Soma

So.

Haven't been on any more 'dates' since the last, been tired/busy and just plainly exuding a frowny sexlessness. 

I lie. I've been on one but because of there being no sex I'd pulled it from the register. It was a date in the classic sense, time spent drily observing one another and gauging what sex with this person might be like, what life with this person might be like, would they burden or enrich? Pleasant or tiresome company? Easy or neurotic? 

We watched Adventuretime in his apartment with his cat whose name I can't remember. Which is weird considering I hold cats in higher esteem than I do children (on the lowest rungs sit middle-aged white men with chips on their shoulders, and dogs). It was okay. He had no snacks for us, which wasn't okay but he was kind of adorable with his proud Superman paraphernalia and barely intelligible accent, a glorious muddle of Scottish and Spanish. He was incredibly forthcoming with the backstory, like exactly where and how he'd been raised, parents occupations, why he broke up with his boyfriend of four years a mere five months ago (the boyfriend left him for a younger model, as it goes). His cat made stool a lot. 

I don't know. It would've been nice to fuck him but neither of us initiated. 

There was a moment where I could've sworn he was going to, or where maybe he was expecting me to, and where I almost did but from being overtired as was he neither of us made our cues. Tragic. 

Also, spending that kind of non-sexual time with a perfect stranger seems contrary to my reasons for joining grindr at all. Am I letting myself be hijacked? 

I'm dead-set against the idealisation of 'partnering off', this idea that sex outside of an exclusive monogamous relationship is to be taken less seriously, mere rehearsals for the latter state. Any sexual encounter for me is an end in itself, primary incentives being ones of pleasure and connection, ideally fostering one another. 

In another post I mentioned the interstices of sex, consumerism and addiction, and at the time of writing this I'm even warier of the role drugs and alcohol play, perhaps especially in the (under)world of gay sex. They're not neutral supplements but are intrinsic to a manoeuvre of commodification, much like grindr, reducing the variables of sex connection to a quantifiable limit. Not so much in themselves, but as they're utilised by certain cultures of sexual practice.

Ennui in the twenty-first century is sexually transmitted.