Thanks to a decade plus of dedication to my writing life, I now understand timing, materials needed, and spaces that serve my craft best. Ultimately it’s the balance between absence and presence. Slow Love Lake Superior is what I call the approach to loving the person/ people/places/practices I do ‘slowly and with quiet, steady pleasure’.
I fell in love with Manatee watching during a birthstate (Florida) visit last month. Here are a few tastes of that sensual watery beast of calm via live cams. Manatee “season” runs Nov 15 - Mar 31. Feels only fitting to give this month’s post to these examples of pure, magical, ocean pleasure. Who needs sports, or concerts, or restaurants…
As I apply to graduate schools, I feel intimate/at odds with the ideas of meritocracy. Hard work. Striving for success. Yes sexy talk for realz and damn!!? I realize I’ve pushed my commitment to pleasure to the side. My creative/kinky brain feels like mush while fine tuning and sculpting cognitive skills. As I ask is it possible to do both, I realize I’ve forgotten to wield my most prized smarts this winter. Flirting.
My brain will never comprehend all that is held in this basin, watershed, body. I don’t try. Just like the enormity of and mystery in Dolly Parton’s magic, a counter sexual manifesto to free us all, and saying yes to kinky queer wild sexual desires like Allison Moon does every day/page. This new decade stretches in front of me. Us all. A giant cup FULL of love juice.
I’ve finally admitted to myself- I’m the bigLake’s bitch. Every year I ride her wild ride and keep coming back for more. The bigLake doesn’t take no for an answer and I love said water for such demanding audacity. The bigLake pronounces, “I’m your number one and nothing else is worth your attention.” I smile and nod, smile and nod. Move closer, dip my hand through her wet. Almost twenty years in, I’m still completely enamored.
By the time September and October ride in, we can’t contain the sexy effervescence bubbling up from us. We welcome pleasure like pros and have fun doing so. We tell more sex jokes, have second, third, fourth thoughts about what’s deemed “sexually inappropriate”.
Oh! beloved Gym I’ve called home for 15+ years, you close this week. Overlooking Lake Superior, your kept me sane during nearly 2 decades of Duluth Minnesota winters. How dare!!! the medical industrial complex tear you down to turn a profit. Your space that’s clean, queer friendly, spacious and cross generational is a solid part of who I am as a sexual being. So in Pussy Manifesto meets Sharon Olds odes fashion, this SiMC blog post is an ode to Gym (CPF). RIP
Every year I’m amazed at how much poetry I experience during Leo&Virgo birthday season/travels. The perfect blend of familiar meets new allows me to make the adventure expansive, soul quenching, and fun. Using my new ‘Love Bubble’ label, even as fall temperatures and colors push summer into next calendared poem at home, I see further into all my August+September pleasures.
Oh Minnesota and all your contradictions! Love how EVERYone’s talking about this performance. Perfect post for my birthday month when I was too pleasured up to create blog magic. Thank you Lizzo. You are a fierce Mpls based pleasure activist.
In summer, I experience 20 minute orgasms almost daily. I drive, walk or bike my body 4 miles down to Lake Superior and stare into the wild eyes of bigLake beauty, my primary love, this place that gifts me water rich experiences everyday. I’m held by green granite hillside, long blue horizon, white lighthouses to my left and right.
I was recently asked, “What’s it like to be queer in Duluth? Will you write about it?” Hmmmm… a delicious and dastardly task, especially during Pride month when all kinds of queer are visible to the naked eye.
As spring blooms and summer bites, I’m reading three books- She He They Me: For the Sisters, Misters, and Binary Resisters by Dr. Robyn Ryle, a choose your own adventure about gender identity, Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, and The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. All three engage re-imagined worlds and queer definitions decorate the pages.
Author Richard Powers queerly writes, “We all travel the Milky Way together trees and [humxns], in every walk we take with nature one receives far more than they seek. The [queerest] way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.”
Newsflash. We are afraid of the word and the idea of pleasure. Especially in Minnesota, the state I adoringly call home for a handful of reasons, where silence and nice are ubiquitous .
The things I value most in the intersection of art, love, activism, and this other-worldy time of year are the trance like places I go.
My fiftieth SiMC entry (I don’t publish Everything)! The perfect time to write about upending gender (a fixed and fluid set of ideas about how all binary to non binary folx identify and express ourselves) and sex (the biological assignments given to us at birth based on genitalia).
“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change in our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.” –Audre Lorde
Four winters and counting in Duluth after escaping from 2012-2014. It’s taken me this long to remember the rhythms of our seasonal year, and place/chart the erotic on my calendar.