The ethical order

i am stuck between having nothing left to say here and extending the purpose of this journal. it seems as though continuing to engage it is transgression, even without the "real life" events that match its intentions. in short, i've been a good boy. except for the drive on saturday with blythe. trying to talk her into sleeping with me. no success. thankfully.

at one point in that drive, anya calls. i talk with her for a few minutes in front of blythe. and make a point of telling anya that i love her. because that is true. then i get off the phone and talk to blythe about how i am not really conflicted, since i can have those sincere expressions, but still have a sexual need that transcends that love.

today was the last day with my psychiatrist in this fair city, before i move. not much love lost. she was nice, helpful. but in an impersonal and meaningless way. only in our penultimate session did she express an interest in teh sexual phenomena i described. -how could it be sexual without contact? -two people masturbating in front of one another.

in fact, melissa took all of her clothese off. i hadn't even kissed her. she laid on her back on the floor and i stood over her. she never had a problem coming quickly through self-stimulation to orgasm. i unzipped my pants and pulled it out and stroked myself before her. also coming quickly to orgasm. i think i wanted her to lick the cum off my cock. but the quick appearance of guilt intervened before i could utter this intention and i made my way to the bathroom of that empty apartment.

otherwise, the doctor seemed unwilling to enter into my fantasy life. to allow me to narrate and pause over the salacious details.

i told her that i was going to start a journal in which i daily meditated on my life of infidelity. that it would be a project towards saving myself and those i love from the heartache that my tendencies fumble towards. i am considering the idea that this past is not an inevitable future. this does not mean i am looking for "conversion," as adrienne and i spoke about today.

one of those posts was to speculate on the event of anya's discovery. what would happen. perahps if i flesh out the details of this terrible proposition, it will reinforce the potential consequences of my actions.

Unethical ponderings

The trajectory of this blog has been aimed confidently towards the perverse: namely, what stood outside the conventions of typical behavior. For a long time, I think, my own story has made me reject those mores merely because of the complications and the failures that I have seen. I have rejected morality out of hand. But morality has a ghosting effect: it always returns.

What I have wanted to voice here, but which has no longer any truck with the musings of the past, are the vicissitudes that do not linger over sexual titillations. The pathos of immorality (named conscience, perhaps poorly). I need condemnation more than adulation. And yet, I provide that for myself. In short, crisis seems imminent. My own consciousness of it is merely an intuition of its concrete expression. Which is not to suggest that there is anything unconcrete about the consciousness. Especially when this sadness seems to color each and every single part of experience.

But the sadness, really, just started today. There were other incidents, like an encounter with Adrienne and her refusal afterwards, which prompted this. Then I realized how manipulative my behavior has been. How much I had pursued my own desires without any regard for those of others, especially those with whom I am so close. My friends. My fiancée.

Why this self-destructive behavior? After my session with the doctor today I walked home but also looked up "sexual addiction" on the phone-computer. The Wikipedia entry is surprisingly thorough. There is no DSM entry for this pathology. And so there are questions about its legitimacy. Considering the unique status of sexuality in our culture, pace Foucault's comments in the History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, it is difficult to make judgment on this issue.

I guess I have been thinking about my friends and their responses to the incident with the heartland girl. The most troubling, is from my friend James, who on hearing it writes me off, claiming that it is too exhausting and too consistently pathetic. The upshot is that a person that cannot control these urges is simply to be forgotten about. What do we do by alcoholics and drug addicts. I have known in my life. The drug addicts have killed close friends, ended marriages, lost property. The alcoholics ... well, not as many. But they have not faired well, as far as I can tell. My friends say, we are sorry that you have done this, but we still love you. But the truth is, I think, that they are saying that we will love you until your problem affects our relationship with you. At that point, this love will reach its limits.

We intervene with addicts. Why don't they tell me that I must get help?

God, I am experiencing the most profound vertigo right now. Actually, it is always the same. I am falling over backwards. Like I did years ago, down cement steps, to the bottom of the steps.

Furtive gatherings

In the taxi on the way to the house of a colleague, we sat next to one another. I'd already told her in the bar my intentions. Comments on the day's occurences: congratulating each other on our achievements. We were celebrating! And then I grabbed her with my left hand softly on her jaw (she was on my left) and my right hand pulling her head, her lips, toward mine. She too grabbed, pulling desperately, her tongue in my mouth. This desperate sense of pleasure struggling to be experienced. But there was a strange complexity to it. When we paused, our lips grazed the face of the other, softly planting kisses. My right hand traced the interior of her thigh. And then we arrived and the fun was over.

The night after, I helped Adrienne celebrate her birthday. The first day's celebration was not enough. I came late, after teaching, to meet her and a friend at a posh, well-to-do restaurant on the west side. Eventually the friend left. Adrienne expressed misgivings at me coming home with her. I meant to help her break a 3-month streak of abstinence. It has been literally years since I have gone that long, or even two months, without sex. But I talked her out of her misgivings. She said, do you want to come with me. And I said, is that an invitation.

In the taxi she leaned against me. I had my arms around her. Out of the taxi, into her door. I take off my jacket and we walk back to the bedroom. We talk listlessly as she prepares for bed about books. Or rather, I'm asking her about the books on her shelf. We are academics and thus, there is nothing else. Except what happens after the lights go out.

Some people's smells. Her's has always had an immediate effect on me. We kiss, not merely desperately, like the night before, but still deeply. We can kiss softly, her lips just touching mine. And then harder, with the surfaces crossing, trying to find a groove where they can fit and stop. Tongues breaking the barriers between the space that is mine and that is hers. Surreptitiously, she'd gotten in bed with a t-shirt and boxers. I did the same. But I stripped off her shirt quickly and then took off all of my clothes. There was nothing I could do to take off her lowers. My teeth bit her nipples. I close down on one and then move my head back and forth so that it travels from side to side between my teeth.

Adrienne makes so much noise. And I haven't even touched her holiest of holies. I cannot help, as I pulled her body against mine, trying futilely to unveil her lower parts, but thrust myself against her. I am hard and I want penetration. Eventually, I digitally penetrate the lower boundaries, reaching inside to feel her IUD. They are peculiar devices, aren't they? Like divining rods, really. She was pleasured, to some degree. She fumbles with me, violent as though I'm a teenage boy, when all I really want is for her to take me into her mouth.

I dream that night of the other Michigan girl. That I cum and she will not lick it off. Among other things.

I have to help myself, sadly, the next day, by myself, on my bed. Fireworks of solitude.

Pathomeme, Episode 418

I've only read a little about Richard Dawkins' theory of memes. A materialist theory of ideas, yes. Or at least this is the way that my imagination fashions it, at this distance in time and space. I haven't read Dawkins in years and not even that book.

When I was in my tweens, I think, I broke my leg for the first time. Skateboarding injury. Launch ramp, poorly constructed, meets young virile body, well constructed, equals broken leg, deconstructed. This was the beginning, I suppose, of a life of the mind. Is the life of the mind about secrecy and suspicion? The mystery is generally a tawdry genre.

My investigations first took me into the closet of my father's bedroom, where on the shelf I found old books, he'd purchased when. My parents were divorced then. Photographic erotica, adorned with the drawing of a woman's public hair between tightly shut legs. Funny books, I think in retrospect. My Secret Garden. Ribbons of my cum needing to be cleaned off of my clothes, other surfaces.

Curiousity eventually discovered a journal. I knew no boundaries and the private self meant merely that it had not yet been uncovered. My father's journal (my father, a minister) told me that he had met women at these summer retreats he'd gone to, when my mother, sister and I went to a family camp, without him. He slept with these women. Names that now sound funny. But they are merely the names of women from a generation older than mine. My father never gave many details. Which is probably best. But he was an adulterer, clearly.

Now I retell his story. My story is much better. I have exhausted the anxiety of influence. I am not a minister, so my story lacks the sense of public scandal. But my brashness makes up for his stupidity, his failure with words, his poor handwriting.

He left the journal underneath the coffeetable in the living room of the house that he lived in alone, now that we had left him. But my sister and I still visited him. How could he have overlooked that potential for disaster? I at least use pseudonyms and immediately delete the history of my browser. I've told none of my conquests the address of this journal (although I've told many of them about it) and I will not.

Love, until my Friday appointment with Dr.C, concealed this glaring stupidity. I felt like the one who had betrayed his trust.

I know now, having doubled my years, that, in the words of Detective Doyle: "That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there." With only few exceptions, I respect other's privacy. But perhaps I respect it most because I've felt the bite of its violence.

Pathogenesis, Part 1

This week, speaking to my psychiatrist, we happen upon the past. Fancy that. She is new. Until this past May I had been seeing this incredibly beautiful Korean woman. That was four years. But she was moving to another state and so I had to find someone knew. Dr.C had this incredible body. Our first session I told her I was not sure if I would be able to do this because I found her so attractive and ... but in fact, those dynamics were perfect. Of course, she had to put up with the occasional come on. Me telling her about how I imagined having sex with her.

The new psychiatrist is also Dr. C. But she is not an incredibly beautiful Korean woman. Instead, she is perhaps my age, finishing her residency. She just had what I think was her first child. She is very nice and has remarkable recall. But I've been troubled by the New Yorker column I read a week ago where the doctor confesses to the patient that there were times when he was paying no attention whatsoever.

New Dr. C is getting used to my sexual theatrics. She still doesn't know everything and I think that she is a little uncomfortable with it. Which is not to say that I am propositioning her or anything of the like. She is not really my type. But sex remains this locus for my personality and I have to speak about it at length. I am the confessing subject our friend M. Foucault is so fascinated by. Except that I know it's all production ... ?

When I was still four or five, my parents would employ one of the teenage girls from the church to babysit us. But now that I think about it, that is not when it first happened. No, it was during a square dance. The kids were bored and so we went to the tired old Christian Education Building. How did it come about that I shared a blanket with this teenage girl and that the lights were turned out? And then she touched me, beneath the cover of darkness and wool. Fondled my small and probably inactive penis. And she let me touch her breasts, which were very large because she was due to become a big girl and was only then growing into her body. Big-boned, as they call them in the country. And then there were at least several times this teenage girl would babysit my sister and I.

This poor girl. She was not, would never be beautiful. She is friendly and I suppose outgoing. And she was apparently sexually starved, such that the small hands of a child like mine somehow made her feel desire. She probably just desperately wanted to be touched. Maybe she too had once been touched. But after that first time, I wanted her to touch me again. I would scheme with my sister to have this teenage girl come and take care of us.

I don't know how long this went on. I suspect not very long. And then my parents, who were concerned with liberating my sister and I from the poverty of not-knowing and repression by talking sexuality to death, had one of these talks at the dinner table. Maybe my sister or I had questions. And so I then, innocuously, told them about the things that this teenage girl would do with me. As one might suspect, that was the end of her services.

Now I feel guilty about it, but not because I had been somehow shamed by this event. Been tainted before my time. Rather, because of the way that I have instrumentalized this narrative. I have told several girlfriends about it. Doing so, as a gesture to produce intimacy where there was none. Because I was empty. This was my story. Which is not to say that I abused it as I did myself. In fact, there were probably only about four or five girls. But I knew, the first time I told it, which was in college, underneath a rain shelter, on a snow covered golf course, with the most magical Jen, that my story was not false, but meaningless, and that I was telling to indebt her. That I was telling to obligate her.

Or to excuse myself. I think these things because I think, how could someone be so sexually deranged, so constantly and unfaithfully desirous, without some cause exonerating him. But I do not believe it. I am simply a bastard.

the perversity of monogamy

I met Anya on the back porch of my apartment. Where I have brought so many women. First, there was Damana, who is this gorgeous tall 22-year-old blond Jewish girl with wonderful, glorious large breasts. She is also a Suicide Girl. We fucked there, in the slight alcove behind the alley door and before the stairs leading up to the backdoor. At a party. Another party, there was Bedlina (who only wished there was a line to her bed), who showed me those breasts she'd boasted about for so long, which were all that would keep her company at night all those nights when I would not follow her home. I showed her my, long, boasted about cock, satisfactory in girth and length. But when I followed her home that night I could not fuck her. And then, several months later, there was Anya.

We talked about kissing people and what kind of kissers we were and what it was like to kiss a new person and the unfamiliarity of new lips. Anya is the director of a gallery in SoHo and her professionalism excites me. Perhaps because of my own lack of professionalism (but that will remain a topic for another day). She is so tightly wound that when you lick her pussy she purrs. Her eyes close and she cannot believe the pleasure between her legs. The smell of her pussy is pungent, although pleasantly so, so that it stays with you until you bathe. Her smell is the memory of fucking her. How she begs you not to stop.

When Anya and I were in Paris together, we spent the nights and the days in our room by the Odéon. Finally, our bodies had the time to decompress and devote all to each other. I prefer to treat the body of the other, for the most part, and so I would allow my tongue to trace lines from her lovely large red nipples down to the down between her legs. The smell of her pussy already strong. My tongue prefers to rub across her clit, feeling its surface against her surface. And then slipping down beneath that clit and penetrating inside of her. Pulling her hips against my face. How many times can I repeat this description?

In that quiet room I discovered how to bring her to orgasm quickly. She likes it hard, and I imagine both because of the way that my cock presses against her cervix as well as because of the way my pelvis presses against her clitoris. And I like to pound into her, with her legs up in the air. This woman who is so inflexible becomes a yogi in my hands. I put her legs against my chest, her knees bent over my shoulder and begin to pick her up that way, with my hands on her thighs and hips alternately. But at that angle, my cock no longer first strikes her cervix, but that famed interior zone behind her lower abdomen, whether legend or scientific verity, I cannot tell. All of the vaginas I have enjoyed have never betrayed any universality. But it is when you are holding Anya up like this, thrusting hard into her, that she approaches quickly ...

I am going to marry her. There. You've heard it before many of my friends. In the meantime, I shall ponder the fate of this misplaced journal and the pleasures from it that I derive. And relate more. Because sexual history is a pleasure all its own. I only wish I could share this with Anya. But the slightest whiff of sexual impropriety raises her hackles. I am a good liar because I believe my lies. And it doesn't change the way I love her. Not that this consolation means anything at all, since it is the damage it would do her that is of concern.

(As for interchangeability, MM, until this moment it hadn't occurred to me it might be a plea for your singularity.)

The Sanctity of Infidelity

Moments when my cock is true. Over the past few days, this girth between my legs. Its shape so solid and impersonal. I'm a gentile and I do not know about the advantages/disadvantages of this to judge, since I've never been a jew, but there is more skin to work with. The pleasure of pulling that skin down, with emphasis on that spot beneath the exit point for my genetic material. This one nerve that makes the head of my cock turn purple.

When I am laying in bed, stroking myself, I think of Midwestern girl. Her body is lithe and wonderful, although my encounters with it have been fairly indirect. She has profoundly blond hair. But more I think of RBU. This morning, a twosome with RBU and LP, licking LP's shaved pussy while my cock thrusts into RBU.

When I come, my eyes are clenched shut and it gets all over my hands. My head wildly flits back and forth. Sometimes I'll lift my head and bang it down onto the pillow. And the moans from my mouth. The pulses of cum emitted from my cock, spreading across my fingers. Afterwards I worry that my roommate's girlfriend heard me from the other room.

Even now as I write this, the verbal images of orgasm cause me to draw a finger across the surface of my jeans. I want to unzip my pants and pull it out. Have one of my readers beneath my desk, taking it into her mouth.