Random Thoughts

Sometimes I miss the women I’ve dated.

Sarah seemed like the perennial California girl, with incredibly sweet and giving underwritings to everything she did and all of her movements and expressions. It was an experience as if anything was possible, and every author I mentioned she’d already read and mentioned their antecedents with wonder and excitement to my inevitable discovery. How much did she experience in her imagination as a teenager?!

She even was so giving she wouldn’t allow herself to receive during sex. She could give a blow job for hours.

She showed me LA as if it were the dream of all humanity, an escape for better childhood opportunities to be something altogether different. An experience of something altogether defying in temperament, because daily life is just too damn boring.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t revolutionary. We saw sites and went to shows, and she showed me Jumbo’s Clown Room. It was more about the expansive feeling that the city was breathing with space and sparkling exhibitions manufactured for emotional consumption, like it knew what we wanted before we wanted it and was waiting in anticipation for our arrival.

It was one of my favorite experiences that I’ve ever had. LA seemed like a foreign country before I visited it, and she brought me inside the belly of it, and we skipped together through the yellow brick road of its substance.

And then we came back to reality. I made her angry the next time she asked me to go. I don’t know why I was so reactive. Maybe it was because the first trip resulted in her being very sad for some reason. Was I the cause of that? I don’t think I was, but I’ve been told things before about myself that I’m still trying to understand. Therapists make a great living showing you what you should already know about yourself.

Maybe it was because of all the sexual assaults she told me she had experienced since childhood. I couldn’t separate them from her present makeup. That was my fault, though it’s hard to know how anyone truly survives such things, and what their embodiment means…much less if you’re contributing to the harm or not. What I’ve found is it is not for me to decide what I’m contributing to or not, because I am not that important. I don’t mean to say that who I am and how I behave isn’t crucial or immeasurable, as the current moment is all we really have, but as long as someone is legally sane and is making active choices in their own bodily autonomy, it is completely up to them how they handle and integrate any of their experiences.

We as men have a hard time allowing the violation of another person, if they were born female, to be something that isn’t immediately resolved.

I’ve had many women tell me about their sexual assault experiences on a first date. I’d like to think it’s because I seem safe, because I listen, and maybe because they feel like I can protect them somehow at the same time. I was a small, weak kid until I was in high school…and even then I had a somewhat slight frame and had to play soccer and wrestle as well as weightlift to feel like I could measure up to other kids - and was still terrified that someone could really hurt me if they wanted to. I was always worried about this at every moment around other men and prepared to defend myself until I was about 32. Even now it’s there in the background, though I know that’s no way to live life.

Sometimes I want to tell women I understand their fear in this way, while I know it is in no way the same. It makes me wonder how we changed so much from when we were children, when everyone was weak and vulnerable. Sometimes I feel like I am truly back in that mindset, seeing someone as if we were kids meeting for the first time. Though I know I am filtering through my complex adult lying-to-myself filter to keep going.

It’s hard still not to want to control the outcome. I will never know someone’s interior experience, but I am confident in saying that sexual assault carries lifelong consequences. I’d like to think it’s much worse for the perpetrators, but some don’t feel anything…

I think it’s possible I’ve experienced sexual assault from at least two women, and of course it was mostly psychological. In that sense it is strangely relatable because I always want to downplay it since so many other situations are worse and apologize for the other person. When people say “believe all women” I think it’s more about the fact that we haven’t even acknowledged as a culture that this is prevalent in our experience as people, that it is all around us, and yet we keep going. But moreso, that normal men are capable of doing this to women as it is most assaults that are committed by someone close to them or known by the victim. And that it could be up to half of women who have experienced it at some point in their life.

I don’t think I’ve ever sexually assaulted a woman. Then again, I don’t think I’ll be in all their heads on their death beds reminiscing on all their experiences. I always tried to be cautious, but we are so much bigger than them. When your experience emotionally was the weak kid up till now, it makes things so confusing sometimes. There’s so much complexity in life, yet things come down to a few choices that are important.

I hope Sarah is doing well. I think I saw her at Vesuvio’s several months ago. If I was sure it was her I would have said hi, though I’m not quite sure she’d be glad to see me.

I am so glad I met her. We always had fun, and she was such a wonderfully intelligent and sensual person and had so much to give life. I wish I could write that in the present tense, but I never was very good in ending romantic relationships. It felt so existential at the time. I’ve learned that there are more ways to be romantic and sexual than expecting a lifetime relationship, though I did find one later, and that there can be life together after sex.

It’s fascinating how people come into your life and change you. After I met Sarah, my whole perspective and even the way I even walk changed a little bit. My thought patterns and my emotions and my way of being in the world, and how I thought about California as a place to live was…different. It isn’t even really anything to put into words.

Living isn’t really about putting anything into words, it’s just being here for the ride. For some reason I am compelled to put things into words anyhow.

Remember that language is not necessarily related to our thoughts, but it is very useful and the clear sign of civilization.

I still miss Sarah, but I know we could never have been together as partners. We were very compatible in many ways though. She asked shortly before we stopped communicating if we could have a purely sexual relationship, and I said yes. I just struggled on how to articulate how that would work for me, and honestly I was scared about how my judgements about here past would come up for me (which really had nothing to do with her. They were my issues.). I really could have used that type of relationship as the next several years were filled with many nights not knowing if I’d be out on the street of if I was truly meant for anybody, and a couple nights in the ER not being able to breathe and realizing in that moment that the closes person I could call who might even answer the phone within 8 hours was 3,000 miles away…

Holy shit those blow jobs felt like true love. Tenderness and willingness to be with the most intimate and dirty parts of one another really does bring out some great feelings and experiences, and it can get you through so much. Other times it can make you feel horrible that you allowed such precious parts of yourself to be used by someone else, who probably is working through their own experiences of being used in even worse ways by yet someone else they knew.

But we can still have beautiful experiences together, no matter what has happened to us. It can even enhance our time together, if it is owned and realized that everything that happens to us contibrutes to who we are now. But our experiences are not who we are. We choose how we show up to them, and what they mean for us, and who and what we allow in the future.

I still wish we could all be together, and continue to integrate what we’ve been through and share it with each other. Maybe that can be a reality in the distant future. For now we’ll still get by with knowing that the frozen aisle is still mostly TV dinners and that Netflix is one of the most profitable companies on the planet.

Is sex just sex, or Netflix and chill?

I love sharing, but it’s hard to let myself do it. To feel safe. Women have an easily attainable outward fear of being physically harmed. Men have trouble even admitting a fear of being touched, of being held, of letting ourselves go, and what can happen when we aren’t accepted in that moment.

It’s why men kill in peacetime. We were never trained to be accepted.

We have to learn how to touch ourselves deliberately, and how to accept touch past that. There should be entire consortiums dedicated to touch rehabilitation for men. It would solve the mass shooting crisis.

Men can be sensual. Men can be accepting. Men can be sensitive.

But so many act like dumbasses.

So women have to be discerning.

This is dedicated to Sarah. Hopefully it’s somewhat readable and doesn’t come off as disparaging or trite in any kind of way lol. It’s my literal thoughts as I am writing them after my morning coffee.

Maybe I’ll edit this later. Maybe I’ll add more thoughts.

I’m glad I met her. I still feel like I am with her in many ways, and that is beautiful. I don’t think I would or could have it any other way.