sex

Music please.

I got a note the other day that complimented me on the quality of my "public longing" (that as opposed, I understand, to the more conventional "secret longing") and this tender sprout of an idea took root in the unfortunately rocky and barren terrain that is what passes for my subconscious these days. I don't know if it's really something to be proud of, but I think I've gone too far down the road of radical transparency to really make much of a turnaround now. Nothing short of the online equivalent to death (that is, taking the whole thing down) can really extricate me from my legacy. Or, as they say in the middle of a bum trip, the only way out is through.

So public longing it is. New tag. Warning to any groundlings out there who might see this post; it's got mature content, which is preferable to immature content IMHO (and as the man sez), but if yr parents aren't into that sort of thing, maybe trip away*.

I'm back in that Swerengen place, which I know at least some people out there get. It's a nasty cocktail of pressurized and randy, a place I get where the facts of my life stretch me out thin enough that there are a real limited number of things that'll make me feel good, and the first one on my mind is getting epically laid, but of course this is a pretty terrible position from which to go playing the scene.

I ejected from a particularly nettlesome day in the SF office (12 hours spent mostly heads down, and not much to show for it) and ran my bike right in front of a cop against a red light. My bad, totally, and I swung away and saved my own life there, but he wanted to give me some shit about it since I guess it gave him a start too. No ticket, thanks, but it really ruins the near-death adrenaline rush which (sorry mom) is a staple of my urban cycling reverie when you get chewed out by the law after the fact.

So he hassled me into walking the bike, which I did for a block or two in case he swung around, and so got a little sidewalk-level view of Thursday night in SOMA. Ostentatious pretty people smelling good in the sort of atrocious way of perfume. Bouncers and young professionals. Sorority girls past their prime. Needless to say this wasn't quite my scene, but it got me thinking a little bit.

Because, hey dipshit, what exactly is your scene? Sure I can sound some aesthetic or class-warriorish notes, but what exactly am I doing with my life that's more interesting or exciting than the yuppie circus on Townsend? Not much.

And this cuts right to the heart of this whole tied-up wish-i-could-get-some scene I've been inhabiting in and out for years now. My man Jack's commandment #4 is to "Be in love with yr life" and that's been a stretch for quite a while now. I don't meant to cast aspersions on any of the wonderful, talented and entertaining friends, comrades and fleeting lovers who've been my companions over the past few years but the truth is it hasn't really been there for me. What gets you out of the bed in the morning? For me, it's responsibility; the knowing that Shit Will Get Fucked Up if I drop out; which is no way to live, long haul.

At the same time, I'm uber-conscious of my massive privileges. I might have eaten off food stamps and government cheese as a kid, been the first generation of my mom's family to graduate from college, but my pops was a PhD, and even though they weren't together they both loved and supported me fully and completely which is the more important point. It's no legacy Yale admission, but in real terms it's the leg up that matters in life.

In other words, the predicament I find myself in is nobody's fault but my own. Ain't no excuse for not living the dream 'cept maybe it's hard to get to sleep sometimes.

Honestly I think I'm afraid to put my desire out there. It's easy to write public longings in the removed digital safety of a blog, but I mean in meatspace, dig. Here I wrote a whole play riffing on the Jungian conundrum of self/shadow-self, and a short decade later I'm too uptight to let my sexy out. I'm unsure whether it's ye old fear of success, or the less glamorous and more cowardly terror before the specter of rejection, but these submerged parts of my consciousness are pretty well deep under.

Which is, again, no way to be long run. This leads to weird flailing thrashes of emotionality. I can see it clearly: too long out of circulation, starting to make more out of things than they really are, the tone of voice when someone's talking about a relationship that tells you not to question their commitment to sparkle-motion. Playing catch-up on the emotional spectrum. Bringing around someone and making all my friend pretend to like them.

That's not me, but I can see it out there, this dark future.

The alternative is to find something to love about my life, about being a grown up, a professional, a self-made man. I've made much hay from my ability to bridge structural holes over the years, but it's left me with a lot of scattered bits of my identity. My political people and art people and red dawn people and drupal people and oldest dearest friends all know different flavors of a Josh, and explaining one to the other can be difficult verging on impossible. Me is somewhere in-between.

And underneath all the sexual frustration in the world is the prom-night romantic hope that maybe just getting with the right girl would bring it all back home. Seems kind of unlikely, really, but it's there.

More likely is I figure out my shit, own it, love it, rock it, and that makes me feel pretty good, loose, hot and free, and then interesting things start happening.

Until then I don't see much alternative to continuing to fumble along, and try not to let any opportunities pass me bye.

---

*I feel increasingly compelled to do these sorts of disclaimers now that I realize my teenage nieces and nephews are on the internet as much as I am, and since my feed hookup cross posts all my stuff to facebook. This whole thing was a lot less complicated when it was more samizdat and all I had to worry about was offending my mom, who's very hard to offend.

Returning to the romance.

It’s been a dark fall so far, hard-pressed and shut in. I’m looking forward to getting healthy so I can go back to getting drunk like a sailor, heaving to and fro, freewheeling and going where I will. Getting out on the road was good, but work-travel is more draining.

High time now to ride another wave, to get up on it and roll. It’s unlikely that I’ll have any less work to do anytime soon, but like every self-help manual teaches (and my own philosophy preaches) the X factor you’ve got real control over is your mind, not your circumstances. Big changes begin as shifts in perception. Mad lib it. Fill in the blank with confidence and everything will be fine, or as fine as it can be.

So there’s an inflection. My situation can be seen as being overwhelmed by an unreasonable and untenable tumult of todos, or a raging whitewater sluice of opportunities to be rafted. We’re in the deep fast water now, the difference between going under and riding it for all its worth really comes down to attitude. If we head into this thing with joy, it should work out. If not, well, there’s a reason the skaters say fear is the mind-killer.

But what’s really missing from all this is the romance, and really it’s nobody’s fault but my own. I’m pretty much impossible to please, my desires in love taking on the same grandiose scale as the rest of my outsized ambitions, even as my ability to invest time, energy, effort ever dwindles. What exactly can you expect?

Of late I’m all wrung out and hung up, exhausted, scheduled, and sick. No room for special lady friends. No time to be genuinely interested even — so long since I’ve been smitten — just the dull sense that I’m missing out and a flickering hunger.

I’m reminded of an old girlfriend I had back in the day who related some advice from her mother upon hearing that she was feeling stressed and overwhelmed at college. “I think you should be having sex,” was the gist of it, pointing out that getting laid can be quite the boon to ones self-confidence in addition to providing a bit of an endorphin rush and being a way to get unstuck from a situation. Pretty logical family; Russians.

So it occurs to me now that in the same way that going and running on a treadmill would be a good thing for me, so might participating in some uncomplicated physical congress.

But how long has it been since that’s happened? Quite a while, I think. Years even. Somewhere in the mid-decade I lost the whimsy jaunt one really needs to, as the kids say, “hook up.” Not that it hasn’t happened, but it’s been different. More laden with expectations and baggage, even if only my own. I miss that old swashbuckling sexual goodness, that simple faith in fun.

It takes a certain kind of purity of the heart, an essential self-trust and self-love that I seem to be lacking. Is this something that can be recaptured? I’m not sure. Maybe this is why people go to therapy.

Actually, scratch that: I’m pretty sure it can be recaptured. When I was down in Uruguay, on my last night in Montevideo I met a fabulous girl and had just that sort of time, carrying on in the streets and making a bit of a scene in the hostel hallway. It was another of my “king of second base” experiences (no sex, even by Clintonian standards), so perhaps this doesn’t quite prove the point, and it’s probably getting a bit of memory gloss, but I think that essential feeling of freedom and rightness was there.

It’s a bit cliche, but the traveling connection creates a situation where you have no choice but to embrace the moment, move with what’s happening. There’s also a lot less in the form of accountability; no reason not to say, do, feel, act. No day but today.

Finding the equivalent moral and emotional latitude in the day to day is somewhat harder. And to be honest that whole thing probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t spent 10 days decompressing on a remote beach with no cellphone or laptop.

So there’s a lesson there. All work and no play makes Josh a dull boy. Blindingly obvious as this sounds, it won’t be until I can regain more of my schedule to myself that the romance returns. “Now You Labor Every Day / Love Life Drifts Away.”

Anyway, good to be back in California. Stockholm was a great old european city where all the pretty girls ride bikes in freezing cold weather. Austin is a mecca, the Portland of Texas, and full of fabulous friends and collaborators and (apparently) cheap rents and wild wide-open american scenes. Tempe/Phoenix is a desert dream city, full of neon and fresh asphalt and the wide open blue skies that only the Southwest can deliver. But I’m happy to be back home.

On the road with a familiar feeling: working in a coffeeshop in Portland with a massive hangover and being behind. The last time I was in this place was a Christmas season ago, stuck under a project trying to launch before the end of the calendar year, struggling to balance all the friends I hoped to catch up with, family to see. It wasn’t any fun. A woman who I really like took me home from a bar, but I was so frazzled that didn’t even work out either; insult to injury.

Today I’m not so lucky to have a problem like that. You have to a) have a crush on someone and b) get into bed with them before you can suffer the full Shakespearean tragedy of impotence. Cute as the girls here in the coffeshop may be (and they are, bless you Portland), I don’t know any of them from adam, so any emasculating secondary impacts from my stress level are purely theoretical.

It’s a good visit though so far. Great people, hot weather, fun times. Truck drives great, and I’ve been tooling around a little on my bike, which has been grand. I’m just trying to clear some TODOs from the old plate before heading out to see my man JD and his fiance, who are around one night only from Arkansas.

Tomorrow is the gorge for Taylen and Rachel’s wedding, and I think a camp-out, then down to Bend. Hope to put a little more trucker-tan on the arm!

Is there a word for this particular combination of stressed-out and horny? Ala Al Swearengen, “I need to fuck something.” Somewhere in the nexus of sexual frustration and nihilism, where the survival urge cycles like a mobeus, inside out and never ending; that’s where I’ve been finding myself lately. Kind of amped, kind of tired, kind of desperate and kind of over it too. It’s a peculiar place.

Personally, frustrating though it is, this seems like a small measure of progress, hunger being preferable to numbness. I feel meta-better with itchy and pent-up than I do with bored and blase. It’s been a while since I’ve had a steady lover in my life — or much action to speak of at all, really — something that’s not terribly likely to change without proactive effort, itself unlikely without some genuine desire. So this is where it starts.

The other morning on my way to work I heard this bit on NPR about the prevalence of hooking up as opposed to traditional dating and courtship. I think their square-world take on it is kind of prudish — “sex without intimacy” is an awfully normative frame, and I’d say hooking up can be quite intimate, even when it is ephemeral — but there’s something to this. One part that particularly struck me was where the young woman they interviewed talked about how bringing someone into her circle of friends seemed like a much more scary (or, specifically, vulnerable) thing than bringing someone to bed. I can understand that.

But the part that really got me was the lyrical description of the process. The idea of a dance. That’s something I miss, powerful like. It’s not something that life in the woods offers many venues for, hooking up, especially when one lives and socializes with a smallish inner circle of peeps.

I don’t really know what to do about this. Kellymundo and I used to joke about “secret hour” — going out on the solo-prowl — but I’m not sure this is really my style. More’s the pity, my daily life routine isn’t conducive to casual social commingling with pretty and available ladies. Most of my friends are settled down, and they pretty much hang out with one another. Not that I blame them, but it doesn’t help me out that much.

So I’m stuck. Toe-tappingly, jaw-grindingly arrested in space. Contents under pressure. In the words of Yousef Islam, “It’s another Saturday night, and I ain’t got nobody.”

The killer thing is that it’s not like I can just go out and get fucked. That might be literally possible, maybe even desirable, but the truth is I’m not really down with the lowest common denominator, and even if I were the logistics seem daunting. I envy those satyr-like dudes, those ready willing and able to get it on wherever and whenever (and with whoever) they can. It’s not particularly classy, sure, but it’s honest, uncomplicated.

I envy too my younger self, my sluttier self, more willing to let the moment roll and go along with someone else’s notional good time. These days, I’m too wrapped up to turn off my mind, relax, and float downstream, and when I look out at the world it’s all pessimism and reasons why not. Hardly a winning attitude.

In the long run I’m sure this will all work out, but in the short run, it feels like I need a little more adventure, and that’s something I gotta work on. No real conclusion here, natch: it’s sort of my deal to work these things out semi-publicly. Helps sometimes to confess, and the sticky personal business generally makes for the best writing, so that’s what I do. With any luck, even when I overcome my petty personal pathos I’ll still find worthwhile inspiration for blogging. Pretty sure that will work out too.

For now, it’s time to leave the house and get out into the world for an evening.

It’s a heady collection of tags: authentic experience, nyc, love, sex, friends; should be a real barn-burner of a blog.

Back in Humboldt for a week now, feeling the raw world-conquering momentum bleed away into wood smoke and the smell of fallen leaves. It’s not unpleasant at all, this country home of mine — next week will be alive with family and friends; the way I fell in love in the first place — but today it gives me a feeling of wistful sadness.

It seems I make myself a smaller person here, or maybe it’s vice-versa with the Mother City making me bigger. Much as I believe the hype about the internet flattening the world, it will always be true that different things happen in different places. It was an immense recharge, to walk again the streets of Brooklyn, to feel the quick hard snap of real subway doors, the great heaping crush of humanity, densely packed ambition and excellence. I draw power from the capital of the world.

And it’s not just the women, but I won’t lie: they’re a big part of it. I have a no kiss-and-blog policy, but this little slice from William Gibson has stuck with me since adolescence, and pretty much nails me to a T:

But Bobby had this thing for girls, like they were his private tarot or something, the way he’d get himself moving. We never talked about it, but when it started to look like he was losing his touch that summer, he started to spend more time in the Gentleman Loser. He’d sit at a table by the open doors and watch the crowd slide by, nights when the bugs were at the neon and the air smelled of perfume and fast food. You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki’s was the one he was waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.

I’m glad to be mature enough to appreciate how things work above and beyond (as well as in and around) sex. Brilliant conversation beats mediocre fucking any day of the week, and anyway good conversation is how you scale those shining peaks of physicality. Takes time, but anticipation works. So I’m happy having a drink and catching up with an old flame, or striking up an honest new connection; not so much of an agenda, just moving on the moment. That’s how all my good times have happened.

It comes in a flood though, my confidence. Once I start feeling good about myself, quit apologizing, ducking out of eye contact, it’s hard not to go over the high side. Josh the Lothario is a natural groove for me; crackling with energy. “Because I can” becomes a powerful rationale: I’m a lucky guy; I can do a lot of things.

Indeed, I get a thrill having more than one love interest, and it’s time I owned that, quit trying to dodge/judge myself. As the man said, the only way to foster Love in your life is by being yourself at 100%, and so I choose (now) to embrace my polyamorous free-lovin’ playboy status.

But then it comes to babies, to the existential question of Settling Down. That posterized photo up there is me and Frank Edward Robbins VI, aka Freddy — or me being a god-fatherly figure here, “Fredo” — who I got to meet and hold in Greenpoint. A pure delight, and a clear indication of things to come.

Indeed, the first wave is on. LGD, author and progenitor of the “35 To 55” strategy will be moving to PDX in the new year to start his family. Jumped the timetable a bit — switched to a Patraeus-like surge, he did — but it’s a happy thing. He was ready, as others are rapidly becoming.

And yeah, I’m a family man in my heart, though not yet in that state of readiness. When I moved to Humboldt I took on a sort of homesteader’s outlook, putting myself through a nesting phase, but without another bird or any eggs. It was lonely, and in some ways a bit of a force, but overall a good thing for my maturation I think. I can feel the potential, the theory, a slick hot run of fortune and luck leading up to the Big Jackpot. It’s a fantasy, sure, but that’s what I need these days.

The question here and now is what comes next. Back in the country, my confidence wavers. The sheer logistics of my life here exert a powerful force: lots and lots of work (I am procrastinating right now, in fact) and a home 10 miles from town. The cute bartender down the hill might pour me an extra/full glass of wine and let me hang around while the waiters fold napkins and talk shop, but I can’t make anything of that. I turn to a shrinking violet. Strange. Hopefully that opportunity knocks twice.

Part of me wants live in New York again, and while my next move is into the garage here in Westhaven, I know for a fact I’ll be visiting NYC more often in the near future. It’s a big life, and I’m a big guy; need my big city fix from time to time.

For now I want to try carrying some more of that energy along, keep some of that swagger on me out in the woods. Unshrinking. Walking tall and getting “out there” out here too.

As a followup to my Californication post below, I’d like to try and shed a more positive light on things. Clearly that kind of writing elicits a reaction — hey, sex still sells, and it’s some of the more honest blogging I’ve done of late — but I think I may have given some people the wrong idea. Not that I don’t appreciate all the ego-boosting, but I can’t help but feel a little bit guilty, like when as a kid you’d fake or exaggerate an injury for attention.

So yes. Let’s get down to brass tacks. In our last installment, I concluded that there was some serious Fear going on, and this was why my sex life was more or less dead. And yeah, the more I sit with that the more accurate it feels.

That’s not particularly great in and of itself, but the first step to happy living is figuring out what you want. Then you have to get it, and that’s another mountain to climb, but just getting some direction is a vital and necessary first start. I honestly feel better already.

When I survey the past couple years — relatively sexless and workaholic — they seem a cocoon. On the one hand maybe I’ve been gestating, and am preparing to emerge chrysalis-like in new glory. On the other hand, maybe I’ve been in hiding, retreating into the woods to bury my shame under a thousand layers of self-made silk. Or something.

Maybe it’s both. More than anything else, I get the feeling I’ve been keeping myself under wraps, off the scene. It’s not a new revelation, but every time it comes up it’s with ring of truth. I think I’ve got a stronger way to say it, one that comes to mind with an anecdote:

So, I was at this wedding after-party and a tall chesty and very drunk girl decided to catch my eye, much though I may have been ducking hers. She wanted to know what I was made of. “What is your story?“ she kept asking me with narrowed eyelids, high-heel-stumbling in place, slumping tits-first into my shoulder and then threatening to tip over backwards. “You’re one of those nice guys, aren’t you.”

It was phrased as an accusation, and maybe that’s why the question got through my normal social filter, because, in the way she meant it, I had to answer deep down that no — no, I’m really not. I’m not one of those nice guys. I am in fact a pretty bad guy, the way you mean; bad in the way you’re probably hoping for right now. But I’m in retirement. So, sorry babe.

She didn’t quite get me, so I told her I didn’t want to make out with her, after which she left me alone.

This exchange was definitely on my mind when I wrote my previous post. It was an authentic unrehearsed moment, and turning it over in my mind there’s a feeling of something true in there.

Much as I exhibit many of the qualities of the nice guy — first and foremost that I am nice, and also a guy — my nature is… something else. And for whatever reason I have been trying to shoehorn myself into this somewhat plastic “nice guy” mold for the past couple years. I won’t waste too much time speculating as to my subconscious (heartbreaker’s guilt, playing it safe) motives, but as a diagnosis this feels like a Real Thing. And again, the point is to move onward, not wallow in the past.

Now. Let me be absolutely clear. It does not follow logically that because I believe I am not a “nice guy,” that I am a not-nice (mean, bad, loathsome) person. Just like any other guy pushing thirty who’s lived a few interesting days in his life, I’ve got a shabby pile of self-loathing lying around. We’ve all got dirty laundry, but this isn’t a pity party. I realize I am a wonderful person, capable of great love, and with all the things to offer you’d expect from the 99th percentile. Indeed, I revel in this.

Moreover, and not to get too post-modern on y’all, but I fully realize that this shoehorning, much as it may be ostensibly motivated out of the desire to quote “do the right thing” — to do right by the women I welcome into my life — is deeply and terrifically counter-productive at achieving this end. Going through the motions is simply an awful way to behave, romantically. You will either:

1. Be unmasked as inauthentic or condescending, and hurt the poor girl’s feelings.
2. Simply lose interest because your heart’s not in it, and hurt the poor girls feelings.
3. End up stuck going through the motions until finally you have to break things off, and hurt the poor girls feelings.

The moral of the story is that our protagonist (“poor girl,” for those of you keeping score at home) doesn’t have a chance as long as I’m faking it. It’s just as inadvisable for me to behave this way as it is for her to fake orgasms. So why have I been doing this?

A lack of confidence feels about right. Without the gall and spine to carry off a love life under my own terms, I’ve degenerated back (role confusion) to the lowest socially-acceptable common denominator. To paraphrase a great film, there’s that fear-talk we talked about.

Und zo, as I said before, I feel a thrill at finally getting my hands around the problem. Coming to grips, it seems imminently solvable: I just have to man-up and master the fractal enigma that is my own authentic romantic persona, and that sounds like an exciting endeavor. It feels damn liberating.

Maybe it’s just my recent-haircut attitude talking — less tangles, more angles — but it feels like I’m entering the prime of my life. I’m fit, smart, witty, and I do pretty amazing things with myself, even if they do keep me at the office until a lot later than I’d like sometimes.

Hopefully this sense will grow. There’s a lot of positive momentum right now.

You know, Showtime is giving HBO a run for its money in the high-production-value TV serial department. Since I heard Duchovny won some award, and I’d already been impressed with the quality of Dexter and Weeds, I figured I’d see what Californicaion had to offer. I find that I like it.

Firstly, I do enjoy David Duchovny. As a teenage fan of The X-Files, I always thought it was kind of a bummer that his and Gillian Anderson’s careers never took off. Seemed like a lot of talent there in their brainy personai. Duchovny seems quite at home in the role of a self-destructive down and out (though still living quite well) New York City author moved to Hollywood. It’s not easy to pull off the intricate mix of sour self-loathing and towering hubris, peppered through with the occasional flashes of authentic charismatic genius that the character requires to not read as a total douchebag. Indeed the actor may be cribbing from his own life more than a little, but regardless it’s highly watchable.

Secondly, Natascha McElhone is captivating as the leading lady, which is essential for the whole formula to work. If we don’t love her, the whole thing falls apart. Thankfully, we do. Or at least I do, and so I buy the essential premise hook line and sinker. The narrative revolves around this on/off relationship, and it’s through this that we see the characters’ redeeming aspects as well as their deepest flaws. It’s from this love story that the show draws its power. There’s an awful lot of fucking, yes, but because at the center of it all is a heartbreakingly jilted romance, the whole achieves a level of emotional sincerity that saves it from the gratuitous precipice on which it sometimes teeters.

The result feels like a dirtier, brainier, more grown-up take on Entourage; SAT vocabulary words, french-cinema sex-farce, and a strong romantic through-line, but also an exploration of the American culture industry and the people caught up in its workings. Entertaining stuff.

Personal Reflections
I’m perhaps biased here, because I feel the sexual ethos of the program dovetails with my own sensibilities quite well, which isn’t something I frequently find. My particular blend of feministic chauvinism / power-tripping cunnilingus is pretty far outside the strike zone of mainstream sex-as-marketing, so seeing it mirrored back in a cultural product gets me thinking — which is all I really ever do these days anyway — but maybe, just maybe, it gets me thinking in a way that might lead to doing… something. At some point.

Sigh. It feels as though I’m retired, sexually. Like I hung up my spurs. I’ve certainly quit trying, and much as I flatter myself with the notion of being an eligible bachelor and all, fortune favors the bold and if you don’t try, well, you can’t really expect much. It’s who dares wins, and I’ve not felt daring in quite some time.

An example. Just this past weekend I rolled out on a sly invite to a wedding after-party. Aside from being not as drunk as everyone else, it was as ideal an environment as Humboldt has to offer for meeting women. There were even some pretty ones there, and people I didn’t even already know. Heady dready rasta mamas and cute be-booted cowgirls abounded. I even had my inviter offer to introduce me to whoever I wanted. But of course I didn’t make anything of it.

And so I wonder, why is this? Some part of it must be fear, and some part of it is certainly a lack of energy/focus, and some just plain old being rusty and out of practice, but these answers seem pathetically vague, especially since I’d actually like to see a change.

I’m reminded of one of my sister’s great writerly maxims, a gripping command for the aspiring creative soul: own your shit.

Confronted with that kind of mandate, I have a few responses.

• Josh Koenig has some issues with self-esteem, in particular with his potential value as a partner, even in the most limited of contexts. Without an internal sense of self-worth, it’s hard to get very attracted or to be very attractive to anyone else.
• Josh Koenig is also, at some level, sexually repressed. As are most of us, but it’s certainly not helping the cause here.

• Josh Koenig worries about the intimacy and vulnerability that truly excellent sexual chemistry facilitates, worries about hurting and being hurt.

That all reads like fear, actually. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Huh. The more you know. Josh Koenig needs to get back in the game.

Well, I’m not sure when or how this will all change, though I’m sure it will eventually. For my own sake I hope things limber-up soon, but it’s a challenge alright. Until I discover, embrace and embody my sexuality as an adult — as opposed to playing the erotically-inspired Peter Pan act that did so well in my early 20s — there won’t be much joy in mudville. On the other hand it sounds like a fun thing to experiment with, the discovery of a new sexual persona. The notion of experimentation itself has a kind of naughty resonance, the freedom to make mistakes, and it seems to me that unburdening myself of some super-egotistical baggage is probably a good thing here.

But it’s late and I’m still a bit under the weather. Given that I’ve thoroughly disgusted my mother and probably 33% of my other readers, and yet honestly feel no guilt, I believe I’ll call it a night and retire in meta-victory.

So the other day I’m down in the little cafe in the basement of the converted warehouse complex where our office is in SF, and I end up doing my cream and sugar right next to this tallish girl who works on the same floor as us. I’ve seen her around a few times. Once we were alone in the elevator for a floor and a half and her nipples got hard. We smile at one another in the hallway, but have never spoken. I don’t know her name.

Getting cream and sugar nothing of consequence transpires, but it’s an interesting moment. For me, at least. Charged.

I’ve come to trust, at this late date, that when I feel like something is going on in that way, it’s quite likely that the other person in question feels the same. Just tonight having a little nerd-bike schmooze at Zeitgeist this was incontrovertibly proven — she doesn’t say hi kind of sheepishly on her way out the door unless she really was looking back while you were having that loud conversation. Drupal set message: trust your first impression.

Aaaaaway, the impetus to write is that the whole concept/phenomena of lust is one that’s been under wraps for some time. Sublimated and maybe a bit suppressed. It’s been a much-lamented state of affairs, as everyone knows. Feels like a change is gonna come, and this is good, but it’s also a trip, re-realizing how sex can throw you for a loop, scramble yr brain.

Lust. There’s no real containing this feeling, which is probably why it’s conventionally considered sinful. It’s like fire — contagious, consumptive, hot, hungry, often destructive, and absolutely uncontrollable once initiated. One can steer clear of the whole situation for a time, but inevitably it feels like a huge part of the human condition is being missed. Zombie life. This is often how it is with powerful deep dark parts of the psyche not traditionally endorsed by society: the nether-world slides by beneath the realm of workaday consciousness, alluring and clandestine. You can live clean in black and white, or risk the depths and bathe in technicolor.

For me the real embodiment of this feeling is in many ways tangential to sex, a jumping off point for broader hunger, for the infinite potential of human coupling, for larger ambitions that are symbolically captured in romantic pursuits. Or maybe that’s too small an idea of sex. Put it this way: fucking is subset of that which makes me lusty. Credit the waning influence of adolescent hormones or my crazy schedule, but really I see a larger dance, one with many anticipations, satisfactions, stimuli, tension and release.

But even considering this, allowing it into my mind, is a new-new thing. Heretofore it’s simply been off the table. That seems to be shifting, which I like. But is also unpredictable, and therefore kindof scary.

Scary in a good way? Maybe. Being open the the universe is always good, and this is really really a part of who I am… I think time will tell.

In keeping with my recent wedding-borne inquiry into default notions of romantic future, the arc of the story, and also owing to the fact that I finished my most recent book conquest — the inestimable Mountains Beyond Mountains (we’re helping out PIH w/their drupals at chapter3) — I’ve been considering the possibilities.

Fact: to the best of my knowledge all but a recent few of my significant romantic interests (the “old flame” category) are now married, engaged to be married, or have been married. Some of them even have children. This would seem to suggest that the kinds of girls I’ve been into over the years are the marrying kind. Also it would seem to suggest that my future more likely than not lies in undiscovered country.

Counter-Fact: I haven’t been in any relationships lasting a year or more, and have never lived with a lover. Also, to put it diplomatically, I don’t have a strong track record of fidelity.

Fact: I really really like kids. I’ve always loved children, was a babysitter as a young man, and I’ve gotten into arguments with people who suggest that it’s morally questionable to bring new ones into the world (as opposed to say adopting). I seem to have a pretty strong desire to pass on my DNA.

Counter-Fact: the particular circumstances of my life (massive work, lack of steady location, etc) are not conducive to settling down. I’ve also shown a particular affinity for rambling, as well as a resistance to compromising personal goals or priorities for the sake of others.

This is how I tend to think, but really this kind of score-carding is bullshit, a truth I’m glad to realize. What I’m interested is not an evaluation of my worth or readiness as a comrade in nesting, but rather some kind of concept of my purpose and aim in a life of love. Looking back, I’ve variously taken on the gestalt of hopeless romantic or shameless hedonist, both with some success and some failure. Neither of these seem particularly apropos now. Some new fantasy of love awaits.

I recently invented the idea of “power dating” for myself, partly because I liked the phrase linguistically, and partly because it seemed like a decently dirty criterion to evaluate potential opportunities. However, what I find really is that I need some kind of objective, goal, or at least understanding of method. Putting aside things I want theoretically in some far-off future, what am I looking for in the precious present? That’s a good fucking question.

For now, I’m still grappling with the unknown, but actually considering this is leading me to permit a whole universe of potentialities, all of which embrace the “facts” but none of which fit into some Leave It To Beaver narrative. More than that, getting out from under the weight of figuring this all out — seeing it as a fascinating question of life rather than a problem to be resolved, hopefully in the next five to six years — is liberating.

So, Kellymundo has a subscription to Vanity Fair, which I happened to pick up (RFK cover story) in the bathroom today. This happens to be the issue with the crazy Miley Cyrus Photos!!!!! ZOMG BARE 15-YEAR OLD SPINE!!!!

Sometimes I’m ashamed of America. Sometimes it’s because we start pointless wars of choice that kill thousands and leave millions homeless and destitute. Sometimes it’s because we’re so collectively sexually confused, repressed, frustrated, nervous, and (updated inre Joe’s point in comments) desperately depraved, we can’t fucking tolerate the challenge of, you know, Art.

Annie Liebowitz is the real thing, and this photo is completely respectable.

America, you’re crazy baby but I love you.

Bonus Liebowitz: Sting portrait, and homo Arnold.

God we’re stupid sometimes.