Something -- the weather or tinny voices in my fillings -- is making me restless. I want to be working on an artwork that I can't seem to start. Last night I sat in bed cutting apart magazines for a collage, but my heart wasn't in it. Strange faces sliced from the news: I saw them sectioning and rejoining in tired patterns. Mouths turn upside-down, eyes latch on to smaller faces like polyps, arms break at the joints like chickenbones and reassemble in puppet angles. Familiar tricks. None of my ideas were as new as I needed them to be. I left a pile of ripped pages on the couch for the cat to sift out a rustling nest late at night.
The sky is sluice and trickle: dark clouds and moist cool wind without the convictions of real rain. A glance out the office windows at the skyline is like peeking into the heart of a deeply conflicted individual. It's driving me to distraction. I would rather, in this mood, have rain, but I would settle for any kind of authoritative climatic statement.
What is there is nothing to do in these bleak times, but talk about sex? Item 1. I had a dream last night in which my rescue squad mandated that all crews undergo "safe sex training," including fairly explicit "role plays" for which couples were randomly paired off. "Just go ahead as you would with a regular partner," they instructed us, "but be sure to incorporate safe sex into the scenario." Despite my luck in having drawn a cute partner, I gallantly requested special dispensation not to actually unroll a condom on to my penis. They were dubious about making an exception, but I was allowed to explain the process in graphic detail rather than performing it on my personal meat puppet.
At one point in the situation, I told the instructor and my partner that I would remove my glasses if I was wearing them. They asked me why, and I explained with some irritation that I wasn't exactly going to perform oral sex with spectacles on, was I? When the instructor left us alone, half naked and a wee bit embarrassed, my partner tearfully confessed that she had been molested by a well-known Charlottesville public figure.
It's funny how boring other people's dreams are. Item 2. During a recent steamy DC afternoon, I watched a jeep bearing three shirtless young gents zip down 17th. As the topless bunch went by, I saw a glint of sun reflected off one fellow's nipple: the inevitable piercing. Despite presumptions of live/let live philosophy, I find the pierced-nip look to be faintly icky on men. Oddly, I think pierced female breasts are rather sexy, but then I generally find female breasts to be aesthetically superior to men's.
This holds true even for men with startlingly developed chests. At my mostly-gay gym, big whoppin pecs are the norm. I see men there sporting bigger muscle-boobs than the breasts of women I've dated. (But then, I skewed towards small chests.) You may be familiar with this manly look: manboobs so swollen and prominent that the nipples are stretched out and point slightly downward. The rack is often displayed peeking through a stringy tank top. Undeniably breasts, they fail, somehow, to turn me on. What joys could be mine, what pure private voyeur thrill, if it were in my power to decide what I find erotic.
Item 3. For want of some materials needed to complete my wholly fake sex site SinDee's Sincam, I have been running it instead as an online foot fetish cam. I quickly became tired of the small plastic eyeball peering at me from its mandatory position over the computer screen, and placed it instead on the floor under my desk, where it stares tirelessly at my bare feet whilst I work. The cam runs at odd hours, whenever I feel like giving the world a good look at my tootsies. Earlier, a cursory tour of foot fetish web sites yielded the disturbing realization that the Net is fixated almost exclusively on women's feet. Blessed with unusually attractive feet, I am clearly missing my calling.