“The Secret Life Of Lexi Featherston” is one of the top ten visited pieces of all time in my blog’s archives. This is largely unsurprising, given that it borrows heavily from the “Splat!” episode of the final season of “Sex And The City.” It appears to be a favorite destination via Google for fans of the HBO series who are up late having girls’ nights in, drinking too many Cosmopolitans although they’re now considered gauche, eating pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby after ordering in Chinese (again!), or, you know, listening to Sade’s “By Your Side” on repeat and crying at their laptops because they’re depressed / they’ve been dumped / they feel they will be alone forever, etc. (Not that I’ve ever done any of those things!) Sometimes I roll my eyes when I check my site stats for the week and see 23 additional hits for this entry and feel pity for whomever was searching for quotes from that episode. Sometimes, however, my curiosity is piqued, and I click through to revisit my own ruminations on the fictional notorious, bed-hopping, Page-Six-featured party girl.
I did that this morning.
One of the great things about guest blogging is that you are constantly looking at your material, or considering your content, through the eyes of a new audience, so that even if you have written about, say, relationships, before, you gain a new perspective from writing about that topic for people who have never before read your ruminations on such. This kind of attention to your content (well, you know, if you’re me) also inspires you to take a fearless inventory of self. It’s what I did yesterday, and all last evening, and all this morning, following publishing my inaugural post here at Justin Plus One.
Bothered by the fact that I could not place an analogy for the “scorched dick” phenom I wrote about yesterday, that I was sure I had read somewhere before, I pondered and searched both my brain and the internet until it struck me, and quite literally took my breath away. The analogy appears in the final paragraph of Elizabeth McNeill’s novella, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair. For those unfamiliar with the work, it is the book upon which the 1986 film “9 1/2 Weeks,” directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, was based. Far better and infinitely more emotionally and psychologically compelling than the film, the book chronicles the female protagonist’s descent into a sadomasochistic relationship with a man, by the end of which she has relinquished all control over her body and her mind.
When my skin had gone back to its even tone I slept with another man and discovered, my hands lying awkwardly on the sheet at either side of me, that I had forgotten what to do with them. I’m responsible and an adult again, full time. What remains is that my sensation thermostat has been thrown out of whack: it’s been years and sometimes I wonder whether my body will ever again register above lukewarm. – Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair
Upon further reflection on this passage, and also on a comment in response to Justin’s thoughts on my “Scorched Dick” entry, in which I had, with no reservations whatsoever, proclaimed that I think monogamy in any sense is antithetical to human nature, I began to wonder to myself, around midnight (which is usually when these thoughts begin), is my sensation thermostat out of whack? Am I so damaged by my previous failed relationships that my capacity to love someone, to be in a relationship, will never again register above lukewarm?
A four in the morning phone call from one of my oldest and dearest friends in San Francisco, during which he told me of his own new and promising relationship, representing the last of my closest friends potentially hooking up and seriously settling down, did little to comfort me. “I am,” I thought, borrowing a line from still another episode of “Sex And The City,” “going to be that sad old spinster who dies alone in his apartment and becomes food for his eight cats because he is all alone!”
Then I checked my site stats, and chose, just shortly before beginning this piece, at around six this morning, to revisit Lexi Featherston.
At nearly four years old, it’s a dated piece, in terms of both personal and cultural references. But it speaks to who I was at the time: a lonely, semi-whorish homosexual who claimed to everyone who would listen and the internet that he adored being single…but secretly wanted to be with someone else.
I have lived Lexi’s life, and I have loved it, embraced it, clung to it, carrying it with me, flailing behind me, from one lounge, from one man, from one bed (public or private), to another. But the events of the past weeks, and particularly of last evening, have made me yearn for something else, and have made me realize just how much…just how much I purport to love being single.
And how so much of that is simply empty bravado.
Suddenly, right there at my desk, I furrowed my brow, smiled a wry smile, and thought to myself, in shock, “Huh. That’s actually not simply empty bravado anymore. I actually do love being single.”
And just like that, I remembered why I loved Lexi Featherston.
My worries about my maybe-out-of-whack sensation thermostat vanished. Because who can say if my capacity to love someone else, to be in a relationship, as I once did, will ever again register above lukewarm? And who cares? When what’s really important is my unabashed happiness for my close friends who are pairing off. My memories of all of us partying at Tunnel when we were, like, five. Manolo stilettos. Living in the most exciting city in the world. And yes, smoking, next to a fucking open window.
Just as long as it’s not on the 18th floor.
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Note: Originally published at Justin Plus One on 17 March 2009.
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