Forest of Vines & Suns

There'll be times
When my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in to sin
Because you have to make this life livable
But when you think Ive had enough
From your sea of love
I'll take more than another river full
And I'll make it all worthwhile
I'll make your heart smile

Strangelove
Strange highs and strange lows
Strangelove
Thats how my love goes
Strangelove
Will you give it to me
Will you take the pain
I will give to you
Again and again
And will you return it

There'll be days
When I'll stray
I may appear to be
Constantly out of reach
I give in to sin
Because I like to practice what I preach
I'm not trying to say
I'll have it all my way
I'm always willing to learn
When you've got something to teach
And Ill make it all worthwhile
Ill make your heart smile

Pain will you return it
Ill say it again -- pain
Pain will you return it
I wont say it again

I give in
Again and again
I give in
Will you give it to me
I give in
I'll say it again
I give in

Depeche Mode, Strangelove

Desire on Ice

Since the brown elephant, touching belts have been a more carnally charged experience. the brown elephant is a thrift store in one of chicago's gayborhoods complete with changing stalls whose doors extend from the bottom of your butt cheek to your shoulders. I bought a sweater and a black woven leather belt. Before I bought the black one, I considered one that wasn't my style at all; camel-colored, very worn and supple, simple. I would have passed it directly forward if not for that texture. Perhaps the belt had been misappropriated in the past somewhere in this very neighborhood and was communicating that experience to me. Whatever the cause, its textures, its knowledgeable give, flashed an image onto the screen of my mind as quickly and surely as the turning on of a projector.

A lover (I won't say which) is in front on me on his knees, facing away. Hands bound (or is it cuffed?) behind his back. The small, cool buckle tight and hidden in my palm.

I don't have that belt now. It's holding up an elderly gentleman's slacks. It's visible behind the belt-loops of a traveler kid's black jeans. It matches perfectly with a seventeen year old girl's cream colored miniskirt.

Yeah, right.

Not this belt. The fashionably minded won't notice it. The practically minded will find fault with it's worn patina and return it to the rack. This belt shops for you, not the other way around. It's looking for an owner, a strong hand, the right mind. It's looking for a master, an extension of its own mind.

I wasn't that man.

I didn't have the courage. I don't know how to say what I want. I don't know how to imagine what I want into being, into your body. Dreams that are real, fantasies into reality. Now when I touch any belt, I remember right down to the base of my spine, right into the humming tip of my clit/dick, what I could do to you if words weren't just rocks in my throat. If the sharp young prick of my desire was released and made whole with your matching will, with your submission, then made supple and subtle and vicious by my own growing strength, age becoming wisdom like oil rubbed into faded leather.

Every Scorpio wants to split his lover open and see stars.

light blue sun

Tonight I am going to Krishna dinner! I have been going to their dinners for three months, prior to leaving this city for a month and a half. I missed the food, which is delicious. But tonight I am also going to the service. My intent for this section of my life, at present, is to combine ritual (a regular daily rhythm; a system of waking, eating, working, and playing that is life-affirming and easy), with a limited but reverant push toward experiences of beauty and truth, guided by circumstance and energetically sourced from the calm and self-contained nature of the ritualistic life-style.

I am working at the greenhouse in City Park. I have spent the last few days painting the interior walls; the colors are beautiful.

A date to see a movie. we stop at mcdonalds. "they play great music at this mcdonalds." He goes to the bathroom and I wait. Private schoolkids everywhere. He gets out, we start walking toward the trolley station. He tells me he's got to get a rat!
To dye it!
"What color?" he asks me.
"Green."
"That's right, I dye it green, I call it Navy Bean!"

We're sitting in the station, he's considering another rat color. Pink! "I'll call it Pinkie. But its got to be a girl, because I don't want people thinking that rat's all over me, you see what I'm sayin'? They tell me my rat's got balls a third the size of its body."

"I can see why you're attracted to me." He says. I give him skeptical eyes. I feel that all my facial emotions are magnified, like I am in a movie. I convey skeptical. I cut my eyes to the right, I lift my eyebrows. He's off in another world.
"What if I got my facial piercings back? I used to have fifteen. Two snake bites," he shows me the scars, "Three in my tongue in the shape of a pyramid," he sticks out his tongue. I regret that I am aroused. I feel like a butterfly collected, wings spread and pinned to the cardboard. I feel like a female lead in a Tom Robbins novel.

"I am a prostitute, but I got to survive, I'm not sorry. My mom was a prostitute too, she used to dance in Vegas. She made thousands of dollars an hour, before I was even born." he's facing me, straddling the bench.
"You're a prostitute?"
"Used to be. I'd rather be naked and beaten and starving, I'll starve to death, I'll go into shock crawling on the ground before I--shit, you see, love is for sex, and sex is money and music is money, you see what I'm saying? You know that song, what's love got to do with it. But I don't think she meant a dude. But no, you can't pay me for anything. Save me from it, maybe. Whatever's left of me."

On the trolley he faces me talking and touching me. I wish that didn't feel electric. "Man, you're great, let me ask you, let's see this, the LIVER, man. What do you call a doctor for the liver?"
"Hepatologist." I have no idea, but yet I know.
"Fuck, yeah! That's what I'm talking about. Hepatologist! That's what I mean about you. Hepatitis C," he says wistfully. We get off the train and walk into the quarter.

We're walking this way and that. I can't tell where we're going. Suddenly he veers off the sidewalk.
"You want to go to the movie or you want to take a nap?" I have no idea what he's talking about. He's leading me into a fancy hotel. People are looking at us strangely. This is a really top-notch hotel.
He's bringing me up to the desk!
"What are you doing?" I ask. I feel fourteen and twenty-eight and eight years old.
"Thought we were going to take a nap."
"No, no, we're not going to take a nap." I exit. He's unflappable. He drags me to a bar, dances. I walk out, he runs after me. I tell him I'm going home. I feel like a giant snail, curving into a giant abalone shell against his constant verbal presence. I wish I was an actual woman or man or anyone who wouldn't feel like an alien shellfish hooked on a bait of desire, strange hermaphrodism unvisible to male eyes, cut up and packaged as female love, shrinkwrapped in styrofoam.
"Can I walk you home? Can I walk you home?"
"If you want to." He does. We go to McDonald's and he makes a hilarious scene. We walk back to the trolley stop in the center of downtown.

---

"You're so hot. You're so fucking hot."
"Why do you think I'm hot?" stiff in my cowboy boots, on a date with a straight man, peering down the empty tracks to look for the trolley.
"you look just fucking like that woman from the Fifth Element, you know, with the red hair. Yeeahh!"
I look at my shoes. Fuck, no.
He dips his finger into his fries, coating it with grease and salt. He drags his finger gently down the inside of my thumb.
"Little worm," he says softly.

He stares at me and raps continuously. I wish I had a mini recorder, I wish I was with him to record him, and not this. He puts his arm around me, I remove it. I shrug away from his touch. He stares at me and licks his lips and babbles and cuts his eyes and pulls down his baseball cap. I feel as if I might fall off the planet. I'm finding that being in the same universe as him is a sexual experience, let alone the same trolley bench. I want to exit this play, to find myself on Neptune's empty shores.

"You and I," he says, "Could have the hottest sex in the world. Triple fuck, no joke. But I see how it is, you and I are going to be the best friends in the world. Hottest sex, yeah, shit! I want to just - ugh -- right here!" I wish I was Evangeline. She would know what to do. But then, she's a girl. They'd go nuts together. She's the kind of girl who will go to Hell with you if she gets to dance and punch you in the face on the way.
We're in a trolley station, next to a haggard-faced blonde he calls Paps. She's on his wavelength. They trade rhymes, laugh, fall into each other.
"Isn't she beautiful?" He gestures to her, wearing his baseball cap.
I can't think of a word to say. She's the ugliest person I've seen in weeks, transcendental love aside.
"If you like that, just imagine her naked with me giving it to her from behind beside the McDonalds!"
This is real horrormovie stuff. "I'm all set." I say stupidly, and he grins at me as if I'm reasonably intelligent. I feel like I've fallen into a vat of tar and pleistocene bird bones.
"I want to conceive a child...we could make a baby, right here in the station, man, oh..." He puts his arm around me, then his hand on my knee. He continues to babble about the baby until trolley comes.

As it pulls up, he pulls me into his arms. "French. Like the french."
I divert his kiss into a hug, step onto the train. "Thanks Charles."
"Am I your hero?"
"Yes."

The Birthplace of Choice

The thrust of modern society with all of its ills is the removal of sacredness from all things. In our television-driven culture, sacredness is exchanged for brand development. A vestige of sacredness survives as the erotic allure of the product, its commodified "essense": the scent of freshness, the coolness of rugged self-sufficiency, the exoticism of a western adaptation on an ethnic art form.

The very concept of sacredness being a removable aspect of a thing is new. If it is a detachable quality, separate from the thing which it inhabits, what is it, really? We experience some revulsion at the sight of a symbol stripped of its proper context, raped of its sacredness. Appropriation of a cultural symbol is a delineation of a multidimensional source material. It seeks to find the emotionally satisfying or titillating part of an intranslatable experience and reproduce that experience in a flattened-out, safe form, for profit in a rapidly changing marketplace whose short attention spans will again drive the push for new sources of coolness and packaged cultural difference.

Read the full article at http://dangeroustosociety.angelfire.com/choice.html.

Cameron's Bridge

(This is about the dream last recorded in my Dreamjournal)

I lay with Lewis last night & my heart was a blue glass wrapped in vines & tangled wire. His words
were knives that wriggled their way into the heart of my dismay, prying apart the heated & close ventricles. I felt a low vibration in my heart, as it pricked up its ears at our conversation, and then the excising of flesh as it was turned away by the blade.

I can navigate a roller coaster in the dark; my active mind has become so stripped and efficient that it wastes no time on indulgence, makes no wandering misstep during times of need. Months of walking in the night of my mind have made me headstrong and steady. This is crowning achievement of my male self; a reactive agility.

"It's clearly not enough," says the dream of the dogs. After getting off of the roller coaster, I stepped into a small cave. I continued through it without pause, had no respect for the mysteries it might contain. And indeed, when I was halfway through, I was attacked by dogs who ran from nothingness and latched onto my arms, halting me. My male self was effectively neutralized and disempowered. Agility, efficiency, and egotistical drive are not much when you have got tiny mutts latched on to both of your forearms and you're flailing them around like an idiot.

This is where the female self steps in. She has the solution. Since our strengths are also are weaknesses, we can say that the masculine part's strength in navigating the roller coaster was his weakness in failing the second, trickier, female test. Was the female side's weakness in the roller coaster was her hesitancy, her desire to stop and assess feelings first? Unfortunately, I didn't find out in the dream what her response would have been to the second challenge.

A possible course of action would be to enter the room anyway, with a submissive attitude, and let the attack potentially occur, as a type of sacrifice designed to bring the female counterpart into control. Lewis rejected this outright, but it's hard to tell if it's a misunderstanding or if he truly rejects it. He suggests that I stay there and "try and understand."

Life is a little room, full of too many small, annoying, debilitating things, I said.
It's a little room and a big room.

It doesn't have to feel like a little room, he said. It can just be 'where you live.' You can feel comfortable there.

I didn't want to imagine getting comfortable in that little brown hole.

Krishna's Planet

My little Hare Krishna Life & Death book explains it this way: The impersonalists leave the atmosphere of the Earth. They visit many planets, and stay for some time. They experience vast and untranslatable things. (In fact, I do not even remember all of the things I have experienced, much less have I experienced all of the things that have happened to 'me'.) Eventually, the impersonalists fall to earth- what a jolt!- without experiencing Krishna's eternality, his endless and timeless pleasure.

The personalists, on the other hand, have a personal love for Krishna. They worship at his feet. They pass the other planets, or perhaps visit with them, but know that those planets only grant differing variations on the life-decay-death scheme, and they continue on to Krishna's planet. Upon arriving, they stay forever.

The book contains no ideas on how one might begin this communion with Krishna, except through chanting. I'm curious because I myself left the atmosphere of Earth & found the Eternal Night Garden, the Heaven of Paths, the subjugation of all of my desires to one, with in its infinite wisdom purged and satiated me. And then it ended! Or rather, it didn't, as it had never "begun," yet certainly I no longer had my eyes open in its kingdom. Why?

It may have been a simple issue of timing, and yet it feels more logistical. I ran out of fuel. Partway to the planet, running on vapors, bailing out of the lander. I feel extremely vacuous. I know I don't have the "fuel" to make it the whole way. In fact, the way stretched out before me like a room crossed halfway each time--the last moments were the most critical to get through, the last minute was as thick as glue. don Juan: "You need drugs to provide the final amount of energy." But I have lost confidence that I am actually going somewhere reachable, to a real perch. I know drugs could extend my energy and concentration hours more, but it would just be more. Not everything, just more. I know I'm not running my life properly, often, but when I do run it well I ascend so quickly but on a staircase so rickety that I'm back to my starting point in mere hours or days.

So now I expect nothing. This is part wisdom, mostly fear. I still want badly to be perfect. My body is a suction cup, siphoning on to energy sources--lovers, people--using them to hold me up somehow, give me structural support. They won't, mostly, but I quietly build bridges of my thoughts, of my created and fantasized material about them, and use it for support. It works, mostly. It gives me something to hang on to.