Human beings took our animal need for palatable food . . . and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species . . . and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools . . . and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language . . . and turned it into King Lear.
None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction . . . that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.
And the same is true for sex. Human beings have a deep, hard-wired urge to replicate our DNA, instilled in us by millions of years of evolution. And we’ve turned it into an intense and delightful form of communication, intimacy, creativity, community, personal expression, transcendence, joy, pleasure, and love. Regardless of whether any DNA gets replicated in the process.
Why should we see this as sinful?
What makes this any different from chocolate souffles and King Lear?
I think porn is important in what it has the ability to teach about sex. While many people argue that pornography poisons our understandings of sex and kills marriages, I argue that porn has just as much of a capacity to show that sex can be empowering, beautiful, healthy and positive.
Considering that my eyes and hair are brown while my little ones could not be more blond and blue as well as the fact that I talk to their mother at least weekly, you’d think that there would be no forgetting that I adopted rather than bore them.
You’d think!
And yet I was gobsmacked — gobsmacked, I tell you! — to find a friend request on Facebook recently from my son’s biological father’s long-time girlfriend. What in the world does she want from me? I wondered, clueless. Why would she want to be friends with me?
It was easy, all too easy to click the “ignore” button and carry on my merry Facebooking way but something nudged me to check if her photos were viewable to the world at large. They were, and in an album creatively titled “Family” I found scads and scores of images of my children. My children! And yet there they were, in a stranger’s photo album!
My friends, I’m somewhat chagrined to tell you that I stewed over this. I agonized, I fretted, I brooded, before finally reason suggested that she likely feels the same about my children as I feel about their new baby sister, the spitting image of my kids who does not live with me. This is why she reached out to me, and why her albums are full of my children and their unknown siblings, and why her partner’s albums are similarly stuffed with a happy mix of clone-like little ones.
Why wouldn’t I be open to the possibility of some sort of relationship with the woman helping to raise my son’s siblings? I’ve done as much as I can do to further the goal of keeping the siblings on the maternal side of the family in contact. Shouldn’t I want the same for the siblings from the other branches of the genetic tree?
I took one last look at my children in her album and accepted her request.
Now, we’ll see how it goes.
***Whoops, this posted several hours ahead of schedule. Please to forgive the regrettable error that allowed a draft to go live before its time. —aag***
The two sides are set to meet with a third party, an impartial observer and mediator who is equipped to help us resolve enough of our differences that we can face life in a civilized fashion.
That is, in theory, the goal. I have no hope that it will actually happen, and as the hour of our meeting ticks incrementally closer I grow more and more paralyzed to the point that I’m pecking out this post now with the near-certain knowledge that I won’t be able to afterward.
I foresee two possibilities. First, I could be roundly excoriated by the counselor for my tattoos, purple-blue nail polish, excessive tummy, lack of proper employment, intractable promiscuity and overall “lifestyle” mayhem. He is a Christian; because of this I fear that any weirdness on my part will solidify in his mind my parents’ belief that I am a horrible human being. If this happens I am prepared in a grim sort of way to fold his advice into a very tiny wad, slip it beneath my waistband, and ignore it just as steadfastly as I have ignored lectures without number from my parents on identical topics. In this timeline the net change in our relationship will total a big fat zero. We will be left exactly where we started.
Well, other than the fact that during the week I spend folding up the advice, I’ll wish more than anything to disappear into the earth from having yet another respectable human being tell me that I’m horrible. There is that. But as I count damage to myself as nigh onto nothing, we will not worry about that week.
In the other possible future the counselor ignores the ways I differ from the average American and advises my parents to do the same. He confirms that Christian or not, forgiven by God or not, I have every right to protect my children as I see fit.
This might seem like a more positive outcome but first appearances are deceiving; such an occurrence would no doubt cause my parents’ dislike to grow even more intense as they become convinced that I set the whole thing up. Or that the counselor wasn’t as good of a Christian as he originally seemed to be. Or both.
I cannot foresee any other possibilities.
Him: I read what you wrote about the condoms.
Me (lazily, as I’d just been fucked half-way through the headboard): Mmm?
Him: You know, I realized what you were up to long before I got to your house. I had condoms with me.
Me: Seriously?
Him: There are times I can be naive but everyone knows what “foot massage” is code for.
Me: “There will be nudity before the night is through”?
Him: Exactly.
*pause*
Me: But I thought I was being so subtle. You know I made a playlist especially to be seductive.
Him: It was incredible. But honestly, after that foot massage you could have played nothing but kazoo music and I still would have wanted to get naked.
Me: Next time I’ll make an all-kazoo playlist and we can test that theory out.
——
So. Anyone know any good kazoo music?
“For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”
~ Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (via The Daily Coyote, via The Beautiful Kind)
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round, and it has thrills and chills and is very brightly colored, and it’s very loud. And it’s fun, for a while.
Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they’ve begun to question, “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” and other people have remembered, and they’ve come back to us and they say “Hey, don’t worry. Don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we kill those people.
“Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride! Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account, and my family. This just has to be real.”
It’s just a ride.
But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that. You ever noticed that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because, it’s just a ride.
When I’m tempted to mourn over ten-thousand things that have gone contrary to my meticulous plans I need to remember this. Persistent indignity or enormous happiness should matter far less to me than they do, and maybe some day I’ll learn to meet each fear and joy with equanimity rather than grasping, compassion rather than anger.
I’m 41 now. Maybe by the time a new decade rolls around I’ll have it down?
Someone has given N. a phone. “It’s only for emergencies,” she reported. “It gets 200 minutes per month.”
That’s not many, I said.
“I know,” she said. “Last month I went through them all in ten days so I had to wait ’til the start of this month before I could use it again.”
What about texting? I asked because throughout our little trip her thumbs had hardly paused.
“That takes minutes too,” she said, then explained the complicated formula which converted texts to minutes.
Don’t you think you should save some of your minutes for later in the month? I asked. I’d never before felt so much like her mother.
“What for?” she responded. “When I run out I’ll just stop using the phone for a few weeks.”
She began rummaging through her stack of CDs so I let the matter drop. We suffered through listened to Evanesence, Eminem and Lil Jon for decades a solid hour before I finally could take no more. I get to pick the next cd, I said, and the moment Insane Clown Posse finished wailing I slid in something a little easier to think around.
So, this new boyfriend, I began.
“What about him?” She’s always been forthcoming about her partners; she’d sung the praises of this new man with each of the approximately ninety-seven-thousand texts they’d exchanged.
Are you using condoms every time? And are you still taking the pill?
The response to the latter was not quite so vigorous as to the former. “I still have to buy a new pack,” she said, “but I’ll do that soon.”
Honey, I said, you have to take them every single day, every single month. You can’t skip. But the new partner hadn’t been in the picture when the last pills ran out, she explained patiently, as if to a very small child. She didn’t think she would need them.
“But you never know when the opportunity might…”
“Pop up?” she helpfully interrupted.
I’m worried about you, I told her once we stopped giggling. I don’t want you to have another pregnancy you’re not ready for. I don’t want you to have to place another baby. I don’t think I could handle it again, I didn’t tell her.
Her answer could not have been more breezy. “I’ll be fine. I’m not going to get pregnant again. And if I did, I’ve got people who could take the baby for me ’til I got myself together. Not you,” she added, unnecessarily.
I gave up. What else could I say to someone who lives so fully in the moment that she neither counts her cell-phone minutes nor troubles her mind about the prevention of conception?
While I stewed she turned her attention to the boy; they jabbered about the adventures we’d enjoyed over the past few days. When the music stopped I fumbled the “eject” button. Impulsively she grabbed my hand away from the radio and squeezed it hard and in a rush of words (there might have been a few tears too) thanked me for including her on the trip and in the kids’ lives.
She sounded so happy, so genuinely grateful and thrilled to have been included on our simple little trip. As I kissed her hand and thanked her for being with us, I thought this, this is the upside of living in the moment.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
–Matthew 6:25-27
For as long as I can remember…even, truth be told, back when I was a kid and still religious–I’ve always had a problem with the Ten Commandments.
People hold them up like they are some sort of amazing moral code that would make the world a better place, if only folks would follow them. And some of them are not bad, really. But honestly? If you set out to make ten rules of conduct that’d make the world a better place, the Ten Commandments really aren’t very good. They read like a hasty and poorly-thought-out first draft, scribbled on the back of a napkin at a greasy all-night diner rather than handed down from the divine lips of a burning bush and carved by an act of supernatural will onto tablets made of stone.
So let’s look at ‘em, shall we? {snip}
#5: Honor thy father and mother that thy days be long in the land which the Lord gives thee.”
No.
Seriously, no. Even as a 5-year-old, I thought this was a terrible rule. Now, as an adult, I think it’s even worse.
Honor and respect are always earned. They are never automatic. I’ve met waaaaaay the fuck too many parents who do not deserve honor–parents who abuse their kids, parents who neglect their kids, parents who rape and sexually violate their kids.
This becomes ESPECIALLY odious when you consider that it’s a one-way street; parents are nowhere commanded to treat their children with respect, and not, y’know, rape and abuse them. Any just system of morals has to apply both ways. It cannot place bounds on the behavior of one group toward another while also tacitly permitting the second group carte blanche with the way they treat the first. This rule is fucked-up and poorly conceived from the get-go. More on it in a bit.
Read the rest on Franklin Veaux’s Journal
Slightly buzzed on free white wine. Exhausted, but having a marvelous time.
