna again, but I would take Lissy or Kelsey or Gia-Carangi or Southeast at D-Land to Demel's in a heartbeat. I'd take jourdannex, yes, but she's...a Grown Up. I'd be far too abashed and intimidated by her ever to be flirtatious and Charming, which is mandatory at Demel's.

My entries used to be a paragraph or two when I first started posting. They now run to four or five pages. Part of it may be that I have more things to run on and on about... Part of it is that I print all my entries off and have them bound every three months. I want each volume to be thick enough to justify the cost of binding.

By my estimate I have something like one hundred thousand pages of things I've found on line--- articles, blog entries, e-mails ---printed and archived and bound. I've been doing that for almost ten years now--- archiving the worlds I discover on line. There are on-line diary entries from Geocities back in '98 or '99--- things I found when a Yahoo search for diary volumes led me to discover the first blogs and on-line diaries I'd ever seen. (Oh, yes--- I wish I'd done the copy 'n' paste thing with DRL's ChinaNoir site from those days...and I wish I'd ever run across Stella at stelladellasera's earlier diaries... One hundred thousand pages... I can read through about lives and Pasts and Stories and Adventures--- live through those. All those lives are better than mine. A girl naked on a carriage house deck in Chevy Chase at sixteen, a girl in Seattle having sex with a random boy so that she can say she did, a girl having hotel sex in "nondescript brownstone hotels" or on car hoods at Johns Hopkins parties--- no one will ever do those things with me, nothing I ever do will be as good as what those girls do with boys. But I do have one hundred thousand pages of lives to escape into... I just don't have any life of my own.

I may sing more academic marching calls: I don't know, but I've been told/ Art history girls use all three holes...

I do miss DRL. I miss her sense of irony and wicked wit. And I hate it that after fours years of promises, she never did buy me sushi and saketinis.

And I remain angry and hurt over the way Rachel at sirena73 Dismissed me...over how she went from being kind and supportive ("hang in there, the world can't afford to lose any more cool people") late last week to being harsh and minatory last weekend--- without warning or discussion.

Crystal Method... I do love Crystal Method... Great music for drinking iced sake and dreaming of beautiful girls dancing with me.

No girls commented on the issues raised by the 7 + 2 list last night. Yes--- I do wish they would. Just as I wish they'd comment on the three Keith Gessen extracts. No one ever will, but I wish they would.

8 + 2 tonight... 8 (add: Montreal) + 2... But still no one has commented on the thoughts behind the entry. And anyone on the list--- Butler PA, SE Texas, NYC, wherever ---still finds the fact that the list is all by phone...and that they were on a list like that with me...to be shameful.

No one reads this--- not Ms. cataplexis, not Lissy at emigree, not even KdG at k_navit or Delighted at D-Land... Not even Liz V. at nightmareteeth, maybe not even Caitlin at kissmecaitlin or Stella at kissmecaitlin...

But I do wish there were voices out there. Or that I was Valuable enough to have a life.