(This is the one where you find out how far behind reality you are... You're catching up really fast though, I promise!)
So here we are: Put up or shut up
time. It’s a landmark chapter here, you see; I’ve actually caught up to the
present. I’ve been writing this for – actually I don’t know how many months, a
few to several – and I’ve been unemployed for over a year, and the writing has
caught up to the life. When I started Laundry and Blow Jobs I did it because I
was still having trouble embracing this life sans career, and it has actually
worked. It fixed me. I feel good now. I guess this is no big surprise, since
writing has always been how I sort things out. Get them out of my head and onto
the paper where I can look at them and make some sense of things. It’s not even
like it took the place of my former job; I’ve been writing for months and this
is what, the tenth epoch on the page? But even going about it so lazily, it got
me here. Contentment. So I guess I owe it at least the decency to do what, when I started, I
said I would do if I ever caught up to the present (even though
I think I said it believing that it would never happen). I said I would turn it
into a blog.
I know nothing about blogs. Seriously,
nothing at all. The only one I ever became totally addicted to was that one
written by the chick who worked in the adult video store, remember that one? It
was a long time ago. So I guess I’d better start reading some blogs to try to
figure out what this one is going to be like, and meanwhile focus on the date and the fact
that I have not had a job for about fourteen months now. Maybe it’s
justification for not quite going through with the blog part yet – I’m really
pretty good at procrastination – but I think it’s fairly significant in itself,
so I’m going to go with it anyway (see?).
February dawns. The month almost
nobody pronounces correctly. Of course it won’t be February when this chapter
goes online. (Look how I actually have
started to think about the blog part!) I know enough about what I want to know
that I’m not going to dump all of this on there at once. I’ll put up an epoch
at a time, until I get used to the idea. Maybe it will be less terrifying that
way. But here in the present, all the public spaces of the world have begun to
appear done up in red satin and pink hearts. Mylar balloons abound and people
seem to think teddy bears are better messengers of human emotion than the humans
themselves. People get so caught up in it all, like there’s something actually
important about the fourteenth. I have trouble with holidays; I’m conflicted. I
always get jealous of those people who have their special holiday – you know
how so many people have a favorite? The Christmas people light up their houses
and put bells on the door, the Thanksgiving people get out their leaf-themed
sweater-vests and begin baking like three weeks in advance, the Halloween
people spend a month planning the most brilliant, detail-specific costume to
try to top whatever genius they put together the year before… It’s like all the
joy they experience during the rest of the year is minor league foreplay for
the season that culminates in the apex of their happiness. I can’t get myself to
feel like that, over a holiday. I’ve tried to get on board with some of the
less popular ones, just to try it out, but the closest I came was throwing a
gathering – cupcakes and cocktails, drinking and dessert – to celebrate Dr.
Seuss’ birthday. It was fun, but it didn’t stick. I just can’t get that excited
about a line of text on a calendar.
Valentine’s Day is, objectively, an
interesting one. Most people who have an opinion seem to choose to actively hate it, but insist on acknowledging it
anyway. It’s insidious, really. Supposedly designed to celebrate love, and in
doing so, effectively ostracizing anybody who isn’t in it. It seems to make
those people feel horrible about themselves (causing the hatred), but it does
it by being the thing they suddenly feel like they should want, even if they
were content to be single, before. How do you want to participate so badly in
something that you hate? Maybe I’m wrong about the way they feel. Maybe I’m
basing these thoughts on TV versions of life, because I don’t understand the
need to feel one way or another about it. It’s a Hallmark holiday. Like
Mother’s Day, it’s a universally accepted command to display an appreciation
for someone when, if you have an appreciation for them, you don’t need a
command to display it. If you need a specific day on which to buy me flowers, I
don’t want them. Really. Bring me flowers on the second of June, when it means
you were thinking about me because I’m always
on your mind.
Still, Valentine’s Day has one
thing going for it: It’s the only day when everybody puts love and sex in the
same basket, like I do all year long. Most of the rest of the time people
insist on separating the two. “A good relationship is about love; sex is not
the important thing.” Or even “Sex is so much better when you are in love.”
Even that one demands that the two are distinct from each other. “Unless of
course, like me, your idea of romance begins on your knees with your face in a
pillow.” That’s Toni Bentley, gods bless her; I am not alone. (And that's not the only awesome line in Surrender, if you're looking for an interesting read about ass fucking.) Some of us do not
distinguish between the overwhelming emotion of wanting to absorb the very soul
of another human being into our own, and the dizzying rapture of fucking that
human until the two bodies are one thing, bound, locked, twisted into every
orifice and pore of each other. Though there have been many, one of the most
palpable moments of love and devotion that I have experienced, happened just
last week. I had been full-body bound, the strap marks still evident on my
flesh, my arms still tied behind my back, welts from the riding crop hot and
itchy on the underside of my ass, the high inners of my thighs… I was between
body-wracking orgasms first from the monster cock in my ass and then in my
pussy, and my husband put his hand against my face, in among the tears I’d long
since lost control of, held me there looking unblinking into each other’s eyes,
and proceeded to bring me to relentless, merciless, pouring, bone-dissolving
orgasm, all over his naked stomach and thighs. It was ecstasy. Was it true
love? Yes. Hell yes, like in a fucking fairy tale. Was it great sex? Don’t be
stupid. Was the one somehow increased by the other? You could argue that each was better because of the other,
but I would not. I would argue that sometimes they are simply the same thing.
You can have a love that isn’t sexual, and you can have sex without being in
love, but you can also have a thing that is so composed of both, as to have
become something else.
Maybe that’s how I’m going to start
thinking about February 14th, when everything goes on sale at both the
chocolate shop and the adult store – conversation hearts to crotchless panties,
though I’m pretty sure the CVS doesn’t have a teddy bear ready to express it.
It’s a day when love and sex are not only desegregated, not merely interchangeable
or interwoven, but fused. We need a new word for it, I think. There are too
many meanings to the word love. Maybe it’s Valentine.
(Communication is the key and everything, but I don’t
actually have any interest in the candy.)
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