Exit Excite

Let's get something straight between us.

One of the grossest things I’ve experienced happened because a friend stayed in my apartment while I was out of town, and left a used condom on my bedside stand, which I discovered with my fingers while fumbling in the dark to turn on the adjacent lamp. It wasn’t until I turned on the light that I realized what I’d fully gripped with the entirety of my hands.

I was too much a coward to complain to the friend, and instead stopped talking to her forever. And though it did thoroughly gross me out, I reasoned with myself that cum wasn’t a big deal (I mean imagine, if they’d left a shit-stained bit of toilet paper) and hey at least they used a condom. Hopefully that meant my bed wasn’t coated in dried up effluvia.

Which is all to say I’ve been preoccupied by sexual excitement today. And I mean, let me strenuously emphasize that my preoccupation is not an invitation to strangers to engage my actual sensibility. I just want to tell you that feeling it is important.

Why do we negotiate conversations about sexual excitement so poorly? It takes such craft to speak to personal eroticism without making you awkward. Most are too prudish to say what it is. We are intellectualizing it at best, erasing the turgid and swollen details with alkaline verbiage. Some are too garish when describing their feelings and succeed only in making everyone listening feel like they’ve been hit on, unwantingly.

I’m listening to this album that everyone’s been raving, and I want more people to just say it’s horny music. So far what I’ve seen written about it avoids mentioning its seductivity but I would place it in the same viscous pantheon as that moany Enigma album. And I mean that in a good way.

It’s too bad the word horny is so unpoetic. That’s not what this is either, though. I’m not just saying I’m horny. That would seem desperate. I don’t want you. It’s something else.

It is cold fog in late summer. The aggression of a pacific atmosphere. The incessant touch of a cloud foaming at the canopy from the pulse of everything inside growing hot, hard, soft, slow.