i love pain – not necessarily the surface-infliction of it, but the bowel-deep pain that stirs emotions and kind of throws them all together as they start moving their way out. catharsis ache. i used to resort only to orgasm for this until i discovered that this kind of  pain makes orgasms even better. it takes a little longer, but longer and deeper is the point (girth is nice too — if i’m going there, i am definitely a size queen).

other expressions like this: on an evening last week when i was writing,  shit was getting serious and i was there in that zone when a large and strange spider crawled across my lap. i lost myself and everything went flying with a shriek. there was a moment of limbo, my 1940s art deco coffee table with its original glass panes and a chromebook and time stopped but then nothing connected. the little laptop landed in a papa-san chair full of pillows and the spider jumped or fell to the floor and wandered off to a less chaotic part of the living room and then i collected myself and sat back down, lighter.

another once had its place here in this paragraph but i lost it while writing the last.

ah yes, it was that time my car went spinning on the highway. a friend and i, on a day trip from Portland to the Oregon coast, were coming home when i hit a patch of black ice with near-bald tires. the car spun in circles in slow motion and Ben and i looked at each other calmly as if we might be about to die. the car came to a standstill with its ass stuck in a snowdrift and before i could even call AAA, a Mexican guy pulled over in a very large pickup truck and winched us out and we had faced death with the utmost in resolve and acceptance and ten minutes later we were continuing on back to portland and it was like it never happened and it also changed everything.

i breathe more deeply after having suffered a little. the process of catharsis is a birthing process. the end result, that great release, is where our focus lies. it makes it easy to forget how much it can hurt along the way but somewhere in the trying of that, i figured out how embrace the pain. i learned to love it. it became ecstasy.