Pie

There's an hilarious rush round the hour of four on a Friday and Saturday night, when everybody's suddenly online throwing 'hey mister's every which way in anxious states of drunken arousal, lest they miss out on a fuck. These are the dregs of the night who haven't managed to nab that right guy to cap an otherwise middling evening of debauch. So, it was with this rabble I joined rank on the Saturday just been. 

I ended up at a similarly desperate guys place nearer to five, more drunk than I can remember being since, well, last summer. I was holding a bacon and egg pie which (in my inebriation) I'd figured a suitable token at that hour. The guy in question was lovely. I stumbled into his room, we stripped and chatted cosily like only conspirators can (strangers for the cause), and within ten minutes or less I was comatose (maybe even mid-sentence). He didn't seem to mind. 

We eventually consummated our rushed agreement when I woke up, and then he hustled me out of his Sunday morning, where he undoubtedly wanted isolation in which to nurse a hangover with base notes of regret. 

Living the dream.

Ballin'

Had a post-work supplement to help alleviate the prolonged strain of service. It could only be justified, at that hour and contrary to my otherwise being completely shattered, by the convenient proximity of this gentleman's apartment. Which turned out to be fucking beautiful. There've been a few 'dates' recently where my host has made me feel comparatively impoverished, this being an especial case, casting a shadow of self-doubt over my recently cheerful pennilessness. Oh well. 

Despite the relative affluence of this guys accommodation, it was an instant-brew we revived with the following morning. 

Its weirdly common, and I'm getting used to it, to the point where I drink it at home with runny cream (out of some kind of nostalgia? povo does nouveau riche. Coffee snobbery is dire vice).

Anyway this guy took 'hosting' literally. There was a little bedside bottle of still water ready for me, an identical one on his side. 

So we're clear this was a really nice guy, and I've preached endlessly on the necessity of a workable connection for a satisfying hookup, which at the very least can be a great sexual compatibility. Sometimes a persons body can phrase things the best, like when your needs align uncannily with a strangers, it's like some profound statement about your oblivious coexistence. Like astrology or something, underlying desire lines like luminous webbing, channels of sexual inevitability flinging you into the open arms/legs of a cosmically ordained counterpart. 

So yeah, it was a good hookup as they go .

Smells make certain memories more distinct than others, and this one had a smell and a taste that reminded me of some of my earliest experiences. I think it was the banana flavoured lube, but there were other hints I can't place, like a blandness that was also sweet. Maybe vanilla. Or white chocolate (I'm not being 'racial', though he was a white boy. A recent trend of mine).

The view from his balcony was pretty fantastic. Maybe I should join a corporate ladder and climb my way into similar affluence, though life without the culinary perks of working in a restaurant is inconceivable. And why is a muted pallet the decor preference of expensive inner-city living? Is there something about colour that's incongruous with the career-attentive urbanite?

Also; my current grindr frequency has me treating people like mirrors instead of entities valuable in/of themselves, I'm gauging myself through their sexual interest in sick games of validation. Not always, but I can pick when I've been guilty of it over the last few months. It feels different, I'm less connected. I hope I can fuck my way back to a more wholesome angle. 

An Inventory

Things grindr has incidentally taught me I don't like; 

Too much cologne

(there's no easy blame for excessive use of the the above. I think personal hygiene can often be clutched at with neurotic gusto as a means of allaying social anxieties, and things like fragrances resorted to with irrational talismanic reverence. I'm personally quite lax about such things, within reason. Anyway, a recent hookup left me with a metal-taste that seeped into my sinuses and bed sheets with pesky resilience. Yuck).

Guys with an aversion to body hair

(I know I said I'm fine with an openness about physical preferences, and that I even support the potentially demeaning conveyance of these on grindr, but seriously; no body hair? That's just fucking weird. I'm talking about the painstaking cosmetic removal of body hair, not its natural absence, and then the insistence of sexual partners doing the same. Is it an an inter-species trans-humanism thing, denying the human body's natural defences?).

Flakes/time-wasters

(If I wanted to pic-swap I'd watch porn. I came here to fuck! Also, hosting is give and take).

Prime example of a time-waster;

Had a guy come up to my apartment and after four flights of stairs he realised he'd left his inhaler at home. He left mine with a nearly blue face, and I haven't seen him since. I hope he made it. 

Also, some of the hottest guys on grindr speak minimal English. I might have to become an arm-chair polyglot (yes, I'm aware I'm reading grindr like it's amazon.com). But seriously, it's a great way of meeting travellers, drifters, and other deliciously untethered beauties for sex that's no less passionate for its momentariness. You never know when that person might cross paths with you again, the world is an open playing field and ones genitals a glaring beacon. 

A thread with the various European boys I've bedded lately is their dissatisfaction with Auckland. 'Expensive and boring' is the verdict. I'm fenced on this, expensive yes but being from a small town I'm yet to be jaded by the city's comparative perks. I'd like to think I can be content anywhere.

 Grindr certainly helps. 

(And is it true parks lower regional suicide rates? I wonder if that's true of most public spaces, libraries for example).

Porno Playlands

It's been forever I know. 

Other projects have gotten in the way of blogging, not the sex mind; just the chronicle. 

Recently had a friend point out the critical (yet invisible) referent of 'sex-stocks', when scrolling for a hookup. These massively pivot on ones profile image, a careful selfie being a make and a clumsy one being a break, generally. And the selfie-genre being so established now (Kardashian's 'Selfish' perhaps fully realising the auto-deification of such practices), it isn't surprising many profile pics are 'professional' ones, maybe recycled from various art/modelling portfolios or (more desperately) captured (paid for?) with the express purpose. 

This conversation came about perusing profiles together (out of curiosity, not recruiting for 'group-fun', though I'm into it), when we came across a pic of a guy recently featured in LYC's Gear Up campaign. We knew this because he'd used the image as his profile pic. I won't mention which in case there are patent-clauses being breached, but I will say this; 

Drool.

Admittedly, after finally collating a selection of selfies I'm happy with, my sense of personal security plummeted. I don't have the time, money or metabolism to look like that, but lord knows I want to. But then why should I? If sex is all, do I have to look like some porn-god to satisfy someone I'll know for twenty-four hours or less? I mean, they're not paying. 

Having said that, before reiterating my stale tirade against the commodification of sex, I'd like to pose grindr is a discursive platform where the fantasy narratives and desire objects proliferated by pornography can be explored and potentially refuted. Certainly the Gear Up campaign is abetting the normalisation of a certain silhouette as desirable, and I don't blame that guy for capitalising on it albeit obtusely (shamelessly?).

I only think that playing with eroticised image should be exactly that; play. Especially when it comes to casual sex. When appearance is thusly regimented the game becomes elitist and overly serious, and not fun. 

Everyone should be allowed to ride. 

(Also, when did the know-how to objectify one's self to an acceptable standard become a valuable life skill? And a fucking knee-jerk one at that? I feel like I've been sneak-attack assimilated into some garish double-think, lured fatally by sex. Oh well).

Revenge and the Absent God

Argh. I find myself giving over to the clipped lexicon of grindr. I've never described myself as a 'relaxed, chill guy' before but find it increasingly necessary as a precursor to a certain kind of hookup. Funny how reliably indicative a guys profile ends up being, adhered to the bandied colloquialisms pregnant with specific meaning. Chill, I've discovered, generally foretells a hookup in brief, strictly no staying over and more often than not excluding anal (stink). Funny to think fellatio a kind of greeting, and any kind of ass-play the opposite of 'chill' (apparently), either too arduous (for reasons of personal pain thresholds, hygiene etcetera) or otherwise signifying commitment. Like it needs to be earned.  

I also suspect for the younger guys with the word 'chill' in their profiles, often paired with 'masc' or 'discreet', it describes either lack of sexual experience or the bizarrely held notion they're less 'gay' if they don't do anal. Like ass play is the master signifier of gayness, not attraction to the same sex. 

Hooked up with a guy who'd seen me around first and then found me through grindr. Flattered much. Anyway the interest was mutual, which got me to appreciating grindr as a way of salvaging missed connection. We drove out to the burbs and the conversation took an interesting turn. His parents were religious, and remain members of a cult-seeming church whose media fuelled notoriety has dropped recently, but are otherwise the subject of frenzied polarisations. This church (which I won't name fully for anonymity's sake, even though my florid skirting should make it obvious) has a totalitarian-like infrastructure, where one man (with the mediation of no one) decides on the direction of tithe, targeting different charitable organisations or events or even direct purchases justified with charitable ends, such as computers for (certain, hardly public/secular) schools. 

At this unadulterated (and thus anti-democratic) decision making, their (high profile) leader sends a collective message, and the collective acts accordingly, fulfilling His wishes with few-to-no questions asked. And he takes a cut for Himself. Members of the congregation are figures of revenue, raw materials for the actualisation of one mans vision for a better world. 

So this guy argued the church does good, while I asked can you blame the media for scrutinising their infrastructure which is blatantly authoritarian, and is any lasting good achievable when it's foundation is an aspirant empire? Their legacy of 'good' is theologically contaminated, exacted by a cynical anti-democratic model, not merely democracy's absence but a radical condescension regarding the public's ability to self govern or even discern for themselves a better trajectory for society. 

He also told me they had successful realtors in the congregation who'd basically established districts around their biggest churches, selling exclusively to fellow members. I imagine their own gated subdivision is phase two. 

We fucked at his parents house, in their living room floor so as not to leave any bed with tell-tale signs. Eliding more personal details regarding this boys upbringing, which he generously shared with me, we'd basically enacted a revenge fantasy of his against his mother and father. A conspiracy of two, what John Berger likes to call (referring to the value of erotic desire in and of itself) 'a locus of exemption from the liability of pain', a sexual synthesis of old wounds staged where those wounds themselves were garnered. The family home. 

I hope I helped reconcile this guy to the sins of the father. 

Jaded-Tricks Are For Kids

So I have had to update my store of 'pics' again. I'm pretty satisfied with this new batch, and taking them ended up being the dated equivalent of cyber-sex, in as much as real-time photos followed sexy chat and (allegedly) mutual masturbation. I'm frustrated the other person was so coy about giving over their details and arranging a hookup proper, and yet there's a weird narcissistic satisfaction in someone bringing themselves to climax over your image. After what I'm guessing was his climax, his interest rapidly waned and he logged off without so much as a thankyou. While I'd  handled this more involved chat as prelude to an evening of actual fucking, I'll bet this guy had no intention of hooking up, despite acting like he was a pic-swap away from relinquishing details and designating the hour. Motherfucker. 

Also, chatted with a guy in a bar the other night about how grindr has hurt the gay community. I'd obviously considered how people could frequent gay friendly venues less with the lure of an easy hookup, minus the costly segue of drinks etcetera, but hadn't fully appreciated this fact and how it might emaciate communities in a local sense.

I have niche communities in mind, or groups of people sharing a street or suburb and a watering hole which one might term a 'scene', that word I'd normally use to describe affected cliques derogatorily, but here meaning organic centres in which individuals share a sense of place and belonging. There is (or was) such a thing as conviviality, the gathering of humans around food and/or drink, quite away from bureaucratic intrusions where the individual is proffered in contexts of shared experience, not consumption (ironically). I believe such gatherings to be possible only materially, their Internet counterparts being another species entirely. 

Will the next generation have lost this mode of social reality completely? Even I feel apart from any 'gay' community (which some might say is the result of generally avoiding active affiliation through some kind of internalised homophobia), and I've got this idea I'm part of the last few ages able to remember life before the total facilitation of social media. I remember the technophobia stemming from txt messaging alone when I was in high school, and can't imagine being a teenager with a smart phone. Fucking heinous. 

But anyway, I'm arguing for the spontaneous appearance of communities outside the organisation of online spaces. I know these online spaces can supplement orchestration now, but that's exactly what they should be, supplementary not substitutive. 

Also recently hooked up with a guy completely DL (down low, discreet), or in other words still in the closet, and with grindr's help quite comfortably. It's unequivocal to me that grindr is delaying the moment of coming out for a new generation of young gay guys, depending on their temperament and circumstance of course. Coming out is the most powerful I've felt in my life to date, a moment of pure self-determination rarely afforded people before they've obtained 'adult' resources, and arguably inconceivable to those who've never felt uncomfortable gender-wise. I wouldn't deprive anyone of that awful/awesome upheaval, that blissful rejiggering of ones life to better accommodate desire. Fuck all the above and related grindr use *drops mic*.

Fucking The Dead (-Inside)

There's a common discourtesy I've encountered. It involves guys checking their grindr messages during the hookup, establishing prospects for future satisfactions even before the bed has cooled. I'm not exactly offended (is it really discourteous in the parameters of casual/anonymous?), more concerned its symptomatic of an attention deficit intrinsic to the rapid gratification grindr provides. More than grindr, I think this describes a mind made berserk by the umpteen online spaces we move through in the course of a day, and the compulsive appetite for distraction these engender. With sex embedded as a possible outcome of 'trolling', it's easy to segue from need to habit, and finally addiction. But can an addiction be recognised in a culture where such behaviours are in the process of socialisation? 

We are all guinea pigs. Gone is media of an analogue form where exposure was a more volitional interface, replaced with immersive facilitation of every facet of our lives, begging rigours without precedent should we choose to practice selectivity. So we are clear, preference is not discernment. Preference is a user-modality internal to availability and the mechanics of consumption. 

Being guinea pigs, the job of wading through the possibilities of this brave new world with anything resembling ethical conduct, is one we've been passively assigned by the commercial run-off installing these new platforms in the first. The question is, what will they be platforms for? Will they simply meet existing needs, or will they also implant new ones for which we'll require future solutions? 

The originary premise of an app like grindr shouldn't limit it's use. The willing subject should, like with anything, be capable of repurposing it to clarify (and enrich, fingers crossed) its own existing problematic scripts. If grindr proves to have little transformative value, if the subject feels hindered as opposed to supplemented, the artefact in question (grindr, tinder etc.) should probably be discarded. Or refitted, depending on its footing in the zeitgeist. 

Anyway, I've had an unfortunate experience. Recently I met someone outside grindr. This person was really very cool, I surmised quite accurately despite being drunk, having this later confirmed for me during an arranged (and sober) meeting a few days later. As conversation followed coffee (the two alternating with swooning grace), times passing had us more and more agreeable to fates frivolous suggestion, namely the crossing of our paths. We jumped to an unmissable connection with gusto, unfurling majestically from our imagined coolness and opening up like strangers rarely do. With good reason, so it goes. I don't know what I said but some coin dropped about my sexual habits and he's since given me the shrug, being a 'one guy kind of guy'. Only the second time we'd seen each other and he felt confident enough to judge me the kind who strays not commits. What the fuck does that even mean? I just wanted to hang out (and we could do still), only he'd extrapolated a year into a fictitious future in which I slew his feelings by betraying a commitment we were nowhere near making to one another, and is consequently no longer open to the possibility. 

That's some delusional shit. That also happens to be some pretty fucking regular shit. Confabulating doomed futures from your own anxieties/insecurities, choosing to waste effort on fearful scrutiny of tenuous and unpleasant fantasies (serving what purpose?), rather than exacting pleasure from the moment (available for a limited time)? 

What a fucking idiot. 

But he's done me a favour. He's made me value the nature of grindr and its users streamlined to a shared love of sex no strings, that in my experience and with amicable frequency can blossom into friendships and more, connections that differ from the established relationship conventions in shape form duration and number, but are no less important or satisfying in being so. 

So fuck you you fucking fuck, take your scared unemployed ass (sadly true) back to the sheltered white-picket subdivision you came from. Some of us have living to do. 

RELEASE (But No Grain Waves)

So I bottomed for the first time in ages. I don't know if I've made it clear or not, but I've been the 'pitcher' rather than the 'catcher' for this blogs entirety, up until yesterday when someone broke the spell. This was achieved by a very competent someone who made me feel exquisite, had the most attentive bed manners and was otherwise a gentleman, and it was perhaps a combination of these (pleasure and safety) which drove me to offer myself in a way I'd half heartedly decided wasn't for me. How excruciatingly wrong was I!

Also, he was your typical bear, and there's something about bulkier guys that makes me want to melt submissively and satisfy every and any whim of theirs with total obeisance. 

I've been exhausted/negative on some fundamental level for some time, but now feel like someone's pushed the reset. I don't envy heterosexual males for whom sex will mostly assume the active-form of 'topping', whereas I'd forgotten that as a gay man I could essentially 'flip' a switch (flip-fucking is a colloquialism for vers or versatile, meaning good to both fuck and be fucked; that's me baby), and shift the dynamics for a totally different sexual experience. Not that sex is neatly dichotomised into acts that are either/or (passive and active, dominant and submissive etc.). 

Basically I love my ass hole again, and I'm serenely pitying my straight fellows for whom ass play is a restricted area, being beyond the comfortable parameters of masculinity as it too closely resembles homosexual practices and sensibilities. I'd forgotten how intense it can be, once the initial sting of being penetrated recedes and there's only that fullness, punctuated by the sweetest jolts to ones prostate. 

I'm definitely becoming graphic now. But seriously, it's so fucking intense and I can't believe it's been almost a year since I allowed anyone to pleasure me in that way. It feels like wasted youth and I need to get back on that saddle. 

Anyway, details. He had a serious home entertainment setup with a 'smart' television and omnipotent sound, and was a stoner but (quite unprofessionally) had no junk food set up for afterward, an observation from which I kindly declined any more than the smallest toke. He was cuddly, a signature bear trait? But they don't have to all be adorable. Just because they don't have six packs doesn't mean they  can't be total cunts. 

So we snuggled on his couch and watched horror movies, also the third season of Girls which I still hadn't gotten round to seeing as I work a lot, and then the first episode of Amerrican Horror Story's fourth season which I'll admit to having mixed feelings over. It's tone is closer to Asylum's, which makes sense because I suspect it's in the same universe (Peppa has a cameo). But ultimately it's more of the same, and for the first time I had to force interest. 

We talked and I found out this guy had just broken up with his boyfriend of seven years. Thus the cuddling. I don't mind servicing very specific wounds, especially if I get fucked like that. 

In the morning I stayed on, peppering more television with more fucking, not leaving until the afternoon at which point cravings for junk food were high (pot and movies, but where the fuck were the grain waves?). 

Also, he was a painter, but not in the high-brow sense, more the as-seen-on-the-wall-of-your-local-small-town-espresso-shop kind (those unknowing masters of kitsch), quietly filling the homes of wealthy dairy farmers everywhere with wobbly impressions of native birds. I confess to being into them, they were crazy-busy and had these glue-gun textures. He'd done a zodiac series in the style of Crowley (I'm not sure this was deliberate), and while I wouldn't pay money I seriously considered smuggling one out with me. 

There was also a Lana Del Ray portrait, just above a water cooler serving lime-flavoured H2Go. Yuck. 

In summary, my ass holding the key to a general existential refresher? The body speaks!

Sexlessness and God (and Money)

This is a sequel post. 

As mentioned, I've let anxieties mar my otherwise steady outpouring of/will to pleasure. I'm trying to describe my own psychological manoeuvres when it comes to relishing sex and physicality generally. These anxieties have been of two related camps, finances and an extrapolation of those finances into a future nowhere near coming to pass. It's only with the obviousness of hindsight these pressures are seen to be wildly unnecessary departures from an otherwise comfortable present, with every facility and support a person of my specific socioeconomic grouping could hope for (wherever I fall on the scale; lower middle?). 

What I'm asking myself is whether there's a conceptual tie between the areas of money and sex, as partitioned by my tireless ordering system (my mind).

I guess money is frequently what makes my pleasure possible, not in the sense of paying someone for sex, but in the trivial expenses surrounding a hookup, enabling the casualness. Also, a certain amount of disposable is necessary for any kind of leisure time outside the home, and even then money haemorrhages discreetly.  

If I think back, my most satisfying hookups have been bookended by drinks/coffee and other costs extraneous to the act itself. 

Do I have less sexual desire when I'm poor? That is, do I feel somehow ashamed of having less money and am I less motivated to have a sexual encounter at these times? What sense of myself are these hookups serving then, the grindr facilitated ones. Are they sought as rewards for possessing money and thereby being a contributing member of society, participating in the flow of capital as an eligible consumer? 

There might be some truth in this, no matter how uncomfortable. Maybe I do feel less deserving of sexual pleasure when I'm broke, which is normally the result of impulse expenditures and, to complete this logic, begs sacrificial abstinence. So then I have to be able to afford sex? With strangers, the answer is an emergent yes. 

What price have I preemptively stamped it with then? At what monetary low is it off the cards for me? And if I was ever rich enough, from this appalling trajectory would I expect perfect strangers to jump my bone as if drawn magnetically to my swollen bank figure? If I'm good for it, should the world open its legs to me by default? Do 'suits' already think like this?

Or is it an ingrained conceptualisation of money as the singly reliable indicator of value, by which nothing of worth escapes an equivalent mediation. Not even sex. I know I've talked about sex as commodity before, but never in observance of my own behaviours. 

More than this, I sometimes feel in spite of myself the absolute licence of money and the cloistering dearth of options when one has very little to none.

I am not a free agent. 

Sexlessness and God

It's been a while because I haven't felt grindr as natural a segue of late, it's been a nuisance and a chore (and a frequently obnoxious one) rather than the god-given convenience I felt it to be just a month ago. I don't know what's heralded this dramatic shift in viewpoint but it's settled in with gloomy belligerence. Am I turning into an urbanite prude more interested in registering the minutia of celebrity/fashion/geek culture (enlarging my store of party-ready quips), than satisfying the nearest ache any human anywhere anytime has ever known, and with near-certainty might I say will ever know? I maybe need to take a retrospective of my life and the things that I want, because obviously my values are changing, which my general discontent with (though presently not exclusive to) grindr is probably symptomatic of; a spiritual 'spring clean'. Oh joy. 

Though I'm not dissatisfied with sex period, just disillusioned about the levelheaded-ness of my casual bedfellows. Apparently you can't gauge if a person is defunct on some fundamental level after an hour and three whiskeys, a skill I'd optimistically cemented in the set. Nor can you make an even remotely accurate summation of another human via grindr chat. Like, seriously, you can't even make a reliable guess as to whether or not the person you're chatting with is worth an hour of your time sexually. They could be all late seventies Sylvester Stallone, confess reluctantly to a semi-corporate occupation with neo-liberal sensibilities which definitely rubs your own imagined proletariat-status the wrong way but you make the decision to go round because they're funny in chat but in a caustic way so you really should've known better, and regardless of money and a knee-buckling twelve-pack still be an embarrassingly inert lay. If I was into that, I'd take up a job dressing corpses at a funeral home.

I did get head in a bar the other night which was new (kind of). I'm not into 'venues' (at this stage). I'm more into seeing what kinda place the guy has, out of some vampiric curiosity. There's something I get out of the hookup which I wouldn't at a venue, it's less anonymous. Seeing their domestic space contextualises it somehow, makes a stable memory even if we never see each other again. It's how I mark time. 

Back to my hiatus. There've been stresses external to my sexual activity and various partners which are hindering my 'mojo'. I don't like the way this stress has undermined my conscious ethos on sex, forcing me imperceptibly into patterns of behaviour I can only now acknowledge as compulsive. But then maybe that's fine. If the reality principle is felt resistance to the pleasure principle, the resonance of No, then loss of control is a necessary reminder, a prophylactic against casual arrogance and also a grounding pressure. I am centred by loss of control, I frequently find it necessary to feel unsafe. These things are fine. They humble me. 

I definitely own sex less when I'm stressed. It's less playful, I take less pleasure in it, as you would medicine. 

So that's where I'm at, that's why the absence from blogging my exploits, because they've been fewer and fouler. 

This post more than any other feels like dirt in plain sight, psychic debris I wouldn't normally scrutinise, but the fantasy-audience intrinsic to the act of 'blogging' and of interfacing with media period, forces me to flaunt the wound with pride. It's like making a blood-sacrifice to a god who finally bestows the peace you've sought, but only after you and your wrongs are made example of. Is this a Christian guilt thing? Is the need to talk about sex, even if consciously prescribing the body-positive, always going to be in light of guilt and expiation?

Politically Neutral Selfies?

Not a hookup but a feeling/experience that begs incorporation, lest the saga suffer potholes. I'm currently acting out what I finally recognise as an alter-ego/avatar, and my only defence against this dissonance taking insidious root and being anything other than 'serious' play? 

This blog. 

 It's a session of updating my user selfiez that's made me realise this. I'm flaunting and flexing like the world is watching, when in fact I'm unflatteringly lit by not lime but skylight, in the least glamorous setting; a boys room, with its accompanying smells and sceptic surfaces and familiar chaos (I love it. Is this how post-industrial God feels about the world today?).

Oh fuck. Even as I write this, I've been rejected because of misrepresentation. I haven't properly curated my selfiez, and this lawyer-cum-National supporter who'd previously expressed an interest has gone cold, thanks wholly to selfiez that sell me as overly-intense/activist/pro-cuordoroy. 

I could already sense a right-wing fragility in this guy, and could've avoided scaring the poor dear off with closer attention to selfie-detail. 

Note to selfies; when dangled for sex these are ideally apolitical, especially prior to establishing a recipients stance. If political stance is known, indulge! Especially if there are fetishised radical leanings to manipulate. Try a Che Guevara tee with sativa accessories for your typical lefty, and for the far-right perhaps a suit and monocle with discreet swastika cuff links. 

But what's overtly political about my shoulder length hair and beard? Any statement either would've made in the sixties has well and truly worn down to banal appropriation. Was this guy raised in a commune? 

Also in my last post I mentioned a hookup with a Fijian/Persian boy who'd been made to feel awful about himself while out one night on Auckland's fag strip, some punters critically citing his grindr profile rather than extending fellow feeling to someone obviously pretty fresh. How fucked. I despair of this country's normalised prejudice against Asians and Indians (broad terms), and am convinced that's what this was; racism in the cloth of deferred righteousness. 

Fuck you oh nameless offender. There's no community for any of us, gay or straight, with these pricks running amok. I hope your family renounced you when you came out, it's probably what you deserved. 

Kidding, that's not a time I'd wish on anyone. 

What cunts though.

To Live And To Let

(or A CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST)

In the name of all things spontaneous, I let an itch dictate (as per usual) and had a hookup at nine o'clock in the morning. I didn't have work until that evening, and with a good eight hours to kill had nothing but empty propriety to dissuade me from thinking it a good idea. Which it definitely was because this was one of the more satisfying fucks I've had recently (do I just have a negligent short term memory?), but looking back there were environmental factors embedding and hallowing the event, such as the weather (pristine) and already being in an open, breezy mood akin to glee-club preludes.

The guy had a really nice place situated in an inner city nook angled to conceal some of our eye-sores, so that looking out I only saw heritage buildings against clear blue sky, pigeons and all, like some antiquarians Parisian fantasy.  Then he made me coffee and we exchanged the usual stats over a Marlboro light. 

This is done to simulate intimacy for those not entirely convinced of the nobility of so mannered a meeting. I've had hookups where after opening a door you're hurtling towards a silent expectant body, all necessary information previously submitted in chat. And that's fine.

But this one had wobbles, hadn't been in the country for too long, from Sydney and of a delectable Persian/Fijian blend, and I'm guessing was using grindr more for finding friends in the city, and that our sex was a lovely mishap (for him, I'm the lecher).

So we talked, before and after. We talked about some stigma within the community regarding grindr that I was unaware of. He'd apparently felt judged one night, had overheard some guys saying in disparaging tones, 'I've seen that guy on grindr', as if to say how desperate or pathetic the app is. Well buddy, what's your excuse? If you're going to chase tail for its own sake, live and let live cunt. I'm done with nonsensical sexual hypocrisy, I'm officially calling it off for the rest of 2014 and thereafter. I relish the privileges of our liberal society, no it's not perfect but bagging its perks is counter productive. Intolerance is perhaps even more galling when it comes from fellow fags.

They're just jealous bro.

Hags

I used grindr drunk and between the hours of four and six am the other night, which I'm understanding is standard practice, new to me though seeing as I'm without a smart phone and use a tablet without data, thus I go fishing from home. If I had the app with me at all times I'd be significantly less productive and/or punctual, generally. 

I'm going to refrain from using it at this time, and in a similar state in future. In hindsight it was out of some weekend fomo compulsion, getting home to an empty bed still a nubile twenty four year old (cough) under the influence. It just didn't feel right. 

However the resulting hookup was hurried and subpar. And I felt less in control. 

But, he was cute, and there was some promise of seeing each other again, perhaps both of us feeling the lamentable circumstances of our meeting and wishing to repair first impressions accordingly. His flat mate was a fuck wit though. It's like nine am and she storms in on a Sunday morning declaring he's meant to be up and drinking with her, oblivious to the fact he's got a bed-pal as she lifts the blinds, or not so oblivious as she sees my dishevelled and disbelieving head above the covers and tells me I look eerily like Ben, on which they both agree. Who the fuck is Ben? And excuse me, but could you tell your hag to rein it in? I'm naked for fucks sake! 

What's weird is this isn't the first brush I've had with an invasive fag-hag flatmate in the last few months, both of whom are single no doubt. Would this kind of behaviour be acceptable on the flip side, with my hookup storming into her room one groggy morning-after, disrupting her innocent cuddles with a presumably conservative het buddy?

I don't think so. Basic boundaries in any living situation shouldn't be affected by somebody's sexual orientation. I found it patronising. 

Also, sort your fucking drinking out! Unless its mimosas over brunch or you're holidaying in the Greek isles, Sunday morning beverages other than water range from coffee to smoothies. Period. 

SkyRim for Fuck-Buddies

So what is the etiquette for seeing someone out in the real world with whom you haven't hooked up but have exchanged 'pics'. This is a perfect stranger who has seen your cock, who has also expressed an interest in having casual sex with you. You'd expect the exchange in real-time to be breezy, all the groundwork having been laid prior to accidentally meeting, only the inevitable effort of sex remaining. Right?

My experiences this evening just been were contrary. I was at a gay-ish theatre show (a knowingly fagged-up version of The Importance of Being Earnest with an all-male cast, ironically about leading double lives), and was serendipitously confronted with not one but two guys with whom I'd been chatting, both parties I'd swapped pics with. Just so we're clear, the pic-swap is a do or die moment and the minute or so after you've sent your pic-share, before the other person has replied, is a harrowing suspension of self-esteem. The release of serotonin when the reception to your fussily composed selfies  is positive, is incomparable (hello social media addiction).

There was no effortless segue from recognition via eye contact to sex, not like I'd pictured. Instead there was an uncomfortable dissonance experienced between whatever rapport I had with these guys online, and their actual physical presence. It was like neither of us had earned the right to see each other, being in preliminary stages of chat. 

Incidental meetings be damned, it was premature and un-kosher; the latter probably because each felt awkward about so readily forwarding nude pictures of themselves to someone they'd never met, an offering yet to bear fruit. 

Outside a moment of awkwardly prolonged eye contact we all pretended that the other didn't exist. It was like they weren't the guys I'd been chatting too, like I'd only engaged tenuously related and mostly fictional avatars, the guys behind the icons taking very little interest in each other outside the vanities of the game. Like it was some RPG adventure, and they the socially awkward malcontents you'd imagine losing themselves in their own online odyssey. 

Furriphilia

Okay, kind of sick of grindr dudes instigating chat without any intention of hooking up, wanting to trade photos and then jack off rather than meet up. That's fucked. That's grindr becoming an extension of a guy's porn searches, with the added excitation of 'live chat', and what's more a free one. Cheap cunts. 

Also, had a guy start an unsettlingly lewd chat with me. He firstly asked me if I was 'pervy bro?', to which I nervously replied 'yeah, sure. What'd you have in mind?', to which he replied 'what kinda porn are you into?'. I thought maybe he was the kind that can't get off unless there's porn playing in the background, and not having any particular or extraordinary preferences I replied with something to the effect of 'meh, the usual'. He proceeded to inform me of his preferences in an exactly ordered list; young, zoo and incest. Wtf?

He then asked me if I was into these or something similar. That's when I smelt cop. 

I ignored the cringe inducing mention of young and incest and asked if zoo was anything like furries. 

If unfamiliar with furries, think back to the very last scene of Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, only rendered in the gross exaggerations of hentai. If unfamiliar with Sexy Beast, just think Goku from DragonBall Z, naked with a striped pelt and cat ears, fucking a similarly mammalian hominid of either gender. 

It's nothing I'm into, I just know it's a thing. A confounding inexplicable thing. 

He said no, but that 'furries would be hot with you bro'. What the fuck did he mean by that? I know I'm bearded in my profile pic, and there's visible chest hair (a rarity on anyone under fifty advertising on this thing, is it a crime?), but I couldn't help but be slightly sickened by someone re-imagining me as an animal hybrid, which they'd then fuck! 

I quickly blocked the cunt and his obviously phoney profile picture. I say so because anyone as banging as that shouldn't have to resort to fuckin' furries! However grindr did give me his location which was a fair distance from the CBD. Perhaps a closeted labourer in a small town somewhere, resorting to obscurer-taboo stuff to satisfy himself in a roundabout way, whereas the vanilla sex with guys he dreams of would be too earth-shattering? Or is that one of my own fantasies?

I guess I'm definitely prejudiced against any Internet fetish that no longer resembles actual erotic practices between human beings. 

Maybe every fetish is a gross displacement of the erotic, an untimely disruption of the libido's 'natural' currents, which I'll be presumptuous enough to suggest would otherwise always point thirstily to human beings. Is this an unfair judgement on any kind of object-fetish being aberrant? 

Calling something divergent isn't the same as labelling it wrong, merely pointing out it's remove from majority trends. 

Whatever, each to his own I suppose, but I'd personally rather fuck a fit twenty-something than be mummified and catheterised (by a furry). 

Cronenberg Lives

I'm getting anxious about HIV. I think I need an education fast, the reach of my awareness pales in the face of it's calculatedly occluded prevalence in this country. Also, do I have to reiterate for anyone in 2014 that a disease doesn't discriminate on the basis of gender or race etc, that it's certain practices involving prone bodies which elevate risk, and not sexual orientation? Moving on.

So I had a test, and have made the overdue decision to have them regularly, taking responsibility for my chosen lifestyle. It showed negative by the way, in case you were wondering. 

I don't know too much about it, but am tenuously aware of conspiracy theories (available for indulgent perusal, somewhere between Self-Help and New Age and no doubt rubbing spines with David Icke), in which HIV and AIDS are lab products, implements of a long term political agenda. I don't know how credible these arguments are, but definitely feel the stigmas of this virus like an icy counterpoint to my otherwise perpetual horniness. Just fuck off AIDS. 

If it is lab made, it demonstrates the insidious manoeuvres propelling technological advancement, and a supreme indifference to the value of human life inherent to the logic of capital. 

Someone with AIDS loses volitional rights to their body, appropriated by pharmaceutical companies as pure revenue thereafter. They become examples for the limits of pleasure, framed by arbitrary stigmas as 'fallen' from the only legitimate mode of being, heterosexual monogamy. Penance for erring from the path of reproduction. 

David Cronenberg's films do a pretty good job of graphically describing the bodily anxiety of infection. I know I keep referring to film, but as Zizek says the film screen is less a theatre-stage of desires than it is a factory, ranging broadly from wish fulfilment to sheer propaganda and never absent of agenda. I'm personally aware of how heavily influenced my erotic life is by cinema, but with dystopian media saturation such as we're living in the trick is rigorous criticality. Fuck there's even a Cronenberg film about that, VideoDrome.  

His films aren't merely about infection by pathogen, but also infection by power, how certain authorities literally write the human body and what can and can't be done with it. If your standard horror movie is in reality a puritan fear-monger denouncing pleasure for its own sake (discussed at length in an older post), a Cronenberg expounds on that instant before you swallow the pill, peeling back the awesome mystery of human sexuality and citing the gross violation of such impositions.

VideoDrome sees its protagonist warring with the reality he's fed by an insidious frequency (called VideoDrome). It's about the loss of identity through the erotic lure of cinema-as-voyeurism (because the channel VideoDrome shows real-time snuff), the loss of ownership over the body as pleasure responses are replaced with doctored fetishes (cinema as factory of desires and fetish-implants). 

An addiction to pornography is an example of the above.   

Anyway, I feel like AIDS is more visible to me now, and the world is a little scarier, if you'll pardon my ignorance.

Also, I fucked an eighteen year old uni student. Was awesome.