I guess Proust has got me thinking; or else, perhaps what I’ve been thinking got me to finally read Proust. But for a long time, years maybe, I have for some reason had this intense desire to have a friend who lives in Paris. Parisian. We’d chat online, exchange emails, slowly mapping out our cultural differences and similarities. And I’d have a constant window into what’s going on over there, what the perception is of the US, trends. If he were a writer it’d be even better; then we could exchange work and hopefully I could sharpen up my French at the same time.

Well it just hasn’t happened. And I’ve really tried. I’ve searched for guys on livejournal, on myspace, even (shudder) gay.com. A lot of beginnings. But it always fizzles out. They always stop writing. They lose interest.

Maybe Paris is just the New York City of Europe. Maybe those Parisians have no time for cultivating a transatlantic friendship, just as many New Yorkers have a hard time believing that anything of value happens anywhere else in the country. NYC is still seductive to me, beguiling, but I’m aware of the tricks it likes to play and I’m not taken in by them anymore. I can look at NYC, amused, but wise to its attituide. I’ve only been to Paris once, so maybe I’m still naive. It’s an odd, sensual, autumnal sort of daydream. I can spin tales about it in my mind.

Proust writes about that: what we imagine is always more pleasurable than the reality of the thing we imagine.