Three Eight Eight: Tales

 Here we are at the end of January in the blighted Year Twenty-Five. There's so very little to write about these days. The world is an increasingly grim and brutal place. There's little enough place right now for tales of elegant sex or speculations on the meaning of erotica.

I did find something, though-- tales from the Long Ago, tales from letters sent me by lovely Young Companions back in the days when actual letters meant something, when lovely, long-legged, underwear-averse girls did flirt with me by mail.

These are things sent me by a girl who saw me as mentor and confessor, a girl who wanted to be a muse, a demimondaine, and an adventurer. She wrote me back in the mid-Noughts, back in better days--

Fantasizing about fucking some tan surfer-girl who moved to Florida to wake up to the sound of the waves. She lives in a bright cottage full of tropical flowers and hanging lanterns, and when I say, shyly, that I haven't been with many girls, she says she could teach me a few things.

I can't imagine living in Florida these days-- hurricanes and Republicans make it no country for me and mine, but my Young Companion back in the day had other visions as well:

Fantasizing about fucking a freelance-writer Brooklyn girl. She rolled her eyes at me along with the rest of the city last year when my poetry was published, but recently she's been crushing on my Twitter. After we break up, neither of us talk about it much, but it was the most powerful orgasms we ever had.

I wish I knew more girls these days who spend their afternoons and late nights constructing fantasies. I wish I knew more girls who'd phone me late at night to whisper their fantasies to me.

Muse, demimondaine, adventuress....I need someone like that again. I need someone to be a Voice for me.

Three One Seven: Salle D'Armes

 My lovely long-legged blonde friend Jill in Wellington NZ told me once about her high school friend who became a nationally-ranked fencer. The girl was good enough to get invited to fencing competitions and fencing master classes all around the Pacific. The girl's name-- I think --was Sarah.  My NZ friend knew at least two other girls named Sarah when she was at her posh private school, so I may be wrong about the name.

But what I do know is the fencer girl (we'll call her Sarah anyway) went off to a fencing training camp in China and had a very hot, fairly public affair with a "much older"  and rather famous German fencing coach. Some things remain unclear in the story. Was the man her coach or just one of the coaches at the camp? I can't decide which would be hotter--- having a torrid affair at 16 or 17 with her mentor at fencing (foil? épée? sabre?) or meeting and hooking up with an internationally-rated German coach while in the Mysterious Orient. So-- I know she was sixteen or seventeen (Jill was just turning seventeen when she and Sarah were emailing about Sarah's adventures in China), but I don't know if she was in Shanghai or Beijing. I don't know what "much older"means here, although given Jill's own tastes in those days, I'd suspect that "much older" means that the man would've been in his forties. 

The story (or as much as I know of it) really is hot. And I would love to know more. Backstories matter, mind you, just as Details Matter. Context and setting are always key. It matters how they met, and how the flirtation began. It very much matters who made the first move. 

My friend at McGill in Montreal told me that she'd gone to university very much in order to have affairs with distinguished and literary older academics, but she was always brought up short by the feeling that she didn't know the correct procedure for initiating an affair with a distinguished Older Man. Was she supposed to look young and vulnerable and wait for him to be predatory? Was she supposed to drape herself on his desk in something slinky and offer herself up as muse and sacrifice? What, she asked, were the procedures in these matters? Who was supposed to initiate? What costumes and poses did she need to know about? Importantly-- which of her female friends should she tell, and how dramatic should her announcement be?

The athletic world-- and especially something like fencing, which strikes me as a fairly incestuous community --might be a place where physical affairs were carried on fairly openly. After all, as an athlete, everything you do is about your body: you're focused on the flesh, and on competition. It may also be a place where mentor-mentee relationships are common. Maybe. I have no idea how age-disparate relationships are seen in China, or what age gaps are regarded as acceptable. And...what are are rules for overseas training camps? Remember the old naval saying: No sin below the equator? Did something like that hold true? If you're a few thousand miles from school and home, training and competing amongst foreigners, are all the usual rules suspended? My Montreal friend laughed once and told me that at Comparative Lit conferences in New York or Vancouver or London, the accepted thing was that quick affairs and gender experimentation were perfectly fine. Distance made everything seem permissible...and hotter.

I do wonder about whether Sarah and her coach spent whole nights together, or whether they sneaked off to dorm rooms or offices or showers for sex. What were the mechanics of the affair. Jill in Wellington had given up underwear by seventeen, but had Sarah? Could she be wickedly panty-free in a fencing costume? How easy would it be to get out of fencing togs for impromptu sex? These are the things I wonder about, after all. And...was the man married back wherever home was? Did he laugh over drinks and tell other coaches about Sarah?  How did Sarah tell her fencing companions...and what did they say? She fired off dozens of emails to Jill about what was happening, but did the fencing authorities in Beijing or Shanghai know what was happening? I'm under the impression that Sarah's affair with the coach was fairly open, that she loved being on the man's arm in public, or at bars. Jill's circle at school did love shocking their audiences, so there may have been some of that.

I have no clue as to how long the affair lasted, or if Sarah ever saw the man again. All I know about Sarah is that she lives in Melbourne these days and has a practice as a physiotherapist.  Before the pandemic, Jill would fly over to see her once or twice a year. 

I wish I knew more, and that I had photos of both of them from those days. There's a very hot tale to be crafted from the story of Sarah and the fencing coach...and a very hot film to be made. I might suggest casting Kenna James and Mick Blue in the video...or maybe Riley Reid and Mick Blue.

Any thoughts?

Three Zero Zero: Debriefing

 I wrote here earlier in the summer that:

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)... or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things... but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

I'd love to see Liberty's journal and its "Older Men" chapter. She always saw affairs as learning experiences, and she was very earnest about that. It mattered to her that each lover, male or female, left her with more knowledge about the world. And, yes, I'd love to know what all those things were. I'd love to know what categories she put experiences into. I think I'd especially like to read the very early entries, to read the entries were Liberty was deciding what she wanted to learn and what avenues she wanted to explore.

I wrote this, too--

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

I do wish I knew how each of them defined "experience". The stories Levin and Liberty and my NZ friend Jill told me were often extremely hot, but what I'd like to do is get at the underlying structures, to get at the decisions each of them made to seek out and be open to experiences. Why this particular lover, this particular thing? I'd very much like to know what Liberty's chapter on Older Men says--- what makes someone worth/not worth being a learning experience. I'd like to go through her checklist of things she did to manage Older Lovers, to properly utilize them. 

Backstories matter, just as details matter. The why of something is as important as the thing itself. 

I'd also like to read the letters another friend has been sending out during the season of the Red Death. You know the backstory:

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do. 

I'd love to read those letters, to read what she thanked them for teaching her. One of the letters I know would be to the much older man who told her when she was sixteen that she needed to stop being afraid and actually make the effort to be admitted to Oxford. That affair re-shaped her life, and I'm taking it for granted that she wrote to tell him that. She told me once that what she has now--- a business of her own, a resume that includes political consultancy, a couple of terms as a town councilor ---owes so much to the older lovers who told her that she was capable of doing anything, who took her to bed and talked about the world. I'd very much love to read those letters with her memories. Yes...I wish I was a recipient of one of those letters. I do envy anyone who was worldly and knowledgeable enough to be chosen as one of her mentors. 

Bildungsroman, Erziehungsroman... and whatever those things are called in French. I'd like to know how Levin and Liberty and Jill constructed the tales of their lives--- my friends in Montreal and Edinburgh, too. How have they structured what Older Lovers taught them? What things in particular did they want to learn, what things did they learn, what checklists and outlines have they drafted...? 

Experiences have to be crafted into stories, into essays, That's always key for me: taking experience and trying to make it mean something. Liberty's journal, maybe whatever was in Levin's Pentalic sketchbooks and notebooks--- those are all things I'd love to know.

Two Seven Nine: Threads 12

Let's remember Marsha, the girl in the stories I recounted about the Electra Palace hotel in Thessaloniki and the cop on the levee.  She was a part of my young life that I do think about a lot these days. I've been told that she's teaching at a tech school--- geology, maybe geochemistry ---these days. I'm told that she's planning a wedding for her daughter. I have to sigh at that.  Still, she is in my thoughts--- or at least the stories I know from her past keep coming to mind.

I saw "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" not long ago. I had to note that Marsha reminded me of Margaret Qualley's character--- the hippie girl Pussycat who was one of Charlie Manson's followers. Marsha was never a hippie girl, though she was an outdoors girl. Not quite so tall as Margaret Qualley, and with larger breasts, but the same long, slender legs and a preference for short shorts and sandals. I'll have to think here for a moment. If not quite Margaret Qualley's character, then maybe Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation". In any case, excellent legs and long, dark-brown hair. I've always preferred long legs to large breasts, but she was a 36C, which went with the outdoors girl look.

Back in January I wrote about her adventure in Thessaloniki with the rich Greek boy, the one who drove her up above the city in his vintage MG. Marsha did have a thing for sports cars. She had posters of exotic ones--- Aston-Martins, Bugattis ---on her bedroom walls at home along with posters from ski resorts. I'll suspect that as soon as the Greek boy showed her his MG, he was three-quarters of the way to getting her shorts off...and certainly set to get road head.

Memory says that there was a boy--- older than she was, of course, in his mid-twenties ---with a sports car that she knew here. He had a sports car, naturally. I can't recall what kind, though I think it was a Triumph rather than an MG.  My own knowledge of vintage sports cars is minimal at best, and all I can think of would be a Triumph Spitfire or a TR-6. He had one, though, and she was stunned and thrilled to be able to ride in it.

What do I know about the boy? Very little, really. She was fifteen or sixteen when they met; I think he was twenty-four. Her first sports car, and her first older man. His name was Tony--- I do remember that. He was called Tony T, though I have no idea what the the T stood for. Marsha met him through her older sister, who briefly dated him. I think Marsha decided to make her own play for Tony after  her sister broke up with him, but the mechanics of it all are a mystery. Marsha's sister Pamela (a film devotee) described Tony once as looking a bit like a younger version of Richard Harris' King Arthur in "Camelot".  These days, I have to to rack my memory for what that would've meant.  I'll note that I stayed friends with Pamela long after Marsha and I had gone our separate ways. I don't think I ever asked her outright about Tony and Marsha, but she may have told me things over the years. Anyway...what else do I know? Older than Marsha. He rented a small house down by the river. He worked offshore, and then or later he worked as a diver around offshore rigs.

She did tell me that he was her first road head. Not her first oral experience, not by any means, but certainly the first in a moving car. Watching Margaret Qualley blithely ask Brad Pitt if he wanted her to give him head while they drove did make me wonder how her first road head happened. Did she offer him her favors to get a ride in the Triumph? Did Tony tell her that the price of admission for a ride at speed down country roads was a blowjob? I'd like to think that he looked at her over the inevitable aviator Ray-Bans and told her that there was a price for a place in the passenger seat. I'll expect that his smile was insufferable, but just what a tenth-grade girl would've swooned over.

Marsha did spend a lot of time at his house, she told me later. Drinking Heinkens and smoking weed, of course.  Cutting school to go do that with a hot older boyfriend was exactly what just what every bougie girl at our school would've thought was a perfect weekday afternoon. They spent a lot of time in bed--- and of course his bed was two mattresses on the floor. Well, at least it wasn't a waterbed. There have to be limits. Always. He liked her FDAU--- face down, ass up ---and he was the first one to introduce her to sodomitical practices. He liked feeling her squirm, and as the older man, he was a bit nervous about getting an underage girl pregnant. Not enough to do anything about contraception, she told me, but certainly enough to get him to do anal sex a fair amount.

Driving with Tony was always about him fingering her down her shorts or under a short skirt. Marsha's usual habit when driving was to kick off her sandals and put her bare feet up on the dash. She'd never heard of a foot fetish at fifteen or sixteen, but she knew that Tony (and a few other older men later) always wanted her barefoot. But having her feet up on the dash made it easier for him to get a hand up her skirt. The Triumph was too small for sex in the car, but Tony knew all the places along the river roads to get out of the car with a picnic blanket.

I used to have visions of Marsha with her shorts off, standing barefoot on the seat of the convertible Triumph, hanging onto the roll bar while she wrapped her legs around Tony. Probably not a viable position, though he could have used it to go down on her. Alas, though, I suspect that vintage Triumphs didn't have roll bars in those days.

Not  a lot of drama to the story, mind you.  She spent a few months sneaking off from school to Tony's house, and he spent a fair number of afternoons speeding down country roads with her giving him head.  In the end, I suppose, they both grew bored.  I wonder if she'd  had sex in a Triumph and wanted to move up to something else, whatever that may have been in those days (a Porsche?)...or if she had a pregnancy scare...or if she worried about being caught skipping school.  I do wonder what would've happened if her parents had caught her with Tony. The drama I think would've been worth seeing.

My lovely long-legged blonde friend in NZ told me that she always took the opportunity to be naked in a fast car with an older lover behind the wheel. My friend in Asheville once pulled off her sundress and drove home naked down back roads one summer night in a battered old pickup truck. I'd like to think Marsha was naked in at least a few sports cars in her teen days. She didn't try being without underwear until later--- something I persuaded her to do ---but I like to think that she'd launched at least a few pairs of bikini panties into the wind and sat with her legs open and sandals off on sunlit drives down the highway.

Two Seven Two: Threads 7

This passage came to me in April of 2018. My friend in the Land of the Long White Cloud sent it to me with neither backstory nor context. She told me that it was something she'd found on her  XHD where she keeps all the secret memories of her past. There's no date on it,  and no names. I wish she'd told me more, and of course I wish I could see more things that she has hidden away on that XHD:

Back then I wasn't good at asking for what I wanted. I wanted to ask him to make just a little bit of room in his life for me. His wasn't a life you could slide into without thought or care. His kid was very sick. I didn't want much. I wanted us to walk our dogs together and go for drives up the coast. We fucked for a while and he just made me feel so good. I lived alone then, and he would turn up at random times. I would cook us dinner and we would watch TV, my head in his lap.

And now...his boy is all grown up and cancer free. His wife left him. He isn't too subtle about looking at my tits. Maybe he is remembering the nights he came on them and the mornings he squeezed my nipples while he fucked me from behind. He is still loud, and funny, and a bit of a goof brain. He wears glasses now. I never thought we were going to end up together; it was a moment in time. But I remember how good he could make me feel and how hungry I always was for him.

It's a melancholy story, isn't it? A married man (her weakness, back in her early and mid-twenties), the sick child, the knowledge that it was all hopeless from the start.  I do wish I knew more about it all. She says that even post-affair, he's someplace where he can see her. Did they try to rekindle the affair? Did they sleep together again? Whatever was the conclusion to all this? I hate it when there are stories that I see that have no context and no conclusion. That's the quondam academic in me.

In September of 2018 I asked her about the life she imagined for herself. She wrote me this about the daydreams she had for her imagined life:

i work at the local arthouse cinema. it's generally pretty quiet. between selling tickets and making coffee and showing people to their seats, i do crossword puzzles and read. i watch a film everyday. i walk to work. i wear skinny jeans and graphic tees, and a cardigan in the winter. i have an older lover who takes me out for dinner and is fond of me. i live with a grumpy old cat called tom. i never really made friends in the city, and i spend most nights with my books. i am content.

I replied to her that same evening, with my own daydream:

I love this idea. I can imagine being in a small town on the coast near a little liberal arts school. I work at a small bookstore, selling books to students and sitting by the coffee machine and reading. Once in a while I teach a History course at the little uni. On weekends I kayak around little coastal inlets and picnic with you on the beach. We have a garden and a small verandah where we read. Our little beagle Frederick sits with us, happy to be loved. We listen to Cigarettes After Sex. I wear slim jeans and oxford-cloth button-downs and black tees. We cook for each other and sit in the evenings and watch the sky and sea darken. Our lives are quiet and simple.

I miss sharing daydreams with her, and I miss the lives for the two of us that we constructed in our heads. I miss the idea that one could be content.

Two Five Nine: Threads 3

Another loose thread left from stories I've been told over the last few years---

Afterwards, i spent my nights with younger boys, drinking cheap bourbon and listening to loud drum and bass. Younger boys were the cure for the heartbreak caused by the older men in my life. They were wild but easy. We would drive drunk and do burnouts in their crappy cars at Skid Alley, an empty lot in an industrial part of town. We had tactical vomits together in carparks halfway through the night on our way between bars. But we spent most of our time at house parties or at the beach. Bars and clubs didn't give us enough freedom to smoke, for their scuffles, for our endless drinking games. The end goal was always to get as fucked up as possible. The day after our parties we smoked weed and and cuddled under blankets watching 90s kids' films. We would fall into bed together, drunk and high. sometimes we just slept it off, sometimes we would just talk for hours and trade movie quotes back and forth, sometimes we fucked. No matter how we spent the last part of the night, everything would be the same in the morning.

A lovely friend sent me this once upon a time when we were talking about our younger days. Her younger days--- the days she's writing about here ---would've been at the turn of the century, in the very early Noughts. She'd have been sixteen in December of 2001. My own younger days would've been much, much farther into the depths of the Long Ago. Her stories, the stories implicit in the quote, might've been anytime between 2001 and 2005 or 2006. Boys--- "younger boys" ---wouldn't have had cars until 2001 or 2002. She graduated from her posh school in 2003, and the stories might well have gone on through her years at university. I've no idea how easy it was for teens to get into clubs and bars and drink where she lived in those days.

As for my own life, I don't think I went to more than two or three house parties in my high school days, and even at university I never really went out in groups. I wasn't amongst the excluded or ostracized, but I was someone on the edges of groups, someone at a party who was there with a drink in his hand, but not part of conversations. I have never done a "tactical vomit"--- I will note that. Needless to say, I wish I knew more about her stories. I wish she'd given examples of the adventures she had in those days. And I envy her those days with the consuming envy of someone who thinks his own life and past (at least in the days that really count for purposes of stories years later) was never as good as my lovely friend's.

Two One Four: Formation

I've very probably written about this before, but since I am posting archived tales, I'll post this again as one of the best memories a lovely girl has ever shared with me. It's certainly a story that leaves me jealous, envious, and depressed. I do wish I could mean this much to the lovely girl in question, and I wish my own life could yield up stories with this much power. This story makes me all-too-aware that there isn't likely to be anything in my own life to ever match her story--- and certainly not in what's left of my future.

My lovely friend sent me these stories--- her darkest secret, she averred ---a few years ago. She told me that she's tried to cut clear of the man in the stories, but somehow she ends up on the phone or on web chat with him far too often. I don't know if she's seen him in the flesh these last three or four years, though it's possible. She calls him B. That could be anything--- Brian, Bob, Bill. The name doesn't matter, of course. It's the power in the obsession and the stories that matters.

Her first discussion of him, in an autumn a few years back---

I can't stop fantasising about my uncle (for clarification - he's my mothers cousin, but I shall refer to his as my uncle for convenience). He must be...62ish now. He's tall and tan and solid. He owns a pub in the outback in Australia. I first met him when I was in my mid teens, he taught me how to blow smoke rings, we drank sambuca and we fucked. Now I can't stop thinking about the last time I saw him...it must have been 2008? Or 2009? It was at a family funeral. When I saw him after the funeral I went up to him and hugged him. Brushing my hands around his waist, I felt something like an electric shock. 'Hey there, beautiful' he whispered in my ear, then kissed my cheek. An hour or so later I noticed him watching me, and nodding his head towards the bathroom. I swallowed the rest of my gin & tonic and walked ahead of him. I was wearing black heels and a black skirt. After he shut the door, he ran his fingers up my thigh, lifted my skirt and kissed my bare cunt. 

I need him again.

And again,  the next April---

it has been years. but there will never be anyone else. i met him when i was 17. not so young, i suppose. but give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. cards on the table, right from the beginning. first cousin once removed is the technical term. and thirty-odd years between us. our first night together i was drunk. sambuca flowed through my veins. but it was electric. i knew at the time it was different to anything i'd ever felt before. i didn't know that i'd never feel anything like it since. it was a cheap motel room. we fucked countless times that night, then the next day he flew back to australia. a month later he flew me to his pub in the outback. we had a whole month together. to date, that was the longest time we ever spent together. i started to understand that it was love. we'd pour drinks at his bar all night, then take a bottle upstairs with us. we would drink and talk until dawn. the sex was amazing. he went down on me for hours.  i'd had men before...but not like this. i felt so powerful, so needed, and so loved. 


we've been together all over the place. vancouver, tokyo, auckland, sydney, the outback, fiji, wellington. we steal long weekends. we fly each other wherever, whenever we have the chance. for a long time i wouldn't let him cum in my cunt. my mouth was fine, preferred. i got over that though. its been ten years now. and nobody touches me like he does. nobody looks at me like he does. he is the only man i want, and i can never have him. 

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.” 


and i have tried to not let it consume me. i slept with men his age. boys my own age. girls. there is only him. i've had long-term boyfriends, who thought nothing when i flew to fiji for a 'girls weekend' and spent four blissful days with his tongue in my cunt and his arms around my waist. when i flew to vancouver with friends he arranged to be there for a weekend too...i told them i was catching up with my uncle, and had his hand in my cunt in the lift up to his hotel room. another time we were together for four nights in auckland. we stayed at a house in devonport, and it was like this 'what we could have been' experience. we cooked for each other, and read aloud to each other. we played cards, and mixed each other drinks. we walked around naked. we bathed together. we came together all week. it was agony to catch the plane home after that. 

he is my addiction. we're a chemical reaction. 

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” 

some nights i stay up late, drinking straight bourbon and smoking. habits i learnt from him, of course. they aren't my only bad habits. on those same nights i might cut and purge. i didn't pick up those habits from him, but i'd say he inspired them. it would kill him to hear me say that. what we have together chokes me. it annihalates me. it is everything, yet it can never be anything. how did it end up like this? i was young and drunk, our first night together should have been just that, a drunken regret. not the start of an affair which would come to both doom and define me. 

and a few weeks ago i got a text. i will see him soon. 

this is my secret. 

I feel deeply jealous, of course.  Always that. I want her drinking Sambuca in my bed; I want her flying to spend weekends in rented beach cottages with me. I want to mean that much to someone, to have that kind of obsessive value to someone.

I will archive stories here, though I suppose that's a painful thing. Still, I was trained to create and maintain archives. There's always the chance that in a few years I'll read these again. I wonder what I might make of them then.  There's always the chance, too, that some unknown reader will find this--- a ghost blog, abandoned on the aether ---and read this and tell herself stories in her head about the tales I'm saving here.

One Three Eight: Fears

I'll put this out to you, wherever you are. If you're reading this, take a moment and leave a comment with your answer.

I'm interested--- I really am.

Tell me what you're afraid of.

No--- not spiders or clowns or mysterious robot insects writhing under your skin.

Not those things at all.

I've been writing here for the last few years about things sexual--- sex itself, sex as a concept, sex as a battleground in the gender wars, sex as aesthetics. But always about sex and its derivatives and social grounding. So that much should be obvious. Tell me about sex--- sex and what you're afraid of.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age. I do define myself as an aging roué.  My own fears begin with those things. I'll certainly admit that. Age and entropy and decay. I live with all the fears of anyone male of a certain age. Hair falling out, eyes and teeth going bad,  my body--- my companion in so many campaigns ---turning on me. It's not all about performance failure, though that is a key fear.  I'm afraid of my body these days--- not just of performance failure, but afraid of being inside it, and certainly afraid of letting anyone see it or be near it. Sometimes it is hard to see even a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Sometimes I think I smell of death, or of something worse. I'm afraid these days of what a young companion would discover if she touched my flesh with fingers or lips.

Those are my fears these days.

Tell me about yours. What terrifies you more--- death or the mirror? What leaves you more paralyzed with shame and fear---- what you might see in a potential lover's eyes or what you might see if you examined your body all on your own? What fears do you have when you think of love and romance or of being next to someone else in bed?

Tell me what goes through your mind on nights like this.

Thirty-Nine: Routes

A friend did a review of Alain de Botton's new book on sex, and I fear that she and I will have disagreements about the review. I rather liked de Botton's book on travel, and I liked his books about airport life and the nature of work. I haven't been too impressed with his books on religion or philosophy, but I wasn't angered or put off by them, either. My friend, however, is put off by de Botton's views about sex. I haven't read his book, but I did spend time this morning reading through her review. I suspect we'll disagree on a couple of things.


My friend Ms. Flox is dismissive of de Botton's views because she finds them Freudian. I've been an admirer of Freud since  my teens. He's an intellectual hero of mine, and his "The Future of an Illusion" has a firm place on my shelves. I've studied and lived in and enjoyed Vienna, and it was through a biography of Freud (more precisely, a biographical novel read one high school springtime) that introduced me to Vienna. So I'm disposed to like Freud, and I smile a thin, cold smile whenever I hear him dismissed out of hand by feminists or devotees of the neuroscience cult. 


My friend cites this passage as a reason for disliking de Botton's book: “The precise origins of our enthusiasms may be obscure, but they can almost always be traced back to some meaningful aspect of our childhood: we will be drawn to specific things either because they recall appealing qualities of a beloved parental figure or else, conversely, because they somehow cancel out, or otherwise help us escape, a memory of an early humiliation or terror." To me, of course, the quote seems totally unexceptionable. We are creatures of our histories. We carry our pasts with us. Does my friend really think that we aren't shaped by our childhoods, or that what we desire or love or fear doesn't grow out of our pasts? 


It did strike me that she had her own reasons for disliking that passage. De Botton follows Freud in tying fetishes and enthusiasms to our childhoods and how our psyches are shaped there. My friend says something a bit later that caught my eye: the need to evade responsibility underlying the entire work is toxic: It’s not that I like this  [fetish] because I’m weird, it’s that my psychological history has a deficit...  That stopped me and rather surprised me. There's more there than just rejecting Freud's ideas about how childhood shapes how we see sex as adults. The word "responsibility" is a red flag here. And consider her phrasing. Is she arguing that one does have certain "enthusiasms" because one really is "weird"? The other side of "responsibility" is guilt. Always. I read that as saying that my friend does want people to  think that they should feel guilt about their enthusiasms or fetishes, that whatever they like or do doesn't have a history, that it's always a matter of context-less, history-free choice that can be derided as "weird", something that should induce guilt.


I'd hate to think that's what she's saying. 


Our enthusiasms, our fetishes, all come with histories. All our loves and hates come with predispositions and genealogies. Mine do, certainly. I can look back at what I've fancied or desired down the years and see how those things evolved. And it's not hard to see some of the things I've been looking for through my particular tastes.  It's certainly not hard to see how my predispositions were shaped,  to see that when I was beginning to think of sex and desire, the channels were already dug for where my tastes would flow. 


I'll make it a question, then. What routes did you travel to your desires and enthusiasms? I know what the choke points have been in my own life, where the channels had been excavated long before I started to travel down them. I hope you'll think about those things in your own lives, that you'll think of the genealogies of desire.  


I hope, too, that you'll understand that your enthusiasms and fetishes evolved along the roads that lead back to your pasts. They didn't appear out of nothing, and they didn't appear because you're "weird".  I remain somewhat disappointed that my friend would use that word, and that she's rejecting the idea of history.  I'm disappointed that she wants to invoke the idea of "weird" and the guilt associated with it, and I'm disappointed that she thinks that what we like or desire or hate isn't shaped early on. She wants to cut away the baggage of the past and then saddle us with the far heavier baggage of the word "weird".

Seventeen: Season's Ghosts

The holiday season has begun, and I had a birthday just as Thanksgiving week began. Every birthday brings its own ghosts. I have enough of my own, I know. There are memories of other cities and other times, of lovely young companions from the past. Memory is a dangerous thing, after all. It's too easy to live inside memories, too easy to be trapped by them. Joan Didion has made a career out of pointing out that memory is always a trap, and that only selective amnesia enables one to go on with life.

A friend wrote once of a Christmas Eve where she was aboard a train from Chicago to Syracuse, listening to her iPod and sobbing helplessly in the upper bunk of her sleeping car. She was traveling away from one lost affair to a city where there was still the remembered pain of another. Another friend told me once that she'd spent empty nights wandering through Montreal, looking at her reflection in shop windows and wondering who this ghostgirl was, asking herself what--- in a short story, in a film ---this girl had lost.

Year's-end is a season for ghosts. Kisses on New Year's Eve, hotel suite weekends in a city lit up with Christmas lights, the ritual of parties and gifts... All those things are ways of dealing with ghosts, with the memories accumulated during a year. Year's-end offers a set of rituals for romance, but there's always a hint of desperation. That kiss on Christmas Eve, the stroke-of-midnight kiss as the crowds cheer in Times Square, the coatroom kiss at the party--- they're done to exorcise the bad memories of a given year, to drive away the ghosts of loss and solitude.

There are lovely girls there reflected in shop windows, lovely girls in long coats moving through the winter night, beautiful girls across a table in a restaurant--- and there are kisses implicit in their presence. As there should be, of course. But each one of them is a ghost for another year, just as you'll be a ghost in their memories.  We haunt one another, and we haunt ourselves.

That's one of the things to remember as the year gutters out.