My Life has become a research project.
Archive for the ‘Writings’ Category
My Life has become a research project.
Butterflies are not so much about love as about surprise. Will she? What if? Does she? Really? What if?
I got butterflies today when she gave me a sneaky unexpected I love you! I was taken off guard and I almost forgot to speak for a moment.
I hadn’t goten butterflies in a while. It’s more like a full-body wag, like my soul and my insides and my tail and my ears wag with joy and excitement and anticipation when I get something from her. She does that to me a lot. A lot. more than she knows, I think.
Butterflies are that “Oh no! Does she like me? really? REALLY REALLY?” Butterflies are that “Oh! Be still my fleeting heart! I think I’m in love!” moments. It’s not that serious but it’s the unknown and the promise of love like you hadn’t felt before.
I got butterflies a lot before, and not as much now. It’s more comfortable now, more known now — but I like the butterflies. I like changing things up where she has me fawning over her with a fluttering heart. I like being her dumb-struck loverboy.
Sometimes I see a transperson in a public place, in a restaurant, in a store, standing with an acquaintance… and I know. Or I think I know. Our eyes lock and there’s a moment where I recognize them — and maybe they recognize me — as someone who lives their life in the gray area between genders.
It happened to me just now. I’ve heard other transpeople talk about it, too — that moment of recognition. It’s agonizing and reassuring at the same time. You’re immediately curious about them, entranced by them, you want to know what about them set off your bell that says “you are like me.” They may or may not be trans — you can never tell for sure. But there’s something about them that draws you.
It’s agonizing because you can’t just walk up to them and say, “Are you like me? What’s your life story?” It’s not exactly an appropriate grocery-store conversation. But, maybe, sometimes, you can smile and nod and acknowledge that you held eyes… and maybe acknowledge that you’ve recognized each other.
That’s the reassuring part. Seeing that there are others like you, out living their normal lives, doing their normal things while living in the gray area like you.
I always wanted to be a cowboy.
I grew up in a small town in Texas. There were plenty of “cowboys” around, though I was not one of them.
They weren’t real cowboys, but they reflected the sentiment. Real cowboys were gone a long time ago. Real cowboys lived with their cattle and their horses were their friends. Real cowboys spent lots of time alone, or with other cowboys, and they spent months on end sleeping under the stars.
Real cowboys carried all of their belongings in their saddle bags, and real cowboys cooked their food over fire. They carried only what they needed, they cared for their herd, and they may have had a dog as a best friend. They may have had a heeler or a shepherd or a mutt that looked after the herd with them, that watched the stars with them, and that listened for coyotes, or men.
I always wanted to be a cowboy.
Real cowboys lived in a time when fences did not slice our country into individually owned pieces. Real cowboys lived in a time when you could drive a herd of cattle clear across the country, with no fences or interstates to interrupt. Cowboys were rugged men who enjoyed their life outdoors, and cowboys were a brotherhood that understood the harsh beauties of the wild over which they crossed.
Cowboys like that don’t exist anymore. We’ve cut up our country and paved the roads and replaced them with trucks, and trains. Cowboys were the in-between of a culture like ours and the shepherding human cultures that have been ours for thousands of years.
We’ve lost them.
Now we have cowboys like me, and the boys in my home town. Boys who wear hats an wranglers and boots, boys who drive trucks but have no farms to tend. Boys and men who crave in a part of themselves the freedoms of cowboys from an earlier time.
I’m not a cowboy. I never will be. But if I had a hat, I would wear it to protect myself from the sun and cold and heat and rain, and I’d remember the cowboys who went before. I’d nod at the others who wear a hat like mine, acknowledging that through all of the differences between their culture and mine, the still, like me, wish to shade themselves from the sun like the cowboys who are gone.
I don’t know you, but I love you.
I don’t know who you are, or where you live. I don’t know what you’re good at; I don’t know your hobbies; I don’t know your aches or pains. I may never see your face.
But I love you.
I know you hurt. I know you love, or have loved at some point in your life. I know that you want to feel wanted, and appreciated. I know that you appreciate good weather and I know that, sometimes, you look at the stars and feel a sense of wonder, like me.
I love you.
I want what’s best for you.
I want you to smile with the sunshine on your face.
I want you to live your life and know that, even at the worst of times, someone out there loves you.
I may never know your name, but I would hold you when you cry, if I could.
I don’t have much to give. I can’t be there at every moment.
But this is what I can do.
I can write and create and perform.
I can pour my soul out and hope that for someone out there, it makes a difference.
I know that my difference is just one tiny drop in the tides of our time. When I think of the problems of this world I get swallowed up by their power.
But for you, whoever you are, this is why I do this. So that someday, you can know that someone out there, me, loves you and wants you to be happy.
I’m terrified to love, but it’s all I have. I hope it makes a difference.
I’m all cool with the idea of “waiting ’til marriage,” as long as it’s a choice that someone has thoughtfully made. The problem is that most of the proponents of waiting-until-marriage almost completely avoid talking about sex at all, except for saying that you shouldn’t do it. Unless you’re married.
And so you wind up with these couples getting married, supposed to “consummate” their marriage on the first night, and they don’t even really have a working understanding of the sexual anatomy of their partners. They don’t even know where the damned clit is!
These are the people I’m talking about when I say “virginal virgins.” They are virgins in the technical sense of the word — they’ve never engaged in sexual intercourse — but they are also “virginal” in the sense that they know very little about sex.
Usually they don’t understand that sex doesn’t have to be painful for the woman the first time.
Let me repeat that: Sex doesn’t have to be painful for the woman the first time.
That it is is an all-too commonly accepted myth.
Sex will be painful the first time for the woman… if the man does not take his time and does not know what he’s doing.
The woman needs to be aroused. She needs to be wet. Her vagina needs to gradually be stretched to the point that a cock will not hurt her.
How? By moving slowly. By having sex education that teaches you what that means and why it’s important. Moving from kissing to fondling to fingering to sex.
Slowly.
I think it’s a good idea for anyone to gradually experience things sexual. To move from kissing to deep kissing to necking to fondling to heavy petting to oral sex to intercourse.
This is a good idea regardless of whether or not you’re waiting until marriage. If you’re waiting until marriage, you could do “everything but” before the wedding night and can move on to “consummating the marriage” the night of the wedding.
But if you haven’t done those things before you got married, then you should do them first. Before “sex.” Be more concerned about exploring and learning your partner than about “doing the deed.”
And for God’s sake… do some research. This is especially relevant for men — learn what the clitoris is, where it is, and why it’s so important. Learn what the G-spot is and how to stimulate it with your fingers and your penis. Chances are that your bride will have a fairly easy time making you cum, but your research takes you an important step towards returning the favor.
In conclusion, if you are a “virginal virgin” on your wedding night, my recommendation is that you hold off on “sex” for a few nights, and first move slowly into “manual sex” and oral sex before attempting intercourse. Albeit this may be somewhat “non-traditional,” the benefits can pay off for years to come.
It’s hard. It’s really hard.
“How do you feel about homosexuality? Well I believe what the Bible says.” With the presumption that it says it’s wrong.
But it doesn’t. It doesn’t say it’s wrong.
It hurts when someone says you’re wrong. “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” But why do you believe it’s a sin? Because you’ve been told. Because it’s been translated and taught in a way that makes the whole act a sin.
“You can love someone but you can never expres your love sexually. That would be a sin.”
How is that? What is that like to be told that? You love someone with the same depth and breadth and intimacy as a heterosexual pairing but to ever touch them in a sexual way would be a sin… while the heterosexual consummation of the same love is sanctioned by God.
There are some who will argue on and on and on about what the texts of the Bible actually mean; I just wish I could show someone — ideally after converting them — the hurt and the pain and the frustration and the anger and the shame and the myriad of damaging emotions that are created by the promotion of the belief that homosexuality is wrong.
A challenge of faith. A crisis of faith that few make it through in their lifetimes. I felt the pain of this debate before I understood that I myself was queer and when I think it I feel the pain of all those around me and before me and I just wish I could make it stop. I wish I could end the people’s pain and I wish I could heal the people’s hurting and I wish I could just turn off the blows that continue falling as the generations continue crawling on.
Life as a rejected people. Life as a group of people scattered across the world and communities and time, as a group of people condemned by a global dogma that says the nature of your love is a sin.
That says the way you know how to love is wrong.
It doesn’t matter how much support you have. It doesn’t matter how much someone says you were “Born This Way” and they — and God — love you just the way you are. You live with the knowledge that your mother or your brother or your grandma or your pastor or your elementary school teacher or your banker… think you’re wrong. You live with the knowledge that they believe and preach and teach that every time you extend a loving touch to your partner that you are doing something wrong.
How does that feel?
They live a life where they can show in marriage the loving touches and caresses and kisses and the knowledge that they share a bed – a sexual bed – together with their family and friends, they can be proud of their love and show it off in an approved way. In parties, in weddings, in church at family reunions.
And what about the rest of us?
When your heart is filled with joy and you are met with sneers and curses? When the family that was supposed to support you no matter what would rather you be alone than share your love at all?
Queer people don’t know how to be straight. Even if they can be in a happy heterosexual marriage, there is still the knowledge that their loved ones reject part of how they know how to love.
What is it like going through life being told that your love and your capacity for love is wrong?
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
It’s a cool night.
I can feel the dark breeze on my hair, on my neck.
The trees are dark shadows against the night-blue sky;
…….their leaves whisper music with the breeze.
The trees talk.
They move their words with the wind.
The grass beneath my feet speaks through the cool blades and it says,
……...“I am alive.”
I am alive.
I am alive, it says. I breathe, I rest, I strain for the sun and I want to survive. Like you, I want to survive.
“I am like you.” it says.
The grass speaks through my feet and the wind touches my hair;
the words come softly, and they kiss my ears (just barely)…
They evade my mind but they touch into my soul
like feathers,
like the tips of feathers whispering into my soul
in the rhythm, in the language of the trees…
“I am like you,” it says.
The Apocalypse is happening. Fer sure.
I think we have a good chance of, within a few centuries, going through something that will reduce the human population by 80%.
AIDS already threatens to wipe out whole nations.
Nuclear bombs can send hundreds of thousands of souls into “heaven” at the same instant, leaving only a trace behind.
Daily, fire rains from the sky in the holy land.
The signs of the “end of times” are here.
“The world as we know it” really is ending. You and I are riding the up-swing of a huge change in life as we know it.
The changes in our time will be comparatively slow, but our children’s children’s children will live in a world different and probably darker than our own. We are riding the upswing of a Change in Times so powerful that its force promises to change the world as we know it as its wave crashes across the Earth.