Hoarding

My boy says there is nothing sexy about hoarding. I was testing out the idea for a character in my sex book. Perhaps secretly she is a hoarder, one of those ones that seems normal until you happen to call at her house. I thought this might make her more human, add to her personality as a real character and not just a cardboard cut out. Hoarding is just not sexy he said to me and I begin to fret.

My family are hoarders. All of them. I am a hoarder in my own way. Before my boy moved in it was obvious from just looking at my flat. Now it is more ordered. My boy takes my things and puts them in their places. Sometimes he orders a clean out and I struggle with each magazine, each pone number, each business card. Throwing anything away is like plunging a blunt implement into my eyeball. Everything has a use and I have not used it. It is enough to make me weep from the waste of opportunity.

So hoarders are not sexy. We no longer have a proper mirror, but I look in the small reflective square that fell off the wall and I know that this is true. My hoarding is just one of the many unattractive qualities. My weight, my height, my anxiousness, my irritation, my hatred of all pop culture, my strident anger at poor taste, my highbrow reading, my insistence on thick rimmed glasses when I know it makes me look like a wanna be hipster, my lethargy, my aggression, my insistence on hanging around people old enough to be my children, my occasional crushes on said young folk. I could go on and on and on.

I throw out half my clothing till my wardrobe is packed but not overflowing. I cull a few of my million books, I clear a space on my desk, but these are not the only things I have to cull. Despite my anger at having to do so I suppose I must shed thirty kilos and find new friends or travel alone. I should begin to dress like a middle aged lady, although that is the hardest thing to imagine. But like any hoarder, even one of these things seems like a giant mountain, looming, waiting for me to climb.

wake

I wake into a sense of something missing. One small, amorphous thing is gone and can never be replaced. It is like a death this little loss of love only unlike with a death there is no funeral, no wake, no fellow mourners. This thing is private and for an audience of one. I sit alone with it, carrying it like a dead baby heavy and low in my body. I drag myself from bed and stumble into a day, knowing there will be more days thrown at me. a barrage. I keep my vision focused on the next step and the next, because to look ahead would be enough to make me crawl back under the covers where I would stay. As long as I am able.

Time Lapse

Those time lapse photographs that show a flower opening, a seed sprouting, a dandelion clock unfolding. I know that Z and Two Noughts is pretentious and dubious but I think I will always love the time lapse photographs of decay. No I say. Stop. Now. Here, in the spring of your life, remember that the shutter keeps on clicking. The body blooms and puffs out and wrinkles up and turns over on itself. Flesh becomes meat, meat becomes refuse, refuse in its time is cleared away.

My time has come and gone. Gone now. Remember gone. At some point the others see you as you do not see yourself, ridiculous, overblown, a cheap drag show parody of your overt sexuality.

Gone now.

Leave them to their young people's dreaming. Remember this. I can't keep repeating it. Leave them to their unrequited longing and their tedious games of 'come here go away'. You are too smart for all that now, too wiley. You are on the turn, you have moved from stop motion joy to stop motion regret. Decay with some semblance of your dignity. Recover what is left of it and uncoil your arthritic frame and just walk on.

Resolutions

I must read at least 12 erotic fiction books in 2012. This is work not play, and yet the list is kind of tricky:
The Story of O by Pauline Rega
The Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
100 Days of Sodom by de Sade (although I might do Justine instead)
The memoir of Josephine Metzenbacher by Felix Salten (who wrote Bambi. I love this. I was obsessed by his books when I was a kid)
Ada or Ardor by Nabokov
The Story of the Eye by Bataille (which is my favourite erotic text)
Fanny Hill by John Cleland,
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,
Sadopaidea by Anonymous
Helene and Desire by Alexander Trocchi
The Tropic of Cancer (or Capricorn) Henry Miller
The Golden Lotus by Jin Ping Mei (suggested to me by the wonderful Eliot Weinberger)

I keep thinking I may have missed something, some key text I should be looking at. I am also not too excited about a couple of them, Henry Miller I have tried before and he feels like a dirge. I feel like there should be more surrealists texts in this list so if anyone knows of another surrealist erotic novel let me know. It is also very boysy but I suppose Paulina Regae and Anais Nin are strong enough to counter that. Anyway as I plunge into the fray y'all must be my guide. Happy 2012.

New Book New Year

You are inordinately obsessed by virginity, that first time. The boundary between innocence and experience, and yet it is nothing but a tiny curtain of flesh torn painfully. The cock in the cunt is nothing but a placement of flesh, like a flower arrangement or the fruit in a bowl. Still you linger on character after character, women who all give in to their longing without breaching the barricade of flesh.

2012 is yet to be torn open. I have my finger poised firmly in the velvety folds of flesh. You would call it honey, this seepage, one year leaking over into another. I would rip and tear it, you take your time, easing the folds apart, looking into the orifice of a new year, sniffing the sweet nectar of something not yet tasted.

I bury my teeth in the people of the past. I, carnivorous friend, take great bites out of loved ones and come up gasping and still hungry. I am buried up to my neck in the past. I am furious and loving all at once, and lustful, always lustful. I want to use the new year before it has taken its first breath. I want to be rid of this virginity that you value so highly. I want to get amongst it.

I have a superstition about new years. What I do on the eve will echo inside me for the entire year. So there are absences that will be noted. I will cry a little that you did not think it necessary to be with me at this time. I will at some point become lonely. I will write for a while, and eat well and drink a martini, glasses clinking off the potential of my future, and all the while I am wondering if I will survive yet another year. I have been high for too long. I anticipate the fall. I am holding it at bay and have been for days already. Not this year. Please. Not this superstition-full day of all the days. Let it pass in peace. Let me have words of love for the ones I care for. Just tonight and tomorrow night, please, keep the nightmares away.

grandmother

when she dies Brisbane will flood. She has been holding the water back with sheer will power. she is the cause of all the good things that have happened to me. when she dies everything I do will be covered in dust. I will still put in the effort but the magic will evaporate. people will not like me. they will see my meanness peeking out through the cracks in my aging skin. they will see my skill at manipulation. they will see behind the thin veneer to the lack of solid structure underneath. when she dies, I think, and I feel my chest tightening with my panic because I know the world will end. she is all that has been keeping it together and when she dies we die, you die. we all die. because when she dies it is the end.

sex books

Seems I will be forever writing sex books no matter how I try to resist.

Sex is at the heart of all adult human interactions and I sidle up to the subject yet again. A small struggle I suppose, because I wanted to prove that this was not all that I can do. The non-sex novels lie like taxidermied birds in my drawer. Lifeless not because they are wrecked or ugly, but because they cannot fly. I care for them. They are my first loves. I am even worried for the one that is wobbling like something newly hatched on the page. Even with a tentative nod from my editor I am still frightened for it. What if it remains stuffed and staring out with all the other stories of my heart? They only want the sex it seems. I love the sex too, and secretly I know that is what I will be remembered for. I can feel myself becoming excited by the new project. Aroused, perhaps. Surely that is the word for it.

I race back to the sexless newborn books, their wings only just beginning to unfurl. I breathe all the life I can in a few short weeks into their fledgling lungs. I hope you fly my loves. I hope you are ready for the world, because come 2012 I must race back towards the world of sex once more.