named him after the post I wrote when I met him: "There It Is.")

named him after the post I wrote when I met him: "There It Is.") KOK ok Fear, Loathing, and S&M Sluthood in San Francisco Since I was small, I've loved the Van Gogh painting "Starry Night.” I loved the cypresses in particular: winding spiral trees, hallucination trees. They were so unlike other trees I'd seen that I thought Van Gogh made them up, and so when I first saw cypresses years later, I was stunned: the hallucination trees had been imported into my world. I'd like to think that my world turned a little bit sideways forever, when I first saw cypresses, but I'm probably being melodramatic. (I'm good at that.) San Francisco has cypresses, and a lot of other hallucinations, too. The city is full of angles, vantages, transitions, unceasing changing views: it feels, at times, like an unsolvable puzzle. A forested path leads darkly under a bridge, suddenly opens upon a manicured lawn with a white lace conservatory. A cement staircase rises through a narrow outlet, resolving itself step by step into a slice of brightly painted Victorian facade. I walked once with a friend alongside an ocean road, pacing through thick fog, and arrived at a dirt path that I insisted on following; thirty seconds later we stumbled upon extraordinary ruins. San Francisco. Halcyon city, heartbreak city. Cypress city. The place I come to recover from being torn apart and, it seems, sometimes the place where I get torn apart again. This is okay with me, because nothing is more fun than overanalyzing strong emotions. I am not even kidding. te OK ok I returned from Africa recently; paused briefly in my adopted city of Chicago to collect my thoughts; and then went to the Burning Man Arts Festival, thence to San Francisco. This is my version of emotional decompression, and it worked! I feel much more centered now. But part of decompressing, for me, was specifically going out to a lot of dates and BDSM parties and pushing my own boundaries, which carries its own potential decompressable risks. At the time of this story, it had been a couple of months in San Francisco, and I was leaving soon. I'd had an assortment of adventures, but there were two guys in particular who I was excited about. Not necessarily in a long-term way -- I'm not in this for the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids (or at least, not yet) -- but definitely in a wow-I-have- to-control-myself-or-I'll-come-off-as-kind-of-puppyish way. New Relationship Energy: it is such a mind trick, such a delicious head-trip. You are the perfect drug. I had to control myself less when I first hooked up with The Artist: possibly the most postmodern individual I've ever met, possibly the most creative, who I've loosely been friends with for six whole years, and who has never ceased to fascinate me. It is hard for me to meet people who keep me thinking, but The Artist never disappoints. If anything, our problem was shifting a cerebral connection into a sexual one: the first time we made out, I absolutely had to interrupt the proceedings because I'd forgotten to tell him about this great sociology paper. It was okay to show how much I liked him because we'd HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018526