H is for Harem

I know that this is irritating for you. I mention your harem and you bristle. This is how I refer to your adoring fans, the women who invite you to view art with them, and to eat, and who send you things in the post.

I would not even have included this post because I know how you will feel about it, that tired old argument dragged out and waved in front of you again. I feel you groan and shake your head. You have tired of me. The joke is old and was once, maybe, and only once, a funny moment. Now it is a whole string of moments that predict a pathology.

I want you to be loved because then you will be happy. I want you not to be loved because then I would have no competition for your affection. I want both of these things to exist in the world without conflict. It is an impossible desire, for you and I to be happy in these opposite ways. I don't know how to love someone else's boyfriend safely despite the fact that I am someone elses wife and steeped happily to my chin in that affection.

G is for Gerontophilia

I was at a party the other day and I was surrounded by people my own age or older. Beautiful people. Not the squeaky shiny beautiful young people that I shy away from at parties. These were folk who possessed a certain grace. A calmness that can only come from experience. The lack of this kind of calm is perhaps why I find myself surrounded by young folk. When I am with older people I feel Naive. I feel that they have discovered some secret that has somehow passed me by. I am more comfortable with the scatty inconsistencies of younger people that remind me so much of my self.

Gentrophilia is a passion for sex with people older than ourselves. It has it's roots in our parental relationships, a kind and loving father, a mother who was absent and therefore we are seeking to replace her in our hearts and with our bodies.

I wonder then why most of my friends are in their twenties. What does this say about my own parents. What does this then say about me?

G is for Glory Hole

We are in the big smoke. This city. Chinatown. The red light district. We are sitting in a bar and they are so young and wide eyed. They stare out into the passing parade. Women dressed like men. Men dressed like women. Prostitutes dressed like men dressed like women. The place across the road is called the Glory Hole and I chuckle, but they have never heard this term before. I find this endearing. This two young men, so clean in the dirty city.

I tell them about the holes in the wall and the play of random genitals, penises drooping through the holes like flowers, rising to the sun when people kneel and touch and suck at them. They are incredulous. It is charming. This is a world that they have not had contact with. I am no seasoned hand at sex shops and peep shows but I have seen and heard and visited. I am a voyeur. I watch with interest. I suddenly feel elevated to a place of wisdom in the eyes of my two young friends, these men who have grown up in an age of free porn on the internet, but who have kept themselves safe from it naive, and ultimately sweet.

G is for Gang Bangs

When I watched the Annabelle Chong story I was disturbed. It was a moving documentary, a well executed piece of work, but I wondered particularly, about her relationship to sex, her public embracing of what we usually keep private. She was starring in a Gang Bang and I watched the male 'actors' sitting in the auditorium waiting their turn. Each one of them was there for their own particular set of reasons. Each one waiting for the man before him to finish so that they might step up to the body on the table, the thin Asian lady, the piece of flesh smelling of other mens' sperm and sweat and pheramones.

Am I like Annabelle Chong? Am I the same feisty but fragile creature, daring the waiting hoards to step up to the plate? Am I using sex as a shield, a red rag, distracting the bull from the truth of the situation. And what is the truth?

The truth is that I am invisible under this veneer of sexuality. I am somewhere inside and sometimes it is impossible for anyone, including myself, to find me. Sometimes I am unsure if there is really any 'me' to find at all.

bicycle handle

He gave me the handle from a bicycle and settled against the wall. He wanted to watch. I suppose I knew that this would be the last time for us. There was no kiss hello, no hug, just a handing over of the implement.

"I want to watch" he said and settled, just like that.

"You want me to masturbate?"

"Yes."

"You want to watch?"

"Yes."

I could have said no, I suppose but this was an adventure I had never been on. I was always up for an adventure.

"Open them," like the bodiless voice intruding on a scene from a pornographic movie. "Now spit."

And I glared. As if the boy could direct me towards orgasm better than I could direct myself.

"Be quiet," I told him, "or I won't be able to come"

"I don't care if you come or not."

And so the line had been drawn. I raced him, from my position perched on the edge of his bed. I watched him fully clothed, but with his penis a ridiculous protrusion, and his hand around it. No spit for him. He had the bottle of lubrication and he used it liberally. I would make this about me, I thought, about my orgasm. I would use him equally as well as he would use me. I watched him stroke himself in that halting a-rythmic way he had and I wanted to get off on it, but I found myself hating him instead. Just a little bit more with every stroke.

He directed me from his lazy lean, removed from the activity, yet involved in it. When he was close the directions stopped. He closed his eyes andd I watched his whole body tense and I watched him catch his ejaculate in the palm of his hand.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the handle from a bicycle inside me and I didn't want to continue. We would not continue. He wiped his hand in a tissue and zipped himself up and he looked unruffled.

"Thanks for that."

When he walked out into the loungeroom to get a beer I knew that I would never see him again and that was Okay too. I didn't particularly like him with his nice clothes and his fetish for nurses. I liked the sex which was always detatched and slightly angry, but I didn't like waking up beside him and I had rarely slept over for this reason.

I left the bicycle handle on his clean black bedspread where it would drip and stain and he would have to wash the whole thing which would annoy him. He was expecting me to stay for a beer, but I gathered up my things and then I left.

F is For Fetish

From Dictionary.com

–noun

1.	an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency.

2.	any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect, or devotion: to make a fetish of high grades.

3.	Psychology. any object or nongenital part of the body that causes a habitual erotic response or fixation.

Krissy:

1. Before bed there is a ritual. To speak of it is to lessen it's potential to protect me. It is enough to say that this has kept me from night terrors since I was a child. Perhaps this all began with the thing I did with soft toys, giving them magical potency that would protect me from myself. I am my worst enemy. I chase myself through dreams, hopping from one horror to another without let up. I use my ritual to give myself some meger sense of control over these terrors. Still my dreams are filled with death and severed body parts and a sense of powerlessness. I perservere with my private ritual because perhaps I am keeping out some even greater terrors with these repetitions. Of course the heart of this fetish is sexual. Sex is the single most powerful tool I call my own. I therefore shake my sexual fetish at the gathering dark and hide under the covers, weathering the storm till the breaking of each new day.

2. You have a pedestal set under you. I am old enough to know better. I set one person or another in this elevated position from which you might fall. You have been fetishised and I appologise in advance. I know that you will dissapoint me and I will prove this to myself one sacrificial angel after another. The sound of youf tumble makes me sad and satisfied all at once. If you can fall then so can I. And so I do. One dull thud after another as I continue to dissapoint myself, tumbling from my unrealistic expectations again and again.

3. Variety is the spice of life. A cliche, but an accurate one. Some of us have the tenacity to develop a fetish for one thing or the other. It is true that even fetishists need some kind of escalation. Higher and higher heels, stronger and stronger pain, longer and longer moments of strangulation. There is an incremental creep towards more risky practices and I see the appeal, I do, but I have no committment to it. I am more scatter-gun in my approach, rubber one day, leather the next, humiliation, domination, missionary and doggy style. I am the victim of my own whims which I change daily like my socks or underwear. I would like to throw myself into one fetish or another, but I am afraid I lack commitment or the ability to finish what I have begun.

F is for Furious

Furious. A joke because you are so calm with everyone.

Except me.

And I make you mad sometimes. I make you grit your teeth and snap like a turtle. I make you the furious being that you are not by nature. And you disturb me furiously from time to time. I am surprised, small dog easily spooked to a yelping rage, excited by your presence, briefly, then galloping off to nip and worry at someone else. But always I return to you. Dog to bone, worrying at the inanimate fall of your shrug. I am something to you but nothing of great consequence and occasionally this makes me furious.

But not right now, as I laze in the sun of a good day, waiting for a stomach pat or a scrap of meat or a small word of affection, licking the beer we shared from my lips and thinking about my next distraction.

Moderating your comments.

This is the first comment that has been unthinkingly cruel. Perhaps the exception proves the rule. People are generally well meaning. I look forward to your comments. I have left them unmediated out of a belief that we should not be censored. I have enjoyed your stories and your surprises. I have peeked into the window of your other worlds through your comments. I have known that you are reading and taking an interest and you have kept me honest in this way.

Yesterday there was the kind of comment that you might hear shouted out of a car window. Some bleary eyed drunk guy. The kind of guy I have seen picking on an intellectually disabled girl at a bus stop. The kind of comment that is spat at me if I walk into the wrong kind of bar. I forget that the world is a vast and various place.

I struggle to remember where I have learned to be unkind to myself when so many people around me prove that I am safe and loved.

Then your errant comment.

Then I remember.

So I have deleted your beer bleary shout and, reluctantly, I have started to mediate your comments to protect myself from them.

It is the end of an era.

F is For Frottage

I have told you about the small cramped space behind the counter at work. I have talked about the accidental brushing up against each other, the electric shock of skin on skin. This way of touching without actually falling into their embrace is my way of finding comfort. I like them. I can brush past them. My physical contact is an accident. The small sexual thrill I feel can be concealed in the hurly burly of the every day. So therefore F is for Frottage and I must admit to partaking in this kind of secret pleasure.

I saw a Frottophile on a train one day. It was peak hour. I watched him pushing against the back of a young woman. She was nervous. She looked to one side. She shifted. She felt crowded but she wouldn't move away from him and he was happy to be noticed without confrontation. We are polite in situations like this. We are loathe to confront the people who trespass into our personal territory. I joke with those I work with about my similar intrusions. "Up close and personal" I tell tell them and we laugh. I wonder if they are being similarly polite, tollerating the unwanted intrusion. Making light of it. I am careful to step back and away if I sense any kind of irritation from a fellow worker. I do not linger. I am there and gone in an instant. But at times I wonder.

F is for Fuck

Copulation.

"No one will make love with me again" he said. "No one will ever find me attractive."

"I find you attractive"

I found him attractive. It was not entirely about the visual stimulous, although I was indeed visually stimulated. He had lost a fair chunk of himself to the disease and it was easy to see why he had concerns, but he still dressed smartly, and I saw the lack of skin and bone but I saw his style staring boldly through it all and I was aroused by this.

"Would you make love to me? This may be the last time anyone makes love to me."

I would have made love to him. I could see his point, feel his urgency. I was aroused by him. But there was that promise, that unshakable vow. "I want to but I can't." I wanted to but I could not, and it wasn't a lack of desire. I was desirous. He was, indeed, a beautiful man.

We parted with regrets and a possibility between us which was never again mentioned, but it was in his half-faced smile, it was in my small sigh on parting. I thought of this through tears that threatened to spill out into the silent crowd. I ached for what I could have offered up but didn't.

They were surprised to see me there but happy. He had a way of making friends. So many friends that it would have been impossible to keep track.

I saw him into the ground and my skin felt sad for the touch I could have offered to him but didn't and I wish that I could know that he had indeed made love one last time at least, but I am afraid that he didn't. I am sad that he didn't. I am sad.

E is foe Essayeurs

Essayeurs were men employed Parisian brothels. They would touch the girls, feel them in front of potential clients. This sexual attention excited the punters to engage in sexual activities with the prostitutes themselves.

I stand with a friend who is single. I stand between them and the one that they desire. I know this to be true. It is some intimacy divulged to me in private, or a hunch. I have read the body language and I know that the consummation of a passion is imminent if things fall the right way. I find myself flirting with the object of his affection. I pour my attention on her. I am leading by example. This is a habit I have that I have little control over. It happens more often with someone that I like. I find myself becoming the conduit between them, the essayeur, exciting the object of my desire by showing him the way forward in this instance. Sometimes in dreams I am the one who provides foreplay. I see myself beginning to arouse the desired woman, stepping away to let the man that I desire find his place where I had been.

I am not quite sure that I understand the reason for this. Am I being kind? Leading the way, delivering my desired person to their pleasure, or am I setting myself up to be the one who is ultimately rejected. This behaviour is troubling but it is repeated, a pattern that I am swept up in. The essayeur who shrugs into his coat and leaves the client to enjoy the spoils whilst I trudges homeward in the cold and dark.

E is for Eunuch

I am jealous of his harem. I do not want to be just one girl in a picture by Ingres. If he has a harem then I refuse to lay down in it, languishing under the subtle breeze of my peacock feather fan. We talk about Eunuchs. It would require a eunuch to service such a smorgasboard of feminine wiles. Someone adept at listening. Some agile, young and preferably heterosexual male to lie amongst so much female flesh. A eunuch has had his testicles removed to ensure that he does not pregnate the herd. I think of them as a herd. The women who are lined up side by side on silken couches, composing poetry to the man, sighing, dreaming, dedicating their dreams. The eunuch has subjected himself to the removal of his testicals. One at a time, if he has been at all organised about it. The pleasure associated with the removal of a testical is supposed to be immense. And so, with both of them now removed, he grazes amongst the herd, nipping a bud here or there, chewing, swallowing only to regurgitate the blossom at a later time.

But wait. I am unkind. The scenario is nothing but a figment of my jealousy. I know better than to imagine a herd of women, women hunt in packs, like wolves, and like wolves, they can be silent and deadly. I pity the poor eunuch who waits nervously amongst them. I swallow down my jealousy and know that I will not be a part of a harem because I am afraid for myself and unable to compete.

D is for Dominatrix

Dominatrix, a woman who is paid to ac out an S/M scene with a client.

A dominatrix does not need to be pretty. In fact it could be seen as a part of the process of debasement to be tied and beaten by someone who is less than beautiful. I am the perfect woman for the job.

I can lean on my props, my leather and my rubber and my cat of nine tails and my wrist cuffs. The accoutrements make me beautiful where my skin fails me. Anyway, if he complains then I will not look favourably on the client. I might touch him, but perhaps I won't. Perhaps I will just tie him in my bathroom and set him to work on the old tiles and the stained porcelain. Perhaps I will make love to my husband and force him to watch. I imagine that our love making is not a spectator sport. He will be confronted by the truth of the sex, the bodies that are just bodies, the ravages of time, the edge of violence that creeps into it and dissolves into a firm and lustful affection for each other. Perhaps we will use the man for visual stimulus, the shackles, the uncomfortable pose, the insertion of various household items. I would never run out of options. I am endlessly inventive.

I know that there is more to the job than this. The act is supposed to be for his pleasure. I must make myself take notice of his needs. A much more complicated power play but isn't every interaction? Am I not always struggling to predict the needs of other. This is my strength and also my failing.

D is for Docking

Docking is a form of masturbation. The foreskin of one partner is pulled back and the other's foreskin is stretched over the tip of his penis. The two penises after being locked into place, are then stroked so that the skin is moved back and forth over the two glans. - The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sexual Practices by Brenda Love

One of the few regrets I have when it comes to my sexual adventures is that I rarely sighted a foreskin. Perhaps this explains a part of my current fascination with men who are younger than I am. I think about their penises and the foreskin is particular. I wonder how it was that in a career spanning so many penises there was a drought of foreskins. It is difficult then to picture the act of Docking or to imagine the push-me pull-you kind of action that would occur.

My one foreskinned-partner came too early in my sexual explorations. I was polite, too careful with him. He used to wince and back away if I lost myself in any kind of passion. I nuzzled up to this part of him as you would a bird, all fragile bone and down and wing. I rarely played with the thing when it was not errect. It was errect so often. I dream sometimes of a foreskin. Something that comes with the furtive sexual longings that so often plague me. I dream of nestling into his lap and it will be flaccid and coy in it's little hood of flesh. I will slip my tongue under the skin, a rolling back and forth motion, soft and gentle but with the possibility of teeth. I will explore the potential stretch of it, the plasticity, the way the thing shrinks back to no thing at all when the blood has rushed into the organ.

If I had ever had two lovers both with foreskins, I would have set them together in this delicate wrestle. There is nothing polite about my bedroom etiquette these days. Self consciousnesss falls to the floor with my clothing. In dreams I drag the two most recent infatuations out of their cowering crouch in my subconscious. They both have foreskins. One I know for sure, the other, I asume, all boys are left with this arresting abundance of skin these days and these men are boys comparatively. I kneel where the view is best and I ease their hips together. Two men, one point of contact. And how they would hate me if they knew the things the three of us would do.

C is for Corprophilia

Coprophilia refers to one who is sexually aroused by feces. – The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sexual Practices by Brenda Love

I do not do scat. It is probably a smell thing. Of course any kind of sex play that involves the anus is likely to put you into contact with at least a whiff of it if not a tracing of fecal matter itself. I take this in my stride along with the other by products of pleasure, semen, vaginal juices, sweat, blood and sometimes tears.

I listen to another conversation about Two Girls and A Cup. It seems that everyone has seen it except me. It isn’t the concept of coprophilia that repulses me. I’m sure the act itself would not bother me as much as some. I have been put off by the description of people’s responses to it. The word vomit has been mentioned. I can shrug my shoulders at the use of faeces, but vomit is another matter. Sometimes I have stumbled across the wrong kind of pornography for my particular tastes. I have accidently seen a deep throating that ends badly. In fact the very thought of nausia makes me nauseus. Shit, however does not have the same effect on me but it does not particularly excite me. For me the act of penetration is the crux of it. Perhaps it is simply a moment of power in a life where I am buffeted in every body elses wake. Even the choppy ride on my own emotions leaves me exhausted on most days.

Bordellos sometimes had a glass ceiling and women would defecate on it while the clients would watch and masturbate below. Roman charioteers rubbed the dung of boars onto their skin. Some men like to wear a rubber suit which traps the sticky warm excretions against their flesh. My neighbour said he once defecated on his girlfriends breasts. All of this is fine for those who want it. Perhaps if I were with someone who needed to be shat on I might comply, on birthdays or special occasions. But it is not my thing and I do not feel the urge to look up Two Girls and A Cup despite the fact that almost everybody else has done it except me. I will stay in my safe little vanilla world where a trace of fecal matter is as close as I will ever get.

B is for Bee Stings

(Melissophilia; Entomocism - use of insects, Entomophilia - arousal from insects, Formicophilia - arousal from ants)

Bee stings are used to extend the duration of orgams, to enhance sensation of the penis and to increase its circumference.

She had a Bee tatooed onto her back. She had a thing for bees she said and we drank to it. We sat in the window after work and clinked pink drinks together and slugged vodka to the sting of the needle against flesh. She said that her bee stung more than childbirth. I said that the words carved into my flesh were nothing compared to the pain of writing a novel. And what I didn't tell her was the pleasure it gave me. The tap of the needle, the sweat of his fist leaning against my shoulder, the thought that this sharp cutting into flesh, this inking, the permanence made me alive to everything around me. The smell of his skin, the feel of the chair that I was straddling, the tight little buds of my nipples. I wanted to lick her bee blood and taste the acid on my tongue. I remembered the taste of menstral blood, the sharp metallic tang, the fist slippery with it.

Some men will react unfavouribly to a bee sting. Some men will fall into anaphylactic shock. For others there will be a swelling of three inches, a penis inflating like a baloon. The bee dies. More often than not the man doesn't.

She is allergic to bees she tells me when it is done and we are back to our pink vodka on the back deck of the bookshop.

The worst pain that she has felt and a pain to make my clitoris swell in it's careful concealement. Some men will hold a bee on each side of the penis and push down on them encouraging them to sting. The death of the bee, a little death. I lift the dressing of her fresh tattoo and smell the sharp tang of her blood and I remember everything.

A is for Apotemnophilia

Apotemnophilia (apo: away from; temp: to pull; philia: attachemt to) describes people who are aroused by the idea of the loss of a limb or body part. - The encyclopedia of unusual sexual practices by Brenda Love

The writing and the painting distracts me from the body. Sometimes handcuffs are enough to silence me. The soft ones I bought with the fur fabric and the metal fastenings that jingle like spilled coins. My arms stretched out where they are useless to me. I can not put pen to paper. I am arrested mid sentence but it is child's play really. This is a vanilla silencing of my favoured method of communication.

The amputation of my arms is like my tongue hacked roughly from my head. Suddenly I would be thrown into a silence that excavates my body from the mud of mediocrity. I ignore my body in so many ways. I bring my hands to it. I am lazy this way. I lift my breasts into my mouth, I press my fingers into it. The body itself is inert. My hands speak for it.

The removal of my arms would see it squirming towards it's own worm-like satisfaction. It must search for things to press against, struggle towards the objects that might fill it. My art would be a scrambling in the earth and clay and here are my words, read like footprints in the mud. My words leave tracks. Only the sharp of eye, the observant ones will hear me as I scramble out my un-armed lust.

ABC of unusual sexual practices

What should I do now that the book is in some kind of shape?

I drift from blog post to blog post without direction. Should I still talk about sex? Should it still be true stories? There is more sex. There is always more sex. But what point would there be? Should I invent some stories? Should we drift into the realm of fantasy? Should I just hop from story to story forgetting about the sex for now, just reveling in pure invention?

I thought perhaps I might do a month of philosophy. Drawing ideas of sexuality from philosophical questions. This seems like my most likely course of action, but now that the book is done I have no energy for sex at all. I feel hollowed out, bereft of stories. I feel like I have lost a friend or a part of myself. I feel like an amputee, feeling about in the dark for a leg in need of scratching and realising that things will be different now.

26 letters in the alphabet he tells me. That's almost a month right there. A challenge perhaps, an a-z of erotic delights, surely I can cover an alphabet without much trouble. I haul out the Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love. I turn the pages one by one. More than enough. My true stories. My responses to a stimulous. A project. An alphabet book for the sexually exploratory. So I begin.

Poetry at last

So that whinge on yesterday's blog post was well worth it. I am now the proud recipient of my first ever love poem.

K orn thins and
R ice cakes will always
I solate my hunger for the one thing that
S lips through my fanny pack and
S terilizes my homogenesis
Y ak milk are my emotions for you.
-Beth

Krissy is imortalised forever in erotic poetry. I am finally a complete human being.

Poetry

You are the kind of boy that girls write poetry for. This must be nice for you. Or maybe it is because you are young and poetry is short and young girls have no time for something larger, and wouldn't know where to start anyway.

Still, there is the poetry and it is read to you or sent to you in little scented envelopes by mail and this must be nice. No one has written a poem for me, or painted me a picture or written me into a novel. I am no one's muse. Once a famous author stole an idea from me and published it and that was flattering in one way, but the novel was less than a success and his sales figures saw him plummet back into relative obscurity.

I will resist the urge to frame you as my muse. You are already muse to so many other women I will feel lost amongst the crowd of them. My work will be generic. All the songs in my computer speak of love for some person or another. The names of girls, the faces, the various parts of them deconstructed. I check my mail box daily but there are only bills and a glossy catalogue for stationary supplies.

sexless

They do not think of you as a sexual being. Always remember that. You are colour and movement. You are entertainment. You are something to bring up in conversation at a party, a show and tell. When they speak to you they are speaking to you without imagining you in any kind of compromised position. When they read the sex you write they are replacing you in their imagination with the kind of girl that they would like to see with her clothes off.

They are not thinking about you. They will never think about you. And if they stumble upon you masturbating in the lounge room when you thought that nobody would creep up to the door, then they will fall back quickly, they will work at erasing the memory from their minds. They will not evoke you later in their bedroom when their flesh is restless. Never for a moment imagine that this will happen.

You think about them almost constantly, undressing them, turning them over, observing all their various shapes and colours. You are pleased with all and anything that they have to offer you. But they will never think about you.

Keep this foremost in your mind and they will never disappoint you.

missing post

I thought I had written a post but I only imagined it. If you thought you had seen it then you imagined it too. It is that old question of the nature of reality which is a question without an answer and it could go on and on if we didn't snap out of it and get on with it.

I saw a man climbing into a boat in the middle of the river. It was dusk. He had supplies. I wanted to be him. I wanted to be climbing onto my boat in the middle of the river with all that water between me and any other human being. I thought there might be blue cheese and crackers in his plastic bag. I thought he might sit there in the dark with his wine and his cheese and his own company. Then he might hoist the sail and ease out into the river in the middle of the night, looking for the ocean.

On the shore a man rode a bicycle in the dark, heaving it up the banks towards the rich peoples houses. I liked him. I saw another man waking in the dark with a guitar on his back. I liked him too.

I walked.

The two men met up, sat down together, talked and laughed and I found I was disappointed by this. I preferred the man on the boat but he was now out of sight, past the bend in the river. I wondered if I should turn around and walk back past him one last time.

Completing a Draft

There is only one thing better than the slow climb to orgasm. This is the moment when you know that the first draft is almost complete. There is this sense that you are expanding and that all of it, the whole world that you are just about to birth, is enclosed in your open hug. There is a moment when you feel that perhaps you are close to the idea of infinity. You can sense the colour and the shape of it and if you just keep typing, one more quick chapter after another, that you will have reached a place where everything is known and you can rest easy there.

I have just emerged from such a place. My back aches. My eyes are sore. My stomach throbs from the excessive amounts of Neurophen that are needed to sustain twelve hours of writing a day for so many days. I am in pain. I am happy. It is like sex only more so.

I sit with the index cards and the draft glowing on the computer screen and my notebook full of scribble and it is just like the morning after sex. I look at the thing that I have done and it has lost that special shine that it contained only hours before. It is messy. There are holes in it. It is tired already and it has only just been brought into the world. I flick through the chapters and I wonder if perhaps it is quite boring. It is certainly long and filled with bad tenses and misspellings. I wonder why anyone would bother reading it at all.

Still there are those hours when it was being completed. There is the moment before the final full stop and the words The End which I typed, just to feel the sense of it and then highlighted them and pressed delete because I never write The End at the end of a manuscript anyway. Those hours were the best I have ever had. In those hours, and in the after glow, I was happier than I can ever remember being.

I have said this before. I said the very same thing when I finished the first draft of my last manuscript, and the manuscript before. I realise now that this is why I write. Not for those rejection letters that leave me sobbing on the back deck outside Avid Reader. Not for the humiliation that I naturally feel when someone says - how's the writing going? Not when my grandmother says - you have a publisher yet? You must have a publisher. You are not a writer if you do not have a publisher. I know she just wants me to achieve something wonderful. I know she only wants the best for me. But in this moment, now, here at the end of something and the beginning of the long and boring trudge across the same territory that is the process of rewriting, here, I know what I have come for.

I have never been happier.

And at the end of the first draft of my next manuscript I will repeat myself. And again and again and again until one day when I grow too old to write any more and only then will I die.

from the timecapsule

I discovered some diary entries from way back when that relate directly to this period of my life. 20 years old but still quite interesting. Here is some of it now:

First the giant purple trees burst into bloom, then at the yellow house on Hale street, the morning glories and the wild passionfruit jealously caught the colour and threw it back. Purple flowers clung to the three tall fences, draped themselves about the monsteriors and bobbed up and down in the pool.

There were wild passionfruit flowes in my hair as I surfaced. In my hair, on my skin, clinging to one of my breasts. I covered my nipples in flowers and floated on my back. I thought about sex. When I emptied my lungs my body sank. Only two flowered breaths left, breath in and I was above the water line. The water sucked at my clitorus. I was masturbating as I floated. Hands free. It was a gentle touch. I wondered how long it would take till I came. If you did this slowly you could orgasm with roomfulls of people watching and no one would know. The thought was erotic. The dots of sunlight on my skin were erotic. The flowers hiding me was erotic.

Elissa was watching me. I became aware of her suddenly and caught my breath, losing rythm. I felt like I must have looked guilty.

"You look beautiful," she said.

I didn't believe or challenge her. I knew I must have looked ridiculous with flowers over my nipples, bobbing up and down in the water.

Under the Trees

I hated the teachers being away because they would make us go sit under the trees. It was the one green space in the school and there were two very old and gnarled trees overseeing it. The school turned its back on this place, the buildings huddled together around a central courtyard, shrugging off the memory of the green space as if it didn't belong to the school yard at all. It was a place for furtive kissing, wild arguments, secret pacts that played themselves out to devastating consequences. One day we found a Catholic school boy, the school captain of a neighbouring force, tied naked to one of these trees. We lingered and we looked but we didn't cut him down.

The Trees were the domain of the grade ten boys, marking time till their next birthday when they could legally slip away from the grip of high-school and slink off into the hurly buly of the real world.

We sat, the thirty of us, still reeking of the primary school playground. There were only six of them but they had the height and confidence of an army.

I felt my friends peel away from me, slinking off to the relative safety of a bench behind the buildings.

One of the boys took my schoolbag and climbed the tree, hanging it off a branch that I would never reach. I had a practiced bored expression. It was the one I wore when my sister was in the mood for systematic bullying. One eyebrow slightly raised, a question - so what's next then? My mouth a steady and unwavering line, a dash which haults a sentence mid step, anticipating more.

Three of them. The other three sat smoking at another table vacated by my classmates. It was me and them and I should have stood and walked off abandoning my schoolbag, but I didn't.

He put his hand up my skirt and the others snickered. Whatever point he was making was lost on me. I didn't touch my friends in any way. I didn't hug or lean against them. I didn't hold their hands or kiss hello or goodbye. I knew that someone shouldn't put their hand up anybody's skirt. There was some rule about this. I was only 12 but I had already had my first period. I knew that most things of the body should be private and I knew that what the boy did was wrong. I didn't yet know about sex or intimate conflict. I didn't know that this gesture had a name. All I knew was that I should remain impassive. I knew not to cry or to give ground. I sat and stared and they snickered and I watched the grade ten boy lick his finger and I thought about the existence of germs and I wondered how he could do that, and particularly in front of his friends. But I didn't blink and I didn't flinch and they lost interest and slumped away.

Somebody retrieved my bag for me. No body mentioned what had happened. The school day ended.

addiction

So it is an addiction, this chemical reaction in my brain that is a kind of self-medication. It is like taking Ecstasy, the slow flow of it through my body. I remember the first time I took the synthesised drug. Sitting and waiting and feeling the change of temperature in my skin, the slick of sweat in my palms, the heavy coming down in my body, like I am falling through water. And the calm. The sudden peace I seemed to make with myself.

Sex is a similar drug. For a moment there is that kind of peace. All of this heralded by the cold sweat and the flush of blood coursing through my skin. The heart beating faster, the inhibitions fled.

I take my drug when I am falling. Emotional flat line. This kick start, a shot in the brain, my receptors firing with the sudden electric shock of orgasm.

I have it under control, this addiction of mine. Gone are the days when I put all of my time into the procuring of the hit, the endless searching for someone to satisfy the need, the upping the dose, one new partner at a time. I am on a programme of the stuff, metered out in satisfying blocks of activity, not too close together, not too far apart. I am a regular user and it feels like methodone. I am on the medication and it is containable, this need.

slab

We lay on the concrete slab and it was colder than we had anticipated. Our warm weather sleeping bags were thin and the chill ate through them. We wormed our way towards each other and there was his warmth against my warmth but we were still cold enough to stay wakeful. I wondered about the state of his body, the excitement that it might betray if our clothing were suddenly stripped away. I imagined it would be impossible for him to press himself against me with all my unrequited longing without even a hint of my desire rubbing off on him.

I make this mistake. It is played out on a loop. My longing, this coming together, this projection of desire that is not even distantly echoed by the one that I desire. I am continuing to play this song even now. The melancholy ache of another mistake in progress.

So he pressed against me for my body heat and I inched back hoping to feel some vague stiffening. And next time it will be the same, and the time after, and the time after that. An endless procession of people that I will desire who will never desire me in return.

Key word friends I feel sorry for

In all the key word searches that have lead readers to my blog, I feel sorry for the people who googled the following things:

Standing outside in the rain cause colds
How to break my own hymen
Make my husband jealous
Crotch odour
Jealous of my facebook friends
cat furious
what is a dry read
tampon discipline
I am finding out that maybe I was wrong
orgasum on hores
how old was eve when she died
Anthony Mullins profile

Answering Machine

Krissy Kneen is away right now finishing her memoir. This process will take approximately two weeks. In her absence you will be treated to seven days of things she has prepared earlier. Most of these are just segments from the memoir some of these are trick posts, things that sound like sections of her memoir but might not be. All of them were written at a previous time. She will be out of internet, phone and personal contact for at least a week. When she emerges she will be just a little edgy, and perhaps tender, from sitting in a room by herself with herself and thinking about herself. I can virtually guarantee paranoia. She may loose the power of speech. There may be some tears.

This said, keep your fingers crossed for her and continue to read about her vagina in her absence and leave messages. Please leave messages. With any luck she will return.

Wish me luck.

I am going away with myself to finish it. It is all about me and I am nervous about the time I will spend in my own company.

Not all of it will be enjoyable. I will tear myself apart and it will manifest in quite a physical way. I will indulge in self loathing and compulsively masturbate till even I cannot bear to touch myself. The work will be done, but the private pain of it will be ugly and perhaps I will not be my friend any longer when I emerge, blinking blind from the burrowing into myself.

The writing of memoir.

The crawling into and up my own anus.

The horrible self-important self reflection. The deconstruction of the I.

Two weeks away with myself. Wish me luck and cross your fingers that I will return.

Now I am 40

Instantly and overnight.

This is how the change has occurred. I am new in my skin. I am a quiet strength. I have no need for any of the little distractions that stretched their net beneath me. I have crawled my way through the frayed supports and I have finally found the water and it is fine.

I was imagining the fall but I had forgotten the ocean beneath it, the vast excitement of possibilities lapping at me. The sheer pleasure of the threat of drowning.

I have been clinging to my younger self like a life jacket, comforted by the whistle and the toggles which cause inflation, and the little light. For a moment that lasted 20 years, I had forgotten about my own natural bouyancy. Now that the fall is behind me I can feel the pleasure of the slap of waves and the little nipping of fish that share the water with me. I know about sharks that lurk and the possible dangers they bring with them, but I am a wiley creature. I have swum through hoops slick as a dolphin and all this play has been good training for my sudden transition.

From the paddling pool to the lap pool and now this high diving act has brought me to the ocean. The dangerous, glorious ocean replete with the possibility of whales.

40th birthday post

so I walked past the Story Bridge and there was the ipod and The Pixies and I picked the kind of grass with the grey pink tufts that I love so much and there was the Story Bridge that I thought perhaps I might jump off but I knew that perhaps I wouldn't because there was that book to write and someone I trusted to proof it when it was finished and I listened to The Pixies and I thought, 15 songs, fifteen of my favourite songs and I thought I might listen to The Pixies again tomorrow on my 40th birthday and I thought, 15 songs and 15 reasons to keep chipping away at it and I thought:

Anthony Mullins, my love, and my father, and my grandmother, and my mother, and Christopher and James, don't forget James and the wonderful package deal of his family that I adore, and Bec and Katherine and Mr Somerville, who is new but pretty central at the moment, and Fiona and the beautiful Michael Wright and Kris Olssen and Nike Bourke and Beth and Elissa and how can you cut it back to 15 songs, but 15 songs is all you really need to keep chipping away at it day by day.

And I looked back at the story bridge and it was so pretty with the lights on it and everything and I thought about the book and the next book that has already started to burn a hole in me and the previous book that I care about and that would be orphaned and maybe a book after that and I just kept walking. Just kept turning the ipod up. Just kept listening to the pixies and tapping the rail of the riverwalk with those feathery grass seeds that I have always loved the best and I thought thanks, to the rest of you, but particularly to the 15 of you who I love the best.

And I thought just get the words written. Just keep getting the words written, and keep writing and re-writing the song list that may never be complete