Tag: ANTs

A Meandering Admission of Darkness & Desire.

During Kara’s Week of Teasing, I was asked by Steve and some woman I didn’t know in the lobby if I’d drive some new girl I didn’t know, had never so much as seen, home. I was fixated on Kara at the time, and it may have even been that day with her back in the kitchen, so I was a little frazzled. When they asked me this question, my anxiety suddenly shot through the roof. I didn’t know who the fuck the girl was they were referring to and I imagined how awkward it would be driving that person home, particularly given my insane anxiety on the road, so I just stumbled and stammered, tongue-tied and clearly hesitant, and they eventually laughed and waved their hands, accepting my hesitation as a no, assuring me that it was all right.

Steve later told me that the girl in question had asked about me during her interview and mentioned that she thought I was cute. Evidently, she also lives in the same town I do, about 24 minutes away, and I could be mistaken, but I believe he also said she actually lived in my apartment complex.

Last week, there was this girl working nights. Aside from apologizing when we almost ran into each other or miniscule exchanges here and there, we hadn’t spoken much, but she always smiled when I was cracking jokes and being insane during the night shift, always smiling in amusement at things I said. Then one of the kids working in the kitchen waited until she went into the breakroom and told me I should go for her. Evidently, she was my age.

It wasn’t as if she wasn’t attractive, either, but next to Kara? After the whole thing with Kara, after being that turned on and wound up and then cut off before the climax, so to speak, and still, despite my utter frustration, still being maddeningly interested in her, I couldn’t settle for anything less.

The point is that I assumed this was the girl Steve had been talking about. That this was the girl that lived where I lived and thought I was cute.

When I came into work this last Wednesday (2/26/20), I noticed a new girl in the kitchen. Black hair tied back, dark eyes, thin body, wonderful ass, sleeve tattoos. Even despite the Kara debacle, I couldn’t stop stealing a gaze at her whenever I could. Shallow as it may sound, she was hot as fuck. As the night went on, it was clear that everything with a dick (save for one guy, though this is understandable, as he likes dick himself) seemed to agree. So I had a new agony. The entire night I didn’t say a word to this girl, and on one occasion when I know I could have locked eyes with her and it seemed, strangely, that this was what she was after, I nervously looked away. 

I opened up with Kara, got shot down, and now I’m afraid of even opening the door to forging some connection or letting my attraction build with another girl — was that it? This was what I suspected. I felt too horny, too desperate, too on edge, too goddamned anxious, and I was petrified of making a fool of myself again, perhaps making an even bigger fool of myself this time, and so I shied away like the pussy I craved.

This was also the second girl of this extreme type that I’d found myself involuntarily fixating on as of late. Both Kara and her were dark, tattooed, in the goth or emo category, and both had a vibe that screamed aggressive sex and all that was kinky. This was by no means a new theme with me, but it has clearly come to the forefront as of late.

What the bloody, ever-living fuck is going on with me? I’m 41, after all, so given my age shouldn’t this desire be declining, rather than rising to new, dark, twisted heights that flood the foreground of my ever-tense mind? 

To jump back in the story, however, after gazing at the new girl quite a few times, I go up front for something and Steve informs me that it was this girl, the hot goth chick in the back, who was the one who thought I was cute, who lives in the town I live, who wanted to see if I could drive her home. This information at once excited me and depressed the hell out of me, for I felt as if I had missed my chance, made myself out to be a cold, unfeeling jackass, and that any opportunity I might have had to get to know her personally and perhaps intimately had been flushed down the goddamned tubes from the get-go because of another goth girl that turned out, be it her intention or not, to be a fucking tease. 

I said to Steve, “That was the girl? I’d fucking take her home…”

Yes, now I’d be all for it, which only made me feel like a total jackass.

Though it’s spelled differently, I later learned that her name is essentially a letter shy of Kara’s real name, and it’s a name that has some other significance as well — at any rate, I will here call her Tara. 

Since Kara’s Week of Teasing, I’ve also been having these stupid, spontaneous fantasies intruding into my muddied brain throughout the day at work involving scenarios ranging from the vaguely conceivable to the utterly inconcievable. First about Kara, and then since the day I saw Tara, her, too.

These fantasies have been limited to short clips, never anything enduring, though I suspect this is only because I’ve been using “thought blocking” techniques, which is stupid. I first came across these techniques when reading up on ANTs, or “automatic negative thoughts,” which are said to accompany anxiety and depression. I have since learned they ultimately only serve to exacerbate such ANTs, however. While grasping a hold of or clinging to these thoughts, becoming one with them and letting them take you away, is a certain avenue toward disaster, pushing them away, blocking such thoughts, only results in rebound. Pushing them away is like stretching elastic: the farther and more intensely you push those intrusive thoughts away, the harder and more impacting they will be upon their inevitable return. The only way to overcome them is to neither pull them close or push them away, but to ascend to a higher psychological dimension where you witness them without reaction, without judgement, and with total mindfulness, and let them arise and pass away.

This was not what I was doing. Not at all.

Instead, I was thought-stopping like mad. I was pushing these fantasies away, choking them down, swallowing them by means of bulging my eyes, blinking rapidly, shaking my head, maybe muttering “shut the fuck up” under my breath, with or devoid of the curse, and then sriving with all my intense might to turn my conscious attention towards something else, even if it was the ash buildup beneath a certain crease on my dashboard as I sat in my car at work smoking yet another cirgarette in my car during my shift. I was thought-stopping because I didn’t want to get my hopes up, because I wanted to accept reality and embrace the facts and respect the truth and not drift into an imaginative world that would only get me amped up again for the seemingly inevitable disappointment, frustration, self-loathing and depression that would only send me deeper down this miserable hole that has all too often become my life. 

As I was taking out the stack of bun trays out at the end of the night, I saw one of the new girls that had been on shift — the one who, along with Steve, had been asking me if I’d take Tara home — had her car running and her door open. I don’t remember if it was snowing and she was brushing off her car or what, but I looked through the open door and saw, in the darkness of the car, what I thought was Tara looking back at me from within the hood of her sweat shirt. Probably wondering why I was such a dick and wouldn’t take her home, and hadn’t so much as looked at her, let alone talked to her that day. 

My life is such a stupid, miserable mess. 

What did I really want? What desires did all this shit as of late really conjure up from inside me and summon to the surface? I wanted a true connection. Emotional, sexual, if not intellectual as well. An acceptance of mutual weirdness between consenting adults, mutual kinks and personal limitations laid out on the table, and the acceptance and value in a taste for aggression in the sexual arena. Just a taste of the deepest form of openness, embracing both the dark and the light in our bodies and minds, the duality cradled at an even higher level, in our fucked-up yet suddenly clearly somehow beautiful souls…

So far that hope sounds half-empty, half full of shit. And I’m not at all confident I’m destined to achieve it.

Need Me Some Body Knobs.

Today, I thought to myself: I wish I had four knobs on my body somewhere, or perhaps a remote control, all for adjusting the volume on seemingly hardwired aspects of this meat sheath, this flesh vessel, this corporeal container that my consciousness is temporarily housed in.

One knob would enable me to turn the volume up and down on my senses. That way I wouldn’t have to hear the machines beeping at work, or the ghastly country music playing on the store radio, or the current Christmas music. Or the jackass that pulls into the space beside me while I’m on break, trying to read a book, with his bass cranked to the max so it sounds like a goddamn T-Rex is tap-dancing right beside me.

So I wouldn’t have to bear the smell when I clean the restrooms. Or stand close to Gus.

So I wouldn’t have to feel the texture of the new rags when I’m cleaning something like the tables in the dining room, or the sound that results when the tag on a new mop head rubs against the tiles, or the bitter fucking cold when I mosey on into the walk-in freezer for something.

I could even turn down my senses to a reality-canceling zero in toto, thereby escaping into my mind completely whenever I desired.

Another knob would enable me to control the volume of my thoughts, though there appear to be multiple layers of thoughts, so maybe I need multiple knobs. At least two: the fully conscious and seemingly deliberate ones and the involuntary and automatic ones, and I’d mostly aim at the second set with respect to conscious adjustments. Specifically, the target would be what are known as Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), the intrusive “Flashback Bitchslap” memories (unless they constitute ANTs themselves; I am a bit perplexed on that point), and that bad music that plays on repeat.

When alone and prepared, I’d turn up the volume and in so doing hopefully banish their spell, take away their semiconscious and no doubt subliminal influence on not only my conscious thoughts, but my emotions (though it could function the other way around, too — or perhaps both, in a feedback loop. I’m not at all clear on that point, either).

I would write them down like a stenographer of the self so that I’d know all the shit I’m saying to myself, whispering to mysekf, and then practice on defeating them. Not through “thought stopping,” as that infernal technique just results in an emotionally intensified and painfully loud rebound, but rather via techniques that actually seem to work, like objectifying the thoughts and bathing in the realization that you are, after all, not at all synonymous with them — like in mindfulness meditation.

Don’t push them away, don’t grab a hold of them, just witness them dispassionately. Let them arise and pass away.

Until I got the hang of it, I’d spend the rest of my time with the semiconscious and subliminal automatic thoughts cranked down to zero. Life is bad enough without exacerbating the issue by compulsively, obsessively kicking myself in the ass from the inside and sucker-punching myself within the confines of my own sacred psyche.

Still another knob would enable me to control the volume of my emotions — and, if I’m not bat-shit insane, the emotions I absorb like a fucking sponge when around other people and sometimes mistake for my own.

Much as I just said about the thought-knob, two knobs might be a better fit here, too. Not because that some emotions are liminal and others semiconscious or subliminal, however, but because some emotions are my own and other emotions seem to come from other people, and I’m sick of feeling them and reacting to them as if they were my own. Empathy is by no means horrible, its just that my empathy is lacking discipline, healthy boundaries, and doesn’t often if ever submit itself to voluntary control. I’d work on this shit like the ANTs — put aside some window of time to practice managing them and effectively mute them when they become overwhelming in the day-two-day and night-to-night.

Last but not least, I’d like a knob for instinctual drives — at least the drive to have sex, as that desire can be quite distracting, particularly when you’ve gone a considerable length of time without scratching that itch.

The consequences are ridiculous. Truly. Everything is sexualized. You feel like you’ve come to share the humor of Beavis and Butthead, as sex becomes your default context for everything. You hear someone say something superficially innocent and giggle like an idiot because in your deprived mind it sounds sexual, like a “that’s what she said” joke, and next to orgasm, laughter spawned from comments twisted into naughty things is the best transient fix available.

While I don’t mind that too much, and for all I know I might have a perverted sense of humor even if I regularly got my rocks off with a preferable member of the opposite sex, the intensity of the drive is agonizing, the need to take matters into my own hands bare minimum once or twice a day lest I be incredibly tense and likely an asshole is frustrating, irritating and, when intixucated, often time-consuming — and needlessly so: why hold off until I can find that “perfect” porn to unload to when it could be done and over with in record time if I wished?

No, having the capacity to turn it off when it’s not seving me or when I can’t manage to serve and/or get served would be wonderful.

Its not too much to ask, either. I mean, why has evolution not granted us this blessed reprieve? After all, there’s even a point where, after you’ve starved for some time, you no longer desire food. Its like your body realizes that you’re at the end, that you cannot acquire the required sustenence, and seeing as the body is probably going to die, it has some mercy on the inhabiting consciousness. But when it comes to fucking, for some reason, the body evidently feels the need to conjure up its capacity for ruthless persistence.

It holds the species above itself, sky-high above the individual organism. It holds the herd above the individual. The troop over the singular, sexually frustrated, domesticated ape caught in the grips of circumstantial abstinence — the circumstance involving fear, lack of confidence, and so on.

Fuck that. I’m starving.

So give me a knob I can turn to take away the pointless agony.