I've been here for nine months now--- it's not really "the new flat" any longer. But it still doesn't feel like home. I remember that the pettable little K-dot at citydress once talked about that, about the idea of Home: what makes someplace Home? When do you know that you're Home? What does it feel like to be Home? This still feels like some place--- a sublet, a room in a pension ---I've rented for a semester or an academic year, a place where I'll be packing up to go to another teaching contract or another research fellowship. Ginny at ginny_mccoo told me once that she'd given away her Ikea bed and almost all her furniture so she should just move between grad school apartments in one car trip. I understand that--- I lived like that for years. I just wish there was someplace that I could think of as Home.

Once upon a time--- back in late winter ---I thought I'd found a suicide while driving home early one Sunday morning from breakfast. I turned down a small side street that ran under the interstate and saw what I thought was a body hanging from an overpass. I hit my brakes and stared and realised that it wasn't a body. It was a couple of shirts on hangers dangling from a piece of cord tied up in the space under the overpass. Someone homeless was living there in the brush that ran from the edge of the overpass down to the street--- camping out there. Not as disturbing as a hanging body, but not by much. Seeing someone's possessions--- someone's whole life ---there in the underpass space or hidden in the brush is disturbing enough.

I am thinking seriously of getting a digital camera. I've mentioned it to both Kelsey at clush and Alessandra at bel_ebat. I was a serious photography type as an undergraduate. I spent lots of Saturday mornings climbing over buildings and doing architectural shots, carrying Pentax and a Canon 35mm SLRs, changing lenses while wedged into building eaves. I miss that.

Kelsey at clush bought a Nikon D40 to take with her to South Korea and Germany. It's a serious camera, and a vur' good one. Alessandra at bel_ebat ordered a little Canon PowerShot sd1000 for herself last fall--- ordered it on her MacBook there in the middle of a class at UT-Austin. I liked it that she was ordering a camera in the middle of a geology lecture. The Nikon that Kelsey has is a nice little unit, though a bit expensive for me. Maybe I'll just get a little PowerShot (the newer sd1100 has image stabilisation, I'm told) and learn how to use digital cameras. I've never handled one before, and I know nothing about mating a digital camera with a laptop. I can do that for a couple of hundred dollars. It strikes me as something worth learning. And I do hope that Ms. Chang is taking a good digital camera with her to St.-Petersburg. She needs to take many, many photos while in Russia.

My sister came by this afternoon to drive me to a Big Box store. On the way back, we turned down a nearby street I hadn't been on in...maybe forever. One of the surviving narrow streets from the city of my childhood. I looked over at the shadowed north side of the street and saw something I know I'd never seen before: a small, old, and largely overgrown cemetery. A Jewish cemetery--- the sign on the aged, low wrought-iron gate just said "Jewish Cemetery". The German word is Friedhof. I've always liked the components of that word. Alter jüdischer Friedhof--- I'd never known there was one here. Though it's been there since 1868--- call that a small bit of research. I do want to go back there. It's the kind of place where I would've spent a long morning with cameras once upon a time, taking b/w shots and then doing a yellow filter and colour infrared film.

I'm drinking white wine tonight--- a small suggestion from Jillian at Gia-Carangi (D-Land), who came home from work at an upscale men's clothier in NYC today and drank off a large bottle of white wine. This is a gift chardonnay. I'll assume it came with good intentions last Xmas. Still--- it is chilled, and one can't go through bottles of extra dry sake or shochu every night.

Delerium's "Twilight" re-mix is playing. Imogen Heap will be up after that. I love her voice. And, yes, "Twilight" f/ Sarah McLachlan. It's such a brilliantly beautiful song. Ethereal, heartbreaking, elegant. And did I convince anyone out there to find Beautiful Pea-Green Boat's "Hammers of Islam"? I need to find more of Heather Wright's vocals. She did an album with Beautiful Pea-Green Boat in 1995 called "Maremma" on some German electronica label--- but where is she in the Year Eight?

And does anyone know whatever became of Legendary Pink Dots?

Ms. Chang says that she'd have married me in the summer of the Year Six for the asking. Once again--- always just slightly too late. Well--- loyaulté me lie, Richard III said: loyalty bindeth me. I didn't marry Libet, though I absolutely should've. But I'll always be there for her as her friend...or at least the Older Lover From The Past somewhere far away. And I'll do editorial advice for her thesis.

I can still have long phone conversations with Ms. Chang--- talk to her about Russian history and critical theory and why I despise post-colonial theorists. It means a lot that I can still talk to her. It does hurt that I won't be able to talk to Lissy again. Lissy at emigree says that she still sometimes hears from the boy with whom she used to lie out naked on a deck at a carriage house in Chevy Chase when she was in high school. He still calls from California, she says, to say hullo. He can do that, and of course I can't. I don't have his Value. I'd never call her lest it all be intrusive and ill-timed and unwelcome. I'd certainly never call her on a weekend lest she be out of town with her soldier-lover, and her little wine-red LG Chocolate keitai would ring while she was in NYC or aboard Amtrak or in a "nondescript brownstone hotel". Call it a rule--- never, ever call if your call might interrupt someone at something, or if you might call them while they're in the midst of travels and Adventures with a lover and you're trapped at home. If you're me--- never call anybody.

I really do need to drink a bottle or two of Unicum.

I'll make it official: I'm quite fond of "Hannah Takes The Stairs". It's a lovely clever delightful small film, and I'll be recommending to any lovely readers and correspondents still out there. "Hannah Takes The Stairs" is worth tracking down--- a film that did make me smile. And I officially have a major crush on Greta Gerwig, who plays Hannah. She's tall and leggy and has pixie-cut blonde hair and a quirky wit and lovely nipples and vur' sexy red eyeglasses. Ms. Gerwig herself used to be a fencer--- something I learned from the post-feature extras. I do like fencer girls. Didn't the girl who teaches at Oxford do fencing at B.U.? (I'm guessing épée, though I'd be utterly thrilled if she'd done sabre)

I did make a small steak tonight. Kosher salt and black pepper--- always the purist style. A small steak--- since it has to mean something when even wicked cachexical girls who pride themselves on their anorexia send you e-mails ordering you to eat. So--- I did the steak, and I'll sit here tonight with cold chardonnay and listen to Imogen Heap and to Massive Attack.

I will read Ms. Chang's thesis when she's done--- she's working with Mikhail Bakhtin's readings of Dostoyevsky. And I want to read Ginny at ginny_mccoo's thesis as well. Ginny is in a PhD program somewhere in Canuckia. I really do want to see what her doctoral thesis topic will be.

Ms. Chang wrote this evening that, apropos of my Essay Question, I'd been the one who introduced her to phonesex when she was in high school. I can't be ashamed of that--- and I'm certainly ridiculously proud that Libet chose me as a partner. And I'm glad that she discovered that she had a talent for it. But...I think what I hoped she'd do was write about the thing that does make me ashamed, the thing I am afraid of--- the thing I'd asked Kelsey and Lissy and stelladellasera and ginny_mccoo about: their thoughts on why phonesex is "empowering" and sexy for girls, but creepy/pathetic for males...especially anyone Older. I do live in mortal terror of a bald spot, of being thought a Rube, and of being re-written as pathetic and/or creepy by girls who once found me Valuable.

VNV Nation's "Empires" is playing... I wish I could dance to it. I wish I had a girl to dance with me.

I still haven't been able to read any notes or comments here or at Facebook that might be harsh or angry or dismissive. I'll never hear from jourdannex or dehumidifier or sirena73 again. Which of course is their right. But I will miss Jill and Rachel; I'll miss never getting to know Jenifer. And I'm hurt vur' deeply that KdG at k_navit won't speak to me after knowing me for twenty years. And of course I'm terrified that I'll never hear from kissmecaitlin or stelladellasera again, that whatever I did to angry everyone else will drive Caitlin and Stella away, too.

Lacey used to say that all my love letters were phrased exactly like essay questions on a test. Another girl told me once that all my love letters could be read very like suicide notes. I understood Lacey's comment--- as always, she was dead on. The other girl's comment I never understood at all.

Gresham OR... Who reads me there? Or in Brighton in Sussex? Or at Dubai in the Emirates? Who reads me in Sunnyside NY, or in Fayetteville AR? I do wonder about these things...

I'll drink the rest of the bottle of white wine tonight, and maybe watch part of "Miss Austen Regrets"... And I'll think of Greta Gerwig. One day I may have a digital camera. But I'll never be back in Budapest... And I won't call anyone. No one ever thinks my calls are welcome. And perhaps no one ever should think them welcome.

If I'm a voice, it's one alone out on the high desert night. No one reads me any more, and no one--- certainly no one from my Past, no lost loves ---will call across the aether and see if I'm still here.