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.

Of Bad Habits & Paying Attention.

Waking up having not consumed booze the evening before makes for such a better morning. I don’t feel the least bit ill, there’s no worry about what I might have posted on Facebook while under the influence, or what I might have texted or Facebook messaged people. I don’t wake up abruptly and with intensity, with automatic negative thoughts punching through to consciousness with unparalleled, psychological violence. The degree of shame and self-loathing, which to some degree is always there, is at the very least bearable upon awakening.

Its like my brain has a quota, that it must achieve the required daily degree of anxiety, depression and anger, and the booze postpones this. I’m a happy drunk. After booze wears off, the moment its out of my system, however, it rushes back in to bloat in the void left behind, promptly making up for lost time.

The lesson: you don’t escape your problems, but you can postpone dealing with them — which only exacerbates issues upon their return.

I must remember this.

It used to be that I’d wake up, make a pot of coffee, consume it all, go to work, drink maybe the equivalent of another pot throughout my shift, take a cup home with me for the ride and then, upon arriving home, my first order of business would be to take another pot of coffee. I don’t think my body was entirely caffeine-free for a moment between the mid-1990s and the first quarter of this year.

The change started slow: I began to stop drinking coffee at any point in the day when I realized I felt anxious, angry or depressed. I stopped drinking coffee when I anticipated getting high, too, unless I was at home. Slowly, I brought myself down to drinking two large cups in the morning, that’s all.

I never thought I’d so much as diminish my caffeine intake, I couldn’t imagine ever getting to that point, but as soon as I permitted myself to accept how it exacerbated my anxiety and many of my other emotional issues, I more or less naturally weened myself off of it.

Could this process work with booze, even with cigarettes? Just heighten awareness regarding the negative effects and I’ll naturally, gradually bring it down to a healthier level, perhaps kick the habit entirely?

Is this the route to self-congruence? Is self-control what you’re purchasing when you pay attention?

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.