Height

I’ve always had this thing when I’m at the top of a building, a sense of just letting go and falling a slight vertigo as it so happens. I feel my feet slowly leaving the floor and the feeling surges through me for most of the duration of my stay. I feel slightly uneasy sitting on ledges, as if I’m going to lose my balance.

I have assumed for most of my life that suicide is a product of misery, that as David Foster Wallace remarked the pain simply becomes unbearable, but I am arguablly happier than I was a year ago perhaps more than usual. Things are going my way, my job is steady, the friends are building, a love life might soon be mine, but the other day I was sitting on a ledge and felt the feeling even greater than a I did before. It was as if I could fly, I wanted that release, to simply fly off the roof and die.

I think this might be a reason for suicide, suicidals are often elated, their unhappiness has come to an end, they have figured a way out of their problems or perhaps they’ve simply become so intrigued by release that they have to try slitting their wrists, jumping off rooves, etc. The jump promises an end to something, perhaps not even suffering, but merely a self. We have so many selves in a life, but so few ways to really destroy their cumulative experience to eliminate desire or perhaps even worse repressed desire. Jumping isn’t about depression, it’s about ending feeling entirely, destroying the means of the self, finding in it a negation we at times need. Flight is a means of merely getting out of this life, finding a way to somewhere else or maybe I just really need to go bungie jumping. =)

Neurosis Map

Problem:

Absence of sexual outlets

Severe emotional pain

Inability to relate with others

Conditions:
1. a repressed heterosexuality in which the hetereosexuality I picked up from another man was to much for me. It went against my values and I thought it was wrong. It also scared the shit out of girls.

2. Repressed homosexuality. I have an experience when I was younger that was akin to a drug trip after a man made love to me on the internet while I posed as a woman. I couldn’t accept the way I felt, guys just don’t feel like that.

3. dented but functional pseudo-bilitis this is a peculiar sexual desire in which women that I love I fall in love with instantly (she’s so awesome etc) I want to fuck. I desire this the most, but approximately 90% of women I love instantly do not desire this type of relationship and additionally do not appreciate my advances.

Outlets:

Unrepressing the heterosexual fantasies potentially makes women outside of my circle available sexual partners… potentially they do after all have choices in their mates. I get the feeling this wouldn’t work because I wouldn’t be fitting into gender correctly i.e. playing the male role they desire.

Butch – Clicked once with a woman who identifies with men. We made out in her car and it was amazing, however these women are hard to find. She wasn’t over-domineering.

Bilitis – I’ve met two bilitis style lesbians I was on the same wave length with, the top was a little bit to much, but the bottom seemed about right. This seems like the best outlet, but again is hard to find. Additionally, lesbians do love other women, it is the physicality of the female body that is part of the turn on, hence a lesbian would probably drastically prefer another woman to me.

Dudes – accepting a sense of powerlessness (is that it?) and somehow furthering along this repressed and almost non-existent facet of my sexuality seems quite hard to do. The major reason is the openness with which I greeted that man long ago was due to ignorance, I didn’t know it was going to take me that far and no he didn’t do anything crazy with me. Additionally, this sexuality appears to be a by product of identifying with women something which I am unable to do right now.

Psuedo-Psuedo Bilitis? Somehow getting with a ladyboy or effemiate man I love. Apparently this does happen.

Identification:
I began identifying with women in elementary school if not before that. I appear to have reached the zenith of this period in college, but due to long term unemployment felt that I had to become more normal. In Bangkok I hit upon an idea of difference, that people come from different places pyschologically, at the time I had the idea that people don’t change and that I’m only the person changing, such has turned out to be false and the block on identity that I have is slowly resolving.

If it is possible to take apart a sexuality, much less one as complicated as mine, there are the further problems of employment, but even following the straight narrow, being not gay and not effemiate, I have been unable to maintain work stability or even a relationship much less the pyschological effects of going with out growth of stagnating in masculinity with out the option of bettering oneself from identification and change.

This map will be updated periodically as I think up more facets, holes, and other enigmas of my many problems.

Who fucking knows?

I am at the point that all those cute images that always attracted me now take on another residence. The images we send women of what is femininity is can be disturbing in the extreme, constant loss of power, always receptive, I am watching Ben-1o with students when an a little female elf, a side character, wonders into the story. I feel the same draw to her that I do to Blythe or other girly accessories, the messages of gender call to me at times (and no that’s not the basis of my claim to trans-gender) the elf spends most of the show accompanying Ben10 (who’s messages for masculinity include shooting laser beams in anger to force two sides in a war to consider reconciling instead of trying to further discussion) I am at the point that I have some idea what it’s like to desire to be out of power, to trust another person with your self, to let yourself be with another in such a way. I have been sleeping after sex. I have been dreaming, things come back to me, I feel better about myself even though I can’t change myself as I could then.
New Years I begin to play a new game, for years I have repressed my dominating desires in sex, which is to say yes I have developed a heterosexuality, but one that doesn’t involve power plays, rather it is boring and based around the person, people I think are really cool I just wanna fuck ‘m, but the domineering stuff never really goes away, it’s always stuck there just below the conscious, like a lump of phlegm in the throat. It is one of several things I repress through out the day, one of several things I have never really been able to express, but on New Years somewhere between the break out of male fantasies I’ve been having and my openness to being the bottom the difference between the two positions blurs. I notice in Monsie that she never repressed such desire, that she could still make love to someone and enjoy it, the ladyboy I end up going home with loves making love to me, she is phenomenal, yet she wants this position, one that I can not afford or play. I am at home thinking of a girl who gave me a massage once. I asked her if she wanted a drink, she said yet, but never showed. I begin to think it’s ok to be in power, I try to relax my restraints, I feel no different, but I fall asleep in the same way as the other fantasies. At the end of the Ben10 episodue the little Elf girl finds a treasure chest, she’s so excited by the prospect of the treasure she throws it everywhere useless, wastefully, in a manor that goes against my self, but because I am with her with in this character in identification I have learned a way to desire, a new way to be useless, a new to be a doll, and I feel like if that’s what we’re teaching women something is fucked up.

p.s. after the massage girl fantasy I saw one of those pics of 1950s robots gropping girl and felt the robot’s power. It is my contention that sex and gender are vastly different things and that identification has little to do with sexual positions.

p.p.s. it occurs to me later the central question of this post is Do you want to be an elf or a robot?

The Night

The Night begins… I don’t remember anymore… I am facebooking or something like that… there’s a party at Glow w/ Nat & Goro. I’m not gonna go, I have to save… I have to go to Laos next week… around 10 I decide to go… glow turns out to be a 3 story house converted into night club. There are girls and eventually I decide to talk to one… she has a boyfriend… Mem and Deyan and Emma are there. I say Hello. Glow has these bed couches so I lie down and play gameboy… I have a gin and tonic… at some point I have a mental arguement with Luz Iriguay… she is enforcing traditional gender roles I need to get up and talk to girls pinch asses shit like that… I tell Mem I need to pinch people’s asses, she grabs mine and molests it, I feel her ass and some friend of her’s ass. He actually has a hot ass. There’s a girl walking around with a page boy cut and a cool dress, I try and talk to her, we can’t relate. The bar has Fernet Branca, I drink two of them and Dane comes in. He can’t understand me, thinks that I’m talking about some night. I say hi to Ichiro. Me and Dane exchange books we’re reading… read… possibly going to finish. Of my remaining 1000 baht I’m down to like 400 at this point which reminds me… I’m down to like 1000 baht left which is one of the reasons I didn’t want to go out… also the ass pinching thing occured to me with the girl with the pageboy cut, you see Luz Iriquay comes in my mind post-fernet branca and while I’m sitting there talking to this girl she turns away from me and I have this idea to pinch her ass, but I can’t because I basically don’t know her and something is just saying don’t do that… so at that point I go and complain to Mem about my need to pinch asses, the guy was tempting BTW. My Nintendo DS keeps crashing so I can’t finish the level I want to in Zelda. I read some Luce on the ereader Je, Tu, Nous and as usual am impressed, her stuff flows through me, I feel the thread of the conversation opening… Some other notable Glow moments, two hired dancers on the stage, the smallness of the crowd, Bangkok’s clubs seem to max out around 60 people, Glow reminds me somehow of the little techno clubs in Brooklyn, small space which packs at most 60 – 80 people. The DJs are amazing it has Fernet Branza, I’d say it’s a win. The party finishes and I end up going to some after hours place at a hotel on Soi 20 walking to in which I can’t kinda help shake my head, this place appears to be whoretastic, but once we get inside it seems to be more that every Thai couple on sukhumvhit has ended up at this place scratchdogs, the music is obnoxiously loud, the mc interrupts every song, some decent stuff comes ons every once in awhile when we enter they’re playing that Jay-Z with Alcia Keys things with “new york… lets hear it for new york…” which is really good actually were it not for the fact that the song is destroyed in 8 different ways before we even get to our miniscule table. Mem has her second boyfriend with her tonight, her friend with the punky hair cut is really cool. She dances amazingly, it’s really hard to watch at times… I just rubbed nicotine into my eyes… I need to shower… BRB… Scratchdogs is the type of place I would normally avoid, but I am having some fun here and at this point I’m so out of girls that the concept of any of these women getting a rise out of me seems absurd all the hootchie mommas around the dance floor are beautiful, but I don’t dream of reaking violence on their body, squeezing body parts etc. except Mem who is pecularily slutty and hence I do slightly lust after, her belly pushing through her dress, her make up offseting her eyes, not quite beautiful, but rather memorable… kinda like my 60 year old manager I tried to dance with unsucessfully at the last school party… Deyan and I agree to leave and we end up at Goro’s which is kinda like what I’d imagine Goro’s place would be, an empty house rented with others which is in tern sparesely furnished with record crates, I love Goro’s place it reminds me of people I knew in Florida etc. It bears a resemblance to the type of place I would have lived in college. There’s a girl on the bed when I come in and her sleep is both erotic vulnerability and question, I feel a link to her, a need to be so vunerable and increasingly women seem like the phoenix bearing under the pressure of male desire, constantly reinventing themselves, or perhaps I’m wrong… I imagine Emma laughing at this… during Goro’s party I also have this mental argument with Emma whose asleep at the point feet away from me, something about sleeping, following women, etc. The dj plays something that sounds like an African chant or Animal Collective over the house record he’s playing, I aks what, he tells me it’s The Police, score one for Sting… I decide to download the album later. At times I’m haunted by radical feminists, butch dykes, and other things and their view of the world, I think in terms of man meat, objectification, I am asleep on Goro’s floor the voices come on, it’s been an hour… I continue to wonder if these people even like me, do they even want me to be there or am I just a quiet lump on the floor, dwindling away into the evening, someone there to bum cigarettes, can I talk? do I talk? do i even want to talk? I serve no purpose, but I do ok self reassuring comments come back on… it’s time to go, we wander down the street… I feel a need to make sure everyone gets into their cab… Deyan can’t even speak a lot of thai… oh yeah I am also haunted that evening by this women who hired me to teach English in Japan who didn’t get me and took each and every facial expression and expanded it out into a world of assumptions many of which are wrong, you know the people who think they understand, but don’t get you? one of those types, constantly annoying because they prick some aspect of the self that shouldn’t be because they can’t give in and admit that maybe they just don’t get anyone. I am to tired to usher people into cabs, I get the in the first one and worry if my 200 baht will make me home… it does and I got a change for breakfast =)

p.s. I am glad I went out.

The Day

Today begins at 5:50 when the Alarm clock beeps and
I wake up, punch the snooze thing on the cellphone
and keep sleeping. I wake up around 6:20 and
then try to get the shower to work, it’s on but
it takes a few minutes until pressure builds up
and then it actually begins to shower. I get out of
the apartment around 6:30 and in a cab by 6:40
despite this I am still almost late to work (I have to
be at work by 7 on Thursdays). On Thursdays I
greet the kids, when I’m not thinking about it I
greet the girls, I levitate
towards them, and they greet me, but I am
assigned to the boys as usual and squak out
“Good Mornings!” as the day progresses. I’m a lot
happier with the men these days, it doesn’t bother me
to greet them.
I get chicken rice and it’s at this point that
the arguements begin. It starts with Anna Kerlin
who is accussing me of something or merely
making fun of me or something like that, these
altercations are often violent, bloody, end
in deaths etc. Natalie Weiss is making fun of me
next, by the time I reach the morning assembly
I am almost babbling to myself in my stride Richard
sits down next to me and I tries to talk to me
I am to absorbed in my inner world to reply
coherently. I remember Oliver telling me that
in Africa, people are told to not talk to the
people who talk to themselves or get angry for no reason etc. The arguements pass, I begin class,
and occasionally drift off in class, I am trying to
get over the violent alteractions in my mind, despite
the fact that one of the women named does continue
to hate me, I am trying to let go, to just accept
that someone I love can never really accept me
greet me or even talk to me… forgive me, that because I did something stupid, I have to live with the
repurcussions of neurosis for the rest of my
life. But it’s that someone can hold a grudge that long or can simply fail to empathize, fail to understand, fail to even grant another the benefit of forgiveness that bothers me. I did after all apologize.

Today I am not tired, in fact I teach my first 2 classes
with out any coffee or tea. I take my break and
fill my thermos with the Chinese tea another
teacher gave me. I help Pranee down stairs and
eat one of the curry pockets she bought at
the hospital. It’s amazing. During my second round of classes I have m1 class with Beautiful who I love. She’s just so amazing, I love being in the same room as her, and we interact in our weird way, back and forth of attempted answers to my questions. Her class has changed from just her answering to the class answering. Beautiful’s click is full of women I get girls that I think are cool. One reminds of a girl I was in love with in Florida and Florida.

Florida comes back to me in dreams at time. I am beginning to feel again and dreams appear to crawl along such axises, up the shaft of the unconscious and into the waking mind. I dream of two or three people from Florida, I also get tattoos and attend fund raisers for effemiate men. Such is the nature of the unconscious this week.

Fragments… Society & Angela McRibbit

Stage: Barren except a desk. A mother enters.
Mother: (to herself) I know, I’m going to dictate a letter for the machine on the desk. (there is no machine on the desk).
Mother: Dear Mark, There are a few things have been concerning me recently. Firstly, you do not have rubber nipples. Regardless of what you claim, the human being does not contain or grow polymer based plastics on a daily basis. Second, you do not run on oil. While I know that you spill oil on yourself all the time you do not in fact contain it in your veins. A liquid called blood runs in your veins and through your fleshy little nipples supplying your brain with the components necessary for thought, self-awareness. (stops for a moment)
What if?
(Mark enters)
Mother: Mark! Where have you been?
(Mark has large plastic nipples and is bleeding oil down his trousers)
Mark: I got in a fight with the other boys.
Mother: Mark you can’t do that! You’re just to sensitive for those boys. Just ignore them!
Mark: What am I supposed to do? They threw me down a stairwell and laughed when oil ran out of my ears.
Mother: Mark oil did not run out of your ears and you also do not have plastic nipples.
Mark: (feels plastic nipples) Mom, this shit is plastic just touch it.
Mother: Mark! I will do no such thing. Now go clean the blood from your ears and get ready for dinner.
Mark: Yes maam… (resigned, he marches to the bathroom off stage)
Mother: Oh! to have a son with such ideas, someone who doesn’t even know what a human is or does or how they operate!

——————————-
Fragment… Angela McRibbit
Voice over: Previously on Angela McRibbit.
Shrouded Man: Angela now that you’ve secured equal rights for women in Islamic countries what are you going to?
Angela (in a pink convertible): I’m going to enter the Galvaworks 500 Desert plateau race. (car makes speed racer like noise, jettisons over a dune)
[cut to Doctor's office]
Doctor: Angela. There’s something you need to know about Quinton.
[cut to convience store]
[Quentin McStag is kissing an old woman]
[cut to Title]
Voice Over: and now back to Angela McRibbt

Shaping yourself

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about girls and I’m reminded of how I created this identity to begin with. Women and sex have always been a kinda claustrophobia to me, a kinda intense sense of longing jealously and ripping someone’s panties off and fucking them on the bed are one in the same sometimes. I created this self because at the end of the road was this dude who got pussy all the time, but I never quite became that guy, I was always hovering around masculinity never quite able to enjoy the pleasures of domination because of my own moral repugance of such ideas of control, but I find myself obessing working towards that mack self and it annoys me. I have managed to create enough of an alternative sexuality that I’m reminded of the joys of simply sitting back and taking it, of just letting someone love you, and I see that in others. The guy down the street doesn’t obsess about his girlfriend he simply feels at home in the little spot of sexuality that his gender has reserved for him. For me, my own desires run counter clockwise, my bottom status runs against the independence the sense of definition that my masculinity enforces, while letting go has provided me with energy, enjoyment, the ability to see a self outside of the gender constructs I obey for simple employment and passability in everyday society. As Kalup Linzy says, gay comes from with in, but that with in can easily be closed up by the desire to be someone you’re not the desire to work towards maleness and it’s associated rewards, but such rewards run counter to my ambigious place in gender, that the women I love love me in a way that differs from their boyfriends, their lovers, their selves, and my own inability to accept the love of the men who love me. I really need to relax =)

Examined Life + Dancing @ Raindogs Sept 5th

A documentary about philosophers & a night of new dance tunes in Bangkok September 5th @ Raindogs Khlong Toey MRT

Mental Health Note

All day long violent fantasies, Anna Kerlin killing me in water, people tricking me and leaving me to alien parasites. Haven’t been that stressed in a long time. Hope I don’t yell at the kids next week. To much pre-occupying my time.
Continued fear that Julie likes me, really can’t take emotional drain of someone being in love with me, but she seems to be nice just fearing she’ll call & complain b4 her birthday she called and said I can’t believe you’re dissing me.

On Beatles Fans

Something about Beatles fans has always really annoyed me. It’s like they know some secret of life that eludes me. Even worse, the secret is supposed to be so obvious, that when I obviously don’t enjoy their music, they all just look at me like dude what the fuck is wrong with you.

Growing up the Beatles were aggravating, all their happy lyrics and the way they turned complicated issues into simple pictorial statements really rubbed me the wrong. There were like a ray of light trying to pierce an abyss, except imagine the sun has a submarine and is submerging itself in order to chase away the blues. Such is the way Beatles fans feel to me, ya know like you have to be happy or something is wrong with you. Which, granted, something is wrong with me, but The Beatles simplicity, their lack of emotional depth or complications, that they could just ya know write songs that simple really annoyed me and brings me no satisfaction. Everytime they came on the jukebox I always felt that slight dread, the day Revoltion 9’s grating radio feedback would become part of my everyday listening habits, when the stupid refrain from The Taxman would cease to annoy and the simple energy of the song would take over. I dreaded the moment that The Beatles became good to me when the icy waters of my soul would have to give in to their chimes and I would float away like a bird on pyschdelic jetsome.

Now we could argue that all great bands are built on such reputations. A lot of people don’t like Bob Dylan… I love him, but his last few albums have totally sucked. But unfortunately somewhere in the repetitive nature of broadcast, in the groups dynamics that keep us all in one uniform culture, we are repeatably exposed to other’s taste, but where Dylan might actually elicit a thought, The Stones might capture the alienation of racial or sexual minorities, The Beatles are always upholding a (yes I really am going to use this term) a status qou. They are the music of a generation that interpreted the sixities counter-culture as a break before suburbia, now mind you their values are better than many, they are after all anti-war and all that and when Paul McCartney goes out on a limb supporting the Dali Lama or whatever he seems quite sincere as much that Yoko and John had something to day, but I just really don’t like their music. So I’ve devised the following game for everyone to play.

Think of a moment before you liked band X. Now hold that feeling in your memory and repeat it. Now repeat after me, “I hate ____________.” Just say it, right now in front of the monitor. Do this everyday till you really build up a resistance to band X. Now look in the mirror everyday and remember that you have just defeated a part of the capitalist machine. Good luck Warrior =)

On a similar note, it would be interesting to get people who intrinisically dislike a certian music together in a room. i.e. a photo of people who hate The Beatles, a photo of people who hate The Rolling Stones, etc.