Somewhere in northern Spain, July 6, 2012 – Today is my 79th birthday! Happy Birthday to Me :-)
My gay – or bi -- teaching “sister” Ivan is here from Moscow, so he and I had a mini celebration with our mutual friend Pili and her 15-year-old gay (but does he know it?) son; and another mini-celebration with my landlady and Spanish teacher Elvira and her 10-year-old daughter, and we will have a birthday dinner together tonight.
Since I know few people here in this town of 130,000, this will be all the celebration I will get, but that is more than enough for someone old enough to try to ignore his birthday when it comes around once a year.
I received an e-mail greeting from my former Moscow lover Misha, whom I have a nude picture of celebrating my birthday in Moscow 12 years ago. Now 34, he is (corn?) holed up in a monastery in Kiev, Ukraine. I hear from him when he needs money, but of course, biophile that I am, I still love him.
I also had birthday wishes from my good friend and editor Basil in Moscow and from my sister in California, my older brother in North Carolina, and my nephew in Florida.
Speaking of ex-Moscow lovers, I got an e-mail from my beloved Sasha saying he is indeed coming and will arrive by bus in my northern Spanish town at 8 p.m. on July 20. He has apparently recovered from his still-unnamed illness, and asked for 100 euros. But when I sent them to him, he was for some reason unable to get them and asked me to send them to him via Ivan when Ivan returns to Moscow on Tuesday, July 10.
In the meantime, I am going to Casablanca, Morocco, on Tuesday in order to renew my visa. I’m going by bus, which will cost 305 euros in total (plus food, souvenirs, etc.), including the hotel, instead of the roughly $ 500 it would cost to fly to Marakesh. The trip will of course be longer and more tiring, but the 200 euro (about $ 250) difference makes it worth it.
Yesterday I received a text message from Javi (pronounced “hobby,” short for Javier) whom I met in the Madrid bus station enroute to Igor’s in Moldova a year ago.
He was a 28-year old male nurse living in Madrid, who taught me the word “maricon” for gay, but denied being gay himself. I have my doubts about that, however, since 1) he struck up the conversation with me; 2) he’s a male nurse (which almost certainly is spelled “gay”); 3) he has no girlfriend; and 4) he has stayed in touch with me by text message over the last year.
“When are you taking vacation?” he texted. “I am taking a vacation in September. Maybe we will see each other in Madrid or in northern Spain? A hug, ’bye.”
So today I answered his text, saying I would be in the Madrid bus station on the 10th of July from 7 to 8 p.m. and on the 15th of July from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. If he turns out to be gay, I don’t really know what I will do, with Sasha due to arrive on the 20th. I certainly won’t jeopardize my relationship with Sasha, but still Javi seemed like a very nice person.
We’ll see what happens next :-)
There’s a very nice 14-year-old whose name is also Javi living on the floor below me. His 30-something parents are also super nice, and yesterday afternoon when my doorbell rang I was shocked to see Javi. “My mother would like for you to come have a cup of coffee,” he said.
I had encountered him with his parents in the lobby a couple of days earlier, and she had informed me that Javi would be spending the next three weeks with a family in Maine to practice his American English.
When Ivan was visiting me one evening last week, we ran into Javi on the elevator with an adorable Yorkshire terrior named “Blackie.”
So Javi had a very pleasant chat in his mother’s apartment, where his grandmother also lives. When I return from Morocco, I will knock on his mother’s door and we will have another cup of coffee together. Then when Javi returns from Maine, we will get together for a chat. As a 14-year-old, of course he’s too young for any sexual fantasies, but he is very pleasant and engaging, and 14-year-olds are always fun to be around.
Speaking of sexual fantasies, former Moscow student Maxim arrived almost a month ago for a week’s visit. He is still so incredibly good-looking, and such a pleasant person to have around.
But my sexual fantasies went out the window when we arrived at my tiny apartment with its one three-quarter-sized bed.
From Madrid we had been driving a rental SEAT (acronym for Sociedad Espanola de Automóviles de Turismo – translated “Spanish Touring Car Company”), a Spanish automobile made by a company founded on May 9, 1950 by the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI), a state-owned industrial holding company.
The plant near Barcelona was opened by King Juan Carlos, still the reigning monarch of Spain, on February 22, 1993, and for a time the state was the major shareholder. Today it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen group, but is still considered a socialist company.
Maxim’s Transaero flight had been 2-1/2 hours late, de rigeur for flights from Moscow, but too late for us to catch a bus back to my home town until the next day. So we rented a Seat at 12:30 that night, and at 6:30 a.m. I opened the door of my tiny apartment.
He politely demurred when I offered to share the pint-sized bed with him. Instead, he curled up on the settee and slept for a couple of hours until we woke up to go shopping for an air mattress.
So much for my fantasies of seducing him!
Yet, I can’t help but think he is probably a closeted gay, as I was when I was his age. At 23, extraordinarily handsome and intelligent, he still doesn’t have a girlfriend. He took one look at my apartment and went out to buy, not only an air mattress, but a vacuum cleaner as well, then cleaned my apartment from stem to stern, including my microwave, and washed one-by-one the dusty ornaments I had brought with me from Russia. Straight boys don’t give a shit how unkempt an apartment is. He did.
But whether he is deeply closeted or just not into old farts like me, I never got to suck his gorgeous (I have never seen it, but it must be) cock. Following the blond Russian body hair pattern, he had no hair on his legs, stomach, or chest and didn’t shave his face the whole week he was here.
Like my Sasha, a beautiful, beautiful, hairless boy! Unlike my Sasha, I will never get to suck his gorgeous cock :-(
When I took him to meet Elvira for my Spanish lesson, she also couldn’t take her eyes off the “guapo” chico – Spanish for “beautiful boy” – and couldn’t resist giving him a goodby kiss.
Nor could I. When he left here on a Friday morning to drive back to the Madrid airport, I hugged him tightly for a long time, kissed him on the cheek twice, and sadly let him go.
Will I ever see him again?
Maybe. Ivan is making arrangements for me to accompany 15-year-old Saul to visit Ivan’s home in Moscow next summer, during which time I would certainly connect with Max. But will I want to abandon Sasha for a week or two in Moscow? We’ll have to wait and see, but I doubt if I will be willing to leave Sasha.
In anticipation of Sasha’s arrival, I have started a book, Life Begins at 80, which will chronicle our life together. Though I will only be 79 when he arrives on the 20th, it will give us a year to practice getting ready to be 80 :-)
My 20-year-old potential Spanish boyfriend, Carlos, suddenly quit writing right after Max left. I told him that Sasha was coming, and that he, Carlos, and I therefore would have little time before July 20 for me to chupar his polla – suck his cock. I haven’t heard from him since.
It’s just as well, since Sasha is much more important to me and my life right now, though it would have been an invigorating experience to experience a young Spanish polla.
Igor, in Moldova, again persisted with an e-mail saying that Denis had been home for a week and that he and his mother needed $ 150 to take immunization shots so they wouldn’t get TB. I decided to convert money into my checking account from savings so I could send him money and also buy my bus ticket to Casablanca before the 2nd Wednesday in July, when the U.S. Social Security Administration would deposit my July check, which would be too late to buy a bus ticket to Casablanca.
As it turned out, Social Security deposited my $ 1100 (about 870 euros) on the 1st Tuesday instead of the 2nd Wednesday. Still, I’m glad I made the money transfer because I won’t be worried about over-drawing my checking account.
An article in the Spanish newspaper said Morocco had turned away a gay cruise ship from Holland because it is an anti-gay Islamic country. It’s just a reminder that I have to mind my Ps and Qs. But I can stand anything for three days.
I also wrote Igor that the $ 150 was absolutely the last money I will be able to send. I wish him the best, but I have to take care of me and Sasha first.
Saw an article on Yahoo news that one of Obama’s former Harvard law professor had taken to YouTube to urge people to vote against him in November because "he has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States."
Roberto Unger, a long-time Harvard professor of law, said that Obama must lose the election in order for "the voice of democratic prophecy to speak once again in American life."
He acknowledged that if a Republican wins the presidency, "there will be a cost ... in judicial and administrative appointments." But he said that "the risk of military adventurism" would be no worse under a Republican than under Obama, and that "the Democratic Party proposes no new direction."
"Give the bond markets what they want, bail out the reckless so long as they are also rich, use fiscal and monetary stimulus to make up for the absence of any consequential broadening of economic and educational opportunity, sweeten the pill of disempowerment with a touch of tax fairness, even though the effect of any such tax reform is sure to be modest," he said.
This track record of Obama’s first four years "is less a project than it is an abdication," he protested.
Unger’s specific complaints?
Obama’s policy is financial confidence and food stamps.
He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices.
He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money.
He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice.
He has reduced justice to charity.
He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight."
He has evoked a politics of handholding, but no one changes the world without a struggle
Still, the probability that the next president will almost certainly name several justices to the supreme court makes me believe that it is important that a Democrat, not a Republican, be elected. In my opinion, Unger is right. Obama has failed miserably to restore American democracy, and a Republican president would probably hasten the process of revolution back toward a true democracy.
Still, I’ve seen enough “teach him a lesson” electoral politics -- (remember a lot of people voted for Nixon, who paved the way for Ray-gun and father-and-son Bush “to teach Hubert Humphrey a lesson”) -- to be very wary of the consequences of teaching candidates lessons by voting against them.
So I still have to urge a vote for Obama as the traditional American political choice of “the lesser of two evils.”
One final diatribe on the refusal of the world’s leaders to acknowledge the death of capitalism:
George Monbiot, a French scholar of current events, published the following in the June 26 issue of the British Guardian newspaper after the dismal failure once again of world leaders to look at the role of capitalism in the oncoming cataclysm of climatic collapse:
It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the First World War. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations -- the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Russia -- could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: Sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue “sustained growth,” the primary cause of the biosphere’s losses.
The efforts of government are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure, though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives, that it runs faster than ever before.
The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.
I’ve read that the scorching, wildfire summer you’re living in is what global warming looks like. So enjoy the experience. There’s lots more to come.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #326 - What is so rare as a day in June…
