8. Two see-through shirts are equal to one regular one, right?

       Can we go back to the recycling, for a minute? Because I think I need to understand it a little better. It was a round trip of only forty feet. It took probably less than thirty seconds. Why was it so terrifying? Why such a rush? And further, why should the rush come from the potential for something I was so clearly afraid would actually happen? I don’t get that kind of exhilaration from other kinds of risk. I’ve always wanted to bungee jump and hang gliding or sky diving or other such dare devil type activities sound like they’d probably be fun to me, but those ideas don’t cause me any fear at all. I have no fear of my own death. Rationally, there’s nothing about death to be afraid of because either there will be something else I’ll be really surprised and curious to find out about, or there will simply be no me to even know I’m dead, much less to feel scared. But take thirteen steps outside my door naked (which I love to be), and I’m terrified. And I love it. Those are two distinct facets of this little experiment. I think I have to dissect them one at a time.

Start with the fear. It’s the same fear from the steam room and the security guard at Target. It’s the same fear as confessing to my husband that I somehow cheated at a sex game or that I failed to complete an assignment. It’s not being able to see the riding crop that I know is raised behind me. It’s the time he took the switch to me with no warning or sexual advance. Understand that from time to time I desperately need him to welt me into stripes that are visible for days afterwards, but I am not a masochist. It’s not about the pain – I don’t even like pain that’s going to leave more than a (gorgeous, delicious, unabashed) handprint. It’s about letting go. It’s about giving over everything. It’s about reaching a point that does not contain any will of my own. It is the emptying of myself. The release of everything I’ve ever pretended to control. The thing I crave is the very undoing of me. It is the profound act of submission. And when it comes, it comes with fear and relief in equal parts. It brings me to tears, and it is my very favorite emotion. Maybe that’s where the fear comes from: The lack of control. Maybe that’s why I love it so much. Maybe that’s why I am incapable of not confessing, when I’ve missed an assignment or reached an orgasm I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe that’s why I want those marks that last for days and that I cannot hide.

Not hiding. Maybe that’s what it is about exhibitionism that leaves me helpless to stop doing it. Maybe, when you strip it all down, that’s why I’m going to take the recycling out naked again, tomorrow. That desire is the other point I’m examining here… I have a friend who hasn’t worn underwear for years. (Stay with me, I’ll bring it back around.) When I first moved somewhere hot, she guaranteed me that I would be the same way in under a year. I tried it. Then I remembered why I can’t do that: It’s messy for me. I always wondered how she could constantly go around without panties to catch all the wetness she must be producing, assuming that she worked the way I did. Then I didn’t think about it again for years. Then, after Naked Day, I realized the obvious: When I was wearing panties, it didn’t happen. It was the lack of panties that was making me wet. It was like I was secretly naked. After that I frequently went without. I can stare you in the face and listen with seemingly flawless attention to whatever story you’re telling me, while I’m actually shifting about ever so slightly, playing with the slippery pussy that you cannot see. Still, it’s a hidden pleasure, and therefore not at all frightening, and therefore not as effective as the ones that you can see. It’s not an exhibition. There are a lot of things I have to do in my day that I cannot do naked. Losing the underwear helps, but for that reason, it’s not the same. So I took off my bra. I lived for many, many years without even owning a bra, so it’s not really a challenge in that way, but as I am discovering, even the minor incarnations of exhibitionism (like taking out the recycling), are more effective than none at all. I don’t want to make people uncomfortable, though. I am myself made uncomfortable by any level of anxiety in others. The trick to navigating that is to feign ignorance. The same way I give a thank you wave in the rear view mirror to make people believe that I believe that they intentionally let me merge in front of them, I put a second see-through shirt on top of my first, so that I can pretend that I don’t know you can see my nipples and every detail of my tattoo.

What does this say about me? I look at the near-teenagers who go out in public with fluorescent, leopard print, push-up bras showing through shirts that barely exist, and I cringe. Then I have to try to curb my judgment; maybe they are just like me. Somehow though, I don’t think it’s the same. I think they want men to see them and want them. (Is it only straight girls who do this? I don’t know…) Regardless of sexual orientation, their exhibitionism is (I think), exacted for the response they get from the people who look. I’m not in it for any response I might get from the people who look; I’m in it for my own response to them seeing. That is different, but it might not be any less fucked up. Maybe it’s just as bad. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe we are all fucked up, and maybe, just maybe, that’s totally okay.

(Naked is a state of mind...)

7. Naked Day

            So, I’m a minor exhibitionist. We’ve established that. But I’ve discovered there’s more to it than bits of semi-public nudity or acts of promiscuity.

It was one of those mornings after a night of sex so good that the after-glow lasts longer than the eventual sleep. I didn’t want to get up. I kicked off the covers and lay naked, feeling the air on my skin, feeling my skin under my hands… Okay I’d have to get up, but I didn’t want to get dressed. I didn’t want the feeling to get smothered under clothes. This is why I own a bajillion sarongs – sometimes real clothes are just too restrictive, but on this day, even that single knot at my hip was too much. Usually the knot is part of the appeal; I have a deep love of restraint, so clothes that remind me of or mimic such things in public are of course, right in my wheelhouse. Not this day. I just couldn’t bring myself to get dressed yet. I sat at my computer just briefly, to check email, and then wondered why sitting at my computer more than just briefly should require clothing of any kind. It didn’t. And I have a pretty cushy desk chair… I declared it Naked Day, and went about the rest of my emails and started in on some writing. Clearly Laundry and Blow Jobs was the thing to be working on, while writing in the nude. The stamp of my nakedness was permanent on everything I wrote; I couldn’t go back and put clothes on words I’d already written, and there was something delicious about that, even if I didn’t remember later which words they had been. Then I got an instant message from a friend. Chatting naked was fun, but it’s not like we were Skyping, so I felt compelled to go ahead and tell her it was Naked Day. She approved (though she couldn’t participate from work). It was the opposite of being partially naked where someone could see me if they looked, but didn’t know to look. She knew full well but couldn’t see. Interesting.

I got a drink from the kitchen. The palm and fingers holding a sweating glass are pretty much always naked, but with the rest of me unclothed as well, I felt it more …clearly. What else would feel different, if I did it naked? Understand that I have always been a walk around the house in my underwear person. I was raised in a family that was not body-shy and spent my summers bathing in a lake with my parents and siblings and cousins, so it has never been uncomfortable. If you live with me, you’re going to see some skin. That isn’t about sex, it’s about convenience and not giving a fuck. This was different. I was making it about sex, like I’d lately done with so many other things. The last time my clothes had been taken off it had been in the throes of rampant physical abandon, and I was carrying that into activities that would have otherwise quenched the lingering sense of it. I couldn’t imagine why I’d never done this, before.

Laundry was the obvious choice to begin with. There is always laundry, and since I’d started writing this whatever-it-is-I’m-writing here, it would forever be linked to and associated with blow jobs, so obviously that was an appeal I couldn’t resist. The best part was folding my husband’s clothes, touching the things I’d seen him put on and take off a thousand times, stacking his T-shirts by color because that’s how he likes it and it makes me feel all housewifey/chore = assignment-ish… No it wasn’t, it was folding the sheets, because you can’t do that without draping them across your body and knowing that they’d been washed because they had been positively soaking with come… No it wasn’t, it was carrying my kid’s stack of folded clothes to his room, because I had to walk in front of the big windows at the front of the house… Hmmm… What other chores happen in view of those windows? The kitchen is right there, so onward to dishes! The dishes were fun because you have to get wet doing them, and wet is, of course, infinitely more interesting while naked. I was not at all careful and might have made a bit more of a mess than was necessary. Then they were finished too quickly so I wiped the counters a bit, since I’d been splashing about so, but it wasn’t the same type of wet that trickles down your body from wrist to elbow to stomach to leg to toes. I decided I could at least gather up all the cans and bottles and rinse them better than I usually do for the recycling. This was nicely wet again, and I got to walk all over the house looking for them, but it was over even faster than the dishes had been. I took them, still dripping, to the kitchen recycling bin and discovered that they filled it up, completely. Now here’s a thing about the way my mind works: Once an idea has popped into it, it’s a done-deal. I can’t not do it. It’s like a rule in the programming of my brain. So the recycling had to go out. Naked.

Now the big, outdoor recycling bin that gets emptied by the trucks every week is only about twenty feet from the front door of my house. Logically, this should be no big deal, or so I kept telling myself. The thing is though, that there’s a big difference between being naked in the back yard at night and naked in the driveway at noon, and believe it or not, it’s not so much about the possibility of being seen. I don’t know the people who live behind me. As I think I’ve mentioned, I like to imagine they can see me while I am outdoors performing whatever blatant sexual activity my husband has bribed me to do (you can get me to do pretty much anything, with the promise of a cigarette), but in my imagination they are grad students from the local university. (Who else would throw parties that loud that go that late?) My neighbors to the front and sides of the house are not my close friends or anything, but I know who they are. I know them enough to know that A) they probably wouldn’t be exactly amused or aroused at the sudden appearance of naked me, and B) it might freak me out a little, if they were. But the thought had been had, so the thing had to be done. So I did it. There are always a lot of glass bottles in my recycling because I drink too much wine, and when – as on this day – the big bin is not very full, they make a tremendous crash when you dump them. I didn’t see anyone as I went out the door, but I didn’t look around really either (because if I did see someone, I wouldn’t be able to pretend I had the slightest regard for their tender sensibilities, and still get my task accomplished), and all I could think about was how jarring that crash of glass would be and how likely to make someone look up. That’s not quite true; I was also thinking about the fact that there are two churches and a synagogue in our immediate vicinity and people who routinely walk to them, not to mention the skateboarders on the next block, the abundance of stroller-pushing mommies and seemingly hundreds of dogs being constantly walked, all people I know enough to wave to. Why did it matter that I knew them at all? Why was it worse that it wasn’t a graphic sexual act??

I refused to rush despite all these fears, and yes the noise was deafening, but I was successful. I didn’t look around, but I didn’t run, and I didn’t cover. I still don’t know if there was a single witness.

And afterwards all I could think about was doing it again.

(Everybody's favorite anthem for disrobing...)

6. Oscar Wilde and portable hard drives

(This is the one with no sex in it. I'll be neither hurt nor judgmental, if you skip it.)         

    I keep an Oscar Wilde quote pinned to the wall above my writing desk. It says “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” This is the section of my unemployed life that was, to me, the highest pinnacle of luxury. Yes, there was still laundry to wash and fold, there were still errands to run, but I had woven my sex life through all of it, so that it was decadent instead of irksome. I was getting thoroughly laid all the time, so I was in a happy mood more than ever, and in the rest of my hours, I was revising poetry. My husband had been on me for some time to back up my documents, so it was a joy I didn’t even have to feel guilty about – it felt like I was getting something done, by getting everything rewritten and categorized in subject files where they could be saved properly. It was blissful and serene. I wrote until 11:00am, did some chores, went to the gym, ran errands, and came home, with various delicious little bits of debauchery sprinkled throughout. It became a routine. A weird one, though. It turned into a sort of existential crisis – though crisis is the wrong word, because it has such negative connotations, and this wasn’t really all that alarming. That’s sort of what made it an existential crisis, though: Nothing was alarming. I came to realize that there was no outside stimulus influencing my life, at all. It was a strange sensation. Nothing happened to me. Everything I experienced, I created for myself. If I stopped doing things, nothing happened. I don’t mean that nothing happened as a consequence of my having stopped doing things, I mean nothing happened. There was no external impetus. There was only me, and whatever I did was whatever occurred. If I thought too much about it, I began to wonder whether or not I actually existed, or if the world had simply sealed the gap I’d slipped out of, behind me. It was like being the main character in a Dostoyevsky novel, which is more than a little unsettling. So I didn’t think too much about it. Plus, I had ten full years of poetry to make just-so, and the deep throating blow job hobby was happily out of control… I was truly a woman of leisure.
    And then my computer crashed.
    Remember that I was revising everything in preparation for backing it up. This is an unwise course of action that I do not recommend. Because it was gone. All of it        was                 gone. It wasn’t just the poetry, either. It was all the work documents I’d written over the dozen years of my career, that I’d need again if I ever came back to my senses. It was the novel I’d started and never gotten around to writing. It was every short story and memoir I’d written since grad school. I’d been living in a bubble into which the world was actively not intervening, and then the world intervened. With a bolt of lightning. Literally. There were days and weeks of attempted recovery. There was dismantling of computers and there were hard drive rescuing devices, there were experts and non-experts, advice givers of all sorts, and every last ditch effort possible, but even though I remember all of that, it still feels to me like it was instantaneous. Like I was sitting at my desk while it rained outside and the lights blinked off and on again and it was just done, leaving me there in that hands-poised-over-the-keyboard stance we all take when something goes suddenly awry. You know the position; it’s called “Woah, what just happened…?”
    I didn’t actually freak out. Because I had been living with that creepy consciousness of existing without outside stimulus, the abrupt reversal of that condition was the most significant thing to me. I kept thinking Huh, well THIS is interesting. I think I knew immediately that it was hopeless, so I set about my acceptance of it right away. My noble husband took much longer to give up, and I remember sitting terribly still next to him, when he finally did, and announced to me that it was officially done for. The first thing I did - because I am belligerent - was pick up the paper next to me and write a new poem. It wasn’t good, but it was new.

will in the off position

spine straight

shoulders back

legs crossed at the knee

arms at the wrist

my stillness is absolute

there is no tension in me

not in my jaw

nor in my mind

I am engaged

in the holy act

of letting go

And I let go.
    A couple of years before, I’d bought a small, extra cool whiteboard, so that I could try out what it would be like to write poems (that I actually liked), and then erase them. I had wanted to experiment with the emotion of that, and the fleeting nature of poetry… I never succeeded at it even once. Until now. I couldn’t do it with one, single poem, so I did it with all of them. Funny old world. I’m exaggerating, of course. Some things trickled back in when I reached out and re-engaged some of the more human external forces in my life – my sister had a chunk of my poetry, one of my former coworkers had a chunk of my work documents, somewhere on my green bookshelf I knew there were hard copies of a couple of short stories from years before. But the bulk of the poems simply no longer existed, except in a different form. I am a scrap writer. A margin filler. And on that green bookshelf, and at the back of my desk, and in my nightstand, and on all the tables and counters, and in every bag I owned, there were notebooks. Notebooks and folders and torn out pages and index cards and the backs of old lists and documents that printed improperly and napkins from the local bar and staff meeting agendas and Power Point presentations, where were scrawled the zygotes of many, many, many a vanished poem. They were not the poems they had become; not at all. They were the first inklings of the proofs I’d been revising for years, Oscar Wilde style. But they were there. If I could really, honestly let go of them as they were when the lights went out, I could get back something else. New plants from the old seeds.

So I bought a new cube of sticky notes, made stacks of every notebook and folder and page I could find, and I began to seek and pursue poems. It took days and days, and when I was finished, there was an Aztec temple of a tower on my desk, bristling with sticky notes like the leaves on a summer tree. It sat there for weeks. Every once in awhile I’d pick up the little notebook on the top and turn to the first marker, shudder, and put it back. Mostly knowing it was there was okay. I could look forward to getting back into the leisurely process of rewriting, without actually doing so, but after awhile it began to glare at me, and I was at risk of beginning to put other things on top of it – burying it so I wouldn’t have to face the starting over. Then one day in the quiet of late morning calm, I sat at my writing desk, opened up a word document on this dusty, hand-me-down lap top (along with my brand new, cloud-based storage platform), and I picked up the top notebook again.

Then I put it back again and typed

Laundry and Blow Jobs

                                                                     at the top of the page.

(Yeah, it's cliche, but hopefully you skipped this post due to the lack of sex, anyway.)

5. Bon bons, after all

            It’s easy to feel a little lost when you suddenly realize you’ve finished eating one of the major slices of the pie chart that is your life. It was only natural for me to panic over that big, empty quadrant of pie plate. I didn’t really want another infuriating job though. That would be like trying to replace apple, which I sort of like, with pumpkin, which I think is gross, when what I really wanted was more like chocolate cake. (My home life is blueberry, in case you’re wondering. It’s dark and sweet and messy and a little tart and overall really, really sticky and delicious.) So here I was, casting around for some decadent, dense, dark chocolate mocha fudge cake with Kahlua drizzlings, and I didn’t even notice that the place on the plate where my job had been was getting less and less empty.

            I was spending my hours moving between small tasks that I had found a way of making my own. I went to the gym and did despicable things to myself in the steam room and the shower and ogled beautiful women in the locker room. I ran errands with my fingers in my pussy at every opportunity. I folded laundry wearing ben wa balls. I went to the grocery store with toys in my ass and made casual conversation with the checkout girls. I sent dirty pictures to my husband at work and I practiced deep throating his cock in the evening. I discovered in my love of exhibitionism that I could go naked into the back yard and listen to my neighbors and people walking by on the other side of the fence, while I fucked myself in the ass or wet my panties not ten feet away from them. My husband was rewarding me with cigarettes I earned by doing nastier and more obvious activities for my imaginary outside audience. He also put me into challenging situations like removing my panties and covering my pussy with lube, while riding with a car service, or taking my favorite pink toy out to dinner. In the mean time I was casually revising the last ten years of poetry, and not feeling pressured to keep from slacking off about it, because all the anal sex and blow jobs and erotic assignments – oh, and don’t forget the laundry – were keeping me well occupied.

Mentally, I was still looking for a big chocolate cake, but in reality, I had something far better. Do you see it? It’s a red velvet cupcake over here, a dark chocolate brownie over there, a gooey caramel in the corner, flanked by two mocha truffles, and a scoop of raspberry sorbet. What’s more decadent than that? There is always laundry in the life of a housewife, but those bon bons turn out to be less of a myth than they are a metaphor.

(Sometimes your own expectations need to fuck off along with everyone else's.)