Stories

Forty Years: I wrote this in just a very few days as the end of October '09 and posted it mostly just to get some perspective and get get it out of my system. When I started it I only wanted to convey a sense of strength, depth and direction of the narrator's desire. Only in revision did I try to show the surprising, surreal reality (surreality?) of how similar falling in love is with discovering one's female led interior. For me, the final realization that I had fallen in complete and irrevocable love was a proverbial bolt from the clear blue, the total shocker I had tried my very best to avoid being aware of for as long as possible. In the story I tried to intensify the love shock with a change-up on the classic stranger's eyes across a crowded room experience, and tried to capture that slow suspenseful sense of fate when we fall in love, the inexorable inexplicable doom about our desire for someone. 'Surprising' is also a rather understated adjective for my discovering I wanted to be a beta man, and in the story I tried to have these surprises parallel the surreal awareness of having sex with a virtual stranger. Thus the moment when he (almost accidentally) realizes that pleasing this woman, sexually and lovingly no different, is what he actually wants to do, and then that this is what he feels he was born to do is an acknowledgement (and later acceptance) of his personal erotic truth.

It would be great if every female led guy fell in love with their soulmate and had these issues figured out from their first experience, from their very first time out of the gate, but it's not very realistic and I'm afraid the sex with virtual stranger device isn't very realistic either. I think it was too surreal and the suspension of disbelief breaks down making it hard to identify with the guy, and forty years of inferred relationship don't quite make up for it. Everything aside however, I would love to hear the same story (perhaps minus the stranger part) from the woman's point of view and wish I could write it. Unfortunately, while my wife knows I wrote this story, she hasn't read it.

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Out of the Many, The One: Not an erotic story, and if not so polished its ideas and imagery is more what I usually write. A true story about this is my wife read it the day after I wrote it and said she didn't care for the whole extra arms thing but liked the ending part where he was doing her chores. She said this in all seriousness while I happened to be doing the dishes. I didn't get to laugh very long before she added that I needed to do the dusting the next day. When I pointed this out, she smiled but I still haven't a clue whether it was intentional.

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Glint is barely fiction; my wife really did say one morning, "This floor needs scrubbing" and that afternoon I really did start scrubbing it. Most everything else in this story has been changed to protect the innocent and does not necessarily reflect their interior process. Actually I was thinking about what made it hard for me to motivate myself, again, and so imagined a scenario in which a guy conquers his 'acknowledgement demon' and the woman gets her way. Of course, Like most fiction, real life doesn’t work this way, doesn’t get resolved this way, but I think also like most fiction, the point remains the point here: if we pay attention to our interior spaces, in time we can have more meaning in our lives and better relationships.

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Exposure I wrote one morning after I saw a police woman, who clearly knew what she was about, laugh.