The Write Thing

The year is unfolding in surprising ways. Where I expected continuance, I am now seeing sad but necessary closure, by marriage, distance, or both. Where I expected briefness, I am now seeing the inevitable development of a relationship. I bet the gods are amused at the dice they cast. I thought I knew, I thought I was wise. Until recently, I even claimed to have an instinct, an ancestral memory that rarely failed. To my disappointment and, in a way, to my relief, it does fail, and the truth now dawns on me. I have to come to terms with the fact that there is a day-by-day quality to whatever we do, despite the long-term frameworks in which we technically see things. I am caught in the certainty of uncertainty, and I’d better like it, or else I’ll have to contend with my own ghost when fate decides for me.

However, no matter how much life insists on contradicting my instinct, I cannot help seeing it in action again. Perhaps that is why, one afternoon in a day of recognition and lovemaking, ages ago in a dreamy Mexican town, I turned around in bed, held her hand in mine around my waist, and without looking at her I said: “I have this sense of…arrival with you”. If I am home or not, or if the gods are just fooling around with me again, I will claim not to know. I will breathe in deeply, count my blessings and hope that my instinct is right.

So the readings went. The suggestion was to be “temperate”, like Shakespeare’s summer’s day, or like a good old Christian interpreting the Bible that nobody wrote. Temperance, that was what 2008 was about.

Edgar Allan Poe became a member of the Sons of Temperance societies in August 1849. Based on the graph above, the meaning of temperance in this case would be sobriety. How else could it be, considering that Poe was an alcoholic? Strangely enough, when the word temperance comes to mind, that meaning in English is almost lost to me. Yes, the word “sober” can also be used as “proper” or “controlled” to some extent. But is a non-alcoholic somebody “controlled” or “proper”, or is (s)he simply a dry drunk?

This brings me back to the question of temperance, and the “no-no” state in the world of alcoholics…what nobody likes to be called: dry drunk. From what I understood, a dry drunk is the person who stops drinking alcohol but remains an alcoholic in behavior and lifestyle. Technically, then, you would stop being an alcoholic when you no longer consume alcohol but…is alcohol the worst of your issues, or only a good cover-up for what you do not want to deal with? If that is the case, we are all technically alcoholics, no matter whether we drink only water, as we all have issues we do not want to face. Now, are we all dry drunks? I guess most of us are, partially, in one way or another.

With the last day of December gone only a week ago, I would officially declare my year of temperance gone. I have now become acquainted with wet and dry drunkenness, and this has opened a new question for 2009. In what way am I a dry drunk?

Good old Poe probably had a poem (nothing better than having your name embedded in the noun denoting your profession to be a master) for this, or more. I dare myself to open that technical recueil on the man that I once rescued from a dusty shelf down near Port Royal RER B station as I fight off sleep and the melancholy of my good ol’ C having flown herself off to Brisbane (even when it would have never worked between us…but what the hell?)

And he has, as poetry always does, an answer:

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow –

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

An erotic proposition, when it brings uneven numbers into the question, is always a tricky one and therefore more exciting. Two young European girls arrive in Buenos Aires and decide they want to open their relationship to another player. They reply to her ad.

A few days later, they meet the potential candidate. First, there is dinner in Puerto Madero, and casual talk over a well-done lamb and three varieties of potatoes as a side dish. Wine is of course the obvious companion. Then there is the decision of going somewhere else for a drink, perhaps a disco, or maybe just a bar. There happens to be one nearby, a straight and cool lounge where they continue to talk…this time about the juicy stuff, sex, clubs, erotica and all the rest. They define their candidate as queer, and they seem to like the coolness with which she talks and expresses her mind. The night unfolds, and they are all a little drunk by now; tired, but not as much as they were before, when the conversation was much less spicy.

Looking at the young couple, it is obvious that their connection has all the elements of lesbianhood. They are totally out, as one of them prides herself in saying while she caresses her companion’s hand and plants her a soft kiss on the lips in front of an admiring crowd. They are kind of hot together, each keeping the boundaries a little open as they play their butch and femme versions of themselves. One of them leads, and this transpires in the long time it takes them to decide what food to order, or where to go. The leader will always have the last word. She later will voice her convictions about the gay community, with her militant past and her vast reading on gay-related issues as a banner of authority. Her partner will remain cool, her eyes betraying a certain admiration for her lover, which immediately precludes any counter-argument on her side (although she does have it). Meanwhile, their incidental guest is amused by the husband and wife scene, and she cannot help thinking that the subject will be a suitable platform for angry sex later on, a perfect remedy to efface the violence of the discussion and set the counter back to zero. In any case, it is already 4.30 am, and the three are too tired to solve the plights of the gay world in one night.

The game remains open for a next time, although some of the cards may have already been played. The potential candidate gets into her taxi and heads home, pondering on the power of classification as a form of security, the eternal dichotomy of men vs. women, gay vs straight, butch vs femme. A little disappointed, she sighs and right there vows that, even if it is a mammoth task, she will still be looking for that soul capable of escaping labels, that woman who will refuse to go by accommodating titles, the human being that will want to evolve beyond the typecast role of Blanche DuBois or Lara Croft. Il faudra continuer à chercher la femme, my dear, a voice seems to say…and a new day begins.