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As a relatively progressive Democrat, I sometimes wonder what realm I am wandering in here. You all probably don't fit into any one pigeonhole like "moderate conservative" or "conservative Democrat." In discussions with my more ardent environmental activist friends, and my more cynical demi-Goth son, the disappointment in Biden is palpable. The problem is, as emigre69 indicates, that we put far too much on the shoulders of one man to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. Our system is supposed to work as a balancing act between three separate but ostensibly equal arms of governance. That… Read more

The current unpleasantness in Eastern Europe has a lot of us obsessing about the issues of war and peace. At some point, the deeply satirical musical parodies of Tom Lehrer came up in a comment thread about geopolitics, if you can believe such a thing, right here on Hamster. There are very erudite pervs lurking here, folks. In any case, whether we are talking about the potential for nuclear annihilation or a slower, dystopian slide on the skirts of climate change, the potential for apocalypse seems more real than it has in a long time, and I've been around a while. For some reason, thoughts… Read more

1978. . . it was the Summer of this song. . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8JPXwst6P4&ab_channel=AlejandroGabrielAtia%2FMusic Stevens County Washington, where an old high school friend persuaded me to come in the Summer of 1978, was a hilly, forested expanse in the Northeast corner of the state, right on the Canadian border where the Columbia River crossed over. My friend needed transport up there to finish off her paralegal internship, and I was in a period collecting unemployment after being laid off from a temporary appointment in the mailroom of a VA hospital. 1977 had be… Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIlSbwFgB10&ab_channel=RamProductions%26CollegeAllianceforMedia Recollection from three summers ago, in the halcyon pre-plague season days of yore. The "sturdy young babe who filled her cutoff jeans very nicely" appears in front of the stage in a red boat neck t-shirt, just about 1:12:06 in the recording. . . High energy ki*dd*os running wild across the lawn as staggering tod*dl*ers bopped to the beat Old hippies and young moms and dads, cool aunts, across at least three generations Watching the swifts and swallows chasing bugs in the warm Summe… Read more

Anyone who has spent even a little bit of time looking at my profile knows I have a wide ranging taste in porn and women, and the occasional trans woman at that. But I am a c***d of the Seventies, and in the Sturm und Drang around the newly evolving post-first-wave-feminist sexual revolution, the subject of body hair seemed enticing and fraught all at once back in the day. This is reflected in the evolution of porn and more general circulation girlie magazines, as well as the changing mores and modes I encountered as I stumbled through my tangled sex life. Looking at images of women through… Read more

Not a particularly original title for the subject matter, but it's a new draft of an old project of mine. . .this is fantasy. I found Susan at home alone again, lying on her bed in the early evening. I don't know why she was there napping, but I paused to gaze at her curled up in her big t-shirt and she just looked so cute. Her face was calm and serene in the dim light of dusk coming through the open window, her auburn hair spread on the pillow as she lay on her side, legs half curled up toward her chest. It was then that I noticed she didn't have her panties on, and as she lay… Read more

On the San Lorenzo with Lilly (This is half fantasy, half recollection. . . ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0vGjE4d-X0&ab_channel=ZoamChomsky I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. I remember this stretch of the San Lorenzo River, above Santa Cruz between Felton and Ben Lomond. You had to know the right jeep trail to take off Highway 9, and it wound down to another social trail that meandered off through sandy soil and redwoods. You could hear the wind sighing softly in the gently swaying younger redwoods, occasionally the echoing screech of a hawk. But another murm… Read more

KISSING “In France they kiss on Main Street. . . “ -Joni Mitchell They were a couple in their forties, I’d say. Maybe she was in her middle thirties. I don’t know. They were kissing. I mean really kissing. . . no mere peck on the cheek. Just really engaged in the act of kissing. There were a pair of rental trucks parked in the lot between a Walgreens and a pseudo-English pub, and they were standing there toward the rear of one of them. She was in a flowery dress. . . not a sundress, but one with a collar and proper shirt front, with a flared skirt below the waistline. Dark hair, k… Read more

AN IDYLLIC RECOLLECTION (This is mostly true. . . ) Everyone would like to believe that the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties had somehow made everything happen easily for horny counterculture types. Sorry to disillusion you all, but we had to work to get laid at least as much as any other generation. . . and I suspect a lot more fucking around took place in earlier years than some people think. In the early 1970s, I was prime draft bait, attending San Jose State in the Bay Area. I was a journalism major, and we were all thinking we were destined to break a story li… Read more

Nights in White Satin with Liz: A Dancer’s Story Ah, that I only had nights in white satin with Liz, but this bit of reverie will be about a dancer I followed with some regularity in San Jose in the mid to late 1970s. Like more than a few, I had a serious crush on her, but like bar maids in any joint where I was a regular, nothing would ever come to pass. And really. . . she never knew. You can cover a lot of cultural ground in a piece like this, but suffice to say by the mid 1970s I had moved on from my days as an earnest journalism major at San Jose State. I had dabbled at novel man… Read more