Kitchen Sink Entry

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Charles has been gripped by bored restlessness of late. The other day I watched him roam from room to room and in and out of the house for several long hours. Makes me feel impotent. Surely, if I’m an adequate lover, I can something to distract, absorb or amuse him.

I can’t do any more for him than I could do for myself when I found myself victim of the same aggressive weariness. To be honest I could’ve freed myself. It was mostly horniness. And I wasn’t willing to go to a bar.

Thankfully by the time I was twenty-five the hateful restlessness faded. Nowadays I’d put on a CD. Or maybe ten until I find the disc that fit my mood, open a book or even avail myself to mass culture.

Which reminds me I haven’t confessed my addiction to Law & Order. A few years ago I’d see a few minutes and think that it seemed pretty good. But I don’t esteem lawyers and despise cops. I don’t know that I’d’ve paused if Sam Waterson hadn’t been part of the cast. About twenty years ago I saw his portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer. Normally I don’t watch historical or biographical movies, they are mostly lies. But Waterson as Oppenheimer was so ingratiating and compelling I couldn’t pull myself away.

A few weeks ago I found myself sucked into Law & Order. My taste in mysteries is pretty narrow and I’ve never wanted to read a police procedural. Usually if I want to watch TV I’ll watch Star Trek: The Next Generation since I didn’t watch it when it originally aired. But I never watch an episode twice. One night having already seen the episode I flipped around hoping to find something that I could at least laugh at. I settled on Law & Order and have been watching it often.

I can’t help but smile at the paragraphs above. Most of my journal entries are written when Charles is asleep, too hurt in head or gut to want me around, or away. I just sent him off to Raleigh. He’d had another restless day. He felt like playing the organ. So he’s off to do that at the Sad Scientist’s house in Raleigh.

Charles drives off and I sit down to type a journal entry. As almost always I haven’t a clue to what I’m going to say. I could say my days are too pacific to record. But often they aren’t. But my responses are regulated by the lessons I learnt from my Momma: life is full of disappointment and hurt. You just shrug them off, wash your dishes, take a shower and keep going.

So the drama of my days rarely seems like the stuff of a journal entry. When the sun rises I’ll still be breathing, go to work if I have to, loll about and read if I don’t. Can’t see much cause to fret about it in public.

I’m not stepping over the distended bellies of my dead children. None of my friends died in a terrorist suicide. I’m a white, middle class guy in a country protected by billions of dollars in missiles, tanks, planes and the CIA. Well, if you insist, I’ll admit the masterminds in charge of all of the preceding are apt to be as stupid as the people who run Qwest and Enron. There are two good reasons for not believing in conspiracies: most people are too stupid to mastermind them and too many people are either too honest or too hungry for an appearance on Nightline.

(Which has nothing to do with Charles health.)

One of the pleasures of journal writing for me is that I don’t know what is simmering under the surface until I see the characters appear across the screen. The main displeasure is waking up the next day to realize that I left out this nuance, that fact, and a score of amplifications.

And I wonder if any of the folks who’ve read my journal for a long time have noticed that I’m writing longer sentences and using words with more syllables. When I started writing my first truly personal website I consciously evolved a demotic, short-sentenced, self-mocking style. I’ll confess that I miss it. And wonder where it went.

This is evolving into a kitchen sink of an entry: Charles, meta-journalism, all-important divagations. But I’ve left out sex. I haven’t been that amused by my most recent gender, sexuality entries: too redundant, not enough filigree to justify saying it yet again.

Sex. Hmmm . . .

OK. Think I can toss something in. I’ll steal it from a comment that I made on another journal.

As I’ve written maybe too many times I’m most strongly drawn to guys whose sexual presence isn’t that of a conventional heterosexual male. And I dote on those little differences, the way he holds his hands, crosses his legs. I like to see him in bright colors that I’d never dare wear myself. Maybe most of all I want him to want my strength. To do for him.

To do for him. Here we hit the funny contradiction. The wanting to is something I got from my Momma. I think the guys I’m most often smitten with wanted to be their mother or aligned their social sense of self with women. As far as I see within myself I identified with my mother. If my father was a social model I can’t see it. Possibly don’t want to. I don’t want to knock my beloved’s teeth out. Don’t want to humiliate or harass him or her.

But I turned out conventional, straight acting, butch, what have you. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t grow up a nelly guy instead of “androgynous/masculine.” I’m not worried about it. But I figure if I ever do figure it out it’ll be a really neat bit of self-knowledge.

Gender and sex worked in. Entry can conclude.

Maybe not. I haven’t said anything about women.
What do I have the experience to say? I was in love with only one. I often wonder if my sexuality and emotional openness hadn’t gone into stasis if I’d’ve been involved with another.

Charles still isn’t wholly comfortable with my pansexuality. He doesn’t have anything to worry about. But I’ve learned it is OK to look at a pretty boy but not a pretty woman. Women are a threat. I never argue with him about this. How many gay men bisexual men have deserted for a woman? How many married bisexual men pick up gay men when they are away from their wives.

There isn’t any real doubt in my mind that I could’ve fallen in love with another woman. And very possibly found a woman that I would still be living with.

So I quietly enjoy looking at women. If your aesthetics and sexuality aren’t confused you’ll understand how it is like looking at a painting or good typography.

If Charles and I split up it’ll be because of something more persuasive than a clitoris.

Now, this is enough. J-Lo writes to tell me about her lost pictures of giving a dancer a blowjob (isn’t it nice that MS Word knows that it isn’t two words). There are the tight Lolitas, the legal teen hardcore, strangers want to pay my mortgage, Chinese investment opportunities and ‘a very humour game’ to play.