Blowing Loads Across the Face of Forever
Trump, Yeezy porn, Netflix erections, blowjobs in high places and an awareness that we've turned the corner on actually successfully ruining EVERYTHING? Maybe.
We were out at Jones Beach. A nice family gathering. And at seven years old I had just learned to read. But, with the plausible deniability of youth, I was reading and asking about all of the wrong things.
“Hey…what does that say?”
I asked and pointed to a scribbled legend on the door of some building on the way to the beach. It had said “FUCK YOU” and, moreover, I knew that it said FUCK YOU.
The query was met with much parental laughter and a conversational shift to something else but the impression lasted. So much so that after a few days, with a piece of large chalk in my hand I went to the street in front of our house in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, a nice Sesame Street-esque Brooklyn block, and began to write, in 10-foot high letters…
F…U…C…K…..Y…O…U.
My mother who would periodically check on whether or not I was still alive looked out of the window and caught me mid-exult.
“HEY MOM!…LOOK!!!!”
She choked back, both a scream and a laugh.
“GET THAT OFF OF THERE NOW!” She whisper/screamed.
“WHY?!?” I asked, genuinely confused. I mean funny was funny right?
“JUST GET IT OFF NOW!”
So I made with the spit and rubbed out all of that fine comedy one sunny day in 1969, having learned that funny is at the very least situational. And, again, that there are some things that are okay small but not so okay when writ large. Or used to be.
There is no new “us” that’s been uncovered this last week. We’ve been here all along, but we’ve been a whole lot less than honest about where here is. Not anymore.
Used to be because in 2024, we find ourselves at the end of a week in the world that involved long, hard discussions about porn, presidents, prostitution, televised erections, continuing sex offenses and total (or partial) nudity as fashion accessory. Despite my mother’s 1969 take though I believe this should be viewed as nothing but…progress?
Against the possibility of us actually focusing on things that really matter? No, of course not. But against a past that claimed to be scandalized when mini-skirts became micro minis, or when bikinis became a thing, these de facto anti-woman regulations seemed to be, for a time, standards by which we felt comfortable living.
Which “we”? Probably the men in we.
“Repression is good for business.” Samantha 38-G is a plus sized porn star. Someone once asked why everyone in porn is a star, but in the case of Samantha it is abundantly clear how exactly she carried the mantle of star. All 38-G of her. And she is a Republican. It is, apparently, a pocketbook issue for her though. “Republicans are good for business,” she said. “Something about being told you can’t have something to make you want to have it.”
And there you have some measure of it. There is no new “us” that’s been uncovered this last week. We’ve been here all along, but we’ve been a whole lot less than honest about where here is. Not anymore. Not when a former President is on trial, not so much for fucking a porn star, but for covering up the fucking of a porn star with cash disbursements meant to grease the skids to the office of the Presidency, where it is presumed, you fuck no porn stars…not already your wife.
Moreover, this doesn’t even begin scratching the surface of the dressing room rape, in Trump’s case, or the attempt to start a porn empire like Yeezy had planned, or the numbers of feature films featuring non-simulated sex scenes that kept our algorithm’s pulsing this week. All pointing to the irrefragable conclusion that all of our sex positivity has been a total negative because while we’re having discussions today about things we only discussed privately in years past, we’re still discussing them like morons.
[W]e’re talking about that which we’d previously been silent about….[But] Talking more about soccer won’t make me like it more…
“Hey man…you interviewed a lot of porn stars. What’s it like?” The questioner was a dental student, and probably now, a dentist. He stood, eyes wide with wonder, earnestly asking what he felt was a valid question.
“Well, they came from the Planet Earth…is that what you’re asking?” I was laughing at his willingness to mythologize fucking on film for cash. “So they had two breasts, two arms, two legs…”
“C’mon…you know what I mean….”
But I didn’t. The mythos surrounding that which we’ve kept closest to our vests has allowed some of our worst instincts to metastasize into the stupid headline shit that’s burned our eyes this week. Excusable in kids, not at all excusable in adults. But here we are, tanked up on transgression, feeling like we’ve done something. Something significant.
But there’s nothing here. Nothing significant. Sex hasn’t changed as long as people are populating this planet and making more people. How we talk and think about it has, and that’s what created the illusion that things are “better” now because we’re talking about that which we’d previously been silent about. Talking more about soccer won’t make me like it more though.
Likewise while communicating more about that which had been dismissed as dirty and not fit for public discussion has now gone mainstream, it really hasn’t made it a smarter discussion.
“It always amazed me that people would pay for this.”
“This” in this instance, was fucking. She was a friend of mine who had worked as a prostitute during the entirety of her college career. Her family had money but she said she wanted to do it, after years of schooling in elite all-girl schools, to learn something about men.
“Did you learn anything about men?”
“I learned about a certain type of man,” she said. But she said the other sex workers laughed at her. In the docket no one laughed at Stormy Daniels when she testified about fucking Trump though, in fact she was not reduced by the experience that would have spelled a professional end even a decade earlier.
That was not the issue so much as the fact that since 2016 our dinner table talk has been full of discussions about golden showers, that is urine play, prostitutes, pedophiles and pedophile island. Discussions that also involved names like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Bill Cosby
It’s all been normalized now though and what most would consider, normally, fun, has now been weaponized as part of scummy courtroom dramas and clickbait-y headlines. Our only remaining hope at this point is that this marks an inflection point where we start talking/thinking about the somatic like it’s something we’re more than familiar with.
Also, with a certain amount of élan and, dare we say, class?
Yes…a future where we can talk about fucking like we talk about food. Lovingly. Adoringly. And with a directness well suited for those who actually enjoy it.
Now wouldn’t that be fucking something?
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 59 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps. Or so they tell me.
Your ending statements should be your platform for the 2024 presidency.