Two Five Six: Threads

I need to find more essay topics for this blog.

When I first started writing here, I wanted to devote myself to writing about issues of sex and its social penumbra here in these latter days. I wanted to write essays about what sex, romance, and all the associated rituals were like nowadays. My idea was to write as myself, as a gentleman of a Certain Age looking at the new world. I wanted to do social commentary, or at least record my own thoughts about things. I'd hoped when I began that I might attract comments and responses and find interlocutors with whom I could have long, rambling discussions about the subjects in my posts.

I still hope for that--- for followers and civil yet in-depth discussions. But I need new essay topics. My hope is that lovely readers will offer up suggestions, that they'll suggest things I might write about. Over the last three years we've all moved away from writing about sex and romance and begun writing about the nightmare of American and global politics. I can understand that: we live in a nightmare time. Yet sex and romance do still exist, and they remain as major topics in people's lives. So I hope that my readers out over the aether will leave suggestions. What should I write about? Are there books, articles, films, events that should become the topics of essays here? I am open to suggestions.

There are still stories that I want to use here, to save here, things I want to remember. There are stories that follow a classic narrative arc--- stories whose endings I know, stories I can see as a story. And there are stories whose full arc I'll never know, whose endings remain elusive. Let's look at a couple. The first one is something a friend wrote me four or five years ago.

The guy with the yacht was Jonny. He lived on his boat at the marina. I really liked him, and wanted him to be an 'official boyfriend'. He was smart and funny and cute. He had a science degree, and had worked all over the world as a boat builder. I desperately wanted things to work out between us, and at the time really thought he would make a great partner (maybe this was just compared to the other men in my recent past). But...he did have a few issues -- alcohol abuse, depression. He drove his car into the harbour in a suicide attempt a year or so after we broke up/stopped sleeping together. He was ok, but got sent to the psych ward and charged with dangerous driving. We are still friends and catch up for coffee now and then and I only want the best for him. 

We went on a few sailing trips together - down to the Sounds, each time in the summer. The Cook Strait crossing was a bit rough for me at some parts. But it was beautiful...we saw lots of dolphins, and it was just incredible to be out on the open water. Two of the trips we booked a house to stay at, and one trip we slept on the yacht. He loved going down on me, and was fucking good at it. For years after I wished we had become something more, and I was convinced I could have helped him. But I think sometimes you just have to help yourself and let people go.

She noted that on New Year's Day of 2013 she'd woken up in bed with him on his boat, and that four months later he'd tried to kill himself. I'm trying to decide if the story is a sad one. She ran into him again last year--- discovered he was project managing the renovation of a big house in her new neighbourhood. She said hullo--- they hadn't seen each other around in a while ---and everything was cordial, but she didn't discover whether he was still boatbuilding or still owned/live aboard a boat. I suppose I felt a twinge of jealousy reading about that (did they sleep together again, even if just for old times' sake?), but the other thing I felt was a kind of emptiness. Am I someone a lovely girl would remember years later? Would she say hullo to me? Am I--- have I ever been ---someone's story? I do want to have been important enough to be remembered, but I suspect I haven't been...and won't be. And of course I'll never know the full story of her adventures at the marina or in Marlborough Sounds.

From October 2012---

 It's much less gloomy today.It has really brightened up actually! and i just had a lunch date, which was very fun.i Today I 'm wearing black tailored pants, a blue and white striped shirt, and a black cardigan...very officey. And he is a friend of a friend, up & coming young lawyer. I will probably fuck him, but i do think i like him more as a friend. Very funny and cute.


I never heard about her lunch date, never heard about the lawyer again.

She wrote me a year later about another lawyer, this one much older:

I did think of you on Friday night, drinking Makers that seemed to set my blood on fire. Lying naked in a strange bed, all I could think was this isn't really me. i'm not really here.

I stayed until the morning and walked home in the dawn light.

Drinking bourbon feels like coming home.

He was a lawyer. I was Alex the florist, sexy & simple & uncomplicated.



She saw him again a bit later:

After our wonderful wicked exchange, I ended up in town until 3am, then ended up at the apartment of the lawyer with the impressive library, got an hour of sleep then washed my face and went to work. Was asked to attend a meeting with the partners...I almost had a fucking breakdown.

I do wonder what became of him. She wrote that he'd made her reach orgasm five times one night and that his library was impressive. I have to know what "impressive" means--- if he really collected books or it that was a euphemism.

And I need to know if Alex the Florist is her usual club nights alias. I need to know how she created Alex the Florist and what personality she constructed for her alter ego.

She told me this fragment back in 2011, a story from when she was 17, back in 2002-2003:

I slept with this guy I met at a club...he was in his early 30s. He gave me E and took me back to his apartment. After we fucked and he fell asleep I stole 2 books and snuck out...


One of the two books was a Steinbeck; she remembered that. "Cannery Row", she thought, though she wasn't sure. Somehow it does matter to know what the other book was.

Stories here with loose ends, with endings that remain unclear.  I hate story arcs that go nowhere. I wish that I could sit with her and pour drinks and ask her about these things. I love her stories, and always have. I just wish I knew more about contexts and settings and the way things played out in the long run.