Stopping

I have flagged the idea of stopping, finishing this blog.527 days of sex and then nothing ever again. I have a book now and that outweighs a blog after all.

I have never been good at stopping. Whispered, 'wait, wait' and me struggling to hold off. I need to be ordered to stop touching it. I need to be restrained, physically, because when the escalation has occurred it is difficult for me to find a place to rest. But wait, wait. I want for this to be a shared pleasure, so for my pleasure and for yours I will not finish here. I will continue. Maybe one day we will come to our collective natural ending.

Affection: a Memoir of Love, Sex and Intimacy.

So. It is done. I have a book.

http://www.textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/affection/

and can be bought from here

Avid Reader

night before

Night before jitters.

I wonder how it felt. The night before the first sex ever. The night before I left home. The night before seeing him for the second time - the first time doesn't count as there was no anticipation. The night before I left, knowing I would never lie beside him again. The night before the announcement of the prize. The night before my launch. When I wear that dress that makes me look nice and I have a list of people to thank. The night before it goes public. The night before they have started to read it. I am still a closed book this night before. Tomorrow, or the next night, you may see me differently.

best anti climax

I remember rare moments of post orgasmic bliss. The times I have wanted to lie with it. The ones that lasted days, little jolts of memory. Instant replays unexpectedly. So rare. I remember the ones I have had. Wish I could have more. But this kind of thing would wear thin. I must wait for the sneak attack. Sex in the afternoon and the sun falling on my naked body. First time with a new lover. The consummation of something coveted.

by numbers

She puts hand on arse, smooths and then slaps.

She lifts edge of frilly knickers and inches them down.

He steps closer and erection can be sighted by camera.

She starts to moan just at the sight of the erection.

I turn the sound to mute. There is nothing less exciting than the moans of a girl who is directed to do so. I am distracted by the thought of this and follow a memory trail to moans that seemed staged, sounds that were not the real response to physical stimulus. To my own noises which sometimes surprise me, stark piggish grunts or the held-in sound of someone asphyxiating.

He enters her. Lifting her leg for the camera's shaky gaze. In a little, out again, in a little more. All this to show us, the viewers that this is the actual act of coitus that we are paying for.

The actual act of coitus. Staged. Performed for me. And the sight of two bodies working at and into each other is eternally stimulating. My own body responds, readying itself for orgasm. Yes. I know that there is no emotional connection, but this is a vagina and that is a penis and they are in contact with each other and I am watching it. He does that fast thing, that piston hard fuck action that is quite popular. It is not a rythm I can sing to, but he takes his pauses and the camera zooms in for a close shot of a penis entering a vagina.

I come. Quickly. My body locking up as it does, muscles spasming in my back and my neck, toes curling, nipples snapping erect. I know how my body works and what it will do. I know that this is a quick physical release and the come down is sudden and brutal. I am overwhelmed by the emptiness of post-porn orgasms. I feel the weight of loneliness, and that too is associated now with sex. This terrible lack. Sad flourescent glare. My to-do list suddenly visible, throbbing in time to in fading pulsations.

insert amusing story

insert amusing story with vaguely sexual connotations here - perhaps one about seeing someone's penis in the sand pit or one from later in life, one that is about a sexual encounter that was exciting but that left me feeling decidedly insignificant. Yes. I remember when I used to write whole stories. Beginning, middle, end. I am aware that I have become internal. Random shrieks into the void. Hello? Are you there? Is there anybody there? I will turn to fiction. This is the answer I suppose. That last post, ghost post. Was the end of it.

picking your team

I wouldn't pick me either. When it comes to the team, I am not a team player. I can run and at times the pack will follow, but I am more concerned with my own direction than the group trailing behind me. I select my companions carefully and ocasionally. When my choice is made it takes a lot to shift me. You pick people as if you were throwing a party, invitations willy nilly. The more the merrier. It is your style.

I had my hand raised. I wanted to be picked. I still have a small cold place inside me that would have liked to have been selected. I watch the team gathering around you and I know I am not a team player. Not your team. I step aside and let the crowd gather at your feet. What I thought was doubles, tennis, has turned out to be basketball. I put my hand down slowly.

Don't pick me. But you probably weren't going to anyway.

secret museums

And the things we keep teach us more about ourselves than about others. Unearthing. Smelling of soil and dust. The secrets we make in dusty places. The hypocracies. The exhibition of broken condoms. The exhibition of torn and marked skin. The specifics of taste and smell, catalogued. Little pins with name tags attached. The spread-eagled mystery of our flesh. The special collection of things that certain people can do for you that no body else has ever replicated.

lovingly secreted. kept in dusty places. Kissed gently, and from a distance so as not to set off the various protective alarms.

same place

So we get to the same place again and again. They asked this question a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago. Cave-girl wondering if she has been passed over because of her narrow hips. Cave-boy knowing that he throws his stone axe without the same vigour, gets less of the beast to feast on. A restless race of creatures continuously battling with our insecurities. The only constant is our own fear of inadequacy.

He doesn't really see me in that way because there are other cave girls, one for each day of the week and then some. I will never choose him because he is not so good with the axe-throwing. But we want to be picked anyway. Even if nothing will be done in the scheme of things, we each want what we should not and will never have. We each want what we wouldn't want if it was on offer anyway.

I turn to the great philosophers and I see that again, I am not unique. I am up there with the Germans, the Existentialists and the Greeks. I am cave girl in her own corner, withering from the cruel gaze of natural selection.

tangle

When you perform with puppets, sometimes their strings get tangled. There is a lesson in this. I am not sure if it has anything to do with sex, but I can see where there is an overlap. A mess of strings and things entangled.

Ah. Writing about sex. Do we get sick of writing about sex? Tomorrow there will be more sex and the nest day. It is the only constant. That, and the idea that we are not in control of our own strings.

writing about writing about sex

Writing about writing about sex is not very sexy. See instructional video - how to have sex with boy/girl. See 'turn the page now - beeeep'. See hygene documentaries played to 12 year old girls who are about to / have just got their first period / pubic hair. See lecture theatres with 100 sleepy students waiting for the clock to tick over to beer o'clock.

Beer o'clock is more sexy than writing about writing about sex.

Writing about sex is more sexy than writing about writing about sex.

Sex is more sexy.

Sex is way more sexy.

Finding a new position after 20 years of tried and true repertoire is much more informative than my article about writing about writing about sex.

So give me the sex and take away the writing about. Give me the new found pleasure and let someone else provide the instructional video.

Sister

I am certain that my lack of competition irritates you. I yield. I refuse to fight. I am a damp sheet hanging on the line and the speed and ferocity of your attacks have often backfired, causing you harm. You are punching at ghosts. I am insubstantial. You could have taken everything from me and I would have shrugged and walked away.

I remember, as a small child, you would steal a toy and cut its mane, its hair, its fingers off at the knuckle. I would hold my tears until my head ached. I would shrug, dry-eyed as if I never cared about the toy in the first place. Sometimes I would comfort the severed plastic stumps later, smothering the damaged hand with kisses. "You know I love you. You know I will always love you." I would sacrifice all that I cared for in an effort against competition.

when I stop

When I stop circling round the problem of you I will let go.

I want to let go. I want to move on without the problem of my lust dragging behind me, snail trail. Everyone can follow the silvery slipperiness and find you at the end of it.

I am embarrassed by this.

I am in two minds. I see-saw between this double-think. I think of Orwell. Enemy and friend at the same moment. We have always been at war and we have never been at war. And so I circle, hooked on the idea of you and it is beneath me, this erratic behaviour.

On his death bed and his love declared and me knowing that this was something that could not be returned in the same way.

I love you, just not in the way you want me to love you.

And so I wrestle with myself, jumping between the lover and the beloved, knowing that there is no happy solution, that the only way out is to slink off to somewhere else, dragging my snail trail of desire along with me.

I will let you go. And, as is my style, I must let you go completely and utterly. And all this love, all this sad wasted love.

He died with all that sad, wasted love. I move away, love hissing out of me like I'm punctured. Why can I not just re-frame this. Why can I not just hold this love out like a present or a shared secret? Why is it all fisted in my womb like a cancer? Why does it hurt in my groin? Did it hurt in his groin? His love for me?

I am letting it go. Honestly. Just a few more days in the water and I will climb out and towel off. Because it makes me cry when I stop. It makes me lonely. I miss it like tobacco or like alcohol. I miss it like some people miss heroin. I miss it like he missed me, fiercely, irrationally and without any hope of repayment.

women in competition

Impossible not to compare. Her against me. But I have grown older perhaps. I do not bristle with my lack of charm. I will not change myself in the spirit of competition. Perhaps her lips were smoother. Her clothes ironed. Her skin soft, or more compliant. Perhaps she made the right noises and I did not. No matter. I had my climaxes and I enjoyed them and it is a thing of the past. We will not compete over who was more so. It is unimportant now anyway.

Michel Houllebeq

My back goes out. Then I remember Atomised. Not a particularly pleasant memory. The spine that cracks, the death of the final fuck. I couldn't withstand to pummeling right now. I make creaking noises when I look to one side. The heart is willing but the body should be confined to a wheelchair. Sexy wheelchair. Sex in a wheelchair. Endless possibilities with a back brace. I fling my head back in orgasmic glee and hear the knuckle crunch of a spine that is unhappy. Put me down like a dieing horse. Someone. Kill me while the pained glow is still post-coital.

Review

Perhaps it is impolite to give you a star rating Kneen. A simple pull-quote perhaps

"fine. Room for improvement"

because I put such little effort into performance. the orgasm that I am seeking is my own. Yours is just something that I use to turn myself on. Your excitement, an inspiration. Your climax a little visual stimulus.

It wasn't always so. I am sure I remember times when my sighs were there to make you harder. My mouth around a penis, purely for his pleasure.

More recently it has been selfishness that motivates me. My mouth that likes to be filled, my breasts that need to be sucked. My various penetrations that all add to the pleasure. All for me. I swallow if I feel like it, if the taste is right on the back of my tongue. I will spit if I chose to. I will take the pain or the kindness in my own time and my own way.

A sign of age no doubt. I hear about women who live alone and wear a groove for themselves in time. My groove is my selfish climb towards orgasm. Mine. For me. And who are you again? My love? My lover? Thank you then, but the pleasure is all mine. And no, I do not fake those orgasms. I never have. If you don't believe me, put your fingers in here now and feel it for yourself.

Rating? Five star full body orgasm for me and your fingers, your penis noting the excitement. You? What were you doing again?

Girl

My, she is pretty. What a striking face, underplayed. She dresses down but it is impossible to hide the gorgeous eyes, the crazy jut of her cheekbones. Her perfect mouth. She is luminous. I could eat her lips. I won't. But I could. I appreciate the strength of her and her intelligence. She reads. She thinks about what she has read. She is a breath of life in a dead place. I would talk to her for hours, but we have other lives. Other places to be. I would run and run beside her and when I tired she would run in circles around me. She is where I want to be. She is my conscience. She is me.

who chooses the porn? This is a tricky point we have come to. You select the site, it is up to me then to choose the porn. Here is where we find out most about each other. Here is where our differences are underlined. I could pick the clips that you would watch from the thumbnail photos of them. Perhaps you could click on my preferences without much thought. Anal sex, the double penetration, fisting, if it comes to that, the body, opening to another, the body swallowing more than it could handle. Perhaps you judge me badly for the extremes of my taste as I know and judge you for the things you will choose. I do not share your passions or perversions. I will try them. I am easily pleased when it comes down to it. But there is a rift, and I am aware of it. Perhaps this is a fundamental fissure in something that is firm and unshakable.

Still, I will watch your pornography and you will watch mine. I will come while watching yours. You will come while watching mine. This is the thing about relationships. The subtle give and take.

two things I do not need in the bath.

Wine and masturbation.

Some times I can just have a bath to read my book, or listen to a fiction podcast from the New Yorker. It is just an association. Pavlovian. I run the water and I crave sex and alcohol. Easy as that. Today I will refrain. I have a handful of pages left to read and I do not need the regular distractions. Today a bath is for cleanliness, warmth and a good book.

no porn

a vain attempt to return to normalcy. I force myself back to pornography. I skip. A second from here, a visual from there, none of it to my liking? What was it that I liked again? Certainly not the way he holds her head and forces his penis into her mouth. Perhaps it is the way he hits her, spits on her, does that fast and furious piston action with his hips. No?

I struggle to imagine what I could find sexy in it as my body readies itself for whatever I may settle on, the skin flushing, my nipples pulling erect, the thickening of the labia. Anything really. I could come from the thought of someone walking around upstairs. I could come from the idea that all the little green lights on my gmail are people watching me. I could come from the warmth of the water and from the thought of all that has come before. I come from the pornography. It is relatively easy but when it is done I feel nothing. There are no small aftershocks. Only tenderness can stay with me through the day. Only intimacy. Perhaps, only the idea of beauty in the form of tenderness. Perhaps, only from the idea of a kiss.

the end of it.

The end of it was very sad even though the course had been run and there was nothing left in it. Neither of them had anticipated this level of melancholy, although she had suspected it might make her sad for a few days and had bought a block of chocolate and a packet of fancy tea to get her through the worst

He moped, opened the refrigerator door, closed it. He opened packets of things and then realised this was not what he had wanted but ate them anyway. They would both gain the weight of sadness. Still. It was over. There would be no repair.

She found a hand towel with the scent of him still on it and thought briefly that she might keep it. A momento of something that was once nice. She threw it into the wash with the sheets and the socks and her underthings. When she took the towel off the line there was nothing left of him. It was the end then.

The nature of love.

Bec knows that David is watching her and for a moment the idea of this gives her pause. She pulls back from this new embrace, she feels the slick gloss of spit onher lips, knows that the lipstick she applied for fun will be smudged but perhaps that in itself is sexy. She looks towwards him. He is sitting on the edge of the couch and yes, he is watching her. Some men like to see women kissing. She has already removed the girl's tiny breasts from the scrap of lace that was holding them. THey are like little pillows of nothing on her chest but the nipples are huge and rock hard and he could be looking at the girl's nipples but David's eyes never leave her face.

Bec pulls her face into an amused frown. Perhaps he has been studying her kissing technique. She remembers David's kisses, big sloppy things that engulfed her whole face at times. The over-zealous enthusiasm of a puppy. Bad kisser. Good intentions. She is remembering this when he opens his mouth and forms silent precise words with his lips.

I LOVE YOU.

And again.

I LOVE YOU.

eratic

Ah eratic behaviour. Does the word have anything to do with eros? Perhaps grammatically not and yet one leads to the other ultimately. I am ridiculously inconsistent. I have always been so. I reconnect with his family and I remember how I flitted from one idea to the next. And yet, behind this is the solid guard dog of my love and care. Always. If I have said that I love you, I will love you forever. This is the truth of it. I may rage and tear my hair and unwind in jealous tangles. I may become some dirvish, some succubus, some crazed creature you would rather avoid. Still I stand at your door panting, through the decades.

I love you now and always is not some trap. I bristled. I thought it was meant to scold me for my lack of contact and my distance. I understand it now. Love, now and always, no matter how distant we become. Our separate parts of the world forever connected by this thin thread of concern that will never be broken.

end

so it fades out. Like this. with an aftertaste and the memories lingering. So something new begins tomorrow and we walk off into it, those who are still alive. We survive it. We do what we can with what we have been given.

I did love you. You know that. And I think you may have felt some kind of love too.

ah. well. that was something.

one about a horse

I am not yet ready to tell you the one about a horse. I start with horses because there are so many references. Equus, Zoo, the passions of my sister who drew horses obsessively. Little girls, their genitals rubbing in time to a gallop. I understand the appeal. A horse is all warm breath and sweat heat and muscle. They smell good, strong and sharp and healthy but with a pungency that reeks of sex. Soon I will tell you the one about the horse because it will be a good one, visceral. It will be full of words that mimic the pace of a canter. It will be arousing. I won't tell you yet because it will not be a true story. I must see the act. I must immerse myself in it. I must feel as close to the horse as any little girl or grown man who clambers up on a ladder to find his comfort and release. I must think about stallions mounting one person or another. The size and shape of it, the livid pink. For this true story I must be closer to the subject.

As a child, I was not so into horses. I prefered the dollhouse, the spaceship, the cave.

This then will be something new.

what is wrong

what you consider wrong today you may not consider wrong tomorrow. In the heat of pleasure nothing seems to be a problem. No line too wide to cross. Pleasure spent and we begin to back away but there is always the cycle of escalation. The scent of sex, the taste of it, the various perversions that seem wrong until we are desperate to try them. Our judgement is clouded by the morality of the here and now. When it is done we long for innocence. Perhaps we can be innocent and guilty all at once. This is the line that I must take. This is the key to the story.

book

He is in the book. He is dead but there he is, in my book and a thank you in the back and he is dead and he never got to see the book. And I never got to tell him he is in the book.

Sometimes I don't care how much others care about me. My own care is enough. It is huge. Sometimes their reciprocation is just a nice thing that happens if it does. Often my love is enough.

Other times I feel the lack of care from them and I would cut my love off cold, a severed vein, the last of my concern gushing out of me, leaving me pale and emptied out.

I love you. I've always loved you. I think about you every day.

I want to stamp my feet at the complications of this love. I want to rage and cry and rage again. I want to tear it up. I will not love like that. It is unfair for him to have loved like that. Someone stop me from loving like that.

How can you not love me? How could I not love him? Why did he chose to love me so stubbornly? What a stupid fucking waste of all that love. What a stupid fucking waste.

Two people in my book now dead. And all the love running out onto the floor where it will make a mess and have to be cleaned up anyway.

Fucking waste.

Horse

I find myself looking up 'sex with horse'. It has come to this. My short foray into bestiality has been in the most odd venue. The Stately library. The quiet and hallowed halls. I open my laptop and my headphones are plugged in. In Ear Park. I hear it, but quietly and I turn the volume up before I realise that the headphone jack is not completely settled in place. The music piped into the quiet air. In Ear Park, echoing out to all the Asian students settled at their desks beside me.

Quiet finally and Googling bestiality. A hunt that takes me to odd places. Finally, YouTube and each click a slow pause for intermittent streaming. Girl and Horse, Sexy Girl and Horse, Horse Sex. And me uncertain how this will end.

This is not something I have ever looked for. Yet the idea of this research, the idea that I can arouse as I disturb with the writing that will follow this research. This makes me shake. An odd excitement.

steal

I would steal it. Surely there will be no trouble. If I am caught I will shrug and say, no harm done. Nothing a few dollars can't fix. I will say I stole it because when the envelope is opened he will seek you out and show you and you will say: awesome. I will be awesome in your eyes and this is how I long to be seen.

silly. silly reckless juvenile stunt. But I would steal it for him. For you.

Paul Auster's missing sex scene

I read Paul Auster's Invisible.

Humming with the potential for sex and damage. There is sex but it is hidden from us. The magician pulls the curtain and there is just the knowledge that it has happened. We hear pale skin, the softest ever and we imagine the buttery girls that have been at our fingertips.

Do all girls taste the same? You think they might, but I remember something acidic on my tongue, a strong scent to it and I would have pulled away if it had not been impolite. I tasted disease or lack of cleanliness or her nasty edge, bitter sticky. No, nothing to do with her mean streak I suppose because another was all sugar, honey sweet when I suspect that she was more insidiously manipulative.

Auster and his triste and my mind wanders to the girls I have known because this girl, Auster's beautiful poised older woman with her striking face and her femme fatal body, this girl is someone I am having on the page. I taste her in the missing sentences. I feel her fingers in my body. Auster's empty sex. I open the curtain and reveal it.

watching

are you watching?

yes

are you watching me?

yes

out there somewhere in the bitter dark, out there in the world with your hands curled around my book. My secret pornography. Not so secret.

with your hand curled into a fist around your penis.

with your hand snapped tight like a flower and inserted into your sticky body. Watching my sex open before you on the page. in your mind. in my bedroom. and yours.

and yes that is my arse on the cover since you ask so many times. Yes you can use the visual stimulus. You can use the internet. Silent pictures. My words like subtitles. Some little fisting scene. Some anal sex, double entry, whatever takes your fancy but the impetus is mine. My sex. Affection is something different. Love another thing. All three of these then brought together and you reading it braille-like. I would show you how slick it is to touch if I could. Some say my work is visceral. Is it? Turn the page. On the little beep. Turn the page now.

Peter Rowbotham

Peter.

You deserve to be named and remembered.

I give you a day of silence.

We had some times.

Goodbye

I would write a post to mark it, but all I have is the words you left me with and no clever way to contextualise them.


So inside it feels like I am running. That is all. There should be more but I have nothing.

Love and tears

So I don't believe in love. Don't really think I should be advocating it. Not in the he loves, she loves kind of vein. So when she reappears, un-erasable it is not love but something else. Still, I listen to love songs, read about it in books. Heartbreaking. I am moved. I look at art. I hug. I kiss. I feel the harsh fist of something in my chest and I know what the the romantics would say about this. Care plus sex. A heady mix of chemicals unbalancing me. I would call it love if I were so inclined. I would convince myself. It would be easy enough. It is the way I tear up. The hormonal wash. I am getting old and softening.