THAT DAY

I have an art show at our cooperative gallery--frame my last few pictures and lug stuff over there. The space is quite different from what I recalled. Did I bring enough work? Put my Planetocopia globes in the front window. Need better signage, but right away people stop and come in. Within minutes, get my first signup for a class in world-building.

Go home, get a couple of round paintings to cover the ugly switchbox on the wall, return, hang them... done. Bone-tired, but done.

THAT EVENING

Our band, the Krelkins, practice. Three hours, going in detail over just four songs. The arts are a harsh mistress...

THAT NIGHT

On a stone terrace or bridge, I meet and flirt with a girl with a heart-shaped face and dark hair. She seems encouraging but oddly passive, seems glad to let me take all initiative and responsibility. Soon I'm unbuttoning her clothes and we end up naked the a nearby flowery lawn, fucking right in public. But before either of us comes...

...a parade marches up! That distracts us. It's a rowdy protest about an issue we both care about (when I wake I can't recall what), and we get to talking about it, and...

Wait, why are we so distractable?

She has friends in the parade, and they congratulate her on her "narrow escape" with her "honor". She seems to see it this Victorian way at first, or at least agrees to be polite, but her expression's changed: she stalks around licking her lips, looks hungry and frustrated. Looking to finish what we started, with a guy who's less distractable--one who knows you shouldn't leave a girl frustrated.

Or yourself frustrated. I'm baffled at my OWN sexual distractability--even in the middle of it! I liked her, I liked sex, and want to resume, but... it's all weirdly un-urgent, absent-minded.

Our friends notice too. One tells me "You know, letting other people steal your sex life is a disease with a Latin name. What was it? Oh: Coitus Distractus." And I wake.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

You know, it's true. I do feel a weird lack of urgency, not just around dating/sex, but around money/career/status too, right now at least. I put all my effort and passion into weird art projects (the World Dream Bank, Planetocopia, our band the Krelkins... but the basic drives for sex and survival sound... nice, but nothing to die for, or kill for. Other people get so fierce about them! I don't. What's with that?

TWELVE YEARS LATER

Well, part of the answer is Asperger syndrome. I knew I was geeky, but until last year, when I saw the DSM criteria for autism, I didn't realize the full extent of my difference. I didn't say disability. I'm not sure that having drives so fierce you hurt each other serves you well. Play nice, dear human friends. Try to keep your claws in. Velvet paws.

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