30 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments

Polygamy? Extraterrestrial Invasion? What?

The first trial associated with last spring’s raids on the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas began this week. Raymond Jessop is charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl, whom he allegedly considered his wife.

Is it just me, or does this guy look a bit odd? Like something that rolled off a General Dynamics assembly line? Like some new breed of bionic mercenary, maybe?

Okay, I’ll shut up. I’m not writing today.

[end]

26 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments

Girl for a Day

Imagine for a moment that I’m addressing a team of psychiatrists from inside a woman’s body.

The following is a running dialog of what it feels like:

This is really fucking weird.

I’ve been in this woman’s body for less than a minute and already my nerves feel unusually raw and exposed, even for me. Now I understand what women mean when they rattle off terms like vulnerability, intimacy, and sometimes, astrology.

Tiers of exotic apparel line the walls of this closet. I sift through everything with incredible velocity, processing how my appearance will resonate in this, or that.

Needless to say, I can’t just grab the closest pair of jeans and be done with it. This is a process of complexity unimaginable to most men.

I also seem to have a keener sense of smell, by the way. And everything I touch triggers an emotional response, as though I’m connected to everything like an unmedicated psychotic.

Did I mention the residual dust I’m noticing in some corners and shelves, obviously overlooked by a preoccupied housekeeper? Does she not respect me?

How I’m able to process all of this without landing in a straight jacket is beyond me.

My brain is a labyrinth of crowded six-lane highways all moving in different directions. I approach life from the perspective of feelings, rather than concrete ideas. Or maybe thoughts laced with more emotion than I’m used to. I don’t really know. Whatever it is I’m sure I couldn’t survive a day like this as a man.

It’s more like:

There is a hippo by the lake. Go and kill the hippo by the lake without getting killed in the process, because you also have to figure out how to drag it home. Period.

I had a fantasy that I would be a very different woman. That I would feel a lot like I did when I was back in my male body. I imagined running out to the nearest tattoo parlor and getting a tramp stamp with a 20-gauge needle. Then I thought I might buy some matching latex, and 6-inch stilettos. I thought I’d feel hypersexual, like a man who’s been granted unfettered access to sex-on-demand, something only women can command, but rarely practice outside of mental hospitals and maximum security prisons for some reason.

The truth is I’m kind of irritated because I can’t figure out what to wear because I’m not sure whether or not the other women at the benefit I’m attending tonight will remember what I wore last week. Wearing the same thing would constitute a major problem. Men are the least of my concerns since they don’t remember anything that doesn’t involve sex or money.

And speaking of men, I’m sick of being hit on by guys who just want to have sex with me! They’ll say or do anything just to get laid! It’s insulting! What the fuck is wrong with them? Forget it! I’m not having sex with any of them no matter what the hell they look like! Be a gentleman…and maybe. Woo me for God’s sake!! Get on your god-damned knees for a change! I need a reason beyond sex to sleep with you.

Did I just say that?

Yes, I did.

See, I realize men are as narrow-minded as they are pig-headed. They require constant stroking, not unlike my Bull Terrier, Todd.

Isn’t that right, Todd?

Biscuit, sweetie?

Okay, enough! I’m done here! I don’t want to see any more!

While the ability to think and feel on multiple levels sounds great, it isn’t — especially where the hippo is concerned.

Now I understand why women outlive men:

It’s because men are narrow-minded and pig-headed.

22 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments

Dirty Words and Drama in Dreamland

Men expect to get laid as a matter of course — and usually without remuneration, including dinner, or in more extreme cases, a Smoothie.

When their expectation aren’t met, they earn the moniker: asshole. This is particularly true when men suddenly dismiss you like something that doesn’t deserve a personal pronoun.

“She’s a bitch. She dates losers. She’s insecure. She’s an idiot. She has crooked teeth. Whatever…”

When this dismissal occurs, you might think of it as lowering someone’s salary, or taking away the company car. They learn to expect certain things and now they’re gone, which makes them feel like they’re moving backwards, which most people perceive negatively for some reason.

Men expect the sex because women have been handing it over freely as all liberated women should, and in some cases, it works.

Sex is great, couple gets along, falls in love, gets married, falls out of “in love,” falls into just “love” so that no one gets killed in the process, and lives happily ever after until some fragment of the dream comes unglued and the whole thing starts all over again with someone else.

So the core truth in all of this is that sex can never be withheld  – or used as a weapon  – in order to get other needs met. There will always be risk in equal proportion to potential reward. When there is no risk, the unglued thing applies.

So it’s a conundrum.

If you want to go down this road, tell fate to kiss your ass and just roll the bones.

17 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 1 Comments

21st Century Romance

A mistress is a man’s long-term sexual partner. The relationship  is generally stable and at least semi-permanent; however, the couple does not live together openly. Also the relationship is usually, but not always, secret. And there is the implication that a mistress may be “kept”—i.e., that the man is paying for some of the woman’s living expenses, or provides her with an allowance.

These “relationships” and/or “arrangements” are booming because beautiful women [the only ones eligible to play] have finally come to the conclusion that corporate life sucks, and unless they’re Madonna, they’d rather spend their time at a spa on someone else’s credit card.

Can you blame them?

With this in mind…

I fell in love for the first time at 18.

I was blinded before I was blindsided, which was the first step in a long process of understanding the complex nature of my feelings and the way I processed them.

Five years later I fell in love, again, with similar results.

I never got it right because I never understood myself.

I chose mates based on criteria that one might better apply to, say, plastic explosives: intriguing and deadly.

Women were a reflection of my fantasies; like myself, which drove the process from no place to nowhere.

At least I was consistent.

We never heal the wounds without creating deeper ones first, and this was a lesson I was never to forget.

Fast forward to 2009 [35 years later.]

The scene is Houston, Texas and I’m not dead. I’m not sure why, but I’m not. In fact I’m still very much in the fray, only this time armed to the teeth with accountants, investment advisors and psychiatrists on retainer.

I’m in a massive circus filled with performances of every kind, and rides which unsettle me to this day.  Of course, I’ve seen them all before. But every day is like a new beginning of a colorful nightmare that won’t end because I won’t let it. There’s something about the emotional bloodshed that intrigues me; the fuel it produces keeps the process alive.

I’m in the century of the annihilation of love, at least in the classical sense of the word. And don’t ask me to define classical because you won’t understand it anymore than a circus seal will understand Shakespeare without raw tuna shoved between the pages, so forget it.

I say all of this, not because love is dead, but because it has lost its way in a world that’s transformed it into the same fantasies that drove me when I was 18 and continue to plague me with this crisis of faith.

What does functional love look like?

What should it feel like, or exact from us?

And if it doesn’t fit some imaginary profile on television, are we out of sync with reality, or is reality the wrong word in this context of life and truth?

Most of us spend our entire lives ignoring that missing dimension as time passes and life fades.

Fast forward to 35 years from now and I’ll drift over the planet like a shadow from beyond space and time [or like a child with a screwdriver] and wonder how much longer it would have taken to get it right?

14 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 3 Comments

Men with Lots of Money and Bad Taste

This is an interesting phenomenon, particularly in big cities where being flashy means being noticed. But it’s a problem for women with an aversion to things like big gaudy furniture.

Just when you think you’ve found the perfect gentleman with lots of cash and flawless demeanor, you walk into his home and it triggers a coronary.

As people acquire wealth, particularly through entrepreneurialism, they remain the people they were before they started. This is one reason Rock Star homes are often the gaudiest places on the planet outside of Disneyworld.

Most of them aren’t Harvard graduates with a generational appreciation of fine antiques, or mid-century modern art and furnishings.

They know some of the names, like Rembrandt or Frank Lloyd Wright [maybe], but as far as furniture is concerned, they only know big and small.

Small is what they think of as modern, which is usually faux contemporary. The big stuff is Faux 17th century Tuscan made about twenty minutes ago and shipped to their homes in an unmarked truck on the same afternoon.

But to most women it doesn’t matter because they’re happy to have a new job that doesn’t require anything their boss isn’t willing to pay for in exchange for a blowjob.

I didn’t just say that, by the way.

But for you women who expect – dare I suggest – even more from men of affluence, might I suggest the lottery?

Because not only will you have to locate a man who doesn’t act like he was raised by wolves, but he’ll also have to know the difference between, say,  Mies Van Der Rohe and Chagall , which he won’t.

So you’re screwed unless you don’t mind dating gay men, or playing the aforementioned lottery.

Or you could just deal with the big cheesy furniture and vernacular heard in prisons across America and just focus on the cash.

If I were a woman, I’d either find a beautiful French girlfriend, or run an ad for submissive males.

Of course, all of this is predicated on money, because it takes a lot of it to cover up bad taste…even in submissives.

11 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments

Getting Screwed: Facts of Life for the Liberated Woman

If you hand over your body to a man that you don’t know well, you’re going to get screwed. When the moment’s gone, he goes with it. You’re still lying there trying to figure out what just happened, because in the context of all things female, what happened remains a mystery. But it’s not. And acceptance is a big hurdle for most women.

See, not only did you just have sex with a man, but you also gave yourself to him. Nothing else played a role in any of this. Nothing whatsoever. Zero. He liked the way you looked and took what you offered. But in exchange for what? Emotional attachment? He’s not interested. And besides, most men have difficulty melding sex and emotional intimacy to a point where one can completely negate the other.

I hear the following from women all the time:

“If he felt so much passion for me, if we had such great sex, then why did he never call again? Why did he vanish into the night without a trace, and then reappear somewhere else – with someone else? We seemed so right…”

I’ll tell you why this happened, and why it’ll happen again and again until it obliterates your chances of ever finding someone you can believe in. But get ready, because part of it may require that you move to another city and start over…sometimes with another social security number.

Of course, you never really start over, because no matter how obscure you become, the water’s already under the bridge, which places you a few notches down the food chain. More specifically, you’re older, which, in the minds of men, makes you less valuable in the context of marriage.

This is brutal truth, not unlike the fact that you’re living on some planet in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no idea why.

When it comes to women, men are a lot like parasites. We take what we’re given until something more interesting comes along. This process has made us seasoned hunters – scavengers – if you will, in a jungle filled with available spoils, which is another reason women get screwed at their expense no matter who pays the dinner tab.

Go play with an adult Bull shark and you’ll see what I mean.

My assistant, Yvonne Boustany, and I are co-authoring a new book titled, “Manhandling,” which will be out next year. You can buy a copy and display it like a weapon next to your Shakespeare anthology. It’ll scare the living crap out of any man who enters your home – or you – for that matter.

10 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments

Dread, Boredom, Alienation and the Absurd…among other things.

There are times when penning a single sentence feels like chasing a hamster down a Worm Hole.

Maybe it’s the years of uninterrupted writing; a process that can feel like a big, lonely planet hammered by an endless barrage of asteroids the size of Buicks.

But I’m not looking for your pity, because as you know, I don’t need it.

Maybe I’m too comfortable, or too tired, or my testosterone has smoother edges after the beating it took photographing, writing and overseeing the production of “InsideOut,” my new coffee table book of cultural blasphemy, which will be available in December.

The signing is in Houston, on December the 16th, by the way.

Whatever it is, I feel restless and off course in a deeply personal way.

Most of life is relatively easy. The work, specifically — in spite of its own unique challenges. The rest of it is where the work really begins because there are no boundaries, and no clear road to either completion or recovery.

It’s like alcoholism, really. Or drug addiction. Or addiction, period.

So it’s problematic. Unwieldy, unpredictable and a cluster bomb of related adjectives too numerous to note without putting you to sleep.

Imagine scooping bite-size circles out of a cantaloupe if that works better for you.

So I have another birthday on the horizon, a busy book promotion schedule, a newly-designed blog site [coming soon]…and pieces of my crazy personal life scattered like crisp, brown leaves on a Connecticut hillside.

Maybe I like it this way. Therapy only answers some of the questions some of the time. The rest of the time I struggle…no matter what I pay. Or for how long.

This is probably when people in my situation start with the cocaine and Jack Daniels. Smoking would be the least of anyone in my situations’ concerns.

Maybe it’s time for me to visit my brother in Florida. It’s a less expensive form of Electroconvulsive therapy, which never fails to shock me back into the realization that I need a big city to feel alive.

Of course, this starts the cycle all over again.

So this is what I do in therapy. Free associate. After my therapist has read my latest chapter or idea, I pay her $150.

It’s obviously working.

Anyway, we all need emotional sustenance. And I’m not talking about a healthy heartbeat versus no heartbeat at all. I’m talking about feeling alive versus feeling like a Hermann Miller chair.

Most of the time I see the world in two dimensions. It can wear on my perception of reality.  I spend so much of my time extrapolating, rather than living in the world outside. And the problem is that the longer I isolate myself, the more unmanageable I become. In public, specifically. I say and do things that come across as alien to people who spend their time surrounded by normal people in public places, like cocktail party benefits and country clubs.

I see the world through my eyes because I don’t have to see it any other way. No one is forcing my perception in one way or another. And because I don’t have to capitulate, I don’t. I guess that’s what makes me sort of a curiosity to people who don’t really know me.

It’s just Jay, the psychopath.

Of course, they don’t mean it in the clinical sense…necessarily. Sometimes they’re not sure, so I keep fanning the flames of their curiosity because I find it amusing.

So for me, this is what it feels like at the bottom of a bucket. It’s not that bad, really. I embrace all of life. The good, the bad, and whatever else there is, and for which there are no adjectives.

Things could be worse. Like everything, for example, which is why I don’t complain to anyone but my therapist.

02 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments

Whole Foods: Custodian of the Insane

Yesterday I observed a woman wandering around Whole Foods with a plate of wilted lettuce in her left hand. She pushed a small cart with the other, which contained a single box of frozen broccoli and nothing more.

As I see it, Whole Foods is a kind of halfway house for the insane: a safe haven to act out paranoid delusions with complete impunity.

One man walks around with a briefcase filled with something he won’t reveal, but everyone knows is nothing but loose screws.

Another is a car salesman one day, a psychic the next. In fact, everything about him is imaginary, excluding the food he steals with the tacit approval of the staff.

One guy had goat horns sewn into his skull until they produced a staff infection, which the natural supplement section couldn’t cure for some reason.

I keep waiting for a nurse to stroll by with a cart full of meds for patients out on a field trip in something close to – but not exactly – reality.

Kroger’s organic section isn’t large enough to quarantine them from the rest of the civilian population.

But I want to get back to the woman with the plate of lettuce. If she were wandering around the Amazon basin like that, the insects would have cleaned her plate by the time she reached the produce section.

What happened to her?

Did she have a normal childhood and then suffer some kind of emotional trauma?

Was she ordered off some interstellar spaceship because the crew got sick of her blank stares?

Profile: 50, no make-up, graying, average in an extraterrestrial-trying-to-be-human sort of way; a throwback to another generation that grew out of Woodstock and then went on to discover reality.

The lettuce was like a badge of honor, and she would glare at me every time I glanced at it.

I could just hear her inner dialog:

“How dare you judge me! I eat organic lettuce. I want the world to know I eat organic lettuce. I’m not even sure I’m going to eat it, but I want everyone in the store to think I am. My behavior makes me feel a part of this community and my lettuce is my pass to the realm of the enlightened. I will wander these isles for hours with my plate of lettuce in my hand because it makes me feel at home, accepted, and at peace with the chatter in my head.”

Here’s my version:

“Look at me. I’m a complete psychotic and custodian of Utopian idealism. I buy into every delusion foisted upon me by the endless array of glossy magazines published by the lunatic fringe. I believe in UFO’s, Bigfoot, the Lock Ness monster, and “channeling,” though I’m not sure what it actually means. I am a terminal victim, and you are my scapegoat…”

Most of you know by now that what interests me most is the stuff I don’t see.

At Whole Foods, it’s the stuff I do, which is why I remain a stockholder.

01 Oct 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments

Important Announcement!!!

We are closing in on the completion of my coffee table book, InsideOut, so you can expect my normal blogging schedule to begin in a couple of days. The project has been a colossal undertaking and my nerves are splintered…which is good for you because it fuels my bad attitude…