Archive for the ‘dissapointment’ tag
Here we go again…
Please let me track down my camera from wherever it is here in town. Oy.
Tags: camera, dissapointment, lostRelated posts
Landmark…
Monday therapy-esque ramblings once again, like a twinge from a phantom limb.
At some point today went south for me. I maybe it was the onset of the rain, the sense that i was returning to the work week without a clear achievement to point to, or a more general feeling of disconnectedness. I started to like writing something cutting at some point, but then read someone else’s bile filled post and felt the futility of solacing myself with snark.
In any event a hefty percentage of what’s online can easily be translated as “Here’s why everything YOU like is WRONG.” Do I really need to add to pile?
Raw weather always gets to me. And today’s chill took me away from executing an art idea I came up with in the morning. Now that seems like a pretty flimsy excuse for inaction as I look at it. At least I’m getting some cooking done. In two hours there will be stew. Maybe a drawing too.
Perhaps I just don’t trust the choices I’m making, both short and long term. Of course there’s no way to pre-determine outcomes, but I don’t even feel like I’m laying the groundwork for the next couple of years. Hrmf,
Tags: daily photo, dissapointment, emotions, Self Sabotage, therapyRelated posts
Dang…
It may not look it in the photo, but that is one dry grapefruit. I don’t quite know what’s worse: the fact that it’s such a disappointing grapefruit, or the fact that I spent so much of the afternoon looking forward to that great grapefruit I was going to have. That’s how dangerous and transgressive a life I lead.
Maybe, since I just got my AARP application in the mail, I should just retire to Boca, where I can get a bag of TEN GRAPEFRUITS FOR $2 BUCKS AND EACH ONE AS BIG AS BESSIE’S NEW GRANDKID’S HEAD, Y’HEAR ME?
Okay, I’ll just settle down. Didn’t mean to get agitated.
Tags: aging, daily photo, dissapointment, foodRelated posts
New York to Kinksters: Don’t Be It, Damn It…
At last night’s TES meeting someone who has been around New York’s leather life for a long time talked about the “scene getting bland” in the midst of reminiscing about the Hellfire Club. Their observation was not dissimilar to those made many times in my circles, and for the most part everyone seems content to let it pass as a truism and move on. I was in a crabby mood however, and lobbed the observation that the the blanding of the scene is no accident, and that from where I stood, there has been a systematic attempt regulate non-conformist sexuality into invisibility in New York over the last twenty years. And then this afternoon a friend drew my attention to this article.
In terms of this specific case I should be honest: I haven’t been the hugest admirer of the way the previous Leather Weekend Street Festivals have been managed, but this story neatly encapsulates the issues at stake in New York right now. We are faced with a city administration that will do anything to make sure that the preening self regard of international consumption continues without disruption. Having “improved” the meat packing district and Chelsea by making it a safe haven for the overpriced inanities of Stella McCartney, hoteliers can dictate the terms under which their guests can be protected from the horrid prospect of encountering the people who populated the area for decades previous. Shopping must continue smoothly. Elegance and ease above all. Their response to the possibility of public sexuality? “Get a room. Hopefully one of our over priced ones.”
Why is this a big deal? After all, people can fire up their laptops and pickup a willing play partner on Recon or Fetlife. In some ways more people know about Kink than ever before. We have Folsom Street East every year. Private parties still happen around New York, and let’s face it, it’s more fun if it’s a little dirty and underground, right?
It’s a big deal because of the utter quietism that greeted this rollback of opportunity. New York currently has one and a half leather bars in a city of some eight million. One SM club that periodically issues cries for help. And no one is talking about it in a larger sense. Gay and Lesbian political groups have abandoned any attempts to talk about sexual behavior, in a bid to argue for gay people’s rights to replicate the nuclear family with the blessing of the state. NCSF, which we all should be a member and supporter of, has too few resources to do much more than put out fires, like last years rash of raids and closings of pro-dom houses and the attendant media frenzy.
Sex and urban life are places where we put our bodies on the line. There is a power to be gained from going outside away from the computer and seeing people do something you hadn’t thought of before, watching people in the exultation of endorphins and endurance, or witnessing the formal elegance of certain D/s couples, or being part of the antic fun of doing fucked up shit, that feels far different from having the “permission” to “do what we want behind closed doors”. When I am confronted by other people’s difference, when it’s inconvenient for me, when it disrupts my somnambulism, I am grateful. That’s what being a city dweller means. It does not mean being a mall shopping gated community denizen with better views and an account at “Design Within Reach”.
Shortly after moving back to New York in 1996, I was involved in the early days of something called Sex Panic!. As an organization it didn’t sustain itself, in part because (in my view) much of its activist stance was pitched at fighting a battle in academic queer studies circles, and it lacked a sense of how to really negotiate the ins and outs of community board politics, which would be the only way to address the development issues in New York. At least it had the will to argue for the sorts of things that few kinky people ever speak out for these days: the right to inhabit our own skin in public without shame or apology. It also was willing to draw the connections between the erosion of sexual freedoms with the erosion of public space. Guiliani presented the thuggish bullying face of that trend. Bloomberg presents the nannyish. Both of them agree that what is paramount good for the city is business, that development and displacement are somehow natural processes that only the irrational would think to question, and that making it all the same is making it all better. In every pot a CVS and every man a hedge fund manager and all that.
Commerce is one thing that makes cities great. Confusion is another. So the next time you’re thinking that you aren’t having as much fun as you used to, don’t blame it on the young folks who don’t know how to do things right or the Stand and Model crowd. Look instead at the shills in city hall who have been working so hard to make us all so much safer and saner. Did they do it with your consent? And if not when will you work up the nerve to tell them?
Tags: activism, anger, dissapointment, kink, new york life, politics, sexRelated posts
Dissapointment…
Today you visited me in the form of a cinnamon roll, disappointment. A roll that looked so rich and caramelized on the platter. A roll with promise.
But once bitten into you were stale, dry, crusty without being crispy, and the icing that coated your top was bland and hard. No yummy raisins lurked on your depths, only the ashen mockery of a morning treat.
You won this round disappointment, but but I vow that ultimate victory shall be mine.
Tags: daily photo, dissapointment, food