PrivateTim

So is it the next chapter where a safe falls on Will ala Wile E. Coyote? Gawd I hope so. At this point it has been 18 months in real time since the start of PMS, but only 4 months in CAP time and Will has gone from a virgin pining for John to a complete slut and no concerns or thoughts about anyone, but himself. This is the book where I started rooting for the sharks every time Will goes surfing.

I so had forgotten that Mr. Hudnut was at Harvard-Westlake at this time and that Peter was playing polo at Stanford for Dante.

The crap he pulled with Neil and Carson, then his attitude when Will ran away. Stef was right to be indignant.

Well, yeah. Except they screw around. :-). Well duh, that is what 14 year old boys do. Buried deep within? Mark wears his adolescence on his sleeve 😋 At this point, I would have thought "Paternity" was winding down. Who knew it had 57 more gutwrenching chapters to go?

No he shouldn't. Sue Ellen was playing with a rattlesnake, thinking she was in control. No one should be surprised when your pet rattlesnake sinks its fangs in you. Like you were around back then. You probably thought Spago was good. 🙂 I liked the original Spago off Sunset, but I was furious when they took over the Bistro Garden space. The Bistro Garden was my favorite place growing up and where my parents took me for my Middle School and High School graduation meals. We sat next to Heather Locklear there once and she smiled at me 😍🥰

This story (CAP) has so many dang characters it is impossible to work them all in and it has to be hard as an author, remembering exactly what your vision/personality for every character you have created. I'm glad you see it that way. Some older guys forgot their adolescence, and think kids like Will should be beaten until they bow deferentially to their elders. Naw, you just ship them off to Carlsbad Army Navy Academy......

Not really... everyone knows that Stanfurd girls are ugly because they are just guys who studied their balls off...

I think he is more trouble than he is worth, Did you know it had 63 more chapters at this time or did that just sneak up on you? No he ain't. Meh... no comment.

As I read this 11 years later, it needs to be said, two things can be true at the same time. Stef has been perfectly right on with Brad and Robbie this book. But it is still easier to parent someone's else's kid. I have no doubt Stef would have done a better job, but I also think Will would have sorely tried his patience and JP's as well. I did. And for the non-surfing crowd, a Hawaii wave is much more powerful than a California wave. A wave hitting the mainland has the continental shelf to dissipate some of its power (energy). It may not effect the height, and a 20 foot face wave in CA can still kill you, but in Hawaii it can obliterate you. The Hawaiian islands are mountain tops sticking above the ocean. Mauna Kea is the highest mountain on earth, eclipsing Mt. Everest. Because there is no continental shelf to dissipate any power from the wave, even a 6 foot face, ala Sandy Beach shorebreak, can kill you or snap you in two. People don't really change, they modify their reactions and behaviors if they figure themselves out. Will ain't going to change either. Oh, and I still think Jeff is a douchebag 11 years later, maybe mores so.

I grew up in the era of email and internet. I remember going through CompuServe, then Prodigy to AOL. I was fortunate to learn early on NOT to send an email just because I had finished writing it and especially not if I was writing in anger. I would type it and then leave it alone for at least an hour. When I reread it an hour later, even I cringed at how strident or even mean I'd been. And when I say, "I learned..." I mean only after I had really pissed off good friends with obnoxious responses to them because we were not in the same place on some matters. The lessons were painful, but worth the life lesson.

Bra, if you don't understand Ryan's about face, you didn't have enough sex when straight guys when you were a teen. 1) You're a fag 2) I'm not a fag 3) That was gross ) Bro, can you suck me again? We don't know who did and did not send Will an email or call him. We only saw a select number of the emails to move the story. As to the phone, all we know is who left voicemails (I think). When your phone is off, you don't get a log of who called. I get people to do what I want because I convince them to. I am Wade, or my namesake Father Tim, I am cool and calculating and don't react. I learned at a very early age how to not give off any reactions. I can manipulate people, if you choose to use that term, without them knowing they are being manipulated. Will is MUCH safer in the mainland surfing scene than he is surfing with locals (if you know what a 'local' is in Hawaii) in Hawaii.

The Capitola Mall survived, unlike the Hawthorne Mall, ironically built the same year as the Capitola Mall. These malls, along with the Westminster Mall (1974) and Laguna Hills Mall (1973) were built in eras when the thinking was, you just can't have too many malls. Capitola survives because there is little else around. Hawthorne was killed by Del Amo and South Bay Center; Westminster and Laguna Hills were killed by South Coast and Fashion Island. Hawthorne is of course the interesting one because it was just flat out abandoned so YouTubers and Tik Tokers could have a field day.

I think it was crucial that Stef was there, otherwise Brad and Robbie would be feeding off each other on how bad Will was and not focus on the chain of events that led to this point. Stef broke through Brad and Robbie's self-righteousness pretty quickly. “Holy shit! Look at my car!” He kicked the tire, an ironic gesture. “What the fuck is wrong with people? Why do they have to fuck up my car when they get mad? " I am enjoying this story more the second time through. You pick up more. I especially love the line above. It reminds me of Indiana Jones, "snakes, why did it have to be snakes."

Bear in mind it is fiction, not a true-life story. The puppet master pulling the strings needs them to behave a certain way so he can move the story where he wants. And bear in mind that people do things out of character in real life too. There are whole giant books written on Moral Relativism so we won't get to an agreement on what is moral, but there have to be better standards, consistent standards that society can agree on to have a society and not destructive chaos.

No, no. I am a laid back beach guy, but I know how to ACT snootier.... And if you thought the Ritz was snooty, you should have seen what nouveau money did to SF and SV in these. Thank goodness Capitola and Soquel stayed low key.

How about Cruella?

I really like this 'reading for a second time' thing. Having read the full story once and the subsequent books, you pick up certain things. I think at this point Sean has fallen for Wade. The exact thing Wade didn't want is happening, which is maybe a cautionary tale for everyone else. If you aren't a skanky hook-up guy who sex is just recreation for, watch out. For a 'sex is intimacy' guy, you can't just become a 'skanky hook-up guy', that is not your emotional make-up.

Callan would work well, but a trust company isn't necessary. Actually a separate trust company make a lot of sense, especially with very large, multi-diverse trusts. A trust company's sole job is to work for the benefit of the trust/client. As we've seen, a bank that also serves as the trustee might not behave that way.

When three U.S. diplomats ran off a mountain road in Bosnia on August 18, 1995 and were killed, it was front page news in the NY Times. It would not have been a secret he was related to Senator Danfield, nor that he was gay. Not really tough stuff to find out.

It doesn't work like that. One day you have this sweet 12 year old kid who does pretty much what you tell him. You love surfing with him, you go to his water polo games and swim meets and all is hunkey dorey. Then he turns 13. Oh my gawd, what have you done to my sweet little boy, where did he go. Usually it takes longer for the rifts to grow, but in Will they are accelerated because of his environment and unique world. Brad hasn't been one of those, "call me Brad" dads, he's been pretty conventional. We have no reason to suspect that Brad has not been a disciplinarian with Will the first 12/13 years of his life. There are just much more limited way to get in serious trouble when you are 12 and younger. I think expecting your 14 year old son to NOT go to college parties is pretty reasonable. Asking your kids where they are going, who they are going with, what they are doing is normal parenting all the way through high school. Telling them when they had to me home is pretty standard too. I get the need for dramatic and poetic license. Will feels a need to party like a college student when he is 14. Brad feels a need to stop Will from partying like a college student when he is 14. Each should understand that the other is performing as expected. Yes, so I could count the number of times I drank in high school on one hand. The guys at the USC SAE house who knew me knew that. The evil concoction the convinced me to consume (Sangria) had fruit slices floating in it. How bad could that be? Bad. Very, very bad. I was so sick still when I got home Sunday my mother thought I had the flu.

OMG a Matt fan and JJ fan commenting in the same chapter.... Oh how things change in the next couple of years.

Status? Richer than Croesus. It is one thing when people think you are well off, but attitudes change when they find out you have FU money.

We don't really know how much JP has because of course it is crass to discuss such matters, but his trusts from the Crampton family have to be sizeable and with Stef probably managing them partly, and the spike in land values in the Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, JP must be loaded. I also think Brad is up there too. More than tax laws it is location, location, location. I don't know how far out Mark thought this story out, but he could not have picked a better place than Stanford and the environs of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View et al. It is not a coincidence that Silicon Valley encompasses Stanford. In a sense Stanford created it along with an assist from the U.S. Navy. Stanford grads Bill Hewlett and David Packard got the ball rolling and it snowballed with a constant flow of venture capital supporting Stanford researchers and more success bred more venture capital. There are a LOT of very wealthy Stanford professors based on 1% or even .5% of ventures they helped birth. By 2020, if Wade isn't a multi-billionaire, he really messed up someplace.

Did all guys just fuck first, and then get to know each other afterward? It is interesting on what you pick up on the second time through. The answer to Wade's question above is, "yes". In the gay community, by and large, fuck first, talk later. I am the only person in my circle of friends who knows the first AND last name of every guy I've slept with and I knew their first and last names before we slept together.

It is an indication of how fucked up Matt is in his single minded pursuit of Carl. Matt thinks he is playing Carl and has no idea he is the one being played