Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | Apr 29, 2007
Generally, the initial reaction of a thwarted animal is to try harder to attain its goal. A starving chicken (Gallus domesticus) prevented from reaching its food by a wire fence will make increasingly frantic efforts to get through it. Gradually, however, this behavior is replaced by another which has no obvious purpose. When unable to find food, for example, pigeons (Columbia livia) will frequently peck the ground even if nothing there is edible. Not only will they peck indiscriminately, but they start to preen their feathers; such inappropriate behavior, frequently observed in situations of frustration or conflict, is known as displacement activity. Early in 1986, just after he turned thirty, Bruno began to write.
-Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
Karl Marx observed, with some humor, that on the eve of the storming of the Bastille, French intellectuals were still preoccupied with balancing the Estates, oblivious to the great transformation that was already well under way. Today we might refer to such behavior as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Examples abound. The much-hyped political upheaval of November 2006, to name but one, brings to mind another of Marx’s witty asides about history repeating itself — the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
But I don’t intend to drone on about politics; I long ago developed Cassandra syndrome, having learned everything I need to know about the future from the yellowed pages of Orwell, Dick, Burgess, Huxley, Gibson and Stephenson.
You see, during the winter months I found myself struggling to balance my own Estates. In Mexico I birthed all sorts of new ideas, and though I carried them around with me, largely unexamined, in the weeks that followed, I had by Halloween succumbed to postpartum depression. I’ve heard this is not uncommon, the return to reality being a jarring experience to freshly tanned and fucked swingers. I suppose this is why resorts like Desire get so much repeat business, why some people even make biannual pilgrimages. However, I am a stubborn, serious-minded hedonist. Banishment to a sex-positive ghetto, no matter how well appointed, is not for me.
I knew I had to move forward, to make some changes in my own life and, perhaps, inspire others (if I were more ethically flexible I might establish a cult or religion). But I was at a loss. I felt alone. Sure, Leslie and I made the rounds, sharing wondrous tales of enlightenment. And I would sit at my desk filing reports, sipping from a glass of straight gin, drawing out the process as long as possible, clinging to the memory of that feeling that came over me for a few days in late September. I, however, couldn’t be certain anyone understood me. Indeed, I’m not even sure I understood myself. “The problem is that we haven’t taught women — or men — how to say ‘no’,” I told someone at a cocktail party, “nor have we taught them how to say ‘yes’.”
People disappointed me. I fell back on old habits yet I couldn’t help but compare every experience to Mexico. Leslie confessed to me that our project felt like more trouble than it was worth; I agreed with her. I remember fooling around with an ex, aware that we were both too deeply embedded in our own narratives to truly let go. Now I realize no one was ever at fault. The conditions weren’t right. People can only join us when they are ready.
But as surely as a long winter must end, so must our confusion. It dawned on me I had been surrounded by people who understood me all along, that we sexual revolutionaries squandered so much energy emphasizing our differences we’d neglected to celebrate our commonalities. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt this way: it was as if we’d all woken up one morning with the same idea… and the resolve to do something about it.
By the time the last patches of dirty snow melted my Estates didn’t matter anymore. A new feeling came over me nearly overnight. No wall was torn down, no statues came tumbling to the ground, but it was a revolution nonetheless.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Sex | Apr 12, 2007
I am drunk now. Please excuse me.
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I quoted him a couple of times. I suck compared to him. I am a dilettante — an artiste of the slightly funny deal. IAMANIDIOT. I think the difference is that he didn’t really give a shit what you people think of him.
I just fucked a married woman and I am sitting here smelling my fingers. The fingers of my left hand smell like Leslie’s pussy. The fingers of my right hand smell like the married girl’s pussy. Why does pussy juice smell so fucking good after it has dried up on your skin? I don’t want to shower.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” the married girl said.
I know the feeling…
She lives in the suburbs and drives an expensive car. I find this amusing. My life is weird. I used to be self-righteous and smug about not fucking married girls. Now I’ve joined the rest of you hairless apes.
I’m listening to the same Red Hot Chili Peppers song over and over again. My obsession with the song has something to do with what happened this past weekend. The song goes like this:
I like pleasure spiked with pain
And music is my aeroplane
It’s my aeroplane
Songbird sweet and sour jane
And music is my aeroplane
It’s my aeroplane
Pleasure spiked with pain…
That motherfucker’s always spiked with pain
My arm was sore. And the next night someone dropped a heavy chair on my foot. I walked with a limp. Also, I felt fucked up inside.
But I think everything’s okay. I feel like I’m coming along as a human being.
And you know what’s fucking bullshit? I quoted Steely Dan in one of my journal entries and when they (they meaning the Man) published my scribblings in a book of short stories they had to remove the lyrics. Turns out they couldn’t use the lyrics without paying an unreasonable sum of money. What happened to fair use? I hope the bean counters hang when the revolution comes. Fuck em all.
Less than 24 hours ago I was fucking another girl. I think she’s my mistress or my bitch or something. She wants me to call her my bitch. “My body is yours,” she said to me last night. I really love women. Maybe I love them too much but I cannot help it. I took a nice picture of my mistress (my bitch?) in the morning but sadly you’ll probably never see it.
I’m still scratching my head — winter sucked and then spring came and I’ve been getting laid left and right, but Les and I have also taken another step in our relationship. We’re seeing people separately. I really enjoy fucking, but I also want to love everyone. And I want everyone to love me. Why now, when I’m getting married in a month? It’s a Hegelian thing. This is synthesis.
Fucking Vonnegut is dead — shuffled off his mortal coil or whatever shit. And my oblivious cock (what is a cock if it’s not oblivious?) was inside a married woman tonight. Can you believe that shit? I can’t even summon a single tear for my main man, yet take me to hear Bruckner’s 7th at the Philharmonic and I’ll weep like an infant. How pathetic is that?
Anyway. The phrase echoes in my head: The system of the world. That’s all it is. None of us ask for this. But we deal with it. And then we die. Blah blah blah.
Bummer.
Maybe I shouldn’t give a shit anymore.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Sex | Jul 18, 2006
I had a dream, or rather a very specific premonition that came to me in a dream. I awoke with the unsettled feeling one has when one has a dream that’s a little too real. I shuffled around the apartment in a daze and then, hours later, came across the prophesied letter. Les must have retrieved it from the mailbox.
My dream replayed. The letter said exactly what I thought (knew?) it would. The crisp stationary was a slightly different shade of white.
I consider myself a rational being. I was educated in the hard sciences. I have the German’s surly disposition towards mysticism: I’m not swayed by self-serving preacher-men and psychics, nor does magical thinking hold much interest for me. Certain phenomena in quantum physics notwithstanding, I do not believe in spook-like actions at a distance. But physics and metaphysics failed me here.
So I did what any sane, reasonable person would do when faced with an urgent metaphysical dilemma: I drank heavily. Emma, recently returned from Europe, told us of her adventures as we sat in a godforsaken Upper West Side bar. “Did you have an Italian stud at either end, or what?”
Emma laughed. “No. They were all too young. And too clingy.”
“That’s a shame. If a guy wants to get laid it’s better not to give a damn.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“But then not giving a damn defeats the purpose of the exercise, doesn’t it?” I was like this all night. Speaking in koans.
We wound up in Emma’s living room. She straddled Leslie, applying warming gel between my fiancée’s legs. In the dim light of the bedroom Leslie said to me: “I want to see you fuck her.” And I did. And Les watched, stroking my balls as I took out my frustrations on our playmate’s cunt. I turned into a raging hardon. I’d annihilated the self.
Later on Leslie told me: “You fuck like crazy when you’re angry.”
It’s a straightforward biological mechanism: anger produces testosterone, which in turn produces the aforementioned raging hardon. And the letter produced the anger. And the dream produced the letter. A deterministic universe, as logical as a clockwork orange.
The next morning Emma woke up late for work (the poor girl had to go in on a Saturday) in spite of my nudging and prodding. I discovered, much to my dismay, that I’d developed a rather profound kink in my neck. Leslie was kind enough to feed Emma’s cat, upon which Les and I said our goodbyes and strolled home in the sunlight. My Dinner with Andre had arrived in the mail, so she popped it in and we curled up on the couch together.
WALLY: And I mean, you know, it’s the same with any kind of prophecy or sign or an omen, because if you believe in omens, then that means that the universe—I mean, I don’t even know how to begin to describe this—that means that the future is somehow sending messages backwards to the present! Which means that the future must exist in some sense already in order to be able to send these messages. And it also means that things in the universe are there for a purpose: to give us messages. Whereas I think that things in the universe are just there. I mean, they don’t mean anything. I mean, you know, if the turtle’s egg falls out of the tree and splashes on the paving stones, it’s just because that turtle was clumsy, by accident. And to decide whether to send my ships off to war on the basis of that seems a big mistake to me.
ANDRE: Well, what information would you send your ships to war on? Because if it’s all meaningless, what’s the difference whether you accept the fortune cookie or the statistics of the Ford foundation? It doesn’t seem to matter.
Viewing the film (for the first time in twenty years) it occurred to me that the way you approach life depends very much on whether you identify with Andre the wide-eyed mystic or Wally the jaded realist. And though once I might have sided with Wally, at that moment I wasn’t sure what to think.
I wasn’t terribly thrilled about going out that night—aside from being brutally hungover, I obviously had a lot on my mind—but I didn’t want to cocoon at home either. Les and I met the date at a wine bar in the East Village and stayed just long enough for the fumes from the fryolator(!) to burn our eyes, sending us fleeing to the comfortably air-conditioned Niagara. Try as I might, I couldn’t work myself out of a fugue state. The girl seemed distant—mercurial was a word that kept coming to mind, although it might not have been the right word—yet I might just have been projecting a bad vibe. My neck was still stiff from the previous night. I felt as if I were being pulled under by the cosmic undertow.
Later on, at the warehouse party, I asked the girl whether she’d be interested in having carnal relations on a semi-regular basis (there ought to be a less juvenile and retarded term for this than ‘fuck buddy’). Ordinarily I’m not one for such formal proposals but that night I was hardly my usual charming self. The girl was intrigued. Later on I found Leslie dancing by herself and I held her for a moment before we took to the street to find a car. The girl joined us and as we rode back into Manhattan, fluff-talking about nothing in particular, I rested a hand upon each of their thighs.
A couple days later I was on the train and I thought Am I dreaming? I wanted to tap the guy standing next to me on the shoulder and ask him “Do you think any of this is real?” but he probably would have thought I was nuts. When Leslie got home from work we talked about Kant (we were in the same philosophy class back in school) and I felt a little better. Even if reality is an illusion, I reasoned, there must be some basis for the concepts we share as a species (e.g., that we inhabit three spatial dimensions plus time) and therefore our scientific intuitions about the nature of the universe need not be invalidated by occurrences we (as of today) lack the proper tools to understand. That is, unexplained occurrences don’t necessitate the existence of dragons and fairy-dust.
That evening I visited the park and found some smooth rocks to sit upon for a while. When I got up to leave I spied a book propped up against a tree trunk. “This is the Dream” read the book’s title. Not a dream but the dream. Whose dream? I wondered.
Because right now I’d just as soon forget about dreams altogether.
