Saturday, November 16, 2013


From a Tumblr site up there. Good advice, no? True? "The storm before the calm?"  Great tension relief. Temporarily. The sex drive is second in intensity only to hunger. When one is hungry and has a big, delicious meal, one is sated. No more. "If I eat another bite, I'll burst."

One is never sated with sex. Sex begets more sex. "Let's do it again."

You can work when you're hungry. Hemingway said hunger sharpened his senses, he could see things with crystal clarity. But when a beautiful French woman walked into his cafe, the cafe where he was writing, the saliva built up and gurgled in his throat. I was engrossed thinking about a case. I can be so engrossed that colleagues don't greet or approach. I'm not there. I don't notice them. I was engrossed and walking back from my secretary's desk to my office, down a hallway and a woman was coming down the hallway toward me. I noticed her. We passed. I turned around to look after her. I was unable to work at all for 15 minutes. It was hours before the thought of her left me entirely. It pissed me off. Unconsciously, uncontrollably, the sex drive leaped up, seized me, and kept me from work.

Sexual desire can overwhelm everything else.

They are bodily functions, the desire for food and the desire for sex.

I do not "do" lunch. I eat because I have to. "Fuck, I'm getting hungry." I go to the cafeteria by the office, get food, bring it back and eat at my desk so I can continue working. Ingestion, a bodily function. Little expenditure of time or energy. Discharge, a bodily function. Human beings must urinate, defecate. Little time, little energy. One does them because one has to. It can be the same with sex. Gore Vidal once lamented how at the end of the day "Ahh, I forgot to arrange sex for tonight." He had to go out, one supposes, and "pick up," having neglected to order ahead for "delivery." However it was for Vidal, sexual discharge for the male usually involves considerable expenditure of energy. The sex act for the male is exercise, sometimes vigorous. One perspires. I perspire blinking my eyes. I need an IV after sex. Sometimes. Sometimes one can have "porn sex," sex as a bodily function and without great expenditure of energy. "Mechanical" sex.

So, there are these things. There is porn sex, unemotional and non-rigorous, there are heterosexual "hook-ups," there are "booty calls," the French have a "five to seven" practice that tolerates liaisons after work and before a "respectable" time for arriving at home. Sex as a mechanical bodily function can be "arranged" in the straight world but it is not the "normal" way, however it may be for homosexuals. The normal is to have sex with feeling. Love or like. Consideration: "Don't take advantage," "Don't treat as a piece of meat." Or as a bathroom fixture, an outlet for discharge. Guilt. Sex as a "union of souls." Overwhelmingly, "union of souls" sex is the kind I, and most heterosexual males, have had. Sex not as a bodily function.

The sex drive stresses me. It grieves me. "I have had enough sex in my life, no more," I said to myself. And it was true, truly true. I pledged chastity. A pledge is a conscious act though; it meant that the desire, the overwhelming, distracting, stressing, aggrieving, guilt-ridden desire was still there. Chemical castration? Powerful drugs, scary. Too much collateral damage. No silver bullet.

Socrates, Plato, one of them, met the other on a byway. They chatted. "How is it to grow old?"  "It is not so bad. The sexual desire of youth no longer dominates." He, whoever it was, felt liberated. Age has helped. I don't get thrown off as easily or as completely as I did in that hallway. I haven't cheated on the last two girlfriends, it's been...I guess, it's been about ten years since I've cheated. The sexual desire has abated but it is still there. It has not gone away and it still distracts. Like now. Pisses me off. "Less stress, more sex?" Not true.