Tidbits on sex and death
JR West Railways has gone into a damage control frenzy after the horrible crash last month (final death toll: 107) and another relatively minor bingle with a car (!). Now, at every JR station, the entrances are manned by obsequious employees who bow and thank you for using their service and bow some more. The head of JR is a dead man walking; he'll resign soon, but the fallout continues. It's the flipside of the fetishising of efficiency and timeliness; while I'm enormously happy to rock up to any station and know that the longest I have to wait is five minutes, it's still kinda scary knowing the pressure the drivers are under to get to the station not only on time to the second, but also to park the train so that the people lined up are matched with the correct doors.
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Cancer is postmodern - the secret creeping betrayal of modernity, of progress. Here we are living now, full of energy, life, the only creatures free of the dictates of survival and here is the secret punishment for our rays and radiations and chemicals which freed us from the chains of evolutionary servitude.
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I think that perhaps the reason that Christianity is so hung up on sex is because it makes breaking the rules so, so much more fun. As children, our parents played the role of God, the arbiters of Right and Wrong, controllers of the snack cupboard, punishers of wrongdoing. But everyone discovered early on that doing the wrong thing was really quite fun because of the potential for discovery, disclosure and punishment. Then our parents shrank back into normal people when we grew up and we needed someone else to tell us off, to tell us that a part of our lives was unnatural and that we shouldn't go there, so that when we did go there, it was a thrill, the forbidden fruit that was sweetest. That someone was God and our new foster parents were priests and they told us that sex and our animal natures were bad and had to be strictly controlled and that God created temptation for the sole purpose of resisting it but the truth is that the story of Adam and Eve and the apple and the snake is not a tragedy; it is not the Fall of Man that the Bible speaks of but the Cleverness of Man in creating such a powerful stigma for the sole purpose of breaking it down. It's why moral politicians and speakers always end up in sex scandals. Those who rail at immorality and vice are secretly battling their own flesh - that's how they can generate so much emotion about the issue - and so often they lose the battle and end up with their lives pinned and spreadeagled on a tabloid page one. I could talk about this as an abstract issue, but it's quite personal. Christianity made me feel bad about sex for a long time, but the thrill I earnt in breaking down those taboos isn't something I want to give up. I'm not angry about it. I'm happy. I only wish I could do it all over again.
Last generation, everyone knew that convent school girls went off like firecrackers in the sack. This generation, perhaps it's those forlorn kids who consecrate themselves to a sexless life pre-marriage who totally lose it when they get a little drunk and start fooling around on the sofa.
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Snapshot; an aged businessman with gold buckles on his shoes and sagging jowls walks near - but not with - a girl who looks half-Filipino half-American perhaps, a mid-range whore, tall, sleek, sultry, exotic, but her sneakers and scowl shows that she's not good enough at acting and hiding to be a top-range whore; having recently purchased an orgasm from her he hitches his pants, cock no longer tumescent, the shrinking pains of post-sex showing in his shuffling gait, his attempt to rejoin society, to walk normally out of the love hotel district.
JR West Railways has gone into a damage control frenzy after the horrible crash last month (final death toll: 107) and another relatively minor bingle with a car (!). Now, at every JR station, the entrances are manned by obsequious employees who bow and thank you for using their service and bow some more. The head of JR is a dead man walking; he'll resign soon, but the fallout continues. It's the flipside of the fetishising of efficiency and timeliness; while I'm enormously happy to rock up to any station and know that the longest I have to wait is five minutes, it's still kinda scary knowing the pressure the drivers are under to get to the station not only on time to the second, but also to park the train so that the people lined up are matched with the correct doors.
---
Cancer is postmodern - the secret creeping betrayal of modernity, of progress. Here we are living now, full of energy, life, the only creatures free of the dictates of survival and here is the secret punishment for our rays and radiations and chemicals which freed us from the chains of evolutionary servitude.
---
I think that perhaps the reason that Christianity is so hung up on sex is because it makes breaking the rules so, so much more fun. As children, our parents played the role of God, the arbiters of Right and Wrong, controllers of the snack cupboard, punishers of wrongdoing. But everyone discovered early on that doing the wrong thing was really quite fun because of the potential for discovery, disclosure and punishment. Then our parents shrank back into normal people when we grew up and we needed someone else to tell us off, to tell us that a part of our lives was unnatural and that we shouldn't go there, so that when we did go there, it was a thrill, the forbidden fruit that was sweetest. That someone was God and our new foster parents were priests and they told us that sex and our animal natures were bad and had to be strictly controlled and that God created temptation for the sole purpose of resisting it but the truth is that the story of Adam and Eve and the apple and the snake is not a tragedy; it is not the Fall of Man that the Bible speaks of but the Cleverness of Man in creating such a powerful stigma for the sole purpose of breaking it down. It's why moral politicians and speakers always end up in sex scandals. Those who rail at immorality and vice are secretly battling their own flesh - that's how they can generate so much emotion about the issue - and so often they lose the battle and end up with their lives pinned and spreadeagled on a tabloid page one. I could talk about this as an abstract issue, but it's quite personal. Christianity made me feel bad about sex for a long time, but the thrill I earnt in breaking down those taboos isn't something I want to give up. I'm not angry about it. I'm happy. I only wish I could do it all over again.
Last generation, everyone knew that convent school girls went off like firecrackers in the sack. This generation, perhaps it's those forlorn kids who consecrate themselves to a sexless life pre-marriage who totally lose it when they get a little drunk and start fooling around on the sofa.
---
Snapshot; an aged businessman with gold buckles on his shoes and sagging jowls walks near - but not with - a girl who looks half-Filipino half-American perhaps, a mid-range whore, tall, sleek, sultry, exotic, but her sneakers and scowl shows that she's not good enough at acting and hiding to be a top-range whore; having recently purchased an orgasm from her he hitches his pants, cock no longer tumescent, the shrinking pains of post-sex showing in his shuffling gait, his attempt to rejoin society, to walk normally out of the love hotel district.
posted by Doug @ 5/27/2005 10:17:00 pm
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