ok.

maybe i needed to rant a little.

i do that sometimes, if you hadn't noticed.

can i get to work tonight? let's hope so.

i never talked her into doing any drumming for me. i was apparently too demanding, as a musician.

but, she at least gave me access to a kit over that summer, and i made good use of it, while she was out fucking around.

what she really wanted was to have an open relationship and stay living together and keep being best friends.

what i really wanted was to have a closed relationship and stay living together and keep being best friends.

but, she wouldn't budge on the open, and i wouldn't budge on the closed, so we had to resign ourselves to no longer living together, and consequently drifting apart as friends.

to be clear.

after i got pissy about her sleeping with other people for the 800th time, she came to me in mid-2004 and just laid it down on the table: she wanted to drop the bullshit and officially declare that we were in an open relationship. she was tired of these arguments.

but, she didn't want a break-up. she was very, very clear on that point. what she wanted was for me to accept that she was going to do what she was going to do, and kind of learn to live with it sort of thing. which, i suspect, is what she'd been angling for the whole time. i don't, however, expect that she would have accepted any kind of infidelity on my behalf (something that i was never even interested in - i'm a romantic, i'm monogamous).

from my perspective, i had been hoping, to that point, that she'd grow out of it, basically. so, to have her sit me down and say "this is who i am. i'm not going to change." was a wake-up call, and i did what i always did: i pulled out.

there are underlying factors. i felt insecure about the potential longevity of an open relationship, although in hindsight i could have answered my own question - we'd been in one at that point for two years. why couldn't it last other than me not wanting it to? i was nonetheless fearful that she'd end up pregnant or something, that an open relationship was not sustainable in the long run. and, that itself masked the most dominant underlying issue: at that point it was clear that she really, really wanted kids and i really, really didn't.

but, i didn't hate her for it. i accepted it. and, we stayed friends - in fact, with benefits - for many years after the fact.

we called it a mutual break-up, but i think it was almost the opposite: neither one of us really wanted to break-up, but we both realized there wasn't really a way forwards.

we were living in a one room apartment at the time. she wanted to maintain the arrangement, which in hindsight suggests she wasn't really serious about breaking up. i mean, how do you process somebody that tells you they want to break-up, but wants to keep sleeping in your bed? she expected me to accept the open relationship, and was baffled when i didn't. and, i ended up moving out unilaterally.

listen: i know what side i'm on, even if i know that you don't know what side you're on.

and, i don't go anywhere near these neo-liberal groups masquerading as feminists or leftists. i never have.

the error that liberals and conservatives are going to make in trying to understand a socialist concept of sex is that they're going to create a false dichotomy between religion and "sexual freedom".

what the socialist position is going to argue is that "sexual liberation" and religion are actually both means of statist control. that's what i was getting at in pointing to divide and conquer.

what hedonism does is turn you into a consumer. you're told this is freedom, and if you come from a religious/conservative upbringing you might see it as such (if you don't analyze it) as a consequence of overbearing or oppressive rules pushed down by the religion, but there's no freedom in consumption, no freedom in commerce. it's not any different than arguing that you're more free if you have more choices on the market, you're just conditioned to see it differently.

true freedom is an emancipation from sexuality, from carnal desire, from hedonism and pleasure. emancipation is transcendence.

casual sex is a weird idea to socialists, because it's almost impossible to understand it happening in the absence of coercion. marx famously argued that all sex under capitalism is prostitution. a more contemporary analysis may suggest that the ubiquity and normality of casual sex is just a reflection of the impulsiveness of capitalist society, a way to fill a void left by the emptiness of consumerism, and would largely whither away in the absence of the capitalist relation.

i wouldn't have articulated myself like this at the time, but i don't think my feelings abut the topic have changed much.

so, we're not going to actively prohibit it, the way conservatives will. you can have your meaningless fucks if you really want to. but, we're not going to promote it or live it the way liberals do, either. what liberals call "sexual freedom" is not some kind of emancipation or something, it's just kind of matter-of-fact.

socialists will mostly largely argue for a society where sex is kind of an irrelevance - a necessity to carry the next generation forwards, and a valid expression of emotion when appropriate, but not this pre-occupation that exists as a distraction from more interesting things, the way it is in contemporary capitalism. we'll deconstruct the status quo as more or less a control strategy, and even break apart a lot of the existing narrative as divide and conquer. and, we'll argue that once you're actually free, once you can actually pursue things that are meaningful and substantive, that you'll get bored with casual sex pretty quickly - that you'd rather find somebody to love.

or, to put it another way, yet again.

she was a liberal.

and, i'm a socialist.

i'm a romantic.

and, i hate market theory.

i want true love or bust.

the way i understand is that, in the culture she comes from, the guy with the sluttiest girl has the most prestige. so, sending your girl out to fuck your friends means you're actually alpha.

it's a status thing.

i still don't really get it.

put another way: she expected me to be a sexist douchebag that saw her as property, and then got confused when i wasn't one and treated her like a person.

like, you hear about these orgies happening at the olympic village that sound like something out of saturnalia. if you take that and splice it with standard hip-hop misogyny, that's the culture she was coming from, as built up from a small town on the outskirts of ottawa.

so, i don't just think that she didn't think sleeping with my friends would bother me. i think she thought i wanted her to sleep with my friends, because that's what every other guy she'd ever dated had been like - guys that pass girls around like they're drugs, or otherwise just treat them as property.

i was a total loner in the middle of a halted transition that listened to punk rock, jazz and instrumental classical music. and, i was a feminist, and outspoken about it. she was attracted to that about me, precisely because it was so different than what she was accustomed to, it was weird to her that i treated her like a person, but that learned behaviour transferred over to social situations in ways that just left me absolutely baffled.

and, she always expected me to take her back.

and, for a while i did.

i don't regret walking out; it just didn't make sense. i have to take the good with the bad. and, while a lot of it hurt in ways that she didn't understand, i'm still left with some experiences and memories that most people only experience as fantasies.

i do wonder what things would have been like if i was able to more effectively hold that mirror up, though.

i wasn't allowed to even talk to anybody else, though.

looking back, she existed in this contemporary culture - and she was young, at the time - where she thought being this kind of communal slut was a normal thing to do. i think she thought that it was normal for guys to share girls, or even that she was doing me a favour - that i was showing her off, or that she had to perform, as a kind of trophy, a sort of catch. that i was bringing her home to share. at that age, i had essentially no exposure to this culture, which is built around sports and bad music and to a certain extent also around blackness (although she was white). i reacted terribly to it. but, i don't think she actually realized that i had never lived in that world, that this was so very strange to me. it was almost more like a culture shock.

and, these guys didn't live in that world either, although, unlike me, they may have liked to pretend they did.

we did stay friends for years after. she didn't turn on me until i went back on hormones. and, i tried to avoid judging her, and think i succeeded in doing it in the end. but, i couldn't live in that world, it was not for me, i just had to walk out of it.

if i can't have mutually consensual and intentional monogamy, i don't see the point of it at all.

evidence of the public lavatories in washing-town:

we got to victoria, did mushrooms in a hostel, and hitched out to tofino, where somebody let us stay at a resort for free, before we camped out on a beach, and eventually made it to poole's, before heading back to the mainland.

these stories will be told in their time.

it's funny how a single reference to one thing can set you off, though.

we were hitching up highway 1 from nainamo to victoria, when somebody let us off in the middle of the road, because they were taking a turn in the other direction. so, we walked up the road a little bit, and she suddenly ran off and disappeared into the forest. she was weird like that in strange ways: she seemed to always know where she was going, even when it was completely impossible. she would liken herself to a nymph, or a fairie, irish creatures, and seemed to often behave like one, in purposeful and conscious emulation.

so, i followed her in as best i could, under foliage, through a ditch and out into a clearing overlooking a river. in the distance, we could see and hear natives dancing - naked - around a drum circle, with plumes of black smoke coming out of a triangular hearth. this was my first time in the rainforest.

she wanted to get down there, to join the tribe - i told her that was not the best idea, and tried to talk her down from it.

i had to hop the fence after her, against my better judgement, and follow her on to an old, decaying train bridge, on the other side of which was the reserve. halfway across, she stopped and turned and fucked me right there; she could have killed me, could have killed herself.

and, i then convinced her to come back to the side we came from - that those fences were there for a reason, and they didn't want us there.

we stopped for a smoke before moving on, and an aboriginal cop very tersely asked us to leave and never come back. i suspect he saw the whole thing.

this was a girl that had a basketball scholarship, although she refused to use it. she held every record at her high school. she was captain of her team. she was dominant, aggressive, strong-willed - and she knew how to take control of me, and place me in a submissive position.

i don't meet a lot of women that are like that. but, if there's a way to 'get' me, that is it - you have to take control.

and, people always wondered why we couldn't just casually hang out in public. the fact is that it wouldn't have taken much to lead to a random fuck in a random place, and we both knew it.

even years later, in like 2012, i remember randomly bumping into her on bank street, and she ran into a children's clothing store in a way that made it clear she wanted me to chase her in. and, so i snuck up behind her.

"i think that would match her socks."

she would often communicate merely by stating "j", and it was up to me to determine what she meant by any specific "j" by measuring the length and tone of it. a short, guttural "j" would be of an entirely different meaning then a lengthy, breathy "j", for example. and this was a, "this is beyond surreal, and i'm too overwhelmed to think" j.

but, i behaved myself. perhaps against my better judgement. like i say: it wouldn't have taken much for her to grab me and pull me behind something...even after that long.

....and, probably even today.

there's, like, ten women's washrooms in ottawa....

i don't know if they still let you do it.

but, back in the day, you could walk through the rideau centre from rideau street up to the mackenzie-king bridge in the middle of the night. she lived in the elgin area, so we'd often come out of a bar in the market after last call and walk back to her place through the rideau centre.

and, one night, around christmas, we made a detour into the santa claus area, around 3:00 or so...

like i say: this was all her. i'd never think to do something lie that.

in hindsight, i should have clued in. it was her, not me. she had a thing for weird sex.

some of the places...

...like, the santa claus exhibit at the rideau centre...

...or the bridge, with railroad tracks, overlooking the native reserve in nainamo....

google says it would have been a bad idea.

1) You will have to give your doctor a semen sample to send to a lab. The lab will count the number of ... Do not use any lubricant or saliva.
2) The semen specimen should be obtained by masturbation. Alternate methods may be discussed but are not recommended. Do not use any lubricant, including saliva, when collecting semen.

i went in to leave my sperm there back in 2002. sarah was absolutely insistent on coming with me, but it didn't really click until after. and i, somewhat cluelessly, left her sitting in the waiting room.

i'm not sure i would have let her, even if it clicked. i mean, what's the point, if i'm going to contaminate it with saliva?

i actually never let her do that, although she tended to offer fairly frequently. i had and still have a bit of a complex with it, it just feels wrong to allow it, as a trans person. even when i went off hormones, it was still a non-starter. and, i wonder if she's still dragging around a hate-on for cosmopolitan magazine - because she'd get livid at even the site of it for years, afterwards. for somebody that cheated on me repeatedly (she drank a lot.), she could sure get pointlessly jealous about virtually nothing.

it cost me something like $50 for a set period.

i got a call a few years later, telling me i'd need to pay up, or they'd throw it out. i let them throw it away. did they?

i can't know...

this is actually also the doctor that essentially every trans person in ottawa went to for hormone prescriptions. i knew a dozen people that were seeing him, at one point.

and, i had sperm in the bank, as well.

i can't know....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/health/sperm-donors-fraud-doctors.html?module=inline

there will be a day in the next six-eight months when i smoke my last cigarette, ever.

the reason i smoke when i'm out is that it's a necessary prop to find pot.

if i don't need to find pot, i don't need to smoke.

i'm sure i'll be over at least once before the end of the year, but i'm getting very close to the end.

it's not cold, exactly. but it's disappointing - and dipping on the weekend, again. so, there's a good chance i'm in for the year, or at least restricting my outings to bands i'm legit into.

that means i could go the better part of the next eight months cold turkey, again, by which time i may have legal marijuana options in michigan, and may never need to buy another pack again.

so, i don't want to deal with people smoking.