pretty dumb things

spencer t. jones, the dog of my life

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago to honor my loss of my first dog, the legendary Spencer. I've reposted it here because try as I might, I don't think I could write anything more beautiful and right.

  Three years ago on 3 July 2003, I euthanized my dog, the Legendary Spencer. I quail a bit at the word "euthanize"; I find my chest contracts at it. It's an ugly word. To my mind, though, the euphemisms are worse: put down like an insult or put to sleep like a child, as if there is a time when he, my furry eternal toddler, will rise again.

Three years ago Spencer and I took our last walk. I leashed him, and he looked at me with dying and hopeful eyes because he loved me and because he loved walks. He unquestioningly went with me; he stepped gingerly down the stairs of my apartment for the last time. For the last time, I watched him pee, him no longer able to lift his leg. For the last time, I saw him pause outside Bang! Bang! because one upon a time the store had been another store, a store that unfailingly had provided Spencer with biscuits, and he never, not even in his slightly addled dotage, forgot a place that gave him biscuits.

For the last time I took him for a walk and for the last time he trusted me.

 He was, unquestionably, ready to die. His kidneys were failing, and his lung cancer had progressed to a point where he hacked and coughed often and with a painful rawness; just breathing, for him, was difficult. He had ceased to eat, even yummy treats like liverwurst. I had, a few weeks earlier, had him shaved for the summer, something I had never done before. I felt he was old and uncomfortable in the heat, so I had brought him, also for the last time, to the groomer's, which he hated.

I bid adieu to his beautiful caramel sundae hair, the first bits of him I said good-bye to; the rest would come later.

And so three years ago for the last time, I brought him to his vet's, where she put us in a quiet room and then injected him with some kind of preliminary downer, to get him to sleep before she gave him his lethal dose of whatever.

He wouldn't sleep there on the vet's floor. He couldn't. His body, dehydrated from his failing kidneys, and his mind, nervous from being at the vet's, wouldn't succumb to the soporific drugs. His eyes remained open and he remained restive. Finally, unable to wait any more, the vet just came in, and kindly and gently injected him with a series of shots. He died in my lap.

I held him and cried, and then I clipped tufts of his ear hair, which I have saved in a box. I also took ink prints of his left front paw on rice paper. (I would, about a week later, walk back to the vet's to pick up a white bakery box that read " Spencer, the loving pet of chelsea g. summers." It still contains his ashes, but now box and ashes reside in a creamy white marble mausoleum, lovingly made by a friend.)

I walked home from the vet's alone. Alone I spent that night and the next day, 4 July. The following day, I took the prints I had made of Spencer's paw after his death to a tattoo artist, and I had him tattoo me with Spencer's paw, his name and his dates on my right deltoid. It's not a very good tattoo—it wasn't my usual artist, and I knew I'd regret its ham-handed scarring depth—but I will never remove it.

I have lost friends, I have lost family members. I have never in my life felt the keening grief I felt over losing my dog. I sobbed with animal loss—deep, heaving, inarticulate moans of loss. I can't even write this today without tears. And I think that this grief is due to the fact that people have disappointed me. People have created conflict. People have given me qualified affection.

My dog never did. Sure, he made me angry. Once he ate the corner of my then-roommate Becky Sue's mattress. It was not a good day for either of us. But Spencer was always unequivocally happy to see me. His love for me was pure, and steady, and unqualified.

I was his God, he was my dog.

I remember in those first few weeks of insane grief, in those days when all I wanted, all I really wanted was to be with him, how I felt his fear of being removed from me, how I worried that no one would take care of him wherever he was, and how I had a dream. In my dream, he and I were out on a beautiful summer day, in a park that wasn't a park, and somehow we got separated.

I saw him across a wide expanse of very green grass and I called him, but he didn't come. He stood there, his long blonde and white hair rippling in the breeze as I called and called, and then he walked, his big Aussie butt twitching, away from me. In my dream, I remembered that he was deaf, that he couldn't hear me, but then I woke and I realized that he had left because he was dead. He was gone, and I could never call him back.

I don't have a religious background. I don't have a clear idea of an afterlife, of a heaven or a hell or even a reincarnation. However, in my hopes, if I live a good life, if I'm moral and take responsibility for my mistakes, if I treat my neighbor as myself, and apologize when I do not, then I shall at my life's end be reunited with Spencer.

In a perfect world, dogs like him would never die. In a perfect world, I would never have known this loss. But in a less perfect world, I console myself, I would never have known his love.

Spencer T. Jones 11/27/90-7/3/03

fucking with the Internet

I've a new post on Filthy Gorgeous Things as part of their June issue, Modern Love. It's the tale of my time spent in the throes of SlutFest 2004, snippets of which have made cameo appearances here on my pretty dumb things. You know how it goes. You spend a summer having indiscriminate sex and one day you find yourself squatting on the very clean bathroom floor of some former tennis pro, fingers spelunking your vaginal depths, chasing an elusive and escapist condom. And you think to yourself, Just what the hell am I doing here?

We've all had that moment. And even if we haven't, we can enjoy mine.

Here's the first paragraph of my piece:

Five years ago, I spent my summer in the throes of something I've come to call SlutFest 2004. For that brief, tawdry and occasionally halcyon period, I gave myself a virtual blank check to indulge unto surfeit any and all of my sexual appetites. I fucked women and men, sometimes together and sometimes separately. I had sex anonymously, and I had sex with names. I had twosomes and I had threesomes (sadly, I didn't have moresomes; I'm not certain why I didn't push that particular erotic envelope). I had phone sex, kinky sex, vanilla sex, banal sex, anal sex and hotel room sex. I had pity sex. I had passionate, even emo, sex. I had a lot of sex that summer, and all the sex I had, every last sweat-stained thrust, spent condom, and ululating orgasm was brought to me courtesy of the World Wide Web.

Now go here and read the rest. Then return here and tell me what you think, because I so want to know.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

is there a google bomber in the house?

Because I'd really, really like one. I will be your friend for life and pay cold, hard American cash. Email me if you are, or if you know, the stealthy motherfucker for the job.

meditations on a cat and his nasty ass

Living in Vermont, my family seemed to go through cats like we went through tubs of mink oil, which is to say quickly and without much attachment. My first pet was a cat named Brillig; I’m too young to remember him because when my mom fled her abusive husband on that May day almost exactly 46 years ago she also abandoned Brillig. The next pet was also a cat whose name has gone the way of all cat-flesh, as did the cat. The next one was named Sammy Davis Jr., as were the next three or four, who were named Sammy Davis Jr II, III, and IV. One was killed by Parvo, another by a car, yet another by something unknown, and the last died of old age.

I have owned seven cats myself. The first, named Ms, a testament to my very early feminism, lived with my family after I went to college, and she lived long enough to grow swaybacked and bald. She also grew demented, thus leading my sister to buy a refrigerator magnet that read, “A cat by any other name is a horrid little fleabag that shits behind the couch,” a sentiment that rarely fails to make me giggle. 

After I left Ms to my family, I got, successively, Grant, Pig and Jasmine, all of whom drifted away, as cats are wont to do. I once saw Pig and Jasmine after they abandoned me; they both gave me the feline stink eye, turned their tails at me, and flashed their anuses as one. I’m pretty sure their body language meant precisely what it seemed to say. When I lived with Eff, we adopted Sam Shepard, the Cowboy Kitty. I moved to Gotham to be with Eff, and Sam accompanied me. He hated it, the indoor kept-kitty lifestyle, and Sam blew up until he looked like Walter Matthau in a cat-suit. I brought him back to Vermont to live out his days with my parents in suburban splendor. He died a few years ago; he was old and still glorious.

Living with and without cats, I discovered something I never thought possible: I am a dog person. In high school and college, when the choice between cats and dogs defines you as much as whether you wear Sweet Honesty or Charlie, drink Coke or Pepsi, or listen to Devo or Motörhead, my choice was firmly feline. I collected cat poems (Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,/are changeable, marry too many wives,/ desert their children, chill all dinner tables/ with tales of their nine lives./ Well, they are lucky. Let them be/nine-lived and contradictory) and made a chapbook. I had the B. Kliban books, the B. Kliban mugs and the B. Kliban posters. I held a staunchly pro-cat agenda. I was all about the cat.

Growing up, I’d had dogs, two of them, both St. Bernards and both hairy, drooling, stinky and much beloved. But in wanting to give myself the insouciant, tail-flipping independence of the cat, I renounced dogs and all their shaggy, needy fidelity. I embraced the cat within, which is to say that I often treated people poorly, was conscious only of my needs, and held no compunction about gacking on anyone’s floor and leaving it to them to clean up.

I’m not exactly sure what changed—maybe it was living in an alienating city for a year in a small apartment with a man I no longer loved.  But at 28 I made the conversion to Dog Person. As with most converts, I became a zealot. I was all-dogs-all-the-time, even working as a dog walker for a year and a half. During that time, I got the Legendary Spencer, and while the canine fervency has cooled, I would describe myself doggy. I love dogs, can’t live without them, want a man who is a dog; pro-dog, that’s me.

And yet I have a cat. His name is blott. He’s black, and he’s evil, which is to say that he isn’t, but being bound by his genetics, as we all are, he can’t help but be evil. Cats haven’t much of an innate desire toward altruism, and no matter how many heart-warming reports of cats dragging babies out of fires I read, I’m not going to alter my views on the intrinsic, and not unpleasurable, evilness of cats.

Cats can see things we don’t. I’m convinced my cat, who routinely sits in corners and stares at the wall with great intent, communes with Other Beings. Blott is odd, and black, and dark, but as cats go, blott’s pretty good. He is friendly and he doesn’t bite much. He is also, finally, old. He’s seventeen, maybe sixteen, and he’s lived with me in this apartment almost as long as I have. He has seen Spencer live and die, and he’s seen another cat, Smudge, a cat who was notable for his stickiness and stupidity and torpor, come and go. He’s seen many boyfriends and born witness to much pain and bad behavior. He doesn’t care. Blott’s indifference is the stuff of legend.

Blott was spry and gorgeous and now he’s old and evil and, I fear, a wee bit senile. Of late, it’s felt like I live in Alistair Crowley’s Shady Pines, a geriatric home for aging Satanists. Daily there is poo and there is goo. This morning I woke at about 6:00 to the scent of doody and a carefully deposited tiny turd under my pillow. I had been visited by the Shit Fairy or, more likely, my cat’s dexterous ass had defied inertia to plop that pinky-nail sized poop on my bed. Later, when I rose, I found a seven-foot long trail of cat gack trailing a slimy path through the kitchen into the bathroom; this line was punctuated by a hairball the size of a gerbil.

My cat is old, 84 human years, if websites can be believed. He has grown extra intensively cantankerous and privileged, which in a cat is saying something. He cries like a banshee in the night, and I answer with food. It’s clear that his death is nigh, and sometimes I feel like it’s not nearly fucking nigh enough. Night after night blott wakes me with caterwauling and bad smells, and I imagine my hands closing around his ancient little neck and snapping it like a sere twig.

I won’t, of course. That would be “wrong,” and “immoral,” and “illegal,” but to not admit my urge would be to refuse the whole story and to renege both my feelings for this cat and my own humanity. Aged dogs look wise and gentle; they look at you with love and the patience of eons. Cats just look more calcified in their spite. Their entitlement grows a stony carapace around them, and we—or at least I—bend to the old cat’s will. I kowtow and placate and scratch behind the ears and beneath the chin. I pick up the shit where I find it, and I’m finding it everywhere. I mop up the goo, and I rub the snot from the cat’s nose. I buy the canned food, and I open the stinky tins at ungodly hours. I do it all because I feel an unlikely, reluctant love, and because I know that when that day comes, and I find blott hard and still and quiet and dead, I will be sad.

I will miss him, that evil little fuck.

Tristan Taormino and my big mouth

Today I received an email from sex educator, writer, feminist porn director, and all-around nicest bad-ass sex goddess known to woman and to man, Tristan Taormino, asking for permission to quote something I wrote in her upcoming informational DVD called The Expert Guide to Advanced Fellatio. Of course, I gave her permission because I'm altruistic that way, and if I can help just one more woman or man to overcome the gag reflex given by the gods in their limited foresight, then I have done a small spot of good for this wet, blue planet.

Tristan, being terribly generous and really just the nicest--I mean, I can't stress this point enough, but this is one seriously nice person; Tristan is so nice she actually makes a misanthrope like me reconsider her permanently dour stance towards humanity--chose to Twitter her request and link my blog and suchlike, thereby bringing an influx of folks to my Twitter page and to this blog. Given the new audience, I thought it might be nice of me (see how inspiring this woman is? It's phenomenal) if I linked again the post that Tristan is quoting from, as well as an additional blow-job how-to.

Tristan chose this exact passage to quote:

Deep throat exercise: Take a moment and think about your mouth and throat. Now pull the base of your tongue at the back of your throat down, as you would if you were about to yawn. Think about making a big, round cave at the back of your throat as you kind of retract the base of your tongue.

Think about how it feels as your tongue begins to move, how you feel your throat open up, until you can almost feel pressure in your ears. Do it over and over again.

It comes from a post called "deep-throat and deep-throating: a primer," and you can find it entire here. If you enjoy that post so much you need more, more, more, please read this other post called "bobbing for semen." It gives tips that aren't quite so double black diamond as deep-throating, but I hope it's helpful nonetheless.

On a side note, this deep-throating primer is my most popular post. It's the one that readers always thank me for. It's also my most-linked post. It brought me to the notice of the legendary Susie Bright and she interviewed me about the post (listen to the interview here), and the incredibly intimidating, intelligent and porcelain-skinned Violet Blue™ linked it on her Suck page. Now Tristan has given it a big thumbs up. Apparently, the night I wrote this primer, I did something right. Which gives even a curmudgeon like me the good down-low warming.

(Can't stand going days without my pretty dumb thoughts? Join me on Twitter and enjoy a hot-and-cold-running blathering.)

James Joyce, a man who liked rumps

I've a new piece on Filthy Gorgeous Things about James Joyce. It's called "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pervert," which is a title that gives a fairly comprehensive idea of what the piece is about. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Stephen Joyce, the grandson of literary giant James Joyce, doesn't want you to know about the letters discussed herein. Stephen Joyce has refused copyright permission, sued Sotheby's auction house, and destroyed documents in order to keep people like you--and me--from reading his grandfather's correspondence and discovering this: that James Joyce, in addition to being one of the greatest writers in English, was a pervert.

I use "pervert" here with affection, not condemnation. Pretty much any person who is a pervert is fine by me. (N.B. I do mean to say consensual and safe perverts. As long as the executors of sexual preclusions toe the lines of both the safe and the consensual, I believe perverts everywhere should be free to let their freak flags fly.) And Joyce, the author behind such works of devastating brilliance and beauty as Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegan's Wake and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was pretty much a dyed in the wool--or, rather, skid-marked on cotton--pervert.

Should you want to read the rest--and how could you not?--go here and do so. Then leave me comments below because, sadly, F/G/T doesn't give you that option.

bodies in time and space

This August, I’ll have lived in Gotham twenty years. In those twenty years, I’ve lived in eleven apartments, though I’ve spent fifteen in the one I’m typing in right now. I moved around a lot my first five years, which is pretty typical for new New Yorkers, actually. In those eleven apartments, I’ve lived with four men, with collective whom I shared around eight years, to make a smeary approximation. Add to those eight the five years or so I’ve spent with assorted other dudes (including the three-ish years I spent with Donny) and for a total of thirteen years, give or take, the cavalcade of my dating life has been traipsing through Gotham.

There are many bodies that hang like asteroids in my one-score chunk of Gotham time and space. There are bodies who throb and glow like pulsars, and others who lie dead and dormant like white stars. There are none whom I’d call black holes, thankfully. But they’re all there, somewhere. Spend enough time in a city, date enough people, and the landscape becomes dotted with relationship remembrances, a ghostly breadcrumb trail that pulses with meanings invisible to any other naked eye.

Taking a cold empiric if necessarily hazy accounting, I’ve spent only seven years on my onesy, and yet it feels like I’ve spent ever so much more time alone than partnered. I am, of course, single now and feeling fine about it. I suffer an almost rosily nostalgic glow when I see couples performing couplehood, which couples do as much to express affection between themselves as to express their bond to the world. Ah, I think, I recall holding hands. Yes, I know of having a wisp of hair brushed from my forehead. I can recollect that specific canting of torsos, the one that implies shared intimacy, emotions and bodily fluids.

I remain able to summon a vague cloud of dating interest, a romantic nebula. It’s a pretty sight when I let my mind drift into that telescopic view. I see the sparkles and the lightning flashes and that ethereal glow intrinsic to the happy clashing of two separate people who spontaneously unite into one hot element. I can visualize that moment and feel it resonate with that pleasurable bassy thrum that bounces between my solar plexus and my svadisthana, to drift a little old-agey prose-wise. I can see it, but I can’t touch it, and I’m not sure I want to.

Which is all to say that at some point in the past few years a seismic change took place. Something major shifted, almost without my notice, and the landscape of my interior life changed, possibly irrevocably. I used to feel a mad desperation at being alone. I felt oppressed by singularity, disfigured by it, strange and crazed and wild at my single experience. I dated in a frenetic rush. I flagellated myself with my own undesirability when I wasn’t dating. I felt the press and crush of my own romantic failures with gravitational force. I nearly broke myself with my own pressure to date. Without a man, I was nothing. I didn’t cease to exist—that would have been a step up in emotional health actually—rather, I turned antimatter, a singularly horrid and shadowy incarnation of my dated self.

Now that wild compunction is past. I put my eye to the romantic pinhole and see the expansive glory that can be a romantic relationship, but I’m still nonetheless aware of what lies just outside of the rim of my vision. The unavoidable disappointment, the uncomfortable sleeping, the pain and the fear and the meeting of parents and other family, the boredom and the sports watching. The apparitional specter of Xs and the weighty baggage that every human accumulates after adolescence. The bad smells and the anger and the stuff that drifts gently away like so much space detritus.

 I hope some day that I’ll be able to put these two views together—the rosy macro and the lurid micro—and finally put the “real” in “relationship.” Neither one view nor the other is valid, though neither are they false. And yet, even a contented spinster such as myself can see the value in the coupled state. Plus, I would really rather enjoy someday having sex. Bodies in space are nice, but bodies in bed are nicer.

Or, faint as the morning star, so I seem to recall.

picture this, my telephone number

I rarely serve up pictorial evidence here on my pretty dumb things, but I've lately embraced the photo booth feature on my iMac. Pictures, for all their two-dimensional limitations, do provide an accurate, if peccable, documentation. I've been documenting change, in short, and I'm going to show it to you, courtesy of my iMac and some help from my friends.

For any number of reasons, I've been slowly emerging from the chrysalis of doom that held me in its livid embrace for so many months and, for any number of reasons, that emergence has caused me to changey appearance. Part of my choice to relinquish the cookies of pain--which I've written about previously--and to implement the diet of vigor sprung from internal forces: the feeling that I was just over and done with managing my emo self by eating. But the other part of my choice came from purely external and vain reasons.

Two months ago, I decided to put into action my friend Karl Elvis's kind offer to buy me a tattoo. I saw my tattoo artist, the very fabulous Stephanie Tamez, at her studio in Brooklyn, and staring at my toad-white upper arm in the clinical fluorescent light of the studio, I was appalled. I got my tattoo appointment, did some quick calculations and cemented my desire to get into shape. If I was going to sport a new tattoo, I wanted that arm to look good enough to eat.

I wanted Stephanie to transform my memorial Spencer tattoo that I already had from its thug life incarnation into something pretty (see original at left; click to embiggen; my computer flips photos; the text isn't mirror image in real life). I'd had an idea that Stephanie, in her infinite dermal wisdom, quickly convinced me was stupid beyond the telling of it. Mercurial and dark, Stephanie rummaged through some of her many drawers and pulled out a tattered and battered book of Victorian clip art. Rapidly, she thumbed through the book, pausing every once in a while to jab a forefinger at one illustration or another. I told her that I absolutely deferred to her good judgment, and after Stephanie took a picture, drew a diagram, filled in a form, and looked at me decisively, I got an appointment.

Stephanie chose for me a design based on Victorian graphic filigree, and yesterday's tattoo session was long-ass, highly painful, and incredibly successful (again, picture at left, the clicking and embiggening). Naturally, because my tattooist's opinion of me is paramount, I sat still as a Maori and stoically let Stephanie have her painful inky way with me. We chatted about books and sex work and her girlfriend and my lack of boyfriend and Texas and why it's difficult to go home again, and three hours later I had new art.

It's not quite finished yet. Stephanie wants to add another curlicue or two and shade the bellies of the cues with gray. "It'll give it depth," she said. I'm not 

entirely sure what that means, but given how well she does what she does, I'm tractable as a lamb. The next appointment is Friday 15 May.

I've another physical transformation in the works. On Thursday, I have an appointment with Randall, my Texan hairstylist, for a haircut. I've not had my hair cut in a year and a half, pretty much to the date (see eighteen months for significance here). I grow hair like Julia Roberts grows teeth. My hair is an unstoppable force. It grows recklessly, willfully and with an assertively healthy abandon. Currently, my hairstyle is out of Lord of the Rings (see left, and what the hell, right). It reaches my waist. And while even I must acknowledge it's pretty, I nonetheless feel like it's also sort of creepy in its Crystal Gayle excess. It's not going to be turning my green eyes blue, but it's not making me happy. Plus, it's a heavy, itchy, cumbersome animal, and I just want to hack it off with an Exacto.

The haircut I'm considering is that of Starbuck in Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Which basically means that I'll be taking my hair into hyperdrive and crossing time and space, as well as transforming it from Eowyn exorbitance to Kara efficiency. Hair has always held a kind of Victorian significance for me. I understand with visceral inarticulacy why in Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" the eponymous Lover chooses to strangle Porphyria with her own hair: her hair is inextricable from her eroticism and to use it to kill her is to punish her for her promiscuity. I fear cutting my hair will divest me of my mojo, but I'm so very tired of this beast decorating my scalp that I'm ready to risk it.

I may still change my mind.

Finally, my friend 1st Republic, 14th Star has made good on his promise to photograph my much beloved graveyard, the one I felt such nostalgia about after reading Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book. Looking at the photos of this halcyon/eldritch space, I get that strange emotional palimpsest of recognizing the old while seeing the new. The graves, their decaying gray and wind-worn nubs, remain the same. The pointy fence and the arching sepulchral trees, however, are gone. The hill to the east remains, but while it had been carpeted in spiky evergreens, houses now peek above the sight-line.

It's hard for me to look at these images. A tsunami of remembrance hits against a flood of newness, and I swirl in the vortex. That said, I do love the one with Camel's Hump in the background. This is the view I remember well, and in a strange reverse-Proustian memory, looking at it summons the taste of meadow, earth, strawberries and growing things.

So many changes, so little time, and yet also so much.

(Want daily doses of my thoughts and bon mots? Follow me on Twitter.)

write on, a status report

A realization struck me yesterday: for the past year, for better or worse, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, I supported myself with my writing. One complete year now, I’ve been a writer. I’m a bit stunned, actually.

To be skeletal honest, most of my paid writing isn’t the writing I’d like to be doing. I am not, for example, being paid to be a columnist, a job I’d dearly love. No great media giant like Condé Nast is doling out my happy yearly salary in great dripping gobs. I don’t get much groovy gratis stuff such as hot-and-cold-running tickets to rock shows (like my friend Sasha Frere-Jones) or tickets to plays (like my friend Terry Teachout) or cruises with 90’s bands and trips to Sasquatch seminars (like my friend Eric Spitznagel). I don’t have a book contract. I didn’t get my piece published in the Times, sadly. I don’t even have agents falling over themselves to court me, as I once did. But I do pay my bills by the fruits of my linguistic labors.

Most of what I write falls under the broadly defined rubric of “copy.” The term brings to mind packing excelsior: stuff that’s made to fill other stuff so that yet more stuff doesn’t rattle around and break from stress, entropy, or gravitational force. The copy I write sells things. It seems I’m fairly adept at writing stuff that sells things. I also ghostwrite, and it seems I’m also fairly adept at ghostwriting, that practice that seems more ventriloquist than apparitional, for when you write as a ghost, you’re transmitting someone else’s voice through your body of work. I sometimes write for magazines, though not often and not the ones I want to write for. I had three sexytime stories published in three separate anthologies last year. I’m writing for a sexytime website (which writing I actually do enjoy). But what I want to write for money mostly isn’t what I’m getting paid to write, not yet anyway.

I have hope. I have guidance. I have ideas. I have talent. And—enter the weirdness—I also apparently have diligence, devotion and discipline. It has been four years since I waywardly began my journey into this writing life, and though I’ve not quite stumbled onto my perfect path, I don’t veer off the trail, to run a metaphor into the dark, loamy ground. I doubt myself with soul-keening acuity, but I do so less frequently. This is a good sign. I also feel as if my writing is getting stronger, more structural; it’s losing its wisteria. Don’t get me wrong: I like wisteria; it’s pretty and it smells good. But wisteria in all its purple glory hides its roots that tear up foundations and leave buildings hollow rubble. It needs to be pruned. Prose is the same way.

I may not yet be paid to write what I want, and I may not yet be paid enough with the kind of consistency to keep me thoroughly solvent, but I am getting closer. Most importantly, none of it would be possible without this blog. This blog started me writing consistently. Having it made me write honestly, bravely and dangerously. I am not a person who can write without an audience. If there’s no one reading, I don’t want to write.

Like the generous support that makes the fine programming at PBS possible, my freelancing year was made possible by this blog, and by extension those people who read it. Because not only did my blog kick my writing ass, and not only did it provide me with my much loved and very necessary audience, but it also brought me almost every single opportunity I’ve had to write. With the exception of one magazine gig, the paid projects I’ve received have come to me through people who read my pretty dumb things: the copywriting, the ghostwriting, the Penthouse and other magazine pieces, the public relations copy, the erotic stories, the sexytime website—all of it.

One thing I’ve learned about blogging: you never know who is reading. It’s a risk to choose to write, but it’s deadening to choose not to. I’d rather be alive and reckless than inert and reckful.

All of which is to say thank you. I write as much because of you as because I must. I don’t know most of you, but you’ve made an indelible, positive mark on my life, like a collective big check in the plus column. I’ve only yet realized an imperfect version of my dream, but I’ve found some lurking eldritch confidence that I’m edging closer to what I want. Slowly, slowly, I’m getting there. Thank you for pushing me.

14, 2, 18 and 99 matters of time

I am woman who is decidedly not a mathlete, yet I am obsessed with counting. This post is about numbers, those theoretically pure empiric indicators of time’s passage and all that goes along with the slow counting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on to inaccurate infinity. Pythagoras and his mystical manipulations might have been misguided in believing that numbers hold an intrinsic magic, but there’s no denying that they carry unassailable power.

On the surface, they’re just figures. 14 years. 2 years. 18 months. 99 days. But as with make-up, linoleum and Potemkin Villages, a pretty façade can hide a Midas load of loss. This final week in April marks a series of anniversaries. Fourteen years since my ex-boyfriend Will placed a significantly dog-eared copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta on the floor, entered his closet, put a needle in his arm, and shot himself up with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Two years since my long-lost biological father sent me that digital bolt from the blue and claimed his stake in my life. Eighteen months since my ex-almost-fiancé Donny and I split. And 99 days since we last spoke.

my new body of smut, now conveniently located othewhere

It began as just a default setting, but as with so many decisions that wear the cloak of circumstance, it has become a clear and conscious choice. I’m not writing about sex here on my pretty dumb things. Or, I should clarify, I’m not writing about the sex I’m having, the sex I’m not having, the sex I had, the sex I want to have, or the sex I dream of having. I do reserve the right to write pretty dumb things about sex as a generalized or ambient concept, a sex divorced from my specific genitals at a specific moment in a specific time with a specific human, machine, or implement. I further reserve the right to write about my sexual history in less KA-BOOM! POW! BLAMO! graphic terms. I reserve the right to break my own rules, in short. I am a despot in the land of my narrative.

This not-choice to not-write about sex seems to have started when I stopped having sex, but in truth, it began well before I started living the lover-free life. It started, really, when I began to realize that I loved my ex-almost-fiance Donny deeply. To trot out the intricacies of our intimacies, however displayed in the laciest of poetic language, felt at odds with my love for him. It began to take on a patina of betrayal, and to pour out to a faceless public the liquid details felt like I was making a product out of precious experience. I stopped enjoying the writing, in short, and it began to feel like a burden rather than a gift.

Then Donny and I broke up and I stopped having sex. I slumped into doldrums; the doldrums grew into a vast depression; and I drowned in that murky black for altogether too many months. I didn’t fucking feel like living, much less did I feel like fucking. Forget fucking writing anything other than what I was paid to write, which was not about fucking.

The lake receded and I’m now high and dry and relatively chipper for an ambient misanthrope raised by a long line of dour people. I have vague and happy notions of perhaps dating in the not-too-distant future, and I have optimism that this potential dating might lead to actual physical friction with another willing, perhaps enthusiastic, partner. But I won’t write about said friction because, as I’ve explored previously, I don’t want to jeopardize a fledgling relationship with my occasional will to overshare the very moist, throbbing and tumescent portions of my life.

Plus, I don’t want to be only a sex writer for the rest of my life. So there’s that. I have too much to say to limit it to things most quintessentially expressed in guttural phonemes.

And yet, I acknowledge that I do like writing about sex. I think it’s important cultural work. I think there’s a power in doing it well, and I have the hubris to believe I do do it well. I just don’t want to do it on my blog. Therefore, you will be able to find all of my new sex writing at the gloriously shiny, newly opened, terrifically sleek and gleefully—if thoughtfully—perverse Filthy Gorgeous Things. In fact, you can go here to read my first piece for the site. It begins with Hegel and ends with Oscar Wilde, and because I’m both thinky and kinky in equal measures, it meanders through strip clubs and deep-throating. I’d love to know what you think here because there are no comments there.

I’m keeping my smut archives here on my pretty dumb things because to jettison them would be untrue to the history of this blog, but the great priapic share of my new sex writing will be now found on FGT. I’m already working on two new pieces on sex and techs. They’ll be really very, if not like totally fetch.

I do hope you enjoy the full body of FGT. It’s quite beautiful and strange and erotic. Plus, it’s wicked smart, and anyone who doesn’t get the intrinsic sexy value of the grey matter is no friend with benefits of mine. I’ll let you know when I post new material, or you can check out my Twitter feed here.

the weight and the loss

Once more, I have cheekbones. They’ve returned or, to be more factually accurate, they haven’t. They’ve always been there like twin hillocks hidden under the snowy cover of my adipose tissue. The spring has sprung; the snows have melted, and the cheekbones have become visible again.

Which is all a purple way of saying that I have lost weight. I have lost weight and I have done it on purpose. For the past six, almost seven, weeks, I’ve been dieting, a word I hate with passionate abandon. I have also been working out, a term I loathe for its blind punnery. We work out issues, we work out with weights, we undoubtedly work out issues whilst we work out with weights, or on the treadmill, while boxing, when we do yoga, or any number of other dumbly physical activities. But diet I have been and working out too, in several senses of the term.

one lone gunperson aiming from language's grassy knoll

In an interview last March, German magazine De Spiegel queried Secretary Homeland Security Janet Napolitano about her choice to replace the term “terrorist” with “man-caused disasters” when she addressed Congress:

Spiegel: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

This linguistic shift has been termed “Orwellian” by many neoconservatives, while Peggy Noonan archly commented, “Ah. Well this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.” Certainly, whether an adherent of Fox News or a devotee of MSNBC, you might feel the new term seems at the very least to be engaged in a warm and fuzzy obfuscation. We ought not to be fearful of terrorists, Napolitano’s suggests; rather, we should be afraid of men and the disasters they can cause. This linguistic re-habbing by Napolitano—and, by extension, the current administration—longs to place the responsibility on individual people who take destructive actions and to equate their destruction with the seemingly senseless abandon of a natural disaster, a tsunami, a hurricane or an earthquake.

The linguistic prestidigitation that turns “terrorism” into “man-caused disasters” does seem to deflect the looming Code Orange fear. We don’t live in perpetual terror of natural disasters. We watch the weather, we hope for the best, and when the worst is coming, we do our best to plan accordingly (or not, in the case of Hurricane Katrina). In effect, the administration seems to be saying, it’s time to take the same approach in the face of terrorism. It may work, it may not, but what interests me is less the softening, humanizing touch of Napolitano’s phrase and more the thorny issue of the word “man.” Because in this shiny, new phrase, it’s a word that is problematic, political, and just plain wrong.

parts and wholes, frankensex and murk

If, like kids today, I’d gotten my nascent ideas about sex from heat-n-serve, hot-n-cold-streaming Hi-Res porn, my ideas would have been a lot more complete. Which is to say they would have been just as incomplete, but in totally different ways. But in the 1970s, porn was not as easy to come by as it is today, and I had to glean sexual crumbs where I could and then mash them together in my head until they formed some sort of cobbled-together whole.

I sneakingly read my uncles’ nudie mags; I squirreled away pieces of the letters to Penthouse, the better to line my erotic nest. I took sexy scraps and amatory orts from whatever novels or movies would offer them up to me: a scene from Oh, God; a limpid nude scene from a Bertolluci film; the flash of thighs and chests from Dukes of Hazard or Love Boat. I even pilfered the soundscape of my parents’ sex, a recollection that today fills me with thudding horror. When you’re twelve or thirteen, you’ll do whatever you need to do in order to flesh out that mute, yowling need.

I remember being around twelve or thirteen and, having just discovered the secret garden that is masturbation, taking the Frankensteinian erotic monster of my own creation out to play. Often, that monster would take the form of a local boy, this kid I’ll name Lance Irish, because it’s the closes approximation of his name I can come up with.  I remain certain that Lance’s phallic name had as much to do with my picking him as anything else. Lance was a chimera. It was upon his body I projected my inchoate desires.

Lance himself had a kind of annoying greaser patter. He had the affect of an unsuccessful snake oil salesman. Today, I’d grant him the metaphor of selling off-brand Viagra, but Viagra didn’t exist in the mid-1970s, Viagra—like cellphones, personal computers, post-it notes, and Hot Pockets—had yet to be invented. So Lance had the unpleasantly slick manner of a huckster, a mountebank, but he was only fourteen too. He would have been a mini-mountebank. He had black hair and a tender sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of his nose. His lips were wicked red (that’s how we talked then, and there, in mid-70s Vermont), and he had these skinny hips. He had a pervert’s air, and I imagined his body white and whippy, interestingly tufted with that black, black hair, and I even gave myself permission to almost imagine Lance’s lance.

Lying in my bed on dark winter nights, or sunny summer afternoons, anytime, really, I would think of how to get Lance to have sex with me. I’d imagine calling him and being all like, Hi, Lance…so, like, do you want to have sex? Or I’d imagine being somewhere and being all coy and flirtatious, rolling double-entendres like spit balls and lobbing them at him until the idea stuck to his skin. I would imagine us somehow, magically, improbably alone, in the same empty place at the same empty time, with too much time on our hands and too many hormones coursing through our bodies. I imagined nature taking its course, even if I couldn’t quite grasp what nature would do.

Unsurprisingly, that place would sometimes be on the flat moor-like plain cresting the hill behind my house. It might be smack in the middle of the fern patch fed by the crick running down the length of the mini-mountain to the right of the moors. It might sometimes be the high and dry sandy ground of the graveyard; I envisioned Lance leaning casually on the blocky mauve carapace of a grave and somehow being improbably suave, and then I imagined us a tangle of limbs in the strawberry-scented air. Sometimes I even imagined him in my own narrow blue bed.

But while the urge was strong, it was not stronger than sense, and I didn’t follow through with any of my rococo and painfully unlikely scenarios. I mean, obviously. Part of the problem was that while I had the Frankensex shambling about in my head, it was missing bits. I knew how sex worked, and I knew that I seemed to want it, but while I could define the act of copulation in a stunning array of biologically correct terms, and while I had a vague idea that people engaged in a whole bunch of activities between the kissing and the copulation, and while I could even tell you some of the Latinate terms for those activities, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how they worked. And, of course, the other part was that the very concept was absurd. Even at thirteen I knew the value of fantasy.

I’d only kissed my first boy at twelve, and I was stunned to find out that the pink slippage of tongue made it exotically French. The magical genie who could make manifest, even in the privacy of my imagination, those other activities was still locked tight in the bottle. And so I was stuck between the hard place of stampeding libido and the vertiginously swirl of my own incomplete knowledge. The sex need pressed itself upon me with enough weight to conjure Lance Irish naked, tufted and indistinctly assertively male, but I couldn’t make a whole out of the parts, nor could I make anything corporeal out of that murk.

These days, I have to range far and wide in the lecherous fields of my mind to come up with anything as eldritch as those amorphous Lance fantasies. My years of experience have licked the erotic lump into a fully formed baby bear, and that bear has itself grown up and given birth. It’s nostalgic to think of those times when alone in my narrow bed, I gave a long, if borrowed, leash to my sex, and I didn’t know where, out in the darkness, it led.

play out your dead

When I was seven, my mom married my stepfather and we all moved to Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, pop. 700. My mailing address was Chelsea G. Summers, Middle-of-Nowhere, VT O5555. Were you to have sent me a postcard, it would have gone to a post office about the size of my current bedroom. I would have walked the half-mile to the boudoir-sized post office to pick up said postcard, and if you’d sent it to me after the age of nine, I would have done so with a large St. Bernard padding along beside me.

My family lived in a converted two-room schoolhouse. Initially, we only rented the right half, but then the grandmother of my mom’s high school friend sold the house to my parents, and we had the whole drafty, poorly renovated hydra-house, and sometimes rented out the left half. To the exact right of us lived an old German couple in an old American farmhouse. To the left and behind us rolled out a carpet of farmland, a sometime home to a herd of Holsteins, and in the spring, many frogs who sang their guttural songs about eggs and flies and the pain of pollywogs and other chthonic frog songs. Beyond the field was a bilious green house owned by a family named Moody. They shared our party phone line. Mrs. Moody drew on her eyebrows. The Moodys had gun racks made out of deer hooves, the deers’ little hooves pointed eternally up, ironically bearing the method of their own destruction.That house always smelled like the bottom of a grease can.

In front of us was a wide ribbon of field. White in the winter, green in the summer and brown the rest of the year, the field unfurled to a river. On the other side of the river were more hills, a string of houses that at night lit up like Christmas lights, and a big red barn where square dances were held. Women went to there dressed in poufy little skirts held aloft by crinolines ethereal as mounds of egg whites. Men wore string ties. I imagine that on Sunday nights these people watched Hee-Haw and enjoyed it.

To the far right, beyond the German couple’s home, beyond the sliver of woods behind and the evanescent pond before, a pond that sometimes froze in the winter and the local boys would play hockey, and I would skate alone thinking of Dorothy Hamill, beyond all that lay our local graveyard.