I’m no stranger to radio silence.  Or some brief and unexpected bouts of post-less-ness, although nowhere near as thunderous as the closing down of a blog.  No, nothing as dramatic, but all in the same, there are reasons, events, people, and things, which may steal your favorite writers away.  The pages become static, the RSS falls silent, and comments go unanswered.  It happens.

My name is not “six.”  Really – ask me for my ID, you’ll see my picture (and a pretty goofy one at that) but no, that name is not “six” at all.  And it’s not wrong to pursue a bit of privacy and anonymity, but it does make for an interesting clash when life happens, and the superhero costume of our sex-blogger selves must hang on a wire hanger in the closet, pushed back perhaps with those jeans that may not fit so right anymore, or that shirt which has curiously gone out of fashion after one or two washes.

Having, then, pressed the pause and play button on the playback of posts to my own blog, I can say only this: please be patient.  Please visit.  Please come back.  The writer misses writing as much as the reader misses the reading.  I know that I wouldn’t be writing if not to be read.  And while it may feel like an eternity of stale pages and silent posts, hang in there.  Send an email, and say hello.  You might get something back – even a few precious small words.  Writers, keep thinking, writing internally.  The words will find the page when the time is (to) write.

Wait it out, and maybe, just maybe – like the exhale after a held breath has stopped the act of breathing – a new post will greet you like the happening delicious first sip of fresh air.

My writing on Birds Are Smart is what I call autobiopornofictionography. (I just googled that word and found no results. I’d like to introduce this very necessary term. Bloggers, is this your medium? What do you call what you do?)

Some posts are all truth and some are all fiction and most are a blend of the two. I don’t label which is which. I borrow characters from one story for another. I put words in their mouths and bodies to their voices and emotions to their bodies and I strive to get at something.

Sometimes I worry about misleading my readers, who I’ve come to feel so supported by. I feel guilty for blurring the lines of reality. I consider writing confessional posts in which I lay out exactly what did and did not really happen. But then I think, any reader who bothers to follow my blog already knows which facts matter and which don’t.

I have been looking at porn for over 23 years now. I still buy erotic art. I collect pulp erotic paperbacks. I make my own porn. I know I still enjoy sex and all of the various art forms but I am so terribly bored with sex blogs.

Sex blogs are one-writer operations about sex. They have the potential to be intimate one on one conversation with a person about erotic subjects. There are no editors. There is no upper management demanding certain content in order to please advertisers. The blogger is free to talk about whatever they want in the manner that they want. A sex blog should theoretically be a window into a blogger’s libido.

What I find instead are journals aimed at grabbing that elusive goal of getting more readers. I see polls asking what the readers want. I see begging for comments and links. I see sexy anime images designed to show how cool the blogger is. I see this desperate, sad, pleading account of how a person quests for more reader hits. I see content that is often bland and inoffensive – or the counterpart which is offensive for the sake of being offensive.

Remember that virgin guy who was so worried that no one would have sex with him? And how he obsessed about it and was so desperate that he wasn’t very sexy because he was more worried about having sex than he was about being good at sex? But now that he has had sex (and he knows he will have sex again), he’s all relaxed about it and is now ten times sexier? It’s like that.

Let it go.

Please.

Not for me, but for your own happiness. Stop giving a fuck about how many people are reading and liking you, and talk to us about sex.

Give me your erotic thoughts. Give me your desires. Tell me your secret adventures that no one knows. Tell me about the secret adventures you wish you were having. Tell me about what makes your hot and bothered. Pretend we are best friends and you’ve had too much to drink and then tell me about what Lisa really did to you last night.

Let’s talk sex. It can be about what you masturbated to last night, I don’t care. I just want to be able to go to a blog and have a one sided dirty conversation. Be that dirty thing I read with as much excitement as the first centerfold I looked at. Make it hard for me to concentrate at work. Make me aroused no matter how shitty my day has been.

You know, you don’t even need to be real. There was no Fanny Hill, no Chatterley’s Lover and no O, and looked how that worked out. You can be as fake as you want to be but quit being a whore for fame and instead be a sex toy for your libido.

Just so I am clear, you can have bad days. You can talk about your dog dying or how worried you are about your job. That’s fine. We all need to get that shit out sometimes. I just want you to be as real with your sex talk as you are with your dog dying. Wouldn’t Rover want it that way?

The world is filled with porn right now. I can watch videos of big breasted Asian women all day long. I can browse millions of galleries catering to my fetish interests. I can make my own porn with my digital camera and hot friends. The only thing you possibly have to offer me is your point of view. Use that. There is only one of it in the whole world.

You will never be as popular as that chick who has a million endorsement ads on her website but that’s okay. She’s popular for being popular. Give the world what you have and you will be surprised how much better your content is. Being popular is a tricky, soul crushing enterprise. It’s about making people believe you are important rather than being important.

Be yourself, instead. It’s hot.

The title itself hints at something. I’ve been told that it looks jumbled rather than backwards, and in fact, there is a study which identifies that jumbled words are indeed easily readable. But there is no jumble; the letters reversed reveal the title to be “disavowed” – perhaps harsh, perhaps fitting.

I wrote this post after having a flashback – I call it this only because I have memories, where my mind slowly recollects facts and eases its way into the emotions and my mindset at the time, and then, on the other end of the spectrum, I have flashbacks. Now, it may be just a tiny bit ironic that after explaining memories and flashbacks, that I cannot remember exactly why my brain conjured up the exact state of mind and the vivid images which fuel this post. I only remember that the feeling was sudden, pressing, urgent.

Like a bad taste in my mouth it came to me quick and sour. Like a bad note, it was shrill, grating. I felt its sting sharp and sudden, flashing from searing pain to a slow burn. Its odor made me shake my head back and forth as if to clear the air directly in front of me. And I saw it happening again, in reverse.

There are times you wonder how you got here. Of course “here” could mean anything – lost somewhere out in the winding country roads far outside city limits, or something more sinister; finding yourself lost in a fog of emotional miasma. Like Hansel and Gretel, maybe it’s worth turning around, following a trail of disappearing breadcrumbs backward in time.

The question maybe isn’t more “how I got here,” but “how did I let myself get here;” which, is something far worse and perhaps something to strike from the record, to deny responsibility for, or to simply let lie unacknowledged.

* * * * * *

I must have been about ten years old when I picked up the book, The Wind from the Sun. I must have nearly fallen over twice on the way to the librarian’s counter, hand eagerly holding my library card and waiting for that particular ringing-thud sound of the date stamp stamped on that flimsy card glued to the inside back cover. Two weeks was not nearly enough; I watched the dates slowly accumulate as I’d return to the library again and again. By the time I was finished, the book was nearly mine.

It’s a “boy” thing, I think (as I let myself lapse into gender bias), to be interested in both history and science fiction. I was certainly caught up in the imagery of massive spaceships, distant planets, and of course, by HAL 9000. Yeah, I was a computer nerd then, as I am (more or less) now.

But, like catching a peek is something more interesting than seeing the whole thing, a lesser known story caught my interest more than the red unblinking eye of the massive supercomputer HAL 9000. It was titled “Dial F for Frankenstein” – a nod to Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder” in title alone (I think) – and as short as it was, it held my interest and refused to let go.

To be brief, “Dial F for Frankenstein” was a hypothetical future, one where the entire planet’s phone systems were connected and interconnected – the largest and most complex network of connections ever made or possible – and suddenly, an intelligence was born. The analogy was to that of a brain; after the network was put in place, every phone in the world suddenly rang – the idea being that all the neurons had somehow fired and the network was suddenly “alive” in the sense that the brain had fired itself up for the first time. Stereotypical chaos ensues.

Of course, the telephone analogy pales to the reality of inter-connected-mess that is the Internet.

To me, though, the idea still strikes me with the same amount of intrigue – in the possibilities, and perhaps the fear, of a suddenly sentient being. Of a creation taking a life of its own, where it grows and learns and becomes more than what you had left it.

Writing, to me, is much the same thing.

The story I wrote was titled “Type F for Frankenstein,” so really it’s an homage to an homage where the idea is yet again twisted. I typed it up during the blitz of writing I did to get six stories out for Halloween, in the infancy of my writing. It remains one of my favorite pieces of fictional writing.

Beneath the surface of what is clearly a piece of erotica, there lie a few salient ideas, and those are the ones which I think about most, picking them up like fancy trinkets in a display case, rolling them between my fingers and my gaze, before placing them back down. I’ve offered a peek, a short story (where the questions can often outweigh the answers), and revealed just enough to move the plot. To keep my own interest, as I can only hope that I’ve kept the reader’s. To provide a fantasy where something is placed, let sit, and then, hopefully, takes on a life of its own.

And so, even though there are questions raised, of life and death, what really I wanted to explore is what really happens to the thoughts after they are placed on the paper (digital or tangible). It’s a phase change, the thoughts and ideas dormant, escaping from one mind, and lying in wait until they are picked up by hungry eyes, a willing mind, and an imagination ready to make some kind of connection.

I imagine, for a moment, watching someone read what I wrote for the first time. I imagine seeing the gears turn, the mind whirr, and the expressions escaping onto their face. I imagine, then, rubbing my hands together and cackling (in my mind), “It’s alive!”

I wasn’t wrong. Their emailed responses were short and to the point. But I didn’t apologize. I felt rebellious and arrogant. “I have to be free to write anything,” I thought. “I can’t censor myself.” Still, around the edges of my rebellion, I felt guilty.

It was then that I was tempted to throw in the towel. I considered taking down my blog, changing my name, and starting fresh. I know every blogger goes through this once in a while, for various reasons: Paroxysms of doubt about a carefully constructed image. Completion of a cycle. Or unwanted discovery. My mini-crisis was composed of a little bit of all three.

There are two mirrors in my bathroom. One can be adjusted to reflect the other at such an angle that I can see my face forwards and backwards, right-side left and right-side right, over and over again into infinity. My public face and my private face are both reflected. In one iteration I’m looking away, in the next, gazing straight out. Looking at this phenomenon is like spying on my secret self. I smile. I make a face. I move the mirror away. It’s not a view I enjoy.

One of my rejected six-word memoirs was this: Tried to overcome Scorpio nature: Failed. What I’ve learned is not to overcome my secretiveness, but to hide it, too, with a show of straightforward frankness. I have a habit of adding layers at the same time as I peel them away. I adopted the blogging paradigm of compartmentalization so easily, I didn’t even notice I’d done it.

I want to convey the truth, but not any particular truth. I want the words I write to form truth on the page. I want to perform a magic trick, appearing to reveal everything, while keeping myself entirely hidden. In fact, I learn the truth as I write it, and it’s nothing new. My secret self and my surface self look much the same, though I’d rather not admit it. Sometimes the view is less than flattering.

A post drifts about in my head, unwritten and only confusedly thought of. An image of lying face down on the bed, and feeling, at that moment, that I was an object of pleasure, that even though I was touched, manipulated into a response, observed to feel pleasure, that it was only incidentally for my benefit. At the time, it triggers familiarity, that I love this. But I can’t manage to explain the feeling without running into a wall lacking in vocabulary. I can’t express it without saying I feel used, and that’s not how I feel. This passivity feels very powerful. It’s a kind of submission without dominance: it’s a role that fits.

It’s to do with how I feel about being the not-wife, the luxury. I’m attracted to men with responsibilities, and duties, and by abstracting them from that life for a day or so, I can give them something of the selfish hedonism of my life, where I strive very hard to only do what pleases me.

And meanwhile I not-wrangle, online, with a relationship where sexually I cede control, even though it’s control he takes naturally but wouldn’t take automatically, and where, out of bed, there is no issue of control, except that right now, I may be losing it over myself.

This is the thing: the irony is killing me, not to mention the schizophrenia. Deep down, I do truly believe that only I can manage multiple relationships successfully. Only I am clear-headed enough to balance out what I feel for each individual, and the sometimes complicated complexity of those feelings, in ways that are not detrimental to anyone else… and at the same time, I know that that is not remotely true, and that I am aware of my position within each of those other people’s multiple relationships. But somehow the outrage I feel when anyone questions my right to share my body or emotions seems completely divorced with how I feel about everyone else doing so, even though I would defend to the death their right to do so, and refute absolutely that I had any right to dictate their conduct. All that is owed me, I believe, is respect, and that is not lacking.

My worlds are colliding, though, with a resonant clang.

And somewhere in all of this that I need to find words for (because if I can’t, I can’t make sense of any of it), reading the words of another man, of how he would touch me, I’m brought up short, taken out of the moment, and yet tied down tight to it.

“Fuck, this is hard. I can’t find the words to write how that would make me feel”, I write, and when pressed: “passive, predatory, waiting”. And then I realize it goes back to when I was first sexually active. a kind of: I’m not doing this, you are… but I accept it; maneuvering both parties into a position where I would get what I wanted, without ever asking for it. I don’t tell him till later that he has unwittingly been dragged into my silent mental drama, and both clarified and confused it (because my drama is caused by my hypocrisy).

All of this, and the inner turmoil, swishes fretfully about inside my head until I start to write. Then I can focus on that feeling of passive responsiveness, and a memory of being held like that, and stretching out, and of feeling hands stroke my flexing skin, and being gently pulled back in again, and the freedom I felt to break away, and the place to come back to.

I can’t write it, though, until I’ve gone back to that (or several) memory. All the details my senses collected and stored then, that have been subsequently triggered by all these other outside influences, have to be in sharp focus before I can feel my way into what I write. I write about how I felt with one man, because since another man reminded me of that feeling I have been trying to write it into sense, and it took another’s words to pull it out of me.

Somehow, by writing, by trying to corral my feelings for three separate and not-consecutive lovers, all of whom, it seems right now, know far too much about me and each other, it almost resolves. I don’t feel the post expresses everything I wanted to say, but I am grateful that I managed to grasp some bits of things swimming through my head and fashion something else out of it, that holds its own meaning. And then I only have one more thing to write, but that is not for an audience to interpret, and probably unnecessary, except that I can’t not write it. And sometimes I wonder why I can’t just write about a fuck that begins here, and ends there.

I was rewarded (in my loopy, bed-ridden state) with a rich, thick layer of insight. Why the director chose this specific angle, what the idea was, and how it was supposed to be conveyed. I flung myself headfirst and was immersed in motives and motivations, subtle subtext, and a deeper understanding of what was going on. And it was great.

Why not apply that same depth, the same insight and understanding to sex blogs? I’ve read countless posts where I’ve longed to hear just a little bit more. There have been numerous times I wanted to ask a question, or found myself wondering and falling deeper between the lines. So why not have the writers themselves answer some questions, shed some light, and maybe hit us with something completely unexpected?

I’d love to understand why we write what we write how we write. And it’ll be great.