Cupid’s Day

I wish I could find a tape, or a torrent, or a script, or something, for the criminally overlooked show Cupid‘s Valentine’s Day episode. The show itself was brilliant, and hardly anyone watched it. But this episode managed to verbalize something; the difference between the storybook, candy-hearts and hallmark cards valentine’s day and a true […]

I wish I could find a tape, or a torrent, or a script, or something, for the criminally overlooked show Cupid‘s Valentine’s Day episode.

The show itself was brilliant, and hardly anyone watched it.

But this episode managed to verbalize something; the difference between the storybook, candy-hearts and hallmark cards valentine’s day and a true celebration of physical, carnal love. This show captured that thought with humor and intensity.

Because the love expressed in hallmark cards is a load of crap. Another holiday based on purchased sentiment and trite, meaningless exchanges of printed paper.

Love is physical. Love is carnal. Love is sweaty, and red-faced. Love hurts. Love is about bodies and sensuality and pleasure and caring. It’s about passion and desire. It’s about fucking, and making love, and kissing, and biting.

A day that celebrates love without sexuality is meaningless and empty.

Forget St Valentine, some pointless martyr of dubious authenticity. This day, any day that claims to celebrate love, should celebrate Cupid, Eros, Aphrodite, Venus, a hundred others. It should celebrate the real love, the physical love, the outward manifestation of the gut-wrenching intensity within.

Love isn’t lacy and pretty. Love isn’t tidy and easy and neat. Love isn’t contained on a candy heart or a paper envelope.

Love bleeds. Love aches. Love is a knife, not a feather, a bruise, not a red crayon.

Love is what moves us and drives us, sustains us. What brings us together, drives us apart. People kill for love, die for love.

Celebrate this carnal, physical, real love. This day, or any other, choose your own. But chaste kisses and paper do not celebrate the love I’m talking about.


Now, with all that said, let me further note that for two weeks I’ve thought this Valentine’s was a tuesday. I of course then planned to do my shopping for pointless cards and candy hearts on monday, being that spontaneous, last-minute kind of guy. So of course, I’m late as usual.

Ah well. Better late than never. Even for vapid, pointless gestures.

One christmas, please hold the christ.

So let’s make this really clear up front. I’m not a christian. I wasn’t raised a christian.

I was raised an atheist. Mother and father were both from southern protestant/baptist families (something like that, I’m not sure exactly), but but they were both intellectual liberals who grew up in souther California. Dad was, as I’ve said, a science and logic guy, and empiricist who would never open his mind to anything science could not prove.

So have no religion. I have no spirituality, per se.

However, I find the idea of atheism to be as — I want to say wrong-headed but that sounds much stronger than I really mean, so let’s say intellectually closed — as theism. Because just as Satanists must then accept a concept of God, in order to worship God’s counterpart. Atheists, by absolutely denying the existence of any deity, thus close the mind to things without any proof.

So if required to label myself, I’d use the word agnostic. It is, to me, the ultimate rational position of mankind in an unknowable universe. We do not an can not ever know.

I’ll put of a rant on organized religion for another day. Because that’s not what I want to talk about here.

What I want to talk about is christmas. Because I love christmas. I love it, not as a festival celebrating the birth of someone who probably existed, but most likely was simply a minor philosopher with really great PR; because we all know he wasn’t born December 25th, and most likely never even lay in a manger. Nor do I love it as a celebration of the solstice, which is far closer to what it is and how it’s celebrated. I love it, instead, as a cultural tradition. Which means that I can love images of Santa Claus just as much as I love a holiday creche; I can love a menorah as much as I love stars and angels and trees.

It’s not about the religion that have tried to co-opt an older tradition; it’s not even about the older tradition. It’s about how my culture, modern America in the 20th century, celebrated the end of the year.

We all know, those of us who think and read, that these are all variants on solstice festivals; something that has existed, I would guess, since man first learned to count the days of the year and predict the long nights and short days of the year’s end. I suspect every culture since has celebrated the solstice in some way, with feast or sacrifice, solemn prayer or wild orgy, drink and plenty or fear. If I were to choose a thing to celebrate, it would be that, since that pre-dates any of our absurd modern ideas.

But to me, christmas, or hanukkah, or kwanza, or whatever else people celebrate here in this season, isn’t about any of that. And it’s not about the commercial nonsense either, about the getting and they buying, though try telling that to any kid you know and watch them laugh.

Christmas is about love. It’s about recognition of the people you care about. It’s about gestures and symbols and celebrations. It’s about remembering to say thank you and I love you and I’m glad you’re in my life to people. Gifts are lovely; and the tradition of gift-giving is a delight, even though I’m terrible at choosing gifts for people and often get myself stressed because I can’t figure out what to get for someone I care about. But the gift-giving tradition isn’t about things, it’s about symbols. It’s about a physical representation of love and caring, the act of giving symbolic of intimate connection.

Christmas is about being with people you care about. It’s about music and drink and food and celebration of each other, of people so see every day and may not always remember to honor and celebrate, of people far away or seldom seen.

Oddly, christmas isn’t about family, to me, in the traditional extended family sense. That may be because I never had extended family; it was always the four of us, mom, dad, kids, dogs and cats, maybe a friend or two. We had no great clan, everyone else from both sides are far away, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, the east coast. It was just us. Later, it was us and friends, but never, apart from a few years with my grandfather, was it ever about generation-spanning family gatherings.

No, it’s about my tribe, not my relatives. It’s about the connections forged not by blood, but by love. It’s about my core family, and the people I care enough about to invite into my family, near or far.

My choice of celebration, my ideal, is not always what I manage. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that my simple view of inner-circle of family and friends is at odds with my extended tribe of in-laws, who have a vast and complicated christmas ritual spanning two or three days of planned events. But more, in my ideal of what christmas is, there’s also a celebration of love in a carnal sense.

Our culture keeps the ideas of love and lust so vastly separate; I do not see that divide as rational or sane. Chaste, romantic love makes no sense to me. Thus I wish, when the nights grow long, the year grows old, and we gather to celebrate, that we could celebrate in an older, more primitive way, with feast and orgy as might our ancestors. Drink and food, and physical love. There are so many things that are easy to say with touch that are hard to say in words, so many things that are easier to say when one is naked and covered with someone else’s sweat and bodily fluids. I wish that were possible in our culture, or rather, less difficult. I’m not talking about fucking a room full of strangers; I’m talking simply about sharing that love with people, celebrating love’s other characteristics.

So to me, this season is not about the birth of a messiah or a miracle of lights, or about shopping. It’s about music, songs of my youth, songs of different cultures with religious words but cultural meaning. It’s about cooking with people you love, eating and drinking with people you love. It’s about remembering who’s important in your life, and showing them you’re thinking of them. It might be about carnal love, it might be about friendship, respect. remembrance, but it is about love.

Friends, family, loved ones who read this space; I do not always show all the love I have, all the respect I have, all the caring and commitment I have. I do not always remember to treat you as well as you deserve. I can be a thoughtless churl, I can be impatient and short-tempered and arrogant and condescending. I can be demanding and forgetful and take you for granted. But I love you; and as always, I strive to be better.

Drink up my friends. It’s been a long year, yet over too soon. Celebrate love in all ways you can think of.

Christmas is about love. Not about jesus or gifts or religion. It’s about love.

So let’s make this really clear up front. I’m not a christian. I wasn’t raised a christian.

I was raised an atheist. Mother and father were both from southern protestant/baptist families (something like that, I’m not sure exactly), but they were both intellectual liberals who grew up in southern California. Dad was, as I’ve said, a science and logic guy, an empiricist who would never open his mind to anything science could not prove.

So have no religion. I have no spirituality, per se.

Read more “One christmas, please hold the christ.”

Thankful For

This could also have been titled ‘these are a few of my favorite things‘. Things for which I give purely lascivious thanks: Women who shave. Women who love me. Women who are not afraid to talk about it. I’m thankful for every woman out there who takes off her clothes and lets someone take pictures, […]

This could also have been titled ‘these are a few of my favorite things‘.

Things for which I give purely lascivious thanks:

Women who shave.

Women who love me.

Women who are not afraid to talk about it.

I’m thankful for every woman out there who takes off her clothes and lets someone take pictures, that I and others like me might enjoy such beauty.

I’m thankful for masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

I’m thankful for the taste of pussy, the feel of breasts in my hand, the curve of a beautiful ass against me.

I am thankful for the beauty of a woman’s orgasm.

I’m thankful for love, for romance, for unexpected connections with people far and wide.

I’m thankful for friendship and for people who listen when I need to talk.

I’m thankful for the words “I love you“.

I’m thankful that people read this shit.

This holiday is a trite, silly thing, but under it lies rites of the equinox, harvest festivals, libations to the gods. Today it’s about pilgrims in absurd hats (puritans — not people who should be celebrated, but instead reviled); it’s about turkey and cranberries, and stuffing.

So I do not, as a rule, give thanks this day. I see no gods, revere no higher power. What I have, I worked for, made, or was lucky to find. But sometimes, some ways, the universe provides; against great odds, things line up and go your way. That is what I am thankful for; the small bounties, the little things that make my life oh-so-much better.

It’s been an interesting year. Outside, in the great big world, there are bad things happening. Government, war, hate, stupidity. A moral crusade, in which I am most certainly the enemy, though my enemies don’t yet know it. But here — in the small places, the little space that is my life, it’s been a year of great bounty. Truly, I am thankful.