Bulletproof
Bullet Journaling For The Being On The Go
[In which the author attempts to excuse his inability to weave a cohesive thesis as a literary experiment on modernism, the cut-up method of William S Burroughs, an esprit d’escalier when the escaliers lead to a dock on the stream of consciousness, et cetera, and so on, just stay with me.]
• There’s a lot on my mind these days and it’s hard to keep it all sorted. I’m doing bullets now— my latest attempt to catalog and corral my scattershot mind— and it’s still Libra season (poor dears; my moon!) and bullets help the mental scales balance, so please bear with me. And I’m very much visited by The Magenta, too, which enervates and excoriates, so the train may jump the tracks, but welcome aboard all the same!
(Truthfully, dear readers who know me from posts previous, it has been The Magenta all along; I only thought it was The Depression).
[It’s a Golden Girls reference, look it up.]
• My therapist wants me to be more in the moment, but the last time I felt fully in the moment, I thought I was dying, so why is that a good thing? I was lying there in a panic attack and I knew— I knew— that was it, my time had come; and I was totally in the moment and everything else faded away, and it was just me and the ceiling tiles and my tears. Completely present, completely in the moment, and it completely sucked.
• Queer sex is not like straight sex. I don’t mean the body-mechanics of it, necessarily, I mean the everything else of it. The emotion, the impetus, the follow-through, the mathematics. Queer sex is just different (and better!).
• The Magenta feels like Imposter Syndrome, but you have to be recognized as something before you can feel like you’re an imposter at it. So let’s sit with that for a minute and try not to bother any strangers on the bus by crying in public. Yessssss… let’s use depression to combat our anxiety! What could go wrong with that?
• There are no “Devil’s Triangles” in queer sex because we’re all happy to be there, happy that we’re joined by our friends, happy to share in an act of pleasure and love and connection, happy that everyone who is there is there, so there would never be a need to avoid eye contact with anyone. Having sex with someone you don’t want to look at seems FUCKING BIZARRE—WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH STRAIGHT MEN?
• This is a place we all get to, and unlike all the other places, this is one we do talk about. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t gotten to this place, and no one feels ashamed once they’re here. It’s the what am I doing with my life place. It’s like a planetary return, except it isn’t, it’s just a place we get to, again and again as we move through life, though hopefully not too often.
• My spider plant has been half-dead for like two years now and I wish it would just, y’know, choose life. I’ve named the plant Johnny Gunther to commemorate (that’s a deep cut, English majors!), because I love symbolism, and this damn plant is nothing if not a symbol— not thriving, but not dead yet, and I have no idea what to do to help it. I don’t know what you need, little plant.
• It’s fine, as far as places go, this place I’m in again. I tell myself that I’ve learned to be here, judgement free, that I’ve learned exist in the moment and sit with the uncertainty, because by this time around I’ve had plenty of therapy and I have all the right tools and I’m doing all the right things. I’m doing everything I’m supposed to: all the boundaries are healthy, all the communication is open and receptive, all the blame is gone. I’m doing all the right things; doing everything right and still going nowhere; what am I doing with my life?
• Getting back to sex… For one thing, I’ve never heard of The Straights qualifying sex— they seem to have a bright line in the sand (mixing metaphors like cocktails!) and know for certain whether something is Sex or Not Sex, Had or Not Had. When straight sex is involved, there doesn’t seem to be any “well, I sat on it, but after like a minute he decided he really wanted to use a condom, so he pulled it out and then we couldn’t find any condoms so we just played videogames instead”. But queer sex has that a lot (y’know, mutatis mutandis).
• If I had a job interview across town tomorrow, I wouldn’t even have enough money in my bank account to get enough gas in my car to drive there and back. But my friends are always bartenders and baristas so if I can catch a bus downtown I can drink for free, feed on scraps, bum a smoke, make a friend, kiss a boy. Life is manageable, but I feel like it’s not supposed to work like this, like I’m doing something wrong.
• I am a human being, not a human doing. That’s supposed to be an affirmation, a recognition that I am present, I am in the moment, I am living a life of light and honesty. But that’s not what it feels like it. It feels like a condemnation. It feels like sloth, a sin, a waste of resources, a waste of space, a waste of time. I’m not a human doing because I’m doing fuck-all these days.
• There are about one hundred and sixty entries in my queer-sex little black book (which is actually an Excel spreadsheet because, y’know, Capricorn/Virgo): eighty-five of them (give or take) record instances of oral/genital contact, about twenty of them are anal/genital contact, and, like, thirty-ish of them are things that involve no genitalia at all (as for the rest… let your mind wander). My little black book spreadsheet records all kinds of physical and emotional satisfaction and I feel great about it. I have no idea what sex will look like the next time I have it, and that’s cool. Sex isn’t a thing done (especially not on or to someone), but an expression, a feeling, a connection. It’s love— for myself, sometimes for the other person, always for who we are, together, as a community— and there’s no right or wrong way for it to go, there’s just us, in that moment, wherever, whatever. Thinking about sex by any other metric just seems exhausting.
• But… oh. Oh, I get it now. It’s a metaphor, a guide, a way. I’d call it the tao of queer sex, but eeehhhhh, no, let’s not do that. Just as there is no bright line between Sex and Not Sex, there is no bright line for living your life; there’s no Right/Wrong way to be you, just as there’s no Top/Bottom in truly queer sex. It’s cool to just be, yall.
You are not a human doing— never!— you are a human being, sharing in all things sensual and erotic, allowing yourself to find joy in the moment, no expectations; you have goals— yes— but no required outcomes that you’ve predetermined as success or failure. Queer sex as a way of life, y’all; queer love, queer power, queer moments, queer being.
♥doug
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Caveats!
1. Read Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power (link). I owe so much to the lesbians who have taught me, loved me, shared with me.
2. “queer sex” is defined as a way of participating in sex, not sex that a priori queer people engage in, especially considering gay men, who have some of the straightest sex I’ve ever seen.
3. “queer sex” is always and inherently consensual and communicative, in every moment.
4. “straight people” is defined as … fuck it— if you’re reading this you’re probably not all that straight, even if you’re a Kinsey-1 heterosexual.
5. If anyone knows what I can do about my poor spider plant, please drop me a line!
