Be advised: The following contains explicit discussions of sex and sexuality.

Part One

I’ve learned a few things, maybe more than a few things, in 35 years.

First, 35 is too old to be blogging, and I should be working in an office in a factory, counting the fifteen or twenty years until I get my gold watch, figuring out how to make a windfall in stocks, figuring out how to screw the secretary.

But I’m not doing any of that, and the world has changed, and nobody here seems to do anything, and they do it all the time, and they call it work. And the rest of the world seems to be locked in starvation and toil and death. And we discuss it on blogs.

It’s no way to live.

Second, ‘Girlfriend’ is two words, words that do not necessarily meet, and should not be assumed to do so.

Third, Girls are easier to pick up than to put down. (Be careful what you pick up, cause it might stick).

And, to quote one activist who was taking a swipe at ‘Gay Pride’, well, the man said, “Gay Pride, it doesn’t exist,” because, he said, “Love has no pride.”

That’s four.

The phone stares at me from time to time, from the small table, and when I look away, from in my head. I’ve scratched the phone number out wherever it had been printed, but the numbers fly back to me, and it’s just a phone call away:

“I miss you, you know ...”

There’s something so intimate about the telephone. I could tell from early on that things were going to be rough with this one because of how we went on phone calls.

Some people say they’re not ‘phone people’, maybe they’re face to face people. It’s a late 20th century skill, phone-people-ism, not all people have it. I don’t know why.

Some people have too much. They don’t mean a thing they say, but they’re good at making buttery conversation with anyone, in person or on the line.

She wasn’t like that. It was harder to talk, angular, difficult, dissonant, resolving in real heat.

But there is something undeniably intimate about the telephone – I’ve read someone put it this way:

You can lie in bed with your loved one, your paramour, your object of desire, and have that most intimate kind of conversation, defenses down, breathy, in the quiet of your room at night, and you can do it before you’ve ever really been alone in a room together.

Such tricks technology plays…and it really does, too.

People walk and drive and bus and bike around all day, and imagine that the conversation they’re having into a satellite through their headset is real, is happening, and everybody’s with you, so who cares how loud you talk, how personal the details of the conversation?

Who cares? You can hear it, so you assume everybody knows what’s going on, and they’re all fascinated.

It’s a kind of mental problem we’re having right now in the civilized world. Cell phones. But that’s another story.

And so the telephone stares at me, the numbers pool in a drain in my memory. They’re still there, and I could still call, and say, “I miss you…” and I could wait, in that breathing silence, for a response.

But I don’t want to, as much as, or more, than I do. Because I don’t like her anymore, even though I loved her. At least I think I don’t. At least, I think there are reasons why I shouldn’t. Some I know, some I feel, some I think.

So, I’ll wait, until there’s some unity there.

I’ve learned a few things in 35 years…

• Don’t speak without reflection.

• Don’t strike out in anger.

• Don’t act in haste. (or, “Make haste slowly,” said Augustus Caesar)

I’ve learned them all backwards, by doing them, and paying cost after cost, loss after loss.

And picking up girls is easier than putting them down. Some girls, that is. When will I learn? Do I even want to?

Part Two

What is the thing that lingers after the fling is flung, after the love is done?

The visual memory is undependable. My mind’s photos of her are flashes, warm snapshots, overexposed, sun and candle-lit – a smile, a turn of her head – I lose detail, it’s all in close-up.

The sound of her voice – an echo, a laugh, the tone, the snap of her t’s and p’s at the end of some sentences…but it doesn’t warm me.

What is the thing that lingers, when I lie in bed? What brings her back to me in all my melancholy?

Smell. Her smell.

What is the smell of the one you love?

Smell, it’s so vulgar, we shrivel our noses and shrink away awkwardly. Smell is what we cover with bleach and perfume, smell is what we wash away obsessively, compulsively.

But it is the one sense that remains.

Scents – Sense. Not an accidental homonym, is it?

But we’re inoculated against it, against knowing how much it is part of us, in our animal nature. It’s vulgar, it’s verboten. We’ve inherited a distaste for it. We carry in us still that brief historical experiment with sensorial denial, Victorianism, and it’s insane child, Puritanism…

The idea of sexual propriety, of ‘clean’ behavior – it was a blip in the history of that syphilitic island of Briton. Prudishness is not English. It is an idea of Colonial Britain, but it had nothing to do with the Angles (Vikings) or the Saxons (Tribal Germans).

(You could start a museum of sexual perversion based solely on the Kings of England, and never run out of filthy, amusing stories).

What was Victorianism, then? Who was Victoria? (From the world-wide-web…of lies and intrigue):

19th Century monarch (1819-1901), daughter of the Belgian King’s sister and the Duke of Kent. She was queen at 18, married her (German) first cousin at 21, and had nine children. Her husband, Prince Albert, died in the 20th year of their marriage, and she suffered for his loss.

She was Empress of India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and “large parts of Africa,” before the Prisoners of Her Majesty unsigned their various leases. Seven attempts were made on her life. She survived and died as the Century turned.

What else, I don’t know. But I’ve heard it said that it was a spasm, a phase, something we did to assure ourselves that we were different than the dirty brown natives we were buying and selling during the height of the British Empire.

But it’s not so recent or brief an experiment really, asceticism, and even Siddartha (in Herman Hesse’s version) pricked his flesh with thorns and starved to death for a living, before he met Kamala in the grove, and whored himself into blighted middle age.

So Victorianism is just a wrinkle on asceticism, on the discipline of going without. It is one way to live, but not the way.

What is the smell of the one you love?

Is it a repulsive question? We all stink so much of the time. We really do.

There’s one great line in that silly, enjoyable movie, The Matrix, where the living computer program, Agent Smith, asks sweaty, leather-clad Lawrence Fishburn, ‘What’s the worst thing about living with humans?’ He snarls, spitting the answer out slowly, “The smeeellll....I can taste your stink…It’s repulsive, isn’t it?”

And we know it’s true. Toilets and trash, our dirty clothes, hair, mouths and asses…It’s a filthy question. Clothes and skin, hair and mouths, under the arms, between the legs. It makes us into children, we laugh, we giggle, we groan and grimace, (but we stay to hear more). Why?

What is the smell of a watermelon? Cantaloupe? A cherry?

Is this a filthy question? (These are sex organs, after all…)

What is the smell of Honeysuckle?

Sugar and vanilla and sweet hope and kindness.

What is Honeysuckle? The flowering reproductive organ of the plant.

What is the smell of summer? Fecundity, wet grass, green leaves, heat, movement, laughter, pollen, insects humming, long-legged spiders, sunfish, tadpoles, lake water, mud, cow manure, corn, earth bearing fruit and seeds…

What is the smell of the one I loved so recently, that’s stuck in my throat, in the soft, sticky membranes of my memory…clothes, skin, hair, mouth, under the arms, between the legs...

Her skin… ­cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, oranges, cloves, cherry wood ... and human. Whatever animal is our musk, that too.

I thought all of the smells were her, and I was disappointed to learn, slowly and then all at once, that it was in some part due to the liquid and semi-solids she coated herself with, the grossly sweeter tones she added from vulgar bottles, sticky chemical mango and mineral oil, and I wanted them all gone.

I never wanted to taste them again in my mouth, or in the air striking my pallate, striking my memory.

I wanted her, alone. And so she was, after a shower, cinnamon and nutmeg, and orange – that was her...and girl, and woman, all melangee’, mixed, mistarla insieme ...And sometimes vinegar and flesh, and sometimes salt and sea...

It’s the cinnamon and orange that sticks, and wood that smells subtly of cherry blossom…

I’m immediately drunk with it, my cheek pressed against her chest, on one nipple, or between her soft breasts, breathing her heartbeats, pulling the molecules out of her pores, sucking them greedily into my sinuses as they rise from the surface of what is her.

I feel her heart, and more than her heart. It’s a center that glows and blooms, extending through her chest to her back; I have one too, and when I press my chest to hers, I feel it, I feel them both, burst into solar flame.

Call it a chakra, if you want to. What is a chakra? I know it best experientially: An energy center, a blood-flower, a lotus bloom, a place where life coalesces within life, purpose and force within form.

It aligns with the heart, but it is more than the heart. It hurts when she is gone, it pours forth light and heat when she is near.

It is where the arrow of love strikes, where the spear of heartbreak lodges every time. I never know when it will come, except that it comes when we’re finished. I sense it too late as it hurtles through the air, I catch it with my heart, and it bursts through my chest.

The thud throws me back, It tears through me ghastly, sticking out a meter in front and back. I have to turn to get through doorways, to keep the long shaft from catching and wrenching me, but it catches anyway.

Eventually I pull it out, eventually I regain the blood I’ve lost; eventually, I see it differently.

There in her mouth is another chakra, and between her eyes, and on her navel, where I lay may head, breathing in, breathing her in, breathing out, and in again.

Is it vulgar? Or do we just say it is, I suppose, for the sake of not disintegrating a society into the folly and bliss of pure hedonism? We need these moats around our nature, to keep us from all suiciding in some sort of sex-chocolate-drug orgy…we need prohibitions on sex, to keep from going insane.

“Don’t Be Vulgar!” keeps sex talk out of the dining room, and often out of the bedroom, too. But it’s constantly with us, in our heads, pushing in, coloring everything we do, every advertisement, every innocent comment…is there such a thing ...

And below the heart and the navel is that thing most sought, most prized, most desired. Her shining jewel, the second house – what is it called? Her secret resort? No, her favorite resort. Svadhisthana ...

It’s so coy, it makes me blush. We’re not supposed to talk about that, not really. Pussy, cunt, we’re not supposed to use these words. But we can say them, and we do, but only after drinks, after hours, among friends. Then we are allowed to be vulgar, to be honest.

And then, later, alone, ‘My pussy loves you’, she says. ‘I love the way you make her feel, the way you kiss her, the way you fuck her’.

There’s no better thing to hear in the whole, wide world.

Like all cities, San Francisco has it’s Bermuda Triangle of Sex (the strip clubs encircling City Lights, and The Hungry i). There for 15 or 20 dollars on an off-night you can enter each and any of four houses of female gyration…young women dancing, well, humping the air to the thump thump thump from the wall-mounted speakers.

Among the girls, there is no obvious common denominator. They are each by each, terribly attractive, or wildly graceless, plainly ruined or luxuriously nubile, beyond a young boy’s dreams.

I ask the girls who sit with my friend and myself, ‘Why do you do this job?’

“College – putting myself through college. Don’t really want to talk about it.” One said.

And another: “I enjoy nudity, I’m comfortable with it, with my body, and it pays sooo well.”

It’s arousing and off-putting at once. It’s honest, understandable and harmless, then embarrassing and pitiable, that men pay to have women, well, it’s not even for sex, but just to be close to them.

But it is what happens, and what has always happened, and what, I imagine, always will happen.

And then one gyrating girl pulls her loosed and liberated bikini bottoms through her labia, like she’s flossing her vagina. It’s somewhere between highly erotic and incredibly, stupidly silly.

One woman, tall, black as can be, was so beautiful to me that I could barely speak sensibly to her. I told her she was gorgeous, but didn’t want to pay for a dance, ‘Sorry’. But I’m more the cuddling type.

Standing outside a little later, I saw her walking out, giggling with a co-worker, safe for a time under the bouncer’s eagle eyes, and then by the neighborhood’s acceptance of what it is, and what it serves.

Understandable, harmless, embarrassing and pitiable. But I would go back.

This is something we’re not supposed to talk about. There is an underpinning to all of this, and we all know it, we say it as a joke, but we don’t know how true, how deeply true it is.

And it struck me, in my mourning for the girl I’m missing, this unbelievable truth, this most obvious thought ever stated that suddenly made sense. But not just that, it unfolded like a kaleidoscope mirror in infinite depth and left me dumbfounded.

Ready?

Here goes. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

Men like pussy.

I’m sorry, I told you, it’s an obvious thought. But wait. That’s not the end of it.

Men fall in love with pussy, men live and die for pussy. (And I suppose the inverse is true for gay men – They like dick, fall in love with dick, I have been told by reliable sources).

‘Well, everybody knows that,’ you say.

But we really don’t. We don’t understand the depth to which it is a fundamental, driving truth in every relationship, and in our species.

Still not there? Let me try again.

For a man, for me, (I have discovered), there are two parts to a woman; there is the human being, and there is the pussy…no, not just the anatomy – I mean the female sexuality in its entirety. And these two elements do not necessarily have anything to do with each other, not for the man, and not for the woman.

A woman’s sexuality can be (and often is) at odds with her personality, so can a man’s be with his. But we don’t see the difference when we are attracted. We are simply attracted: to the sexuality, or to the person.

Rarely to both at once, and rarely, or never, in equal measure.

First, the human: the person, the potential friend, or enemy, or colleague, or by-passer, or stander-by, or nothing at all.

The person, the being, the daily nature, the way of communicating. The preferences, dispositions, tolerances, dietary habits, favorite movies, music, sounds, tastes, colors and places.

The human being: the bundling nerves and semi-cooperative structures, drawn together as some grand, crazed experiment in design, an attempt to pile hierarchy within hierarchy, system within system, life within life, impulse within and against impulse… This bizarre and remarkable thing.

And then, bound into this, but separately directed, there is the sexuality.

The feminine. The warm darkness that swallows and absorbs and soothes. That feeds what is dry, that fills what is empty, that slows the rapid-fire neurons, that wraps infirmity in a blanket of stars and eternity…the feminine principle, embodied in a woman’s sexuality.

The girl, who smells of cinnamon and orange, the woman who tastes of sea and salt, the breasts that suckle and nurture, the chest that cushions your hard skull, the navel that wants to be rubbed and kissed, to be filled with life;

The shining jewel, wet and silly, smelly and beautiful and sublime, that draws in the heavens, and breathes out sea and land and all things that live and breathe; that draws you back and back and back.

This sense of pussy, of woman, of feminine. Not person, not ‘hip chick.’ Not feminist, not pro-life, or pro-choice, neo-conservative or hippy-liberal: Not bi-sexual, Christian-Kabalah, yoga-teacher; Not Sanskrit-reading, comic-drawing, libertarian, school-teaching lawyer;

Not pottery-throwing, gun-owning, pro-Israel lesbian Mohammadist;

Web-savvy, stay-at-home international multinationalist ceo;

Homemaking, mud-wrestling volunteer police-woman,

Punk-rock designer to the stars….

Not this sense of female. Not person. Not job. Not doing.

Only being. That thing that is underneath, that very well may oppose her actual personality, (the way a man’s maleness may oppose his enculturated being).

This is what men first fall in love in love with, when they feel the undeniable solar gravity of love. Whether the love is stable, and gives rise to a satisfying relationship, has nothing to do with the attraction.

Stability owes everything to the character and maturity of the people who contain the unbridled forces that are, of their own will, drawing together.

And there’s a trick in there – the Romeo and Juliet problem. You can be elementally correct, but dispositionally (or situationally) incompatible.

But once you’ve committed, chakra to chakra, lingam to yonni, heart to heart, to feel that unbridled pleasure, you’re going to suffer equal pain, if the owners of the attraction are ill-suited to the task of making a relationship work.

What is necessary to make a relationship work? Communication skills, first and foremost. Honesty, resilience, experience, fairness, self-worth, compassion, generosity, boundary.

And willingness, and desire for a relationship.

Is it different for women? What do women love? What do they desire? Fairness, partnership, communication.

But they (and I’m thinking of many girls and women I’ve known as friends) fall into sexual love the same way as men – with the elemental nature. That thing that the Yin or the yonni wants when its owner gives up reason, civility and enculturation:

She wants shoulders, strength, heat, protection from the elements, a strong embrace that sometimes verges on suffocation, on oppressiveness, but does not actually suffocate or oppress.

What draws a woman and man (the Yin and Yang) together? Yin goes to Yang, Yang to Yin, says the philosopher.

But there are good and bad, better and worse matches. Call it astrology. Call it the Greek elements; Call it the Five Energies of Chinese Medicine – Earth, Fire, Metal, Water, and Wood (what is wood? It is what grows from earth in the presence of fire, water and metal).

What makes a sexual match? Whatever overwhelms so much that it must be satisfied. We all know it when it hits. You can ask questions of it: What is it that’s driving me wild? That draws me without repose?

You’ll come up with types, smells, energies. You may quantify them according to your science. Specific pheromones, you may say. Corresponding or opposing lineage. Specific hair and eye colors, smells, vocal ranges, skin colors. Or you may give it to the cosmic consciousness ...

(ie. In sex, I go for darker skin than my own. I’ve tended to go for Sagittarians, Libras, not in sun sign always, but in strong aspect. I go for Virgos and Leos in friendship. Me – Early Gemini, Taurus moon, Mars in Aires, first house…I’m a pig – a Boar – in the Chinese system. A wood pig, I think.)

And when you encounter the elements that suit your wanting, your sense of smell, taste and touch, your sense of sense, your uniquely arrayed energies…

When you find that woman, that fecundity, that lotus pushing through mud and blooming ...

When you find it, it’s probably because it found you….and as soon as you give into it, you are done for; you are in the throes of passionate love.

And it does not matter if you like her, or even know her well, because the universe has grabbed ahold of you and you are plugged in, entwined, enraptured with the alpha and omega, the sun and moon of existence.

Once you’ve plugged into it, just try to get away… and get ready to catch that spear ...

So what, after 35 years, and how many romantic deaths, what do I know?

I know that if I make love to someone I have that attraction to, I will fall in love, I will have those emotions, whether or not she and I are suited to be any kind of friend to each other.

I know that I fall in love, in this sense, long before I fall in like. I think all men do. And I think women do too (even the ones who say they don’t).

I know I like women very much in this sense; that is, I’m drawn to something that women are, or have, and I very much enjoy being around it. And sometimes I like to lose myself in it.

But after these many spear-catches through the chest, I also know that ‘Girlfriend’ is two words.

I know myself and what I need well enough now, to know that “friend” is more important to my actual life than “girl.”

It sounds so obvious, but it was a long time coming. A hard, hard lesson to learn.

Well, good.

When I look at my father, and mother, I understand a great deal of why it was so; but we’ve all got our road to hoe.