I Lust For Human Drivel

I’m horny, but not for sex. I get off on unnecessary things. I believe only in the unnecessary, the trivial, the abandoned dusty boxes in our brains labeled “My fourth birthday or “And The Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story” (tv movie from 1999.)  “God is in the details” I think... God said that? And while I totally believe in the value of knowing purposeless, unhelpful data, I also wonder what mental space it’s compensating for. What would I do if I finally threw out the box in my brain attic called “All the different instances my Spanish teacher was weird to me.” Or “TRADING MOM (1994) starring Sissy Spacek”. What would I be making room for? Elon Musk? Forget it.

  I want to walk through the sentimental junkyard of the back of your head with you. I want you to hurl the litter of your life at me, while I’m trying to live mine. I’m sorry I’m getting graphic. Certain strangers flood me with their unnecessary knowledge because they know I am like them, another psychic hoarder. Somewhere inside there is a part of me that thinks if I finger the facts about this famous murder, this movie, this album, this memory enough, then I will somehow win at something, but its really just an endless game of rumination.  I have a fair amount of self awareness around my useless reveries so I don’t try to smother anyone else with them anymore, but I often find myself smothered and I, unfortunately, like it...a lot. Floating down the mind streams of some stranger who I accidentally made eye contact with, while reaching for maxi pads, is an essential part of my existence. Being weighed down by one sided conversations consisting of the frivolous minutia of someone else’s reality delights the damage in me. It’s a suspended feeling, realizing we’re all living in our own whirlpools of not very interesting falsehoods.

 I realize this is an abstract thing to want to have sex with- someone’s mundane musings. Perchance, I should masturbate while someone tells me about how they are organizing their closet, but thats not the same! Too healthy. It’s about being spontaneously trapped by someone’s asinine thoughts or memories. It can’t be orchestrated.  It’s like a sadistic grin from the little old man in the clouds saying “Everyone is so completely insane, but its healthy!” 

I writhe with pleasure like a mermaid caught in a net of small talk with strangers who shouldn’t be confiding in me. I find it intoxicating and miserable in the best sense of the word to be held up by someone who has a pointless tale to tell. Your mom ruined your brother’s surprise party seven years ago? You didn’t get great sleep last night? You like the color blue. All fascinating.  The subtle boundary crossing really tickles me in a way that is probably, alas, “wrong” but jeez, it feels good to hear someone drone on about their slice of life. There’s a stillness that arises when I’m listening to things that I know “aren’t meant for me” meaning a person is spilling their emotional soup into my lap, but I suck it up with a straw. I can’t help myself. In some ways, I think its my deepest call in life to be some sort of psychological plumber sent to help unclog the pipes in peoples brains, but by no means should I be listened to like a therapist. Just there to listen and jar things loose.  I have a friend who has the same feeling, that they are some sort of magnet for people’s cloaked confessions. Perhaps some people have a valve open that others have shut, or we just have a complex relationship with boundaries. But lets not reduce it to something ugly! I want to hear about your daughters trip to Cancun in 1994! 

The claustrophobia of a talkative driver! What a fucking thrill! Feeling the dissonance between what is being said and the heavy energy weighted in the air?? Pure cinema. Glances in the rear view mirror to make sure you are listening.  I melt.   These voyeuristic glimpses into other peoples reality tunnels helps me remember how distorted our perceptions are. How tiny our huge problems seem to be and how large our brains make our little bullshit. The internet has only highlighted this and warped the scale of our lives past the point of return. 430, 000 People have died from Covid 19 in the US and also your friend posted a picture of their butt and their dog is missing, but it was found and now they’re selling their ugly couch and giving the dog away.

I’m not alone in missing the unnecessary, which is I think is partly why everyone is creating collective reactions online for us all to stay “sane” together and get our fixes of distraction and attention.   While I’m guilty as anyone else who makes different variations of the joke “I’m depressed” on twitter,  I wonder if our collective trauma responses will simply bite us in the collective ass in the end. Are we really processing anything by intellectualizing it and then putting it online? Are we learning or giving ourselves dementia? There’s so much written about the  internet. I’ll boo hoo elsewhere. I am still horny, but not for sex and the online world does a poor job of replicating the subtle euphoric space I step into when I’m suddenly learning about someone’s family tree, while trying to take out the garbage. 

   When I worked at a video store, a man came in to sell CD’s. I told him I couldn’t take them because they were too scratched and dirty. He proceeded to lick the CDs at the counter without breaking eye contact with me. It wasn’t sexual. It was defiant and I loved it. His eyes were dead as he took long licks, I was repulsed but couldn’t look away. I now realize he was a prophet sent to give me something to think about after the video store would close and eventually the world would too. I can’t believe there’s no more human crap to whine about/ treasure.

These humdrum interactions give me vitality and they are currently vacuumed out of the culture. They mean more to me than amusement, it is intimacy.  Intimacy is just telling each other secrets whether verbally or not.  Romantic relationships function to help us absolve ourselves from our secrets. Sometimes all relationships are are burying secrets in your own shit hole closet for the other person.  When I say secrets, I don’t mean anything intrinsically negative or huge. Just stuff you’re hiding from other people or yourself.  Every relationship is actually a thruple because you create this objective witness together who after the relationship falls apart goes “I told you! I saw the lambs getting slaughtered months ago!” As I get older, hurting feels way harder, but the witness feels wiser and I realize my body is the slow learner, the dim bulb, who has to go through the motions until it listens. How’s that for a lil mind stream? You see why I like it? No? I’m still very much horny, but not for sex. 

So what happens when human drivel is discarded from the culture? When people can no longer just  waste your time because it simply not safe. What happens to our brains when we can’t drain them properly and when we feel guilty more and more for every exchange we do have. My fear wants to believe we are becoming more robotic and less empathetic because all that we have to relate to each other are our curated projections of ourselves. We are now only relating to representations, it’s all manipulated. Is the goal to be fully transparent online so that there is no difference between the projection and the reality? I don’t want to merge! I want to be caught off guard by someone who is grieving on the 10 year anniversary of their cats death and who wants to show me pictures of the dead cat while we wait for our very necessary prescriptions to be filled. At least then, there’s a feeling of needing one another.

The optimistic side of me thinks this time has cemented and exposed the authentic friendships and relationships in everyone’s lives. It seems like a hard time to fake it in any sense or morph yourself to try and fit into some sort of ill fitting dynamic. Those days seem gone for everyone. And while to me, it makes no sense under the current boulder pressure of chaos and death to be riding on someone’s equally stressed out, weeping-for-mommy dick, I still want to listen to someone to give me a tour of the rubble of their lives and share with me the garbage that they just can’t seem to give away.