Excerpt from 'Sperm Wars' by Robin Baker

It is late on a Saturday night and a man and woman in their late twenties are getting ready for bed. As they drift around their rooms, attending to the minutiae of life, they are naked. For them, this is usual and of no sexual importance. They are no longer excited by simply being naked in each other's presence. In fact, they now scarcely notice each other's bodies. As it is Saturday night, they know they will have sex before they go to sleep. Yet, as they vacantly pursue their separate routines, there is no hint of foreplay, even when on occasion their paths cause their bodies to brush past each other.
It is a week since they had sex — last Saturday, in fact. Four years ago, when they first met, they had sex at least once a day (except during her menstrual periods, when neither of them was particularly keen). In those early days they would have ridiculed the possibility of intercourse only once in a whole Week. Now, once a week had become more and more common, even though their usual routine was still to have sex twice a week. Until, that is, two months ago when they had given up using contraception.
Not that they were in any rush to have children. They hadn't yet contemplated the earnest nightly conception campaigns that some of their thirty-something friends had delighted in describing to them. Rather, they preferred to leave it to fate (and so far fate had decreed 'no conception'). They had both found mild sexual excitement in the possibility of conception and for a while their rate had returned to three or four times a week. This week, however, had been different. A couple of separate nights out and, if they were honest, an unexplained coolness between them had conspired against their ever quite getting round to sex. The usual warmth of their relationship had not fully returned until this Saturday morning as they drove on a pre-arranged visit to her sister. Even now, as they eventually got into bed, they could both still feel the legacy of the week's coolness. It was with some tentativeness that the man made his first faltering contacts with his partner's bare body. Once started, however, they quickly slipped into their usual routine.
He begins by gently kissing her face and stroking her breasts. Then they kiss deeply. He strokes her legs to her knees. After a while, he moves down and sucks her nipples. All this time, she cursorily strokes his back and buttocks. Tonight, as is often the case, she cannot concentrate and her mind keeps slipping back to conversations with her sister earlier in the day. She is jolted back to the present when he places his hand between her legs, moves her longest pubic hairs, opens her lips and inserts a finger to check if she is wet. He thinks she is ready. She knows she is not and winces at the prospect of unlubricated penetration. She moves her hand, finds his penis and gently squeezes, in part to see how ready he is but primarily to delay his moving into position. Briefly, her ploy works. He pauses to savour the sensation and responds with half-hearted massage of her genitals. Even though his massage misses her clitoris by a centimetre, he detects (or imagines) an increase in wetness on his finger inside her vagina. He moves his hand and begins to shift his body into the missionary position. She keeps her hand on his penis, and when the moment comes helps to guide its swollen tip into position. She leaves her hand between them for a few seconds to stop him pushing too hard, too soon (she is still nowhere near moist enough). Then, she has no alternative But to abandon the act to him. It takes a while before his gentle working backwards and forwards makes her lubricants really start to flow and his penis is able to enter fully.
Until she was lubricated, the woman had focused her mind on his and her genitals and the mechanics of penetration. But once she is lubricated and he begins the routine of thrusting, her mind drifts back to her sister. Her attention returns to the present only when he makes an uncomfortable movement. Despite her abstractedness, years of practice allow her to time the quiet noises in her throat to the man's thrusts. Then, suddenly, her mind jumps back to Wednesday night and the man who had flirted with her when she was out with a group of her female friends. Now, in her mind, it is him on top of her. Her heart speeds up, her breathing quickens, and her noises get louder. But just as her fantasy begins to take shape and she feels she might even come, her partner makes a particularly awkward thrust. Her fantasy disappears. The moment has gone, and the next second she realises he is ejaculating. She makes a sound for each of his contractions, then relaxes with him as his penis shrinks inside her. Impatient for him to remove his now dead weight, she coughs, gently. His limp appendage is ejected, he moves off her and they slip into their usual post-coital embrace. Both feel guilty at not having made more effort for their partner's sake and both feel depressed. Briefly, they exchange untruths over how pleasurable everything had been before eventually drifting into post-coital sleep.

So what of 2011 and the coming days?

Well apart from us being 4 months into it already, I just have a feeling we are on the edge of an era of big things

You could say this is inspired by the 2012 phenomena, and before you start, no I dont buy into the doom story, it's just another year as far as I can tell, but, maybe it is an opportunity for people with a consciousness, to raise it a bit.

What does that mean?

Basically, tune out of the shit stuff and into the good

If life is just a perception

then let's choose what we perceive

.

My meditation work, which has been a 4 year journey so far, bumped up a gear this last year. Right now I am working on Osho's 112 meditations based on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra

wtf? you may ask

and well you may ask it

The first meditation is the one Buddha, and he was quite possibly a real chap, found enlightenment through. Just the one. Called Anapana, focusing on his breathe going in and out the nostrils and he thereby achieved enlightenment, stopped the world, stopped the monkey brain from reacting

I was having a dig around with these funky meditation techniques and then happened upon 48 to 50, and was pleasantly surprised to find them relating to sex and how to go about it

Meditation was, after all, supposedly invented as a way to achieve a state of bliss otherwise only achieved during sex

not the humpy bumpy scratchy shimmy bang bang bang uh uh sex, the other sort, involving being quite still and highly aware of everything until the body starts shaking, and it does, I can attest to this phenomena

Though personally I actually quite like it feral, but that's just me

So meditation is what I am working hard at, whenever I can, which is quite a lot, and it is doing me good, I would never say it is a cure, like I am still punchy as fuck and prone to sleeping with the wrong kinds of women....but then I dont actually see these as problems anyway, but I digress

So what of 2011 and the coming days?

Well my suggestion to us would be this,

Get ourselves a nice place in the sun it doesnt have to be expensive,
Make our lives about lifestyle choices, fuck trying to get rich, we'll never get there
Make it about the moment, bugger later, later we are all dead and that's a fact
Learn tantra and meditation - trust me you need them both in your life
the secret to both is simple, stop trying to do something.
Manifestation is the way forward - dont work your ass off for it, intend it towards you
Do a vision board - 3 days it took me and blew my mind it worked so well

and that's enough from me for today, now I need.... to stop trying to do something

Actually I may knock out a quick jizz-free wank first , and then that

coz that's the kind of guy I am


Here is a piccie of the place I love to be, things seem all ok when I am there....

Gods Bless you all, Goddesses too, here's to a bright fuckin future coz we all deserve it

: )

2010 was the year that...

I got fired

I sold everything I owned, again

I gave up smoking

I meditated every day, most of the day, for 3 months and went wherever the road took me

I completed my circuit of Australia, started on a bicycle in Katherine in 2007 and finished on foot in Cooktown 2010

I sat in front of a tree in Cooktown for 3 days, until I experienced what Buddhists mean by 'the true nature of existence is emptiness'

I returned to Sydney broke but in exactly the right head space

I started a business in I.T.

I had free time and money

I let go of some bad things that had followed me for too long, and defined me for too long

I had to let go of a relationship with a girl I thought could be 'the one'

I started drumming congas, and getting paid for it

I said goodbye to a suicide friend and watched him go into the earth in a black wooden box

I rented two places at once, one in Sydney, one on a cliff-top ocean view setting in Kiama

I finally let go of the dream of being a musician, then within months, I was released on a CD published by a record label in the UK. In 30 years of trying to make it in the music industry, this had never happened before

I made my first vision board

I said goodbye to Bondi

I am back

Wordpress didnt really work out for me. I feel in need of some skull-bloggery again and I may have some time here and there to do a bit, so , dusting good ol blogspot dot off....

And may I suggest following my other blog too, Daily Blog, if only because it has a photo of one of my favourite nipples on it -

http://thesmilingbean.blogspot.com/

Illiteracy in bigger chunks

found a website to publish my scrawls so probably wont be back here so much
havent used wordpress at all either for that matter...no time at the moment

if you come by here and want to read more from me, visit this site and seek out my various publications all for free.....


http://www.wattpad.com/user/mdkberry

:)

Evolve and survive....its another of my mottos

http://foxyfree.wordpress.com

grief and the real Pandora

I went to Confest, never been, the lift seemed to fall into place, the timing, well a relative died two days before and I needed space to grieve.
work wasnt working out.
I needed out of the city. it fell together. it felt right.

I had just finished making a divining tool. started it in 2006 in Wales on a retreat with an African shaman (...yawn) yea I know, we pseudo-hippies just cant stop looking for answers under these god awful banners but, you've got to keep looking everywhere without judgement when you know the hounds are chasing ever on, fueled by those consuming flames, and getting closer each day.

So, I threw the bones...looked and saw....ritual, things needed, to be addressed, for my Nan and my Aunt. Both now dead, but grief is a strange thing. I didnt do it right until I did it right. Let go to the pain, not for a few hours silently alone together in some cold church, but for a few days in the heart of the natural world. I had learnt from Malidome Some, of the Dagara tribe, a process. So I figured I would follow it.....them bones....d'em bones...thrown down and like a compass they seemed to show me the way. How did I know this stuff? I wasnt sure at all, but I did.

I knew I needed water, to heal, I knew my gran had some stuff there needed addressing, I didnt know what, my aunty too, so it seemed. I knew Nature was to be the arena, it was all in there, clear as clear could be. Then me. l'il ol me. I was in there too. my gifts. my magic. a little deeper. I was about to go a little deeper.

that is what d'em bones were saying.

I felt kind of like Bambi that first day trying to walk up the creek barefoot slipping over rocks, until I got to a quiet water-hole that caught my attention. I saw a small cave and knew it was the place to set a shrine to the beings that lived around there, to ask for welcome and acceptance and to ask forgiveness for my intrusion, just simple respect really. Then another spot seemed to flicker in the corner of my eye and made me look. it was by the water and I knew was just right for setting as a shrine to my dead, my relatives, my Nan, my Aunty and in some ways my entire lineage going right back to the beginning. Dont you wonder sometimes what we might find there if you could touch them again, speak to them again, like some Avatar world.

and people go to the movies for it. Why not go into nature, since its there. doh! too obvious maybe. and scary. Easier to buy a ticket and some popcorn then to dribble listlessly, unblinking for three hours, feeling fluffy yet strangely sad when it stops, and like you might be in heaven if you dreamed or wished it hard enough, but instead get in your metal car and drive through concrete streets, to walk into your box-like fabricated house and get into nylon sheets, and cry yourself to sleep because how can it possibly really exist? Yet for a moment the child in you was brave enough to want it more than anything in this life, or the next?


so I do my stuff, set the shrines up. speak out loud, feel stupid, like a city slicker in the wild, just totally out of place, stumbling loudly, crunching sticks and generally making a noisy nuisance of myself in the garden of the gods. but I dont really care for my own stupidity and embarrasment because today I am fuelled by death, my wrath at its theft, the sense of loss, the sense of needing to do something to help this pain , this gnawing in my guts , to make it move along, to know it, to go into it. to deal with it. and fucking well deal with it the right way. so I feel stupid? so what. listen, or kill me. I dont really mind which.

I speak my thoughts out loud, let that place know my intention for being there, for setting up the shrine, for wanting to find healing, not just for me, but for my family, my Nan and my Aunty , the things they never got to do , the things they never got to fix, the things that hurt them, broke them, suffered them, the things they loved, the things they did and didnt dare do, the places and people in this beautiful world that they never got to say goodbye to, or say sorry to, or say thankyou for, or to forgive, or to love, or even maybe to hate.. I am here, right now to address all this, for them. for me. for them. for the living, for the dead. maybe even for you.

then ...once it is said, out there, put out there, said, done...I stop.

look around, sit down

and more importantly...

shut the fuck up.

silence.

silence.

the minutes pass....

my mind calms....the cogs of the machine slowly calm ...a little.
I was considering ways to dig it out with a kitchen knife once, I am glad I didnt. Now, I just sit still until it calms to a lull, a dull thud that seems so loud when you enter the utter silence of nature. then something else starts to grow, a sound. I think at first it is inside, then I realise it is crickets.

it grows.

louder

until it is so loud it almost hurts my ears.
little legs, hundreds of little legs scratching making that amazing sound that actually hits me like soft bullets. I can feel them making out my shape with their sound, assessing me, reading me.
undoing me.
what is this?

I sit in it.

bathed in the sound.

and something else occurs to me.

that sound just shut the machine whir in my head off completely.

I sink into it. happy because despite the fire ant that just chomped into my foot and the mosquitos that are right now drilling my back for blood, and the ...JESUS H CHRIST !... those are leeches I can see wiggling between my toes....yuk....despite all this taxation by nature on my body, those god damn crickets are cleansing me of something far more intrusive, demanding, deadly and quite possibly evil.

I sink into natures' bossom. home again, she devours me. quite literally. it hurts, physically, and it hurts like fuck emotionally, but spiritually I know just where I am at, and with that I enter what some might now call Pandora, and the roller coaster ride of turmoil we have come to call grieving begins.