So long story short, Friday, my roommate believes the small and apparently painful bites she has found on herself are bed bug bites… again.  This was the hardship of the summer and this time around, we simply have to address by removing books, and fabric to a reasonable degree, to plastic bags, and calling for a treatment – we can’t do what we did this summer again, either of us. She calls the landlord who hates us, he says we can break our lease, so tired is he of bedbug news, and I overhear her making her case that this isn’t anybody’s fault.   He, it seems, is saying the same thing he always says: “We’ve had that place for twenty-five years and we’ve never…” I yell out, “It has nothing to do with the last twenty five years!” He calls me later in the day (I am the “good cop”.  Honestly I am very kind and measured with every horrible fool I must deal with after my six years in Astoria.  It’s the easiest tactic for me.  I think I get screwed over sometimes for being “too nice” but I’d get fucked over as much trying to be “harder” and in a way I’d be fucked twice because I’d be trying to be something I’m not. I stand my ground- I don't back away from obvious sense, and reiterating it as many times as I must, but I don’t throw out the baby that I’m small and pretty and these landlords for the most part are old-country enough they can’t show me their dirty core motivations, or backtrack as soon as they do if I just make the right face. I know. I’m no fool. But I appreciate if we all stay on the social niceties page.  Without this face, I’d be a whole other person… something of a frightening idea. ) and an imbecile exterminator comes to really and truly drench our house and all our things in chemicals - “once and for all” as it were. My roomie gets the hell out to meet her guy, a new guy since the last time we went through this, but, ah not so unfamiliar. I am not fucking anyone right now so when we do these insanely toxic treatments, there’s no go-to place for me.  It’s not her responsibility.  I feel for her that she is the one experiencing these bites. But at any rate I find myself stranded in Astoria.  When I brave return to my house six hours after the treatment I find the air indoors wholly un-breathe-able, drink a bottle of wine outside and call D-------, to tell him I "actually have a big favor to ask": would he pick me up? Can I sleep at his house?  First my stepmom tells me to get a hotel room.  I appreciate the advice, but no.  “One of those websites for hostels or deals” – I mean, there must be a better way. (you know I love hotels, but to find a deal I'd have to internet search in the toxified house, take a train into manhattan- it was already 8:00pm. A hotel?)

Status updates you can’t post to facebook:  A diminished sex drive compared to say, my twenties, is a blessing and a joy.  Late in the summer I went on a “The last straw. That’s it.” okcupid date.  A lunatic whose clothes smelled musty, who I met late at night downtown, he was working the soundboard at “Under St Marks”. A group of Canadians, singers, comedians, had the place for the night. As I shimmied into the backmost aisle seat in the underground pit, I palmed my cell phone, and held it low under my chair.  He texted “Hi.”  I listened to the curly haired stand up comic on “stage” implying incest, screwing up his joke, riffing on his name, his uncle, incest again and texted my “date”, “have you seen ‘Fame?’”  He texted back, “No. Why?” I texted nothing.  He texted to come over to the booth which I did between acts. I whispered “Which dial is his monitor? I’m obsessed with monitors” He said “You just want to show off your knowledge.” I smiled.  Not the wittiest retort although true. When the show was done, I smoked out back with the Canadians. Ky, my date, commenced giving me massages (which could not relax me since I didn’t know yet if I wanted him touching me).  I spent the next few hours trying to relax, tensing to his advances, trying to relax enough to enjoy the adventures he sought for us, explaining that we wouldn’t be sleeping together over 2:00am coffee, then pressed against onlookers at a Doug E Fresh show(!) and then fleeing as Ky frowned.  The cab departs.  I realize I am not dating any more.

The realization I am not dating has yet to give me anything but pleasure in thinking it. 

Early in the summer, before I wasn’t dating, D------- took me to the beach in a rented car.  The trip was a great success, and at the time, I’d laid myself a gauntlet that a male person would bring me somewhere in a car with-God-as-my-witness-I’ll-never-go-hungry-again style.  After the beach, it was back to D-------’s house. (We dated a couple years ago but it ended when he yelled at me about his workday on the phone. There’s an old blog post about it!)  I had my period which, though bloody and messy, meant I was at least feeling like sex.  I blew his enormous penis.

Break.  That was a funny break-point. I’m in my made bed now, in my aired out bedroom, wanting to get to my point. 

That would be: that day, the idea of his huge cock and blowing it turned me on.  I know I blow his mind when I’m into it. How wouldn’t I?  As far as intercourse, well that’s oookay.  I come too fast and then have to sort of put up with the huge thing.  Sad to say, these are the facts. It’s a relief when the whole affair becomes too bloody. I’ve come and we can clean up and relax now.

So we try this again.  What a perfect thing right? He doesn’t drink, he has wheels, he loves to read, he isn’t asking for a girlfriend, he has an enormous appendage, he’s nice to women.  I travel out to his place in summer heat – an hour or more on the subway, what he calls “Prospect Heights” I insist is “Crown Heights”.  I’m hungry and upon arrival realize I don’t know what I’m doing there.  I don’t want to have sex.  Now I’m just at his house. We eat a little, he goes and buys me a bottle of wine and opens it with a drill, we eat, go to bed, and I tense to his touch, toss and turn with horrible dreams all night.  He is angry at me in my dreams for not having sex.  We have long conversations about what a confusing and unfair person I am.  When I wake up and push him away, then touch him lightly, feeling sorry for these pushes, I try to explain and he lets me dig a nonsense grave.  “It doesn’t feel natural.  It feels to me… today. It feels to me…. Now…. That I don’t know, it just isn’t right… just to be so reasonable about it – like I can’t do this. I can’t just kind of say ‘You’re here. You’re fine.  Lets have sex so we both get some’  Are you angry? Does that make sense to you?”

I think he was kind of angry or at least rejected-feeling.  I don’t know.  After I pushed him off again and explained how I was feeling, and I think told him that I wanted a boyfriend to be with, not a buddy, that I needed to feel… something, he had a Eureka moment “So none of that is my fault!” Me: That’s right. Yes.  It isn’t you at all.  We went for brunch and I played some jewel game on his iphone and it felt like being in a sexless relationship.  The kind I’ve nearly never had, always too busy having sexual connections that arrive at me feeling agonizingly in need or want, or fucked up relationships, always sexually strong, and then everything else smacks us, knocks two crazies out cold.  But I feel like an asshole who won’t touch his penis, no matter what I’ve said. And eventhough he seems totally fine having realized it’s not his fault.

Anyway, maybe you think this is a lot of writing all just to say “there’s no chemistry” or “you’re just not that into him”.  I feel like there’s an interesting thing to articulate though.

I called D------- last night and he was there for me.  He took me to a diner, he stopped at a bodega so I could get some Claritin. When we got to his house he vacuumed up all the cat hair and downloaded Real Time so we could watch it.  As we laid in bed after the show was finished, he touched my breast and I didn’t like it.  He went out to read on his couch so I could sleep and came back in around 5am and we only lightly cuddled, mostly just slept next to one another.  I was relieved. I didn’t want to have sex.  If I did, I would have felt like I was for all those reasons listed above.

I love my diminished sex drive of the past few months.  It’s serving me enormously well.  When’s the last time this blog went months without me really liking someone a.k.a, often a.k.a, having had a lot of sexual chemistry with him, and then feeling disappointed when he was pleased with that great sex time and that alone, or some other angst like that.  That last straw date and really feeling like it was the last straw was amazing.  I like how I feel.  It seems to me, yet, a shame, that if I ever was – and I think I once was, evidence suggests… - I now am not able to get myself going for someone just because, hey, that’s hot.  I especially feel a little sorry if he went out of his way to be so nice and is asking nothing of me.  Just wishes I wanted it.  Just feels me right there.  I can't fault him.  I'm the one who wants to just sleep in our separate spaces. I'm the one who feels that way.

In this long ass, poorly articulated attempt to articulate, I am saying:  oh me oh my- once I’d have sex with someone because they were nice to me.  It was not always a disaster wherein thereafter I was in love- it was sometimes but not always. But now that’s all done. 

When I have to explain how it’s all done, all my enthusiasm for your cock, I feel so defensive- as I attempt to explain I think it is as if I’m saying “Oh I have issues.   Yes I’m frigid- it’s my issues” and that is really not it at all. I just don’t want a nice man with an erection who went out of his way for me to feel rejected so it ends up couched that way.

I am so grateful that it hasn't turned out like so many told me it would (not so far) – that my thirties would be a time of aching sex drive.  That I’d just need dick DICK where ever it may be found!  Maybe it won’t last, but deprioritizing sex and particularly deprioritizing dating feels so right.  I don’t even know if I wish I’d found a great relationship instead, I am liking it so much.  All I can possibly do right now is think about myself, freak out about myself, worry about myself all the time.  I am open to love- which would be someone actually seeing and getting these machinations of my mind, and loving them.  But right now, unlike so many other times I’ve chronicled, I’m not even longing for it.  You see, I’ve given up my friends.  I’ve given up and it feels very good.

I couldn’t be a hooker for a place to sleep and I do sort of feel sad not to have given that fun and acceptance to the nice, good, kindly person who gave me that place to sleep.  But I cringe to the penis! And that feels good.  What a crazy blogpost.

I love you all so much my friends, you may not even know.  I love you more more more more more.

-Alexis