sex

So the other day I’m down in the little cafe in the basement of the converted warehouse complex where our office is in SF, and I end up doing my cream and sugar right next to this tallish girl who works on the same floor as us. I’ve seen her around a few times. Once we were alone in the elevator for a floor and a half and her nipples got hard. We smile at one another in the hallway, but have never spoken. I don’t know her name.

Getting cream and sugar nothing of consequence transpires, but it’s an interesting moment. For me, at least. Charged.

I’ve come to trust, at this late date, that when I feel like something is going on in that way, it’s quite likely that the other person in question feels the same. Just tonight having a little nerd-bike schmooze at Zeitgeist this was incontrovertibly proven — she doesn’t say hi kind of sheepishly on her way out the door unless she really was looking back while you were having that loud conversation. Drupal set message: trust your first impression.

Aaaaaway, the impetus to write is that the whole concept/phenomena of lust is one that’s been under wraps for some time. Sublimated and maybe a bit suppressed. It’s been a much-lamented state of affairs, as everyone knows. Feels like a change is gonna come, and this is good, but it’s also a trip, re-realizing how sex can throw you for a loop, scramble yr brain.

Lust. There’s no real containing this feeling, which is probably why it’s conventionally considered sinful. It’s like fire — contagious, consumptive, hot, hungry, often destructive, and absolutely uncontrollable once initiated. One can steer clear of the whole situation for a time, but inevitably it feels like a huge part of the human condition is being missed. Zombie life. This is often how it is with powerful deep dark parts of the psyche not traditionally endorsed by society: the nether-world slides by beneath the realm of workaday consciousness, alluring and clandestine. You can live clean in black and white, or risk the depths and bathe in technicolor.

For me the real embodiment of this feeling is in many ways tangential to sex, a jumping off point for broader hunger, for the infinite potential of human coupling, for larger ambitions that are symbolically captured in romantic pursuits. Or maybe that’s too small an idea of sex. Put it this way: fucking is subset of that which makes me lusty. Credit the waning influence of adolescent hormones or my crazy schedule, but really I see a larger dance, one with many anticipations, satisfactions, stimuli, tension and release.

But even considering this, allowing it into my mind, is a new-new thing. Heretofore it’s simply been off the table. That seems to be shifting, which I like. But is also unpredictable, and therefore kindof scary.

Scary in a good way? Maybe. Being open the the universe is always good, and this is really really a part of who I am… I think time will tell.

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.

So, Kellymundo has a subscription to Vanity Fair, which I happened to pick up (RFK cover story) in the bathroom today. This happens to be the issue with the crazy Miley Cyrus Photos!!!!! ZOMG BARE 15-YEAR OLD SPINE!!!!

Sometimes I’m ashamed of America. Sometimes it’s because we start pointless wars of choice that kill thousands and leave millions homeless and destitute. Sometimes it’s because we’re so collectively sexually confused, repressed, frustrated, nervous, and (updated inre Joe’s point in comments) desperately depraved, we can’t fucking tolerate the challenge of, you know, Art.

Annie Liebowitz is the real thing, and this photo is completely respectable.

America, you’re crazy baby but I love you.

Bonus Liebowitz: Sting portrait, and homo Arnold.

God we’re stupid sometimes.

Flashing through the accumulated images of the past week, it’s a heady mixed bag. Trying to work my way from being a direct-actor to a manager. Trying to get ahead of the curve. Trying to continue my studious avoidance of all feminine diversions. Trying not to get boring as I get old. Trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Trying to communicate. Trying to love. Trying to speak correctly. Trying to listen. Trying.

And a few things occur to me.

In the smear of pint-night down at Everett’s, veterans of the military and Gillman st telling stories early, Kelly and Zya creating interpretive dances to Neil Diamond, then the kids coming in as the evening sets in; there emerges a ray of light in shiny blue tights, sheer brilliance, such as to make me avert my eyes. She looks pretty good at the coffeeshop usually, but this is another level, enough to make a man reexamine his beliefs. It occurs to me that my “my head’s not in it” excuse for studious avoidance of such is a self-fulfilling prophecy with real limits in its utility. Something’s got to change, but for the moment, hey, at least you’ve got a collectable pint glass to duck into.

And from this, a potential remedy for my romantic listlessness, a possible self-concept, an avenue of habitual action. How does “power-dating” sound? It’s more applicable than my retired manslut persona non grata, and it could be useful to get me out there in some way. It ties in with ambition and other shadowy forces that need outlets. I don’t know how it squares with living half-n-half between here and the Bay — where exactly do I set my sites? both? — but it seems worth trying.

The general premise is that, hey, I’m a single successful guy. I’m trying to make something of my life and managing some success. Why shouldn’t I be aiming high, perhaps absurdly and intentionally so, in my pursuit of companionship? Why shouldn’t I try to find someone who wants to be part of a power couple? It’s unlikely that my ambitions are going to cool off anytime soon, and I like powerful women, so why not make that my new thing?

I’m not sure yet, but this still seems like a halfway decent idea in the morning.

Finally, on another note, a chance for adventure. My great friend Julia has some free tickets to Coachella, and I’m going to try and pull off a little last-minute trip action. It’ll be good to get a change of scenery. I’ll take some photos or something.

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.

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.

Remembered because Tommy gave me the latest Hold Steady album, and also casting some light on recent events, here’s one of my all time favorite Kerouac quotes:

“…boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk – real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”

It’s a good one to remember. Published in 1957 too, meaning it was written and thought even earlier.

And, apropops nothing, my company as if it were run by lolcats.

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.

It’s the last day of summer, a summer of many scenes, travel, exploration, some hard yards. You learn things about yourself, things you didn’t even know you didn’t know, those fabled unknown unknowns.

You might come back from Mexico and discover from your roommates that you displayed a rather more zesty case of wedding-fever the other weekend than was previously known. It’s all second-hand knowledge because you honesty don’t remember yourself, and it sounds kind of tawdry, but making out with your friends’ ex-girlfriends is a staple of Portland culture, so it’s all good, right? Right.

One just like the other, Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother.

You might have your friends from Burning Man roll through, and go on and on about your square-ass work history over pre-dinner cocktails, and find out that the one you had an eye for already has a man back home. It’s all in the game, but would you have found this out if you handn’t had a burned-up hand and talked a bit more pretty? Might it have played differently, more like you’d hoped? The world may never know, but you try not to stress it. You resonated. That’s rare and true and more than enough.

It’s been two good years since I’ve felt clear like I’m starting to, back around the last time I returned to Brooklyn, post-Vagabender, starting up as a legitimate young man. I found myself a pretty nice girlfriend then, or maybe she found me (as has tended to be my m.o.), but regardless we had a pretty good thing for six months or so in Park Slope. The Belle do Mois. As has also tended to be my m.o., I got lured away by another bright sweet one, a real peach, and then I moved to the hills of California and didn’t come back, lost her too. I wonder in hindsight what was really behind that decision to run.

Back then, just after I’d settled in Brooklyn, I came home to Oregon for my man Dave’s wedding to the lovely Jessica, and in the drunken evening after my mom and I had a kind of heart to heart. She wanted to know whether I was afraid of commitment, how often I was drunk when I met these girls. You know, good honest questions from the most authoritative Woman in your life. I was already in the process of re-evaluating my attitudes towards relationships, fucking, love, etc, but I think that kind of got me to face up to some real truths about what I wanted, where I was going.

My boys and I like to kick around “the 35 to 55” as an abstract concept, and it feels like roughly the right target for starting a family, but life and love don’t really run on a logistical schedule. A plan is just a list of things that don’t happen. I’ve done enough spins around the block not to care about being celibate for six months or more, but there’s no denying I’m lonely, and also no denying I’m playing an active role in keeping myself this way.

It’s hard to say. I’ve never been particularly talented at fidelity, and I’ve not always been so good at being up front and honest about this. It’s a shortcoming. It’s something I think about in guilty and regretful ways. I came out here and stuck myself in the woods, away from distractions I said. Took myself right out of the game. You can’t fuck up if you don’t play, but you also can’t win, not to mention the fact that it’s boring as hell.

With the 20/20 vision time brings, it looks more and more like a retreat of sorts. In many human ways it was a big move forward — living with good friends is something that brings me huge growth and joy, and starting a company wouldn’t have been feasible if I weren’t here — but in terms of Love, the big question, it was a kind of Final Ramble off the scene. I’ve been out a few times since I moved out here — a picnic lunch, making out with young mothers — but nothing past second base or three dates. As has been pointed out, apparently I need to fly across the country to get laid.

It’s a different world from Brooklyn, for sure, but the truth is I don’t apply myself. I’m not really “out there.” I have to give myself the freedom to make mistakes again, and I have to work on being more forward. It’s not really my nature to be aggressive or competitive when it comes to the ladies. Like I said, my m.o. is often to let them come to me, which doesn’t really work so well in these parts, and probably isn’t all that mature either.

I wonder about the times when I’m very drunk, superego peeled more or less all the way back, and this reverses itself. The other week’s wedding fever is probably a good example, and thinking back a couple years again I remember the first or second weekend I was back in Bklyn, going out on the town, really hitting the scene. That’s the last time I have blank spots in my memory. I left my jacket somewhere, made some questionable 2am phone calls that were only known because of outgoing call-tracking, etc.

Frank told me at the time I was like a Great Dane in heat, which is probably accurate and kind of funny, if not the most flattering image. I feel some unspecified shame around this area, but the truth is that this is how I’ve found Love in the past: going for it with gusto. So what do I have to do to get the cop out of my head without drinking myself blind? That appears to be the $64,000 question.

Life comes in waves, and patterns have a way of recurring. Not quite history repeating, but there are echos, resonance, familiar contours to the road. No moment is the same. There is no stillness. And yet, I feel like I’ve been here before.

Out at Burning Man, one afternoon I had a bunch of our neighbors over, interesting wild people a few years my senior, and was kind of bird-dogging this 30-something conversation about love and sex and relationships. When it came to my piece I was short and sweet, talking about being a romantic, a three-week wonder, looking for something true and being frustrated because “there’s nothing you can really do to go find love, no action you can take.”

“That’s not true,” my neighbor said. “The most important thing you can do is make sure you are at 100%, with yourself, with what you’re doing. That’s how you find love.”

It seems like good advice. I took it to heart. Out there on my journey of spiritual cleansing, riding the dusty back-roads of Saturday night, head full of acid under a heavy moon and Johnny Cash and Bobby Dylan on the boombox singing about the Girl From the North Country, I realized just how much I wanted love in my life again.

It’s obvious, yeah, but in my experience revelations are always obvious when you say them out loud. What makes them revelations is that they stick. They arc from idea to belief. They spawn new habits of action, as the Philosopher might say.

Anyway, that’s about all the navel-gazing I’ve got for the day. It’s a beautiful Saturday. I’m going to wrap up my hand, go out and enjoy the Equinox.

So another long post, but this one because I stumbled upon an old cache of never-blogged textfiles from 2003 and before. Dynamite stuff from the archives — like these old artistic source texts — and some of it still topical!

Here’s a bit from deep inside my mind back when I was still a Young Buck, and right before I fell in love again, it’s interesting to note. Borderline arrogant, true, but that kind of free and open state of mind is something I think it would be very positive for me to reconnect with.

Dancing.txt (1/27/2003)

There was dancing, and I overheard a fairly nubile 20-year-old tell some lucky chump. “I want sex. I like it. It feels good to me. I don’t do it a lot, but I want someone who will give it to me now.”

He seemed at first to be too much of a weify wannabe hipster/jock hybrid to step up to what she was pitching, and for a moment I entertained a fantasy of “cutting in” so to speak. She and I had been dancing somewhat in sync earlier, and lustful thoughts had been propagating for some time. But I hesitated. In the moment I became plagued with doubt; about who I was and what I was doing; about who she was and if I really wanted her; doubt about the very nature of my own desire.

During the intervening doubtful minute, the lucky chump realizes the what score is and decides he knows what to do. Soon they are gone, and thinking it over I’m not all that bothered. You see, I realized if I were going to try it with her, it would have to be something like this:

Josh: Sorry, I couldn’t help but notice the proposition you just made to this gentleman, and I’d like to make my services available to you this evening, should you be so inclined. I’m good, and I’m leaving town for New York City in two days. There will be no complecations.

20-y-o: Ummm ok. [resumes talking to other guy]

[But then… 20 minutes later]

20-y-o: Ok, are you game?

J: You know I’m leaving town, right?

20-y-o: Yeah.

J: Ok then one condition.

20-y-o: What?

J: It has to be passionate.

Now we all know this would not likely work in reality, so it’s better off just being a fantasy. Kind of makes me consider taking to penning erotic fiction though. Have a pseudoname and everything. I mean, how’s that for a pick up conversation?

Girl: “So what do you do in your spare time?”

J: “Ohhh, I write erotic fiction.”

BAM!

Of course conversation is really what it’s all about. I’ll be 10-times more likely to have sex with a girl if we can have an engaging conversation. That’s worth more than any physical feature. The prettiest face is’t worth much if you can’t talk to it and boobs are really only as sexy as the head they’re attached to. While it’s always nice, ass has no value in terms of rhetoric.

But then the deep sleeping truth awakes and arises that there are more ways to have conversation than to speak with words. After all, dancing is a form of conversation — one I enjoy but do not excel at — and the body can speak volumes. The thought springs to attention that sex is a conversation as well, and lucky for me one I am both enthused about and skilled at.

I then follows that — theoretically — if you just started dancing and it really worked and you then moved on to having sex, you would never need to speak a word. Indeed! An ass is a good conduit for information, if it’s purposeful and freely swung.

And so you entertain the vain hope that you’ll make that star-crossed connection, that your eyes will lock, that you’ll both burst open with the life energy and desire that’s surging within you, end up having great and soulful intercourse, maybe in the bedroom downstairs, maybe on the lawn out back, maybe in the back of some strangers automobile. Real moaning and drawn-out shit. Soulful. Passionate.

I want to sleep with someone I don’t know very well. New material. Unexplored territory. Strangers. I want it to be like what I’ve just described. I want to just lay down with an ex who I think might be willing to not make any pretensions. Having fun, cuddling, making out, screwing in an epic fashion. Any way you cut it, it’s time to be honest.

In spite of all that I’m still glad I came home alone tonight. It was worth it for the fantasy. Fantasy is pretty valuable to me.

I used to call it “the gut feeling” with my friends. The stab of innocent virgin lust that would hit me almost once every day, if not more. It was caused by my crushes, and it was the most powerful pang I’ve ever felt.

I related this once in a theater exercise about creating a 60-second story from a memory that would communicate a feeling, picked the ultimate single example of crushlust I could think of. Fifteen years old, walking down the hall and out from the left-hand juncture swings Caryn, whose profile I stare at in acting class. She has reddish hair and it’s swinging down her back as she walks in front of me, my eyes trailing her spine. She’s wearing a white skirt that’s relatively short for a high-school student, but not exactly scandalous, and she’s wearing white tights to match.

Or so I thought, until the sway in her stride swishes the hem enough to the left and I see they’re not tights but some kind of hellified thigh-high stockings, and for the moment that this band of leg above the top of the stockings and below the hem of the skirt flashes out — looking back with my minds eye I see it in slow-motion — and I am an almost mythical stereotype of a teenage boy, confounded completely. I’m lucky to keep walking straight.

Yes, this was the desire I remember. I had it chronically since I was a teenager, and then pretty good and strong for a while with my first girlfriend.

With her, the feeling stopped being virgin but remained pure and true right up through the end. I called it love and still believe it somedays. We were just too young and not done growing to hold it all together. The post-relationship sex was mind-blowingly hot too, though it tended to be more nakedly about power. Not like the good sweet days when we’d gotten to know each other’s bodies pretty well and I would lie next to her and look her in the eyes and just touch, without saying anything. And then we would do it and she would claw up my back and I would talk dirty to her, and it would still be still pure and innocent. It was right. Amazing times.

These days it’ll take conversation to give me the pang. I related that whole stocking story to a girl a little while ago during the course of a pretty good conversation. Later that week we made out. She was a perky little bi-sexual with a pretty strong queer edge, and while she wasn’t bad looking, I wasn’t really attracted to her physically. Initially, in fact, I didn’t think anything was going to happen at all, but then we started talking.

We discussed sociology and sex and the Simpsons, made magnetic poetry together and I got to discover the very girly side of her. She would sometimes literally try to win an already well-argued point in the discussion by batting her eyelashes at me. When I pulled at her with my arms or bit her lip she would emit a little squeak, exhale, and respond tenaciously.

It was fun and safe, and I’m into that. I’ll deal with my aching blue balls on my own if the makeout is worth it. Not that I don’t want to have sex, but when I think going for it is going to ruin the vibe I don’t want to trade great makeout for mediocre boinking or static uncomfortability.

Which brings me back to dancing. It’s a good way to check people out, see if you like them, and usually there’s space to have a real-words conversation if you want to. Or you can let your pelvis do the talking. Up to you, cowboy.