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.