Spent the morning at the coffeeshop re-reading Stuart Stevens' "Malaria Dreams" and making story notes. Tallinn Old Town on a high summer night, chilled vodka at an outside table, and a lovely American co-ed talking to the Older Man there with her and telling him about her Dark Secret...

Walked across to the Zeppelin Pilots' Club for lunch. Two Tiger beers and a plate of fried crawfish tails at the bar. Home to sleep with Philip Glass' piano etudes playing. Awakened a couple of hours later by thunder outside the window, short and sharp as rifle shots. It's still raining outside, and I can hear thunder moving north and west across the river.

Pleasantly tired at the Zeppelin Pilots' Club--- I'd watched "Mad Men Season 2" last night and then been on the phone to my Birmingham girl 'til 0400. Pleasantly tired, too, waking up to thunderstorms outside. My green-eyed opera girl should've been there to wake up with me, to listen to Glass' "Metamorphosis" and curl up in my arms in a darkened room.

Laura wrote a brief entry about missing her grandmother's cornbread--- a very Southern thing: fresh hot cornbread with butter, or with butterbeans and their juices spooned over it. I had to write her back about that. I have the same kind of memory: the cornbread my grandmother would make, the big high-ceilinged kitchen in an old frame house just outside a small town north of New Orleans. My mother knew how to make that same cornbread, and she'd serve it with round steak and gravy. I miss those things. Laura wrote back to say that she was glad the two of us had both grown up in the South and shared memories of the South. I'm glad about that, too. Southern Louisiana and northern Alabama are very different, but there are things she and I do share as Southerners. I spent a lot of my life making sure I didn't have a "Southern" accent and not fitting in with a lot of Southern culture or stereotypes. But I am Southern-born. New York is my city, and the place where I've felt most at home. I'm a city kid at heart. But there are parts of the Deepest South I'll always have with me.

The Village Voice on-line says that the All Points West festival last weekend was hit with heavy rainstorms that kept audiences away and reduced the site to mud. I suppose I'd be a terrible person to say that I'm glad monsoons hit All Points West. That would all be based on envy and bitterness toward a certain person, and my own feelings of inferiority toward her life now. But I can't feel that. I really can't. I could quote Marcus Aurelius if I wanted: The best revenge is not to be like that. I do feel envy and bitterness when I think of her. But I shouldn't, and I know it.

Letter meme answers... Some very intriguing ones are out there. Marina at prettyuniverse chose E and selected "ethnomusicography" and "extragalactic astronomy". Very nicely done. My green-eyed Laura had O and C and chose..."Older Lovers" and "One-way tickets to strange countries" and "Clandestine affairs with older men in other states". I like that rather a lot.

Talking last night late, I did tell her that I always fall for girls who look a bit like Shane from "The L Word". She laughed that gentle Southern-inflected laugh: Don't we all, darling? Which is perfect, too. And she will get a keffiyeh and a hipster-girl cigarette case.

Laura tells me that she's told one female friend about me...and told her Gay Best Friend. No outrage or horror so far. She moves back into her rooms at university tomorrow, so we'll see what her roommate may have to say. Of course, I do think my opera girl likes having a Dark Secret, and I of course like being a Dark Secret. "Clandestine" is always a fun word.

I liked the first three episodes of "Mad Men" Season Two. Slow-paced, but a fair amount of character development. I'll watch three more tonight. I like spending nights with white wine and Netflix. I just wish I had a leggy and green-eyed Birmingham girl in just one of my dress shirts there on the floor by the worn velvet couch to watch films with me.

A beautiful girl in just a man's dress shirt... That's been the hottest thing I can imagine since ever...well, since ever. All the way back to junior high, really. I can remember being thirteen or fourteen and just being utterly thrilled by photos of actresses (Bond Girls, I think) in nothing but a man's shirt. The question, of course, is--- white or blue? White is more classic. Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo, I think, would do best in white. Lacey liked my old Brooks Bros. buttondowns in that trademark framboises-et-creme faded pink. Laura sent a couple of photos of herself in a pale blue buttondown. She's wonderfully dark-tanned, and that just may be her colour. Though I'll have to see her in French blue.

Tiger beer at the Zeppelin Pilots' Club, Tiger and Asahi and Sapporo Dry in the fridge at home. If Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo goes to Kenya, I'm told that the clear favourite beer in Kenya is called Tusker. I'll have to hear Miss Ginny's report on Tusker, and on Castle Lager, the South African rival to Tusker. Though I am told that Mozambique makes very good beers--- 2M, Laurentina Clara, and Manica. You can buy Tusker at grocery chains in England, but I'd love to get Miss Ginny's report on Tusker and 2M and Castle from their home turf. If she does go to Afrique, I need postcards and beer reviews...

I haven't been to the Met in far too long. I have to see the Met and the Cloisters again, soon. And I have to take the lovely, leggy Laura to the AMNH. She and I must spend a Friday at the Met, and then a long Saturday at the Museum of Natural History being the Royal Tenenbaum siblings. We can be Richie and Margot all through a long autumn Saturday. We make a good couple for that.