a confession

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It has been more than 20 years since my last confession (which is probably a sin in its own right).

My greatest sin is that I've become hopelessly out of touch on a few things. The war in Iraq, the movement of the stock markets, the anticipated End of the World date based on the most recent Calamity Forecast. I'm admitedly out of it.

One of my truely mortal sins is the asset allocation of my so-called retirement plan. But we'll take that up some other time. There's too much penance to do on that front. I'm turning it over to my Mimi. If there aren't G&Ts and never-ending card games in heaven, she's jot time to pray my retirement savings out of the purgatory in which they've landed.

But here, father, is where my being hopelessly out of touch has come to bite me in the ass lately (and you, as a Catholic priest, will probably appreciate this): I've forgotten how to give a blow job.

Now, as a woman-loving woman (which you still count as a sin, but for which I refuse to seek absolution), it is not especially important to me, this blow job business. It would be an outrage if I ever forgot the art of cunnilingus, to be sure. But I'm finding myself needing an artisan's understanding of blow jobs these days, and ... well, let's just say some memories are too vague to mine.

Barring personal research -- which is never out of the question but also not terribly likely (despite the beautiful man I was eyeing the other night) -- I've had to turn to other sources of information. Fortunately, one of my classmates is utterly lacking in shyness on the topic of sex and has provided me with detailed and highly useful information. It also jarred my memory a bit.

Nevertheless, in writing about all this sexual activity, I find myself feeling a little odd. It's not that I'm unaccustomed to sexual fantasy. You and me both know, father, that the Church is just setting up people for failure when it instructs them not even to *think* about sex. Coveting? Really, father, who doesn't "covet"?.

But I'm not accustomed to having intact stories be delivered to my doorstep by my Inner Writer. Not in any way, not in any genre. Fiction has not been a part of my mind in many, many years. Why has it suddenly returned? And why, father, do you think it's come back in such a ... tawdry fashion?

I wrote something about two women a few days ago. As soon as I began to pen it, I was surprised by what I found being spoken by my Inner Writer. Not so much about the sex itself. It's of average salaciousness. What has proved a curiosity to me is that I can see more of them.

How can I explain this? Imagine the first story I wrote is represented in my mind's eye as a scene I'm viewing through window, a window unattached to a house, just hanging there against a blue blue but partly cloudy sky. I can see everything that is happening, I can know the minds of all the parties visible, I can see everything that's going to happen before it happens, but it is my writing of it that actually brings those events to pass. When I'm not writing, the scene in the window is a still frame, the story already complete, just waiting to be performed.

The story presents itself to me like that.

But here's the thing that's really making me wonder: As I look at that scene in window, I am distinctly aware of several others lined up behind it. Looking past the window, there against the sky, are lined up at least half a dozen stories.

As far as I can tell, they're all about sex.

So it begs the question, father, about what's going on? For years, no words, no thoughts, no imagination. I thought it had abandoned me. Is there some reason that when it returned, it came in a genre in which the greatest challenge is avoiding the use of cheesy synonyms? (See "erotica" enty for more about that.) I hope I will, in time, create better metaphors for "slick mound" and " stiff member," because cheesy is the bane of my existence. I can't stand it!

Perhaps I am simply sublimating, father. Having lost contact with loving touch for a bit too long -- and it being the doldrums of winter and all -- perhaps my mind has gone awry. Perhaps my unconscious is showing me unexpected things. Or perhaps something has shifted in my consciousness and untapped a creative spring.

All those stories lined up in a row confound me. Whatever their purpose, they're knocking. How many times will I answer? And just how sinful is this going to get?

For poetry was written before time was. And whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate that region where the air is music, we hear the primal warblings and attempt to write them down. But we lose ever an anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.