“Femisaurus Sex: Women, Dinosaur Erotica, and Toturous Sensations” – WR 333: Advanced Composition

Just one example of the magnificent cover art.

Recently, a very small media buzz started to surround the works of two women authors, Christine Sims and Alara Branwen. They write within a genre that they pioneered: Dinosaur Erotica. Jezebel first reported on it, cheekily suggesting that the site “found something to haunt your dreams and fuel your nightmares: DINOSAUR EROTICA”. E! Online begins their feature on these works with, “We love dinosaurs. Like, a lot. But not like that” (Emphasis added). And The Daily Mail Online cautions that, “If you thought Fifty Shades and Harry Potter porn pushed the boundaries of good taste, then prepare to be shocked”. The media’s curiosity into these stories is understandable—with titles like “Taken by the T-Rex and “Ravished by the Triceratops,” there’s a definite whetting of their reader’s appetite for the odd and bizarre. Each news outlet satisfies its curiosity towards this cultural outcropping by using a slightly different strategy. The journalist’s responses are usually spackled with ironic voyeurism, a banal attempt to distance themselves from the culpability of reporting anything worthwhile from such an oddity in the cultural ether. The consensus from these stories seems to be a collective: “Huh? This exists, reader! And well, of course it does; it’s the age of the internet, after all”. With one important exception…

While the idea of Dinosaur Erotica is thrilling, titillating, tantalizing—morbidly interesting—it is something most people will observe with a passing prurient distance, concluding that it’s just not for their thing. Put another way: this genre is niche, at best. But as the reporting points out, it’s a surprisingly popular niche. The availability of Kindles and e-readers, The Daily Mail reports, has led to “The success of EL James’s Fifty Shades trilogy” and “unusual porn genres” within publishing. People appreciate and exploit the anonymity that an innocuous and commonplace electronic device provide; they are able to explore erotic genres and stories without having any anxiety of the public looking at their book cover and labeling them as “naughty.”

The fear of stigma is omnipresent, especially for the American women who largely consumes this media genre. The collective cultural imagination often paints these women readers of erotic fiction to be sexually frustrated marms, old maids that pine for a sexuality they never explored, and bored suburban wives whose love life has been devoid of flavor for years. And this pathological caricature often extends to the authors as well. Which is why New York Magazine’s Q & A with Sims and Branwen, these inventive women writers, is so remarkable. We find that these stories of Jurassic encounters do not represent a displaced manifestation of middle-aged sexual frustration; they are the calculated, experimental work of two, young, socially-active college students.

The authors’ age and social health is not in-and-of-itself the remarkable thing, though it acts as a pleasing reversal of stereotypes. Instead, what’s most remarkable is the journalistic tone of the Q & A, itself. The article expresses that the intention of this piece of reporting is to check in, “ask how they’re holding up, and how two Texan girls in their early twenties got into dinosaur porn”. While not devoid of scandal, the tone even in this sentence is understated and respectful. It suggests that these two women’s lives were briefly interrupted by some media attention and that this journalist simply wants to see how they’re doing after the fact; and what’s more, the journalist wants to know how they started writing what they write, in their own words. The article does not address the reader’s potential discomfort—or the writer’s own discomfort—with the subject matter. The tone does not attempt to justify why this article is being written; the tone is set with the simple statement that this is a lucrative genre and that these two students are interesting enough discuss their own story of success and sexuality.

What we find, through their brief interview, is that these women were tired of low-wage jobs, were inspired by the potential to self-publish in today’s marketplace, and deployed aspects of their own professed “freaky mind[s]” to lucrative ends. Their ownership of their sexuality is never put into question; it’s not a question the journalist decides is worth asking. The question of sexuality only comes up after Sims jokes that she calls Branwen her lover because they spend so much time together. And only then does the author ask, “I hadn’t considered whether you were lovers! Can I ask about your sexualities and/or relationship statuses?” The journalistic restraint! Whether these women were lovers, lesbians, bisexual, heterosexual, kinky, freaky, dirty, was a non-issue until Sims teased it into the conversation. And whether or not the journalist had or hadn’t considered it is somewhat moot since the ability to leave that question unasked until prompted, is impressively respectful to these women’s private lives.

Moreover, this article is an exposition of two women who may not make art but are able to masterfully and artfully find new outlets for expression and success. They saw a niche and filled it, they own it because they made it their own. They are reaping the benefits of their shrewd maneuvering. They know their sexuality, they manipulate it and mass-market it. It may not be a manifestation of their own secret desires but it expresses a comfort and unapologetic spirit of empowerment and agency. And the journalist’s response isn’t congratulatory, necessarily. It doesn’t have to be. But it isn’t moralizing either. Its tone is curious without being maternal or paternal; the journalist asks questions with a light-hearted dexterity. Instead of talking at these women with big foam fingers pointed in their face, groping for controversy, someone decided to relax and let them talk about what they’re trying to put out into the world and why they’re doing it. Because its a question worth asking, no doubt about it. Sometimes, and in this case, it’s a much more fascinating, fulfilling conversation than any fleeting sensationalism provides.

Song of my Subject – A Poem from a Freewrite

 

I speak — sometimes — I don’t,
Sometimes, sometimes, too much,
Often too much. Often,
Sometimes, I’m a damn fool.
I make mistakes, fool
Sometimes a flash of red
Flushed onto my faces flushes
As I slither down into my chair.
Sometimes I feel drunk, overindulgences
Intoxicated into excitement and possibility
Spills spilling onto over the chair, anticipating.

In these moments, I am a vessel, cistern, sieve, a hydrant,
“How is it that I can both ‘be’ one, and yet endeavor to be one at the same time?”
Butler gropes at the supple folds of my velvety grey matter,
Flitting, flirting, orgasm before the courtship. Courtesan, paragon,
Whitman’s eloquence — the — wantonness is virginal,
His halo, his crown of thorns, his beauty, apotheosis.
My mouth is open, eager for peer pure intellectual bukkae,
Spunk, seed of discourse. You say: gross. I say: Satisfying.

Judith/Jack boy/girl boy child man cub – I want to be like you
“A kind of imitation for which there is no original”
Butler drones and her sinewy tendril caresses.

I bound into the sling, my mouth full of gag
In the tawdry dim light of the bathhouse dungeon. He
Hoists disciplines and punishments, Foucault, bald.
An unfamiliar smell, his — the panopticon. The scrivener’s wall.
Smarmy, uncouth, too couth, it’s the gay 90’s, he’s dead.
In prison, entrapped in contraption, the Cartesian
He has devious deviant devout way with my willing,
The safe word is “Biopower”
I — I use it freely — there’s no escape.

“Dinosaurs: A Story in Reverse” Free Write – WS 399: Writing as Activism

A Dinsosaur Bukkake Tragically Interrupted

We hibernated, waiting for the world to heal so we could wound it again one day. Our shrewy, mammalian bodies peeked out of our burrowed dens to survey the destruction that had just occurred. All the dinosaurs went extinct that day; opulent extravagance died with them. The rusty, brown earth enshrouded what light there was, suffocating everything with particulate pollutants. A massive explosion with more force than a million nuclear weapons kicked up an oppressive, dusty cloud. Two tumbling balls of outrageous, flaming rock cascaded from the angry, murderous heavens. Their time had come; they needed to be punished for their arrogant decadence. In the dank, balmy heat of the Mesozoic jungles and bathhouses, the Dinosaur Gay Pride Parade was especially blasphemous this year.

“Gazing at the Cock’s Roost” Critical Essay – WR 457: Personal Essay Writing

“Cock-a-doodle-doo”

It’s hard to say where I picked up the line “no one goes through the gate anymore; they just hop over the fence.” I attribute it to Seinfeld. But I’ve only watched two episodes of Seinfeld and I’ve never watched his standup. Google offers no evidence that anyone has ever said it. And since Google is my only resource to find authoritative advice, we’re taking it on faith that I didn’t just make it up. Regardless, it’s an awesome metaphor and it still captures a sentiment that I try to express to men as I help them select a new pair of underwear. Flies: the slit on men’s undergarments, dug into to pull a penis through and pee, are a thing of the past. And I defer to Seinfeld as the source of sage advice because people don’t trust me when I tell them that “eighty percent of men no longer use their fly.” I don’t always trust myself saying that either, it’s another canned one-liner that I’ve picked up and long since forgotten from where. That one, I’m pretty sure my boss told me. He probably yanked it out of trade magazine and is now misquoting it. And like a game of telephone, the source material has become muddled and unverifiable.

I work at a men’s underwear store, UnderU4Men and I’ve collected these sound bites and clips of artificial wisdom to be an effective sales person. I have a reputation to maintain and sales goals to keep. On any given day there’s almost always an older, modest man and his doting, cute, petite wife that come into the store. The store is marketed towards a “main street” customer; the target-demographic are those who spend the majority of money in retail: females.  Like so many women who have spent the majority of their adult lives buying themselves bras and panties at stores not unlike this one, the woman who’s just walked in is elated to be here. This man is not. My job is to bridge the gap between their disparate attitudes in the hopes that, through conversation, the wife’s excitement can meet the husband’s apprehension in the middle. The hope is that both parties can find a pair—or several pairs—of underwear that makes them both happy. Some couples are more willing to compromise; some husbands are happy to submit to the wife’s choices. Some men come into the store with a girthy list of specifications, based upon a pair of underwear they bought at Nordstrom Rack a decade ago that has become the paragon of men’s undergarments in their mind: they have to be unbranded, black, cotton, with no elastic, a wrapped waistband—not too thick—but also not too thin, with a fly and a low-rise on the waist. They’ll settle for no less, even if it means they’ll never find another pair of underwear to wear ever again.

Sometimes, these same men can’t be bothered to shop for themselves, so they send their partners into the store with this impossible list of demands. And I am stuck fighting the demands of a straw man who can’t even be here to make these requests on their own. But sometimes, they are both here—like the couples mentioned earlier. We talk about what the guy likes; boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs, trunks: how substantial the underwear’s coverage should be, how tight it fits, how long the legs are, if there’s any leg at all. I usually don’t mention jock straps or thongs but those are options too! Then there’s fabric: do they want to stick to cotton? There’s 100% cotton, there’s cotton/spandex blends, nylon/spandex blends, polyester/spandex blends. There’s the “natural fabrics”: merino wool, modal—made from beech wood trees, tencel—made from eucalyptus, bamboo—made from bamboo (no joke). All are splinter free! Or your money back.

All this is to say that we get to talking about a lot before we start to talk about anything specific. But inevitably, there’s a man that’s been shown a few of my personal recommendations and starts to realize that most of the underwear—regardless of the size fit and fabric— doesn’t have a fly. And panic sets in. “Where’s the pee hole?” “Where’s the slit thing?” “How am I supposed to piss while wearing this underwear?” There are many, many things that I’m willing to answer but for these questions, but I let Seinfeld respond for me, to keep things light-hearted. But most of the time, their reaction, still looks a lot like this: “So I just pull my pants and underwear down and show the entire restroom my ass?” Internally, my response is “sure, that’s one way to do it. I mean, I do it differently. I myself, jump over the fence without mooning anyone in the process. Just breathe, sir; I was able to figure it all out without hyperventilating and having an aneurysm ” “The missing fly won’t accidentally invite some scandalous gay cruiser to motorboat your exposed buttocks.” But I have to say all that more gently. Something like: “well you just pull down the front of the underwear and still use the fly on your jeans. You don’t have to pull your pants down”. I can’t help whatever latent sarcasm my voice carries as I speak in these moments. It seems unreal that this is such a foreign concept to some men. But then again, I’ve never really used the fly, it’s a complicated apparatus. I try to be understanding.

Since a long, long time ago, people have worn underwear. Men’s wear and what is fashionable has changed dramatically and differed radically within cultures, social standing and a lot more. However, throughout all of this, underwear seems a relative—but not universal—constant. Most dudes have worn underwear, smallclothes, loincloths or grape leaves, Matthew McConaughey and a few other commandoes excluded. But Digging up where the fly came from is a tricky bit of archeology and I think it would have diminishing returns. At the end of the day, what are you left with? Knowledge that flies were put into underwear after some Victorian had too much trouble with his codpiece? It would be a fun, grotesque bit of trivia to know, sure—even if it were actually true. But would finding that out make you feel more enlightened—or like a more interesting cocktail party guest? Maybe; but I make my living selling man-panties and tracing the fly’s inception sounds like a total bore to me. Because we kind of already know why they’re there: they make sense. They may not be a necessity for everyone but they’re useful. It’s this sensefulness and utility that I find most intriguing anyway.

Flies are nothing, if not utilitarian. They’re used to pee out of. They serve no other purpose. Well, there was the one German woman who asked me, worriedly and in broken English, where the hole for sex was. So, clearly there are creative ways to use a fly, as her and her husband discovered. “How is the cow supposed to get out of the barn without a door?” she probed. I think she meant “how does the cock get out of the roost?” But farm metaphors can be confusing in your second language. But let’s chew that cud for a moment: “how does the cow get out of the barn?” Not as easily as you’d think, even with a door.

A standard fly is anything but standard. They are all a vertical slit cut into the crotch of underwear but their similarities end there. On boxers, they are straight-forward: the slit is overlapped slightly by downy fabric on each end of the opening and usually has a little button in the middle, for closure—Georgia O’Keeffe, eat your heart out! But boxer-briefs, trunks and briefs have a more nuanced take on what a fly should be. Some have the button-enclosure, like boxers but many have a labyrinthine jumble of openings and layers of fabric to navigate. Sometimes, to remind myself why I don’t use flies, I try to use a fly. I waste seconds of my life digging at my crotch, trying to traverse the messy folds that house my penis. It’s frustrating! I was never taught how to use one but even if I had been, no two fly-mazes are made the same. Some only require a reach into-the-front and around-the-bend. Others require a reach into-the-front down-to-the-bottom and a pull-down-and-back up. Sometimes, the snake has a lot of grass to slither through. I feel inclined to give any man who routinely does these dick gymnastics a gold medal.

There are other options to aid in piloting the jet stream. One, more sensible option is the Swedish Fly; it’s cut into underwear horizontally, instead of vertically. It was Swedish military-issue in all underwear produced during WW1. Just a reach-down and a pull-out—like all Scandinavian ingenuity: it’s simple and requires no instructions. But it’s never really caught on; it’s never been typical. It’s a novelty. Why? My theory is kind of graphic but you’ve made it this far, so it’s safe to say you aren’t squeamish. When a man gets excited and his penis becomes erect, it doesn’t have a lot of places to go; an easily accessible opening provides the opportunity for some breathing room. There’s nowhere to go but up! It’s an armchair hypothesis, to be sure; but nonetheless, a compelling one.

So make no mistake, I understand why the fly exists. But it’s a bit of a non-issue for me. It’s there or it isn’t:  I still manage to pee either way. No skin off of my dick. It creates as many problems as it solves. And as far as a time-saving device goes: it fails. I want to comfort those few men who place so much value and importance on an extra piece of fabric, with a small hole cut into it. This 20% of men, who still politely use the gate and don’t hurdle over the fence, aren’t always easy to console. I want to explain that it’s really, not the end of the world. But when a man reacts so defensively to something that is so trivial, my cogs start turning. There’s an instability that’s fostered by a lack of fly in men’s underwear. There’s an even bigger instability caused by what flies are replaced with: enhancing pouches.

“Men’s underwear has switched from a logic of use to a logic of size” laments a writer from New York magazine, in an conversation that Judith/Jack Halberstam anecdotally refers to in one of her/his lectures. It’s just one of many points that Halberstam employs to illustrate the shifting trends and mores in men’s wear, men’s culture and the very concept of “Men.” As someone who’s fascinated by gender, gender roles and gender fluidity, I’m inclined to agree. The enhancing pouch ushers in a brave new world for men’s underwear. What does a “logic of size” provide in men’s underwear? It tinkers and screws with the idea of purposefulness in underwear. The purpose of underwear is now more complicated. It’s not only a buffer placed between your groin and pants but also, something to be desirable in; now it’s something to show off.

Male anxiety is as tricky as any anxiety of privilege can be. Men’s desirability has never been so phallic and penis-centric. Men’s desirability has traditionally been a displacement of the penis onto other things like fully-throttled cars; throbbing wads of cash; big, hard careers. Men’s ability to objectify, to collect objects, and surround themselves with objects dictated and enhanced their attractiveness. All of this says, “hey look at my large, aching, impressive endowment; I’m a person you desire.” Clearly, there are exceptions—no one disputes that. But it’s been compellingly argued by uncountable sources that male allure was shaped by almost everything but the penis and its size. A certain majority of men don’t mind talking about their assumedly large members, with boastful bravado. Other men remain more modest. However, make no mistake, penis size has been one facet of many in the calculus of male desirability. It’s just never been so explicit and pronounced as it is today with the enhancing pouch.

To clarify, not all pouches on men’s underwear today are “enhancing” in such obvious ways. Some are designed for comfort, some are designed for support, some are for sports-performance. By-and-large, if there’s a pouch, there’s not a fly. So it’s a muddled dichotomy but a dichotomy nonetheless. But a pouch is a pouch and regardless of function, they do set out and package the male genitals in very overt ways. Some just say “pouch front underwear” on their boxes. Others have more ostentatious names like “Trophy Shelf,” “Trophy Boy,” “Almost Naked,” “WonderJock,” “Show-It Technology,” “Saxx,” “Shock Jock” and the list goes on. The “Almost Naked” is the highest selling pair of underwear in our company, the bamboo soft fabric is one selling point but the hang-free pouch is another. “It’s supposed to feel like you’re not wearing anything” I tell customers, as if they couldn’t figure that out on their own.

That idea that it feels like it’s not there is appealing to men. They want to feel free and unbridled; to let it all hang out. They also might not want to think about what underwear they’re wearing throughout the day. Comfort is still king in men’s wear. But the “Almost Naked” also foregrounds the penis; it’s front-and-center in the apparatus. I think it looks unflattering; all the schlongs that I’ve seen in this pouch have looked somewhat like a cross between a fruit basket and a bird’s beak, regardless of how big the banana is. But I also can’t argue with the success of a pair of underpants that outsells anything else in the store three-to-one. I tell people that “it’s something to look at once it’s in there.” So, I’m not lying.

Other pouches just bring it all to the front but don’t make such a spectacle of it. I prefer these the most. I feel sexy in them, I feel desirable. I also feel comfortable. They enhance without being obscene or vulgar about it. I have my own reservations about making such a phallocentric declaration. I’m as susceptible as any other man to the anxiety of desirability. Making the penis a pronounced object of desire, subordinate to the logic of size, fosters a lot of insecurity. And insecurity shatters the confidence that has formulated male sexuality for a long time. Women are used to push-up bras, make-up, manicured body hair, things used to enhance the sex-appeal of their bodies for men. If all are subject to the gaze and the gaze is male, how do men feel when their penis is so naked and exposed to it? The penis becomes an object desired by other men. Not only the phallus, an abstraction buttressed by wealth and objects, but the penis itself. Men form their aspiration to be better, more desirable men through the size of one another’s penis in this new world of underwear. And it’s kind of queer, even if they’re wearing the underwear for women. And that’s why I think that The NY Magazine Reporters observation—that there’s a change from a “logic of use to a logic of size”—is so compelling. It’s a fundamental shift in masculinity and a shifting of the male gaze. Underwear is devoid of the comforting, supple folds of the fly and replaced with pouches that broadcast their penis size. With this, come new ideas of what is sexy and how to make a man wanted by others.

Some men—like the occasional customer I talk to—are angry, defensive, seething and scared. Some, like the reporter Halberstam talks to, are simply confused. Men now navigate a world which seems outwardly codified and purposeful; a world that was once somewhat easier to navigate and exist within as a male-bodied man. But it’s getting more complicated; maybe a lot less complicated. Maybe it’s just foreign, unusual, and slightly queerer. The reporter’s sentiment isn’t fear or annoyance or retaliation. Like him, most men today approach it quizzically and perplexedly. But some don’t, some get upset and defensive. Some cling onto every last scrap of fabric that their disintegrating security blanket of masculinity has—including the fly.

Malice: A Memoir Essay – WR 457: Personal Essay Writing

I transferred to a brand-new elementary school at the beginning of third grade. What I remember before Deer Creek Elementary is fragmented at best, memories only flash before me—moments on the soccer field, a boy with a cute haircut, almost getting hit by a fire truck while flying down a hill on my big wheel. And Bobby, but I’m not ready to address him just yet.  In my baggy sweatpants and fluffy sweatshirts, that I wore because they were soft and comfortable, I awkwardly but effectively made new friends. At the beginning of the year, I asked out my first girlfriend; Katelin, or Callie, or Cassie, a forgotten name but still beautiful. We would pile musty woodchips into elaborate fortresses under the jungle gym. We were king and queen; titles we bestowed upon ourselves to legitimize what was, for all intents and purposes, just an excuse to spend time with one another. We’d make declarations of everlasting love and devotion to one-another, broadcasting our royal edicts to the gathered minions of Deer Creek Elementary while they chased each other around the playground. Together we’d leave recess with splinters stinging our palms, reveling in the mildewed, cedar-fleck castles we’d created, mortared with our sweat and determination. Pining for marriage and a kingdom; we’d toil to build our walls as high as possible with a hope that today would be the day that they stood for eternity. We’d always return to find our stronghold leveled and elatedly begin reconstruction. The janitorial staff laid siege to my bark-chip empire every afternoon but we persevered, intent upon our world-building.

But even royal marriages end and my bastion’s demise came in the fourth grade. Kaetlin, Cassie, Callie, moved away—to another realm far, far away. With my new classmates, I too, had new subjects and a new domain. I had the opportunity to build new citadels and create new empires. But I was a social climber stuck in a caste-system. In this social reincarnation, I was no longer royalty, just another peon. Something in another life—maybe arrogance—had put me on the lowest rung. I lacked my queen at recess but I built anyway. But no one wanted to play my games anymore. Instead of building things under the twisted metal superstructures with me, everyone wanted to play above me. My benevolent smiles and regal gestures were met with ridicule and distaste. My proclamations and fumbles for attention were met by turned shoulders or confused stares. I was always alone on the swing set; the chairs next to me were still shivering and freshly abandoned. I’d try and join-in and play tag, only to be the kid that no one even bothered to chase—I could run endlessly and too fast.  I was no fun to be around. I was distasteful; something upon me marked my pariah status.

I examined myself, begging the universe to tell me what had changed. I slowly began to see that my kingly robes were more akin to a peasant’s burlap drab, covered in wood, dirt and the moldy splinters of my earthen forts. My homeliness begot distaste; my sweat pants and shirts no longer comforted me, they only offered an opportunity for ridicule. I abandoned my old garb en masse. The only sweatshirts I’d now wear had to have GAP tattooed across them, something recognizable and accepted. I begged my parents to buy me the itchy denim jeans and scratchy chinos that I had scorned for near a decade. And the bark chips were left sitting, dispersed and unmolested on the playground where they always were.

The three acres I lived on, the untamed childhood I’d blossomed within no longer appealed to me. All that was out there was birch trees and rich clay, fields of vibrant wildflowers, vegetable gardens and crawdad traps, garter snakes and lady bugs, apple trees and an unfinished tree house. I came to realize the pungent, unpleasant smells that permeated the outdoors. Our neighbor’s horses were knee-deep in their own feces, their dung ripened in the wet, warm summers and clung to the inside of your nostrils. There were always clouds of flies and yellow jackets swarming your summer picnic on the back lawn. These newly discovered malodors and fetid, overripe flavors sat in my mouth. The tall grass began to slash at my knees and my feet would blister with overuse. The soft, ant-rotted logs that I used to split open and watch explode with little blacks bodies no longer seemed fascinating; those logs now burst like putrid, gangrenous wounds—a pestilence that I ran home to hide from. And so, safely inside, I would retreat into the basement and build my kingdoms out of plastic Lego blocks. I’d construct colossal spaceships and wage war in the twilight of refracted sunshine through the wet, dark windows. Dirt and wood wouldn’t heal my pain and feelings of rejection. I had nicer clothes now and had to keep clean and tidy, like royalty should. So I’d spend all my afternoons down there—hidden away—building solitary, sterile-plastic realms.

But let’s not say that “everything” started here.

One day, earlier on, before I had delusions of grandeur, on the car ride home from Montessori school, my mom queried, how my day was. Like mothers do. I crooned the expected “fine” and we chat about her day while I remain mostly mute. Once home, I descend into my bedroom lair. I leap over my Lego spaceships frozen in an epic melee; I fly past my Star Wars figurines perched menacingly upon my bookshelf and I dive into the mountain of stuffed animals piled onto my trundle bed. Tearing off my clothes, my tiny, naked body is covered in the downy embrace of Rabbits, Orcas and Bears as I burrow deep into security. The soft fleece is relieving; it doesn’t yet carry the discomfort and ostracizing of the fourth grade. But no, everything was not “fine” today, mom. Can’t you just know that?

What I haven’t told her is that an ominous shadow has been cast over me in pre-school; his name is Bobby. He torments me in my early, formative years. I’m supposed to be discovering my inner, individual potential and instead, I spend my time on the playground cowering in fear. Enough is enough. And I finally milk the courage out of myself to complain to my mom about him.

During this time, my mother is an explosion of dyed-black hair and Janet Reno glasses. She wears big, floral dresses with exaggerated shoulder pads. She’s tough and sinewy but is undeniably the most motherly person I know. And always has been. She grew up poor, in the middle of five siblings, the median between older brothers and younger sisters on a farm in rural Sandy, Oregon. And while her brothers threw burs in her hair, tortured her relentlessly, she latched onto their company throughout her childhood. Her brothers were her best friends despite the times like the day they tricked her into the bottom of a pit where they left her for an entire summer’s afternoon. Sunburnt and scrappy, she learned to keep up and fight back.

So, while I found my mom’s suggestion—that the Montessori school deal with the Bobby problem or she’d “teach her son how to land a punch”—unsurprising and even motherly, the look of abject horror upon my teacher’s faces suggested that this woman was wild and tempestuous.  She may have been the HR manager for a major insurance firm now—trained in conflict management—but her past was inescapable. And she was a loose cannon when her son was threatened. She was the matriarch intent upon teaching her son how to fight fire with fire because that’s how she knew how to do it. Life, as she remembered it, was hard. She wasn’t about to let her son learn to be a victim.

But that isn’t quite all of it. My teachers were also concerned because Bobby, they said, had left Montessori school months ago. I had been complaining about a phantom menace who had been absent in my life for a while. To this day, I have no idea what he did to me or why I feared him so much. Something about him was malevolent and unrelenting. He followed me months after he no longer had a physical presence. He was a shadow on the wall without a figure to cast it. I could have made it all up. I could have made him up. He could have been a bully but he could just be another kid like me and maybe, I simply didn’t like him. This evasion made my mother deem it unnecessary to teach me how to swing a left-hook and we all moved on with our lives, onto better things. It’s a moment in time that we can look back on and laugh and tease over dinner. But without any doubt, he was the first memory of pain I have.

After Bobby, my mom had very few pearls of wisdom, outside of self-defense, on how to cope with and understand pain. Maybe most of my childhood pain was trivial. Once, I woke up in a cold-sweat, with a searing fever and begged to stay home from school. She looked at me with a flash of compassion and then gruffly told me to “take an Advil and get over it”. She let me know that I was being silly and that if I had a fever, I needed to take medicine before I decided to try and get out of school.

She had only one piece of advice about fitting in and even that was a defensive strategy: do not, for any reason, make fun of Sean. Sean was a boy who lived down the street, his father was a weird dude who rode his motorized scooter up-and-down the road we lived on, at all hours of the day. Sean’s dad was a software developer and his mom was a mental health professional. Together, the expectation would be that they formed a normal, nuclear suburban family—and outwardly, they did. Except that Sean was crazy, he had anger issues and an inability to understand and relate socially with others; I remember him as the rabid dog chained in the corner that everyone enjoyed throwing pebbles at until he snarled and lunged. My mom’s advice, to be just friendly enough to leave him well enough alone, stemmed from one guiding principle: If Sean brought a gun to school, which seemed possible to her, then I would be spared from his wrathful carnage. I’d stand by, removed from the taunting, name-calling and verbal abuse. I’d watch Sean be provoked and smile inwardly as he pounced onto the backs of his attackers and dug his teeth into the small of their necks. They weren’t as shrewd as I was.

By seventh grade, I’d found myself in every rung of the social hierarchy. It felt like schizophrenia when every word I said, everything I liked, every last gesture I made, was open for interpretation and judgment. I was Zeus perched upon Olympus in the morning and then Icarus plummeting from heaven by lunch, having flown too close to the comforting warmth of unconditional love. One day, to one person, Star Wars was cool and the fact that I devoured books, trivia and data surrounding this universe thrilled; while other days, it only bored or nauseated. I played soccer: soccer was cool, no wait, actually it’s gay. And gay is bad. What was a safe choice of music to listen to? My friends would routinely abandon me; I’d make a few only to have them decide that I was too much of a liability, too uncool, too attention starved. I crawled deep into the cavities of my mind, analyzing, correlating and inferring. I couldn’t decide who I was since any concrete foundation only invited demolition.

Opportunities to climb the social caste came and went, sometimes, they’d provide the mobility I craved and other times, they were dead-ends. From within this constant state of flux, someone emerged as the paragon of pain that I could inflict upon another person. Her name was Lindsey. Lanky and Amazonian, she towered above me with sad eyes and scraggly, blonde hair. She would whisper behind my back, letting her friends and others know that she liked my awkward demeanor and dyed-blonde blonde hair that I parted down the middle. She’d glance longingly or approach me after class for a quick, casual conversation. And I didn’t know what I thought of her until money entered the equation, a pittance: five dollars—but still green. Nicole, another girl is slowly flapping Abraham Lincoln’s mocking scowl in my face. She’s offered this sum for me to ask Lindsey to be my girlfriend. Money did strange things to my twelve-year-old self and so did a hunger for acceptance. Together, these two destructive desires—for money and for approval—coalesced into a torrent and I now wanted to ask Lindsey out. When I asked Lindsey the question, I never said that I was interested. I don’t remember what I said; something like “hey I heard you like me; do you want to be my girlfriend?” This could be complete bullshit; I could have picked out that scene in my head from a TV show. It seems like such a vapid thing to do and I can’t really imagine myself saying it—even at age twelve. And yet, I know that I asked her out—know that I said something—I know because so much pain surrounds that stupid, mindless, heartbreaking action. I wince when I think about it; it was such random, unbridled cruelty. But I also know that in the moment, it felt orgasmic.

I had a harem of girlfriends that I rotated through in middle school. I was only paid to date one of them. I use “girlfriends” as a loose descriptor since it was more like a close friendship. But we were in middle school and close friendships didn’t make sense between boys and girls unless we codified it into something permissible. And thus, girlfriend became a very real term—and with it, the expectations of the designation. Odd as it was, my string of girlfirends and I never kissed. Certain things still seemed taboo and I now say that it was because they were all my beards, masking my homosexual desire—even if such feelings were left undissected until after high school. The “love” that my girlfriends and I shared, if we can even call it that, was a gross misinterpretation of the word. But certain things that seem so silly in retrospect are very real and important as a burgeoning adolescent. Which is why, when Nicole exposed my subterfuge, Lindsey’s eyes welled with tears. I was outplayed by a cleverer social puppet-master, a pawn for Nicole to maneuver and strike out with. I was left to mop the blood off of the chessboard. The joy of the kill was snatched away from me, victory was firmly in Nicole’s hands. I was the one that Lindsey called for weeks, crying. She kept telling me I was terrible and thoughtless and that she wanted to harm herself because I was such a malcontent.

And it’s all true; I was stupid and blithely wicked. Complicit in a greater plan or not, I played my part with a smug sense of glee—I knew what I did would hurt. I just didn’t know it would hurt that bad. I’d forgotten the moral of my mother’s lessons on Sean:  actions have consequences; pain ripens and fosters anger, resentment and hatred. I had to pick my targets more discerningly; random acts of pain against the vulnerable were reckless. Tyrants torture the small folk and trod upon the weak; I don’t want to wear that crown. And so, I turn my efforts onto those I see wearing armor; even the smallest fissure provides the opportunity to dagger and twist. As they lay bleeding, I step into their place. But even my armor has cracks to be exploited by those more cunning and opportunistic. I will never be king again. But malice remains intoxicating.

“The Electron Does Anything it Likes” Free Write – WR 457: Personal Essay Writing

The electron does anything it likes!!! The self-righteous bastard!!! We are all subject to its whim and fancy. Why are we here today? Because the electron decided we should and made it so. It orders our meals for us and holds the doors open, like a bad date who thinks they’re chivalrous—but we know they’re just trying to get something for themselves out of it. The electron is unbridled ego. It does not send you a birthday card—it’s too preoccupied doing as it pleases. Who does the electron think they are, Higgs Boson? The fucking GOD Particle?

“The electron does anything it likes” Freeman Dyson

But the moments that the electron’s inertia seems to focus on us feel special. We get to be the center of the universe center for a moment. And those fleeting moments in the electron’s eternity are why we still invite the electron around. All that energy can’t help but rub off on us. It makes us excited that the electron’s excited. We want to bounce off of one another, unfettered, without fret or concern about the petty social niceties of doing so.

From e’lynn: “Love, n: Senses relating to affection and attachment.”

Gustav Klimt - "Hygeia"

My piece on love from the latest issue of e’lynn magazine:

Love, n: Senses relating to affection and attachment. Love, the dictionary definition, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, if you must know: there you have it. My work is done. That’s all you need to know about love, isn’t it? That about sums it all up? Our most personal, intimate feeling and emotion can be encapsulated so simply and plainly. Something so deeply human is  purposefully vague to the point of banality.

It’s no guarded secret that the nature, truth, the very ethos of love is illusory. It’s a concept so embedded, hackneyed, confounded and distorted—donning a plurality of meanings so vast—it is exhausting to stake a claim to knowledge of it. Musing over it, I myself worry there is little to be said of love that hasn’t been said already. Exposing it as a clichéd concept is, itself, a tired cliché. What, then, is left to say about love?

There are twelve definitions of love, as a noun—just a noun mind you, within the Oxford English Dictionary, and within each definition, subcategories of clarification and exposition. And that very breadth of scope is what so frustrating about saying anything meaningful or valuable about love. One, singular definition rarely does any concept justice but it at least acts as an apt summary of the abstract underpinnings; with love, this is apparently not the case. A square dozen summaries are required to hash-out what love means, and depressingly, as I said, only as a noun.

Without giving into despair, I believe there’s an elegance in the simplicity of the initial, primary definition, however. The fineness lies within its ability to mean nothing and everything about love all at once. Is this a satisfying definition? Yes—but paradoxically, no.

Senses are an innate human faculty; within everyone, lies the ability to experience the world through the capacity of sensory perception and expression. Within this definition’s framework, love is an intersection of the senses that are awoken and excited by affection or attachment. Everyone has the capabilities to experience love as a simple or profound feeling of affection or attachment to someone or something.

Humans are compassionate beings, capable of feeling immense connection to concepts, ideas, places, objects and each other. Abstractly, love is vast and indiscriminate, sometimes chosen, often unavoidable.

Tracing the etymology of the word love into old English, it surfaced as a filial oath and expression of reverence or caring towards lord—both God and King; and inversely, as a concept of gratitude and compassion towards the lord’s subjects. Love, through this lens, represents an acknowledgment of respect and duty, the necessity of care and esteem from two parties in a relationship.

This same reverence fostered concepts of admiration towards nation and nature, as kings went out of favor. Nations nourished love of the land they encapsulated and while the budding romantics of the 19th century rejected loving the nations, they were obsessed with the beauty and symbiosis within humanity, nature and love.

Romantic love wasn’t an idea that has existed forever, lust and temptation were not celebrated ideas. Marriage was an almost entirely economic agreement up until the modern era. Feelings of passion, a burning desire, the inability to remain composed around a certain person—what we now allude to as love—was something to experience with a mistress but certainly not a wife. The list of love’s incarnations goes on and exists in a perpetually evolving and expanding discourse. What love means to someone today will not always be the same tomorrow, love can be eternal and momentary. Today’s love may foster a connection and reverence for a lifetime even when that which is loved ceases to exist within our life.

This, to a large extent, is why no mention of love between two people is made within this definition, it is made subtext in favor of a more inclusive definition. Person-to-person love is always somewhat trivialized by the breath of experience that the word love covers; important, human and necessary though it may be, it is a form of love too individual to universalize.

Love between family members is different than love between friends, and our lovers experience a form of love that may be no less or more profound than the love we hold towards nature or beauty. The form that love takes varies; the way in which we experience love differs. How deep we choose to love is inconsistent and tumultuous. The feelings we associate with love may not be experienced in the way we think across cultural boundaries. What constitutes love is wholly unique to our own person. But that is why we should continue to love, it should always be fresh and exciting. We have the ability to self-determine what love means and act on those feelings of reverence, compassion and fealty. It’s innate, human, unavoidable, intense and inexplicable.

Don’t take my word for it, Valentine’s Day may be for lovers but we have to capacity to go out out and love everyday.

From e’lynn: “Bittersweet Trifles”

Gustav Klimt - "Music II"

My short story from the latest issue of e’lynn magazine:

Music. Terrible music, what is this? Is he trying to woo me? Some sort of bizarre, new age jazz muzak—I hear it trickle out the cracks of the door and into the hall way. It’s saccharine, pouring like sweet, jagged crystals into my ears. A cacophony of boring. What’s like tooth decay, except for a brain? Is that even a thing? Doubtful. Whatever it is, that’s what’s happening right now. If it keeps up, the inside of my head will be one gaping cavity by the end of the night, slowly rotted away by this Sweet-and-Low music—not even remotely the best of metaphors but it’ll do. Christ, I’m still standing here…why am I still standing here?

I guess that maybe I should be grateful. At least it isn’t 70’s R&B—it’s not Marvin Gaye. Blaring “Let’s Get It On” would just smack of desperation—this displays a totally different intentionality. The muzak is lazy, maybe even a little pathetic, but at least it’s not desperate, really.

Is it desperate? Could this be his plea for intimacy, for something more? It’s the second date, I’m no strumpet. I’m not some cheap floozy. I know it’s Valentine’s and all but that doesn’t just void the social contract of date-intimacy progression. He’s got to work up to it and judging by his choice of music, he’s either trying too hard or not at all.

Well, I’m being a little unfair, maybe a tad harsh; he never seemed disingenuous. But then again, I base that all off of one date. People put on a good face on the first date. The little Thai restaurant by his place, cute and delicious as it may have been, may be the only card that he has up his sleeve. That’s where he takes all his first dates. And then he has second dates and the magic stops because the good show he put on initially is over and they come to find out that he’s a one-idea kind of guy. On the second date, he drags them to a hot-wings place where the waitresses wear tube socks and daisy-dukes and rub his thigh while asking him what he’d like to drink. Then he orders a beer that you can buy a 6-pack of at the corner market for $5 and gabs about hockey for the rest of the night. Tacky—that’s the type of guy that plays this type of music on valentine’s day.

Super tacky.

Knocking. I gently tap on the door jam. Why? Jeeze, I don’t know; that was weird; it just happened. I guess I was tired of standing here, listening to this awful music. Might as well dive right in and make a night out of it. No use being alone on Valentine’s—or as the corpulent bus driver joked—“singles awareness day”. I’ve heard that joke plenty of times but I liked it best when the bus driver said it. Most things sound better out of the mouth of a bus driver. “Good morning, there’s going to be a 20 minute delay in service” Yes, that’s it, keep singing, my little lark, you make disappointment sounds like angelic poetry.

Anyway, no use being alone on Valentine’s and the door’s already knocked—it’s too late for excuses, he’d catch the tail glimpse of my calf as I dart down the stairway and that just wouldn’t suffice.

Footsteps. My grip tightens on my bottle of wine; I’m not planning to drown out the terrible at the bottom of several glasses of this cheap Merlot or anything. No sir. Sobriety might be my best friend tonight. But something tells me that it will at least fortify my resolve to not make a desperate run for the nearest window.

What did he say we were eating tonight? Italian food—pasta? Nice try, buckarooni. I’ve been played in this game of charades before. The cook, eh? How many dates until you abdicate that role? Besides, I’m no fool, I know what cooking Italian means, you bum. I’ve had the pre-made frozen shrimp scampi, I make it too. It’s pretty damn good. Toss it all into the fry-pan and ditch the evidence in the waste bin—one authentic meal coming up! —courtesy of your grocer’s freezer isle! Tacky, as I said

Rattling. There’s the doorknob, that means that the night’s about to start. Big smile; check. I have to look happy to be here. I hope I look ok. I did my darnedest, the rain was unexpected, I should have brought an umbrella. Could have, should have, would have—as they say. It’s too late to fret, I’ve frittered away my last-minute primp time.

Inhale. It’s going to be fine; anxieties aside, I’m not at home watching re-runs of the wild-and-wacky rom-com-thon with my friends Ben and Jerry. And that alone is cause for celebration.

Exhale. The door’s open. Look at his toothy grin, there’s no faking that. Beaming, affectionate glances, a pleasant invitation inside, punctuated by constant flashes of those big, pearly teeth; he’s happy to see me.

Cute. He’s wearing a tie. Not too shabby, mister. He even did his hair. He looks, well…not tacky—I’d venture to say that he may even look a bit classy. I’m hit with the smell of dinner, it smells good: rich, delicate, buttery  it’s a smell that is too transcendent to be pre-packaged. I can see the baked brie over his shoulder. This is a labor of love. Someone’s smitten and honestly, after tonight, I may be too.

I step inside. I can excuse his taste in music for the time being.

Mitchell’s Winter Reading Suggestions – Modernity, Ethos and Reality.

I recently did a winter book list for the monthly zine that Nathan’s sister puts out E’lynn. Check out the whole magazine, it’s full of good stuff!

I just included some of my favorite pieces, ones that I thought were fun but also challenging in some way. All of these works confront ideas, or interrupt conventional narrations of modernity, ethos and/or reality in ways that are accessible and captivating. Feel free to take or leave my advice, just get out there and read something!

Pastoralia by George Saunders

Easily read over a long weekend, Saunders collection of short stories center around the absurd and bizarre—masked as the everyday and banal. Never relenting a shred of wit, he digs into how pedestrian and unremarkable utter nonsense can be in life. All of the pieces Saunders includes are perfect surrealist literature, but nothing quite beats the unrelenting cynicism and raw sarcastic potency that the novella, to which Pastoralia owes its name, provides. Following two actors that live as cavemen in an interactive museum display, the novella deconstructs ideas of modernity and the callous reality of 21^st century life by framing humanity, identity and existence as a series of performances. Never allowing the bleak to overwhelm his work’s tone, Saunders injects healthy amounts of humor and a quirky charm to his language and characters.

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

Written by an Oregonian and as much about philosophy as it is nostalgia, the compact The Tao of Pooh delightfully challenges the reader to slow life down in order to savor it. Embodied within our favorite honey-loving bear are ideals of simplicity, unpretentious appreciation of beauty and fineness, and an approach to life that relishes the journey as much as its outcomes. The message is perhaps best summarized through the book’s parable of the vinegar tasters: 3 men surround a vase of vinegar, one man’s face expresses bitterness, another’s shows sourness, and the third man beams a smile in appreciation of the sweetness. Using this image, Hoff contends, “sourness and bitterness come from the interfering and unappreciative mind. Life itself, when understood and utilized for what it is, is sweet.” Interconnecting Pooh’s appreciation for sweetness with a laymen’s version of Daoist philosophy, Hoff makes a lighthearted appeal to enjoy simple pleasures and to follow the road life takes you down.

The Photograph by Penelope Lively

A moment in time, a gesture, an expression and performance, all are encapsulated in something as simple as a photograph. Expectations are upended at the discovery of one such hidden photograph, masking—what appears to be—adulterous affections. The Photograph follows the journey of Glyn as he collects the pieces of his identity and life, shattered by the discovery of that single, illusory picture. As broadly emotional as it is deeply personal, Lively examines the psychology and concepts of beauty, intelligence, and happiness and how their intersection is not always how it appears. Nakedly examining the life of his wife, Kath, Glyn begins to realize that happiness and beauty can be used as facades to hide pain and listlessness. Photographs can only represent reality and in doing so, they obscure the real with untruth. In The Photograph, Lively asks what reality is, if not a well constructed lie.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Beginning with a series of stories and characters, interconnected tangentially at first, Mitchell slowly builds a rich narrative that is simultaneously engrossing and challenging. Getting past the first chapter, which follows the journal of a 19^th century seaman in the Pacific and is riddled with archaic, dense language is an initial struggle but it is completely rewarding to see it dovetail into the subsequent character’s lives. Spanning centuries, Cloud Atlas jumps into eras and decades ranging from a mildly dystopian near-future to the aforementioned past. Each character and period is so believably and masterfully portrayed that they seamlessly fold into each other, pulling you deeper into the ultimate narrative. Lauded as one of literature’s most recent masterpieces, and encompassing just under 500 pages, it’s an ambitious read but well worth the undertaking. The movie, directed by the Wachowski siblings, creators of The Matrix, and starring Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, and numerous other big names, is in post-production and seems as exciting as it is quixotic, given the sheer scope of this piece. Take a long weekend to dive into Mitchell’s dynamic, captivating world before it hits theaters for a wholly and uniquely realized work of art.

The E’lynn version of my article, pages 10-14 were edited, so they may flow a little better. Feel free to give me feedback, for example: did my recommendations stoke some interest in the novels? I love feedback, especially constructive criticism, please and thank-you!

Check out the E’lynn website too, Erica caters as well as putting out the zine and is one fantastic lady.