Friend and his sex life.

*WARNING*

This blog entry is going to be rather explicit, maybe, so if you are offended b y sexuality or profanity, you may wish to skip it.

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A friend of mine came over yesterday. I didn’t really want him here, I have to get up for work at 4AM on Saturdays, so when he showed up around 8PM, I was really not amused. He’s a cool guy, mind you, and when we get together from time to time it is always interesting because he and I have a very similar sense of humor and we always find ourselves laughing. This is great, but I really needed to get to sleep.

I was not really in a mood to listen to bullshit, but the friend in me did so anyway, because the obligations of friendship demand it. You see, my friend has issues with relationships, and by that I mean he usually has more than one going at a time.

Now, I’ll tell ya, I am not a judgmental conservative type. I think if you like to have sex, go have sex. You like it one on one, fine. You like threesomes? Fine. You like big fuckin orgies? Have at it, just be careful, responsible, and above all, be honest!

His latest drama is really all about having found himself “in love” with two people. One, a lovely young lady who I have known for a year or so, and the second a very handsome man of about 35 who I have only met the once, and the impression I got of him was not a pleasant one. But he likes him, loves him by his account.

Now, the woman knows all about this. She is pressuring him to commit to a more monogamous relationship, but the man does not know that he is also dating a woman. If you knew him and me, you would know that he tells me everything. Sometimes I have to stop him, because I don’t need to hear how wet she was when he was sliding in to her or how good it felt to get fucked three times in one night.

It isn’t that I am a prude. I love porn, I love erotica, I love sexuality as a topic of conversation and as a means to explore ourselves and our connections to each other. It is that I know him, have been intimate with him, and have always tried to maintain a certain decorum, a certain line that I try not to cross with people, and he seems not willing to respect that line, that boundary.

I am fine with him talking sex, I just don’t want to hear every detail.

He is a Pagan, not a Hellenistos, but a Wiccan, and part of me wants to quote the Rede to him when he talks about the man he is dating not knowing about his relationship with a woman, but I am also left to wonder if perhaps telling him might hurt him more than not.

So, I turn to Aphrodite in search for an answer, and I was shocked to find that she was not very helpful to me. I didn’t have tea with her, of course, but in meditating on the questions involved, I found that I was left bereft of an answer.

Should I advise him to tell the man he’s dating? Should I advise him to commit more fully to his girlfriend? The only answer that kept popping into my mind was “Tell him who he is” and that left me a little confused. Am I supposed to sit him down and point out his personality to him so he can better look at this with the proper mind set?

Hmm, it’s a fuckin mess, but I think what I really want to say is, I wish you hadn’t bugged me with this shit. What does someone exploring Aphrodite advise someone in a situation like this?

Laughter and worship.

So, as I mentioned in my last entry, my life is turning to shit, but i am somehow managing to keep myself from depression or the dark feelings that so often accompany me in life. The truth is that since starting this little challenge of mine, these meditations on the Gods, I have become far more calm a person. I am less argumentative, far less prone to depression, and far less cynical about the world around me, and part of the reason for this is my willingness to laugh.

But just today I was thinking about Aphrodite, about her unique domain, that of laughter, and I had to take the time to say thank you to her for the way she has helped guide me through my inner turmoil these last few months.

Laughter is a funny thing, and no that is not intended as a pun. We humans find comedic value in so many things. From the raunchy to the cute, from the wholesome to the offensive, and it is this ability to laugh at ourselves, and let's face it, others, that we find that that old saying really is true. Sometimes laughter really is the best medicine.

So, how does one incorporate laughter into worship?

There are cults in Hinduism, philosophies, based on the idea that laughter, the actual act of laughing, is actually spiritually healing. Is there such a thing in our own religion? Can we find it in ourselves to look beyond the way our culture places such a sense of severity on religious practice and learn to laugh and be merry as part of our religious observances. Or, perhaps, I should be asking how am I going to accomplish this? After all, I am the one responsible for my own relationships with the Gods.

Laughing our way through worry.

I have to be honest with you. I am in deep shit. I won’t go into details, but I will say that this economy has destroyed me. Last month was a month full of worry, stress, and self loathing based on my own preoccupation with simply not becoming homeless. I have managed to keep this internet thing going, because it has become my main form of communication over distance, and it helps me stay in touch with my family in Connecticut and Florida, but little by little I have had to remove everything from my life that ever gave me pleasure.

Hell, it’s a good thing my cock is attached, or I would be really depressed.

But in the last few years I have learned a few things about myself, and the way I connect and rely on the Gods. So I took a step back and told myself no. I was ready to remove the last three things I pay for every month that still manage to bring me a little enjoyment. The Internet (I could always use wifi at work or at local coffee shops to keep my sites up to date) my cable TV service, which I admit is now much diminished, and my satellite radio subscription.

But let me tell you, I am not really a couch potato in the regular sense. The amount of TV I watch is actually not large, but I do like to watch comedies, maybe a few dramas, I hate reality TV, and adore those docos on Discovery, PBS, etc. And I would probably go insane if I didn’t get my Howard fix every morning.

So as I sat and meditated on a few things I realized that I was becoming old. I was letting the world make me into an old fart. No joy, no laughter, no fun in my life, and just as all of this is happening, I made the transition on my star from Poseidon to Aphrodite, the laughter loving Goddess.

It wasn’t a conscious thing. I didn’t transition because of what was happening in my life, I transitioned and as I worked into it, I realized the coincidence of it.

Beauteous Aphrodite called me to her as I needed her. My heart called out to her without me even knowing it, and now I must seek to explore that, to understand what it is, other than her laughter, her fun, that my heart is seeking. I must, I think, be forced to confront my own inner hermit and beat him down so that I don’t forget to live as I try to keep myself a float. After all, what’s the point of saving oneself from drowning if one has no water or food to live off in the middle of a stormy sea.

So, bring on the funny, miss Aphrodite, I can handle it.

Laughter Loving Aphrodite

Aphrodite is often called laughter loving, She is a goddess of delights, of joy, of pleasures that elicit laughter and fun in human beings. The often negative connotations that Christian culture place on the gifts of Aphrodite are actually the positive aspects of the Goddess of Love.

One imagines Aphrodite as a Goddess who loves comedy. Who loves humour of all types and delights in the power of laughter in the human psyche. A power we possess as a means to rid ourselves of the stresses of life and survival. The crude joke, perhaps, may be her favorite. She may laugh at the antics of Howard Stern, or revel at the knife’s edge of Chris Rock’s satire as it points out the absurdities of our culture. Perhaps she loved Sam Kennison and adores Bill Cosby, and tunes in regularly to Raw Dog and Comedy Central.

Perhaps, most of all, she laughs at the absurdities of our own attitudes toward sex, an act which is itself full of absurdities and pitfalls of raw emotion.

I do not believe that the Gods meddle in our lives in ways that we so often think of when we refer to them in myth. I don’t think Aphrodite is busy making my dick hard when I see a hot man or woman on the street, but I think their power, and hers especially, simply permeates things. It is a probability that is always present and which our hearts, minds, and souls are always thirsting and reaching for.

After all, we all love to laugh, and laughter is just an expression of something deeper. A release of emotion, her most powerful domain.

I come to ponder these things as I see my own life crumbling around me. As I see my country falling into financial ruin and its people nervously refusing to be generous. In times when the heart feels so heavy, so strained with worry, laughter loving Aphrodite becomes ever more important to us.

Aphrodite's Sense of Humour

If we are to acknowledge Aphrodite as a divine power intimately linked to emotion, then among the most powerful of the tools in her arsenal is laughter. She is even called Laughter Loving Aphrodite (Philomides) by the ancients, who understood that her power was one that enriched and enhanced their ability to feel pleasure, to enjoy life, and to laugh at the world around them.

But laughing is different from having a sense of humor, All people laugh, but not all have a true sense of humor, which to me is the ability to laugh at yourself as much as to laugh at other things. A sense of humor includes the tweaking of people, the giving of ills in order to make one laugh at oneself, so when New Years Eve came around this year, on the heels of my Heliogenna observances (which I must apologize for not posting on the site, I will try to do that today) I was more than happy to indulge in a little Dionysian, Aphrodisian, and Erotic fun for the sake of liberating myself from the ills this past year brought me.

At this point, I have been single again for about a year, and while I have certainly had sex since, I have not really indulged in some of my more slutty behaviors. I do not apologize for these, I have no need, I do not subscribe to the Judaeo-Christian puritanical ethic, and do not apply that ethic to anyone, male or female.

So, New Years is the time to do that. To leave behind the more conservative aspects of my personality and go with the slut fag pig boy that I can be from time to time. I won’t be crude and go into all the gory details, but I will say that I had a great time, and so did several other people. Safety precautions were taken, of course.

But as the night wore on, and the party at my favorite private club/bar wound down, Aphrodite, who had until then provided me with the enjoyment of her most lascivious of gifts, played a little trick on me. Someone, unknown, took my coat accidentally, and with it, my keys.

It is very stressful, knowing that after such a phenomenal night, you are now essentially stranded, and locked out. In the end, I had to break in to my own apartment, and hope that the owners of the bar could contact the membership so they might bring my coat, and more importantly, keys back.

I had to ponder all this. That I had such a great night with Aphrodite and Dionysos in mind is not odd. I have had more than my share of great sexual and erotic experiences when I have allowed myself the liberty to give myself to them. But, as I pondered it, I realized that almost every time I have, something odd and negative has also happened to me. Were I a Christian, or Moslem, or Jew perhaps, I would think that maybe I was being punished, but as a man who believes whole heartedly that the Gods want us to enjoy life, and Aphrodite especially, I started to think that these things were simply meant as contrast.

That, like the negative and positive space in a photograph, the awesome pleasures Aphrodite affords us are balanced by a wicked tweaking of our nipples that provide us with a way to see how good her gifts are in comparison with the bad things that happen to us.

Her sense of humor, because after I pondered the whole thing I did find it funny, is one that can, if we are wiling to have a sense of humor ourselves, teach us a great deal about ourselves, our emotions, and our ability to deal with them.