Fucking and punching (keys)

I'm not dating and I'm not writing. These two things both are and are not related. Both, however, seem to make the handful of people who seem to care about me express concern about my general well-being. Now, I could write some treatise on how being single is a choice and being all up someone's butt (and having someone up mine) stresses me out anyway. And about how I get blocked from time to time and the average length of my writing blocks is about two years and so this one is really nothing to worry about. But, like, I'm a little worried about me too.

First, let's explore the creeping horror that overwhelms me every time I consider venturing forth into the jungle to find me a mate. It's not that I've acquired a growing husband-hunger or baby-hunger or that I'm feeling that mythical ticking of my biology (my body is not a bomb) hammering away at my insides. I do not feel a hankering to "settle down," as it were. But I do like having a little company. As I've confessed here before, I'm not exactly un-lonely. It's been about six years since I've had anyone in my life I'd consider a partner. And, truth be told, I have not had one single solitary date since I was pregnant. And that's coming up on a year ago already.

Oh, yeah. The lasting effects of my abortion. Sorry, this isn't really about that. Not exactly, anyway. I do not regret it. Let's take that off the table right now. I don't fantasize about having a little bundle of shit and drool--I mean, joy--to keep me company. I want a grown-up in my life, thanks. Not someone who'll make my house smell like spoiled milk. But there are lasting effects of the pregnancy. Or rather, lasting effects of the series of events that led up to the pregnancy and the series of men who populated said events.

My loneliness had me flinging myself from short-lived affair to short-lived affair with people I really didn't like very much. It was a full-scale clamor for some kind of intimate connection and I was using sex as a short cut toward that intimacy and/or a screening tool to determine if there was even a chance of ever getting there. I like sex. I need sex. I can't really get to know a person without it, I don't think-- not really. Not the way I want to know a person. But short cuts are unpredictable and this particular one seems to function more like a worm hole--hard to tell where you'll wind up on the other side. Sure, I should have known that I should have proceeded with more caution, when some other, less impetuous methods of judging compatibility would have had me ending most of those short-lived affairs before they'd begun. Pretty much without exception, I knew I didn't want to date those guys before I slept with them. But I second-guessed myself and worried I wasn't giving them a fair shot--only to learn a couple weeks later that my gut's not so stupid after all.

So, at this point, getting back on all those horses (or new horses, as the case may be) just makes me tired in my bones. And there's a bigger problem too. Even if I swear to forgo sex until I'm sure I like someone, I don't have much faith in the notion that there IS someone out there I'll like. (Panic button thought: and then I'll never get laid!) Now, friends tell me this attitude is overweeningly pessimistic, so much so that it sounds just like one of those prophecies I could fulfill all by my lonesome (so to speak), right? But is it? I mean, sure, I can put on my saddest of sacks and bemoan that Mr. Right For Me just doesn't exist on this mortal plane, but that's not really what I'm getting at. I feel as though I've been dating for a long time. A long, long time. I've gotten snarled up in a long relationship that almost worked, but had some irreparable flaws. I've played around with some not-quite-real relationships that I knew were wrong from the start. And I have met a lot of no-way-no-how-I-don't-care-how-hard-your-cock-gets kind of folks. Actually, I would say that a preponderance of this latter sort of fellow has filled my dating cup and overflowed it.

So, here I am, 33, carrying so many emotional suitcases you could call me Madame Tutli-Putli, and thinking, you know what? Maybe the dude who can put with me, and who I can also tolerate, doesn't exist. I don't come to this tentative conclusion out of pessimism. I come to it out of experience--the sort of experience that's left me too exhausted and wounded from the oft-repeated first, second, third date grinds and the disappointment and the plain ol' cringing remembrance of mistakes past to go at it again. I'm not real sure I have another college try in me. I mean, I'm fucking old. And cranky. And not just a little world-weary.

So, I'm lonely. So, I'm not dating. Frankly, I still want to skip dating. I want to get to the partnership thing already and leapfrog right over the obligatory getting-to-know-you steps. And, perhaps, this has always been my problem. Only now I know that fucking my way past the early stages drags some ugly side-effects behind it. Like a pregnancy by an asswipe, for instance. And a handful of guys who think I'm this awesome, liberated, no-strings fuck-beast and therefore seem to like me a lot more than I like them (up until, like, date 7 or 8, at which point they discover that I'm a depressive, neurotic, anxious little thing (Seriously, dudes. Just read this blog. It's right here.)), for another instance.

Shut up. I know this stuff --sex not being a short cut to real intimacy-- is supposed to be obvious and all decorated with circus lights and shit. But it isn't. It just isn't. And, for me, I don't think the temptation to use it as such will never be more than a whim away.

So, I'm not dating right now. I have no idea how long this dormant period will last--but probably at least until the idea of ending it doesn't make my stomach roil with bile. Really, I think that if the idea of dating, in the abstract alone, has puke-phobic me glancing sidelong toward the bathroom, it's probably for the best that I not push myself on this issue just yet.

Of course, this also means I'm not having sex. Which is hell on this blog, amirite?

Yes, it's long been true that my sense of creative enterprise has been fueled by my sexuality. Sometimes I've wondered if my brain's just wired funny, because reading good writing makes me lubricate. Likewise, when I'm in the flow of my own tumbling, loopy prose. So, am I gonna blame my not-writing on my not-fucking? Yeah, no, not really. I can't do it. That's not why I'm not writing.

I'm not writing because nothing seems important enough to write. Sometimes I come across some little point of interest. I hold the idea of writing about it in my head for a minute, right before I decide someone else is gonna do it better, more sharply, more astutely and so why would I bother adding my own sub-par variance to the mix? Or, like, I'll find something that excites me for half a minute and then I discard it, already bored. Like I can't work up the enthusiasm for any given topic (save my own self-doubt, apparently) to be able to yoke myself to it for a sustained post. Really, it's that I do not believe that my tiny little piping voice, in the maelstrom of the internet, is worth my own time -- let alone yours.

Sure, I recognize that this is a particularly loathsome variety of perfectionism: if I can't write something of monumental importance, something that'll speak to the very souls of multitudes of internet habitués, well, then I'm just gonna take my keyboard and go home. It's retarded. I'm don't have the chops to aspire to that kind of bullshit posturing and I should just get the hell over myself. I know. I know.

But the problem is that I look at the volume of text of which this blog is composed and I'm both a little aghast and a little embarrassed that I was ever arrogant enough to put fingers to keys in the first place. That I ever thought any of it mattered. And, again, I know. That's not the point. Very few folks out there are writing the next Great American Blog, and I never really had that ambition in the first place. I merely had opinions and liked words (have/like, whatev). But in the absence of being in love, in the absence of having a job about which I felt passionate, I had this blog and I had a handful of people who read it and responded positively. And therefore it accrued great, great value for me. That is, it did until I walked away from it for a little while and very quickly stopped missing it. At which point, I lost all confidence that I was ever doing anything here other than feeding whatever part of my ego was wrapped up in my "identity" as a "writer."

I mean, even this post. It is another navel-gazing, overshare-y, excursive exercise in convincing myself my mind isn't atrophying. Do I have a point beyond that, I wonder? What might it be? Eehh. Don't answer that. Please.

To top it off, last week, I was reading "Octet" from David Foster Wallace's book, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. He's got that section in it, you know? The part that devolves into, essentially, a direct address of a certain writerly persona that one could interpret as not being terribly divergent from DFW himself? The part in which he sort of neurotically parses the problems of trying to write any damn thing at all? Right? And tonight, as I doggedly plug through this mess, I keep thinking, Oh! But DFW already did it better and funnier and more honestly and with more heart than I ever could.

So, why am I trying? Why am I about to expose this post to an audience with parameters so amorphous that I can little judge its friendliness?

Yeah, I have I no idea why.

Lately, I've been besieged with a funk pertaining to my growing feelings of all-encompassing ineffectuality. This morning, a friend told me I should write something--anything--as a stab at pulling myself out of it. Of course, because I'm a contrary twerp, I told him that was a stupid idea because all of my writing, past and future, is stupid and pointless and would only exacerbate my feelings of being ineffectual. And then because I'm a really contrary twerp, I went and wrote this thing.

So, um, the short version is "I'm fine, Mom."

English-Plus!

There's an important bill on the ballots in my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee today. Because I know that several amongst my small smattering of readers hail from that very city, I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't bring it up-- especially in light of all the high global and American community spirits currently aloft in my adoptive city of DC.

There is a group of citizens who've got bees in their bonnets about government services being conducted in languages other than English. They've brought forth this so-called English-Only bill to enact some dubious legislation that will prevent non-native English speakers from recieving services in their own tongues. Now, the impetus behind this bill is fear-- fear that the "fur-eigners" will take over; fear that, because so many immigrants will work for less money than born and bred Amurikuns, said Amurikuns will lose their gainful employment to these nefarious interlopers. Now, I could go on and on about how these fears are unfounded (we spoiled Americans are pretty effin' reluctant to fill all those thankless, menial brazero positions after all, aren't we?) but there's really no need. I can sum all that up by saying the bill is ethically questionable at best and a logistical nightmare at worst. In a best case scenario, it'll cost the city budget gajillions in added costs incurred while coping with skein after skein of brand new (totally needless) red tape.

It's important that my Nashville readers do their part for voting this thing down. My mom's been on her soapbox about it every time I've talked to her in this past month. My dad gives me poll numbers whenever I speak with him. And Jon. Well, Jon's been posting regularly about it for months, with some particularly interesting bits in the last 10 days or so.

Actually, I would have been harping about this here on my own blog much earlier, but my biggest source for links, information and commentary about it has been... Jon's blog. And well, dear readers, please forgive this: my impending over-share. As Jon's and my complicated relational enterprise came to a relatively abrupt end a few weeks ago, I've been reluctant to link him-- which is one part petty, one part self-preservation. On a daily basis, I'm still cycling through a regular rotation of disconsolate sadness about the demise of our conflicted association, hot rage at him for any number of perceived affronts, and nauseated irritation with myself for still feeling so passionately emotionally involved in the whole thing. He's been my closest human spirit for the last four years and this is a trying period of detachment. I made plane reservations for my annual excursion to the Nashville Film Festival last week and I'm experiencing something of an onslaught of mixed feelings at the prospect of attending the festival without him as my companion. The last thing I need to have happen is for the simple act of my linking pertinent, trenchant information from his blog to stir up some pit of uneasily salivating attack dogs from deep within me. The second-to-last thing I need is his interpreting a passing on of political commentary as an invitation to engagement of some sort. It's not. Really.

So, I know this post is an emo mess. That is, in part, I have no doubt, due to that fact that I'm feeling pretty deeply mired in my annual winter funk-fest at the moment. I may or may not have some more to say on how much January in DC sucks in a future post.

But nonetheless, I hope I can catch a couple readers before the polls close. Please. Go read Jon's posts. He's far more versed in the nuances of this thing than I am, so he sounds a lot smarter than I would if I tried to recount it all in my own words. And then go vote this thing back to racist-hell from which it came. Go!

UPDATE: As you can tell from the comments, this amendment did NOT pass. Now non-native English speakers can continue to receive 911 care with the aid of a translator. See? Nashville's not so heartless after all.