I find this sort of thing kind of baffling:

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday there was no timetable for wrapping up an investigation of an Internet report that Vikings quarterback Brett Favre sent racy text messages and lewd photos to a former New York Jets game hostess.
...
Deadspin reported the voicemails include a man asking to meet with Sterger, who now is a TV personality for the Versus network. The website posted a video that contained those messages and several below-the-waist photos - said to be of Favre - that were allegedly sent to Sterger's cell phone.

Now, let's be clear. I don't really care whether or not Brett Farve did some douchy things or not, but the article caused some resonant vibrations and it's a good jumping off point. Every time I read something like this, I feel the sense of a gap between me and other men. Maybe it's generational, maybe it's sensitivity or awareness or just having strong women in your life. I feel like i know a little something, and this is an opportunity to put some things out there that I think are good for people to grok and understand.

To wit: if you're a young man, or just a man who doesn't (yet) know much about women, here's something to chew on. You like to look at stuff to get turned on, females typically don't. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Music please.

I got a note the other day that complimented me on the quality of my "public longing" (that as opposed, I understand, to the more conventional "secret longing") and this tender sprout of an idea took root in the unfortunately rocky and barren terrain that is what passes for my subconscious these days. I don't know if it's really something to be proud of, but I think I've gone too far down the road of radical transparency to really make much of a turnaround now. Nothing short of the online equivalent to death (that is, taking the whole thing down) can really extricate me from my legacy. Or, as they say in the middle of a bum trip, the only way out is through.

So public longing it is. New tag. Warning to any groundlings out there who might see this post; it's got mature content, which is preferable to immature content IMHO (and as the man sez), but if yr parents aren't into that sort of thing, maybe trip away*.

I'm back in that Swerengen place, which I know at least some people out there get. It's a nasty cocktail of pressurized and randy, a place I get where the facts of my life stretch me out thin enough that there are a real limited number of things that'll make me feel good, and the first one on my mind is getting epically laid, but of course this is a pretty terrible position from which to go playing the scene.

Returning to the romance.

It's been a dark fall so far, hard-pressed and shut in. I'm looking forward to getting healthy so I can go back to getting drunk like a sailor, heaving to and fro, freewheeling and going where I will. Getting out on the road was good, but work-travel is more draining.

High time now to ride another wave, to get up on it and roll. It's unlikely that I'll have any less work to do anytime soon, but like every self-help manual teaches (and my own philosophy preaches) the X factor you've got real control over is your mind, not your circumstances. Big changes begin as shifts in perception. Mad lib it. Fill in the blank with confidence and everything will be fine, or as fine as it can be.

So there's an inflection. My situation can be seen as being overwhelmed by an unreasonable and untenable tumult of todos, or a raging whitewater sluice of opportunities to be rafted. We're in the deep fast water now, the difference between going under and riding it for all its worth really comes down to attitude. If we head into this thing with joy, it should work out. If not, well, there's a reason the skaters say fear is the mind-killer.

But what's really missing from all this is the romance, and really it's nobody's fault but my own. I'm pretty much impossible to please, my desires in love taking on the same grandiose scale as the rest of my outsized ambitions, even as my ability to invest time, energy, effort ever dwindles. What exactly can you expect?

Of late I'm all wrung out and hung up, exhausted, scheduled, and sick. No room for special lady friends. No time to be genuinely interested even — so long since I've been smitten — just the dull sense that I'm missing out and a flickering hunger.

It's a heady collection of tags: authentic experience, nyc, love, sex, friends; should be a real barn-burner of a blog.

Back in Humboldt for a week now, feeling the raw world-conquering momentum bleed away into wood smoke and the smell of fallen leaves. It's not unpleasant at all, this country home of mine -- next week will be alive with family and friends; the way I fell in love in the first place -- but today it gives me a feeling of wistful sadness.

It seems I make myself a smaller person here, or maybe it's vice-versa with the Mother City making me bigger. Much as I believe the hype about the internet flattening the world, it will always be true that different things happen in different places. It was an immense recharge, to walk again the streets of Brooklyn, to feel the quick hard snap of real subway doors, the great heaping crush of humanity, densely packed ambition and excellence. I draw power from the capital of the world.

And it's not just the women, but I won't lie: they're a big part of it. I have a no kiss-and-blog policy, but this little slice from William Gibson has stuck with me since adolescence, and pretty much nails me to a T:

But Bobby had this thing for girls, like they were his private tarot or something, the way he'd get himself moving. We never talked about it, but when it started to look like he was losing his touch that summer, he started to spend more time in the Gentleman Loser. He'd sit at a table by the open doors and watch the crowd slide by, nights when the bugs were at the neon and the air smelled of perfume and fast food. You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki's was the one he was waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.

As a followup to my Californication post below, I'd like to try and shed a more positive light on things. Clearly that kind of writing elicits a reaction -- hey, sex still sells, and it's some of the more honest blogging I've done of late -- but I think I may have given some people the wrong idea. Not that I don't appreciate all the ego-boosting, but I can't help but feel a little bit guilty, like when as a kid you'd fake or exaggerate an injury for attention.

So yes. Let's get down to brass tacks. In our last installment, I concluded that there was some serious Fear going on, and this was why my sex life was more or less dead. And yeah, the more I sit with that the more accurate it feels.

That's not particularly great in and of itself, but the first step to happy living is figuring out what you want. Then you have to get it, and that's another mountain to climb, but just getting some direction is a vital and necessary first start. I honestly feel better already.

When I survey the past couple years -- relatively sexless and workaholic -- they seem a cocoon. On the one hand maybe I've been gestating, and am preparing to emerge chrysalis-like in new glory. On the other hand, maybe I've been in hiding, retreating into the woods to bury my shame under a thousand layers of self-made silk. Or something.

Maybe it's both. More than anything else, I get the feeling I've been keeping myself under wraps, off the scene. It's not a new revelation, but every time it comes up it's with ring of truth. I think I've got a stronger way to say it, one that comes to mind with an anecdote:

You know, Showtime is giving HBO a run for its money in the high-production-value TV serial department. Since I heard Duchovny won some award, and I'd already been impressed with the quality of Dexter and Weeds, I figured I'd see what Californicaion had to offer. I find that I like it.

Firstly, I do enjoy David Duchovny. As a teenage fan of The X-Files, I always thought it was kind of a bummer that his and Gillian Anderson's careers never took off. Seemed like a lot of talent there in their brainy personai. Duchovny seems quite at home in the role of a self-destructive down and out (though still living quite well) New York City author moved to Hollywood. It's not easy to pull off the intricate mix of sour self-loathing and towering hubris, peppered through with the occasional flashes of authentic charismatic genius that the character requires to not read as a total douchebag. Indeed the actor may be cribbing from his own life more than a little, but regardless it's highly watchable.

Secondly, Natascha McElhone is captivating as the leading lady, which is essential for the whole formula to work. If we don't love her, the whole thing falls apart. Thankfully, we do. Or at least I do, and so I buy the essential premise hook line and sinker. The narrative revolves around this on/off relationship, and it's through this that we see the characters' redeeming aspects as well as their deepest flaws. It's from this love story that the show draws its power. There's an awful lot of fucking, yes, but because at the center of it all is a heartbreakingly jilted romance, the whole achieves a level of emotional sincerity that saves it from the gratuitous precipice on which it sometimes teeters.

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.

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.