Writing and Fighting

(Above, me and the homie, Seda, back when we were perfect strangers)

As I mentioned yesterday I spent Friday night at Seda's watching flicks and trying to get over my anxiety about finishing a script rewrite in just a few days. There was so much work to do along with errands, a social schedule and and the knowledge that I only had two full days before I was dealing with the anklebiters again. She had a tournament to fight in the next afternoon.

There have been rituals that she and I have developed for our chill time as a platonic couple. One of them is true crime shows. Forensic Files and The Investigators on TruTV, Crimes that Shocker the World on Biography. Night after night we've bathed ourselves in tales of gruesome murder, jealous, violent rage and sexual perversion. And we like it. More than that we love liking it.

As we viewed and hour-long special on BTK, a serial killer in Kansas we marveled at the things that got him off, at the atrocities he committed. For us such things are a case study in what's wrong with the world, in how the systems that govern us and the stress that comes with them can so easily break the fragile and cause them to tap into to parts of the human psyche meant for defense and survival in extreme situations. But the thing about our discussion was that we had no problem admitting that we liked it, even admitting to an understanding of how and why certain things the killer was into could be a turn-on.

When I asked her why it was that we, unlike so many, were free to be honest with ourselves about our analysis of such things, she said that's the gift of being artist. For she as painter and I as writer, we are reflections of the worlds where we live and hence tend to understand then more intimately than the average Joe and Joanna. We have far fewer people telling us what to do in our day-to-day, far fewer limits on where our imaginations can travel. Our creative expression frees us.

I am now thankful for a life where I avoid the general consensus as much as possible, where trite sideshows like 'Dancing with the Stars' and 'Big Brother 28' have never as much as blipped on out radars. We spend our fun time bathing in the realest of the real, the most graphic, the most visceral, because it reminds us of just how alive we are. And that's a slightly off-beat but just as beautiful thing.

It makes me think about my married friends and their spouses, about the struggle of striking the balance of maintaining sense of self while still being a unit. I couldn't say 'I do' to anyone who thought that my fantasies disgusted them. I couldn't trust someone who wasn't willing to let me into their private places sometimes, someone who didn't want me to explore their forbidden terrain. I'd rather be alone for life than settle for that kind of surface interaction.

You can't just do it for the kids because at some point they go to bed. They go away for the weekend. They have lives of their own. If we can't tell each other what we want in the privacy of our own bed, or how we truly feel about the folks that make up our worlds (within reason) then what's the point?

In the last few days I've come to see just how little some men know about women. To quote my dearly departed Grandad, we as men, will never understand them. But at least I've always managed to make an effort. I always understood that there was more to the world than macho bullshit. That's a blessing that's definitely comes in hand in adulthood. Out.