Written after July 26, 2024 - In sequence with “Kill”

I am a little obsessed, in my attempts to write about a first encounter, but obsessed in advance, obsessed with forming the groundwork for a narrative that would be entirely of my own making, and at least altered or set on a particular track by the act of inscription. In simplest terms, whatever interest I have in the actuality of another man has been significantly attenuated by having spent a certain effort writing about meeting him.

In the mean time, I’ve deleted this little object of obsession, I’ve deleted what I wrote about a first date, and favored dissertative reflection. I’ve thought more about my love of the concept of the unary trait, and done some research in the vein of articulating what I want with my long-term commitment to promiscuity, and with the ledger, with the hunt, and with the twinned concepts of psychoanalysis and prostitution.

This post is going to be a pain to read, a pain to write, I can just predict it. I wish I could simply produce a list of men and women I have slept with and have it express everything I want to express about my habits, my philosophy, my rituals, my private religious life. So let’s call it “Ledger.” Let’s examine my “ledger.”

It so happens that I’ve been on fourteen first dates since I came to the city, and fourteen first dates in Ithaca. The symmetry bothers me a bit. Is it time to add to the tail of the series, and make it a good deal longer?

In accordance with this desire to lengthen the list, I went on a date with a man, and a short seller, last weekend. I’d rather date women, but it’s hard to find women to meet, and I’m no longer afraid of women after having met Christine, though I do understand now that it’s difficult for me to imagine being promiscuous with various girlfriends. Women demand me to imagine or play-act the seriousness and engulfment of monogamy. I can’t do that for now, I want something more decadent; I want some relation with someone who has, for whatever reason, become disencumbered from all narratives of romance.

No. 29, or Dustin, chose an ornate Russian restaurant in Flatiron, Mari Vanna, as our first date spot. Before he arrived, I had been standing outside for a while, and glimpsed through its open casement windows a dark-wooded interior, and various flowers on the counters, and ethnic objects displayed on high shelves. Three Asian women in Lolita costumes took photos outside and a handsome waiter with a sharp slavic vibe exited the restaurant. Dustin approached in thick-rimmed, black, rectangular glasses—six feet tall, blond, with a robust but somewhat fleshy body. I don’t remember what he was wearing otherwise. It was immediate to me that he felt older, and therefore from a foreign continent. If anything he reminded me of the physicists I had worked in the vicinity of at SITP. In his first photo on Hinge he has his brows knit together dramatically, to comic effect. I liked how he looked in that image, but didn’t see any traces of its drama in his actual person.

I tried my best to fetishize him for his affiliations, his background. He had lived in San Francisco for fifteen years before moving to Chelsea two years before. He struck me as one of those Stanford men whose lives are in fact duly defined by the affiliation, and later admitted to me that at one point in his life, he had realized that everyone in his social circle had come from Stanford. I made a remark about his name which landed, about how it sounded Western, in the sense of the American West. I asked him about Oregon, where he’s from, and about his relationship with religion, as he had identified himself as Christian in his profile. Later, I asked if he had any thoughts on Peter Thiel. He said, with some forethought, that the very rich don’t become rich from having crazy ideas. He wondered what he might ask Peter if he got to spend forty minutes with him, but didn’t propose anything. Then he shared that Thiel had once invited him to interview for a position, but that the interview never happened. He also revealed to me that he has forty computers running in his apartment. He’s founding a hedge fund and probably needs to start trading in the next six months.

I gathered that he had various accomplished ex-girlfriends, who had desired that he be master to them; this had made him “skeptical of modern feminism.” He asked me how I felt about the notion of the white man with an Asian fetish, and discussed two girlfriends, one Nordic, and one Californian (and Asian). It had surprised him how different he felt from the tall, blonde Nordic woman, though they looked so similar. In comparison, the Asian woman had felt very much like him. I told him that I had never had reason to be concerned about men who liked Asian women, and said that I had often found myself with Jewish men.

I didn’t realize that he was a short seller until relatively late in the conversation. This truly was the “hinge” around which everything swung; I started to wonder if the contrast between Adam and Dustin could mean something, or more accurately, if I might not ask Adam more about his relationship with his profession.

Near the end of the date two attractive women whom I had been eyeing intermittently slunk out of the restaurant with a sharp-looking man, who gripped tightly the wrist of the brunette, leading her out. She was wearing a thick white collar with a conspicuous silver ring hanging off its front: maybe a professional.

I described what I had seen to him, and he didn’t react in a way that was particularly responsive.

After the meal ended we walked to one of the tables in Madison Square Park, where I asked him if he thought about sex much, and he said no. So we didn’t have sex. I considered not even sending a follow-up text after the date, but I did decide, after a day’s delay, to tell him that while I was unsure of our potential for connection, I was open to meeting him again, and that if he wanted to meet again, he should send me something to read. He quickly responded with an affirmation of his enjoyment of our meeting, and wrote that though we probably weren’t romantically compatible—as he is more “traditional,” and probably can’t provide the “complexity” I seem to want—that we might keep in touch as friends. He asked if we might meet again, in a couple of weeks, for coffee or lunch, and that he’d try to come up with something to recommend that I read. I found this satisfying, and sent him Daniel Lefferts’s “My Year of Finance Boys,” and commented that though I had up till now only had a glancing proximity to the short world, I was interested in developing a deeper and more informed relationship to the practice of short selling.

The reading he sent ended up being a chapter from a famous anti-semite’s treatise, The Culture of Critique. It was on “Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic Movement.” He had mentioned during our conversation that he didn’t like the name Adam because he knew too many Jewish Adams, and had not liked them, and that this was perhaps a manifestation of his anti-semitism. This was before I had said anything about my own Adam, a Jew. I was titillated by this symmetry: my Jewish Adam short-seller v.s. the Christian Dustin short-seller who doesn’t like men in the former form. But I wasn’t too interested in engaging with him after this.

The encounter left me thinking about my desire for a sea urchin boyfriend, a star fish boyfriend, a plankton, a diatom, a crustacean. I’ve been joking about this, with Adam, about my desire not merely for a functional reef tank, but for a sea urchin whom I might have to evolve for. I’d need to dive down there and release my eggs into the ocean currents at the right time of year, when sea urchins respond to a slight rise in sea temperatures and release their biological materials. I feel that rich men in finance—not the consultants, but those who feel authorized, on account of their elite educations and facility with math or law or political philosophy, are like sea creatures, living in a hermetic fearsome liquid universe, releasing salt tears like sea turtles and other marine animals who swallow but who cannot metabolize the salinity of their native waters.

Maybe I really am a gold-digger, but the figure of speech is incorrect for me, who seeks spiky marine animals, echinoderms with pentamerous symmetry, and polychaete worms, with their striking feathers and bristles and tendency to inhabit the openings of geothermal vents or the rarefied innards of methane ice.

So that wasn’t the one I wanted to write about, and yet it remains easier to present the narrative that came out of a mental, uncarnalized condition. And it was a start, to realize that I had been on fourteen dates in Ithaca, fourteen dates in New York City. I report all this to Aleksandra, who apparently wants to know who I am.

Fourteen dates in Ithaca; the ones I found boring or insignificant are difficult to remember as names, so I call them July 6, August 1, September 14, September 18, April 2, April 13, Feb 26, May 13. Then there were the ones who mattered to me: Vieno, for being the first, though we didn’t have sex, and only went on three dates. Dylan, whom I liked very very very much. Alec, who lives in a van and whom I had over at my place for a brilliant tactile night. Keiron, whom I thought was so cool, though we only met once, and then kept on bumping into each other on campus. Alex, of course. Michael, strange bohemian musician and “townie.”

Fourteen dates in NYC: Kyle, the therapist in Flatbush whom I hooked up with once. X, the saxophonist. Adam, of course. Ricky, the psychoanalyst on the train who essentially rejected me perhaps for being too young. Adam Q, the plumber with a heart of gold. T, the Turkish Harvard grad trying to find a direction in life, who kissed me in a bar in DUMBO. Luke, the perverse man on the street, tall rich architect. I, the registrar at Gallerie Perrotin whom I didn’t like, who kissed me on Bowery, as I watched old Chinese men and women carry out their trash. A, the video game designer whom I met at a divey place in Bushwick, no fun. Ethan, whom I would’ve had sex with in his Gramercy apartment had his parents been at their rural mansion. R, the only Asian man I’ve gone on a date with, a rather flat experience. Chris, of course, with all the heartbreak. Christine, who seems to want a master. Dustin, a 44-year-old Stanford-educated short seller.

Last year I wrote about the subway tunnel, about the inhumanity of the tunnel, and of me in amorous affairs: I can feel myself engorge a little thinking about the potential comfort of sleeping with someone I can talk to, but it’s not love that I see at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel is what I want, pure abstract cylindrical tunnel, the signifier of desire. Perhaps I will be swept into love against my will, but I think I can permanently keep myself at arm’s length from words like “commitment,” which used to matter to me. I want to feel dominant, powerful—I want men to fall in love with me because I represent an ideal, and ágalma. I want to have that and meanwhile snicker about how I’m not ideal, how I’m merely a shell or receptacle for fantasies about me.

I’ve been evasive; I hide behind tropes and figures and abstraction. I seek to be a camera, describing men but never describing myself. I go out with my gun (my self) and hunt down men to write about. I’m immoral when I fail to articulate what I want in advance. I get caught in the imaginary, and fail to release much.

I think I want to be mirrored. That’s why I am compulsively drawn to writing about this, and writing like this, and meeting people in order to construct a particular openness that closes down in the form of the text, with its obvious stylistic resonances and a recognizable way of thinking. I won’t claim that what I write now is exactly like what I wrote last year, but that when I write as I’d really like to, that is, “best,” the results are similar. I admire what I wrote last year for its ability to convey my investments in writing about otherness.

So I have attempted to inhabit this excitation, in spite of an obvious jadedness, and added to my ledger. I have No. 28, the anti-semite. I have No. 29, who is married, and who should so clearly go back to his wife. I have No. 30, and I add the first photograph and first two paragraphs to the top of this essay. The sequence is now 28, 29, 30. There will soon be a No. 31 or No. 32 who becomes a better ending to this piece of writing. But for now I allow for a two-step movement in the sequence, from No. 28 to No. 30. In a sense, No. 30 is arbitrary, all that matters is that I liked and fucked him on the first date, and that I’m excited about him.

I think about what makes No. 30 so appealing as a side-chick, as an affair partner.

It’s that he seems so “unserious,” and committed to this unseriousness.

His eyes look so vacant and lazy when I suck him off; in the ideal universe, he works on his articles about Hume and on his off-hours or (or mental off-hours), receives services from a pseudo-whore, a PhD candidate who seeks to gain clarity on the nature of her dissertation. The pseudo-whore is cold and professional, and is too wise about the partial nature of desire to become entirely “obsessed”; she is the perfect complement to an avoidant fuckboy, a single-at-forty-one recently tenured professor, who was previously seeing a woman in an open relationship once a week. “Everything was cool, great, we would text a little bit, until she started to get obsessed, and then she got run over by a truck. She survived, but is now in intensive recovery.”

I was obviously already on the road to being obsessed, however, and could easily imagine falling in love with him. In order to slow this process, or neutralize it entirely, I would have to narrativize the encounter.

But what I wrote about him was comprehensive, detailed, and boring. I wondered if its boringness reflected on the fact that our encounter was not more interesting than any other first encounter. What mattered to me was the lie I told Adam that morning as I left the apartment, saying that I was “going to Petco and stuff,” and the success of it having happened. A brief three-hour morning tryst and then I was back. I had enjoyed being treated like a whore, a shikse, and not as a subject of cultural investments; I liked being outside the economy of academic treatises and literary artifacts and marriage. I also cared that he had compelled me to touch his cock while we sat on the stoop on Perry Street, and that he had grabbed my ass in full view of street traffic. Moreover, there was something about his face and fundamental odor that had been attractive to me.

There’s something so massive about arriving at this clarity of attraction. At the same time I have to assume that I won’t be seeing this man again, for he hasn’t responded to my latest text, about how his move is going. I have to assume that a 41-year-old man wants nothing to do with a 26-year-old beyond brief whorishness. I’m still so drawn to being humiliated by my attraction to absence, and have spent several days in vigil. What’s humiliating about it? Perhaps the predictability of it, the way it flattens me to the trope of abandoned woman, fixed on a single instance of loss, unlike the whore, who forges onwards with her pitiless labor.

I’ve had several dreams, too, which were primarily disturbing, including one in which three men were heaped on me in bed. Two of them performed sexual acts on me, but the third lay asleep, undisturbed. The third was my partner, ostensibly Adam, and the first was someone who resembled Dustin. The second is a shadow to me, I can’t remember anything about his appearance or what he did. In any case, I was wrapped up in the pleasure of this scene, but primarily curious, and disturbed, by the impenetrable sleep of Adam.

I’d like to be covered with two men’s cum, in fact, in alternation, and to fuck each raw, and to intermingle sperm and confuse fathers, and to engender the “bromance” of mimetic desire. I’d like to adjudicate a competition, watch rivalry unfold, witness the hunt, witness the plotting or coercive aggression of mate guarding. I’d also like to become sharply aware of the problematic realities of polygamy, of adultery, of cheating and lying, of being too liquid and open, of not having fidelity to the concept of “primary.” I want to be known down the line as someone who was both excessively moral and truthful and immoral and crude.

Adam’s preference for monogamy has been on my mind since I began writing this, since I saw in his face a clear unhappiness with my decision to go out with new men. His preference, I think, is more than reasonable. It symbolizes for me the process by which one accumulates wealth. One accumulates wealth by saving and focusing on work. Is it not the case that I too should strive after maximal gain, and that this should involve funneling all my libertine energies into the project of sublimating these energies into preservative text?

But I suppose I have no idea if this difference between us two is tenable; will it be possible for us to stay together for much longer, as I recognize that our ideas about sexuality contrast so obviously when we speak about it? I refuse to write much about Adam, or what he thinks, in much detail. I can never know the full extent of what he thinks and to write about it and invent it would be to present truncations of the truth, falsehoods, distortions. But I know how he reacts when I talk about other men and I don’t want that.

And I know is that my life with him is the basis from which I’m able to recombine myself, recombine elements of memory, of space, of repetition. I think about this basis, but only outside the text, because to investigate it on a screen would be to alienate it from me, to become unmoored from the basis.

I’ve been living with him for ten months. Around when this began, I took a Friday off from seeing him to sleep with another man named Adam in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. After this, I more or less determined that I preferred being with “my” Adam. Then I was with Adam and some combination of Alex and Zane. This lasted for six months, until May, when I went on a few boring dates, and met Chris, and thereafter, Christine. Christine was the only one I dated with the conscious intention of becoming monogamous. I wondered if I might, through this relationship, move out, and allow Adam to find his rightful mate. But Christine wasn’t a good match for me, and as it turns out, Didi is attached to her history of sluttishness, for which Adam is a limit. A center, a limit, and a locus for understanding what it is that I seek to find or avoid in my searching.

In my state of half-joblessness, I care very much about my work ethic, and about whether or not this whole project of promiscuity is tenable, whether or not it contributes to my living the life of wealth that I need. I care very much about the possibility that seeing patients in the spring will form a robust substitute for sleeping around with or engaging in conversation with random men. To what extent does my fantasy of promiscuity rely on upsetting a very important rule about dedication and private property? Anyway, I am invested in my ties with Adam not because I fetishize features of his being, but because we are so deeply habituated to one another that we constitute one another’s home territory. I am protective of this territory and of its endurance. So these days I don’t present myself as single; I tell the men on the apps in advance that I have a partner, and moreover, that my partner isn’t that open to non-monogamy in the long term.

In the following week I’ve been in Oregon: Portland, Mt. Hood, and Cannon Beach. In Portland, wizened white homeless drug addicts and their tents are set up all around the appropriate parts of the city, and there’s an extremely spacious and fun Snow Peak store on the west end of town, before it vaults into a hilly park. Who lives here? What is it like to have sex in Oregon? I imagine that if I lived here I’d become a truly abject nymphomaniac, sleeping around with every passably attractive man, never satisfied. No Jews, all Christians? Evangelists, missionaries, descendants of Protestant migrants from the South? I overheard a real cowboy talk to his mom on the phone in Sandy, a town between Portland and Mt. Hood—something about a bloody nose and a horse that had gotten excited. On the television there’s news about wildfires. I see on Tinder various firefighters and guys who look like their main hobby is riding mountain bikes or skiing, and who have never apparently left the state for college or any other reason. I spend the hours on the bus through remote, golden-grassed land thinking about Adam and Jed, about my hope for a sort of “bromance” involving both. To be honest, I thought more about Jed than Adam; I thought much more about Jed, about his eyes, and the fact of their hazel green, and the fact of his odor, and the facts of his nose, eyes, face, cock, voice, clothes.

When I came home, Adam fucked me, grabbed me, just as he had when we first met, and it felt thick and lodged, his erect cock; the experience of sex was the adjective “lodged,” and familiar in a way which implies “deep,” and rough like the inner sanctum of a tree. As I started to come, he pulled out, and spurted cum in six or seven discrete jerks a pool of semen a bit below my belly button, which trailed off to the left.

I’ve added another man to the ledger, so now I’m at 31, or seventeen first dates in NYC.

I’d say that my added encounter has cleansed me of a certain bad taste left behind when I felt more stuck.

Why am I drawn to this? Why sexual promiscuity? Why am I stuck in this particular formalism?

Enumerating my encounters without describing them seems necessary to my liquidity. It’s essential that I accumulate these men with a kind of randomness, with a kind of neutrality. There are objects I desire, but they are as clear and arbitrary as signifiers, as I had been interested in Jed because he likes “promiscuity.”

But I’m not fetishistic, I think—still more libertine, though what is a libertine without a small dose of the ability to “single out”? Before all this happened I spent several afternoons sitting in WSQ Park, reading a book on Sade, where I began to think about about my project in relation to the concept of libertinism:

If the libertine keeps precise accounts, down to the unit, it is not because one stroke more or less would modify his sexual pleasure but because this very exactitude (however arbitrary), and its enunciation, are what engender his pleasure. He takes pleasure in counting up bodies and strokes on the spot; in the aftermath, however, drawing up an account of the proceedings gives him just as much pleasure.

(This is from Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, by Marcel Hénaff)

We may wonder whether this method of singling out body parts and appraising them has a precise correspondence in the operations of fetishism. Sadean desire is marked by disqualifications that admit of no exceptions, concerning not just the size of the penis but also the shape of the backside, the whiteness of the skin, the firmness of the breasts, and so on, to the point where the presentation of a character is often limited to the presentation and exalting of these elements, or of one among them. At first glance, this is fetishism itself—and yet, for Sade, nothing could be farther from libertine desire. The selective dividing up carried out by the eye on the desired body is marked not at all by a fetishistic emphasis, but rather by the precision of taxonomic reason. To privilege one element is only to choose the best way of connecting two bodies conceived as mechanical devices. This privileged element, always the same one, is inscribed in a series of other elements that carry out the same function. In other words, all these body parts, singled out as privileged objects of desire, constitute a class and recur by means of the individuals who populate the narrative. They are, as it were, the table of elements in a chemistry of desire, the elementary signs of its algebra. They are placed right from the start into the symbolic order. For precisely that reason, there is no question here of any fetishistic process, which characteristically takes a strictly individual object.

Yes, exactly, and I think I derive some pride from being associated with libertinism, because libertinism is more threatening than fetishism. It threatens to destroy narrative suspension, an passion for detail, and the exposition of character, and therefore most structures of romance. Libertinism enjoys the meaninglessness of enumeration, and leaves no room for the love of the single soul by another single soul. It saves nothing!

Libertinage leads logically to murder. I feel the truth of this statement after having been bored with various strange men, and having felt the kinder form of apathy which led me to have sex with No. 31, ultimately to good effect. To good effect, because if killed my desire for Jed, who is now stale, and one count before.

No. 31, a muscled man with a large cock, and soft, baby-like skin, was not my type, and I had very little to fetishize in him. He was not Jewish, he was a software engineer at Google, and had an innocence that led me to think that he might be a masochist. He told me he had expected me to murder him, or something, but we fucked in a way he described as “tender” (I bit into his back and neck), and I came after he had thrust his large cock into me several times. Then I learned to jerk him off in such a way that he would orgasm, as I asked him to tell me what in particular felt good. He came on his own stomach, and I enjoyed seeing this; he told me felt much better. It was, apparently, the weirdest sex he had ever had, and when I asked him to expand on this, he said it was because it truly felt like the experience of having sex with a stranger.

I felt cleansed after this encounter. It felt nice to see him come on his stomach, it felt nice to come with his large cock lodged inside of me, so invisible, so unknown. I had seen it and admired it and then it was all inside, all unknown, and from that unknown activity came the energetics of pleasure, which ends in a dissolution of the cleanest kind, call it sex as bleach, sex as oxidation, sex as total noise, cut to silence. “Apathy acts as a solvent upon causality,” Hénaff writes. “It constitutes not one set among others but the element that circulates among them in order to detach them from one another and, as a result, flatten them out on the surface of the table of possibilities. […] Thus we have a solvent (apathy) and an amplifier (libertinism), a principle of lucidity and a principle of exaltation. Apathy ensures the determination of the elements, their cohabitation, and their analytic precision; in other words, it establishes a topos. Libertinism causes the elements to circulate and takes them to their maximum intensity; in other words, it establishes an energetics” (88). This is more or less how I feel when I write up my ledger, adding each man’s number and the accompanying descriptive documentation; it’s also how I feel when I “prowl the field” on the apps.

Or when I walk around Manhattan, sometimes going to WSQ Park to read and watch others from a bench, though I can’t say that my gaze is ever apathetic when I’m in public space, everything happens in instants, and even the languor of waiting isn’t languorous so much as it is warm and impregnated by the details of the weather on some particular minute or hour of the day. I rarely find “prospects” in public, so the public itself becomes the prospect, I wonder, often, which street, which neighborhood, would make for a good random walk. It’s always around 4 or 5 PM that this happens, that I walk to escape from the monotony of the keys.

I was in the Park, and smiled a lot, as I read what I’ve copied below. I could forge a “Didi Propaganda” out of this material, on the “transformation of a prostitute into an independent libertine,” on the “libidinalization of the whole economic process,” on the notion that “the point of production is waste,” and on the question of what role such female libertinism plays in the construction of “speech,” “perspective,” and “adventure”:

The transformation of a prostitute into an independent libertine is an attack on the economic order because only women, by trading on their bodies, can carry out an operation forbidden to men: the complete perversion of capital. Although prostitution does nothing to challenge men’s economic power, and even confirms it, prostitution can still pirate the effects of men’s economic power and make it unrecognizable. Thus the libertine woman goes the male libertine one better: without working, through her erotic value alone, she causes the movement of capital from the male sphere to the female sphere. The point, however, is not to replicate the model of men’s economic power. The libertine woman forges or breaks all her contracts, invests nothing, is wasteful, rids wealth of all productive value, and in this way libidinalizes the whole economic process, exhibiting the repressed sexual content of all political power. She grabs the machinery and puts it back together in reverse, showing that conclusion was contained in premise, and effect in cause— in other words, that the point of work is sexual pleasure, and that the point of production is waste.

The male libertine, forced into a static position for the sake of whatever economic or social status he has awarded himself, cannot circulate inside his own field of power. It is he who has forced himself into a sedentary function, and he offers nomadic freedom to the libertine woman. She is the mobile, indeterminate element among fixed and institutionally recognized male positions, the element that displaces and transmits desires, wealth, and messages. But the logic of the gift given and reciprocated is no longer followed because she no longer follows the imposed, limited routes of exchange, which establish families and trace the boundaries of cultural and symbolic endogeny. She herself exchanges herself, and with everyone. She causes wealth to circulate, but only so it can be wasted (in luxury and sexual pleasure). She makes speech circulate, but only so it can be made public and infinite (the saying everything of libertine philosophy). This is why she is narrative. She is the emblem of desire’s circulation, and of its price, but she is also the figure of the ubiquitous multiplicity of perspective, or point of view (she goes everywhere, sees everything, covers everything). And, because she is freely exchanged and voluntarily offered, she is adventure speaking itself.

Later, I discovered, Hénaff makes the point that it is ultimately Sade, the writer, who rakes in all the profits: Sade is the ultimate pimp of the female adventuress-libertine, who as a character in a narrative, remains beholden to the author in the end. And then, I wondered, what difference does it make for a woman to be the bearer of her own narrative? The female writer of a female character is only another sort of pimp, and as a subject, is thus split between a masculine and feminine role in the constitution of her narrative voice, no?

I told No. 32 about this after we had fucked; funny that I got a man to speak for me in that context—thank you, Marcel Hénaff, thank you, Marquis de Sade, thanks for your service, thanks for allowing me to sit back.

But I realize how little I gain from exhibiting what I’ve written in vain detail about some adventures. Today I acquired another body for my ledger: A man named N, whom I had a decent time with. His apartment was above a Buddhist association in Chinatown, near the Manhattan Bridge. I didn’t want to have sex with him, but I prostituted myself in order to get a glimpse of a small private corner. It was comical how desirous he was of me, or of sex, rather, and once we were done, the conversation extended, became more “real.” He had gone to Stanford around the same time as me, and was one of the more fluidly intelligent people I’ve fucked.

Is that what I like, that someone is “fluidly” intelligent, such that their mind might intensify movement, liquidity, sale and flow, waste and expenditure? So that having a mind is not about containing things, but rather facilitating the flow of difference, moment-to-moment. He was able to speak about what was on his mind, after he came his thwarted love for his coworker, which he began to speak about after I asked him, cheekily, what is mother was like. I felt very much like an agent of analysis, a wild agent of wild analysis, crouched naked on his bed, hugging a folded knee, as I saw his cock harden and soften as he talked; each time he paused for some significant amount of time, or glimpsed at my body, his cock would clearly harden. Otherwise he was focused, lost in thought about his love, or about the various qualities of our beloved city.

The picture of the stairwell at the beginning of this post is from the building in which I had sex with No. 30; I had very much enjoyed the elegance of the small Perry Street two-bedroom he was subletting from another philosophy professor. It was a few doors down from the townhouse where Carrie Bradshaw lived in Sex and the City, and thus imbued with whatever narrative that show brings, but I associate the block also now with the writing of my first couple of encounters with Adam from last August, which spanned the same street and block, three times over: first at the bar called theotheroom, then, at 22 Perry Street, and third, at my pre-date peregrinations around Wallsé. This July, while attempting to watch fireworks on that block, Adam fingered me discreetly as we leant against a wall one street over. And in August, No. 30 asked me to stroke his cock after we had made out on the steps outside of another brownstone on Perry Street. Just as I was considering how to place my hands, he had us scoot over so that a woman, approaching from behind, could get through to her front door. The bumbling manner of our morning, as if drunk, still leaves me with desire; I think of the moment in which No. 30, or Jed, told me that he used to be called Didi, because it was a shortening of Jedidiah, I think of the moment when I admitted to him that I had wanted to meet because he was moving from West Village to East Village, which I associated with Adam’s own move in reverse, from East Village to West Village, though he had ultimately given up the apartment on Perry Street for something more affordable on University Place. I had enjoyed so much the reality of these coincidences, as I do now.

Do I waste the significance of these signifiers when I unlock them, flaying out for everyone to see? The contents of each man are nothing more than his cock, the way he comes and the way his body and soul seem to deflate and flatten after. And the way I associate every other word I can attach to him with words I’ve known before. I love the city and whether the city is masculine or feminine it stands in triangulation with each of the men I add to the ledger. I adore the built structures, I fuck in tribute to the rooms which house sex, and maybe even the office buildings which house the firms from which they receive paychecks. I suppose I specialize in the limited but sizable population of white men who live in lower Manhattan.

All this enjoyment of the possibilities of one-off encounters led me to break up with Adam, specifically after I had gone on the fourth date with the man named John, who works for a magazine and lives in Brooklyn. John had a kind of open-mouthed smile that reminded me of the John in Ithaca, the John whom I was so in love with, and read Lacan with; I attempted to cancel the date the day of, feeling tired and conflicted about the nature of my activities, and yet he somehow convinced me to go, saying that he had really looked forward to meeting me. John and I are no longer in touch, it seems, though I’m sure he’d be responsive if I reached out. It’s nearly impossible to go on a second date with anyone who has a history; this man had separated from his girlfriend of several years several months ago; she had lived with him, and he could no longer afford to rent alone, hence his move. John had a tenderness in how he used his body, a kind of loving way of kissing, and he did a lot of kissing, not seeming to tire of it or to recoil from its fundamental intimacy. I slept with him in his bed that night, and dreamt of him. I dreamt that I was in the car with him; he was a dark-haired child, and looked Jewish, and his sister was also with him in the front seat. They were cuddling, or making out, while the grandfather drove us to a seashore or lakeshore and pointed out all the birds. I noticed an improbable number of birds evenly distributed on the waters, and began to name some of them. The grandfather put the car in reverse as I was naming them and backed away from the water, and I became aware of John and his sister’s intimacy. The sister noticed me looking and seemed embarrassed. John isn’t Jewish, he’s from Charlotte, NC, and has dark blond hair, like Ithaca John, but his hair is straighter and finer, which I didn’t particularly like, but he was handsome in a kind way, the kind of man that is hard to not imagine as “catnip” to women, and I found myself immediately wondering what it would be like to be in a relationship with him, and was both repulsed and attracted, knowing that this John wasn’t my fomer John.

But I took a table from him, a low table with a black lacquerish look and a fish painted on it. He was trying to get rid of furniture before he moved, and so I hauled a little coffee table across Prospect Park the next morning before hopping on the 2 train. It seemed like a move back in the direction of living in my apartment, and by the time Saturday came around, I was able to resolve myself into the conclusion that it was time to split away from Adam’s 30 E 9th St. Then I met with Alex, before he drove me to Ithaca and fed me shrooms, an experience during which I was almost entirely occupied by the distinction between right and left, especially as I wrote and sent text messages, finding that each time I looked at the words the letters seemed to be reflected or oriented differently. Returning to the city later, I was less resolved about the decision to move, and spent a few unhappy days languishing in Manhattan before going back to Flatbush, where I spent several very unhappy days before returning to Manhattan. Luckily, I have a more consistent part-time job now, in tutoring students on their college applications, and I’ve been feeling a little more economically empowered to eventually move if I need to, or simply to spend money on yarn or ceramics.

Thus I close out this ledger, having reached the number 33, and having now fucked thirteen men and women. I am 26 years old and have been a woman for two years, and hope to continue my ledger for years to come.