Love is about lies. Love is fantasy, malapropisms, and outright lies.
I have made a new fundamental change to my diurnal routine. It involves that part of the day which saw the last major and significant change to my routines. The morning shower.
The last big change came within the last 4 or 5 years. Whenever it came it still feels like yesterday for as much of a welcome it has been.
That big change was so simple it’s hard to imagine, and perhaps makes it seem more simple changes are afoot.
I sit. I no longer stand, awkwardly, even recklessly, in that narrow space of the bathtub that was not even designed for overhead showering. Instead of wasting that energy on standing erect I sensually, lazily cross my legs, land my ass on the floor, and for some stretch of time I just sit there. It is as close as I come to meditation, something my mental tics and hypnic lightshows make impossible.
For a few years I spoke. Into a recording device far too expensive for the task I spoke of the previous day’s conquests, the coming day’s waste, the nature of all things. How many hours I filled with this talk I may never know.
I intended to make a radio of it, and in fact I accomplished that, if only briefly. A predictable quantity of time is spent masturbating but most of it is spoken word, with the swirl of outdoor sounds (sirens, dogs barking, angry people screaming) floating through. The mics are binaural, so they pick up everyfuckingthing.
Among those hours of prattle arose some reasonably insightful and listenable things. But the hours. So much of them. So many. An hour of audio feels like much. Not many. Not more. Much.
Enter into this landscape of fundamental shower-related changes this week’s pronouncement: I will not shower first thing in the morning. Instead I will sit here, at this desk, writing and expelling what Einstein allegedly said was a person’s best creative energy.
It makes the day feel like two-in-one as I shower not now, at 7am, but at 11am. The post-shower afternoon feels like a new day.
It also relieves me of the hassales and even hazards of multitasking in the tub. Drinking coffee, ice water, and masturbating while recording myself speaking sometimes stretched my mental and physical resources thin. Coffee spilled, I had to turn around 45° to access the water on account of where I had to place it, masturbating was always disrupted by lying my warm back against the cruelly cold surface of the unheated tub.
Those hours (cumulative) of myself masturbating seem so righteous in the moment but not so much after the fact, days or weeks later when I play back the audio. Why would it be of any listenable merit? The activity and the action happens almost entirely in my head. The physical motions are as superfluous as the sounds they generate.
One of my masturbations became a brief collectors item on the dark web. A group of people in Japan found Payphone Radio and seemed to think it was out there by accident. They recorded hours of the stuff, archiving it in some extinguishable storage spot where content would be purged after a period of time when no one accessed it. It all seems to be gone now, over a year since it was first passed around, though I assume it lingers on the hard droves of whoever recorded it in the first place.
Hours of that radio’s audio circulated for a time, one batch with a disclaimer and warning that, among hours of intellectual and winsome chatter, you would find yourself listening to “the sound of a man masturbating.”
It is true. With lockdown imposed I changed the way I did Payphone Radio, calling in from Skype and not germ-sponge payphones. In the spirit of quarantine and as a reflection of the sudden celibacy that disrupted my patterns of the previous years I joined the other millions upon millions of us masturbating like we’d never done it before, taking it a step further than most by including it in one of my public radio stations.
Whoever distributed those hours of recorded Payphone Radio audio did not seem to think that the same person as had been speaking so articulately and eloquently for hours previous would go on to document himself masturbating. Masturbation is, in fact, not the farthest-removed metaphor for most if not all of my radios.
But one individual seemed to think he had a tabloid headline with “The Sound Of A Man Masturbating.” I loved it. The mystery, the darkness of the secret exposed, shared publicly with on an anonymous dark web message board with a disclaimer fit for CP.
But enough about that. My days are now doubled, it seems, by delaying the shit and shower portions. I said the day started with the shower but really it was the shit, usually a big blast followed by a placenta-like aftershit. The clarity of my days depend on being well shat before leaving on my miles-long constitutionals.
The days are doubled as I spill out hundreds upon hundreds of words, as if catching up on some chore, some unrequited chase. I feel oceans fill the room at times. Oceans of waste. The Sea Of Shit.
…
Presently I enjoy the sound of a garbage truck outside, wheezing and squeeling like an animal being beaten. I might attempt to record it but it has already passed.
A woman and I used to wait for this sound, not here but at her place on Riverside Drive. Every Monday and Thursday around 7am the sound of a garbage truck would wake us from our sleep, making a horrible-sounding scream we characterized as “sad” and “painful.” That poor garbage truck sounded like it wanted to die before ingesting one more sack of trash.
We would feign empathy for this mythically agonized sanitation recepticle. “That poor creature.” “Sounds like pain and suffering.”
This feigned empathy in turn transferred to each other, transforming into genuine affection, becoming a predictable but wholesomely-so preamble to our morning fuckfests, usually lasting until after 9am. I can still feel myself inside her, she was so tight and small. She weighed less than 100 pounds but had outsized breasts for such a small body. I loved them.
She frequently turned my head so we looked at each other in the bedside mirror. The mirror view of us fucking turned her on tremendously. To me it seemed like a crutch of some sort but I never complained. It seemed to make her want me more, or so I let myself think.
Sex was unpredictable with her. In the mornings she was usually insatiable, coming with all the force her small body could summon.
But at night, after a glass of wine, she was difficult, and annoyingly coy. I remember how she would sometimes bust out laughing after I undid her shirt and tried to take down her pants. Something about getting the pants off made her seem to think the very idea that we would have sex was ludicrous.
I would stop my attempts and sit on the bed, she standing over me with her belt still loosened and the zipper ½ way down, her sequined panties glimmering some in the low-lit room.
She sensed my confusion and went to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth and stripped off her pants and bra, putting on a white bathrobe and returning to me sitting on the bed. Without another word we kissed, touched, held each other.
We knew how to talk, though. When the morning fucking was done we showered and spent those garbage truck Mondays and Thursdays together, walking in the park or sitting on benches on Broadway. She and I would, apropos to nothing, occasionally mimic that garbage truck sound, emitting a gutteral, throaty squawk of a garbage truck’s anthropomorphized pain.
We knew how to amuse each other. She was a lot of work but when tensions broke they unleashed floods of laughter. I don’t remember how it ended, or why, exactly. It just kind of faded. We had what ended up being a farewell brunch at a diner on West 57th Street. I was practically salivating at the memories of touching her. I told her how beautiful I thought she was. She frowned.
The awkwardness of our sex was later explained by her coming out as lesbian. We used to talk every c
