october 15 already

Bushwick, Brooklyn

My desires are for other things at work, usually sleep, but often these days for a noble life, a life of meaning and adventure, a different life. There, I have been listening to the “This American Life” archives for the past week or so, hearing stories of people who are living in ways different from me, living in other places, doing more compassionate things. At work, in that sea of cubicles, my desires differ from those that take place outside of that space, probably because most of my desire there is to somehow imagine my life in a different setting, one opposed from the tedium of this temp job. Outside of that setting, I no longer have that thing that seems necessary to oppose; outside of that setting, other things are opposed, loneliness, boredom, and distance among them.

And so on my lunch break, I did agree to meet up with this man who I met on the street not too long ago for an after work roll in the hay. Back at work though, listening to these stories Ira Glass had compiled, that desire for sex with a stranger had vanished. There were other factors at play also, chief among them my bowels and how they had yet to still fully feel regular after being fucked on Saturday night by this nice boy with soft skin and a big penis. So I texted this man met on the street some excuse saying that I could not make it after all, not feeling that, no longer needing the thing he provided me when I met him, having since had sex with more attractive people, but more importantly younger ones, my peers, people I at least have that in common with.

I am really happy for the most part, but something is off and I would be the first to admit to that. One manifestation of that offness is the infrequency of entries on here as of late, and the lack of care with the ones posted, there being very little self-reflection and introspection, rather just a flippant recounting of events, of this and that happened, or I saw this and went here, and while that may at some point in the future interest me, when I want to recount what it was I did on that particular day, it fails to do the thing I want to do with this, to have a stronger relationship with living, to intensify my living, to give it a meaning I otherwise may not have noticed when rushing through the actions, when making out with that person, when dancing at that bar drunk off an open bar. There are those details, but I want to get at the narrative behind those things that make me happy enough. And that there is the problem, the thing that is off; there is not much of a narrative to my living these days. My head is a muddy mess. I haven’t thought clearly in seemingly months. There are things on my mind, things about my current situation as relates to boys, to health, to my job, to sex work, to my friends, to my apartment, all of them in a less than settled state right now, and there are thoughts about how to get things to an ideal situation that would remove those thoughts, would at least no longer have them as thoughts that cloud out other thoughts. There are thoughts about exactly what ideal would mean, something about which I am not even sure, and that unsureness about what ideal would be to me is the thing more unsettling than the actual lack of idealness.

On a cold morning a couple of days ago, I took a shower, a really hot shower, and I stayed in there for a probably a good half an hour, it doing for me what all my thinking and not thinking about these things had failed to do, to remove all these thoughts from my head and to make me present, to make me a body instead of a mind. It is why I love swimming so much, the water at every point on my skin, this total body sensation, making me a body, feeling things at all points, pleasure on the entire surface of me. The physical contact making me aware of physical reality in a way I not always am. In movies, when someone gets hysterical, starts panicking, another character will usually slap them, saying, “Get a hold of yourself.” And it is that slap, that forcing of physical reality upon them, that brings them out of their mental convolutions, situates them in their actual present. Showers, sometimes, can have that effect upon me. Sex, too, often does, and that is why I am so often chasing it.