(I have to lose weight for an upcoming — minor — operation, and this is the diary of how it makes me feel)
Day 18
I’ve lost 20 pounds and I am starting to enjoy looking in the mirror again. I was standing outside a restaurant on Church street and a man came up to me and started flirting. I know he was flirting even though I’m very unadept at this. Interesting that he is someone I have had my eye on for years, I’ve seen him making moves in bars and thought hmmm…he’s so sexy and so what’s the word …assertive? Unlike me. He said “I went down to the beach today, took off my clothes you know…but it was so windy.” NOT too much information at all. He touched me twice in one conversation and I have never met him before. (Flirting 101 — touch them lightly, casually, but not offensively.) So what does it mean to be desired, and why does it matter? Well first of all I’ve been living this tragical life because I’ve always been a big burly threatening-looking man so ergo, albeit, therefore, duh everyone expects me to come onto them and I’m just not constitutionally capable of doing that. You have to come onto me. So I’ve missed out on so much because the outside of my body has been sending a message my inside can’t deliver. I get women for this reason. (Their bodies send the message that they are weak and yielding personalities when so many are not. Get it?) Anyway, all my personal pain aside, men are not desired, are never — not the way women are, our bodies are not culturally fetishised and it is all that I have been desperate for all my life really is to be desired, and all it takes is twenty pounds. I know you don’t like it — when I say ‘you don’t like it’ you don’t like that, right? Speaking for you when you’re not there, that’s what you don’t like, right — but you are there, aren’t you? You are reading this? — no, now this blog is getting too meta. What I am saying tho is you don’t like it when I talk about men being desired -- it’s a huge cultural taboo. But just go to Shakespeare, go to Two Noble Kinsmen. Shakespeare is unabashedly unaware of this taboo it seems, for the knights are young and beautiful and help each other put on their armour before they fight each other ‘oh did I pinch you?’ — the one kinsman says to the other. The other might reply: ‘You mentioned caring about the injury to my supple, young, tender, hard, sun-grazed, lightly furred, dapple flesh, no, I don’t mind. I know that we are set to do battle against each other, and perhaps kill each other, but you hope my armour doesn’t pinch.’
Wow. Is that love? Desire? Obsession? Or just plain nuts? So this guy who is flirting with me (his name is Gilbert, by the way, that’s his first name, like my last, so we are in effect Two Noble Kinsmen — or perhaps ignoble ones) I don’t know if he’s beautiful on the inside as well as the outside as Shakespeare would have it, probably not, after all, we talked about the weather. Well I shouldn’t hold it against him - or rather I would love to hold anything against him I could. We must all talk must about the weather sometimes, mustn’t we? (Chateaubriand did, it’s what Barthes liked about him.) But what matters is that this man who desires me is violating an ancient taboo by worshipping my body not because I am a warrior but only because I look like one (I am doing a passing imitation of a warrior now that I am leaner) and of course our sex, if we ever have it, will not be generative — a cardinal sin — it will only be for pleasure, it will be for the orgasm alone, so put that, as they say, in your pipe and smoke it.
