(Unearthed now, written on 29 July 2025)

These days I’m full of adoration; I know that adoration is a word with theological connotations, but I don’t want to be associated with that. I love and adore Adam. I love and adore Jerry. I use terms reserved for family members to refer to them: my babby, my graimps, my husbant, my mimmy, my wife, my son. Otherwise, I compare them to animals, to lions or otters or foxes or roaches or rats. I tend to do this privately, in the theater of my imagination, or in my writing, or in my dreams. I believe I kiss them more passionately than anyone would kiss their most beloved dog, however. I love them more than anyone would love their most intimate animal companion. I compare my lovers to animals because I love animals, and I grew up thinking of humans as debased and flawed, but I also think it’s absurd to claim to love an animal, as such love can’t be mutually affirmed, not through words, and love is fundamentally verbal.

For the first time in my life, I adore certain men the way I might have adored a family member. I adore the fact of human relations, the idea of kinship. I have little or less to do with animals, and I know this because I’ve been thinking of getting a pet, but I don’t really think I should get a pet. I’m so full of love for Adam and Jerry. I believe I would have been less promiscuous, less prone to experiment with people, if they were actually lab rats. The love of a family member is terrifying. I respect the independence of animal life, I don’t want to get wrapped up in my implicit fantasies of what they are. I want to be with people who can correct my fantasies, who can keep me from being too immersed in the selfishness and falsity of projecting onto the adored certain traits.

One of my teachers this semester has a poodle, an elegant, somewhat petite fawn-colored poodle named Althea who stays in the office with her all day. She’s a very elegant dog, hard not to find attractive, respectable, adorable, and well-behaved, but she’s curious and active too. She often looks bored during class, and either sleeps, paws at her bed, or comes to us students in search of stimulation. Other students in the class tend to beckon at her and touch her with big smiles on their faces, but I never do. Last time she climbed onto the sofa and approached me with her snout close to my face. It was as if she was about to kiss me, but I knew that she merely wanted to smell or lick something new. I knew her gesture had nothing to do with affection or desire, and that being so close to me was simply something that would stimulate her senses. She sniffed me and she sniffed my shoes and she sniffed my backpack. I wondered if she was particularly interested in my magnolia perfume, or if it was my native odor that she “heard” most clearly. Instead of giving her scratches or stroking her fur, I wrapped my fingers around her foreleg and gripped it sort of hard. I wanted to feel the lean musculature beneath the skin, and the shape of her bones. I knew that it didn’t mean much to her, in terms of her pleasure or stimulation, but I figured that if she wanted her selfish pleasure of smelling me, I’d do what I wanted and feel her legs.

After getting what I wanted, I softened a bit, and fondled her soft ears with those curls that feel like mongolian sheepskin, and put my hand out to allow her to lick it, and this was interesting, since her tongue was very soft, not like a cat’s, more like something I would eat. But I didn’t give her the gratification of a hard scratch or a deep petting because I wasn’t into that kind of stuff, that game of giving affection to a dog who touches you out of boredom. I guess I was a bit worried that my classmates would notice how dispassionate I was, so I did give her a little scratch before she moved on.

This got me thinking, I must not love dogs at all. No more than I could love a human stranger who came up to me and harrassed me for sex. And at the same time I love animals who have no interest in me, like tarantulas; I like watching them hunt and groom themselves. I like watching fishes in aquariums do their thing, and I like frogs. That’s not really love is it, that’s admiration, but I still adore these animals and when my tarantula died I cried intensely in analysis and thought about writing something in mourning. I didn’t, however, because I wanted to respect that she wasn’t a human and that if another tarantula died she wouldn’t give a fuck about it at all. A tarantula is a solitary creature, it doesn’t hold funerals for its kin. So don’t funeralize a tarantula.

So I don’t like it when cats rub against me, I don’t like it when dogs look at me with their big eyes, clearly because they want some food or attention. I’d much rather love an animal who doesn’t have an inkling that I’m there than one who can ask for and receive pleasure from me, I like sex because there are so many barriers involved. I know I’m neurotic because I maintain various barriers to the fulfillment of anything.

No one I have sex with is able to do it without being preoccupied with what I’m thinking, and the giving oneself over ot instinctual impulses occupies only a small fraction of the encounter. When I have sex I’m so caught up in questions and thoughts, I’m never unconscious even when the orgasm comes, at which point I am sort of at the end of an insight, the orgasm is a punctuation mark in a sentence, and completely continuous with a grammatical way of life. I’m sure some men would not like this about me. They would want me to turn into a lake, a mountain, or a dead deer.

But most men are a bit less grammatical. I believe they want the structure of my grammar to rub against until they yield to my structure. Men want to get fucked over and lose themselves to the object of the woman’s drive. I’d wager that even the most submissive women are totally in control in sex because of how structured they are by their fantasies. Men break when they’re buffeted by the waves of a woman’s desire, and so men have better access to that allegedly feminine experience of falling apart.