Ritual Spontaneity

So a while back now, you asked me:

"wow. 15 years?! may i ask? how did you negotiate the ride (rides, and riding other people), was that something that evolved and changed? was it hard to bring up?"

I started writing what could become a novel to you about it. And then I stopped. Distracted by other things, people, tasks, and words. It probably deserves a novel. Lol. All these people publishing fake memoirs, and I need to figure out how to even write the real shit down with enough fiction to protect the love I still have for the people involved. Funny thing is, I ended up writing the Reader's Digest version of that novel, sans fiction, to a recent important encounter.

Let's call him B.

(Barthes loves a letter for a name, and I love the fact that Barthes is all over the first entries of this blog. I've spent a good portion of my morning looking for where R.B. says why all the friends he refers to in his work, starting especially with the Fragments, are referred to with letters. I don't think I found it, but I did find this. R.B. is apparently pained by the fact that he often makes certain spelling mistakes. Letters all alone console him. It's from an essay on Erté. "Before or outside the word, the alphabet achieves a kind of Adamic state of language: it's language before the fall, because it's language before discourse, before the phrase, and yet, already, thanks to the substitutive richness of the letter, absolutely open to the treasures of the symbol... Erté's letters are happy objects. Just like the good fairy who, with a touch of her wand, bestowed a gratuitous gift upon the child and made roses fall from his mouth as he was speaking (instead of the toads that were brought about by her evil rival), Erté gives us the gift of the pure letter, not yet compromised by any association and therefore in no way tainted by any possible mistake: gracious and incorruptible.")

We, that is T and I, met B thanks to a mutual sex buddy. The four of us had a lot of fun. And then, later that same week, the three of us, T, B, and I, had a lot of fun again. And then, maybe like not even a week later, B kept saying he was too busy, but he ended up having a cancellation just as we were chatting on the internet (he's a graphic designer, but has a couple of interesting photo projects on the side). And it was naked night at our local sex club -- a naked night T often goes to because he likes it like that -- and I somehow finagled B into the idea of the three of us meeting up there. It was a little crazy. We attracted the boys like moths. It was, as you've quoted me elsewhere, our joy again, in a kind of hectic contagion.

There are many more delicious details (I love the resonance that has here), but I'll spare them for now. Because the main thing I wanted to say is that in the wake of all this, and faced with B's provocative mixture of, on the one hand, resistance to this becoming a thing and, on the other, his ability to ask me, in a chatroom but point blank nonetheless, "what do you want out of a trouple?" I wrote him a letter. T and me recounted in precisely three pages of lucid French prose. All leading up to a lovely paragraph of how this might relate to him. He has yet to respond directly, and maybe he never will. But it was a good thing to get down on paper. In a brief form. (And at this very moment I was able to refer to it in further chat with him without feeling needy or downtrodden or abused. This, after the last week or two, is a very real accomplishment).

I could translate the letter, but I don't think I'm there quite yet in the publicity of my desire. Though apparently, if you hadn't noticed, I'm nonetheless quite far along. Because, as you say, all else does seem to be bullshit. And all the apparent craziness of our desires is what we have to somehow make our way through to get to things like the birds in the tree in Berlin this time last year that really were beautiful. I'm glad that came through to you on the blog. What I didn't describe was the echo that reverberates from an awakening world. That's not bullshit, nor was the sex T and I were able to have the other night just after you and I imagined and set up this blog. That sex was so great thanks to some things I was able to understand thanks to B, and a really good mere ten-minute session of psychoanalysis. "Power is vulnerable" is actually one way of saying what our sex was helping us realize. And if I remember correctly, what comes next is "what we need:" "ritual spontaneity."