Jesús María: 21 de enero de 2015
I keep putting off writing about the other night when we went to Jesús María, where there is a rodeo or something but we never went to it. Instead we bought cheap sangria in this huge night street market and walked around, talking, laughing, taking pictures, looking at the hundreds of stalls with clothes of every color shoved, folded, hung, and stretched in on and over every possible available space.
My favorite was the tight black crop-top with the English words, “the funnest travel.” Totally describes my life right now: trying to fix my incorrect grammar while exploring another culture. I think maybe it is the funnest thing I’ve ever done.
There were five of us: me, the three Brazilian students studying journalism and economics (qué buena onda) and the same young German I talked to at four in the morning that one time, and who got very drunk on sangria and tried kissing me. Finally I relented, thinking “what the hell, I’m single now, might as well experiment.”
Aaaaand worst kisser ever. He literally just poked his tongue out and wiggled it around while I tried to change that experiment into something sensual, attractive, desirable. Epic fail. In the end I danced away, avoided his drunken grasping for the rest of the night. I think alcohol brings our animal instincts out into the open, revealing them shamelessly to the later sober person’s distress and possible regret.
I’ve started reading this incredible book called The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson, and he is a beautiful writer. He speaks of the evolution of human consciousness, saying that it was used for reproduction and survival, not self-examination.
For me, it was as if the alcohol had wiped any possibility of self-examination from the consciousness of this German youth, and had magnified the true purpose of his mind, of all our minds: to channel emotions, desire, for reproductive ends. A shadow of an instinctual need for sex, in this case a kiss, the beginning animal step.
I cut that off as quick as I could, a swift amputation of a malignant cancerous sore. Maybe this was my own instinctual reaction to a perceived threat. Survival, in my mind, is so often the avoidance of men in need of sex. They become marionettes handled sloppily by a child, slaves to their own biology, and I need something infinitely more interesting before I give myself up to them.
I guess you’ve got to fuck my mind first before you can fuck my body. Or at least don’t be so obvious about the intentions I already know you have.