AOC was asking about Finnegan’s Wake; did you really read it, and i said, yes, i did, and i actually recorded it—and then felt bad about it for various reasons (i had better things to do than make a recording of me reading Finnegan’s wake—I don’t even like James Joyce; I think he’s boring, and i feel like an idiot when i try to like it just because other people like it—i liked it alright for a time, but that changed as I matured as an artist) so I destroyed it.
Anyhow, I explained myself, and AOC told me not to destroy things anymore because at some point somebody might choose to get interested, even if they turn out, in the end, not to like you. i’m fighting back right now and i knew what she was talking about: Chuck Schumer wouldn’t throw his weight behind Mamdami, New York’s next mayor, which we could only assume was because Schumer catered to wealthy democrats—people that were okay with democracy as long as they didn’t have to roll their sleeves up and use their influence to boost up the rest of us.
then AOC asked me if i ever used to cut myself and i told her, yes, i did, but not very often, maybe once every six months, or a little more than that, and then she wanted to know why and i told everybody, at that point, that that was between me and God and then i told my AOC—my orphan (i knew better than to think of Alex as my Alex, at least in away that could bring shame to somebody)—that i disagreed, for a while, with a number of my spots—which, back then, I referred to as moles, even though they weren’t three dimensional—they were mostly just brown.
anyhow—i see them as spots, now, and i think they are special; in time, i imagine, people will see your spots and like them—they’ll think of you as a rare animal—and, in this sense, i mean an animal that you love.
what else did AOC want to know about? i told her—and everybody, then, that I was queer, or sexually different, a little bit of everything that all seemed to cancel itself out; naturally she wanted to know if i was sure that i wasn’t gay, which might be interpreted as a fair question even though I was a little offended: so i told her the sex (in some ways) was doable, but i’d never had a crush on a man.
“We can go as slow as you like,” I said, “if, that is, you don’t want to make a big investment, and, furthermore, you want to see if I, semi-asexual, should fall in love—or at least think about you enough to sustain an erection. I had some sildenafil if i thought i needed it—if I were crushing hard but couldn’t get an erection, but i didn’t want to need it, and, furthermore—given my sexuality, it might not work since it increases blood flow without necessarily increasing desire. So, to answer any further question, which she might not have asked out loud, i said that we’d have to play it by ear, and, of course, if she couldn’t handle that, it was best to absolve each other of whatever romance we might’ve shared—because I wasn’t going to talk about it. I wasn’t going to do anything that felt wrong. So basically we’d be just like normal people going on a date, in fact.
Finally AOC asked me how many partners i’d had, and i answered that question too (not very many) although I told her exactly, and, once that was out of the way, I was anxious to talk about something else—such as, for example, any interest or change in her life. since when? “Tell me your thoughts on God,” I said. i don’t want to well, i was a little miffed because i’d just answered some wall to wall questions that were not easy to answer. But, technically, I didn’t ask Alex about God, although i was curious; instead i’d asked my AOC, and it was her response that i got. So i asked Alex about it, and she said that she didn’t believe in anything supernatural—including an afterlife. That was a bit of an impediment, for me, but, my belief in an afterlife was always in question even if I was trying to prove that it was a fair question with possibilities. My thoughts on God in this respect had only started forming when I was AOC’s age, in fact, so I chose not to express any reservations i might have had. The real question was, “Do you have faith in something greater than yourself?” But I I didn’t want to ask her that at this time. It was clear to me that she did.