Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Ruminations

[apologizing profusely for the yawning chasms between updates]

I loathe flying. I guess I could go so far as stating that I hate most every form of public transportation, from riding the Grey Dog province-to-province to any local city transit. I remember catching the Greyhound from Alberta to Quebec, two and half straight days of sitting cramped between rows of felt seats ornamented in rows like crooked teeth in a noisy mouth. At first, it's an adventure, and you meet people who won't be getting off the bus until near the same time as you. Then you gradually realize you hate those people. If you're like me, every rest stop is a set of dips or pushups off the rear trailer hitch or chin-ups in the bathroom off the stall door while people eye you like you're a psychopath, and falling into a hermitic state of isolation on the furthest seat blocking out their ignorant vibrations. Probably while listening to Godspeed! You Black Emperor, or I dunno, Tool or the Black Angels (submersive shit, you know?).

I have this habit, of starting things off on a dark and sour note, don't I?

My apologies, it's the holidays and as much as I will forever love Christmas and the Muppets this is one of those particular times of year that still manages to exert itself on my nerves like a stress-inoculation exercise. I just recently got myself a two room apartment in a townhouse in the Ottawa Glebe and looking forward to moving in and having nothing to do but collect unemployment insurance, attempt fruitlessly at hoarding that money away for studies in the Fall, and working out like some sort of savage.

I think the main engine driving my perpetual ire is the fact that due to this being the Christmas holidays and me being stuck in the backwater sinkhole my parents refer to as a home I haven't been laid or even really pursued being laid and it's driving me fucking bat shit. They define satyriasis as the male-affected form of nymphomania and although my thoughts on sex-addiction ruminate more or less on the wholesale dismissal of personal responsibilities towards one's significant other there are times where I ponder its sultry implications. I swear to God I have beat off like eight times a day and gorged myself on pornography to a point where it's getting to be saturating. I really, really love sex. My friend M generally feels the same and we really have an outstanding time when I visit her up in Alberta when she's single or feeling adulterous. We connect on the weird and I think spectacularly intense way that freaks and fuck-ups do, exchanging personal experiences and shrouded intimacies while lying wholly exposed on whatever mattress made itself convenient for our dynamic forms of conversation. She once admit to me that she'd decided to do the craiglist prostitution thing, why slave away getting her ass pinched by losers in a dead-end town serving drinks when she can make a month's worth of profit in a single night. I find myself truly comforted by the fact that she backed out of this at the last minute (litterally at the john's door) as fast as her feet could carry her, because she is one of those people who leave footprints on your heart and I care about her and know all to well the kind of emotional stigma which can develop from that kind of shit. I occasionally think about doing porn, or at least looking into it, with the grotesque amounts of adult material I've sifted through on the Internet you come across enough male "stars" with small dicks or weak ass motherfuckers who can't get hard even though two gorgeous models are litterally kissing each other around their dicks -and let's be frank, or at least I will, blowjobs are probably the greatest fucking thing in the world. I would sell my left arm for a great blowjob. But back to porn, I worry about what I assume everyone has about that line of work. It's pretty much it's own form of prostitution.

Sometimes it seems legitimate though. And realistically I've done some pretty despicable shit in my life in the pursuit of sex or at least in its service. I've implemented ball-gags, cuffs, chinese rope, once savaged a chick across the face because she wanted me to beat her around, have cheated and been cheated on and been 'the other guy', had sex on beaches and walking trails in hotels-by-the-hour, campus dorm-rooms and common-areas, stair-wells, alleyways... I once fucked a woman, Dorianna (I'll never forget because it was a unique name), who I met only because I sent a text message to the wrong number, while her three-month old played with inter-locking paper cups on a motel room floor. I did my best to show him that you could pop the cups out of each other when you stacked them while his mother did her best to take the entire length of my cock down the hallway of her throat  before she slid herself down on top of me. There was a manic, desperate edge to the sex which was electrifying. It was one of the hottest sessions I've ever fucking had, but that's still a pretty white-trash piece of shit thing to do. I mean maybe that shit flied back when we still threw feces at each other but it somehow seems wrong, now. Sometimes I wonder if we ever really evolved passed the baser instincts our living predecessors exhibit in the zoo - I mean you ever listen to the Jason Ellis radio talk show? Enough women seem to have grown up secretly fucking throw pillows or action figures or crucifixes to satisfy the desperate hunger of carnal fulfillment while men either fuck teddy-bears in their juvenile years or find whatever they can to masturbate with or agree to have sex with the most debasing or human examples just because, hey, fuck it right?, that sometimes watching chimpanzees fuck coconuts makes epiphanic sense on the Darwinian scale.

Assholes keep a count of how many women they've slept with. Tucker Max (an asshole of outstanding calibre) once said "when you hit the three-digits you start forgetting whole women entirely. I'm definitely at that point. This isn't a macho elaboration, and I think you'd be surprised to know what dirty, freaky shit most people you know have gotten themselves into and never confessed. One of the "few" forms of pillow talk which drive me fucking crazy is the all-too-famous question "how many girls have you been with" or vice-versa, like the number defines you as a person. The fact being that I'm here with you in the now and the more partners I've had the better chance you have at getting off more than once you goddamn stupid. There is so much bullshit stigma attached to promiscuity. And at the same time so much tragic deception. The proverb the "grass is greener on the other side" is the more true for it, I think. My friend Dave, who is currently married and has been with less women than I have fingers on one hand, constantly states he lives "vicariously" through me while I do the exact same with him, envying the stable and loving relationship with all of its ups and downs and uncertain futures. Down another of life's roads I might have been living in Newfoundland in a cramped two-story and completely purple house running a stroller up and down the winding and hilly avenues of St-John's for exercise and I still wish it was so today. Life sucks ass back and forth and for everybody, but I think that's what makes it so god-damned endearing. Sometimes I wonder if I'm only at peace when I'm at war, despite harrowing memories of fear and bloodlust and monotony and heat and drudgery and political bullshit. That's off topic, really.

When I take a step back from the pub-crawling and public-sex and revert to my more subversive cinephile and literary roots I always find an appreciation for fictitious (or historical) personas who, through power or fame or fantasy, detach themselves emotionally from their human brethren. On my return to the 'world' passing through Cyprus and finding myself at, yes, a "cabaret" while Russian goombas lit my cigarettes and offered me drinks as expensive as handjobs I sat myself next to a Ukrainian women who was clearly a sex-slave. For the previous week I found myself ignoring or becoming bored with pretty much every piece of ass who flitted into view around the bar-scene but this woman was captivating. We exchanged stories, she appeared wide-eyed and curious as to my immediately preceding experiences in the Middle-East while I was enthralled about how she had ended up where she was and her kid back in the Ukraine. I paid 200 euro to take her back to a brothel/hotel and we fucked non-stop for like three goddamn hours, I came in her mouth and wherever else she demanded, we moved into the shower, et cetera. There was a haunting kind of softness to the whole thing. That all changed at aruond 6am when two attackers tried to break my door in (I assume to roll me, so I went over the balcony), but that's another story. I have this complex for distressed women and it gradually seems to worsen, and I find myself dismissing normal women for single mothers, strippers, prostitutes... this may all stem from my formerly failed relationship. I guess deep down I just want to change someone's world. Isn't that fucking sappy? Ugh.

We humans are fucking insane.

Ta,

Gin

Saturday, December 11, 2010

"Cheers"

You know it was only a few months ago I found myself sitting hunched over one of those big, mahogany-looking group tables on the bottom floor at Patty Boland's in the Ottawa Byward Market, staring at the ice cubes jostling silently with each other the bottom of another empty gin & tonic and feeling perhaps lonelier and more miserable than any one person could condense inside a frail human body all at once. A week or so later I would find myself back in Afghanistan, which, much like the life and times I'd left behind, had already become a much different place anyway. That night, like virtually every night of my chaotic vacation-time, all in different cities and provinces, I spent thinking of a beautiful girl in a blue dress who would wear her house-key around her neck on a bath-chain, because otherwise she would 'probably' lose it. I thought about other things, like why I wasn't being shot at and wondering if I ever had been, but mostly I thought about dark eyes and a smile that made me feel like I was six-years-fucking-old-happy and playing in cardboard-box castles. And more importantly I brooded on how amazing I was at fucking up, the one thing I seemed to get so right, along with the boozing, debauchery, womanizing, death-defying and the occasional game of Mario Party. I have no fucking idea why I'm writing this. Mostly, I think, because I am currently sitting alone - which is an important detail - in a shitty hotel room in Montreal, watching drifts of snow float lazily around the orange glowing of street-lamps, I have to wake up three hours from now, and I'm still thinking about that girl and hating myself for weeping and wanting everything back when I think a more sober part of knows it never will be.

I guess I'm starting this little 'journal of a gentleman bastard' on a bit of a down note, but take that with a grain of salt - I'm in a down fucking mood, I'm listening to "Swelling", a song by Sarah Jaffe, and the riffs and vocals are cutting me like razors, and I want to get more drunk and fuck something but North America has this thing about serving alcohol passed two-am unlike it's more civilized counterparts in Europe. I'm reveling in being a lush. The laws I broke vindictively in the impossible hours of the morning on the island of Cyprus would really just be scraping the service. And you'll hear about that, and you'll hear about a ton of shit, I expect.

I'm a writer, I guess. I say 'I guess' because I have this thing where I've never even attempted to publish anything or even finish anything in order to get it published. I may just be a soldier, but I don't even do that full-time. I'm a man of enormous appetites and inflated virtues and amorphous commitments. I love to learn and procrastinate, fight and converse, write and destroy, drink and fuck and all the while wishing I was married (which was, I'll bite, a very new wish to my ears) and had a kid on the way. I never really thought about writing a blog, either. Not until I read 'Confessions of a College Call Girl', which is a visceral and ironic window into exactly what it advertises. I dated a call girl, and related deeply. Fuck me, right? I used to love reading about the shenanigans of 'Tucker Max' until I realized that nothing he did was really extravagant at all and quite a few people could compete with that debauch story-telling, myself among them (and I suspect, that really is why everyone loves it). This whole thing is probably going to end up sounding pretentious, I'm only 22 for crying out loud; but let it, if it does, and if it doesn't thank God someone else is convinced.

In any case... this is me. I went to university as an English major, spent two years in Lethbridge, Alberta basically pursuing every vice I could and hemorrhaging as much money as I could towards everything but the pursuit of a Bachelor's degree, the resulting tens of thousands in student debt landing me on a combat-tour of the Middle East with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment, from which I only recently returned. I can be a borderline alcoholic, have spent my share of nights vomiting uproariously into toilets, boudoirs, bathtubs, gutters, and occasionally all over myself. My drink, is gin. Bombay Sapphire. With tonic, a slice of lime, and a slice of lemon. I think every man should have 'his' drink, maybe not something he limits himself to but at least something he can comfortably start off a night with. I smoke. I smoke 'John Player Standard', because my dad smokes 'John Player Standard' and I will never forget the smell. But, if I feel like a smooth ride, 'Belmonts' will always be the Cadillac of cigarettes. I love women, and I love sex, and I pursue and will continue to pursue sexuality until I probably get run over by an ambulance. I love travelling - I've been all across Canada, lived in more cities than I can ever manage to squeeze into the 'past residences' section of any job or school application. I've been overseas, into the United States, and god willing I'll see the rest of the planet one bar at a time. I engage in astronomical highs and morbid lows, I seem completely unable to ever do the right thing at the right moment, am spectacular at fucking up and somehow coming off as charming while doing so. I can be petty and vindictive, passive-aggressive when I should speak my mind and an emotional time-bomb when I should restrain myself. I'm about as big a klutz in relationships as I am in real life.

All this to say I'm going to talk about sex, I'm going to talk about drinking, war, rage, jealousy, relationships, sex, and drinking. And I'm curious as to who is going to give a fuck and read it.

In any case, ladies and gentlemen, it's Gin O'clock, so let's get started. Just let me light up, first.