A Senseless Distraction

I didn’t expect her to show up, but she did.

Sitting at the table in the café, I noticed her come in. She sat down with a nervous and half-apologetic smile that I’m sure was entirely natural and not-at-all fake.

I acted like I wasn’t thrilled to see her. Because they think less of you if you let on how thrilled you are to see them.

Beautiful girl with a narrow face and pale skin. Dark eyes and almost-black hair. Like the girl from my dreams.

(It was a dream, by the way. But the dynamics play out often enough in real life that a dream works just as well.)

I really didn’t have time for her. After all, I’d made very clear to her that I have an important meeting at six and I really don’t have any time to spare for her.

Because of course they don’t have time for you until you don’t have time for them. Then you have to shake them off while they grab onto your leg and leave claw marks from hanging on so tight.

Yes, I know I’m dehumanizing women by referring to them as a vague mindless collective with no unique individuality of their own. A little like the Borg, come to think of it. But I’m completely capable of appreciating women as unique and valuable individuals.

As long as I’m not at all interested in them sexually.

Beautiful girl, remember. But — and remember this was a dream, although in a metaphoric sense the same thing happens in real life — the longer she sat there talking to me, the less and less beautiful she became. Until by the end she hardly looked like a person anymore.

Just a vague blurry cartoon face with perfect hair.

This life is a nightmare. But in the nightmare, the particular nightmare that stands out among all the other nightmares as particularly nightmarish is sex.

I don’t talk about love. Love is something for poetry, or marketers, or the part of my fiction where I let out my masochistic fantasies and dreams of ultimate reconciliation, or for people who have a lot of money.

Maybe there was love sometime in the past. Before the pill, maybe. Before rubber, maybe. Before there was a safety net.

Now there’s only sex.

And nothing on earth could be a more senseless waste of thought or energy.

It’s not really done for pleasure or enjoyment. Sure, you act like your having a good time, you put up with her “joking” jabs at your ego, you throw a few completely serious jabs back, and you go through the ritual of getting to know each other.

But really all I care about is whether I get to disappoint her at the end of the night or not.

I really don’t enjoy sex all that much. It’s mostly a nerve-wracking ordeal I go through in order to prove something or other to myself. Honestly, part of me would rather be back at home reading Dostoevsky or the Bible.

It’s more fun to write about sex or think about sex, really. The thing itself is just another distraction from reality.

Probably my obsession with sex is more a product of the culture than anything else. The media I’ve consumed — I’ve watched a lot of porn in my time.

Porn is another nasty influence out there in the culture at large. People act like it’s fine, but deep down they’re ashamed. I know I am.

…

And anyway, I talk like I’m chasing pussy all the time. But really I’m not. It’s just that in a perverse kind of way I feel like it’s my duty to chase pussy all the time, so even though I don’t I feel like I should act like I do.

Chasing pussy is an arduous and frustrating task. Maybe the ideal for the twenty-first century man is to have the pussy chase you. Like in that photo of Leonardo DiCaprio sitting on a beach with a half-dozen supermodels in bikinis surrounding him.

Maybe that would be enough to quiet the gnawing feeling of being essentially unwanted and undesirable…

I’ve said before that sex is an insoluble problem.

At another time, in another century — or hell, even in another decade — monogamy might have been a tolerable answer. But now? No. I’ve seen too many divorced dads and too many unhappy marriages. Makes me thank my stars I managed to be born into a stable, two-parent family.

And look how I turned out!

I’ve floated the idea of celibacy every once in a while, and it still hasn’t gone away. It’s not exactly an ideal solution, but it helps me pour all my mental energy into my writing the way I never could if I were raising a family or chasing girls.

(And it’s not like many of the writers I most admire were all that successful in love, anyway.)

Although there are other worries that come with the whole celibacy idea that disturb me so much it makes me think I might be better off sticking to chasing girls.

That’s the whole reason I wrote this post, really. To avoid having to write about those bigger, scarier ideas that have me questioning my mental health. We’re talking big, bizarre ideas that make all this sex writing look like a Sunday school class.

You remember how way, way, way back I wrote something about how I thought of all this writing as a big excavation?

Well, I’ve found something.

And I’m not sure how to deal with it, or even if it’s a good idea to deal with it right now. It may be too much for me to handle right now.