pretty dumb things

bitchslapping 101

Last Saturday, I went to a play. It was, and I wish I could be more charitable, really pretty awful. It did, however, give me the platform to indulge in what very likely is the bitchiest bundle of prose I've yet committed to .doc and which was published today on one of my favorite blogs, Tits and Sass. The play in question, Stripper Lesbians (or possibly Lesbian Strippers, I can never remember), raised my ire not merely for its unabashed sloppy writing but also its lack of fundamental knowledge about strippers and stripping. Here's a choice morsel of my T&S post for you:

I also had difficulty following the logic of this play. To wit: Aisha is both a stripper and, as DJ reads from Evan’s thesis, “unemployed.” DJ himself is actually unemployed, although he does audition for Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night using a monologue taken from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and appears to live with Evan post-breakup under her good graces and on the money that she earns as a stripper, despite the fact that she was a finalist in “Glamour’s College Student of the Year” for her article that “Mak[es] Anti-Sex Trafficking Sexy,” which was taken from the thesis she wrote while working at Wildlands, a strip club that does not appear to dabble in sex trafficking but has attracted the interest of Playboy, which wants Aisha to pose, to which Evan is opposed to because it’s anti-feminist, which they discuss in a scene that takes place after one showing on-stage discourse that culls equally from a Gender Studies 101 syllabus and any episode of South Park featuring Cartman’s mom’s scheisse films (suffice to say that Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, spanking and German accents make cameos). Oh, Aisha is also a cellist. She plays not for money but because it’s her “passion.”

However, I suspect my greatest antipathy to Stripper Lesbians came not so much from the kind of sense it made—which was none—and more from the fact that it didn’t seem as if anyone connected with this show had ever been inside a strip club, much less talked to an actual stripper. 

You can go here to read the rest.

I found it an interesting exercise writing about a play, especially one this rife with issues. This play held a deep-fried King Rat of problems, really, and its dusting of condescension only made it more perplexing. In short, I had to make some really hard decisions.  

For example, I had to cut any discussion of the moment when DJ, the ex-boyfriend and thus token heterosexual male, auditions for Long Day's Journey Into Night by reciting a passage from feminist bible Our Bodies, Ourselves. On the surface, it's a joke that works. It's a funny conceit for anyone--male or female--to give a monologue gleaned from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the surface concept that someone would do it to get a role in Eugene O'Neill's quintessential American drama of addiction is even funnier. 

And yet.

The passage that Stripper Lesbians playwright Kate Foster chose for the script is one centering on sex-workers. It is, in fact, this:

Some feminists have been critical of prostitutes for reinforcing sex-role stereotypes, by allowing themselves to be sex objects or for participating in the sex industry… and contributing to violence against women, as some see sex work as a form of violence in and of itself. Others insist that it is a legitimate way for women to earn money from men. As one prostitute said, "It's my body; why shouldn't I be the one to decide how I should use it?" In the words of an ex-prostitute: “I've worked in straight jobs where I've felt more like I was prostituting my being than in prostitution. I had less control over my life, and the powerlessness wasn't even up front. People didn't see me as selling myself, but with the minimum wage so little and my boss so insulting, I felt like I was selling my soul.”

Again, it could work dramatically. DJ, the former boyfriend, is angry. He is angry not only that his girlfriend has become a lesbian but that now that his girlfriend is now a stripper she is no longer his girlfriend. His anger permeates the play, driving the dramatic action, such as it is. So, ok. I can see the logic for why this is the excerpt.

It could work, but for the way that the actor performs the monologue, and the way he performs it is this: he puts on his very best crack-ho voice, slouching in the corner, pretending to smoke a cigarette, like he'd just walked off a street corner.

Because, you know, prostitutes are funny. As are strippers. And, I guess, lesbians.

There's this thing that The Atlantic and The New York Times do when they write about sexytime sexy sex, and it's kind of like my mom's face when she talks about my former strip job or my fake boobs. It's this pursing of the lips that liberals do that shows their genteel distaste for certain kinds of sex. Look around you, and you'll see the liberal in the corner clucking over the perverts. It's a thing, and it's in this play, and it's in Tina Fey, and it's in major media, and it's all about us.

This play was steeped in righteous condescension, but because the underlying message is "See? Strippers (and lesbians) are just like us!" the play gets off the hook--and the audience can feel validated as they laugh along. 

I'm not suggesting that there's not anything funny about strippers, stripping or strip clubs. There is. Lots. I'm also not suggesting that it's not a place for parody. It is. Boy howdy, is it ever. I'm just suggesting that there's laughing at us strippers and there's laughing with us. And that we're smart enough to know the difference.

 

pubes, politics, pop and words, words, words

The crickets chirping on this blog wouldn’t make you suspect it, but I actually have been kind of busy the last few months. For one thing, I’ve been enjoying a simply crushing melancholy, one that has come complete with a charming shame spiral and the consumption many big blocks of cheese. It has been simply fabulous trying to get out of bed in the morning (and usually succeeding). Fortunately for those who love me, or even those who love to loathe me, it remains as difficult now as it ever has been to find a guillotine on EBay, and thus I suspect I'll be with you for a while longer.

Beyond going fetal early and often combined with cheese-eating, I’ve done some writing for pay on the website 4-Letter E-Books. The site is also publishing one of my fave erotica writers—and by “fave” I mean one whose writing I admire enough to have stolen whole clauses—a woman who goes by the name Remittance Girl. You should check her out.

“The Honeypot,” my column for 4-L E-B, takes an analytic look at sexytime stuff happening in media, on the news, or in popular culture here in the States. It’s sort of “Love, American-Style” for curmudgeons, misanthropes and anhedoniacs, which is to say my people. I might start writing about actual sex should I start to have actual sex again, but in the meantime, I’m feeling like the Dorothy Parker of sexuality, so I’m just going to stick my tart tongue out and go with it.

The first piece I wrote is about pubic hair. More specifically, it’s about the clucking liberal-in-the-corner Atlantic magazine take on pubic hair written by Ashley Fetters. Here’s a choice follicle plucked for your reading pleasure:

Porn is the cause for all this missing pubic hair, according to not only Fetters’ piece but also conventional wisdom—both the LA Times and The Guardian responded to The Atlantic article with scathing opinion pieces condemning in one huffing breath cosmetic surgery and porn, as if the two industries are holding hands, if not swapping fluids. Commonplace says that the sight of bare, glistening, wet, split, open and, above all, shaved beavers has driven women on both sides of the pond to extreme acts of depilation. Shaving’s passé; waxing is, like, so totally late ‘90s; everyone who’s barely anyone, Fetters suggests at the end of her article, gets lasered. It’s a whole big, bare thing, really, and Fetters’ piece caused, as Fashionista reported, women to get their muffs in a huff—so much so that Londoners took to the streets last Saturday for the Muff March, a protest in favor of natural genitals.

The easy way out of this hairy situation is to state obliquely that it’s a woman’s choice. You can shave it, you can save it. You can let it grow, you can make it go. It’s your pubic hair, and as in other things vagina-related, it’s your choice. The problem is that while we would like to pretend that it’s simple, it’s not. You can hum along to Amanda Palmer’s “Map of Tasmania,” the woolly-happy-spirited pubic anthem while twirling your armpit hair around your fingers as much as you like, but hair is never just hair.

You can go here to read the whole ball of wax.

I wrote my next piece on Newt Gingrich. It’s kind of awesome to see a Republican presidential nominee with Gingrich's mind-bending hypocrisy become the accidental posterboy for open marriage, at least it is if you’re a Progressive Democrat with serious perverse leanings, as I am. So I wrote about Maryanne Gingrich and how her announcing that Newt wanted an open marriage made for some very, very strange bedfellows in the polyamorous community. Below is an excerpt, but go here to read the full Gingrichian orgy. (If you want to see something really fun, compare these two Google Trend graphs of Newt Gingrich and Open Marriage. They're like Castor and Pollux.)

Gingrich has a famously problematic marital history. Currently, he is wed to wife #3, Callista Bisek, for whom Gingrich both converted to Catholicism and left wife #2, Marianne Ginther, who had just been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when Gingrich left her. Gingrich has a pattern; he began sleeping with Ginther before he’d divorced wife #1, Jackie Battley, who was just beginning her battle with cancer when he announced to her that he wanted a divorce. It’s a whole big thing, really, and all this Newt and Callista and Marianne and Jackie history only serves to complicate any connection between Newt and polyamory, 

Not that this complication doesn’t mean that advocates of open relationships haven’t tried.

And then last week, I wrote the piece that I feel proudest of. It all started when I tweeted, “Oh, I get it, Lana Del Rey is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction. Dirgetastic!” And then I wrote a whole piece about death and sex and repression and white skin and eyelet tops. It’s a whole big thing, and here’s a snippet:

Here’s my simple explanation for the LDR phenomenon: LDR is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction.

Stay with me here, setting aside your feelings for either entity, or both, if need be.

LDR and Twilight share a deep, abiding love of all things dead or dying. Life is just the thing in the way standing between you and your eternal white-toothed youthful glory. Life is that dead part, that portion where you’re standing around, beer in hand, rivulets of dew running down your teenage wrist, waiting for your boyfriend to put down the joystick and notice you in your blue-jeans. Life is roaming the halls and the hills in your godforsaken small town dreaming of a better death. Life is that inconvenient bit where you’re clothed, however attractively.

You can go here to read the full chewy thanatos and eros black-and-white cookie.

Look for my 4-L E-B column the last week of every month, or just follow me on Twitter. I’m delighted to know what you think or if you’ve any suggestions. You’re the meerkat’s monocle just for reading.

 

13 ways of looking at an abortion

Thirty-nine years ago, the decision known as the Supreme Court handed down the decision known as Roe v. Wade, giving American women the legal right to abortion. I’ve had a few abortions, and I’d like to celebrate this decision by listing a few ways that Roe v. Wade has enriched my life.

Because of Roe v. Wade:

1) My labia, perineum and pelvic floor remain in their original pristine showroom condition. No one likes to depend on Depends.

2) I worked to support myself for six years by stripping. And then I got to write about it. Roe v. Wade is the gift that keeps on giving.

3) I didn’t have to spend the ‘80s driving a mini-van.

4) My breasts are fake and they are spectacular.

5) I had the freedom to go to graduate school to pursue my Ph.D. in English Literature. And then when I realized I didn’t want to be an academic, I had the freedom to drop out. Freedom is totes the coolest.

6) I never, not once, had to marry a man I wasn’t sure I wanted to be bound to by law. And therefore, I never, not once, had to get divorced when it all went asunder. I hear that it's really rather unpleasant.

7) I neither have a kid who’s turning thirty this year, nor do I have one who’s graduating from high school. Most delightingly, I don't have to keep track of all the others in between. So confusing.

8) I get to wear this groovy t-shirt that reads “Ask Me About My Multiple Abortions.”

9) I’ve never had to endure the peculiar hell of having my child walk in as I was blowing some dude.

 10) I can be as lazy, solipsistic, narcissistic, workaholic and/or hedonistic as I want to be, and I don’t feel one iota guilty about it.

11) I have relatively few stretch-marks. See above.

12) Baby-free, I am a free bitch, baby. 

13) I feel fine about my choice not to bear children. I didn’t want to be a mother, and I didn’t have to become one. It’s a happy ending that one should really see in a fairytale.

To support women's right to choose, go here. I did.

 

my name is me

I wrote something for My Name Is Me, the campaign against requiring "real names" on social media, a recent requirement by both Facebook and Google+. I wrote obliquely about my experience because my silence wasn't helping to protect anyone--least of all myself. Everyone who knows me knows my pseudonymic identity, and, frankly, my stalkers had made sure that anyone who Googled me could put my "real" name with the one I had chosen to write under. I decided to make a stand against this charade that somehow "real names" protect people or keep them honest.

They don't. 

Long-time readers know that I've had issues with stalkers. My stalkers--and I know who they are--drove me to the lintel of suicide. They were pretty damn effective, actually. I'm a sensititve person, for all my bravado. But as time went on, I realized they couldn't really hurt me. When my worst fears were realized and my college students found out about my blog, nothing happened. When I got another job in academia, nothing happened. When I left that job and got another, now writing for a living, nothing happened.

I'll probably keep on writing under "chelsea g. summers." I've garnered some sliver of fame and a healthy Twitter following. People still read this blog, even when I've not posted recently. I like the way the name I gave myself looks in print, though I like the name my parents gave me looks as well. There's no reason why I have to choose, which is a luxury of being a writer in a coddled country with a strong history of freedom of speech. Dissidents in other countries don't have my priveleged position. They don't have a choice and, often, they don't have a voice. 

As I explained in my post on My Name is Me, it's not our names that define us. My stalkers chose to go by hundreds of different, equally plausible, names. None of them real, and none of them scented like roses. All of them created with the sole intent to hurt me. We are not characters from Restoration comedies, penny dreadfuls or Dickens novels. Our names don't define us, whether we choose them or accept the ones we've been given. Our actions define us, and I can hold my head up high and claim both of my identities.

 

 

hoarfrost

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

 

Hoarfrost

 

I wonder if I just need to get laid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

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

 

be your teenage dream tonight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sure is pretty, though.

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

Digressive post-script:

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

mind/body/split

It’s interesting having a body. I just turned 48, which makes me soundly middle aged. I don’t often feel it, no one seems to think I look it, and I don’t think I act it—which is to say that I don’t feel, look, or act as I expected I would at this age. I really thought my life would feel much more solidified when I got here, but here I am and all is as fluid as it has ever been.

“Fluid” is an eldritchly apt term for me right now. I just wrote a piece for Filthy Gorgeous Things on fluids, which is to say more exactly the white tiger of female sexuality, which is to say more exactly squirting, which is to say yet more exactly female ejaculation. I wrote the piece for FGT’s Discovery issue, and I did indeed suffer a recent discovery in fluid form. The piece is free, and you can read it here.  I’ve heard it’s kind of hot, and if you’re in the mood for hotness, you should just click that link and abandon this post, which is not hot.

This piece of writing is less about pimping that piece of writing and more about the confluence of events that made that discovery possible, and that confluence of events is most simply aging.

I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I grow old, and if you’re lucky, one day so too will you. Rolling of trousers is optional, aging not so much. If you live, you will get old, and there it is in its stark, jolie-laid, and wabi-sabi glory. You have a body; it’s interesting. In fact, there are two points when your body seems most interesting, and those two points are pubescence and menopause. I’m not sure how you men-folk understand the great Change of Life, but those two prolonged moments seem to me the bookends of physical interestingness.

I am not yet menopausal, in point of fact, but I see it looming as a monolith. It’s in the distance and every day it gets larger until one day I won’t have a choice but to confront it. Every month, I still get my period. The Change is yet to come, but come it will; in fact, comes it does. From my perspective, watching The Change come incrementally closer is not unlike my experience at eleven of watching my nipples grow soft and my mound grow downy. It’s just less quick, less sanguine, and less anticipated. I’m in the middle of Change, and it makes my body interesting.

Most of my adult life, I’ve just lived in my body. Sure, I waged war with it, and I found détente with it. I hated some parts and loved others, I got angry at its shape and its feel, its size and its contours. I vainly primped and stroked and patted, as women do. I have shaken and shimmied and paraded and pranced, both for money and for fun. I have shared my body with many people, and I’ve shared great passion with a handful of them. But mostly, I lived in my body. I felt emotion and sensation. I didn’t feel much of a split.

A few years ago, I got pneumonia. I was sick enough to spend a week in bed and crack ribs coughing, but I was so poor that I didn’t go to the doctor’s, and I couldn’t afford to take time off from work. It was the first time that I felt the crush and press of my own mortality. Your body can—and will—fail you, I thought. It was sobering, weird and ironic. Being a morose and depressive type whose daily thoughts had often been punctuated with thoughts of suicide, I ought not to quail at my own mortality. I should be pretty accustomed to it. And yet.

So there I was, hacking so hard that I cracked my ribs from the inside and living for several weeks with the lingering pain, a stabby reminder every time I reached too quickly for a book or a can or my dog. I had an epiphany. I realized that one day my body, this body that I had loved and hated myself and with which I had loved and hated others, would fail me. It wasn’t a question of if; it was a question of when. And then, as one does, I got better, and the thought went with the illness.

I have a high pain tolerance. Part of it is the deeply Protestant nurture of my family. Part of it is dancing for six years and lifting weights off and on for thirty. I treat my body cavalierly, pushing through the pain because pain is for pussies. Injuries are for the weak. The strong are Cock-D, and I am the strong. I am, in fact, such a commando that I had been walking around with my rotator cuff torn about 75% for untold swaths of time, a fact discovered by my doctor about six weeks ago. He scheduled me for surgery the next day.

I’ve rarely been an invalid. I broke my wrist when I was 21, and I tore my ACL when I was 9. That’s it. For the past six weeks, I’ve been walking around in Sling, a giant black two-piece Velcro-and-foam ensemble that both holds my right arm and straps it to my waist. Judging from how much people avoid me in public places, there might not be anything more spectacularly invisible than me in Sling. Walking into Sephora or American Apparel, I feel as if I ought to wave my debit card while shouting, “I have a $1,200 balance and I’m not afraid to spend it!” Anything short of that makes salespeople’s eyes slide off me like I’m coated in Teflon. Ditto those of my fellow consumers.

But Sling, which ruins the lines of my clothes and marks me as invalid, is not the worst of it. The pain might be the worst of it. For six weeks, I’ve been in near-constant pain. Sometimes the pain has been such a great and keening beast that I cower and go fetal. Most times, the pain is a low susurrating animal, like a mewling rat. It hurts, and it’s exhausting. I went a month not sleeping more than two hours at a clip. Now I’m sleeping as long as my Tylenol lasts, and then I wake. I count Tylenols like coffee spoons.

Actually, no. The worst of it is the envy and the longing. I watch people with their hands in the air, waving them like they just don’t care, and I marvel. I recollect the ability to wash the top of my head, but it’s probably a month away before I’ll be able to do that again. I crawl like a toddler toward a full range of motion. I was overjoyed when, for the first time three weeks, I was able to apply eyeliner. Some day soon, I’ll be able to put my hair in a ponytail without bending over at the waist. I hear that one day I’ll do a push-up again, but that day is about six months away. I mourn.

I miss feeling whole, hale, and healthy. Mostly, I miss the fact that I can no longer, not ever, treat my body cavalierly. I will never, ever be able to slam weights around like a fucking Marine. I’ll never be able to dive in all commando and, as I did when I began running, go out and do the six-mile Central Park loop just to see if I can. I can’t be Cock-D. I have to work slowly, incrementally, pussily. I have to pay attention to my body, listen to it. I hate that. I feel like a schnook.

I age and that’s interesting, but I’m not young anymore and that’s not. I hear there’s wisdom as pay-off for this necessary winding down. I have yet to appreciate it. All I want to do is jump rope as the Ramones blasts in my earbuds and my breath catches and my quads burn and gorge rises. All I want is to push my body with Spartan abandon. All I want is to be able to hug fiercely and long. All I want is to be me again, and that’s not possible, not as I have been. I may be more than my pained, healing, and afflicted shoulder, but I’m not sure who that is.

There has been a split far larger than the two tiny scars in my shoulder would suggest. Time will not heal the rift; it’ll only make it larger.

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those fornicating sentences: on a grammatology of fucking

It's a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation. On the frothy beverage side, I have a new piece up on Filthy Gorgeous Things. On the stark airy side, it's not free. But the Maraschino cherry is that the piece is only $.99. You can, therefore, buy said article as you would download a song by Lady Gaga and thus show Filthy Gorgeous Things how very worthy you find my writing. You can also buy a whole subscription to FGT and show the mag how very worthy you find the totality of their endeavors. Your choice, really.

This piece, which I've entitled "On a Grammatology of Fucking," centers on the convergence of two of my favorite things: syntax and sex. Here's an excerpt from the middle of it:

I suppose I’m drawn to the rules of language for the same reasons that I’m drawn to sex that has ropes, blindfolds, the sting of floggers and the sweet smell of submission. I like rules because I like to break them. I like structure because I enjoy subverting it. I like structure, and structure is narrative, and just as I pretty much abhor free-form poetry, I pretty much abhor lyrical fucking, that rose-petal-strewn-bed, Sarah McLaughlin saccharine flavor lovemaking—that kind of sex that abides by conventional Hallmark syntax and doesn't allow for nips, bites, wicked attenuations, or short declarative sentences of pneumatic fucking.

There's more on either side, and if you do indeed buy the piece, you may learn a thing or two about commas and passive voice. Oh, yes, things may be learned if this article is bought.

And if you find in this wintry economic climate that you'd enjoy some free stuff after all, here are a some links to older posts I've written on grammar: one, two and three. Because I'm not merely independent, I'm a rebel with a clause.

UPDATE: The piece is now open, free, unlocked and available for your slightly NSFW reading. Enjoy the glorious cost-free reading, and then please let me know what you think in comments below.

Do as the London Review of Books does and follow me on Twitter. My meandering mind many times a day.

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.

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.