Lately I want to write sensuous things, words that fill the mind with feelings of the earth and of the flesh. Not sexual things necessarily, not smut, not porn, not erotica (so many words for it!), but things full of sensory images, pieces laden with physicality. The way these are forming in my mind is no doubt highly influenced by my too-great intake of sexblogsmut over the past few days, but nonetheless they are still elsewhere from that. But I can’t get the word-pictures to come out right, it seems, or I haven’t been able to. Maybe I can now.
I wanted to make you feel the warm mud between your toes, then the grass, brushing wet and cool over your skin and washing the dirt away with its damp, dewy freshness. I wanted to talk about the hard, smooth cement sidewalks, and the rough black asphalt driveways. The wet patches on the drives steamed in the post-rain heat, and even the cement had that wet-then-warm smell. The air shimmered with mist and sun and the soft, lingering scent of raindrops. I slipped, once, my foot skidding into the soft, slick silt, leaving a mark like a baseball player sliding into home. The mark ruined the curvy lines of the washed-up dirt but I liked it, the straight tail from five round toeprints. The people who live at the top of that street don’t bother to groom their trees too much, and pine needles hold water well: in beautiful, sparkling droplets. I walked through them and as the branches brushed my shoulders and hair, I was showered with cold beads of wetness. It was lovely, the little spots of water all over my bare arms, warm from the sun.
Today, too, I had things I wanted to write, but more than just write: wanted to– to feel, but in the opposite way, turned inside out: to force the feeling upon you, to make it so that reading becomes knowing, to make it so you can remember something you weren’t there to see, like Homer, to make it poetry. I don’t think I can but I always try, I suppose that’s my strength. Anne of Green Gables, the queen of strengths and weaknesses, once said that her one virtue is that she never makes the same mistake twice, and since she makes so many mistakes, she’s certain to run out eventually. I’m not like that but maybe if I try everything, constantly, I’ll hit success.
Today I read too much smut (and yesterday, and possibly the day before…). I’m bored, with too much time and a computer with internet access and hormones running around screaming in my body. It’s becoming a hobby, just for the sake of sampling all the different writers of sexblogs across the tubes.
Peeling warm bell peppers after reading smut is not a good idea. Peeling warm bell peppers with your mother after reading smut is a worse idea.
Do you know how you peel a bell pepper? In this recipe at least, you char them. Cut them into flat pieces, and grill them till the skin is a nice, even black. Then let them cool in a plastic bag, so they stay moist. As soon as they’re cool enough to touch, you peel them with your fingers. So today I took a slab of warm, yellow bell pepper, and I started to peel it. All it took was a gentle smush and the skin moved away immediately. Black pieces of skin, thin and dry and crisp like paper, began to pile up, leaving behind a smooth, slick yellow slab. The pepper’s flesh was warm and wet, sleek and smooth and velvet-soft.
To a girl with a very dirty state of mind, the words “warm, wet and soft” connote one thing and one thing only. This is absolutely not acceptable when peeling peppers with your mother. Nor is bursting out into giggles because of that thought. I wonder what my mother thinks is wrong with me. More importantly, I wonder what she thought of the peppers.
