Yara’s Proposal.

It’s maybe the first, second week of May.

At work, I ask for assistance from Marjie, an old manager that has recently returned to this cess-pool, run-down town in Ohio from her two-year departure to Buffallo, New York, where she lived with her boyfriend, homeless, and slipped back into her coke habit.

While it takes some effort to confess, I like Marjie as a person, and really enjoy working with her. Our dynamic is ripe with sarcasm, risky jokes, and mild flirtation, and she tends to bring out the deep well of spontaneous, biting one-liners in me. Our banter is rather cathartic, I’ve found. And when we have a serious conversation, it’s untainted, likely due to the fact that we’ve purged Anything But from our system.

Plus, I think we work well together as a team. She’s fun, and when we work together, we get shit done.

So naturally, given the inspection coming up on the 10th, I requested her help when I felt another individual was required. And it was required. I had to clean the light fixtures outside of the building, which would have been easy enough a task if not for how high up they were, and how high up the ladder was that I needed to use. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of heights, but this height and the unlevel ground, it made me feel more than a bit uneasy.

I asked if she could help me out by holding the ladder. I trusted her enough to do so. Plus I knew if I asked, she would.

And she did.

She did for a short while, anyway, but then we got busy and, given her responsibilities, she had to go up front for a bit. I decided to tell her, when she returned, that we’d just do it later, maybe after my break. Maybe another day.

So much for all of that.

I went out front, lit a cigarette, and crouched down. Eh, I’d tried.

A hit or two in, I turn my head to the right and I see Yara approaching the building. She sees me. I wave. She smiles. She waves.

Eventually, I go back inside, carrying that absurdly long ladder with me. With business still hopping, I come to the conclusion that my greatest contribution right now would be to clean the lobby, the dining room, or whatever you wish to call it, and so that’s what my dumbass does.

And as I proceed to do so, I hear my name being called. It’s unmistakable. I look up, to the source of the attention, and I meet her eyes. She’s standing at the counter. It’s Yara.

I walk up to her, our eyes still locked. She extends her hand, and I almost instinctively extend my own so as to hold her own. Touching the soft, radiating, probably-too-young ethically-speaking, but fuck-it-she’s-legal skin. Mingling, flirting with the energy she’s giving off like a radiant, rogue star passing by — a star having decided, for whatever fucked-up reason, to let herself be caught in my gravity, and revolve around me for what will certaintly turn out to be but a limited time only.

And I, a rouge planet, spinning helplessly around the dining room in the wake, cleaning tables, sweeping the floor, and an eternity later going behind the counter, where I look up only to see her staring back at me from across the boundary.

Unlike other customers, she doesn’t seem annoyed in the eternal wait. Still meeting my gaze — forever calm, confident, and deeply thirsty — she lifts up her hand to obscure the side of her mouth, asking something I’m sure I heard right, though it’s a question I’m somehow conditioned to doubt.

I have to pass by counter, walk up to her in the ill-defined line, all to ask her what she said, ask her to repeat it, to lean my ear just to take it all in, just to ensure I hear her right.

She asks it again.

“Wanna fuck?”

I’d heard her right?

Fuck.

“Yes,” I tell her, instinct overwhelming me, dominating reason. After a moment, with the boundary of the counter still between us, I find myself adding:

“I admire how direct you are.”

And I do. I so fucking do. Yet in my mind, it’s all too, too fucking good to be true. so much so that later, doubt intervenes, and as is my chronic tendency, I need to reinforce the truth.

So later, I text her.

“Did I hear you right?”

And I did. Over a decade dry, maybe twelve years in this agonizing, sexless desert of a decaying, dying body, and at last: an offering.

At last: an oasis.

And I could run, yet given my deeply-embedded trust issues, I crawl.

I crawl towards…

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.

The Little Death.

10/99

It was fairly late by the time we got back to her sister’s place, and though I wanted to go home, Anne convinced me to stay. I had no car to drive home with, as she had driven me, and she told me it was too late for driving, anyway. She promised she’d take me back in the morning, and pushed me to call my parents to tell them where I was. I really didn’t want to do so, but I did, just to satisfy her. I ended up waking them up only to tell them what they would’ve assumed anyway: that I wouldn’t be home until probably noon tomorrow.

Anne and I pulled out mattresses from the kid’s room and put them on the floor of the living room for us to sleep on. Her sister, Janice, took the couch by the window, and Shelley went into her room with the creepy green light, along with her friend.

Anne and I lay on the mattress, with her head at my feet, and I looked down at her closed eyes and sighed. There was no way I would be able to get to sleep, thanks to my chronic insomnia. It would be hours if I got so much as a wink at all. My mind couldn’t help but fixate on Shelley and the story her sister had told Anne and I regarding her having dreams about being abducted by aliens, or being freaked out by the face of the standard Gray, or the story Shelly had told me her self about seeing those lights dancing in the night sky outside the balcony where she once lived.

And then there was Anne’s strange, little friend, Ella, who believed she was an alien. Then there was me. Why did Anne tend to attract weirdos like the three of us?

In any case, maybe Anne was right, and there was no way to know for certain whether any of this was real, if the government was covering it up. There seemed to be no sure road to truth, and even if I knew that truth for certain, I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was also correct in declaring that there wasn’t a damn thing I could hope to do about it. The answer, she said, echoing the Dizzy character I’d heard so much about but never met, was to stop thinking and start living, to live in the Here and Now.

”What are you thinking about?” Annie said from the other end of the mattress.

“Nothing,” I told her.

Nothing, nothing. How many times had I myself asked questions like that only to receive the response of “nothing,” knowing full well that it was a blatant fucking lie? How many times had I, myself, given that response, as I had just then, when it was the farthest distance from the truth? How much love, happiness, misery, hate, fantasy and memory, truth and lie, thought and emotion, confusion and enlightenment throughout the course of human history had safely hidden behind the guise of that bloody contradiction of a word, “nothing”?

That’s what she’d been preaching about, though: nothing. No thought. Stop thinking, stop conceptualizing, just sink into feeling, into sensation. And here I was, thinking about thinking about nothing.

I looked back down at her. All the time I’d known her, all that we’d been through, and she was still here with me: just one more relationship that was hard to explain, pin down, or define. One more relationship that, if logic dictates, shouldn’t have lasted. Yet I’d learned long ago that logic isn’t the guiding force in the universe, and if there was any doubt the evidence lay right there at my feet.

“You can come down here and talk,” she said, and so I swung my head to where my feet had been seconds earlier. We both had a cigarette and talked for a long time about things.

As I looked in her eyes, I thought I sensed something — but I told the animalistic fool in me to shut the hell up and to maintain some self control. We put out cigarettes and lay down beside each other, our conversation working it’s way into reminiscing. In the process, we rolled our heads closer to one another, and I was wondering how close I was permitted to get to her. I tried to read her, to ascertain what it was she wanted. In the end I just up and asked if I could kiss her.

“You don’t have to ask,” she said, and I tried to justify my asking, but she cut me off and kissed me instead.

I pulled back after a while and just looked at her and smiled. “Been waiting awhile for this…”

She put her finger to my lips. “Do you always have to talk?”

She didn’t say it in a sweet, sexy voice, either. At least to my ears, it seemed as if she was honestly annoyed. I was a bit confused, because that was one of the things I’d always liked about her: we could hold deep conversations while we were otherwise engaged in doing things to one another. I took the message, though, and I tried to shut my trap.

It was a long time that we played, too, and I got to do the things I hadn’t done in a long time. Then it got more heated. It got more heated than it had ever gotten between her and I, more heated than it had ever gotten between me and anybody. On reflex, I went to say something, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than her finger again went to my lips.

“Just feel. Try to stop thinking and sink into the moment.”

She unzipped my fly and her hand went down. I tried to do as she had instructed, to shut up and stop thinking, and just enjoy it all. I felt a warmth, a comfort, a trust sweep over me that I hadn’t felt since… when had I felt that?

And then I felt something different. Something unprecedented. Something strange, beautiful, wonderful, and ultimately foreign.

“Is this okay?”

The feelings sweeping through me put me in a state of indescribable awe. I shook my head almost violently.

“Yeah,” I said, and took off my clothes.

Any fear regarding what I had just agreed to was annihilated upon my guided entry. I lay back, and she moved atop me like an angel of the god I don’t believe in. It was smooth, warm, and rhythmic.

She was fucking beautiful: adjective. I was fucking beautiful: verb.

It wasn’t long, though, until I knew what I needed. I spoke up and asked her if I might try the top, and when she said okay I apologized like I’d just robbed her of her rightful throne. She insisted it was okay, and seemed to have no aversions. It seemed to be a courageous move on my part, for this was absolutely foreign territory. I tried to go with the flow; grow with the flow. I did the best an amateur can do.

As I was atop her, I closed my eyes. I truly put all my effort into not thinking, just focusing on the feeling. What happened somewhere in the rhythm, somewhere in the electric sweat between her and I, is a kind of thing that had often happened to me: I saw things.

I was soaring above a dark, desert plane at a steady speed, looking down from a bird’s-eye view at the desolate landscape, occasionally spotted with what I assumed might be people far, far below. The vision felt so real, the sense of motion felt so real. It felt as if I was bi-locating, as if I was in two places at once. Looking down upon that dead, desert landscape, I wondered if I had finally lifted from the pessimistic, futile, narcissistic wasteland I’d been stuck in the previous four years. Perhaps what I was seeing was a metaphorical hallucination regarding that.

Had this been all I had really needed — ironically, something I had feared?

“Who are you looking at behind those eyes?”

“No one.”

If I tried to explain what I was seeing in my inner eye, it would just come out total gibberish. Even if I had enough focus to talk in a comprehensible manner, I’d just sound crazy again, and she probably would’ve told me to shut up and sink back into the feeling anyway. Besides, how could I explain how she was obliterating all my preconceived notions regarding sex? That this wasn’t just some primitive, animalistic act? Sure, I knew damned well that it was a primitive ritual carried out by an organism’s most basic impulse — to survive, at least genetically — but I had never believed it when my punk rock friend told me it could also serve as a conduit to a spiritual experience. I never understood Annie when she said that it was her favorite recreational exercise. Yet here I was: I felt the snake rising at the base of my spine and biting my brain, intoxicating me with it’s magickal venom. Every pore of my being was irradiating in this sensual fire.

I had been so wrong. This was nothing like jacking off.

“Focus on me,” she said. I had closed my eyes again, but I opened them now to look down on her beautiful body. I escaped that picture-show behind my eyelids, and gazed upon my amazing companion.

After we went on a while, she grabbed the sides of my body tightly and told me to stop moving in a very sudden, urgent voice. At first, I wasn’t sure what to think. Had I done something wrong? Had I hurt her? Was I such a fuck-up that I’d even fucked up fucking? Fuck.

“You’re about to feel a female orgasm.” I will never forget how she said it. I will always admire how blunt she was. “Don’t move.”

It was the most bizarre thing — the way it felt like waves, like ripples, like I had stuck my soul in an ocean. She had hers and then told me to “finish up.” As I did as she had asked, I closed my eyes again and I saw Picasso-like still-lives in my mind’s eye, of lamps and couches and other such things. The images were wonderful, colorful and vivid. If only I could save these pictures in my head to file, I thought. If only I had paints and brushes and a canvas beside me.

“No thought,” she said, as if she could tell that I was glimpsing something in my inner eye. “Just feel.”

Indeed, I had nearly forgotten to practice the art of no thought, so I ceased to speak. I ceased to think in words, even in pictures. As I sped up my rhythm atop and between her, everything within me rushed to a point of silence, into static, to a blissful blur. It was nothing but pure sensation; pure emotion. When I reached climax, she grabbed my sides.

“Stop.”

As I swelled in her, I felt the most awesome thing in all my life. I had thought my nocturnal habits of taking matters into my own hands had brought me to orgasm, but it was nothing. It was truly a foreign experience until that night. I dispersed into everything. I was pure energy. I permeated the universe; the universe permeated me. I was at peace with everything. I was the universe.

I made noises beyond my control. She made the noises of a pleased, intrigued girl.

She got up and went to the bathroom.

I think I had this look of amazement, of shock, of total confusion stuck on my face. What the hell had just happened? I could, like, have that every day? Is this what normal people experienced on a routine basis — was sex supposed to be like this? Is it this cool because this is the first time I’ve ever experienced it? That I waited two decades? Is it because I’m a quadruple-Scorpio?

She came back, then I went, and upon my return she asked me if I‘d like to smoke. I was out of cigarettes, so she offered me one of her Marlboro lights. I still can’t smoke one of those without reflecting on that evening. We smoked, we talked, and I was numb and wonderful. We drank water amidst the fumes and utterances and pleasant emotions that enveloped us.

She asked me if I’d liked it, and I shook my head in a most certain affirmative. I wasn’t sure if I was sure about anything else as much as I was sure how fucking beautiful that had been and how great I now felt. I’d glimpsed beyond the horizon of the morbid state I’d been stuck in the last four years and had seen what could be. I felt entirely cleansed and energized. I felt as if I had gone into the depths of the dreariest sleep, and had suddenly been awakened — as if I had gone into the deepest pits of hell, and then been given transcendence -‘ as if I’d gone through the bridge of death, crossed it, and came out reborn as something new.

They call sex the little death, and I finally knew why.

“You know,” she said as she exhaled a stream of smoke, with a sly little smile dominating her face, “for a guy who doesn’t believe in god, you sure call out his name a lot.”

Chronic Masturbation & the Monkey Dream (7/30/21 Dreams).

Just in case the title didn’t give it away, too much information lies ahead.

Proceed at your own risk.

There were three dream scenes I recalled upon awakening.

In one, I was talking with two or three writers from Rick and Morty, who were sitting across a table from me. I was asking them if the first episodes of season 5, as I suspected, weren’t the Rick and Morty we usually follow, but ones from an alternate universe. I cited Rick’s lack of using his portal gun until recently as suggestive evidence, as well as him drinking out of a champaign glass rather than his typical flask (though I’m not sure this one is accurate). They all seemed to be checking out the episodes on the same laptop after I said this, as if they were curious themselves — as if, despite being writers for the show, they didn’t know, either, and wanted to know if I was telling the truth.

In an even shorter scene, I’m walking to a convenience store dressed in a monk’s robe, but as I do so my pants, from beneath my robe, begin falling down to my ankles.

It was the last dream scene that I found most curious, however.

Looking out the second-story window of my old room at my parent’s house, I see the big pond in our front yard that we used to swim in (which doesn’t actually exist), which in turn makes me think of a bigger and better swimming area just a short distance away (which also doesn’t exist).

Suddenly, in the tall grass and bushes down below and between the pond and our house, I see something moving. Its a monkey. Somehow it sees me, too, and then it comes up to my window impossibly quick and stares at me through the glass. For a moment I think its going to start masturbating, which for some reason made me consider masturbating, but instead it just continues to stare at me with this ambiguous expression and uses one hand to open what turns out to be a door in its chest. Inside, there is a circular mouth of sharp teeth.

The monkey image sort of hung around with me, perhaps only because of my desire to draw it, and it took me a few days to take the time to try and interpret this dream scene.

Water often signifies emotions and the unconscious aspect of ourselves and, at least on a personal note, there are also associations with sex. Then there is the matter of the monkey, which, given what I thought he was about to do at the window and the phrase “beating the monkey,” likely was symbol for masturbation itself — associated with sex, clearly, and as a consequence also emotions and the unconscious as well.

This might make even more sense given I’ve been kind overdoing it in that department as of late.

Instead of masturbating, as I anticipated, the monkey opens up a door in its chest; instead of a heart, it has a circular mouth with sharp teeth targeted inward. As for the teeth and the chest, they’re supposed to be symbols of power and aggression — showing teeth, pounding one’s chest. An open mouth, on the other hand, is seen as a symbol of openness and receptivity, and this seems to resonate with the alleged meaning of an open door — being open or receptive to new opportunities. The window is also said to suggest new opportunities, or perhaps just a new perspective.

So the chest is power and agression; inside it, an open mouth, which is receptivity and openness… but within the mouth, sharp teeth: again, power and aggression.

Like the monkey was a goddamn Russian doll of dualities, a Chinese box of polarities.

And though it only struck me long after, there’s the presence of a mouth in place of a heart. Especially given that it was such a sharp-toothed, inhuman mouth, this struck me as a little unnerving in retrospect.

Even so, the image of the monkey at the window as a whole doesn’t necessarily suggest something bad. It may just imply that behind the aggressive masturbation I’ve been engaging in is a deeper, heart-centered hunger that I may still have the opportunity to satisfy.

I feel a bit uncomfortable writing that, but that’s honestly how I would interpret this dream image if it were someone else’s dream.

This may be even more relevant due to something I’ve been writing lately, a blog post I’ve constantly been putting off finishing. Which leads me to wonder: are my dreams heckling my blog posts before my procrastinating ass even gets the chance to finish them?

Aftermath of a Partial Letdown.

I do feel that I get lonely sometimes, and I mean the kind of lonely one gets when they’re single and want that deep, intimate connection with someone. Some female that I can trust and share my secrets with, someone who can rely on me as much as I can rely on her, someone to hold as I sleep rather than hug a pillow, someone who compliments or compensates my character, as Carl Jung put it.

More often, however, I’m only incredibly horny, and that isn’t a good reason to get into a relationship. Or even date, perhaps. I’ve found that when one is horny enough and can’t bear to think of oneself as so primitive and shallow their private parts disguise their demands for sexual satisfaction as yearnings of the heart. As a consequence, I can’t even be entirely certain that when I feel lonely its truly loneliness; to the contrary, there is good reason to suspect that its just my dick’s last-ditch attempt to drive me towards the ol’ in-out via a false flag operation.

That may have been behind the whole Kara thing. And maybe that was truly what was behind me accepting Mary’s request for us to go out sometime and actually following through with it despite my isolationist tendencies and the ongoing global pandemic.

The evening I spent with her a few weeks back was nice enough, and I didn’t even manage to get my geographically-dyslexic ass lost on the way to her apartment. Actually, its her brother’s apartment, which he let both her and her daughter live in with him. It was a small but cozy place, and the only off-putting thing I eyed on the tour, or throughout the night for that matter, were two little Jesus pictures hung beside one another on the wall just behind the door.

I made the decision not to ask, but to pay close attention if she indicated any religious persuasion. And I tried to be conscious of my tendency to mock religion, as I didn’t want to offend her with any jokes poking fun at religion. I didn’t consider this self-censorship, either, so much as courtesey. If she asked me my angle on religion, I would oblige.

Later on in the night, in the midst of conversation, she referenced “getting right with god.” I held my tongue and let it bleed.

After the short tour, we ultimately rested our wary asses on the couch. The first member of her household — apartmenthold? — that I met was a little black cat named Spooky, who, unlike all other names in this blog that aren’t celebrities or political figures (fuck, is there a difference anymore?), I will not use a pseudonym for, because I fucking like the name. Spooky was a nice and delightfully weird little creature who occupied my attention throughout the night.

Next, her daughter came in, who I never really remember talking directly to me, but seemed sweet enough, and did occasionally laugh at things I said. Ultimately her brother arrived, who in some ways seemed like a more extroverted, motivated, and trusting form of myself. He seemed very giving, very welcoming, which I feel I might be like if not for the underlying suspicion and fear of being used or judged. He also had broadband empathy devoid of my fears of forgetting about my own emotions and being consumed by the other person’s.

If that makes sense.

He had all the good qualities I feel in me without the embittered obstructions I erect as a self defense mechanism, to put it another way. On top of that, he’s an excellent cook, but that came later. When he first came in, he was talking about the elderly landlord who wasn’t looking so good and had run out of his medication. He also hadn’t bought any food. So he had run some errands for him, but because he was tipsy he didn’t want to use the landlord’s car, so he did all the food shopping and whatnot on foot. As he told this story, he offered me a 24 of Bud Ice, which I gratefully accepted.

We had all been in the area just outside their apartment where they smoked when this incredibly skinny guy came in, and I quickly pieced together that he was the daughters boyfriend. While he certainly had a distinct feel about him in comparison to the other three, he fit in quite well with them: he was generous, trusting, welcoming. We smoked weed in the kitchen, where the brother began cooking.

The boyfriend had a lot of carts, but no vape pen, and I had my own pen in my bookbag in the truck. Sometimes I take a hit or two on break, as it tends to elevate my mood. I needed to offer it: they’d been so kind, and I had thus far only donated by awkward presence and cranberry juice for the vodka. I offered to go get it, and eventually I did. It was only on my way to car that I realized how moderately drunk and incredibly high I was. I got back and they passed it around. Talking a little, mostly listening, I couldn’t get over this group. Really. I liked them. All of them.

There was some talk of Gypsies among them in conversation, I believe regarding their family, which made me think of Hemlock Grove. It also made me remember a conversation Mary and I had had earlier while on the couch alone together, where we were talking about dogs and I mentioned a former collie my parents had had named Gypsy. She seemed to light up and told me how cool that was. It makes sense that they’d have some gypsy in them, too: they seem nomadic, very family-oriented, with true friends brought into the fold and considered to some degree as family.

At some point, as we were out smoking alone, she tells me how her ex-husband was schizophrenic. She didn’t know when they first marrued, but over the years it became painfully evident and she finally handed him the divorce papers. She had at least one live-in boyfriend before moving in with her brother, and it seems she — as with her brother and daughter — have been moving from state to state, town to town for most of their lives. To someone like me, who has lived in Ohio all throughout this life, I found that fascinating.

I waited till I was sober, gave her a hug, and headed out. Shortly before I did, I realized that though I really liked her, really liked her whole tribe, there was nothing there between her and I romantically, even sexually. Part of me did feel let down, and I immediately began to worry that she might feel differently. In either case, I had gained a really cool friend, if I could secure her as one, and a really cool friend who wed me to a circle of equally awesome people, but subsequent hangouts would never again be confused with dates.

She texted me back the next day and said that what she was really looking for right now was a friend, which was a profound relief. Even before the “date,” I had been driving myself nuts, as if it turned out I wasn’t interested, I didn’t know a kind way to express that to her.

Now, I realize this hardly constitutes trying in the realm of finding a girl, and in fact hardly constitutes dating, and that if a child were to give up after he’d fallen multiple times as he’s trying to walk on two feet, that kid would remain crawling on all fours for the rest of his life. But maybe that’s the wrong analogy. And even if its not, this “child” is 42 fucking years old.

If I could just get laid by a girl I find fascinating and attractive, no strings attached, and get all this out of my system after a sexless decade, perhaps I’d find that’s all it was. Just a biological impulse to scratch that instinctive itch. Or maybe, after I’d get it out of my system, I’d find that sex was only part of it, and while I need it, I also need something more.

Maybe maybe maybe. Maybe I’ll never get laid again, and I’ll have to pick up the mystery in my next incarnation.

Sometimes its hard for me to believe I’m a member of a social species.

Of the Dangerous Duet of Thumper & Pumper.

12/14/20

Shortly after awakening, the scene replayed in my mind vividly, insanely vividly, but I was still groggy. I at first assumed it was a dream, though it soon dawned on me that, no, this was a memory of something that had actually happened, and it had happened yesterday at work.

It was the end of the night and I was up front, having a brief exchange with Anthony, a guy who started maybe two, three weeks ago. He’s a broad-shouldered machinist, maybe it his late twenties, who works with us only part time. He has a young son he sees weekly, I believe, and he currently lives with his parents. I find him to be an incredibly likable guy, typically upbeat, kind, and reasonably social. He’s also forged a bond with Paula, a sixteen-year-old that works with us, as well as Gillian, an 18-year-old girl who started about a week ago that has been referring to both him and I as “daddy.”

I forget why exactly I referred to myself as “a dirty old man” in his presence, but as soon as I said that, his floodgates opened.

Out of nowhere, he confessed to having feelings for Paula, who also has feelings for him, too, he said, despite her having a boyfriend and being underage. As I cringed inside, I told him I had put that one together myself. He drives her home, hangs out with her, spends money on her — shit I feel she wanted me to engage in months back, though I thought that to be an epically bad idea, given our age difference. I also suspect that some part of her delights in manipulating men simply so they do things for her, which is precisely why I started putting my foot down with respect to letting her bum cigarettes and letting her take hits off my vape pen.

I will not be controlled, goddamn it.

He also confessed that Gillian had been sending him boob pics and so on since he flirted with her that one day — though I seem to remember him mentioning to someone else how he had sent her a dick pic that day as well, which seems to go beyond casual flirting, despite his failure to mention it in this context. I mean, to me that sounds more like a blatant advertisement, one that nonverbally announced his intent and desire, so it would seem he was literally asking for it.

Gillian had also been telling him how she always wanted a kid, which he openly declared was a red flag as he went on to tell me he needed to stop thinking with his dick.

I concur.

Unlike the case with Gillian, he feels connected to Paula, he tells me. He’s had a lot of girlfriends and he’s never introduced his son to any of them. I didn’t immediately get the connection, but he seemed to feel bad about this for some reason, so I quickly did my best to assure him that this was, in fact, a sign that he was being a responsible parent.

He wasn’t finished, though. He then added that he did introduce his son to Paula, however — clearly his way of conveying to me how much she meant to him.

Again, I like this guy, but he needs to be careful. The age issue between him and Paula is by no means a minor one (pun not intended, believe it or not), and thinking solely with his evidently photogenic Johnson is certainly not to be recommended.

Its not just him and her and her, either. To the contrary, every time I see the struggles and complications people deal with, the webs they get wound in when it comes to sex and relationships, I begin to remember why I’m an isolationist bachelor that keeps people at an arm’s distance at best.

I get lonely. I’d like to feel that connection with a woman again, to trust someone, to realize in the midst of fucking her that no matter how hard, how aggressively I thrust, I could never get as close to her as I yearned for.

But then I remember how shit ended. How it always ends. How all is transient. How the nature of the universe is entropy. How the only constant is change, and of all things, the experience of that kind of joy, connection, trust, and meaning has been most fleeting. And how in the end it seems as if the universe tricked you into trusting someone enough to let them lift you up from the muck and the bottom of life and help you ascend to the skies — just so that it could drop you. Just so it could abandon you to gravity, cast you towards impact, and reinforce those negative, pessimistic, cynical, fatalistic, perhaps nihilistic notions regarding existence, thereby justifying your act of staying close to the ground, swimming through the muck.

The lesson?

Allow yourself to be vulnerable and the best you can ask for is that you’ll be stabbed from the front.

Though most frequently I have been the one to end things, in which the lesson would be:

Believe you have the courage to make it work only to find yourself giving up and walking away a short time later, as if some part of you was determined to fuck things up all along.

I took at him and them. I look back. I look around and within and I tell myself that its not worth the effort. Even aside from the particularly dangerous elements in his specific circumstance, the cost is too much. Perhaps I should cast this lingering dream aside altogether, aspire to be a self-sufficient monad without all this perpetual second-guessing. Yet I still find myself looking for The Girl — in girls I’ve pushed away and passed by in my life, girls around me, girls I may have yet to meet.

I keep looking like I expect to find someone, but maybe this is just a stupid game instinct tricks us into playing.

Listening to your heart may be no more wise than listening to your dick. And being hypnotized by the duet may be the most foolish path of all.

Porn, Sex, Dreams, Cunnilingus, & Other Things.

7/9/20

Just the other night as I was lying in bed in that twilight state of consciousness, I suddenly realized that I was embedded in a vivid, though dimly-lit, sensory-rich. spontaneous fantasy. I was on a bed, having worked my way down the satisfying, naked body of some woman, now passionately engaging in cunnilingus. I became aware in the midst of it, and as it continued to go on as I was sort of half in it, half in observer mode, I thought to myself: What the fuck is this? What the hell is going on?

Unless I’m masturbating and deliberately engaging in a sexual fantasy, this was unusual for me. My brain has never burped up sexual scenareos in the twilight state, at least so far as I recall; the fantasies and images that play out in my head in the in-between place are typically either terrifying, as when I find images of Gray aliens staring down at me impossibly close, or relaxing, such as images of water, nature settings, and the like.

I felt shallow. Primitive. And given as its closing in on a decade without sex and I’m not confident it will ever happen again, I shouldn’t be experiencing an involuntarily hypersexed imagination now, at 41 years of age. It immediately became obvious to me that I needed to quit watching so much porn, maybe stop viewing it entirely, as it was clearly infecting my brain.

Then, this morning, I awoke from a dream in which I was going down on girl while she was sitting across from some other girl at a table. She had literally asked for it — or perhaps in some way demanded it, as it feels as though I owed her this or something, or it was in exchange for something else. In any case, I didn’t mind — until getting down there, that is. My tongue was entirely disoriented in the bush. It was so hairy I couldn’t feel out the lips or clit. I was just diving, lost in a thick mesh of curly follicles.

Suddenly, I woke up cold, shivering. The sensation seemed immediate and intense. I know I had the fan on in the other room, but it couldn’t have been that cold, especially that suddenly. Confused, I just covered myself up in my bedsheet and comforter and tried to go back to sleep.

And it’s true, that two times may be nothing more than a coincidence, but personally, I don’t fucking think so.

I’ve only eaten out one woman in my life, and that was Anne, my ex-girlfriend from years ago. In fact, she turned me on to quite a few new things sexually since I first met her, when I was about sixteen. She took my virginity, for one thing. She introduced me to spanking. Her and I watched porn while fucking on her couch. We even fucked on a chair, which was a new experience, which was pretty damn satisfying — until the abrupt introduction of the cold, wet nose of her Greyhound, anyway.

So many other experiences could have been had, too, if my sexual imagination was as kinky back then as its become. So it goes, I suppose.

And toward the end, before the tie between us was severed entirely due to my idiocy, I began the practice of going down on her. I remember the look on her face when I could see it, when her back wasn’t arched and the top of her head wasn’t digging into the pillow, her body waving like the sea. The noises she made left me feeling powerful and creative, as if I were playing some living, musical instrument. Her inner thighs would clamp down on my ears like a vice, and it reminded me of when I was a kid and put sea shells to my ear, hoping to hear the ocean, as the old wives tales told. This warm, wet, fleshy vice worked even better.

More recently, diving in the muff has featured in a lot of the porn I’ve been watching while intoxicated. I rarely turn to porn during the evenings when I’m just smoking pot, but when I both drink and smoke, it almost seems to be an inevitability. I begin writing, working on a post like this or a more enduring writing project. Then, as the inebriation heightens, I turn to writing poetry that I post on another blog and which often either confuses or embarrasses me if I’m foolish enough to read them later, in an entirely sober state of mind. Ultimately, I either go to the porn folder on my laptop or punch in search terms ona search engine used exclusively for porn, likely adding to the aforementioned folder in the process. These videos are almost exclusively pmv (porn music videos) or videos with a dark, magickal edge to them (some o.t.o. videos come to mind, as well as some Ophelia Rain videos). A few of the videos I watch regularly feature a variety of kinky shit, though a consistent theme within them has been, you guessed it, the guy eating the girl out.

I’ve also come to save select porn videos, and though for years I was able to keep a promise to myself that I would only watch porn in the high-and-drunk state, I’ve relatively recently come to watch them when I jerk off before work.

The routine is this: jerk off before bed, then jerk off before work. If you’re too damned drunk to achieve climax before bed, jerking off before work (which almost never fails to bear fruit) is a necessity. Otherwise the chances greatly increase that I will be a hypersensitive, hypertense, easily-enraged and remarkably insensitive asshole that day. Anxiety is more likely. Depression is more likely.

So perhaps porn working its way into my sober state of consciousness could be a variable here, could explain why this activity has recently manifested in the semiconscious twilight and dreaming states. Along with the aforementioned nine years of no sex, of course.

Most of the time, when I have dreams or spontaneous fantasies, I have an unofficial process. I write down quick notes so as not to forget and then later work at fleshing them out. I contemplate their potential meaning to the best of my ability and then do a Google search for the predominant symbols in the dream and explore them, seeing if they make sense in the context of the dream as well as my waking life. It rarely provides an answer, but almost always helps. I didn’t do that with respect to today’s dream, or the earlier fantasy, for that matter — at least until now — and I usually do it more or less immediately. Which makes me suspicious of myself. Which made me do it just now.

As a dream symbol, cunnalingis can mean many things: the desire to please, which can include the unselfishness of oral sex as well as using your mouth, or the words we speak, to move people, like playing a glorious song on a musical instrument. It suggests an attention to detail, as in “hitting the spot” through muff-diving or through effectively articulating yourself.

So does the fantasy and dream suggests higher aspirations or merely reflect my intensifying sexual desires? Is it just a convenient metaphor, or should it be taken literally?

Fucked if I know. And I haven’t been in some time, hence my total ignorance on this matter.

Sex & Struggles.

Once upon a time I was under the naive impression that the desire for sex typically diminished with age, but I’m beginning to expect that, if this is true at all, its likely due to the fact that throughout your life you get it all out of your system by actually engaging in fucking. Then, once you’re in your 40s, perhaps, all that sexual energy has been discharged and the desire diminishes.

This is just not how it appears to be working with me, and maybe its because I’m a really late bloomer when it comes to damn near everything, I don’t know. Maybe watching porn has exacerbated the desire, maybe I was just too distracted with all the crazy shit in high school for my instinctive needs to properly blossom back then.

Given the choice, I’m not sure if I would elect to satisfy the desire often enough to keep my head clear or just extinguish the desire altogether, just banish that distraction once and for all.

At least one of the reasons this is on the forefront of my mind today is because I saw that girl again. Kara, as I called her in my other blog. We’ve never spoken, despite my feeble attempts, but the energy around her seems unusually sexually charged. And she’s the right kind of goth. She has piercings, tattoos, and these sharp, predatory eyes.

The last two times I’ve seen her — the only two times I’ve seen her — she’s felt angry, borderline enraged. Today she seemed a bit softer, lighter, happier, and though we still didn’t talk, I sensed some attention and curiosity in her toward me right as she was leaving, just as I was clocking in.

This is confusing.

And maybe I’m just delusional; the way things in my life tend to work, I’ll never know.

Though my curiosity about her is rather vast, my mind keeps wrapping me in sexual fantasies regarding her more than anything. It just gets tiring. This kind of interest rarely leads to anything and I could be focusing on so much more productive things.

It was so much easier back when I never cared about sex, didn’t feed the desire. It was also so much easier during those rare periods in which I actually had sex and was busy as a bee making up for lost time.

Either is better than this tense, agonizing limbo I’ve let myself remain in now — and for my longest stretch yet.

Pointless Resolutions for Another Revolution.

I bought two 24 ounce beers on the way home from work last might after we closed the place early at ten, but I wasn’t in the mood to drink by the time I got home. So I put in a pizza, got mildly high and watched the last few episodes of the second season of Lost in Space.

Aside from work, this wasn’t a bad New Years. Not in the least.

I still find it interesting that on the night when everyone drinks I elect not to participate despite the fact that I’ve been drinking frequently as of late. I think I just like to bite my thumb at tradition. Any time a large group of people are really into something it immediately becomes suspect and any appeal it had tends to evaporate.

Its like when I’m planning on doing something out of my own volition and then someone tells me I have to do it or really should do it. My desire withdraws.

Earlier in the day, I was thinkimg on how New Years resolutions seem to be a pointless practice, as no one ever seems to follow through with them. That fact kind of takes the pressure off of making such resolutions, though. And since I’ve been trying to write every day, I forced myself to make some with the full awareness that I will not, in all likelihood, live up to them and they’ll probably roll over into 2021:

1) Stop drinking. Or at the very least slow the fuck down. At this point, I would really like to just stick to smoking weed. Weed hangovers are comforting, like someone wrapped you in a fluffy, warm blanket. Booze hangovers make you feel sick, and sometimes they can even make you feel like a raw nerve, hypersensitive to everything. And I clearly have enough of that naturally. I’m nearly always self-loathing when I wake up after drinking, too, and this is never the case with cannabis.

I’ve continued drinking because it allows me escape from my emotions, from giving a shit at all. Its also a convenient way to shift gears and not take the fucking bull shit work packs into me home with me. No wage slave hangover.

I’m a very happy drunk — and another word that begins with an “h” and ends in a “y” — and so its much like having a button I can press to make myself happy whenever I wish. I have also told myself that it helps with writing, but it does only up to drinking, say, a 24 ounce beer. After that, only poetry seems possible unless I want to write something I’ll find stupid and horrible upon sobering up. And while pot may not be the best sleep aid, experience suggests its infinitely better than booze.

2) Draw every day. Even if its just a few little sketches on a single page of my sketchbook, I need to get the artistic juices flowing again on a daily basis. Not drinking may help with this process, as booze and art do not typically go together in my experience. Cannabis, however, is perfect for the practice.

3) Get laid. Not drinking may make any attempt to get laid even more difficult than it already is. The longer its been, the more anxious I am when I sense that a golden opportunity is in close proximity. The more I need it, the more difficult it is to obtain.

Drinking at a bar, which I rarely do anymore, would provide a potential way to circumvent this not-getting-laid problem, but clearly not if I quit drinking altogether.

Though it’s probably not the time to rant about this, I really wish they’d legalize prostitution. It could be regulated if brought into the light, the women would be safer all around, and schmucks like me would certainly invest. I think I’d be happier and more relaxed. Probably more confident as well.

4) Get a better job that’s closer to home. This would either require getting a job closer to where I live now or securing a job elsewhere and finding a new residence in close proximity. In any case, I could watch this shithole town I work shrink in my rearview mirror for the last time and it would be beautiful.

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.