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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contrarian Corner: Mirror’s Edge

Animal Collective: Meriweather Post Pavilion Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you then.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

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

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

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

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

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

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

amboabe — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:43:00 GMT

I can't remember exactly how old I was the first time I put a finger into my own ass, but I remember liking it. I was probably 15 or 16. I was so guilt ridden about it after the fact that I walked around the house for hours torturing myself with the idea that I was probably gay as a result. What other implication could there be for a man to inserting something into his ass? As airheadedgenius pointed out, it's difficult to escape the power play implications with anything involving a man's behind. For a man, putting something into someone else's ass is macho; putting something into your own hindquarters is a lilting defeat. The alpha versus the limp-wristed beta.

It's the same idea that underscores our thinking about dick size and the entirety of sexual expression in a culture where sex is a commoditized lever to manipulate people's insecurities. Sex is a blunt instrument that you exercise, correctly or incorrectly, on your supine partner whose receipt of your unbridled sex thrust is an acknowledgement of his or her powerlessness before the mighty cock. The way zeitgeisty talks about anal is like the Patrick Bateman school of sex.

Stripped of all its macho connotations, though, the ass is just another collection of nerve endings that can be used to pleasure yourself or your partner. The presence of the prostate lying dormant a few inches inside is a double win for men ready to loosen up their instinctive recoil again letting themselves become the receiver for one mortifying moment. Ass play can be an incredibly gratifying sexual experience though, for either sex. It's a kind of sexual dissociative.

The sensory experience of sex for a man is so typically wound up in the act of penetrating, and the specific group of sensations that come along with it. Feeling yourself penetrated at the same time that you are enjoying the metaphysical whoosh of penetrating someone else is surreal. It's an out of body experience, like an alien abduction or astral projection. It's like being in two separate places at once, wholly conscious of everything around you.

One of the enduring mysteries of heterosexual sex is the fundamental divide that separates the penis and vagina. No matter how much rhetorical information we might pick up in afterglow confessions or coffee shop dishing, men will never really understand what it feels like to have a vagina nor will women ever understand the sensation of having a penis. I used to lament this fact when I was younger. Talking to some of my girlfriends about their orgasms I felt wholly jealous that a hummer and gradual build up to ejaculation were my only sexual prizes. It's nice but when there's talk of 20 minutes of roiling orgasm where the whole world turns a different color, it's hard not think of getting one's nut off as a milky consolation prize.

Is ass play the key to breaking into this orgasmic ether? Is "banging" an ass, or anything for that matter, really the key to convincing someone that they love something? Is it just another way of reestablishing the traditional power positions in a newer, hipper vernacular? There's something undeniably whole and complete about uniting the act of penetrating and being penetrated in one person. It also seems to be a particular pleasure that's unique to the male libido. What's the female analog for penetrating?

Ass play can certainly be a complicated affair; it often requires a good deal more attention to timing and logistics than most other sex acts. But in the end it's just another fundament in the language of sex. Avoiding it is sort of like dating someone who insists that you never bring up politics or religion with them. It's not like politics or religion are so inherently important to a relationship, but the focus on them as immutable taboos are surely an indicator of some lapse in communication or basic dysfunction. Likewise, banging someone's ass can be like filibustering a conversation. An empty bit of formalism that gives the appearance of function but whose primary purpose is to prevent progress and avoid confrontation with the other side.

date machine : taboo

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

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'