So it’s your fucking birthday, which I feel deserves some recognition, which I don’t feel about everyone. I ignore FB birthday notifications unless I really care about someone, or need to be socially strategic with them, and when I don’t ignore them I just use them as a prompt to send someone a text message or an image.
You’re going to do even better.
Your birthday feels like it’s a Special Day. It’s not as Special a Day as May 1, which is Hiatus Kaiyote Album Release Day, but I think that’s fair enough, and anyway it’s a day that I want to spend some time in acknowledgement of, which I’m doing in advance of the actual date, because that’s when I have time (because you’re not here, but you could have been, so I’ll phone you into my 16-hour-lamb-self-date via time spent communicating with you. I will stop when the lamb gets here, obviously, but just for a break.) And because time is actually quite relative. I told that to a guy today who I see regularly for a session that’s pretty much just 2 hours of edging. I told him ‘maybe you can come now’ and then I didn’t let him, explaining that time is after all ‘just a construct and is truly subjective, so your now could be my much later.’
I’m not bad at what I do, but I am probably an acquired taste.
Anyway, if you were here I couldn’t wear this dress, which I’ve already worn on a date with you, and I didn’t bring enough clothes this trip (despite having 2.5 cubic metres of luggage capacity) so I had no choice but to wear this, really, and anyway I felt I deserved to wear a nice dress, counting myself along such significant dates as Sam & Gina, you, Aloysuis, who have seen this dress across a table over the last 10 days.
I was thinking about what I could give you as a birthday present besides a blow job which you’re a fool not to rearrange your plans to receive, and I thought maybe since you’re 45 I’d do something involving that number, as practice for my future career as an unpaid intern for Buzzfeed, which I’ll bet you click on sometimes, because despite how very non-normative you can be, you can also fit lots of delightfully easy stereotypes, which I really enjoy about you, because they help me to stay cynical. Which is helpful in not loving your blindly or irrationally (bad practice). Which maybe I could, if I didn’t know that sometimes you click the Buzzfeed links. Well, actually I don’t know that you do that, but I have typecast you as definitely sometimes clicking Buzzfeed links. That should be good information to you, in deciding whether or not I am a Good Investment. You are welcome.
So:
45 Things.
1. I am really funny.
2. You are really cute.
3. It’s hard to get started. Like I definitely know what I want #9 to be, but before that, I’m not sure. I have much more work to do before I can work for Buzzfeed, better not quit my day job.
4. Thank you for being a really respectful tourist to my sex work. You could be so much more offensive about that, and you don’t, which I don’t think is because you’re self-censoring, but because you have a worldview that includes the validation of my profession, if not its glorification, and I loved hearing about the first time you saw a sex worker, because I’ve seen photos of you when you were young (because now, ‘elder’) and I can imagine your sweetness and your hard-on, which makes me want to fiddle you-as-a-youth.
5. My current biggest fear is that my body is a problem.
6. Sometimes you put your head on my shoulder or somewhere in that vicinity and I kiss your forehead, or your cheek, in a certain way, and it feels like a beautiful, nurturing, acknowledging thing and gives me a sense of thorough fulfilment and softness and fond-ness. That’s nice.
7. I have a lot of really beautiful self-portraits from when I first started doing porn. Most of them are in an iphoto library on a hard drive that has cracked it. I try not to think about how devastating that loss is.
8. I have no impulse to police your body and think it’s beautiful and touchable and loveable in all its forms and when I reach down to touch the base of your cock and feel hair, there’s a sense of home.
9. I think there are a million reasons why you’ll really like this, which I think will cross over with some of my own reasons.
10. Actually: Xplore is like this mine for you. A pussy mine. You survey the territory, you scape at it a bit (softly, without unrecoverable damage) and when you find the good stuff, you bring in the machinery and get to work. No one can blame you; these are rich resources and these are the times we live in. You will deny this, because mining is a garish metaphor, but when there are precious elements buried in the bedrock, you will find them. And thereby your life is rich with these fucking gems of women who are fascinating, ethereal, loveable, generative, sweetly fierce, and deeply valuable.
11. Well done you. And no, the metaphor isn’t thorough and it is garish becasue whiskey makes us bold (but what if you were the Gina Rinehart of Xplore?!).
12. A bartender just told me that he had ‘much better’ scotches than Laphroaig quarter cask and I told him that was highly offensive because it’s my favourite. He only had half a shot of Laphroaig left so he gave it me for free, which is the correct thing to do when you try to talk a chick out of a scotch choice, brah. And now I’m drinking his pick, which does have more complexity, but there’s no substitute for the security blanket of your Table Whiskey.
13. I would absolutely pay to watch you have your cock sucked by someone who wasn’t a woman. Consider this, and let me know. Take as long as you need to consent, I’ve got time. (Hint: ‘no’ is not the correct answer.)
14. I have come to see washing my hair as something really significant. This is partly because I bought really expensive shampoo and conditioner as a way of economically coercing myself into washing it less (I am very responsive to class conditioning), but also because when I get the sea / you / fluids / the scents of my clients / grit / travel in it, I want to hang onto it until vanity takes over. I haven’t washed it in almost a week.
15. I shared something really personal and dark here and then deleted it. What’s our line for TMI? Is it important to keep it light?
16. I can’t think of anything. Moment of silence.
17. The way you move when I tie you is so annoying and makes me want to only tie you on the floor so that you don’t have as much purchase. Because it’s like you’re not listening. I know that’s not your experience – I know that you feel you are listening, and responding. But we’re speaking and listening at different volumes. You’re all progressive and outside the box and I’ll do what I’m moved to, and I’m all This Is Shibari and Don’t Make Me Look Bad. It’s cute. It also makes me want to get much better at total immobilisation, which has never really been my motivation for rope, but you are kinda forcing me into it.
18. I want to mark you. I want to give you the extended divine discursive corporeal experience of impact. I want to take you out into the woods and beat you. I want to push your body past its limits. I want to be present when you dismantle. I want to see your whole world shaken up. I want to scare you a little, and I want to make sure nothing can get you.
19. Can’t have everything.
20. This song is everything, and I have it on pre-release, so technically I have everything.
21. I have a sharp mental picture of your fingernails and toenails. I can feel their smoothness inside my head and under my fingertips. Sometimes I want actual pictures, but none of us in relation to each other exist. Once there are photos: what changes?
22. I think that photo of you and Jana in the photobooth is really nice. You both look really good – people you’d want to see fuck. But also you have this stoicism which I feels somehow evident. Contained. NBD. Slow release. Etc.
23. I watch too much Bondi Hipsters.
24. Take-Away Shows are done the way I want to make erotic film. This was the first one I ever saw:
25. You are currently my funnest poly challenge. Without having a named structure for our relate / connect / know situation, without doing much verbal processing of emotions, circumstances, or relativities, you fit into the growth of my understanding of myself as a non-monogamist. This delights and scares me. I keep my distance and fall into the falling. Contradictions, checks and balances. Fun.
26. My rope model’s hair smells the way my hair smells now. She stayed late at my birthday party and I beat the shit out of her alone in my house I worried about the neighbours hearing. I made noises I had never heard come out of myself. I felt really deeply like a sadist.
27. That makes me really sad about not being actually here for your birthday. Whatever, you have plenty o bitch. I often remind myself that you have plenty o bitch.
28. I am a domesticity fetishist. Building spaces is sublime. I used to do a lot of imagemaking in domestic spaces, my impulse for which has faded over the years. As I was writing this I even remembered a blog I used to run that was mostly about domestic space. Some examples of previous domestic aesthetics:
29. This is something Eoin and I used to watch when we felt sad or needed cute. I want to be there for your viewing of this but technically we live in different places. I’ve watched it so much that I can mimick the intonations in the voiceover.
30. I will never let go of you telling me that you didn’t want to ruin our friendship by fucking because it will always be a reliable thing you were wrong about. (Well, at the time of publication anyway.)
31. Having a stack of cash in my pocket makes me feel powerful. In many ways this disgusts me. My 20-year-old anarchist self turns in her grave. But it’s true. It makes me feel like I don’t need anyone to look after me, like I can assert myself when the waiter is trying to pick me up, it makes me feel like I could live by myself in a flat overlooking some body of salt water with my cat who will always be wonderful and have a queen-sized bed that she’ll ignore the space in and sleep between my legs.
32. Seriously, if you want a part-time cat later, she’s really great, I have a large body of evidence.
33. Since I don’t do much nonfiction reading these days, my favorite poet has been the same since high school, and that’s e.e. cummings. I thin he has influenced the way I punctuate. i also sang a choral arrangement of one of his poems which was especially beautiful. i still remember the 1st alto line. Here’s the arrangement (we didn’t have fucking orchestral accompaniment though). It’s a bit Christian but, yanno, passion makes music.
34. My high school English teacher Mr O’Brien was someone I would have liked to have fucked. He was really nice to me but he never fucked me. He did give me special books and burned me CDs and drove me home from school one time. I always wondered how he had such powers of resistance. Later I heard that a student had accused him of inappropriate behavior and he’d been fired. I really feel for him.
35. I want you to not underestimate how much you fucking me means to me. It really moves me that someone wants to exchange pleasures with me that much and that mutually. You have cultivated an evolved sensuousness. I need to be around that sort of thing. It’s very hard to explain how it does me, what it does to me, etc. I want to do it for days and everywhere. Sometimes you are the Redeemer of Genital Sex. You (can) bring my unconscious to the surface. Sometimes I see things on the backs of my eyelids.
36. You whimper. Like a fucking puppy. I love it and sometimes it makes my inner sadist want to kick you.
37. When I come I feel real.
38. Squirting in porn made me feel a bit like it was a circus trick and that made me a bit self-conscious about it. And not really fully owning it either. I feel like that’s still floating around in my body somewhere.
39. You are very present in what characterizes Sydney for me. I want to talk about this more with you but we need to be drunk in our undies.
40. Stacks and Cats on Tits & Sass
41. I had a pen pal-turned-first-lesbian-crush from the time I was 10. It didn’t get sexy until we were teenagers. I wanted her for so many years and ultimately she decided she was too holy to like pussy. That shit gave me a major complex. I may have told you this one before.
42. Let’s go to a Hiatus gig sometime. I am really interested in how it feels to be crying and dancing at the same time.
43.
Don’t you just wanna come on her pretty cheeks?
44. Vincent Moon worked on the Take-Away Shows. Then moved on to filming music ritual in all kinds of places. He’s an amazing filmmaker, I saw him speak at ACMI a few years ago.
45. I really, really, really like you.