pretty dumb things

my rejected tail piece: the good, the bad and the anal

I wrote a piece for a magazine that was rejected. It's about anal, and if you want to read it, it's below the fold. I suspect my own ambivalence about writing the piece imbued it a bit too heavily for publication. Hey, it happens. My remunerative loss, your chewy gain.

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.

Breaking News! Joss Whedon as Popular as Anal!

My pretty dumb things have had exactly three days of traffic that topped 10,000. The first were Wednesday and Thursday, June 28 and 29, 2006 and the other was yesterday (it looks like today is pretty on-spot to break the 10K threshold too. Fingers crossed!). The first 10K spike occurred when as an editor at Fleshbot I compiled a sex-blog roundup of all posts that were all-anal all the time and then mirrored that compilation here with an anal greatest hits of my own.

The second 10K spike that happened yesterday and which I continue to ride the crest of today came as a result of my Joss Whedon/Dollhouse post being placed on the front page of IMDB and then being picked up by the fine fanatics at Whedonesque. I use StatCounter to keep track of my traffic; below are the two StatCounter graphs of my blog's traffic for the dates in question, the top being anal's 2006 and the bottom being Whedon's 2009:

 

(Note that this second graph was downloaded at approximately 10:30 a.m., Saturday, 7 March. This data is therefore incomplete.)

What we see here is pictorial evidence that supports my supposition that anal sex and Joss Whedon share a nearly equal popularity. Indeed, if you moderate yesterday's findings to reflect that my blog is less popular now than it was in 2006 because I've more or less ceased writing about sex, the argument could be made that Joss Whedon is in fact more popular than anal. Plus, Joss Whedon does not require lubrication, and he's been legal a lot longer. Clearly, the only thing to do now are side-by-side blind anal/Joss Whedon taste tests to see which people enjoy more.

In the meantime, I've already ordered my "Joss Whedon: More Popular than Anal" t-shirt for ComiCon 2010. Because I like to know that whatever my activity of choice may be, I will come prepared.

(Thank you to the kind people of Fleshbot, IMDB and Whedonesque, as well as the assorted perverts who congregate there. I could never have spiked so high and so hard without you.)

my boyfriend shadow-dreams of anal

“I think I had a sex dream,” Donny said. “It was a little unclear. There were all these doors to these rooms in an apartment that was mine, but wasn’t mine, you know?”

Yes, I said, I know how that is.

“Anyway, so I kept on having this dream and at first you were just sleeping behind one of the doors. But then later in the dream, or maybe it was another dream, it was hard to tell, anyway, later on you were having sex with someone else behind the door, and I don’t know how I knew it, but I did and I found it really, uh, erotic. Somehow.” Donny said.

Uh-huh, I said. Ok.

“And then I had a dream that we were having sex and maybe there was somebody else or maybe there wasn’t but it was really hot.” Donny said and paused. “Anyway, I think we should have anal.”

Uh, ok. I said and laughed.

lube enough and time

“I’m really tired,” Donny says to me. He is methodically mashing canned dog food into dry kibble. “Do you mind if we don’t have sex?”

Really? I ask. I thought we might have anal, I say and bite the right leg off a gingerbread cookie. I pause, chew and say, I’m wearing a buttplug right now. I gave myself an enema, I add and smile.

Padding around Donny’s apartment, muddling time away while he does what he does so that we can do what we do, deep and hard and unhindered, with a clean conscience and washed hands, sitting on his nubby-slick bourgeois couch, the metal plug snug-comfortable in my ass, the television burbling insipid distraction, I think: How different this holiday season is from last year, and yet how much more different from the year before.

Last year, I spent Christmas with my family in Vermont, wrapped in the jangly steel wool cocoon that is my family. I felt half present and half absent, as I usually do with my family. They have a pulsating love and a flickering regard for me; I am, as I’ve said before, a hologram to them. For me to be fully there terrifies us all. And so I do what I’ve done since adolescence: I fixate on some boy, somewhere, and I let the great purple swell of my crush buoy me up and over the swell of my family bosom.

For the past two winter holidays that figment fixated boy has been Donny. Two years ago, we were in the off mode of our on/off/on/off relationship. After witnessing the cautionary tale of his parents’ marriage over Thanksgiving, he had summarily dumped me the Monday after, and so that holiday season I was despondently single.

Two years ago, I returned from Vermont and threw myself into dating new men. I dated the second movie fumbler. I dated the second Cat Man. I dated a couple of seconds, and by February, Donny returned to me, and I dated him.

Last year, Donny and I were engrossed in the slow and tender heart-smithy of forging our love together. We were banging it out. Heating it up, cooling it down, shaping and honing, testing and deciding whether it was worth it all, or if we should melt it down, start from scratch, or throw it all on the scrap heap. It was a highly distracting activity, this heart-smithy. While I was home in the grey Vermont Christmas, my parents tense, my sister absent, I welcomed it.

Last year, I returned from Vermont feeling red-raw with the inescapable pain of being with my family. I wrote about my need to be fucked back into wholeness by my much-missed boyfriend, and I wrote about how he finally did so. We spent last New Year’s together at a restaurant near his house eating an unspectacular meal and having an unsatisfying conversation. Then we drank champagne and played Jenga. I won handily, a fact that disturbs Donny to this day.

This year Donny and I ate dinner Christmas Eve at our favorite French restaurant. I spent Christmas with Donny’s family, an event notable in part for its happy chaos and intimate tedium and in part for its relatively low buzz of stress. This afternoon, Donny and I will board a plane and fly to Vermont, where he will meet my parents for the first time. We’ll be going to my favorite French restaurant for New Year’s dinner and then we’ll watch the fireworks. We’ll see how it goes.

And all of this emo-family-stress-love-scented context I provide for the assfuckery of the other night. Donny had phoned me from work. On the phone, he uncharacteristically told me how, immersed in the previous night’s insomnia, he had groped his way out by looking at a picture of me kneeling before him, his cock down my throat. That his cock is down my throat no one looking at the photo would know—all you can see is my kneeling naked form, the swoop of my back broadening into the generous curves of my ass, my hair hanging down around and Donny’s naked body rising like flesh obelisk above me.

Seated in his office, Donny told me in hushed tones how he’d looked at the picture and imagined fucking my ass, and that long minutes later, hands covered in lube, he came to the silent-movie assfucking imaginings and how thus released and resolved, like Hamlet’s imagined soul, into dew, he slept.

I love anal, but it’s a huge psychic and physical commitment. It takes forethought and preparation, like Martha Stewart’s rococo recipe for baked Alaska. Anal embodies physical and emotional risk; it has caused me both kinds of pain. Anal’s risks are anal’s rewards. Nothing gives as much pleasure, but nothing makes me break down sobbing, inexplicable and inarticulate, like butt-fucking.

This moment, this week snug between the Merry and the Happy, though, felt like the right time to offer the ass up to Donny and to the Sex Fates, or Sex Furies, as the case may be. The Erotic Muses, at any rate. And so I planned it—I squirted, I held, I released, I washed, I shaved, I lubed and I plugged, and I arrived at Donny’s doorstep with that prize hidden inside me like a fig in a pudding.

It was a risk worth taking, I can articulate here and now. At the moment, though, when after Donny had laid me on  my back and licked me with his pointy tongue and sucked my clit with his open pervert’s mouth; when he knelt above me and intently fed me his epic fat-bellied cock with one hand while his other pinned my hands above my head; while he fucked my persimmon-slick and swollen pussy above and below me, the plug pointedly obtruding with the most delicate insistence; when after these long hours of wet preparation, I held Donny’s well-lubed cock in my hands, poised and hovering above it, like a cliff diver on the brink; when, finally, painfully and then joyfully, with the pleasurable conflict of ripping velvet, my ass was entered, filled and fucked by my boyfriend; when my orgasm surrounded me like a mauve curtain, like the flight of a hundred hundred birds’ wings, like the rise and improbable crest of some somatic surfer; when my body took over for that fast eternity, Donny under and in me, during that there was no articulating anything. Not that moment, and not the moments after, when we lay together curled as cats dozing.

But now, here, in the paper-white light of day, I can say  the risk was worth it.

Happy New Year one and all. May you all drink good champagne and win at Jenga.

pillow words to live by

The words to leave you with are these: After anal, forgo the lemon pickle.

On the plus side, at least I did do it in the right order. On the plus side, I had the sodomy first and the curry after. Because if you must, if you really must, enjoy both the Indian food and the Greek sex in a diurnal duration, you really want to adhere to that informal rule: butt-sex first; curry later.

In my mind, national holidays positively scream “give yourself an enema and grab the lube, baby,” and not just because sodomy has been my lawful right since the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Lawrence V. Texas on 18 November 2003. More so, though, than simply availing myself of my legal right to be fucked in the ass by my lover’s fat-bellied cock is the fact that legal holidays give the two of us, a modern and urban couple pressed by time and crossed by traffic and bound by logistics, the unequaled luxury of uninterrupted time.

Time to ready our bodies, time for foreplay, time for the long and languorous running sentences of seduction and sensuality, time for all the heavy heaving breathing requisite for sodomy. Time to hold one anther after, then shower, and then hold each other some more.

There is, in my estimation, no such thing as an anal quickie. It’s not merely that anal sex requires the greatest trustiness of all sex acts—and it does—but it’s also that to do it right, and by “right” I mean with pleasure, with safety and with hygiene, I have to take the time to prepare for it. Before sex, I shave or wax; I give myself an enema (the means to my end); I mentally psych myself up; and during sex, Donny gives me a lot of foreplay; he pops a buttplug into my ass to stretch me a bit; he and I work up slowly, elliptically, inexorably to buttfucking. After sex, we spend extra time curled as quotation marks, making sure that each of us feels loved.

Buttfucking is like climbing Mt. Everest. In both endeavors, there is necessary preparation, no small amount of gear, a great deal of deep breathing, a conscious will to do something not entirely normal, and a wondering sense that while at the apogee, the pleasure may be brief, but it is also astonishing.

The month of August was an arid month for me sex-wise. Between my schedule and Donny’s, between my going to Vermont to care for my post-op Moms and my going to Fire Island for my vacation (which Donny’s schedule could not accommodate), we had sex on average once a week. Which is certainly more often than not at all, but it’s many fewer times than I wanted to have sex with him. (Even after a shower I can smell him on my fingers and pillows; I am in love; all the time and every day and each night would not be often enough.)

Moreover, it felt over and over that our sex was watery and pallid. Some kind of Mr. Woodhouse-type invalid gruel, some kind of ice-water and oatmeal sex, some kind of paucity in place of our usual profligate, if monogamous, perversities. It felt as if my gourmet banquet had been replaced with tasteless white food. I was, as I have admitted, getting bored.

I was also growing a bit anxious. Perhaps, I thought, the honeymoon was over with me and Donny. Perhaps, I thought, the halcyon period we’d enjoyed had been sucked dry and spent as a Bogarted bong hit. Perhaps, I thought, the thrill was gone, or if not gone, then maybe faded, and isn’t that really rather worse, the fading, the ashen dregs of the great staring me in the face accusingly, the great’s muted glory taunting my prodigious memory. Perhaps, I thought, I should resign myself to  the merely good.

This long weekend I found my anxiety had been, as it often is, for nothing.

For this long weekend, Donny fucked me properly.

cold ass ice

Step outside and it feels as if you’ve entered a hot, wet oven. You’re the pat of butter on the baked potato that is Gotham. It’s hot, hot, hot heat, wet and hot, and it cleaves to you, sweat-pressing your skin and enervating you with its doughy-moist succubus embrace.

You need to go somewhere the sun don’t shine. You need to find your place in the shade. You need to embrace your inner arctic. You need to stick an ice cube up your ass.

Maybe you try it on your own the first time. Maybe you go out and you buy a bag of ice because the cubes in your fridge just seem like you’d be shoving a square peg in a round hole, which you would. So you go out to the delis and the bodegas, the grocery stores and the mini-marts, you search high and low for those cubes shaped more like a child’s cartoon smile than a shoe box. You find a bag, you plunk down the outrageous $2.50, and gleefully you bring them home.

You stow the bag carefully in your freezer and you survey your bathtub. You consider the switch-twitch at the knot between your labia and then you consider the ring on your tub. You are suspended, momentarily, between desire and laziness, between disgust and yowling erotic need.

You clean the tub.

You stop and you admire its creamed-butter sparkle, and then you go to the freezer and you open the bag of ice. You pick out a singular, perfect, crystal-smile cube. You put it, a quick cold moment, in your mouth. You exhale and imagine you can see your breath in the freezer’s polar air. You take the ice cube to the tub.

You realize you still have your clothes on, so you put the cube in a cup, store it in the freezer, go to your bedroom, take off your clothes and tip-toe back to the bathroom. You don’t know why you tip-toe, there’s no one home, no one but pets to disturb, and they’ve born witness to so many of your indulgent perversions that they’re not even curious. But tip-toe you do.

Undressed, you get the cup out of the freezer. You add a second cube, just in case.

You go to the bathtub. You squat ungracefully and you recline clumsily. You extend your legs up the wall, so that the faucet sits between your splayed thighs, like the face of a grotesque lover. You consider for a moment running the tap with that gentle flickering stream that when you place your pussy exactly below its cascading fall, you come in a few wet minutes, your hips undulating a silent liquid adulation to your Neptune lover.

You consider it, but you don’t do it. Not yet.

You take a cube, you rest it against your asshole and you feel the immediate pucker of the asskiss, that quick inward convulsion, that wrinkle-crinkle in and up. And then with a deep breath, surely, remorselessly, unmercifully you use your index and middle fingers to push the ice cube into your ass.

The shock of the ice. Silver sliver ice-nine-esque core radiating. Like the plunge into a mountain stream from the inside. A swift round shot of pleasure/pain/pleasure.

Your breath inhales ragged-like. You imagine it’s not unlike the sensation of crack, only pure body.

You lie there in the tub, the ice melting in you, your breath quieting its rush-rush pants. You can almost see the cube rounding and erasing, turning into a little puddle of water, you can almost see it and you can feel the pain easing into a pure goodness.

You find that your hand moves between your legs, and you rub your hard little knot of a clit, your legs up the wall, the ice melting in your ass, you rub and you rub, and you imagine your lover watching you, maybe with his friends, all of them crowding in at you in the bathroom, perched on the sink and on the toilet, peering down with you with encouraging eyes, commenting favorably and as you imagine, and as you see the ice melting, and as your hand rubs your little hard knot, as the heat bears down on this glass city, wrapping it in still-born siroccos, as your heels scooch uncontrollably down the vanilla cream tiles of your shower, you come.

Or perhaps you just get on your hands and knees before your lover, hand him the cube and tell him, Stick it where the sun don’t shine. And turned away from him, you smile secret as he does so.

a hit, a miss, an error and a fuck

It was all going pretty well. I was tied up across the width of my bed, arms and legs spread wide like an elongated “X.” My naked body marked the spot.

A pillow under my head, a blindfold on my eyes, its interior fur pressing against my eyes and its black leather smell against my nose, I was comfortably restrained, beginning to relax into the position’s imposed immobility and delightful anxiety. Earlier, Donny had asked me to get out all of my toys and put them on my desk, but then he had named a specific few: my buttplugs of four sizes and two materials, my two vibrators, and the Big Dildo. I had arranged them on a vintage tablecloth spread over my desk, an impromptu pervert’s picnic. And now I lay back, listening for clues about what he would do to me next, half hoping I’d guess it right and half hoping that I would guess it wrong.

“Where are your nipple clamps?” Donny asked.

On the right far corner of my desk, I said. I heard rummaging, the rustling of plastic or paper, a clink of ceramic, and then Donny say, “Fuck it.”

“I thought I told you to take out all your toys,” he said.

I told him he hadn’t been clear. That he had begun by saying “all,” but had then switched to enumerating certain ones. And anyway, I said, my clamps were on my desk; it wasn’t my fault if he couldn’t find them.

“You’ve been very sassy,” I heard him say, accompanied by aurally detected movement. “Why…are…you…so…sassy?” he asked.

Something hard and round against my mouth. The ballgag. Donny swiftly smashed the big red leather-covered ball against my upper lip against my teeth, mashing the lip down forcefully against my teeth as I yowled around it.

Ow. Ow. Ow, I said, unable to enunciate “poodle,” my safe word, and flapped my hands in their tethers to indicate the pain.

Donny removed the gag, sensing my discomfort.

Fuck! I said and licked the inside of my upper lip. I tasted the copper of blood and felt a small marble beginning to form just left of the cupid bow’s center. I told Donny to use his tongue and feel the lump; he did, and to my surprise it felt quite nice.

I told him that now I would look like a one-quarter Angelina Jolie, and he said it wasn’t that bad.

Donny, trying to recapture his capital D status after the great ballgag gaffe, told me to open my mouth wide. I did, and he popped an end of the steel plug in my mouth. He told me to warm it, which I did, sort of. And then after telling me to open wide so he could remove it, he shoved it in my ass, not uncomfortably nor ungently.

He positioned himself between my parted and trussed thighs, and set about bringing me close to orgasm over and over with fingers, mouth, and toys, until finally he let me beg him to let me come and I did, helpless, bound, vulnerable, blindered and happy beneath his scrutinizing gaze.

Removing the steel wand, but not the plug, Donny clambered on top of me, sliding his cock into my still-ululating pussy, wedging himself inside my snug aperture made tighter by the unyielding presence of the steel buttplug in my rectum. He groaned loudly, said something vaguely incoherent about now using my pussy, and commenced sinking his rigid cock into me.

I have to pee, I said.

I’m sorry, I said.

I’ve been drinking a lot of water, I said.

“It’s ok, baby,” Donny said and started untying one of my hands, I used it to untie the other, and he meanwhile freed the leg tethers from the bedstead. I began pulling them off my legs, and he told me I didn’t have to do that and I could just go to the bathroom but to remember that I had a buttplug in me.

I scurried off to the bathroom, trailing about thirty feet of rope behind me, to my cat’s active delight. In the bathroom, I quickly popped the buttplug out of my ass, squatted, peed, wiped, flushed, trailed the rope and the cat back to the bedroom, fetched the lube, trailed the rope and the cat back to the bathroom, re-inserted the plug, washed my hands, trailed the rope and the cat back to the bedroom, got stuck dragging the cat across the floor, yanked the rope with the cat into the bedroom, and got back into bed.

“You didn’t have to leave the rope on,” Donny said.

Oh, I said.

“You look like Marley’s ghost,” he said.

What? I asked, the ghost of fuckings past?

“Yes,” he said, and laughed.

As I lay on my back, Donny positioned himself over my face, his previously turgid cock gone all baby-bird flaccid in the past few moments. I opened my mouth and took the head of his cock in, gently cupping his balls with my left hand.

“Yow!” Donny bellowed, jumping about eight vertical inches. “Cold!” he yelped.

I giggled. I washed my hands, I said.

“I guess you didn’t use hot water,” he said. “That’ll make things go in the wrong direction,” he said, and took the head of his cock in his hand, guiding it to my mouth. I sucked the tip of his cock, running my tongue in clockwise circles, pressing my swollen lips against it, deep-throating him with savage delicacy until his cock grew hard again. Once more, Donny positioned himself between my thighs, once more he began fucking my slightly obstructed pussy, the plug rubbing against the thin wall separating my pussy and my rectum.

Once more, he sighed, once more he picked up tempo, once more he muttered something sweet dirty nothing about my pussy and his fucking. Getting his groovy groove on in my tight tightened little post-orgasmic pussy.

And then plop! The buttplug popped out and rolled under my hip.

We looked at each other and laughed and kissed. And then he lubed his dick and fucked me in the ass because when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

Or some such anal equivalent.

oh, joe jackson, where have I gone right?

I don’t want to be one of those annoying, smug coupled ones. When I have been single, which has been often, or when I have been unhappily coupled, which has been nearly as often, I bristled at the happy loving couples. They made me sick, in short.

I wanted to hurt them. Indeed, not quite a year ago, I wrote what amounts to a manifesto against the happy loving couples, their hand-holding solidarity, their affectionate pleasantries, their high-end, luxurious happiness powered by their own sense of self-satisfaction.

I don’t want to be one of them, those people who are really only setting themselves up for their own dismal demise, therein giving the rest of us the satisfactory icyhot flush of well deserved schadenfreude.

Times have been when I would, with only a slight twinge of guilt, gleefully roast the happily coupled ones on twin spits, marinating them in their own juices as each of them twirled over the fire of their own mutual passion. (I would imagine each of them catching one another’s eyes as they were spit-spun over those white-hot extra flamey coals, their eyes flashing with desperation, and mine brightlit with retribution.)

I don’t want, then, to be one of those roastful ones.

And yet, I must admit being oxymoronically seriously giddily happily coupled. Oh, yes, I am. I am guilty with my own sense of couply satisfaction. I am happy, and somehow I still stand outside myself, my remembered bitter single self pointing my finger at me, mouth agape in shock and horror.

I would then happily sniper rifle the me that I am now, were I then to have seen my now self hand-in-hand with the Donny.

It’s gross, really. We sleep snuggled together like Paolo and Francesca. When I shift in my sleep, I feel Donny nestling closer to me, often uncomfortably—he wakes sore in the morning from the efforts of his nocturnal flesh pressing. (To my credit, I did have continuous and prolix dreams of amours with Nathan Fillion as I slept with Donny last night, so perhaps all is not as well as it could be between us, which is a relief.)

The sex. Oh my sweet Aphrodite on a pocketless pita, the sex. Donny has come to loving to watch me come. He splays my body out like a playset and manipulates me with his hands and his mouth for hours. Saturday night, he propped my abundant and good-natured ass on three pillows, the better to watch my pussy bud, flower and burst. He knelt behind me, thumb on my clit, one or two fingers thrust inside me, watching the frisson slowly build in my body, murmuring dirty words of encouragement behind me.

“Show me how you’re my slut,” he said behind me. “Show me,” he said; “come for me, slut,” he said over and over until I did.

And then he assfucked my accomodating and blissy butt with abandon and lube (and a ready towel, always a towel).

Today he laid me out in front of him, brought me close to orgasm, and kept me hanging on that delicious precipice for a sweet eternity. Then he fucked me until I spoke in unctuous tongues.

Oh god oh god oh fuck oh god, I called out to him, this Donny, my love.

We go out to dinner in post-sex bliss and over order. We drink copious wine. We have in-jokes. We cook brunch together. We fight about politics and we end up in each other’s arms.

It’s disgusting, really.

I’m glad the me I was last year can’t see the us I am today. I’d be forced to do myself some serious bad-ass harm. I’d be forced to kick my ass with the full gale-wind force of my arctic bitterness.

I don’t want to be one of those smug happy couples. Remind me pointily if you find I get too rotund with my own complacent “you complete me” couplehood.

Please.

donny redux

Freud, I think, was spot on in this one thing: in our ass sits our emotions.

A synecdoche is a part for a whole, and our heart has become the synecdoche for love and its loss. Our stomach, or testes if we’re men, which I am not, for courage and anxiety. Our feet for wanderlust and flight. Our shoulders for burden. We feel, somehow, these emotions in these somatic seats; when we lose that which we love our hearts literally and figuratively hurt.

But our ass, says Freud, is where we hold back. Our ass, after all, is one of the first things we learn to control. To learn to control is also to learn to lose; moreover, it is to learn a fear of loss beyond our control.

A person who is anal retentive, according to Freudian psychological models, is one who learns to control a bit too well, a bit too efficiently, a bit too anxiously. 

I am not anal retentive, but I am anal. I have a deep and profound awe for my anus in general and the act of anal sex in particular, something that regular readers of my pretty dumb things know perhaps too well. I have awe for the act in part because the pleasure and the pain are so earthshatteringly resonant and in part because I find doing it leaves me vulnerable and emotional and open in ways I cannot even begin to articulate.

I have not been entirely honest with you. I have not been entirely open. I have not been entirely honest with myself, really, and that’s the thing that’s more important because I don’t know you, the swirling hordes of my readers. You are mostly numbers to me, and while I appreciate you and your little blips and dots and IP addresses and your comments, your comments especially, most of you I don’t know. And it is to myself I owe the honesty at the end of the day.

To myself and to those whom I love.

Last night I was opened. Last night I was fucked.

Last night I saw Donny. Again. The strobe light of our relationship continues flashing offONoffONoffONoffONoff in a stream so continuous that our movements have the herky-jerky stop-motion look of actually being illuminated, when that light is merely an optical illusion. We have, since I broke up with him after Fire Island, seen each other. We went to the Yankees games, Donny and I, and we had fun.

I took a picture there at Yankee stadium, and I’d share it with you, but then two anonymities would be broken, and mine is my own to give, but Donny’s is not. This picture of us at the game, the first one, has fucked me up. We look so happy, he and I. We look like a couple. We look in love and we look comfortable with each other. I look at it and it feels easy and right.

It’s not easy.

Suffice to say that it’s not easy.

Last night I saw Donny and we..what?..had sex/made love/buttfucked. We did and it was sublime. Amazing. Celestial and warm and like being wrapped from the inside out in multitudes of feathery wavelets until I screamed aloud and long with the sheer intense pleasure of it all.

And then I sobbed.

Freud, I began, said in our asses sit our emotions. Technically, no, he didn’t quite put it that way. Technically, yes, I am simplifying, transmogrifying, altering his views to suit my anal purpose, but you will grant me this liberty, will you not?

I was buttfucked and something unnamable broke in me and I sobbed. My body heaved and convulsed with the force of my crying. Long, silent breath-free interludes punctuated by the ragged force of sobbing. My sinuses jammed with snot. My face crinkled like the fists of a child.

I was blindsided, if one can be blindside not from the outside but from the in. My emotions smacked me up from my bowels. I had no idea that this was sitting inside of me, waiting, biding its time, gathering force, until, with the force of Donny’s cock, it was released.

And as I wept one coherent thought kept going through my head and it was this: I’m just a little girl.

I’m just a little girl, a voice kept repeating to me, I’m just a little girl and I can’t hold this all in anymore.

Sometimes everything just feels like a lot, you know?

Sometimes it just is.