Free Associations from a Grindr Enthusiast

I've been re-watching Lars Von Trier's Depression Trilogy recently, and in all three films (four with Nymphomaniac's split volumes) there are instances of sexual aggression in some kind of knee-jerk rapid-response to boredom. In Anti-Christ these are more nuanced and happen when She gets too close to the abysses of her own grief, but across the board sex is used as an evasion of introspection, which I'd venture (without having any kind of certificate in human psychology) the experience of boredom often precedes.
There's also an interesting comparison of sexual satiation with multiple partners (Nymphomaniac Vol.1), to the musical phenomenon of polyphony, where the polyphonic chords in a Bach excerpt are paralleled with three of Joe's more sentimentally recalled lovers.
Firstly, my grindr experiences have definitely fallen into the former category. In fact, most of the sex I have is to kill boredom, segueing naturally from menial chat which honestly holds the same interest as a facebook check, when I don't have anything better to search or to commit my time to. It's a kind of 'why not?' with apathetic underpinnings, even an awareness of said-apathy and the dim hope that this one, maybe this one will break on through. But nothing in service of the ego can penetrate ennui. That's what makes the films of Sofia Coppola so utterly dishonest.
It's the same as smoking, or any activity that's become habitual rather than a sincere commitment of ones time and energy with a specifically envisioned arrival point. Any such 'thing' becomes a pointless sublimation of life, that energy is dissipated for a static image rather than harnessed for a dynamic with the truer, changing Self-image.
Grindr (and social media generally) definitely utilises self-image, but the parameters of self-expression are even more constricting there than amidst the varying etiquettes of real interactions. I'm suggesting the nuances of the physical cannot be perfectly emulated. Ever.
To be a 'saleable' thumbnail with a winning profile is key. For the successful grindr user a brand is cultivated, by necessity a static image that panders to the genre ie what is generically considered 'hot'. This is the beginning of every hookup, not the chat itself but the projection of a curated self-image, in the framing of which is a latent request. To whom? To the Internet, the Universe, the grindr community. A request of what? For specific sexual partners and experiences, not boldly stated but inherently, according to the homeopathic mandates of 'like begetting like'. The more accurately the Self is advertised, the more chance a sequence of truly gratifying hookups will ensue (this belief in a world responding continuously to the observer, for myself extends beyond the rhythms of grindr).
Also, what is the value of self expression? Am I talking artistic? Would an orgasm be the ultimate form of self expression? What is the social value of what's being expressed?
Is that a scientifically regressive notion? The idea of sexual energy, or the substantive circuitry of desire and the endless transferrals-ebbs-amplifications of couplings (from the build-up of attraction to coitus itself), culminating in the orgasm like an infrared lotus; this concept flirts with New Age sensibilities, giving materiality to the subjectivities of sex.
Okay, so what is sexual energy? Is arousal quantifiable or unequivocally relative? Free association or embedded reproductive edicts?
And what is the social value of an orgasm?
John Cameron Mitchell's Short Bus is a so-so movie about a post-9/11 New York, focusing on the titular anything-goes type sex-venue and it's patrons. At one point the flamboyant hostess is describing sex as a 'magical circuit board' by which everyone is connected, and in their own sex lives expressing the same numinous synergy according to the cognitive/experiential epithets of the individual.
I like this image. It socialises sex (as the film intends), and gives sex precedence over the monogamous relationship, which one could argue epitomises the anti-social by establishing an exclusive locus of sexual and contractual rights between two people, away from 'the commons'.
The social value of an orgasm by the circuit-board model would be the endless transmission of sexual energy (or Life Force). Monogamy, defended no matter what internal impoverishment might ensue, would by this model be hoarding energy outside collective use and thereby stunting it. Empirically preposterous but beautiful (not so preposterous if you substitute energy for assets under the contract of marriage).
This model parallels the redistribution of cultural content as decentralised by the Internet (commercial whiplashes be damned), a quasi-spiritual mapping of the flow of Chi, as well as showing crude infrastructures of a socialist society (there's no trickle-down on the circuit board).
What really is the difference between all of these things, and sex?
What I'm doing is hypostasising sex as anything with vested human interest, sex being the embodied realisation of human interest. From desire to orgasm, from ideal to manifest destiny, the Realised is the Orgasmic.
Reality = Orgasm.
The remotest inkling of an ideal or desire is the human subject (that's us) deciding affirmatively to be here in Life as anchored by a specific form (as yet imaginary), which the subject wishes to possess or embody (I favour embodiment, Things are clutter).
The form itself is almost arbitrary. What matters is the tension of desire rather than its gratification, as tension brings 'process' into focus, aka Life.
Grindr and medias like it diminish this process, littering the path with minor gratifications which are either harmful if they usurp the aim, or helpful if a wider conceit is remembered under which each hookup is a burning shrine. Is that a Romantic notion, to live under a bannered Idea?
I don't think so. Rather, I think it's the supreme rule of living a life of embodiment, whereby the self-image is consciously aligned as much as possible with an Essential Truth, that envied state of Jungian lucidity. I don't think there's any clear manual in existence on how to attain this Truth, but mindfulness and a certain earnest are generally advised (the importance of Being, cough).
To make a return, how is having sex from boredom compatible with ideas of sublime-process and affirmation?
The depressed sister Justine in Lars Von Trier's Melancholia does this. Profoundly dissatisfied with the monotony of her own wedding day, Justine lets a stranger follow her alone to a golf green, where she turns and fucks him in flippant disregard for the propriety of the ritual (mostly trivia) surrounding her, of such importance to Justine's 'well' sister Claire. There's a suggested sublimation of intuited untruth in ones surroundings, with the sex-urge harnessed to explode these perceived extrications, returning the subject to some sort of Natural State.
Is sex, by way of being closer to 'animal' nature, a link to biological truths which society has thus far failed to domesticate or total? Does the sex urge, springing from boredom or aggression, only partially stand for psychological avoidance, and in another part tell of thwarted self-expression, resorted to when no other idiom suffices?
Justine's forfeit of her own wedding day is a rejection of the symbolic order. She strips her reality back.
Alienated by the hack-affluent wedding reception, and by proxy institutions sustaining a way of life such as marriage/money/reproduction (for all of which sister Claire is a passive advocate), sex (with a complete stranger) reinstates Justine as a subject.
Sometimes all you need is a good fuck, and the recipient of your fuck in that instant is a non issue.
I guess grindr can't be reproached as a provider of fucks. And what else is it trying to be?
Necessary to add, the repeated film references come down to the subjectivities of sex being fed by the iconic. Personally, my sex is still being conceptualised by cinema, and a steady diet of porn. Also advertising; some of my earliest stirrings were over male underwear spreads, a carefully assembled consumer lure for which we've Calvin Klein to thank (it also ingeniously skates a straight/gay crossover market with equal appeal to women, and then there's the celebrity device e.g. David Beckham, that Jonas brother, or even Justin Bieber).
With sex being so textured and plural, so tied to the shape and limits of selfhood, not just biological function but a whole imaginary with assured market interest; yes, with sex being all that (and who knows what else) we should be able to take our time and sexualise ourselves however we please, building with each fuck to bigger and better orgasms, to cement our successively more refined ideals/desires.
However we identify should be comprised of whatever we want, from wherever we see fit to lift it. The psyche doesn't patent.
Let every Orgasm be a Divine Statement, and Amen.

Antiquated Manoeuvres in the Dark

I've also been experiencing some new kink-aggression and extended chats resembling what might not still be referred to as a 'cyber'; is that an archaic term for erotic chat? Well, that's what's been happening. There've even been Skype invitations, which I'm yet to accept. That feels like a significant upgrade from present conduct, with its own set of potential behavioural/attitudinal pitfalls.

One French guy keeps telling me how much he'd enjoy having me on my all fours, slutty ass raised while I lick the floor. Licking his boots would make more sense, but why the floor? Am I cleaning up my own jizz or something? I feel like hypothetical sex scenarios have to be specific enough for me to immerse, otherwise it's like feeling out a puzzle together; 'you're where, I'm doing what, who's that joining us?' Maybe I'm not a lateral enough thinker to benefit from such practices. I prefer real dicks, with the lights on.

Okay, this guy is really persistent. I'd probably not be reciprocating if he wasn't also very hot. And French, I've had shattering experiences with the French (one of whom is the model for a particularly strong fuck cycle, a constellation of tastes and preferences fixated on this one guy that, like weird gravity, draws me to similar sexual partners and emotional terrain). 

On top of everything, I'm feeling like grindr isn't the free-associative erotic forum I thought it to be. Rather, it's where hegemonic ideals of what is and isn't an acceptable appearance are incubated, misshapen, exaggerated and disseminated. Heaven forbid you be a few kilo overweight and NOT a bear, in which case being slightly rotund is a fetishised standard. 

I thought facebook was an insidious platform for comparative living, but grindr works just fine. I've encountered a few profiles rather desperately affirming professional lifestyles, advertising a relatively 'together' person seeking the same. 

How fucking boring! 

Spontaneous chemistry that happens with no prior knowledge of a persons lifestyle is pretty cool; a person is an entire universe with (hopefully, fidelity to selfhood assured) their own unique mode of living. I don't want to 'order in' a human that's curtailed themselves to some myopic specifications of attractiveness, written from a few cinematic odes and antiquated commercial identities. 

Finally, I had a real 'date' and not a hookup. Grindr can still pleasantly surprise, though it's yet to meter an existing ratio of disappointment. 

Mildly Racist

Less and less grindr is becoming something I can write about, I'm losing my objectivity. It's officially integrated, feels completely normal, no longer disrupting the banality of my day; rather, it's become indistinguishable from said banality. It is no longer an adequate holiday. 

I haven't written about my hookups because I haven't been able to articulate myself regarding them as easily as I used to. They are just a given of my week now, rather than novelties to mull over after the moment with pen paper and erection (or tablet and erection). I don't even recall most of them fondly anymore. Perhaps I'm less discerning now, simply out to get a hookup, crossed over to the dreaded notch on the belt mentality. 

There have been a few goodn's though. Ive recently concluded I'm sexually prejudiced. All the evidence is there. So, I decided to go counter-type and pursue someone I'd not normally.

Was really hot, and contrary to type re girth (don't make me reiterate and sound like a total bigot). I don't know if satisfaction levels were mutually exclusive with race. Too many variables to isolate an ethnicity-based sexual inflection, identifiable by approach and technique, perhaps a survey alongside the practical could bring such enquiry closer to empirical standards. 

Sounds like a future project. 

Fuck Cycles

Hello new year. 

Haven't been updating the sphere because last few hookups have been godawful. I can't remember if these preceded a negative deeming of grindr, or if my negativity thereof incidentally heralded a drought of semi-decent good times/strangers. My love life of late has been under something like a karmic upheaval, unexpected resurrections and the return of once-missed connections, all without aid of grindr. 

Maybe it's because I've changed focus without realising, and the app is no longer serving me on the level it was. I sense a pending review of self, most pressingly my attitudes regarding sex, because clearly I have different needs right now and grindr's not the ticket.

It's been good, weird, psychologically disorienting, bad; I feel emotionally frail. And hot to boot. I mean literally, I can't get a lazy pump-action going before I'm apologising to some guy about how profusely I sweat, that it's just a thing and he'll have to cope. I have in mind a stairwell fuck that was so humid I swear my fingers pruned and I thought I'd pass out.

Fuck summer. 

So do I have any ideas re the abrupt disinterest in grindr?

Using it recently, I've found myself stopping mid chat, realising I have no intention of hooking up with this person, commencing guilt on my folly and throwing myself into some other productive pursuit to redeem the wasted effort. But what's more productive than pleasure? Has my appetite transformed into something higher, am I transcending my most basic biological functions albeit momentarily?

On stale incentives, a friend enlightened me to the hazards of 'fuck-cycles' a few months back. These are when you have a legendary sexual experience with someone, and this person becomes the cast of your ideal, beyond whom you try and recreate that experience by enacting similar conditions and recruiting numerous doppelgängers. 

Ironically, the deliberation of the simulated moment falls short of the miraculous providence that guided the encounters's various components into being firstly, frustrating and exacerbating the memory-desire endlessly.

It's like blowing a neural fuse after reaching nirvana and never being able to quite make it back.

Perhaps pleasures need to be relinquished as soon as they occur, fuck this compulsive documentation. Nostalgia generally segues into suffering, creating a schism between the past and the present whereby the latter is negated. 

Like that golden age shit.

I'm unintentionally leaning towards hemp-toting notions of The Endless Moment, revering the unique essences in times passing without attachment, enjoying the procession without anxious critique (popularly symptomatic of an aggrandised sense of self; bad Westerners!).

I don't know.

(Admitting ones own ignorance is the first step toward enlightenment...)

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).