tera patrick / the way of the superior man, evidently paranoiac watching

Allright. Why is the blog "create post" title bar somehow linked to my google ( guessing here) search bar memory thing - you know, you type in a letter and it gives you all these possible choices of words/searches you've typed before that start w/... say "t". And why are they so goddamn embarrassing. is google like confession? Does blogspot want me to write about these things? A detective digging up old dirt?

September 19th, 2004. Dear google, I am lonely today. I want to have wondrous erotic encounters but with whom? Sarah’s not around and no one else is either. Please help me find photos of streaming video images of Tera Patrick giving blowjobs, getting fucked in every position the Kama Sutra can think of and still get a camera in there, to help me with the miserable realities of my life. Oh google, also, can you look up this whack-sounding book my therapist recommended, and oh, blogspot, can you remind me of these two wonderful moments in my life a half-dozen months later? (found the pictures, not the book - Tera Patrick is a sometimes very beautiful woman, although I can't say I’ve fully psyched my relation to porn - I think I would like it better if it was a) more process (eros) and less product (display). and b) if it was more a social adjunct than an asocial one and c) the stuff wasn’t as addictive and mind-deranging to the susceptible as crack cocaine. still, not a bad place to explore once and awhile, learn something new (look at that).Google, just one thing, make that shit free, I ain't paying.

Jim Goar asked me about censoring myself and, well, there's a passage I would normally censor. But these silencings create ugly echoes and ripples...Another thing I would normally censor is that I just looked down and saw the tiny mouse that is in our flat today and told him in a boyish voice (speak small to the small?): "little mouse, can't you go home [looking to the side to see if the cat’s round looking to the side to see if the cat's around][mouse sniffing foot and unhurriedly scurrying a few feet off – under the futon couch] you don't live here...and it's not safe". Actually I'm amazed any mouse could live in this cat dense area. Go little mice! Go poets and writers not afraid to speak the unspoken! Down with us being subalterns, those nasty little half-castes that get the stick from the boss and are expected to pass it on to the truly abject ( a little mouse, a cat, a homeless person or the guy at work no one will talk to, all the plants we call weeds, boulders w/ lizards sunning on them where a freeway should be [boom!] the millions without enough food to eat, living on a dollar a day or less when the SF Muni costs $1.25.

It hit me: I just met el pobre Mouse. Then…

I had several paragraphs more here, I was very happy with them, one of those moments when you just finish typing and it’s a great feeling, satisfying, I was excited to share the post, and then the spell-check wouldn’t open (popup blocker) and then something horrible happened – I lost 50, 60% of this post. So I am typing it in Word now, vowing never again to trust typing on-line, where there is no text to save, too virtual, too fragile. MWord will at least store its lost data.

So anger and loss. And then okay. It told an amazing little story that unfolded here as I was typing – how I heard my punk rock neighbors discover a mouse – maybe in the mouth of their cat – and how the guy – a big Henry Rollins with a shaved head type – put the mouse in a bag – took it downstairs into our shared courtyard, the girl whined after him "John, nooo.... John, noooo" not to kill it – he said “its just a little mouse” and I knew he was going to kill it and then heard him whack the shit out of the bag with some blunt object – saw him: grim-set frown, saw him throw the bag in the garbage – girl abandoned the mouse after those few weak (totally weak) words – I wanted to say something but was paralyzed – felt stupid – it happened, I made myself into a subaltern, failed to speak and insert myself into that text, he went back upstairs and I got angry. At everyone, mostly me (el pobre Mouse : cowardice begins at home). Then I got up and went outside to check on the mouse. He was in the garbage, in his brown bag. I roughly/gingerly – a little afraid –as always-of death – shook him loose and onto the ground, a few inches – he was dead – half-curled, still warm and soft – a visible cut or two – eyes closed – stoned non-expression – little claws and long limp tail. I put my hands together and said (no, chanted) a dedication gatha for him, low and a little trembly first word:

All Buddhas throughout space and time
All Bodhisattvas, Mahasattvas
Maha Prajna Paramita

The great wisdom of the far shore, of the other, of the western paradise, Shambala, nirvana, land of Amida Buddha, right here. Worried the neighbors would hear me. Bowed, picked up his tail – still dead – walked him over to – a few feet away – our garden plot, kneeled and w/fingers dug a shallow grave, a couple handfuls of dirt, placed him in, under the calla lilies, sprinkled the dirt on him, patted him down, his tail still out, buried that too, forgot to bow, bow.

I was very proud – truth be said, of, after writing this, the following line, which came to quite sweetly, out of the blue:

And so I would bury you, dear reader, when your time came.

-

So, tender, and this is all history now, all recap, I talked a little more, slightly embarrassed perhaps, with sincerity, always embarrassed of being sincere – Where’s that ironic armor so I don’t get hurt out there, ma? Where’s my carefully worded not sayings, or said so you won’t notice, or said just so you’ll hear it right, and I’ll come out okay (unscathed). Dear readers – do you want to tear me apart? I can tell you I get scared – but the neighbors might hear, will need to hear from me if we aren’t going to go around and disturb all the peace w/ our mice killing and our federal prisons and arsenic skies and M1 Abrams tanks and F-18 Hornets and that woman wanting me to sign a petition to make all teacher pay based solely on merit – and I told her the very words (merit decided by whom?) made me nauseous, (“okay, then you don’t have to sign”- but she was wobbly - wasn’t sure if I meant nauseous with a headache or nauseous at the idea – I told her I had a headache – and I realized the answer was both).

Disturbing the peace. that was el pobre Mouse’s crime, that is always his crime: but whose peace? peace as a maintained order, patrolled, guarded, a box rimmed with wire. barbed.

-

Started off with porn. There’s this weird moment I can enjoy when you look at the image and the man becomes a woman, the woman a man, and its never said, but its there, this slippage – and I see, say, Tera Patrick’s face as one of the guys on Mount Rushmore: I read woman as hardworking, stoic, steely determination, an act of great endurance and will achieved through strength. And the little guys pumping away for some little girl dream of himself, all sugar and spice with more leg hair. And those moments when the other gig is up – and someone – or everyone – looks bored. I wish porn wasn’t built only around the wankery of male fantasies – some give and take, some social eroticism, some porn-on-the-street, in the marketplace (not at it’ edge in some peep booth, or veiled through the wink wink of advertising) in the carnival, mixed up, uncapitalized (or done with capital as an accessory, not sole motive) porn given some good vibrations treatment – that would be something worth seeing. Engaging with. I know there are people who do positive porn, the same way I know its cold up in the Artic. I have no real experience of this stuff, but I do think the erotic could come more into a public and playful (not that horrible protestant hard-work porn) space, pleasure is a lovely thing. A friend of mine tells me of how they kiss in the streets in Brazil – full kisses, w/ tongue. It means: I like you. Let’s do this Just this. Not necessarily always leading to (tiresome) that. A lightness in that this.

So here’s to those who celebrate the erotic, with all its possibilities, charms, and (always possible) traps: to Robert Duncan, to Paul Blackburn, to the songs of Leonard Cohen, and mi pobre Sara Larsen. To the troubadours who got thrown out the window of late, and to those writers, and I will stubbornly count Juliana Spahr among them, who are bringing the body, the sexual body politic, back, center, lovers, lovers, loves.