text • chris rusak

10-09-08

Diptych one. (Revelation.)

Part of it was timing.

The situation I was in went like this: it was a special party in celebration of the weekend, and on these types of weekends, the travelers outnumbered the locals. The party the month before was my first back in quite a long time, over two years. The ones of the past were held in what was otherwise a fisting dungeon. Everything was grimy and black latex, two things that don’t turn me on. The former because Crisco emits a rancid funk and the latter because it’s so feminine. Anyhow, the party is now held in one of the city’s better pansexual dungeons/playspaces/buildings. It is down on the lower floor of three, underground, in what is normally the straight dungeon. I have yet to see the gay dungeon, but I look forward to a change in decor. It is a central playspace nucleus of which two tunnellike hallways are on parallel sides, perpendicularly surrounded by smaller semi-private playspaces and a video room with high fructose corn syrup laden consumables. The bottles of water always run out first.

What I only failed to realized until just recently was that, for me, what is essential is to decide whether to be submissive or dominant for the whole night before I walk in the door.

I had invited myself into a duplicitous reality, of doppelgangers, of hyperactive and aggressively increasing over-stimulation that fried every synapse in my nervous system, unleashing wave after wave of anxiety that bottlenecked into a full-scale panic attack. There is a reason they call it attack.

It comes at you like a knife. Right in your chest, directly above your heart, in fact, you first think it’s a heart attack. Then, remaining on your feet, but coherent and paralyzed, you realize your alternate fear came true. You cannot speak and you can barely begin to think. You are locked into a whirling dervish of negative thoughts, squid ink to a thimble of confidence, and everything falls apart around you. The last step leads to darkness. A silent basement with dusty thoughts of yesteryear. The hit of an axe to a wall from three minutes prior. An overflowing trash can in the corner. A remarkable dim, yet broken light, swinging from the ceiling in the corner.

In front of me was what I thought I could only imagine. A freshly clipped head. Sideburns running down his chin. No moustache. Skate shoes, barely laced. Color coordinated. A white boy with black hair and brown eyes. And he’s here, at this party, with me.

Somewhere in this realization, a thought peeled off the wall.

It is often hard to grasp onto the subconscious thought that triggers the spiral of cognitive distortions. One of the first skills you use in practicing cognitive behavior therapy is keeping track of your thoughts and digging deeper to and remaining more aware of the oft quick blips that disappear as fast as they came: concentrated, silent explosions that ripple through your mass disturbing matter and the surrounding energy. But, they are there. Always.

And, the more you learn to use cognitive behavior therapy, the more you reveal in time. There is a chapter on remission in the manual that users learn from to practice the technique on their own or with a therapist. That chapter tells you there will be a remission, if not multiple ones. Always. Because you need to only reach the first level, the first time. One must experience the joys of being well first, to make worth having to battle it the second time. The second time you get to the real structure of your thoughts. The real definitions of your anxiety. The incredible place that is your core. You could not handle this the first go around.

The young guy that I could hardly believe was with me in the same room, publicly subscribing to the same practices of sex and lifestyle that I did, exited the room with a rather portly, older man. Attractive, I presume, for a man of his age, and whatever age it was it was grand at that. This puzzled me. Perhaps it shouldn’t have, or perhaps it should. But, it did. I figured, after all, we all have our spectra we participate in. My range is fairly wide in terms of mathematical proportions.

As the evening continued, I began to notice more and more of what I wanted. Dominant counterparts in the correct visual display. Men with a confident facade and, hopefully, and strong interior. I had craved this leaderlike energy and it was present. All the while, I noticed that The young guy continued to pair off with similar men, refusing the courting of his those close to being a peer.

What conflicted me was the desire to connect on two sides of the mind, simultaneously, in the same controlled environment. An impossibility? How does one show contrasting sides of their Self to the masses without invoking confusion? How much do we reveal? How do we reveal it?

Present in a moment with no real time for ontological deliberations, I decided that I needed to reconnect with the outside world and remember which illusions I was a part of. Daylight is a great reset; each morning we dial back into the world we are a part of after our slumbers from the neitherlands. And, nothing is more realistic than the smell of stale urine from a San Francisco alleyway. I left the dungeon and took a walk around the block, receptive of mindful stares from neighbors and dazed inquisitions from the homeless residents of the sidewalk.

The sunshine did little to help.

Having accomplished as much as I was going to in the fifteen minutes of daylight I absorbed, a few basic refutations to some core cognitive errors, I picked myself up by the bootstraps and walked back, admittedly with no plan, no direction, no inkling as to how to attack my situation. In essence, I reentered more submissive than I left, but still grasping onto the desire to have it all in the moment.

We live within this great illusion. We are not what we seem, and many of us are able to transcend this recognition and live beyond the ramifications of the otherwise ignorant attitude others pursue with. Yet, here I was in a dual illusion. An overwhelming urge to dominate my peer, and an incredible urge to be led. The young guy was still there after the sunshine, but now with his third grandpa of my seeing. I was disappointed and I gave up my hope at that point, if nothing else to assuage my anxiety by eliminating the necessity to decide anymore.

I played very little for the duration of the party. I chatted and verbally connected with many, but it was from a distant, observational, sponge-like plateau where my only working capability was to absorb all the information around me for later processing. To partake as witness alone in the events all men were subjecting themselves to.

My final choice here, my surrendering, was painful but necessary. When you are faced with a mountain and you lack the proper tools to mount the peak, a climber must instead trek the circumference and take back a list of what they need in the next approach. To tackle otherwise creates a risk of abrupt plummet, or at best, a scrap-filled somersault descent towards gravity.

I lost. I considered myself a loser in the possibilities of experience of the day. Of course, submission is about surrender. On a deep, but opaque, terrace I knew that in a twisted fashion, this was all stroking my ego.

One comes back to center. One finds their self creating. An artist sits down and loses himself, again, and the visual translation of experience begins. One reveals their own subconscious during their process. One deconstructs, reconstructs, razes… we take necessary steps to progress or regress as we direct ourselves.

I had entered a moment where time and the position of other experiences were not in my favor, and timing is everything. A world of often imperfect alignment is where we live. The appreciation of the dynamic lines between experiences, movement off the grid of action, obtuse angles through intersections of energy, cutting paths to places we seek…

In the end, I’m not the loser. I lived a loss. I felt pain. There is a satisfaction that comes with that.

I wrapped myself in my own submission and I simultaneously dominated myself down. I led myself to a darkness I created, I witnessed the power of it’s creator, I felt what I could command. I was able to see beyond an impossibility, even if that possibility did not then extend outside my own being. What has been taken from this experience, and the objectification of the experience, reaches far beyond the fulfillment of an ethereal memory captured and stored within the same realm of the darkness experienced.