pretty dumb things

hey, baldwin, are you talkin' to me?

Things are kind of tense here in pretty dumb headquarters. To be completely honest, I’m just about three steps away from hyperventilating into a paper bag. I’m hinkier than a cat high on crack. I’m bitchy and aimless and nearly spinning in circles with the stress. I’m so wound tight that the idea of a batting cage feels appealing, and less because I’d like to hit a few dingers (I have no hand-eye coordination with balls. I have this weird depth perception issue wherein things that fly at me seem to drop from view about a foot and a half out) and more because I’d like to swing a bat at something hard.

It would probably be a bad idea. I might start swinging and just never stop.

I’ve metaphorically jumped at friends and acquaintances; I can envision the time when the jumping might be literal. It seems I’m permanently rocking my Travis-Bickle-Are-You-Talkin’-to-Me. I’m making small children cry and I think I like it. I have a yowling desire. My desire to yowl yowls. I’d like to get into a bar brawl. Maybe with Alec Baldwin. I bet right now I could take Alec Baldwin. I’d like to pull his hair and punch him in his squashy belly. I’d like to do a couple shots of Jamesons and then call Alec Baldwin names. I bet I could take him.

Stress makes me want to do weird shit. Extreme stress makes me want to do weirdest shit. Right now, I’m so stressed that I feel like a fruitfly with ADD on steroids. I can’t sit still, can’t concentrate, can’t get anything done, and pretty much just want to break stuff. I might be turning into a fourteen year-old male latchkey kid. I kind of wish I liked porn.

I’m sincerely stupidly stressed right now, I mean stressed to the air-huffing, cuticle-eating, Alec-Baldwin-fighting breaking point, because I have essentially committed myself to being a writer. I have left my teaching job, a job that I’ve held for the past eight years. I had started teaching in 1999 when I first started my Ph.D. coursework, and except for one year off in 2003-4, I’ve taught every year since. No longer. I’ve stopped adjuncting, and that means that I’ve no discernable income beyond my freelance writing.

In essence, I’m putting the vast majority of my eggs in my book basket. I’ve been slowly plugging away at my proposal, and I’ve given myself until Thursday to finish it. On Thursday, I’m sending the whole fat lot of it to my agent. He’s a very good agent. He’s a very big, important agent. He strides as a gentle, white-haired, and quite tan colossus through the publishing world. Frankly, I’m shocked and amazed that he wants to represent me. I’m taking it as a testament to the slim possibility that I might a) have some talent and b) be able to sell it. But I could be wrong.

It’s a big change, a huge change, a change that I want so badly that I have a hard time talking about it without reaching all twitchy and wild-eyed to the nearest wooden object and knock-knocking it like an obsessive-compulsive. The stress/excitement/stress of all of this pretty much makes me go glossolaliac. I keep myself tight and close, like a mean dog on a short leash. I haven’t slept for days. I have hollows beneath my eyes that I could keep paperclips in. I’m just about levitating like a very angry, very needy top. I feel like my mind is justhtisclose from spinning apart from sheer centrifugal force. I’m forgetting consonants and verbs.

It’s not good. It’s not pretty. And while my adieu to my life of teaching college freshmen how to read and write was both sentimental and delighted, and though I feel in the center of my solar plexus that my commitment to this writing life is the right thing, I’m fearful and stressed into near-complete aphasia. Which, you might note, is seriously counter-productive to the writer.

Don’t tell me to breathe or to do yoga. Don’t suggest that I meditate or balance my charkas. Don’t give me the names of herbs to infuse or tinctures to swallow or Jungian colors to stare at. Don’t hand me prayer beads or tell me to count to ten. Don’t offer bromides, platitudes, aphorisms or panaceas. Except for maybe Xanax. A Xanax wouldn’t go amiss right now.

Nor would the address for Alec Baldwin. He looks like he has a few demons he needs to exorcise. We could probably do some happy damage to one another.

on being fingered with rings

Marriage is a contract that I may never make, and yet I like being fingered by men with wedding rings. It’s not that I can feel the ring. Wedding rings tend toward the slim and the flat. I’ve never had the experienced the interior wriggling of a finger with a ring rococo as Liberace’s , a skull bauble thick as Keith Richard’s, a chunk of metal clunky as Robert Lee Morris’s Superman. The rings that have been inside me have been modest, prudent, utilitarian bands signaling commitment.

There have been three of them in reality and one in my imagination. Of the three real rings, one man was unquestionably cheating and after we fucked, would stomp around the room muttering, “I’m damned. I’m going to hell.” That was not the best part of our sexual congress, and I didn’t keep the affair going very long. (Parenthetically, I might add, shortly after our brief tryst ended, this man fell in love with another woman, and now he, his wife, and this woman live separately in what is by all accounts an amicable polyamory. Bully for him.) One of them lived in a state of prolonged commitment to both his wife and his unabashed affairs with multiple women. He was very open about it all to the women in his life, almost business-like, and yet quite caring to me. He interested me intellectually, but not enough to see him more than twice. The third, and most recent, lives in a happily open relationship with his wife of several years. He has lovers; she has lovers; it all seems quite idyllic.

I feel conflicted about cheating. On the one hand, it’s just not a very nice thing to do to the person to whom you’ve plighted your troth. It isn’t honest, and it smacks of cowardice. A person should strive not to be pusillanimous, a word that feels so much like what it means as to be nearly onomatopoetic. On the other, I tend to be compassionate to people in pain, and often—though not always—people who cheat are people in pain. They’re putting their feelings into actions, not into words, and that, unless it’s interpretive dance, is often a problem. When I consider infidelity, I am caught betwixt me moral core and between my compassion. Mostly, I come down on the side of not cheating, if you’re at all interested.

But this piece of writing is less about the squishy ethical territory of infidelity and more about how I like being fingered by a finger with a wedding ring. Clearly, when the finger is diddling me, I can’t see the ring. I can’t even feel the ring. So the pleasure of the ring comes neither from the visual nor from the sensual. It’s a purely imaginative power. It’s a pleasure that rests in the seat of all pleasure—my pinky-grey and corrugated brain.

It’s difficult for me to put my finger on the exact spot of that imaginary pleasure. I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that part is powered by the shock of the illicit thrill, if indeed the finger belonging to the man fingering me is infidel. Like almost every other human, I do feel pleasure in transgression, and crossing this boundary, like all the strange others that for one reason or another give me the good down-low tingle, nudges whatever purely physical pleasure there is into electrically-charged territory. But the illicitness isn’t it in and of itself.

I know that it’s not because the man, the imagined man, the one without the ring, the one whose ring I imagined and in imagining it found great delight, was Donny, my now-X and then erstwhile fiancé. It was his imagined not-ring that prodded me to gyrate indecorously one sunny August afternoon, his naked fingers twisting and turning inside me. My mind furnished his finger with a ring. It bedighted his third finger on his left hand with a ring, and though neither the ring nor even possibly that exact finger was rubbing the walls of my pussy like a magic lamp, it was real enough to me, and I came from the concept as much as from the reality.

Which all leads me to believe it’s not the cheating that I like. It’s the abstract concept of commitment. It’s the symbolism of the ring, this piece of metal that our culture uses to denote those of us who have made a pact with another human from those of us who haven’t. It doesn’t matter whether the man has committed to me—though clearly my fetishization of the ring in general and my somatic response to Donny’s fictive ring in specific suggests that a commitment to me would be ideal—it’s that this man has committed, for good, bad, or ugly to someone.

I’m sure that my ring thing speaks silent tomes about me. Commitment is something that has eluded me. I, like Mr Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, have reached Q. I cannot, however, reach R, and I should very much like to, even if I suspect that commitment, like the lighthouse, will seem a lot less mystical once I get there, whenever it does, however late in life, in whatever way I’ve been altered by my own world war. I’m sure that my ring thing is fertile ground for solipsism. I think, however, I’ll prefer to hold onto it with my febrile erotic imaginings, flickering, imaginary and powerful.

on my 2,500 mile booty call

A distance of 2456.6 miles is quite a lot to travel for a booty call, though I might add that the booty of the man in question traveled still further yet. The sheer distance—all those fat atlas inches that add up to two mountain ranges, three time zones, eleven states, lots of major rivers and the aforementioned almost 2,500 miles—intimates that this call wasn’t just for any booty. This call was, when I first conceived of it, the clash of sexual titans.

I’d often imagined this man in any number of prurient ways with multiples of configurations. Though human bodies have a relatively finite number of ways in which they can reasonably interlock, or do so without taunting gravity and without undue physical strain, I had thumbed through a heavy battalion of possibilities after meeting this specific man for the first time a couple of years ago. That first time we met, we were chaste as anchorites. It did little more than provide mulch for the fecund fields of my polymorphously perverse imagination.

Individually this man and I have quite the galactic bodies of sexual experience. We have, as consenting adults, consented a lot, consented early, consented often and consented to things your mother might have warned you about had she sufficient imagination to envision the sweaty-naughty thoughts that have made you glow tumescent. Individually, this man and I have quite the reputations in our relative and Doppler-widening circles. Thinking about our eventual tryst, which I did a lot in the months between his proposal of it and the time it came to fruition, I imagined our bodies clanging together with seismic force and ringing out like the battling swords of Norse Gods.

Imagining our trysting, I saw visions of dark plums frugging in my head. Unspeakable acts, or nearly so, things that left marks, things that made me walk like John Wayne for a week, things that embarrassed even me, things I’d never done before, things I’d never do again, things with ropes, buzzers, hats. I imagined the kind of erotic play that legends wish they had. Casanova, Rochester, Anaïs Nin, Mata Hari, Wilt Chamberlain: they would all quail in the face of our mutual enjoyment, either that or they would give us a roseate high five for a job very well done.

And yet, when we met, this man and I, in that beige, studiously inoffensive hotel room, the clash of the sexual titans it was not. What is still stranger is this: it was a good thing that it wasn’t.

There were several points in the planning and execution of this trip when I nearly backed out. The final point came when upon arriving at JFK at 6:13 for my 6:30 flight, I was too late to board and had to wait three hours for the next flight. Exhausted and nervous, I almost took it as a sign from…something that I should change my mind, turn my tail and head home. I didn’t. I stayed. I waited it out. I sat my ass in a hard plastic seat and I paid too much for wireless and I mourned Jet Blue and I made the 9:30 a.m. flight.

That first day there in California in this weird, plastic city full of weird, plastic restaurants and weird, plastic imposed fun, I felt a new strange shade of weird, plastic displacement. Still, it felt nice to see this man whom I barely knew but liked. We hugged. We ate baba ganoush. We slept in separate beds. We did not kiss. We were, once again, anchorites, and I was giddy with exhaustion.

The next morning, a day that rose with an unseemly earliness and a thick egg-yolk light, we showered, individually. We lay on a bed, and we kissed. My towel was, as I’ve mentioned, plucked off my body like a leaf off an artichoke. We, well, what’s the best way to put it? Words fail me a bit because what it most felt like was making love, though without actual love—and what I feel may or may not be love, but it’s a love like I love a friend with a devoted abstraction devoid of anything I could exactly call passion—it’s hard to know what to call it. But it was smooth, it was soft, it was near silent, it was gentle, and it was without clash at all, much less anything else titanic.

It was human, and it was nice. It was nicer than nice; it was quite lovely, actually. It felt good, and it was fairly tame. Rose petals on the bed would not have felt out of character. It was the vanilla custard of sex, and it made me recall how vanilla custard can be quite tasty. Vanilla custard can, in fact, hit the spot. Which this did, thank you very much.

And when the custard hit that spot, and my hips up-arched like a Roman bridge, he on his knees towering like a telemon, and I started to feel my banshee wail burble up from my gullet like a geyser of unstoppable sound, the man clapped his hand over my mouth and I was silenced. We fucked, quieter than mice, silent as slumbering lambs, so hushed were we that had we been fornicating in the reading room of the New York Public Library, we would not have been shushed. We fucked, nearly noiseless, a few times in a couple days.

The thing is, it was nice. It was nice in bed and it was nice out. We made for good company—compatible enough that I genuinely enjoyed this man’s intimate presence, but not so compatible that now that I’m home I pine. I feel no pine. I am pineless. It’s quite swell, actually. I quite recommend it to anyone who has been suffering a slow and painful break-up as I have since last September when my erstwhile fiancé picked a vicious fight with me, signaling the beginning of what would turn out to be a long and drawn-out breaking of my heart. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as sexual healing, though to be true to both the experience and this man, the healing came from much more than just the sex.

It’s hard to find the right combination of booty upon which one can reliably call. I am, right now, very happy being very much alone; I am experiencing a touch of agromania. I am swathed in quite the circle of invisible bubble wrap. I am feeling exceptionally self-protective and often keenly hungry for solitude. Still, I needed to be touched inside and out. I needed the press of lips, the silk-steel feel of cock, the caress of a caring human, the ineffable release of orgasm. I needed the kinds words this man said to me. I needed his tongue, both literal and figurative. I needed the whole kit and caboodle, the complete 2,500 mile booty call. I needed it to be just perfect enough and no more than that.

And as the California clock tick-tick-ticked close, closer, closest to done, I needed for it to be over. I needed to get on that plane and I needed to come home. Blissful, thankful to another and blissfully and thankfully alone.

stupid, stupid UTI

Ok. I can’t forbear writing about it anymore. It’s inescapable, and try as I might, I can’t avoid its pointed reality. The real reason I haven’t written is not so much that I’ve been exhausted or that I’ve been busy—though both are true—and less this: I have a urinary tract infection of simply epic proportions. It is consuming every iota of my waking attention, and I have been awake a lot.

If you’ve never had a UTI, you can’t imagine the simple and occasionally exquisite agony of being aware that you are, indeed, equipped with a bladder and a urethra. Aside from the quotidian experience of feeling that I need to pee, you know, normally, I enjoy living my life in a blissful ignorance that there’s anything surrounding said need to pee. I like forgetting that I have the whole kidney-ureter-bladder-urethra kit and caboodle. I like that area to remain anonymously functioning, free of attention, and vaguely pleasurable. I like my pee-area to be like a stoplight: necessary, sometimes mildly annoying, but on the whole completely unremarkable.

The UTI feels like there’s something small and sharp boring its way out of your nethers, and it is a feeling unmitigated except for when you actually pee, and then it flames out in a great internal conflagration. Plus, it’s gross. I could describe the fetid particulars of my urine’s current state in language so florid that you might not consume anything but organic cranberry juice for days, but I’ll censor myself and let your imagination give the wide brushstrokes for you. Suffice to say, this is not the pale, pretty posy-happy pee of usual. And I’ll leave it at that.

See the really insidious thing about the urinary tract infection is not so much the pain—though the pain is extra-special pyrotechnic painful. It’s not the lingering sensation that you desperately have to pee, and then when you go to pee, only about a dropper full of urine dribbles out, reluctantly. It’s not the general discomfort wherein you can’t sit, stand, lie, walk, fidget, lounge, lunge, laugh or loll without feeling like you’d like to take a large ice cream scoop and just pull out the whole bladder entourage, consequences be damned. It’s not the fact that you have to take Cipro to get rid of it, and that if you don’t, you run the risk of having the infection crawl up your urinary tract and, like Nazis into Poland, lay waste to your kidneys. No, the really insidious thing about urinary tract infections is the misguided belief that sometimes—sometimes—you can cure them yourself.

I am a big fan of sidestepping conventional medicine whenever possible. Peeled garlic, plain yogurt, St. John’s Wort, Vitamin C, colloidal silver: I’ve used them all and more to combat a range of illnesses wide as an acrobat’s knees. I have bought cranberry juice, extract, and capsules in bulk and consumed them like M&Ms for UTIs in specific. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a crap shoot—or a pee shoot, really. And this time, it was to no avail. I am off in eight minutes to pick up my Cipro from CVS. Not that I’m counting the minutes.

And the thing is, I knew—knew with a titanium certainty—as I lay in bed with my long-distance lover this past weekend, lay drowsy and limp as a grimalkin in the sun, knew full well and knew with a consenting adult’s lifetime of experience that my choice not to pop up out of bed with the alacrity of a whack-a-mole could result in this pernicious UTI. I knew it then, and I ignored it. Somehow, nestled in that hotel room, blank and beige and inoffensive as Ellen DeGeneres, I thought that somehow, some way, this time the UTI wouldn’t materialize. I could have peed and staved off this hellish infection, and I didn't.

Somehow, as I laid sated and smiling with my long-distance lover, I thought the magic of a new lover, the ever-unfolding promise of that utopian space of a hotel room, the whole unfathomable unlikeliness of the entire erotic enchilada, would protect me like a talisman. That somehow, some way, the UTI would see me, smile, and happy for me, pass me by.

I was wrong. Stupid, stupid UTI.

Image comes from the New York Times health guide on urinary tract infections, an article that gently points out exactly the breadth and depth of my denial.

36 hours

Yesterday I saw Donny. It lasted around two hours and illustrated both why I love him and why we aren't together. He gave me my stuff. We kissed. He left.

Today, I have an appointment for a Brazilian and a mani-pedi. I'm going to wash my floors, pick my prettiest underthings, and pack my suitcase.

Tomorrow, I hop a flight to Calli very early in the morning. By this time tomorrow, I'll be somewhere over the rockies and on my way to meet a man.

I may not sleep at all tonight.

the loneliness of the long-distance writer

So here’s the thing. Of late, I’ve been the one not so much waving as drowning. Admittedly, as badly as I’ve felt in the past few weeks—and I’ve felt bad; I’ve been breaking into tears at the oddest moments; for example, today when I opened the letter sent from the Indonesian Fruit Bat I adopted through Bat Conservation International, I wept—as badly as I’ve felt, it hasn’t been so bad, relatively. And yet, even if it's not incessantly-daydream-of-guillotine-bad, it has still been pretty freaking bad. Pretty bad indeed.

Overwhelmed would be the way I’d put it. Overwhelmed and alone. I’ve been dipping into the loneliness of the long-distance writer, and it is a crazy-making endeavor indeed. No wonder why so many authors have been addicts, dipsomaniacs and tipplers of sundry stripes. There’s nothing quite like being holed up in your atelier, spelunking about in your head, sifting through the thought-nuggets you've brought to light, and then trying to translate those ephemeral gems into those most cozening beggars—words. It’s an endeavor best made for people who have, whether through doughty hearts or total foolhardiness, made peace with the inescapable fact that deep down everyone is more than a little insane.

I have seen the madwoman in the attic and she is I.

It’s fine, though, really. I spent so much time alone when I was growing up that I have the backwoodsman’s uneasiness around people. Alright, that’s hyperbole, but I’m definitely the most extroverted introvert I know. Stressed as I have been of late, I imagine a world devoid of people. I imagine being able to walk the streets of Gotham invisible to other people, for it’s really more that other people are aware of me that discomforts me than it is the other people themselves. They have every right to be there. Me, I’m not entirely always so sure.

The visible voice behind the seminal eighteenth-century newspaper The Spectator was the eponymous Mr. Spectator. Though written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Mr. Spectator was the putative author. Not unsurprisingly, Mr. Spectator was a watcher. In the first volume of the newspaper, first printed 1 March 1711, Mr. Spectator claims to have lived his life in near total silence. “I threw away my rattle before I was two months old,” he avers and says that he never “spoke three sentences together” in his whole life. Silent, Mr. Spectator is free to look and listen—and of course to write. He says in that first issue, “I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am resolved to do it in Writing; and to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die.” I can relate to Mr. Spectator.

I’m not silent. I can easily be the center of attention, but what feels most natural to me is a nearly numinous state. I wish I could glide silent and apparitional through the world, unnoticed. Like Mr. Spectator, I like to watch (except for sex—then and only then do I like to be watched). Like Mr. Spectator, I am resolved to put myself in writing. Actually, it’s less a resolution than it is something I can no longer avoid. I might do well to ask the same question as the much beleaguered Alexander Pope, my favorite eighteenth-century Catholic hunchback genius, “Why did I write? what sin to me unknown/ Dipp'd me in ink, my parents', or my own?” It’s a peccant muse that taps me on the shoulder. I’d rather have been a dancer.

I never “lisp’d in numbers”; I’m no genius. But here I am, writing, writing more and more, and getting paid for it more often and with more money. I never expected it, but there it is. And here I am growing ever more reclusive by the moment. I’m hermit-etically sealed.

Last Friday when I went to see Mike Doughty, I was briefly separated from my friend when we wended our way down the many stairs and out into the night. I came out this exit and found this really very good-looking man making eye contact with me. He approached me. I froze.

Damn, I thought, he’s attracted to me. I’m attractive. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

He stopped me to ask directions to another club. He made non-stop eye-contact. He lit a cigarette meaningfully. He cupped his hands around the match like they were holding a breast. I gave him the directions in fits and starts, suddenly stuttering aphasic. I gave him half-wrong directions (they were also half right, but I suppose that directions, unlike glasses, are never half-full). My friend finally arrived and I breathed a sigh of relief that I could leave this attractive man, tall and dark and gleaming stubble and matte black leather and the smell of man and smoke.

“I thought I was interrupting a tête-à-tête,” she said. She was, and I felt glad she had.

People freak me the fuck out. I’ve never felt comfortable being looked at, and I have always been. I have been looking forward to slinking off into the graceful invisibility of middle age. It has not yet happened. Instead, I hibernate—and aestivate—here, cloistered in my head and my apartment, both fearing company and longing for it, both wishing that I’d accepted the handsome stranger’s silent invitation to go show him the way and fervently glad I didn’t, both lonesome and independent, equally.

hear, there, tonight

Technically, I'm still on hiatus in order to finish up my book proposal, which I might add is an experience akin to watching honey freeze, which is to say slow, but somehow sweet. However, I wanted to let you know one last time that I'll be reading tonight as part of Rachel Kramer Bussel's In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series. It's at Happy Endings, a former massage parlor, at 302 Broome Street. Doors open at 7:00, the reading starts at 8:00, and I'm reading dead motherfucking last, so you can expect me to read from about 9:35-9:45, give or take a few minutes.

Do come and say hi. I'll be the blonde in the reading glasses, oatmeal knit dress, caramel boots and bemused expression.

Also, thank you to the ever-charming Karl Elvis and to Simon, my simunchy, for the lovely flowers you two sent me in honor of my blogday. You're the best virtual friends a girl could have. Kissykiss, indeed.

hi! hiatus!

I've promised myself to finish my book proposal by the end of this month, so I'm going to take a little break for the next week or two.

I will, however, be posting on Wednesday 19 March because that's my pretty dumb blogging anniversary. I will also be reading an excerpt of my story "Stuck at Work and Late for a Date" from the recently published anthology Yes, Sir! at Rachel Kramer Bussel's celebrated In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series the day after, Thursday 20 March, should you want to come and wish me happy blogday in person.

In the meantime, there's no writing like old writing. Enjoy some smut. Enjoy smut that's just butt. Enjoy some smut that's slurpy with porn-starry spit. Enjoy some squeaky clean pop (no poop here!). Enjoy some old-fashioned emo-tastic solipsism (complete with some solecisms). Or just enjoy the smorgasbord of goodness that are my personal, hand-picked favorites, yarns knitted by my hands especially for you.

hear, there, everywhere

Rachel Kramer Bussel has asked me to fill in for one of her readers at next week's In The Flesh readings. Just as it always does, this In The Flesh will take place on the third Thursday of the month, or 20 March for this month, at the hip lounge Happy Endings on 302 Broome St in glamorous New York City, New York.

Last time, I read as part of a true confessions line-up, and I read a piece about fucking a clown. This time, however, I'll be reading from my story in Rachel's latest anthology, Yes, Sir! If you live in or near New York, you probably know that In The Flesh is more fun than a barrel of risqué and poorly trained monkeys. I really loved reading last year, and I'm very excited about getting the opportunity to do it again.

Come down and see what I look like when I'm not in your imagination.

wicked busy and hoping for forgiveness

I'm terribly sorry. I suck, I know. And not, this time, in the good, slippery porn-starry-spit way. I haven't had the breath to write, for I've been running a personal ultra-marathon, and what with that big strike of Gatorade handlers and those binding Lycra leggings, color me too pooped to hunt-and-peck at the end of the day. At least I've risen from my funk that kept me from doing my dishes or sweeping the floor or much of anything beyond going fetal.

In lieu of a real, bona-fide, fully-fledged post, which I will write tomorrow--I promise, here's a link to  Lucrezia Magazine, where you'll find a piece of mine all hot off the digital press, though it is based on pieces I've written here on my pretty dumb things.

Also, I've a little update on the contest wherein one of you will win a fully vibrating and fun-filled My Buddy Boudoir package. Rather than pick a winner myself, which I can't because I love all of my readers equally, the My Buddy Powers-That-Be will pick a winner for me. You still have until Tuesday, 11 March, let's say noonish, to enter. Do so, if you've not already.

keepin' it short, if not real

Ok, so my friend Terry Teachout, who may or may not be the mystery date lurking behind the door of my lascivious future, has posted his six-word memoir. I was, therefore, compelled to write mine.

Here it is: Lycra to literary, not Diablo Cody.

I've also been procrastinating like a rabid weasel with ADD on the site Free Rice, which tests your vocabulary while feeding people through the UN World Food Program.

Finally, don't forget to enter the contest. Just send me an email or leave me a comment telling me why you should be the lucky recipient of a free My Buddy package. Send me something good by 11 March, and you could receive a big, innocuous cardboard box chock full of vibrating fun.

UPDATE: a friend has written two six-word memoirs for me that are far better than my own. I suppose, though, that as she wrote them, they're more six-word biographies than memoirs. Here they are:

G-stringed dancer, bared all on paper
G-stringed at Flashdancers, naked in literature.

Another friend observed that my earlier six-word memoir suggests that I "have Diablo Cody on the brain." He's probably right.

robert browning knows more about love than hallmark

Not Shakespeare’s earthy sonnets, complex as humus. Nor those of Neruda, strong and deep and full of wonder. Not the hurrying pastorals of Marvell, nor the fleshy conceits of Donne, or the stark and stalwart modernism of Auden. Not even the exultant song of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. No, my favorite love poem is one by Robert Browning, a man not known for his love poetry, unless you consider his torturous, sometimes tortuous, dramatic monologues of killers to be love poetry, and I suppose they are, of a sort.

My very favorite love poem, the one that reliably brings me to tears whenever I read it is Browning’s “Two in the Campagna,” published in his 1855 volume Men and Women. It’s not a poem much read or studied. Other poems get the notoriety. Poems like the eldritch “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and the very fine, morally questionable “Fra Lippo Lippi” get the notice. This one, my favorite, only gets read by those of us who have fallen in love with Browning’s poetic compassion for tweaked, the twisted, the casually murderous, and just keep on reading his other stuff for fun.

Browning was not an autobiographical poet. No Sexton or Plath, no Rossetti (neither the florid Dante nor his more reserved sister Christina), no Swinburne, no Baudelaire, Browning didn’t spend his poetic energies on translating his quotidian experience into transcendent lines. He didn’t mine his own experience for his art, not much, not often, not palpably. And yet, there’s something about this poem, my poem, that seems to sit pretty in pain and autobiographic in nature.

“I wonder how you feel to-day,” the poem begins, and I see the two of them, Robert and Elizabeth side by side in the wild fields that in the mid-nineteenth century surrounded Rome. “We sat down on the grass, to stray…This morn of Rome and May” it continues. I imagine them, the smell of old earth growing new things, the slender green of the grass, and I hope that Flounce, Elizabeth’s spaniel, ran happily about them, barking. Browning’s relationship with his wife is one of profound poetic whimsy—A.S. Byatt’s Possession is only the most recent of novels based on their love, but there have been others. Browning and Barrett Browning had a kind of love story that can only inspire more love stories.

In 1854, when Browning penned this poem, Barrett Browning would have had just over five years to live. They had gone to Italy in no small part because Barrett Browning was ill, possibly with tuberculosis, and Italy was where British folk went to heal.

In the sixth line, the poem turns. “For me, I touched a thought, I know,” says the speaker, who may be Browning and may not (I like to think it is he), and likens the thought to “the turns of thread the spiders throw.” And this is why the poem slays me, because it is as much about love as it is about writing and it is as much about the impossibility of both as it is about the intense necessity of each.

“Help me to hold it!” the speaker exclaims. His thought, he finds has eluded his grasp. It was there; it is now gone. There is only the haunt of the thought, and who better to turn to in order to find it but to her, his lover. Seeming to trail the thought, he watches it scamper over weeds and walls, through insects and up slopes, across the wilding landscape that surrounds Rome. (I imagine Rome rising like a leviathan out of the greenery. I see its white domes off in the distance. The space between is dotted with rotting ruins and hunched peasants scratching their lives from the land. The sun pours liquid and hot.)

All this mass of nature waxes heavy and erotic and there is the lull of bees: “Such life here, through such lengths of hours/ Such miracles performed in play/ Such primal naked forms of flowers,” the speaker says, getting derailed by the sheer effusive lushness of the country. “O my dove,” he says, “Let us be unashamed of soul/ As earth lies bare to heaven above!” And then they seem bare inches from some prelapsarian fucking. Birds do it; bees do it; let’s do it; let’s have sex outdoors.

And then another turn. “How is it under our control/ To love or not to love?” he asks. Our expectation—my expectation, anyway—is that here the speaker will launch into something ecstatic, something wide and free and liquid and calm, something as accepting as Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” It doesn’t. Browning, the husband, or his speaker, it’s hard to tell who speaks in this poem—there is no discernable character here—rejects such a premise.

He says, “I would that you were all to me,/ You that are just so much, no more.” It’s heartbreaking, and it’s true. And yet the poem is a love poem, it is, in fact, the only love poem I’ve read that accepts the naked and pained fact of love: we will always be separate from our lover. Try as we might to smash our bodies back together, try as we will to express how we feel, try as we can to share our lives, to unite and not untie, we never, ever will succeed. We are apart, even as we are together.

Our love, however great it is, will, except for brief and splendid moments, remain as elusive as that thought. This poem bravely recognizes this; the speaker says:

I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul's warmth,— I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak—
Then the good minute goes.

It’s a terrible moment, and a beautiful one, that reduces the poet to dashes. The lines break and break again. The poem, like the moment, cannot hold. The rhythm of the poem too, the uneven rhyme of four tetrameter lines followed by a single trimeter, suggests that the best you can hope for is one perfect moment in a mass of instability. (And this is why I’ll never be a poet. Poetry’s necessity of rhythm and meter and inherent mathiness are inimical to my brain.)

At the end of the poem, after “the good minute goes,” the speaker returns to his far-flung thought: “Just when I seemed about to learn!/Where is the thread now? Off again!” On the cusp of rediscovering that thought, it’s gone, evanescent in the light. It whisks off, leaving the speaker, the poet with the “Infinite passion, and the pain/ Of finite hearts that yearn.”

That’s the couplet that slays me, that nearly inevitably reduces me to tears for Browning and his wife and the crumbling ruins that surround Rome and all the love I’ve had and expressed in these tiny driplets because the moment passes before I can hold it, and when it’s over, it’s just too late. And these are the lines too that argue too why love and writing and writing about love matter: because we feel more than we can bear, we think more than we know, and the beauty as well as the burden comes when we try our lowly best to write those mercurial moments into being.

You can read the poem in its entirety after the gap.

romance is...two little kids holding hands and a pair of great steely balls

Last week a magazine editor sent me, and presumably a whole passel of other female writers, a query about what we found to be romantic. He urged me (and the invisible others) to riff, rant and otherwise rail about romance.

Here's what I responded:

Romance is, for me, all about context. What I consider romantic from a long-term love can be very different from what I consider romantic in a one-night stand. Sometimes being romantic equals being simply, unabashedly emo. Other times, it’s synonymous with being nakedly erotic. It really depends on the guy, where we are in the relationship, and what else is going on in my life with and without him.

In my life there have been men who could not have done anything romantic. It wasn’t their faults. They did all the right things, things that had other men done them would have slayed me, but because I wasn’t emotionally attached to them, or because I was angry at them, or because I suspected  the motivations for their grand, romantic gestures, I could not view anything they did as romantic. They could have strewn the ground with roses, created a candle-lit path, and led me blindfolded while reciting Browning to a bed covered in Agent Provacateur lingerie and tickets to Paris, and my response would have been, “Wow! Seven p.m.! Wanna watch The Simpsons rerun?”

That said, the one thing I consider to be romantic—emotionally and/or erotically—is when men surprise me. Maybe it’s something simple, like bringing me a flower, or pushing me against a wall and kissing me with fervor. Maybe it’s something more complex, like asking me out for dinner and a movie, but surprising me with a trip to the Planetarium and a handful of mushrooms. Maybe it’s just sending me a book I might like, or putting a hand under my skirt in a restaurant. Whatever the act is, it falls under the ineffable heading of catching me off-guard, but in a good way.

The thing about the well-done surprise act is less what the man does as it is that it shows that he has pondered what I might like, read my mood correctly, and has the cojones to take a steely chance. I like men who take risks. Risks to me are romantic. I also like men who show that they have been paying attention to me, even when I wasn’t dropping hints. It’s one thing to have a dude pick up on a hint; it’s something entirely different and vastly more fulfilling for him to take a chance on something because he’s paid close enough notice of what I’ve said to think he just might get it right.

The absolute least romantic thing in the world is whining. Nothing makes me grow a big metaphoric rubbery one like a grown man sounding like a petulant toddler. I don’t enjoy infantilization in anyone but in infants. Men who whine or do the big puppy-dog eyes or thumb in the mouth kind of crap make me want to slap them, and not in a good way. Whether we’re talking sex or feeling, nothing—absolutely nothing—is less romantic than acting like a little boy. If I wanted to get naughty, dirty sweaty with a little boy, I’d be a pedophile. I’m not. Act like a man, and you’re already on the road to romance.

Other things that fall into the decidedly unromantic category: worrying about how much something costs, playing possum in the face of erotic initiation, failure to appreciate effort on my part to be romantic my own darn self, doing the same-old same-old dating two-step, looking at a clock or a watch, playing it safe.

Romance doesn’t have to cause you to call and raise your credit limit. It can be free. Download and print out a poem and stick it somewhere I’ll find it. Stop me as we’re walking, look me in the eye and tell me I’m beautiful. Wash my hair and give me head in the shower. Just take a moment and show me you care about me and/or want to fuck me. It’s pretty simple, really.

Romance is risk. Take the latter and you’ll create the former.

So I’m curious, what do you—both you women and you men—consider to be romantic?

sick as the proverbial pooch

I have been hit with the killer flu. Forgive my paucity in posts or interest in life beyond my bed and DVDs of television series.

All I have energy to say right now is that the njoy Eleven is indisputably all that. Donny and I continue together but without any happy resolution. The book contract for the book that is not my book but will be written by me is in the hands of negotiators. I wrote this dating article that was put on the front page of Yahoo and it garnered some really funny comments and email responses. Apparently, Boeing only makes parts of the F-22 Raptor. And apparently, that particular mistake of mine really twists the panties of some airplane aficionado readers. Who knew.

Beyond that I'm reading a book about Zombies and another about Italian wines and between the two and the effects of my flu, I'm having some seriously Buñuelian dreams.

That's all.

Ps. Just for fun, here are the two emails I received in response to the Yahoo article by people who seem completely offended by my factual inaccuracies (which facts, parenthetically, I garnered from Wikipedia, thereby illustrating once more that you can't trust the Wiki. Love the Wiki, but trust it as you would a lover with a history of infidelity, for the Wiki will fuck you). Mea culpa, boys. I am sorry.

From a reader called "Michael":

Chelsea,

I couldn’t help but notice the very glaring error in your article,  “In many ways, learning to date isn't a whole lot different from learning how to fly a Boeing F-22 Raptor”.  What is wrong with this statement is that Boeing only makes part of the F-22 Raptor, Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor.  Boeing is a sub-contractor to Lockheed Martin on the F-22 Raptor program. One problem with making an error due to mis-information or insufficient research is that the rest of the article’s credibility becomes suspect.  

Michael

And one from "DMH":

I didn't even make it through 4 sentences of your article before the errors begun.

Boeing is not the maker of the F-22 Raptor.  They produce sections of the plane but Lockheed Martin is the overall manufacturer.

And yes, I work for Boeing.

ripped off by a douche, part 2, back in time

My experience teaching has taught me that if a person plagiarizes once, he or she will do it again. Therefore, it came as no surprise to me when a friend discovered that the plagiarist I alluded to yesterday had stolen from me in at least one other post.

In my previous post on this matter, I forbore naming the blog or the individual who stole from me. I hoped that writing a post about her, but stopping short of naming her, would be enough to shame her into contrition. While I certainly contacted the site administrators for the two sites where she posted my content, I felt fine about just letting the administrators handle the up-close and personal dirty work, leaving me free to vent my righteous anger in an amorphous and unspecified fashion. The posts in question, both on the individual’s blog and on her MySpace page, were removed, though unsurprisingly I received no apology.

Today, I can forbear no longer. Clearly, my being polite doesn’t mean much to my plagiarist, for if it did, she would have carefully cleaned her blog of all content that she had appropriated from my site. She could have taken more responsibility than merely stating that she was taking a leave of absence from blogging; she could have removed the articles she stole and no one but she would have been the wiser. She did not. I am, therefore, left with little recourse but to name the plagiarist. She is Jadedgirl, and I wish to shame her publicly.

Here is the passage my friend read to me from Jadedgirl’s blog post entitled “The Welcome Mat…or a summary of the Jaded year in dating”:

Directly after this time, recuperating from my fling with my ex, I took up with Doug. And I began to fall for him. So I asked him, after several consecutive weekends we’d spent together having tender, rose-petal-strewn-bed, Sarah McLaughlin sex, snuggling post-shower like little bunnies, if he thought he was going to fall in love with me.

A couple of months later…he said he wasn’t sure…as you all know by reading.

This began a period of time, of course stretching through the summer, when I spent a lot of time marinating in my own self-pity and listening to Jeff Buckley. Want to get in touch with your inner Robert Smith? Listen to Jeff Buckley. A couple of choruses of “Hallelujah,” and you too will be wondering where you put those straight razors.

But I got through it. I began to come to a nearer understanding of what I wanted in a man, what I was ready to give, what was frightening me, and how I could cope with all of the chest-clenching angst surrounding these realizations. And in the midst of all of the crashing, gilt-colored leftover salmon depression of the summer, I began to feel some kind of clarity.

Not exactly translucency, but a lift in the mist.

I had, of course,  still been in touch and in love with Doug all through the summer. And we have even had some tender moments, and sweetness that would lead me to believe in actions and not words.  But lately I found myself a little melancholy, and unsure of what I need here, and my hopes for him, my hunger for him. And I am ok with the steadiness, but not the question marks in the air. So we are where we are still…in limbo.

But it’s ok…they know me here.

But I have been really, very clear with him about what I want, and I believe that he heard me. So after a certain amount of dancing around one another like porcupines in heat, wanting to be with him and feeling very defensive at the same time, we are still committed to whatever it is we have committed to.

Note the amazing similarity to my 21 March 2005 post titled “gunshy”:

During this time, recuperating from my fling with my fictional character, I took up with Donny. And I began to fall for him. So I asked him, after several consecutive weekends we’d spent together having tender, rose-petal-strewn-bed, Sarah McLaughlin anal sex (more about anal some other time), snuggling post-shower like little bunnies, if he thought he was going to fall in love with me.

A couple of days later, he said, no. So much for Donny. I thought.

This began a period of time, of course stretching from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, when I spent a lot of time marinating in my own self-pity and listening to Jeff Buckley. Want to get in touch with your inner Elliot Smith? Listen to Jeff Buckley. A couple of choruses of “Hallelujah,” and you too will be wondering where you put those straight razors.

But I got through it. I began to come to a nearer understanding of what I wanted in a man, what I was ready to give, what was frightening me, and how I could cope with all of the chest-clenching angst surrounding these realizations. And in the midst of all of the crashing, gilt-colored depression of the holiday hoop-la, I began to feel some kind of clarity.

Not exactly translucency, but a lift in the mist…..

And I was really, very clear with him about what I wanted, and I believed that he heard me. So after a certain amount of dancing around one another like porcupines in heat, wanting to be with him and feeling very defensive at the same time, we slept together.

See, here’s the thing. I know that Jadedgirl’s blog is a tiny, little blog. It’s a nothing blog. I know that in linking her here, I’m giving her more traffic in a day than she sees in a year of blogging. It’s not about how many people have read my words and thought that they were hers. It’s about the fact that my words are my property, and when people steal my words, they make diffuse the voice that is mine. My voice, the voice that makes me money, that expresses who I am and what I think and what I hope and what I’ve experienced, the voice that is the contract I make with myself and with my readers, becomes eroded.

And I will not stand for it.

Jadedgirl, you are a liar, a thief and a traitor to writers. I would feel sorry for you if the righteous anger left any room for it.

flu, or the pause that fails to refresh

I'm sick. My elbows hurt. Usually, I'm blissfully unaware of my elbows. I like it that way. The less aware I am of my joints, the better. Often, because of the years of bump and grind in high heels on thinly covered cement floors, and because of the years of running, lifting and jumping I did in order to be hott enough to bump and grind in high heels, my knees hurt. My elbows not so much. Which means when my elbows hurt, I know I'm sick, and sick is what I am.

It's a flu, and I have it because my elbows tell me so (along with the fever, the near-narcolepsy, and a few other somatic indicators). It may be a day or two before I can write anything sustained or cogent or at all.

So here a few of my favorite pieces of yore:

drive, she said, which narrates a compelling story of riding in cars with boys
angels?, which looks at women who have made their living being looked at
the chewbacca defense, which discusses my love for one furry thing
part 24: answers to smaller questions, which gives a typology of male strip club patrons
new york, new york, that city liquid in the night, which provides a double slice of my life
quotidian sex and other tiny intimacies, which tries to talk about real fucking
boy/girl/boy, which describes my threesome which was more less than more

I'm going to go self-medicate with chicken soup and Alka-Seltzer cold tablets and then I'm going to watch Buffy and imagine a world without elbows.

nibbles

Given the controversy my latest polemic stirred up, and given that my narrating the recent travails of my relationship fares little better among my readers, and given that I'm not currently having sex and can barely be bothered to masturbate, I've decided that I'm going to play it safe and tell you what I had to eat today:

• 2 12-oz cups of  half de-caf, half caf coffees with half and half and one-half packet of Splenda
• 1 bowl of Irish Oats with soy milk and a couple of tablespoons of maple syrup
• 1/2 breast of a roasted chicken with 1/2 of the skin, the other half of which I gave to my pets
• 1 whole Nittany apple

That is all.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am going out for Mexican later and will probably be consuming some or all of the following: 1 pomegranate mojito; 1/2 plate of chicken fajitas; a large glop of guac and a handful of corn chips. Alert the media.

Now go on with your bad selves and try to find something controversial in that.

have the rolling stones killed, or happy birthday to me

It is indeed, as the charming Viviane has announced, my birthday. I am, in addition to Ethan Hawke, Rebecca Romjin, Sally Field and John Philip Sousa, today a birthday slut.

I'll be enjoying it by meeting with the people surrounding the book project and then a dinner at my favorite French restaurant with a few girlfriends. You can celebrate it by some brief bliztkrieg bopping to the legendary boys from Brooklyn.

kissykiss,

chelsea g.

son of distant cousins of letters they've written

A few weeks ago, I received a question to answer as part of my on-going Yahoo! Dating and Relationship series (somehow, I’ve become an authority; go figure). This question essentially went like this: this woman, “Robin,” had been in an intermittent but long-term relationship with this man who was almost-but-not-quite divorced, and every time she pressed him for a commitment, he backed off. The relationship was good; the sex was great, and all she wanted was a sense of a real commitment.

When first presented the question, which I got before the great Donny debacle, my response to my Yahoo editor was the essence of succinct. Time’s up, I said, Game over. Dump him.

My editor gave me kudos for my brevity and novel take on the question, but urged me to flesh out the naked white bones of my response.

I did, and in the interim, Donny had his matrimonial meltdown, and all of a sudden, I found my advice was something I wouldn’t want to take myself, and therefore it also became something I hesitated to give “Robin.” You can read my full response here.

Today, even though I’m not entirely sure I gave her the best possible advice, I still understand why I told her what I did—essentially to figure out where her wants ended and her needs began, and to figure out whether enough of her needs were being met to take care of the wants. Certainly many of the responses I received from Yahoo! readers took exception to my advice. You can, if you want, read their responses below. Little did they know that I have no trepidation about letting my readers speak, however gutturally, for themselves.

content/content

In the last two-and-a-half years, I have somehow, improbably, amazingly, shockingly, grown rather content. It’s a bizarre idea for me to accept—that I have not merely broached an edgy entente with my inner demons, but that I’ve actually crossed the Rubicon into some semblance of happiness. I find myself slightly agape. It’s a strange feeling for me, a person who has lived most of her life feeling everything but happy.

For most of my life, my emotional Chinese menu has been comprised of main dishes of depression, angst, vague malaise, and inchoate discontent; side dishes of black ennui, red-hot rage, indigo resentment, verdant envy and bilious self-loathing; as well as occasional sprinklings of glee, pride, insecurity, pessimism and futility. I can’t say with any honesty that I’ve been a happy person for most of my four-plus decades on this wet blue planet. I remember being a pretty happy toddler, but at around five, I stopped being happy, and—in the words of Ferris Bueller’s sidekick Cameron Frye—then the depression set in.

A big part of my depression is hereditary. I might as well be Swedish, considering how genetically and culturally programmed I am for self-extinction. My biodad is bi-polar. My maternal grandfather killed himself, so did my step-father’s mother. My sister is schizophrenic. My genes are a roiling pool of mental instability. Previous to my newfound state of contentment, I would count myself lucky that my personal anthem of insanity took its form as a constant bass-note acceptance of the my latent suicidality. I considered myself fortunate that I didn’t really want to throw myself under the A train; I just wanted to think about it a lot. I considered myself lucky that I didn’t hear voices; that on the chaotic spectrum, my thoughts rested on the “ordered” end, not the “disordered” side; that I didn’t have to rely on psychopharmaceuticals to live through another day.

I’d grown so accustomed to feeling down that feeling down looked up to me. Pain was normal. Any other state was sleep.

About four years ago, I started going to therapy. It sucked. I hated it with a white-hot extra-flamey passion. Words rarely fail me, but I find myself unable to express the sheer difficulty of my first year and a half of therapy. It was ranked “10” on the technical difficulty level in the gymnastics of emotion. Every Friday after my appointment, I would have to crawl into my bed and  cry myself to sleep. I felt myself plunged like a lobster into the boiling pot of my emotions. For weeks I’d be sunk into black-hell depression, only to find myself a few weeks later mummified by white-burn rage. I didn’t know exactly how I felt, but I knew that whatever it was called, this guerilla emotion of the moment, it sucked. And sucked prodigiously.

It’s a testament to exactly how crap-awful I felt, I mean really felt, that I stayed in therapy. It’s a testament too to my therapist, who is really very good, even if she has recently returned to the incomprehensible animal-bunch hairstyle of yore. If she weren’t so good at her job, and if I hadn’t spent a lifetime in so much pain, I wouldn’t have stuck it out to visit her every week, week after week, 45-minute hour after 45-minute hour. I would have quit if I hadn’t known somewhere, deep inside me, that I’d feel worse if I stopped. But for a really, really long time, it sucked, it sucked really bad.

And then something started to change. It was like the first few glimmers of spring, when you look at the buds or that slight green mist on the ground, and you wonder if it’s real, or if you’re just imagining it. You look and you stare and you wonder if it’s too good to be true, or if somehow winter is indeed ending. At first I felt like that. Like I couldn’t trust my own changing emotions, the less-bleak tundra of my soul sprouting incongruous new life. At first I was afraid I was manic. At first, I couldn’t parse my happiness, for I’d not been happy, not in forty years.

Now, though, I can and I do. I have both the inward and the outward signs of actual contentment. I have, it seems, found a man I love who loves me too, and we love each other with a strange and new genuineness. I am, it seems, going to get married. I will, it seems, be paid to write. I can, it seems, trust myself to sculpt a life worth living. I am, it appears, happy. Or if not outrightly happy, then I'm content.

Wacky, that.

And no small part of my life—its burgeoning successes and its mellow contentment—is owed to this, my writing, my pretty dumb things, my blog. I started this writing almost three years ago, and my early entries were raw, harsh, confessional, angry, edgy, confused, manic. They were funny, too. And honest. And lots of other things. Mostly, though, they stand mute testament to my earlier and still-convalescing self. I felt a lot of pain. I made this place as one more space to express it, and by expressing it, free myself of it.

Over the past years, I’ve confessed a lot of stuff here that has weighed me down—the truth about losing my virginity, my abortions, my stripping, my betrayals—all  these things that I felt  resting heavy on my shoulders, like molting fur coats, like big bags of dirty laundry, like lead weights. I divested myself of them here. Like a surrendering soldier’s arms, I laid them down. I wrote too about sex, my love of it and my joy in it and my ambivalence about it. I wrote about a lot of things; I’ve written nearly 600 posts.

What’s funny to me is that as I grow more content, I have to search farther and farther for content to write. I have so much less to confess, now that I’ve made peace with my various spiky demons. I have a lot of joy. It’s weird. I don’t get it. I hope I’ll find stuff to write about, cushioned now as I am in my own light-stepped sanity.

I think my blog will be changing in the upcoming year. I hope you, my readers, will keep on reading. I have made one change today. Today, I resigned my post as Fleshbot editor (I have turned my Tuesday Fleshbot reins over to the capable hands of Always Aroused Girl). I’ve been doing this round-up for over a year and a half, and it has been great. But now it’s time to give someone else the chance I have had and to give myself the room to devote my self to my own writing.

Whatever that may be.

We’ll see. It’s a strange and changing thing, life.

new links and so on

I've added a few new links to my blogroll in the past few weeks, just because I can and just because I occasionally get simply dizzy with power.

Under the "Rakes" heading, I've added Chris Hall's Literate Perversions, the title of which should really be recommendation enough. A regular contributer to Sex in the Public Square, Chris blogs on politics and gender, politics and sex, sexual politics and political sex. You get the picture. It's political and it's sexual.

I've also added Eric Spitznagel's Vonnegut's Asshole. I really {heart} Eric Spitznagel's blog. He's funny and smart and he does the kind of easy-going multi-layered essay that I covet in the darkest corners of my heart. He's also what we jealous folk on teh Internets call "A Real Writer" because he's published in very glossy magazines and in book form and everything. Spitznagel's on a tiny sabbatical, but read his archives. I am particularly fond of this post.

I've broadened my collection of "Tarts" by adding a couple of burlesque links, a stripper link and a couple of smart bitches who sexblog. Daily Burlesque is pretty much what it sounds like, except that it's not really daily, sadly. But who can't use a round-up of all things tassled to add to their daily bump and grind? In addition to Daily Burlesque, I've added The Candy Pitch, a blog written by another "Real Writer," Kelly DiNardo, whose biography on Lili St. Cyr will be released mid-October. I, like Susie Bright, have succumbed to the charms of the Hobo Stripper, and after reading her writing, I find I am in complete wonderlust. I especially like her post on living  in vans with dogs.

Finally, who doesn't love a little extra exegesis with their sex? I know I do, and so I've added Marcelle Manhattan's blog into the mix. And just because not every goddess needs to also be a lady, I've added the salty goodness that is the blog of Tracie Egan aka Slut Machine of Jezebel.

My "Other Libertines" category is kind of a grab-bag of goodness. Whatever doesn't seem to fit anywhere else seems to fit in here. So I've added the Ghostwriter's Love and Hatemail, again, self-explanatory and fantastic. I very much like the hate letter from dog to his tennis ball, though if it were my dog writing it, it would totally be a mash note. And last but not least, I've added the Eye of Venus to this list, for its compendium of all sites sex-bloggy has proven to be indispensable to my latest Fleshbot sexblog round-ups.

Oh, and if you're interested, I have a new article up on Yahoo! dating wherein I liken computer dating to flying a Boeing F-22 Raptor to questionable rhetorical effect.

kissykiss,
chelsea g

ps. And because I'm value-added, here's one more site I find really funny. In the algebra of blogs, it's LOLCats + PostSecret. What's not to love?

wherein i wonder: what's wrong with being a fucking whore?

It’s just a short exchange, but it got me thinking. What, indeed, is wrong with being a fucking whore?

In an episode entitled “Popping Cherry” of season one of Dexter, the Showtime series about a benign serial killer, Dexter’s sister Deborah, a cop, visits a clutch of street prostitutes to query them about being witness to the abduction of the most recent victim in a string of serial killings. Deborah, who had been working undercover as a hooker in Vice, now approaches the group of girls she used to hang out with dressed as a cop—all conservative pants suit and graphite blue shirt and flashing badge—a far cry from her previous outfit, the “sex suit” she wore when working undercover, of hot pants, high heels and halter top.

“Listen,” says Deborah, “I have a confession to make. I’m a cop.”

“You’re not a cop,” screams one woman dressed in black short-shorts and a cut-off hot pink t-shirt. “You’re a whore!”

“I’m not a fucking whore,” Deborah counters, pointing her finger in the face of the hot pink t-shirt chick and shooting the intensifying adverb “fucking” like a bullet.

“Hey,” interjects Shanda, another in the group. “What’s wrong with being a fucking whore?” It’s a question that she repeats in the episode, and it’s the one that got me wondering. What, indeed, is wrong with being a fucking whore? And how has my thinking about whores, and whoring, changed?

cock/rock/castrati

I suspect I’m growing crotchety in my advancing years. I’m all about the crotch, especially when I listen to music. Kids today, I think, what do they know? Who are their idols? What do they listen to when they roll around idly on their beds and listen to music? And what, exactly, took the cock out of rock?

I am not a music critic, though I try it from time to time. I have no credentials beyond an ever-expanding music collection and a willingness to listen to just about everything once (exceptions include polka, reggaeton and that plastic Long Island disco they play on Z100 on Friday nights). I am not particularly well-versed in music history, and I’m certainly not a musician myself, given that I lack the requisite inherent mathiness for musicality. I don’t follow any one band with avidity, and while I like going to shows, I don’t make it a vocation. I’m definitely a musical dabbler, a dilettante at best, a rank amateur in the grand pantheon of people who write and think about music. And yet, I cannot forbear expressing my rock-cock consternation.

As much as my musical tastes glibly wander all over the genre’s map, I am deep-down a rock chick. My musical gut impulse is to consume the raw, the dirty, the gritty, the blues-based and the drug-addled. I may listen to everything from techno to flamenco, but I am most likely to keep my twitchy index finger from pressing the “next” button when my iPod rests on rock. In the kingdom of music, my inner self wears the battered leather pants and t-shirt and slouches in the corner near a puddle of its own sick. It’s just the way I am, for good, bad or chain-smoking.

it's snot sex

In general, I am a big fan of viscosity, sex-wise. High viscosity, as the old ads for STP motor oil used to aver, helps to guard against thermal breakdown, and what is true for combustion engines is equally true for human fornication. You’ve got the piston, you’ve got the cylinder, you’ve got friction. You need viscosity, or you’re going to seize up and burn.

In sex as in motor engines, I definitely have a pro-viscosity agenda. I wave the big foam finger for viscosity. I hold high the viscosity flag. I am all about viscosity, whether in the form of porn-starry spit, or high-quality lube, or general genial vaginal lubricant. As I’ve stated in previous lucibrations on lubrication, I’ll use pretty much anything in the literal pinch, and I’m not ashamed to say so.

However. As with stretch Range Rover limos, genetically altered strawberries, and Brangelina, a previously good thing can be blown up into monstrous proportions. The same human manufacturing plant that brings us that lovely high-quality spit that allows us to swallow cocks like oysters, as well as that delightful lubricant that allows pussies to be pounded comfortably numb, also brings us snot.

Snot is not cute. Necessary as snot is—and it is, without it our sinus cavities would be sere, cracked and parched as salt flats—it is loathsome. I hate snot. Boogers, boogies, loogies: I hate them, hate them all with an extra-flamey white-hot burning passion. Snot is mucous gone wrong. Snot is sneaky. It’ll catch you at your weakest. It’ll drip quietly and hang for all to see, and you caught without a hanky. It’ll pop out all yellow and gleaming, shiny and revolting, and you won’t know until someone is kind enough to tell you. I cannot say it enough: I hate snot. For snot does not merely sneak up on you unawares, but snot is the silent killer of sex.

I have, not unsurprisingly, sinus issues. Since 9/11 when the air in Gotham was permeated with too many problematic substances to name, I have suffered from sinus problems. Every fall, I am under siege from the inside. I wage a preemptive war with my sinuses—Flonase, a neti pot, Sudafed, Tylenol Sinus and Cold, Benadryl: these are my weapons. I do my level best to hold my sinuses back. They usually win; I am usually struck down at least a couple times a fall; I succumb to blinding headaches and Lucille Austero dizzies. This fall has been no different.

Yesterday, a Sunday, Donny and I wanted to have sex. The flesh was willing, but the sinuses were weak. Not merely mine, but his too, as my boyfriend was suddenly battling a vicious cold, a cold that was overflooding his body with viscous snot. We found ourselves both needing to be either totally upright or completely supine. Leaning over was impossible; my head exploded from the pain and Donny’s nose was in constant peril of going drip drip drip on my cheekbones. It wasn’t cute and it wasn’t hott.

Any armchair fucking mathematician can diagram the proper physical geometry for our fucking. The fucking wasn’t the issue. Girl on top, boy lying down. You know, your basic Cowgirl (variations: the Reverse Cowgirl or that thing chicks do with the squatting over the cock, whatever that’s called). The issue was foreplay. The question before my lover and me what this: How does one get the cock hard and the pussy slick when neither can be comfortably or sanitarily face down for longer than a nanosecond?

I mean, my boyfriend couldn’t even kiss properly. He was, for this afternoon, a mouth-breather.

We struggled. I gamely straddled Donny’s head, nestling his head between my thighs. I couldn’t get into it. I kept on looking at the shelves before me and thinking how they really needed dusting, and then how the pernicious dust was probably behind this whole sinus issue anyway and maybe I should just take a Benadryl, kick Donny out and finally dust. Donny’s sounding kind of Darth Vader down there didn’t really help, especially since my Star Wars fantasies tend toward the Wookie.

Perched up there, my head comfortably up above my heart, I idly eyed my length of white rope hanging from my bedstead and considered tying my boyfriend up. I envisioned myself a black-corseted Ma’am, forcing my naked and white boyfriend to do my bidding. I mused momentarily about teasing him into submission, perhaps introducing a tiny buttplug into his virgin ass. I considered it, thought about it all, a small pleasureshock running up my shakras.

It was too much work. I wanted the orgasm, and so did my man; I wanted the connection, and so did my man. I wanted it all, but one mucous system was working overtime and the other was refusing to play. Add to that Donny’s intermittently flagging cock (a syndrome that always temporarily flummoxes me), and I felt stymied and snotty. It was enough to plunge me into a minor pet.

I clambered off, squirted lube into Donny’s nonplussed palm, and some into my own.

“What the hell are you doing?” Donny asked. He seemed a tad peeved.

You do you, I said. I’ll do me, at least until we get close to coming, and then I’ll hop on top.

I looked at him. He looked back blankly. Do you want me to go to the other end of the be so you can see better? I asked.

Donny rolled his eyes and I put his hand to his cock. I put my hand to my pussy. We laid beside each other, rubbing and holding one another, watching and slowly, incrementally, growing large and wet, respectively. Our thighs touched, our lips did not; our excitement mounted; our bond felt shared as our breath gradually grew heavy, punctuated occasionally by sniffles.

pokin' in the boys' room

You know something has passed “in” and gone around the bend to “out” once a Republican Congressman is discovered doing it, and yet what with all the current brouhaha over bathroom sex, I feel I cannot forbear writing about it myself.

What is it, I must ask, about bathroom sex? Is it the pull of shiny porcelain? The tug of circling water and its promise of easy clean-up? Is bathroom sex somehow more forgettable because its very surroundings seem made for erasing fucking’s physical remnants? Or does the bathroom’s strange ubiquity (all bathrooms, more than any other kind of room, resemble one another) somehow stamp its sex more indelibly in memory? Is it merely the voyeuristic thrill of being discovered in flagrante delicto in this most “privy” of rooms? Or is it that bathroom sex with its mixing of visceral needs—the offal and the sexual—intimate our own oft-denied bestial natures, that of fucking where we shit?

Most likely it’s some confluence thereof.

Susie Bright on her blog has taken an unofficial survey of people’s bathroom sex experiences. The responses make for interesting reading—unsurprisingly a full spectrum of Bright-blog-reading public have kissed/touched/sucked/and fucked in bathrooms. One would expect no less from Susie Bright’s readership, a group of people who most succinctly are united by their enjoyment of sex in all its glorious ruttiness. Odd, then, that these people find something in common with Sen. Larry Craig, other than, you know, a burning need for oxygen and the right to trial by jury.

I myself have had sex in bathrooms. I’ve had sex in bathrooms both public and private, though the latter far outweighs the former, and always with men, though I've had sex with both men and women outside of bathrooms. But then I’ve had sex with myself in bathrooms far more often than I’ve had sex with others.

the joy(lessness) of sex, wikipedia-style

(Yes, I changed the title. I came up with a better one whilst showering. One never knows when the muse will strike.)

A journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but the road to sexual knowledge can begin with a single click. Sex is often very confusing. All those body parts and all those holes, so many possibilities for interlocking body parts to interlock. So many ways to “do it” and so few diagrams.

Fortunately, as with so many other things, so too with sex. Whether you’ve an idle curiosity Marko Kolsi, a devoted interest in the National Library Board, or a passion for Zonnebeke, Wikipedia wants to indulge you—in fact, it wants you to participate. It’s hardly any surprise that as with Genrikh Yagoda, the Sunny Boys, or a Type 68 Assault Rifle, when it comes to sex, Wikipedia to the rescue!

Yesterday, my interest in Belladonna, a porn performer who this week announced her retirement from performing, though not producing, films, was piqued by a couple of articles, so I looked her up on Wikipedia. Just who is this Belladonna, I thought to myself, and why should I care about her? I found out from her Wikipedia entry that Belladonna was born Michelle Anne Sinclair to a Mormon family in 1981, and that she, like me, had a troubled adolescence, although she, unlike me, chose to go to Los Angeles in hopes of becoming a nude model. (I, unlike she, kept my nude modeling to Burlington, Vermont, and indeed only modeled nude once. I found it less transgressive and more creepy. However, I do acknowledge that I did it a very long time ago—when, actually, Belladonna was a toddler—and times have undoubtedly changed.)

I also discovered that Belladonna, according to Wikipedia, “has built a reputation for her ability to perform in almost any theme in mainstream porn, and for her willingness to perform in almost any sexual scenario,” including an act known as “double anal.”

Double anal, I thought, that can’t actually be what it sounds like, and I promptly plopped “double anal” into the search box on Wikipedia. Which directly took me to the Wikipedia page entitled “A List of Sex Positions,” truth in naming if ever there was one.

This page doesn’t merely provide an unembellished list of names of positions—which would be more confusing than enlightening—rather, it gives a physical description of the position, and it enumerates these positions in ever-growing complexity. Therefore, as you’d expect, the page begins with “Penetrating Partner on Top with Front Entry,” or “Missionary,” if you prefer, and explains permutations, with nods to The Perfumed Garden and The Joy of Sex, apparently the two reference works for this page.

From the engagingly named “Penetrating Partner on Top with Front Entry,” the entry moves on to “Penetrating From Behind,” or “doggy position” and all of its various incarnations, including the “spoons position”; whoever wrote this Wikipedia entry really likes to toss around the slang. Moving onward and upward through postures of ever-increasing complexity, the entry on fornication culminates in a subheading called “Less Common Positions,” which includes a description of “the Piledriver” and the warning “don’t try this at home.” Perhaps, then, a hotel room. Or a wrestling ring. In its journey through its garden of adults’ earthly delights, the entry takes quick dips into anal, oral (both fellatio and cunnilingus), threesomes and group sex.

(“A group of males masturbating is called a circle jerk,” the entry informs and provides a hyperlink.)

Reading it, I often found myself having a hard time envisioning what-all was exactly going on with the couple getting it on. Take this entry from the “Less Common Positions” section:

The receiving partner lies on their back with the penetrating partner lying perpendicular. The receiving partner bends the knee closest to the penetrating partner's head enough so that there is room for the penetrating partner's waist to fit beneath it, while the penetrating partner's legs straddle the receiving partner's other leg. The in-and-out thrusting action will move more along a side-to-side rather than top-to-bottom axis. This position allows for breast stimulation during sex, for partners to maintain eye contact if they wish, and for a good view of both partners as they reach orgasm.

I’m sorry, but, Huh? I have had a lot of sex, some of it in odd, crab-cramped postures wherein I found myself bracing my body with my feet against the rungs of my bed, or my window frame, or whatever I could find. I have folded my body origami-like for fuck’s sake. I am no stranger to yogic sex. I can’t, however, even begin to picture this position described.

Fortunately, Wikipedia has considered the spatially impaired such as myself and