Looking for Good. You Can Dance if You Want To. Love/Want/Need. Virtual Sex and Violence and Weight Lifting. Scare Me.

--I haven’t been handsome the last few days. I try to blame my haircut, but I know it is something deeper.

When I prepare to leave the house, I try to make myself believe I think I’m handsome, because I know if I act that way, I’ll look that way.

--Several of my students are shooting a film and I go to the rehearsal for awhile then head downtown to meet KH. One of the more interesting things about her is that she has professionally danced the tango in Argentina.

You’ve got to admire that.

--It’s more Halloween than it was last night and the bars are full of people that use the holiday as an excuse to try come across as sexy. Girls with eyebrows too dark for the wigs and skirts to short for my libido; boys who dress in costumes that accentuate their physiques and so have to spend the night sucking in and trying to shuffle the bit of gut fat upward and suggest pectoral heft.

KH tries to get me to dance but I won’t do it. She holds my hands and dances anyway. She’s quite good at it and as she starts to whip her hair around I wonder how it is that people keep themselves from just fucking all the time.

--The nice thing about KH is that she recently told me that perhaps I am one of those men whose destiny is to simply move from lover to lover. Like a character in a Blake Edwards film.

I don’t think this is true of me.

I can romanticize myself like that, but it is to the other vision that I am truly married. The one in which I am a full on partner with some woman, where we are nearly perfectly bound. Not as simple as the love of songs and movies, but something strong and transcendent just the same.


So KH throws on a Juan where I know in fact there should be a Quixote, but what I appreciate about her confusion is that it really suggests she doesn’t mean to try to possess me. That she like me beyond the idea of making me hers.

In short, that she really is interested in being my friend. Even when she’s making her body move like that.

--Mostly, the girls I’ve know say “love” but mean “want” or “need”. When they realize that I am not going to bend all the way in that direction they can become quite hateful.

It almost always surprises me. I’ve said it before: I’m naïve for a cynic.

--It’s a long drive from the center of the city home. On the freeway I see that a cop is behind me. I don’t know how well I’d breathalize. I want to do something to convince him I’m fine, so though I don’t need to, I make a proper lane change complete with turn signal to demonstrate that I am a law abiding citizen.

--C, the girl I know who is going into the internet sex trade, gives me the link to her friends S&M site. There’s a section that suggests those who live too far away to visit her but want to make “tributes” anyway can do so. This is followed by a list of appropriate tributes, including an entire month of rent and links to wish lists at various internet vendors.

--Writing of the virtual world and problems with it: Vice City, San Andreas.

Oh no.

They’ve got me lifting weights and taking meals. I mean, really, this much virtual reality is too much. When it gets to the point where my character has got to get out of the car and urinate, I’m done.

---How frightening it is to realize that there are losses we can experience that no act of art or prayer can reconcile. The way you finally learn that the body can take damage that will never heal. That you will limp the rest of your life. That that scar is going to be on you when you die.

And you realize that not only will it be like that for the body, but for the mind. You will never be whole again. You will never be clean again.

Not through any act of therapy. Not through any act of confession.