Monday, October 14, 2013

Ernest Wilson's "Sentimental Man"

Yesterday, I went to this guy's house and we drank glasses of water on his couch together. He told me that this fantasy of his first probably started when he was about nine years old. The old Batman TV show. He was watching it. That is when he first got turned on, really noticed himself being turned on by something. It was when Batman was getting punched in the stomach by the bad guys. He would go see every action movie in the intervening years and in every single one, without fail he said, there was this scene of the hero being held down by the bad guys and getting punched in the stomach. It was really quite weird he said, how almost the exact same scene happens in all of these movies. He wanted to know why that was.

I was there because he wanted to punch a guy in the stomach, to do some role playing, him being the bad guy, me the tough sexy hero getting punched in the stomach. He first explored this even before the Internet he said. Even then he had managed to find a thriving network of people with similar fantasies. He thought he was a weirdo, alone in his fantasies, and was so happy to meet so other people with the same fantasy. Once the Internet came along, he realized that were thousands of people with this same fantasy, and he was relieved to find out he was not so alone, that what he though was a weird sexual fantasy that only he had was in fact a pretty common one.

He explained the scene to me, how he wanted it to go down. He put on some Led Zeppelin. It took me a few minutes to get into playing this character, but once I did, I was really into it. His punches were light. I wanted them to be harder, to actually hurt, but I faked the pain. He kept on saying how he was going to turn my abs to mush. I kept on flexing my abs, trying to make it seem like I had defined ones, since clearly this guy is really into superhero abs and punching them.

The sun was coming in through his window, Led Zeppelin was blasting, and I was naked in bed with a sexy older guy pinning me down, jerking me off, and punching me in the stomach. It was a beautiful day is what I am trying to say.

I then met up with Andy, had some drinks in the East Village, and then went out to eat at Bunker in Ridgewood, which was quite delicious. I drank too much, but had a lovely time. I walked past beautiful industrial buildings on a stretch of Flushing Avenue I had never walked down. That area where Bushwick and Ridgewood meets has a real sense of poetry to it. There is something beautiful and not of New York about the place, or not of this current iteration of New York that we live in. We crossed some railroad tracks strewn with garbage. The streets were abandoned. The sun was setting, the sky a beautiful color, and through the large dirty glass windows of a factory of some kind, that sky's beautiful color looked even more beautiful filtered through the haze of this old glass.

I had read some William Carlos Williams the night before, his two "Pastoral" poems, and their lines were ringing in my head as I took in this scenery. "These things astonish me beyond words."

There was tape, thick spools of black VHS tape knotted up in big clumps along the side of the road. It had been so long since I had seen such a thing. I was thrown back to other eras, when for whatever reasons strings of both VHS and cassette tape always seemed to be gathered by curbs, occasionally fluttering with gusts of wind, some angry person, or lots of angry people, smashing cassettes and VHS tapes all over this country, pulling out the tape, pulling and pulling, yanking it from its casings and throwing it out the windows of cars as they drive by angrily cursing the names of ex-boyfriends.

Despite waking up hungover this morning, I still felt pretty great. I knew what I needed to do and I also knew that things are pretty fucking good, that life is really quite a beautiful thing. I am trying to be a better person, and it's a process, but to know that I am taking steps toward such a state, that I am aware of a better self and trying to bring that self into being makes me immensely happy. I want to be good. I am trying. And that's really all there is. Just making the effort to be better. You can't ask more than that. And when you do that, when you make that effort, it's amazing how good you can feel, how happy you become with the world.

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