Who Wears The Dress
© April 25, 2009
So I met my soulmate last month and like the little schoolgirl who fantasizes that it will all be dreamy when you meet your mate, I too thought I had won the Lotto, but instead of millions of dollars, the pay-off would be a life filled with constant blissful love. Now I’m thinking maybe I’d have been better off with the cash.
Sometimes you get an epiphany, and if you’re lucky you get a ménage a trois with Epiphany and her sister, Tiffany. The view through the doorway usually comes in a moment of high times—uh, page 32 of the July 2007 issue of High Times that is, the “How To Roll A Tighter Spliff” issue. Sometimes it can occur after an acid trip where you snap back and say, “Damn, we really are all one. That shit’s for real!” Sometimes it can be when you’re in love, where your goo-goo eyes for your love interest makes every little minor thing seem rosy. You step in dog shit and you start singing an impromptu song, “Shitshoe, I’m Detective Shitshoe. I search out the spots where love is a-hiding and I point my shitshoe at her and—SHITSHOE!” But then sometimes you wake up and say, “Whoa, wait a sec. I just stepped in shit and—FUCK!”
My SM (soulmate) forgets her I.D. after I reminded her the day before to bring it and so we can’t get into the party that I paid $43 for tickets. The money was going towards two charities and so I could take the money from my charity envelope, which I don’t even consider my money, and not feel so bad about it. But, besides the little Jew part of me that was like, (said with a lilting accent) “$43. That’s a lot of kishka!” I was pretty happy just being with my girl regardless of what activity of which we were going to partake.
And then it was the movie screening that we were going to go to on Thursday where a few hours before it started I received a text message saying, “I’m not sure I’m feeling 100% and I think I may want to stay home.” I haven’t felt 100% since 1973! The plan was that we were going to see the movie screening together, she would crash over my place and we would hang out the next day, maybe some morning sex and a yoga class, before she went to work. Now all that was cancelled because, you know, you just can’t have the same experience at 97%.
Tonight was a raw food potluck picnic in Central Park where SM was supposed to go with me at 6:00 and, surprise-surprise, when I didn’t hear from her by 5:45 I sent a text message that, even though text messages don’t carry tone of voice well, this one probably carried a little. “Uh, it’s 15-minutes before the raw food meet-up. I’m guessing you’re not coming? It would have been nice to know a little sooner.” I sent a similar text message at five minutes to six when I still hadn’t heard from her and she texted me back, “Working. Won’t make it.” Alright, fuck me and my guilt-tripping bullshit but, seriously, how much of this shit do I have to take? I mean, even if God himself pulled enough bullshit on me I’d finally say, “Alright G, you’re out. Point my ass towards Satan.”
In one email exchange we had this week, because of brainwashing from television sit-coms, I felt like I was the whining little bitch who needs more attention and that she was the non-communicative male who “needs more space.” I told her that while I once felt always connected even when we weren’t together, I had started feeling somewhat numb when apart. I still felt “connected,” sort of, but not in the panties-getting-wet-when-I think-of-her way. I did some “spiritual justification,” thinking that perhaps this was a more “evolved” way of feeling, that I wasn’t obsessing over her, that in a way I am feeling detached—and that’s a good thing.
Now maybe that bullshit might be true but I have a feeling this has about as much chance of being the case as me being blindfolded and spun around six times in a room full of cackling chickens and then throwing a dead-on bull’s-eye. (For the record, I’m not really sure what the need of the cackling chickens is but it seemed to add to the basic pandemonium of the situation.)
I went back and forth with starting to text message her (as I can’t seem to ever get her on the phone) and then cancelling it out, because while I want to be truthful and authentic with the one I love, I also don’t want to force her into feeling or doing anything based on guilt or obligation. Finally we talked on the phone and I said how I was feeling a bit dead inside. Now that I think of it, this was before the movie and she soon hung up and didn’t make it clear to me until she responded to the text I sent to her 15-minutes before the movie asking if she was coming with, “Not coming. Will email you.”
Her email made me feel that it was clear who wore the dress in this relationship. She said that she needed her space and private time and time with her friends and that she actually was able to process our love and feel closer to me when we were apart. Now I am the FIRST one to understand the value of private time. In fact, before I incarnated into this plane of existence, God asked the class of souls, “Does anyone understand the value of private time on the Earth plane?” and my hand was the first to go up (I was going to answer, “To be able to jerk-off without others watching?” but that’s another story.)
But the thing is, it’s not like we are seeing each other every day. I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s old patterning but I thought that new lovers would want to see each other more than once a week. Oh, I’m just being old-fashioned, I know. Next I’ll be putting a scratchy one on the phonograph player.
I’m in a quandary here, which is not an egg factory run by nuns for the vocabulary challenged. I do not want to impose any rules or regulations to the relationship, which runs awry of my anarchist principles, but I also know, as they say on the streets, “I’m just not feelin’ it” (and then usually after the second hit on the crack pipe, they start to “feel it.”)
In one of my conversations with the Universe, I was in bed and crying like a pussy at the time, I told Her that I didn’t care how painful my experiences were, just as long as I was on the fast track to full consciousness. Well after enough spiritual kicks to the balls, I was like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein when he told his crew before being locked in the room with the monster, “No matter what I say, do not open this door,” and then once the monster started to approach him he banged on the door and said, “I was kidding. Open the door!”
One point of irritation for me is probably something that the Universe is gracefully illustrating to me as one of my annoying qualities, namely that in pursuit of your personal progress, you can’t dismiss the feelings of all those around you with, “Hey, fuck ‘em if they can’t hack it.” So while her path may need some “private time” (sounds like some pathetic guy who dresses up in a cheap suit and asks a stripper at the titty-bar for some “private time” where he is going to spend $300 on a cheap bottle of champagne and she’s going to give him a private dance in the other room where, if he’s lucky, he’ll be able to grope her ass a little), there is a slight selfish aspect to this in that she is looking at her needs with complete disregard to the two other entities involved—me and “the relationship.”
You see, regardless of whether I “should” or “shouldn’t,” the more time we spend apart, the more I am like Diana in A Chorus Line who sings about how in her first acting class everyone was “feeling” the snow, woosh-woosh, and “I felt nothing.” It’s kind of like if a dog needs two meals and an hour of exercise a day and you say, “Look, I’m fuckin’ busy! I’ll walk you a half-hour and feed you once a day.” In case the simile flew under you, “the relationship” is the dog and it’s just so possible that without at least two fuckin’ meals a day it’s going to become as thin and boney as my raw vegan dog, Abandon. Get it? Look, I’m feeling vulnerable here. I need you dumb fucks to stay with me.
So let’s just say I’m that abusive dog caretaker. I start to see that my dog is not only not thriving but suddenly I’m seeing phone calls on my monthly statement that I don’t remember making to the “Kill-Your-Pups A-Wee” euthanize place and when I call them up they tell me that someone called from my number in a “ruff” asking for brochures. I have two choices, either start feeding the little bitch at least enough to keep her alive or that one day when I receive the bill from “Kill Your Pups-A-Wee,” that I accept that I was partly responsible for her offing herself, while I pray that she didn’t use prime-time minutes to call for her appointment.
This is the difficulty of being in love. You always have to honor yourself but you also have to dig beneath the surface of what you think is “honoring yourself” and realize that if your honey is miserable and you don’t feel bad about it, the relationship should probably be euthanized.
I’m aware enough to see my old patterns and to NOT want to fall into the unconscious reactionary behavior of the past. I am also not feeling happy and that is starting to become my prime directive.
In my second favorite book, Illusions: Tales of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach, our protagonist comes across a man who, like himself, is also giving rides in a bi-plane for money but soon realizes that this man is somewhat unusual. First of all, no bugs ever gets squashed on his windows (joke: “What’s the last thing to go through a bug’s head when he hits your windshield at 50 mph? His brains.”) He then sees that this strange man never has to clean or add oil to his plane…and then the real magic begins. We find out that he was a messiah but was not groovin’ on the crowds and the pressure and finally told God he wanted out. God was like, “You do whatever makes you happy” and he was like, “Cool, fuck this gig,” and left to fly his bi-plane.
I’m starting to realize that being in a soul relationship or helping others to become more aware through my teaching—if I’m not happy, I don’t really care. I’ve broken out of the missionary conditioning long ago, whether religious or New-Age, that I have to lie on my back while everyone fucks me from on top and think if someone doesn’t turn me on my stomach soon and fuck me from behind I’m going to scream! But I keep getting sucked back in because every time I see someone’s eyes sparkle a little bit with an awareness that I have helped them to remember, it is like a heroin high—it feels so good that even the painful diarrhea following it is worth the soaring (I don’t do drugs, I just saw the movie “Trainspotting” and now am a self-proclaimed expert on heroin.)
But I think I’m out of the messiah game. I’ll still share some of my writing. But the writing is more going to be for me than any attempt to wake up the somnambulistic. And I’ll still teach once in awhile. But this, too, will be more for me to experience being in my flow and less for the pathetic aerobic yogis who come for an exercise class and tighter buns. Or maybe I should just play out the end of the messiah game, you know, where you die a gruesome death because you pissed enough people off by showing them that they were living a lie.
Regardless, I have to decide what to do about the soulmate thing. Truthfully, I am no longer into sex just for pleasure; it actually makes me a little sick. Before my SM, the last time I came with a girl, I had to keep my mouth closed and swallow my puke to avoid her from thinking that my cum was not only clumpy but contained pieces of broccoli in it.
I’m thinking if this relationship dissolves that I am done in the love game and will be focusing 100% on my blindfolded, chicken coop dart game. Maybe what the Universe was giving me was a taste of True Love and once I tasted it, I no longer needed to stick my head in the trough and burrow down. Maybe now that I’ve experienced this taste—and as I wrote in “The Mushroom Cloud,” one taste is an eternity—I can move on with a non-distracted focus on expanding my consciousness to the level where I can remove a girl’s bra with my mind.
It’s also possible the Universe is telling me, “Don’t think just because we sent you your soulmate that you can just go unconscious ride this one out. You still need to work and the times require you to work harder now.” That lesson might not have fallen on deaf ears if I weren’t a lazy motherfucker.
I have never felt as at peace as when I have been with my SM but I can’t rely on our once a week rendezvous to find my peace. I don’t have the answer. Damn, that’s annoying! I thought I “got it” but clearly the Universe still has a few lessons for me. I feel like the idiot in the casino who after a serious winning streak shouts out, “I CAN’T LOSE!” and the Universe raises an eyebrow and says, “What did that mother fucker just say?” and strikes him down until he’s gambled away his child’s college fund and knows that he’s going to get a serious beat-down from his wife when he tries to explain this one to her.
My experience has showed me that it’s best to “Keep cool, honey bunny” and ride the waves and you usually end up on shore, that is if you aren’t smashed into the rocky, shelly bottom or if you do end up on shore, you aren’t too exhausted to move from fighting the undertow and then get a third degree sunburn and pussing blisters which formed over your entire body which, like in “Goldfinger” when they painted that girl’s whole body and she died because her skin couldn’t breathe, causes you to die but in your case due to sheer disgust.
Maybe I’ll have a serious discussion with SM about this—by text message, of course. Carrie on “Sex in the City” was dumped by a Post-It note. I was fired from the last yoga studio I worked at via an email. I suppose a text message saying, “Hey, great to meet you again, my soulmate. See you again in the Great Oneness of All,” wouldn’t be so out of the curve now, would it?
For the record, I don’t wear the dress in my relationships. This is mostly due to my wide, childbearing hips and a lump I have in the front called a penis that doesn’t allow the fabric to drape elegantly and the fact that even if you’re a Scott wearing a kilt it’s still a very gay look. Unless we’re role-playing and I’m Little Bo Peep and my lover is my flock of sheep, you won’t see me skipping to and fro wearing a dress. I don’t have a problem skipping to and fro, mind you, just not while wearing a dress.
ADDENDUM (May 6, 2009)
I wrote this piece on April 25, 2009, almost one month to the day of when I met my soulmate. I was not sure what was going on with my feelings inside but I knew that this had nothing to do with how I felt about her, nor did it dissuade me from my 100% commitment to us; it was just a new experience and I was a little unsure and scared about it and needed to see her.
One girl who liked my un-blog writing and seemed to develop a fondness for me—to which I was very clear that I was unavailable, telling her that I had met my One—came to her first yoga class with me, where I had my dog assisting. In an email afterwards she wrote: “…the character of your blog… who I had begun to confuse with you… …is very different than the energy I sensed when meeting you in person and in the presence of your dog… who really ‘told’ me the most about your true nature.”
You see, my un-blog isn’t me; it’s a character I play with which expresses aspects of me hidden in the spaces between the words. I mean, some things I write are so NOT where I am now. I will not get into it now but with all my talk about sex or wanting to do this or that perversion—let me just say that I have a distance from sex at the moment where sex without love is not even fathomable for me. Yet if you read my un-blog you will probably come off thinking that, “All this guy wants to do is get laid.” You would probably think from my un-blog that I am daily sticking things in my ass as well and this is not true either; I only do that on Tuesdays.
My writing is also a way that I can not only share ideas in a silly way but also release some of my tension. You see, every day more and more words and stories and ideas and teachings fill my head and throwing them down on paper, or into my computer, is one way of releasing some of the pressure in my skull so I don’t look like the head of “South Park’s” Mr. Mackey after he smoked a joint and explode.
A friend of mine who knew me before I had stepped into the role of “Swami X” and had shared in the teachings and love of the man who went by the name his parents gave him when he first came into this world, asked me what was the purpose of creating “Swami X,” seeming to fear he was a distraction to me sharing not really Truth but the true beauty of my-Self. I told her that I had a plan and that “Swami X” fit into that plan and if I found that he started to no longer serve his purpose, that I would kill him off and let the “first man” resume his place at the helm.
Of course I’d kill him with some drama, such as a jealous disciple shooting him in the head during meditation and his last words before falling into an eternal savasana being, “It’s about time, you pussy.” Or if I want to be boring I could make a sex scandal involving him sleeping with his students, but this tired story has been already played by every other Swami who has come to America from the caves and I like to be original…maybe I’d have him sleep with the male as well as female students just for a little twist.
I’m starting to think that he is becoming more of a distraction than he is worth, that I have brought to life my own Frankenstein monster and I have started to lose control of him and his murderous ways. I wouldn’t mind him murdering my old self, just as long as he didn’t step into the void and start to claim himself as the emperor of my Soul. It looks like a piece entitled “SWAMI X MUST DIE!” is not far off.
I was planning to write a whole piece about what the “purpose” of my un-blog is and how most miss me for the “Jesus Cartman” character of “Swami X” who I write through [see my first un-blog entry, MY INTRODUCTORY BLOG: Seek Your Drugs Elsewhere!] I mention what I have here to explain that I was feeling needy and unsure of what was going on with me and wanting to see my girl and when she wouldn’t make herself available for me, I used this piece to release some of my anxiety.
The mistake I made was that I sent her a copy of it, foolishly thinking she would find it amusing, and when re-reading it now, I see clearly that because English is not her first language and she would not get most of the references to movies and other nonsense and the sarcasm would also be lost, all she would really get would sound like a guy who is saying, “I’m feeling nothing and I’m thinking this soulmate thing is for the birds” and that was NOT what I was saying. While I did feel the need to see her and uncertainty about what was going on inside of me, I never doubted our connection and, truthfully, I didn’t really take the piece too seriously, looking at it more as just an exercise in mindless banter.
The result was that we met and when I saw her face it was the first time that I saw her that she felt miles away. I smiled and said, “Hi,” and she was all business. She pulled out a print-out of this piece and had only one small paragraph circled, the one where I said how perhaps this was the Universe telling me that just because we brought you and your soulmate together it doesn’t mean you don’t have to work. She said how that was the only paragraph that made sense to her. It probably was the only paragraph that did make sense in the piece, besides some references to needing to see her and feeling she was not making herself available to me.
After some less than optimal back and forths, she finally said, “Why are you doing this?” In hindsight, I think it is those words that hurt the most. To me they spoke words from the spirit of which I don’t even think SM was aware. They were saying:
“We have a beautiful love and this is definitely a Soul connection. I know you grew up in a family where you could yell and scream at each other and the next day say, ‘I love you’ and all was forgotten, but my incarnate being needs to be taken by the hand and walked along the path slowly. You are yanking her arm out of the socket and she is not ready for this. You are forcing her to exert her free will—which is even more powerful than Soul love—to do what she feels she needs to protect her self. Why are you destroying this gift from Spirit?”
I shit you not, my Soul was aware of this conversation but my own incarnate being had his own human frailty issues, just like SM, and he couldn’t fully focus on the quiet message of Truth over the loud jabber of garbage. It was an ambulance’s siren blaring while your love tells you “I love you” and you respond, “Wow, I hope someone isn’t hurt!” not realizing that the person in the ambulance is being rushed to the hospital and your insensitivity just sent your relationship to the morgue. I wish he could have seen that if he only kept his internal processing working while keeping his mouth shut, that he and his love could walk slowly hand-in-hand until they were finally ready to gallop together, or something less horse-like. To think about how things would have been different if the ears were open and the mouth remained shut is almost too much to bear.
We got together the next day, as my parents had gotten us all tickets to some show which, the Universe be damned, was a collection of about a hundred love songs from musical theater and film over the last half a century. She showed affection towards me but now she seemed hypersensitive and things that seemed pretty benign could turn her mood 180 degrees on the spot.
One example was I had gotten her a white sweater for a dollar from this outdoor junk store in my neighborhood. Far be it from me to dress her up like the Barbie Doll I never had, but when I saw it I just thought she’d look so cute in it and couldn’t resist.
Not knowing whose funk could have been on the sweater, I threw it in the wash. Because I’m a moron, I threw it in with the colors and it came out looking kind of grey and as if someone had stepped their sneakers in axel grease and then proceeded to jump up and down on it. She laughed when she heard about my retarded washing antics, explaining to me that you can’t wash your whites with your colors, making me wish that I had met her years ago before every single white item I had turned a permanent shade of grey. So when she met my parents and me, she was wearing the sweater. She had washed it herself and it had miraculously regained it whiteness. Of course, being a guy, I didn’t recognize the sweater until she reminded me.
After dinner we were walking to the theater and my Dad was telling her about how I ran the New York Marathon. He asked her if I had told her about this and she said no. After my Dad went on she turned to me and said, “Oh sorry, you did tell me.” I responded with, “Hey, if I couldn’t remember the sweater, I guess it’s okay you not remembering that.” Granted, this was not my best joke—but offensive?
Which reminds me of the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry tells George that he was trying to keep up with a girl talking dirty to him and after she mentioned something about her panties he said, “You mean the panties your mother laid out for you?” to which George responded, “What does that mean?” and Jerry answered, “I don’t know! But she immediately got offended, put on her clothes and stormed out of my apartment!” and George concluded, “It’s a little unusual. But offensive? No.”
SM failed to see the humor in my joke and immediately turned off and said, “Why do you do that?” and I thought it better to explain my joke rather than try to decipher which of my personality disorders to which she was referring. I explained to her that I was joking and ragging on MYSELF for not remembering the sweater I got for her and that I didn’t give a hoot whether she remembered some trivial fact I shared with her or not. Just as quickly as she turned off, she turned back on, which was good but I was painfully aware that she seemed to have one hand on the love valve and my mouth seemed to be turning her into Michael J. Fox, with a shaky Parkinson’s hand in control of its flow.
The same on and off happened in the theater while we were in our seats and in hindsight now I know it was because she was still reeling from processing this “Who Wears The Dress” piece, that her Soul was still trying to hold on to the connection but her incarnate being was unable to assimilate it.
One song they sang during the show was Billy Joel’s “She’s Got A Way.” I told her later that that song hit me deeply: “She’s got a way about her, I don’t know what it is but I know that I can’t live without her…She’s got a smile that heals me, I don’t know what it is but I have to laugh when she reveals me. She’s got a way of talking, don’t know what it is but it lifts me up when we are walking anywhere.” I told her that that was all I needed from her in my time of desperation, when I was feeling alone and scared—to see her smile and be healed, to hear her talk and be lifted. I so wished that her Soul could come to my aid and help her body just say, “I see now, my love. I’m sorry I didn’t understand before. Let’s put this behind us and reside back in love.” But it was too late; her body already had one foot out the door, along with her head and with the door between us, she was unable to hear any pleadings from our Souls.
We started to kiss and, like all people, I thought this could somehow make us forget the problems we were having; I felt, maybe prayed, that this could help remind us of the deep connection beneath the nonsense that we were letting get in our way. We made love and she came and I chose not to, which was probably another mistake on par with the sweater joke.
Because of certain practices I have done and because I truthfully valued sharing love with her over sharing bodily fluids, it was irrelevant to me if I came or not. This also allowed me to sex her some more, making an end run for giving her a second orgasm but I was tackled before reaching the end zone due to a technical difficulty; it seemed the end zone needed to close down to allow the grass to regrow.
The next morning she started to give me a blowjob and, for the record, she does this very much to my liking. I stopped her after a bit and pulled her up to me. She was like, “Don’t you want to cum?” and I said, “It doesn’t matter to me.” She asked something that was on her mind. “You chose not to cum last night, didn’t you?” I told her I had and her incomprehensive look resulted in the explanation I shared with you above.
Was there some deep-seated manipulation going on, just like how a woman often controls a man through sex? Was I attempting to control something here by somehow getting an upper hand in the sex game? There’s always the possibility of some subconscious workings but I really think, IF ANYTHING, the only “plot” was for me to let her know that I loved her more than cumming. Her face had that, “I understand the words but I really don’t get it” look, because seriously—what guy doesn’t want to cum in his girlfriend’s mouth? Her Soul communicated to me that, once again, this was too much and I finally listened to her Soul and said, “I think I want to cum now.” She smiled and I came and I had hoped that this had allowed her arm to heal from any yanking I had unconsciously given it from rushing her incarnate body. This was Tuesday morning. On Sunday she told me she felt nothing and didn’t want to see me anymore.