June 3, 2020
The city doesn’t bother me, b/c so many layers of thought and feeling insulate me, felted layers that only a certain, insistent violence can penetrate. I enjoy crowds my mind cannot ignore.
What happens if I open myself?
What do I notice?
A cute girl in a skirt. Small, circular bruises speckle her upper thigh. We pass in each other in the intersection of Yates and Blanshard. The noticing of women by my eye is a habit of training, or ghost of passed youth. I’m rarely attracted or interested, but my eye always notices and yanks my attention away from my book or thought: another woman’s body I would have wanted. I am not post-sexual or celibate. I’ve never considered myself demi-sexual, and would have to modify it to something like – can experience sexual attraction to strangers, but can only have sex with intimates.
Since grade six, I’ve wanted to fuck everyone. This feeling continued through my twenties. I’ve had very few sexual partners. I can’t risk humiliation. (What does it mean?). I lick terror from their skin. (What does it mean?). The judges arrayed around the bed make statements, ask questions: is she hot enough? What if they find out? What will they think of you, at this late moment, if you say, I’d like to stop? What will it mean if his penis penetrates you? Is he on top of you now? I know that you imagined it the other way? How do you parse meaning from the ease his juvenile body pushed through your pretense, pinned your arms above your head, and kissed you? It would be embarrassing to scream stop and run – wouldn’t it? You’re the one who brought him here. If she had stayed would it have made a difference?
Bodies entwined create meaning, unexpected couplings create questions which you will provide your own answer too, demands I can’t now avoid, eyes that expect, interrogating organs: what does how I fuck mean about me?
….
I don’t fuck for pleasure. Pleasure occurs as a by-product of intimacy. Pleasure occurs, because of intimacy. I feel like I know this, because I have such a high barrier to intimacy.
What do I want then from these fantasies? A way to butress my self-conception? Why does my sexuality manifest this way? Is it trying to protect itself from itself?
But then the actual experience always disappoints. I don’t want the fantasy of control. I feel like an actor in someone else’s fantasy. Nor do I like it when you humiliate me, not in reality anyways.
All my best memories of sex are the those instances when I reached openness.
. . .
Many people who don’t interest me – no spark. I pass a woman in her late forties, slant smile and sideways kindness that felt erotic.
A block earlier on Yates, something caught my eye. I can’t remember. I mention it, b/c I only stopped to record it and the way my mind works. A circuminvoluted collapse towards me.
The only other, the only difference, is erotic.
Not even love?
Should I (or not) read the previous entries? I suppose I already do as I type them for publication. (And I always edit. Could I ever write something perfect?).
I worked on Kingsway Massage. When I had the wife demand money, instead of intensifying the tension there was a loss. The narrator changed their approach. No! He thought of a better cover story goaded by her questions. But who really thought of this cover story? Me or him? Perhaps, I go back and leave him without it. Is he the type to think well on their feet? Would he have anticipated this line of questioning and prepared? Could he storm out of the room and return an hour later with the better story and then gaslight her when she claims that’s not what he said?
Following this logic does he gaslight himself? Re-imagine what happened? Blame it on the masseuse? And then desire another run? Fantasize?
