pretty dumb things

greetings from lake lachrymose!

The thing about the cruise ship that is my interior life is that I never know ahead of time which event I’ll be attending. One day, I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go but my own emotional gala. Another day and I find I’m at some suburban coffee klatch, chatting amongst my selves while we all talk over one another’s sentences and refuse the pound cake (only to eventually succumb to its buttery vixen wiles). Still another, and I’m at a frat party, downing body shots with abandon. On any given Monday, I’m at an inner wake, dressed in fetching black and mourning…something. On any Wednesday afternoon, I’m at a tea, all sedate and crumpet-eating. Outside, it might be raining, but inside I might be entertaining. There’s no rhyme or reason or invitation in my emo life.

Lately, and for a long and completely understandable time, I’ve been attending a drawn out pity party. It’s been necessary, this Mad-hatter’s tea of patheticism. I’ve moved my way down the seats of the seemingly endless table, surrounded by the scraps and orts of my lingering feelings for my X and metaphorical china cups ringed by the vestiges of something that was once comforting and warm and now is cold, congealing and faintly repulsive. There’s been a lot of self-pity and frankly, I have laved myself in it. I lost a lot, and loss requires mourning and yadda yadda yadda cookies.

Then, suddenly, there was a break in the party. I thought I saw the last of my pity guests as they sloped sullenly out the door. The tail of Eeyore. The grey skirt of Emma Bovary. The metal clunking of Marvin the Robot. I thought I’d courteously shoved them out the door, goodie bags in hand (a package of Kleenex, a sample-pack of Xanax, a copy of Eat, Pray, Love) and bid them a not unsentimental adieu. I thought that with the tender pop and bang of my 2,500 mile booty call my pity party had ended.

Not so much. In the past few days I’ve found myself once more surrounded by the disco dirge of lament. I have found myself once more on my couch in the classic “woman weeping on fainting couch” pose: body flung like laundry, legs curled in an S, arms folded origami-like under face. I have been that woman on the couch weeping inconsolably and I have heard the slow inexorable crank of the pity party, like the worst sort of French accordion music, start up once more.

I have tried to resist the pull of the increasingly morose Julia, my emotional Cruise Director. I have tried to beg off, and like Amy Winehouse cry, “No! No! No!” as Julia has tugged at my sleeve and led me pity-party-ward. I have tried, and I have failed. Ultimately, I just succumbed to the chthonic beat. I went limp and I wept. A lot, and with Buffy in the background because if I am a geek, I am at least consistent. Nothing has quite the cathartic impact of Buffy’s words to her sister Dawn right before she flings herself into the glowy-red rift between demon dimensions thereby fulfilling her prophecy that death is her gift. “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it,” Buffy tells Dawn. Currently, I’m resisting getting that tattooed on my body.

I’ve been resisting a lot lately. Most recently, I’ve been resisting emailing Donny and telling him something so drippy in bathos I can’t even write it here. I’ve resisted calling him. I’ve resisted emailing him. I’ve resisted and I’ve resisted from one moment to the next. I’ve felt like I can’t live another moment without smelling his scent, and I’ve resisted telling him that. I’ve resisted calling him and telling him that my heart simply will not stop breaking. I’ve resisted every impulse to tell him the truth: that I miss him palpably.

So instead I called him with the news that Snoop Dogg had made a cameo on One Life to Live. Never mind that neither one of us has ever watched a soap opera. Never mind that neither one of us has more than a passing interest in the oeuvre of Mr. Dogg. Never mind that telling Donny this piece of news was tantamount to telling him that I am having a hard time living without him because this piece of news was so pointless as to travel around the bend and become pointed.

No, on second thought, do mind that last bit. Nothing says something like nothing, really, and there’s not a lot less of something than Snoop Dogg on a soap. It’s the kind of bubble that screams when popped.

So greetings from Lake Lachrymose. I’ll be leaving here soon. I think I’ll take up a residence at Chagrin Chateau, where I’ll be staying in disguise. Look for the woman on the couch with the dark glasses, wadded hankie in her hand, and cookie crumbs besprinkling her bodice.

on being fingered with rings

Marriage is a contract that I may never make, and yet I like being fingered by men with wedding rings. It’s not that I can feel the ring. Wedding rings tend toward the slim and the flat. I’ve never had the experienced the interior wriggling of a finger with a ring rococo as Liberace’s , a skull bauble thick as Keith Richard’s, a chunk of metal clunky as Robert Lee Morris’s Superman. The rings that have been inside me have been modest, prudent, utilitarian bands signaling commitment.

There have been three of them in reality and one in my imagination. Of the three real rings, one man was unquestionably cheating and after we fucked, would stomp around the room muttering, “I’m damned. I’m going to hell.” That was not the best part of our sexual congress, and I didn’t keep the affair going very long. (Parenthetically, I might add, shortly after our brief tryst ended, this man fell in love with another woman, and now he, his wife, and this woman live separately in what is by all accounts an amicable polyamory. Bully for him.) One of them lived in a state of prolonged commitment to both his wife and his unabashed affairs with multiple women. He was very open about it all to the women in his life, almost business-like, and yet quite caring to me. He interested me intellectually, but not enough to see him more than twice. The third, and most recent, lives in a happily open relationship with his wife of several years. He has lovers; she has lovers; it all seems quite idyllic.

I feel conflicted about cheating. On the one hand, it’s just not a very nice thing to do to the person to whom you’ve plighted your troth. It isn’t honest, and it smacks of cowardice. A person should strive not to be pusillanimous, a word that feels so much like what it means as to be nearly onomatopoetic. On the other, I tend to be compassionate to people in pain, and often—though not always—people who cheat are people in pain. They’re putting their feelings into actions, not into words, and that, unless it’s interpretive dance, is often a problem. When I consider infidelity, I am caught betwixt me moral core and between my compassion. Mostly, I come down on the side of not cheating, if you’re at all interested.

But this piece of writing is less about the squishy ethical territory of infidelity and more about how I like being fingered by a finger with a wedding ring. Clearly, when the finger is diddling me, I can’t see the ring. I can’t even feel the ring. So the pleasure of the ring comes neither from the visual nor from the sensual. It’s a purely imaginative power. It’s a pleasure that rests in the seat of all pleasure—my pinky-grey and corrugated brain.

It’s difficult for me to put my finger on the exact spot of that imaginary pleasure. I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that part is powered by the shock of the illicit thrill, if indeed the finger belonging to the man fingering me is infidel. Like almost every other human, I do feel pleasure in transgression, and crossing this boundary, like all the strange others that for one reason or another give me the good down-low tingle, nudges whatever purely physical pleasure there is into electrically-charged territory. But the illicitness isn’t it in and of itself.

I know that it’s not because the man, the imagined man, the one without the ring, the one whose ring I imagined and in imagining it found great delight, was Donny, my now-X and then erstwhile fiancé. It was his imagined not-ring that prodded me to gyrate indecorously one sunny August afternoon, his naked fingers twisting and turning inside me. My mind furnished his finger with a ring. It bedighted his third finger on his left hand with a ring, and though neither the ring nor even possibly that exact finger was rubbing the walls of my pussy like a magic lamp, it was real enough to me, and I came from the concept as much as from the reality.

Which all leads me to believe it’s not the cheating that I like. It’s the abstract concept of commitment. It’s the symbolism of the ring, this piece of metal that our culture uses to denote those of us who have made a pact with another human from those of us who haven’t. It doesn’t matter whether the man has committed to me—though clearly my fetishization of the ring in general and my somatic response to Donny’s fictive ring in specific suggests that a commitment to me would be ideal—it’s that this man has committed, for good, bad, or ugly to someone.

I’m sure that my ring thing speaks silent tomes about me. Commitment is something that has eluded me. I, like Mr Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, have reached Q. I cannot, however, reach R, and I should very much like to, even if I suspect that commitment, like the lighthouse, will seem a lot less mystical once I get there, whenever it does, however late in life, in whatever way I’ve been altered by my own world war. I’m sure that my ring thing is fertile ground for solipsism. I think, however, I’ll prefer to hold onto it with my febrile erotic imaginings, flickering, imaginary and powerful.

on my 2,500 mile booty call

A distance of 2456.6 miles is quite a lot to travel for a booty call, though I might add that the booty of the man in question traveled still further yet. The sheer distance—all those fat atlas inches that add up to two mountain ranges, three time zones, eleven states, lots of major rivers and the aforementioned almost 2,500 miles—intimates that this call wasn’t just for any booty. This call was, when I first conceived of it, the clash of sexual titans.

I’d often imagined this man in any number of prurient ways with multiples of configurations. Though human bodies have a relatively finite number of ways in which they can reasonably interlock, or do so without taunting gravity and without undue physical strain, I had thumbed through a heavy battalion of possibilities after meeting this specific man for the first time a couple of years ago. That first time we met, we were chaste as anchorites. It did little more than provide mulch for the fecund fields of my polymorphously perverse imagination.

Individually this man and I have quite the galactic bodies of sexual experience. We have, as consenting adults, consented a lot, consented early, consented often and consented to things your mother might have warned you about had she sufficient imagination to envision the sweaty-naughty thoughts that have made you glow tumescent. Individually, this man and I have quite the reputations in our relative and Doppler-widening circles. Thinking about our eventual tryst, which I did a lot in the months between his proposal of it and the time it came to fruition, I imagined our bodies clanging together with seismic force and ringing out like the battling swords of Norse Gods.

Imagining our trysting, I saw visions of dark plums frugging in my head. Unspeakable acts, or nearly so, things that left marks, things that made me walk like John Wayne for a week, things that embarrassed even me, things I’d never done before, things I’d never do again, things with ropes, buzzers, hats. I imagined the kind of erotic play that legends wish they had. Casanova, Rochester, Anaïs Nin, Mata Hari, Wilt Chamberlain: they would all quail in the face of our mutual enjoyment, either that or they would give us a roseate high five for a job very well done.

And yet, when we met, this man and I, in that beige, studiously inoffensive hotel room, the clash of the sexual titans it was not. What is still stranger is this: it was a good thing that it wasn’t.

There were several points in the planning and execution of this trip when I nearly backed out. The final point came when upon arriving at JFK at 6:13 for my 6:30 flight, I was too late to board and had to wait three hours for the next flight. Exhausted and nervous, I almost took it as a sign from…something that I should change my mind, turn my tail and head home. I didn’t. I stayed. I waited it out. I sat my ass in a hard plastic seat and I paid too much for wireless and I mourned Jet Blue and I made the 9:30 a.m. flight.

That first day there in California in this weird, plastic city full of weird, plastic restaurants and weird, plastic imposed fun, I felt a new strange shade of weird, plastic displacement. Still, it felt nice to see this man whom I barely knew but liked. We hugged. We ate baba ganoush. We slept in separate beds. We did not kiss. We were, once again, anchorites, and I was giddy with exhaustion.

The next morning, a day that rose with an unseemly earliness and a thick egg-yolk light, we showered, individually. We lay on a bed, and we kissed. My towel was, as I’ve mentioned, plucked off my body like a leaf off an artichoke. We, well, what’s the best way to put it? Words fail me a bit because what it most felt like was making love, though without actual love—and what I feel may or may not be love, but it’s a love like I love a friend with a devoted abstraction devoid of anything I could exactly call passion—it’s hard to know what to call it. But it was smooth, it was soft, it was near silent, it was gentle, and it was without clash at all, much less anything else titanic.

It was human, and it was nice. It was nicer than nice; it was quite lovely, actually. It felt good, and it was fairly tame. Rose petals on the bed would not have felt out of character. It was the vanilla custard of sex, and it made me recall how vanilla custard can be quite tasty. Vanilla custard can, in fact, hit the spot. Which this did, thank you very much.

And when the custard hit that spot, and my hips up-arched like a Roman bridge, he on his knees towering like a telemon, and I started to feel my banshee wail burble up from my gullet like a geyser of unstoppable sound, the man clapped his hand over my mouth and I was silenced. We fucked, quieter than mice, silent as slumbering lambs, so hushed were we that had we been fornicating in the reading room of the New York Public Library, we would not have been shushed. We fucked, nearly noiseless, a few times in a couple days.

The thing is, it was nice. It was nice in bed and it was nice out. We made for good company—compatible enough that I genuinely enjoyed this man’s intimate presence, but not so compatible that now that I’m home I pine. I feel no pine. I am pineless. It’s quite swell, actually. I quite recommend it to anyone who has been suffering a slow and painful break-up as I have since last September when my erstwhile fiancé picked a vicious fight with me, signaling the beginning of what would turn out to be a long and drawn-out breaking of my heart. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as sexual healing, though to be true to both the experience and this man, the healing came from much more than just the sex.

It’s hard to find the right combination of booty upon which one can reliably call. I am, right now, very happy being very much alone; I am experiencing a touch of agromania. I am swathed in quite the circle of invisible bubble wrap. I am feeling exceptionally self-protective and often keenly hungry for solitude. Still, I needed to be touched inside and out. I needed the press of lips, the silk-steel feel of cock, the caress of a caring human, the ineffable release of orgasm. I needed the kinds words this man said to me. I needed his tongue, both literal and figurative. I needed the whole kit and caboodle, the complete 2,500 mile booty call. I needed it to be just perfect enough and no more than that.

And as the California clock tick-tick-ticked close, closer, closest to done, I needed for it to be over. I needed to get on that plane and I needed to come home. Blissful, thankful to another and blissfully and thankfully alone.

with a cock in your mouth, you speak in labials

There’s really no other way to put it: I really missed sucking cock.

stupid, stupid UTI

Ok. I can’t forbear writing about it anymore. It’s inescapable, and try as I might, I can’t avoid its pointed reality. The real reason I haven’t written is not so much that I’ve been exhausted or that I’ve been busy—though both are true—and less this: I have a urinary tract infection of simply epic proportions. It is consuming every iota of my waking attention, and I have been awake a lot.

If you’ve never had a UTI, you can’t imagine the simple and occasionally exquisite agony of being aware that you are, indeed, equipped with a bladder and a urethra. Aside from the quotidian experience of feeling that I need to pee, you know, normally, I enjoy living my life in a blissful ignorance that there’s anything surrounding said need to pee. I like forgetting that I have the whole kidney-ureter-bladder-urethra kit and caboodle. I like that area to remain anonymously functioning, free of attention, and vaguely pleasurable. I like my pee-area to be like a stoplight: necessary, sometimes mildly annoying, but on the whole completely unremarkable.

The UTI feels like there’s something small and sharp boring its way out of your nethers, and it is a feeling unmitigated except for when you actually pee, and then it flames out in a great internal conflagration. Plus, it’s gross. I could describe the fetid particulars of my urine’s current state in language so florid that you might not consume anything but organic cranberry juice for days, but I’ll censor myself and let your imagination give the wide brushstrokes for you. Suffice to say, this is not the pale, pretty posy-happy pee of usual. And I’ll leave it at that.

See the really insidious thing about the urinary tract infection is not so much the pain—though the pain is extra-special pyrotechnic painful. It’s not the lingering sensation that you desperately have to pee, and then when you go to pee, only about a dropper full of urine dribbles out, reluctantly. It’s not the general discomfort wherein you can’t sit, stand, lie, walk, fidget, lounge, lunge, laugh or loll without feeling like you’d like to take a large ice cream scoop and just pull out the whole bladder entourage, consequences be damned. It’s not the fact that you have to take Cipro to get rid of it, and that if you don’t, you run the risk of having the infection crawl up your urinary tract and, like Nazis into Poland, lay waste to your kidneys. No, the really insidious thing about urinary tract infections is the misguided belief that sometimes—sometimes—you can cure them yourself.

I am a big fan of sidestepping conventional medicine whenever possible. Peeled garlic, plain yogurt, St. John’s Wort, Vitamin C, colloidal silver: I’ve used them all and more to combat a range of illnesses wide as an acrobat’s knees. I have bought cranberry juice, extract, and capsules in bulk and consumed them like M&Ms for UTIs in specific. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a crap shoot—or a pee shoot, really. And this time, it was to no avail. I am off in eight minutes to pick up my Cipro from CVS. Not that I’m counting the minutes.

And the thing is, I knew—knew with a titanium certainty—as I lay in bed with my long-distance lover this past weekend, lay drowsy and limp as a grimalkin in the sun, knew full well and knew with a consenting adult’s lifetime of experience that my choice not to pop up out of bed with the alacrity of a whack-a-mole could result in this pernicious UTI. I knew it then, and I ignored it. Somehow, nestled in that hotel room, blank and beige and inoffensive as Ellen DeGeneres, I thought that somehow, some way, this time the UTI wouldn’t materialize. I could have peed and staved off this hellish infection, and I didn't.

Somehow, as I laid sated and smiling with my long-distance lover, I thought the magic of a new lover, the ever-unfolding promise of that utopian space of a hotel room, the whole unfathomable unlikeliness of the entire erotic enchilada, would protect me like a talisman. That somehow, some way, the UTI would see me, smile, and happy for me, pass me by.

I was wrong. Stupid, stupid UTI.

Image comes from the New York Times health guide on urinary tract infections, an article that gently points out exactly the breadth and depth of my denial.

spank me

I hate blog posts that go all "I'm-sorry-I-haven't-blogged-but." They always seem so lame and flaccid.

But I'm sorry I haven't blogged but I've been incredibly sleep deprived and really rather busy. I promise to give you who are still reading my pretty dumb things and somehow remain interested in what happens to me and what I think about it something to read very soon.

And, yes, I made it to and from California, where there was indeed californication, and the weather was the californiest. In short, fun was had. For a longer narrative, check back later.

Forgive me my radio silence, please.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

36 hours

Yesterday I saw Donny. It lasted around two hours and illustrated both why I love him and why we aren't together. He gave me my stuff. We kissed. He left.

Today, I have an appointment for a Brazilian and a mani-pedi. I'm going to wash my floors, pick my prettiest underthings, and pack my suitcase.

Tomorrow, I hop a flight to Calli very early in the morning. By this time tomorrow, I'll be somewhere over the rockies and on my way to meet a man.

I may not sleep at all tonight.

and my black t-shirt

I’ve had a lot of relationships. I’ve lived with five men. I’ve had many more intense boyfriends and a couple of intense girlfriends. I’m pretty practiced with the break-up, and yet I marvel at how it doesn’t get any easier. Age and practice make easier many other difficult things—losing a job, getting a job, first dates, moving, financial woes, all of these stresses have eased with the passage of time and my reluctant acceptance of maturity. Not so much with the breaking up. Breaking up, if it’s something I don’t want, remains as raw as eggs, as abrasive as tarmac, as hard as eternity.

If you’re the leavee, rather than the leaver, there’s this moment in every break-up when you take stock of your stuff and decide whether it’s worth the emotional turmoil to get it back. (If you’re the leaver, you can decide before you take action what to do with the stuff; it’s one of the fat advantages of being the leaver.) You ask yourself if the pain of the loss of the stuff is more or less than the pain of getting it back. You consider the visceral thrill of that horrorslothian moment when you open the signed, sealed and delivered box—or even more evocative, the door. You do this, anyway, if you are me.

Donny has a bunch of my stuff. Mostly, it’s sundry clothes and sex toys. A few pairs of panties, a bustier, a bra, a pair of pajama bottoms, a couple of t-shirts. A butt plug, an njoy toy. Not much, but a fair bag of things that when I considered them in their tawdry heaped glory, I knew I wanted them back. Donny has nothing at my apartment. He would always carefully amass his belongings at the end of every trip, fold them, and place them pointedly in his backpack. He made sure that fine lines were drawn and kept between us. He kept me at bay with his devotion to the discreet.

A couple of weeks ago, the day that I ran into Donny’s cousin at the place where I freelance, I called him. It was a moment of weakness and I knew I’d regret it, and I did. He mentioned something about my stuff. We had a brief stuff discussion. It got the stuff ball rolling. Stuff was in the air. It hung like an astronaut’s laundry, still and strange, in the space between us.

I told him that we needed to have a conversation about how I would get the stuff back—whether he’d mail it to me blank as a bill, or whether we’d chance the face-to-face meeting. I told him I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do beyond getting the stuff, so he could think about it and get back to me.

Weeks passed. And so in my head the stuff grew. It became a monolith of stuff. I could see my box of stuff tucked in a corner of Donny’s apartment. I could see it gather dust, mote by mote. I could feel its tiny heart beating like Poe’s tell-tale heart, even 170 blocks south of it. I could hear my stuff calling, and even I knew that I had to get it back because it was no longer stuff; it was tender debris.

Tender debris is the phrase I use to name all the physical detritus of a defunct relationship. When a relationship dies, some objects become imbued with this aureole of loss. Sitting somewhere in between a Victorian memento mori like those eerie flowers made from the hair of the dead and a fetish doll, these objects grow uncanny. Saturated with free-form feelings, these objects get bigger than themselves, somehow. They take up a lot of room. These things are the tender debris.

I’ve had a few drama-filled moments of tender debris. There was the time that I had to break into the house where I once lived with my boyfriend—the first boy I ever lived with—and found him in our bed fucking another woman. Later, having moved out, I went in under the cover of darkness when he and his band were out playing. I gathered my Bert Stern Marilyn Monroe book, my collection of vintage handbags, and my clothes. I forgot the cowboy plates I inherited from my grandmother, and I mourn them still. I’ve had some civil Great Stuff Exchanges too, where we acted like grown-ups and sipped tea, and at the end we hugged meaningfully.

Dramatic or decorous, the stuff is nearly systolic with emotion. I know I can live without the stuff that Donny has. It’s just…stuff. Panties and a sex toy. Who cares? But it’s the metaphor that holds meaning. If I don’t get my stuff back, it languishes there until he tosses it in the trash like a dead goldfish. I resist being relegated to the trash heap. I could have him mail it to me, but that feels so imperious and impersonal. I don’t want to open the box, really. I’m busy accepting the stark naked reality of our break-up, but I can’t accept the postal system.

So tomorrow, I’m seeing Donny. I’m getting my stuff, and I am sure it will be awkward in the special way that only people who have been once been close as vines and are now dead as leaves can be. There will be unfinished phrases. It will be studded with ellipses. It will fumble and fail. And then, like all things, it will end.

Which, really, I remind myself, is the point.

take me out to the ball game?

There were many things I loved to do with Donny. Sex, obviously—he is the muse for the great wolf’s portion of the naughty-sweaty writing here on my pretty dumb things (a fount of writing that has dried up along with the linn of my sex life, sadly). I loved going to restaurants with him; we always shared everything; it was like eating our intimacy. I loved the date stuff—going to movies, theatre, and like that; I loved the quotidian stuff too—taking our dogs to the dog run, shopping for health and beauty items, you know, the things that couples do when they’re couply. I really miss all of that stuff I used to do with Donny.

Like Yankees games. I really miss going to Yankees games, a loss that has been honed sharp and bright with the start of baseball season and the sudden dash of good weather here in Gotham.

I am a Yankee fan, for good, bad or ugly. Outside of New York, being a Yankee fan is kind of like drinking only Starbucks coffee: you have to justify your love of the evil empire. Sure, it’s evil, but I love it, you feel compelled to say, however ruefully. Inside New York, being a Yankee fan is pretty much a default setting. Sure, there are Mets fans—and they’re so cute with their copycat stadium and traditions—but pretty much everyone who is anyone and lots of people who aren’t are Yankee fans. I am but one of those in the swarming horde.

My relationship with baseball in general and with the Yankees in specific is kind of finicky and romantic. I don’t really understand baseball, or not in the way that grown-ups understand it, anyway. All those numbers and acronyms confuse me, and frankly, I don’t care about statistics. I don’t watch the game for the RBIs or ERs or whatever. I watch it for the poetry. I like the endless diamond that seems to stretch like a kid’s summer vacation into infinity. I like the unabashed green, deep as an emerald and set in place by only a few simple lines of ocherous  dirt. I like the back of Derek Jeter’s neck and the sweep of A-Rod’s thighs. I like the fact that this game takes as long as it needs to; there’s no clock in baseball. I like that. I like a lot of things about baseball and they all tend to the abstract.

Mostly, though, what I love about the Yankees is Jorge Posada. It’s not an erotic love. I don’t want to “do” Georgie, as the recently departed Joe Torre used to call him. I want to put Jorge on my bed and look at him or maybe hug him, like he’s a stuffed animal. I just want to bask in the general glory that is Jorge Posada, because I love him like I love my dog: uncomplicatedly, unreservedly,  and unconditionally. If he had chosen to sign with another organization last February rather than renew his contract with the Yankees, I would have jumped ship with him.

Our love is mutual, even if my number 20 has no idea. Jorge tends to play very, very well when I’m in the stands. Donny once crunched the numbers and discovered that when I’m there, Jorge bats around .700, which is really very good, I’m told. I’m reluctant to suggest a direct cause-and-effect relationship between my presence at Yankee Stadium and Jorge’s output when I am there, but I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. Suffice to say that my very first Yankee game Jorge hit two home runs. I thought that was kind of, you know, normal, but Donny assured me it was not.

I think you can feel the weight of my sadness now that my conduit to the Yankees and proximity to Jorge has dried up. Donny’s and my break-up has done more than merely break my heart; it has deprived me of Yankees tickets. Nay, it has possibly even damaged Jorge Posada’s game. I let his current injured shoulder to speak wordless volumes about my absence from his life.

Sadly, my watching the game on television does nothing either for Jorge or for me. I don’t really “get” televised games. Mostly, they make me want to read a book or masturbate, or both. Plus, when I watch a game, I seem to have no effect on number 20 (my replacement favorite Yankee, number 24, Robinson Cano, appears to have no link to me whatsoever; he does what he does whether I’m there or not; I do, however, like his name and he has a very genuine smile, and yet he’s no Jorge). Plus, there are all those advertisements. I leave a televised game feeling depressed, not rejuvenated. It has none of the sparkle of the live.

So this is where you, my devoted New York readers of my pretty dumb things come in. If any of you—man, woman, both, whatever—happen over the course of this long and liquid summer have tickets and want to give them to me, take me, or sell them to me, please let me know. You can email me here. I especially like going to the game with people who can explain to me what is exactly happening and don’t mind questions that would be more appropriate from a second-grader than from a fully grown woman. And I have to say that those seats that are closer to the field are really much nicer than the ones way up near the sky. I especially like the ones where they have the waiter service and you can sit in your seat and watch the Yankees all practice swinging the bat while you wait for the waiters to bring you things to eat. I like those the best, but really I’ll take whatever I can get.

I rely on the kindness of strangers with Yankees tickets. Think of it this way, don't do it just for me; do it for Jorge. And, really, who can refuse anything to a man with ears like that?

The middle photo and caption comes courtesy of LOLYankees.

the trouble with dreams

The part where I dream of him every night has commenced. Every night, or nearly every night, often enough that it feels like a nightly event, as if my unconscious has a regularly scheduled date for pernoctation, I dream of Donny.

Mostly, in my dreams Donny is moving out, despite the fact that we never lived together. In my dreams, he’s packing boxes, or he’s surrounded by boxes already stacked and packed, and I am struck by both the visual of a nearly vacated room and the feel of a room made new by its echo. In my dreams, I wonder where I’m going to put things, how I’m going to fill the space, now that he has moved out. (Before we broke up, I had all these dreams that I had two apartments, one I lived in and one I didn’t. In my dream, I got eviction notices for both; I felt stress about how I’d pay for both of my homes, especially the empty one.)

I’ve had other dreams where we’re just together, doing stuff; stuff is done by us, and we are there. There’s nothing special about the dream. No penguins or uncanny architecture. No bones or flying or bullets or bodies. No dwarfs or she-males. Just us, talking, doing stuff, and the pervading sense that the end is unquestionably nigh. I’ve had dreams where we fought, and in them we fought with a kind of spitting primal anger we never had in waking life. I’ve had dreams of Donny, lots of them, of late; my mind works overtime to process this loss.

(I also had a dream that in this highly posh, art deco L.A. hotel, Naomi Watts seduced me. She pulled me down onto a velvet divan the color of an arterial spray. She was wearing silk of a color somewhere between ecru and lemon. She kissed me and held my face in her cool, narrow-fingered hands, and the room swirled and morphed and somehow I was in her bed, all crisp, white linen and bolstered headboard swathed in yet more arterial velvet.

She and I were kissing and touching, undressing one another with our hands, and suddenly her husband Liev Schrieber was there also, undressed but for his boxers. I looked at Naomi, who nodded her ascent and then reclined on her side to watch me slide Liev's boxers off over his cock, already swollen and hard as a dehiscent fruit. I got this vivid view of his abdomen carpeted with bristly hairs, my hands shorts sliding his boxers down, the shiny-taut toasty-pink skin of his glans, and his moon-shaped face watching. My mouth nearly watered with the prospect. But then, as dreams do, it got mussed by the appearance of two more people, one a male-male, one a she-male, and in my dream I made my regrets. A threesome with Naomi and Liev was one thing; a five-some was something entirely something bigger than my unconscious mind could wrap itself around. They were very polite, if disappointed.)

This oneiric processing of the emotional break-up is nothing new for me. After I broke up with C, I spent seven long, heart-wrenching years dreaming about him. My C-related dreams were unequivocally painful, involving as they did my dreamed obsession with him: us meeting unbeknownst to his wife and sharing some brief fucking passion in a strange apartment; my breaking into his house and poring through his things, touching his photos like totems; my stumbling across him and his wife in flagrante delicto, and feeling a blaze of delicious horror. These were always painful dreams. I often woke up weeping.

At some point near the end of those seven years, I dreamt of C and I told him how often I dreamed of him and how I would wake up in tears. I knew as I was telling him that the dreams would soon end. They did. I can now see C, and I feel affection for him. I feel gratitude. The ghost of our years together and our love beyond reason colors the room, hovering in the milky distance, but I don’t feel pain. His life is not mine, and I feel thankful for that. In those seven years after we broke up, I never thought I’d get to this point, and yet here I am, able to stand on a peninsula and see C-land, off in the distance, wave a cheerful hello and then walk away with neither insouciance nor sadness.

Someday, I’ll get to that point with Donny, but it’ll be a while. I’m feeling better than I was. I’m now nearly funk-free; I’m able to do the things I need to do without feeling like they’re bigger than I am. I am no longer so distracted that I feel immersed in the Donny-fug, like it’s swirling about me all emo-miasma and clouding my vision. I’m able, from time to time, to see clearly. And then there are my dreams working overtime. (Over time, they will fall away like leaves. Over time, I’ll grow a new pearl where Donny once was.)

I don’t have sex dreams about Donny. But I can still smell his scent, evanescent as water, sweet like beech trees. I can still feel his fingers, and I can still remember the way he kissed. Someday, those details will fall away too. Fall like fluff and stick somewhere, anywhere, but not here in my consciousness.

a dirty girl on Dirty Girls

Ok, true confession time: I don’t really like much erotica. I find it rather boring. All that insert-tab-A-into-slot-B interlocking of body parts. All those ubiquitous, predictably long-legged, ruby-lipped, tumescently membered, achingly pussied, roseately nippled clichés invariably cause me to grow a big, rubbery one, which is quite at cross purposes to the whole point of erotica.

Erotica—like comedy, like political speeches, like advertisements—has just one over-arching aim; it, like those other genres of writing, is supposed to elicit a single very strong reaction. Just as comedy that makes you laugh is successful, and comedy that doesn’t isn’t, erotica that makes you frisky is, and that which doesn’t isn’t. But just like comedy that makes you think—or political speeches, or advertisements, or any other genre that supercedes its generical limits—when erotica can make you feel something in addition to frisky, that is when it’s transcendent.

Dirty Girls, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and recently published by Seal Press, does that, at least once, and even when it’s just down-and-dirty, terrestrial erotica, it’s still pretty sublime.

The abstract concept of Dirty Girls is a pretty swell premise for an erotica collection. Historically, girls who are openly sexual have often been both castigated and paradoxically elevated because of their sexuality. As a culture, we are preoccupied with dirty girls; we are like William Faulkner to Caddy’s muddy drawers, forever staring up at some girl’s dirty panties and finding inspiration and excitation twinned with fascination and revulsion. Because a bunch of women writers writing a bunch of naughty prose is never just a bunch of women writing, the title Dirty Girls has inherent in it a sly recognition of its own significance. You kind of have to respect that knowingness, and you kind of have to respect the design of the book, replete with fingerprints, like we readers are already complicit in touching it, ourselves, and the dirty act therein.

It’s quite clever, really.

Beyond the simple premise, the book is a great, big heaving mass of prose that, like the best of burlesque shows, comes in a wide array of shapes, sizes, sexual proclivities and aesthetic styles. It’s like an erotic smorgasbord; there’s going to be some dish that will appeal to you, whether it’s the earthiness of Tsaurah Litzky’s coke-sniffing, bathroom-humping waitresses; the biliotaphic, ecdysiast fantasies of Carol Queens’ virgin girl’s day out to the Lusty Lady; the oneiric poetry of an older artist and a younger man of Suki Bishop; or Allison Tyler’s sly exploration of the pleasure of being a putative “good girl.”

My favorite piece is Shanna Germain’s “Until It’s Gone.” I like my erotica to work in many senses—and Germaine’s story evokes the garlicky sizzle of cooking, the cow-shit scent of leather, the salty somatic push and pull of sexual release, and the bittersweet twang of lost love. It’s just a pretty-ass piece of writing; it’s also terribly hott-making.

I think I can speak for any woman who has ever been called a “dirty girl” that it’s nice to see us getting our just deserts, our pleasurable amuse-gueules. And whether these nods take the form of an literary paean to cocksucking (Melissa Gira), opera-house fingering (Maddy-Stuart) or anonymous sex (too many to name) or a literal one somehow seems to matter less and less.

Dirty Girls is available at Amazon.com and wherever fine fucking fiction is sold.

on what i'll happily settle for

To wed or not to wed? When should it be a question?

In the past fifteen years, I have had the opportunity to “settle”—that is, to marry a man whom I knew was unquestionably less than perfect—twice. The first time was in my early thirties; the second was in my early forties. Now 45, decidedly single, sprouting the occasional grey hair, and fully aware of my own tick-tick-tick mortality, I remain resolutely glad I didn’t choose to marry either of these men.

Settling is quite the hot topic for single women right now. Since Atlantic Monthly published Lori Gottlieb’s article “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” in March, this concept of women taking a long, cold, appraising stare at their paramour and deciding, “You’ll do!” has gained astonishing cultural legs. Not merely has Ms Gottlieb garnered a book contract, but she has sold the rights to the movie as well. Do a quick Technorati search for the article’s link, and you’ll find over 600 blogs have written about the piece. A Google search for the term “Marry Him! Lori Gottlieb” gets you almost 200,000 results. It’s a great, big watershed of an article.

the loneliness of the long-distance writer

So here’s the thing. Of late, I’ve been the one not so much waving as drowning. Admittedly, as badly as I’ve felt in the past few weeks—and I’ve felt bad; I’ve been breaking into tears at the oddest moments; for example, today when I opened the letter sent from the Indonesian Fruit Bat I adopted through Bat Conservation International, I wept—as badly as I’ve felt, it hasn’t been so bad, relatively. And yet, even if it's not incessantly-daydream-of-guillotine-bad, it has still been pretty freaking bad. Pretty bad indeed.

Overwhelmed would be the way I’d put it. Overwhelmed and alone. I’ve been dipping into the loneliness of the long-distance writer, and it is a crazy-making endeavor indeed. No wonder why so many authors have been addicts, dipsomaniacs and tipplers of sundry stripes. There’s nothing quite like being holed up in your atelier, spelunking about in your head, sifting through the thought-nuggets you've brought to light, and then trying to translate those ephemeral gems into those most cozening beggars—words. It’s an endeavor best made for people who have, whether through doughty hearts or total foolhardiness, made peace with the inescapable fact that deep down everyone is more than a little insane.

I have seen the madwoman in the attic and she is I.

It’s fine, though, really. I spent so much time alone when I was growing up that I have the backwoodsman’s uneasiness around people. Alright, that’s hyperbole, but I’m definitely the most extroverted introvert I know. Stressed as I have been of late, I imagine a world devoid of people. I imagine being able to walk the streets of Gotham invisible to other people, for it’s really more that other people are aware of me that discomforts me than it is the other people themselves. They have every right to be there. Me, I’m not entirely always so sure.

The visible voice behind the seminal eighteenth-century newspaper The Spectator was the eponymous Mr. Spectator. Though written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Mr. Spectator was the putative author. Not unsurprisingly, Mr. Spectator was a watcher. In the first volume of the newspaper, first printed 1 March 1711, Mr. Spectator claims to have lived his life in near total silence. “I threw away my rattle before I was two months old,” he avers and says that he never “spoke three sentences together” in his whole life. Silent, Mr. Spectator is free to look and listen—and of course to write. He says in that first issue, “I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am resolved to do it in Writing; and to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die.” I can relate to Mr. Spectator.

I’m not silent. I can easily be the center of attention, but what feels most natural to me is a nearly numinous state. I wish I could glide silent and apparitional through the world, unnoticed. Like Mr. Spectator, I like to watch (except for sex—then and only then do I like to be watched). Like Mr. Spectator, I am resolved to put myself in writing. Actually, it’s less a resolution than it is something I can no longer avoid. I might do well to ask the same question as the much beleaguered Alexander Pope, my favorite eighteenth-century Catholic hunchback genius, “Why did I write? what sin to me unknown/ Dipp'd me in ink, my parents', or my own?” It’s a peccant muse that taps me on the shoulder. I’d rather have been a dancer.

I never “lisp’d in numbers”; I’m no genius. But here I am, writing, writing more and more, and getting paid for it more often and with more money. I never expected it, but there it is. And here I am growing ever more reclusive by the moment. I’m hermit-etically sealed.

Last Friday when I went to see Mike Doughty, I was briefly separated from my friend when we wended our way down the many stairs and out into the night. I came out this exit and found this really very good-looking man making eye contact with me. He approached me. I froze.

Damn, I thought, he’s attracted to me. I’m attractive. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

He stopped me to ask directions to another club. He made non-stop eye-contact. He lit a cigarette meaningfully. He cupped his hands around the match like they were holding a breast. I gave him the directions in fits and starts, suddenly stuttering aphasic. I gave him half-wrong directions (they were also half right, but I suppose that directions, unlike glasses, are never half-full). My friend finally arrived and I breathed a sigh of relief that I could leave this attractive man, tall and dark and gleaming stubble and matte black leather and the smell of man and smoke.

“I thought I was interrupting a tête-à-tête,” she said. She was, and I felt glad she had.

People freak me the fuck out. I’ve never felt comfortable being looked at, and I have always been. I have been looking forward to slinking off into the graceful invisibility of middle age. It has not yet happened. Instead, I hibernate—and aestivate—here, cloistered in my head and my apartment, both fearing company and longing for it, both wishing that I’d accepted the handsome stranger’s silent invitation to go show him the way and fervently glad I didn’t, both lonesome and independent, equally.

an open letter to The Crotch

Dear Crotch,

Forgive me. I’m sure you receive letters all the time. After all, you’re a very famous crotch, attached at the hips to a very famous woman, Madonna. You, dear Crotch, are legendary. Dare I say it—I think I dare—without you, Madonna herself would be impossible. You are the wind beneath her wings. You, dear Crotch, make the people come together. You make the rebel and the bourgeoisie come…well, you know the rest.

I think, and do correct me if I’m wrong, you first came to light in those frothy days of True Blue—just another one of those wonderful things that 1986 brought us. Along with Hands Across America, the Mets winning the World Series, and Geraldo’s opening of Al Capone’s vault, there was you: the birth of The Crotch.

Ok, not exactly a birth. You’d been hiding there in the shadows all along. I might be overstepping my bounds in hypothesizing this, but I think it was the performance at the previous year’s MTV awards that brought you out of hiding. Too long had you been shrouded in tulle, wrapped in layers of Cotton-Lycra, overshadowed by multiple rosaries and the belly: in 1986, you’d had enough and you struck out with a vengeance.

This shot by Herb Ritts and published, I think, in Rolling Stone, was your grand debut, no? Sure, you’d made it big in “Open Your Heart To Me,” that lyrical homage to peep shows, Liza Minelli and young boys with a yen for musical theatre. But it was really this photo, so insouciant, so saucy, so sassy, so gender-bendingly adorable, that really transformed you from just another crotch into the unstoppable juggernaut that is The Crotch. (Click to embiggen, should you want to revel in your decades-old glory.)

1989: The world was your oyster. It’s not an overstatement to say that Jean Paul Gautier created his most famous garment—the cone-bra corset—around not the bosoms, formidable in their own right, but around you. You were the point of the piece, the apex of the triangle, the cherry on the sundae, and certainly it was this time period that you, The Crotch, was made the most of. She could hardly keep her hands off you, and who could blame her. Express yourself, indeed.

Crotch, you were on a roll. You ruled the early ‘90s. And even if “Justify My Love” overlooked your considerable assets in favor of other, lesser crotches, you know that the Sex book was yours. You own that book. You strode it like a colossus; you kicked ass and you took names. Befurred by a pubic bounty, sheathed in leather, pressed against the blindfolded  face of some undiscovered beauty, The Crotch made Sex. Sex without you would have just been a vanity project, but you made it compelling. Compelling enough that people like me bought the book despite its spiral binding that fell apart in one viewing and its dumb matte paper. Steven Meisel worships at the altar of The Crotch.

It’s no wonder that after the heady success of the early ‘90s that you took a bit of break. Laid low. Hunkered down. Recouped, regrouped and reassessed. You had been a very busy Crotch, and it can’t be easy to be so often so much in motion. No one can blame you for becoming so much of a recluse. And after all, it’s not like you were idle. You took the time to have a kid or two, to learn how to ride horseback, and you did a lot of yoga.

Then suddenly The Crotch was back and it was better than ever. Lean, mean, sculpted. A veritable adamantine carapace of a pubic mons. In 2005, tired of giving the limelight up to the Arms, you returned. But you were coy about it. You showed what a knowing Crotch you were, what separates you from all the other crotches of the world, why they are merely a crotch and you, The Crotch. It is  the picture for Confessions on a Dance Floor that fully illustrates your genius. Because even though you’re invisible, you seem to be present, crotch, all Crotch; even hidden from our view, we can’t help but see you. Crotch the uncanny, the invisible visible, the Crotch that isn’t, and because it isn’t, it looms larger than life. Oh, clever Crotch!

At this point in time, perhaps drunk with your own undeniable success, you were suddenly everywhere. Shrink-wrapped in pink, The Crotch undeniably had a quest for world domination, and I think it’s not too far out of bounds to say you’ve achieved it. You are unquestionably the first Crotch, the noble Crotch, the Crotch that launched a thousand quips. You are a Crotch above the rest. All other crotches cower in the tenebrous shadows thrown by you. Other crotches quake in you wake. Perhaps a few, only a handful, don’t fear you. I hear Chuck Norris remains unsubdued.

Which is what brings me to write today. Understand that I myself do fear you. I am cowed by The Crotch. I have no doubt that you could beat my mere mortal’s crotch into a bloody, tattered pulp with your steely Crotch power. It’s only with great respect that I suggest that perhaps you’ve grown too flush with power. After all, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power, well, let’s just say that crotches smaller than you have gone over to the dark side.

See, the thing is that a while now, you’ve lead a split life. You tend to appear either in the assertive clothing that is your in-our-collect-our-faces wont, or in a dress pilfered from the wardrobe to Atonement (or in gym clothes, but that’s been a constant for decades). Lately, though the boundaries have begun to bleed. Lately, its as if The Crotch must assert its will every day, whenever it wants. Take, for example, the dress you wore to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Note its undeniable 40’s styling, but note too how it’s sheer—and sheer where? That’s right, just where The Crotch is.

Note too the photos adorning the covers of two recent publications, Elle and Vanity Fair. Both of them are all Crotch all the time—Elle takes the R&R HoF sartorial mixed message and Vanity Fair typifies the  classic Crotch shot. It is a lot of Crotch. Especially when you consider how much Crotch there is in the upcoming album. It’s a World of Crotch. It’s a Crotch-eats-crotch world. It’s a Crotch-Crotch-Crotch world. And maybe it should end.

Maybe, just maybe, you might relinquish your crown to another body part. What about Legs? They’ve rarely been given their shot, and they’re lovely enough, strong and supple. Or what if you stay there, but down-play your power a bit. No need to retreat into flowered muu-muus, but what about a nice pair of jeans. Wouldn’t you like a nice pair of jeans? Everyone loves jeans, even Crotch. Or maybe you’d like a dress that doesn’t look like it should be worn with a cloche. You’ve never done the sixties—how about rocking the Jean Shrimpton for a bit and taking a well-deserved rest?

See, Crotch, you are loved. Feared, even. But no god needs to be visible all the time. Always leave ‘em wanting more. It’s the first rule of show biz. And, really, a Crotch of your stature should know when to say when.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

looking forward to--and askance at--fucking something strange

So time goes tick tick tick, and each splattering spot of time makes me feel just an iota more anxious. Sure, those individual dots of time could all add up to a landscape as serenely sensual as a Serraut. They could also coalesce to form something more grisly, something more akin to an arterial spray than a Sunday in the park. See, the point is that in just a couple of weeks, I’ve an assignation for unabashedly carnal purposes with a man who is a near-stranger and in a city not my own. Frankly, I’ve crossed the emotional river from pure excitation to polka-dotted anxiety.

Plans have been made. The tickets have been bought. Discussions have been had. Scenarios have been imagined. Emails have been exchanged. Body fluids, thus far, have not, but if it all unrolls as it has on the red carpet of my mind, they will be (if in such a way that fluids can be “safer”). It’s not new territory, this planning to make carnal merry with a man I don’t know particularly well but to whose eel I feel an electric attraction, but it feels that way. Exciting and new and frankly just a bit terrifying.

I used to be a bit reckless. I wasn’t reckful. I recked, recked with abandon, recked without a thought to consequence. I recked a lot. I let myself be caught like a maquerau in the seine of willfully blind blundering fucking, and I liked it. I like throwing caution to the wind. I liked the blank bliss of not thinking, that whitewash of consciousness, that feeling that the mental rheostat was being dialed down by this strange flesh, these new fingers, this grunting supplication to sex. I fucked my way into brief quiet oblivions, and even if I recognized that all was not healthy with my world, I did it anyway, because it worked and because I needed the vacation.

Then things changed, as things are wont to do. I gravitated toward Donny as he gravitated toward me, and with the gravitational pull of our relationship, our previously wildly spinning lunar bodies began a stately orbit. We were in sync, and it was good. It seemed it'd last; it didn’t. (Which might be the six-word memoir of my relationship with Donny.) Things fell apart, as things are wont to do; the center could not hold. Now I find myself graver than I had been. Grave enough that I don’t feel the keening need to crash my body against another—any other—in the blind hope that joy will be felt, that escape will be possible, that the strange will be made beautiful and whole.

Now, nearly four years after that point in time I have called SlutFest 2004, that time when I gave myself the big blank check to fuck my way to self-knowledge—an endeavor, I might add, that despite its myriad problems is not without great merit—I’ve changed. I’m no longer so willing to part my thighs for any Dick, Tom or Harry. I am no longer willing to take the risk and walk that erotic high-wire, pole in hand, covered spangly and washed jangly with desire, chin raised with cheeky bravado. I’m not so willing to take that risk that was its own reward. I’m not so willing to fuck a stranger, in short.

And yet, here I am, making this plan, buying these tickets, having discussions, writing these emails, and imagining scenarios. Here I am, dead set on exchanging bodily fluids (albeit with the caveat of “safer”). Here I am, both looking forward and looking askance and feeling the ambivalence of excitation and anxiety. Here I am, closing in on a couple weeks to meeting a strange man in a strange hotel room in a strange city for some strange, blessedly strange, transcendentally strange, blissfully strange, fucking.

(Because, please ye gods, let it be strange, exciting and new.)

The anxiety is there. It swirls around the banal (what if he smells funny?); it eddies around my insecurities (what if he thinks I’m fat?); it circles around the egotistical (what if he bores me?); it bubbles around the big (what if we can’t stand each other?); it churns around the emo (what if it all makes me sad?). The anxiety is there, but so is the constant flame of my knowing that I need this.

It may be painfully cliché. Yet sometimes you just need some sexual healing. Sometimes you just have to get back on the horse. It’s as clear as mud, as fresh as a daisy, as obvious as the nose on my face, as pure as molasses, that I need something hot, hot as hell, and I’m going to take the bull by the horns, and I’m going to fuck the man. In any case, it should be better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick; it may even end up being better than sliced bread.