The Unified Theory of Foreplay

 I was walking on my treadmill and listening to iTunes shuffling on my computer while thinking about my Monday. I have a class to teach as soon as I log in to work this morning. I started getting a little frustrated with the gods of the shuffle playing slow jams when I realized that the music wasn't a bad thing for the pace I was setting. My sedate pace of two miles-per-hour would make a physically fit person frustrated, but I am not fit and was breathing a little hard after fifteen minutes of slow and steady walking. That was as it should be. Why, then, did I feel like I was missing something important?

As I started closing out my hour of exercise for the morning I was working through my schedule mentally. I was prepared for it all in my head. Then I visualized my to-do list that hangs below my daily calendar. Oh shit, I have a blog post due today. 

Next came several minutes of beating myself up for posting a status update over the weekend when nothing was due. Damn it, David, you wasted an easy post. You can prattle on endlessly about this little project of yours. Now, you have absolutely nothing on your mind that you want to post publicly and you need to put together something presentable before the end of the day. 

Deadlines take the fun out of lots of activities. I will stay in grease up to my elbows happily turning wrenches and ratchets working on a vehicle to fix something up or to help someone else out. Change the situation to me having to complete a repair in order to have a vehicle to get me somewhere on a deadline and that zen mechanics mindset turns into snarling curses and agitation. 

The same thing happens when I need to write on a deadline. Suddenly the entirely sedate and pleasant act of sharing my thoughts and feelings on the internet turns into panicking to get something worthwhile to write about. To be fair, I do not panic easily. The David reaction is a little bit more sedate. I grump to myself a little bit and then turn to figure out how I am going to make things work. My Mother was very fond of saying that I did not know the meaning of the word hurry. That used to irk me something fierce. Now, I have embraced that part of myself. I have two basic speeds for completing tasks. I am either on or off. 

By that I mean that I design my work so that I do not do things in a hurried fashion. I prep everything early as I can. I try and pay attention to things that do have a deadline so I am well ahead of them. When, like this morning, I realize I have forgotten something and have to do it at the last minute I try and resign myself to it and find a way to get the work done without letting regret or panic get involved. I do things like filibuster the first eight or ten paragraphs of this post talking about deadlines and panic rather than get down to business talking about what is actually on my mind while giving my brain a chance to kick into gear and actually present something worth posting about. 

Cute trick, huh? It killed fifteen minutes of my required writing time. I cannot phone this whole thing in though. I want all my blog posts to be about something. Sadly, the only thing I have been chewing over in my mind is a rather saucy and slightly naughty topic which I normally try to avoid mostly because I do not think anyone really wants to hear that from me. Ah well, when my brain will not let something go and the gods of the shuffle have played Bump N' Grind at 8:11 am you just let go and hope for the best. 

First, I have to change the song and uncheck it. How do I still have R Kelly in my library. Gross. Oh, yeah. It is just Down Low and the aforementioned track. They are kind of funny from an ironic point of view. Still. Uncheck those. Maybe delete them later?

Where to start? The nipples story is probably not right, but we will get to that in a moment, super promise. When in doubt start at the start of the story. 

I have always been girl crazy as far back as I remember. I strongly recall pretending to be He-man rescuing Teela from Skeletor. I did not understand at that age that Prince Adam was probably more into Beastman than Teela. I even remember vaguely having an argument with one of my female cousins around my age that He-man would rather rescue Teela than She-ra. She-ra was a sister or a cousin and even in my somewhere between four and six year old mind I knew you did not want to smooch on a family member. I did not have a clear concept of what you would do to celebrate saving the damsel in distress, but I was very interested in finding out. I also always wondered why He-man didn't go after the Sorceress. She was a babe even with the bird headgear. 

My cartoon crushes were ever present. Scarlet from GI Joe was hot. April O'Neil was a total babe. I never could figure out if the blonde or the Asian girl in Captain Planet were worth my attention, but I did not that both of them were too good for Wheeler. He was a ginger dork. That carried over into puberty when my friends and I would argue between Storm, Jean Grey, and Rogue. While none of them were a bad choice, I always had a thing for Storm particularly when she had the mohawk. It was the 90s and I was coming to really appreciate women with punk rock sensibilities. Who knew that I just shared the taste of the (likely) middle aged artists who drew them? I wouldn't figure that one out for a while. 

Being girl crazy comes with some interesting ideas in a young mind. I did not know who I wanted to be at that age, but I knew I wanted to be someone that a girl would like. Having no clue what that was I leaned on the mediums I was familiar with. Pepe LePew and I seemed to share a common interest though I was hoping to be smart enough to know when the girl skunk wasn't really a skunk but in fact a black cat with a white paint streak down her back. 

It wouldn't cross my mind for a couple of decades that Pepe LePew was sexually harassing that poor cat. It was a horrific revelation. Is cartoon guilt a thing?

In those formative years between the time my base personality set into place around age six and the time I hit puberty I was immersed in a culture of heroes getting the girl. It was in advertising. It was implied as a reward for being a great athlete in every movie and after school special. It was the theme of quite a bit of the stories I read. There were certainly exceptions like Great Expectations and Romeo & Juliet, but in my youthful arrogance I could see where Pip and Romeo had caused their own failure. The one that left me completely confused was Guinevere cuckolding Arthur with Lancelot. I have always been fairly obsessed with knights in shining armor, but the rules of heroism and chivalry defied Guinevere's choices, actions, and behaviors. 

Little did I know my struggle with this story would foreshadow changes in the rest of the world for years go come. Arthur wasn't that great a guy. Neither was Lancelot. Then again Guinevere might be one of the first literary women to have exerted a choice counter to the image of damsel in distress or that of being an object of desire.  I mean was Estella really a character or was she just a plot device wielded against Pip by the perhaps justifiably bitter Mrs. Haversham?

Gosh. I got in deep here and the inspiration for this post really is a story about nipples or rather nipple play. Have faith. We will get there.

I was starting to have some doubts about the way things worked in the storybooks reflecting the function of reality. Still, I wanted to win "the girl" whoever she was. That seemed to require a few things. I needed to be strong, smart, and brave. Handsome probably would help and if I grew up to be tall and dark (whatever that meant) there were probably bonus points. 

To be fair I interpreted dark as deep and brooding. It led me to wear a lot of black and take a pretty philosophically grim view of the world in my teen years. Again, like the rest of this totally silly and unnecessary, but the whole point of this post is to talk about how completely clueless and full of shit I have always been. 

Eventually I pulled away from stories and started to do the only thing that creates progress in our great human experiment : trial and error. I tried on different personas and measured how people reacted to them. I tried different behaviors and actions almost all of them with the stated purpose of attracting attention. If this sounds tragic, sad, and fake as hell trust me it was. That happens when you are trying to win a contest that doesn't actually exist. 

More sadly, some of it worked. I got a few girlfriends along the way. I kissed them, held their hands, and as I got older the more mature stuff started to happen. I have to admit this changed my focus considerably. I wanted to get really good and very practiced at the one series of related actions that we all get a desire for when those hormones go wild. 

Again, trying not to get super graphic here. I will try to demonstrate my thought process using kissing. Swapping spit may not be the cleanest or best topic of conversation. It is above and beyond better than the details in my head which do not need sharing. 

I don't know that I remember my first real kiss. I do remember a few of the first people I kissed more than once. Mostly, they were spontaneous and I was left too pleased with it happening to actually think about things like technique. When the surprise of it all passed I did start thinking about how I could impress the person I was kissing. I developed a style. 

For sake of argument let's say that the factors for a kiss are body position, lips, tongue (if it is that type of kiss), and hand position. This is fairly elementary based on all the things that actually happen when two people kiss. Still, it is plenty for the purposes of this post. 

My starting routine might be simple. Begin closed mouth kissing. use left hand on their hip to pull our bodies together. use right hand at her jawline with my fingers brushed into the hair at the nape of her neck, increase intensity, and escalate based on responses. Experiment. Adjust. Repeat. 

This process works pretty well if you have open communication in your relationship. You can get honest feedback about your technique and changes things like saliva output (if such a thing is within you control) in order to better please. The problem is that so few relationships have this type of conversation more so when you are a teenager or twenty something where your smooching partner is more likely to gossip with their friends than actually say something to you if you could improve your skills in a given area. 

I really wanted to be the very best with all of those skills. I asked for feedback. I got some. I don't know how honest any of it was, but I experimented and adjusted. I used some of my skills just for the sake of trying them out on someone new to get their reaction. This experiment carried on for many years. I tried to create a grand unified theory of moves not understanding that I was attempting the impossible. There were charts. There were graphs. There was tons and tons of reading, watching informative videos, and gathering information in conversation. 

Then it happened. In one comment my delusions were shattered. 

I was gathered with some friends laughing and joking and talking about anything that came to mind. Since most of us were young and hormone driven people the topic turned to sex. Being the whore I was at that age I had slept with about half of the people present. They knew it which made the conversation a bit more intense. One of the girls in the group turned to talking about foreplay. We somehow moved to nipple sensitivity and she called out," He (her boyfriend) thinks they are radio knobs or something. He just keeps twisting and it hurts!" 

This was followed up by much laughter and teasing. It created an absurd picture in my mind of the guy working both nipples as if they were the radio in my old Chevelle like he couldn't get the volume or the station right. I have an extremely visual imagination and with the advantage of having seen the speaker topless a time or two I was almost in tears from the mental image alone. Granted the scene in my head ended with her armpit announcing," This is Paul Harvey, good day!"

A more practical side of me took note. The entry in my brain was something to the effect of," Do not twist nipples like radio dials." That thought stuck there. It made sense to me. I wouldn't want my nipples twisted that way. Ouch. Recalling the conversation and the mental image still makes me laugh to this day.

Imagine how mind blown I was later when I had this exact thing requested of me. Naturally, I was hesitant to oblige. I had rules in my head that informed me against the action. All my little rules had served me pretty well and I was not ready to consider the reality: Everyone was different and trying to make a set of rules that works for everyone is impossible. In fact, the same person who blew my mind with the concept that nipple twisting as if I am trying to get from 89.1 to 107.7 in a damned hurry changed my perspective on a few of my own beliefs which were good for me. 

The truth is everyone is very different... and not just where their nipples are concerned. I wanted to make myself some universally appealing person and that just is not possible. Forget for a moment that the attempt is unhealthy. I just did not understand that there were going to be things about myself that I had no control over that other people were not going to like. Even if I had pulled off tall, dark, and handsome it would never work for everyone. It shouldn't. Variety is what makes the world go round. 

I wish I had invested the time, thought, and energy trying to unlock the secret handshake combo to please my partner on getting to know myself. Spoiler alert for those of you who have not figured this out yet, but no matter what you do to make other people feel good if you do not like yourself then you are going to be unhappy. Happiness comes from inside and is enhanced by the company of other happy people. If any combination of the people involved are unhappy or do not like themselves misery will spread like the flu. That is true no matter how good a kisser you are because eventually that just isn't enough. 

It has been many years since that discovery. I have spent quite a bit of time figuring out what works best for me and how to be happy in my own skin. I don't rightly know what got me thinking about the nipple radio knob conversation a few days back. Brains are funny. With all these chemicals flowing through mine from the satisfaction of completing tasks to the high you get from good exercise there is no telling what will flat to the surface of my grey matter. 

What I do know is that it is Monday. My blog post was due. I feel like I told a good story. It even had a lesson. Hopefully the 6 to 13 people who may read it will give me a little feedback so I can work on my technique, but I am probably always going to be a moist kisser and a rambling emotional writer.