date machine : madagascar

Date Machine: Who Am I and Why Am I Here? or Let’s Keep in Touch

amboabe — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:08:00 GMT

I didn’t want my last post to be a formal goodbye so I’m going to do all that formal housekeeping here, in my second to last post. My name is Michael Thomsen.

“Amboabe” was a dumb nickname I gave myself in Madagascar. After an extended rant about something marginal and self-reflexive my friend S, who was a fellow volunteer, said “I hear you barking, big dog.” Madagascar is a country defined, in large part, by taboos and there are a lot centered on dogs. Dogs are considered filthy. It’s taboo in many areas to bring a dog into your house. It’s taboo to feed a dog the same food that humans would eat. It’s taboo to refer to another person as a dog in any way.

Dogs are mangy and opportunistic lurkers, crawling through the filthy back alleys on a never-ending search for food and shelter. They’re turned away and cursed at every turn. Children amuse themselves by beating dogs with sticks or throwing rocks at them, giggling when they evoke a pathetic yelp.

“Amboabe” is a literal translation of “big dog.” Once I got to know people in my village, I would make joking reference to myself as “amboabe” to see how far I could bend the taboos. When I told Bernadiny, the tank-like nurse at the clinic where I spent most of my days, she scowled and said I was dirty. “That’s not alright,” she told me. “People can’t be dogs. That’s bad.”

I made a point to laugh and make joking faces whenever I said it, but it was always received with headshakes and clucking disdain. After my first year, I noticed people had started calling me by the name. “Where is the big dog?” they would ask my neighbors when someone was looking for me. “Are you coming on the vaccine drive… big dog?”

The scorn was still present, but I could see the lips pointing upwards just a little bit every time they said it. Bernadiny started calling me Amboabe regularly, shaking her head at how ridiculous it was. There was no one else in town who could have been called a dog, much less request it. It was stupid. Absurd. Wrong. She would shake her head, as if she couldn’t believe what she was doing, and then laugh to herself when she saw what an joy it was for me to hear her say it.

Nothing happened when the taboo was broken. There wasn’t any ugly incident, the gendarmes didn’t storm the clinic, and god didn’t strike anyone down for blaspheming the human spirit. We laughed, and shook our heads. It was so stupid. “Beeg dug,” she would say in her broken high school English. “Eka, izay ty anarako,” I would tell her. That’s my name.

I write for a website called IGN.com. I freelance for them now, but when I was in San Francisco I was an associate editor. I wrote about video games and music. Before that I lived in LA and wrote for a smaller video game website called Nintendo World Report and had a day job at a big game company called Activision (the people that make Guitar Hero). I wrote a couple screenplays and came pretty close to raising $500,000 to direct one I wrote about kids in high school. It didn’t really come together and then I got offered the job in San Francisco.

If you want to read other stuff I’ve written, you can Google me. It’s not hard to find. Here are a few links just in case. Hopefully you’ll recognize the voice, even if the terms might seem a bit foreign. If you aren’t moved by my writing here I don’t know if any of this other stuff will change your mind. But it’s me, I wrote it.

Editorial: The Case for Six Days in Fallujah
*and here's a short video interview I did for ABC about the game.

Contrarian Corner: Mirror’s Edge

Animal Collective: Meriweather Post Pavilion Review

Writing for Date Machine has been one of the most consistently difficult things I’ve done over the last year, and this has been one of the toughest years I’ve had. It started with my grandfather dying, and ended with the possibility of my mother dying. In between, the love of my life moved across the country to live with another man, I got an STD, I feel into a depression and lost twenty pounds.

But I wanted to write. And so I would come home after work every night and sit at my desk for three or four hours trying to come up with something that would be worth reading; something honest, entertaining, and worth returning to. I tried to do it five days a week, after twelve hours in another office, and in between directing, producing, and editing a short film, and working on some other freelance writing jobs.

It’s been great to do it with Zeitgeisty and Airheadgenius. It probably doesn’t seem like much of a trick from your end, but on my end it’s been consistently frightening. It’s easy to be honest and unapologetic with your friends and people you care about, but it’s a separate thing to do it out loud and in public. It’s really hard to spend hours sharing something vulnerable and intimate and indemnifying, only to hit publish and face an anonymous swell of readers eager to evaluate, convict, and issue sentence.

We’ve fought amongst ourselves, and the end has been no different than the beginning in that respect; but I’m thankful to have written alongside them. It was always a little less daunting to climb out on the rhetorical limb when I’d see each of them taking their own risks everyday. Whatever I’ve written here, it would have been less without their camaraderie.

I’m also glad that you’ve been here, reading all of this. I’ve tried to give what I could of myself in every post. I’ve also asked for you to give me your time, and your energy in reading all these little stories and thoughts. It may not seem like it given how self-absorbed much of this must read, but I appreciate that time and energy more than you may expect. Whether you liked what I wrote or loathed it, you still gave me a hearing and that’s the most any writer could ever ask of any reader.

If you want to stay in contact, I’m on Facebook. Find me if you want to. If you’re in New York, buy me a drink. If you’re not send me a note.

Tomorrow afternoon will be my last post. I’ll try and finish in the same way I started, with some red meat. I’m kind of scared to write it, but I’ll be talking about everything that’s happened since I moved to New York.

See you then.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

Date Machine: Women at 30, or the Scent of the Medicine Cabinet

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet

amboabe — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:37:00 GMT

On Wednesday the US Ambassador to Madagascar said the country was "on the verge of civil war." He encouraged his staff and any other westerners in the country to evacuate while commercial flights were still available. Over the last several months protest and violence have been ebbing and flowing, led by the Mayor of Antananarivo's claims of corruption and fascism against the sitting government of Marc Ravolmanana.

I lived in Madagascar from 2003 to 2005, working as a health educator for Peace Corps. It's hard to reconcile the country I lived in with the militant urgency that comes through in reports about the looming conflict. As contentious as things become in our country, as much economic turmoil lies ahead, the prospect of living in a country at war is incomprehensible. War is an abstraction in the west, something we've left behind. It's a wedge for arguments between red and blue, the socio-political equivalent of a giant foam index finger pointed at someone else with guilty insinuation. We still fight wars, but they don't happen in our homes. They exist out there, in pictures and on television.

It's sad to think about the migration that happens in advance; the flock of friendly foreigners finally reaching their limit. Bustling regional capitals gradually transform into muted cities of boarded-up storefronts, curfews, and eyes peering down onto the street from a window. Then one side opens fire, and the other side fires back.

I was evacuated from China in 2003 during the SARS epidemic. There was no impending war and no real danger, but it was still a terrible experience to go through. I got the call on a Friday afternoon, I had twenty-four hours to pack my belongings and travel 700km north to Chengdu where we would be flown to Beijing and then home to America. I had been in country for almost a year.

I spent the rest of the evening with the other teachers at the mining college where I taught. We had one last dinner together at the school restaurant, an impromptu banquet with lots of speeches and measured words of gratitude. I felt sick and weak. I guzzled glass after glass of beer with each toast and still felt sober and joyless. My blood pressure dipped and I could barely feel a pulse in my neck.

I looked around the gathered faces, people that had been innate parts of my life six hours earlier. They looked eerily separate, like severed fingers in the road. Our connection was so fragile that a sixty-second phone call in the middle of the afternoon was capable of breaking it irrevocably. I felt like a liar and a coward. I had told these people that I loved them. I had told myself that I loved them. And now I was leaving without a whimper of protest.

I packed my bags and took the 2AM train to Chengdu. I was there in the early afternoon. I holed up in a hotel with some other volunteers and went out with a big group for our last night in country. It was a morose evening. Everyone was trying to behave normally, joking and gallivanting, but it felt hollow. All my laughs tailed off quickly and eye contact was fleeting.

I stumbled back to the hotel after closing time with a woman I had dated on and off during my time in China. I liked her a lot. We hooked up after a few weeks in country and saw each other throughout most of training. I got freaked out at a certain point because I was falling for someone else and S kept an emotional distance that made me uncomfortable. We were sent to different ends of Sichuan province and I only saw her every two or three months after that. We tried to be friends, but we had a special knack of hooking up after a few drinks.

We stumbled back to the hotel. Peace Corps made us share hotel rooms and my roommate was already fast asleep when we returned. We had started kissing in the bar and continued to make out on the long walk back to the hotel. We decided to go into the bathroom. She hopped onto the counter and straddled me as we kept kissing. Soon enough my pants were down and my shirt was off.

We had just started having sex when, in a fit of drunken bravura, I picked her up and swung her around onto the upper portion of the toilet bowl. We started to have sex while she leaned back on tottering porcelain. After a few minutes there was a loud crack and the upper portion of the toilet came apart with a loud crash.

I held S up, precariously wedged between the wall and the jagged remains of the toilet. Everything felt ridiculous. We were having sex in a hotel bathroom while someone was sleeping on the other side of the wall. Broken porcelain and toilet water covered the floor. I looked at S and realized my heart wasn't into it.

I tried to reassemble the bigger pieces of the toilet into something that looked normal, then climbed into bed with S and fell asleep. A few hours later there was an urgent knock at the hotel door. She was on an earlier flight and had to leave for the airport. It was just after 8AM, and a weak gray light was coming in through the window, the perpetually overcast smog of Chengdu masking the sunlight.

It's hard to know where the borders are. What are the hard and fast lines that separate two people? Where is that final point on the map where you cross from one person's domain into another's? I got up and gave her a hug at the door. I kissed her on the cheek. She smiled her gentle little smile, lips closed softly over her teeth. I let her walk into the hallway without reaching out again. "Bye," I called after her, just before the door shut.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor

Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Date Machine: Sex in the Office

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

Love Machine: Can You Be Friends With an Ex?

Sex Machine: How Soon, Sex Toy?

Date Night: Kissing in the Rain

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs

Love Machine: The Three-Year Itch

Sex Machine: Show Me Your Penis

Date Machine: The Gun Show or Is That All You Got?

Love Machine: Morning Breath Kisses

Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile

Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds

Love Machine: Making A Scene

Nerve Confessions: Oh Hai, You're Pregnant

Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate

amboabe — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:16:00 GMT

I came home yesterday after almost a week away. Within ten minutes of walking through the door I was masturbating. It was quick and perfunctory, but when my come spurted out over my shoulder and fell inconveniently onto the floor behind me I realized it had been too long. For months I've meant to put myself on a daily masturbation regimen. I exercise every morning, I eat three times a day, I spend most of my waking hours hurling my brain at work projects, so it seems like short shrift to not give my sexual side a trot in the park more than once or twice a week.

I used to masturbate everywhere I could. In high school I would get a bathroom pass in the middle of a class to sneak down the hall and pleasure myself. I've done it on more flights than I can remember. When I lived in Madagascar, I went for a walk out into the countryside surrounding the village I lived in. I trudged through the sand and loping shapes of cactus for a few miles. The sun was starting to go down and I stopped for a moment in total silence. The only thing I could hear was the dim reverberation of the air in my ears and the occasional brush of wind.

There was empty wilderness in every direction, dry and gnarled. The village looked like a small collection of toys clumped together, an isolated refuge against the harsh lunar landscape. In the same way I could hear the air in my ears, I felt it against my skin. The sun was falling and the air was returning to a neutral chill that the mid-afternoon heat had covered up. I felt it all over, like water ebbing upwards in a high tide. I felt gravity pulling against my penis.

Every breath I took broke the silence, every step I took sounded amplified, like I was listening to it through headphones. I felt a strong impulse to strip and feel the air against my body. I took a few steps off the footpath I had been following and stepped behind a dried bramble of dusty thorns. I dropped my shorts to my ankles and started to masturbate.

My head was a total blank and there was nothing remotely arousing to see. It felt clinical; the cold in the air was the impersonal metal of some doctor's instrument. The closer I got to coming the more bizarre things felt. It was like trying to stay in a dream with a bright flashlight shining in my eyes.

Then I heard a cow low. The sound of sand crunching came from somewhere nearby just as I finished. I pulled my shorts up in a chill of adrenaline, kicking sand over the pile of come at my feet.

Less than a minute later, a lanky farmer came strolling down the footpath with a few cows out to graze on the sparse clumps of weeds that sprouted underneath the cactus. He seemed surprised to see me come out of the brush. I greeted him and made it back home by dark.

Masturbating is like trying to reconcile two realities; one is always retreating. I didn't have time to masturbate tonight. My hope for some kind of daily sexual endeavor seems farther away now. Tomorrow morning, I'll sit on the BART, listening to my headphones, doing kegels, staring at all the other people reflected in the glass, with the darkness speeding by underneath. Tomorrow.

And then tomorrow again.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: My Mother

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph

Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date

Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

amboabe — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:33:00 GMT

The stupid thing about aphorisms is that I can never remember where I heard them first. At some point in my life someone told me that you're never supposed to go to bed angry in a relationship. It might have been a greeting card, a sit-com, or in a paperback I leafed through during a lazy summer. Now I've absorbed it as a subconscious truth without having ever really thought about it for myself. When I think back on it, there are plenty of times I've fallen asleep angry, lying next to someone I loved.

One time was in Madagascar. I spent my two years there orbiting around in an unrequited love for T. Towards the end, things had reached a sad point of strain. I was coming to grips with the myriad reasons why things hadn't worked out between us. I was withdrawing. The closer we got to the end, and the further I withdrew. I tried to let my emotional investment in her fall away.

Seeing her those last months reminded me of the loneliness at the pit of my bowels. I still loved her but I realized I didn't fit in her life in the way I wanted. I would make a point to sit with other people the few nights we were in the capital together during our final departure conference. One of the last nights together was in the Peace Corps flop, crammed into a twin mattress in the top bunk of a room shared with six other people. We fell asleep back-to-back. I didn't know why we were even sharing a bed. It seemed like a structural formality, or a social obligation since beds were in short supply.

I had a terrible nightmare that night. I dreamt I was walking through a bright and sandy village with lots of roadside stands made of bamboo and palm fronds. I walked through some huts and wound up in a dugout canoe with a Malagasy person oaring me down a rivulet, steering away from the ocean. T was in another canoe heading in the same direction. My friend M was in the canoe with her. M was seeing T's best friend and had a natural friendship with T, free of all the weighted angst that dragged on all of our interactions. They were looking away from me.

Soon my canoe started floating aimlessly T and M kept moving onward at a steady clip. I watched them move further away from me, heading inland.

I woke up with a sharp inhale, sweating intensely. I was filled with sadness. It was almost 4AM. In my sleep I had turned so that I was looking at T's back in the darkness. My heart was beating fast and my brain felt like a gyroscope rotating on a wobbly axis. I turned back onto my side so my back would be to T.

I heard T exhale behind me. I felt the mattress shift as she turned over. I couldn't tell if I had woken her or if she was still sleeping. She pressed her torso into my back and reached her across my shoulders and chest. I put my hand on her forearm. She exhaled loudly, like a vent. I was worried I was too sweaty in her arms and shifted away on my hip a few inches, but she pulled me back even closer and didn't let go.

I felt my brain slow down, her skin was familiar under my hand. It smelled like what was underneath all the perfume, and scented soaps, and mango moisturizer that was her chemical trace. It was the unadorned version of herself, the smell of a body without an apologetic medium in between. She'd told me she loved me before, but I never believed her. She never acted like it, when she said it to me it sounded like an aphorism, like it was the next line in the script of our own private sit-com.

In the morning I told her I had had a nightmare and asked if I had woken her. She said she had slept the whole night through.

Don't go to bed angry. Or else do.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date

Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex

Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux

Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House during the Holidays

amboabe — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:04:00 GMT

Christmas offers a lot of opportunities for debauchery, from indiscrete meetings under the mistletoe to accidentally hooking up with someone from IT after the office holiday party. Going home for the holidays can become a long stretch of time in the suburbs with nothing to do but randomly run into some old friends from high school at the local good times bar, buy a round of jager bombs, and suddenly wind up sleeping with the gawky Goth girl from History class in your old bedroom. Christmas is one of the few times of the year where two consenting adults can still wind up shushing each other in bed for fear someone's parents will hear.

When I left home for college my parents moved to a Southern California. I grew up in Fresno, a tacky central valley city where shiny new pick-up trucks were a status symbol. The city was once a loose blot of agricultural sprawl populated by hard-handed grape farmers and Mexican migrant workers. While I was growing up in the 80's and early 90's the cheap cost of land and the cozy relationship between contractors and city councilmen contributed to a construction boom that saw tract houses and strip malls mushroom. There was an uneasy balance between the earnest old time farmers, the gawdy noveau riche contracters, and the slickster real estate agents with sterling silver bracelets that kept everything moving forward.

Everyone in my high school rallied behind the same idea that Fresno sucked and they couldn't wait to get out. LA and San Francisco were the two urban dreamscapes that most kids in my class dreamed of escaping to after graduation. There weren't many kids who talked about staying in the central valley, getting an office job, marrying, and settling down a few miles from their parents. No one wants to talk about settling down in high school. No one's willing to admit that one day they'll have to cut their losses and make a deal, trading freedom and ambition for stability and familiarity.

I don't know anyone in Fresno anymore, and I don't get to go back there for the holidays. When I come home for Christmas it's to a strange new suburb, where everyone is always a stranger. There's no one to go out with and nowhere to go out to. One year I went to the bar at a T.G.I. Friday's with my brother. It was crowded with people eating fried breading and drinking Bud Light. It was the socio-sexual equivalent of being in 10^th grade gym class.

Christmas at home has been a historically abstinent time for me, but New Years Eve is where I have, lately, been confronted with a lot of those old high school-age issues of where to go with someone you're hooking up with, and how to be quasi-discrete. Over the last five years I've been in a different city for New Year's, usually sleeping on someone's couch or sharing a hotel room with some friends. Hooking up with someone can become a bit of a logistical challenge. How do you invite someone back to your friend's apartment to have sex on the couch while four other people are passed out on the living room floor? How do you separate from a group of friends in a strange city and follow a relative stranger back to their house (or the parents' house) without worrying about how to get back home again?

I was in Austin last year and spent hours making out with a woman in a dance club that I had gone to with a big group of friends. Closing time neared and we wandered to the parking lot where her car was. She seemed pretty insistent about me not coming back to her place (because she had a live-in boyfriend, I later learned). The only other options for us to continue down the carnal path we'd embarked on was in her car in a parking lot under a freeway overpass, or on the aforementioned living room couch with an audience of passed out revelers. We could have gotten a 2AM hotel room too, but those simple and obvious ideas are sometimes the hardest to come by in the cold night, hanging on to a strange new body in a foreign city.

A few years earlier I was on a remote island in Madagascar with a big group of friends for New Years. We rented a diesel generator from one of the locals and hooked it up to a sound system in an empty hut and threw ourselves an improvised party. I was sharing a tiny bungalow with five other people so, again, intimate space was not a freely available commodity. After dancing for a few hours I broke off with a woman and walked down to the beach. Actually, I carried her down while she straddled my hips like an overgrown papoose. There was a bright moon out and we started kissing in the surf.

Soon our scant tropical wear was bunched up in thoughtless crumples, pushed down off our hips. It was perfectly romantic to be naked on a beach under the moon, but after two hours I became vaguely aware that it was getting really cold and my fingers were pruning. Every gentle wave that lapped up onto our bodies was drawing away body heat, and a breeze had picked up, making it even colder. Neither of us had our own rooms. It was time to go somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. We inched up the beach a little further out of the surf and returned to the metaphysical ringing of New Year's bells with each other's bodies.

An hour later I looked up and saw a couple of Malagasy men had pulled up a log at the line where the palm trees and undergrowth gave way to the beach. They were quietly watching us.

I tried to shoo them away but they were security guards for the bungalows where we were staying and they weren't moving. We tried to carry on ignoring our audience but this was the last straw. The sky had started brightening in the east and the cold wetness had sunk into my bones. I suddenly felt tired and we decided it was time to retreat to our separate bungalows.

This year I'll be in Seattle doing more couch surfing with another big and randy group of friends. I have no idea who I'll be kissing at midnight on New Year's Eve; probably no one, save the merri-go-round of anemic pecks from the small friends I'll be with. Maybe that's the better way of doing it. Or maybe I'll get lost up in the tinsel and champagne and wind up with some strange accountant in a park, my pants around my ankles and snow falling down all around. Normally, darling, I wouldn't do this kind of thing.

Previous Posts:

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex

Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux

Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings

Love Machine: What Work Is

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message

Date Night: The F U Date

Sex Machine: Shave My Bush

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating

Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble

Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy

Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn

Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex

amboabe — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:53:00 GMT

I went to bed early on Friday night. I felt guilty for not doing more to inaugurate the weekend with something social, but I was exhausted. Thursday was our office holiday party and I was out too late, up too early the next morning, and bleary eyed by sundown. As I was brushing my teeth I heard some moaning coming through the walls of my apartment. I was immediately curious because my neighbor is an older woman, near seventy, and lives alone. The idea of her having sex at 10:30 on a Friday night immediately tickled at my curiosity.

In the year that I've lived in my apartment I almost never hear anything from my neighbor. She cranks the TV up when Dancing with the Stars is on, and I've listened to some of her rambling diatribes on the subject when she's caught me on the balcony some nights. She gets visits from her son, who is the super for our building, and baby-sits her new grandson every now and then. Otherwise her social life is entirely comprised of television and her overfed cat.

The idea that she had suddenly had enough, decided to put on some lipstick, walked out to the smoky jazz bar on Twenty-Fifth Street and brought home some spot-bellied gentleman caller to listen to her vinyl collection was exciting. It's easy to take for granted the more basic physical needs of those around us. There is a fundamental shame about body function and nakedness that sits in perilous opposition to the idea of close-quarters living in an apartment building.

I feel an embarrassment some mornings when I walk to my dresser after showering and realize I'm naked and in plain view of anyone on the sidewalk or in the building across the way. I was looking at some porn clips in between bouts of writers block the other night without realizing that the volume on my computer was turned all the way up. As the trumpeting cries of the actors came blaring from my speakers I literally jumped out of my seat.

My neighbor on the other side is a young and attractive woman who just moved to the city. I hear her talking on the phone some nights or talking to her small terrier when he's acting up. I was certain that this blast of truck-stop porn was coming through loud and clear on her side of the wall. What would she think of me the next morning as we passed each other in the hallway, me late for work and her on her way out to walk the dog? She would see me as the anti-social porno monster with a Jenna Jameson screen saver and a weekly email updates from AVN.

When I lived in Madagascar people used to shit on the periphery of my yard every few days. I would look up from my desk and see some mischievous twelve year-old or a woman headed back out to the countryside after market day, squatting in the long yellow grass where a curb might have been had the scene been moved to America. If they would catch me staring at them emptying their bowels, they would say hello as if they had just stopped to tie a shoelace or pick up some dropped papers.

Sex was also conducted without much thought to the immediate surroundings. Families of six or eight lived in single-room huts, and when husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend wanted to have sex, it necessarily happened with a room full of relatives dozing right next to the lovers. Confronting those most basic physical functions was unavoidable, and it became meaningless.

Living in an apartment building in a big city should, theoretically, be similar. When I lie down to sleep at night, my head is probably four feet away from my older neighbors head. Two sheets of dry wall and some fuzzy pink insulation is all that separates us. When I snore, I'm sure it reverberates through the walls, when I share my bed with a woman I'm sure the sounds of sex are unavoidable.

When the only sounds I hear from her apartment are the announcer building up drama for the big finale on Dancing with the Stars it makes me sad. Is that how things end up? Thinking of her body, swollen with age, slack and speckled, still writhing on her bed, twisting the sheets, mixing her sweat with someone else's made me smile. I want to think of her in that way. I want that experience to be something she still seeks out.

After a few more minutes of teeth-brushing I realized it wasn't my elder neighbor, but the Guatemalan couple directly above me having sex. The moaning and the dull thud against the mattress sounding like a loop, two people perpetually falling, grappling with each other against the rush of air and unavoidable gravity pulling on their naked bodies. Maybe I should start looking more closely at some of those bored old men in fedoras sitting in the park on sunny afternoons, watching pigeons circle the garbage cans. One of them might wind up being a fan of Dancing with the Stars. Maybe they could use a date too.

Previous Posts:

Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux

Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings

Love Machine: What Work Is

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message

Date Night: The F U Date

Sex Machine: Shave My Bush

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating

Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble

Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy

Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't

Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy

Sex Machine: My First STD

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

amboabe — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:51:00 GMT

This is something I wrote in Madagascar after I got the invitation to my ten-year high school reunion a little more than three years ago.

---

I have recently been engaged in an elaborate fantasy that I am living with, and wholly in love with, JD. She and I were in the same grade and occasionally shared a class (I can remember junior year honors chemistry with Mr. L who was old and pink-skinned and had freckles that, upon closer examination periodically proved to be scabs) during 4 years of high school. She was short and skinny, I guess 100 pounds, naturally dark-skinned so as to seem non-chalantly tan year-round. She had big brown eyes and an elongated pear-shaped nose that made her look like a small brown dog. I haven't seen her in ten years (except for once – see further down), but even when I saw her with regular frequency I didn’t pay that much attention to her. She was so perennially happy and affable that she seemed almost asexual. In high school I was a sweaty, masturbating fiend with a mullet and gave little thought to anybody whose image I couldn’t use to lacerate my shame and self-loathing.

I didn’t have any friends in high school. I spent every lunch period sitting in spiteful silence with B, a kid who I never liked much and whose company I kept out of fear of ridicule because there was no one else I could have eaten with. I did have acquaintances formed in the unoccupied minutes of class time with lab partners or whoever was in the neighboring desk, and a few of these acquaintances were shaded with a mischievous comfort and candor (even if it never turned into party invitations, or phone calls, or idle hanging out in more domestic quarters). It would be a stretch to put JD in this category. I, to the best of my recollection, never sat next to her, never got assigned random group work with her, and never bumped into her passing by the library with her friends on their way to lunch at some exotic off-campus location like Taco Bell or Arby’s.

But I did like her, very much if only in a we-will-never-have-sex-and-you’re-way-too-happy-to-be-interesting-to-my-inner-inadequacies-so-I-don’t-much-care-if we-never-have-a-substantial-conversation-over-the-next-4-years kind of way. I always noticed when she was around. I liked it. It made me think good things might be possible, however improbable. I never pined for her, but I did have a kind of vague crush on her. She was always smiling and hygienically positive and supportive of people in a way that I took to indicate she was probably good at Trivial Pursuit and knew how to play Scrabble and had never once told her parents that she hated them; she was a beautiful person who was easy to forget.

I’m 28 years old now. It’s 5:08PM. There’s a pale white moon just coming out over the treetops in the east. The sky is still blue. The sun is a big orange diffusion in the west, going down. My ten-year high school reunion is in 4 months, and I have just alerted the organizers that I will not be able to attend (but “I miss you!”). I am sitting in a small cement health clinic in a town of about 5,000 people in Southern Madagascar. There’s usually never anything to do at the clinic and I daydream a lot. I hope that she sees my name on the list of people unable to attend and, if she does, I believe that she will e-mail me shortly thereafter and then it will only be a matter of time until we are sharing an apartment in residential Hollywood and regularly exchanging casually sincere “I love you's".

The last time I saw JD was in July of 1996 at the Krakatoa Coffee Shop in Fig Garden Village Shopping Center (Fresno, CA). I had just turned 19. It was the summer after our first year at college. I still hadn’t found a summer job and would sometimes drink freely refillable black coffee, read, and stare in vague directions while enjoying the pose of contemplation that was little more than a cover to more fully appreciate the physical dilation and mental quickening from 4 cups of late afternoon coffee. J showed up, smiling, and cheerily recognized me alone at a table (was I reading The Painted Bird?) and joined me. I don’t remember anything we talked about, but I started by saying, “So Ms. D, how is life in the Ivy Leagues?” (When I get nervous I try to be arch and condescending). She went to Yale. I was jealous. I have a vague recollection of learning from her the specifics of train travel from New Haven to New York. This was the one and only real conversation I have ever had with JD.

I miss JD. I don’t resent myself for missing somebody that in retrospect I hardly knew. How much do you have to know about a person to like them? How much do you really have to know to love them? This has nothing to do with the elaborate and fairly superficial relationship fantasy above, but I love JD. I’ll probably never see her again. If I do, I don’t know how our conversation will go. It will probably be short and end with something like “It was really good to see you again.” “You too.”

Getting older is scary. Being alone is scary. There are nights here I can’t sleep until late. When it’s night in Madagascar and there’s no moon and I am alone the mudbrick house I live in creeks wickedly, and the hissing cockroaches shuffle against each other, jockeying for space in the crooks of the door jam and window frames sound like someone trying to get in. The blanket feels too hot and the air too cold and I can’t sleep for hours until late when I just stop caring about what might be outside and fade away.

I don’t want to fade away. I want to love things and be in love with things. It’s easy to do this when you can take a thing (is my memory of JD a thing or a person?) out of the confusion of its present tense and transform it into an emotional trinket, a comfortable keepsake. Is it wrong to take the thing of my memory of JD and try to dress it up in real-person clothes and make it move and talk like a real breathing person? Shouldn’t one at least ask permission for indulging in a fantastic romance with the long-distance vapor trails a person leaves in their wake?

I want to talk about you now. You have come this far with me, living vicariously through the shadow puppetry of my remembrances or quietly occupying some unnamable mental restlessness following the cartography of my ebbing psyche. I can’t promise you that I would be able to devote a reciprocal amount of attention to your stories. I might be impatient for you to reach some kind of point. Have you been impatient with me so far? I’m finding this very hard to write because there is no means to breach the silence set up between you and me. I can reach you, move you, but I can’t feel you. You can't reach me. We live in different tenses.

I've been trying to describe an absence through a fond recounting of something that once filled a small place in that absence. That absence is in constant flux, persistently evolving and changing shape. You are the only constant in that space. I want to caress the lip of your absence inside of me, my finger trailing over the fleshy ridge between our two tenses. See if you can feel it, these words tracing themselves through the vapors of your body. I love you. Now stop. I want you to read me naked. Am I asking too much? Take your clothes off. I want the air that brushes up against your body to move alongside my voice, inside your own, while you read these words:

I’m dying. I am alive. These two things are separate and side by side, contracting and expanding in the space of the other. Occupying the other, retreating into isolation. I want more than anything to feel you inside of me.

I don’t want any specific piece of the past back, I don't want any transmogrification of what ten years of an ever-evolving present has done to someone who I was too afraid to openly cherish when I had the opportunity. I want my emptiness, my absence. I want the fluctuating contours of it, glistening with moist time, to surround me, slide its wet grip down over me, over all my length, then slowly back up.

You can put your clothes back on now.

Is memory rhythmic, undulating in compulsory cycles of focus and release? What separates a question from its answer? I’m writing now 3 days after I began this. JD and I have divorced. Maybe the cruelest notion about something that functions in cycles is the implied promise of return. Has anything left that could actually, necessarily return? Things have changed and redistributed themselves, but everything that was is.

Isn’t it? I’m asking you. And because I have a question and now you have an answer (at least some answer), is what separates question and answer the same as what separates you and me? How many of you there are, how many answers. How easy to confuse an answer for an explanation, a memory for a thing, a distance for an empty space. How easy to fall in love with what can’t answer back, some gaping orifice that couldn’t possibly have said fuck me, but instead, mutely, dumbly becomes a receptacle for the undulating strains of someone groping towards a wet and inconclusive spasm in whose saline glue everything will be held together for a spell, until the ejaculate dries and flakes away and JD begins to resemble all the other things I can’t remember.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings

Love Machine: What Work Is

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message

Date Night: The F U Date

Sex Machine: Shave My Bush

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating

Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble

Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy

Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't

Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy

Sex Machine: My First STD

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Love Machine: Let's Make Babies

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines

Sex Machine: My Kingdom for a Boner

Date Machine: Don't Make Poopy in the Office

Nerve Confessions: Fat and Skinny, Ugly, Pretty

Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do

Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants

Date Machine: Rate My Ethics

Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

amboabe — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:26:00 GMT

So this one time I fell in love with an ex-cheerleader. She was a tall and lanky woman from Wisconsin and had an accent vaguely reminiscent of a goose. She camped out overnight once to get a new N'Sync album the day it released. She told dirty jokes and always had a self-deprecating line at the ready. I didn't think I would have anything to say to her when we met. The first memory I have of her is standing up in front of a group of scrubbed down Peace Corps volunteers in an incongruously posh hotel conference room in downtown Philadelphia and confessing to thirty strangers that she had cried leaving her parents that morning.

When I was twenty-five I spent a year in China teaching English with the Peace Corps before being evacuated during the SARS epidemic. I chose to re-enroll and was sent to Madagascar, which is where I met T. Going back into Peace Corps was a hard thing to do. Choosing to re-enroll was easy. After a dizzy year in China, living like a celebrity on an inflated government stipend while working 14 hours a week was one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had. I wasn't ready for that experience to end so I eagerly dove back into the nostalgic dream of living in a hut somewhere tropical and digging latrines for the world's incapable poor.

The idea was nice, but the reality of being back in Peace Corps in a totally new country and with a completely different group of people was overwhelming. It felt like re-enrolling in high school. Staying in country during my first year in Madagascar, abandoned in some dusty waypoint in the middle of the arid south was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was the worst kind of déjà vu. I felt like I was doing something I had already done, but in a totally alien environment.

But so the cheerleader. She was the first person I remember meeting in the group of people I went to Madagascar with. I responded directly to that blunt first confession she made in front of the group. Then I dismissed her as a "type." She was a cheerleader. I don't date cheerleaders. I don't listen to N'Sync. A month later we got drunk and wound up hooking up.

For the next two years T was the emotionally unavailable one and I was sadly trying to swim upstream. It didn't work. I was in full freefall, trying to find something to keep me from abandoning my dream of digging latrines. It's easy for me to think of her as some kind of life raft I reached out to just to avoid having to leave country. Most of our friends in common believe I was deluded in thinking there was more.

Three years later she's in another country living with a square-jawed military man and I've moved on. But I still love her. I remember my flight out of Madagascar after having finished my time there. We shared a hotel room together the last night. We stayed out late and got drunk. We went to bed and didn't do anything. We laid side by side and fell asleep for a few hours. The car came to take me to the airport at 6am the next morning.

I emptied out my guts in Madagascar. I gave everything I had to give to the people in my village, and to T. It wasn't good enough. The best I got in my village was the nickname that has become my screen name here. I left behind some laminated drawings about proper nutrition in the local school. I lectured women on proper breast-feeding techniques, and I tried to tell people how to counsel friends with HIV that don't have access to medical treatment. And I fell in love with a cheerleader who never gave me anything back.

I remember sitting on the plane as we were ascending, pulling away from the land below and looking at pictures from the region where I had lived in the airline magazine. I started balling. It wasn't nice and quiet crying. My lower lip started shacking and soon my whole chin was spasming and I had to turn my head flush with the window so that nobody around me would see. I knew I would never go back to any of it. I knew that I would never get the shreds of myself that I had left behind. I felt a terrible gratitude, like a crushing weight pulling against the ascent. Everyone loses in the end. But being able to give it all away, to see bits of yourself drift off into an indifferent and alien world; Madagascar, a cheerleader. I felt like the luckiest asshole in the world.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down

Date Night: Two Women in One Night

Date Machine: Kissing on the First Date

Nerve Confessions: Rate My Penis Size

Celebrity Confession: Tom Brady's Love Handles

Date Night: The Wine Bar as the End of Civilization

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

Date Night: The story of the one that got away.

airheadgenius — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:14:00 GMT

We exchanged emails back and forth and decided to meet for a drink at a restaurant. He was younger than me, according to his profile by about 5 years, but actually my guess would be more like a decade. Fresh faced did not even begin to describe it.

His conversation was stilted. I felt like I was being interviewed for the position of his (older) girlfriend and I don't do "interview" dates. In case it's escaped you whilst reading my blog, I have a lot to say and conversation tends to flow rather than having to be compartmentalised into "what do you do?" and "where did you go to college?" etc

I tried freestyle, but my date didn't seem comfortable with the format. Truth be told, he didn't seem comfortable at all.

He was nervous at best. In fact, like a rabbit caught in the headlights, this chap actually seemed afraid. Now before you naysayers - and you know who you are - think that he was disappointed in my appearance, let me assure you that I look like my photos. And he'd been impressed with my pictures and even more complimentary about actual me when we first sat down. So I don't think it was an "ewww, she's awful" that was making him jittery. Yet jittery he was.

See, there are men that deliberately date older women because they consider themselves to be more mature than their peers and find chicks their age to be too frivolous. Presumably some of these men are in fact more mature. There are also men who pretend to find their peers immature and see themselves as being "an old soul" for want of a better cliche, but many of this band of brothers are simply in denial about the fact that they have a Mommy complex.

This character fell into the mommy complex category and mommy was making him nervous. I tried to be kind. Instead of my usual full on self, I just smiled and listened, interjecting supportive pleasantries whilst desperately trying not to appear condescending.

He stammered and cleared his throat and drank glass after glass of water, barely touching his cocktail. I gave him an out: "You know, there's nothing worse than sitting through an hour with a date you're not into. I won't be in the least bit offended if you won't want to stay."

This induced the biggest stammer of all. Apparently he was very keen to see it through to the bitter end. So, I continued to smile and wave, smile and wave. (Well, without the wave as it happens. Just briefly channeling Madagascar)

I'd vaguely been aware of a gorgeous man entering the room. Usually I would've had a quick shufty, but I didn't want to unsettle my already unsettled date so I sat tight. But then gorgeous man came and sat at the table adjacent to my date and opposite me.

Hoooo-ey, he was fine.

And, can you stand it?!, he was checking me out.

Oh-fuck-ing-hell! The man was full on looking at me and I was sitting opposite another man that I had no interest in whatsoever.

There is a God and s/he's pissed that I am atheist.

I prayed, now that I'd seen the light, for my date to use the bathroom. At this point he had drunk about 3 litres of water, so surely nature would call at some point?? CALL NATURE CALL, I yelled in my head. But to no avail.

Gorgeous man struck up a conversation with us. US. Oh shit shit shit I cannot stand it. Nature!! MOTHER nature fachrissakes. Gorgeous man's voice was like treacle. I swooned. Now (those of you who know me will back this up), I can flirt at Olympic level. I've got this killer look that, by all accounts, has "I could do you a serious favour" written all over it. I toyed with the idea of flashing my eyes at him, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. Not because i am not bold, because bold I am, but because I am a mother. And sitting opposite me was my little man-boy and I just couldn't do it to him.

So, I turned my attention to my date. And after a few more minutes, gorgeous man left. At that point the man-boy excused himself to use the bathroom as I inwardly bludgeoned myself to death with a bar stool.

I am practising the art of flinging my business card discreetly under the table and into a pocket. Just in case.

(p.s. Momma's boy asked me for a second date. I politely declined. I didn't think his nerves could take it)

And moving swiftly on to my Daily Knob

(I ripped Daily Knob off Zeitgeisty's Daily Throb obviously. You can choose if you prefer the first or second generation product)

The delectable Joaquin Phoenix. He's been in some dodgy films for sure, but many a chick would like to hear him say "My face is leaving in 5 minutes, be on it."

The obligatory back catalogue:

Be sure not to miss this one: The Chick Facial File

Mirrors Confession plus Daily Knob!

Abusive?

Celebrity Confessions: Boy George Dick Trilogy Part 3

MORE dicks in my inbox

Dicks in your inbox

Read my Sodding Profile!

Nerve Confessions: Herpes

The Queen Confesses

The Arse Man Cometh

The Ass Play Chronicles

The Sandwich Blowjob Porn Connection

Bangin Ass

Deformed Dicks

Did I really dream that?

Why I don't date Celebrities

Fashionably late or just a slacker