Tape

You are what you think.
Haphazardly taping your motley pieces together, your consciousness – looped recording of your thoughts – makes your world.
Past and future squeeze the present out.
Thinking past, thinking future, you become a ghost of repetition.

I.

I Confess

They were in an “open relationship,” so he didn’t have to lie when his lover asked him – more pruriently than inquisitorially – did you do anything interesting today?

–No, he would say, though the taste of a secret visitor still tingled on his tongue. He wished he could say – Yes, a tall stranger came to me on this afternoon of a faun. I can still feel his liquid tongue licking my ear. His lips were shiny like wet shells and his belly burned against my cheeks. He kissed my feet. When he exploded on my stomach, his semen pooled in my thirsty navel. I can still smell his neck, his hands, his knees. He wished he could say yes, but he couldn’t. If he stopped lying, how could he ever believe himself again?

Spanking the Monkey

–Even monkeys don’t do that, the invisible priest hissed through the confessional grill.

At the time, he was too naive to question the priest’s knowledge of primates.

–Bless me father for I have sinned . . . Nobody told him that masturbating was a sin. The little pamphlets – a bad confession was a passport to hell – which scrupulously listed venial and mortal sins didn’t mention it either. But as soon as he learned how to masturbate, he knew without a doubt – this exquisite pleasure must be a sin.

Nailing a calendar to the door of his room, he marked black X’s on the days when he defied temptation. By some subtle reasoning – Catholicism’s impossibilities made him ingenious – he included the days when he touched himself but was able to stop short of coming. Sometimes he managed to marshal as many as three successive X’s – a stupendous achievement for a horny teenage boy – but still not good enough to receive the bland white Body of Christ on his tongue two Sundays in a row. (It was too mortifying to confess the same sin – did he have any others? – week after week.)

–These are my sins . . .

Childhood Adulterated

Night and day the house creaked and groaned with his mother’s unasked questions. His father’s silence was a glassy wall that reflected and amplified her inarticulate anguish back to her. Her unvoiced questions consumed her till nothing was left but a mouth without a face. Still this howling mouth strove to bind him to her with its tortured questions’ coils. His father escaped (his mistresses asked him no questions), but he didn’t.

II.

Battle Royale

–You always . . .
–I never . . .

They needed something new to quarrel about – all their fights were repeats.

After another wrangle in which they seemed to be reciting hackneyed lines, he decided that they should just record representative fights and play the appropriate tape whenever they felt an altercation coming on. Meanwhile they could do something useful or fun, like clean the basement, see a movie, or fuck. (Some of their best fucks happened after ferocious fights – why wait till after a fight when they could fuck during it?)

Some titles in their library of squabbles:

• The you’re-asking-for-something-I-can’t-(don’t-want-to)-give fight
  
• The you’ve-never-understood-me fight
  
• The you-remind-me-of-my-mother fight
  
• The I’m-too-anxious-to-have-sex-so-I’ll-deflect-your-advances-by-starting-a-fight fight
  
• The I’m-hiding-something-and-it’s-making-me-irritable fight
  
• The I-want-to-be-alone-but-I-can’t-ask-you-for-space fight
  
• The I’m-hungry-why-do-you-insist-on-talking-about-this-before-I’ve-had-something-to-eat fight
  
• The why-can’t-you-guess-what-I-want-I’m-giving-you-all-these-signs-do-I-have-to-spell-everything-out-for-you fight
  
• The I’m-horny-but-I’m-waiting-for-you-to-start-something-why-do-I-always-have-to-be-the-initiator fight
  
• The why-are-we-having-this-fight-again fight
  
• The you-don’t-appreciate-what-I-do-for-you fight
  
• The money fight
  
• The I-feel-like-I’m-losing-my-independence fight
  
• The I’m-jealous-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-know-it fight
  

Ironically, in our zeal to hide our vulnerabilities from each other, we only succeeded in becoming more and more adept at poking each other’s sore spots.

III.

–I don’t believe in love; love is a story I don’t believe in, he told all his lovers early on, when they were just falling in love. Curiously his disavowals never seemed to faze his lovers. Did they know something he didn’t?

He’d been with the same lover for seven years. What was their secret? They had none, unless it was that they never fixed their future. (Happily ever after is for tidy fairy tales not for capricious fairies.)


The present is what escapes the story we are always telling ourselves. Eject the story! Break yourself. Let every moment remake the world anew – not in your image.

See here. See this. The past and future wind and unwind in this moment, this unrepeatable crossing.
See now. Give yourself to the deviant instant, to the swerving ecstasy of the other – another world – unfolding in you.




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