Joyful to Hear (by Mila) · Looking @ Entries

excerpt from the middle of an untold tale (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:54:12 -0600

The sound of the wicker papasan creaking, shifting, hitting the sliding mirror closet door – click, click, click. Her breath, quickly, matching your pace. Her fingers gripping, grasping, leaving red marks on your biceps; upon these arms you’re balanced, suspended above her, a lever on the fulcrum of your feet. She sighs. She moans. The fan’s blowing on low. Your iMac on the desk, it sings something with a dance beat, a metronome for your movements, Sneaker Pimps remixed, perhaps. Untz, Untz, Untz. And there’s that empty glass of absinthe and a half-smoked clove. That short black schoolgirl skirt – the skirt of your thousand sins – lies worn, unworn, donned and disrobed, on that ugly, dirty greenish carpet.

The papasan slips and shifts, loudly, without warning, and her eyes fly open.

Don’t let me –, she starts.

– I’ve got you, you answer without pause or pretense, and her eyes are closed again, with a laugh and her lips turning up. You feel her tightening against you, her thighs clutching you more closely, and her fingers, they were clutching you as they would a liferaft, now they soften, begin to curl into their own smile.

You barely hear what she says. And it is quick, like a trap springing shut.

I love you.

But you know what it was. Still above her, still within her, still moving to the meter of the moment and the music, you tell her to say it again.

But there’s the sound of the papasan creaking, shifting, click-click-clicking. There’s the pace of her breath, the fan’s low hum. The beat of trip-hop in your ears. The rising baritone arc of her sighs. Her lips forming unchosen words into phrases too quiet to be whispers.

She does not repeat those three words. Her secret, her reckless secret, loose for only a moment. But she cannot take it back from you. She cannot remove it from that place in your mind, the afterimage of a sun floating on your thoughts. It is there, singular, and it will not go from you. The best it offers is to take a back seat to the moment spread open before you, theatre light spilling out from the projector, a story unfolding around two whose attention falls not on the screen but to these sensations. To each other, to yourselves, to what is within, nascent, arriving.

You take, you devour, you consume – her. And she, in accepting all of your hunger into herself, she consumes and devours you. Greedily. Soul feeding upon soul. There is no hesitance or shame. The mid-afternoon thunderstorm crackles and rumbles on the window glass.

And there is the mirror, reflecting you back upon yourselves. That single yellow rose – long ago dry – shining out the top of an empty bottle of fine tonic water. That OfficeMax desk chair, in places worn to a sheen from hard use. There’s a Bible, closed, on the other edge of the floor. Neruda lies spread-eagle and perilously close to the corner of the desk. The Riddle of the Sphinx is below the two of you, mounting a well-highlighted copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract – and it does neither complain of its place, nor solve any puzzles that are made in these minutes.

You will bring her here. She will fight you, but she does not want to fight you. You will bring her here.

Among the papasans and paperbacks. The music, and this moment. She will bring you back.

to -

now.

trial by fire (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:09:11 -0600

The sun rises. The sun sets. Day after day, we take for granted — in the very grain of our language — the geocentric myth that the sun revolves around us, rather than we around it.

Every day, light shrinks away from us, setting the heavens aflame before fading to azure and then to black; and every day it crawls out from behind the horizon, painting first the sky and the clouds, the hills and the trees and finally the land.

It’s easy to forget from where we stand, but we must remember: light and dark do not rotate around us – we rotate around the light and the dark.

I struggled for a long time with my intensity, with the depth of my feeling. I fought with demons of doubt and despair so deep I could barely dream of dawn. I lied to myself about love and joy, because I saw so clearly how my brightest passions cast the darkest shadows.

This afternoon, two of my friends talked to me about their relationships. As we talked, a couple of themes emerged: the first, we need to be better at trusting our instincts even when our thoughts offer up doubt and fear.

The second came up when a friend remarked to me that she was trying not to be too attached to her current situation. I told her that the flip side of non-attachment, if based in fear, is a lack of full commitment to the moment.

We think of daytime and nighttime as opposites, when in reality they are complementary – one defines the other. Like night and day, many of our emotions have also have flip sides. Anger, for example, is the shadow side of discernment – discernment that defines our personal right and wrong, our boundaries, our limits. Anger often strikes when someone or something violates our definition of ourselves; dismissing such strong feeling outright risks losing sight of why we needed to react.

Just about a year ago, my ex came out from Chicago for the summer. We made a lot of mistakes in that relationship. Things ended badly for both of us, abruptly, without closure.

We fought. A whole damn lot. And then some more. We fought as hard as we loved. As I look back on that relationship, however, that fighting wasn’t a mistake. I don’t regret it because when we lashed out at each other, we did it with complete straightforwardness. When we fought, I knew where I stood. She knew where she stood. And for the first time in over a decade, I was able to express what I wanted and what I needed directly, without a filter, without worrying if she could handle it.

For a very long time, I’d been trying to reign in the darker aspects of my intensity – a fiery independence, a willingness to fight and fight hard for myself – giving preference to the lighter passions, my romantic side. I tried to love fully while holding back love’s shadow.

But not with her.

One of my friends today asked, as she was trying to figure out why a guy hadn’t called her, “if he doesn’t like me, why doesn’t he just come out and say it?”

I tried to explain that it can be hard to do, especially if you do like and care about someone quite a lot, but not enough. It’s hard to take that step and say what might seem hurtful or disappointing. And then, because we fail to embrace that shadow, we become less honest, to ourselves — and to those we love.

Someone else challenged me that I liked girls like my ex – who was much younger – because I could control them. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I couldn’t even dream of controlling her, and her independence tested even mine – these are among the reasons I liked her. I could be me, light and dark, all of me, without limits. And at times it still frightened me to be so raw and unfiltered, ferocious. I could sleep at night, however, because I’d said what I needed to say. I’d been me every step of the way.

It’s so easy to fall back into old habits, so easy to want to show you care by doing one little thing here or one little thing there, even though you don’t really feel it, that someone else wants you to do. Yes just this once becomes a string of yeses, and no becomes harder to say. The shadow side of love gets brushed under a pillow, but it doesn’t go away.

And now I’m feeling more and more drawn to my dark side, to say no just because I don’t want to do something, and not need to explain. To do exactly what I want to do. To show that I care in the ways that express me, that express my care, and not conform to someone else’s definition of caring.

You might say I’m feeling selfish. Selfish – self-oriented – is part of the shadow of love. If love is the coming together, the union of two beings, two complete beings must exist, whole in themselves, before love can come into being.

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn… Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent – ?) … Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, VII

I want, simply enough, to be me. For me alone. To love the way I love, not the way I’m asked to love. To sneak off into my silent cave for hours, perhaps days at a time. To reach out when it is in my heart.

And she whom I want will be the one who sees me, who hears me, and her heart knows every word, every syllable, every movement, every action, is wholly me, and wants that from me. Who sees my faults and my feats and needs nothing more than what is, and what could be.

And she whom I want will be she whom I see without a need to change, the good and bad alike. What isn’t perfect won’t need to be perfect, because who among us is ever perfect? And who wants a person with no sharp edges anyway?

But for now my task becomes ever more clear – embrace the dark side of me – the selfish me – give it practice and strength so that I can reassemble myself into the whole being I need to be before I can love another without being disassembled by a union which is not yet for us.

We live in a world of day & night. Our entire lifecycle depends on the rising and setting of the sun each day – to sleep, to dream – and our entire environment needs the alternation of light and dark. So why would we try to deny ourselves for another? To do so kills the life of any honest communion, of any love within which surrender is possible.

I don’t want you – or you – or you, not now. I simply want me. And when I have found me, when I have embraced me, when I have surrendered to who I am, without filter or measure, then, perhaps – and only then – will a you who wants who I am rise up in the east like a sunrise: complete meeting complete, in wholeness.

Clouds and all.

bottle cap (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:13:29 -0600

“If I could bottle it up, I would. But then that’d defeat the purpose of that personality quirk that makes you write half-sensical phrases in notebooks, on your updates, on your blog – twirling your feelings around like a clumsy drum major.

“But if I bottle it all up, mix it all together, just a bland beverage with no distinguishing bitterness, a weak tea. I want Moxie. I want something I have to sip, sip and wonder, and always want for more.”

I remained silent as he compared my insanity to fizzy water, looked down at my skirt, thought of a thousand secret things to write. I smiled.

“They think I like the crazy ones.”

I asked him, mirroring his smirk, “Don’t you?”

“I don’t want you to go.”

They never did. I was their intoxicant. I never wanted to go, either. I liked the way my unhinged brain entangled him, more than my body – which has its own charms, of course – ever could. I liked the way it felt to be held in his arms. I liked saying I love you to him and then the next yelling at him. And he’d always say he loved me. He was my drug.

But I am my half-sensical phrases. The unfiltered miasma of me. And I always invent that bottle’s damning approach. And then it’s time to go.

I held his hand in the middle of a street.

“I won’t.”

April Fools! (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:58:22 -0600

Ok, so I had to play some form of April Fool’s joke. But everything’s actually going great – no lawsuits, even! Joyful To Hear will go back to its regularly scheduled programming by tomorrow, April 2nd.

At least, my lawyer says I should deny everything at the moment.

we didn’t start the fire (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:05:55 -0700

I have a problem with cute indie girls. The ones that’ll charm you with their sweetness one moment and then tell you exactly how it is the next.

So this afternoon, I made it past a gauntlet of two bearded boys in kelly Greenpeace jackets asking if I had a moment to save the world. It’s not that I don’t think the world’s worth saving. Certainly not that I didn’t have a moment. Part of it is the tenacity of the Greenpeace activists on Pearl Street, positioned at key places along the way to interrupt as much traffic as possible. Another part of it is that I don’t support most of Greenpeace’s current platform or methods.

I made it past these two boys only to be accosted on my way out of Starbuck’s (yeah, yeah, look at that fuckin’ hipster wearing his corduroy jacket and sipping his latté and all. Go ahead, poke fun!). I made it ten feet before a cute, bespectacled, pierced indie girl with streaks of blue in her black hair smiled and asked how my day was going.

So yeah, I stopped. She made small talk for a few minutes. College student, forget which one, studying art (of course). She asked me what year I was. Of course. Lots of smiles and eye contact. Really working the charm. I knew it was coming.

So do you know anything about Greenpeace?

Le sigh.

So I told her that I wasn’t currently interested in supporting Greenpeace’s efforts. But don’t you want to save the world?

Here’s the deal, I told her: Have you ever heard of Zaadz? Or Gaia.com? Yeah, I helped build that community from the ground up. Three hundred thousand people currently, all with a vision of a better world.

And you know the thing I learned? We all have different visions.

In reconsidering change, I wrote:

Here we are, each of us, believing that we know which way to steer the universe to save us all. And yet most of us still don’t even understand ourselves.

I take issue with people and groups who want to blame others for their problems, for society’s problems, for the world’s problems. Not because the people around us don’t bear some responsibility for all the messes we co-create, but because when we refuse to take responsibility for how our own actions create this world, we refuse to accept the possibility that we have the power to heal the problems we face.

We’ve all grown up with frightening shadows of terrible things at home and abroad: famine, disaster, war, nuclear power, global warming. So many fears, so many problems, many of such immensity that we feel powerless to do anything except toss a few dollars here and there to worthy causes, try and recycle our soda cans, and eat green or local or vegetarian.

Billy Joel sings we didn’t start the fire / it was always burning / since the world’s been turning — but we do keep the fire raging. Not by ignoring the problems or by doing too little, but by pretending the true problems are anywhere except within ourselves.

We blame presidents and politicians for where we are. We blame the liberals or the conservatives. We blame Christians or Muslims, atheists or humanists. We blame the Chinese. We blame urban decay. We blame hillbillies. We blame Big Oil. We blame corporate greed. We blame welfare moms. We blame environmentalists. We blame each other.

Nothing — nothing — will ever get done while we stand around pointing fingers at each other.

Rampant blame and the failure to accept personal responsibility are symptoms of short-sighted thinking. There’s no logical reasoning in attacking an evenly-matched opponent when you want to get something done. Entrenching yourself against an enemy only pitches the battle and prolongs both sides’ inability to achieve their goals. Even when a small victory is achieved, it is often quickly overturned or at least defanged by detractors.

So, Greenpeace (and any other group hoping to change the world), if you want my support, dedicate your efforts to finding common ground. We are all human and sharing this world together, and we do share enough to understand each other, even if only a tiny bit sometimes.

There are no insurmountable divisions between men and women; I believe that with all my heart. We create the walls between us out of the dust of thoughts and memories, held by the mortar of our experience. And our experience is tinted with our prejudices, imagined and real, inherited and newly created.

If you want to change the world, I said, find common ground. Look not for weaknesses in your enemy but for each other’s strengths and insights. Do not tear each other down, but reach out a hand to each other.

So she closed her book, smiled at me, and said, You’re a Buddhist, aren’t you? Bet you’re going to tell me ‘change must come from within.’

I just smiled. Something like that.

the rake (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:46:17 -0700

Some smart but socially awkward guys just want to find a way to connect with women, get confident in their company, and maybe even get a girlfriend. And that – well that’s pretty damn sweet.
- Kelly Diels, I’m Not Picking on Pick-Up Artists. Much.

I used to be a nice guy.

No, wait. I used to be a Nice Guy. You know the type: the perennial friend, the guy who has more women friends than men, the one who never seems to get the girl. The guy who secretly wonders why women keep ending up with the asshole, but gladly gives them his shoulder to cry on when The Asshole inevitably ends up acting like… well, an asshole.

The guy who waits in the wings waiting for the girl to come to her senses (because obviously, she can’t be acting sensibly and be with that guy).

The problem with nice guys is that most of them are secretly afraid of women. And they take out their fear and confusion with the opposite sex in veiled grunts of frustration to the few male friends they have, asking why the hell doesn’t she see how good I am for her? and how can she be so stupid?

Because, see, at heart, the nice guys hold onto a lot of anger against the women they supposedly care about. They’re angry because — time & time again — they’re passed over for some guy who isn’t “worth her time.”

I know this because I used to be one of these guys. And I hated the guys who treated women (in my opinion) like shit. More than that, however, I really couldn’t understand that my female friends weren’t being stupid or silly. Because that’s how we nice guys rationalize your behavior, you know. We can’t for the life of us figure out why you like who you like, and we just convince ourselves you’re out of your minds and will eventually come to your senses.

Offensive much?

Women aren’t stupid – certainly not as idiotic as the Nice Guy mind wants to believe – and I’ve often wondered in the years since if my female friends didn’t know or at least sense the feelings I wouldn’t voice.

As I said, the problem with most nice guys is that they’re afraid of women. They’re not willing to risk what they have with a friend, despite the depth of their romantic attraction. They’re not willing to speak truth. Instead of being willing to take you to task for repeatedly dating men who hurt you, or even willing to ask the question: hey, why?!, they validate your anger, let you cry, hang out around you in your times of need in the hopes you’ll throw them a bone in a moment of weakness.

I used to be a nice guy. I know these things.

. . .

A long, long time ago, as I was nearing the end of a year-long period of self-imposed celibacy following the dissolution of my marriage, I joined a free online pick-up artist community at the suggestion of a friend.

I’ve never been the type of guy to meet women at bars or clubs – the idea of meeting up with someone for a night, taking them home, sleeping with them in a drunken stupor and parting ways the next day – well, it just never appealed to me. I met people in bookstores, grocery stores, in my philosophy classes, at work, online. And certainly not through conscious effort on my own part. My ex-wife (while we were still married) once pointed out a ticket-takers blatantly obvious flirtation with me as she stamped my hand at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

I hadn’t noticed a thing.

You’ve got to have a broader understanding of me beyond this point. I’d considered myself a feminist for a long time (nice guys often do), had read Transforming a Rape Culture (not an easy task) and other seminal works of feminist literature at the urging of my ex-wife, unsuccessfully fought to have alleged removed from its place before rapist in the college paper (and later found myself and the Editor-in-Chief of the paper surrounded by Katie Koestner and two dozen angry women at the middle of a walking bridge on the Hamilton campus)…

I’d had my eyes opened to the entitlement of being a white man in our society. I never worried about walking back across our campus at night – it seemed so safe to me, so hearing that other people worried shocked me.

But I didn’t really see what I’d been doing inside my own head until I joined the PUA community, a newbie with a chip on his shoulder and a bunch of strange ideas about women filling my noggin. I read tale after sordid tale of how a guy’d been lucky, met a girl he liked who liked him back for a bit and then dumped him for being too nice. Or she never paid him attention at all. And – in the presence of other men – they weren’t shy about voicing their anger at women for such behavior. Their voices rang loud and shrill, calling women ‘stupid’, ‘selfish’, ‘manipulative.’

In the PUA community, a fatal attraction for the one that got away (or the one you never had) was called ‘oneitis’. And the crude advice they gave us newbies? GFTOW: Go f*ck ten other women.

It’s a terrifically vulgar way of saying get over her… move on – in a sort of sucker-punch locker room talk. And even the same guys who can’t talk straight to a woman aren’t so afraid of telling a guy they need to shape up or ship out. I never listened to the words literally. I got their message, or at least translated it into something I could accept: meet other people, realize there are many other fish in the sea, etc.

So a lot of nice guys showed up here – this wasn’t a paid community, though some people did stop in to shill their product, and some of the guys who hung out there moved on to create their own seduction classes – and as you might expect, the atmosphere of misogyny stunk up the place like bad cigars.

But if I looked beyond that, the lessons of the PUA community fall into several categories:

Technique – Cubing. Magic Tricks. Games. Negs (mild insults designed to show women you’re not afraid of them even though you really are). C&F (Cocky & Funny – projecting confidence and humour). Openers. Ice-breakers. Much more.

Psychology – gaining rapport through mirroring body language. Overcoming ASD (the anti-slut defense, and yes, I’m sure that name raises a lot of hackles). Cock-blocks and how to avoid them.

Self-improvement – eating healthy. exercising. doing what really interests you.

The thing about most of the techniques taught in PUA communities is that they’re cheap, cheesy, and wholly designed to let guys fake it until they’ve found their own confidence. As are the self-improvement elements.

So I went out on assignments. I encouraged myself to walk up to women I found attractive (for me, that usually meant someone in a class whose insights I particularly valued, or whom I saw reading a Buddhist book at the Coop, or sitting at the Cambridge Zen Center) and striking up a conversation. I pushed myself past my comfort zone – getting a number here or there, perhaps going for a kiss. I bombed more often than I succeeded. And I never really used any of the techniques. I’m no magician, and I wasn’t about to start any potential relationship being someone I’m not.

But slowly, something happened. I did start noticing how the pseudo-psychology they peddle does somewhat describe people’s behavior in the real world. I started treating everyone I met with the same personality my friends get – I give them a hard time. I tease them. I call them on their shit.

And why does this Cocky & Funny thing work? Because when a person truly interacts with confidence and humor, it shows women (and men, for that matter) that they aren’t afraid, aren’t hiding. A huge problem with nice guys is that you never actually know how they feel about you. With (good) confident men – and I specifically remove from that group those without integrity – they’re honest when they’re happy, and honest when they’re not. Life is simpler.

I noticed a few times, when the prospect of greater intimacy loomed between us – that I’d hear things like, I’m very picky about who I sleep with (even before anybody had even mentioned or suggested that prospect). Before I joined the PUA community, I’d have considered that a full stop. After? It didn’t rattle my confidence. I just kept being me. And we were all happy about that.

As the guys who started with me kept at it, I noticed something happening – they ranted against women a lot less frequently. They started taking responsibility for their own issues. Their own fears. Their own shortcomings. They began to look at themselves, to work on the parts of themselves they felt needed work. They stopped blaming women for their loneliness and realized that – perhaps – they shouldered most of the blame for the life they’d led so far.

What’s amazing when a person truly takes responsibility for their own qualities & imperfections is that they find their own power.

I ended up leaving the community within a few months. I left with a final message, that I’d discovered the games and tricks and verbal manipulation weren’t for me. I’d discovered that one doesn’t have to GFTOW to overcome oneitis. But more importantly than that, I’d learned the things I’d really needed to learn: take care of yourself; be yourself; do the things you love; and don’t make your whole life the pursuit of women.

And that’s what I did. I can’t say I suddenly became a Lothario. But as I shifted my focus away from meeting women, I ate healthier, drank more water, started paying a little more for haircuts that flattered me, developed a personal style, took classes and read about subjects that interested me. I ended up moving to Maui for a little while. I built a little online community. I deepened my Buddhist practice. I wrote. And I wrote even more.

I never did really go out of my way to meet random women after that. But as I took care of myself, something else changed. People approached me – they often had before, but I’d totally missed it – and I knew how to react. I wasn’t afraid or scared. And I didn’t blame them for not seeing me.

The people who came to me – they saw something they liked in me, something that attracted them. And instead of changing into that scared, powerless nice guy, I treated them like friends from the beginning. I didn’t worry about messing things up. If I liked someone they knew. Sure, I still had a good shoulder for crying on, but there wasn’t anything hidden between us.

And I still did have my doubts from time to time. I once let slip to a girl that I was surprised “a girl like you likes me.” Oh, well, she had none of that. I got an earful. And she disavowed me of that silly notion once and for all.

So yes, you meet me and you might notice a bit of Cocky & Funny these days. But you know why? That’s me. That’s who I am to the people I really care about. And I dare say I’m a bit interesting (ok, some people call my brand of interesting eccentric; after all, I am an absent-minded professor type). But a lot of what turned me around were those few months in the locker room, trying to filter out the misogyny and the rampant testosterone-filled posturing, trying to get past the silly games, the theatrics, and into the real meat.

Because men aren’t stupid either, and the fact is, there was some real wisdom hidden among all the sweaty gym clothes and ego-inflation. Some guys actually paid attention and learned a thing or two and decided to share it with the others. Us slow-learners.

The downside of these communities exists in the risk that men won’t learn to take responsibility for themselves and their own actions. These are the men who study the tactics and the psychology religiously, who work the magic tricks, the card games and the art of persuasion to a fine art. They fill their void of confidence with con games and tricks of manipulation. Instead of coming to view women as equal people, they convert their nice guy feelings into asshole feelings. To them, women are still stupid and need to be tricked into realizing who’s right for them. To them, women need to be manipulated and convinced.

That’s not true seduction. What real benefit exists in attracting someone to you if the you they like isn’t really, well, you? Is it really satisfying, at the end of the day, with a woman lying in your arms and smiling happily at you, if she only sees this act you’ve been pulling just to get her there?

Real seduction is still something magic. And it’s on-going. It’s not about being someone else or reciting scripts or doing what some PUA guru told you to do. It’s about having enough confidence to take great joy in honest and playful dance with those you like. Real seduction becomes effortless. It’s a smirk or a playful tease without hidden agenda. It’s leaning in toward each other to listen more intently. It’s the way our eyes move from eye to eye to mouth and back again before a kiss, but not because we know the Kiss Test. Simply because this is just what we do, who we are.

The magic of real seduction is in the back-and-forth. The thousand little things we do that convey interest and attraction to each other. The tiny little games we play. And all of this can be observed and discussed and shared – by women to women, men to men, etc, etc…

But the spark, especially the one that lasts, is something that – like enlightenment – can’t be taught. It can only be pointed toward: we are most attractive to others when we’re being exactly who we want to be. Not who we think we should be. Nor who we think other people want us to be.

We’re most attractive when we are who we want to be.

Learn this lesson and take care of yourself. That’s all you really need to know. And to think I didn’t even charge you for this deepest, most powerful secret of seduction!

I highly recommend you read Kelly Diel’s blog series on PUA, which served as the final push for me to post this blog entry, which has been rattling around in my head for – oh, about five years.

strippers & such (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:37:31 -0700

Inspired by Chelsea’s post of a similar name.

My ex was a stripper.

Now, I’ve been to strip clubs before. Before I moved to Boulder, on a week-long trip to this fine city, a female friend of mine — one of those friends you never quite expect to say the words Let’s go to a strip club — suggested a few of us hit Pearl Street’s resident red light district (yes, that’s a joke).

And there was the time I visited one with a best friend, years ago, on a trip to Macworld in New York City, just outside of Times Square before they really cleaned the place up. That’s where I learned that strip clubs are where you go to buy overpriced drinks from scantily-clad waitresses and get hit on by women leading up to the inevitable question: So… do you want a dance?

And the time I went to meet up with another girl friend of mine who was having a tough time, after she interviewed to be one of those waitresses at (by their advertising, anyway) ’Manhattan’s best gentleman’s club’. I must’ve spent $80 on the world’s weakest gin & tonics just to have a way of shooing away the line of women approaching me for – yes, a dance. And they didn’t even stop to get to know you, or make small talk. Just So you wanna dance? That’s New York for you.

I swear there’s a science to these places – all the flashing, swirling lights, sparkling glitter, dark corners and skimpy outfits – designed to disorient the senses, to make a man dizzy and more susceptible to the advances of women they don’t know and won’t know twenty minutes after the song ends.

Finally though, the onslaught ended when my friend’s friend – herself a dancer, told the rest that I’d only come to pick her up. I was happy for the respite, my resolve weakened considerably by the gin and the glittery din.

Or the time a few of us drove up to Montreal. I don’t exactly know what we were thinking. Perhaps we were emboldened by a trip to a sex shop with another female friend of mine (for laughs, nothing more, I tell you). I’d found a bottle of this absolutely awful-smelling pheromone cologne, and when I saw awful, I’m talking sweaty feet packed in dirty socks and sprayed with Brut awful. So of course I made her smell it. She jumped back, saying Oh my god, that’s putrid!

Wait, let me smell it again.

I had to drag her away from the stinky colognes; she would not stop sniffing that skunk piss of a scent. I ended up buying a teensy bottle. Not to wear, mind you. Just so I could haul it out every so often and test my friend’s noses. Most guys scrunch up their noses and look at me like I’m insane. So do the women. Except the women invariably want another sniff. Or two.

But anyway, back to this strip club in Montreal. My friends insisted on buying me a dance (See, I’m not the type who comes up with these ideas, generally. I’m the one who follows along, thinking… ok, this could be amusing… maybe I can use it in a story someday.)

I tried to delay the inevitable, waiting until the last possible moment to pick someone out. When the DJ announced the last dance, they just wouldn’t let me out of it. So I looked around, chose a petite young brunette a simple black dress. They brought her over to me, she smiled shyly, introduced herself, and started to dance for me.

Perhaps a minute in, the lights came on. Not mood lighting, the reds and purples and blues sweeping around the room. Not black lights making teeth, tongue rings, recently washed clothing and lint glow. No, the overhead flourescent wash-you-out and make your skin translucent, let’s make everyone look bad lights came on. And she’s here half on my lap without a stitch of clothing covering her body. We’re not in some corner of the room hidden by the back of a couch, either. This is right in the middle of the couches and chairs where everyone sits to watch people on the little stages scattered about.

Bless her heart, she blushed but tried to keep going. Any mood we’d had going for us ran away like the darkness when those lights came up, but she tried.

And then, mid-song, the DJ turned off the sound system.

Trying to give me my friends’ monies worth, she kept dancing to some imagined tune inside her head, for perhaps another thirty seconds, until I put my hand on her tiny bare shoulder (earning me a stony glare from one of the bouncers), smiled as warmly as I could given our mutual embarassment, and said, It’s ok. Thank you! She flashed (funny how the thing I remember most about her wasn’t her body; it was this moment of disarmed intimacy) a huge smile of relief, hugged me, wrapped herself haphazardly in her dress and scampered off to the safety of the dressing room.

So the thing is, I’ve never really gotten the allure of strip clubs as something sexual. I’ve almost always seen them as just another form of entertainment experienced together with friends, and never been the guy who suggests such activities. But sometimes I’ll go along… I mean – who doesn’t enjoy laughing at the utterly confused look on a friend’s face when a girl knocks off his glasses with her breasts?

But where was I? Oh. My ex was a stripper.

To be fair, when I met her, she was a student. A rather creative and brilliant one at that. (Yes, I have a thing for smart girls. Smart, slightly off-kilter girls, apparently. Psychoanalyze that!)

And I’m not sure she’d ever considered dancing naked as a career choice. Not until one Tuesday night in Boulder when – after the few open bars WITH dance music playing on such a night had all closed – she suggested we go out and listen to some club music.

I only knew one place that’d be open and still playing music. Yes. That place. No, not the one in North Boulder. I’ve never been there and never had any desire to. If I’m going to enjoy myself at all at these places, I’ve got to know they don’t have secret back rooms where illegal things happen. I’ve got to know the women there are enjoying what they’re doing or at the very least are being treated fairly and not abused by the owners. The place has to look… well, it has to have some class, which I admit is a bit of an oxymoron when it comes to strip clubs.

Oh, and have I mentioned that in New York, tipping anything less than $10 at a time at the stage gets you a look that suggests you’d be dead in a dark alley if that happened anywhere else? Boulder’s cheap compared to the Eastern seaboard.

But anyway, we went down. I spent more time watching her reaction than any of the girls wandering about. I bought her a dance because she looked so excited to be there. I had to go catch the girl she wanted, who was about to clock out for the night. But when they started the private dance, the look of pure giddiness on my ex’s face made me smile. And then I looked back at the stage, sipped my drink, and waited for her to come back.

So… we only went that once. But she decided perhaps she’d like to try dancing over the summer. I’m not really one to tell someone what they can and can’t do, the place didn’t seem seedy (well, any more seedy than a topless bar, perhaps), and she was excited about it.

So I joke that it’s my fault she became a stripper. To be honest, I hope she got out of it after the summer. I could see someone trying it out for a little bit, pocketing some extra money and getting an admittedly interesting experience in the meantime, but I just don’t see it as a positive long-term career choice. Just too many elements that could wear a person down or lead them further astray over time.

So my summer looked like this: t-backs and teensy skirts strewn all over the apartment. Giving fashion advice (do you think this’ll make em stare?). I once answered the question: do you think this hajib works better as a tube top or a skirt?_ (Answer: You’re wearing a hajib as a skirt?! How tiny are you?)…

Meeting up with people I knew who asked, How do you know her? and didn’t know I knew where they’d met her. Sitting with a guy in a bar, listening to him tell me how it’d been years since he’d met a girl that made him want to date again, and how he was so mad she was leaving… and that if anyone hurt her, he’d bust the guy up.

I was a dance choreographer, an armchair movement coach. Me. The guy who trips over imaginary tree trunks and who’s mastered the art of the one-foot, I-just-slipped-on-black-ice pas de troix (finished with a twirl and a shaky flourish, of course).

I was a bodyguard, glowering at horny guys staying after in the hopes of something. I was a cuckold more than once: I fell in love! she said one night of an interesting customer. The honeymoon wore off overnight.

I was a hairstylist – I think I dyed her hair three different shades of red and pink. And she threatened me with the blue.

Ask me about the recently homeless former chef she convinced me to let stay for a night, who drank all the alcohol in the house (not that much, really, just a bottle of wine and half of amaretto that I used to make sours… I’m really pretty good at that, by the way), and absconded with my Blu-Ray copy of Ratatouille. Who steals Ratatouille?

Or the time we hung out with some young Buddhist guys, one of which had quite a bit of chemistry with her, who couldn’t figure out what our story was, and how after leaving that apartment she grabbed my hand and walked like that on the Boulder Creek Trail with me all the way home.

And then there was running into her co-workers. In broad daylight. On Pearl Street. With their kids. KIDS! She’s a mother?! And you can’t call out their name. Oh no, because it’s not their name. And people might wonder why anyone calls them that. I still have one guy who works there who wonders why I haven’t been back every time he sees me on the street. No reason, I say. And he looks at me like I’m crazy.

I was a typical guy for a summer. I saw more boobs and more ass than I’d ever even wanted to see. And the things I thought I might have a problem with – a girl I’m seeing dancing suggestively for other men – turned out not to be an issue at all. I actually had more of a problem with the guys she met outside of the club.

Hell, winter fell upon Boulder and I was still explaining to confused men why she never actually showed as much interest as they’d like. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she often asked me how to respond to texts from guys: Come on over, what if we don’t see each other again? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we never knew exactly what we were to each other, and how on earth do two arguably crazy people know what they are to other people when that’s the case?

But hey, life wasn’t ever dull. And as I moved out of my last apartment, I found a few various bottles of stripper scents (yes, like lilac and strawberry) that she’d left behind. And a single bra pad, squishy and filled with liquid. I wonder what one does with a bra that’s got only one pad.

I found myself asking how did I get here? quite often that summer. But one day, watching her darn a pair of cherry red fishnet stockings, sitting in a red-and-black shirt adorned with a faux smock, legs akimbo in a bright red tulle skirt just barely hiding a pair of hello kitty boyshorts, with her bag full of hundreds of dollar bills sitting half open beside her, my book of poetry, with a cover picture of us in quiet and simple embrace, opened to the last poem, the one I wrote about her (laying face down on the floor, wide open — the book, I mean — on top of a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract), Sneaker Pimps & Birthday Sex playing in heavy rotation, I realized love itself can be kinda like a strip club. All the flashy lights swooshing through, all the exotic scents… it disorients you, makes you dizzy and soon you’re shelling out your heart, folding it in half and handing it off to someone else. It can be an intoxicant – let it take you over, and it can get you in a lot of trouble… but a little can add some spice to life. Not a bad thing, necessarily.

Now that I think of it, the too-bright lights came up on us pretty early in the summer, and we just tried to keep going after the music stopped playing. Must’ve been the lighting.

finding my way back (Entry)

jake@wideopenspac.es (Mila (Jake Stetser)) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:24:35 -0700

Light snow falling on a blanketed city. Taking stock and looking ahead. A solitary flute floating on the quiet wind. Telling my friends how much they mean to me. Chasing a pair of Shih Tzus, one black, one white, kicking up clouds of powder. This is my Boulder.

About a year and a half ago, I lost my way.

Looking back, we can usually point to the events that knocked us off our path, the little tragedies that begin a spiral of behavior and decisions that slowly take us further from ourselves. But getting lost is a series of choices, little moments, tiny steps, each taking us further from the trail we’ve set out to follow.

It’s not filling a suddenly empty schedule with the things we love. It’s doubting the love right in front of you. It’s staying quiet when your heart wants you to speak. It’s turning away from the obvious causes of your unhappiness in the hopes that they’ll resolve on their own.

Once we’ve lost sight of the path, even our good decisions sometimes lead us further astray, with evening settling in and the snow covering our footprints behind us. We grasp at the things we love and think we need in our lives. We look around and the woods we could have navigated blindfolded seem strange and unknown.

Getting lost isn’t about making the wrong choices. It’s about making the best choices we can and still circling, zig-zagging, deeper and deeper into the spaces and the places that scare us.

It’s about waking up and wandering about with unkempt hair. It’s about closing off from friends. It’s about forgetting the lessons we’ve learned.

Getting lost is a thousand little missteps that lead us nowhere slowly.

No matter how far we stray from the path that’s best for ourselves, we are still, however, only ourselves. Maybe with a moustache. Maybe without a care for what clothes we put on. Maybe with an inability to pay attention to the important details. Maybe we blame ourselves for everything terrible that’s happened. Maybe we fall in love with people who are at once amazing and destructive.

The reasons for our actions are often impenetrable to those that love us. Counterintuitive. A bit crazy perhaps. We’re just lost and adrift, trying to find the groove again.

We’re ourselves even in crisis, and we learn so much about who we are in the opaque wilderness, beset by strange sounds and dangers seen and unseen. We react, but if we watch ourselves, if we pay attention, we see little gems of wisdom glinting in the snow.

And then the turning point, when it comes – it comes sometimes in the guise of disaster, sometimes a lucky break – but they are the same thing: a moment of clarity brought on by persistence, by perseverance, by remaining true to who we are. And if we see the hint of turning, if we follow the arrow pointing us back, we begin the journey home. We begin finding our way back.

Finding my way back is about shaving off a mustache. Getting a hairstyle that really looks good on me. Looking inward for a while and getting my head on straight. Fixing my camera. Focusing on getting the very basics solid. Telling friends how much I love them. Listening to sounds of a quiet, snow-covered city. Making scary choices. Feeling grateful.

It’s about buying new socks. Sending baskets of goodies to my lover. Writing lists of what I’ve done and what I want to do. Sharing beautiful moments with beautiful friends. Forgiving. Remembering. Rejoicing.

It’s about playing and flirting. It’s about mending. It’s about writing and not writing. Taking pictures. Reinventing the self. Reaching out. Reaching in. Smiling. Catching a friend’s hand as you pass each other in a crowded club, squeezing it just to let her know you’re there. A kiss at a party. Patience.

It’s about stopping and looking around until the unfamiliar faces of the trees around you regain their warmth and familiarity. It’s about choice after choice of forgiving and loving yourself, the people around you, your world, until the alien landscape that threatened to swallow you up once more spreads out before you like a backyard you’ve played in for years.

About a year and a half ago, I lost my way. But now, I’ve found my way back.