Week 42 (7)

Spanking the inner Comstock.
Saturday, 22:52

Mind and body, Jekyll and Hyde; I’m back on that dualism kick again. Nicholas, you see, has been around for a couple of years—and no, I’m not getting needlessly metaphysical on you, and yes, I am talking about my pseudonym as if he were a separate person (you did know Nicholas Urfé was a pseudonym, didn’t you? I mention it somewhere, I’m sure); it’s because if I keep saying things like “the pseudonym of Nicholas Urfé and the context I associate with it has been around for a couple of years” you’d lose your patience and start throwing things at the screen—so, Nicholas has been around for a couple of years now, and he’s really quite the convenient mask for dealing with, well, any of a number of things; it is a wondrous truth we’ve discovered in this internet age, in that it’s ever so much easier to be embarrassingly intimate with complete strangers than one’s closest friends. (One has ever so much more to lose with close friends...) So I can sit here and type thousands of words about, well, the sorts of things I type about (and already the squeamish reticence is setting in; squish it, squish it like a bug)—sex, and writing about sex, and wanting to read about sex, and digging towards the bottom of those terribly deep foundations, and women and men and tongues on skin and strategically placed tattoos and teenaged dykes and sisters and queer boys in baggy jeans and the whole unbearably sloppy mess of it squatting on your chest and breathing wet and hot in your face until something in you rises up, that one thing, whatever it is, that one thing that shines and keens and rings in your ears until the ten thousand things fall away, just for a moment—

You know. That.

So when I must—as I am called upon from time to time these days—I must deal with “Nicholas stuff” without the comforting interface of keyboard and iBook and internet and cool, dry, ironic prose that I can take some time to mold and shape to my purpose and from which I can distance myself at any point—when, f’rinstance, I’m standing in my kitchen, chopping garlic, phone tucked between shoulder and ear, eyes on the poster of Ganesa as I’m chuckling at a wryly catty anecdote about smut and anal sex—it’s then the inner Comstock rears his shaggy head, glaring and tapping his foot, and even though the mouth is open the tongue is tied; the moment passed, the bon mot exiled to l’escalier, and I start brooding over the fact that I’m brooding and I’m trying to figure out, is this Nicholas? Or is this me? But the question’s meaningless; the split itself does not exist; the boundary’s so easily crossed because it was never really there in the first place. And much as I love watching those slippery moments of ambiguity when carefully cherished dualities collapse in other people—or, naturally enough, fictional characters; I am a cruel and exacting god—the irony is somehow lost when it happens to, you know, me.

Luckily, that irony isn’t. And I like my martinis very dry.

(I’ll get over it, thanks. And of course the Spouse knows. She thinks the whole thing is terribly funny. It’s just me; I’m a terribly squeamish prude. Really—I’m told I blush impressively.)

 

Esoteric pop culture.
Saturday, 00:06

Like most oxymoronic things, I love it. We’re halfway through Evangelion (a DVD every week or so, along with food and free-ranging bitch sessions), which is fine; silly, sexist, uncomfortable in its mix of high school angst and apocalyptic dread, but weird and geeky (in the right sorts of ways) and committed to spinning fastballs out of left field (and I think I just irreparably mixed a metaphor there; what do I know from baseball), so it’s engaging. Japanese culture, atomic bomb psychic fallout, the usual giant robot/suit of armor stuff, bizarro Christian apocrypha. A fun jambalaya.

Our friends—what, you want pseudonyms? The magician and the accountant, does that work? No, but—our friends had borrowed our first four tapes of Utena , the ones that are available in English sans piracy, so there was the inevitable discussion about amazing structure and astonishing storytelling and how implacably cool Touga is and the bastards, the utter fucking bastards who have the gall to hang the whole fucking story right in front of your eyes in the very first episode—in the opening fucking credits—and it still doesn’t matter; you still don’t see it coming (even if you’re told to watch out for it); it still blindsides you somehow even when you see it all a second time—

You have to stop for a minute and imagine, okay, a story that is told within the confines of a commercially structured twenty-some-odd minutes an episode stricture, yet manages, over the course of thirty-nine episodes (nineteen and a half hours, or thereabouts) to tell a single, coherent story, maintaining a startling consistency in tone, manner and execution from start to finish (over the course of about four years’ production time, I think; I don’t know a damn thing about how television seasons work on Japanese TV); that is aimed at adolescents, nominally, yet manages a bleak and realistic yet highly romantic and stylized picture of adolescence, and burgeoning sexuality, alternative and otherwise, genderfucked and polymorphously perverse and dangerous and thrilling and dark and unbearably exalted without pulling any punches or sugarcoating any pills; that turns the limitations of repetitive and static animation due to budget constraints into sophisticated storytelling and rituals that build, with each iteration, into apotheoses rich and strange; that trusts its audience with tremendous leaps of faith and delivers every time; that somehow through some alchemy blends high school angst and fairy tales and comic-opera costuming and surreal slapstick into—into—

I already used jambalaya, didn’t I? —And anyway, that’s inappropriate; when all is said and done, Utena is like some clear, sharp, cold liquor—there’s a long and involved ritual you need to go through to get at it (contacting fans, locating fan subs, finagling deals—there are some good fan subs out there—then sitting down and watching the whole thing—), but when you pour and lift your glass and knock it back there’s one single flavor that’s left, though it’s hard to remember, and impossible to describe—

Yes. It’s just a Japanese cartoon; the music is at times an acquired taste, and Chuu-Chuu was most unfortunate. And most Japanese cartoons suck, like most of everything else. (Remember Sturgeon’s Law, and know that it is kept wholly.) But the good ones, man, the good ones—this one—are amazing.

 

White crows; presque vu.
Thursday, 20:54 [posted 22:42]

“You talk,” says Mr Hilary, “like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.”

Which—assuming, just for a moment, that I’m the one he’s addressing—fairly well sums up my attitude towards magic. (Not that I like either Mr Hilary or Mr Flosky or Mr Cypress, from what [little] I’ve read of them; I haven’t, after all, actually read Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey ; I just cribbed the epigram from a chapter of Little, Big .)

How—odd. So I was sitting at home a couple of hours ago getting ready to type something up since, you know, I blew last night off, and my mind was a blank, and then a crow honks outside. And I started to think of October, and chilly weather, and unknown men in long coats, and something big, just about to happen, that terrible thrill of presque vu—

Magic.

But: I took a moment or three to collect some links; then the Spouse came home, and mail was dealt with; dinner had to be cooked (leftovers); the Buffy rerun on FX was “Lie to Me,” which had to be watched (didn’t have it on tape); the furnace had to be lit (while we upstairs may not mind waking up with cold feet and jumping about going “Hoo, hoo” and dashing into the shower, and anyway, cold weather makes the cats more cuddlesome, our downstairs tenants are wimps); and since the washer and dryer are both pretty much toast and the laundry had built up to the point where we neither of us had, well, clothes—well, I’m at the laundromat down the street now, and Inside Schwartz is on the TV and I can’t change the channel (ye gods, but it’s—just bad; people watch this? willingly? —Then, Just Shoot Me is still on, isn’t it), and the last thing on my mind is, well, magic.

Much less sex.

White crows? It’s from William James: “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.” Problem, of course, being that you tend to get so caught up in trying to figure out exactly what a white crow would look like, if, you know, you ever got to see one, that you end up missing all those crows that, while they aren’t white, per se, aren’t exactly black, either—

Much less the assumption that there’s necessarily a law which insists that all crows must be black. —Um. I think the basic point here is that typing in a laundromat just doesn’t bring out the best in me.

(Little, Big? Yes, it’s good. It might even deserve its cult status. But it’s also dreadfully classist and fatalistic to a fault without really admitting to the tragedy inherent in fatalism; he cheats, in other words. Ægypt is much, much, much better.)

Amended 22:42

Holy shit. That was Amy Sedaris slumming on Just Shoot Me. How come nobody tells me these things?

 

Quivering.
Tuesday, 22:41

What the hell, right? —I don’t remember the sex with rebound all that much. I was living in a two bedroom apartment with (stops, counts off on fingers) four other people at that point, so when she moved in (an argument with her father on Mother’s Day), things got a little tight. She was sleeping on the futon with me, but as for sex, well. Moments when I’m sure my long-suffering roommates heard more than they wanted, or let on. Sneaking off into the woods behind the complex. (Sneaking?) Stealing away in her van, parking at that highway turn-off. The snowdrift of condom wrappers slowly building up against the back doors. Then she lost the van. (Her, quivering, in the kitchen; me, just around the corner, stupid and puffed up and telling the cop no, I didn’t know her, never met her, what van. The cop not fooled for a moment, but what the fuck could he do? —The van got towed.) And she wasn’t picking up and moving on. And it was clear that whatever I was doing wasn’t picking up and moving on, either. So. Hey, you can stay, you know, I’m not going to kick you out, none of us are, and you and me, we can be friends, you know, but. No more. Let’s just not. Okay? —Chivalry became this passive aggression (when wasn’t it?): no, you sleep on the futon, I’m going to sleep on the couch. It’s my damn apartment (well, me, and four other people), I’ll sleep on the damn couch if I want to. So I come home from a late night at the brick factory and sure enough, there’s rebound, zonked out on the fucking couch. I was tired. My shoulders ached. I was more than a little stressed. What the fuck, right? The futon was far more comfortable.

Middle of the night, I wake up.

There’s someone else in the futon with me.

Her nose was cold, and her feet were cold. Or so it seems, which is weird, since it was June, and not February. She burrowed into me, spooned up against my back, one cold foot sliding clammy up my calf, a hand stroking my upper arm, her lips pressing a kiss to the back of my neck, and behind my ear, and again to the back of my neck. A breath, sighing along my skin.

—She never got the thing about the back of my neck. Like most paranoid people, I’m terribly ticklish, and once set off, highly sensitive. (Lying on the couch watching TV with the Spouse; she wiggles her fingers in the air a foot over me and giggles as I quiver. “That is so weird,” she says.) But especially the back of my neck. You do not fuck around with it unless I trust you and know exactly what you’re doing and even then, backrubs are just not a good idea.

So. I’m lying there, frozen. Pretending to be as asleep and dead to the world as it’s possible to be. Sleeping Guy, the role of a fucking lifetime. And when her breath settled, and her body slumped away, and her arm fell, I scootched so carefully away and up and out and she never stirred.

For 48 hours I manage the miracle of not being in the same room as her until my roommates freak. So I sit her down. This isn’t working. You can’t do this. You’ve got to go. There’s tears. A recrimination or two. She has nowhere to go, no one to turn to, I’m trying to be patient, what about the aunt you mentioned a couple of weeks ago, five miles away, well? She sniffles and goes to the bathroom. Comes out, walks through the living room into the kitchen, rattles around in a drawer. Walks back through the living room and back into the bathroom. Shuts the door. Starts running the water.

I give it a minute. I give it two, because, honest, she was smart, and funny, and I’d respected her, you know? That respect had pretty much been leached away, but—

I opened the bathroom door, and lost my temper.

Grabbed the knife out of her hand. Slammed off the water and bellowed at her, get the fuck out of here. Followed her into the living room, what the fuck did you think you were doing? Threw the knife on “fuck” and it stuck in the wall, quivering. Belittled her for getting it wrong, even prepubescent goths know you slit them vertically, for fuck’s sake, not across. Told her to go play in fucking traffic. Watched her face screw up and dissolve in hot tears and did not give a good God damn—

A couple of months later: I’m living in a new apartment with—again—four other people, though two of them are new. Settling in, and there’s a knock on the door: it’s rebound. In the intervening months, she’s gotten a really short haircut and fallen in with a bunch of scruffy neo-pagans up in NoHo and discovered girls and blood and sex magic. (This was before it was hip to spell it with a “k”.) So I invite her in. Offer her coffee. Listen to her tell me about the scruffy neo-pagans and the girls and the sex magic. The post-ritual orgy thing at the farmhouse, where she was doing dishes naked, you know, and the guy she was with comes up behind her and takes, you know, the short hairs on the back of her neck and tugs them, like this—

—eyes wide, I hissed, but didn’t move away, didn’t flinch, just sat there—

—and she had, you know (grins), come so hard, just standing there, right? Knees banging the cabinet door, she still had a bruise, see?

That’s what I remember about rebound.

 

Other people’s orgasms.
Monday, 23:58

Specifically, my best friend’s sister’s first orgasm—at my hands, at least. Making out in the hammock at the end of her room, lined with the French doors through which I would sneak, later (months later). My best friend and her fiancé similarly engaged on the day-bed below, though not, perhaps, to the same degree. My hand, thus; hers, rather emphatically, there—and she sucks a mouthful of air past my lips and lifts her head, gasping and shivering, and pulls back with a jerk, setting the hammock to swinging. I’d had no idea it was coming, thought I’d hurt her, pinched something, done I knew not what, but— “Are you okay?” I asked. “Hey—” I called her name. My best friend starts to giggle; her sister, to blush. I figure it out. My best friend’s fiancé snorts.

Earlier, the girl I’d so rather callously dumped twice, who never did come—not with me, at least; I used to draw my own out, a performance, almost—it started, see, as a joke, riffing on Kevin Kline in Fish Called Wanda, but, you see, it had grown into something else under the pernicious influence of Guy Gavriel Kay, seizing upon that moment when, you know, you’re not really there, that instant, that slice of time that isn’t time, the iridescent seafoam that turns into dull, sticky salt water the moment you try to capture it in petty metaphors, seizing that moment and trying to make it visible in my face, the tendons in my neck, my eyes, the way I would slump, a puppet whose strings have been cut, the stilted attempts at speech, as if speech were, for the moment, just beyond my grasp—I’d been to that grey place, you see, the White Goddess’s antechamber—except, of course, it was all an act; I was faking it—trying to draw it out for her, draw her in as best I could, since, you see, she couldn’t, or so she said, but that’s all right, she never really had, she figured, so she wasn’t missing much— Anyway. She—this girl, the one I so callously dumped, twice—not my best friend, not my best friend’s sister—this girl—before the night I recounted above, at the top—spent the night with my best friend’s fiancé in an attempt to slake her sorrow. (Me, I was chasing my best friend’s sister. —I never said I wasn’t a callow youth.) And, well. At his hands, she did. Did indeed. And (this is hearsay, you understand) apparently, she gasped, quite in surprise. And frowned. And said, “Ah.” And then, “I see.”

And then, after a moment: “It tickles,” she said, “rather like a volcano.”

One of these days, I’m going to steal that line.

 

(Come away,
(human child,
(to the water....

(Come away,
(human child,
(to the water, and the wild...

 

What a difference...
Sunday, 22:49

Apple picking, and smelling that sweet smell of apples left to lie in the sun, and wondering if pumpkins are more or less dense than flesh. (It was about the size of a human body, crumpled into a fetal position in front of the table with the sign on it that said if you guessed the weight of the pumpkin, you’d win a prize.) Thinking about the buzzing of hornets, and the way apple juice is sticky when it dries; the spouse holding a—Bræburn? Red Cascade? Granny Smith? an apple, anyway, so I could bite into it, her hand dipping with the weight of my bite, the thrust of my mouth. Apple trees leaning, clinging to tension wires strung between poles. Their branches so loaded, weighted, freighted with fruit like red tumors, too heavy to be held up without support. Just waiting for the first blustery wind. Horse-apples, littering the driveway on the way back. The harsh burnt sweet smell of gas and oil from the tractor pulling the haywagon. The PA outside the farm’s store by the highway, playing Christian kids’ music so thoroughly “Country” it was a parody of itself; hermetically sealed, a recursive ironic loop, its very own Borgesian labyrinth. The llama looking vaguely affronted in the pen full of goats. Fecundity. Fructification. Sweet rot and stickiness; crisp clean air and hot sun; sex and death.

Well. It worked for me.

 

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