Ask you, Askew
So in the entry, Skew, Skewer, Skewest, I had set out to ask a particular question. In fact, it was that very question which presaged the entry.
However, as the polluted, rainbow-colored stream of consciousness flowed out my fingers and onto the page, I ended up in a backwater, an eddy, where I asked a question different to what I intended.
The question I wanted to pose was not about expectations of primary relationships, honestly. It was about more common, work-a-day (I dare not use 'quotidian' again), more local and immediate expectations from meeting someone, from hitting it off with someone, with first-dating.
I'm not one of those queens that leaps from "hey, you're kinda hot" to "happily every after" in a single blue-leotarded-red-caped bound, so the question I did want to ask was of a much less grand scope.
In a local-cosm where sex is like tennis (but with less preparation) or a game of pool (but with more equipment); and where the unchecked growth of open-relationships has polarized sex and love into near-opposites instead of natural adjuncts, have put coyness and subtly on the endangered list and have managed to make secrecy tantamount to privacy (it ain't, folks), I have to wonder: is there still a place for those of us who, by choice or by accident or experience, are at odds with a culture which has simply lost the knack of moderation?
In my mind, that's what it's all about: the knack of moderation.
Ever more extremes, ever bigger, wider, deeper, faster, more intense, harder, more dissociated, less personal, higher, louder, brighter...
Now, before those knees go a-jerking, I acknowledge there are race-conditions everywhere. In politics, bombs fall on countries who have something we want. In evolution, giraffe necks and peacock plumes occur. In religion, Torquemadas and Popes JP2 abound. In Republicans, there are adrenaline-junkies and testosterone addicts everywhere.
Who has learned the lesson of the Closet? The Gay Bash? The stupid, antiquated christian fuckers who either point fingers or stand, arms akimbo, being all judgy 'n' stuff?
But I digress.
Has entrenched gay culture led to in-the-trenches thinking?
I have hoards of friends that I simply adore, who I assume feel the same towards me, but there's rarely an opportunity to test the mettle of the relationships. I suppose that's good, that I don't have strong need in any given direction, but I'm not all that certain that most of my friends would approach me out of need, even though I try to be sure they know I'm there for them.
These fragile, tender, subtle things do not seem to have voices that can be heard above the noise created by those in search of their next fix of a laugh, of sex, of a high, of an ego-stroke.
Those are the Moment-Seekers I described in the op-ed piece I wrote for Frontiers SF and that also appeared through QueerDay.com.
Who still believes in the Spannungsbogen—literally, the Span of the Bow—that self-imposed delay between recognizing the desire for the thing and the act of reaching out for that thing? How do we get our knack of moderation back?