Category: General Musings

Do you ever write stories in your head? Like when you’re rehearsing a difficult conversation you need to have. You forget your lover’s singing recital because you were busy flirting with the redhead at Starbucks and you spend several minutes picturing yourself explaining yourself to your lover – what you will say, how expressive your face will look, the gestures you will make to emphasize how large the men were who knocked you out and left you for dead.

And then there are the martyr stories you tell yourself when you feel like you’ve been unfairly blamed. You get angry. You get depressed. You tell yourself why it wasn’t your fault. You justify your mistakes in your head by pointing out where things could have been saved if only someone else had stopped it. You remove yourself from the process in an attempt to nurse the budding anger towards everyone else who brought you to this place of guilt.

All these almost-real stories, lingering in your head.

One of the three books I read over my vacation was “The Dog of Marriage” by Amy Hempel; she was so strongly praised by another of my favorite writers, Chuck Palahniuk, that I had to find out why he exulted her so.

I did.

Writing is art. In this respect, it is no different from painting, singing, or playing a musical instrument. If there is a difference, it is in that most other forms of art require at least some physical aptitude to be proficient at. Writing requires only basic communication skills. The rest is pure inspiration, imagination, and motivation.

Like all art, great writing takes many forms. Some master the rules of grammar and structure only to turn them on their heads. Some follow the rules concisely, crafting their stories with precision. Some draw together the threads of a story with a seemingly effortless force of will. Some are generous with their words, writing effusively and with granduer; some whittle away at their words until all that is left are the bare bones. Some rely on style, some on the story, some on character.

No one can tell you how to write. They can provide you with the tools of your trade (spelling, grammar, structure). They can provide guidance. They can offer support. But they can’t tell you how to write something. Doing this has a term already – its called collaboration. This is fine if that is your intent. But never let your voice be drowned out in the chorus of others.

[audio:WonderBoys_NobodyTeachesAWriterAnything.mp3]
Michael Douglas, Wonder Boys

Sadness has weight.

In my youth, I was well acquainted with this weight; comfortable and seductively warm, it settled over me like a well-worn blanket. I wore it like a velvet albatross around my neck – it was almost sleek in how it felt, a presence against my heart that lured me into quiet contemplation. It brought on a lethargy that slowed time down for me; an antithesis to action, it gave me the room to think, to expand, to seep into spaces I would not normally consider. And when the moment came to pass through into something else, when the weight fell away, I felt all the more free for having carried it about on my shoulders (which had acted as a scale to the real and imagined griefs I had conjured).

It is not a mantle I wear so often in adulthood; anxiety and stress have replaced sadness and depression. They were luxuries of youth. Now, I do not often have the time, the room, for such things. I can be a dark person, but it comes now from my cruelty in action and not so much from a brooding demeanor.

And the familiar weight has long been absent, a friend thought of but seldom spoken to.

I believe there are times I miss it.

This post is inspired by one written by VS in regards to the truth and from a conversation I’ve been having with NE.

Taking a break from work today, I was enjoying the unusually good weather and smoking a clove (an occasional, but important, vice of mine), when I paused by a large tree; the trunk was about four feet in diameter and a good hundred or so feet high. The limbs were thick and split several times, creating a cavernous canopy of shade and clear (if challenging) pathway to the top. In short, the perfect tree for climbing.

And I felt, for the first time since I was fifteen or sixteen, a surge of excitement – the kind you have when you do find a good climbing tree.

But I’m not fifteen or sixteen anymore.

I am often accused (by those close to me) of having never quite grown up. This stems partially from the fact that I still think legos are a perfectly acceptable gift to give and receive, partially because I am a bachelor who doesn’t always know the finer points of house keeping (not to say I don’t keep my house clean – I do; I just don’t always remember that even the guest bathrooms require hand soap), partially from my rather unique initiation into the world of sex, and partially because I am a selfish bastard.

I am miserly with my time and privacy; in my space (which means anything from my home, to intimacy), I want things on *my* terms, an affection that is somewhat responsible for my Dominating tendencies. NE has done a lot to balance this out. Of course, I know where some of this comes from – I grew up second oldest in a household of six children. I had to learn how to get off silently because, for much of my childhood, I shared a bedroom with my three brothers. Privacy and space were in short supply.

As for sex – well, for those who are caught up on my autobiographical posts, there will be little surprise in knowing that while I most likely knew *more* about sex (and all its permutations) than anyone at my high school, I had *less* actual experience than all but the most anti-social kids. This would change in college, but at the time it meant I missed out on a lot of teenage experiences.

I do not consider myself unattractive, but truth be told, my best traits are intangibles – the way I know how to exert just enough strength with my hands to make it clear I can hold someone still and yet make them feel completely safe under my touch; the way I understand certain human needs well enough to bring them to the surface with a few words; the way my intuition has allowed me to give someone exactly what they want within hours of meeting them. But in high school, without experience to hone them into a practical set of skills, they simply weren’t enough to get me to the dance on time. Of course, to be honest, I wasn’t really that interested in dating other teenagers. While my classmates were losing their virginity in the backseat of their father’s car, I was enticing thirty-year old women to meet me so I could practice spanking techniques.

The end result of which is that there are certain areas I am quite comfortable with and have been for a long time – and there are some that I am only now getting a chance to explore.

In a month or two, I turn thirty. I know that I have matured in a lot of ways in the last year and a half and my priorities have changed slightly. Now I have to decide what is important to me – who do I want to be when I’m thirty-five? I am not yet sure.

Two things I do know.

It is important for me to have certain people at my side.

And the wolf must always be restless.

Yesterday, while getting ready to drive to the movies, a ladybug landed on my windshield.

I have a rather solid truce with the bugs in my house. As a rule, if an insect is not bothering me and is not threatening to crawl/fall on me (or one of my guests), I leave them alone. Otherwise, I exert my rights as a brute and remove it.

Watching the ladybug crawl across my windshield, I moved the car out of park and took to the road. Despite hitting 70mph, the little bug managed to hold on. It would slowly scuttle forward an inch or so and then stop. The whole time, I fought the impulse to turn on my windshield wipers to remove it (a method decidedly lethal for the ladybug). I don’t consider this impulse to be particularly evil or bad. I wouldn’t have blamed another from knocking it aside. So why didn’t I do it?

It’s for a very silly, yet personally important, reason. If there were beings out there that was looking at me the way I was looking at the ladybug, I would hope they wouldn’t wipe me out without a more meaningful excuse beyond unthinking whim. So the ladybug survived and a few minutes before I arrived at the movie theatre it flew off.

By the general standards of our society, I am very bad man. My morals are more then a little suspect. I have trouble staying in lines. And yet, I can say without unconsidered pride, that I get along better with my fellow human beings then most.

Those rules I do have, those unwritten ideas that I live by, I work hard to uphold; many people who purport to live by society’s standards do not actually abide by them. And if there is anything in this world I detest, it is hypocrisy. But as much as I despise hypocrisy, we all live with it. No one escapes it. The least we can do it be honest about it and when possible try to live by rules you know you can abide by.

One of those rules I know I can live my life by is simple: Do no unnecessary harm.

When I make decisions that will affect others, including people I don’t know, I always balance my desires against this rule. Am I unnecessarily going to harm another with my choice? (defining what is necessary and what is not is an entirely separate topic).

Wicked, cruel, and amoral – Yes. But also deliberate, intelligent, and with fevered reason.

This is the beginning. The highly efficient divestiture and distribution of food, board games, alcohol, and personal belongs. Lining up the Malibu rum, pineapple juice, port, Berringer white zin, cheap amaretto, desert wines that taste like grapefruit, Jaggermeister, and a veritable army of beer bottles. Dead soldiers will replace those sent off to perform their duty, and a glass graveyard will stand in place within just one week. The first cigarettes are smoked on the deck.

This is love. Watching NE dance with her husband to Spiderbait’s Black Betty; she stands on the coffee table as the music makes her free and she sheds clothes until she has been reduced to the essentials, the beat riding her hard and bringing her closer to her husband who stands in front of her like an open and closed doorway, dressed only in swimming trunks that can be zipped into a pocket and a cowboy hat that looks oddly appropriate.

This is serenity. Skinny dipping on a hot August night with five of your best friends. Fish nibble at your calves as you drift along on your back; the chorus of crickets and the pinpoints of stars overhead provide context for the moment (time is thin here, and the warm embrace of the water is dangerously comforting).

This is lust. Hands on SB’s waist as she presses along NE’s back. Feeling NE through SB, through the rhythmic pressure of thighs along thighs and something deeper, something more…more because it is the wanting of it, the wanting more of it, that makes it feel so very fucking good.

These are the moments in between. The card playing, the book hiding, the wine splashing, the trampoline wrestling, the fish saving, the long discussions about crippled brothers, traffic, balls (size), C sharp, threesomes, and being controlled from behind; the languid days that are so correctly similar that they blur like an out of focus movie reel until they make one long continuous ribbon of memories.

This is vacation.

O sleep,
blessed is your embrace.
though fickle can your affections be,
I remain, as always,
your disciple.

***

I am such a slut for sleep.

I know a lot of people who see more then six hours of sleep as a waste. They mock my complaints when some activity requires me to forgo a few hours of sleep. To be honest, I am not sure why I need eight hours of sleep; I believe it is because I abuse my conscious mind so much that it requires several REM states just to stretch and work out all the kinks my active mind busily creates.

But it matters not why. I am content to just adore sleep and not question my affections for her.

I love waking up gradually and stretching luxuriously in bed as consciousness slips in like an old lover, inhabiting my limbs once more.

I love the feeling that comes with waking up too early and then finding out that, for one reason or another, I get another half hour or so of sleep. I greedily draw those minutes to me, all the more precious because they shouldn’t be there.

Give me eight or nine hours of sleep every night and I can handle anything. Angry, frustrated co-workers become people who just need subtle nudges in the right direction to succeed. Cat-ravaged curtains become an excuse to buy something in a deeper shade of green. Bumper-to-bumper traffic becomes a way to catch up on the intriguing audio book I am in the midst of listening to. Harsh criticism becomes creative critiquing. Broken processes become puzzles of efficiency. Proposals become a game of wordcrafting. Bratty submissives become convenient excuses to practice innovated spanking techniques.

As the narrator says in Fight Club: I become the calm, little center of the world. I become a Zen Master.

With just six or seven hours of sleep, I become…a normal human being. With less then six hours of sleep…bad things happen. Mogwai eating after midnight-like bad things.

I haven’t been getting much sleep the last few days. But – as of tomorrow, I am off to a lake house for a week. I plan to get a lot of sleep. And then I plan to use my calm little center to toss stones into the gentle tranquility of others. Ripples can be so much fun. Especially when they have affects unexpected by those who think they know better.

From Vegas, the city of sin:

Several months ago I was reading DC craigslist’s rnr (rant and rave) and saw a thread that hooked me into reading for several hours.

Secrets. People were posting lists of their secrets. And not just any secrets, but terrible, cruel, brutally honest facts about their lives and how they had led them. The posts would end with a coda expressing just how freeing this admission was.

I can dig that.

Sharing ideas, feelings, and guilt will always makes us feel lighter. But for all the things we tell our family and friends, there is a large amount of accumulated details that we don’t – *can’t* – share with anyone else. Those moments that see us at our weakest. That reveal the true fault lines in our lives. That show the cracks in the masks we wear. To admit these things to other people, people who know you, is to make them real. The truth – the real truth about who we are – can sometimes be quite painful. It’s difficult enough to live with without having to stare it in the face.

Imagine we all carry around a sack filled with those things we can’t share with anyone. We hardly notice the weight because the increase in size is so gradual. A lie here, a hidden fact there. But this invisible sack does grow heavier. We stoop just a tiny bit more every day. Those people posting their secrets had found a way to tear a small hole in the sack and let the worst of it out.

I envy them. I try to be honest in my life. With myself most of all. But I’ve kept enough to myself to create a noticeable burden – my own sack full of misery to carry around.

Here is the start of my list of secrets:

1. I didn’t cry at either of my grandmothers’ funerals. I fear it is because I am too self-absorbed to truly mourn for others.

Feel like dumping some of it out on the ground? Go ahead. Leave an anonymous comment.