latest entry from my journal. It is proably a bit too touchy feely and
personal for the zork.net / crashmonkey crowd and they will probably
squirm and cover their eyes and say "too much information" as they
read it but since I'm a member of this crowd, I too get a to take a
stab at shaping its character.
Sleeping with Critters.
The guy that I'm renting a room from has a cat named Max who sleeps
with me almost every night. I've often wondered why he does
that. Cat's are not social animals for the most part. He is a free
animal. He can and does sleep in many different places throughout the
day. Why does he choose to snuggle up so close to me almost every
night. I've gotten to know Max pretty well. He's an old cat. I think
he's about 14, almost all black, and evidently half siamese. He seems
to have the temperment of a siames cat. It is kind of neat; he seems
smarter than most cats. First of all he can talk a little bit. He
seems to know two maybe three words of English: Out, Hello, and
Max. At first, I couldn't believe it but now that I've thought about
it a bit It makes a lot of sense. He's an old cat and he's heard
"Hello" and "Out" many times during his life and just like a parrot he
has learned to imitate the sounds. Day after day for years, when
people walk into the room and they see him they say, "Hello Max" and
so he's adopted that as his greeting. He also had to ask to be let
outside to go to the bathroom and so two or three times a day he would
stand by the door and mew and someone would come up and say, "Do you
want out max." So now he says "out" when he wants out. Anyway, in
addition to being able to talk a little bit, he also has some very
simple emotions. You can almost see them. He doesn't like people
walking around near him and he voices his feelings by making a sound
and by taking a swipe at you. You can see him being upset a bit on his
face. However, he has other simple emotions that are a little harder
to explain. You can sort of see him move through them. They are not
big complicated multifaceted emotions. They seem kind of primal to
me.
Anyway, I've always wondered what makes him tick. Why does he come to
sleep with me at night. He really does make a point of it almost every
night. It is not like I pet him or anything. Most of the nights he
just comes and he literally cuddles with me. It is rather odd,
sometimes he almost does it like a human in some ways. He will strech
out full length with his body next to mine and his head near draped
over my arm. Other times he is more cat like and he will turn himself
into a little circle but even then he doesn't often sleep down by my
feet. He balls himself into my stomach. It is very much like cuddling.
I have to admit, that I never really thought about it because he is a
cat not a human but it is kind of a nice thing for him to do. It sort
of says in his own sort of way, I like being with you. I feel safe
around you. You are my friend. When you are sleeping, you are much
more vulnerable than when you are awake. Many of your defenses are
down and you are certainly not in control of the situation. When two
creatures are both allowing each other to be near them when they are
in that state it represents quite a bit of mutual trust.
It is kind of strange. We humans are exceedingly particular about who
how and when we sleep with. Most of the time the only people we sleep
with are our lovers, parents, or children. Sometimes, women or girls
will sleep with other girls but even that is pretty rare. Most of the
time unless we are with a lover, parent, or child we sleep alone. I
think this is kind of sad. Why does there have to be this such a
strong prohabition to having people sleeping together. I think that
part of it is because it is so rare and because when it does happen it
between people who are not related it is almost always for sexual
purposes. Since the platonic version is so rare and since the
association with sex is so strong sleeping together almost implies
having sexual relations or one kind or another. Heck "sleeping
together" has even become an euphanism for "having sex".
It really is a shame that the world is like this. I think that as we
erect these very strong barriers between ourselves ostensiblely to
protect ourselves, we loose sight of the humanness of others because
we have not experienced it first hand. We don't feel them breath. We
don't feel their heart break. We don't feel the warmth coming off of
their bodies. We don't feel the pleasure of being helpless around
another and seeing other's helpless around us. Never being helpless,
never being vulnerable, we can forget the exchange of trust between
individuals that occurs in those situations. I can imagine how this
could lead to an ever increasing number of people who become
sociopathic to one extent or another. They do not have the image of
another person, warm, breathing, heart beating and helpless next to
them burned into their brains and because they don't have that
connection with the humanness of another, they could become unfettered
from the awareness of the humanness of others and feel comfortable
hurting others.
It really makes me wonder, if the right thing to do with criminals is
to lock them away from society. It seems to me that it reinforces the
distantness that some of those people feel from those that they
victimize. It seem to me that a better more human approach to dealing
with these people is to put them in situations where they feel their
own vulnerability and where they deeply experience the pain and
suffering that deeds such as theirs creates in their victims. Instead
of treating them as a seperate and distinct kind of human, we should
seek to humanize them by making them more intimately aware of their
own humanness and the humanness of others.
All of this thinking arose because a few days ago, a young lady
invited me into her bed. She was the host of a party and I was one of
the last guests there and as things were winding down we moved to the
bedroom and to talk and interact with the last few people
there. Somewhere around 2am, I think, I just fell asleep on her
floor. I guess everyone else wandered off and as the girl was getting
ready to bed down herself, she placed a blanket over me. It woke me up
enough that I realized that in addition to being cold, the carpet was
scratchy. I must have mumbled something about it and she said,
something along the lines of "you can join me in my bed if you like".
This woke me up considerably more, my mind raced to analyze the
situation. I've been so conditioned by my upbringing that the first
thing I considered was that she was making a pass at me. For no good
reason that I can remember I threw away this hypothesis. Maybe I
figured that ethicly I didn't expect her to be initiating an affair
with her girlfriend's husband. However, since Nina and I have been
having some considerable problems recently, I considered the
possibility that she may be steathally working on probing or taking
down my defenses toward her. She had a long time boyfriend who was not
terribly different than I am. She broke up with recently and I
considered the possibility that though it was unethical to try to
steal me from her girlfriend, she may be quietly making a minority
investment in me so that if Nina and I do break up, then she could
have a head start on building a relationship with me. I thought that
strategy was wise and it would be something that I would
do. Therefore, whether or not that was what she was doing it was a
good thing. So I threw that out as a decision criteria.
The thing that really made me decide to do it was the realization that
my inhabitions were quickly building up a wall to an activity like
that. What I realized that, I decided to take affirmitive action and
crawl over into her bed. In my past, I've allowed my inhabtions to
rule and several of those moments I have come to regret later. I can
think of many times in my past where I didn't do something that I
really wanted to do because of my inhabitions and the feeling of
regret has nagged me for years. Plus earlier in the night, I had hit
an automatic inhabition that I didn't realize was there. Several of us
were giving each other massages. I really wanted to be one of the
people who was massaged. I wanted to be touched but for some reason,
anytime anyone put their hands on me I was way to tickelish to allow
them to do anything. It is probably because, I don't get touched very
much. I was feeling kind of frustrated from that and I didn't want to
voluntarily cut me myself off from something in such close proximity
to automatically cutting myself off. It would have just bumbed me out
too much.
When I crawled into her single bed with her, at least one of us had to
be on our side for us to fit. Most of the time both of us were on our
sides facing the same direction. At first, I kept my arms folded
between us but it really did feel awkward and so I asked her if I
could put my arm over her. She didn't mind and later said that she
thought it was very considerate of me to ask. We spent most of the
night like that kind of spooning together. Her in front of me. I
thought about it later, I think that was the only position that I
would have felt comfortable with. If I had lain with my back toward
her back it would have felt like we were sort of mad at each other or
at least like we were trying TOO hard to take a very intimate
situation and turn it into something not quite as intimate. On the
other hand I feel like it would have been even more intimate if we
were face to face and that little difference could have made the
situation a little confusing. So the only ways that really worked were
with both of us on our sides facing the same direction.
One other thing that I did was almost a bit comical thinking back. I
had my hand draped over her shoulder and down her front and so I
commanded my hand to hold onto her lower wrist even while I was
sleeping. I wanted to make sure that I didn't let go so that my normal
muscle relaxation wouldn't allow my hand to drift up and come to rest
on her breasts and give her the impression that I was stealthily
trying to cop a feel of her breasts. I was kind of funny, I woke up
several times throughout the night just to check to make sure that my
hand was still holding onto her wrist. In the morning my hand muscles
were a little tired from holding onto to her all night.
In the morning, even though I woke up several times to check on my
hand, I woke up refreshed and I felt really good. I felt happy --
which is kind of unusual for me. I really enjoyed it. It made me feel
really good. It made me realize how much I crave and need human other
human's contact. It made me consider the possibility that I'm a touchy
feely person after all. I think that more people should do this more
often and not just with their lovers. It would be good for
them. People should learn how to take down the walls that seperate
them, and learn to trust other people and be trustworthy. I think that
if we all did this, the world would be a better place.