As I’ve written before, my sexuality is almost entirely reactive; left to my own devices in the absence of the right kind of sexual stimuli, I rarely feel anything like what most people describe as “lust”. I don’t just wake up in the morning feeling horny, I don’t have spontaneous sexual fantasies, I don’t seek out porn or other sexual imagery and I haven’t successfully masturbated since 1997. But this doesn’t mean I’m frigid or dysfunctional; I respond to sexual stimuli of the sort that push my buttons with tremendous passion, as anyone who’s ever seen it happen can attest. It’s not that I don’t have an “on” switch; it’s just that it doesn’t have an automatic setting. But attentive lovers can find my most obvious triggers fairly easily, and can then get me in the mood as easily as they can start a car. Of course, there are other buttons that are less obvious, and a couple that are known only to me; once in a while I even respond to something I read or see, or something a lover does, in a way that surprises even me (though that’s pretty rare these days). Imagine if you will a pressurized tank of libido which remains completely still and quiet until the valve is opened, but then gushes out at great pressure, and I think you may begin to get the picture.
Over the past few years, it seems that my creative output has become a lot more like my libido. In high school and university I could write on pretty much any topic anyone wanted, and I’d come up with spontaneous writings of all kinds on many different subjects. Over the years that ability waned, and it became rarer for me to just write off the cuff; in the past two decades I’ve come to need a proper trigger to set me off, and those of you who’ve followed my blog for years may have noticed that the variety of triggers has decreased. The reservoir of creative force isn’t even close to depleted; it’s just that the number of different things which can tap into it is smaller than it once was. Many things that would’ve once inspired an essay are now unable to induce the flow of creative juices, while others still set off a torrent of words and ideas, sometimes more than I expect. And that’s why I’ve altered my format over time to favor columns in which I react to things such as questions or news stories, and to allow a more variable length; it’s much easier for me to simply set out basins to catch these outbursts than to waste time and energy trying to divert the flow into channels of my choosing, where it may not want to go.
