Sex, Religion, & Thought-Tracks.

3/15/18

For the last few months, I’ve been keeping up with the daily samatha meditation. I’ve noticed that my mind is back on hyperdrive lately, perhaps an effect of the meditation and the fact that I’ve stopped drinking. Again, I’ve noticed that much as I keep a bare minimum of three folders open at once on my laptop, I keep at least two distinct tracks of thought going on in my mind at once and hop between them. Today my mind’s been bouncing between the subject of religion and the subject of sex.

With respect to the religious track, it has a definite source. Monica came into work last night, though it was her day off. The live-in boyfriend and her had gotten drunk and she left before they got into another fight, and now, clearly inebriated, she sat down in the dining room while I was cleaning and began spilling to me. It didn’t take her long to bring up the subject of a god, though this is not a conversation she’s had with me to any extent before.

Since she can’t believe in people, she explains, she believes in god to get her through life. She just talks to “him” and asks if he’ll help her get through the day. If she didn’t believe in god, she confesses, she wouldn’t be able to take it. She’d kill herself.

Just try it, she tells me. Just wake up and decide to believe.

As I try to explain to her as gently as I’m able, I don’t think I’m wired the same way, because it just doesn’t work for me.

When I realized I didn’t believe in a god back in high school, for a brief time I saw it’s lack of existence as a bad thing — until I subjected it to analysis. Then I realized it just fucking wasn’t. In addition to the fact that there is no convincing evidence suggesting the existence of such a creative, cosmic intelligence, I also see no evidence that believing despite the lack of evidence has any real, practical utility as a coping mechanism — at least for me. I know it makes her and others feel comfortable, fills them with hope, but I was never able to understand why. A totalitarian, cosmic father figure that draws the lines between right and wrong, dangling the carrot of forever-heaven in front of us and hovering the whip of eternal hell just behind — well, it just doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

If such a god did indeed exist, he would, in my humble opinion, be the biggest asshole conceivable. I wouldn’t support him anyway.

Talking to her, though, I leave that part out.

She tells me it doesn’t have to be that, but that I should just “believe in something.” I never understood it when people said that. What do they mean? That we all have to invest uncritical certitude in the notion that a creator of the universe exists? That we all should have blind, unquestioning servitude in some external force? Neither seems necessary to me. Neither seems healthy. Any way you slice it, no god — not even The God of the Infinitely Vague — seems attractive to me.

I tell her I see evidence suggestive of reincarnation and that consciousness is but a resident of the body, that there may be other planes of existence or parallel universes our consciousness can access — that I am an atheistic dualist. But her god, her Jesus, the concept of original sin, the notion of heaven and hell? I can’t, don’t, won’t swallow it. And the notion that this singular book — anthology, really — is a guidebook for life? I don’t see it. That shit just never made sense to me.

I can cherry-pick stories and lines from Dr. Seuss that are as relevant to life. The bible doesn’t stand out as a book, let alone a guidebook, sorry.

I don’t say all of this to her. I like her. And if it keeps her from killing herself, let her have the crutches. I’m thankful something is keeping her alive, even if it’s bullshit. But I can’t stomach it. And my mind and my soul relents as well.

So that religion was on my mind makes sense given last night’s conversation, but the thought-track dealing with sex? That’s another matter. The memories just sprung out at me from nowhere; jumped into my consciousness from the seeming void, unprovoked.

Once, when Claire and I were going out during high school, I was with her at night in the front seat of a large vehicle. It may have been my old Celebrity, my first car, but for some reason, I remember being higher up, as if in the front seat of someone’s truck. In any case, we were parked at night in the dirt lot beside a house just around the block, where her cousin went to practice in his band. I wish I remembered how it started, specifically if I actually had the balls to initiate it, but my hand was down her pants. Fingers worming around. It was warm, moist, wonderful. I was working away as I watched the illuminating expressions wash over her beautiful face. She seemed to be enjoying it, but I was forever uncertain, and I remember getting incredibly nervous, certain that I was doing something wrong, and ended up stopping. I later confessed this to her and she stated the obvious: that if she seemed to be enjoying it I should have just kept the fuck at it.

I never had sex with her. I had better get the chance and take it before I die. At least once. Bare minimum.

Even after I lost my virginity at age twenty, after it blew my mind, I didn’t do that again for five years. It seemed to establish a pattern of sorts, one in which I would suffer enduring periods with no sex (I’m on a seven-year-stretch right now, as a matter of fact, and it stands as the longest period of inactivity yet), punctuated by short periods where I make up for lost time. Anne, the complex gal who took my virginity, probably fit the profile of a nymphomaniac, but it always seemed to me that she just liked sex, and there’s nothing wrong with that. During the last time we were together, I remember her telling me that our sex drives were similar, and how, based on that, she didn’t understand how I could go so long not having any sex at all. I reminded her that I was a rather chronic masturbator, but its true, it’s not at all the same thing. So am I a self-denying nympho, then?

I also remembered when Anne came back from Texas, how I had sex for the first time in years, and out of nowhere, in the midst of me doing the ol’ in-out, she spanked me on the ass.

I stopped a moment. She then asked, and I confirmed: Indeed, I like that.

Over time, she was interested in letting me try out new things. I bobbed in the muff for the first time, we had sex while we both watched porn, had sex in a chair until her greyhound tried to cut in.

I thought to myself how I haven’t had sex since I started smoking pot, and given that it makes masturbation infinitely better, I’m really eager to do the real thing in that state of body-mind. I need to find an interesting, pothead girl who wants to stone-bone rather than simply continue to engage in my nightly, solo weed-whacking.

Why has the desire suddenly flared up like this? Is it because I’ve stopped drinking and my sex drive isn’t buried by the haze that it’s been on my mind again lately?

And why am I ping-ponging betwixt sex and the religious issue in my head today, specifically? As I chewed on that for the latter half of my work shift, it struck me again that there’s probably a link between our romantic feelings for a significant other and their religious feelings for a goddess or god. To me, this helps explain why conservative men talk about Jesus in a manner that in any other context would, to their ears if no one else’s, sound blatantly homosexual. It also makes sense out of the hypnodomme thing, as they seem to strive to link sexual, romantic and religious feelings through hypnosis in order to condition some heightened sense of drooling worship and control in their subjects. I’m glad I got out of watching those videos at the same time that I kicked the booze: once I blew the nightly load, and certainly after I sobered, the thought that I was watching those videos made me feel nauseous.

I am more apt to deal with Pagans and Buddhists; their concepts are more attractive to me. Eastern religions in general, and Native American beliefs, they fascinate me. Even Satanism seems to have some merit, at least one form if it. Not that I could be certain I’d ever call them my own.

Maybe I need to have sex with a Pagan stoner with Buddhist leanings or something. Let today’s mental tracks crisscross, let those trains of thought collide.

On Whack-a-Mole Memories.

On December 5th, I awoke with a short, final scene from a dream in my head. I was walking passed a table of three in a crowded restaurant and heard a familiar voice. I turn and discover its Mickey and Channing, two friends of mine from high school that I recently learned have a child on the way. We all hug warmly and I congratulate them.

As of late, for whatever reason, I’ve been spontaneously remembering and thinking about a lot of people from my past. Most notably, however, are the memories dealing with Anne, an exgirlfriend, as they keep popping up in my mind. Its like there’s a frustrating insistence behind it, too, as if some part of my mind keeps trying to remind me of these moments.

I don’t dwell on these memories as I used to, having made a deliberate attempt to stop. When it comes to my more anomalous experiences, that is a different matter, but in that case it isn’t about emotional reminiscing, but a desire for greater understanding, and I try to do this in tandem with research that expands beyond my own, personal memories. Unless it ties to something in my present, be it a real-life experience or a dream, or at the very least brings something new to the table, I try to avoid mulling over the same old memories. I want to move forward, not drift backward.

At least with respect to Anne, however, the thoughts and memories keep recurring. Its always along different avenues of thought, too, and its beginning to bother me. I thought I was done with this, done living in the past, but the present keeps opening doorways that lead me back there.

The past is always present, this I know, and I’m not one of those people that constantly blasts others for focusing too much on what’s behind them or trying to look too far ahead of themselves. Its important to remember, it pays to anticipate, and given the time lag inherent in our sensory perceptions, we never experience the objective “here and now” anyway.

Sorry, Buddhists. Facts are facts.

Even so, on a personal level, I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking back, looking into the past, and its long overdue that I focus on moving forward in my life. I don’t want to get distracted or hung up on things, good or bad, that happened years ago, decades ago, lifetimes ago.

Now I’m forced to wonder why I keep getting led back to her. Yes, I realized relatively recently that if I should have stayed with anyone and actually nurtured an intimate relationship, for countless reasons it should have been her, but that is long since over and done with, dead and gone. And unless it relates to something at present or presents something that will help me build a better future, I can’t waste my time and energy digging into it. Yet she keeps popping up. Its like I’m playing some psychological game of Whack-a-Mole, or like I’m Bill Murray’s character Carl, fighting that goddamned gopher in the movie, Caddyshack.

In either case, I realize, that rodent of a thought inevitably wins.

Remembering Rosie Finch.

After I awoke, I sat on the toilet and let my mind wander. All I could remember regarding the dream I’d been having just before awakening dealt with walking around with a broom and dustpan, sweeping things up towards the back of some house — and though the house and property seemed vaguely familiar, I can’t quite place it in memory. I also remember walking by a small group of people from work and jokingly patting them on the head as I passed by. In any case, I made it around to the side of the house, where the main entrance was, where I was finally alone and was about to enjoy a cigarette when I awoke.

I checked my phone, which was on my nightstand, and found it was 11:36 AM — six minutes after my alarm should have gone off, but I don’t remember even hearing it. Nor have I been able to retrace the mental steps that brought me from thinking of that dream to thinking about Rosie Finch, but I find it highly unusual that she erupted in my mind, seemingly out of nowhere.

I met her my Freshmen year of high school, just as my life was beginning to take a strange, dark, surreal turn and the stress shot up to unimaginable heights. It was in math class that I first met her, I think. She was a quiet girl in a red flannel sitting at a desk near the window, and I recall exchanging words with her and finding her to be pretty cool.

At first, anyway.

Soon enough, I discovered that I was by no means the only one attracted to her. For Homecoming, a bunch of us met at her house, a group largely composed of guys who wanted her. That’s where she first revealed her awesome capacity to be a raging cunt.

Days prior, I was in study hall when a guy I knew made like he was going throw a wadded up ball of paper at me. I ducked and, like an idiot, slammed my face on my desk and busted one of my front teeth. I had been as self-conscious as hell about it, and it certainly didn’t help when she began laughing at my chipped tooth and referring to me as “chip.” Shortly thereafter, her and another girl named Rosie spent an entire period of art class trying to outdo each other making fun of me — not about the tooth by that time, as I had gotten it fixed, but about damn near everything else, including my new “interest” in aliens and UFOs.

As their insults of me continued to feed off one another, I remember just staring into space, distancing myself from all and everything as I nervously and intensely played with the rubber eraser in my hands (better than a stress ball, as it turns out). They only stopped their verbal assaults, and quite suddenly, when one of them spied my gummy eraser and asked me what I’d made, what that was. I held it up and it looked like a duck, who Channing, a friend of mine, elected to name Belzebub.

I eventually began drawing him, even attempting to make a comic book starring the character. I’d hate to have to credit the Rosies for all that.

A year or two after graduation, we came back into contact with one another. I don’t recall the particulars, but I think she bumped into me at the grocery store I was working at at the time. We hung out once at her place, where she introduced me to iced coffee. However much a coffee addict, I preferred it hot. We hung out again, this time at my parent’s house, in my room, where we made out, I fingered her, and she ended up sucking my dick, if I remember correctly.

It was this particular memory I stopped at and really considered this morning, really trying to examine and feel it out, as I was suddenly feeling quite suspicious of myself. Did that really happen? I’m fairly certain it did.

The last time I saw her was long after graduation when Channing and I were hanging out at a crowded diner in a town nearby where I still lived with my parents. Though she was sitting right beside me, speaking aggressively to whoever it was who was sitting right across from her, she never acknowledged me, nor I her. She had a shaved head and one of those puffy jackets on.

Why was I suddenly thinking of her this morning, however, particularly after that dream? The only thing I can think of is that perhaps it stemmed from that part of the dream where I was patting coworkers on the head. One of them I think was Devin, who I have described to others as a gay man hiding in a glass closet. Everyone can see it, no one is going to judge him for it, so I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just come out of the closet, breathe in the fresh air, and just be who he is. What better time in human history to be a homosexual, after all? There will always be total assholes among us, but he would have a welcoming community as well.

I contrast him with another guy I work with named Ronald (not to be confused with Ronnie) who “came out” as gay after a pretty, blond-haired girl at work claimed he said inappropriate things to her in the kitchen. I didn’t see that coming, nor did another gay guy I work with, and he can generally smell his own. For this and other reasons, I’m fairly convinced Ronald is a homophony. Bisexual at the very least.

Ronald and Devin, they’re sort of polar opposites in my mind. Yin and yang.

My greater point is, I think Rosie was a closet lesbian. It was in the 90s that I met her, too, when that sort of thing wasn’t nearly as widely accepted as it is now. There were always stories about her and another girl I went to school with, one of a few that eventually committed suicide. Aside from the manner of her ultimate end, there were other reasons to suspect the girl had a rough life, and I always got the sense that Rosie was considerably damaged as well, and maybe that brought the two of them together for a time. Though I don’t imagine it was all of it, was a lot of it the fact that she was gay and her parents perhaps considered all that a sin? Were they homophobic and, as it was with another kid hiding in a glass closet whom I once knew, did they threaten to kick her out of the house and disown her if she was gay? I’ve often wondered if that is the case with Devin; if that’s maybe why he’s hiding.

I didn’t think to look Rosie up on social media. I have no interest in doing so, really. I do wonder what became of her, though.

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.