Subject: Re: Thought of the day
From: Omphalos <ASVS>
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Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004 22:51:36 -0500
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===================

On Mon 02 Feb 2004 03:39:17p, "Matt Huang" <Shadowarbiter@aol.com> wrote
in news:7751cbfa.9401301216.5c400296@posting.google.com: 

> My boyfriend, Brad, always spoils our love-making by going 
> berserk at the end.  I like the pleasure of sexual union to spread 
> deeply through every crevice of my being, like the mysterious smell of 
> incense permeating every room in a quiet house.  Just as incense makes
> familiar, worn-out places seem exotic and imaginatively alive, the 
> sensual rhythms of love make the body ripple with newness, feel 
> freshly created, closer to everything, seen or unseen. 
>  But Brad doesn't want any of this.  He just wants to thrash
> like an animal dying wildly in a steel-fanged trap.  He wants his eyes
> to bulge and his chest to heave; wants to feel his loins go seismic, his
> mind shatter into sparks and smoke, his voice wear away to a sandpaper
> bugle.  
>  He wants to die frying in the electric pussy.
>  But this isn't me at all.  I'm not the glittering slut-queen
> of Babylon; I'm the woodland nymph, bedding in ferns, dining on
> baby mushrooms, shy even at the sight of racing squirrels.  
>  "That's a load of crap!"  Brad belched when I tried to explain
> this to him.  "You're as timid as a brain tumor devouring the cortex
> of a rotting hobo.  Christ, I mean, most people need to take angel dust 
> to get as surly as you."
>  He was lying when he said this.  When I was a child I used to
> think I was made of delicately folded tissue paper.  I really thought
> this; I thought I was a paper doll crafted by a laconic, lonely widow 
> who never had children.  Somehow I had been kidnapped by my imposter 
> parents then forced to pretend that I was a resilient, growing creature 
> who toughened up under adversity and learned, rather than shredded,
> under stress.  Self-protective, clever, strong enough for a randomly
> vicious society and an impassively stampeding race.  Yet the thrust of 
> time just mangled me, crumpled me up, discarded me into the spongy 
> safety of my inner fantasy worlds.  
>  I was a ballerina who accidentally twirled into the midst of
> a street-gang.  
>  "Yo, give a crack pipe and a pistol to the girl with the frilly 
> skirt."   
>  "Look at them hazy eyes, man.  Shit, she already high."
>  "Ballerina?"  Brad mocked me delightedly.  "You're as graceful
> as an elephant on ostrich legs."
>  The thing is, the whole world had this perception of me.  And 
> when everyone seems unanimous in misunderstanding you, you start to 
> wonder if it isn't you who's making the misunderstanding.  Or at least 
> you do if you're a fragile paper doll.   
>  But to get back to Brad's atomic love-bomb thrust-o manic 
> brain-pop approach to lovemaking: my real problem with it was that I 
> wanted my love to have a stilling effect; I wanted my affection to sooth
> like a honeyed melody, to charm to life the quiet, delightful side of 
> my boyfriends, re-awaken the playful, tender little boy in them.  
>  "You want to kill me, dammit."  Brad had weird interpretations
> of the things that I said.  "You want your pussy to be a deadly weapon,
> a frightful tool of domination.  Like most women, you're silently 
> furious at your own frailty, and want nothing more than to conquer,
> crush, demolish all life -- especially male life.  Like most women, 
> since you have the capacity to give life, you think you should also
> be able to destroy life.  Well, I think that really sucks."
>  Brad accused of really being a passion-crazed berserko when
> it came to sex.  I think he was just projecting; trying to make
> his propensity for carnal frenzy seem less weird by saying that it 
> was really, deep down inside, what I wanted as well.
>  "You're not comfortable with your own sexuality.  That's
> the real issue.  You're afraid where it'll take you if you let go 
> of the reins."
>  The first time Brad met my parents was at a big family picnic in 
> Griffith Park.  We were all gathered at an enormous picnic table, really
> nicely done by my aunt.  We had all brought foods -- hamburgers, steak, 
> chicken, a glorious array of salads, a zillions kinds of chips, all 
> imaginable shapes and colors -- and during one of the few silent
> moments, one of those odd synchronous breaks in all of the conversations
> going on simultaneously, Brad said through a mouthful of potato salad,
> "You know, this tastes exactly like clitoris."  
>  The silence held.  My mother looked over at me, her mind
> set like Jello.  I could feel her struggling not to cry.
>  That night, me, Brad, my older (by one year) sister Kim, her
> boyfriend -- an extremely polite Jehovah's Witness guy in his early
> forties -- and our two cousins Joe and Mark and their friend Pam, 
> who seemed to be dating both of them, all went camping in the hills
> around an old, grafitti-covered watertank just east of the Hollywood
> sign.  The terrain was very
> rocky, with lots of dense, crunching shrubs and tall, dry grass.
> Patches of wild sage and other herbs that we couldn't identify to
> made the air smell very mysteriously perfumed, rich, and wild.  Every 
> few minutes Brad howled like a wolf, and as the sun began to set he 
> ripped off his shirt and began running in circles around our campsite.  
>  "Is this normal for him?"  Pam asked.
>  "No," I said.  "He doesn't get out of doors very much."
>  "I have to say I love his energy," she said dreamily.
>  Martin, the Jehovah's Witness guy, sat with my sister under
> a tree reading from the Bible.  Our two cousins heaped sticks on an
> old fire spot encircled by round rocks, though we had already 
> determined that none of us had matches or a lighter.   
>  "Is he a maniac in bed?"  She asked.
>  "Depends on what you mean by maniac, exactly."
>  "Does he use his feet?"
>  I called to my cousins, telling them I'd found some more
> sticks for them.
>  "The soul speaks through every part of the human form," Pam 
> said in the eerie, remote voice of something disembodied, "And sex 
> is the cry of the soul in a forest of accumulated un-desire."
>  The cousins began fighting over the best way to arrange the
> sticks.  One of them threw a branch in anger.
>  Martin and my sister stood up facing the sunset, reciting the 
> Lord's prayer in deep, resolute voices.  Brad raced around us in 
> narrowing loops, his howl hoarse and shrill, his feet now bare.
>  "Sex turns no one back," Pam said, stroking her hair.  "It is
> the only way into the dark waters of the soul."
>  When Brad simmered down and came back to the camp, he was
> wearing an old jacket he had found in the bushes.  He pulled something
> from one of its pockets and began eating it.  
>  "Next," he said with his mouth full, his narrow eyes set
> on my forehead, "Next I devour you."
>  My sister gulped. 
>  "The Lord will protect us from this sick man," Martin
> assured her quietly, petting her clasped hands.
>  We had brought sleeping bags with us.  Martin didn't share
> one with my sister; he slept on a wool blanket on an old road 
> winding around the hill, its tarmac cracked into discrete slabs,
> weeds sprouting from the cracks.  His Bible lay open beside his head, 
> its print illuminated by the moon and the stars.
>  One of the cousins slept with Pam for the first part of the
> night while the other continued reorganizing the stacked branches, 
> muttering quietly to himself, occasionally tossing branches into the 
> shrubs surrounding the camp in a hurt, frustrated gesture.  Later I 
> woke up and saw the other cousin there, lying asleep beside the 
> unlit heap.  
>  Pam seemed to enjoy hearing her voice cry out in the
> night, echoing against the hills.  It seemed to heighten her sexual
> excitement to hear herself crying out like an animal.  
>  "No," I said to Brad, pulling away from him and trying to zip
> up my sleeping bag to keep him out.
>  "Lady," he said angrily, "We are the last survivors of a
> nuclear halocaust.  The future of the race depends upon our
> reproductive strength, our courage to face sex as something more than
> mere pleasure.  We have a job to do, and we must do it selflessly."
>  The moon swelled above our camp, looking both icy and hot,
> pregnant with the glow of the sleeping sun.  The mountains ached with
> the echoes of Pam's passionate love-cries, and drew back from my
> clamp-jawed silence.   
>  When I woke up from a long, dreamless sleep, the cousins
> were gone.  Martin was jogging in place, reading the Bible.  Kim was
> folding up bedding.  Pam was sunbathing nude in the golden morning 
> light, answering "meow" like a cat whenever anyone said anything to 
> her.
>  We left Brad, still sleeping, alone on the hill.
>  As I drove out of the park back to my apartment in Glendale,
> I remembered seeing a "CAUTION: RATTLESNAKES" sign at the head of
> one of the trails.  
>  I had recently heard radio news reports about scorpions
> being found down in Long Beach.  Tiny, pale, fragile ones that 
> would surely have gone extinct long ago were it not for their 
> highly concentrated venom, their spring-like stinger-tails.  Radio
> anchors speculated about them marching north to the city through 
> roadside dust.  
>  Africanized bees had been spotted on the fringes of Los 
> Angeles county several times in the past three months; a long 
> awaited intruder, madly aggressive, darkly swarming.  Humming nets
> of pain that pursued people tirelessly, even to their own death.
>  For a couple of weeks I wondered.  Once or twice I began 
> driving back to Griffith Park to search the hills, to call out and
> listen to the echoes of his name, but I always stopped at 7-11 and
> bought a Slurpee instead.  
>  As far as I know, Brad never came out of the park.  He may
> have gone completely feral.  I imagined him eating leaves and 
> gnawing on roots.  Masturbating in the moonlight.  Capturing errant
> dogs.  Concealed behind bushes, a muddy-faced, crazy-haired,
> menacing clown.  Gazing down from the hills at the city surrounding
> the park, increasingly beffudled by the sight of civilized dwellings.   
>  I didn't miss him, actually, because it turned out he really
> wasn't very unique.  My next boyfriend, who I habitually called
> Brad even though his name was Bob, had the same propensity for rude
> physiological detonations.  A seismic fault through his spine, it
> seemed.  Madness lurking like a speck of shadow in the nuclei of all 
> his living cells.
>  It wasn't just sex with him, though, so I suppose he was even
> worse than Brad.  Whenever he finished anything at all, he had to go 
> through some sick little ritual of finality.  A mini-funeral for 
>  finishing a meal (leaning back, patting his boulder-like stomach,
> groaning with exaggerated pleasure), or 
>  losing a video game (stooping down over the controls, cursing,
> lightly pounding his hands against the machine), or
>  ending a telephone conversation (summarizing the most irrelevant
> parts of the conversation, proclaiming his enthusiasm about our next
> date, thanking me for my time, spewing assurances of his love), or
>  completing whatever he was doing in my bathroom (looking me dead
> in the eye then declaring, "Okay, I'm all done in there.  It's all
> yours. I didn't leave a mess, I promise.  You have nice soap, by the
> way."), or 
>  celebrating victories by his favorite hockey teams (driving along
> the Golden Sand freeway late at night firing what he called his "pet
> revolver" out the window at the sky).
>  It was like every time anything ended, no matter how trivial,
> it reminded him somehow of his own eventual death.  To sweep every 
> trace of death thinking out of his mind he had to perform a ritual
> cleansing.  
>  Sometimes, of course, his moronic little performances were
> quite dramatic.  On the afternoon that he finished filling out his tax
> returns, he bought a pair of doves to celebrate and let them go in 
> his car.  
>  "What the hell are you doing?"  I demanded.
>  "I'll let them live in here.  It's like a zoo on wheels now."
>  "What the fuck?"
>  "I figure I'll get about forty dollars back from the I.R.S., so
> why not spend the money promoting life?"
>  Eventually the birds suffocated in his car, and he pretended
> not to notice.  For weeks he continued talking sweetly to the dead bird 
> on the dashboard, continued breathing the noissome bacterial vapors.
>  Bob got so whacky I had to see a psychiatrist to deal with his
> problems.  The shrink, whose name was Thelma Rheinquist, M.D., mostly
> just blabbed about how I was having trouble imposing my affective
> language on the men I was allowing to take advantage of my dependencies
> on the male archetype within my own sub-psyche, and recommended that I 
> start taking either Prozac and Xanax, or Zoloft and Trilafon, or 
> Thorazine and Imipramine, or any quadrupling thereof.  I found my 
> discussions with her cold and ridiculously cognitive, but she dressed so
> well that it seemed worthwhile just to make mental notes about her 
> attire.   
>  Bob liked to work on jigsaw puzzles.  Sometimes he had trouble
> sleeping, and instead of reading, or watching television, exercising, or
> masturbating, he would go into the livingroom to work on puzzles.  One
> of the puzzles was a large, blank white rectangle.  
>  "It has no picture on it," I pointed out.
>  "That's what makes it challenging."
>  One evening I found him working on it with the lights out;
> feeling the edges of the pieces with the tips of his fingers.
>  "I was going to say that'll drive you insane, but..."
>  "I know what you're going to say."
>  "You're already crazy."
>  "If I finish it, I'll be enlightened.  Insanity means nothing
> to the enlightened.  You see, the universe is a jigsaw puzzle designed
> by god and pieced together by his angels.  In mastering jigsaw puzzles,
> you learn the underlying structure to the divine scheme of the 
> universe.  `Sane' is a code-work in our militaristic society for
> `harmless.'  The question is, if `insane' means harmful, what sort of
> harmfulness is it?  Harmful to what, exactly?"  
>  When he finally finished this puzzle, he insisted on taking
> me out to dinner to celebrate.  
>  "I'm enlightened now," he said, honking his horn at another
> driver who hadn't done anything, then flipping him off.  "Omniscient,
> you know?  I could drive with a blindfold over my eyes; I could drive on
> the wrong side of the freeway, dodging opposing traffic.  I could pilot
> an airplane from here to Moscow, even though I've never flown before."
>  "Because you finished a jogsaw puzzle."
>  "Because I've touched my seeing fingers on the braille in which
> God wrote the instruction manual of the universe."
>  "In a jigsaw puzzle."
>  "I have lain my head on God's chest, right above his heart,
> heart the patter-patter-thump, patter-patter-thump of the loving
> heart of God.  Listened to it.  Grasped its meaning.  Incredible.
> Totally incredible."
>  At the restaurant, he yelled at the waitress because she tried
> to give us a seat in the middle of the room instead of a booth by the
> window.  Finally she relented.
>  "This view," he said, "Enchants me."
>  "You didn't have to scream at her."
>  "This is a view of the labratory of social kindness.  Everything
> is, when you've risen up to saintly intimacy with the handiwork of 
> God."
>  Bob insisted on ordering a whole candied chicken, though this
> wasn't on the menu, insisting to the waitress, "Look, I'm entitled to
> it; I have figured out things about the universe that you will never, no
> matter how many times you're reincarnated, discover.  Ha!  Unless you're
> reincarnated as a candied chicken."
>  He didn't speak at all while we waited for the food, but stared
> with a look of critical curiosity at the people walking past the window.
>  I wasn't interested in provoking further maniacal outbursts from him,
> so rather than attempt conversation I took out a sheet of graph paper
> and began creating a cross-word puzzle of obscenities (this was my
> latest hobby), and didn't look up until our food arrived.  
>  They brought a whole roast chicken for Bob, a darkly glistening 
> lump that smelled like maple syrup, which he attacked with his saliva
> and his fork, stripping off all the skin which he stuffed like stained
> paper into his mouth.  When he had stripped the chicken naked, he put
> his fork down and began staring out the window again.  
>  As we left the restaurant, he complained weakly of feeling sick,
> then announced: "My former life has come to an end.  It's a new chapter
> for me.  You know what I mean?  Things are turning.  I'm a new person.  
> I'm not sure you know how to deal with this, girlfriend."
>  That night when we had sex, right as he ejaculated, he shot
> himself in the head with his pet revolver.  This had a pretty big impact
> on me, at least from an emotional point of view, because for a long time
> I thought that his deadness (he was still inside me sexually when he
> croaked) entered my psyche.  I have no illusions about death being a
> sexually transmitted disease in itself, as opposed to the climax of 
> some S.T.D.'s, but I certainly didn't want a big fat smudge on my
> life-force.  So I fired my psychiatrist and went to a psychic for
> regular soul-cleansing.  
>  I invoked spirits from other planets and other planes; some
> soon to be incarnated in human form, some descended from the kind of 
> fungus that lives on stellar light; I absorbed the energy of crystals,
> some material, some ethereal; I conversed with the quasi-sentient 
> vestiges of pre-human earthly civilizations; I embraced the
> consciousness of a race of musical notes that breeds only with
> instruments of fire. 
>  And then I met Larry.
>  I met him in the produce section of Verna's supermarket.  
> Verna's fruit is arranged in precarious pyramids with the most rotten 
> ones at the apex, and all of the others essentially inaccessible unless 
> you were willing to risk upsetting the balance and triggering an 
> avalanche.  I considered this arrangement unfair, deliberately designed 
> to frighten people out of buying the healthy fruit for fear of 
> embarrassing themselves by making a mess.  They cunningly forced you to 
> buy the rotten fruit.  Other, less penny-pinching markets would just 
> throw that crap right into the trash.  So I found the most luscious, 
> pristine looking apple at the very base of the pyramid and yanked it 
> from its former branch mates.  Apples bounced against my ankles, swarmed
> in a widening circle around me like fat, blushing, legless rats, dove
> under the wheels of other shoppers' carts.  
>  People were staring.  Some horrified at what they were 
> witnessing, with a "You selfish bitch" look.  Others smiled, admiring
> me, always having been too fearful to do what I did.
>  A little girl standing near me was looking up with confusion,
> anxiety.
>  "Nice going, you clumsy twit!"  I yelled at her.  "Try being
> more careful next time." 
>  Within five seconds of the apple debacle -- I swear, within
> five seconds -- as if he could feel the shock of the fruit hitting the 
> floor like a blow to the overall life energy of the supermarket, or as 
> if viewing the accident with an invisible omniscient eye, the manager
> spoke over the P.A.: 
>  "Clean up in produce.  Clean up: produce."  
>  Then a man began scampering around my feet like a frenzied
> worshipper, stooped, his face bright with concern, gathering the apples
> from the floor in a plastic basket, then with lightning speed replacing
> them in on the metal stand.  At first I thought he was an employee.
>  "Don't worry, it happens to everyone," he said at the level of 
> my knees, gathering more broken-skinned fruit from the disinfected
> floor. 
>  "That's nice of you."
>  "Oh, no.  It's nothing."
>  Larry was just like that.  Lovingly picking up the apples I'd 
> knocked over in a fit of resentment, and grateful to do it for me.  He 
> would've picked up three million of them if I had spilled that many, 
> would've spent the rest of the year doing it.  
>  For me.  A stranger. 
>  "I like to really stretch courtship out," he told me on our first
> date.  "I mean, why rush?  Savor every moment, every tiny leap in 
> affection, every new petal that unfolds from the blossoming love.  Do
> you tend to share that view?"
>  "But do you...I mean, what's your view on sex?  How do you like
> it?  Really frantic and wild, feverish and stormy?"
>  "Oh, heavens, no.  I like it to be like a slow vitamin drip
> into my soul.  Sex should nourish, not exhaust."
>  The first few times we were intimate, we didn't even sleep in the
> same bed.  He brought an old sleeping bag out of his closet and unrolled
> it on the floor.  Instead of touching each other, we fondled symbols of 
> each other.  He gave me a transparent crystal ball the size of an apple,
> and I gave him a simple, round cup made of amethyst, or whatever sort of
> crystal it was.  I dunno, maybe just glass.  Anyway, we lay in our 
> respective beds and silently stroked the symbols: I rubbed his ball, and
> he carressed the interior of my cup.  Once in a while one or both of us 
> gasped, or moaned.   
>  After a few dates he began licking my empty cup, and this worried
> me a little, but after about an hour of doing it he fell asleep.  I
> walked over and put his ball in my cup, which he was still grasping
> in his slender, hairless fingers.  The next morning he told me he'd
> felt more closeness with me the night before than he'd ever felt with a
> woman before.
>  Larry came into my life at a time when I had all but given up
> on men because they were so demented and animalistic.  Everything seems
> so bloody urgent for men; it's like they consider their genitals an
> endangered species and must, absolutely must, use them to maxiumum
> capacity while they're still hanging around.  
>  But Larry was not afflicted by the usual masculine insanity.  
>  He once told me: "I wish I were just a little one-celled
> bacteria living in your intestines."
>  He wanted me to be the world for him.  The sun, the ocean,
> the nighttime sky, the majestic mountains rising through the swelling,
> wandering, struggling human hoards. 
>  "Darling," he said once, his tongue a little swollen from 
> licking the cup for four hours, his teeth getting a little loose from
> accidentally biting down on it, "I wish I were a hair on your body.
> A flec of dandruff on your scalp.  A bug on the ground for you to stomp
> on.  I wish I were one of those apples, perishing from your omnipotent
> touch."
>  With Larry, everything seemed like a beginning.

I always knew you were a sick fucker.

-- 
€
    

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