The Monkey Trap

Hola Everybody,
I have an informal meeting today and several interviews scheduled for the rest of the week. Man, late capitalism ain't no joke.

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Back in the day, it was easy to capture a monkey. All a hunter would have to do is wander into the forest and find a ripe coconut and cut a hole that was approximately the size of a monkey’s fist. He could then drink the refreshing milk and some of the soft flesh (young coconuts are best!). 

After eating, he would secure the now empty coconut with a chain or strong rope to a tree. After placing a banana or some other fruit inside the coconut, the hunter would go home.

Eventually, a monkey would come by the hollow coconut with the fruit inside and try to pull it out. However, the hole was only just large enough for the monkey’s empty fist. When his fist was holding the banana, he couldn’t get it out.

By the time the hunter returned they monkey had been struggling for hours to get his fist out along with the desired prize, the banana. Seeing the hunter approaching, the monkey redoubles his effort to extract the banana. 

Now mind you, all the monkey has to do in order to escape is to let go of the banana. Then he can pull out his hand and run for safety. But does the monkey let go? No way! The reason being that monkeys always think, “This is my banana. I found it. It’s mine!”

And that’s how monkeys get caught all the time.

Interestingly enough, it’s also how humans get trapped.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Strange Sex]

Hola mi gente,

I work at (not for) one of the largest penal colonies in the world, Rikers Island. It is a highly dysfunctional, violent world. I facilitate workshops at one of its most violent facilities. I will be writing more about those experiences very soon.

Today, this blog is about sex. Enjoy the holiday weekend to my readers in the USA.

Desire (or: Strange Sex)

It's so much better to desire than to have… The moment of desire, when you know something is going to happen -- that's the most exalting.

-- Anouk Aimee (1932–) French movie actress

I once dated a staggeringly beautiful woman. She was beautiful beyond anything I could approximate through mere words. Exotic, tall, with an arresting presence, and a curvy figure, she was every man’s dream made manifest. She said she loved my intelligence and confidence and the fact that her beauty didn’t intimidate me (it made me hard). As is true with most women like my friend, her love life was a mess: extremes between being lonely on the one hand and meeting jerks on the other.

I loved the heck out of her except there was one problem: she didn’t enjoy sex!

Contrary to what some people here think, I’m not a sex fiend. However, I do enjoy sex. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t “good in bed” (whatever the hell that means). Technically, she knew what she was doing. The problem was that she didn’t really like sex and was aversive to true intimacy (but that’s most people -- including women). Sex with my friend often felt as if she were performing a duty -- something necessary to keep me around. It was a real turn off. Of course, being with me means you’re going to open at least a little.

We didn’t last too long because it was frustrating for me to be around someone who saw sex as a duty and not an art to be practiced. We remained friends, however, and would keep in touch. One day, she called me. She had gotten engaged and was having the same problem. I suggested she participate in some tantric workshops, open up some of those energy centers.

This is not an uncommon problem. First, we all like what a childhood friend and I used to call “strange sex” -- sex with strangers, or new lovers. Moreover, women desire this also -- don’t give me that crap, you know you want to even if you don’.

::blank stare::

Studies show that one of the most powerful fantasies, for both men and women, is sex with a stranger. But why is it that we seek the novelty? Why does sex often becomes stale, especially in long-term relationships? I think part of the reason is that we don’t work at sex. Too many of us are like my former lover -- sex is something you have to do to keep your man (or woman) from getting it from someone else (strange sex syndrome). It’s also because we often don’t screen our partners for their level of sexual desire -- especially over the long term. You know how it is: in the beginning you can’t seem to get enough of each other. New lovers will often accommodate one another and are happier than bugs in a rug. The problems don’t tend to emerge until much later.

Let me put it this way: if two committed people want to make love only once every six months, that’s perfectly fine -- there is no problem. It only becomes a problem when there’s difference in sexual desire.

Sure, one way to manage the problem is masturbation. Don’t look at me that way, married men and women masturbate -- it’s normal. But I didn’t want to be jerking off all the time having that lovely body next to me. That was too frustrating. I’ll do it once or twice, but I wanted her ready, willing, and able --reasonably speaking.

The other day a married friend of mine and I were having a conversation. He’s always asking me about my personal life. He has a beautiful wife that I always flirt with. It’s cool -- it’s an inside joke. I have nothing but the utmost respect for my friend and his wife. One day, he was reluctant to go home and when I asked him why, he said he had to go home because he and his wife had scheduled a sexual tryst. They have two young boys and I could identify: I remember when I was married and the sex had become more a duty than something to savor. In addition, busy lives means that sex has to be penciled in between soccer matches, birthday parties and PTA meetings. I laughed at him and told him to go home and perform! 

There are many factors involved in low sexual desire, but for me the most important one is lack of creativity. We fall into our ruts -- the lick em, stick em, and cum school of sex. It gets stale ladies and gentlemen. There’s no role-playing, or if there is, there’s no energy behind it. Contrary to what you may have been told, sex isn’t a natural act, it must be practiced. In order for sex to remain viable, it must be an integral part of mutual growth. It must be almost like a religion. A religion in which both partners are transformed, becoming more evolved in the process.

If you can cultivate sexual energy in that way, then the sex never gets old, it’s always crisp, fresh, and new.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Expressions]

¡Hola! Everybody…
It’s Friday, it’s summer, and I ain’t got no job! Dang! I’m good! LOL

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-=[ Expressions ]=-

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
-- Marianne Williamson, from: A Return to Love

Every day, every waking moment, you desire to do many things, from hugging your lover to earning money. Why is this? What is the underlying motivation or feeling behind all your hopes and dreams? This is the dynamic tension between who you really are and who you assume yourself to be. Our desires reveal who we really are.

Let me explain, dearest…

Take your desire for an intimate relationship as an example. There are countless reasons for engaging in a relationship. But the fact is that you only feel completely fulfilled in intimacy when you and your lover trust each other so implicitly that you feel free to let down your guards, open, and love. This is your deepest desire in intimacy because the actual truth is that you are love, but you perceive yourself to be a separate, isolated individual. So you scheme and often manipulate, and dream to experience in your relationship what, in reality, you already are.

Here’s a good one, one I grapple with as well: we want to experience financial security. In truth, however, we are abundance, although we assume only sustained effort will provide a feeling of ease. You engage in high-risk behavior because you perceive it as living on the edge, but the truth is that every moment you are at the edge of death -- the ultimate edge of winning and losing -- but your fabricated security makes you seek risks. You want to eat that box of chocolates because, dearest, deep down inside in your heart of hearts, you are blissful fullness, though you may have closed yourself from its pleasure and seek its aftertaste instead.

And in this way you wander through your daily acts of “living,” seeking to approximate the truth of you are -- the you that you have lost contact with. This drama of approximation is the story of your life. You even admit at times, when the lows get too low. You never quite succeed like you really hope to. You never quite get the love you really want. And so you either get on the treadmill or give up trying. In either case, you are missing the point of existence.

The uninhibited expression of who you really are is the only thing that will set you free from the trauma of feeling incomplete. The truth is, dearest, you are what you want.

The farther you stray from your genuine self, the more you crave the qualities of your genuineness. Since you have blinded yourself from the love that you are, the love that lives inside of you, you look to your lover to cherish you. Exiled from your home of unlimited openness, you seek instead to expand the sphere of your influence, the size of your stock portfolio, the borders of your country. Seeking the freedom of ease that is already your part of your inherent nature, you try to discharge stress through masturbation, watching TV, and all those secret habits of release. You miss the simplicity of being, so you seek it in the warmth of a heroin rush, a fluffy bed, unsafe sex, or a box of chocolates.

Then there are the times you fret over your appearance, seeking outside of yourself to find the radiance already possess. And you think to yourself constantly, almost obsessively, in order to provide a mirror reflection of your own presence. Yet, in truth, you are sheer presence, whether or not you reflect yourself by thinking.

Dearest, whenever you are ready, you can stop trying to find what you’re dismissing and start being who you are in truth. Yes, to surrender in this way, this completely, is utterly terrifying -- all that work you’ve done on your self image instantly vanishes. Yet, this is the only real way to live. Otherwise every moment you live you live missing who you truly are, and in that way you create a self-image that isn’t the real thing. You feel a lack. This tension of a deficiency winds into an intense knot of desire. Eventually, it warps you.

Divorced from and craving the depth that you miss, you may find yourself engaging in risk-behavior, self-abuse, and manipulating and terrorizing others -- or perhaps just sitting in front of the TV and indulging in “comfort food.” No matter how extreme or mundane your misplaced efforts become, you always have the option of opening as your source. In the grips of that obsession with chocolate (or a cock), you can open as the abundance of the life-force that you are. How would you act if you connected with your inherent abundance? Open as you are, the knot unwinds…

Caught in the trap of the Gordian knot of your desires, your most naughty moments of perverse indulgence, as well as the rounds of daily life, you are missing who you truly are. Instead, through constant practice, you can open as every twist and hope. You can live as love, alive and spontaneous. The fact is, dearest, your deepest desires are who you are.

Love,

Eddie

Happiness

¡Hola! Everybody...
I need a new suit...

This is another repost. I reworked it a little, though it would’ve been better if I delved into one aspect of it a little deeper.

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-=[ Pursuit of Happiness ]=-

“Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention.”

-- Greg Anderson (1964–)

I remember listening once while a fellow meditator listed a string of unfortunate situations as a way of explaining her unhappiness. The teacher sat and closed her eyes for what seemed like many moments and I thought he was going to dig up a pearl of wisdom, so I was listening with all my might. Instead of an answer, however, this is what the teacher said, “You will always have this problem.”

That was fucked up, I thought to myself. However, I have since learned that this was a powerful teaching.

There are two very different ways of attaining happiness. One is so deeply conditioned in our society that almost everything in our culture supports it. The other is radically different proposed almost twenty-five centuries ago and is still followed to this day. The question for me today is: which approach is most likely to contribute the most happiness? My money is on the older approach.

First, I should begin by offering a basic definition of happiness. For this, I will turn to modern systems theory (I know, I know, it sounds egg-headed – bear with me). Every organism, whether cellular, social or psychological has some sort of membrane, or boundary that defines its internal and external. In other words, every organism has boundaries that defining its self from its environment.

Still with me? Ok!…

At a very basic level then, happiness can be simply defined as a state of equilibrium between inner and outer states. Unhappiness is created when we experience an uncomfortable tension we call desire -- the yearning for this tension to resolve itself. We want the outer world to be somehow balanced with our inner world.

Which bring me to the two strategies for achieving happiness: One is to change the external environment – the outer world – to meet the needs (or wants) of the organism, the other is to change the internal state -- the inner world – to adapt itself to the environment. In other words, we can strive to change the world in order to satisfy our desires, or we can change our needs by adapting to the world. Both strategies have as their goal the aim of removing the agitation of desires, one by fulfilling them and the other by letting go of them.

For humans as we are structured gratification of desire usually means getting each of the six senses to experiencing its object of desire (whether the object is a thing, person, or place) together with a feeling tone of pleasure. Of course, we all know that such moments cannot be sustained, but that doesn’t seem to be a deterrent. Even knowing we can’t satisfy all the senses all the time, the satisfaction of some of the senses some of the time is still considered a very appropriate thing to do with our time.

Virtually everything in our culture reinforces this idea, and we are continually encouraged to define ourselves by how many of our desires we have been able to slake: a new car, a bigger, better home, a more attractive partner, a newer iPod (my particular weakness. *grin*), etc.

This tendency to change the world in order to calm our desires is actually based on the idea of how things should be, and therefore is dependent on how much wisdom we can bring to bear on any given moment. As someone who actively participates in activists’ causes and social justice, I have a strong problem here. I mean, shouldn’t the desire to change the world for altruistic ideals -- making the world a better place -- be a better desire? In fact, many people get Buddhism wrong. There are good desires, even noble ones. It’s not that some desires are not more worthy than others. I find the problem is in the nature of desire itself.

Because we are so conditioned with the notion that happiness is something to be pursued “out there,” it might sound odd to hear of a tradition that talks of uncovering happiness from within. A long time ago, a great man stated that to live is to know suffering. I think this is true enough, we all know suffering in some form or another. However, he also said that there is a way out of suffering if we seek out its internal causes, understand them, and solve the problem through internal adjustments. According to the Buddha, it’s not the tension between the inner and outer worlds that causes unhappiness; it is the desire for the external to change (or not to change, as the case may be), which is itself an internal state.

The one constant in life is that everything is constantly changing. Even our bodies are constantly changing, replacing dead cells with newer ones. People come and go, electronic gadgets become obsolete, replaced by newer, faster, and thinner models. *grin* Conditions in the world are notoriously unstable and often subject to forces beyond our control, while internal desires are intimate and more accessible. It is simply more efficient to adapt to the world than to alter it. Now please! Don’t take this to mean that we just sit there and do nothing! I’m talking here about changing the basic mindset of getting more, grasping for more, as a major focus in attaining happiness.

Grasping and getting is problematic because the mind, as the creator of desires, will always throw up more than can ever be satisfied by even the most successful series of external changes. The fact is that even if we were extremely successful at making everything outside of ourselves be just the way we want it to be (at the very least, a childish thought, you must admit), we could never get anything fundamentally perfect. Because our desires are always changing, because they are often conflicting, and because the changes in our external world can never keep up with the pace of a wanting, grasping mind, the satisfaction of desire as a strategy for happiness will always be doomed.

What I love most about this teaching, however, is not this particular insight, but the fact that it isn’t a “philosophy.” The Buddha actually left us a method to use in order to attain this relationship with our inner worlds. But that’s another post, for another time.

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog [Desire]

Hola! Everybody…
Geeeez… The economy is surely in a fucked-up state. Financial markets are deeply screwed up, and last Friday we learned that the job market contracted by another 159,000 last month, the ninth month of consecutive job losses.

In other words, if the Bush tax cuts didn't make sense in 2001 and 2003, they make a whole lot less sense now.

Yet McCain doesn't merely want to extend these cuts forever. He wants to put them on steroids -- expand them dramatically, by cutting the corporate tax rate by about a third, at the cost of $735 billion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center (TPC). As Biden effectively emphasized in the Vice Presidential debate (smack down?), that move delivers $4 billion in annual tax cuts to the very same Wall St. Welfare Queens © that recently got their first $700 billion entitlement check.

What’s funny is that I was debating a so-called “fiscal conservative” on here the other day who was defending McCain’s proposal which is the opposite of what any true conservative, fiscal or otherwise, should be cheering. Let’s be real here, people, Neo-Cons are fine with Socialism as long as the right kinds of people are receiving the handouts. They love sharing, but only if the sharing concerns debt, and the taxpayers are the ones sharing it.

SMDH

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-=[ Desire (Or: Strange Poosie) ]=-

“It's so much better to desire than to have… The moment of desire, when you know something is going to happen -- that's the most exalting.”

-- Anouk Aimee (1932–) French movie actress

I once dated a staggeringly beautiful woman. She was beautiful beyond anything I could approximate through mere words. Exotic, tall, with an arresting presence, and a curvy figure, she was every man’s wet drown given flesh. She said she loved my intelligence and confidence and the fact that her beauty didn’t intimidate me (it made me hard). As is true with most women like my friend, her love life was a mess: extremes between being lonely on the one hand and meeting jerks on the other.

There was one problem: she didn’t enjoy sex!

Contrary to what some people here think, I’m not a sex fiend. However, I do enjoy sex.you’re going to open at least a little. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t a “good lay” (whatever the fuck that means). Technically, she knew what she was doing -- sucked a mean dick. The problem was that she didn’t really like sex and liked true intimacy even less (but that’s most people -- including women!) Fucking my friend often felt as if she were performing a duty -- something necessary to keep me around. It was a real turn off -- all that material going to waste. Of course, being with me means

We didn’t last too long because it was frustrating for me to be around someone who saw sex as a duty and not an art to be practiced. The other day she called me. She’s now engaged and she’s having the same problem. I suggested she participate in some tantric workshops, open up some of those energy centers.

This is not an uncommon problem. First, we all like what a childhood friend and I used to call “strange poosie” -- sex with strangers, or new lovers. Moreover, women desire this also -- don’t give me that crap that you can only fuck under certain conditions with only certain lovers.

Bullshit!

Studies show that one of the most powerful fantasies, for both men and women, is sex with a stranger. But why is it that we seek the novelty, why sex often becomes stale, especially in long-term relationships. I think part of the reason is that we don’t work at sex. Too many of us are like my former lover -- sex is something you have to do to keep your man (or woman) from getting it from someone else (strange poosie syndrome). It’s also because we often don’t screen our partners for their level of sexual desire. Especially over the long term. You know how it is: in the beginning the bitch can’t even bend over in front of me and I’m all over that ass! And she’ll often accommodate me and we’re happier than bugs in a rug. The problems don’t tend to emerge until much later.

Let me put it this way: if two married people want to make love only once every six months, that’s perfectly fine -- there is no problem. It’s only a problem when there’s difference in sexual desire that it becomes a problem.

Sure, one way to manage the problem is masturbation. Don’t look at me that way married men and women masturbation -- it’s normal. But I didn’t want to be jerking off all the time having that lovely body next to me. That was too frustrating. I’ll do it once or twice, but I want that poosie (or ass) ready, willing, and able --reasonably speaking.

The other day a married friend of mine and I were having a conversation. He’s always asking me about my personal life. He has a beautiful wife that I always flirt with. One day, he was reluctant to go home and when I asked him why, he said he had to go home because he and his wife had scheduled a sexual tryst. They have two young boys and I could identify: I remember when I was married and the sex had become more a duty than something to savor. I laughed at him and told him to go home and perform! LOL!

There are many factors involved in low sexual desire, but for me the most important one is lack of creativity. We fall into our ruts -- the lick em, stick em, and cum school of sex. It gets stale ladies and gentlemen. There’s no role-playing, or if there is, there’s no energy behind it. Sex isn’t a natural act, it must be practiced. In order for sex to remain viable, it must be an integral part of mutual growth. It must be almost like a religion. A religion in which both partners are transformed, becoming more evolved in the process.

If you can cultivate sexual energy in that way, then the sex never gets old, it’s always crisp, fresh, and new.

Hay Cariño?

Eddie

The Friday Sex Blog [Bootie Calls]

Hola Everybody...
Yaaaay! It’ Friday and I feel sick. I need some compassionate woman to come lay next to me, service me sexually, take turns sleeping on the wet spot, read with me, and watch Film Noir movies all weekend. All applications will be considered.

Hey! I wanna “superman” somebody! I’ve never done that before!

I have some pics donated by two lovely ladies, but I haven’t had the time to “fix” them so I could post them. One requested anonymity, so you all will have to wait! There’s an interesting back-story to today’s blog photo: it was taken by yours truly and then one day, unexpectedly, it was sent to me via snail mail. As in, remember this, you scheming ma’fucca? LOL

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-=[ Bootie Call! ]=-

It was two o’clock in the morning and she was saying no. and I knew it was that kind of no: final, punto y final! As in, “No Eddie, you can’t come here it’s too late, you should’ve came when you said you were coming to hours ago. But noooo, you wanted to get fucked up and hang out with your friends. Well, fuck one of them now, because you ain’t fuckin’ me tonight!”

Okay, sure: I was drunk and blasted out of my head with a list of drugs as long as your arm, but even in my condition I saw a hint of possibility in that response. She was angry and that meant she still cared and furthermore (and more importantly) the possibility of angry, raw sex just increased ten-fold. I felt my cock stir at the potential in the moment. If only I could say the right words, all I needed was a foot in the door. Just then a car passes by and popular song of the time No me Digas Ques es Muy Tarde (“Don’t Tell Me It’s Too Late”) is blasting away… I see my opportunity and go for the jugular. “You hear that chulita? You hear that song?!!... ” LOL!

I was notorious for drunken bootie calls. Sometimes I would manage to make a complete idiot of myself and I would kick myself in the morning, embarrassed at what I had said. Sometimes, as in the example above, I would get lucky. I felt bad when I finally made to her apartment. She was pissed, threw a book at me and when I saw the cold dinner and candles that had fizzled long ago, I felt like an asshole. And I really wasn’t an asshole. I was just sexually motivated and in my 20s. I was fuckin’ (yes fuckin’) everything in sight.

Back then there was only one way to make a booty call and that was via a landline. There was no personal computer, no cellphones if you could believe that. But there’s nothing like an old-fashioned lusty, middle-of-the-night “I wanna fuck you, baby!” phone call! LOL!

I was thinking about this other day while talking to the author of the following email:

Now, there are several things funny about the above email. For one notice my response. You would think Mr. Eloquent, Eddie the Poet/ philosopher-king would have written something more than just his telephone number! LMAOOO! Quick and to the point: “Eddie, I’m lusting for you…” response? Telephone number, no poetry, no articulate moist-inducing, panty-wetting words, just my number! LOL! (yes, the number is blurred on purpose!).

That email was followed buy a “modified” ::grin:: bootie call and luckily for the lady (or me), she lives in another state (no, I’m not disclosing who she is – that’s up to her, this ain’t Mo-skip’s blog). Otherwise, I would’ve tried my best to make her ovaries sore! LMAO! Sweetie, I promise you, I want you just as bad and in many ways. I guess the good thing about a bootie call is that it has some element of truth to it, right? Stuff you wouldn’t say otherwise, just slips out of your mouth.

Today, advances in technology have added many options I never had when I drugged and drank. For example, you can send a drunken text message complete with a sexy (or pornographic) jpeg attachment! And guys? Please stop sending pics of your cock. That shit, according to the many women I have spoken to, is old. Unless a woman has specifically states she wants to see your, ummm, shortcomings, believe me, it’s not a wise move.

So yeah, we have emails, text messaging, cellphones, voicemails – oh man! Voicemails! One particularly beautiful young lady on 360 left me a drunken VM at 2 AM (“Wake yo muthafuckin ass up…”). You could hear the bar noise in the background. Too funny! I was trying to see if I could transfer it to my computer for today’s blog, but I wasn’t able to. Hunny, you can call me anytime when you’re horny! LOL!

I just want to say that the email totally flattered me and I was happy to hear the person felt that way (even if she was tipsy when she wrote it. LOL

Erotic communication has changed over the years, offering us many more ways in which to embarrass ourselves ::grin::

Have you ever sent a bootie call? Ever received one? LOL!

Love,

Eddie

PS: Sex is good for you!