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.

Canadian Hole

Which I mean as a plural singular. Visiting one of their metropoli. Last night, at this bar called Ronnies Local 069 and had my eye continually on a woman sitting with friends. And Canadian women do not divert their glance when it connects with yours. It is the most peculiar thing. They will look back at your innocuously. Unlike when women look back at you in the United States, which is rare and without even the slightest hint of doubt what is meant (when it does occur). In Canada there is no dialectic of glance-connect-look away-glance again or ignore.

As she and her friends began to leave, she stood there, a few feet away from me, waiting for them to pass by and looked at me plaintively, finally saying, bye, which I reciprocated. These being the only words spoken.

Oh the desire of the eyes. She was tall and lithe and had long black hair, lovely eyes and a smile that responded to mine once or perhaps more. And I do not know what would have come of it, had I invited her to join my friend and I for a drink. He's married and his wife is back visiting her mother country, so he invited me here for a few days of boy time, I guess you would call it.

I tell him all about this year. AT and then the women in the bathroom at the bar and then LP and then SS. I tell him about this blog and how I've been waiting for some kind of moral redress and not receiving it. And so he says, following my request that someone tell me I'm a fucking asshole, that I'm a fucking asshole. Which stigmatizes me for a while until later I ask him if he really so thinks. But he doesn't. THe morality of infidelity for him is a purely practical concern. A health concern. And rightly so.

He tells me that if he passed something to his wife he would really consider suicide. And I sympathize with this, although suicide for me has many more meanings. But that threat of not-knowing has worked its magic on me at times. And I've been lucky.

Would I have been able to take this dark-haired beauty into the bathroom (where all great things happen)? And what would this meaningless kiss have meant. Would I have enjoyed it for the pleasure of the kiss, knowing that I was bound to leave this country in just a few days? You see here friends, I'm nothing like you. Women are for me a continual potentiality of love, in addition to the pure pleasure of bodies.

Hole. The term a Greek restaurant owner used, who my friend worked for, back when we went to graduate school together. A woman would come in and he'd say, J___, look at that hole. I thought that was so funny when he reminded me.

Never Enough

I am a sensitive creature and so silences disturb me. Even beautiful silences.

So again I return to this thought about the ethics of revisiting this erotic past of betrayal, and if this revisiting is itself betrayal.

For me, habit is very important. Habit is the basis of character. I follow Aristotle in this regard. And so the habits that we repeat shape us. For these reasons, I am both sympathetic to the claims of Chelsea girl, in her recent post, and to the writer that she critiques. Pornography, like all forms of cultural product, does, in the forms that it repeats, create habits of thinking and acting. In other forums I have defended these claims to potentially absurd consequences (that reading crap like The DaVinci Code should be prohibited for certain age groups). The idea is, garbage in, garbage out.

My critique of that text comes, not from having read it (like I could waste four hours reading that when I could be reading Michel Tournier or the like), a mere aesthetic judgment, not a judgment about its content (let's just pretend like I can maintain that separation between form and content . . .). But with pornography, the matter is more complicated. Pornography has always struck me as so facile in its end. That is, why, although I am trying to implicate myself among this community of individuals (largely among a bunch of female writers (such as the above) I feel comfortable with and not their male counterparts, zum Beispiel, this fellow), I know that I cannot enjoy posts describing sexual acts as others, those who comment on their posts, do.

I mean, these posts interest me, don't get me wrong, but they don't really arouse me. I've been image habituated. I have to end up visiting Redtube to get off.

But I do get aroused by revisiting my past. At least some of the time. And I feel exhilarated in exhibiting these incidents, which by the standards of this community I seem to enjoy would be quite "vanilla." But for the same reason that I worry about the way that pornography shapes the way that I view sexual interactions, I worry about the way this exhibitionism and the betrayal in particular that it emphasizes shapes my own actions.

My history with betrayal is quite old. But the closer I come to so-called maturity (at my age, it has been a long time coming) the more I wonder why I can't be happy with less and what conflicts I am precipitating by continuing these practices. Shouldn't all this be tapering off a little?

Or have I fetishized infidelity so much so, that I cannot, like Séverine in "Belle de Jour," enjoy a relationship without being unfaithful and its concomitant guilt?

Maybe I've been lying to myself and I simply need to admit to polyamoury. Yet I feel quite convinced that, neither I nor another could sustain that.

Enough of Guilt?

Christian rituals die hard. If they die at all. And guilt is by no means a Christian ritual. It makes me wonder if the akrasiacs also felt guilt. Or were they just perplexed? I like that description the best: "something did not occur as planned."

Yet these instances are guilt of the I-got-caught variety. Not my sort.

So let me explore the I-got-caught variety, for some contrast and consideration. I call this the "cleaning out the apartment story" (of MC (#6) and KHG (#11)).

My heart was rekindled with love for humanity after a summer of intrigue (2001). More exactly, a summer of "potency." I had been in Italy for a boot camp of sorts, involving Danes, other Americans, "body," "earth" and ... Robert Smithson ("art"). A philosophy event. I'd never heard of Robert Smithson before or earth art, for that matter. But the concept of this work thrills me. Particularly, the temporality of the earth. There I met Rasmus. And would that I were in love with Rasmus. About a week or so in we started asking each other "are you feeling potent today?" and the other would answer, "oh, I am feeling incredibly potent today." We needed a secret universe where we could escape the intuition of the winter ahead. And for that magical lapse in time, we'd found it.

After the boot camp was over, he asked me if I'd care to come to Tübingen with him, and then afterwards back to Copenhagen. Naturally. In Tübingen, we did a lot of couleur-besuchen and there I met Tina, who only kissed me for a few minutes in a room apart from the one where her Chilean soccer player boyfriend was. Then in Copenhagen he introduced me to Carolina (#10), who was his friend who he'd also slept with. She was a lovely loaded girl who was coasting through life in a beautiful apartment. When I got to Paris for the few days before my flight back to the states, I sat in that dreadful room in the southern part of Paris writing her letters.

KHG was one of the new members of my program. A beautiful girl from butterchurning country. Her skin is a glowing fairness. She had blondish hair. She had scars on the back of her upper arms from the farm. We fell in love the way people are supposed to fall in love. She had a boyfriend when she arrived. Quickly dispatched that sorry fellow. We kissed on a skateboard ramp, admiring its graffiti. That was around the beginning of October.

But I was leaving in January to spend several months in Paris. I remember just a few nights before I left, we were having sex and in the middle she burst into tears. It was the most romantic thing I think I've ever experienced.

I was cleaning out that apartment where I'd lived for nearly two and a half years. There, I'd been with LCB and LR and MC and X(J)M and ... the funny business with OA and whoever else. MC stops by. On her way back to central New York, where'd she'd been teaching at the time. These were infamous visits. Essentially booty calls. But nothing since October, because I'd been with KHG and my heart and cock were so incredibly single-minded. With KHG, the world has been eclipsed.

That day I was cleaning up from a party I'd had the night before. We all got so drunk and even Dylan, who'd be dead only five years later, was there (I wonder if he ever knew his end was so near?). I restrained myself to mainly words with MC. But somehow in the bedroom, which was even barren of a bed, she had laid down on the floor and taken off her clothes and was touching herself. And I was standing above her, had pulled it out and was stroking it gazing at her body.

This was a repetition of a thousand other times.

I think not too infrequently about the time that I had gotten her pregnant. Not that I had known when it was. But there was once that I recall very vividly. It is late at night and I'd probably spent most of the evening drinking at the bar with her and a couple of friends (our nickname for her was "set theory," as in, are you going to learn some set theory this weekend, when I was going to visit her). She had mounted me and my cock was so hard and fully penetrating her and it seemed like that tiny most sensitive point at the head of my cock was pressed almost into, as if it were possible, her cervix. And I think that I saw fireworks as I came inside of her. That was a year before that afternoon when MC laid down on the floor and rubbed herself.

I stood above her, and would not even let her lick the cum off my cock after I came. And it was an act inspired by post-drunkenness and my own inability to process my confused feelings. That I was leaving KHG, after I'd just met her and we'd fallen so desperately in love. And I needed some diversion from the sharp pain of that confusion.

Months later, MC had shared a room at the Pacific conference with AT. And MC told AT, KHG's friend, about having sex with me and how it had repeatedly happend and about how I had always come back to MC after all of the little interludes, including LCB, XJM, LR, etc. MC and I would meet at motels between here and central New York, just for a night of sex. We would have phone sex, sometimes multiple times during one week. In fact, even years later, after KHG and I'd broken up, I slept with MC yet again.

And AT told KHG. I was in Tübingen, ironically, that weekend in the spring of 2002, when AT told KHG and she was ... distressed. Upset.

I lied to her and told her nothing had happened and that MC was making up the entire episode. And I stuck to my story. Luckily, no Starr inquiry was following the evidence. There was no cumstained dress. And KHG, either believed me or decided that she would pretend that she believed me. I prefer the latter explanation, so as not to insult her intelligence.

I felt guilty, but perhaps more than that upset that I would lose this relationship which had meant so much to me, to this silly thirst for pussy that'd overtaken me as I struggled, like a child, with feelings that adults (whoever they are) are supposed to be able to process.

KHG and I lasted about a year after this.