Two Nine Six: Poster

I've probably written about this before, but today one of my social media accounts sent me a notice that a girl I'd corresponded with for a bit back in the Long Ago was having a birthday. She must be thirty-two or thirty-three now. She's in London Town now, highly successful in her field and quite married.

What I'm remembering about her tonight is that she once had a blog where she posted a photo of a poster reading "REMEMBER: You Are Someone's Reason To Masturbate". That would've been in her early or mid twenties, when she'd just moved to London. She was a gym rat girl in those days, and a party girl with an eating disorder.  I remember seeing the photo of the poster and grimacing. Depressing thought, really.

It's not hard to intuit that she was using the poster as inspiration to hit the gym more, to run and stretch and pump weights. An inspiration to starve more, too. But it was all an attitude that was so alien to me.

I'll note that another expat girl I knew in London Town in those days laughed when I told her about the poster. She waved a hand and said blithely that Everyone is someone's Reason. Well, yes...for her, that was (and is) true. She has a long list of conquests--- always older, inevitably distinguished, often married, usually moneyed. She's been used to being in the upper demimonde since her late teens.  She can take it for granted that she's always been someone's Reason. Being part of admirers' fantasies is something she takes for granted.

Again--- that's utterly alien to me. I can't imagine ever being someone's Reason. I can't imagine that in the past, and I certainly can't imagine it now. I find it increasingly difficult and shameful to admit to having any fantasies of my own, and it seems highly, highly unlikely that I could ever be anyone's Reason.

My blonde friend down in NZ told me once that of course she'd fantasized about me. I looked at the screen and felt an odd rush of disbelief and anger. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to make her lie to me or why she'd want to tell me such an obvious lie.

I can sit and listen to lovely young companions tell me stories of their adventures and encounters. My life is constructed of stories, not atoms--- you know that saying. But I have so very little to offer them in return these days.  I'm not foolish enough to think that I have anything physical about me that would inspire fantasies, and I can't imagine having stories of any value these days.

I could never put that poster on a wall in my rooms. It's not something anyone male could do, really. Put something like that up and you'd be open to both derision and political attacks. And you'd have no defenses. None.

And...even if you were someone's Reason, you'd have no control over who that someone might be. I can't escape the belief that having someone themselves unattractive fancy you or fantasize about you means that you have done something wrong. Let's always make a note of that.

There's no chance that I can identify with either of the two girls in London Town about the thought in that poster. There's no chance that here in these latter days I could ever tell a girl that she was my Reason--- even we were in a very sexual relationship and I was offering her a compliment. There's no way to say that to a girl these days, and there's certainly no way that any girl would take me as a Reason.

I'm a very good listener, and I used to be a good storyteller. I used to be good at crafting stories and bringing lovely bookish girls into fantasies.  But I'm of no value whatsoever at being part of anyone's fantasies as a player.

Two Nine Five: Leather

Tonight I'm thinking again about my posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud, about Jill down in NZ.

I'm thinking about the stories she told me about the rich older man she fancied back maybe five or six years ago. She may have known him longer than that, but memory says that it was in 2015 and early 2016 that she was last involved with him. I know very little about the older man himself--- in his mid or late fifties, I think. Maybe sixty now. Jill always did have a taste for older men, a taste I have to approve of. She always called him "the businessman" and hinted that he spent his time "owning companies". That could mean all sorts of things, really. She never did tell me how she met him, or how old she was when she did, or what their early encounters were like. She hadn't seen him for a while when they ran into each other by accident in an Auckland bar in 2015. They had a drink and (of course) ended up in bed in his hotel suite.

She did tell me that he was rich even by her family's standards. Once, later, she wrote me to say that she felt guilty and ashamed because  one night off Cuba St. in Wellington she'd given a blowjob in a parked pickup truck to someone she described as a "bankrupt builder". Pickup truck in Kiwi is ute...a ute. For utility truck, I guess. She was ashamed that she'd given a drunken blowjob to the Bankrupt Builder and was cheating on The Businessman. How could she do that, she asked, how could she cheat on someone who had ten million dollars?  (My question-- $10 million NZ or in USD?)

What Jill loved best about being with The Businessman was that he collected expensive cars. He collected Aston-Martins and was a member of the NZ Aston-Martin Owners Club. He'd take her to meets and road rallies. I don't know how many of the cars he's owned over the years, or exactly what he owned when she was sleeping with him. She enthused once about having been in a V12 Vanquish, so that may have been his ride when she was with him in 2015/16.  I did Google the car, and I'd like to know if she'd been in one with him.

I think you know where this is going. Jill always hinted that she'd had sex in an Aston-Martin...maybe in more than one. She laughed about the make of the car, since she had been a major fan of the early 007 movies. Easy enough to imagine her in a parked Aston-Martin Vantage outside some posh restaurant like The Grove off St. Patricks Square, short cocktail dress up around her hips, straddling The Businessman. Let's note how my mind works here. I can see her in detail, tell you what colour and fabric her dress is, tell you that she's dark-tanned and obviously not wearing underwear (she rarely does). I can see the expression on her face as she rides him. I can't tell you a thing about him, though. Not looks, not expression, not suit. He's irrelevant as a person. It's Jill and the car that matter.

A V12 Vanquish would be a perfect stage set for a posh blonde party girl like Jill. I'm not especially interested in fast cars or sports cars, but an Aston-Martin is a stage set that I can see.

I can't get past the vision of Jill naked in an Aston-Martin. I can imagine her in her classic Ray-Bans, pulling off her cashmere pullover and cut-off denim shorts and leaning back naked while her Older Admirer drives through Grey Lynn in Auckland. I can imagine her laugh as she puts her bare feet up on the dash and turns up the music.

I can imagine her naked on open highway as well, the car at speed, Jill's sundress tossed into the back. If I had her here tonight, I ask all the questions that would help me turn the image into a story. How hard was it to get a sundress off in the passenger seat of the Vanquish? Harder than peeling off skinny jeans or leggings? Windows up or down? Wind in her hair or not? Would she curl up in the seat or lean back and put her feet up? Would she caress herself while the car accelerated or lean across to give the driver road head? Were the windows and windscreen dark-tinted or was she thrilled by the thought of performing for passing truckers and teen boys? What did it feel like, being naked at speed? What did the leather of the seats feel like against bare skin? That's something I do think about: Jill's hair in the wind, sunlight on her freckles, nipples hard, the North Island landscape rushing past.

Now of course she's been naked in parked cars since her early teens; let's take that as a given. But being naked in a Vantage V12--- a car that costs something above $US 175,000 ---or a $US 300,000 Vanquish V12...that has a very special erotic energy. I can't imagine her not always feeling obligated to sit in one of those with the back of her skirt flipped up so that she'd always have bare flesh on the leather seat.

In some better world, she'd call me late at night and tell me about textures and sensations, about the sound of the V12 engine while she gave head or fingered herself at high speed down a coastal highway. These days, my own selection of stage sets is deeply limited, and I'm unlikely ever to have new ones. But beautiful, leggy, posh girls in expensive sports cars--- there's an image I can like. I just wish I had more details and more accounts of adventures from young ladies with a taste for speed and transgression.

Two Nine Four: Masks

I've been thinking about desire and enticements, about what we see in what we desire.

I've been reading about the Los Angeles club scene in the 1960s, reading books by Eve Babitz, who was the chronicler of that world. I've liked Babitz's stories and memoirs for a long time. Her "Slow Days, Fast Company", "L.A. Woman", and "Sex & Rage" have been favorites of mine since my days in grad school. She was always a better It Girl than any of the Manhattan scenesters. The Warhol girls may have been cool, but none of them got naked to play chess with Marcel Duchamp.

I suppose it was a combination of things that made me want to re-read Babitz. I'd seen the new documentary about Joan Didion and I'd just read Taylor Jenkins Reid's "Daisy Jones and the Six". And I'd seen "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". All of that made me want to go back and re-read Eve Babitz, especially "Slow Days, Fast Company". Lovely short pieces, a lovely invocation of a Los Angeles I'll never see. Please call this a recommendation. Let me know what you think of Ms. Babitz.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fantasizing about the young Jane Birkin and the young Francoise Hardy-- two of my key Sixties Girls. I suppose reading "Slow Days, Fast Company" and "Daisy Jones and the Six" has made me fantasize about mid-Sixties California girls. I don't know what that means, and of course I haven't given up my dreams of being in Paris and London 1965 with Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy. But I am going through a phase of L.A. girls in miniskirts and big sunglasses as images for desire.

How do desires and fetishes change? There are underlying points in all my fantasies; that much is always true. A certain age, long legs, a disdain for underwear, dark tans. a certain height and angular slender build. Those things are part of the definition of desire for me. But if some things are necessary for me to feel desire, periods and costumes and styles do change. Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy are leggy Sixties girls, but they're not quite girls you can imagine partying with Eve Babitz at a party in Malibu. The trick, I suppose, is to find out what's behind the shifts in the precise forms of desire. And let's be  clear--- it's all as much about sets and settings as it is about the girls themselves.

Yesterday I walked from my office to a small burger joint to lunch. While I was waiting for my order I noticed a girl standing on line to pick up a take-away. I was struck very much coup de foudre with her.

Probably nineteen or twenty, tallish, slender. Streaked light-brown hair to her shoulders, light eyes, a seriously dark tan, perfect legs. A very tiny khaki miniskirt--- a look I haven't seen much of this spring and summer ---and cute sandals. And...a mask. She had on a black face mask. Somehow the mask made it all work. Somehow the mask made her desperately desirable. It is the season of the Red Death, and we're still in the midst of the pandemic. The mask may be the new normal for the rest of the year. After all, I was wearing one myself. But the mask and the miniskirt were a trigger for serious desire. I may have imagined her in the mask, those long legs over my shoulders. I may have imagined her gasping in orgasm through the mask.  I may have imagined those things, but I have no idea why they came to mind.  I'll certainly never know who she was, but it was the combination of mask and miniskirt that instantly made her a fantasy girl. So I suppose that Red Death face masks will become a fetish for me, the same way that ankle bracelets on lovely girls once did.

I've always needed the idea of sets and settings--- places, architecture, lighting, fashion ---for any fantasies to work. Right now it seems that I need the image of a certain kind of Sixties scene...and I may need lovely girls to wear face masks and tiny skirts. Or just the face mask.

But in any case, I have no idea where these images and fetishes come from.  I have no idea when and how they'll mutate or shift.  I'd still love to take the girl in the mask to a party at Ms. Babitz's house in the Canyons in some imaginary 1967, though.

Two Nine Zero: Stage Sets

Someone asked me yesterday why I'm not taking vacation time this summer. I told them that the Red Death had ruined everyone's vacation plans, so that I might wait 'til fall. I think I also implied that my finances weren't up to a vacation right now. That last part is certainly true, but it's not the key reason why I'm not going anywhere this year.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age, yes. A vacation for me would require certain amenities. At my age, I'm not going camping or whitewater rafting or rock-climbing. I'm usually bored at the beach, and I have no interest in any place like, say, Las Vegas.

My idea of a vacation can be urban. It can be about spending a week wandering streets in Manhattan or Montreal. Or I suppose it could be about renting something like one of the Pure Pod cabins my friend in New Zealand told me about. It could even be about sailing somewhere, though it could never be about being on a cruise. But whatever sort of vacation it would be, it would require  a lovely young companion to be with me.

I have been on vacations alone. I've ridden trains alone across Central Europe and wandered solo through towns in Slovenia and Hungary. Those things happened long ago, and while they're good memories, these days I have no interest in vacationing or traveling alone. I need a young companion to be there with me. I see no purpose, no purpose at all, in travel without a lover.

A vacation of any kind is expensive, and I live in genteel poverty. But a vacation should also be a romantic adventure, a time spent together with someone with whom you share passion and wickedness and dreams of creating stories. Right now I have no one in my life, and I have no destination in mind.

A city, a Pure Pod, a sailboat... Those things mean nothing to me in and of themselves. They're settings--- stage settings ---only. A hotel rooftop pool,  a sailboat deck at twilight, a Pure Pod deck--- those things have value as stage sets for sex and romance. Settings matter. Settings are the stuff underlying stories--- sneaking into the alleyway behind the bistro, watching a lovely companion swim naked off a moored sailboat, watching the city skyline from a hotel bed. The settings matter. You might think that you can have amazing sex in any ordinary bed in any ordinary room in any banal town or city. But it's not the physical act itself that matters. It's the setting, it's doing it in someplace out of the ordinary, it's collecting stories to be remembered years later.

I can't begin to imagine going anywhere without a lovely young companion who'll help me christen locations and create stories for later. I can't go anywhere without adventures and encounters that will match or out-point things girlfriends have done in their lives before me.  I want to be able to say that the stories and locations and adventures they're having with me are as good as those they've had with other men.

Financial limits are always are good excuse. Right now I can't afford an extended weekend in Savannah or Vancouver. But the real difficulty is that I have no lover in my life right now. And I'm not going any place where we won't be christening risky or stylish or amazingly visual spots together. I can't travel without a leggy, literary girl who'll see a vacation as a chance to create erotica together.

Two Eight Nine: Disclosures

I was sitting outside with a lovely neighbour here at the lakeside flat the other night, talking and working our way through a bottle of Belvedere vodka with iced tea. How Deepest South is that, do you think? I'll note that we were in separate deck chairs on the upper deck, and that we were properly socially-distanced. This is the time of the Red Death, and I've been socially-distanced and properly masked throughout. My neighbour herself is a lovely girl. She's been here in my apartment complex for almost four years now. She has long, toned legs, a mass of reddish hair, and is something of a party girl, though she's no one's fool. The night itself was good. Cool for the season here, with the scent of earlier rain still in the air.

At some point she confided in me that she was and always had been "a total sexual deviant". I hadn't heard the word "deviant" in twenty years, and I was immediately intrigued.  She reached out one arm and tapped her glass on mine and drunkenly repeated that she was "such a deviant". Of course I asked. How could I not ask? She told me that she'd lost track of how many people she'd had sex with, and asked me if I remembered my own body count number. I do, of course, but that's because I've always written such things down, all the way back into my teens. Everything is written down, everything is annotated. I did become a trained historian, after all. I didn't ask whether she didn't know her own number because it was so large or simply because many of her encounters had been drunken couplings that she barely remembered. Please note that I'm not imposing any moral judgment here, and I never would.  She's lovely and probably thirty or thirty-one. I can make a guess at what the number might be, but the only significance it would have is if she and I laid bets on whose was higher at her current age.

She then told me that she felt like a deviant, too, because she'd had girls in her past. She'd always loved girls, she told me, though she hadn't had the nerve to hook up with more than a few--- which of course is very much like my friend Jill in NZ.  How odd that she finds being at least occasionally bi to be so wicked that she can only admit it after several large vodkas.

She looked at me and shook a finger and told me that she just knew I was someone who tied girls up and whipped them. I had to laugh at that. Good guess, I told her. Very good guess. But of course I do love playing with blindfolds and silk scarves and riding crops and candle wax with lovely young companions. My neighbour told me that I was just so obvious, that that was something all men my age who had "all those bookshelves" liked. I did shrug and tell her that with age you learned to rely to technique and style rather than raw physicality. That was all okay, she said. Older men came up with interesting things to do. And you, she said, I'll bet you're really good at doing scenes and telling stories with girls. That's something I was proud to hear.

This does not--- let me emphasize that ---end with the two of us in bed, or with her on my couch being whipped. It doesn't. It ended with us clinking glasses and just talking until two or three in the morning.  In a non-plague year, it would've ended with a long hug and maybe--- maybe ---a goodnight kiss.  But it wasn't a night that was going to end in bed. It didn't need to, and while I love flirting shamelessly with her, I'm not going to step outside any bounds.

But it did make me think. During the night out on the deck, we talked about our respective experiences and pasts. I've usually been someone to whom strangers in bars or on trains confide their secrets, and my neighbour found me to be a good listener and a safe confidant. I'm glad that she does. Importantly, she hasn't been embarrassed or nervous around me since. That matters, too.

Nonetheless, it is an odd thing. She told me that she hasn't had anyone who'd understand about her secrets in years. I've been feeling the same thing lately. Confidantes are hard to find lately. Certainly harder than when I was, say, twenty-five or thirty. It seems much less safe these days to admit anything to anyone. In the time of the gender wars, admitting anything to anyone seems like putting a weight on their shoulders or, worse, like some kind of demand or threat.

I've always loved the whole experience of drunkenly telling one another secrets, about disclosing one's past and interests and fancies. There's a delight in that, in the sharing. Sharing fancies and obsessions is very often better than sex-in-the-flesh. Mutual surprise, the moment of laughing with someone at shared things, the electricity of being on the borderline between flirtation and seduction--- all those things make disclosures fun.

Yet it feels less safe now. Not just because the other person might be turned off, but that they might be angered. I'm less and less sure these days about such things. It's hard to offer up compliments, of course, although my neighbour is fine with my obviously appreciating her legs. But it is harder to tell the stories girls and I would've talked about twenty years ago, or maybe even ten. The world has changed around me and sometimes I haven't followed along with it.

Two Eight Two: Taxonomy

The time of the Red Death does give you space and solitude to think about things, to examine (endlessly examine, sometimes) memories from better days.

Last time I wrote here, I recalled something my friend Liberty said about the older men in her life and past:

Liberty told me that what she liked about affairs with Older Men was that they all had kinks and obsessions that they'd rarely (if ever) been able to talk about with anyone. She was always willing to listen and learn...and not mock them. 

She told me that when she was talking about the Santa Fe gallery owner who'd revealed his foot fetish to her. She was always quiet and a bit solemn, and always willing to listen. And she was right, mind you. By the time you reach a certain age, you'll have acquired a fetish or two--- or at least some particular obsession. And it'll be hard to talk about. By the time you reach a certain age, you'll know what you like, but somehow you'll feel less and less able to talk about it. You'll be more aware of social rules than you were at twenty, and for some complicated set of reasons far more afraid of being an outsider than you ever were in your days at uni.

I don't share the gallery owner's fetish, but I have a couple of small obsessions of my own, and I've noticed that my level of social unease has been climbing. At twenty or twenty-five I'd have talked about anything with a lover or potential lover, and I'd have been much more courageous about being open with my interests. At twenty-five--- back in another age, another world ---I had my left ear triple-pierced and paid no attention to remarks about that. These days, though, I find it hard to go swimming in the pool downstairs from my flat not because of my looks or age, but rather because I did get a couple of body piercings a few years ago. Nothing, mind you, that the current governor of New York isn't supposed to have, but I'm much more afraid of mockery or even simple questions than I ever was at twenty-five.

There are rank-hierarchies to everything, and I am far more aware of them now. I told a lovely blonde friend in an Upper Midwest city all about Liberty and the older man in Santa Fe, and she laughed and told me that Liberty was right, that older men had so many things to teach her, but that they were all afraid of girls her age mocking them. I'll trust her database on that. She'd been a gallery girl in Brooklyn and London once upon a time, and she'd been an escort and a sugar baby briefly. She and I talked the other evening about  hierarchies and fears, and she said that Liberty's partner had a point. A man, especially an older man, being into blindfolds and riding whips with girls like her at least had an air of danger and delicious wickedness about him, but a foot fetish always seemed to be silly and pathetic. She didn't mind doing either thing, she said, and she loved sex while blindfolded. And, yes, she said, she'd had older men cum on her bare feet before--- not her preference, she said, but it wasn't anything that disgusted her.  She could, she said, have told her female friends about being with an older patron who was into s/m, but she wouldn't have told anyone about a patron who liked her feet. And she couldn't have explained why.

Liberty was once in my bed with her wrists tied with silk scarves and bits of colored candle wax dripped on her. I knew you'd do this, she laughed. Never doubted it. That was early on in our acquaintance, and I was glad that she thought it was all fun. It's like being in some goth video, she said.  I felt...safe that evening. If she felt comfortable with older men because they had stories to tell her and things to teach her, I felt comfortable with her because she was open to adventures, because she saw me as someone who could create new stories with her.

Much later, on another night, after she'd told me about the gallery owner in Santa Fe, she asked if I'd do the things he did to her. I told her that, yes, certainly--- if she asked.  We had to talk about that answer. I had no objection to doing those things if she asked. So long as she asked, they'd be games, adventures, things done in play between friends and casual partners. If I asked her, though, they'd be fetish-y.  If I asked her, the things would feel shameful. We lay there in a tangle of sheets and tried to decide why I felt like that--- and why she could very clearly see my point.

There's a structure to preferences and obsessions and fetishes. Those things can be very clearly arranged in branches, lines of descent, hierarchies. Liberty was open to men teaching her things, to exploring things, and she always wanted me to feel like I could tell her things. She wanted me to give up body fear and body shame, to regard fetishes as just play, to have no social anxiety over my body piercings. I felt (and still feel) grateful for all the things she tried to teach me, and for all the stories she told me. But as much I was (and am) grateful that she let me be part of her own stories, I still have a deep reservoir of fears about telling young companions about what I like and don't like.

I do find it harder and harder to just accept what I like or don't like, harder and harder to reveal myself to someone with whom I'm trying to build a certain intimacy. My blonde, long-legged friend down in NZ told me once that she couldn't imagine that I'd ever be shy asking a lover for something that gave me pleasure, but that's no longer true. These days, alas, I'm far too anxious about identifying what I like or want or what gives me pleasure. I remain willing to do almost anything a lovely girl asks me to do for her or to her in bed. I'm always willing to try to give pleasure. But it gets harder and harder to ask someone to do anything for me.

Two Seven Eight: Boccaccio

Early spring, and the Red Death is here. The city where I live is in semi-quarantine, with empty streets and social life reduced to nothing. My understanding is that hospitals here in the city are quietly moving towards a crisis.

It's a grim season, and there's no denying that. My lovely blonde friend in the Land of the Long White Cloud has gone missing. New Zealand is under crisis rules, with its borders shut and businesses closed. I've no idea if she's well or if her employers have shut down altogether.

It's an odd thing, the plague in a social media age. I suppose people are still texting, but no one seems to be lamenting that there are no voices out there over the aether. I'm a creature of a dying generation, and telephone voices do matter to me. I suppose that FaceTime and Skype still count as interaction sites, but somehow that's not the same as long talks by phone late at night.

I've seen a few suggestions that here in the time of the Red Death, writing letters is a key skill to revive. I do agree with that, actually. There's something heartening about actual physical letters. There's something about ink and handwriting that makes you feel like you're actually part of a relationship with someone.

COVID-19 has of course destroyed not just the bar and restaurant industry, it's also ruined sex work and most sexual interactions. Sex workers in Europe and North America are trying to move online, to do webcam and cam-girl sex to stay financially afloat. There are no bars or clubs anymore, and fear has emptied out dating apps. In a world of N95 masks and using Clorox wipes on everything anyone touches, sex is fairly out of the question. Even s/m is hard to do if you're Social Distancing--- whipping a lovely young companion at a minimum distance of six feet (two meters?) is a difficult thing.

Now I will assume that the online sale of vibrators and dildos has spiked.  The Solitary Vice is the one sexual release left...so long as Amazon Prime continues to deliver. I could note that while Lelo and Hitachi are still bringing pleasure to women, there's no equivalent for men. Or at least no equivalent that anyone male can discuss. Women can tell clever, amusing stories of getting through quarantine and Social Distancing with their vibrators, but no one male can preserve any self-respect if he admits to wanking his way through the plague season. Of course, that's a story for another day.

Tonight I'm thinking about Boccaccio and the Decameron. You know the backstory for that, I'll presume. Somewhere in Italy during the Black Death, a group of wealthy and cultured refugees from the Plague assemble in a country estate and fight off boredom by telling one another stories--- usually scandalous, lascivious, and wickedly clever tales of adultery, seduction, and complicated affairs. I think that there was an updated version in the late 1960s, an Italian film called "Boccaccio '70". But in any case, I am thinking of Boccaccio's characters telling tales of lust and passion while the Plague hovers just offstage.  I'm thinking that we need a Decameron 2020. We need to tell one another tales of encounters and adventures, tales of the things we're all prevented from doing by COVID-19 right now.

My thought is that I'll spin out more threads here, that I'll tell stories from the Pasts of lovely friends, and just possibly a few tales from my own past. I hope you'll read this and respond with your own tales. If phone sex is a dying art, and no one actually writes letters any longer, then at least we can tell one another tales here.

I'm expecting that there'll be very little "normal" happening through the rest of the year. The Red Death may not be just outside the window, but it is out there.

So if you are reading this, do write. Do let me know about the stories I'll be posting...and let me know your own stories. This may be all we'll have for a while.

Two Six Seven: Numb

I saw ads at social media today about a product called Roman Swipes. I first thought the wipes were male body-cleansing wipes, much like the Every Man Jack "speed shower" cleansing wipes I've become obsessive about storing--- wipes designed to make sure that a potential Young Companion isn't sickened by the taste or scent of male flesh and male...parts.

I'll note that I have a supply of Every Man Jack and Cetaphil wipes on hand just...in case.  You did note that I've become horrified and disgusted by my own flesh, didn't you? You know the drill: shower twice a day under water as hot as I can bear, use a body wash probably originally designed for biohazard labs, and rough washcloths that will abrade away a couple of layers of skin. I'm not taking any chances.

Roman Swipes, though, aren't body cleansers. As best I can tell from the ad copy, they're  wipes saturated with a "4% Benzocaine solution" that's supposed to increase time-to-male-orgasm by 340% over several months.  The idea of course is that the Benzocaine is a numbing agent and that you apply it to...sensitive areas to reduce overstimulation-- i.e., it numbs your penis to prevent what used to be called ejaculatio praecox. It doesn't seem like you can just go into a drugstore or to Amazon and buy a pack. From what I could tell by a quick glance at their website, you sign up for a monthly or quarterly program.  Now I have nothing to say about the product or its efficacy. I was just perplexed by the idea of the product.

Ejaculatio praecox has never been my problem. Quite the contrary. I don't need the product for its intended use. When I first glanced at the advert, I hoped it was for another body cleanser. I'm always in the market for anything that can assuage body fear for a little while.

Reading the ad copy, though, it began to occur to me that I am reaching a place in life where Encounters might require pharmaceutical assistance. That hasn't happened yet, though I know it will...which itself is a fear that keeps me paralyzed and unwilling to try.

I used to tell myself that if it ever came to that, to systems failure, that I wouldn't be too proud to use the Blue Pill. My friend Katie in the Home Counties told me that she'd been with men who were a wide range of ages, and that she had no problem with the Blue Pill. She'd known boys in their twenties who used it "recreationally" and men in their late sixties who did need it to perform.  She told me that the Blue Pill existed to solve a problem, that it was nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, she said, she had a problem with dryness, and she'd just use a bit of "personal lubricant". Same thing, she told me--- there's a problem, and you use a tool to fix it. None of it is a judgment about your value as a person or a lover. 

When she and I talked about that, I completely agreed with her. I told myself that if ever the time came, I'd look for a simple and efficient way to fix the problem. Just a pill, I told myself. And I had confidence in my other skills. I told myself that I wasn't a one-trick pony. I knew other ways to offer pleasure to  a Young Companion, and I knew that if the moment came, I'd get through it.

None of that is likely to be true, of course. Over the last year, I've been edging closer to fear that any systems failure would in fact be a judgment on my value as a person. A year ago, I'd have brushed off any fears.  That's not the case tonight. I'm paralyzed by fear of failure, and in the best tradition of...much of my life...I'm unwilling to risk being seen to fail.  Worse, I'm unwilling to be seen at all. I'm increasingly unwilling to be touched. Tonight, even if the opportunity presented itself, I'd be unwilling to be a body with a Young Companion. I'd take it for granted that my flesh--- look, texture, taste, scent ---would disgust any girl who'd be in my presence,

So...I don't need the Roman Swipes. The Blue Pill would be pointless. I have a store of Every Man Jack wipes and I spend my time standing under scalding water and sanding away at my skin.  If I could remove any trace of texture, scent, and taste, I would.  The next stage is...what? Changing my clothes down to the skin two or three times a day? I don't think the Blue Pill can do anything about my growing inability to venture out into anything social.

Two Six Five: Memories

I thought today of a girl I hadn't seen in half a lifetime. The year is ending-- the decade, too. That may have put me in a sentimental mood.

I was at a small deli near my lakeside flat and the young girl behind the counter reminded me of someone from my own past. I took the sandwich I'd ordered and smiled and tipped her well on my debit card and walked home in the cold with a lost name and face in my mind.

The girl I'm thinking of was named Toni. She lived next to me for a while just after I'd finished university. She looked like...hmmm...a young Aubrey Plaza. Dark brown hair in a short bob, blue eyes, glasses. Yes, the girl at the deli today had the same look.

Toni was maybe nineteen when I first ran into her. She was a neo-hippie girl. I do remember that, and I remember that she almost always had a guitar with her. She was always very serious and solemn, and she'd sit out on her porch and play guitar or read. There were always boys over there at her house. She had, I discovered, a reputation as an easy armful, but somehow she always looked quiet and introspective. We'd run into each other walking places along my street, and we'd see one another at the tiny coffee shop on the corner.  Lovely eyes, lovely legs. The sort of girl who always had a sketch pad and a novel in her backpack.

The first time we went out was impromptu and awkward. I asked her to join me for a drink. The place was painfully hip, back in the day when date bars were transitioning from fern bars with lots of brass to a more exposed-brick look. The place was called...either the Square Peg or the Brass Button. I can't recall which, though eventually we were at both often enough. It was late spring, and she wore a longish peasant skirt I remember that. Drinks, yes, though I can't recall what we drank. Vodka, probably. We drank, talked, and flirted. I think maybe I was the one who was flirting--- she was always too serious for flirting, even when she was deciding to sleep with someone. We walked down to one of the city parks and went out by a lake. I remember undoing her skirt and kissing my way along her legs. She wasn't talkative during sex, though she liked stroking my hair while I talked and undressed her. I do remember her wearing a small ankle bracelet she'd bought in Belize, and I remember that she was bra-less that night, with a necklace of some kind that lay between her breasts. When she rode me and leaned down, the little locket on the necklace would fall into my face and I held it in my mouth. She did have underwear on, and I tossed them at the lake and told her she should never wear any when she was out with me. She came back to my house that night and stayed over. She did make a point of never wearing underwear when she and I went out.

We saw each other sporadically; we were never really a couple. Sometimes that summer she'd call and ask for a ride to places across the city--- open mic nights, poetry readings. She always made it clear that  she'd trade me sex for a ride.  She made a point of being transactional. She liked my company, I think, but she disliked emotions and expectations.

I remember a photo I took of her once. She was standing by her bed with her arms crossed. Tiny, faded denim cut-offs. A cropped blue-and-white halter tee. Deliciously barefoot. That pensive expression that I did fancy.

It's not much of a story--- an affair that lasted off and on from a May through mid-autumn. She stayed over a few nights; I stayed at her place after a few parties. Around my birthday that year she moved across town to share a house with her sister. There were highlights--- Toni bent over someone's car parked by the lighthouse park while I slid her denim mini up over her hips, Toni swimming naked at a motel pool while I handed her a bottle of vodka, Toni and I in a bathroom stall at Square Peg. Highlights, but nothing I suppose that's quite as good as any of the stories I posted here over the summer and early fall. Certainly nothing as good as anything my leggy blonde friend in New Zealand may have done in her own early twenties.

I have no idea whatever became of her. It's all half a lifetime ago. I hadn't thought of her in forever, or not until I was chatting today with the girl at the deli. I need to call up more memories. Toni isn't a bad one at all. A good mid-twenties affair, simple and uncomplicated, and one I had long before sex became something baroque and  fraught.

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.

Two Five One: Palimpsest

I was trained to do History, and I believe in keeping archives. I have paper journals dating back twenty-odd years, and notebooks that reach back to my undergraduate days. I have correspondence, including love letters, that dates back into the Eighties. And I have chat logs that go back a decade, filled with long exchanges with lovely young companions. I've never thought of purging any of those things. They're my past, my history, and they hold memories of places I've been, adventures I've had, and girls I've loved or desired. History matters, stories matter. I've lived my life through stories, and everything that I am is built up out of stories.

And yet there's something unsettling about going back through my past. My blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me once that she couldn't imagine me ever being hesitant to tell a lover or potential lover about my desires and preferences. That was one of my great skills as a lover, she told me: being willing to be utterly open, being able to show girls that there were so many ways to seek out pleasure and delight. It wasn't so long ago that she told me those things, and they meant a lot. These days, though, I'm starting to feel uncomfortable about that.

My friend down in Aoteoroa exchanged years worth of emails and chats with me. We explored a great many fantasy scenarios and fantasy worlds. We told each other all about our pasts and dreams and adventures and kinks. She'd write me to say that the two of us were able to do and try everything. No shame, no limits--- she'd tell me that all the time. But these days all our exchanges are beginning to worry me.

She's not the only one. Other lovely young companions have spent hours and hours on the phone with me, spinning out worlds and scenarios. Those late nights meant the world to me. We'd be inside each other's dreams and pleasures and desires and I'd feel alive and valued and able to explore whole new sexual and romantic worlds with girls in other cities and other countries. Tonight I have to wonder if I'd do those things now.

Here in the age of the gender wars the idea of having fantasies, let alone sharing them, is increasingly dangerous. I look back on the things lovers and I shared via email or chat or letters and I feel wary and something very close to miserable. Once upon a time, I'd never have been ashamed of any of the things I said or did with young companions. These days I'm deeply worried of being judged and mocked and condemned in ways I'd never have imagined a decade ago.

I look at the chat logs from what my Wellington friend and I talked about for years and what crosses my mind isn't that she felt safe enough and thrilled enough to say No shame, no limits to me, but that someone, somewhere, someday will use them against me. I'm beginning to feel the same way about the letters and emails archived over the years.

I can't decide whether it's all the Zeitgeist or if it's that entropy is winning and that I no longer have the energy to believe in pleasure and adventures. Whichever it is, I find myself not just afraid, but ashamed. Shame, unlike guilt, is external, socially-imposed. I'm becoming ashamed of all the ways lovely young companions and I found pleasure together. I'm becoming ashamed of the things that gave me pleasure. I'm becoming ashamed of having shared those things.  I know that it's that there's been some sea-change in how we view pleasure and adventure, and I look at the things lovers and I said and did and feel...empty. I feel like I'm losing my past, that the age we live in is telling me that everything I desired and felt and enjoyed was wrong, contemptible, shameful. I hate thinking that the girls I shared all those things with now despise me and reject the things we did and said.  I hate that, but there's nothing I can do about it.

Two Four One: Gallery

There is a question that occurs to me tonight: what are we permitted to desire?

Of course, asking that question immediately leads back to another, more basic one: permitted by whom?

I think the answer is, simply enough, social media. Social media has become the gallery of hooded figures passing judgment on us all. Cancel culture, call-out culture--- whatever the term, social media has become an externalized superego, the external voice of social shame. Twenty years ago, what you did in public could be judged by your friends, certainly, and by the relatively few people who physically saw you. You weren't yet judged by an audience of potentially scores of thousands.

It's possible that a generation ago, guilt meant more than shame. How you judged yourself meant more than what strangers thought--- if only because there were so few strangers who were aware of you or who were physically close enough to see anything you did. And now we've displaced the right to issue judgments to the people who view your social media.

Right now, most of us have some kind of social media presence. Not so much here, mind you, but at places like Twitter or FB, places designed for interaction. Judgment has become much more externalized. Social disapproval, social exclusion--- all that has become much more weighty. There are more voices in your ears telling you that what you think, what you desire, what you do and are is unacceptable and shameful.

Tonight's question is simple: what are we permitted to desire? And more--- how are we allowed to articulate that desire? 

When you look at a potential partner, a potential lover, what are you allowed to want? Here in the age of the gender wars, can you say that you want anything specific? Can you say that you like a particular set of physical or social qualities? Age, height, weight, eye colour, hair colour--- are you allowed to have preferences? Are you  required to justify your preferences? Are you even allowed to justify your tastes? Can you even express desire without being told by angry, unknown voices that you have no right to feel anything at all?

I've said this before, but it feels much harder now than it did twenty years ago to even talk about desire. Once upon a time, discussing fantasies and sharing memories of past adventures would have been part of any enjoyable date, of any courtship ritual. Who can do that now? The ghosts in the gallery are there waiting to call you out, to cancel you--- and they needn't actually be lurking on your smartphone or your laptop. They're on the devices of everyone around you. They're sitting invisibly at your shoulder, waiting for you to make that first mistake.

The ghosts in the gallery have no clear set of standards for judging you. Their point is that doing anything at all is wrong. Being there is wrong. Any choice excludes and marginalizes, they'll say. Any courtship is coercive. Any social time spent together is an imposition on someone's time. Any sexual preference--- positions, places,  fetishes ---is wrong. Physical desire itself is wrong, and certainly coercive to discuss. Pleasure is not just seen as a zero-sum thing demanded of someone else, pleasure is regarded as suspect all on its own, as a concept.

To write about sex and pleasure, to write about courtships and explorations--- that's no longer acceptable. The voices in the gallery can tell you with derision and vitriol that talking about those things makes you complicit in oppression.  Feeling desire is something that must be suppressed, and discussing it must be cancelled. So the gallery voices say.

And right now no one is defending the idea of desire.

Two Three Six: Interlocutors

I ran across an article the other day lamenting that men, because they have no male friends or social support networks, rely on their wives and girlfriends and partners to keep them emotionally stable, that they burden and wear down their significant others with their psychological needs. A persuasive article, mind you. And it made a real point--- masculinity as defined in contemporary North America leaves no real place for men to develop support networks amongst themselves.

I've said that before at this site. A North American male--- straight, white ones certainly ---past about twenty-four or twenty-five is socially discouraged from maintaining any close male friendships.  Having close male friends past that point leaves one open to accusations of being closeted gay or else a man-child who can't commit to a "real" relationship. You know the term I use: either a Peter Pan or a paederast. And so men throw all their psychological needs onto their girlfriends or partners--- one more weight for the women in their lives to carry.

The article made very good points. There's no denying that. Still, though--- it is disheartening. Dispiriting, anyway.

I sat at my office desk reading the article and felt vaguely guilty. Vaguely empty, too. Truth to tell,  I can't think of any male friends with whom I'd discuss anything personal or emotionally deep. There are a few people with whom I'd trade stories over drinks--- tell tales from books I'd read, bring up odd   bits of information on line, talk about films ---but none with whom I'd discuss anything approaching within cannon-shot of intimate. If I told any stories about myself, they'd be the kind that fall into the category of once-upon-a-time about places gone or adventures in my university days.

So there's that much truth in the article. There's no one I'd invite over for drinks, no one whom I'd call and suggest going anyplace. If I made a list tonight of people I'd count as friends, there's not one who's been to my flat, not one whose home address I know. I have female neighbours who run back and forth between apartments--- cooking, having drinks, sitting outside and talking 'til midnight. That's just not something I can do.

The article also made me vaguely ashamed of ever thinking of long conversations with girls who've been friends-and-lovers. I read the article and found myself deciding not to send emails or make phone calls or send texts. For much of my life friends-and-lovers and I spent long nights on the phone, talking and flirting and having  extended, complicated, random conversations about anything and everything. Looking back, I feel somehow guilty. I feel guilty about being an emotional burden, or about taking up someone's time or emotional energy.

I'd always thought that one of the key reasons for having a girlfriend, a lover, a partner was that you'd have someone to be part of those late-night talks. I'd always thought that being able to have an interlocutor, a confidante, a late-night voice was a key part of a relationship.  Late-night conversations made so many things better, offered a sense of belonging, a sense of comfort and safety and value. Sharing confidences, sharing stories, offering support and belief--- those things were so much of why you wanted a lover, a partner, an affair. I treasured those conversations, and now I feel ashamed of them. Nowadays those long late-night talks sound more and more like an imposition, like a burden and an emotional drain. Asking for time at all sounds like coercion.

So here we are: unwilling now to contact anyone, to call or write or text or do anything that could be construed as asking for anyone's time or energy.  I find that I can't do that, and I can't contact anyone, especially someone who's a friend-and-lover. I won't be a burden, and asking  for time, advice, support, sympathy--- that's no longer acceptable. Unburdening oneself is a burden to others; sharing one's intimacies is an imposition. I can't--- won't ---do that.

Two Three Four: Nerve

I remember a film from long ago, a film whose name and actors I can't recall at all. I might have been in my first year at university when I saw it--- it was as long ago as that. Last night I remembered one scene, and it's stayed with me.

There was a scene where one of the main characters was exposed to nerve gas. I can't recall why, whether it was a lab accident, a military training accident, or something deliberate. I can't recall, and in the end it doesn't matter. What I do remember is the character sprawled on a floor somewhere, his body spasming and twitching as the nerve gas took effect. A scary enough scene, disturbing and grim.  What came to me last night, though, was not a character dying in the story, but how his body jerking helplessly was far too like what you might look like in the throes of having sex or, maybe more to the point, in the midst of indulging in the Solitary Vice.

Sex is almost always about loss of control.  That's coded as good in a great many scenes: giving up control in order to find pleasure, to be able to receive pleasure.  Yet while the film scene did make me think of how I (or anyone) might look during sex, thinking that also made me ashamed and depressed.

I've seen a fair number of lovely young companions indulge in the Solitary Vice over the years. That's been something I've asked them to do for me. Some, yes, have offered to do that all on their own. I've had young companions tell me that they wanted to show me what pleasure looked like. Some I know enjoyed the performance itself, enjoyed the idea of performing.  And, yes---- I watched and thought they were beautiful. I admired the way they gave themselves up to pleasure. I envied them the ability to lose themselves in what they were doing, the ability to hold my eye and bring me into their own sensations.

Do I have to say that I've always and ever been hesitant to do the same thing for them, even when they've specifically asked?  The reason why is and always has been body dysphoria, I suppose--- or at least a distrust of my body. That film scene with the nerve gas victim haunts me right now--- the jerking limbs, the aimless kicking, the head helplessly shaking. I'd imagine myself looking like that, and I'd know at some very basic, foundational level that there was nothing attractive in the way I'd look, that whatever happened with my body, the young companion watching it would either laugh or be disgusted and contemptuous.

I am not at home in my body and never have been. I have good eyes. I have long, slender hands. These days (and years too late) I have good cheekbones. But there's nothing in the way I hold myself, nothing in the way I move, nothing in the way I look undressed that's sexually alluring. There's nothing about my body these days that doesn't represent decay and failure to me. I find it harder and harder to imagine taking any pleasure in my body or taking any pleasure from it. I find it impossible here this afternoon to imagine my body giving any pleasure.

I've always thought of sex as something crafted into story arcs,  and I can't imagine a story these days where my body doesn't look like that dying nerve gas victim. I'm certainly nothing to watch, and anything physical I might offer to do with or for a young companion would look like that spasming, helplessly twitching body in the film scene. That character dies a horrible and hopeless death. Anything I'd do with my body, anything I'd try to do with a lover, would be what was happening there in that long ago film.

Two Three Two: Checkboxes

I realize that by writing here at all, I run the risk of being thought obsessed with sex. I find sex and courtship fascinating, but what I'm obsessed with seems to be something else. I'm much less obsessed with sex than with the accessories and accoutrements of sex.

I'm obsessed less with sex itself than with how sex fits into stories. I see sex and courtship as based on stories, on narrative arcs. I look less at the act than at how and where it all happens. Sex in one's own bed in one's own house may be wonderful, passionate, intimate, athletic. But it's not as good as sex in a parked Aston-Martin or on a sailboat moored in Milford Sound or atop a rooftop bar in Manhattan. Location matters, just as all the sets and props around you matter. Sex matters less for the physical sensation or emotional exchange than for the stories constructed around what you've done. I've believed that all my life. Part of roué-hood is telling stories, after all. All the things I've ever done in my various careers have been about telling stories. And every story requires a setting and props. Every story requires accessories.

I've written here about Morning After Kits, and I have been obsessing over those for a couple of weeks. I want to know what lovely girls take with them to assignations. I want to go over their Morning After Kit inventories and see what exactly they're preparing for. I want to know how often they carry their Kit items--- whether they're carried only on some designated nights or whether the girl is always ready for some random coup de foudre moment.

Let's be clear here. There is envy involved. Not so much envy of the sex, or of their ability to have random encounters, but envy of the Kit itself, envy of having a list of items. A lovely girl will send me her list of Morning After Kit items, and I'll go through it to see which of those things (or their male equivalents) I either have or can acquire. A travel toothbrush and a travel-size tube of toothpaste? Check. A travel-size anti-perspirant container? Check. A body wipe or two? Check.  A sign of my own obsessions is that the first time a girl sent me a Morning After Kit list, I instantly dashed to my laptop to find and purchase a travel toothbrush. In the end, I bought a dozen or so. I knew that I was unlikely ever to need them--- if nothing else, I prefer to bring Young Companions back here to my own rooms ---but I wanted to have them because they made me feel as if I could have the same kinds of accessories and accoutrements as the young ladies of my acquaintance. That new box of body wipes on my bathroom shelf is there for the same reason: Look, it says, I can have a  Kit, too! I can be ready in hotel rooms with a lovely stranger! I'm going to take as a given that this is something that could be described as pathetic.

This happens to me. I end up obsessing over lists and checklists. I want to check whatever boxes so that my own story arcs will be as good as those of my Young Companions.  I check off accessories--- cleansers, moisturizers, hair masques, wet wipes ---and I also check off locations (parked cars, rooftop bars, sailboats, offices, bullet trains). Again, this may in fact be sad, but presentation is everything. And I do long for story arcs as good as those of my Young Companions.

Two Two Nine: Fingertips

There's a moment in any relationship that's delicate and vulnerable and exhilarating. It's simple enough--- the moment when you first take a lover's hand.

I do have memories of that, of how it's done. I remember sliding a hand across a table during a conversation and lifting a girl's hand up to twine my fingers around hers. The conversation carries on, and when it's all done well, neither of you even looks at your hands. The girl may spread her fingers and let yours go between them. Fingertips may tap against one another. You're still talking--- books, music, whether you prefer chocolate powder or cinnamon dusted on a cappuccino.  You're looking into one another's eyes and your fingers are learning each other's touch, learning each other's skin.

When it's done well, there's that knowing smile between the two of you--- first touch, the first statement that you're here for a ritual of flirtation and seduction. Sitting there--- coffee shop, bar, restaurant ---and touching across the table. It is an exhilarating moment. So much can be opening up here, so many possibilities are implicit in that first touch. There are other touches that offer up excitement, of course. The first time you put a hand on a lovely girl's bare leg while you drive at night, the first kiss on a bare shoulder--- those things matter. Holding hands, though... Holding hands is a ritual beginning that manages to be gentle and tentative, a ritual that allows the first touch, a ritual that makes a statement about your value.

I'm old enough to have done this a lot. Old enough to have memories of that first touch in different cities, different countries. I'm old enough to have done it in all kinds of venues. It's always meant a lot to me. But here in these latter days, I'm worried that it won't happen again.

Like so much else--- seductions, first kisses, first experiments and statements of preference or descriptions of fantasies and hopes ---it just seems increasingly difficult to do.

Once when I was very young, I went on a camping trip in the mountains. I remember hiking with friends through woods and along streams in a national park. I remember crossing streams stone to stone, doing small leaping steps from one stone to another. It was easy enough, even with a backpack.  I felt very much at ease. I was looking to the other bank, looking up at forested slopes and peaks in the distance. And then--- I looked down at the water and the stones and froze. I couldn't cross by instinct any longer. I was suddenly aware of what I was doing, aware of having to judge distance and balance. I no longer had any sense of rhythm, no ability to do this without thinking. I was no longer outside myself, and I was paralyzed with having to think.

That first touch, the first moment of sliding a had across a table to hold hands with a lovely girl--- I think I've lost the ability to do it. It no longer feels like a ritual. It feels like something I have to think about. I no longer have any sense of when and how to do this. No rhythm, no sense of flow. And I'm not sure it's something I can do if I have to think about it and use my conscious mind.

It's a bad ability to lose. I don't know how I've lost it, and I don't know how (if ever) I can get it back. That table surface is now a barrier I don't know how to cross.

Two Two Seven: Ink

I have been trying to imagine writing a love letter again. It's not an easy thing. I've always had a good eye for ritual, and I've always been able to lose myself in rituals. It's hard tonight, though, trying to imagine writing a love letter.

I've told you how it should be done. On good paper, always. At the very least, you should use hotel stationery, preferably a good hotel in some city far away overseas. Good paper, though, is always best. Something purpose-made for serious correspondence.  Heavy envelopes, too. And a wax seal.  There are people who'd tell you that a wax seal is pretentious, but I think they're wrong. The seal is archaic, but deliberately so. It says that something is personal and private, that whatever's in the envelope is private and valuable. There should be something satisfying for the recipient, too. When she breaks that seal, she knows that she's seeing something that was for her and her alone.  You should always use good ink. That's a given. A fountain pen and good ink. It should be a pen you have to think about, a high-end tool for something important. You need to feel the pen when you write, to feel a sense of doing something that matters. The ink itself should be, well, not just black or blue. I do mix my own--- blend inks to get a colour that means something to me, a colour that reminds a lovely girl of me and what I am.

I can imagine those things. I can imagine laying it all out--- paper, pen, ink. You can write a love letter at a cafe, or in the reading room of a good library. Home is best, though. Easier to have the right music when you're at home. Easier to feel a sense of intimacy, too.

I'm not sure that I could do it tonight, even if I had someone to send a love letter to. I'm not sure what I'd say. I'd be afraid that any statement of feelings would be considered manipulative or coercive. Something simple--- I want to take you in my arms and kiss you. I want to feel you next to me in the morning. Something simple and basic and ordinary. But here in the age of the gender wars, couldn't it be made to sound coercive or threatening, even if the recipient was someone who'd shared your bed and who'd told you that she felt desire and affection for you? If you tell a lover (or a hoped-for lover) that you'd like to go places with her, do things with her, see the world with her, aren't you demanding her time? I read a piece online not long ago where the author was horrified at the idea of asking someone out. You were asking for someone's time,  he said, and for his generation, nothing was more carefully-hoarded or valuable than time. Asking someone to make time for you, to do something they weren't work-obligated to do, to do something they hadn't thought of themselves...wasn't that coercive and "entitled"? More--- asking someone to do something, asking at any time, was saying that you didn't think their own lives were already filled with important things. It was asking someone to expend time and emotional energy in reading your letter and in having to actually go out and deal with people.

There are other fears, too. A really passionate love letter could seem emotionally overwhelming. And the recipient could all-too-easily read it aloud to her female friends and mock you. I think--- or I'd like to think ---that no well-brought-up young lady would've done that in Jane Austen's day. I'm not sure I'd trust a lovely recipient not to mock me to her friends now, and that fear leaves me empty and sad on two levels--- that someone might do it, and that I'd be the sort of person to imagine her doing it.

In all honesty, I can't sext. The format is just wrong--- it's not a format I'd be any good at.  Texts are too short, my typing too inept. I don't have the room to craft fantasies. And, yes, I think of texts as too easy to spread out to people who'd laugh or be disgusted at what I'd sext to someone. I've always had an imaginary audience judging me, I've always tried to avoid the derision of the imaginary judges in the audience.

Tonight I'm looking at my collection of fountain pens and bottles of ink and wondering how you go about telling a lover (or hoped-for lover) about what you like, or what you want, or what your feelings for her are.  What ways do we still have, here in the age of social media and the gender wars, to do any of those things?

Two Zero Three: De Bourgh

It's been a sombre year. So very little good has happened, and many of us here in what used to be the American republic are emotionally exhausted. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, in a post-Weinstein world, it's harder and harder to write about sex. We no longer see sex as something that's exciting or fun. Sex is no longer wicked in the fun way. Everything I've seen in the past few months has described sex only in terms of power and coercion. Every single article I've read about the future of sex has been written by a woman who's taken it as a given that flirtation and seduction, especially if done at any location vaguely connected with work or school, is inherently oppressive and disgusting.

The only person I know of who's still enjoying herself having sex is my friend in London Town, who wrote me about her Christmas plans while visiting family in the States:

Had a nice visit with my former professor (including naughty sex on the floor of an empty classroom at my old university while he was supposedly administering the final exam to a class of his students) en route and am now in the hills of New England deciding if I want to take either of my out-of-the-blue marriage proposals seriously. I'm leaning towards no. Though I am making plans to visit the very wealthy, powerful, never-married (and really not at all bad-looking) 70-year-old at one of his houses before I head back to London. But I honestly think it would probably be a disaster.

She also had this to say about the social hierarchies of air travel:

Regarding air travel, first class is better than business class. However, many airlines only have either first OR business class these days. British Airways is somewhat unusual in having four classes on many of its flights: economy, premium economy, business, and first.

That was in response to a note of mine speculating that one of her Older, Moneyed Gentlemen would've paid for her first-class flight from LDN to BOS. I'd wondered if first-class or business class was the more exclusive these days. That's not something I'm likely to know.  I have the idea that she once flew to some kind of rendezvous in Singapore (professional? romantic?) in one of those 0.10% masters-of-the-global-economy quasi-cabins that airlines like Emirates and Singapore reserve for the global elite. Now of course I saw the first "Emmanuelle" film many a year ago, so my only question is whether she did the Young Sylvia Kristel-on-the-Concorde thing in joining the Mile-High Club. The in-flight amenities and cuisine I couldn't care less about. It's only the carnal uses of the flight time that I care about.

Anyway...I do wonder if she'll give me a call from wherever she is in New England. I like her, and of course I enjoy hearing her stories. But I forever feel utterly de bas en haut around her. Socially, intellectually, sexually. I mean, she's never played Lady Catherine de Bourgh around me, but I can't help imputing condescension on her part. I have a very keen sense of class distinctions and rank-hierarchy, and a very heightened sense of self-loathing. Let's be clear. I could never be part of any of her Encounters or Stories on the grounds of my looks, poverty, social ineptitude, and possible sexual incompetence. Even if I had an invitation, I'd never take the risk of total humiliation.

I used to think that I was rather good at creating fantasy scenarios via telephone. I was actually quite proud of the craft. I think it was listening to my  friend in London Town talk about men and their fantasies--- her even more than listening to Ms. Flox do the same thing at her various blogs  ---that persuaded me that anything I might create or fancy would be trivial, jejune, and pathetic. So that's just one less thing I can risk doing, and certainly one less thing I can believe gives me any value.

Two Zero Zero: Silence

I've been thinking about how the voices out in the night have fallen silent, one by one.

There was a time not so many years ago when my phone rang late at night and lovely young voices were there to tell me stories and be there until long after midnight. I understand that the current social stereotype is that Millennials would rather take an arrow to the knee than actually talk on the phone, but I miss those voices. I miss the days when you could have long conversations, when the telephone was the tool for flirtations and seduction.

I'm a storyteller. That's what I've always been. I've made my living by telling stories, by constructing narratives. It's how I've made my career, and it's how I've enticed lovers into my life. Without stories, without the ability to tell stories, my life would be empty.

All the those late-night conversations are missed. Books, films, music, lives, hopes--- the conversations would wander from topic to topic 'til dawn. They'd take long detours into flirtation and seduction, and we'd construct long, intricate fantasies. We'd tell one another about lovers in the past, about adventures and encounters, and of course about all the things we wanted to do with future lovers--- places, people, positions, wardrobes and costumes and accessories. We'd create scenarios and imagine what we'd do with one another.  It occurs to me that those days are over. It's not just the lack of voices on the other end of the phone.  It's that fantasies have fallen out of favour. Fantasies are now regarded with suspicion and a kind of disdain.

I can't imagine telling a lovely girl about any of my fantasies these days. To tell her would be a kind of aggression, the gender warriors would say--- something that demands her attention and response, something that imposes on her time.

I can't imagine taking the risk of telling a lovely girl about my fantasies.  It's all too easy nowadays to imagine not just mockery, but political disdain. The current wisdom is that no one can just have fantasies, that all fantasies must be judged in some social-political context. Why take the risk? Why end up stammering out political apologies?

Letting someone know about your fantasies also risks being pigeonholed--- of being regarded as someone who likes only the things in the fantasies. If you enjoy a particular scenario or genre,  then you risk being tagged as being nothing but someone with mere repetition compulsion.

There was a time not so many years ago when exchanging fantasies was a key part of flirtation and seduction. These days, that's far too risky to do. My own take is that these days one's sexual fantasies are judged far more harshly than they've ever been. One's fantasies may be "problematic" on political grounds. They can be mocked as inept, jejune, boring--- or as signs of weakness.

It's easier to remain silent. Say nothing, ask nothing, admit nothing, reveal nothing. Silence is always the default procedure.  

One Nine Nine: Default Mode

It's been months since I was here, and I do apologise. This has been a bad year. It's been a bad year for what used to be the American republic, and it's been a bad year for me here in my own life. I haven't had the energy to write here, and somehow nothing personal, nothing individual or sexual, seems important these days.

Nonetheless, let's consider the current versions of certain Arbitrary Social Rules.

We live in the age of what a friend of mine in Los Angeles calls "the triumph of the autistic". What he means by that is that the social world is increasingly coming to accept "no social interaction" as the default mode. You can see that in things like the replacement of phone calls by texting or even the replacement of email by apps like Slack. The default mode increasing involves doing everything possible to lessen any need for long conversations or contacts that require any ability to read and interpret social nuance.  Social rituals are increasingly seen as too exhausting, as demands and impositions, as aggressions.  Hell is other people: that's the new default belief.

My friend in Los Angeles calls this "the triumph of the autistic". He relates it to an age where tech sociopaths are regarded as culture heroes, where writers like Nick Land tell us that in the era of tech and Singularity dreams, only the autistic can cut free of human messiness and grasp the new world of tech.  My own preference is to call this the Age of the Armoured Monad. I've been using that term for a while, largely to refer to the Gender Wars--- though I think it does have a wider application. The era is one where the world is made up of individuals with no real social links or obligations, where friendship and romance are seen as proletarianization, as being forced to "perform emotional labour", as being imposed on. Even speaking to someone can be instantly construed as a "demand for time and attention" that's illegitimate. There's an app of some kind that's being marketed now that provides an immediate cash value for each and every act of "emotional labour" one might perform. Listening to a friend's troubles? Well, here's a dollar value taken from the hourly rates of therapists.  Meeting a lonely friend for coffee? Well, here's a dollar value based on...what? Value of foregone time? Rates for "girlfriend experience" level escorts? Offering reassurance and verbal support? Well, that can be calculated, too.  I expect the same app also provides dollar values for things like cooking dinner for a friend/lover. All I can see it that the app is a weapon in a knife-fight for moral advantage in a relationship, and a good reason never to ask anyone for anything.

Remember: the default choice is always no contact, no interaction.

Let's think for a minute about the new social rules, shall we?

If you're out with someone---- well, you shouldn't be. Being out with someone, asking someone out, is an imposition on their time and energy. It's a demand, and you shouldn't be making it. Even if the other person willingly goes with you, it was an aggressive thing even to ask.

If you are out with someone, well... do not walk alongside them. That can be construed as expecting them to pay attention to you or, worse, expecting them to hold hands or allow an arm to be put round them. Do not walk behind them. That's lurking and menacing. Walk ahead of them. Walk ahead of the, and don't look back--- that's a demand for attention and feeling "entitled" to look back and find them still there.  Walk ahead, and keep walking. Say nothing. That's key--- say nothing.

Needless to say, never suggest a destination. Never suggest a route. That's assuming that you can take charge. Never stop to look at anything--- you're imposing your likes and interests on someone else. Certainly make no suggestions for drinks or menu items--- that's only an attempt to flaunt your dominance and your allegedly superior knowledge.

Undertake no acts of social courtesy. Open no doors, carry no bags or packages, take no coats. That can be construed as a ploy for later repayment in one form or another.

If you are at, say, a cafe or a bar, always sit so that you're against the wall and the other person has a clear path to the door, a clear path away from you. Never, ever get between them and an exit. Never sit directly across from them.  Never put your hands on the table. That can be construed as a demand to hold hands.  Never look directly at them. Eye contact is aggressive, a challenge. At the very least, eye contact is a demand for attention, and asking for attention is always and ever forbidden.

When possible, always sit at right angles to the person you're with. Look off into the middle distance. Do nothing that can be taken as an expectation that they'll pay attention to you.

In conversation, well... Some rules are very clear.  Never be the one who introduces a topic. Never, ever change the topic. Never initiate a conversation, never close out a conversation--- who are you to do those things? Never, never disagree with someone's opinion on anything. Never state your own opinion in any positive way. Both things are aggressive, acts of attempted domination. Never contradict anyone, never say that the other person is wrong. That's always and ever "gaslighting", and  doing that shows that you're a dangerous psychopath.

Never call. That's absolutely forbidden. A phone call imposes not just on someone else's time,  it also forces them to deal with someone else's nuances and emotional meanings both spoken and unspoken. Never text. Texts are intrusive and demand a response. Texting someone more than once a day is a clear sign of dangerous tendencies regarding obsession and control. Asking someone to make and keep an appointment is always a demand for control over their time.

Remember--- do nothing that can be construed as a demand for time or attention. Ask for nothing that can be called "emotional labour". Do nothing that can be construed as an attempt to direct, shape, or guide a conversation or an evening--- that's asserting an entitlement to control. Ditto for asserting an opinion or raising a topic.

Remember--- you shouldn't be there. That's key. You shouldn't be there. That you're there with someone else at all is a clear imposition on their time and energy. Social interaction is always and ever a kind of exploitation. Any social exchange is an act of reducing someone to proletarian status. Any social contact requires others to read your emotional state and unspoken meanings and cues--- in other words, to expend time and energy on you. You, quite simply, are making illegitimate demands just by being there.

The default mode is always no contact, no interaction. Remember that. This is an age of armoured monads. Social interaction depletes your stock of time, energy, and attention.  Any contact is, at root, illegitimate. Accept that and stay well inside your own armour.