These Are My Confessions... Part I

Greetings fellow Monsters. Sorry I’ve been away for so long, but I’ve been trying to fit in again, trying to pretend that I don’t have a raging, mauling beast inside me that I must use every spare ounce of energy to keep in check. The prospect of feeling just like everybody else, of fitting in, safe in our little lives and comforted by our little relationships, of being made content by all that our own two hands have brought us is a very seductive, very appealing myth indeed. And I’ve been out there chasing it, to no avail. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

It other words, we’re never going to be able to reach back into the past and acquire that which will make us happy and content. But that doesn’t mean that we as humans should stop trying. In fact, one could argue that the very nature of humanity requires that we try, insists that we pursue that which we cannot achieve: A pure articulation of love; the sense that we as humans have been fully recognized and understood by our fellow humans, a pathway back to Eden. Frankly dear readers, I don’t know how I got off on this tangent. I started this post wanting to talk about affairs. At first I was going to write about mistresses, but I’d like to think that I use my words carefully, and dictionary.com defines a mistress as: “a woman who has a continuing, extramarital sexual relationship with one man, especially a man who, in return for an exclusive and continuing liaison, provides her with financial support.” Let’s face it people, that’s simply too narrow a definition to get at what we’re talking about here. One doesn’t have to be a man to have an extramarital affair (with or without money), and one doesn’t have to be married to have a mistress. A more accurate definition would be something like this: Affair (noun), an informally structured (and often clandestine) physically or emotionally intimate relationship, performed simultaneously or in parallel against another more formally structured, publicly recognized relationship. And I was going to write about affairs because I was thinking about having one, or rather trying to start one (it still takes two to tango, even in our internet age). But before I jump head first into the shallow end of the cesspool, I wanted to run some things by you dear readers. Before you start burning up your keyboards trying to persuade me out of doing this or that, let me just say that I don’t think any of the classic arguments against affairs are going to work with me. And it’s not that I don’t think those classic arguments don’t have merit, it’s just that I’m in a place where I don’t really give a fuck. What I do give a fuck about (and therefore want to write/talk about) is why I would start this affair. Believe it or not, I think it has a lot to do with sadness. I know, not exactly the first rationale for an affair that pops into everyone’s mind. But I arrived at it through a pretty rigorous process of deductive reasoning. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Walk through this with me for a minute, will you?

First off, let’s eliminate the impossible. I am not starting this affair because I want sex with a new person. Honestly, for all practical purposes even the possibility of sex is irrelevant. Sex is the Stanley Cup, the Larry O’ Brien, the Vince Lombardi or Commissioner’s Trophy. It is the thing that is symbolic of a victory, but not the victory itself. And mere symbolism is not at all what I am after, though I do admit that people often confuse the climax of stories with their denouement, the theme of the story with its moral. I can go to my wife for sex. No, what I’m looking for is escape, escape from myself. Most days I am filled with an incredible, enormous  sadness. And being filled with this incredible and enormous sadness leads me to great shame, for after all, what have I to be sad about? And realizing that I have a great shame which itself emerges from my enormous sadness causes within me a raging storm of self-loathing. These storms seem to last for days on end, and the hardest part about them is the brave face I must present to the world while it is raging on inside me. I must appear to be happy, and well-balanced, optimistic and content. Sometimes I think that it is from these storms that my inner monster emerges. Riding high on the sea of my turmoil, he appears and encourages me to do the most destructive thing possible, in the words of a kindred spirit, “to destroy something beautiful”.

But I don’t want to destroy something beautiful. I want to run. And so for me, having a mistress is all about creating that place to run, maintaining a space to hide from my own demons. With a mistress I don’t ever have to pretend to be happy, or to have it all worked out, or to be in control. With a mistress, I can just be a ten car pile-up on a drive-in movie screen, replayed endlessly in slow motion. A mistress would never tell me to cheer up, would never ask me when am I going to get my shit together, never pout because I’m not quite the man she hoped I would be all those years ago when she first decided to fuck me hoping it would turn into something good. I know what you’re thinking, that scenario really doesn’t sound like too much fun for the mistress. And I certainly see your point, from a distance it doesn’t seem as though I’m really offering much – save misery – unless what she also wants is also a place to hide from the expectations, the desires, the plans, the promises she made to herself of her own life. I promise that I would never tell her to lose that weight, fix those teeth, be more confident in herself or to just pull herself together for heaven’s sake, she’s not nineteen anymore. As her mistress, that’s not my job. All we’d be asking for is the chance to be mutual witnesses to our own desperate acts of self-loathing, that and a little comfort. Kind of like Leaving Las Vegas, but in my town, with me as the star. Perhaps that’s it. I’ll put up an ad on the local craigslist: ‘Male lead actor seeks female costar in a local remake of Leaving Las Vegas. Oscar worthy performances only please. Live takes only, no edits or re-shoots. To be filmed in black and white, or sometimes Technicolor, as appropriate.’

So you see, I guess I wasn’t really looking for a mistress at all, at least not in the way folks normally talk about them. And yes, I know when it is all said and done folks won’t make a distinction between what I wanted and what it looked  like, won’t make a distinction between what they think to be true and the depth of the reality the surrounds them. I’ll just be another guy who was fooling around on his wife, risking everything (as if they knew what ‘everything’ was to me) for sex. They won’t know what you know true readers, and I won’t bother to explain to them because only here, in the space of the monster’s inquiry, can I present

my confessions…