date machine : sex

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

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

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

amboabe — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:18:00 GMT

When I turned 30 I threw myself a big party. I convinced a bunch of friends to come to LA for the weekend.

It was like a big slumber party for two nights, air mattresses. Sleeping bags took over the living room floor and my bedroom was filled with everyone’s luggage. I was worried about turning 30 for a long time. I was 25 when I abandoned my career in the movies to join Peace Corps. I was almost 29 when I finally returned. I had to start my life over from scratch. I did odd jobs for a few months before settling into a job testing video games with a bunch of high school students earning $290 a week.

Most of my college friends had made formal moves out of the earnest squalor phase of their lives. They were lawyers, geologists, teachers, and homeowners. I wasn’t worried about turning 30 because I felt old or decrepit, but I was aware that I’d sacrificed any real vertical achievement for the sake or a series of barely connected horizontal ambles. At 29 I was driving my father’s 1994 Geo Metro and putting 3 weeks of my monthly salary towards rent.

The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t care. I was doing what I wanted to be doing; there was nowhere else I could have imagined myself. I wasn’t exactly winning the fight, but I was engaged in the one that I wanted to be fighting. When I realized that, I decided that I had something to celebrate.

This was also around the time I started seeing a 37 year-old woman. I thought about our age difference all the time. She graduated from college the same year I started high school. She never gave any outward signs of being uncomfortable with our age difference. I would make a point to avoid anything that drew attention to it. Every now and then she would reference her college days, or some high school stories and I would try and look straight through her, rapidly hitting the fast forward button in my mind.

I liked her. She was curious, giving, spontaneous, she had a pink streak in her hair and good taste in shoes. We got along well, and entertained each other with our differences. It was a great friendship with sex thrown in as a perk. Still, it was strange confronting the edge of a generation gap. Her favorite music seemed outmoded to me, and she spent money in a way that I had only seen middle-aged housewives or children of privilege match.

When we kissed her taste was neutral. There was no lingering musk, no trace of the fecund sex hormones flowing through her body. Her saliva tasted literal, perfunctory, not suggestive. Her neck always smelled of perfume, but there was a twinge of the medicine cabinet underneath. The bottoms of her feet were flattened and permanently callused the way my mother’s feet were. She had the same white sunspots and thick knotty calves I’d seen on my mother growing up.

I don’t know if my reaction had more to do with the fact that we were better suited as friends than lovers, but I sensed her age in everything. Even when I wasn’t thinking about it directly, the age difference hung between us.

When you’re in love with someone you can get over a lot. The other day my friend S told me about her husband’s penchant for trapping her under covers in a cloud of his flatulence. If I could one day learn to live with the stench of my lover’s shit, I’m certain that a waft of the pill box on the nape of her neck would be manageable.

Her age hung between us because, in retrospect, there was a lot of distance between us to hang things in.

A few months later I hooked up with a 22 year-old. I wonder what I tasted like to her? I wonder how I smelled for her? Was there the germ of grandfather’s old A-shirts in my sweat? Did my mouth have the beginnings of the staleness of an old man gone a few too many hours without eating?

Sex is a window of opportunity. The farther apart yours ages, the less incentive there is to go through that window together. You have to be in love with someone to make up for it, or else it becomes stilted and ghastly. When I turned 30, I realized that my own window had shifted. But I wasn’t ready to let it shift that far ahead. Not without a better reason than being “good friends.”

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

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

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

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

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: 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

Date Machine: ahg, ambo, zeit threesome, plus booty calls.

airheadgenius — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:51:00 GMT

As advertised by Zeitgeisty, last night the three active bloggers on Date Machine went out on a non-date. (spjv has been incarcerated after a bar brawl and fishnets is locked in a tiny box after a revenge attack)

I hadn't planned to meet them because a) Zeit insisted on Manhattan and b) from some of their blog posts, it didn't seem worth the price of a babysitter.

But, it's Spring Break and my kids and their father cooked up a last minute scheme for them to spend the night at his apartment. This was the first time they'd ever slept over so it was a big deal.

I needed somewhere to go as I was feeling a little emotionally fragile and didn't want to spend the evening alone and, since most of my friends have kids, it was a bit late to make other arrangements. Upshot is, I met them in the East Village.

Ambo looks exactly like his photographs. There's an English expression for it: dragged through a hedge backwards. I mean that kindly. He has chaotic hair and is long and lean with a nice smile and laughs easily. He didn't say anything creepy the entire evening.

Zeitgeisty looks uncannily like his photographs. Actually, now I think of it, we've all seen him in 3D on the chicken dance video so maybe that's why he seemed so familiar. What was surprising about him was that he has a really soft, pleasant voice.

They are both abundantly bendy it would seem. At some point or other, they sat cross legged on the banquet seating. Are skinny people always bendy?

Neither one is remotely obnoxious and both were charming company. My reality has shifted.

Anyway, it was a fun evening and I was really glad for the distraction as I would have been miserable at home. I came back to an empty house and couldn't even go into the kids room because their absence was horrible. I didn't get to sleep until about 3am - it was so weird to be in the house at night alone. It occurred to me as I lay awake, that I haven't slept in a house by myself in 6 years. The last time I took a business trip was back when my first son was just over a year old. He stayed in our Manhattan apartment with his dad - we were still a couple - and I flew to LA to work in the garment center there. 4 nights without him back then was tough, but different from now because I wasn't so enmeshed in my role as someones mother.

Since then, I had a second child and they have been with me every single night with the exception of a long weekend when I went to Aruba with a girlfriend for my 40th and 9 nights when I went home to see my Dad before his surgery last year. Both times, I slept alone, but there was someone else in the house.

I missed them.

Although it did occur to me that my dating life would be easier and less expensive if I got a night completely to myself every now and then.

On the Date Machine non-date, we talked about booty calls and friends with benefits.
Both Zeit and Ambo said that they weren't into the concept, but kinda wished that they could be at times. Both don't seem to be able to separate affection from sex.

I was thinking about that last night, given that I couldn't sleep and there's precious little else to do at 3 in the morning in a house by yourself.
In the past, I wasn't able to separate the two either and could never have had the constitution for a FWB a few years ago, but now I've developed the ability to compartmentalise my needs and separate my desire for sex from my desire for love.

Like most things in my life, it all comes back to being a parent.

I am loved. As my kids and their dad got ready to leave yesterday, my 5 year old said "take my picture mummy so you can remember what I look like". I nearly cried. The theory of this event was great, but when the reality of it came, small son couldn't stop crying and had to be physically carried out by his dad (whom me loves, but he is just very attached to me)

I am loved. I am adored even.

I have some great friends so that's companionship covered. I have physical affection on an hourly basis from my children. What I am missing is sexual intimacy. And you can get a version of that with a booty call.

It's not the perfect situation - ideally I'd love to have love, companionship, physically affection and sex all from one person, but in the meantime I can get by with them in segments.

Synergy, or something.

Here are some I made earlier:
Is this thing on? Does anyone find love on Nerve?
Do you attract douchebags?
Jaded or pragmatic?
Let down badly by an Englishman
Dating and dying
Do your friends hook you up?
Is size everything?
King dong and kizz volume
Prostitues - yay or nay?
The female orgasm
Fabulous at 40, the reprise

I like this guys body, but there's something deeply disturbing to me about a man being coy.

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

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

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

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:

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: I'm Not That Kind of Girl

amboabe — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:59:00 GMT

I've never had sex with anyone I've met online. Almost every internet date I've had has been an intellectual experiment, trying to build something visceral and sordid from the personality bric-a-brac of an online profile.

The format encourages people to retreat to a comfortable distance and offer the least genuine portrait of themselves in the hopes of maximizing their allure. Online dating is a space for apparently evolved and mature people who are capable of finding a romantic partner through appreciation of mutual hobbies, common backgrounds, and interesting conversation. When I ask my women friends who date online about whether or not they hooked up with a date after an evening out, they are usually agog at my presumptiveness. "Of course not! I'm not that kind of girl."

A couple of years after college, my friend P spent a year traveling through Europe and Asia. I remember an email he sent me describing the fabled attitude of Scandinavian women towards sex. No one would seriously think about starting to date a man unless they had slept together already. You might get along perfectly well with someone, but if there wasn't any physical chemistry, what was the point? And how could you really know if there was any physical chemistry until you had slept with someone?

One of the most frightening things about meeting someone out at a bar is that you only have physical qualities and some vague hunches about personality to go on. It can feel reductive and carnal in the most basic form, seeing someone you're attracted to and finding a way to insinuate yourself into his or her evening. For some reason, sitting politely through dinner and talking about politics and nostalgic childhood memories is a more legitimate way of connecting with another person.

That may be a great way to make friends, but I don't think it's an appealing way to think about meeting a lover and partner. Of all the women I've ever loved in my life, my response to them has been immediate and primal. When I was fourteen I prank-called a girl and just hearing her voice say "Hello" for the first time was like sprinting into a tripwire and tumbling to the ground in a woozy pile. I didn't know what to say back to her; I was stupefied and tingling with the sudden flush of new nerve endings opening in my chest.

There's an inherent risk in dating. It can be as simple as risking rejection or as terrifyingly serious as courting new disease and infection. The "good" girls are the ones that are mindful of these social traps and maintain disciplined and formal conversation until a man can prove his reliability and interest in more than a quick and sweaty good time.

Those are the ones I hope to avoid. R was my first friend who used Nerve for dating. She told me that she hadn't met a single person from the website and not had sex with him. One of my closest friends in San Francisco is a woman who I had sex with after six hours of being first introduced. We've never had sex again and I'm pretty happy just being friends with her, but I certainly don't regret having pushed the outer limits of our attraction.

I like women who drive fast and take chances; who don't apologize for their sex and don't feel the need to adjust their behavior based on fear of what someone else will think about their expressions of sexuality. I want a woman who trusts her instincts as much as her intellect, and has faith in her ability to manage the consequences of leading with her heart and gut.

I've never met that kind of woman online.

Previous Posts:

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

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

Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous Posts:

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

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

Date Machine: Sex in the Office

amboabe — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 06:29:00 GMT

I was at work today and saw a picture of a man in a glossy yellow Speedo and Pikachu helmet in a random link someone sent me. It was accompanied by an ominous "not-safe-for-work" heading. Images of opening a scat porn page flitted through my head as I hit the link.

"Inappropriate" is one of my least favorite words. I have no idea what it ultimately means or why people use it the way they do. The idea of propriety implies an objective standard for something. When it applies to rogue links that pop up throughout the day, it usually implies something that is sexually inappropriate. You might not want to see footage of a baby inadvertently getting smacked in the head on YouTube, but odds are relatively low that you would wind up in an HR meeting if someone saw you watching it.

A picture of a naked human body, however, is generally cause for professional panic. One day at work I was tired and not thinking clearly. I inadvertently typed in the web address for my favorite porn site in my browser window. Before I realized what I had done there was a picture of a round-butted woman showing her vagina to the camera while two men stood on either side grinning.

I felt a timer go off in my head, measuring how many seconds the image was on my screen, visible to whoever walked by. Would my boss turn around in his chair before I could navigate the mouse icon to the small red X in the corner? Was someone already gaping in disgust behind me, passing by on their way to the Xerox machine?

I felt a diluted sense of impropriety looking at this sculpted man's body in a Speedo and cartoon helmet. It's not close to pornographic, but couldn't it make someone just as uncomfortable? NSFW.

I remember finding out two of my co-workers were having sex at work a few years ago. I was working for a big talent management company. The man was an assistant to one of the partners. I found it hard to believe a woman could find him attractive. He was pale and had a face that looked puckered and sour all day long. He spoke in mumbling half-measures and always ended his sentences with a glare that seemed confrontational. He was also a mouth-breather.

I found out he had been having an affair with a slinky blonde who worked for a department head and whom some people disliked strongly. She never seemed to have answers for anything. It looked like she had embedded herself in a great position with a puppy dog smile and a suggestive wardrobe (sheer and bland in the way that business attire can still tease the form of the body beneath).

For a few months they had been having sex in the copy room after hours. Working late was de rigueur; there was always a handful of frazzled assistants anchored into their headsets with a leaning stack of scripts still waiting in their inboxes. This was the first job where I ever masturbated on the clock. The nights when it was after ten and the cleaning people had come and gone, I sometimes felt a need for a second wind so I would swish down the hall to the bathroom and thump myself for a few minutes.

So it made sense to me that some of my co-workers were having sex in the spare corners of the office after a long day. I was glad it was happening.

For the amount of time the average person spends in an office, it's absurd to think their sexual side can be muted. I think about sex in some form all day long. In between emails, in meetings, while organizing articles; I fill in the spaces with a mobile of sense memories, a second of remembered touch, a moment wondering what someone looks like naked. These thoughts are inappropriate. A person should not acknowledge having them in a work environment.

It's terrifying the extent to which we've encouraged one another to incrementally dehumanize ourselves; to trade honest recognition with an appropriate façade, all for the sake of the company, for productivity, to spare some frail accountant's need for moral boundaries.

When I opened the page with the picture of the man-Pikachu on it, I was actually relieved. It was so much tamer than what had been going on in my head moments before.

Previous Posts:

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

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

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

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers, or the Padded Bra

amboabe — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:07:00 GMT

I was talking with my new roommate tonight and she admitted to a habit of telling men she is about to have sex with that she wears a padded bra. This reminded me of a few horrific moments I spent with an old girlfriend when we had sex for the first time.

I've never dated women with large breasts and I don't really care one way or the other. Breast size is pretty low on my list of wants in a partner. I've been with a lot of women who had smaller cup sizes and wore padded bras. These bras always struck me as bizarre machinery.

I admire a nice bra, a functional girding ornamented with lace and Victorian detail. There's something honest about the dual vanity and purpose of a bra. If the weight must be supported, then let it be supported beautifully. Extra padding in the cup doesn't have any purpose other than to mislead. Seeing a padded bra is always faintly disappointing. I never feel duped that someone's naked body didn't live up to the promise of the swells and slopes of the clothed silhouette. The idea that person I'm with wanted me to think they were something else, even superficially, is sad in some small way.

After spending an evening watching TV together, my ex and I moved to her bedroom together. We had kissed on the couch for a long time, slowly and without any great sense of urgency. I slid my hand over her body and she demurred. She would pull back for a moment and smile at me coyly, and then we would kiss again. I thought she wanted to move slowly and so I didn't try and escalate things.

Then she asked me to come back into her bedroom.

After a while, I was on top of her and began undoing her bra. I wanted to feel her skin against my own. The bra was a jarring obstruction every time it rubbed against my chest. We kept kissing as I slid the bra down and moved my hand across her bare breasts for the first time. I immediately panicked.

There was no breast there. Where I thought I might have felt some small mound I found only skin and rib cage. In the darkness it felt almost concave. An idea started to form in my head, her reluctance to escalate things in the living room, the slowness of our kissing, absence of anything beneath her bra. She must have had a mastectomy, I thought. I couldn't come up with any other explanation, so dramatic was the disparity between the poofy B cup bra and the planar landscape of her upper body.

Am I ready to have sex with a cancer survivor? Is there a proper method for making love to someone who's had a mastectomy? Was I doing something earlier that made her not want to tell me? What does it look like with the light on?

My mind was running away with itself, inventing an elaborate set of irrational conclusions in a few seconds. I was on the verge of asking her about it when she shifted her weight and I felt the thin layer of her breast ripple. I suddenly felt like an ass. She hadn't had a breast removed, it was just that her breasts were exceptionally small and all but disappeared when she was on her back.

I had no issue with her breast size. I wouldn't have given it a second thought had I known to expect it. I wasn't reeling at her body, it was the disparity of the projection and the reality. I wasn't there, naked and in bed with her, because of her body. I wanted to be with her, to feel like what it was like. I didn't want ideals. I wanted particulars, her particulars.

That can be the hardest thing to have faith in when you're having sex with someone for the first time. It's so much easier to let the person see what they want to see, to willfully mislead their gaze to an idyllic exaggeration. It's frightening to not apologize for yourself, to put it out there in all its adorned honesty and trust that whoever it is that you end up with will be able to take it and love it for what it is: a part of you.

Previous Posts:

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

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

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

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

amboabe — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:39:00 GMT

When I was in high school I imagined that being able to hold out for more than three or four minutes was a rite of passage. Watching porno and listening to other men talk about their sexual experiences I figured it was something that just inevitably happened, like baldness. I was wrong.

I always experience a moment of doubt when I'm sleeping with someone new and we're about to have sex for the first time. It's hard not to get carried away on the wave of excitement and physical discovery, which is usually when I start to wonder whether or not my sprinkler head is going to go off too soon after entry. There are few things quite as soul crushing as feeling like you've got to apologize for something after sex.

I have a decent understanding of the varying levels and intensities of my own arousal and what it means for my prospects of coming. With a little extra management and thought it's easy enough to keep everything at a maintainable level of arousal without getting the sneezy tingles. Still, there are times when it all evaporates into a vague momentum that suddenly materializes in a few irreversible seconds of spasm.

It's nice to think that lovemaking can be reduced to a handful of colloquial rules of thumb, but sex always surprises me. I can't think of a single experience I've had where there wasn't something new or unexpected. I'm surprised enough by all the subtle shifts and new aspects of my own body: a fleshy callous felt from the underside, the tangle of my hair in the mornings, the veins of my forearm. The more you get to know something, the more it changes.

Having sex with someone new is a flood of new detail. Feeling the touch of a new hand, the taste of a new mouth, the sweat of skin, a new rhythm, new contours; there's so much happening all at once that keeping track of my own arousal slips a few notches in importance. Then the moment is irrevocably at hand.

Other times, I come too soon because I just don't care about lasting longer. I get infatuated with my own immediate feelings and don't want to moderate them at all. I want the galloping rush to carry me in as far as it can. This is usually the least satisfying kind of sex. In the moment it seems like a great idea; the impulse to keep pushing farther and faster is totally logical. Then it all evaporates, the starry chariot that seemed to be ascending heavenward minutes earlier is transformed into a sweaty hulk with only a distant echo of that thrill left inside.

I suspect this kind of low-level joy, the natural equivalent of popping a whip-it, is what makes it so easy for men to celebrate sex as something worth bragging about. This kind of sex is the ego running unrestrained, the dog off the leash bounding through the park with no understanding of where it's going or why.

For how much anxiety I've experienced over coming too soon, I've never gotten any real flack for it from the women I've been with. "Don't let it get to your head," S told me the first time we had sex for a good three minutes.

I look at orgasms during sex like punctuation in a paragraph. They don't make me tired, or lethargic. They're energizing and they make me more interested in continuing. It makes me hungry to see and feel even more of my partner. When I masturbate, I avoid doing it late at night because it will keep me up with a racing heart and restless mind.

There's something private about having an orgasm. It can be like a little departure, watching your partner leave her body for a moment, eyes closed, moving in a silent rhythm of her own making. In the best cases, both people can go along to the same relative height, like looking at someone on opposite sides of an elevated chasm. Coming early is like being on a pretty mountaintop and not seeing anyone else, it's pretty and lonely. Narcissistic and irresistible.

Previous Posts:

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

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

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

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Beacause…

amboabe — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:57:00 GMT

The times are grim for abstinence organizations in America. Under George W. Bush organizations that promoted abstinence in sex-education received more than $175 million a year. When the Obama administration submits the first draft of its budget to Congress later this year, chances are high that spending on abstinence-only sex education will disappear.

I'm not sure what the main thrust of my sex education was in high school. I only have two memories from the class, which wasn't available until I was a senior. There was the expected bevy of STD slides blown up to cataclysmic proportions on the overhead projector. I've sat through this presentation at least ten times in my adult life and I still can't remember which disease is supposed to burn and which one causes lesions. Is The Clap gonorrhea or syphilis? I still have to look it up.

My other memory is of an assignment where each student had to make a graphic lifeline for themselves, starting with the important events of their childhood and continuing on through a speculative adult lifespan. I remember only one kid in the class of thirty included sex in his timeline. Everyone else was busy reflecting on poignant family trips, big games, or memories of close friends. D left all of that out of his timeline and instead told us all about how he lost his virginity when he was fourteen, and how it was one of the most important experiences in his life.

He didn't go into any more detail and he didn't anoint the topic with undue nostalgia or verbal wisteria. But he admitted to sex being an important and cherished part of his life in front of a room of his peers without any irony, self-deprecation, or cheap punchlines.

I was still a virgin at seventeen, and mostly convinced I would remain so until marriage. I had no idea what sex was beyond the whispered rumors in hallways and the lusty pantomimes on television. I understood the mechanics. The diagram of how sex happened was perfectly clear, but I didn't ever stop to think that it might actually mean something beyond the elliptical unicorn fantasy I had about it.

The problem with abstinence-only education isn't anything inherent to the idea of celibacy. It's more that it seeks to limit a person's understanding of sex outside of their own chosen practices. There's no great trick to protecting yourself from STD's nor to understanding how the reproductive system works. The pervading mystery is why, in spite of all that simple and easily available knowledge, our instincts still push us towards irrational choices in the throws of sex.

I've made a lot of irresponsible decisions with sex. I have been lucky to have avoided any life-altering consequences, but every time I've had unprotected sex with a one night stand or someone I should have thought more carefully about protecting, I knew what I was doing. I realized my behavior was illogical and carried the possibility for unintended circumstances. But my feelings were so strong in the moment that my logic was overruled.

The tragedy of sex education has been a fixation on the facts in a vacuum. Sex ed is an hour spent looking at penile chancres on a big screen, or a week spent caring for a symbolic baby doll. We describe everything that surrounds sex, but we still don't talk about the act itself and what it means to us; why it matters. Everyone has different answers to that question, and there isn't any final truth to arrive at, but shouldn't that spectrum be a part of the education offered to children?

What is sex to begin with? At the end of his life Akira Kurosawa said he understood less about what makes a film then when he first began half a century earlier. Growing is a process of discovering the extent of your own ignorance. The more sex I have, the less certain I am about what it is. It's good. It's bad. It's thrilling. It's exhausting. It's scary. It's surprising. It's beautiful. It's slow. It's fast. It's happy. It's sad. It's lonely. It's transcendent. It's an obligation. It's a delight. It's a new discovery.

But it's not something that fits on an overhead projector, regardless of whether science or religion has had the last say in drafting the facts.

*Second picture taken from the Slice Blog by Jessica Yatrofsky.

Previous Posts:

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

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

Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs

amboabe — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:30:00 GMT

I used to have a stupid habit. I would go into a social setting and announce a challenge. I'd wager some arbitrary sum of money that no one in the room could make me come in less than ten minutes. I thought it was an innocuous icebreaker, but once somebody actually took me up on it.

I had forgotten the word "handjob" existed until I saw Rushmore. There's a scene in which two fourteen year-olds debate the claim that a mother is giving out handjobs in a local swimming pool. The idea of someone touching my penis in the buildup to sex as being anything worth bragging about is ridiculous. It's just a part of what happens during sex. I wouldn't have singled it out anymore than I would have described the kind of mustard in the sandwich I ate for lunch today. There was definitely mustard in it, and it was an important part of the sandwich. But saying there was mustard does little to really describe the experience as a whole.

Hearing the debate about the sexual version of condiments was a small revelation for me. I had forgotten about the adolescent fixation on sex as achievement. "Oh my god, this is great. I've got to hurry up and finish so I can tell my friends," as the comedian once said. The term handjob is so hairless and deliberate. It's entirely juvenile to think of being in the same room with a woman and emerging with nothing more interesting than a manual pistoning. It's something only a fourteen year-old could marvel at (and I, most definitely, used to be that fourteen year-old).

Coming from an adult, bravura about "handjobs" is absurd. That's why I got stuck in the habit for so long. It amused me to walk into a room of comparative strangers with a crass line soliciting a handjob, in the form of an ineptly transparent wager. To my thinking, it was a good way to loosen a stiff crowd and bend conversation towards territory that was more personal. I become the vulgar buffoon by going too far, but hopefully some people will feel a little bit less timid about taking conversational risks of their own.

Then one time, a friend of mine took me literally. I was trying to pass out on a couch after a party when my friend S coerced a woman into calling my bluff about the handjob bet. I heard some muffled conversation coming from outside and suddenly I felt a warm body lying on top of me. I felt someone's tongue licking my lips, and a hand worked its way into my pants. I had spent the evening drinking rum and snorting Phenobarbital (which was a bad idea).

I opened my eyes and recognized my friend L above me. We had hooked up once before so it made a little more sense that I was suddenly involved in foreplay when I had just wanted to go to sleep. But I knew what was happening and it was disconcerting to be called out about something so openly ridiculous.

I was in bad shape. I felt like the inside of a bar drain, grimy and sick. I liked L. She was smarter than me and wore glasses that darkened in the sun. I wasn't sure if I wanted to have sex with her, but I probably would have been convinced had I been in better shape.

Instead, I became the butt of my own joke. She couldn't make me come in less than ten minutes.

So ended my phase of making handjob jokes.

Previous Posts:

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

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

Date Machine: You people smell

airheadgenius — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:22:00 GMT

Long story, but the short version is that I rent one of my apartments out short term.
There's a strictly no smoking policy. There's even the threat of a $300 fine for any infraction.

Some people left the other day. Sweet, hippie couple. Couldn't have been lovelier.
I went into the apartment after their departure and thought it smelled kinda funky. Mannish. Hippyish. Patchouli oil and sweat. But what can you expect from hippies right? Especially hippies on a romantic long weekend away.

As the smell dissipated though, it became clear that there was a strong undercurrent of cigarette smoke.
The apartment is furnished and everything smelled to high heaven. The linens, the drapes, even the rug. It was nasty.

It took two days of open windows, a bottle of febreze and copious amounts of detergent to air the bugger out.

Which brings me to dating and smoking. I smoked for a good 17 years - from aged 13 - and quit cold turkey on my 30th birthday. I missed it like someone died for the first few months, but was determined that my lungs had suffered enough abuse and it was time for them to breathe deeply again.
It probably took a good six months for my sense of smell to come back.

And see, that's the thing: smokers have no idea how bad they smell. Cos the fuckers can't smell it.
But trust me, oh smoking people, you reek to high heaven.

I hate it if I am riding in elevators and someone steps in having nipped out for a cigarette break. The smell on their clothes in that horribly confined space is just nauseating. I would hate to greet a lover, move in for a hug and smell stale smoke, much less taste it on their breath.

At this point, what with my sense of taste and smell back to tip top condition, I don't think I could date a smoker.

Could you?

Here are some I made earlier:
Click Addict
Profile Pictures
If I don't get laid soon
Sex standing up
Is this the best you can do?
Are you insulted?

Juicy Lips

Today, it's a Daily Un-Knob. Don't try this at home.

Sex Machine: The Kink In My Hair (and other weird fetishes)

spjv840 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:38:00 GMT

When it comes to fetishes, I'm pretty vanilla. I'm not into toe sucking, toe licking, being whipped, beaten, choked, donkey punched, being pierced by large needles in strange places. I don't get off on latex, being watched or watching others, orgies sound more like a huge collection of germs than a good time and people with stumps do not turn me on. F*ck me in the ass and I'm happy. But not everyone is so easily satisfied...

I saw an ad on craigslist recently in the "strictly platonic" section (because we all know how well that rule sticks) from a man looking for women with medium to long hair who would be willing to let him wash their hair and nothing else. And he's willing to pay! I'm imagining a new kind of hair salon here where women and men go in and get paid to have their hair washed by people with kinky hair washing fetishes.

My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to go on a search of various sexual fetishes to see how weird some of these get. Strap in, or strap on, it might get bumpy.

Things that turn some people on, in no specific order:

Vorarephilia - eating or being eaten by others; usually swallowed whole, in one piece

Vomerophilia - being attracted to VOMIT

Hybristophilia - criminals, particularly for cruel or outrageous crimes

Coprophilia - Poop play

Diaperism - attraction to diapers or people wearing diapers

Frotteurism - rubbing against a non-consenting person

Apotemnophilia - being an amputee

Lactaphilia - attraction to human breast milk

Mammaphilia - female breasts (.....)

Ondinism - pee play

Peodeiktophilia - exposing one's penis in public or non-consenting person

And then it gets really weird. There are sites dedicated to:

- Trampling (women walking over men, usually in heels)
- Girls eating sandwiches
- Gut flopping (use your imagination)
- Girls sneezing
- Crippled women

And don't get me started on Objectum Sexuals, or people who are in intimate, emotional, sexual relationships with inanimate objects.

Sex Machine: Bigger Isn't Always Better

spjv840 — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:52:00 GMT

I once dated a man who had a very large urethra opening. The kind of large where you can't help but stare at it in surprise for a second before realizing that maybe you shouldn't be staring at it with a look of shock on your face. That sucker was BIG, man. I could probably have stuck my thumb up there, but I'm not into that kind of thing (NSFW).

I've never seen anything like it and quite honestly, hope I never do again. Not to be mean or anything, but it was really unattractive - like a big eye staring right at you. I remember catching a glimpse of pre-ejaculate fluid pouring out of there and thinking "EW, that's going to be in me in any second now".

My question is this: Why do some men have larger urethra openings than others? Does it get stretched? Or is it like ears and noses and it just comes (...) in different sizes?

Have you had experiences with larger than normal urethras?

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

amboabe — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:45:00 GMT

A few months ago I was at a press event in downtown San Francisco. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon listening to media briefings, chatting with PR people, snapping photos, and trying to figure out what would be worth writing about. Just as the conference room lights and business friendly chatter was making me feel like I was trapped in a windowless nuclear bunker, I decided to get out. The first place I could think of escaping to was H&M, where I bought a bunch of new underwear to wash the business casual sterility out of my pants.

I don't need more underwear at this point in my life. I have a drawer filled to the very top with a variety of intimate wear that could last me three or four weeks without a washing. Underwear shopping is a new vanity I've given over to in the last few years. I get excited for a few minutes every morning when I know that I'll be putting on a colorful new pair. I stare at myself in the mirror for a few minutes before putting on my pants, taking in my body, the swells of cotton, the edge where the hem becomes skin.

A few years ago, the thought occurred to me that my perfect sexual mate would be a clone of myself. I would know every last little corner of the body, and might feel some disembodied pleasure in sharing that knowledge with an intimate doppelganger. Is it gay if it's with yourself? Buying new underwear in the afternoon on a Wednesday is a concession to that metaphysical ghost, my shadow lover.

Shopping is vaguely sexual to me. The crowds of curious strangers, the idealized ensembles, the impersonal optimism of the music, the white walls and tiles framing it all. Clothing stores always remind me of this, the collage of expressive colors framed in restrictive white box buildings. They want to lure you into the mirage of a better version of yourself, thinner, sleeker, and perfectly unique. Everyone mulls around in comparative silence searching for their own personal mirage.

Someone I used to date told me she had sex in a dressing room once. It's hard to describe the flames of jealousy that rose inside me when she told me this. I've never had sex in a dressing room, but I can't think of a single sexual experience I would want more than that. It's such a startling experience to find yourself alone, in a small boxed room in the heart of a department store; stripping down to your underwear, staring at yourself nearly naked in the mirror, anticipating the discovery of some new skin, a flattering pair of pants or a fitted shirt.

I would want that moment to involve the surprising discovery of another person, not just a pair of pants. To be in the cement bowels of Union Square, shivering under the heatless lights, and to be there with someone else. Swoon.

This morning, I put on one of the pairs of underwear that I bought that day. They looked amazing on the rack, the color seemed like it would mesh perfectly with my skin tone under the store lights, the bright elastic band seemed like a perfect little accent to have poking above the belt line of my jeans. It seemed perfect imagining it there on the rack.

Previous Posts:

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

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

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

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

Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date

Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

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

Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party

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

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Drunk Men Do It.....Better?

spjv840 — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:22:00 GMT

It figures this survey would come out a week after I decide to give up booze for good.

According to this survey by Western Australia's Keogh Institute for Medical Research drunk men are better in the sack than the sober fellas.

"We found that, compared to those who have never touched alcohol, many people do benefit from some alcohol, including some people who drink outside the guidelines," Dr Chew said.

Is this the universe playing a cruel joke on me?

After studying the effects of alcohol on 158 Australian men researchers found that men who drank within the recommended guidelines had 30% fewer problems during sex than their sober peers. Clair Weaver of The Sunday Telegraph said that "Even binge drinkers had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who never drank, although this type of drinking can cause other health problems."

And to fuck with my universe even more, researchers said that ex-drinkers were the ones with the highest rate of problems in the sack.

It's not all that surprising, I suppose. After a few drinks inhibitions fall, the sex is hot and everyone ends up (at least somewhat) satisfied because there's no holding back. When you have too many drinks the only thing that falls is the man's limp dick and the woman's hopes for the night.

The article went on to say that "After other risk factors were excluded, weekend drinkers, high-risk drinkers and those who exceeded alcohol-intake guidelines had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who drank one day a week or less. Ex-drinkers, however, had the highest risk."

So what happens to all those other studies that said alcohol turns a man's penis soft and makes drunk sex sloppy? Gimme a minute...I'm trying to think of all the drunk sex I had versus the sober sex......................Jesus, they might be on to something here.

Thoughts?

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

amboabe — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:17:00 GMT

Pictures tell lies. They trap a moving, changing moment into a single frame that points to a vague encapsulation of the truth. I saw a picture of Barack and Michele Obama dancing face to face at the inaugural ball, and I immediately started wondering if they were going to have sex on inauguration night. I can't fully imagine what it must be like to be so close to a lifemate after having gone through such a dramatic transformation, from gangly law student to American figurehead. Does sex have place in that world anymore? Is there time for physical intimacy with so many dire threads dangling on the periphery of the celebration?

Watching someone evolve is inevitable in long-term relationships. For many that I know, this constitutes a kind of gradual slackening. Getting married is a finish line, a celebratory goal after which two people can give over to the pursuits of property management, consumption, and an annual vacation to a postcard somewhere in South Western Bavaria or the West Indes. How many people get to see their partners actually excel over time? How many loving spouses watch their mate become more than he or she was as an awkward undergrad?

This is me projecting, but seeing the Obama's dancing against a blue sea of heads gazing up in the darkness, it's hard not see the sex there between them. Barack's forward-leaning posture, his chin jutting hungrily into Michelle's face, I can almost see the thoughts in his head. The wetness, the warm touching of skin, the rhythmic thrust inwards, straining to ascend, the hips rising in anticipation of his momentum. The arch up, the coming together, the falling back, the dilated pupils, the clenched hands, fingers interlocked.

It all becomes a metaphor in the picture when I look at it, the two people there project sexual silhouettes, stuck in the gaze of a political machine, but still holding onto the mundane mystery of a human relationship.

One of my greatest fears about long-term relationships is thinking about the ways that I'll change over time. I don't feel any different inside now than I did when I was a boy, but pictures tell me that I have changed. I can only imagine what changes are left for me in the coming decades. This image terrifies me: a woman looking at me in twenty years, wondering where the wave broke, wondering when the man I used to be transformed into the slouching, wrinkled reduction sitting on the couch.

It makes me woozy to imagine a relationship that is still on the upslope twenty years later, cresting unimagined territory, moving forward in tandem. I can't imagine experiencing it from that height without needing the expression of affection to take a physical form, to put in primal action all the things words miss.

But it's just a picture in the end. A stolen frame, a fraction of a second in a night that must also be larded with hand shaking, obsequious coddling, political ingratiation, and impersonal pomp. How much of that momentary flush of desire can be left after a maelstrom of toothy smiles and flashing bulbs? I don't know. When I imagine myself in that position, the secret service is guarding the door while I'm in the bathroom fucking my wife, trying to hold on, in momentary freefall.

Previous Posts:

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

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

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

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

Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date

Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

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

Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party

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

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

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

Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap

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

Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex

Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux

Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

State Machine: SHANIQUA the kind lass who busted my CHERRY...and god bless AMERICA...

zeitgeisty — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:30:00 GMT

I can hardly believe it, today we’ve just witnessed the inauguration of our country’s first black President – my heart is overflowing with pride and I feel an optimism I haven’t felt since I was a child. It’s truly a thrilling moment.

It is mind boggling to see how far we’ve come in such a short while. It seems just these past few years we’ve been steadily righting the ship in definitively positive increments as far as race relations go. In fact I now can state confidently that the time is at hand for a coming together as a nation finally, and decidedly. All the prejudices and discriminations of the past will soon enough just seem like a distant poisonous cloud arching high up, hanging over almost imperceptibly in the far corner of our memory dissipating across a new morning sky.

For me, all of this makes me think back wistfully to 1993, when things were still so different…1993 the year I lost my virginity.

1993…1993. Seems like a lifetime ago. Shit, it IS a lifetime ago.1993, an awkward time filled with the irritating sounds of bell biv devoe, infused with Temple of the Dog - a nauseating combo if there ever was one.

1993 - flannel and Malcom X hats, Northern Exposure and a Different World… Nirvana and Dr Dre!...

…and there suspended in the amber of my soul like some prehistoric moth, lies the memory of Shaniqua – the kind lass who finally busted my burdensome cherry.

To be honest, my parents weren’t thrilled to death when I told them I was dating a black girl, as they still had their heads all wrapped up in that whole ‘other-ism’ trip at the time. It wasn’t like they were totally over-the-top with their opinions, it was more of an aching sense of disapproval I’d get each time I looked in their eyes. Still, you can’t really blame negative learned behavior, all you can do is try and un-learn it – which they have over the years with a bit of prodding. Anyway, they were just looking out for me - they didn’t want any trouble…

…and remarkably we did get our fair share.

At first it was truly hard to comprehend, I mean, we lived in New York after all, not Alabama. Yet here we were receiving hostile stares, being confronted with rude angry remarks, and one time some crazy fuck even spat at our feet. Of course being a total wimp, I was pretty much useless in these situations. All I could do was feebly curse them out, or block them out of my perception in general. I didn’t have the balls – or physical wherewithal – to kick any ass.

Still we hung in there for awhile, despite the fact that we really had absolutely nothing in common. She was nice enough, don’t get me wrong, and I shall ever be grateful to her for finally releasing me from the shackles of my virginity, but it was hardly a perfect match. Actually, it probably had more to do with the fact that I was pretty much an intolerable asshole at the time more than anything else.

You know, I haven’t spoken to her in 16 years, and now can barely even picture her calm and even countenance, but she’s significant to me – she’ll always be my first foray into the realm of the senses. It’s funny, I remember the room where it all went down – cigarette butts on the carpet, musical equipment strewn about, a general sty – but I can’t for the life of me remember the actual act. She was a good gal though, and I wish her well.

So Shaniqua, shall we say...all that will be and ever was?… all that I never said… and with tears still in my eyes, President Obama’s inaugural address still ringing in my head…

…. God bless America.

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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