Zzzzzzz

One of the things that I like best about the times when b&c is out of town (aside from the unrestricted opportunity to chase men, of course) is falling asleep with the DVD player on. It's a throwback to my single days, when I did that all the time.

I used to have a lot of sleep issues. Some of these have to do with light: I have a terrible time staying asleep if there's any daylight in the room, and I go to considerable lengths to block it out. I don't give a flying fuck about how my window treatments (yes, "window treatments" is the appropriate term for several layers of heavy fabric thrown over a curtain rod and another heavy layer of fabric covering all that and tacked to the wall) look from either inside or outside of the bedroom, but if I wake up early on a Saturday morning because of the sun, I am one pissed-off motherfucker.

Mostly though, the sleep issues stemmed from NMS, or noisy mind syndrome. I think the way the medical literature describes NMS is "the inability to tell your brain to STFU," though it is possible that I'm paraphrasing. In any event, back in the day, if I tried to lay me down to sleep, I often couldn't because I would start thinking about stuff. I will spare you most of the details of my inner monologue, but I will say that at least these days I'm thinking mostly about sex. In those days, I was often thinking about Victorian literature and/or whether I still knew how to derive the quadratic equation. It turns out that with NMS, it is not enough to have derived the quadratic equation earlier that afternoon. You still have to get up and complete the square again that night/morning.

Anyway. While daylight and most other light from the outside made it impossible for me to sleep, the comforting flicker and glow from the TV wasn't a problem, and the images and sounds distracted me sufficiently so that I could fall asleep without running to the Internet to check whether the fundamental theorem of calculus had changed in the last forty-five minutes. Oh, shut up. It could happen. Did you ever think Pluto would suddenly stop being a planet?

I'd always pick a familiar movie. If I didn't know what was coming, I'd be too interested to go to sleep. And then I'd usually drop off within a few minutes of beginning to watch it. I'd often wake up again when it was over, especially if the DVD menu had annoying music on a loop, but by then I was usually tired enough that if I groped for the remote and hit off, I'd be able to fall right back to sleep.

(By the way, I hear that a lot of people who have trouble sleeping use masturbation as a sleep aid. I don't get that. Jerking off gets me all worked up and alert. It's a great way to start the day, when I have time, but soporific? Not so much. Though I will say that one of the great pleasures of tax season is that I'm so tired that I can crank out a load and still fall to sleep. Score. Generally, though, if you need to sleep, you're much better off with sex with a real boy. It's easy to drift off when you've got somebody warm to hold onto. Especially if you've just fucked a load out of him.)

I mention all of this primarily because within the past few days, I've watched two movies that are excellent to fall asleep to. Sadly, I didn't purchase them with that in mind, but lemons, lemonade, whatever, right? The first was Gone But Not Forgotten, an American film about amnesia and park rangers. You must be thinking that a gay film about those topics cannot help but be hot, but in this, reader, you are mistaken. The movie is predictable, somewhat amateurish, and depressingly void of down-and-dirty. There is one semi-explicit sex scene, which -- don't let the cover fool you -- does not take place out of doors. If you're planning to jerk off to this scene, you won't want to dawdle: it doesn't last all that long. I will say that both of the male leads (hot guys in their thirties) are men that I'd happily fuck. Preferably both at the same time. The movie does have a certain sweetness to it, but it's the kind of sweetness you get when you absent mindedly put too much Splenda in your latte. Not that it's ever happened to me, of course. By the way, if you're looking for this movie, be aware that there is another movie of the same name. Presumably, that Gone But Not Forgotten doesn't have any gay sex at all, which, sadly, wouldn't distinguish it very much from the one I saw.

Comme un Frere is a French film that clocks in at just under an hour, a time that is entirely appropriate since it's pretty much an unrated After School Special. Almost everything about this movie -- beginning but not, alas, ending with the main character's ass -- is depressingly shallow. At the end of this movie, if you're still awake, you're likely to find yourself saying, "so what?" or, if you're culturally aware, "et alors?"

Most stories of young gay love deal with situations that are vastly removed from my own experience; nonetheless, most of them are very compelling. How hard is it for a story about a young man experiencing his first love and/or sex with another young man to be compelling? Harder than I thought, apparently. The biggest problem here is that the main character is unattractive. Not physically unattractive, emotionally unattractive. He's very detached: at every moment, you are half expecting him to say "Aujourd'hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas." And because of this distance, all of the sexual energy between him and various other men (any one of whom I would happily eat with a spoon) falls flat. The situation is not helped any by the fact that he's very inexperienced, so he's (appropriately) bumbling in the sex scenes. There are, at least, a few of those, and in most of them, he ends up being fucked by someone with a very nice ass, so you can imagine that the hottie is the meat in your sandwich. Or you can just lust after his straight best friend, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm not, but the guy in question is very cute, and you can probably interpret the film to be saying that his sexuality is at least slightly ambiguous, so go for it.