Kiss Me. Time Tripping. No Big Turn On. Two Liars.

--There are times when I feel overly kissed. The beginning of last summer was one of them. And it was true that through the spring I’d been involved in a lot of kissing. But that feeling of fullness comes to me at odds times, when I haven’t been kissing all that often.

Or odder yet, sometimes I feel the need for more kissing even though I am kissing a lot.

It’s the same with food. Sometimes, no matter how much I eat, I feel hungry. And other times, no matter how little I’ve had, I feel full.

It all goes to suggest I really know very little about hunger.

--Maybe I am starting or am even well into a mid-life crisis. There are little signs. Though I don’t think of my old man death, I think of being an old man. Of aging. Of being old.

Driving on a stretch of road between here and the grocery, a place that winds through forest, I get the sensation I got when I first begin to drive down windy roads, or any roads at all, that strange thing overcomes us when we are kids and the headlights slice through the dark and we feel there is nothing that can stop us.

It is as if I’m emotionally time tripping, some Billy Pilgrim who can’t make the journey backward full on, but feels as if he has.

And when I recognize that, that these feelings are not the feelings of a man my age, but of a kid, cleaner and with half his innocence in tact, I get a strong sense of longing.

I guess we can call that crisis.

--I never try to pick up girls at the gym. I’d never even speak to one if she didn’t speak to me. But I notice them, from beneath the bill of my cap or out of the corner of my eye. I don’t leer. I hope I don’t, anyway.

In any case, there was a woman today, half heartedly doing those thigh exercises where your legs are very far apart and then you squeeze them together and then let them be pushed apart again, the kind of machine you never say a man using. She wasn’t so much squeezing and unsqueezing as just letting her legs fling up and then slamming them closed.

She looked bored. Her body was thin but flaccid, with no real tone.

You could see the little tendon high up on her inner thing. It made me think of chicken, something I haven’t had to eat in 12 or so years, the way sometimes you bite a piece a tendon snaps.

Needless to say, it was no big turn on.

--In Britain, Bush was voted top screen villain for his role in Fahrenheit.

--After first saying that she had no respect for lip synching performers, and then blaming her band for what was apparently a lip synching performance of her own on SNL, Ashlee Simpson finally admits that that is precisely what she was doing.

Ever calculating toward possible endorsements, she said that she had to lip synch her performance because of acid reflux syndrome.

As if she didn’t seem a big enough moron on her reality tv show.