A Great Place For Waterwings And Cannonballs

But the 100 hour test made me realize some things about the way I run my life. Not things I didn’t know at least a bit already, but it definitely brought them to light. I live my life like a robot. I follow strict routines and patterns day in and day out. I know how long nearly every task I do will take to perform, I could draw a map of where I go in my apartment every day and how many times I go to each room. I know pretty accurately what I wore and ate most of this week and last. I could probably go three weeks back if I wanted to. But I don’t. You get the idea. I love trying new things, I have experimental taste in food. I travel to different places in the city simply to see what they’re like. I do my best to spend time with people I don’t know very well, thought there aren’t many opportunities for this. New experiences keep my life from being something exceedingly routine. 

The problem is that I’ve let the sexual activities in my life become exceedingly routine. Busting a loadº about six times a week just worked for me. It kept my mind (mostly) off sex when I needed to be thinking about other things. I got a better sleep. But it gets fucking boring. So I try out different techniques, it gets better for about  a week, and then it gets boring again. My system has outgrown it’s usefulness. It was put in place so that thinking about getting laid wouldn’t get in the way of doing homework or keeping the apartment proper. But the problem has become the opposite. Originally sexuality was obstructing my life, now my life is obstructing my sexuality. regular masturbation robbed me of the motivation to go out and get laid. 

Ok here is my shocking admittance: I haven’t gotten laid since moving to Montreal (a year and three months). Fuck. That just blows. It’s my own fault though. There have been plenty of opportunities. I just haven’t been willing to go to the effort. It’s been practically handed to me, and I just though “well why bother, if she wants to date I won’t have time for that, and I’m kinda tired right now anyways.” This has gotten terrible. The combination of laziness and logic and responsibility that rules my brain has done some serious damage to my game. This has got to stop right here. I’ve got to stop watering down my motivation and passion with routine and masturbation. Um except it has been quite a while now and my 100 hour test ended 45 minutes ago. This might be a good place to end.

?Yes I have capitalized on this on other occasions.

?I was going to try and fit as many expressions for this in the journal, but it might get tiresome, and it also exceeds the scope of this 

composition.

Somehow during the course of my evening, the question of whether or not anal sex was a vanilla sex act came up. My roommates and I were at a loss. Anal isn’t naturally occurring, save an occassionally miss*, but neither are blowjobs or anything else anyone does, so whether or not cavemen did it is a moot point. We’re not fostering the next generation by doing it, but it happens.

In a recent polling of friends via drunken Never Have I Ever, about 90% had tried anal. But all of them had tried it in long term relationships. Anal is a pretty hard thing to pull off in the short term, or even a one night stand. It might even require an in-depth conversation to initiate. 

With the advent of the internet pretty much every fetish is well known, and what might have been bizarre pre-1993 is now an admittable kink. Ah! I just remembered how the conversation came up in the first place: There was a segment of a variety show featuring clips of armpit fetishists on youtube. One of my roommates admitted that armpits were pretty good, and the conversation progressed. Personally I think armpit is just an accessory to side boob, but that’s just me. But to hear my roommate admit it, he being the traditionalist that he is, was surprising.With every kink receiving so much exposure, and all but the most outlandish being acceptable, is anything non-vanilla† anymore? 

The resolution I came to was that anything that might require conversation to initiate is non-vanilla. If you have to explain it to someone, it isn’t vanilla sex. 

What is considered standard sex is sort of the same as what’s considered standard good looks. People think that every guy wants Scarlett Johanson (meh) and every girl wants Brad Pitt (wicked!) and that everyone wants missionary with passionate kisses. Of course this is not the case, and standard sex doesn’t quite do it for some, or probably most, people. Someone might want Kevin Spacey beating them up in a chipmunk suit. And that’s totally okay as long as Kevin’s into it. Or if he’s getting something in return. But uh, that’s a totally different thing, and my thoughts on the Price of Admission are pretty much the same as Dan Savageº, and I certainly couldn’t do justice to it. I’m gonna go eat a Drumstick.

*Really that is a terrible excuse and a sneaky way to check whether or not your partner is open to what you want to do. 

†Chocolate? Can we make a list of kinks, group them toghether and designate everyone’s kink as an ice cream flavour? Everyone could just tell their potential partner their flavour and if they matched up, then all would be well. Is there anything argots can’t do for subcultures?

º http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ObrFwjesno&feature=channel_page

My family wasn’t super conservative but I haven’t ever really talked with them about sex with my parents. I retract that, there were two occassions. First one was when I was about 14, watching a National Geographic special with my dad, and he said “look Jeff, those two elephants are having sex!” and I said “uh huh?” and that was about as close as I ever got to The Talk. 

The other time the word sex came up in conversation with my parents was during a screaming match. This is when I was 17 and they were convinced I was rebelling and living a life of debauchery when I was staying out late*. I yelled “Listen, haven’t done drugs or had sex so get off my back” and that quelled whatever fears they had.

All my friends were just as clueless I was. I was a quiet kid and certainly didn’t talk to any of the kids who might know what sex is at the tender age of 7. The dream was this: I was on the playground, and there was a boy and a girl who said that they loved each other. I told them that they didn’t really love each other, they said they really did. I told them that to prove that they were in love, the boy would have to put his penis in vagina†. They didn’t because I guess they weren’t really that convinced of their love and the dream ended. It’s a little weird, but after that it just sort of made sense.º

I’m curious as to whether humans know the mechanics of sex  instinctually or not. In prehistoric times I imagine that kids would have seen adults fucking (or I guess it might have still been considered mating if we’re going that far back). But if someone were raised in a vaccuum, and were presented with a member of the opposite sex, would they know what to do?

Do kids need the sex talk? The internet doesn’t seem to think so. Of course with the advent of the internet, I guess kids can just search it. Post internet kids have it easy. But most sites I found said to parents that they didn’t need to give their kids a talk. That instead of forcing it upon their kids they should instead “cultivate an atmosphere where the child is comfortable to ask about sex.” I don’t think I agree with this. It sounds great in theory, but I think that most people couldn’t 

cultivate-an-atmosphere their way out of a wet paper bag. It seems like lazy 

parenting. I had and have a great relationship with my parents, but I certainly wouldn’t have felt comfortable bringing up the topic of masturbation.

I think parents need to talk about sex with their children. It might feel painfully awkward, but the alternative is worse. I don’t know anyone who really got The Talk, at least not until long after they had become sexually active. Every guy I’ve talked to felt immense shame about masturbation, even though it’s perfectly healthy and normal. A girl a know was convinced she was dying when she got her first period. Another broke her hymen while riding a horse and had no idea what had happened. The talk is bad but the alternative is worse. We can’t just hope our kids will learn it in a dream.

*I wasn’t. Instead of getting trashed and boning through my adolescence, I read graphic novels and watched cult cartoons. It didn’t get me very far in high school but it gave me a bit of a head start when it comes to knowing what’s cool to know about in your early 20s as a beta male.

†It was all very PG, I certainly did not see them fuck in the dream. I also seemed to be confused about the correlation between love and sex.

ºI also dreamed that the ghost of one of my high school classmates was haunting me, and found out later that he had died in a boating accident a week prior. And I watched Ferris Bueler’s Day Off the day before John Hughes died. But honestly it’s all a coincidence. Probably tells us that sometimes strange shit happens.

I usually appreciate good looks in men, and even sort of have taste. It might not be because I’m attracted too them, but for the sake of comparison. Guys after puberty are all sorts of competition for each other, and bros before hoes and all that aside, a lot of the time male friendships are based on competitive

behaviour. Guys play videogames or sports or see who can drink the most to see who is the best. Because eventually it all comes down to being alpha male. My friend suggested to me that I might appreciate good looks in men the same way I might appreciate a good make of car or a sturdy shovel, but I don’t neccesarily think that’s true. Sturdiness is not the primary factor.

I also can appreciate a man’s body from an artistic perspective. Guys are always better to draw than girls. Maybe that’s because I know a guy’s body better, but to me men are cardboard boxes and women are plastic bags. If you have remote talent, you can draw a cardboard box and it will look damn good. It’s solid and mechanical and shapely. Women are like plastic bags, you can draw them, but unless your very talented, they’ll end up looking flat or fake. But if you nail it it’ll look fucking great. But I digress. Attention to men’s looks certainly isn’t sufficient reason to reconsider one’s sexual orientation.

Throughout my life I have always had close male friends, as most boys do. But I know I occasionally experience love beyond platonic brotherly love*. It would fall closer to the romantic love end of the spectrum, where I could think to myself that I wouldn’t mind this person being the most important person in my life. I can think of several guy friends I know right now who feasibly fit into this category.

On the flipside, there are very few women I feel the desire to be this close to. Rarely do I have the desire to enter into a relationship with any girl, not out of shyness or fear but just a lack of want for it. Logically to me I would pair up much better with another guy. However the crux of the problem is this: I don’t want to fuck a guy. There just isn’t that urge to just jump any guy who seems attractive to me. I see a guy and think “man, that looks like a cool guy, we should hang out I bet we’d get along great.” But no chemical thrust to fuck them. I tried watching gay porn but realized that I don’t even like most heterosexual porn† so it certainly wouldn’t be a good litmus test.

I went on a diatribe about my problems to my roommate, and they suggested that I just have a really good eye for male relationships, and maybe a bad eye for female relationships. close friends are just people you love and don’t want to fuck, and significant others are people you love that you do want to fuck.

When it comes to my own sexuality or anyone else’s, people should be a little more introspective than they probably are. Obsessing over it is bad, but the worse thing is not be to think about what you really seek out in in a partner. I haven’t really had many good, comfortable sexual experiences in the past. Either I didn’t know the girl or didn’t like the girl or we were somewhere uncomfortable in our relationship° or I felt pressure to perform beyond my abilities. And ultimately that all leads to a great desire now to have a simple, familiar, safe and comfortable relationship. Or maybe I just need a man.

*There a word for that, just googled it but cannot find the word I’m looking for. Platonic is friendly love, eros is erotic love right? There are two other latin words for kinds of love: The love of god and 

romantic love, but I can’t remember what they are. There might be a family one too.

†Why is no one attractive ever in porn? It just doesn’t really happen. I now spend $4 a month for Suicide Girls, and it’s certainly worth it. Even the articles are fucking great. It’s also a beautiful and functional website.

°Or just somewhere uncomfortable.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have always asked a bit more from their fans than other bands. 2006's Show Your Bones was a folky acoustic departure drastically different from their art punk debut Fever To Tell.On It's Blitz  the Yeah Yeah Yeahs change their style yet again. If the synth soaked single Zero worried you, with it's 80s reminiscent vocal melodies and static song structure, then you might have a little trouble digesting the album on first listen. But first things first, It's Blitz might have the most viscerally satisfying album art ever. It's worth picking up the album just for the hand-crushing-egg cover and CD depicting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on a pizza.  Open that pizza box and have a listen.

The first three tracks may be troublesome for those of us who are not dance music fans. They're indisputably synth dance tracks, and though they reveal a before unknown side of the YYYs, it seems as though some of the band's chemistry is squashed underneath the looming foot of club music. Karen O's vocals shine through, but Nick Zinner is not quite as inspired on synth as he is on guitar. Likewise Brian Chase's syncopated pattern drumming is absent and is mostly replaced by the monotonous kick-snare-kick-snare beat ubiquitous in dance music. The key to enjoying these tracks is getting a very nice set of speakers or turning your headphones way up and listening to that stellar production. Nick Launay and David Andrew Sitek (of fellow New York band TV on the Radio) do and absolutely epic job recording the album. The mixes, backing tracks and meticulous tweaking really do make the album.

After It's Blitz's initial dance assault, the album becomes a bit more YYYs veteran friendly.  Skeletons serves as the soft, sweet eye of the storm before we get to the meat of the mid-album. The Juicy Dull Life is a perfect track for fans of Show Your Bones and those aggressive guitar riffs and buildups make it one of the standout tracks of It's Blitz. Runaway gives us a chunky 5 minutes of  ominous piano balllad, eventually swelling to orchestral grandeur. Tunde Adebimpe (also of TV on the Radio) accompanies Karen O on a Bee Gees style disco romp in Dragon Queen, which, although bizarre, adds breath and variety to the album. Also included are acoustic versions of four of the tracks, which beefs up the scrawny 10 song album, and will certainly be enjoyed by fans of Karen O's side project, Native Korean Rock. Ultimately, if you've survived the blitz of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs change in styles over the years, or if you've never heard them before and are looking the get your feet wet, pick up It's Blitz and dance 'till your dead.