Some advice columnist recommended writing letters and never sending them. It sounds like an idea that is at the same time ingenious and horrendously optimistic. A never-ending one-sided dialogue runs in my head when I'm angry with someone I'm not talking to, shadowboxing with a series of insightful, finely-honed jabs that never leave marks. If I put that down on paper, though, I don't know if it'd make me feel better. Although I guess that's what this blog is, so ... hrm.
I'm seeing this new woman, and now I've got a problem. A penis problem. I'm into her, and I'm attracted to her, but my loyal member (the Brown Bomber) wasn't able to retain the structural rigidity necessary to seal the deal last time I got her naked.
Which is and isn't a problem. It happened before with my previous flame on my first time out, something I attribute 70% to nerves and the first time being seen naked by someone who didn't have a clipboard in hand. But nerves build on themselves, and I've had performance anxiety for most of the week since that incident. Which leads me to today, when I get another chance. This post, this unsent letter, exists to address the extra 30% that isn't just the yips keeps revolving in my mind.
What scares me the most right now is getting hurt. After getting broke up on for the first time by someone who, in a fit of first-love fervor, I believed unable to deviate from our shared reality, I found myself wanting to pull back from any potentially painful positions. But I've gotten kind of deep in it with this girl. My desire for her outpaces my fear of getting stabbed through the heart, although the race gets close sometimes. So the sex thing makes me fear that I'll get dumped on the spot if I fail to rise to the occasion. Which I know in my heart to be bullshit, as her feelings for me seem to be more than lust and I can make fairly persuasive oral arguments.
To go one level deeper, I love this new woman. I've already dropped the four-letter L-bomb. But I keep thinking about what I used to have. There's a comfort to the past, so long as you keep from thinking about all the bad parts. The in-jokes, the familiar-if-not-great sex, the sense of camaraderie. We're on our way to (and, hopefully, beyond) all that, but the proximity the ex's memories linger. I don't want to put the girlfriend or myself into a shit situation by staying in a liminal space, but I can't control my nostalgia.
Hrm. Do I send this letter or not?
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
The Gristle Brand
The theme of this blog, if there really is one, is writer's block. So many of these entries begin with an ode to its terrifying power that I think it'd be fitting to name it as the official mascot of Neue. But once I get past the Homer-esque invocation to my muse, I can rev up the blood-rusty chainsaw that is my mind and really go to hell with it.
Power. That's what it's all about, isn't it? What and where it is, and how to get it. It's the question that's become me in the recent nights, the all-consuming issue sitting unacknowledged at the center of every interaction or word spoken. My quest for physical power has wrenched me toward the testosterone side of the force, and with that hormonal backdrop comes a certain perspective. I'm losing my ability to empathize with people I see as weak. Strength can be any number of things: money, power, intelligence, sociability, looks, pragmatism, cleverness. I want it. All of it.
There's something unspeakable about the drive for conquest. The manly men of the world decry that their machismo is vilified by a society they consider 'feminized,' but I think ambition's just become tacitly encouraged rather than openly so. But in the grand Victorian model, that which goes unsaid in polite society creates an undercurrent of obsession. I worry about revealing my desires, as I endeavor to maintain a well-balanced, genteel persona. Machiavelli said, when asking the question of whether it was better to be loved or feared, that it was best to be loved and feared. A Gordian solution to a philosophical problem: truly, he was a man after my own heart. So perhaps my conflict is a false one, another one of the self-made roadblocks on the toll road to Powerville.
The punchy ending to this would be some sort of revelation about the nature of desire, or how inherently unachievable the goal of true power is. Maybe some sort of rumination on how the lust for control mirrors the pursuit of my fellow alcoholics. This isn't one of those entries. I'll continue studying, going to the gym, and attempting to mack on girls. I say this with the sublime resignation of one who has discovered a universal truth: what else is there?
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| I wrote a poem about Randy Savage for a women's lit class once. I got an A. Should I feel guilty about that? |
There's something unspeakable about the drive for conquest. The manly men of the world decry that their machismo is vilified by a society they consider 'feminized,' but I think ambition's just become tacitly encouraged rather than openly so. But in the grand Victorian model, that which goes unsaid in polite society creates an undercurrent of obsession. I worry about revealing my desires, as I endeavor to maintain a well-balanced, genteel persona. Machiavelli said, when asking the question of whether it was better to be loved or feared, that it was best to be loved and feared. A Gordian solution to a philosophical problem: truly, he was a man after my own heart. So perhaps my conflict is a false one, another one of the self-made roadblocks on the toll road to Powerville.
The punchy ending to this would be some sort of revelation about the nature of desire, or how inherently unachievable the goal of true power is. Maybe some sort of rumination on how the lust for control mirrors the pursuit of my fellow alcoholics. This isn't one of those entries. I'll continue studying, going to the gym, and attempting to mack on girls. I say this with the sublime resignation of one who has discovered a universal truth: what else is there?
Monday, May 28, 2012
El Pensador
Filling this space is so hard. All the nothing on the page is intimidating, a constant chastising display of just how much I haven't written. But the only thing more played out than writers writing about writing is writers writing about not writing, so let's continue.
Getting my thoughts down helps me organize them, but it also serves to memorialize those ideas that have been swirling through my head to long. Nothing tombstones a nagging notion like seeing it written down, cast in the closest thing the internet offers to stone. Right now, I find myself dilemma-sick, thinking about the girl who doesn't read my blog anymore and also I used to fuck. In the hierarchy of non-fictive tedium, writers writing about not writing is superseded by people writing about heartbreak, and I'm eager to reach my nadir.
Even with her (or me, perspective-dependent) exiled to the land of wind and ghosts, all the extant memories keep floating in my preconscious, waiting to break into the waking world. Only time will serve to exorcise her shade, but the future seems more distant mid-haunting. (I might've rode the ghost metaphor farther than its spectral legs could carry it.)
The trouble, I suppose, is knowing when to feel like I'm out of the woods. Most patients are unfit to diagnose themselves, and I'm no different. Quite frankly, I hesitate to even admit to heartsickness, out of some combination of emotional constipation and a desire to win the breakup. And there are the relics of the era newly bygone. There was a picture:
A Valentine's day present, and the one thing I feel unsafe getting rid of. Because maybe she's already deleted her copy, and then it'll simply cease to be. So I keep it.
But I can't reconcile being a romantic with being a realist. Because I know that I didn't cry when I saw that picture two months ago. And I have a feeling that six months from now it'll only elicit a bitter flip of nostalgia. So the practical concerns (what to do now, I can honestly do better, let this be the end) are fighting in the streets with Love and its discontents (images of wonderful times now impossible to recreate, the desire to find a way back into the relationship, and every variety of pang). I'm falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy in a big, bad way, pining for something which was intermittently great and often unappetizing. But that's the nature of the thing.
The pithy line I used to summarize it to her, stolen from Civilization V's translation of Aristotle: "Time crumbles things; everything grows old and is forgotten under the power of time." But I wouldn't like this post ending with something that grand; it's inappropriate. I've discovered heartbreak in much the same way people "discover" restaurants - it was there the whole time, you just hadn't walked in. I'd love to end with a bit of "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator", a poem as tailor-made for me as any could be, but I truthfully don't particularly resent the glimmering creatures who make a feast of each other tonight. Also, even at the end of my rope, I can't help but get douche chills at the idea of posting poems on my blog.
It's good to be back.
Getting my thoughts down helps me organize them, but it also serves to memorialize those ideas that have been swirling through my head to long. Nothing tombstones a nagging notion like seeing it written down, cast in the closest thing the internet offers to stone. Right now, I find myself dilemma-sick, thinking about the girl who doesn't read my blog anymore and also I used to fuck. In the hierarchy of non-fictive tedium, writers writing about not writing is superseded by people writing about heartbreak, and I'm eager to reach my nadir.
Even with her (or me, perspective-dependent) exiled to the land of wind and ghosts, all the extant memories keep floating in my preconscious, waiting to break into the waking world. Only time will serve to exorcise her shade, but the future seems more distant mid-haunting. (I might've rode the ghost metaphor farther than its spectral legs could carry it.)
The trouble, I suppose, is knowing when to feel like I'm out of the woods. Most patients are unfit to diagnose themselves, and I'm no different. Quite frankly, I hesitate to even admit to heartsickness, out of some combination of emotional constipation and a desire to win the breakup. And there are the relics of the era newly bygone. There was a picture:
A Valentine's day present, and the one thing I feel unsafe getting rid of. Because maybe she's already deleted her copy, and then it'll simply cease to be. So I keep it.
But I can't reconcile being a romantic with being a realist. Because I know that I didn't cry when I saw that picture two months ago. And I have a feeling that six months from now it'll only elicit a bitter flip of nostalgia. So the practical concerns (what to do now, I can honestly do better, let this be the end) are fighting in the streets with Love and its discontents (images of wonderful times now impossible to recreate, the desire to find a way back into the relationship, and every variety of pang). I'm falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy in a big, bad way, pining for something which was intermittently great and often unappetizing. But that's the nature of the thing.
The pithy line I used to summarize it to her, stolen from Civilization V's translation of Aristotle: "Time crumbles things; everything grows old and is forgotten under the power of time." But I wouldn't like this post ending with something that grand; it's inappropriate. I've discovered heartbreak in much the same way people "discover" restaurants - it was there the whole time, you just hadn't walked in. I'd love to end with a bit of "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator", a poem as tailor-made for me as any could be, but I truthfully don't particularly resent the glimmering creatures who make a feast of each other tonight. Also, even at the end of my rope, I can't help but get douche chills at the idea of posting poems on my blog.
It's good to be back.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Don't Even Bang Unless You Plan to Hit Something
I got a girl, and I gave her the keys to this blog. It wasn't quite a mistake, no, but the beauty of the secret blog is that it serves as a receptacle for my most unrepeatable thoughts. I can't really let 'er rip if I know somebody's reading who shares a bed with my on occasion - at least, not without frisking them for weapons before lights-out. So I let this blog become fallow, its mix of diary entries and angry rants festering from a lack of attention.
So she dumps me, and now I come crawling back. Typical, right? See, I switched my major, from English to Chemistry. Part of me worried that my words had been sacrificed when I chose to pursue a career whose promised future was more than $20K a year and cheese sandwiches. But I guess I can still torture a metaphor and craft a run-on like a motherfucker. I've become more masculine, but my writing remains as unsure as ever. I'm sure Ezra Pound would cluck his tongue if a gang of feminist critics hadn't dug him up and nailed it to a red wheelbarrow. Ah, well.
So she dumps me, and now I come crawling back. Typical, right? See, I switched my major, from English to Chemistry. Part of me worried that my words had been sacrificed when I chose to pursue a career whose promised future was more than $20K a year and cheese sandwiches. But I guess I can still torture a metaphor and craft a run-on like a motherfucker. I've become more masculine, but my writing remains as unsure as ever. I'm sure Ezra Pound would cluck his tongue if a gang of feminist critics hadn't dug him up and nailed it to a red wheelbarrow. Ah, well.
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