Nuclear Winter

I tell no one about the relationship substitutes I am hiring. My mother calls asking if I'm seeing anyone special. Mom, they're all special.

Being truly intimate on a longterm basis, getting romantically close to people, seems unattainable. It isn't that I don't want to take someone home, have them go back to Texas with me and meet Mom and my stepfather, David. I crave the normalcy. I'm just not getting any better at figuring out how.

In fact I am regressing. The astrologer's demand that I love and be loved seems ever more Sisyphean and unreal. The great thing about paying for love is always being in control, even while giving my body over to someone. It's a love life devoid of emotional risk. The fact that I even think of it as a love life is probably more telling than I might wish, and more pathetic.

I stop writing here, worrying that I'm making myself appear pathetic. Should I go back, erase all of this? Talk about something less personal, like the size of my penis?

The need for control grows stronger. Like a metastasized cancer it spreads into all the crevices of my life. The massage habit is only one symptom. I develop a fetish for spring-cleaning in every season. In truth I will always look at the idea of reorganizing a closet as a fun and satisfying way to spend the afternoon. But I start getting weird about stuff, like an old person, obsessive and set in my ways. Towels have to be folded a certain way. Dishes stacked just so. Physical and emotional encounters continue to have clear boundaries. I liked cutting things away, starting from scratch. There is a destructive element to it all. You might imagine being able to put stuff in perfect, Germanic order is less a destructive activity than one of building or creating, but I don't think it's that at all. What I like is the ruthless clearing away, the garbage bags crammed full of trash, the shredded financial records.

I also develop a thing for what it feels like after the exterminator comes. There is an eerie stillness, no sound, nothing stirring, like nuclear winter, which I think of as comforting. I can stay in bed in my bomb shelter forever. Comments? Questions? Email me.