Big Ed's Place

Early in life, I discovered that I was a voyeur. It may have been access to my dad’s Playboys or something more ingrained and natural. I just discovered I liked looking at naked women.

As I got older, the mere sight of bare flesh stopped being interesting to me. I started to discover that the energy conveyed by a naked woman was as or more important than the fact that her clothes were gone. Close ups of body parts became dull. Traditional nudism, which represses sexual energy, also lost most of its charge. I even remember, in my twenties, when a strip club trip felt empty for the first time. Despite being an enterprise devoted to faux sexuality and bare female skin, I was bored. The dancers were clearly just going through the motions and the motions themselves were no longer of interest to me.

Now that turned out to be somewhat ironic, because a few years earlier, I’d been a regular at a club where I’d spent more than a healthy share of dough. There, almost all of my funds went to a single dancer—a fact rather well known among the club staff. In fact, one day I walked in and before I even sat down another dancer walked over and said, “she’s not here.” I shrugged and decided to return another day.

What made that one dancer special? She took her dancing seriously. She constantly worked on developing new moves and new tricks. She often came up with new costumes. When she gave private dances (lap dances weren’t legal in that jurisdiction then), she had a whole host of moves and looks to draw my eyes exactly where she wanted them. It was a silent “look at me.” “Look at my eyes.” “Look at my hip.” “Now look at my bare breasts.”

I was entranced. I was enthralled. If they’d had an ATM in the club, I’d have been broke.

That “look at me” energy has turned out to be the charge I get from being a voyeur. Peeping Tom type voyeurism doesn’t work for me because, besides the consent issues, the energy isn’t there. The woman has to know she’s being watched. She has to want to be watched, or at least looked at for a while.

Sometimes that energy can be captured on film, but not always. There’s a coyness to it, an “aren’t you in for a treat,” that’s absent in most porn. It’s naughty, not nasty. The ‘view’ is a treat—not something that’s just a flaunt.

I think that the “look at me”/“I’m looking” energy exchange is similar to top/bottom energy in a good bdsm scene. It circulates and is reciprocal. My looking feeds her pleasure at being seen, which feeds my pleasure at looking even more. It’s sexual, but far beyond simple stimulation or the quest for an O. The thrill is both more intense and more subtle. Fine wine instead of a greasy burger.

There are of course many ways to enact this energetic exchange—lingerie, semi-public flashing, and even traditional burlesque can also pick up the same flair. It also doesn’t matter too much if the woman has model quality looks or not. I’d rather have an average looking woman who’s sending ‘look at me’ signals than a beauty who’s bored and taking my gaze for granted. There’s no magic in body language that conveys I’m just one of millions. Instead, a garter belt and a smile can overcome extra weight or physical ‘flaws’ galore.

For me, that’s the core of voyeurism, and the enchantment. She conveys “look at me”—and I comply.

I submitted Deep Dish to my first publisher. As expected, it was harder to hit ‘send’ than I expected. I intellectually knew that it wasn’t a big deal to do so, and I knew intellectually that if I got rejected, it wasn’t a big deal. That didn’t stop the nerves.

And the thing is, of course, that I’ve been rejected plenty of times in my life in a wide variety of venues before now. When I first started applying for jobs out of school, I mailed 101 resume’s and had 19 interviews before I got an offer. I probably went on dates with close to a hundred women before I met my wife. And that’s not counting the women who I tried to reach through online dating sites that never bothered to even acknowledge my email.

That hasn’t prevented it from being nervous and sweat inducing each time I step into a new arena.

For the pattern in each case was the same. I’m on edge about the first time. I get rejected and it stings more than I anticipated. But I pick myself up and try again. I get a second rejection which stings again. After a few more rejections, the sting gets less and less, as if I’m building up an immunity or a tolerance. And then at some point, it becomes almost a game and I find I don’t care.

This was literally true in the year before I met my wife. I was online dating and I reached the point where I said, before going on a first date, “either I’ll have a good time or I’ll have a story to tell.” The fear of rejection was long gone.

So I know I’ll eventually stop being nervous and submitting to publishers will feel like old hate. But damn, going through this again and again is getting old. My brain knows better but the gut continues to churn…

This past week, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Monocle, a fellow author in the Tentacle Dreams anthology. He’s the third erotica author I’ve met in the flesh after becoming acquainted online and all three times have been both a delight and a surprise.

Now some of this is the standard dissonance that occurs in meeting someone for the first time that you’ve already gotten to know through the ‘net. I learned in internet dating (which I did for a few years and is how I met my wife) that it was actually pretty important to arrange that first meeting before one’s impressions had solidified in the mind. When all we have is words and maybe a photo or two, our minds fill in the gaps to define the ‘character’ we’re corresponding with, much like we do with fictional characters. I found that if I spent too long corresponding before arranging a meeting, then I’d have a more detailed, solid, and wrong image in my head of the woman. The greater the dissonance, the harder it was to stay present on the date and have a good time. Basically, my preconceptions tended to spoil things.

For example, I was constantly being surprised by height. Online, my imagination makes every woman the same height relative to me–which is just a few inches shorter. It doesn’t matter if her profile had said something different, it was how my imagination conjured her up. Of course, I’m 6’3″, so there are very few women only a few inches shorter than me. It makes little difference sitting across a restaurant table, but it’s often surprising standing up.

People online don’t have bad breath, eyes that wander all over the room, or funny moles in distracting locations. They don’t have an intense gaze that can either unsettle or entrance. They rarely have unexpected pauses in conversations and the ability to edit before hitting ‘send’ increases the intelligence of their discourse. Of course, they also can’t hold your hand, give you a kiss, or convey all that a smile can convey beyond an emoticon.

So I learned that the best way to avoid the dissonance was to avoid having built up a mental image ahead of time. That’s easy in an online dating environment–just don’t stretch out the online correspondence. It’s harder for more casual connections. Monocle I had not become acquaintances with the plan of some day meeting, like online dating does. It just happened because of fortuitous circumstances.

What can make it more complicated with an author is that there’s the person in the flesh and the person in their work. Monocle writes much darker stories than he comes across in person. I couldn’t help wondering if people who met Stephen King felt the same way–”Nice guy, but have you really considered what must be going on under the surface?” Of course, being an author myself I had a pretty good idea of what could be going on under the surface and how it related to reality (some, but not enough to be meaningful).

So, for me, the bigger dissonance was he had read my stories. I mentioned the trial to do tight plotting in Dealing with the Devil, and his response was “Oh, yeah, I read that one.” I did a doubletake. Usually, people I’m speaking with face to face knew me before they knew my writing. It was strange to be on the other side, wondering about what impressions my work gave of me.

Of course, most of what we talked about was writing and publishing. That was fun. Not only could we swap stories and comments faster than the internet allows, but we found that in many ways, we’ve had comparable histories. We’ve both been writing for about the same length of time and have recently hopped to publishing some of our work. His focus has been largely on shorter works, but he has a much larger backlog as a result (check it out, he’s good). We had similar experiences in the early online erotica communities and even managed to swap stories about people and places we knew.

Which, I think, was what ultimately made it pleasurable. Here was someone who knew. I didn’t have to explain what it’s like to be a writer. I didn’t have to explain what it’s like to write erotica. I didn’t get confused stares or sidelong glances about what I do. It was freeing and relaxing at the same time.

I had the same experiences when I met the other two authors, though it has been many years since those encounters. It kind of makes me winsome for some such face to face support group, though I suspect I’ll never join or organize one because of real life hurdles. But every now and then… the time with another author in the flesh may be a great touchstone worth having.

Remittance Girl riffed on my last post to talk about ideals and the disappointment of being real. While my original post had focused on the non-existent dream girl that many guys desire, she added the Mr. Right of the Romance novels. She wrote:

Similarly, women are forever tantalized by the strong, silent and unbearably buff Mister Right, who sensitive when it matters, with an IQ off the scale, masterful in bed and fiscally responsible to boot. Tender in all the right moments and utterly lacking in any baggage that might get in the way of them fully committing to a lifetime of blissful domesticity – or even a couple of months of it. Romance featuring just this sort of mythological creature still outsells every other form of genre fiction. And, in the 48 years I’ve been on this planet, I can’t honestly say I ever met a single one of those.

In doing so, she reminded me about the secret to seducing women: be that guy.

Now obviously, this archetypal romance novel alpha male won’t be able to seduce every woman. Nor will every guy be able to pull it off for an extended period of time. But those are only issues if the guy is trying to seduce a specific woman or aiming for some long term result like marriage and kids. If the guy is just looking to bed a lot of women, all he needs to do is ‘be that guy’ from first meeting until he’s done fucking the woman du jour.

And I do mean “fucking” on more than one level, because we’re talking about fucking women over as well as fucking their bodies. There’s a certain lack of moral compassion required to be a pure pickup artist. For even if a guy is being an ‘ethical slut’ and clean in his communication, he’s still taking advantage of deeper hungers that he almost certainly lacks either the intention or the ability to fulfill.

I know. I’ve been there. I’m not proud of it.

While my twenties had been very lonely and very troubled, by my early thirties, things had begun to change. I won’t go into all of what happened, but by the time I was 32, I had learned a fair amount and knew how to at least project self-confidence on early dates with women. I’d also discovered internet dating, which is a great way to make sure one’s first impression is intellectual instead of physical.

So I had a first date with a woman I’d met over the internet. It went well, in large part because I was in full alpha male romance novel lead swagger. By the end I could tell she was itching to be kissed. I did so, hard and passionately. We had the second date in my part of town and afterward I invited her back to my place. She left late that night, but not before saying it was the best sex she had ever had.

I was chuffed. I spent the next two weeks strutting in ways that would have embarrassed reality TV stars. I bragged to my friends. I invited this woman to spend the night over Valentine’s Day weekend for a sex marathon that I was sure would rattle the roof.

And I fucked up beyond belief. I was so high about having ‘scored’ that I really didn’t see her as a person. While I was confident I’d said that I wasn’t looking for anything emotionally serious with her and that I wouldn’t be monogamous, I honestly couldn’t be sure she’d heard me. In hindsight, even if I’d said them, I certainly hadn’t made sure that they weren’t lost in the blizzard of “I’m a great alpha male” malarkey I was also throwing her way (and trying to convince myself was actually true).

So she showed up for our overnight date with a bag of presents for me. Lots of presents. Handmade presents.

Oh, crap.

I learned in that moment that it doesn’t matter what the words are nearly so much as the what the energy and actions are that accompany them. For her, I was the Romance Novel dream come true. I knew better.

I did end the relationship as kindly as I could and we each went our separate ways. Later, as I continued to date via the internet, I encountered several other women who were projecting that same desire in early dates. If I came across as close to the men of their novels, they were eager to invite me into greater intimacy, be it emotional or physical. If I had had less of a conscience, I could have gotten laid often.

Since then, I’ve poked at the peripheries of the men’s pickup subculture, where guys buy a book or pay for a workshop to learn how to score with women. I haven’t waded into it enough to know for sure, but I haven’t encountered anything that would contradict what I’ve learned myself. The best teaching material is the romance novels that women buy.

Now I know that somewhere there’s a guy reading this and thinking, “yeah, but I’m not the guy from the romance novels and I don’t think I could be. Even if I could, I’m not sure I want to stoop to the low ethics of a pickup artist.” To which I say, “great!”

Now, as I’ve said, not all women want the Romance Novel idea. Also, there are plenty of women who are smart enough to know that the Romance Novel ideal is impossible. They’d be happy with just some of those qualities in the guys they date. In particular, “sensitive when it matters,” “masterful in bed,” and “fiscally responsible,” from Remittance Girl’s quote above, are learned behaviors that any guy can achieve. Additionally, in my experience, self-aware honesty is pretty high on the priority list for many women, and especially for women beyond their own early 20′s experimentation phase. So being self-aware enough to know you’d rather treat a woman as a person than a score is a great start.

Which brings me around to a conclusion similar to Remittance Girl’s. The Romance Novel guy is unreal. So is the pickup artist, and they go hand in hand. But isn’t reality, with all it’s beautiful flaws, better?

I came to that conclusion rather firmly before I was 35. Then I met my wife, and proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I’ll keep the Romance Novels as light entertainment because there are better ways to actually live.

I knew a woman once who had a successful phone sex career. She did well in part because she took her calls at her computer wearing a headset, which allowed her to take notes during the conversation. Then, when the client called back, she could quickly remind herself what they’d talked about and whatever personal details he’d shared. Her clients felt they were special to her, when in fact they were little more that a well-organized tickler file.

The other major contributor to her success was that she was a masterful story teller. She knew how to drop the little details into a story so that it rang true, even when it was completely made up. She also often included little vignettes that showed her embarrassing herself or in other unflattering light. After all, why would anyone lie about things that don’t make them look good? Her confessional stories rang ‘true’ and garnered a quick large following.

For me, it was just one more data point on how much men (or at least many men) crave authentic voracious feminine sexual energy in their lives. Skim any Penthouse Letters book or free stories site aimed at men and you’ll see that most of the women in them are high libido, highly sexual women with low inhibitions. That’s what enough male readers want to be able to sustain those publications and sites. That’s the draw for many fantasies such as wife-watching. And yes, there’s probably a longer post in here somewhere, since I didn’t address this head on in my Power of the Feminine post. But the point for this post is that I wasn’t surprised that a successful phone sex operator was able to tap into that craving.

Unfortunately, she made a mistake. It was early October a few years back and had recently snowed here in Denver. So in one call, she mentioned that she was going to take a break and go skiing. Unfortunately, the client she was talking with knew that the Colorado ski areas weren’t open and so caught her in a falsehood. He was furious. She told me that he flew into a rage and called her all sorts of names before hanging up.

She was shocked, but ultimately dismissed it as a minor loss in her customer base. It wasn’t exactly a Crying Game surprise, after all. She also didn’t understand why he was so upset. She kind of understood, but she really didn’t get it.

I did.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised to read about the takedown of Alexa, the blogger of The Real Princess Diaries. Her blog was highly rated and followed, but she turned out to (probably) not be a high priced call girl in San Francisco, and instead appears to have been a man living on the other side of the country. I say ‘appears’ because the blogosphere is still humming with possibilities and accusations and I frankly can’t keep up, much less intelligently comment.

Now, I’d found Alexa’s blog a while back and enjoyed reading it from time to time–maybe once or twice a month. The writing was solid and it included all those little details that made it ring true. I recall one story where she described joining the mile high club on a cross-country flight with a couple of marines she’d met in the back of the plane. She devoted a couple of paragraphs to describing the difficulty of finding a position that worked in the lavatory, and what they were bumping into as they fucked. There was humor in it, as well as the sheer hotness factor.

At the same time, there were posts that made me go, “this is, at a minimum, exaggerated.” One of the stories, for example, was about putting on a sex show at a private party in a rich section of San Francisco. The details of how she got to the party sounded like they were straight out of Eyes Wide Shut (review coming soon). She had a story of being a weekly morning office blowjob for a regular, which besides being an amazing risk that not one of the pros I know would ever willingly take (too much risk of getting caught), the details themselves rang as contrived (walking there, the blowjob always on the same day of the week just before his secretary arrived but never actually getting caught, etc.). Finally, too many of Alexa’s stories were just plain hot, whereas the sex workers I know would say that the majority of their memorable encounters were just weird. “Hot” was a rarity when they were doing it for pay. It was a job with its good days and its bad days, and how many of us truly remember the specifics about our average or slightly average days?

But while I doubted the veracity of many or all of Alexa’s posts, I didn’t spend much time on it because this is, after all the internet. Isn’t there a famous New Yorker cartoon that says, “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog?” I read her posts firmly aware that they could be complete bullshit, but it entertained me from time to time and that was the whole point.

Obviously, it wasn’t for someone else. It could be a simple case of mental instability on the part of the person who outed him (Remittance Girl has some scary examples in her comments section, including one from me about an author friend I know that was cyberstalked). However, having read the original screed, I don’t think it was.

The person who did the outing was pissed. They did a lot of work, fueled by anger that was more than casual, in order to do the attack. While several sordid details of possible other improprieties have come out since then, few were included in the original post. This was personal, and whether it was because of some flame war that spiraled out of control or something else is currently unknown.

But I couldn’t help thinking of the phone sex worker I knew, by analogy and extension.

Because we, as an aggregate and often as individuals, want more from the internet than mere entertainment. Sometimes we want accurate information. Often we want community in ways that the physical world cannot easily provide. And sometimes we want connection.

I’ve been there. I celebrated my 25th birthday alone in an apartment with a pizza, a rented VCR, and some movies, trying to pretend I wasn’t desperately lonely. I had a year in which I went months when my only physical touch with another person beyond a handshake was a lapdance. The internet, still in its infancy, was a fucking godsend.

The internet allowed me to maintain some semblance of human connection. It allowed me to be emotionally honest in ways that I just couldn’t with those I spent my time with face to face on a daily basis (as most were coworkers). It allowed me space to sort out more of who I was and what I thought–trying on personas and growing from the experience. In some ways, it helped me stay sane.

And I think it’s that sense of connection that is at the heart of both the sense of betrayal and some of the reaction to it. “Alexa” apparently was false in some of her personal connections with others on the web. They felt betrayed. In response, there was a take down, which betrayed “her” in personal ways. It’s in that sense that Remittance Girl’s comments about the vibrancy of the web strike home with me.

I think a lot of the vibrancy of the web is in the connections. We can meet and relate with people all over the world with whom we might not otherwise ever become aware of. We can find support and friendship and community and the occasional good idea. Which just makes it sad when it’s perturbed by something like this.

Which is ultimately where I end up. There are plenty of places debating the particulars of Alexa and in the end, those particulars won’t matter much to most of us. It’s not like we’re the person that’s been destroyed, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s not sad for the rest of us that it happened.

The Ugly One has been on my mind lately, since we’ve been working on the ebook. I woke up recently with my mind swimming with images from an incident in my past where I missed an interesting opportunity because of my belief that I was ugly.

I was single at the time and a good male friend of mine wanted me to meet his new girlfriend. He’d told me stories about how hot she was in bed–that after a boring marriage (she was separated, working on the divorce), she had gotten very exploratory. She’d show up at his place in a trench coat and lingerie. They tried all sorts of variations of acts and positions in bed that she’d never done. They found some interesting places outside of the bedroom to fool around, and so on.

So one night I drove the hour and a half to their side of town and we went barhopping. She spent most of that time talking with me and even being a little flirtatious, which I saw but didn’t understand. Finally it grew late and I told them I needed to get going. I was tired and I still had a long drive ahead of me.

My friend suggested I crash on his couch. Now I’d slept on his couch before and it was awful. I’m a big guy and his couch is small. There was no way to get comfortable and I’d barely gotten any sleep. So I declined.

My friend and his girlfriend pulled aside to talk and then he came over to me, out of her earshot. He said, “Look, she’s always had this fantasy of being with two guys at the same time, but she’s not quite ready to go through with it. So why don’t you come over?”

So here’s where the ‘ugliness’ kicks in. My thoughts were: Okay… they want to keep talking, I’ll sleep on the couch, then if all goes well, maybe in a few weeks something will happen, but probably not.

The idea that I was being propositioned for that night just didn’t register. It was incomprehensible. The thought was so ridiculous it didn’t even enter my conscious mind.

Why was it ridiculous? Because I believed that women don’t sleep with ugly guys they’ve just met and I was ugly. If a woman slept with me, it was because she considered me a good catch or because I was charming and romantic. In other words, if a woman had sex with me, it was because it was part of a relationship and she wanted the other parts of the relationship enough to tolerate having sex with an ugly guy.

So, since I didn’t want to sleep on that couch, I turned my friend and his girlfriend down.

The reality was, she was just getting a touch of cold feet. She did find me attractive and what she wanted was for us to go somewhere more private, give her a chance to get her courage up, and then for me and my friend to take the lead in seducing her.

So, being completely oblivious to this reality because of my own self-conviction that it couldn’t be true, I said goodbye and drove home. A few weeks later they broke up, permanently removing the opportunity. A few years after that, he and I were talking one night over drinks and he confirmed the true reality above. I’d blown it by walking away, and she’d interpreted it as me not being interested in her, which was why it was never offered again.

This was not the only time I unintentionally passed on sex because I just couldn’t believe that the woman was offering it.

One woman went so far as to invite me into her bedroom and kiss me standing next to the bed (after an evening that included a lot of sexually explicit conversation), but since it was a first date, I did the gentlemanly thing and left. The next day, of course, I realized that she had been practically begging me to seduce her–she didn’t want to take the lead, but she did want me to push her down on the bed. There was no second date because she said we were looking for different things. A few weeks later, I talked to her and found out she’d decided to get into swinging (after our date) because what she really wanted was simple no-strings sex.

There are other examples of lesser magnitude, but the common thread was that “I’m ugly. Therefore a woman would not want to sleep with me for the sex. Therefore this seduction/offer/flirtation can’t be real.” Fortunately, I eventually woke up and discovered that it wasn’t true at all.

And hopefully I showed that transition in John’s life in The Ugly One. A bit more dramatically and compact than my real life, but isn’t that what fiction is for?

In my experience in the bsdm world, most people just “play.” Bdsm may be an occasional or frequent part of their sex life, but it doesn’t define their life. This is consistent with how most people live their lives. Sex may be important or unimportant, but it is not the majority of their life.

There are, of course, exceptions where sex is the majority of a person’s life. Sex workers and addicts immediately come to mind. I’ve found very few people who aspire to either of those roles or lifestyles—a few natural courtesans and tantrikas but that’s about it. For most people, career, family or other hobbies are much more defining than what they do in the bedroom. Most people don’t aspire for sex to be more than “play” regardless of how kinky it may be.

However, in the bdsm world, there seem to be a notable exception, which is the 24/7 sub (someone who is a submissive 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). They’re sometimes called a “lifestyle” submissive and they spend their days serving their master, much as happens in the movie Secretary. I’d originally taken this to be just another fantasy like harem fantasies—fun to enjoy in the daydream, but unworkable in reality.

Aside—yes, I know there are real harems in the world these days. However, I have yet to hear of a real one that wasn’t either a case of women being held against their will or women being paid a whole lot of money to participate. The former I find repulsive and the latter is beyond the financial reach of 99% of men, even in the wealthy West.

So I was surprised when I met my first 24/7 submissive in our bdsm club. She lived with her Master and Mistress and served their needs around the clock without question. In exchange, she was a member of the household. She turned out to be happy to discuss her life at length. Later, I watched her break up with that Master and Mistress and be collared to another Master and his wife. That latter relationship lasted a few years before it too broke up, but by then I’d left the club.

For her, the lifestyle was in part because she just couldn’t manage life on her own. Despite being in her 30’s, she couldn’t manage her money, be reliable in meeting appointments, or even do basic household chores without screwing it up. I never understood why that was true, but she fundamentally needed someone to take care of her and tell her what to do on a day by day basis.

Such day to day direction gave her life structure and helped her relax and be happy. As such, she was more than willing to do whatever her Master ordered, be it sexual or not. I saw her first Master make some very wild orders too—including loaning her out to other Dom’s from time to time. Since I never played with her myself, I don’t know what her limits were, but from her public play and the stories she told, I imagine they were pretty far out there.

One example—she was blindfolded and taken to a party. She knew there were about 20 people there and it was in a private home and she could recognize some of the voices, but that was it. She was ordered to strip naked, then bound to a chair with her hands free. Then she was told she had to masturbate to ten orgasms before she would be released, which was a lot because she was not multi-orgasmic. As she tried to come, she could hear the party going on around her as if she wasn’t there, with barely a comment about her show. When she finally managed her last orgasm after many hours of masturbating while tied up, she was untied and taken home. Her blindfold was never removed at the party and she never found out who had watched her play with her clit. She told me that despite the orgasms, it was more an ordeal than pleasurable but she did it because her Master had ordered her to.

Now I don’t know if she was a good example of those who become submissives 24/7 or not. While I met a few other submissives who said they were 24/7 at play parties, I didn’t really get a chance to know them well enough to know what that meant.

That said, I did meet another submissive who almost lived the 24/7 lifestyle. She was fully capable of living on her own and a generally well-adjusted person (at least as well-adjusted as any of us are). She lived with her Mistress and their rule was simple–the Mistress could give her an order at any time while they were both home and she had to obey it. They had a code she could use if she didn’t want to obey it for some reason, so she wasn’t as deep of a submissive as the first woman. So sometimes she’d be told to go clean the sink and would say, “Is my mistress sure?” and then get a different order. Sometimes she’d be told, “Service me. Now.” and she’d immediately drop to her knees and begin licking her mistress to an orgasm.

So what would it be like to truly live the lifestyle? I suspect I’d personally be exhausted if I had a sex slave 24/7 because I know how much energy taking care of a toddler requires. Is it something that perfectly sound submissives, without the problems of the one woman I knew well, would sign up for? I lack sufficient data. Nonetheless, of the common ‘big sexual fantasies,’ it does seem to be one that does happen from time to time.

Recently, I attended a technical conference that I first attended 15 years ago. A lot of ghosts came flowing back, and not all of them were pleasant.

The first time I attended this conference, I happened to call the up-until-then-love-of-my-life, who I will call “Alicia” for simplicity. We’d broken up 2 years earlier, she’d move to Europe to pursue another romantic relationship, but that had ended badly and she was back at her parents’ house. That was about a 3 hour drive from the conference.

We had a very pleasant phone conversation and tried to figure out how we could meet in person. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out the logistics. It was clear then that we were both entertaining ideas of getting back together. Six months later when we did meet, though, the window for reconciliation had closed. Would we have gotten back together if we’d been able to meet that night? I sometimes think we would have, but of course there’s no way to know. It’s just my memory of the conversation and what life was like for both of us at the time.

So… why didn’t we get together if we both wanted to? Because the technology didn’t exist. We knew we’d have to meet in the middle in order for both of us to make our next-day obligations and we couldn’t figure out the logistics. Sure, there was a map that showed a town halfway between us, but we knew nothing about what was in that town that might be suitable, and we had no idea how we’d get in touch when we arrived.

Two problems that are completely irrelevant in the age of the internet and cell phones.

Today it’s yelp followed by mapquest and we’d have a place. Then cell phones to ensure we connected. No problem, no missed connection.

Now my life has turned out pretty well and I don’t begrudge the lost connection. I wouldn’t have met my wife, after all, and she’s a much better match for me than “Alicia” was. So I don’t have a lot of regrets about the lack of technology then, but it does make me wonder…

…and while there are obvious analogs in writing (certain stories could only exist in certain times or the available technology would render much of the plot moot), I’ve also started wondering how the technology changes affect our memories.

Ya see, memory is often more emotional than rational. We often have clearer memories about things that triggered strong emotions than those that were just intellectual. So what created those states?

I clearly remember the frustration of not knowing how to connect with “Alicia”. I remember how overwhelming it was when we finally quit trying. And I remember the angst when I realized later that the window for getting together had closed.

Similarly, I remember times in my youth of giddy nervousness, waiting for the phone to ring. I didn’t dare go out because I didn’t want to miss a specific call. I got cranky when my dad got on the line. Of course, answering machines and call waiting made those issues moot long before cell phones. Do kids have that anxiety today? And how does it color their romances?

Which calls into question some of my own memories. I remember all the drama of teen romance. How would the drama have been different if I’d had better technology? I don’t know. But I do suspect I’d remember those times quite differently.

I don’t have answers, of course. It’s just one more reminder of the fungibility of the human memory.

My wife and I recently celebrated our fifth anniversary. It’s definitely been a “whoa–where has the time gone?” phenomena for us–the days seem to have flown by. But it did give us a change to look back at our seven year relationship.

The thing that I wanted to write about here, though, was a comment that was made to me when I was considering proposing, that’s affected my writing. A good friend told me, “Pick a partner that helps you go further than you can on your own.” It’s turned out to be incredibly good advice

Now by “further” he meant “makes life richer and deeper” as well as “helps you go where you want to go.” Richer and deeper are difficult terms to define, but most people have a sense of them, particularly spiritual seekers. There are times, when one is truly living in the moment and truly present, that the words takes on a hue and a sense that is more than it does in those moments when we’re wrapped up in our heads and our ego-selves.

It’s a sense of awe simply at living.

And I’m blessed to get that with my wife.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent the other definition of “helps you go where you want to go” from being operative as well. The tricky part is, of course, knowing where you want to go. What may be today’s objective and pined-for goal may be discarded five years from now. That said, there are exceptions, like the desire to have children. But my personal experience is that those exceptions are few in number and generally obvious.

But I’ve found that that doesn’t necessarily matter. A partner who helps you and supports you no matter what direction you are going is a blessing. Many people say that about our kids–”I want them to be happy, no matter what they choose to do.” How many of us say that about our romantic partners?

In my case, my wife’s support has been instrumental in me getting so seriously into writing (were you wondering when I was going to bring it around to writing?). For a while, she was my editor, but it hasn’t been her active support that’s been important. It’s really the emotional support and the trust. She provides a solid base from which I can explore.

And I think that’s critical for writers of many stripes. We need people who believe in us. We may not be in a place where we have patrons who support us, like days of old. But I think most authors have hit a point where they’ve thought, “what the heck am I doing?” Those moments are much easier to get through if we know that someone, somewhere, has our back.

We go further then, in what we can get done. With the right partner, we also go deeper, which can manifest in our writing. At least for me, it’s made a huge difference to be married to such a woman.

This past weekend, some screwups by an airline resulted in my family arriving home at 2 am on a night when I had to be at work at 7:30 the next morning. I managed only four hours of sleep before the next day.

It was a challenging day, both for the sloppiness of my work and my difficulties in concentration, but also because I realized I had to watch what I said. Lack of sleep had lowered my inhibitions, much the way alcohol can.

Which got me thinking about parties, particularly college parties where it seems that lowering inhibitions is the point. They start late, they involve alcohol, there’s enough people there to get a contact high and peer pressure to do things that one might not do on one’s own. Mix in a lot of single people with a lot of hormones flowing and it’s little wonder that hooking up for sex is often the result. The question is–would the hooking up occur without the lowered inhibitions? Or would the participants balk for one reason or another?

It also got me thinking about a conversation with a swinger friend of mine. He said that swinger parties often had alcohol flowing and sometimes to the point of definite excess. At the same time, the ‘action’ often didn’t start until midnight or later. He himself admitted that sometimes he and his wife needed a drink to help ‘loosen them up’ before they were ready to play.

So… you’re going to a club, planning on having sex with people there, and yet the inhibitions still need to be lowered. Hmmm…

In contrast, the bdsm clubs are pretty strict about no alcohol. The ‘play’ can be pretty dangerous if done wrong, and the line between right and wrong isn’t that broad. For example, spank someone across the meaty part of their ass–it can feel good. Hit their tailbone, and it just hurts (and can cause damage). Those two points are only a few inches away, and if you’re standing a few feet back with a flogger, your aim had better not be compromised by those beers you had earlier.

Yes, sometimes bdsm parties don’t get started until late, but most of the ones I attended started ‘play’ well before 9pm, and you could leave at midnight (as I usually did) having seen or done plenty.

Which means the ability to lower inhibitions is completely different. And it leads me to wondering if the result is a different type of people.

For me, I had to talk myself into going to a bdsm club over several months. I had a lover/friend who was a member and introduced me to other members in a social dinner well before I took the plunge. The first time, I pretty much clung by my friend’s side. It took a few visits on my own before I truly felt comfortable enough to lower my own inhibitions and join the play.

I also didn’t drink until I was in my mid-twenties, and I’ve never been drunk to the point of being sick. Hangovers, yes, but only in my own house. And then only with very close friends, where the comradery was the point, not trying to hook up.

So… the experience of drinking late in the night to lower one’s inhibitions as a desirable act is foreign to me. Instead, when I find my inhibitions non-intentionally lowered these days, it usually means that something went horribly, badly wrong.