date machine : nerve

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

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

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

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

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

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

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

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

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

amboabe — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:03:00 GMT

When I was in junior high my best friend would give me the names of the girls at his school that he thought were pretty.

I would go over to his house and call them while he listened, talking with the confidence of not knowing or caring about them. I hit it off with one girl and after our first conversation she asked me to keep calling her. So I did. We talked regularly for a month before an actual date was arranged.

She was going to see Three Men and a Little Lady with some of her friends at a theater across town. I convinced a couple of my friends to come with me. We had to convince my friend M’s brother to take us, which took a lot of whining and begging, that, in turn, made us late for the movie. We snuck into the darkened theater ten minutes after it had started. We couldn’t find the girls and decided to just watch the movie and meet them outside when it was over.

After a dramatic climax on an estate somewhere in the British countryside, we shuffled outside. My friend S had half a pack of Camel Lights and he waited for the chance to go smoke, growing irritated with my insistence on meeting these random girls.

Towards the back of the exiting crowd I saw a group of four girls. One in the middle looked like a fuzzy approximation of the face I had seen in J’s yearbook. I was already nervous, and as I saw them heading our way still oblivious to our presence, my heart started throbbing and my hands tingled with new sweat.

Feeling like there was no way out, I took a few terrified steps into the crowd. As I came nearer C looked up and saw me. Her face went blank and it looked like her mouth fell open just a little bit. I thought that she might turn around and run back into the theater to seek refuge.

“Hey, I’m Mike,” I said as I stepped in front of them. C’s friends started giggling. C looked me in the eye while her legs twisted against themselves.

“Hey,” she said.

I didn’t know what else to say and after a few seconds of terrifying silence passed I asked her to come behind the theater with me and my friends to smoke cigarettes. I knew C liked to smoke, she stole her mother’s menthols.

C’s face transformed from blank to incredulous. Her eyes narrowed and her lips parted in disbelief just before she started laughing in my face.

“No way,” she said. “Why would I want to go smoke cigarettes with you?” she asked. She grabbed one of her friend’s hands and started walking quickly away, saying she was late and had to get home even though it was summer and the middle of the afternoon.

Up until that point I had the self-loathing adolescent’s hunch that everyone found me physically disgusting, and this was the irrefutable confirmation I had been waiting for.

It took a long time to realize that I was only revolting to some people, not all. It’s always a surprise when I find people who are actually attracted to me. Even when I can’t reciprocate the attraction it’s always lovely to be reminded that I am desirable to someone, somewhere. And it’s even more of a surprise when I find myself together with someone I’m attracted to. Throughout the years I’ve found myself stealing glances at the women I’ve been in love with, wondering to myself how I wound up with someone so lovely.

I’m not adept at picking up women, and I don’t really try to. I resent the notion of seduction. I don’t want to convince someone that they should be with me. If they’re not interested from the outset then neither am I. But there are two general practices I’ve used when I’m attracted to someone, which I’ll now share with you, in sequential order.

1. Say Hello
2. Shut up

There are a lot of men who’ve applied endless thought and energy to the arithmetic of seduction. They’ve created a conversational roadmap that any man can use to make himself appear more desirable. The idea of following a conversation by rote or having a specific objective in mind while talking to someone doesn’t really inspire my sense of romance. But saying hello to an attractive stranger does.

It’s obvious, I realize, but how many people ever really act on attraction when they’re out? How many people catch your eye every day, and how many do you try and connect with? I do it once a week, sometimes less, and usually without anything coming from it. It’s easier to sit back and analyze a person, imagine who they are, look at what they’re wearing, build up a nice fantasy, and then let it all evaporate in a poof as they walk out the door a few minutes later.

Deciding you’re interested enough to risk rejection and embarrassment for the sake of saying hello to someone new is always worth it. Even in the crumbling flames of rejection, the knowledge that I tried has always been better company and comfort than inaction. Like everything else, you can worry that there’s a right way and a wrong way to talk to somebody, that there’s a formal set of standards for seductive conversation. But there isn’t. You determine what’s right and wrong, seductive or unappealing with each person you meet, and the standards are in constant flux. But you can’t find out until you say hello.

The next step isn’t as intuitive. I’ve been described as aloof since I was a teenager. I can be quiet and withdrawn, disappearing into a veneer of passive gazing. But I can also go on epic runs of motor-mouthing. It alleviates my anxiety to fill in all the silences with a gush of words. I have to force myself to talk less when I’m with someone new, to be comfortable with the presence of conversational slack.

I like to use conversation and wit to make a show of how much I like someone, and my speech can become slightly manic trying to rid myself of the tantalizing burden of the attraction. Instead, I am more attractive when I shut my mouth and trust in the fact that there is an innate attraction. It doesn’t need a flood of nervous puns and embarrassing stories to make it blossom. So when I’m out with someone I really like for the first time the thought that goes through my head more than any other is, “Shut up, just shut up.”

It’s hard to trust yourself when you’re taking a chance with someone you’re attracted to. You take the spotlight for a few minutes. You become the guy in the coffee shop or the dude in the vegetable aisle trying his luck with a woman. People are watching, people are eavesdropping; you’re on stage and have to perform. When I feel strongly enough about a person, I’ll force myself out in spite of the embarrassment, and then try to keep my mouth shut for as long as I can stand.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

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

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

Date Machine: My Friend’s Girlfriend is My Girlfriend

amboabe — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:07:00 GMT

When I lived in LA, I was hooking up with a woman to whom my friend P had introduced me. They had dated the previous summer. She had just moved to LA and he thought she might need a friend in town.

During the few months that we were hooking up, I used to torture myself with the idea of her meeting my roommate. We were a bad match romantically, but I had never met anyone like her and I swept myself away on a stream of admiration. She was as smart as anyone I’ve ever known with an advanced math degree from a renowned university. Her fingers were always moving when she talked, opening and closing around some unseen shape.

She had droopy eyes that made her look perpetually drunk, and she drank heavily. She was cheerful and always welcoming; she had a habit of bringing random people from the street back to her house for parties or after the bars closed. Her living room was a patchwork cantina of Ivy League wine snobs, debauched beach bums, and whoever happened to be passing by on the street outside. In the middle of that she could still turn and look me in the eye and say something alarmingly direct and unflinching.

The first night we met, she hosted a small dinner party, then we went out to a bar in Santa Monica. She spent half the night in the bathroom crying over an ex-boyfriend. I watched her and her roommate go in and out of the bathroom for 2 hours with my friend and some other guy who she had slept with a week earlier. He had an exaggerated afro poof of hair and a strong jaw line with a dimple at the end. He quoted the lyrics to Peaches’ songs for the group and then would wait for us to share in his delight. “Suckin’ on my titties…”

I imagined her looking at us three leaning against the bar in the gawdy pinky light and bursting into tears, wishing her real man was there with her. Her private disappointments and public outbursts of joy made her seem reckless. Needy and self-sufficient. I was smitten.

She remained elusive the whole time we were hooking up. I liked her more than she liked me. It was never going to work, it would never be more than a series of drunken interludes. My roommate was my opposite in all the ways that made me weakest and most prone to failure with her. He was loud and arrogant and full of caveman bravura. I secretly worried about bringing her around for fear that he would fecklessly seduce her and then throw her out the next morning like an empty beer bottle.

A year later I was in San Francisco and they met in a group outing at a baseball game. They hooked up that night and they’re still seeing each other. I’m excited that they’re seeing each other now that my wet emotions have been taken out of the equation. They’re a good match and I hope that they’ll continue to find ways to be good to each other.

I’ve met a lot of the women that I’ve wound up dating or sleeping with through friends. It makes sense that there would be a natural crossover for friends and girlfriends in a group of people with an already strong affinity for one another. But we’re not supposed to date people our friends have dated. It’s off-limits; we’re supposed to ignore innate attractions out of deference and loyalty.

I’ve slept with four women who had dated friends either before or after. Sex makes people vulnerable. You can’t hide yourself when your totally naked with someone, and it can feel like a betrayal when someone you’ve been naked with leaves you and gets naked with one of your best friends. Bro’s before ho’s.

My ho’s are my bro’s too, and neither deserves a place above the other. And I wouldn’t care about either if they asked me to avoid having new experiences, following my gut and my heart, to protect their ego’s and insecurities.

I’d rather just sleep with their ex-girlfriends. And I’m sure one day they’ll be sleeping with some of mine.

Previous Posts:

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

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

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

Love Machine: Dating Someone With a Handicap

amboabe — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:13:00 GMT

I was walking down the sidewalk in Chelsea a few days ago and I saw a pretty woman in a wheelchair.

I caught her eye as I came closer to her and her friends. She looked back at me. For a second I wasn’t sure what to do. I stare at people. I have the attention span of a dog and I can’t mask my initial curiosity with people’s appearances. I stare at pretty people, the homeless, people with disabilities; anything mildly abnormal is like catnip for my eager eyes.

There’s usually a sense of shame that accompanies these bouts of staring. I feel like I’m gawking at people’s least flattering sides and when they notice me watching I feel petty and cruel. With handicapped people, this embarrassment is especially powerful. Like really pretty people or celebrities, people with handicaps always draw stares. They’re always interesting to look at: the strangeness of their limbs, postures, the way they move.

We’re supposed to pity people with handicaps. We’re supposed to avoid staring and pretend like they’re just the same as everyone else even though they’re not. They’re equal in every respect and don’t deserve condescension. Somehow looking at someone who is different has become imbued with social condescension. If I stare at a person with Rickets or in a wheelchair it must be out of disgust and revulsion. They should be protected from that cruel gaze.

I’ve never known anyone that had a major disability. I’ve never really thought about dating someone with a handicap. Then I saw this woman in a wheelchair the other day. She returned my stare as we got closer. It was comfortable and confident. She wasn’t alarmed that I was watching her wheel herself down the sidewalk, there was no apologia in her eyes. She had blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and freckly cheeks.

I imagined having sex with her as we passed each other. I wondered what her legs would look like: atrophied, the joints bulging like overgrown knuckles. I imagined how strange it would feel to see her vibrant and flushed face while feeling her dead limbs angled out at my hips. It was a beautiful daydream for a few seconds, the withered parts of the body still hanging on, making the parts that were still alive and full of sensation that much more precious and immediate.

Today, I saw another woman with a handicap. She had a malformed arm that looked like it had never grown past the elbow. It didn’t look like an amputation but a simple quirk of development. Her upper arm came to a pointy end with a series of molten-looking skin flaps that just poked out of her shirtsleeve.

She had the same look of serene confidence on her face that the woman in the wheelchair had. Before I might have fixated on the bizarre shape of her deformed limb, but it became part of the periphery. Her indifference to her limb combined with an unafraid smile as we passed was completely alluring.

I passed by both women without saying anything. It all happened in a handful of seconds and then we were passed each other into another pack of people pushing down the sidewalk. How many times a day does that happen?

In the end there is no real difference between dating a handicapped person and someone with a normally functional body. The same initial qualities that would attract me to any other woman were the ones that drew me to those two. But everyone has a different story to tell and a different body to share. It turns out I was glossing over an entire group of people because I was hung up on the Orientalism of their bodies.

Where can a guy go to meet a nice girl in a wheelchair?

Previous Posts:

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

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

amboabe — Sun, 03 May 2009 00:26:00 GMT

I was arguing with my friend P about competition last night. He believes the need to compete overshadows everything in our romantic lives. This need is especially acute in men, because we have traditionally been yoked with the role of pursuer. I don’t care. I don’t want to compete against the field to wind up with someone who’s attractive and successful just to show everyone else that I can.

Relationships aren’t prizes. They’re hard work and require a lot of sacrifice. Why would anyone want to compete to get into a bind like that? Why would anyone want to enter into a relationship with someone that they had to convince to join them?

A few weeks ago I went to get an STD/HIV test. The clinic was intended to serve the needs of high-risk gay men. There was only one woman working there. She was short, had curly hair, and walked around with an eager smile and beaming eyes. After listening to her talk to some of the other volunteers I figured out that it was her first day on the job.

An hour later she came out into the lobby with a file in her hand and called my name. As I followed her down the short hallway to the testing room I felt a small thread of nervousness unspooling in my midsection. I was already jumpy about the test, I hadn’t expected to be going through it with someone I was attracted to.

She held the door open for me and I sat in a chair against the far wall. She closed the door behind her and sat down with her overflowing smile. For the next ten minutes we talked about my recent sexual history. Coming clean about all the lewd, kinky, and potentially infectious behavior I’d engaged in over the last half a year is not high on my list of things to do with a women I find attractive.

We got to talk about what kinds of fluids have been in my mouth, my preference for anal play, and I retold the story of my first STD from last year. You’re cute, and also I used to have dick snails.

As I was going over all the unflattering proclivities of my sexual self, she seemed unfazed. She nodded during particularly embarrassing details with normalizing statements, “Yeah, that’s totally common. I know a lot of people who are into that.” As I rambled, her fingers were in constant motion along the hem of her shirt running along the edge of the fabric and skin. She tilted her head to the side when I tilted mine, she laughed out loud at all the obvious puns that I nervously tossed out.

It came time to draw blood. She rolled her chair next to mine and straddled my knee with her legs. She took the inner part of my forearm in both hands and gently ran her thumb up and down over the crook of my elbow to find a vein. I’m lanky and have veiny forearms. It was a hot morning and I’d walked a mile and a half to get to the clinic. My veins were presenting.

She said she was having trouble finding a vein. She asked me to hold out my other arm. She took it and ran her fingers along the skin of my inner arm, leaving a warm tingly trail in their wake. Neither of us said anything. Five seconds went by. Ten seconds. Our heads were a foot away from each other, my knee was inches from her lap. I could smell the soap on her skin, the soft hint of detergent from her clothes. I had started sweating a little on the walk over. There was probably some musky remnant of it mixing with my Apricot deodorant.

She leaned in closer, looking at the veins coming down my forearm. Her breast drifted across my hand as she moved. It happened again when she sat back.

After the test was over we kept talking, our words trying to prolong the last few minutes we would have together with whatever meager excuses we could find. We talked about travel. She told me about a trip to India with “my boyf—someone I was traveling with.” A few minutes later she made the same edit, changing an unformed “b” word into “the person I live with.”

I told her I was moving to New York in a week. She mentioned meeting in New York three different times, though she had no plans to come to the city and didn’t mention any friends there.

I’m not sure what my cues of attraction are, but I was swept away with her. I must have been rambling, my sentences coming out like blushing torrents of self-deprecation. I wanted to ask her out. I knew I wouldn’t because I was leaving in a week and, though my attraction to her was strong, it wasn’t unfamiliar. It was sporting and friendly and fun, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It was just a surprise to find someone like that in a place like that.

When you really like someone you don’t need to compete for anything. You don’t need to prove anything, because the simple act of sharing your time and thoughts is entertaining enough. You can convince people to like you with a little thought and social manipulation.

It’s like doing a card trick, you can convince people that they’re seeing something extraordinary when its just sleight of hand. With the right ones you just have to be honest and find a way to stick together for as long as you can. Staying together is always the harder part. Convincing someone to come home with you is easy. It’s a cheap trick and the payoff is a lie.

How you pick up a nurse: go get an STD check.

Previous Posts:

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

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

amboabe — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:28:00 GMT

The other day a woman I went out with a couple times sent me a Facebook chat to give me well wishes on moving to New York. We went out a couple of months before I moved, though that was long after I had already decided to leave San Francisco. I never mentioned to her that I was moving, but she had read about it here. “It would have been nice to know that before,” she wrote.

It probably would have been awkward first date conversation to mention the fact that I was moving across the country in two months because I was still in love with a woman I used to date. Would it be inappropriate to go for a goodnight kiss after confessing something like that?

Everybody has baggage. Everyone has unflattering stories or ongoing issues that they’d rather keep tucked away in a back pocket to prevent them from ruining the present moment. Being in love with someone else would is a whopper of a secret to take into a first date.

Expectations ruin everything in love. A first date should be the one moment of time between two people where there are no expectations. Two people come together because they’re both attracted to each other. You can go in looking for love, a stable partner, a good time, or a few hours distraction.

I don’t know what I was looking for with all the different women I’ve been out with over the last year. I don’t know what I’ve really had to share with any of them. I don’t think I’ve been closed off from the idea of finding someone new to love. I haven’t had much extra love to share with someone else so the odds of actually finding a new special someone have been low.

Finding someone to fall in love with is the great canard of dating, and it’s one I’ve been uselessly tethered to for the majority of my romantic life. I’d never understood the point of seeing someone if there wasn’t some rosy, romantic future insinuated against the horizon.

I was always looking for it; I had the dating equivalent of the hundred-yard stare. I’d listen to the women I was out with tell their stories while imagining what things might be like between us ten years down the road. How would we talk to one another in our first home, expecting our first child, one of us earnestly working their way through grad school. My eyes were glazed over with disengagement in the present because I was busy roleplaying in some imaginary future.

Now I have no faculty for looking into the future and imagining what might be there for me. The future is inevitable, and it’s always the things that are most unpredictable that end up having the biggest impact.

So should I have told women I was going out with that I was leaving? Odds are low that anyone would have gone out with me if I had. I did mention it to one woman who sent me an email through Nerve. She never wrote me back.

In the beginning, I forced myself to go on dates to shake myself out of the depression of seeing someone I loved leave. I was dating by rote, forcing myself to go through the motions. All I wanted was some momentary distraction, the relief of a few hours away from all the little empty spaces I was suddenly discovering all around.

That changed. I started meeting interesting people, and was having enjoyable experiences with them. It was hard to not compare them to what I had felt before, and every time I did I would see the watermark still above me, how high the wave was when it broke.

That was when I stopped thinking about dating in terms of the future. I stopped imagining what would come next with the people I was seeing. I stopped speculating about how viable a pair we might be over the long term, and started thinking about how entertained I was in moment. I began to enjoy going out for the absurdity of it; the stilted formality of it; the possibility of some unexpected joy on a Wednesday night, like kissing a woman I’d just met at a stoplight in the pouring rain.

If I’d made some mention of the fact that the future would be much harder and more complicated with any of those women, we probably never would have had met each other in the first place. That’s all a date ever is, an opportunity.I didn't want to miss any just because I was headed in another direction.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

amboabe — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:31:00 GMT

I fall in love quickly. How much do you have to know about someone before you know you love them? It’s a yes or no question, and when you know there’s no need to sally about and over-qualify things. Yes. Me. I do. But does the same apply to sex? How much do you have to know about somebody before you let them into your pants?

I don’t like having one-night stands but I’m a hypocritical opponent of the practice. I once slept with a woman before I’d even spoken to her. It was a New Year’s Eve party in Madagascar. I was drunk and with some friends in a small room we had convinced a local to convert into a makeshift disco for the night. The woman came in with her friends close to midnight. I thought she was a French tourist.

After an hour we wound up dancing close to each other and soon we were grinding. We started kissing without saying a word. After a few minutes of making out I picked her up and she wrapped her legs around my hips. I carried her down to the beach nearby and we had sex until the ocean water turned chilly in the pre-dawn air.

At one point I heard her moan my name and I stopped short. Not only did I not understand how she knew what my name was, but I was shocked to her speak with an American accent. It turns out she was another volunteer and we had friends in common who’d told her about me. I had no idea who she was.

When the air turned cold and the giddy booze high gave way to lethargy we decided to walk back to our hotel rooms. We hugged good night and went our separate ways.

Another night I went out with a friend who invited a girl he used to date out with us. We went to a bar and after a couple of hours, the girl pulled me outside to the back patio. She told me I was cute and said something nice about my hair (swoon). We started kissing and an hour later we were in a cab on the way back to my apartment.

We had athletic sex for a couple of hours and then I started to feel the onset awkwardness of being in bed with a relative stranger. Absent a deeper attraction, her body seemed like a foreign object in my arms, not something intimate that I wanted to get closer to.

After the second hour I tried to roll over on my side and pass out, but she was wide-awake and horny. She kept finding new ways to get me hard and I thought it would have been awkward to suggest we fall asleep with a bouncy erection. So we kept having sex until she was tired enough to fall asleep.

I was sullen and selfish the next morning. I had started wishing I was alone half-way through our night together. The sex was technically great, but I didn’t want to have great sex with someone I wasn’t that excited about. In the morning all the sex between us was gone and we were just left with the same two relative strangers who had jumped at the chance to sleep with each other the night before.

I offered to buy her breakfast but she had to be at work soon. I walked her down the street to her car. We hugged and exchanged numbers. We’d had sex and didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers.

Sex covers a much broader spectrum of people than love. There are people I immediately know I wouldn’t want to have sex with. But most people are question marks. All those strange new faces and bodies moving past each other on the sidewalk, in the subway, in the tight corridors of bars and restaurants, in between cubicles in offices. Sometimes the only way to find out whether or not you really want to have sex with someone is to jump in and try.

It’s easy to seduce someone with your clothes on, to draw another person’s imagination and sense of optimism. When you’re naked there aren’t any tricks of seduction left. There are always a million reasons why things can’t work, and only one reason why things do work; one opaque, immovable, physical gesture, an affirmation. Yes.

You never really know until you’re already there.

Previous Posts:

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

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

amboabe — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:04:00 GMT

I went to see a band called Starfucker play in Brooklyn last night. Everything they played was danceable, and the small basement room was filled with sweaty people bopping to the clickity-clack drums and pulsing basslines.

There was a man up against the front of the stage who danced throughout the whole set. He was wearing an old t-shirt and a Holden Caulfield hunting cap. He was a little chubby and pale but he moved with a selfless abandon that was endearing, almost encouraging. I felt conscious about not dancing when I looked at him.

A few years ago I met an ex-bagboy with anger management issues who had just finished a year stay at a Buddhist monastery. He was thin and soft-spoken. He looked perpetually sunburned and had a blushing smile that he seemed to wrestle with in fits of embarrassment.

He once told me that women can tell if you’re good at sex by how well you dance. He opened his eyes a little wider and tried to suppress that blushing smile when he confessed that a woman he once knew had told him he was a good dancer.

I like to dance. I used to feel self-conscious about it. I would only do it in private or, if I was drunk enough, with a woman in a crowded party. When I was twenty-three my friend P told me to shut up and just two-step to everything. A girl I used to date suggested that I dance like a praying mantis, all gangly angles and insectoid gestures.

I’m not sure if that’s true or not. I am long and thin. There’s a fine line between lithe grace and loping angularity with a frame like mine. Some nights are less graceful than others apparently.

I’ve stopped believing that there’s a good or bad way to dance. A woman I was sleeping with once tried to teach me how to dance. We were in a loud disco with the kind of schizophrenic electronic music that everyone says they like but few actually enjoy listening to (e.g. Autechre, Aphex Twin, Mu-Ziq). She bounced up and down while tilting from side to side; she was basically two-stepping to some absurdly fast breakbeat music.

I don’t believe there’s a right way to dance. Dancing is like sex; it’s an expression and shouldn’t ever become an act of assimilating to a set of best common practices. It’s easy to imagine there’s a right way to dance because it preys on all the nascent social anxieties we all have.

With sex, everyone’s certain they’re an above-average lover. Everyone seems to have osmotically absorbed those best common practices, but with dancing, and especially for men, the best common practice is to confess incompetence. “No, I can’t. I’m a terrible dancer,” we tell each other. Imagine if you were sleeping with someone the first time and they declined to go down on you, claiming that they’re really terrible at oral.

So but there I was in a basement in Brooklyn, watching another man dance because he liked the band so much that his body had to move with them. He looked perfectly in place when I just glanced at him, like the impossibly joyful crowds on a New Year’s Eve special dancing along to a Pink song in their Macy’s best. The longer I watched him the clumsier he became. He was off-beat and barely moving his hands. He turned in slow circles, making eye contact with everyone around him but his body was little more than off-kilter pendulum in a furry hunting hat.

I wanted to join him. I wanted to dance alongside him, to feel that same immediate need to let my body speak because it was filled with happiness.

But I couldn’t. I just wasn’t that into the band.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: Becoming a Virgin Again

amboabe — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:51:00 GMT

Last year my friend S confessed that he had become a virgin again. This is a phenomenon that occurs when somebody goes for a year or longer without having sex.

I was alarmed to find out that there’s actually a name for this kind of thing because it had been almost a year for me too. I’ve gone on long sojourns without sex in the past, but I’d never stopped to add up the days and weeks and months. I didn’t realize there were specific words to categorize people according to lengths of time they’d been without a little wettening in their pants.

For the most part, I am stingy with my sex. One-night stands are fine in theory, but I am not wired to enjoy them soberly. Sex is too intimate and, when my faculties aren’t numbed by some substance, being that close to a stranger’s body sends my brain into a gyroscopic spasm of disembodiment.

I also avoid anything resembling a relationship whenever I can. It’s a combination of selfishness and self-defense. I don’t have brakes in relationships. I freefall for people. Knowing that, in combination with the memories of my parents’ acrimonious relationship, I have developed an instinctual avoidance of intimacy. And to complete the Freudian circle of hypocrisy, I steer subconsciously towards those things I fear most. So I am an emo-gazing fop who avoids having to live up to the hermetically sealed virtues of my own rhetoric.

I give good advice, but I create all these fragile emotional constructs in my own life and each one inevitably comes crashing down in a tinkling cacophony of shattering china.

So I’m comfortable going through extended periods without sex. Sex is not a body function for me. It’s not a glass of water. It’s not a sport. It’s not a stress reliever. It’s language and intimacy, and I know that thinking that way means there’s always less sex on my horizon when I go out for a night.

But for S, the idea that he hadn’t had sex in a year was torture. He huffed and puffed, he groaned and strained and cussed. He let loose a dozen variations on the time honored “I gotta get laid.”

In both China and Madagascar, I heard many graven-faced men tell me that they had to have sex or else they would get sick. Keeping all that sperm trapped inside a man’s guts inevitably led to poor health and a shambolic state of mind. It sounded like voodoo logic at the time, but watching S I started to wonder if his sperm hadn’t pickled in his brain. He seemed depraved and come-drunk.

What I don’t understand about people who need to have sex but don’t are their reasons for not having sex. It’s not difficult to have sex. You might have to lower your physical standards a bit, or endure some embarrassing bouts of rejection at a bar before finding that special someone to spread her legs; but sex is always attainable. If all a person wants is the sport, the relief, the satisfaction of physical contact, then go get it. It’s out there. It’s right around the corner. It’s probably at some bar five or ten minutes from where you’re sitting and reading this. Sex is tricky, but it’s not hard to find someone to have sex with.

I remember when S finally had sex again, thirteen months after his last encounter. He went out on a first date with a woman, got really drunk, brought her back to his apartment, and had sex with her. I was excited for him when he told me. I was sure this would have been the pivot point where would go from defeated to victorious and confident. He could walk into every room with the pride of a man who had the metaphysical scent of sex hovering in his pants.

He wasn’t. He was exactly the same. Sex had solved nothing. He was just as unsettled, dissatisfied and irritable as he had been the week before.

He’d had sex, but he didn’t like the girl. And when the sex was over and the booze had worn off he felt exactly the same as he had before it all began. He had re-lost his virginity and nothing had changed. I suspect he secretly wished he had waited for marriage.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Sex Machine: Come on My Face

amboabe — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:13:00 GMT

Zeitgeisty speculated last week that it’s hard to know whether pornography preceded certain socio-sexual habits, or whether normal people invented them. Swallowing is something I’ve rarely experienced, but I’ve always found it sweet when it’s happened to me. I’ve never pulled out and come on someone.

I feel ridiculous when I pull out. After all of the intense emotions and dilated ascendency of sex, without a condom through impatience or mutual agreement of some sort, the man reaches his limit and manages to remove himself just in time to spill his seed on some more fallow turf. The well-timed pull out must surely have been practiced by generations of randy men, precocious students, and willow-eyed cock-painters.

More recently, the pull out has become a requirement of most all straight pornography. It’s the pay-off, the visual punctuation for the vicarious masturbator. Whenever I’ve been in a position to come on another person I always feel an uncomfortable parallel with porn. When I feel myself closing in on the ejaculatory pivot point without a condom, I feel torn.

Coming is just a moment during sex for me. It’s not an ending point or some super desirable peak. It’s nice and all, but it’s not a big part of what I want out of sex so the more energy I have to spend thinking about what will happen when I do come is distracting. Especially when thinking about it evokes all sorts of expulsive imagery of porn men milking their scepters onto the fleshy landing pad of a woman’s breasts or face. I can’t handle thinking of myself in that way, and I’m even less interested in thinking about someone I’m sleeping with in that way.

For all the social rhetoric to the contrary, there’s something instinctually derogatory in porn for me. There are a lot of crafty ways to rationalize pornography as empowerment, but I have a wince-reflex when I think about it. For me it’s most effective the more derogatory it is. All the Vaseline-lit softcore porn feels unnatural and alien. The athletic grinding and animalistic hammer sessions feel the most honest to me. I’ve lately found some porn that’s openly derogatory to men.

Groups of Amazonian porn star women roam the streets looking for regular guys to sleep with. They have quick rabbit sex with convenience store clerks, chubby mechanics, dorky comic book nerds. They emasculate the homely, make fun of the guys with small penises, or the ones who can’t get an erection.

When I think of pulling out and coming on someone I feel the same insinuation of macho dominance and conquest, the physical degradation of someone I care enough about to sleep with.

I masturbated for the first time since I moved to New York a couple of days ago. I came all over myself, my chest, my chin, my navel, my thighs. It was a mess. And it felt nice. The warm, velvety come felt soft and inviting as it pooled over my skin. It felt gentle and modest. It was a few ounces of bodily fluid. It smelled neutral; it probably smelled like me.

Bodily fluids are a good litmus test for attraction. When someone’s leakings disgust you, odds are good you’re not really attracted to them. When you really want someone, thinking about their saliva, vaginal fluid, sweat, period, come, pre-ejaculate; it all elicits some carnal hunger. We’re taught to be ashamed of our bodies and their functioning. These are private areas, and personal zones that can feel dirty to share with someone else.

The notion that coming on someone is actually, truly degraded implies that there’s something dirty or improper in coming; that a nice, normal woman wouldn’t want all that foul man tar on her body.

I never imagined that it could be nice and sweet; just another part of yourself to share with someone you really, really like.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Sex Machine: Because I Can

amboabe — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:09:00 GMT

I was out over the weekend and a woman asked me to come home with her.

There’s a theory that scarcity makes sex more desirable. The harder a person is to attain the more we yearn to possess them. We catch glimpses of what their sex might be like; the smell of warm skin on the first hot night of the year, the darkening shadow in the space between the breast and bra, the teasing line tossed out without thought for the strained urges it might inspire.

I don’t believe in it. Having sex is not an achievement. Finding someone you’re attracted to feels good, but it doesn’t make you a better person. I tend to lose interest in people when they present themselves as unattainable. (That line is probably eliciting groans from a few friends who, having followed along the underbelly of my romantic life for the last few years, would argue that the opposite is true.)

Conspicuous consumption has become intuition for many of us. I grew up watching my brother feed his belts through the label on his jeans so that everyone could see he was wearing Calvin Klein’s. Value is created on the supply side. We can be made to want something because the label tells us it’s something worth wanting. Few could tell the difference in the fabric, threading, cut, and dye, but we let the label assure us that the jeans are worth $150. It’s an act of faith or self-perpetuating intuition.

In the same way, an unattractive man in a shabby suit might suddenly become intriguing if he walks into a bar with a beautiful woman. Or the woman might become dramatically more desirable because of make-up, body type, or a style of dress that mimics something upwardly mobile. We want people to believe that we’re better than them to bait their pursuit, which blots out our own insecurities for a moment or two.

But so there I was, drunk and talking to a woman running her index finger along the small of my back and suggesting I crash at her place instead of trudging 30 blocks uptown. I knew from the minute I saw her that I didn’t want to sleep with her. She was pretty, had a nice body, and was personable. I also felt that our personalities were at loggerheads. There was no sexual grist, no foreboding. Like her sense of humor, everything about her seemed earnest and deliberate. We would have bad physical chemistry.

She could have been as aloof and unattainable as she pleased, I wouldn’t have felt any greater need to be with her.

When the proposition came I had to reconsider everything. The fact that she was so forthright and deliberate about stating what she wanted made her more attractive. Her attainability was an aphrodisiac. I didn’t feel any more or less attracted to her physically, but I felt more willing to take a gamble. I didn’t especially want her but knowing that she wanted me made me wonder if I hadn’t overlooked something. For a few minutes I was more attracted to her than I would otherwise have been.

I didn’t go home with her. It was late, I was tired, I felt nauseous from too much booze, and I knew, from past experience, that things generally go poorly when I jump into sex with someone without an animal yearning. But I was dangling by a thread for a few minutes, a sex deer in the come-on headlights.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

amboabe — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:40:00 GMT

I sometimes wonder if I am not romantic enough. Being called a misanthrope and a pessimist has been one of the most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had writing here. I love people. I wouldn’t spend this much of my time sharing my experiences with them if I had no faith in the inherent goodness of all people. But there remains a gap between inward feeling, outward expression, and the interpretation of those who see it all happen.

Feelings are overwhelming most of the time. I know it might seem uncharacteristic for someone as prone to emo-gazing introspection as I am, but I find myself unable to articulate my feelings almost every day. “If you only knew how much….” “I don’t have words to tell you…” For all the handy rules of thumb and universal truths of being in a relationship, it’s hard to not wind up at these abstract dead ends.

This is the space in which romance exists. When I run out of words, taking action can fill the space. Failing to take action can say just as much.

A few years ago I biked 25 miles through the Malagasy highlands to see a woman that I liked. We had hooked up a few times in during training but were about to be sent to opposite ends of the island for the next two years. I didn’t know what I felt for her, but it was strong. I remember the first time I felt her vagina, I had a reaction that I didn’t understand. It felt like a pillow to me. It was soft and rounded, warm and slick, tongue-like.

I had never had a reaction that strong to anyone else’s body. I didn’t know what was happening. It felt like I had stumbled on an intimate glyph that was speaking to me in a primal language that I didn’t realize I understood. I didn’t understand how an experience so powerful could have been spurred by a woman I’d been making diarrhea jokes with a few weeks earlier.

I figured whatever it was would find its own natural explanation if I could just see her again. So I biked through the muddy hills on my day off to visit her. It took 3 hours to get there. I was sweaty and covered in dirt when I arrived. I asked around the main intersection in town and found her place. She laughed when she saw me. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

I had no idea how to answer that question. “I just wanted to say hi,” I said.

We made awkward small talk on the front porch for half an hour and then walked back into town. She was meeting some other trainees in a neighboring town for the afternoon. We got a taxi, a puttering Citroen from the 60’s, and went one town over to meet with the others. I felt awkward and vulnerable. My trip was driven by some irresistible urge for closeness but instead I was sitting in a roadside restaurant with a big group of people telling innocuous stories about our host families.

After lunch we went back to her town. The sun was starting to go down. I only had a few hours of daylight to get back. We looked at each other for a few seconds as I was trying to figure out how to say goodbye. I had come all that way and had no idea what to say. I had just wanted to see her, but I suddenly felt embarrassed at how much absurd effort I had put into “just seeing her.”

“Can I have a hug?” I asked her. (I’m wincing as I write this – I hadn’t asked anyone that question since Jr. High).

“Sure,” she said and beamed her toothy smile.

We hugged. I got back on my bike and pushed off towards home. Rain clouds started to gather and the wind picked up an icy metallic edge. Halfway home it started pouring and the road turned into muddy sludge. It took more than four hours to slog through the swampy morass. I was dripping wet when I finally made it. The sun had just gone down over the horizon.

Feelings are terrible because they’re out of our control and there’s no way to share them with anyone else. You can suggest and describe them to elicit empathy. You can act on your feelings, use them as the motivating seeds to make something for somebody else; to give them their own feeling as a result of something you’ve done. Love is not a foreign experience, especially when you know someone well. It’s easy to see through the cracks, if you apply a little effort, and understand what and why a person does what they do.

I still wonder if I’m not romantic enough. Do I give enough to the people in my life, or am I always withdrawn and overly calculating about how I behave? Time for more emo-gazing.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

amboabe — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:51:00 GMT

So as you’ve probably heard I had drinks with Airheadgenuis and Zeitgeisty the other day. We spent the better part of the evening in a gay bar, with softcore porn playing in monitors underneath the tables and big ticket Hollywood movies like The Great Santini and Polanski’s Tess projected against the far wall.

According to guy lore, gay bars are the easiest places for a straight man to meet a woman. I remember casting the first short I directed several years ago. I posted ads in Backstage West and met with dozens of actors afterhours in my boss’s Beverly Hills office.

I remember one guy I spoke with jumped very quickly from telling stories about his acting background into tales of his sexual prowess. It seems some male actors in LA are more excited about their prospects for having sex than they are about working. Hey look, ma! Somebody fucked me! Can you believe it?

This man swore that he could have sex with any woman in a gay bar. Their defenses are down, they feel safe, they vamp suggestively without having to worry that some guy is going to get the wrong idea, and they tend to drink heavily, chugging fruity two-for-one specials.

I had originally planned on shooting the short as an all-nude production. When I mentioned this to they actor he immediately stood up from his chair. “I’ll strip right now, if you want,” he said. “I’m not ashamed of my body at all. You want me to get all the way naked?”

I’ve always had mixed feelings about gay bars. I don’t like the idea of separating social groups based on sexual preference. Bars are bars. People get drunk, they dance, they try and meet someone new, many wind up bringing someone home later on. You’re a little less likely to hear Tom Petty or Dire Straights in a gay bar, but otherwise, the idea is basically the same.

On the other hand, the gay bars I’ve been to have felt less serious and weighted down with social posturing than other straight bars. Would that there were more straight bars with porno playing on the walls and colors outside of the red and black vinyl variety.

The first gay bar I remember going to was in Austin. It was a lesbian night at a place called Boyz Cellar. All the bartenders were topless and covered in bodypaint. It was surreal to be in a room filled with women and not a single one paying attention to me. Knowing in advance that everyone in the bar was outside of my sexual purview took a lot of tension out of the air. I felt like I could stroll around leisurely and talk to anybody about anything. There was no worry about having intentions misconstrued or being shot down by a cranky tyrant.

After a couple of hours one of the friends I was with reached a level of dramatic intoxication and decided she needed to vomit in the corner. The bar manager saw her and asked that she leave. She was still lucid enough to feel insulted by this and she went nose-to-nose with the pasty man for a few minutes trying to pick a fight before finally relenting.

I don’t like the idea of having to pick someone up, no matter what the context. There has been a lot said for the thrill of the chase and wanting the unattainable, but I don’t see the value in either. I don’t believe in unattainability. We’re all born out of the same primordial question mark. We all want to believe in someone. We are all attainable.

Chasing after someone is equally uninteresting. Why should I have to pursue someone who resists the idea of my companionship? If they don’t want to spend time with me, what does it benefit me to convince them otherwise? I want to fight for the people who’ll fight for me, and not chase after a trophy to validate my sense of achievement.

Those two ideas hang heavy in straight bars, like wooly fogs across the neon light. It might be easier to pick someone up in a gay bar. But it isn’t any easier to fall in love.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

amboabe — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:51:00 GMT

A few years ago a friend asked me if I would be willing to donate sperm to her and her partner should they choose to have a child. The idea freaked me out and made me excited all at the same time.

I don’t like children nor do I get along with them all that well. They seem so helpless and inexperienced. Of course they have good reason to be, and I was just as helpless, if not more, when I was a kid. I marveled at some of the stupidest things in the world. One Sunday when I was four years old, I forced myself to watch a full episode of Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. When it was over I sprinted into my father’s office to tell him what I had done.

What would you do if a small kid lacking even a full set of teeth and the ability to wipe himself came bounding into your office to announce he had just watched Charles Kuralt for a full hour and a half? There are some people with an instinct towards patience and nurturing; selfless creatures able to set aside their own agendas to help shape a new life in a healthy and stimulating way.

When we were younger my friend P told me that I would be a terrible father because I’m too selfish. I was shaken at the time, but the more I think about it the more I think he might be true. I don’t know if I could listen to my child enumerate the lore of Dragonball Z or tell tales of fishstick wars in the cafeteria with a straight face. Would I have the restraint to not nod off midway through or take advantage of the time to catch up on deleting old text messages?

Still, I’ve wanted to be a parent for a long time. I remain uncomfortable with my selfishness, and for whatever life is worth, I feel like there’s nothing more meaningful than passing something along for the future. The idea that I might be able to cheat my way into half-accomplishing that metaphysical task seemed like a good deal. I could have the satisfaction of passing along my helical secret for another generation while avoiding the more uncomfortable challenges of actually raising a child into a healthy and functional adult.

Now that I’m “freelancing” for the foreseeable future I started to wonder whether or not it would be worth it to become a sperm donor to earn a little extra money at the end of the month. I know the money in sperm donation is marginal, but fifty bucks is still fifty bucks.

I decided that I couldn’t give sperm to my friends because I didn’t think I could handle the idea that my child was out there in the world without my being able to be a regular part of its life. I may have no idea how to handle a child and my brain flips over at the thought of returning to those adolescent discoveries of all the things taken for granted in adult life, but if a part of me is reborn somewhere in the world than I want to confront those things.

Also, I was in love with one of the women involved and I thought that might be a little awkward.

Now that my own immediate survival is slightly less certain, the idea of auctioning off my future babies seems like a much more realistic possibility. Maybe there is a place in the world for my junior, and maybe it might be better if I have nothing to do with him or her. Maybe it’s an even trade: fifty dollars for an anonymous scrap of immortality, playing happily in the green fields of a ranch house out in the country side, flying a kite or chasing raccoons through the forest. I’d masturbate to that.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

amboabe — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:07:00 GMT

I was having lunch with my friend M the other day and she mentioned one of her girlfriend’s who’d been writing back and forth with a man through a dating service for an extended period of time. They’d never met in person.

It’s easy to imagine this is the worst face of internet dating.; two people so lonely for companionship that they’re willing to spend big chunks of their time emailing their daily devotional thoughts and fears. It might be one thing to have an intimate correspondence with an old friend who lives far away, but the idea of doing it with a stranger carries an undercurrent of desperation.

When I was twenty-two I wound up emailing a woman who had gone to my high school. A mutual friend thought that we might have something in common. We were both writers, read too much, and had a similar taste for deviance and disruption. She still lived in Fresno and I had been in LA for more than four years. I didn’t know anyone there anymore, and the idea that I might still have a friend in the town where I grew up, a writer no less, made me happy.

We started emailing and got along as predicted. We picked up each other’s musical references and had patience for arcane arguments about DH Lawrence versus Anais Nin. In hindsight, it was an embarrassing scrum of mutual assurance that we were separate and better than all those other slackjaws; a short-term emotional cocoon for the overly sensitive post-graduate.

Our e-mails gave way to phone calls, and after a few months I decided it was time to stop ebbing around the edges. I asked her if I could come up and visit her one weekend. She said yes.

I had no idea what she looked like. The only point of reference I had was a hazy photo from my high school yearbook. She was pale and freckly and her lips were small but puffy pink. I had the mental pre-tingle of sex the whole drive up. It was exciting imagining what she would be like in person. I had come to know her personality well enough, but there was a whole other being to be reckoned with. Her physical bearing, her mannerisms, rhythms, movements, smells. Her inner self had been a good partner so far. I was hopeful that the physical side would be a good match as well.

When she opened the door to her apartment I was overwhelmed by stale air and cat piss. She was wearing dirty blue sweat pants and a baggy t-shirt with blotchy stains spattered across it. Whatever might have been tingling inside me earlier came to a stop.

Suddenly, the idea of a long weekend with A’s company seemed like an insurmountable trudge. I had imagined a lithe kink-sprite tumbling from the pages of Delta of Venus. Instead, I was entering the zone with a pallid introvert with an over-generous tolerance for the stench of her cat’s bodily waste. For a moment I imagined turning around, walking back to my car, and driving the four hours back to LA.

“Come in,” she said.

We talked for a little while. I helped her with the last bit of tidying up which my arrival had so noticeably interrupted. The sun was going down and we decided to get some beer and watch a movie. I was nervous and tried to keep her at arm’s length with conversation, hoping I could cover my recoil with some affable chatter about anything so long as it was non-sexual. She remained quiet, answering in barely audible mumbles and short clips that I couldn’t reconcile with the woman I had gotten to know over the phone.

After a few beers and an hour of an old movie she suddenly became animated. We were sitting side by side on her couch, awash in a sea of cat hair. She reached for a small tin of lip balm and put some on. She asked if she could put some on me.

My body stiffened and I tried to keep my eyes locked on the television. This was the moment I had been dreading. She was going to try and seduce me now. I had hoped I could passively joke my way through the weekend as if we were just good buddies catching up. But she was ready for sex. I figured out some terrible excuse for not wanting to put on lip balm (“Why? I don’t really feel like I need it.”) but she persisted. After a few minutes, we came to a compromise. I would put on lip balm but I would apply it myself.

Not deterred, she bent down at my feet and started undoing my shoelaces. I was wearing heavy boots and it took some doing to unlace them. I knew what was happening but I didn’t know how to tell her no. I wished there would have been a button to push or a placard I could hold up that could settle things. Instead she pulled off my boot and smelled the inside with a giant inhale, all while looking me in the eye.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she asked.

I told her we should just watch the movie. She threw my boot across the room and then leaned over me, lowering her mouth to mine. I leaned away and held my forearm up to keep us separate. She pulled away and looked at the floor. She sat down next to me on the couch and after a few minutes I heard her crying.

We finished the movie in silence and then went to bed. I lay beside her all night, rigid and afraid to move for fear of brushing against her.

Affinity for someone’s personality is not sex. I had no idea.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

amboabe — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:19:00 GMT

I was out with some friends over the weekend. After some polite peacocking about taste in obscure music, the talk turned to women. “My sister used to be a whore in college. No judgment,” my friend B said. “She’s married now. But when she was younger she’d had every dick on campus.”

B’s sister had never charged money for sex. But making this slur seems to be the only social shorthand we have for talking about a woman who has more than a polite amount of sex with her one true boyfriend. A man who has barrel loads of sex is a “stud,” a top-tier specimen prized for his reproductive value. A woman who has had between 10 and 100 dicks inside her various parts can only be compared to a prostitute.

A sexually active male with a horsey appetite for women is something that engenders pride. The female analog is shame and social disrepute; a penile spittoon for the licentious and decrepit men in a society who must stoop so low as to pay for a hump. Some progressive men will admit that there’s nothing wrong with a woman being a “whore;” no judgment. But still, there is no easy and deliberate way for a woman to talk about her sexuality without entering the Bermuda triangle of whoredom.

This is anecdotal, but the most sexually active of my friends are women not men. Not all, but the majority. They are not whores, no matter how euphemistically the bounds of meaning might be applied to that term.

I hate the idea of pursuit in romance. It connotes an imbalance in values. If men are supposed to always be in pursuit of the mythical “lay,” then women must surely have that magical wunderbeast lurking somewhere under their skirts. Men get lucky. Women get fucked.

I am an imperfect lover, but I don’t believe what I have to offer a woman in physical terms is any more or less valuable than what any woman has to offer me. Sex is a shared experience, something two people choose to give to one another. There are physical differences, but holistically it shouldn’t be any better or worse for one side over the other.

So why is there still such an entrenched legacy of men begrudging women breadth of sexual experience? Even when there is no conscious judgment, there is a strong implication of historical immorality.

Before I moved to New York, my friend P told me stories about how hard it is to find a steady girlfriend here. Meeting women is easy, but New York is a hotbed of eligible men. I’ve never been in a place where there is a higher concentration of well-educated, well-dressed, attractive, and generally interesting men. Women have choice in partners here in ways that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It’s intimidating. What’s the incentive to settle down into a regular movie-renting habit with one guy when it comes at such an opportunity cost? It’s not hard to imagine a lot of nice men in the city pulling up the sheets over their exposed nipples in the morning, calling after the woman as she dashes out the door. “Call me!”

I’d rather imagine two people happy to share a new experience with each other, finding the momentary dilation of a new mouth, a new vessel filling the swollen ripple, pushing against one another, finding the same beats and measures. Holding onto each other while pushing apart.

Is there a need to create a separate iconography for people who like that experience? Isn’t it something that everybody likes? Who wouldn’t rather be having sex right now, instead reading these words trapped in the pixels of a thousand different monitors?

I propose that B’s sister is not a whore, judgment or not. She is a woman who would rather be doing the same exact thing that most of us would rather be doing. And at one time she did. Again and again and again. I envy her.

Previous Posts:

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

amboabe — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:13:00 GMT

After seven months of planning, saving, angling, thirteen boxes, and 170 pounds of luggage, I've finally moved to New York.

Moving is the best and worst of everything in life. There's nothing more exciting than starting again; going to a new place and fighting to figure out how you will fit into it. And there are few things as dispiriting as seeing everything you own reduced to a pile of banker’s boxes and black duffel bags. All the excitement and anticipation is framed in a fearful vertigo.

I've made a lot of major moves in my life and I remember the night before each, staring at the final collection of luggage. That's it, that's all I have. This is my only remaining physical footprint, and I have to strap it to my back now and heft it to the airport and fling it into the unknown.

I stayed up all night both times before I left for Peace Corps. The first night I stayed up packing and repacking. When I left for Madagascar I spend the night at a friend's Halloween party and then drove back to my parents house at 4AM. I had a 9AM flight and I decided to make some coffee and stay up the last few hours playing a game called Super Mario Sunshine.

The night before I left for New York, I stayed up till close to midnight wrestling my bags. Then I gave up and went to sleep. My mattress had been recycled so I slept on a yoga mat in my friend's apartment in Berkeley. I had strange dreams all night. In one I was in a symphony hall that turned into a dormitory. My ex-girfriend from China was there and I wandered around trying to find a free bunk to sleep in.

In another dream I was having sex with someone I'd never seen before, standing up and with her leg propped across my waist. I kept waking up every hour, checking my cell phone to see what time it was, paranoid I would oversleep. I got up at 5:15AM, minutes before I had set the alarm to go off.

I felt awkward on the train, my four big pieces of luggage sticking out amidst the early morning commuters. I felt numb and wished I had caffeine. I kept imaging the cheap duffel bag I bought for $8.99 in the Mission ripping open along it's bulging seams, spilling all my belongings into the aisle.

The worst part of moving is the uncertainty. Even in moving to a city I've been to before, headed for an apartment I've spent lots of time in, it still felt like everything was up in the air; a photograph of someone throwing a bucketful of water into the air, the globby particles suspended in motion above the ground.

All those feelings are useless, bouncing around in an entropic vacuum with nothing but speculation to keep them in check. They all feel so immediate and crucial in those hours in flux, suspended between two points on a map, strung out on a piece of yarn connecting them. As soon as you land, they become absurd, disconnected from the daily realities of wherever you wind up.

I had no way of anticipating Los Angeles, Prague, China, Madagascar, San Francisco, and now New York.

And now here I am. To begin. And begin again.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

amboabe — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:09:00 GMT

Moving is stupid. I've had two months to get everything organized and I still wound up the night before with my four bags stuffed to bursting. After all the planning there remained a pile of scattered detritus, all the random crap that I wanted to take but couldn't find space for. I felt like a caveman staring at two sticks and kindling, trying to figure out if there was any other way beyond the obvious to accomplish what I wanted.

One of the things I've carried with me through every move since I left home is a plastic filling container that my mom gave me when I was sixteen. I've used it to store old letters, birthday cards, and scraps of writing amassed since my adjective-laden teenage years (one of these days I'll address that habit for real).

I looked at the beige plastic rectangle filled with old memories that I hadn't looked at in years. I knew it had to go.

I unfastened the flimsy metal clasp and dumped all the scattered papers out onto the floor. "Only the most important stuff is coming along," I thought.

A big proportion of all the old scraps were drugstore cards for various occasions: graduation, birthdays, Christmas, past moves. Cards I had received in the late 90's were oversized and ostentatious. They unfolded like small erector sets with paper scaffolding and puffy text written in sparkles. Inside these salutary behemoths were paper leaflets that unfolded like tablecloths. There was enough room to write a chapter in a novel, but most had a paragraph or less of handwritten text. "We love you!" "We're proud!" "Hope you have a great day!" "Congratulations!"

I threw most of them out.

Then I had the uncomfortable surprise of finding some old love letters to J which I never sent. I became friends with J my senior year in high school. My old English teacher told me she had a crush on me one day, and so I made an effort to talk to her. I was all elbows and awkwardness, which is why I think we never got past being friends. But I wanted to. We would wander through the newly-opened Barnes & Noble together. We'd sit at Krakatoa Café in the late afternoons, drinking black coffee and arguing about books.

We started emailing when we were in college, but she grew distant. She joined a sorority and became entrenched in her theater program. We were both surrounded by tens of thousands of new people and possibilities. The incentive to stay in touch dwindled.

Before I let go, I had one last flush of emotion. I was working at Yosemite for the summer between my first and second year of college. I felt like I was in an alien world most days, far away from the safely structured decadence of my college life. Not everyone was a middle-class kid on their way to a lucrative career sprung from an Economics major.

I would quote from the letter, but thankfully I'm writing this on a plane and it's tucked away in my checked luggage in the cargo hold below. Re-reading that letter to her, written in a nineteen year-old's emotional upheaval one desperate summer was mortifying. It was like looking at a terrible picture of yourself, with the lights and angles all wrong, so that you look like someone else entirely.

There can't have been any period of time when I was so needy and sniveling, so uncertain. So willing to make someone else an answer to all those adolescent wants, like a nostalgic voodoo doll for happiness.

It was three pages, front and back, on spiral-bound notebook paper. The last paragraph trailed off into an incomprehensible attempt to define what I wanted from her. It ended mid-sentence.

At least I didn't send it. It's hard to remember, it's so long ago now. But I must have reread what I had written and realized there was no way to send that to another person. I was a driveling teenage mess, and the fact that I was writing a rhetorical pitch for why we should make a go at romance together was a sure sign that our friendship had run its course. I wasn't talking to her anymore, I was writing to myself, spewing my own uncertain issues at the paper and planning to send them to her expecting a solution.

I never sent it, and I never heard from her again. But I brought that letter with me. It's gone from Yosemite, Fresno, Los Angeles, China, Madagascar, San Francisco, and now it's own it's way to New York, twelve years later. The dried up tissue paper from one summer when I was a wet teenage mess.

J, you were a lousy friend. And I was worse.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

amboabe — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:45:00 GMT

My dad came to the city for an afternoon to help me mail some boxes the day before my move. As we were talking about times to meet, I mentioned I had an appointment for an HIV/STI check.

My dad was quiet for a second, then said "Uh huh. Well, how about the next day then."

I grew up in a religious home. My parents are Seventh Day Adventists. My brother and I had to go to church every Saturday morning growing up. We had to observe the Sabbath too, which meant from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday we weren't allowed to watch TV or spend the night at our friends' houses. Caffeine, alcohol, pork, and, certainly, pre-marital sex were also frowned upon.

I took all of these restrictions as unavoidable inconveniences when I was a kid. When I was sixteen I read the bible in its entirety and tried to believe in my parents’ dogma. It didn't take so much. The more I read and thought about it, the less I believed.

By the time I left for college I was on my way to leaving their religious cocoon for good. Caffeine, alcohol, pork, and pre-marital sex all worked their way into my day-to-day life (though the sex part was comparatively tricky for a long while). I would happily debate the principles and rhetorical validity of religion, but with sex, I would almost never make reference to my own life. And my parents never showed any interest in learning more about my sex life.

It was taken as read that I would avoid sex until marriage. I didn't want to go out of my way to be dishonest with them, but there weren't many occasions to bring up my sex life in the course of normal holiday conversation. It's not that I don't want to tell them. But I never feel like I have a reason to. I assume both of them were virgins until they married so I'm not sure how worthwhile it would be to have a conversation about having sex with my best friend's ex.

I don't avoid the topic, though. I sent them links when I first started writing here. I'm not proud of a lot of the stories I've told here, but they were all choices I made and have become a part of who I am. I don't want to hold that back from my parents.

I have no idea if they read any of this. They never bring it up, and I rarely mention it. I don't have children so I'm not sure what it's like to cross the last border of sexual reckoning with a son or daughter. What is it like for a parent to reckon with their child's sex life, especially when it is based on such different choices from their own?

After my dad and I had dropped all my boxes off at the post office and finished the last round of errands for the move, he looked at me sideways and then looked down again. "So when will you get the results of your test?" he asked.

"I got it back already," I told him. "They can do most of it on the spot now. It was all negative."

"Mmmhmm," he said.

He looked straight ahead, one hand on the steering wheel. I wondered when it was that he last had sex. I didn't ask.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

amboabe — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:36:00 GMT

I'm moving to New York next week. I quit my job at the end of February. I've been saving money since last Fall. I've got a couch to sleep on when I land, a laptop to chase jobs with, and not much else. I'm doing it for a woman.

I've never thought about moving for someone else before. I've been in love four other times. During my most desperate throes the idea of giving up vocation and place for any of those women was an abstraction at best. I fantasized about diving in front of stray gunfire in slow motion to protect them; I pictured myself warding off packs of armed muggers in dark alleyways absorbing macho bruises to keep them from danger. But I never contemplated risking anything real.

I met N a year ago. A mutual friend had an Easter brunch at his apartment. He and N were matched against each other in a pancake-off. He was making chocolate buckwheat pancakes and she was making a banana walnut recipe.

I had been in San Francisco a little over three months. My new job was transitioning from a surreal delight into a time-consuming challenge. By Sunday morning I was feeling tired and selfish. I remember thinking I looked like shit. I had just conditioned my hair and it was puffy and frizzy.

I was wearing a pair of beige corduroy pants and a white knit polo shirt with thin horizontal stripes that was too small for me. It was short and too tight in the arms but the midsection shot out in an angular waddle that I didn't like. The pants were a little too short and I was wearing black ankle socks that were uncomfortably apparent when I sat down.

When I arrived, my friend led me through his shotgun apartment to the kitchen where everybody else was waiting. That was where I saw N for the first time. Her back was to me. She was wearing a pink thrift store sundress and a white apron. I saw the pale skin of her calves, blotchy in the cold March air. I saw her black and wavy hair coming down over her shoulders. The air rippled. I knew who she was before she turned around, before I saw her face.

Two months later she moved to New York. I fell apart.

I remember the day she left. I invented some reason to take the morning off from work so I could stay with her right up until the moment she had to leave. We spent the night at my apartment, woke up to a bright and sunny day and walked back to her old place. I remember walking that path many times over those two months. I was always getting off work late, but I would walk those dirty sidewalks as fast as I could to meet her almost every night of the week.

We were quiet that morning. I smoked one of her cigarettes on the way. We held hands. I teased her, wanting to pretend that this was another normal day. Half an hour later we got to her apartment. It was getting close to noon. We stopped at the threshold to her front door. I didn't know what to say. I had known that she was leaving from the beginning. We weren't going to be able to stay together.

I knew that moment was coming, but I had ignored it. We faced each other and held both hands. I kissed her and held on for a few seconds. "It's going to be hard to let you go," I told her.

She was quiet. If she said anything, I don't remember it.

We kissed one last time and I started walking back down the sidewalk. I turned around and watched her. She looked at me and then started putting the key in the lock of the front gate. I turned around again at the corner of the block, but she had gone inside already. The threshold in front of her building was empty.

When I started writing for Nerve she asked me never to write about her. "If I wind up on there, you're a dead man," she told me.

She's been in every post I've written. Sometimes it's been literal, other times she's been in the blank spaces between words, the invisible center around which all these little black letters orbit.

I know it's stupid to think about someone in those terms. People aren't centers of gravity. She's just a woman. At the end of all these strung out words, like loose strands of thread, there's just a woman waiting. She has cuticles and calluses and plaque and eye boogers and dirty fingernails. She watches CSI and owns a Jack Johnson record, She's just another person, in a world of other people.

And here I am, with my bags packed and a one-way ticket to New York City. I have no idea what will happen when I get there. It's tempting to think of relationships as an answer to something. It's so easy to imagine that I'm reaching a finish line. After thirty-one years of living I'm finally ready to confront the metaphysical truth with my metaphysical doppleganger. This is what everyone wants, isn't it? The one. To find that person you're willing to put it all on the line for, the albino unicorn galloping into the sea.

No matter what happens, this is just another beginning. Life doesn't get easier and simpler. It expands, becomes more complicated. I'm scared. I've got a lot of good rhetorical reasons for moving. There are plenty of new and interesting prospects for my career in New York, I've wanted to move there since I was a teenager. I have a lot of lovely friends in the city and while I'll be broke and couch surfing there will be a bounty of new opportunities to chase after.

But that's not why I'm going. I'm moving because I'm in love. I'm moving for N. Whatever happens between us, I don't want to have felt what I feel for her and not stood up for it.

I don't know what the weight of my life is worth. I don't know why I exist or what benefit can come out of it. But I do know who I love. I knew before I saw her face, and I know it now. She has black wavy hair, calluses, dirty fingernails, a Jack Johnson record, and some questionable taste in television programming.

A few days ago I wrote about getting text messages from her being inevitable while she was in San Francisco, like watching a wave building out on the ocean before slowly coming to shore. I had nothing to lose then. I was the stationary one, sitting passively on the shore, feeling the wet rush from each swell crashing against the sand.

Now I'm the wave out at sea. I feel myself rushing and swelling towards her, a stationary figure waiting on the shore, watching me come apart in a foamy haze as gravity pulls me closer.

For a few wet seconds it's like I'm levitating.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

plan b and the contingency fuck

Date Confessions: Still more SNARKY and ASSININE responses to Nerve Dating Confessions... plus throbbage

zeitgeisty — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:13:00 GMT

Back by popular demand.... I take your confessions, and turn them into comedy gold.

"I think I have a psychological addiction to feeling special. If I don't have it I will do anything to get it. Even if it means hurting someone I love."

I think the proper clinical terminology for this is ‘self centered cunt’.

"What is it about Spring that makes past crushes/exes/hook-ups come out of the woodwork?"

Simple, Spring is always the time for getting back in touch with your Plan B contingency fuck. You see, Spring is when most people get dumped by their Plan A.

"i waited for 20 years for him to find me again. but he did and it was worth the wait."

…and the icing on the cake is his monthly social security check!!

"I don't remember every bad choice I made being bad while I was making them."

Except maybe that one time I had unprotected sex with Mr. raging herpes guy.

"Yes, she's my cousin. But my mom would give me hell if I cut things off with her. You understand, don't you?"

Random text message intercepted from the Palin family….

"I just don't see you as the Honey, I'm home type."

You’re more like the….’bitch, I’m back, crack out the wine cooler’ variety.

"I am shy. From a pseudo-evolutionary standpoint, you could make the argument that my model should be recalled or discontinued."

Taken from Charles Darwin’s childhood diary…

"My boyfriend and I were standing in line for ice cream when he leaned over and whispered in my ear; "I forgot to wash my face. It tastes like you." Then he kissed the top of my head, put his arm around me and smiled. It was embarassing/sweet/gross/sexy/adorable."

What he failed to notice was, he actually HAD washed his face, he simply mistakenly ordered the ‘skanky puss’ flavored ice cream.

"What on earth makes you think having a drink with me is the safe choice? Surely you know me better than that! But, yes, we can start with a drink and see what develops. Maybe you’ll find out what’s on that top shelf…"

It’s a huge dildo right… c’mon of course it is… big honking 10 foot plastic cock.. right? Right??

"I can't decide whether being sluttier would make me feel more liberated or depressed."

The better looking you are = more liberated… the fuglier you are = more depressing.

"I've had so many problems with men in the past year it has completely skewed my sexuality. I was once someone who loved and desired and was open about sex and proud of it and now sex is so intertwined with bad feelings and memories of failed sex and relationships i can't watch porn with couples having sex, i can't listen to people talk about having sex and i can't masturbate without waves of sadness flooding up to the surface even though my body craves sex like crazy. I can't handle it, how could i get this way? I look at old lingerie i used to buy in eager anticipation for someone else and i just want to cry. I am so embaressed by this and how will i get over it?"

Jesus.. quit your whining and go suck a dick.

an oldie but goody...Jlo

spit or swallow

women are cruel

older women

Psychology of the female orgasm

Does HAIR matter?

SEX TIPS for DUMMIES

Patterns in relationships

Love in the time of recession

The MIA phenomenon

Getting nailed with a strap-on

Why smart people can't get laid

Going through old e-mail - revisiting past babes

How I picked up the babes on the internet

If you're hot then it's ok?

Handjobs in Hungary

Striving for consistently decent sex

one year anniversary

bachmann turns my stomach overdrive

dream date

i love ya but i don't like ya

how i met my girlfriend

date with a transvestite - blogger doodle

sex with ichat

the myth of the bad boy

blind leading the blind

facebook 25 responses

how wet do you get?

my lame attempts at voyeurism

Celebrity relationships

my soundtrack for a broken heart

Shaniqua

100 posts!

Choking on desperation

I'm not an ASIAN fetishist

Wouldjarather

junk in 'da trunk : the ASS file

Fun with dating confessions

Stay away from my nipples!

wouldjarather?

didjaever?

Are all women gay?

She was an ex nazi but she had spectacular jugs

new years resolutions

bloggerdoodle

are moustaches sexy?

the last 4 people i fucked slipped my mind

the indie girl in my office has knowledge of my bowel movements

merry xmas

twas the night before xmas

fuckability VS beauty

RELATIONSHIPS under stress.. Can true PASSION last?...

blogger doodle

Dancin'.. does it get you hot?

Telling the truth in relationships

How much sex is enough?

The end of jealousy for me

Get that Zeitgeisty look!

Blogger Doodles

Rate THEIR pick-up lines

Older babe alert

Obligatory posting on cyber-sex

the importance of finding true sexual compatibility

Will you just take my penis in your hand already?

Snark and ass

5 things I'm thankful for

licking ass and taking names

Snarky and assinine responses

The Origins of my cold, black heart

relationship dealbreakers

The different kinds of vaginas

Snarky dating confessions responses

I wanna bang your friend

Show me your jugs

translations

Is there an expiration date on passion?

translations

used to be cool - zeitgeisty on MTV

crazy pants

hurting for a squirting - the female ejaculation file

the gardener and the rose

blogger doodles 3

We fart therefore we are

TRANSLATIONS

Blogger doodles 2

My most cringeworthy moments with women

Are you a sociopath part 2

Are you a sociopath part 1

The sex and the city movie was lame

The worst sex of my life

commitment phobia is a myth

Translations...

TYPES

Do.. do women really suck in bed?

The odd disconnect between profile photos and reality

50 sexual expereiences I've never had

Dating COnfessions translations

I'm a breast man... the JUGS file

John McCain makes my peepee go limp

Video blog - 'The word on the steet' - the nature of attraction.

My dating confessions TRANSLATIONS

My internet dating advice

What we want vs. What we need and the power balance between man and women

All Porn SUCKS!!

The night PAULINA and I discussed sex

How important are someone's politics when choosing a patrner?

Nerve Confessions: It's all about the looks stupid!

Sex with someone I love - The MASTURBATION file

The Greatest Online Dating story - The PERSONALS file

'But baby I HAVE to put a profile up, it's required!!' - The GIRLFRIEND file

BITE ME! - Snark.

My first kiss...a remembrance of thing past

Feel the paste in you face - The FACIAL file

Talk dirty to me!!

I abstain! The fear to fuck

The unvarnished TRUTH about dating on the internet.

BITE ME!!!

Pontifications on the bangin' of ass - The ANAL file

The brass ring

Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test

amboabe — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:24:00 GMT

I went to a free clinic in the Castro tonight to get an HIV/STD test. It's been five months since my last test. Throughout my 20's I was tested sporadically. Every couple of years I would wind up with a new physician or have to complete a form physical. I never worried about the results.

My sex life was intermittent and I used condoms whenever I had a regular partner. I didn't think anymore about the HIV test anymore than I worried about the testicular cancer check. There's always a possibility, but I felt young and in control of my life. Finding someone to have sex with was a bigger priority than worrying about the consequences.

Going through my recent experience with possible HIV infection, it occurred to me that I was being irresponsible in not getting tested more frequently. Going in once every couple of years isn't enough. So I've decided to be tested at least twice a year from now on. It feels like a byproduct of age. Sex is no longer a lucky indulgence; it carries a real and heavy responsibility.

I don't like thinking about it in those terms. I'm impulsive and swoon at the faintest suggestion of romance. Thinking of sex in terms of an infection I might have given to someone else makes me want to vomit. But confronting nausea is a part of adult life, like eating brussel sprouts.

I had unprotected sex in the end of September. My last test was in early November. My inner den mother tells me I'm due for another test.

So I looked up the closest free clinic, found one that offered after hours testing, and made my way to it after leaving the office for the night. The clinic was at a crowded intersection, right across the street form a disco. It had a bright neon sign outside, advertising its services. I felt a flash of shame walking to the front door. I still have some remnant stigma about sexuality inside; I wondered if people were looking at me, the stupid slut walking into the STD shop for a tune-up.

There were six or seven men sitting in the clinic waiting room, reading magazines. Nobody looked up as I walked to the reception desk. It was 7PM. They were open until 9PM. I thought I had plenty of time. I caught a hint of confusion cross the receptionist's face as I approached, undercutting his practiced smile.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

I didn't know what to say for a split second. Was there a proper and discrete way to get the point across? Was there an unspoken protocol I should have been aware of?

"I'm here for an HIV test," I told him.

He started looking around the reception desk and didn't respond immediately. He handed me a card and then explained that they were booked for the rest of the night. Apparently getting an HIV test at a free clinic isn't as simple as showing up and asking to be seen. He told me there were eighteen people already in line when they opened that morning. He told me to come back the next morning and expect to wait the whole day.

It looks like responsibility costs a full Saturday waiting in a lobby and not just sneaking in an hour before closing on a Tuesday. Sex has such long and inconvenient tentacles.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Bartender

amboabe — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:48:00 GMT

I'm sitting at a corner table in a bar watching a man with a laptop bag still around his shoulder hitting on the bartender. He's cute, curly salt and pepper hair, dressed in one layer too many for the weather. The bartender is thickish with a pretty face and small breasts mashed into a tight black top.

Everyone wants to sleep with the bartender. How could you not be attracted to a person who appears in dark and drunken light, half a body floating indifferently through the murk, looking you straight in the eye and asking you what you want? Even when they're not attractive, they're always unaffected. There is nothing I could say to a bartender that hasn't been said already.

No pun, no insinuation of attraction, no trick of eye contact during an innocuous question. Bartenders are romantic sibyls; obscure Tina Turner's waiting for someone with a grin full of hope to step up and lie to them about how great things might be. They have nothing but time. This guy at the bar has been talking, making jokes, asking questions, putting on a show of being uninterested for more than half an hour. She smiles at him. She nods in acknowledgement, walking back and forth to customers, washing glasses and working the beer spouts. She smiles, and gives nothing.

He just paid his tab and left. "Thanks for the hospitality," he said, rising from the bar stool.

I tended bar one summer. I was nineteen; it was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college. I got a job working in the tourist village in Yosemite. I lived in a tent cabin beside a parking lot, working split shifts all summer. 8AM until 2PM and then 5PM to Midnight. In the mornings I worked the cash register at the ice cream shop, and in the evenings I'd pour pitchers at the bar in the pizza parlor.

Most of the people I worked with were felons. At that time there was a recruitment program that offered employment in national parks to people recently released from prison. My roommate had just finished serving two years for beating another man with a tire iron. One of my neighbors had done five years for something relating to cocaine (he always demurred when I asked him for details). I cried while sitting on a log in the parking lot on my first day.

I spent the summer trying seduce H, a waitress in the pizza parlor. She was a puffy lipped brat from Orange County. She was bony and talked about ska and surfing all the time. I would watch her from behind the bar gliding through the small circular tables in the manufactured lodge where we worked. When she returned to the bar with her orders I would steal details of her face; the little fissures in her lips, the translucent freckles across her round cheeks.

I found out she had a boyfriend my last day in camp. I got drunk with my neighbors, the felons. We drank Southern Comfort and goaded another boy who had gone to my high school and had a learning disability into wrestling a bear cub in the parking lot. I had the first hangover of my life the next day.

I used to watch "The Pick-Up Artist" a couple of years ago. A lanky man in a puffy fur hat said the best way to pick up a bartender is to feign indifference. Lean against the bar with your back towards her and avoid eye contact as much as possible. Condescension about her position of servitude is advisable. "What do you have going for yourself besides looks?" he suggested to his pupils as an opening.

You can't pick up the bartender. The bartender doesn't exist. But if you keep your mouth shut and look them in the eye without flinching at the right time, they might want to pick up you. And the prize is waking up the next morning with someone completely new in bed next you. It might even be a felon.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?

amboabe — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:37:00 GMT

How long do you have to date someone before you can start calling them your girlfriend or boyfriend? Is it even something you have to worry about asking?

A few years ago, I dated a woman for five months. I started to think of her as my girlfriend. I wasn't seeing anyone else, and we spent a lot of time together. By the third month we would talk almost daily. Texts were exchanged throughout the day, evenings were spent eating together or cocooned on a couch watching television.

I wondered whether we had crossed some formal threshold without realizing it. I remember sitting on her couch one lazy night, we were watching television, a show I would have found tedious under any other circumstance, but watching it with her gave it a new bearable quality. "This is what I would be doing with my girlfriend on a Tuesday night," I thought to myself. "So are you my girlfriend now?"

The more I thought about the question, the less I cared about the answer. I wasn't seeing anybody else and I didn't feel the need to look any further. I felt content. I had someone to laugh with, someone to eat and drink with, and someone to curl up beside on the couch at the end of a stupid Tuesday night. I didn't care if she was seeing anyone else. It didn't seem like it, she never flaked on me or had excuses spilling out of her purse at inopportune moments.

Things were comfortable and convenient. It was so easy that I thought it might be better if she were seeing other people. It might have made things seem like less of a concession. Getting together with someone because it's easy is never good news. The longer we went without confronting that piece of semantic housekeeping, the easier it would be for me to leave when the comfort became too much. Three months later I was seeing someone else.

I asked a woman last year if she would be my girlfriend. Actually, I asked her if she'd be my girlfriend "for six weeks." We had been going out for a couple of weeks and I'd known she was moving away from the start. The finish line was set hard and fast up ahead. I didn't ask her because I wanted to know what she would say. It wasn't a question. I knew what we were together.

In the space of a few weeks she had become a bright new center of gravity. She wasn't comfortable or easy, but inevitable. When I got her texts at work they didn't feel like surprising reminders that she existed. It was, instead, like seeing a wave finally reach the shore after having watched it build and come in from out at sea.

When I asked her, I knew the answer already. It was a declaration, not a question. It was a confession. I want you to be my girlfriend.

It's an arbitrary label to apply to someone, and it doesn't really change what's between two people. Call it a banana, but a label doesn't add intimacy or security, it just alleviates the stress of worrying about what comes next. Calling someone your boyfriend or girlfriend is like coming in out of the rain. There's an instant feeling of relief and security, as if you've accomplished something and can now sit back and enjoy the fruits of romantic achievement.

"Yes, I'll be your girlfriend for six weeks," she said, smiling in the dim bar light. It didn't change anything. It felt good to give an outward showing of how strong my feelings were. It was nice to see her smile because of it. That was all.

She left six weeks later. All I had left was a stupid placard with some old title on it, oxidizing with each passing minute.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar

amboabe — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:51:00 GMT

I haven't been able to post very much this week. I've been covering a big conference for my day job and have been swamped from the time my alarm sounds until the time I turn the bedside lamp off before collapsing into sleep somewhere after midnight. The world starts to look a lot different when it's dark and you're still doing something work-related, especially when there is a superficial veneer of the social laid on top.

Last night I was having drinks after a long day with a game developer and bloviating in a frazzled rant that evaporated into the air almost as soon as my lips closed around the tail end of my thoughts (Anyone think that's homoerotic?). There were two other couples in the bar, an old man and woman who looked like tourists in loose-fitting variations on beige. Then there was a couple tucked away in the corner who spent the whole two hours I was there making out with one another.

I kept looking at them. Neither person was especially attractive, and their kissing was almost meek. The man was clearly enraptured with the woman. He leaned into her the whole night, while the woman sat back smiling but still leaning away, forcing him to move towards her. She kissed him with her hands on his face, indulging brief moments and then pushing him away. Once or twice an hour they would lose each other in an octopus embrace, mouths straining to open wide, chins undulating around some unseen force passing between them.

I was rating them as I watched them. I was deconstructing the whole thing, analyzing who was doing what and trying to trace what their outward comportments were saying about their feelings. In the middle of a conversation about work, a medium to which I've dedicated a large part of my life's energy, I was perpetually distracted by an insinuation of sex.

In an interview I did a few weeks ago I closed with this question, "At the end of The War Room, James Carville said that next to love, a person's labor is the most valuable thing they have to share in life. Who do you make games for? Do you have an idea of who you're sharing your labor with?"

Sometimes the line between labor and love is vaporous. They are not separate things. So tomorrow it will be a challenge to avoid getting drunk and making lewd passes at colleagues because my sense of the perforation between personal and professional is non-existant. And then one of these nights I may finally have sex in a taxi.

Previous Posts:

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

amboabe — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:24:00 GMT

I had a pressing need to venture into the heart of the suburbs this weekend to find a Target. I rode BART to the end of the line in Richmond. I had never been out that way but my roommate told me that all my retail needs would be taken care of in that mythic borderland where the city meets the suburban wastes.

I got off the train in a gray drizzle and soon realized I was in the middle of nowhere. There was a sign announcing this was Downtown Richmond, but all I could see was a Burger King, some empty office buildings, and long corridors of stucco apartment buildings reaching towards the horizon.

I started walking towards the Burger King, hoping it would be the start of a commercial trail of cookie crumbs that would lead me to anodyne sprawl of Target. I was wrong. I kept getting further and further into a residential kaleidoscope. There wasn't anyone out on the sidewalks; streets were lined with ramshackle houses hemmed in with cold chain link fences.

I zig-zagged through the neighborhood for an hour, feeling my tether to the BART station grow tighter and tighter as I went. Richmond reminded me of Fresno, the Central Valley town where I grew up. It was peaceful, unassuming, and deathly quiet. You could see someone walking towards you from a quarter mile away and minutes would pass as you watched each other draw closer, tense and uncertain.

I went back to Fresno a couple years ago, taking pictures for a movie project that fell apart. I stopped at the neighborhood grocery store in the afternoon to get some water. It felt smaller than when I was a teenager, like a toy approximation of what I had been expecting. I walked past the bakery and someone called my name.

I looked behind the counter and saw a cross-eyed women with frizzy hair barely contained under a hairnet. She had crooked teeth and a blackeye. "You don't remember me, do you?" she said as I walked towards her.

"I don't think so," I told her, trying to place her face. It was pale and riddled with liver spots under the harsh lighting.

"I was your second grade teacher!" she said. "I remember you."

I had a faint memory of my second grade teacher, but it was impossible to reconcile this woman with that silhouetted shape. I was tiny then, and the orbit of my life was a blip, happily filled with the sugar rush of childish pleasure. The world was above me and I felt like I was gradually rising to meet it, a watery mirage waiting on the other side of the surface.

Then here was my teacher, cross-eyed somehow, bruised and withering (I kept wondering who in her life could have given her a black eye), baking cakes with industrial-sized equipment in a chain store. The more we talked the less I could reconcile our past and present states. I felt like I was watching someone drown while being drawn further and further away.

As I was walking back to the BART station, defeated in my attempt to find Target, I walked into a narrow pedestrian alley through an underpass. I saw a woman ahead of me, stubby and round, sauntering through the walkway in heels and a tight mini skirt. As she walked the mini skirt rode up her hips until her buttocks were drooping onto her dappled upper thighs.

She was walking slowly and I was catching up to her. The smell of piss and car exhaust was trapped in the underpass. When I was a few feet away she turned around as if she knew I had been there the whole time.

"Can I ask you a question? Does my butt show when I walk?" she asked. It looked like she was grinning to herself.

It did, but I didn't want to tell her so I lied. "No, not that I can see."

I asked her if she knew where the Target was. She said I was still a long way away, twenty blocks down. I knew she was lying. She smiled at me, it felt lascivious and confrontational.

On the other side of the underpass I peeled away towards the BART station and she kept walking straight ahead, wobbling on her heels and in no rush to get anywhere. Her butt was still showing. And I was still looking at it.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

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

Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs

Love Machine: The Three-Year Itch

Sex Machine: The psychology of the FEMALE ORGASM: "The PLEASURE PRINCIPLE"..plus throbbage.

zeitgeisty — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:44:00 GMT

The Female ORGASM.

It looms large in the male psyche. When you think of all the sturm and drang, fear, self loathing, feelings of inadequacy that can be associated with attempting to make a girl cum, it all seems a bit silly – especially considering that it’s something pretty much easily achieved with a little bit of rubbing.

Still, all this ‘worshipping at the altar of female sexuality’ continues. It’s never about the man – contrary to what the ‘perceived wisdom’ might be. I know women love to say that men are clueless, and only out to get laid, but this poses the question..

‘When exactly did it get to be the man’s job to provide the orgasm anyway?’

I mean think about it, why is it that men must ‘achieve’ their own orgasms, while women are ‘provided’ with theirs? I’ve always found this to be yet another instance of infantilizing the woman, and I’m sure it’s more prevalent here in America than anywhere else.

Of course looking at it logically, men probably have set up this situation themselves. By repressing women’s sexuality, we in turn must now go back in and find it for them. It’s the hero’s journey. This is all part of the sick puritanical hoe down – if you’ll pardon the pun.

I was reading an article in the New York Times the other day about a coed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm it was titled ‘The Pleasure Principle’. There was a quote that jumped out at me that stated…

“I don’t think women will really experience freedom until they own their sexuality.”

The thing that immediately popped in my brain was that it’s actually MEN that will never be free until they own their sexuality. Until women can be responsible for their own orgasm, true sexual liberation can never be achieved – or in the words of the immortal Richard Pryor…

‘Hey I GOT MINE… GET YOURS!!’

Personally I don’t know how many times I’ve had mind numbingly boring sex with women where it was all about THEIR orgasm. Complicated little rubiks cube permutations worked out to a science all for their pleasure. Sometimes performing excruciatingly painful prostrations as if I were some wine eunuch at the palace - to hell with my own pleasure – and for what? What did I get out of it? An ego boost?

Big fucking deal…

When you think about it, when it comes to sex, men’s pleasure doesn’t really play a whole lot into it. This first seems odd, as we are all so predisposed to think ‘it’s a man’s world’ across the board. The truth is it’s really a big scam – at least pertaining to the bedroom. As men we’re taught to appreciate sex as if we’re being handed some supreme gift from the gods, when the truth is there are two bodies being offered up, and all risks are shared.

When it comes down to it, for men it’s about ego and for women it’s about worship. The thing it should be about is animal – and I don’t mean to bring a sheep into the proceedings.

Sex should be wild, unfettered, animalistic and free – free being the operative word. Yes we should do our best to make each other feel good, but the ultimate responsibility for our own pleasure should rest squarely on our individual shoulders. We should not rely on someone else for ANYTHING and that includes the orgasm.

the dove girls..

Does HAIR matter?

SEX TIPS for DUMMIES

Patterns in relationships

Love in the time of recession

The MIA phenomenon

Getting nailed with a strap-on

Why smart people can't get laid

Going through old e-mail - revisiting past babes

How I picked up the babes on the internet

If you're hot then it's ok?

Handjobs in Hungary

Striving for consistently decent sex

one year anniversary

bachmann turns my stomach overdrive

dream date

i love ya but i don't like ya

how i met my girlfriend

date with a transvestite - blogger doodle

sex with ichat

the myth of the bad boy

blind leading the blind

facebook 25 responses

how wet do you get?

my lame attempts at voyeurism

Celebrity relationships

my soundtrack for a broken heart

Shaniqua

100 posts!

Choking on desperation

I'm not an ASIAN fetishist

Wouldjarather

junk in 'da trunk : the ASS file

Fun with dating confessions

Stay away from my nipples!

wouldjarather?

didjaever?

Are all women gay?

She was an ex nazi but she had spectacular jugs

new years resolutions

bloggerdoodle

are moustaches sexy?

the last 4 people i fucked slipped my mind

the indie girl in my office has knowledge of my bowel movements

merry xmas

twas the night before xmas

fuckability VS beauty

RELATIONSHIPS under stress.. Can true PASSION last?...

blogger doodle

Dancin'.. does it get you hot?

Telling the truth in relationships

How much sex is enough?

The end of jealousy for me

Get that Zeitgeisty look!

Blogger Doodles

Rate THEIR pick-up lines

Older babe alert

Obligatory posting on cyber-sex

the importance of finding true sexual compatibility

Will you just take my penis in your hand already?

Snark and ass

5 things I'm thankful for

licking ass and taking names

Snarky and assinine responses

The Origins of my cold, black heart

relationship dealbreakers

The different kinds of vaginas

Snarky dating confessions responses

I wanna bang your friend

Show me your jugs

translations

Is there an expiration date on passion?

translations

used to be cool - zeitgeisty on MTV

crazy pants

hurting for a squirting - the female ejaculation file

the gardener and the rose

blogger doodles 3

We fart therefore we are

TRANSLATIONS

Blogger doodles 2

My most cringeworthy moments with women

Are you a sociopath part 2

Are you a sociopath part 1

The sex and the city movie was lame

The worst sex of my life

commitment phobia is a myth

Translations...

TYPES

Do.. do women really suck in bed?

The odd disconnect between profile photos and reality

50 sexual expereiences I've never had

Dating COnfessions translations

I'm a breast man... the JUGS file

John McCain makes my peepee go limp

Video blog - 'The word on the steet' - the nature of attraction.

My dating confessions TRANSLATIONS

My internet dating advice

What we want vs. What we need and the power balance between man and women

All Porn SUCKS!!

The night PAULINA and I discussed sex

How important are someone's politics when choosing a patrner?

Nerve Confessions: It's all about the looks stupid!

Sex with someone I love - The MASTURBATION file

The Greatest Online Dating story - The PERSONALS file

'But baby I HAVE to put a profile up, it's required!!' - The GIRLFRIEND file

BITE ME! - Snark.

My first kiss...a remembrance of thing past

Feel the paste in you face - The FACIAL file

Talk dirty to me!!

I abstain! The fear to fuck

The unvarnished TRUTH about dating on the internet.

BITE ME!!!

Pontifications on the bangin' of ass - The ANAL file

The brass ring

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

amboabe — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:07:00 GMT

The first thing I heard on my alarm radio this morning was that Natasha Richardson had died of complications from a skiing accident. I had been asleep for five hours and it was still dark outside when the blare of the radio announcer reported her death. From that morose news he transitioned seamlessly into The Supremes.

I've never been in love with someone who died. The first dead body I ever saw was my grandmother's. She died in a small mobile home near my parents' house. Before the people from the hospital came to pick her up my dad asked me to come down and see her one last time. I had been with her two days earlier, when she was still alive. She was tired and in pain. She had a stress fracture in her spine that was a constant struggle for her.

I was scared walking into the bedroom of her flimsy little shack. The walls were thin and I could feel the floor bending underneath me. I was filled with superstition. A mobile of ghoulish imagery rotated around my mind: wrinkled and dangling flesh, toothless mouths, animalistic grunting. I was afraid my frail little grandmother, who stopped and pointed every time she saw a bird and made farting noises when she got up after dinner, had turned into some gnarled distortion of her former self. I was afraid she had been transformed into a monster.

Instead, she was just empty. Her face was neutral and quiet. Her body was lying flat along the plastic lined twin bed that she slept on. My father had folded her arms across her chest and put a few small flowers in her hand. She was the same as she had been, just a little bit colder and stiller. She was gone, but she was still there in almost every way that I had come to recognize her by.

Last April, I spent the weekend with the woman I was seeing. She was leaving in a week and we would have to stop seeing each other. The sun was starting to go down and the evening wind was gusting. We had spent the afternoon having sex but were going out separately that night. She had a going away party with some friends I didn't know and I had promised my boss I would come to his house warming party.

I remember lying next to her in bed, the daylight slowly graying and losing heat around us. I felt her warm, naked body against the length of my own body; a little envelope of heat where they met. Her head lay in the crook of my arm and when I looked at her face the first thing I could see was the curly line of small hairs running in an unkempt arc across her forehead. Her apartment was lined with stacks of half-filled moving boxes. We were drinking frozen sake from red plastic cups.

We went up onto the roof of her building to smoke. I put on one of her sheer silk robes, spilling over with paisley. We sat against the waist-high ledge that guarded the front of the building, looking south on the city. Everything was white and twinkling in the heatless light. The wind felt cold and kept blowing our robes open.

I put my arm around her and pulled her against me. I was shivering a little from the cold and the slushy sake. I teased her about something. She smiled and leaned in closer to me, pressing her arms up to her chest to hold in the heat. I felt like a ghost or an angel. Something inside me had switched over, a small floodgate was gushing out happiness. There was no urgency, everything was serene and far away, a composed miniature. It was cold, but the coldness kept pushing me closer to her.

And then—

Previous Posts:

Obituary Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

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

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

Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs

Love Machine: The Three-Year Itch

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

amboabe — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:16:00 GMT

There's something deeply territorial about being in a relationship. I went out to a bar with a woman I had been seeing last year. I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back there was a tubby guy in his late thirties sitting in my seat trying to make conversation with her.

The guy wasn't an enticing specimen. He had a desperate tinge to his laugh and he was dressed in Mom jeans and a dumpy jacket that fit him like a trash bag. Still, I felt a cockishness tickle the back of my brain. Who is this doughy little weasel that snuck into our corner booth the minute I got up? I crossed in front of him and took my seat, trying to politely follow what they were talking about.

I remember consciously thinking not to make any physical show of being with my girlfriend. I forced myself to not put my arm around her, or rest my hand on her thigh. I wanted to show him that I wasn't threatened by his presence. I was lying to myself.

When I turned eighteen, my older brother broke up with his girlfriend and called another girl he had dated to assuage his tenuous ego. She had started seeing someone new and after some contentious teenage words my brother wound up on the phone with her new boyfriend. They threatened each other for a few minutes and agreed to meet the following night to fight.

The next night, four kids rang our doorbell. They were hulking boys, not quite men, but strong enough to make the difference seem arbitrary. They were country boys, four junior firefighters in tank tops that showed off their veiny biceps and lumpy forearms. My brother went out to the front yard alone to talk to them. After some nose-to-nose man-barking one of them hit my brother in the face.

Seeing the three others waiting behind their friend, my brother turned around and started moving back to our front door. The kid jumped on his back and kept hitting him from behind. It looked absurd for a few seconds. Two grown men in a piggyback ride, arms and elbows flailing sloppily.

My brother threw the kid off his back and made it to the front door when my dad stepped in front of the boy. My dad is a bony accounting professor. He has a funny Danish accent and I've never seen him angry. He's not a fighter and when he stepped in front of the other boy it wasn't in aggression. But seeing my brother disappear in the front door the four kids turned on my dad. They surrounded him and let punches fly in a flurry. I heard the sick thud of bone and flesh smacking at high speed.

I saw my dad put an arm up to try and buffer the blows. He dropped to one knee. "Stay down, old man," I remember one of them saying as he stood above him. I was fourteen. I had been watching the whole thing, too scared to move. They broke my dad's cheek and eye socket. He had blood in his eye for a month after.

Love makes you vulnerable. Relationships can seem like an answer to some pervasive question; the elliptical dots at the end of all our metaphysical uncertainty. We idealize them as conclusions, irrevocable affirmations that we can be worthy and desirable partners. The truth is relationships are as temporary and vulnerable as anything else. They are a long series of choices; everyday your partner must wake up beside you and decide that you're still what they want. Every night they must look around them and choose to come home to you in sprite of all the other available choices.

It's easy in the beginning, when the love feels revelatory and the gravity of a new body is strongest. Over time, it's much harder to keep both partners mutually interested in fighting for one another, choosing to stay together with each passing day. We've invented convenient institutions to ameliorate the fear of being left, mandating the irreversible dictum of "until death do us part."

Knowing that you could promise away so much of your life to someone who could still walk away is scary. After all the dew-eyed promises and sincere vows of the everafter, there's no way to speak for tomorrow. You can't ever say what will happen. Sometimes it's enough to make a man take a swing at someone else.

Previous Posts:

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