December 3, 2011


Unsuccessful date last night. I’d been looking forward to it, too. Maybe a person should think twice before he invites someone over and then talks immediately, obsessively –weeping copiously-– about his former boyfriend. Or maybe I should resign myself to possessing the face–if not actually the disposition–of a good listener. Too much gin–there were generous cocktails, anyway–and then home–nearly sideswiping a car on 19/23 which had not turned its lights on, then to odd dreams in which I was an editor choosing the winner of a novel contest, then finding A) that the chosen novel was entailed in some complication with its agent, and 2) that the author, in frustration over these complications, could shoot up high in the air like a rocket, then turn and come down and land on his toes. In the dream this was a display of the most transcendent anger.

In fairness to my date, I realize that I’ve always thought that conversation is a deeper intimacy than sex, and so believed that physical contact should come first, or at least quite early. There was a time and a place when this was a more common conviction. To me a kiss is less provocative than a confidence. And far less invasive. Why would a person want to know your past or your beliefs or your tragedies or your experiences at yoga camp if he does not yet know your body, the simplest item of them all? Unwanted monolog is, to me, as threatening as unwanted sexual advance, and usually far more time consuming. The body is the door, and one should enter there even before knocking on the ears. Consensual physical contact should be the least complicated thing in the universe, and that upon which all the complexities build. So I think. Maybe I’m the last of us in all the world.