pretty dumb things

a meditation on dish soap

For those who like to listen, I've also provided a helpful vocal recording: 

 

A meditation on dish soap

 

If you want a sobering exercise, try buying dish detergent in a country where you do not speak the language.  “Come se dice dish soap” will not get you closer to purchasing said dish detergent, nor will “dove è il dish soap.” There is, of course, the international language of package design—the modern equivalent of medieval signage wherein a picture of an artichoke would denote a vegetable store, or a hock of ham would indicate a butcher—but if you spend twenty minutes staring at inscrutable rows of antic colored plastic bottles and can’t find that familiar uxorious shape, you’re kind of fucked. 

Eventually you stumble around, and you realize that Italian supermercati don’t abide by the organizing principles that you have grown up to expect. They will, for example, place the cat food directly above the preserved fish products. It’s a prolonged game of “Witty, Pragmatic, or Oblivious?” and you’re not winning. 

Living in Italy for three weeks now, I realize I’ve carved out for myself a strange interstitial life, one where I’ve not quite committed to an ex-pat existence, but one where I have slowly relinquished many of the customs and pleasures of my Gotham life. I no longer, for instance, really just wish I could call a diner and have them deliver a fucking veggie burger, already. 

I dream in Italian, but I don’t understand it. Everyday conversations swirl around me, and I try to latch onto words and phrases with my grubby, fat toddler’s hands. I am a kindergartener of language and custom stuck in the body of a ferociously intelligent woman. Squat and mute in the stream of gossamer cocktail talk, I feel like an elite athlete in a full-body cast. I could make jokes. I could banter. I could shine bright and brilliant if only I could understand. I can’t. My tongue curls and clefts and tingles and aches. I am lost. 

“Allora” punctuates Italian conversation. Its frequency is to American “whatever,” and its meaning inhabits the linguistic grey space in the Venn diagram of “now,” “then” and “soon.” It’s not our idea of “now,” which is “ora.” It’s also not "then" like English “then” which indicates a time both in the past and in the momentary abstract future, nor is it soon, which means nowish. It’s a grey-space word and it is everywhere. Its ubiquity speaks volumes about the Italian relationship with time. 

So does the phrase “è cosi,” which means “it’s like that.” There’s a pervasive resignation here. Italy has been plundered so many times throughout history. È cosi. You can’t get Wifi. È cosi. You can’t drive your car down that street. È cosi. The cashiers at the supermercato hate you. È cosi. Berlusconi is a criminal, a cheat, a cretin and a douchebarge. È cosi.

È cosi. È cosi. È cosi. Allora. 

I’ve been a great big geek my entire life, and I’ve been reading science fiction since I first stumbled on an Asimov novel in a pile in my parents’ bedroom. I was, I think, eight. But for the first time in my life, I really get it. I am a stranger in a strange land. These people are not my people; their customs are not mine; no culture in its right mind shuts down between 1:00 and 3:00 every day; it’s madness, I tell you, madness.

Which is to say that I’ve been mainlining Dr. Who and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Science fiction has grown less fictional and more real. I try to assume the bemused British façade of the Doctor, to adopt the eager disposition of the Companion, and to remember always to carry my towel. Above all, I try to remember this: Don’t Panic. If the cashiers at the supermercato hate me (and they do; they reject my carefully phrased apology of “Mi dispiace. Sono americana e il mio italiano è terribile”; they roll their eyes and flare their nostrils with such vehemence that I can hear it; it sounds like pigeons landing), I summon those words. If I don’t stamp my train ticket and the conductor acts as if I’ve committed a grievous sin, I summon those words. If I am negotiating a sidewalk the breadth of a kitchen counter as traffic whooshes by so close I could touch the cars, I summon those words.

Don’t panic.

The cemeteries are lovely. The produce is stunning. The men are often good-looking. I can see the sea from my parlor window. My friends still love me. Don't panic.

I want a cheeseburger. I want a lover. I want to understand. I want my dog, my closet, my friends, my voice. I want to get rid of these Euro coins. My wants pile up and cause a scrum of hooligan needs. I want. I want. I want. 

È cosi.

(This is how you say “dish soap” in Italian: piatti gel. Easy peasy. Don’t panic.)

 

hoarfrost

If you want to listen, there's audio. If you want to read, there's text. If you want both, go for it, you glorious ambidextrous bastards.

 

Hoarfrost

 

I wonder if I just need to get laid.

It’s tough being a writer of sex and not having sex. I might as well be a country singer and have my truck, my gun and my alcoholism pried from my warm, live hands. Or a gangsta rapper grown out of the ghetto and into the custom of money, fame and a giant walk-in closet for all of his very fine athletic footwear. Or some similar poet whose customary muse has up and left her when she stumbled and fell upon another lifestyle.

The truth is that I do miss fucking. I miss the smell and the touch and the feel and the taste. I miss having my hair pulled. I miss the clash of teeth like titans in the night. I miss the eldritch elastic pull when a lover’s cock enters me. I miss the electric kinetic and the pushme-pullyu of fucking, the slow velvet build of orgasm, the pink charivari climax and the swift sledding back to reality. I even miss feeling bored, lying there, counting, and wondering how much longer I can suffer this interminable fornication.

I miss the sex. I miss the tongues and the lips and the spit of it. Lately, kissing scenes in movies and on TV make my neck hairs rise with desire. I never really understood the big of filmic kissing. I would stand aside in Asperger wonder with ticka-ticka-ticka analytic thought. I could comprehend the narrative point, and I could fathom the aesthetics of the visual—the two faces silhouetted like a Grecian frieze—but my loins missed the visceral point. The kiss was still a kiss, but it left me cold.

No longer. These days, what with my frozen state of affairs, the merest whiff of chemistry gives me the slow roll and the quick flick of desire. Post-Hays code, of course, even a desperate girl has some standards.

I miss the tiny bird beating heart of my clit made molten. I miss the springy steel-in-satin feel of a tumescent cock. I miss the suck and the squelch and the slurp and, hell, I even miss the queef of it. I miss showing off. I miss taking it down. I miss the ancient, atavistic rhythm of my hips, and I miss the shadow look of intensity on a man’s face as he comes close to. I miss the spicy scent of taint. I miss the mushroomy bloom of fucking as it billows from pillows, and I miss the shiver of heat two bodies in coitus throw like rays off the sun or devils from August tarmac.

I miss it. I miss it all, the good, the ecstatic and the ugly. For perspective, let me lay some digits upon you; I believe I had sex about twelve times in 2010, maybe six or eight times in 2009, and yet fewer in 2008—thus I’ve gotten to the point where I even miss bad sex. After a while, even frozen pizza begins to look good to a starving man.

And yet.

I really want a love, and not just a lover, and that’s the real cause for the severe sere of my sexlife. Not even the lack of writing, not even the need to cast about after difficult, petulant muses, muses whose subject matter feels like marbles in my mouth—or worse yet, vanilla pudding—is quite enough to make me put my feet over my head for men for whom I’m not head over heels. I’m not saying that I’ll never part my dimpled knees for anything less than the next great amour; I’m just saying that I’m feeling picky.

Picky. Self-protective. Tomayto. Tomahto. I’m a little tired of having my heart broken so casually, and that is, for me, a side effect of casual sex. Not always, but often enough. A lifetime on my back and on my knees, and I finally realize that what I want is love. Really good sex can look a lot like love if you squint your eyes hard enough across the pillows. I’m a bit weary from a lifetime of wearing my need-hungry goggles to see bedfellows as something more meaningful. If I took a hard look at all but four of the men in my life, I’d see they were all bits of fluff and fun, and while those four men are men of substance, they were incontrovertibly the wrong man for me.

Which is all to say what I said earlier. It’s tough being a writer of sex who is not having sex. I look forward to going to Europe, to living as an expat, to fumbling my way through an unfamiliar tongue and an unfamiliar land and an unfamiliar people. “Gnomo” is Italian for “gnome.” Vorrei mangiare qualcosa, ma non adesso, più tardi.

Whatever. I’ll be there and maybe the words will come. Maybe I’ll meet a new muse and I’ll feel those stories flow free and fast and clear and bright. Maybe I’ll meet a love, a lover. Maybe I’ll love. Maybe I’ll make it. Maybe I’ll fuck and find melting. But maybe I’ll be happy enough if I write.

Without words, I am nothing. Even with, I am not much bigger.

 

re: cycle

Some of my Twitter followers like being read to. Here's an audio recording of this piece for those of you who feel similarly.

 

Re cycle

 

Last fall, I was bored. I was in front of my computer, and I was bored, as we children of the twenty-first century are wont to be. I was struck, as we so often are, with the clarion call of the bored and the jacked-in. “I wonder,” I thought, “if ____________ is on Facebook.” I did a cursory search and discovered that, uncharacteristically, improbably, unthinkably, ____________ was indeed on Facebook. I sent a friend request and waited.

In this case, _____________ was the ex-boyfriend I have referred to alternately as “the heretofore love of my life” or “C.” We were desperately, crazily, ridiculously in love, and we were desperately, crazily, ridiculously mismatched. He was Palestinian, conservative, Republican, and eleven years younger; and I’m, well, not. Still, the love we shared was real and true and amazing and it stretched the bounds of credulity and I’ve never felt anything of its ilk before or since.

I trusted C entirely. I believed him when he said he loved me because his actions mirrored his words. It wasn’t just that he took care of me when I was splintered fragments, that he fed and housed me, that he cooked for me, that he held me in the dark. It was that he worked to mend my relationship with my family. He didn’t judge or condemn; he just saw something that was broken and needed fixing. He taught me to care about my family, to see the value in their stunted attempts at love, and to work at being better to them.

Beyond the sex—and it was shockingly good sex, achingly good sex, the kind of sex wherein time stops and planets form and stars become suns—what C and I shared was probably the most adult relationship of my life. I have this thing where if I love someone, I mean really love someone, I see his faults and love him for them; if I don’t love him, I mean really love him, the man can’t even chew food right. My ex-boyfriend Ernie, for example, slurped when he ate. I wanted to decapitate him with every mouthful. C, for all his faults, was perfect.

And then, somehow, he wasn’t. Or I wasn’t. Or we weren’t. Or the future wasn’t. We began talking marriage, and we couldn’t make our parts fit together. He wanted a wife who stayed at home and took care of the kids. I knew that I was not that woman. We negotiated and we talked and we discussed and we realized that we were wrong for one another. With the gentility and civility of two partners finished with a waltz, we parted. I regularly dreamed of him for seven years, until I didn’t.

In the meantime, he did find a woman more conservative than I. They married, moved to Jersey, and had a couple of kids, as some people—people who are not me—do. Over the years, I would occasionally stop by his business to chat, and I remember his disappointment when I said I was getting married myself. Some people reacted that way. They wanted to me to be unfettered and fancy-free; to think of me married was, apparently, a violation. It was a strange reaction, but C was hardly alone in it.

The last I’d heard, there was trouble in domestic paradise. Conventional nuclear family living, it turns out, is hard to maintain. The marital bed had been surrendered to the kids, the youngest of which was four and refused to sleep anywhere else. The wife had failed to find fulfillment in being a housewife and had found refuge in a pottery store and an affair with her trainer. I didn’t feel a scrap of schadenfreude at C’s cold crash into contemporary reality. See above: when I love a man, I love his faults. It was an indulgence that didn’t end with time or with space.

That afternoon last fall, to my surprise C accepted my Facebook friend request with alacrity. Not only did he accept, but he immediately sent me a message. “Where have you been?” it read in complete. I read the message, and then I looked at C’s pictures. He looked good. He’d always been terrifically vain. He had pretentions toward modeling, and whenever he had a bad day, he’d put on a wife-beater and my Gap overalls and walk through Washington Square Park, gathering the glances of NYU coeds like wildflowers.

His pretentions to modeling had followed him to adulthood, because these pictures could only be shots for a book. One in particular stood out for its shiny ridiculousness; it looked like a CD cover for a collection of Julio Iglesias-style love songs. But, whatever. If it made him happy. And he did look good. He also looked divorced. There was not a mention of the wife, not a picture, not a scrap of wifey evidence. Indeed, he was divorced. The half-life of his nuclear family was that of a radon isotrope. It turned out to be short, in short.

That one Facebook message opened a torrent of communications. There were emails and texts and phone calls. There were plans and there were confessions. There were reminiscences and there were stories. There were laughs and there was some strange patina of intimacy. It wasn’t intimacy exactly, but it was tender as flesh and twice as tempting.

The dates, though, kept on being rescheduled, pushed off and remade. It was no big. I was busy; he was busy; he was, after all, a solo parent half the week and he was seeing someone else. “It’s not serious,” he said to me, as if I’d asked, and I hadn’t. I can’t say that visions of C didn’t dance naked in my head, but I was no fool. Whoever I had been thirteen years ago when we broke up was not the woman I was now. I had no desire to take up old roles and tread those boards again, but I can’t say I didn’t dream of the sex. I also can’t say he didn’t oddly encourage it. Sometimes our texting seemed more like something I’d expect from a lover. It was disconcerting.

We had one almost meeting, foiled by the exterminator at his business, who came unexpectedly and stayed late. Maybe there was no bugdude. Maybe it was all cold feet in the pretense of killing roaches. I’ll never know. It almost happened, and then it didn’t. I took off my make-up and my big-girl clothes, scrubbed my face and my teeth, slipped into my jammies and went to bed.

The texting fell off. He stopped leaving excited phone messages. The emails ceased. It was a read-between-the-lines kind of end of the affair, which is sad. Being an adult, I can deal with rejection. It’s not my favorite jellybean, but I recognize its existence and its necessity. And yet. It’s confusing to be rejected after what felt like nothing as much as an electronic courtship. It’s confusing to have a person whom you’ve loved text you that he divorced his wife in part because they didn’t share the passion, trust and lust that he had shared with me. It’s hard to know how to parse those blips and blops on your iPhone.  It’s no place for heartfelt confessions of lifelong regret. It’s no place to reveal the bleeding.

I have stalked, and I have found. I have friended, and I have lost, again. It hurts less, but it still hurts. Great loves should have more dignity than to blip on in cellular calls and Facebook updates and tattered emails. Great loves deserve better than recycling. Lesson learned. Lesson learned, but it's an empty lesson, for there is but one heretofore love of my life.

 

the stuff of dreams

I made a sound recording of this piece. You can listen to it, or you can read it, or both. Your choice.

The stuff of dreams

 

Last week, I had a sex dream about a friend of mine. It was vivid and delicious, and when I woke to my cat’s mewling and tromping heavy across my head, I struggled to return to it. The details dribbled away faster than I could recall them. Like an Aboriginal sandpainting in a tornado, it flew apart and slipped into cracks, and all I was left with were a few pastel scraps and orts. An improbable coupling on a mattress in the middle of a medieval courtyard. The breath-warm feeling of joy and completeness and pleasure that suffuses good sex. The sense that in fucking, this friend and I had done something wildly irrational, murderously stupid, and ill conceived, and that we had defied the odds.

I often have sex dreams. I rarely have them about friends. Usually I dream about celebrities or ex-boyfriends, people whose private existences are dwarfed in size by the scale of my own projections about them. When I do dream about friends, I wake wrapped in the disconcerting and weird. It’s one thing when I willfully choose to place friends into my onanistic fantasies, when my inner Candida Royale casts them in the porn narrative that plays as I do the voodoo that I do by myself, so well.

It’s another thing entirely when my despotic unconscious usurps that role and suddenly I’m plunged in the throes of hot, hot, dirty friend-on-erogenous zones action. It is, of course, fine in the dark of the night. Everything is entirely natural in a dream. But by the light of day and naked bulb of conscious thought, I find the lingering dream-shred disconcerting. I find myself mildly haunted, the erotic specter of my platonic relationship poking its head out at inopportune moments. Suddenly, the dreamed about is cast in a new and flattering light. My conscious mind gets hijacked. Thoughts wander. It’s weird and discomfiting.

Then there’s the question of whether I tell the friend. Do I or don’t I? Does he or doesn’t he (or, occasionally, she)? Will this confession lead to further weirdness and discomfiting? Or will it lead to some dreamy land of fulfillment? Or will it, as is and should be most often the case, lead to nothing more than a brief flicker of flattered feeling on the part of the dreamee and the not-unpleasurable frisson of shame and revelation on the part of the dreamer?

This time, I did confess—both to the world at large and to the friend in specific. First, I tweeted that I’d had a sex dream about a friend, and then, I emailed my friend and told him that he was the person about whom I’d dreamt. “Feel flattered or, you know, whatever,” I wrote eloquently and not at all ambivalently. He wrote back and, half-jokingly, asked whether in my dream he’d had a big cock. Sadly, that detail is not one of the grains of sand that stuck. I could not give him an accurate answer. I like to make people feel good about themselves when I legitimately can, but I’m hesitant to conjure details when I can’t.

Later in the week, this friend and I had a drink at a bar in Brooklyn. It was a cold night, and sitting at the bar, talking about Sarah Palin’s blood libel and the smell of my cat’s excrement and Twitter and writing and other sundry subjects, we got waylaid by this assertively drunk guy. This guy, bald and sporting hipster eyewear and hipster facial hair and garbed in hipster black, was double fisting red wine and Couvoisier. When the girls to his right left, he swung and turned on us, inserting himself into our conversation like an f-bomb. My friend patiently and deftly redirected the guy. Almost Mr. Miyagi-like, my friend made the guy wax off into the patient Brooklyn dark, and we were left alone to finish our night.

This friend and I, we have a history of unusual candor. It’s good and it’s interesting, and it’s nice to have men in my life upon whom I don’t project white picket fences and the entire Kama Sutra. I’d like it if my unconscious stepped the fuck off that particular stoop and meandered down the way to furnish me a dream about The Situation or Sherrod Brown, someone healthy and positively silver in his ripeness for projection. Sadly, I don’t have the choice, but that is the point of the unconscious. It visits us in the night and lays the mice we’re not expecting at our feet.

Confession has one clear advantage: unbosomed of the secret, I am no longer the sole bearer of it. Priests, therapists, friends, readers: they all play the same role in this. In telling, we are no longer Atlas shouldering the globe, all lonesome alone. We share and in sharing, we lighten the load. My friend, I think he’s cool with it. We laughed and quick-kissed good-bye. He went to his apartment and his dreams, and I to mine, each to his or her own, never the twain to meet, except as we choose.

Or, you know, not.

 

shock and ew, or why complacency is bad

For its "Shock" issue, I've a new piece on Filthy Gorgeous Things. The issue's topic should give you a fairly good idea of whether or not you want to read the piece. It might, or might not, be your cup of O+. In any case, here's an excerpt of my piece, which I titled "The Value of Shock: Why we need the gasp and shudder of the unfamiliar":

A few years ago, I attended a sex blogger soiree. The lone monogamist in a group of X-Game level perverts, I felt overmatched. These were people who treated sex with the kind of hobbyist devotion usually seen in Civil War reenactors and ham radio enthusiasts. They had special clothing, a schedule of activities, DIY books and DVDs. They went to sex camp.

I don’t give this back-story to cast aspersions; I say it with a sense of marvel. I respect people who devote themselves to the pursuit of arcane bodies of knowledge—I was, after all, an academic. I am just too much of a dilettante with the attention span of a fruit fly to throw myself so whole-heartedly, or whole-genitally, into any activity for any length of time. I also give this back-story to provide context. This group was bonded by a shared experience, and I was an outsider. And this relationship, that of one who knows and one who does not, is necessary for shock, which is what I felt when one of the group told a story that happened at sex camp.

Stolidly middle-aged with a life-long hippie’s mane of gray, the woman told the story of the event she witnessed with neon bright eyes. “First,” she said, “he tied her to a chair, took out a phlebotomist’s kit, tied on a tourniquet and withdrew a pint of blood...."

You can go here to read the rest. While you're at it, you also want to read my friend Sean Doyle's piece,  "Big Buck Hunter." You might have to pay a buck to read it, but it's worth it. 

I begin this piece on shock with a seriously disturbing story that I'd heard in the most civil of environments--at a tea. We who write about sex in Gotham used to have this very polite gathering of sex-bloggers every few months. As with communes or jam-bands anything with baroque interrelationships has a tendency to do, this society eventually collapsed under its own incestuous weight and in a pyrotechnic conflagration of drama.

They were, however, interesting gatherings for reasons I wasn't expecting. I never, for example, got laid from one. The perverts' teas never led to actual perversion, at least not for me. I cannot speak for others. What, instead, was provoking for me was the purely intellectual experience of interacting with people who had minds ostensibly broader than my own--and how those discussions challenged my own ideas about myself, my ideas about sex, and, occasionally, other's ideas about me and/or sex.

Perhaps the most adorable conversation I had was one with a woman who was a staunch defendant of paint art enemas. (It might also be called "paint enema art" or "enema paint art" or "art paint enemas"; I remain a little unclear on the exact nomenclature). Paint enema art involves pretty much what you imagine it would: the administration of a non-toxic paint enema into the anal cavity of a person who then shoots the paint over a canvas, thus creating "art." 

I am not, I suppose, sufficiently sex-positive to see this act or this product as "art." As I told the very enraged young woman with whom I had the discussion, I support the rights of the paint enema art makers to make paint enema art and wave their paint art enema flags high; I do not, however, have to see the products as "art." She was having none of my argument and saw me irretrievably Bourgie. I did feel somewhat vindicated when upon recounting this conversation to my friend Audacia Ray, a woman whose impressive resume requires ten minutes to read and process, "Well, it's not very good art, anyway. The paint always flakes off."

Not all conversations were so light-hearted. After writing what remains, I think, the most important and most painful of all my blog posts, the one where I narrate my seven abortions, I found myself at another sex-bloggers' tea. A woman--in fact, the very same middle-aged woman with long hippie hair as the one who tells the FGT anecdote--told me point blank that while she was pro-choice, she thought that seven abortions was "too many." I tend to agree, but on a deeply personal level. My pain, and my need to inflict my pain on myself again and again upward to seven, was more than any one human should bear. But this woman was being judgmental, and quite frankly, fuck her and her condescending lack of compassion. People in pain deserve understanding, not judgment.

These days, I write a lot less frequently about sex, which makes this blog deeply problematic, and my role as a writer a bit more nebulous. In part, I write less about sex because I'm single and my days of indiscriminate sex are more or less past (I make exceptions from time to time). But mostly, I'm looking to write about other stuff. Sex is swell. I love sex. But a writer, or at least this writer, can't live by sex alone.  It might also be that when I was writing about sex a few years ago, the community was thrumming. It was new and interesting and everyone was doing it, however good, bad, or ugly.

These days, not so much. Things change. Everything happens. And if you want to read one of my favorite pieces of writing that has to do with sex and shock and O+, read this. I'm still quite fond of the piece and the revelation that I experienced in it. Only when we're past the possibility of surprise have we lived too long--or run out of things about which to write.

 

five things 2010 taught me; or celebrities are profound about the darndest things

I learned a few things this past year, and I wanted to write them down, if only to remind myself. We so rarely learn things from other people, unless those other people are The Doctor or Buffy Summers. Or, apparently, Felicia Day.

Five things I learned in 2010:

Pain matters

For most of my life, pain has been a constant, though it has been emotional pain, not physical, as much as one can separate the mind from the body. Three months ago, I had surgery on my rotator cuff, which had hurt for a decade, and which pain I’d learned to live with, much as I learned to live with my depression.

The recovery from the surgery was unbelievably painful. It took about ten weeks before I could sleep through the night—at first I woke up ever hour, then every three hours, then twice a night. For two months, I couldn’t raise my right arm. I couldn’t brush my hair. Everything hurt. And then, slowly, it healed. I can now hail a cab with my right arm, a necessary skill for any Gothamite.

What I learned from this experience is twofold: pain matters and it is not infinite. I have to pay attention to my pain—be it physical or emotional—and I can trust that it’ll get better. But it’ll only get better if I take care of it. Ignoring pain does not make it go away. Ignoring pain makes it stay, and often it makes it get worse. Pain matters, but it doesn’t define me. This has been an important lesson, and I raise my hands in the air that I’ve learned it.

Live authentically

The one thing I’m most proud of in this past year is the sense that improbably, imperceptibly, and incrementally I’ve grown to be more me.  I used to carry about a great weight of remorse about my choices, about living a life that doesn’t conform to cultural expectations, and about having a history marked more by depression and loneliness than joy and connection. The more I’ve accepted who I am and what I’ve done, the more joy and connection I’ve found—and the more joy and connection I’ve found, the more I’ve accepted who I am.

A lot of this change stems from making a brand new circle of friends who are all amazing, strong, creative, glittery and gorgeous women, and none of whom are in the least bit conventional and all of whom are aces with that. They have inspired me more than they know, and it has been an honor to swig whiskey from the bottle with them. Sometimes other people can drag you closer to being who you are. Wacky, that.

I am and am not entitled

I, like you, deserve the rights afforded to every human under the Constitution. I, like you, however, am not entitled to have the job of my dreams, a beautiful and healthy body, lots of caring friends, and a robust intellectual life—unless I (or you) work at it. If I put the work into my profession, my body, my relationships, and my mind, then I absolutely motherfucking deserve everything that comes my way. In fact, I’m entitled to it.

Our culture talks a lot about entitlement as a negative, but it’s also a reasonable expectation, a glory, and benefit of work. If you do the work, regularly, honestly and diligently, you are entitled to everything good that comes from those hours you spend working (the hard truth is that you may still not get it--life fails to be fair, even to the hardworking). If you don’t work, you’re not entitled. You may be lucky and get the fat goods anyway, but the chances are so low as to be infinitesimal. But if I do the work and something good comes my way, fuck yeah, bitches. I’m entitled. Rawr.

Let it go

I learned this lesson from Twitter, where I follow only 99 people, while I have 1,102 followers. If I take on a new follower, I axe someone. I’ll follow only 99 people.

In part, I follow only 99 people because it’s a cool number and I’m not above pretension. But the real reason is that it’s the number of people whose tweets to which I can commit. I’m not going to follow more and not read their tweets. Unless it’s a really busy day or I’m away from my computer or iPhone, I read every tweet from all of my followers (and those who respond to me but whom I don’t follow). I often click and follow links. I regularly look at Twitpics. More than 99, and I’m overwhelmed; fewer than 99 and I’m bereft.

Which is a pretty good way to think about limits in general. We all need limits. Limits keep us safe and happy. Too much room and we’re lost little bunnies, too little and we’re starved. As adults, we choose our own adventures, however tame those adventures may be. It can be difficult to decide what you want from the grand buffet of life, but choose you must. You can’t carry everything, nor should you. As painful as it may be to make a choice, you must make that choice. You may like something, but you may still find you’ve got to let it go. You may find that something isn’t good for you, and you’ve got to let it go. You may love it; you may hate it; you may be bored by it; you may think you need it; you may be hurt by it. When there isn’t room, you’ve just got to let it go.  Make a choice, and let the unchosen go.

Everything happens

Being depressed is a lot about feeling stuck. It’s a lot about feeling that your life doesn’t change, that you just spin your wheels in the much and the dreck and you’re just so tired. The thing is, however, that change happens. However paradoxical, it’s an immutable fact that everything changes. I’m not one of those people who believe that everything happens for a reason—there’s much in this world that’s entirely random and meaningless, and I’m grateful for that—but everything does happen.

Everything does not, however, happen as you plan, or necessarily as you want, but happen it will. The more work you put into things happening, the better the chance is that what will happen will somewhat conform to your hopes and dreams, but that’s not a given. Only that things change is a given.

When I started this blog in March 2005, I didn’t have expectations. I just wanted to build a better blog than the guy who dumped me. I succeeded at that, but I got a whole lot more. I got noticed, and I got published. I also got an email on New Year’s Eve 2007 from a man who’d read my writing and wanted me to write for him as a freelancer. This October, I took a job with his company full-time. In February, I’ll be moving to Italy, where I’ll be spending 8-10 months a year, if all goes according to plan. I’d never expected that at 48 I’d be moving to Europe, learning another language, and writing for a living. But I am. It’s exciting. Everything happens.

 

picture this

Let’s see.

I’m in a calendar. In fact, I’m the pin-up shot for December 2011, a festive position in which to be. The position is probably due to all the parti-colored feathers and the champagne bottle, from which I genuinely did swig. The picture-taking took place during one of those nights in an artists’ loft, and when in the artist loft, you do as the artists do. There were many women tromping around in various states of delicious undress, and all I can say is that I’m delighted to be in their company. Also, I took pictures.

You can buy the calendar over here on The Rumpus, and when you do, you can feel good about supporting The Rumpus (even if your primary motivation is to get pictorial evidence of my fake but spectacular bosoms. I mean, holy levitating boobs, Batman. My breasts look as if they’re going to float away. It's an optical illusion aided by the corset I’m wearing; my actual breasts do not defy gravity to any extent that strains either credulity or natural law). I built the wings in the photo myself, and those I’m very proud of, though were I to do it again, I would engineer them a bit differently. As it turns out, $220 worth of feathers weighs quite a bit.

In this calendar, I’m portraying one of my very favorite literary figures from one of my very favorite books by one of my very favorite writers: Fevvers of Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Carter’s prose humbles and inspires me; she has that rare ability to craft a sentence whose syntax evokes intrinsically while challenging absolutely. Her writing gives me that frisson of pleasure that comes only when the strings of the heart and the head are plucked simultaneously. Add to this precision Carter’s predilection for magical realism and her unabashed socialist-feminist political leanings, and I swoon.

The novel, sadly, is out of print in the US. That’s a deep down tragedy and no doubt about it.

I’m feeling fairly fond of the photo in the calendar. I have a vexed personal history with photographs. I didn’t take good photos, and then I did, and now I don’t so much. I think the calendar shot makes me look both hot and daft in equal measures, and I suppose I can live with that. Once upon a time, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, every picture I took was good. My driver’s license shoots looked like Francesco Scavullo had taken them, full-on with beauty lighting and wind machine. It’s not the case anymore. My face has shifted, and where the transition from 3-D to 2-D used to play up the angelic angles of my cheekbones, now it highlights wrinkles.

That’s life, I suppose; it’s also death, but slowly. I don’t rue aging, but I do suddenly come to understand why actresses do fucked up things to their faces. Were I to blow my face up twelve feet wide and luminous, I’d probably scramble for the Botox, Juvederm, and Collagen too.

Lately, I’ve gotten drawn into photography, in part because I have friends who are models, in part because I have friends who are photographers, and in part because I got an iPhone, and every douchebag with an iPhone and a Hipstamatic app thinks she’s a photogrpher; I am that douchebag. Taking my own photographs and looking at the photographs of others is a lot like writing myself and reading Angela Carter. There is what I can do—and then there is what other people can do. I pray for the wisdom to know the difference, as well as the temerity to keep on going in the face of crushing self-doubt.

One of those photographers who makes me die a little bit is Symon Chow. I wrote about him for Filthy Gorgeous Things a couple of months ago. I came to his photos through seeing one of his nudes reblogged on one of the Tumblr sites I follow, but all of his pictures slay me. I love his full-frontal commitment to a vintage aesthetic, and I’m equally partial to his eldritch sensibility. Any man who has been given full rein to run amok in the Mütter Museum’s storerooms earns my eternal, bone-dusty respect. I’m just sad I’m no longer in the full flower of my photogenic self.

Time passes. You snooze; you lose. I snost; I lost.

So what, you ask, is the thrumming subtext in all this text? It’s this, dear reader, you may notice my face here is lots and lots. All kinds of my face. Even a gossamer shred of my first name. Which is because my “anonymity” has become more or less a charade. Everyone I know knows I have this blog. I used to have to keep it on the down-low because I taught at a Catholic college. Then I had to keep it on the down-low because I worked at a conservative community college. Today I work for a man who picked me because of the strength of my sexytime scribblings. I maintain this second name because this identity is more famous than I am.

Also, it’s fun to have doubles. Just ask any model, artist or photographer.

pinch drunk

Last Wednesday night, I did something that is such an unbelievable breach of Gotham etiquette, such a mark of extreme louche behavior, such a shame-making urban act that every time I have confessed it to another Gothamite—and confess it I have, as if the telling of it will scrub my soul clean—to a one, they have reacted the same way: A jerk of the head, a gasp, and an exclaimed, “Oh, no!”

“Oh, no!”: it’s the same words, but it’s not the same exclamation as when I had my iPhone jacked out of my bleeding hands on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I had a roommate move out taking as much stuff as he could carry (including, inexplicably, the light bulb from the ceiling). It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I went to work one night in the ‘90s and found my strip club door padlocked with a big Marshall sign on it proclaiming the property seized. It’s the same words but not the same exclamation because while the other situations occasioned compassioned and understanding, this one engendered only horror and the clear, unadorned relief that what happened to me had not happened to them.

And what had I done? I got so drunk that I puked in a cab. It was the full cliché glory of taxicab puking. An unanticipated need. A thin rivulet of bourbon stink. An irate taxi driver. An inability to find my wallet. A quick panic. A huge payment. An unsteady mile-long walk home in high heels. It was ugly. May it never happen to you.

Slender are the surface facts that brought me to puking in the back of a Gotham taxi. I’d been busy all day and I’d not eaten much. I think my grand total of food for the day amounted to five eggs, two corn tortillas, a pile of potatoes and a couple threads of green beans. I rushed off to a party, stopping only to grab a bottle of Buffalo Trace Kentucky whiskey from my local liquor store. At the party, we all dispensed with glasses and took slugs out of the bottle, in a circle, totemically, as if we were sharing a hookah.

I don’t, therefore, have a clear idea of how much I drank, but it probably wasn’t much more than a customary heavy pour. I’ve never held my liquor well under the best of circumstances, and these circumstances were not even in the same congressional code as the best.

But the surface facts really don’t tell the whole story and the whole story is that I went to that party with full intention to get drunk. Not as drunk as I got, nor as quickly, messily, shamefully or as pointlessly, but drunk. I wanted to get drunk because the day before I discovered that the doctor who performed my rotator cuff surgery is, and I quote my insurance company, “outside my network.” I owe him just under $13,000. It may be immature, and certainly for me very unusual behavior, but I wanted a night when I could forget the money and feel angry about it simultaneously and illogically.

I’m not good with money. I’ve written before about how bad with money I am. Money is hard to write about. I’d rather write about the seamier side of my sex life than my bank balance. I feel shame over being as deeply, profoundly and, let’s face it, inescapably in the red as I am. Again, the surface explanations for my extreme in-the-redness are fairly simple. I’m bad with math. In fact, I have dyscalculia, which makes negotiating numbers incredibly hazardous and anxiety provoking. My parents never taught me to manage money. They dropped the ball on that, as they did on many other things like table manners, social etiquette and playing well with others. And money has never been much of a driving force. It’s nice to have, but I’ve never really cared about a status of living that affords me much beyond the general basics adorned with an occasional furbelow.

But the three-D truth is naturally more complex, and the truth is that I never really considered myself worth much. Therefore, managing my money wasn’t a priority. I didn’t think I’d be here very long. I thought I’d be dead by my own hand or, more likely, by an “accident.” I didn’t pay attention to my student loan debt. I owe in the low six figures. I didn’t pay attention to my taxes. I owe in the low four figures. I didn’t pay attention to my credit cards. I owe in the mid-four figures. I have a lot of debt.

What I don’t have are assets. I own nothing. I don’t have a car, a house, an apartment, jewelry, stocks, bonds, or anything anyone would want to buy on E-Bay. I have over a hundred snow-domes and too much vintage Norma Kamali and ten pairs of Frye boots. I have second-hand furniture and a computer that’s going to celebrate its fifth birthday. I have many pairs of Wolford tights. And that’s about it.

Shockingly, I’d begun to make peace with it, my lack of ownership and debt, and I’d begun to take measures to make my debt more manageable. In fact, I have an appointment with an accountant tomorrow, an appointment I’m going to have to cancel because I can’t afford it. In the past couple of years, I had begun to take steps to fashion a life that allowed my ends to meet, that would help my hand reach my mouth and feed me, that would—perhaps—allow me to pay my debt while living. I, in short, got a job that I hated. And then I quit that one, and I got a job that I actually like.

At 46, in the worst economy since the Great Depression, I got the things that culture had been telling me I should get while I clapped my hands over my ears and sang “La la lala, academia lalala, freelance writing la la la.” I got a job. I got a pension. I got health insurance. At 47, I got another job. I got an IRA. I got different health insurance. I got doctor’s appointments. I got surgery. I got a great, big stinking debt that I wasn’t expecting, and I got it just when I was towing the cultural row, doing the work that I didn’t like and then work that I sort of like, but whatever. I was living the life I had never wanted. I was living the life of a schnook.

A few weeks ago, I was out at dinner with three others: a big-deal writer, a writer poised on the brink of being a big deal, and a writer whom we all believe will be a big deal. We were talking about the necessity of being successful and the big deal writer’s belief that to make a dream come true you need to say you’ll do it, out loud, to others. I told him about my six-figure student loan debt and then I devolved into my anxiety about a penniless future. He stared at me and said levelly: “You can’t worry about all that yet. You just need to get to broke.”

He is right, of course. Right now, my goal is to get to broke. Not to save. Not to buy. Not to pad the walls of my Spartan cage with downy softness. To fill in with dollars and cents the yawning cavern of debt. The debt that weighs on me, that makes my life unmanageable, that in my mind marks me and makes me unattractive, unmarriable, this yowling anti-dowery that not all the goats in the world could counterbalance. (Tell me now that your self-worth isn’t inextricably tied to your bank balance.) Right now my goal is to get even, and even is something I’ll never get working this $60,000 a year job.

In that dinner conversation, I agreed with the big deal writer. He looked at me again, the gears in his labyrinthine brain going full spin. “What sexually explicit and intimate memoirs have sold?” he asked. “I mean, have any?”  I was stumped. (I still am.) I was taken aback. (I still am.) I was crushed. (I still am.)

I’ll be over there in the corner, curled fetal, but without the bourbon. It’s bad enough to be plunged in an industrial sized vat of fiscal despair. I don’t need to puke in a taxi to remind me of my shame.

 

someone thinks my writing is elegant: younger men and tight prose

So I've a new piece up on Filthy Gorgeous Things. It's about why I like younger men, and it's called "Robbing the Playpen." Totter on over there, read it, and return. I'll wait. Here's an excerpt:

But my preference for a man is younger. He used to be a standard eight-to-ten years younger (and, indeed, this is the age bracket I like for a relationship), but now he’s a lot younger than that. He is, if you look at my last ten years of sex history, anywhere between a seemly ten years to a rather staggering twenty. I admit it: I quake when I could have gone to high school with my lover’s mom. It makes me feel weird and, well, really old. Age is not just a number. Size matters. And you’re not only as old as the person you’re fucking.

But fuck them I do. Most recently, it was this creamy dish of an Eastern European of uncertain descent. He possessed a mind of dark beauty and a cock as long, straight and narrow as a ruler...

The man described above is the man over whom I suffered tristesse and then wrote about it. He and I email one another from time to time. He feels flattered, which I think is sweet and which junction of flattery/sweetness probably sums up the relationship between muse and artist more than it does the relationship between younger man and older woman.

Though what the hell do I know? I've never been a younger man.

I have, however, been written about, and it is flattering and creepy in equal measure. That frisson probably goes a long way to explain my extreme singleness. 

For some cosmic crash of events, I've had sudden uptick of readers here on my pretty dumb things. Even when I haven't posted for months and months, I maintain a tidy 300 or so pages read a day, primarily because of this particular post on deep-throating. I am, apparently, a blow-job queen, an empress of fellatio, a doyenne of deep-throating, a consort of cock-sucking. I knew I enjoyed the activity, and I've always taken pride in it, but I never considered myself that much of an authority. Apparently, the Internets sees me as the Martha Stewart of knob-slobbing, and I suppose that's a good thing.  At any rate, it keeps my page-count consistent.

That chart to the left or above (depending on the size of your window) is empiric evidence in the form of search results that brought people to my pdt. You can embiggen the image and count it up, but I'm guessing about 3/4 of this list (it goes on beyond the scope of my screen) has to do with sucking cock. I'm not entirely sure about the person who searched for "SEXY MEN DEEP TROATING LADIES SUCKING COCK," but who am I to rain on another human's consensual fantasy? Likewise if you're the person asking "how often should i suck black boyfriends cock," I'd answer "as often as you want and he's willing." Not to presume, or anything. 

Regardless of what brought them, it's always really gratifying to take a quick look at my stats and see that someone is devouring my archives. This is my 801st post, give or take a few. If you consider that most of my posts average a bit shy of a thousand words, and then if you times the numbers and carry the one, you'll see that I've written quite a lot. I have a metric shit-tonne of archives. There is, in short, a lot to read. And it looks as if there will be yet more. (But you'll find the anal stuff here and the oral stuff here, you beloved smut-seekers.)

For a variety of reasons too excruciatingly boring to tell, I've recently fallen in love again with my blog. My blog also has undergone a subtle refurbishment at the hands of 3Design3; I'm quite fond of the work this company has done. I'm not sure which came first--my falling back in love or the refurbishment--but I do like the new look. Even if this confluence of events suggests that I am at heart a shallow, superficial, Oscar Wildean kind of girl. 

I ramble. Forgive me. I had some really bad news today, and it leaves me wanting a big tumbler of brown alcohol. Thanks for reading. Even you trolls. You love me, you really, really love me.

I could just swallow you whole.

PS. I forgot. A friend of mine also has a piece on FGT about her time working as a hostess at sex parties. You have to pay to read it, but it's worth it. This woman is no slouch as a writer. Watch her, seriously. She's all that and.

be your teenage dream tonight

I have, of late, become unnaturally obsessed with Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” It is—and while this statement may hip-check hyperbole, I nonetheless believe it—the perfect pop song. The chopsticks-like piano riff, the driving drum-and-bass duo, the cotton-candy-pink vocals, and the pleasantly vapid tinge of vocoder: each new line drops this delicious pop bon-bon. It’s a melting confection, and since I downloaded the song about 24 hours ago, I’ve listened to it no fewer than 15 times.

I already copped to the unnatural obsession. I am, after all, a woman who is neither the very button on prime’s cap nor on the soles of her shoes. I live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors. In the lower belly of my prime, I find there’s not a lot of it left, but what there is left is glorious.

I can rarely simply enjoy something without subjecting it to anatomist’s analysis; thus, I have created a hydra of my obsession. Not only must I listen to “Teenage Dream,” but also I must nail down its heuristic pleasure. Meaningless pop calls for epistemological analysis; that’s how I roll. And what I’m coming up with is pretty simple, but as most simple ideas tend to be, also fairly profound and that is this: “Teenage Dream” may have all the earmarks of prepackaged pop, yet it’s completely irony free. It is perhaps the most earnest expression of what it feels to be young, free, and falling in love since the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

Again, hyperbolic, but I’m going to run with it.

When I was twelve, my grandmother had portraits taken of me because, she said, she wanted pictures of me before I “got that cynical look” on my face. Perry’s “Teenage Dreams” embodies that pre-cynicism look; it gives that look a fetching hook and a dance beat. The world is wide open; it’s beautiful; it’s sexy; and it’s replete with love.

It’s not exactly my experience as a teenager. I was large with “going all the way,” medium-sized with the “no regrets,” but decidedly small with the “just love.” And yet, while the “Teenage Dream” experience was not my own, the feeling was. The weird thing about growing up is that you don’t lose that feeling, at least I haven’t.

This past August, I went to my 30^th high school reunion. I wrote about the more salacious parts of experience here on Filthy Gorgeous Things; I forgot to link it back in September. I had a lot happening in my life, and promoting my own writing took a back seat with the laundry and the dusting. Rereading this piece, I like it even better than I did when I wrote it.

What I don’t mention in the FGT piece is that the day before the reunion, I’d suffered some seriously sublime food poisoning. The day I flew out, I had to change my flight twice; I could not stop puking. I think I vomited fourteen times in eight hours; you do the math; it’s not pretty. Thus, I was kind of a shell of myself at the reunion. It would have been a fairly surreal experience under the best circumstances, and being a whiter shade of hurling pale, I found it to be hallucinatory. Mostly, it felt like one of those dreams you have where everyone you know is there and they’re being really nice to each other, but they’re also all dead.

To heap yet more mirage on the hallucinatory sundae, the reunion took place at the gentleman farmer estate of one of my classmate’s—and it was a house where I’d spent significant time when I was a child because friends of my parents owned it. The palimpsest of experience was so over-written as to be nearly illegible. I reeled, but it might have been low blood sugar.

Going back to Vermont is for me always a fraught experience. You can never go home again, except that, of course, you can. You go home and you see things as you see them now, and you remember them as you thought they were, and the overlay of the two experiences can be vertiginous. It can also drive you to picture taking. Memory likes evidence of one kind or another. Sometimes Proust eats a Madeleine; other times, he takes out his iPhone and snaps a few Shakeitphotos. Memory lane, as it turns out, it quite pretty in August.

This is the road where I lost my virginity in a Ford truck. The night we went all the way, it was not this bucolic. It was January, and it was at least double-digits below. There was alcohol involved, and I kind of wished I had done things a bit differently. Perhaps if I hadn’t been sixteen in a town of 750 and a high school of 600, I might have.

As I wrote in my FGT piece, I saw the man who Was There First. He has not aged well, and that’s all that needs to be said about him.

This is the road where I first received the oral pleasure. (Click to embiggen the pictures, should you desire.) While I lost my virginity in the front of a Ford truck, I first got head in the back of a Subaru wagon, and, really, if you’re an American woman, the meta-metaphor of car and sex act probably feels so true as to be over-determined. While the man who first lapped my teenage pussy was not at the reunion, I did happen to run into him later. He seems to be a kind, thoughtful, gentle and interesting man who does not deserve the apparently humdrum and disappointing life he lives.

I feel bad for him, and I feel absolutely delighted that I got the hell out of Dodge when I did. It’s better to dodge a hell than to live a life of hell in Dodge.

This is the view from the house where I grew up in Nowhere, Vermont. It’s a lovely landscape, and it’s virtually unchanged from when I was little. It also gives you a glimpse into why I read a lot, why I have an imagination of Edward Gorey proportions and why practically every day of my adolescence was an exercise in drumming up reasons not to kill myself.

It sure is pretty, though.

Looking at these pictures, thinking about how it felt to drive through those green, green landscapes in my rented Buick Something, I recall the promise of the Teenage Dream. I remember it, and in remembering, I realize that for all the sepia tinge of melancholic nostalgia, I’ve really lost nothing. It’s there, accessible, in my head: a life rich with unimaginable sensual pleasures, unutterable prettiness, endless sweetness and skintight jeans. I recollect how driving those well-remembered roads, I felt the lifting of the veil of cynicism, the gift of age, experience and Gotham. I remember what it felt like to be young, to be young still, to be young now, to be young forever. 

Digressive post-script:

This is the road where, on graduation night, I found the guy passed out in the middle of the road. I couldn't find a way to fold that story into the narrative above, other than to say that if there was a night in my life more deeply steeped in the wide-open highway of teenage hopes, I can't remember it. I was wearing a slamming fuschia dress and matching heels. I wish I had still had them. I found this dude who was dead to the world. It was a moment worthy of David Lynch.