Recreation Turned Existential Anesthetization

I fuck like I do drugs

@still.hear

Dinah was from Germany, a film studies PhD who didn’t know who Ethan Hawke was. Our first date we drank coffee on a cafe patio. She was almost as pretty as the pictures she posted online–spindly thin with prominent cheekbones that were upstaged by endearingly large front teeth. I made her laugh at least twice, and practiced a cool reserve, knowing I was punching above my weight and wondering if she knew it too. We went on a second date–a hike by the ocean. The next time I saw her, she’d taken a bus to my one-bedroom apartment from her place in Berkeley that she shared with a couple other grads. The sex, was sex. The sex was like drugs. The kind of drugs I regret doing because their novelty is no longer extant and my time could be spent more productively. Why did I do this shit? I called Dinah a car before she could explain that the backpack she brought was for an overnight stay.

From the jump, sex was in my purview and slandered. At the onset of puberty, my family’s PC was endowed with high-speed cable Internet and early iterations of file-sharing services, LimeWire and Morpheus. My afterschool searches for Jasmin St. Clair and Jenna Jameson plying their trade and my inevitable onanism were juxtaposed by Catholic guilt. A dialectic of God and biology—a body itching for release and the papal party-line that I was a sinner. Jerk off and pray for forgiveness. The last time I ever went to confession, I even told the priest about my sin.

A few years later, sex shifted from digital to analog. My parents, devout Massachusetts Catholics, reminded me to “Keep it in your pants.” Both them and the Church warned me of copulatory consequences–everything from AIDS to teenage pregnancy. When I did have sex for the first time, at a party, drunk, without a condom (the public school I attended had an abstinence-only sex-ed policy) I was beset by the anxiety of the possibility I had gotten someone pregnant, and later thought I had the clap (a burning sensation when I pissed). I didn’t end up knocking up anyone that night, and I didn’t end up having an STI (probably a UTI), but the sheer emotional weight of those near misses on my Catholic constitution seemed to be god saying, “I told ya so.”

It took me almost a decade to forsake that god. To be able to enjoy fucking without a logic-less panic settling in. I got older. Scrubbed away the psychic residue of religious guilt. I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by a therapist in Indiana who had the same haircut as my mom and wore a crucifix, and I learned most of my internal dialogue was bullshit static to be ignored. I got prescribed some good ol’ Western medicine that kept my cortisol levels in check and got my serotonin up to snuff. I fetishized death as a reprieve and took to appreciating present-tense pleasure.

Having ironed it all out, I fell into a near-decade of extra-curricular arrested development, one among a legion who opted out of having a kid and would never have the capital for a down payment on a house. I drank and got loaded liberally and fucked frequently. I’m not particularly good at seduction. But, I did move to a libertine city and belong to a generation that fucks without much reservation. On dates I know to check my slobbering-dog impulse at the door, keep my hands to myself, actively listen, ask questions, and have something interesting to say. It feels good to feel good without so many goddamn hang-ups.

@still.hear

Sex and drinking/doing drugs aren’t dissimilar to me. I fuck and get fucked up when I can. Because I can. Because feel-good-now-why-not? But the waning days of my salad days passed, and only recently did I realize that epoch was over–like when you are a kid outside, preoccupied with play, then you notice the street lights are on, it’s dark, and time to go home. Some of my oldest, drunkest friends got sober. Some got married. Most are around and I see them on weekends. Either way, it’s time to go home.

And what is home? A place of purpose and belonging, of course. And where is home, and with whom? I don’t know man.

In my mid-20’s I worked as an elderly caretaker. I saw clients old and infirm, stuck in the pseudo-solitary confinement of their malfunctioning and misfiring bodies. Their spouses had passed or had never existed, kids estranged or never born. The only people acknowledging them were paid to do so. Later at a Boston psych hospital I worked at, I witnessed people cursed with poverty, paranoia, personality disorders, psychosis. Sole inhabitants of alternate realities, sitting on the side of a waterproof mattress, acknowledged every 15 minutes by the staff just to make sure they were still breathing. Most of the patients never got visitors, even on fucking Christmas.

I see myself in the aforementioned. After all, I’ve gone slightly insane and ended up in a psych ward (twice). And someday I’ll be old (with the proliferation of private equity and the shredded social safety net, I can only imagine the elderly warehouse they’ll put me in). That fear of the so-very-alone plays in my daydreams and reiterates itself in nightmares.

And it’s at this inflection point that I reconsider getting fucked up and fucking: I’ve debased myself more for substances than I have for sex–sacrificing dignity at times, moral high ground in others, or personal safety on the occasional evening. But at least with substances you know where you stand, and you don’t delude yourself with what you’re getting.

I was fresh out of a long-term relationship when I connected with Katelyn. Our first date was on Christmas Day. We walked around and talked, and made out like teenagers before we parted. The next time we met we rolled around in bed, the heat from her electric fireplace made me uncomfortably sweaty. Katelyn was a personal trainer and a bad conversationalist. She had beady brown eyes and a traditional Japanese tattoo that covered her ribs, outer ass, and thigh–I can recall this despite my dogshit memory because it was the first picture she ever sent me via text. After sex, Katelyn intimated I wasn’t exactly her type. “Looks aren’t everything,” she said, comparing me to the incredibly in-shape men she met at the gym or wherever. We connected at least one more time, and then she flaked on me and I had too much pride to ever call her again.

I didn’t really like Katelyn, but I liked knowing I was liked by Katelyn, at least enough to fuck me. And I’ve surprised myself on how much my day-to-day hope and despair hinges on feeling fuckable. Sex and getting loaded have both played roles of recreation-turned-anestethization, but only one gives me Potemkin salvation. Because somewhere down the line, after the internalized Catholic shame, and the unbridled slut-ness of yesterdays, after somehow slipping from forever-young to a fear of dying alone, I came to mistake being fuckable with being likable, and being likable with being lovable. And if I’m lovable, I might be saved. I might have a home. I might get a visitor on Christmas.