Schrodinger's Cat

Sex & Death (warning: explicit material + gets a bit grim in parts)

23-10 Waiting til mid January to be able to take a blood test which will tell me whether or not I’ve picked up HIV or Hepatitis from that prostitute with who I had unprotected sex. I’ve committed a sin, not necessarily in any Christian sense (though that too) but in having done something which contravenes my own morality – I’ve displayed a total lack of respect for my own life and so don’t deserve to keep it. Over the next couple of months I’ll become acquainted with fear and will get to wrestle my demons. Less than 0.1% of NZ’s population have HIV but I’m sure that when it comes to transsexual prostitutes who don't insist on protection the proportions are spiked somewhat (though half the cases are in Auckland).
Am I going on some theory that fear of imminent death will lead to a burst of productivity and let me get started on writing the book which it’s been my life’s ambition to write? Worked wonders for Anthony Burgess. In any case I’m not in any immediate danger – if I do have HIV then I can probably count on at least another five years of life before it turns to AIDS. There’s still time to write, travel, meet people, learn things. Would being HIV-positive be helpful as a marketing angle? That’s deeply sick. Would it give a sense of urgency – time running out – that would let me get some work done? If facing death – as I’m doing from now on – isn’t ready-made subject matter what is? And if committing delayed suicide, as I have done, is such a good way of sparking a book, why doesn’t everyone do it? Can the hypothetical book have any possible merit or value given its writer’s decadence and apparent self-loathing?
What I’ve done goes way beyond stupidity – insanity must be the word.

I almost made it, broke free from the albums which had become a millstone, ‘a strange kind of happiness, lacking in joy’. When I wrote that about three years ago I must have been feeling jaded, so is my recent jadedness any more or less deep than then? That line was a critical comment on the idea that with the bad times of late high school over I was now nominally happy. Writing songs is an act of alchemy, but now I'm not sure if I have the right to write them any more. (Oh wait, Kurt Cobain already got there - 'what else should I write? / I don't have the right / find my nest of salt / everything's my fault'... I'm back to where I was at 16!)
2003 has been all about breaking through the walls of bullshit and illusion I’d built around myself – byproducts of stubbornness like fat clogging arteries. There were good & honest intentions behind my songwriting & my perverse desire to work in film – a lifestyle to which I’m probably quite unsuited since I like sleep too much and am firmly opposed to kissing ass to get things done. But I seem to have dreams less often than I used to which might account for the way my songwriting slowed down and more or less stopped. I kind of switched to longer forms of writing eg short stories. Could learning to write essays at university have been a factor, rewiring my brain into a more structured & less free-associative way of functioning? Ye get the spring loathing down then, feel the green vegetable matter turning rotten. Feel the dust and jaded mold.
Each short story is progressively darker. ‘No, you brought it on yourself’ is always the devil’s reply.

This is rushing forwards finally as I’d said to myself when I finally finished narrating the breakup (gasp) in diary. Is it the ultimate outcome of pigheadedness? Have I actually entered into hubris myself? Is this what it’s like traveling up one’s own ass (warm darkness)? Not necessarily – just occurred to maybe do 4-piece version of ‘Ascension’ on Thurs 30th, an example of an idea dawning in the grey mass.
At the same time, this is the beginning of a genuine newness. Wounded bayonet shrugs aside to come and go what the newness (cipher) sees. I deleted old phone messages.
Each project has a gravitational wave. No, it’s not that I can’t do albums any more – it’s that I must relearn. Every time you enter a new, higher phase of existence you start at the bottom. That’s a basic principle – schools are structured that way.

5-11 ‘Writing is more of a habit than using’ sez William Burroughs. I keep trying to quit. I only wrote that book of short stories last year because my job applications kept getting rejected. I blundered yesterday by missing out on work next week at the DOC visitor centre due to some other work that might be available in Paekakariki – train journey = time hassle + expense, whereas visitor centre would have been only a minor interruption to my days and some useful income. So it looks like I’ve got the rest of this week and next week to myself to try and come up with something remotely creative. Opportunity to read & write. I have pen & paper, computer w/ internet access, public library nearby, can go for bike rides when I need a break… limitless potential at my fingertips.
Not true that I only wrote the stories because of my jobhunting frustration – there were other factors, not the least being that I had to discover whether I could actually do it. A writer is someone who writes, as opposed to someone who is kind of arty & thinks it would be cool to write something some day. It’s a huge amount of work, with next to no reward at the end. Even in the case of somehow miraculously getting published, there are so many books out there as it is, and subtracting all the crap that’s still an awful lot of masterpieces to try and stand up next to. ‘Anterior Pathways’ turns out to be a small modest success – I expressed a somewhat original style and though it’s not autobiography it does document a lot of my own experiences from the preceding few years.
This time round I’m attempting to do it without the aid of marijuana. I haven’t necessarily decided to quit cold turkey, but given that weed was a factor in my recent decadent phase in which I possibly killed myself (I just haven’t stopped breathing yet), and it wasn’t actually any fun it seems worth stopping at least for a while. It’s fairly obvious which parts in the preceding paragraphs were written stoned. Have to learn to apply those kinds of grammatical assaults to more conventional writing while straight.
Before 2002 I used weed sparingly and could make a tinny last for months. Then I started using it heavily - & got some good work done though at the expense of becoming a semi-recluse and alienating my girlfriend (not that she was without her own faults, far from it). But rather than quitting when the album & book were done I kept pushing – ‘Overgrowth’ documents the resulting burnout as it happened. The thing is, I think it’s actually pretty successful as a story – not much (if anything) in the way of plot but there is some psychology in there, the non-linearity seems to work, and the black comedy is (I think) pretty funny. This gives a sense of paying a price for one’s art, so was it then logical to court death while making the last album? How far am I willing to go?
The other factor was that I was barking up completely the wrong tree by trying to enter the hostile alien environment of the film industry. Why?
Springtime again – I’ve come to the end of a year-long cycle exploring the seasons. It started last winter when I started getting seriously into writing – ‘Spring Forces’, ‘Overgrowth’ and ‘Whin the Autumn Wain Sex Begain to Fall’ are overtly based on the seasons. I found the beginnings of a release, of a new cycle beginning this winter getting the job at DOC, reorienting me in a career direction both more stimulating to myself and more useful to society, and forming a band The Winter. The best part about the band name is that it ties in so perfectly with what I’ve been doing with the seasonal explorations - and the name was Mike’s idea not mine. Accepting other people’s ideas, external input, seems to be my big new modus operandi. Entropy increases in a closed system, so external input is the obvious antidote. We had our first recording session on the winter solstice – the end of the autumn decline, from which new life can arise in spring. And risking an early death functions as hitting a giant reset button?
One possible explanation is the art-as-compensation-for-tragedy theory, with the art an attempt to fill a void. There’s the bit at the end of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch film where Bill tries to enter the country of Annexia – the guards ask his occupation, Bill says writer, they say how do we know, Bill shows them a pen, they say prove it by writing something, Bill shoots his wife, they welcome him in. Burroughs had to kill his wife to become a writer? Nick Cave says he became a writer when his father died. Artists need struggle. I didn’t grow up in poverty or have any experience of tragedy, I come from a comfortable middle-class upbringing so I had to take tragedy on myself by picking up a lethal & incurable disease which will foreshorten my lifespan? But whether I live for another five years or fifty doesn’t make much difference, all humans are on a time limit. There’s also the cynicism involved in volunteering for tragedy, which thereby replaces pathos with bathos and is merely a sad waste.
Coversely, to be a writer do you have to have some tragedy in your life? In that case who in their right mind would want to be a writer? In any case being able to write is more to do with having some ability to manipulate words, and imagine characters & scenarios & problem solving etc, none of which need have anything to do with self-loathing. Thomas Pynchon has a line in V – my age when he wrote it – about “the single melody, banal and exasperating of all romanticism since the middle ages: the act of sex and the act of death are one and the same”. If nothing else AIDS is a pretty successful dramatization of that idea.
At this point I’m the Schrödinger’s Cat in the box – I might not have picked up anything. I seem to have avoided the lesser STDs such as Chlamydia but the biggies, can’t be detected yet and so the box won’t be opened til the new year. From there I’ll either continue on a normal lifespan or will have to adjust to a shorter time limit. It’s nothing for me to be unhappy about, though the news would be pretty devastating to family. Whatever the outcome will be it makes no difference either way to the rest of this year. Of course I could always get killed crossing the road before January…

8-11 A problem I’ve been aware of over the last year for writing is the need to get away from autobiography, to be able to create fictional characters not directly based on myself. They need to develop a life of their own. Focussing on myself is too small a world, and it must be an unpleasant place given what my action demonstrates about me.
Fear of an early death isn’t really the issue. If I do test HIV positive that’s something that can be adjusted to & could even make planning out the rest of my life somewhat easier. No chance of having children & no need to try and buy a house, save for retirement etc. Five years is enough time to travel and to write a book, though not a Finnegans Wake. The issue is more what does my action say about my attitude to myself – is my self-esteem really that low? Things were going OK & I was getting my life sorted out – I’m in a much better position than a year ago in that now I’m out of debt, I’ve got a band to play in finally, I’ve had one really good & interesting fulltime job which pointed me in a productive direction for the future (and gave me new skills and references in the process so jobhunting shouldn’t be as hard as it was before), I’ve been meeting new people, I’ve had time to get over being dumped at the start of the year… so I had to subvert all that? The imp of the perverse strikes again.

13-11 Sometimes I get these general low-level feelings of unease and/or unhappiness with no apparent cause. Could be that the problem’s neurological? It’s not even as though it’s a tradeoff for writing ability since my writing is slow to the point of nonexistent, goes around in circles a lot, and I’m not making much progress coming up with fiction. Today I could just be nervous because I had an interview for the journalism course - which I’m still somewhat ambivalent about wanting to do – and so have to wait to find out if they’ll take me. In all sorts of indeterminate states these days.

May as well reconstruct the events that led me to my current position. I was walking home at about 4am - it was after either the dress rehearsal or first night’s performance of our Jazz Festival show at Bats, so I’d been doing something I enjoy and having social contact etc although resigned to sleeping alone yet again. I’d had a few drinks but was far from drunk. Red car pulls up, Maori-looking figure asks do I want a lift? I had a hundred or so metres left to walk and it was at least a reasonable guess that this was a prostitute, so would have been easy to say no thanks – I’ve said no plenty of times in the past. This time I got in, ‘Susie’ said she’d just got off work, being polite I asked what work was, she said ‘I work the streets’ - she offered me a blowjob, we could go over to her place, I shrugged, said OK. This was all totally flat emotionally. Morally I guess I see nothing wrong with the idea of prostitutes though spiritually they weaken their clients and presumably themselves & sex with them is totally empty & unsatisfying and therefore pointless.
The one enigmatic part of the exchange was that she said ‘you know what I am?’ - I said yeah, with maybe a bit of a sigh. What exactly? A prostitute? Already established that. A transsexual? Probably – she was male-sized and looked fairly androgynous. But what else could she have meant in the subtext? A demon? The end of my life as I’d known it?
We went to her house, it looked reasonably upmarket so there must be money to be made in prostitution. She asked didn’t I have a girlfriend, I said I used to & yes I do miss her. I gave her the money in my wallet – a $5 note and a few coins. I followed directions to undress and she started giving me a blowjob – I got erect OK but didn’t find it particularly interesting. To date I’ve had only one really good electrifying blowjob that’s resulted in orgasm, from my girlfriend early on in the relationship. This time around my reaction was completely neutral; it felt kind of nice but wasn’t arousing. In fact my state of mind through the whole encounter was one of boredom, just going through the motions.
She offered full sex - sure why not – I asked for a condom and she got me one – she said I had the biggest cock of the night - I didn’t look down to see what I was sticking it into – I have only a vague idea of what gender reassignment entails or what it feels like to want it done – I’ve always thought of myself as a straightahead heterosexual male so conscious desire to experiment must have been part of this – I don’t see anything wrong with homosexuality but have never felt any attraction towards males even when approached by gays in the past - Susie didn’t particularly look like a woman and had no breasts. The sex didn’t take long – she said she came - we hugged and kissed a bit afterwards – the other two prostitutes I had in student days were parlour girls, no kissing allowed but very feminine & using protection was a matter of course. Relationship sex or even a good one-nighter is a million times better.
We lay on the bed & hugged for a while, it was good to have contact with a warm human body. After a while I got another erection and climbed on top and we had unprotected sex – too much trouble to sit up and get another condom from the dresser? It was all my doing, there were no mitigating circumstances. It took maybe 25 seconds and was pretty unspectacular. Then I got dressed, she asked to keep my underpants as a souvenir and licked my ass. I didn’t find that exciting or repulsive – a little distasteful maybe. I didn’t give her my phone number. The sky was getting light, I walked the two blocks to my flat and went to bed and was pretty soon regretting the whole thing…

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Posted by fiffdimension at November 27, 2003 10:11 AM | TrackBack