I'll Show You Mine

I am excited to use this space to share my latest writing project:

I'll Show You Mine
People Talk Candidly About Love, Sex, and Intimacy
Since mid-January 2010, I have been conducting interviews with everyday people as they share their stories and talk candidly about their love lives, past and current relationships, sexual experiences, and views on intimacy.

INTRODUCTION
We enjoy peeking into other people’s lives. My upcoming book captures candid interviews with people about dating, relationships, sex, and love. We are intrigued by these topics, because they tend to be the most interesting, entertaining, and revealing.

The imperative and immutable desire for intimacy universally unites us all. What is the current state of intimacy? How do people define intimacy and what does it mean to them? By examining our love lives and sharing experiences, we can learn a lot about ourselves during those intimate moments when we are at our most vulnerable.

There is value in understanding each other’s perspectives that can assist us with shaping our own viewpoints and might help us erase any stereotypes or misconceptions we might have about each other and how we choose to live. It can also help us grow.

The tradition of oral history lends itself to this project. What Studs Terkel did for “work” in Working, this book intends to accomplish with “intimacy.”

CONTACT ME
If you are someone who thinks you might like to participate in this project, please email me. OR, if you think of anyone else that might be interested (or interesting), please encourage them to email me.

My email address is greg.gerding@gmail.com.

Exclaiming Points

Does the exclamation point mean the same thing now that it did one hundred and fifty years ago? It seems to be the most abused punctuation mark in this, the earliest part of the twenty-first century.

The exclamation point of bygone times seemed hefty and full of weight. The exclamation point of today seems bulimic and sounds of whining.

How was the exclamation point first born? In what year? In what reference? How was it introduced and first used? Did the creator of the exclamation point die instantly afterward, struck dead by the sheer violence of its birth, flayed to bits by its sharp and severe edges?

And what angry bitch bore the use of ALL CAPS? What freak of nature, what abomination? Which two beings copulated to create such a monstrosity? Did the Caps Lock key conspire with the exclamation point?

Please, won’t everyone please just stop yelling? I’ve been rendered deaf and blind by your shit rhetoric and your shit attitude. LIGHTEN UP! RELAX!!!

Another New Year

I want to apologize to the wind and the rain and the small child that resides inside me. I seek a calm that will not come. I suffer from a restless mind and a damaged heart.

The other day, I envied the glassy, placid river. So smooth, like I could have walked right off the end of the dock across the top of it and been supported.

I have finally been released from prison and I’m already anxious to enter the next one. And I can’t tell if that sentiment pertains to work, or to love.

Is there joy in despair? Is there profit in despondency?

They say, “You should find work that you love.” But the work that I love I suffer at great costs.

The muse, my warden, my executioner, I might notice the axe in her hands, if I wasn’t so distracted by her bare breasts. To think that I could make such a beautiful creature mine. Ha!

I continue committing more crimes, knowing that my only true home is a jail cell. And the only true moments are those that don’t involve paying or watching or sitting, but rather are filled engaging in anything anywhere else.

How many ways do you have to try killing yourself before you simply transform?

I don’t have to remain a prisoner, I do have that choice. No prison guards accompany me, I willfully move myself between routines; my cell, my three meals, my time outside in the yard. I could cut myself free at any time. Why is it that I stay? To whom or what am I bound? Or beholden?

And where went ignorance? Man, I miss ignorance. And naiveties. I miss naiveties too. There used to be so much innocence. So much innocence. And then the world interfered. It got in the way.

The only common denominator through everything, through innocence and our cold, hard lives is a capacity for hurt. We can be hurt and we can cause hurt at every level of our lives, and across every generation. Hurt does not discriminate. Hurt extends to all, and across all borders.

Is hurt a capacity? Or a capability? Or is that the variable? That it could be either one? Or both?

Alphabet People - Letter L

“L” represents the ongoing love affair I have with the written word. L is the perfect letter. L truly is the embodiment of life’s dichotomy. During the day, in block print, L is stiff and unyielding in its angularity. But at night, in cursive script, L can be loose and loopy and sometimes languid. The letter L has birthed some of the greatest words in our language like “love” and “lust” and “life” and “lips” and “licking lollipops.” It has given us ladies and labials, lamebrains and lushes, laughter and lardasses. It’s given us lewdness, lexicons, and lesbians. And, some might say most importantly, it’s given us liberty, libations, and libidos. But, it has also brought us liars and lightning. And without L, we wouldn’t have limbs, linguistics, literature, lineage, or light. And we wouldn’t have lingerie! My god, can you imagine? Who would want to live in a world without lingerie? I’d give up limbs just to save lingerie. I could even do without litigation, locusts, and lobotomies, but lingerie? Never! Without lingerie, women would be stuck with just boring old underwear. And that would be lame for all of us. If we didn’t have the letter L, we could never lounge or lie down or get loaded and there’d be no lovemaking or lubricants. And, if that were the case, we would be feeling terribly lovelorn, low, and limp, but we wouldn’t even have those words to express what it was that we were experiencing. I mean, really, can you imagine a world without lunch? Or lyrics? Or librarians? Or LSD? And there’d be no land. We’d be constantly swimming! That would suck. I would get tired.

Alphabet People - Letter K

“K” is my girlfriend. K is my girlfriend now. We met in San Diego six years ago. And by “met” I mean I only remember meeting her for the first time six years ago. Actually, we had apparently met several times through a mutual friend over the course of years before that and she said I was dismissive each time. She said I acted like, “Who the hell is this blonde hanging out with me and my drinking buddies? She doesn’t belong here.” I guess I was quite the snobby drunk then. I don’t recall meeting her any of those times and one of them includes spending a whole day together at a Padres game. She said I was pretty preoccupied with the girl I was dating at the time. When we finally did “meet for the first time” six years ago, I had been sober a year and was hanging out with my friends. It turns out that our mutual friend had been trying to fix us up all those previous times and she had given up on me ever getting with K. Instead, she was now trying to hook K up with some other single guy she knew. I took notice then. I saw this idiot embarrassing himself trying to impress K and I could see that K was not impressed. And I remember thinking, “Who is that? She is super cute. I need to introduce myself to her.” So I cockblocked the idiot and introduced myself for what I thought was the first time. “Hi, I’m Greg.” “I know, we’ve met several times.” “We have?” We’ve been together ever since. A year ago, we moved to Portland and are now trying to have kids. People are always asking me, “Shouldn’t you marry her first?” I can never seem to get the order of things straight. But fortunately K finds humor in everything. Including me and the story of our “first” meeting.