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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments

[minstrel hussain boy]

even as my age advances, there are the moments where, out of the blue, things just happen. mostly it happens around the fewer and fewer times i play live for somebody. even then it has become less of a sure thing. still, the zipless, sport fuck, where there are none of the messy entanglements of relationshipland, has both its attraction, and its own carnal therapy.

go. enjoy yourself. try not to think too much. it spoils everything.

[marianne]

I'll wish you luck if you wish me luck.

I'm meeting someone for the first time in just over two weeks, too. All those same insecurities and questions and doubts swirl in my head, along with the excitement and heat.

You, we, just have to trust instinct. I know this is going to be right.

[J.J. Adler]

Y'know, I think returning to a former M.O. and indulging an instinctive need for something reckless (and somewhat dangerous?) is not a bad thing at all. I find it kind of empowering, to make the conscious decision to actuall DO something rather than have it done unto me. I envy the ability to jump on a plane and meet in an unnamed hotel room. So I urge you to dive in, past and all, and give over to what you crave.

And the guy? I think he might be in for a heck of a time himself.

Crossing fingers for you.

[Duke Orsino]

Go for it. I did, and I've never regretted it.

[Goose]

Yay for you! Good on ya and have a good time!!

[Pete]

CG,
Climb back on that horse and enjoy!
Pete

[Girasole]

Sorry CG. Perhaps I am the only one who thinks that you are crazy to leap into something like this when you are still grieving what you have lost? What about your heart CG? What about your tender heart?

[Unbroken]

Good for you! It's time to move on. Have fun!

[S.P.]

Based upon what you wrote (and felt) back at the end of February, I'll second (third/fourth/fifth?) the motion to go through with it. I can't help but wonder, though, what you'll eventually write about the experience...

[Prospero]

I suppose there's a knack to maintaining just enough nervous anticipation. Too little and you lose half the fun. Too much and you overshoot into nerves, pessimism, mortal dread. But... as everyone else has said, it will be fine. Been there. And it was a wonderful, giddy, "we really should go out for food now" sort of time. Better yet, that wasn't the end.