Spanking the inner Comstock.
Saturday October 20, 2001
Mind and body, Jekyll and Hyde; I’m back on that dualism kick again. Nicholas, you see, has been around for a couple of years—and no, I’m not getting needlessly metaphysical on you, and yes, I am talking about my pseudonym as if he were a separate person (you did know Nicholas Urfé was a pseudonym, didn’t you? I mention it somewhere, I’m sure); it’s because if I keep saying things like “the pseudonym of Nicholas Urfé and the context I associate with it has been around for a couple of years” you’d lose your patience and start throwing things at the screen—so, Nicholas has been around for a couple of years now, and he’s really quite the convenient mask for dealing with, well, any of a number of things; it is a wondrous truth we’ve discovered in this internet age, in that it’s ever so much easier to be embarrassingly intimate with complete strangers than one’s closest friends. (One has ever so much more to lose with close friends…) So I can sit here and type thousands of words about, well, the sorts of things I type about (and already the squeamish reticence is setting in; squish it, squish it like a bug)—sex, and writing about sex, and wanting to read about sex, and digging towards the bottom of those terribly deep foundations, and women and men and tongues on skin and strategically placed tattoos and teenaged dykes and sisters and queer boys in baggy jeans and the whole unbearably sloppy mess of it squatting on your chest and breathing wet and hot in your face until something in you rises up, that one thing, whatever it is, that one thing that shines and keens and rings in your ears until the ten thousand things fall away, just for a moment—
You know. That.
So when I must—as I am called upon from time to time these days—I must deal with “Nicholas stuff” without the comforting interface of keyboard and iBook and internet and cool, dry, ironic prose that I can take some time to mold and shape to my purpose and from which I can distance myself at any point—when, f’rinstance, I’m standing in my kitchen, chopping garlic, phone tucked between shoulder and ear, eyes on the poster of Ganesa as I’m chuckling at a wryly catty anecdote about smut and anal sex—it’s then the inner Comstock rears his shaggy head, glaring and tapping his foot, and even though the mouth is open the tongue is tied; the moment passed, the bon mot exiled to l’escalier, and I start brooding over the fact that I’m brooding and I’m trying to figure out, is this Nicholas? Or is this me? But the question’s meaningless; the split itself does not exist; the boundary’s so easily crossed because it was never really there in the first place. And much as I love watching those slippery moments of ambiguity when carefully cherished dualities collapse in other people—or, naturally enough, fictional characters; I am a cruel and exacting god—the irony is somehow lost when it happens to, you know, me.
Luckily, that irony isn’t. And I like my martinis very dry.
(I’ll get over it, thanks. And of course the Spouse knows. She thinks the whole thing is terribly funny. It’s just me; I’m a terribly squeamish prude. Really—I’m told I blush impressively.)