Shoes are to women as _____ are to men
The three sweetest words in life are no keep going.
Let me give you some context.
You feel exasperated in your nine to six job. Spare you the details. Sexual frustration. Social awkwardness. People are squares and live in tangled webs of traditions, taking conventional things for granted. No one thinks about it.
Before I even think about it, something tells me to think about it. A program runs inside me. My thoughts are pre-established.
Language is the worst way to communicate. Words have implications of such a small scope that speaking about anything is like trying to find the substance of life inside a shut cathedral from the outside, as you use a plastic spoon to scoop away at brick. Analogies are as effective at explaining things as sucking a turkey leg through a straw.
There is no way to escape it. The context of your life, living this, you privileged you, you have friends and you have the internet. You know about musicians, everyone knows about musicians and yet when you hear that someone shares your taste in music you relate. Everything is assumed because it is already played out that way.
Think about that metaphor, the ineffective analogy, of the hand that pulls the strings and you’re the puppet. But imagine a gigantic spider spinning a web. It catches the living objects on earth and turns them into spiders, themselves spinning further webs, until everything is so webbed up there is no possible way for anything or anyone to be but a spider spinning webs.
Let's move forward. Or maybe we can just start somewhere else. You don’t know why your head is always in the gutter, or why everyone is lying about themselves, calculating thoughts and then using their lack of comprehension of language meticulously to gain some web-spun way of life. To spin their own webs. There’s only one thing free of these webs, and duh, it’s fucking. It’s the only thing that matters. I mean, it is the only thing that somehow makes matter, makes more stuff, makes cells replicate into a baby, the only thing that matters, matter is a verb, an important piece in this spider web puzzle. There is nothing else to do but make love. A man and a woman enter a conference room in a cosmopolitan building office for an information-related company. They enter with folders in hands. And when they close the doors behind them and pry away ears and eyes, when they find themselves out of reach from the standardized mental judgement of others, the social conditioning prevails, and it is a huge mystery to me why these people don't put down these folders with numbers and letters in them and make love to each other incessantly. Non-stop.
The two people in the office don’t take their clothes off and kiss, but rather, sit down cordially and discuss, with a joke here and there, a joke done countless times before, about their work related projects and what not, and maybe at some point they talk about how tired they always are and complain about their weekends and how it sucks that this this and that but this and that.
You don’t know why, but it’s the only thing that makes sense, to rub against matter, to put yourself into a warm hole. You don’t know why particulars about a person will make you throb. It used to be your neighbor. That was hot. Then it was girls who dress a certain way and listen to music you appreciate. Or just someone very open sexually. And then somebody sheepish. A sheep shy. Short hair. Cut off jeans. At the beach with blond hair. And then, all of the sudden, it’s your friend's girlfriend, or someone your friend is interested in. For some reason, this repeats, over and over again. You’re willing to risk that secret. Now it’s people at your job who could surely cause a problem for you. People you don’t even like, whose voices annoy you. People you don’t even find attractive, but that one woman who is married and older and dresses in black polyester all the time. Or the girl whose hair is short in a bob and she looks like a boy even more so than you and you can’t stand how much you want to enter a bathroom stall with her.
You pine for your best friend’s girl for years. The three of you are besties. You’re like family. But she is irresistible. She is the greatest person on earth according to you. Everything you ever wanted in a companion. Just like you. But with the wrong guy. You wake up in their apartment in a different city during one of your visits with an erection and you think about the two of them just above you on the bed and how you just want to slip in. The torment when you’re out at a bar and you’re both drunk so you start rubbing hard against each other, amicably, of course, but who knows, neither of you really acknowledge it. She looks at you passionately like no one before. Not true, but to you it is so. Her man is right in front of you. He can’t see it because you don’t let it on. And then sometimes you swing your arm over her and you feel a cold response and it twists up your intestines.
Years after all this suffering, suffering you put on yourself for falling in love with a girl who is just perfect but who you shouldn’t, one night you rub your lips on hers, and she is taken back, and you try again, and again she pulls back, so you stop and feel the universe collapse inside of you and pull you down, the earth crumbling into tiny rocks, one with a bit of turf and a single flower on it dismantling into nothing, the sun itself shutting off, every single feeling of guilty shame, embarrassed sadness, remorse, suffocating illness all multiplied exponentially at once inside of you, and then she pulls you back and says no keep going
