Musing

I was wrong about the questions my kid would ask

Found poem in “The Ethical Slut”: many good ways to stay safe. Hold structure fairly.

I had an epiphany connecting my engagement with sex workers — and my uncertainty about Margot’s performativity — to my childhood in a ‘funhouse of distortion,’ raised to believe my father was straight. Wondering whether Margot is real or performing repeats the same psychic wound: never being able to trust what I saw or was told.

I’m writing about Isabella, one of two women who taught me the most about my sexuality. She showed me my cock could be an object of desire, while the Secretary taught me my desire itself could be desired. I miss them both — not just for sex, but for the intimacy we shared.

I just read this book (my second complete book in two days – it’s vacation!) – and damn. I feel like, now, I have a reading list for the next ten years! And, it fucking blew my mind.

I biked home from my 40th high school reunion feeling the same alienation I felt in high school — most of my actual friends weren’t there, and the crowd felt like a different world. I had a few genuinely connected conversations and skipped the after-party, choosing to bike in the night air, and my wife, and scotch, instead.

I had an epiphany about the shame I feel when relationships with women end — a deep sense that I am bad, unworthy, and that the loss is proof of it. It connected my pattern of abandonment to my mother, and felt like genuine news even though I’ve written about it many times before.

Death has been a constant presence throughout my life — from losing grandparents as a young child to my mother at nineteen. My own 21-year-old child, though, has been largely sheltered from it, and losses are now drawing closer.

What being sad, being a little depressed, looks like in me.

I’m depressed. Not TERRIBLY depressed. But depressed.