love

In keeping with my recent wedding-borne inquiry into default notions of romantic future, the arc of the story, and also owing to the fact that I finished my most recent book conquest — the inestimable Mountains Beyond Mountains (we’re helping out PIH w/their drupals at chapter3) — I’ve been considering the possibilities.

Fact: to the best of my knowledge all but a recent few of my significant romantic interests (the “old flame” category) are now married, engaged to be married, or have been married. Some of them even have children. This would seem to suggest that the kinds of girls I’ve been into over the years are the marrying kind. Also it would seem to suggest that my future more likely than not lies in undiscovered country.

Counter-Fact: I haven’t been in any relationships lasting a year or more, and have never lived with a lover. Also, to put it diplomatically, I don’t have a strong track record of fidelity.

Fact: I really really like kids. I’ve always loved children, was a babysitter as a young man, and I’ve gotten into arguments with people who suggest that it’s morally questionable to bring new ones into the world (as opposed to say adopting). I seem to have a pretty strong desire to pass on my DNA.

Counter-Fact: the particular circumstances of my life (massive work, lack of steady location, etc) are not conducive to settling down. I’ve also shown a particular affinity for rambling, as well as a resistance to compromising personal goals or priorities for the sake of others.

This is how I tend to think, but really this kind of score-carding is bullshit, a truth I’m glad to realize. What I’m interested is not an evaluation of my worth or readiness as a comrade in nesting, but rather some kind of concept of my purpose and aim in a life of love. Looking back, I’ve variously taken on the gestalt of hopeless romantic or shameless hedonist, both with some success and some failure. Neither of these seem particularly apropos now. Some new fantasy of love awaits.

I recently invented the idea of “power dating” for myself, partly because I liked the phrase linguistically, and partly because it seemed like a decently dirty criterion to evaluate potential opportunities. However, what I find really is that I need some kind of objective, goal, or at least understanding of method. Putting aside things I want theoretically in some far-off future, what am I looking for in the precious present? That’s a good fucking question.

For now, I’m still grappling with the unknown, but actually considering this is leading me to permit a whole universe of potentialities, all of which embrace the “facts” but none of which fit into some Leave It To Beaver narrative. More than that, getting out from under the weight of figuring this all out — seeing it as a fascinating question of life rather than a problem to be resolved, hopefully in the next five to six years — is liberating.

New tag. Drupal set message “Power dating.” Backstory on that is here, and I’ll elaborate with new thoughts now.

Well, actually, first I start with self-quote, to illustrate just how sisyphusian this feels at time. From my report back from Baja, which feels like another lifetime:

I realized, for instance, just how blatantly I’ve been keeping myself out of range of romance out of fear more than anything else. Sex and love have always been intertwined in my experience, and avoiding one is a pretty good way to skirt the other. Much as I bemoan my lonely state, it’s my own choices and habits of action that render it so. I’ve been rationalizing this to myself as a kind of jaded maturity, but now I think that’s just bluster.

The truth is I’m afraid of what might happen: of getting hurt, of hurting someone else, of getting into unknown territory where the possibility of both those things just gets greater. It’s weak sauce, really, because this is what life is all about; but as they say the first step towards finding a solution is admitting you have a problem. So there’s that.

I also realized in conjunction with the above that I’ve been looking backwards a lot, for similar reasons, when really I should be looking forward. The possibilities of the future are almost literally endless, and when I begin to entertain them I feel a real true gut-level sense of trepidation — “don’t make plans; don’t invest; shit doesn’t pan out, remember?” — and it feels like it might be that good kind of Allen Ginsburg brand of fear. The kind I know I should pursue.

That was nine months ago. Today I remain in almost exactly the same position. The Girth sort of confronted me with this last night — in the good way that friends do — as we were getting ourselves fired up to go out in Berkeley. Because it’s true. I am afraid, and even as I can feel my whole being becoming increasingly energized, I have nervousness and trepidation in my heart. I have performance anxiety, concerns about failing to meet my own high standards. More than any of this, I have layered defense mechanisms which are used to rationalize and obfuscate the whole situation under the auspices of reducing hassle.

This is childish. It is time this ended.

So we went out to a nice little drinking establishment where they have ginger beer (great with gin) and soothing live jazz music. I rode my new Mission Bicycle down just for kicks. After a little seat adjustment it feels like god’s own chariot, and I’m actually kinda bummed to be leaving it here for a while. Doesn’t do me much good in the HC though (or doesn’t it…).

Anyway, the speedy ride and sparksplus get me well-primed to hit the scene. Not that we’re doing anything crazy, just having a couple cocktails and looking at pretty girls of a Saturday evening. There are two such behind the bar, and as a sign of how high I feel I’m riding of late, I skip on past the Girth’s worldly wisdom of not attempting to engage such creatures — to wit: pretty women who wait tables, sling coffee or pour drinks are virtually un-flirtable owing to their massive overexposure — I give the one a little friendly sass while ordering our beverages.

Conversation turns to the increasingly bourgeoisie nature of our lives, and my man is nice enough to humor me with some flattering words about how I’m going to be successful without losing my humanity, and to let me spin out my faux philosophical ramblings on our first-world problems. I invent a good bit about Maslow’s pyramid of human needs as a series of mechanisms for social control, and the ascending of said pyramid as the sweet road to freedom. We talk about the general fuckedupness of the world. The evils of the prison system. The gradual stripping away of the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments (only true checks against a police state), and the strong chances that we will get a Democratic president and congress, but not universal health care.

The revolution misses us, and we miss it. Part of my feeling better and better about life makes me think once again that there’s something good to be done with our cultural capital and freedom to work outside institutional structures. There’s a lot of injustice, especially when you’re not a financially comfortable, physically fit, straight white male American. What to do with all that dumb luck, you know?

By and by we get another chance to make friendly with the bartender since the gentleman to our left is being a bit of a prick. Common enemies are good at producing solidarity. Her shift finishes at about midnight and she takes a seat next to my buddy, and I think suddenly this has potential, though she spends a good amount of time talking to the handsome long-haired fellow further to the right and at some point a very skinny man with a very trendy haircut enters and exerts some signs of social ownership.

It’s at this point that I disengage, and upon reflection I’m a little disappointed. She was obviously at least somewhat interested in me/us, initiating small-talk and asking to try on my hat, etc. She introduced herself, and when we did finally roll out she put her hand on my chest and told me it was nice to have met me. Her skinny/trendy companion could easily have been an affectionate homosexual friend, but I used the pretense of a putative boyfriend to ignore the fact that this girl, who I legitimately thought was attractive, seemed to think I was attractive as well. And this is a move borne of fear, or perhaps even cowardice.

So yeah, baby steps. I’ve been making some progress. Getting it up to flirt in the first place, and I did an ok job talking to a cute girl down at Coachella, and with a couple of shiny local faces in the elevator at work, and having nice correspondences and the like. But the killer instinct is lacking. As my brothers at Wu-Tang Financial remind me, you gotta play this game rough: in, out, grab, get, bonk. Coffee’s for closers.

To that end, I think the next logical step for the plan of Power Dating is Operation Get Real Hot, which involves improving my personal grooming routines and getting into a healthy gym habit for the next three weeks I’m up north. After that it’s Operation Get Out There And Mix It Up, which is a little more of an unknown.

I decided to take a peek at my google analytics the other day, and I discovered that by far and away the most popular post on my site over the year to date is one I’m actually rather proud of: Me And Maslow’s Pyramid of Human Needs Down By The Schoolyard. Almost 1000 people have seen that so far this year. Even assuming half of them were robots (and hey, robots need philosophy too), that’s still immensely gratifying.

Its no secret I’ve been burning the candle at both ends lately. When I come down to SF it tends to get worse, feeding my workaholism. Even though this is ostensibly a thriving cosmopolitan metro area, I really have no life here, and with an office it’s easy to stay at work to the point where coming home is just a trip you make to sleep before getting up to do it again. It reminds me of the MFA days in a way, or college. Any of those times when I was doing stuff for 16+ hours a day and having no sex.

Not that I’m complaining. Coming home late and hungry and unable to find a can-opener to make myself some tuna salad notwithstanding, I’m a ways away from the point where this pattern really generates any kind of meaningful irritation or negative response. Indeed, for as long as things can be kept in the power curve — never forever, but what is? — this isn’t a bad way to exist. It makes me productive and relatively happy w/feelings of accomplishment, etc, and possibly even provides good grist for later milling when time is less tight.

And still, I can’t help but feel like something is slipping past me here. I mean, the impending birthday is probably driving these feelings, sure, but I can’t shake the sensation that I’m whistling into oblivion. I can’t help but note the toll my current pace of activity (and past times of uber-business) put on my existing relationships, the massive impediment it poses to forming new connections.

To put it another way, I’ve never fallen in love in the midst of a workaholic bender. I’ve never even come close, to the best of my recollection. I’ve generally been frustrated and lonesome. It’s a startling and embarrassing admission of mortality, but apparently my own tender human flower needs time and space to unfold. Who would have thunk it.

Back in March in Boston, I shared a meal with my friend Kate, and she told me about a dinner party at which the initially-suspect hostess (a psychiatrist or psychologist or some other consciousness manipulator) orchestrated the initial chit-chat around a series of questions designed to lead to meaningful table conversation. It turned out to be quite a winning program. One of the questions asked — and one we discussed as quite an illuminating query if one takes it seriously — is that of “what is it really that gets you out of bed in the morning?”

Whether you’re one who’d rather stay in bed, but you’re coaxed/driven out by some feeling, or the type who just can’t stay put, or even someone who’s depressed and feels like they’d just rather call it off for a day, we all rise and meet the world at some point. Why? What is it that prompts or provokes us to expend that human effort? What is it that fuels our first conscious acts? It’s a fascinating question to ponder, and a revealing one to share.

For me the gut reaction, and one I don’t love to be honest, is that there are things and people that count on me. Shit will get fucked up if I don’t get out of bed. There are many other amazing reasons to love being alive, some of which I feel from time to time, but that’s what that causes me to rise and meet the day: responsibility and obligation.

Now, I can spin this as a positive thing, and it’s arguably not a bad character trait to be responsible, to feel a sense obligation, noblesse oblige even. Still, in my heart of hearts I feel this is evidence of a huge problem for me. While I clearly do have a sense of obligation, and it works, and I can appreciate how responsibility figures large into the larger arcs of life, I don’t really believe that this is a sustainable state of things for me personally.

For as long as I’ve known myself, I’ve been motivated by my passions and ambitions. While those are clearly still in play, I feel they’re increasingly dulled, sublimated, subsumed under various auspices. My starry eyes are all but extinguished, my grand sense of ambition whittled down to positive fiscal growth. That’s no way to be. It’s rather sad, actually.

In any event, the conclusion I came to whilst pondering this on the BART is that I should probably do some things for myself. I have no idea what those things might be, but it seems necessary (if not necessarily right) to root around inside for some purely selfish motivations, and see if they can’t be satisfied.

So, it’s this kind of head-space that I take with me to the deserts of SoCal, for a bonafide vacation weekend. It’s good timing, really. I’m hoping that a change of scenery and company will help jog my thinking further.

Spring Awakening is a famous pre-expressionist German play by Frank Wedekind, revolving around the onset of puberty among some schoolchildren in a deeply repressed 19th Century community. It has a new life as a somewhat simplified or dumbed-down Broadway musical. Since I first read the text about a decade ago in College I’ve been borrowing the title, which has an appealing lyrical quality, as a shorthand for the semi-cyclical (re)emergence of my lust for life.

It is the vernal time again, and Humboldt County isn’t disappointing. The sun is shining, and last night I went out to a kick-off party for our nascent roller-derby league. Our friend Hanna is participating (around her regular gig down in SF learning to tattoo; that’s dedication) and there are a bunch of other good second-degree connections. The place was loud and full of ruckus, rock bands and dance-teams, a silent auction of art, desserts and donated items. With a minor amount of cronyism and a little but of quick bargaining, we managed to score a truly atrocious/awesome USA USA USA blanket: the flag, the eagle and a FDNY truck marked 911. Made in Korea. Amazing.

It was the first night of spring and also the full moon, the club chock full of attractive people with ambiguous sexual agendas. Mine was/is rather nonexistent. Much as I relish the return of the sun and the verdant fertility on display all around me, to-date I’m personally untouched. I’m sure that if I gave myself enough rope to get all boozed-up and wild like the old days there’s an odds-on chance I could hang myself sufficiently well to at least make out with someone. It’s an occasionally appealing thought, but it hasn’t happened.

These days I’m traveling more regularly than ever. I’m trying to hire people. The muscles on top of my cheekbones involuntarily twitch from time to time, which I assume is stress-related. As is to be expected of such desperate declarations, my new-years resolution of “less work, more sex, flossing” is falling flat. Even the flossing has become spotty, though twice a week is much better than never.

The above reads like a complaint, and I suppose it is, but actually I’m feeling pretty upbeat lately. If I quit cudgeling myself for being such a workaholic for a second, the sweet kick of being busy and engaged lifts me up. I have a feeling something similar would happen in my pants if I quit preemptively busting myself down for being a Lothario. It’s an occasionally appealing thought.

Work and Play: New Perspective on Relationships

On top of being conventionally successful, the process of starting a business with two other equal partners has been an incredible learning experience. It really is a relationship, and not always an easy one. We’re friends, just like you’d want in most any relationship, but there’s a whole lot more being piled on top of that friendship.

I realized the other day that this endeavor has gone on far longer than any sustained romantic relationship, and that I’ve been undeniably more generous with my time, energy and patience in building the business than I have heretofore with matters of the heart. Not that I see (or want to start seeing) Love as a business proposition, but it is a revealing contrast.

Another aspect of this is the how these various pursuits intersect with the inner drive of my ambition. The connection with work/career is fairly obvious, but it occurs to me that in my more romantically prolific days much of that action was aided and abetted by my desire for personal accomplishment. It’s a crappy and egotistical thing to admit, but for a lot of my young adult life I wanted to prove myself a good lover. It was a brass ring to reach for, and that was part of what drove me.

Today I don’t have that ambition, nothing to prove. Indeed, getting back to that preemptive bust-down I mentioned before, I’m more worried about just what might happen. While I have theoretical ambitions to be a family man, that’s not the sort of thing that translates into day-to-day real world behavior. Indeed, to the extent that this ambition creeps onto the scene in influencing my actions, it’s more of a buzzkiller than anything else.

To conclude, I really need to loosen up and have some fun. Probably that means setting some boundaries for myself, figuring out a more reasonable goal to reach for. Is there anything wrong with just having a good time? And isn’t it through simple acts of openness and joy that greater truths and possibilities are uncovered? This is what my experience tells me, and what my written beliefs profess. My habits of action are currently misaligned; have been for some time.

The question is how to let go lightly, forget the cheek-twitching stressors and let myself be once again swept up in the truth and beauty all around. Good question.

Somewhere on the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.

Notwithstanding the fact that it’s the intellectual equivalent of cocaine cut with baby-laxative — which let me tell you really isn’t any kind of fun, appealing though it may seem — there’s lately been a new spasm of comment around the crypto-racist tome The Bell Curve, a book that tries very hard to create an intellectual edifice in support of timeworn prejudices about who’s smart and who’s not based on skin-tone and “cultural background.” Poo on that.

This isn’t a post about politics though, so I’ll leave the debunking behind the links above. Rather, it is a jumping off point to talk about the personal conundrums of intelligence, or more generally “capacity for life.” This is a post that’s filed under “authentic experience, hubris, love” and “juicy.” So then, lets get to it.

First principles. Statistical metrics of measuring human capacity and/or achievement are suspect. Highly. At the same time, it’s also undeniable that there are differences in people’s capabilities and accomplishments, especially borne out over time. Equality is an ideal, something to be pursued in principle but impossible, even counter-productive, to enforce in practice. Different people do different things, and this is Ok, and probably Good.

Disclaimers aside, I’ve got good stats. Standardized general testing consistently puts me in the 99th percentile. That’s one in a hundred, one of 10,000,000+ in China, nowhere unique or even really special, but certainly someone who’s “talented and gifted,” as they say.

But it ain’t easy being a smarty-pants, as a casual acquaintance with The Simpsons will tell you. Being a bright person in a lowbrow world is stressful, and a lot of people don’t really make it. I think of the girls I’ve met who pretend to be dumb until it’s no longer an act, the freaks and geeks walled off from social contact out of self-defense, the poor souls who opt to self-medicate away their standard deviations from the norm. I think about the way that my own perspective as a 1-percenter creates pitfalls and traps.

I started working up this blog topic after I wrote of my recent experience becoming a “class-traitor”. Contemporary culture uses money as a crude proxy for human value, capacity, achievement. It’s near the top of that list of suspect metrics (right up there with “how many people have you slept with?”) I wish we could all do away with.

Having been raised w/my hippie values, money-as-virtue isn’t something I can really get behind. But you can’t help growing up a little North American Scum; it gets into your head. The struggle around that was what animated my thinking/writing, and I found it to be interesting and good to ponder.

Lurking beneath my riffs on fiscal solvency and the social distance it creates is a much more hairy bundle of questions about real human capacity, intelligence, energy, chi, whatever. Why is it that some people are leaders and others are followers? Why is it that some people are more charismatic, smarter, able to get more done than others? And if you think you’re one of these people, what does this mean for you?

I find myself stuck between the egalitarian and elite. On the one hand I believe that “everyone can/should be able to live like me, do the things I do, understand the things I understand.” But people are different. Regardless of what might exist in the realm of possibility, the way I live and the things I do are not accessible to everyone, and I want to be with my own. There’s an in-built drive to seek this, and there’s an undeniable allure to the notion that you’re a part of something special, discriminating, un-common.

People start using terms like “level” and “league” when they talk about this sort of stuff. “Big fish, small pond” and all that jazz. I’m generally uncomfortable with that talk. There are enormous problems with elitism and hubris. Just from a practical standpoint, exclusive cliques don’t work out well, whether they’re out on the playground or running the country. Once you start reflexively screening out people or ideas based on the perception that they’re somehow “beneath” you, you’ve started concocting your own downfall.

Yet at the same time, the pattern-matching part of the right brain and the evaluative and analytic part of the left brain are constantly at work categorizing the other human beings around us. This is natural, inescapable, and hardly without merit.

Perhaps this isn’t the sort of thing that other people get hung up on, but I find myself stuck on it a lot lately. After a lifetime of moving to bigger and bigger “ponds,” I took a leap into a much smaller and more private pool. It’s a more sparse social world, less ambitious and boisterous compared to what I’m used to, and I don’t have many people around who really understand what I do or who can play my brand of intellectual tennis.

Most heavy on my mind is how this factors in on questions of Love. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I need a woman who I can go toe-to-toe with on multiple levels, and this hasn’t been easy to find. Partly this is because I almost immediately slip into competitive modes of thought (e.g. “toe-to-toe”), and competition isn’t a great frame for romantic relationships, and largely because what this means in practice is that I’m terribly fucking picky. Except when I’m not.

As you can see, this line of thought is fraught with self-contradiction and hypocrisy. I’m uncomfortable with language I turn around and use two paragraphs later. I’m suspect of statistical measures, even as SAT scores and career achievements have been known to turn me on in a decidedly superficial way. I’m publicly shoring up my egalitarian conscience while internally hoping to find my way into an elite club of peers. The serpent is eating his own tail, and ain’t even shy about it.

Ultimately it is this inability to let go and roll with things that’s the greatest drawback to living in the 99th percentile. You’re inescapably conscious of your position, of your privilege. This very easily becomes an inhibiting kind of self-consciousness, a second-guessing one-step-removed-from-real-living meta-consciousness. Every superlative compliment you’ve ever received just reinforces the notion that you’re different, better, blessed. And yet you’re still lonely. You still make mistakes and do bad things and hurt people. Nothing changes, it’s just that you get to be more keenly aware of how it all goes, and of your own power and weight in affecting the situation one way or another.

I remember when I was about 14, one of my young friends telling me about his first-time experience of being in a mosh pit, the feeling of being able to move a crowd, to lean into the people next to you and have that really do something. When I was still in the process of discovery, exploring the reaches of my capacity and power was exhilarating. Every day a new horizon. Now it feels like more of a known quantity, and the whole thing is paralyzing well beyond the simple moral of Uncle Ben’s Law. Perhaps I’ve become to focused on the harm, rather than the good to be done.

Bringing it all back home, it’s not like this is an impossible situation. I have confidence that I’ll be able to let go and roll with things again. It just takes a lot to engage me, and without that it’s not going to happen. Much like okcupid’s advice to the Playboy, finding adequate challenges is probably my best out. There are always more horizons out there, and the best way to stay limber and avoid creeping stuffy aristocratism is to stay on the move. Never draw a box around what can be known and what can be done. There is no 100%, just infinite and unfolding degrees of closeness.

Like most of my peers, I don’t much like valentines day. It tends to be an artificial creator of stress, unwanted and advantage-taking. I resent it conceptually, even though in practice it has worked out on occasion.

A decade ago a friend of mine drove me from NYC to New England where my then-girlfriend was going to an all-girls college. The first love of my life. That turned out to be a very good weekend, the cold brisk Massachusetts air and light through leaveless trees, frozen ground and beautiful old architecture and heavy quilted blankets. Probably the best valentines to-date.

Five years ago I went on a first date, out with an artsy clever brash girl, a self-described bad girl, a girl who brought me gifts from the dollar store: this garish yellow notepad I still have (and use) today, and a bar of soap called stud which set the tone but was promptly lost. We had drinks at Beauty Bar, and it was the night before the big protests against the Iraq war. That one worked out alright too, even if we didn’t stop the war from happening.

This year I stayed home, begging off from seeing the cute soccer-playing girl I’ve gone out with a few times in the past couple months, probably signaling finis to that going-out. I didn’t intend for that to be the case, but the tone of her voice strongly suggested displeasure at our scheduling difficulties, or more specifically my lack of attention and follow-through in that regard.

It’s something I have some experience with, the way that women get gradually fed up with me and my half-heartedness. It’s not something to be proud of, but I’ve learned to recognize the scorn this inevitably brings, even in trace amounts.

I would like to be a better person, and sometimes I am. But I’m also fickle and picky, especially when it comes to women. At the same time I want them all to love me always. It’s literally childish, I know. This is one of the main reasons I’ve tended to avoid dating people who I know socially. It makes things simpler, operating without the additional pressures that a second-degree friendship brings. It makes it easier to play it straight when there are fewer people to please.

“People to please.” Jeebus, Koenig! This is how you know your life has gone off it’s philosophical rails, when you start thinking of your day-to-day like a public relations campaign. The truth always feels better, right? Even when it seems unpleasant and hard, especially when it seems unpleasant and hard.

Yeah, shit. So what is the truth? The truth is that my purposes and objectives have changed over the past several years, and my romantic sense of self has yet to really recalibrate. I was having a little heart-to-heart with my man Luke down in the Cornell Club, and I vocalized for the first time — which I’ve been saying and feeling in so many words some time now — that what I’m really interested in is finding someone to settle down with. Speaking the words made me realize how true they were.

That’s all well and good, laudable, obvious even, except that in tandem with this I seem to have lost my lust for visceral experience, the flame of Dionysus gone flickering, low and cold. Couple that with my vanity, my hubris and ambition, the height of my high-side soulmate standards and a recent spate of confusion about my life’s purpose and future, and you’ve got a potent recipe for long and lonely times, which is what the past 18 months have been, for the most part.

The truth is I really don’t care about sex for its own sake anymore. It’s not motivating. Well, that’s not really true. The more accurate truth is that I don’t care about sex as much, and I care about its consequences a great deal more than I used to. The cost/benefit analysis has changed.

This feels grown-up, but also sad. There’s a loss of faith in there, a cynicism, a dimness, a pessimism, even some fear. I don’t know whether this is just an aditudinal phase or the irrevocable effect of experience. I hope for the former, if for no other reason than life’s more interesting when one believes in mystical and potent powers which supercede the narrow realms of consciousness and logic. And because I don’t want to be ruled by fear. And because I have a lot of fun memories, and would very much like to make some more.

Something’s amiss. Pure fun is still nowhere to be found, and more of my philosophies are offended. “Presence is perfection.” “The most important thing is to stop struggling.” These are catchphrases for the self, yeah, but they’re also things that I have believed in, ideas I still intellectually embrace. Presence is more illusive than ever, and this paradigm of public relations — expectation/perception-management — produces crippling bouts of precisely the sort of “struggle” it’s most important to stop.

As the philosopher says, “beliefs are habits of action,” and in that light many of my so-called Axioms of Living are no longer things I can truly claim to believe, at least not in the utilitarian sense. They are not the principles that I live. Which is probably why I feel so estranged from myself.

The crisis of meaning has always been with us though, and the fire and the blackness wait around every corner. It feels good at least to be able to put my finger closer to the likely source of my discomfort, even if I remain clueless as to a resolution. This is not exactly new territory (as a survey of recent posts tagged “sex” confirms) but it feels more precise.

The best that can be said for artificial constructs like valentines day is that they provide a focus, an inflection point for things that are already happening. Learning is always a plus.

It was a slaughter. By the time I got around to buying seven shots of Kessler for the table — “smooth as silk” — we were all coloring well outside the lines, flirting with the ladies, shouting half-bright witticisms at one another. Yes, for the Girth’s 29th birthday, after a very lovely and grown-up dinner of cayenne chicken and freshly-made pesto, we got drunk.

This is an old passtime, one that brought us together as wild young men, and still serves a bonding purpose, even if the path is now more well-worn and recovery a bit more difficult. It doesn’t happen that often, this dionysian fugue, this western tradition of peeling back the civilized parts of our brains. We’re more self-conscious and protective; more self-judging too. We’ve got better things to do a lot of the time. We worry about our health. Still, the ritual persists.

Considerable vulnerability is created, both during and after. This is part and parcel with any loss of control, and it’s what we hope for I think, part of the draw. Things will be admitted, attempted, words blurted, action taken. Magical events may transpire, and in the hard light of day, with luck, truth will reveal itself.

The morning finds me shaky, giddy, mumbling rationalizations and pining away over a girl I haven’t seen in more than year. The hard light reveals an empty landscape; my cupboard is bare. It’s a weak kind of feeling, and I don’t like it.

All of this is information, and with that and some will a change is going to come. As the philosopher says, beliefs are habits of action. Mine are in need of refreshment, renewal. I’ve been numbed-up, stuck in a rut, far less than 100% of who I am. I’ve been sleeping in late and reclusing on the weekends. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Somewhere along the way I fell out of love with my life. I stopped taking risks or reaching very far. The stars fell from my eyes, and now I feel both bored and boring, a pedestrian person in desperate need of an attitude adjustment.

Huh. This turned into kind of a bummer of a blog post. Sorry about that. It’s not that hard to make your heart beat faster, but it’s nigh impossible to force a new feeling.

And life’s really not that bad. I aught not to whine. Superbowl was pretty great, I thought.

I suppose I’ll close it out with an old good video, in honor of where this all started:

My friend Sarah is on her way to India. She’s among the finest of the people I’ve gotten to know fairly well since moving up to these parts, and an amazingly talented artist. We have a few of her pieces around the house, really great paintings, and honestly one of the main things that set the mood and made me really want to live here.

Now she has some of her work online too:

Paintings By Sarah Finestone.

I really love Sarah’s art. It strikes such a great balance between portrait and pastiche, symbols and subjects. That you can see my friends and roommates in some of them probably makes it more exciting for me personally, but I feel that she’s really in a good spot stylistically, and hopefully will go places with her creative endeavors.

If I were a rich man I would be a patron. Maybe someday I will!

Spending a week inside the Robbins Family Nest got me thinking quite a lot about my own rather barren romantic landscape. I’m being screwed by O’Hare Airport (as usual) and have several hours to sit here, so I figured I might try and organize my head a bit about this.

I’ve come to see my decision to relocate to remote Humboldt County in part as a semi-conscious decision to get away from women. In one way it could be seen as a sort of self-purification or monastic thing. Alternatively, it could be seen as a decision to flee. It’s unclear, but all in all the decision was right for me, and I am where I am, so I sort of try to look forward.

It occurs to me lately that sex and love are in some ways skills, requiring energy, attention, and more than anything practice if you want to do well. It’s like a bicycle in that you never forget how, sure, but it also really seems like the kind of thing where you can lose your edge; or, to be more specific, where I currently feel dull and edgeless.

So there are flashes of paranoia that, having taken myself out of things, I may not easily find my way back — that I could end up drifting along nonplussed by the world, libido curled up asleep inside me where I put it to bed. That’s an unpleasant thought.

And then, thinking of that mis-attributed quote about how our greatest fear is our own power, I’m immediately struck by the opposite idea, that maybe what troubles me isn’t ennui or boredom, but rather a fear of living, of what I might do or be or become.

That would explain this semi-conscious self-divorce. If I made a move to cut myself off from sex, I must have done it for a reason, and that reason probably has something to do with me not being very happy with myself.

And, thinking this, I know immediately that it is true.

When I visited with my Father and family, I spent a good long late night talking with my step-sister, who is honestly closer with my dad than I am these days, having lived with him as a teenager and stayed closely connected since moving out and starting her own family in Phoenix. Talking with her got me to consciously see my old man in a different light, one which I realize had always been there, but I hadn’t really thought of directly.

He’s this really classically moral guy, you know? And even though I have a great deal of confidence in my own moral fiber, I know I’m not like that (e.g. I’ve used drugs and have no compunctions about premarital sex). And even though I don’t want to be like that, apparently I’m not quite happy with how I am.

That’s what made me want to make “more sex” the counterpart to the “less work” lead-in for my new years slogan. In the past, I’ve found my best and strongest love interests in times where I was sort of free and sleazy. That sounds bad, but there’s a cycle that works between confidence and openness. Getting to the point of finding capital-L Love requires (for me) heroic feats of surrender and vulnerability. It’s a leap of faith; takes a lot of chutzpah. Feeling free to get laid has helped with that in the past.

For the last year or so, I’ve been fighting against that pattern: pining away over the lack of love, but keeping a pretty tight lid on my sexuality because for whatever reason I got it into my head that doing it that way was “wrong.”

Wrong? Immature, maybe, but where did that normative self-judgment come from? I don’t quite know, but there’s a lack of self-love there, that’s for sure. There’s something about the Shadow-self too, and something about permission to make mistakes. It’s a lot to figure out, but clearly it seems necessary to get past that kind of self-judgmental thinking.

And the real downside, beyond the simple lack of practical success, is the slow bleed of self-belief. That dullness I started out talking about is looking a lot less like a lack of desire or edge, and a lot more like a crisis of confidence. Intellectually I understand I have a lot to offer — not fishing for compliments here — but there’s a big gap between (for instance) knowing you’re good-looking and feeling hot. Until I really feel it, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Similarly, the fact that my emotions and desires are beyond my control and could be compromising in a number of ways leads me to stuff the whole business down, even as I long for some jolt of something to break the monotony. I know this is no way to live, dreamless, repressed and un-romantic, but knowing that and living differently are (once again) two very different things.

In many ways this is familiar territory. Back in early May of ’07 I wrote a piece called Fumbling the Flutter (Or How I Realized My Sex-Drive Needs An Overhaul) which still feels very accurate. I have a certain low-level confidence that things will work out, but it’s sort of annoying to still be in the same place.

Hence the resolution/slogan: less work; more sex; flossing. I’ve flossed several times now, and should be able to take most of next week off of work. Hopefully the rest will come too.

So Saturday night I got back up on that art horse (which I’ve only been talking about for eight or nine months, so that’s pretty good), and did a nice little talking piece at our christmas party talent show. Text is here. It was very well received, and even though it was far from my best work, it was up to my own standards and I was pleased. I haven’t shown off that side of myself too much since I moved out here, so it was nice to be able to let the artist out, to do something worthwhile with people’s attention.

It turned out to be a more preachin’ thing than I’d originally intended. That reading was latent in the verse and I’d just chosen not to rehearse it with that in mind, but the crowd responded on that wavelength, and our home in Westhaven was the original community church, so it seemed appropriate. It also made me realize the last time I did something performative I was officiating Frank and Laura’s wedding.

Maybe I should just go with it, create myself a guru preacher character. I like being coy and vulnerable too much to go full out Reverend with it, but at the same time the form doesn’t have to be so didactic, and it could really work for a lot of things.

To be honest, as an adult I’ve always equated art with religion. My training tended towards the ritual and having come up without a conventional religious framework, the process of creativity and the divinity of Really Good Performance/Product are what underpin any personal notions I have of mysticism and magic. It’s a human and social thing for me, the moments the acts evoke. It’s old-time; clap hands and all.

Anyway, it left me more exhausted than ever, but feeling high and mighty in my soul.