Touch Yourself

The meowmeow stretches his curvy leg to his mouth. He hooks his sharp little teeth onto his sharp little claws. Everything about this cat is curves. His legs the suggestion of cheetah. He's all hooked into himself, curve locked into curve. He yanks. He tumbles backwards as he pulls with some force. It sounds enough like toenails being clipped, that shell like clip of a noise, but it hardly resembles that $1 clipping tool we all know how to use so well. RP says that the cat does it because he can't stand his too long nails. They stick to everything. He scratches them on any material resembling a rug. He is gripping, slicing, yanking, scratching. But when he tilts back, when he has a mouth full of claw and paw, it's great. It's like watching the seven year old gymnast perform, as instructed by family and friends, to bend backwards, to put her feet on her head, to turn into a crab pretzel. Contortionist contort! Warp yourself for those who cannot! I love when the cat yanks on his nails. I love the way he falls over from doing it so hard. I like the ease with which he understands that this is one way to do what I want for myself. The domesticated meow defying his dependency with some self reliance. I should still probably help out with his sharply curved claws, but sometimes it's just too precious to behold his own little solutions.

A good friend of mine and his girlfriend used to chew on their toenails. Mostly for the sheer thrill I'd imagine. They both grew up in ruralish America so of course we all pinned this on them as an explanation. Gross, uncivilized, folky sorts. What bodily freedom we all mocked. Sure it's hickish on the surface, but that's so located in how I relate to America. Teeth can do so much, may as well gnaw on your nails on a need to need basis. Maybe we were just envious because there was the potential within our own bodies to do the same thing. They were just demonstrating something bodily we share, they were harnessing it into something to do. Hmmm, I wonder how many times we see things that our bodies have the potential to do that bother us, I mean the things that could harm us our obvious, but what about the physical feats, choices really, that are latent within our current bodily selves, do we see these and unknowingly feel weird about them, distance ourselves from them. I think it has something to do with decorum, what we are expected to do with our bodies. Especially in the public/private sense. Picking your nose, ear, vigorously scratching your head etc. Sometimes I feel like I am choosing to do things with my physical self in front of people so I can trigger a reciprocal physical response. Let's discover new places and uses for our bodies. Let's be cats hooking our selves onto our selves and yanking! That is not just masturbation!! I recently had such a wonderful bodily rediscover, it's only happened to me a few times, but it's a great feeling. There's a little dent directly below my tailbone (for n00bs and for me it's aka directly above my butthole) that is just so precious. If you poured a thimbleful of water on it you would probably overflow that dent like crazy. It's still my own little watering hole. I associate it with water because I discovered it in the shower. Everyone knows the shower is the expected place to play body relearn, to find new things, to also be wary, on the lookout for lumps anywhere. It was intensely invigorating to remember this little dent, I was vaguely aware of it I think, and to trace over it, to feel a sensation of me that's been dormant, waiting to be acknowledged. Perhaps a crude example, but we're talking about what bodies are capable of, and touching yourself in new ways that lend themselves to levels of understanding your own capacity for sensation seems terribly crucial. I want people to say, I need to touch myself, there's something I need to know, and not be expected to orgasm or to be a social pariah who reveals too much. Dunno. Keep on chewing on them nails kitty.

I'd like to end on a future reminder about some writing I'd like to do on faith. I am just going to do a brief list of the kinds of faith I'd like to distinguish: material faith, symbolic faith, symbolic order faith, religious/supernatural faith both of which are loosely tied to my understanding of obligations, servitude-diminishing yourself, definition, fervor. The way I listed them is a sort of chain, the first two are sort of subsumed under the third. The final one and its associations is a reaction to the symbolic order faith. The one I want to write about the most, the one I am most interested in expressing is material faith. I don't know what the consequences of trying to depict or capture faith are. I just know it's something I should mull over and something I should be writing about.