A languid summer dreamtime has descended upon me

So, keeping in mind that "soon" is a relative word, particularly when one is speaking of the dream world…

I’ll be back soon.

More most excellent erotica: Skin Boat

I’ve found another new collection of very powerfully written male POV erotica. This site is quite new, but I think you’ll find that the quality of these beginning offerings more than makes up for the small number of posts so far. Do give this site a visit (and encourage this author to keep writing). This is wonderful stuff!

From Skin Boat :

She has you mesmerized. She lies back, on the little cafe table, opened. Her hands clasp her ankles. You sit on the slim chair before her, looking. Exploring. She desires this, has voiced it. She wants you to see her. Your thoughts whimper like dogs before her…

The Provocateur

If you love great erotica, you must visit The Provocateur . True to his name, this author will provoke you, but in the most delicious of ways.

For instance, this, from a post entitled, Animal :

Always: You are the emotional wall that I batter my ram against in some effort to understand this world better. Because here and now, in the face of you – I know nothing. I am nothing beyond this. Here and now. I am an animal. And our naked bodies, glistening with sweat and strain and tortured ecstasy slap together as the sound of all my fiery worlds colliding.

Your heaving chest as the Alps. Your cunt as the wettest, fertile valley. And your legs as the roads that lead me to your hungry, wet hole in this earth.

Anything less than this is unacceptable.

I am animal. And so are you.

Going with the flow

So… I haven’t been moved to write here lately.

For whatever reason, I have a lot of resistance to writing about my personal process right now. And so, rather than fight that resistance or continue writing about my attempts to try to "figure it out" (which is, I suspect, just another form of resistance), I’ve decided to just go with the flow here and heed the wisdom of the resistance; just let it be what it is.

Interestingly, I’ve also not had much desire to write any poetry or fiction lately either, even though I have several half-started pieces hanging around. But, I know this is just part of the way of writing, so I also know that when I feel moved to write again I will.

In the meantime, though I’m a bit lack luster in the blog department right now, I’m still here, floating around the net, reading and commenting here and there. So…

see ya around.

Happy Mother’s Day

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
~Author Unknown

No, really…
Happy Mother’s Day - to each and every one of us, regardless of mother status or circumstance. No matter how difficult, how beautiful, how present, or how absent she is, we all have a mother in us somewhere. I hope each and every one of us can find our own best way to celebrate her today.

Image credit: chelle at Morguefile

Meme-y

Mr. Edgy Tom tagged me. I knew he would get me back for this eventually.

Damn.

Ok, then… This is the "What Are You Reading?" meme.

1. Pick up the nearest book.

The JCPenney catalog (seriously, this is what was nearest at the time. I had just ordered curtains for my living room).

2. Open to page 123.

Hmm… a two-page spread of matronly mix and match essentials made from unnatural fabrics.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

Go from ordinary to extraordinary!

4. Post the next three sentences.

Start with these versatile basics. Expand your ensemble with unique jackets and festive accessories. You’ll have a wardrobe-winning combination.

5. Tag a few people.

I plead the 5th. I never had sex with that woman. I acted alone. No, I’ve never seen that person in that photo. I don’t know nobody and nobody saw me do this.

.

Festive accessories?? Wardrobe-winning combos?? See, this is why I only buy curtains from JC Penney. And maybe a blender or two.

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?*

I have a request. This is for anyone who reads here - whether you’ve read for the last two years or you just found this place yesterday.

As part of my recent ruminations about disclosure I am trying to get clear on what the hell this site is about. Today I realized that it would probably help to get out of my own head for awhile and seek out a different perspective on that particular question. And who better to ask that those of you who read here.

To be clear, I’m not asking for psychoanalysis. Goodness knows, I do way too much of that myself! In fact, that’s exactly my problem right now - too much loopy self-analysis about what I’m doing with this site.

I think I know, I assume I know, what this site is about. And that’s where the different perspective part comes in. I realized that it’s quite possible that you all may be out there reading a very different site than what I, in my neat little self-referential world, think I’ve created.

So, what I’m interested in hearing is what you think this site is about (literally and/or metaphorically). And I guess a secondary question might be: Would you say that this site is true to what you think it’s about?

To those of you who feel moved to respond to my request, I thank you in advance. Feel free to either leave a comment here on this post or email me - whichever you prefer.

.

*What’s The Frequency, Kenneth , by R.E.M. A catchy little song about a freaky occurrence by my favorite rocker/monk, Michael Stipe. I only use the title here to evoke the self-referential confusion that can happen in this odd media-ridden world we live in. In other words, this is my disclaimer stating that I have no plans to beat up Dan Rather. Nor do I wear foil hats. Really.

However, I have often wondered what the frequency is. And why Kenneth ain’t tellin’.

Conversation with the divine

I was absolutely delighted by the number and length of the comments people made on my previous post (and I thank each and everyone of you who chimed in!). But, I was not surprised that so many people felt moved to talk about the subject of identity and blogging.

As was evidenced by your comments, we all blog for various personal reasons and under different circumstances. And each person’s reasons are true and valid to them - regardless of whether or not anyone else thinks those reasons are good ones.

There are many reasons why I blog, but of all the factors that draw me to this forum, probably the strongest is the conversational aspect of it. Though I consider myself a private person in many ways and I very much enjoy being alone, I would never be able to live comfortably for very long in a situation which required me to take vows of silence or to cut myself off from conversation with other people. And indeed it does seem that in this lifetime I have actually taken a vow not of silence, but of conversation!

For me, writing actually fulfills that vow in some ways. When one writes, even in solitude, there is always a conversation going on; there is always a correspondence with someone, be that an assumed or imagined audience “out there,” an interplay between characters in a story or, as I’ve talked about many times on this blog, simply a communication going on between aspects of oneself.

I’ve recently been thinking about the idea of conversation with the divine, and how that concept is really missing, or at least not encouraged outside of overtly “spiritual” pursuits in this culture. By conversation with the divine, I do not mean prayer or meditation or situations in which a person directly communes with their version of a divine being through worship - though these are all forms of divine conversation. What I’m talking about here is the idea that Michael Dames speaks of in his book, Mythic Ireland:

In Ireland, the Divine is nourished by conversation. At its best, Irish talk retains a sacramental quality and so needs no other justification. Like any creative act, or rather like THE creation of the gods, “the crack” is understood to be a primary event. In its stream, idea, emotion and thing combine in whirlpools (whose equivalent in Irish music are jigs and reels), alternating with placid stretches and furious falls. At times, submerged cargoes, long supposed lost, rear up, waterlogged yet intact, to bump and nuzzle in the ceaseless flow. Such supernatural talk is no mere description or illustration of a parallel reality. It IS the Other, returned to life - a life made between speaker and listener (who exchange roles, turn by turn), and where eye and gesture contribute like the glitter of sunlight on a wind-stirred lough, to the business of serious delight.

The way I understand what Dames is saying is that simple human conversation - the ideas and debates and emotions we share with each other - is not only a profoundly creative human act, it is also our umbilical, the lifeline which connects us to the nourishing numinous truth of our existence. It is our communication with each other that reminds us, again and again, of the places where human and divine intersect.

Regardless of what the blog-o-sphere can be, despite all the dangers and dark corners, it can be also this: an invocation to the Other; an invitation to the gods to come out and play. Conversation, even through this odd medium we call blogging, is a celebratory feast… for the gods, and for us.

So, to all of you who enjoy this blog (yes, even you lurkers), please always feel free to say your piece here, to add your voice to the festivities. Or, if you are inspired by something here and would rather go back to your own blog and riff away… go for it!

Whether you are pseudonymous, anonymous, or just motormouth-ymous, know you are participating in, as Dames says, a primary event of sacramental quality… disguised quite cleverly as blogging.

Now… Guinness for everyone!!

Zander Vyne

In my sleep
you came, all stillness,
muse-shadowed like night
kissed by the wet tongue of Morpheus

I devoured you there,
painted you under the moon—
velvet lust in red strokes,
silver etchings of tears

This little piece of wonder, called Morpheus, is from a new self-titled erotica site called Zander Vyne. If you love truly well-written erotica, please visit her site… bookmark her… add her to your reader… whatever it takes to get this goodness into your head!

Blogger question of the day…

I am really struggling with disclosure right now; with how much to write about and how honestly. There are about a million things I want to write about, need to write about. But I feel stuck.

I’m spinning my wheels in the mire of questioning how much truth to leave out versus how much truth it takes to write a post that’s worth writing (worth it for both my own process and for the readers of this blog).

But I decided to write this post rather than just think about this issue privately because I know that this struggle is not mine alone. It is part of the total package any person takes on when one decides to blog.

The question of how much to say versus how/what/who to protect with the judicious use of omission is one of the difficulties that we all must face sooner or later. We all set our limits when we begin (consciously or not), but the act of blogging, especially over time, often has an odd way of forcing us to challenge, or at least more consciously address, every single limit we thought we’d already decided on.

It’s always been important to me to write here with honesty - not so much a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of honestly, but an emotional honesty. Even when I was posting only fiction and poetry here (and not actually blogging), it was important to me to be creatively honest.

And yes, I agree that it’s ironic that writing under the “lie”of a pseudonym is often the very thing that allows one to be deeply honest in this exact way - a very twisty psychological truth which is perhaps better discussed in another post.

My current struggle with self-disclosure (and therefore, self-censorship) is not driven by a worry that my partner will find out about and read my blog (he has read it all along), or a concern about what others in my social circle would think if they found out (I don’t really belong to any social circle that wouldn’t accept my writing here), or even the fear of suffering embarrassment or worse where my job is concerned (I’m self-employed).

The struggle for me is primarily with myself. Recently, I’ve been changing in ways that feel quite drastic to me. And today I realized that part of the reason I’m struggling with self-disclosure is that blogging about these changes is beginning to produce really uncomfortable levels of inner dissonance inside this little collection of selves I call “me.”

The night I wrote this post, the tension of still being the old me while allowing another newer and less powerful me to express herself became not only weirdly disorienting, but threatening to my old self.

Basically, it seems the reason I’m so stuck right now is because I’ve become invested in protecting the old, established me that I’m trying to grow beyond. It’s her judgments that I most fear. She holds a lot of power over whether the new self I’m trying to write into being here lives or dies.

So, in a way, I could say that this current state of stuck-ness is literally, to that new self at least, a mortal fear, a serious concern with survival. And to the old self, the questioning of what and how much to censor is simply an attempt to stall the inevitable.

So…

That’s all very interesting. And I do feel like this realization has opened up a new channel of communication between my old and new selves. But I’m still not sure about what this all means as far as self-censoring on this blog is concerned.

My boundaries and limits are in the process of changing, obviously. And so I’m a little skittish about making new decisions about levels of disclosure at this point. Things are a bit too slippery to get a good footing on that just yet… not slippery enough to make me stop blogging, though. *smile*

So, what is my blogger question of the day? Well, it’s mainly a rhetorical question but if it trips your trigger, by all means, feel free to respond at length about it here in comments or on your own blog (especially those of you who write under a pseudonym):

Who is really writing on your blog, and what is he/she really trying to say?

or an alternative question I just now thought of…

Do you feel the dissonance between your “real” self and your blogging identity and if so, how do you handle it?

or, if you prefer a more Coffee Talk style prompt…

I’ll give you a topic: Anonymous journaling is neither anonymous nor journaling. Discuss.