from the sprigs* archives: don’t worry, this story has been pre-approved by loveshack
September 30, 2008
*I wrote this piece March 19, 2006. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
(I’m a little silly on soy milk, so I’m throwing caution to the wind and posting this without reviewing it for typos and whatnot. Yeah, that’s right: This is how I roll when I’m silly on soy milk. Just when you thought you had me all figured out. Now watch: Dave will swing by and point out all my typos and whatnot.)
It’s 1998. Valentine’s Day. When I wake up, LoveShack is full of energy, which is unusual for him. He’s never been a morning person. He tells me he’s got something special planned for me, instructs me to get dressed.
We’ve been dating for almost three years, so my mind begins to put the pieces together to form a very specific picture: The chipper mood. The special plans. The cheesy holiday. I’m convinced he’s going to ask me to marry him. We’ve been talking about it for quite some time but haven’t made any real plans, and there’s been no proposal.
LoveShack asks me what I’m going to wear. It should be something comfortable, he says. Don’t wear a dress. Maybe that cute brown skirt and a top.
Although LoveShack often compliments me on the clothes I wear, he rarely micromanages my dressing process. This could mean only one thing: He’s going to ask me to marry him by one of my favorite trees, the one that’s about a mile in on a hiking trail just east of Kansas City. I need to wear something cute, so when I recall the moment he asked me to be his wife, I don’t have to envision myself in ratty old painting pants, a T-shirt and my hiking boots, my usual hiking get-up.
How considerate of him, I think. To be thinking ahead like that, making sure I have an attractive visual of this day to store away in my memory. And how wonderful for him to tell me I should wear something comfortable, something I can move in, since a long hike down a dirt trail is required to reach the destination that will witness our commitment to being together for the rest of our lives.
I spring to life, now in an even better mood than LoveShack. As I push my arms through the sleeves of a white knit top, I try to pretend like I don’t know what he’s got up his sleeve. I tell myself to quit smiling. If I smile too much, he’ll know I know what’s up. My mouth keeps working its way into a smile, in spite of my silent directive that it not do so.
I locate the brown skirt, the one LoveShack asked me to wear. Then I find some thong sandals. They won’t be the best for hiking, but they go with the outfit, and they’ll do just fine. I pull my hair back, apply a little make-up, something I wouldn’t usually do for a hike, but today isn’t just any hike. It’s the first hike of the rest of my life, the one where he’ll get down on one knee, the branches of the tree will make the sun dance in patterns on his face, he will produce a ring from the pocket of his coat, smoothly, as if he’s practiced this motion thousands of times, as if his life depends on its effortless removal.
I will cry immediately, my mascara running in feathered lines down my cheeks, my tears making criss-crossed paths as they go and sweeping my blush along with them in the process. I will fall on top of LoveShack, straddling and clinging to him, my face in his neck, my tears on his skin, and he will know from this reaction that, of course, my answer is yes. Although I won’t actually say it, caught up as I am in the enormity of his gesture. The hike, the tree, the absolute most-perfect way to ask for my hand in marriage.
Once I’m ready to go, LoveShack tells me there’s just one thing left: He needs to blindfold me. He has a handkerchief in his hand for this purpose, which he ties around my face. Then he leads me out the door of the house, carefully guiding me down the stairs. I love that I trust him this much, knowing I won’t misstep in his care. And if I do, he’ll be there to right me.
We pull out of the driveway and, before I know it, he tells me we’ve arrived at our destination. By my calculations, we’re about 45 minutes away from the head of the hiking trail. I rework my image of what’s about to happen. Perhaps he decided to take me to a park in town, but even if that were the case, the drive should have been a little longer.
Before allowing me to remove the blindfold, LoveShack plays up the moment.
Honey, you said you wanted a ring, he says. So I’m getting you a ring.
A bright, metallic feeling moves through me. This must mean he’s taken me to the antique jewelry store in our neighborhood so I can pick out one of the old-fashioned wedding rings I love so much. How wonderful to include me in the selection of the ring.
You can take off your blindfold now, he instructs.
I do. And I see that we aren’t at the antique jewelry store after all. We are parked in front of a strip mall that contains a liquor store, a used vacuum cleaner store, and a tattoo shop. I ask what we’re doing there.
I wanted to get you a ring for Valentine’s Day. A belly-button ring. Remember how you used to want one of those?
I look up at the sign for the tattoo shop and realize they also do body piercings. I start bawling, but not the kind of tears I thought I’d be shedding on this day. Then I start screaming.
I can’t believe you did this to me on Valentine’s Day! You can’t just date a girl for three years, then blindfold her and tell her you have something special planned without her thinking you’re going to propose!
LoveShack, still not realizing the enormity of his blunder, laughs and replies, I said I was going to get you a ring, didn’t I?
I cry more and yell louder, Yes! And when you just said that, I thought you meant a real ring, a wedding ring! Not a belly-button ring!
I am inconsolable. I refuse to look at the thing in the seat next to me. The hurtful, cruel thing that has been in my life for three years. The thing that should have known me better than to treat me like that. (Should have known not to treat any woman like that.) That’s when I realize he is not the kind of man who will get down on his knee in front of one of my favorite trees to propose, let alone dream up such a plan in the first place.
Still, as I demand he take me home and swat away his attempts to reach out from his bucket seat and hug me in mine — as if he is a swarm of mosquitoes whose every bite is lethal — I know he’ll manage to right even this situation, to thrill and delight me with so many loving gestures during our lives together that sometime, long after we’ve gotten married, this day will become nothing but a funny story, one that will make me love him even more with every telling. (Or maybe not.)
letters to myself
September 20, 2008
How you allow men inside: through breath that parts your lips, is taken up in your lungs. They say your name and it threads through you like a weed vine. Their diamond stylus needles fall into your ruts, take up residence there, scrape gently along your ridges. Men pull from you what is within you and translate it as sound. You keep skipping, like a record. You keep skipping. You hold their names in your mouth, roll them around like rocks. When you speak, you return to them what they have breathed into you. When you speak, there is no sound, only motion.
from the sprigs* archives: boob job
September 19, 2008
* I wrote this piece Nov. 27, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
I am lying on my stomach, my bare body covered only by a white sheet. The thread count is high, so the sheet feels like silk when it brushes against my back and ass. Music is playing softly in the background, something slow featuring wooden flutes.
I hear the doorknob turn, then Natasha steps into the room. The lights are off, the room lit only by three scented candles. Natasha is young, mid- to late 20s. She is thin with delicate features and long, brown hair that she’s pulled back. She giggles as she carries a bottle of warm oil across the room to where I am lying.
Natasha gently lifts the sheet, uncovering my left leg. She works the oil, which is mixed with sea salt, into my skin. With all the force her small hands and slender arms are capable of, she begins kneading my thigh and calf.
That’s right. I am getting a massage and exfoliation. I’m at a fancy spa in Victoria, British Columbia.
I don’t care that I don’t know Natasha, that we will probably never see one another again. I don’t care that I had to pay her to touch me like this. All I know is, this massage — which I thought would be relaxing — is actually quite hot. I haven’t been naked with a woman in a long time. (Sure, I am the only one who’s naked, but I’ll take what I can get.)
Plus, I know I am going to leave this spa without any trace of dead skin cells on my body. Natasha will see to that.
Just when I think the massage has gotten as good as it’s going to get, Natasha, who has asked me to reposition myself on my back, asks in her soft, high-pitched voice, Would you like me to do your chest?
I play it cool. Um … suuuure. She slowly removes the sheet from my chest. Standing behind my head, she leans over me, arms outstretched, her own chest practically touching my face. I try not to make any strange faces at the feeling of her hands working the oil and salt into my breasts.
When her pinkies sweep my sides, it tickles a little. I start to smile, only partly because she’s tickling me. I say, Sorry, I’m a little ticklish. She responds, Oh, I’m ticklish, too. She giggles. I giggle. Would you like me to stop, she asks. Oh … noooo, I respond.
When it’s all over, I leave her an enormous tip.
That was in August, the last time I visited Victoria. This past weekend, when LoveShack and I were visiting again, I made an appointment for the exact same spa service at the exact same spa. Yet things didn’t go down in exactly the same way.
It started out promising. Different room, different masseuse. But I am naked, and there’s oil and salt involved. All in all, things are looking pretty good. I notice at the outset, however, that there’s no music. And the candles aren’t lit. But I can look past those details. Any moment, the masseuse is going to enter the room. She’ll have an exotic name, and I will be minutes away from being felt up.
The masseuse, whose name I forget, gets things off on the right foot when she says, I’m just going to ask you to part your legs a little for me. Oh yeah, I am thinking, This is going to be good. But it immediately becomes apparent she doesn’t have the same touch as Natasha.
Natasha combined extreme pressure with intense abrasion. With her, I felt like a naughty girl who needed to have my naughtiness scrubbed right off of me. I thought I was going to have to scream STOP before she removed all the skin from my limbs, not just the dead skin.
Not so with this gal. She wasn’t digging into me with everything she had. And there was absolutely no giggling. Then, right before the part where she would reach second base, the worst thing of all happened: She quit.
We’re done now, she announced almost brusquely.
What? But what about the girls, I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate.
How could she be done with the massage without any titty-touchy? She didn’t even do my stomach. What the FUCK just happened here, I asked myself after she left the room.
She told me to take my time before coming out to shower off. So I laid there and did for myself what I’d paid her to do. I rubbed the salt and oil mixture into my own breasts and stomach. But it wasn’t the same. I feel myself up all the time.
As I took matters into my own hands, I wondered if the boob rub was an optional part of this service. Or had Natasha offered me a little something extra, if you know what I mean. Had Natasha given me the female equivalent of a ball rub? Images from that massage flashed before me. The candles, the music, the giggling, her chest in my face.
Had Natasha played me for a bigger tip? Or was this masseuse just shirking her responsibilities?
I would never know, because I couldn’t figure out a way to ask the spa’s managers without seeming like a perv. And I didn’t want to get Natasha in trouble if she was working the system. I might want to go back sometime and ask for her by name, after all.
from the sprigs* archives: piss
September 16, 2008
* I wrote this piece Jan. 20, 2006. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
As a child, I had a strong desire to control myself and my environment, and that desire extended well beyond the areas in which I could exercise any degree of control.
This is how it came to pass that I peed on my paternal grandmother.
It happened when I was about five or six years old. She was on vacation with us at Lake Texoma, where my father loved to go fishing. For some reason, my grandmother had agreed to make the drive down to the southern border of Oklahoma with my parents and me. My grandfather may have tagged along as well, but that doesn’t matter. This story involves only me, my grandmother and my control issues.
I was in the bathroom peeing when I suddenly became aware of how well I could seemingly control my stream of urine. Off, on. On, off. I was able, with just a few flexes of the right muscles, to start and stop the flow with precision. In the excitement of the moment, I was convinced I could make just one drop of pee appear before stopping the stream.
Further, I somehow imagined the single drop would remain suspended in the air, as if my mind could control it once it left my body. As if through thought alone I could make that drop hang there as long as I wished to have it hang there — so everyone could see my achievement of producing only one drop of pee.
In my delusion, I rose from the toilet and ran, naked, into the bedroom next to the bathroom, where my grandmother sat on a twin-sized bed.
Grandma, Grandma, look at my pee, I said.
No, honey, I don’t need to see your pee, she replied.
I insisted, No, look. I just want to show you something.
Why don’t you go put your clothes on, she said.
Though phrased as a suggestion, it was clearly more of an order. An order given by an old woman becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the situation in which she currently found herself.
I was always a stubborn child. I knew I’d discovered something special, the ability to pee and then not pee at will. To overcome my body’s instincts and desires through focused application of muscular force. I wanted to share this discovery with her. She would see. Once I showed her, she would see how special this ability of mine was. And, in turn, how special I was.
So I peed.
I stood in the bedroom and peed all over the brown shag carpet, all over my grandmother’s feet. I was mortified. Couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t been able to control it in front of her. She gave me a look that said any hint of love for me which had ever flittered through her cold heart was, at that moment, snuffed out forever.
I ran, naked, from the bedroom, back to the bathroom from whence I’d come. I again sat on the toilet, this time rocking back and forth. What have I done, what have I done, I asked myself in rhythm with my rocking.
To her credit, my grandmother never told my parents about the incident. She didn’t have to. I’d already learned my lessons: First, pee has a mind of its own and can’t be controlled, especially not by a mere child. Second, don’t ever pee on someone whose love for you is bounded, else you are bound to lose their love entirely as soon as the warm rush hits their bare feet.
oh dear god, not a fucking list post
August 29, 2008
Hell yeah, this is a fucking list post.
Why? Because someone (who I won’t name but three guesses as to who it is) says I need to post. I do everything that someone tells me to do. So let’s do this.
1. I dislike my site host. They can take the invisible ***** hanging from my invisible **** and suck on the hairy things as if they were designer candies. I don’t mean to be graphic (OK, I do), but my site host has left me no choice. They have been completely unresponsive to my requests to fix the server that my site is hosted on, or at least force the hosed-up site or sites that are also on my server to shape up because those hosed-up sites are affecting my site as well as Postal Poetry. And that gets my invisible **** in a twist, as if I were one of those two dudes in Puppetry of the Penis.
2. I dislike this blog template. It’s proving to be inflexible and downright annoying. I thought I could make it work, but apparently not. Sometimes you just have to learn when to walk away from an unsalvageable relationship. And sometimes you have to learn how to spell the word “unsalvageable” without misspelling it seven times first.
3. I had a boil most of the week. Furuncle is a better term. If you squint hard enough, the word “furuncle” looks like “funnelcake,” and everyone knows Mrs. Funnelcake and I like the word funnelcake.
4. My hamster ran off tonight. I found her. She was acting all cute and innocent when she waddled out from behind some crap I’ve amassed in a closet near her cage. But she screwed up my planned three-day vow of silence, that she did, since I ran all over the house screaming her name like this: “Trudy!!! Trudy!!! Truuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudy!!! Trudeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!!”
5. About that vow of silence: I decided to have a three-day vow of silence. Vocal silence, to be precise. I wanted to resist my impulse to speak, since working against impulses is always sometimes occasionally rarely a good thing. I wanted to verbally communicate only what was necessary which, in the case of a vow of silence, is nothing at all. I wanted to settle myself down, since I’ve been feeling fragile for the past few days for various reasons. And not allowing my body to reverberate with my own voice seemed like as good a way as any. Until Trudy got loose and loused it all up.
6. Someone I used to work with closely died yesterday. He was a good man, an outstanding employee, and a true visionary when it came to technology and communication.
7. Oh no! LoveShack just came home with some weird news. Sigh. Gotta jet.
from the sprigs* archives: double my pleasure (or, ‘the one where i use a lot of clichés about the weather’)
August 28, 2008
(photo credit :: Ten foot penis by j.a. holland)
Well, crap. I wanted to post something light and funny from the Sprigs archives today so I could get away from all the death and sad that’s in the air. But then I started reading this piece and remembered that Heath Ledger is in it, which means this piece is now full of death and sad. Fine. I will post this. But then I am going to lie down and wait for tomorrow to happen.
* I wrote this piece Nov. 18, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
Today, I was with an acquaintance of mine at a bookstore. We were perusing the magazine section when he turned to me and said, out of the blue, Let me ask you this. Does the thought of two men together turn you on? This is not a typical question for this acquaintance to ask (after all, he is only an acquaintance), so I was a little taken aback. Until he explained that he was asking because the movie Brokeback Mountain (which he’d seen featured on a magazine cover) was being marketed to women.
Now, I don’t know what rock I’ve been under for the last, well, however long people have been talking about this particular flick. But I have clearly been under one. It is simply unconscionable for me not to know one of my favorite actors, Jake Gyllenhaal, will be getting hot under the buckle with fellow hottie Heath Ledger. I think my grabbing the magazine off the rack and tearing through it to get to the article on the movie answered my friend’s question: Yes, I am turned on by guy-on-guy action.
I didn’t always know this about myself, though there had been some signs. For example, I owned a couple of gay-and-lesbian poetry anthologies in the early ’90s, and I would sometimes become a little flushed when reading the poems written by gay men. But I didn’t realize I was attracted to images of men getting busy until …
Hold up. Let me set the scene for you. It was 1995, Kansas City, the dead heat of summer. The temperature was hovering at around 110 degrees, which, thankfully, included the heat index. It was so hot, you could have fried an egg on the sidewalk.* However, it was also so hot that nobody in their right mind would have entertained the thought of actually walking out into the blistering sun, finding a suitable patch of sidewalk and dropping an egg on it. Instead, people were sensible. They remained in the air-conditioned goodness of the indoors. Kansas Citians aren’t dummies.
I was living in a third-floor apartment with my friend/roommate, a gay man. We were not fortunate enough to have air-conditioning. My roommate was out of town, so I had the stale, festeringly hot place all to myself. But I couldn’t enjoy my solitude because of the oppressive heat.
I had to take my clothes off, not because I was feeling sexy but because they made me feel like I was wrapped in electric blankets. I got a bath towel and soaked it in cold water. That was a trick my roommate had taught me a week or so earlier. Poor man’s air-conditioning, he’d called it. I laid down on the faux-leather sofa in the living room and covered myself with the wet towel. It felt great. For about 10 minutes. At which point the towel was dryish and warmish, so I had to repeat the entire process. I would be trapped in this endless cycle all day: wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa, wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa.
I needed something to do, but without cable TV, my options were limited. I didn’t even have the energy to read a book. (Plus, holding my arm up to read would be work, which would produce heat, which would be completely counterproductive to my goal of cooling off.) My gaze fell upon my roommate’s gay-porn collection. What the hell? The TV was right there, and I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I popped in a tape.
You might think this sounds pretty pathetic: naked girl covered in wet towel watching gay porn. But it wasn’t pathetic at all. Nope, I wasn’t pathetic watching that first tape. Or the second. Or the entire collection. Twice.
At first, I told myself I was just watching for research purposes. But that story doesn’t really hold up when you are on your ninth or tenth tape, although I did come away with some new moves I could try out on LoveShack. (Yes, I was dating LoveShack way back then. I wonder where he was that day. Lying on the sofa at his place watching lesbian-porn videos? Probably.)
I know what you might be thinking: I just watched all those videos because I was loopy from the heat. Not so. I was, in a word, turned on. (OK, that’s two words. But I wanted to avoid the word “horny” because I have an aversion to it. The word, that is. Not the state of being horny.)
Sadly, I was also literally too hot to do much of anything about it, an irony that was not lost on me at the time. (I think LoveShack got more than a spoonful of lovin’ from me later that night, though, once the temperatures dropped a smidge.)
Now, don’t start drawing any weird conclusions about this post, like thinking I am really a gay man trapped in a bisexual woman’s body. That’s just ridiculous. And please don’t leave here with the impression that I go seeking out gay porn. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I haven’t seen a gay-porn film since then. Watching a whole gay-porn video library in one day is enough to sate my desire for a good long while.
But today, a decade later, when I heard Jake and Heath were going to make out in Brokeback Mountain, well I knew it was time for another gay-movie fix. Even if I will be fully dressed in an air-conditioned movie theater. And even if it isn’t exactly gay porn.
*It wasn’t really hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Apparently, pavement has to be at least 144 degrees for that. Even at a sweltering 110 degrees, the pavement wouldn’t have been quite that hot. But the image worked in the post, so I used it. I’m a liar like that.
what can i say now that’s not as indistinguishable as two instruments hitting the same note at the same time with the same vibrato?
August 27, 2008
Dear Dave,
Since we’re being honest, I’ll offer this:
Vibrato has always made me sad.
Manipulating air, bending
a perfectly serviceable tone
for no reason other than to inject
something uniquely human.
Why must we put on such displays,
approach our music as if every piece
were a dirge that we should heave
and huff our way through, taking up
and expelling oxygen in bursts,
the way our mothers breathed
when they pushed us into the world,
begged to be rid of us and, once they were,
relaxed back into natural respiration.
Because vibrato is impossible on the clarinet,
it comes closest to the squawk of a goose.
And if you blow into the nose holes
of a goose that’s been felled, or so I am told,
you can play it’s clean brittle song.
* * *
Lirone has joined in on this conversation here. Dave and I encourage others to do so as well. What we’ve been doing is linking back to the poem we’re responding to in our salutation. If others join in, please do the same for the poem or poems you are responding to in your salutation. That way, everyone can follow the trail of the conversation.
from the sprigs* archives: what was(n’t) up
August 14, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Dec. 14, 2005. It’s part three in a three-part series about meeting LoveShack. Part one can be found here and part two can be found here. I am sharing the series because Deb asked me how LoveShack and I met, and it’s (obviously) a long story.
In the mid-’90s, Westport was a trendy Kansas City hangout. People would flock there at night to frequent the bars and clubs. If you were lucky, you could watch a piss-drunk guy whip out his dick and urinate in front of you on the sidewalk. Those of us who didn’t want to get pissed on would hang out at tamer Westport establishments, like Broadway Café (which was more of a coffee shop than a true café).
It was a comfortable evening in September of 1995 when LoveShack and I sat at a table outside the café, him with a coffee, me with a crumbly baked good and probably something fizzy to drink. (I hadn’t yet become addicted to Coca-Cola.) We watched folks pass: the students; the drunks; the women dressed like sluts in hopes of snagging a man; the men walking along, eyes fixed on the asses of the women who were dressed like sluts.
We were having a lovely time. We were in love after all. We’d professed our feelings early on, had been having great sex, and had practically moved in together, though we still maintained separate apartments. I would grab my English homework, a change of clothes and miscellaneous toiletries, then head over to his place most nights, where we would stay up late talking about nonsense, watch late-night reruns of Seinfeld while he brushed my hair, and have sex — did I mention we were having great sex? — before falling asleep in each other’s arms.
Since we’d been together six months, I thought it would be neat to reminisce about when we first met: how awkwardly I’d asked him out, the log roll, and how — when we were fleshing out the specifics of the date down at the deli — I’d accidentally blurted out, I might just jump over the counter and then jump you, after which I’d been mortified.
Yes, this seemed like a good time to have a laugh about all of it. As part of this discussion, I turned to LoveShack and asked, Why did you ask me to leave so early on our first date, anyway?
There was silence. (Not silence, really. LoveShack was silent, but the people passing by were pretty rowdy.)
He asked me not to get mad if he told me.
I promised, even though I hate promising not to be mad about information that has not yet been shared with me.
* * *
I need to back up a little here. Calm down. I’ll get to it, but I should first set the scene to help you make sense of what LoveShack is about to tell me. This is, in part, a story of how different two people’s perceptions can be. Here is how I would reconstruct the day I asked LoveShack out:
(You’ll notice I’ve left out all traces of my awkwardness.)
A sexy woman dressed in a provocative but not compromising way enters the deli. She moves gracefully across the room, takes a seat. If this had been an old black-and-white film, she would have asked the man behind the counter for a light. But it is 1995 and she doesn’t smoke, so she orders the log roll instead. As she nibbles ever so femininely at the roll, she bats her eyes at the man, then locks in on him as if to say, You are mine, in a take-charge, but still feminine, way. She charms him with her deep, lusty voice. She is assertive. She knows what she wants, and she wants him.
And this, apparently, is how LoveShack saw things that day:
(You’ll notice I’ve exaggerated this scene slightly for effect.)
A sexy woman enters the deli. She is well-manicured, every detail flawless. She moves gracefully across the room, almost too gracefully, as if she’s spent time rehearsing these movements. She’s so fluid, she seems unnatural. Before she takes a seat, he notices she’s a little taller than the average woman. She orders the log roll and, as he hands it to her, something feels off. (Why had she gravitated toward this particular dish? What did it signify?) As she tries without luck to cut into the roll, she stares the man down intently. She is quite possibly the most aggressive woman he’s ever encountered. If this had been an old black-and-white film, she would have offered him a light. She was that take-charge. He notices how low her voice is. It seems a little raspy, somewhat affected.
Our difference in perception is important. It establishes why I was so shocked by LoveShack’s confession.
* * *
So where were we? Oh yes, I turned to LoveShack and asked, Why did you ask me to leave so early on our first date, anyway?
There was silence.
He asked me not to get mad if he told me.
I promised, even though I hate promising not to be mad about information that has not yet been shared with me.
I thought you might have been a man, he said.
I responded, You what I might have what a what?
* * *
Most of you have not seen me in person, so you don’t know how ridiculous this thinking is. Nobody else has ever accused me of being a man. (Not that it would be an accusation, really. There’s nothing wrong with being a man. I’m just not one.) I will try my best to explain LoveShack’s bizarro thinking, some of which I touched on in the exaggerated scenario above. It boils down to two things, really:
1. He’d just seen The Crying Game.
2. He thought I was too feminine to actually be female.
I don’t really need to explain the first item. It speaks for itself. So let’s break down the second item. We will herein examine all the evidence LoveShack presented in support of his hypothesis that I might have been a man:
A. I was moving in a self-conscious way.
Sure. I was trying to be sexy. What man wants a clumsy woman? Was it affected? Of course. Was it something I learned as part of my overall plan of changing my gender from male to female, something I mastered between getting breast implants and learning how to tuck my penis between my thighs? No.
B. I had a low, raspy voice.
OK. I can see his point on that one. My deep, sexy voice is a little drag-queeny. I’ve learned my lesson. I will never use that voice again.
C. I was a bit tall for a woman.
True, but he is a little shorter than the average man. That didn’t make me think he was a woman in drag.
D. I was aggressive, almost like a sexual predator.
I admit I have a pretty wacky sex drive, and it leads me to do some intense things. I will also admit I think more like a man when it comes to sex, eschewing foreplay and cuddling. (Cuddling: barf.) Finally, I will admit I came on a little strong with LoveShack. But still, that doesn’t mean a penis was responsible for my actions. I am this way all on my own, little old estrogen-laden, card-carrying-female, vagina-having me.
This next one is kind of embarrassing. But it’s essential to the story, and LoveShack says I have to include it.
E. Ahem. My pelvic bone was ever-so-slightly noticeable.
Keep in mind, I was very, very thin at the time. My hip bones jutted out, my ass had no padding. From head to toe, I was all kinds of boney. And this meant my pelvic bone was, as I said, a teensy bit discernable with the naked eye, even through my clothing, which made LoveShack think … you know … I might have had something taped down, down there. I did not, for the record, have anything at all taped down, down there. I had only standard-issue girl parts.
* * *
That’s it in a nutshell (no pun intended). LoveShack had a twinge of a feeling that I might be a man. And on our date, especially when we got to making out, he was afraid he might encounter something he didn’t want to encounter. He even brushed his arm against my crotchal region at one point. I thought that had been a mistake. But during our conversation outside the café, he divulged that he was testing the area for signs of unusual activity.
LoveShack is a very normal, balanced human being. I feel the need to impart this fact, given what I’ve shared with you. Also, he is open-minded, which he proved by going out with me again, even though I might have had a log roll down my pants. But I had no such apparatus and, as soon as he got laid, his fears were allayed. Of course, I could be post-op. Just kidding. I promise I am not.
(But I do have an invisible penis, which is a story for another day. Or for never.)
from the sprigs* archives: no more moves
August 13, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Dec. 13, 2005. It’s part two in a three-part series about meeting LoveShack. Part one can be found here. I am sharing the series because Deb asked me how LoveShack and I met, and it’s (obviously) a long story.
I talk a lot. That probably comes as no surprise to those of you who’ve been reading my posts. I write like I talk, only the writing is a little better because I have the ability to review, edit and fill in details I’d usually forget or gloss over in conversation.
I’ve been told I give very complete answers to questions, which is why job interviews are a nightmare. I find it difficult to limit responses to between 20 seconds and 2 minutes each, the recommended time range for answers to interview questions. Two minutes tops? That doesn’t cut it. I end up giving half answers, quarter answers, tenths of answers — and interviewers are left to fill in the blanks.
My longwinded nature makes for long posts, and I appreciate your hanging in there with me as I flesh stories out. Take my post yesterday. It started as a meme I’d seen on some other blogs, including Octopus’ Garden. I’m sure you’ve all seen this meme.
The idea is to write about what you were doing 10 years ago, five years ago, one year ago and yesterday. I started thinking about 1995, 2000 and 2004. These were important years in my life. I might even call them pivotal years. So I was off writing and, true to form, I started in on a very complete answer. Before I knew it, I’d written 1,300 words or so about a couple of days in March of 1995. I am not really finished with the meme yet, and as long as I find this project entertaining, I think I’ll keep chipping away at what I was doing in 1995.
So here goes.
It was March 12, 1995. LoveShack picked me up for our first date in his rundown Honda Civic that had been in a huge accident while its previous owner was at the wheel. The car had been deemed a total loss by the owner’s insurance company, and LoveShack offered to buy it for a few hundred dollars. The car wasn’t very pretty but it still worked fine. He never really treated it with respect, though, because it was literally a reject of a car (with the salvage title to prove it).
So he trashed it. That is, he treated the back seat like a giant trashcan, throwing all manner of things back there, including apple cores, paper, soda cans and chicken bones (turns out he wasn’t a vegetarian, even though he worked in a vegetarian deli). I am not a person who keeps my own vehicle immaculate, but this was over the top. I could barely handle the smell of the car’s interior — dust mixed with organic and inorganic decay.
But I overlooked it. We all have our shortcomings. And his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel provided a huge distraction from the unbecoming state of the back seat. He drove me back to his apartment, which was spotless. Aaaah. This is the kind of cleanliness I could really get into, I thought. The place was decorated well, but not too well. He and his roommate had a shabby-man-chic look going. He had a room devoted to guitars and music, which I found irresistible (not the room itself, but the fact that he had musical talent and a room dedicated to musical expression). I’ve always dated musicians.
(With the exception of my first boyfriend, who didn’t play an instrument and couldn’t hit a single note on pitch. Not a one. His renditions of Beatles tunes made for really interesting listening. Like I said, we all have our shortcomings.)
LoveShack and I went in the kitchen and started making dinner together. We’d decided beforehand that this would be a nice first-date activity. While he was getting the blender set up, I saw that his hands were shaking. He told me he was nervous, which I’d gathered from his hands shaking. He continued: He hadn’t dated a lot of women; he’d just come off a long relationship; he wanted to make a good impression on me. God, his divulgence was so endearing, I wanted to jump his bones right there in the kitchen.
But I resisted that urge until after dinner, when we’d made our way to the loveseat. He had a copy of Gray’s Anatomy on a nearby bookshelf, something left over from a college class he’d taken. Sensing we were about to kiss and suddenly nervous myself, I hoisted the reference book off the shelf, dropped it in my lap and began thumbing through the pages, landing somewhere in the section on “female organs of generation,” which made me feel even more awkward. It was like having an advertisement on my lap that said, Hey, lookie here at what’s awaiting you under my dress.
He didn’t notice the book. He was taking off his glasses.
He was leaning toward me.
My nerves must have made me take a deep breath
as if I were going to be underwater
for who knows how long.
Then his lips were on mine, and we were off.
I was no longer nervous. He was no longer nervous.
Our organs of generation were throbbing in unison, and I was ready to strip down naked with this shy musician I hardly knew, to let his hands play me like an instrument.
(This is not terribly characteristic of me, by the way. I usually dilly-dally when it comes to sex. My first boyfriend and I waited almost a year before doing it. Having said that, I do have to admit that the amount of time I wait with a partner seems to be about half the time I waited with the previous partner. Good thing I married LoveShack; if that sex-waiting-period trend had continued, I would eventually have been sleeping with people before even meeting them.)
(OK, the analogy I made in the last sentence doesn’t really work, but I don’t care. I think it’s funny, so I am keeping it.)
So here’s what went down that night: nothing.
NOTHING!
Nothing went down. Nobody went down.
Everything appeared to be going great. In my head, I was listing all the reasons I could not sleep with him on the first date. I was also making a parallel list of reasons I could disregard those reasons and sleep with him on the first date — without seeming like a slut. LoveShack and I had worked our way into a horizontal position on the loveseat, and I was sooooo ready to put out when he curtailed our activities by saying, I think we should call it an early night.
I got my stuff together, and he drove me home in his crappy car, whose putrid stench seemed much worse than on the ride there.
Blogger’s Note: I’d love to keep talking about this, but I’ve already rambled on so. I guess I’ll have to take this topic up again tomorrow. There is a very interesting reason LoveShack took me home so abruptly. You will never guess what it was.
from the sprigs* archives: fingered
August 12, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Dec. 12, 2005. It’s part one in a three-part series about meeting LoveShack. I am sharing the series because Deb asked me how LoveShack and I met, and it’s (obviously) a long story.
It was 1995. I’d just separated from my first husband. I had seen LoveShack on several occasions, even before my husband and I split up. He worked at a vegetarian deli I frequented. I have to confess that, although the quality of the food was highly variable, I went back again and again in no small part because of LoveShack’s warmth, courtesy and the look of his delicate, long fingers as they held whatever dish he handed me.
I would close my eyes and imagine those fingers trailing along my breasts or neck. Or even better, running along my scalp, making their way through my hair. If he can handle a stuffed squash that way, just think, I thought, what he could do with me.
I moved all my things out of the house my first husband and I rented, then I did what needed to be done to give my newly leased apartment that lived-in feeling: I set up a place to write, plugged in my television and got my stereo hooked up. Once I was all settled in, it occurred to me I was free to date whomever I pleased. I hadn’t been in this position for three years, since my husband and I had been married for two years and we’d dated for a year before that.
Suddenly, being able to date again intrigued me. I decided to make a list. Not an actual list, but a mental list of suitable candidates. First, I wanted it to be a man. (I don’t know why. That’s just the place I was in at the time, I guess.) I came up with a short list that included a guy from my Shakespearean Drama class, the delicious guy from the deli (that was LoveShack, but I didn’t know his name at the time) and a couple of other men who populated the list briefly but whom I quickly crossed off for one reason or another.
So it was down to Hot Shakespeare Guy and Delicious Deli Guy. I took a good, hard look at Hot Shakespeare Guy in class the next day. He definitely had potential. On the up side: thick wavy hair, nice build, English major, writer, silky voice. On the down side: I’d heard he liked to play golf, but I was trying to keep an open mind.
I made my move after class. OK, truth be told, he made the move. He’d been sending me signals all semester, but nothing had materialized until that day. He must have picked up on the fact that I’d been checking him out. We started talking after class, and everything was going well until I noticed his fingers. They were short and kind of fat, like Vienna sausages. Not at all like Delicious Deli Guy’s hands. I imagined Hot Shakespeare Guy pawing at my naked body with those things, as if I were his putter or nine-iron, but I didn’t want to write him off. Not yet. Not just because of Vienna sausage fingers.
But then he started in about Shakespeare. He didn’t “get” why we had to read a bunch of crap by some dead guy, he said. Now I was concerned. I began to back away from him. He continued talking, telling me he was a modern writer, after all, and what did Shakespeare, or any other writer who wasn’t contemporary, have to do with modern writers?
It was clear this man’s defects went well beyond the chubby little stumps he called fingers. He was one of them: a dead-writer hater. You know the ones. They’re the writers who only wanted to write, write, write and not be bothered with actually reading the work of other writers, especially those who employed words that might need to be looked up because they’d fallen into disuse over time or who used meter and rhyme to advance their stories.
This warranted a reaction. Rather than continuing to back away from him, I shifted gears and moved closer. I was all riled up. I let him have it. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something that started with How dare you, ended with poser, and had the phrase call yourself a writer tucked in the middle. Then I made my dramatic exit through the ornate, oversized doors of Haag Hall, not even looking back once at the glorious head of hair I was leaving behind.
A few days later, I made plans to visit the deli for lunch. I would arrive in something sexy but not slutty, intoxicate Delicious Deli Guy with the pheromones I would shoot into the air like a human pheromone atomizer, and that would be that.
In reality, I was undone by my nerves the moment I arrived. I ordered something completely inedible, a dish called a “log roll,” which appeared to be a whole zucchini with only the top and bottom sliced off. True to its name, it was as hard as a felled tree. My disposable plastic knife and fork were no match for it. This dish vexed me. It was impossible to be delicate while handling such a tough vegetable entrée.
I felt the pressure to perform. If I couldn’t take control of something on my plate that resembled a hard cock in length, girth and, well — hardness — what would Delicious Deli Guy (erroneously) assume I’d be like in bed?
I had no choice but to put down my utensils, slide my log roll to the side, and turn my attention to the looking-and-acting-sexy portion of the program. My main course that day wasn’t the log roll, after all. It was Delicious Deli Guy. I made small talk with him using my seductive voice, and I found every excuse to look him directly in the eyes.
Within minutes, he had disappeared out the back door of the joint, leaving me alone with his co-worker, who took the opportunity to ask me out.
Dammit! My charms appear to be working, but on the wrong man, I thought. I declined the co-worker’s offer. He seemed dejected. Under other circumstances, I would have been more sensitive to the co-worker’s feelings, but I had to do some recon, and quick. (This was a love-or-lose situation.) I asked what his friend’s name was. LoveShack, he told me. I asked if he was seeing anyone. No, he isn’t. Huh. I couldn’t figure it out. Why weren’t my moves working on him?
LoveShack came back in the deli a few minutes later. Turns out my eye contact had made him nervous. He didn’t know what I wanted from him. Is there some schmutz on my face or shirt, he wondered. After checking himself out in the restroom mirror, he went out back to smoke a cigarette and take a breather from the intense whatever-the-fuck I was doing to him. When he returned, he was skittish and barely looked at me. I took my cue, paid for my blasted log roll, and left.
My plan had not gone as smoothly as I’d hoped. But I couldn’t let it go. There was just something about him. He hadn’t said anything offensive about dead writers, he didn’t play golf, he worked at a vegetarian deli, and he had fingers I wanted to suck. When I got back to my part-time job on campus, I grabbed a phone book, looked up the number for the deli and called him. Here goes nothing, I thought.
I don’t remember our exact conversation, but it went something like this:
Me
Yes, is this LoveShack?
LoveShack
Um, yes.
Me
This is the girl with blond hair, the one who ordered the log roll for lunch today.
LoveShack
Oh, was everything OK with it? I’m sorry. It wasn’t very good, was it?
Me
(lying) Yes, it was great. (slight pause) Do you remember who I am?
LoveShack
I remember you.
Me
Oh. (noticeable pause as I muster nerve to blurt out next sentence) Well, I was wondering if you’d like to go out sometime.
LoveShack
Sure.
Me
(shocked and ecstatic, and coming off totally uncool) REALLY??? You would? Greeeeeat!!!
I know we talked more after that, but that’s all I remember. I don’t even think I told him my name before asking him out. This was the only time I’ve ever asked someone out on a date, and that story shows why I should never be allowed to ask anyone out again. LoveShack was very patient with me through that whole awkward mess. He is a wonderful man, and he makes a phenomenal veggie sandwich. I still get jealous of bread when I see the way he takes it in hand.
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive it – indeed the world’s need of it – these never pass. — Mary Oliver
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
