Men/Sex As Reason, Season, or Lifetime by Kyle Phoenix

Recently I was contacted by a blast from the past---an ex---10 years ago we dated for about 6 months, then fizzled out, I had my first live in BF and then when we broke up, I called the first ex to come over and relieve my sexual boredom (as I knew he was safe, reliable, available, etc.)  We'll call the first one, Carlos #1(that used to be my codename for guys I was seeing to friends and such---I have this whole theory about not exactly discretion but I've dated....some high profile people, a few rich ones, some older and even once or twice some in positions of influence that would've affected how my co-workers viewed me...and ironically two of their names were actually Carlos so it kind of stuck)<<<<

Carlos #2 was just a brief one night stand that became my go to sex date/friend with benefits for a couple of years while single and dating.  The most hilarious thing happening while I was teaching a class with a huge video screen, using a cable TV show as a edutainment/learning example and as I turn to the screen Carlos #2 is on the show---I actually said out loud "Holy shit!"

I bring up the above because Carlos #1 coincidentally called a few weeks later out of the blue while I was sitting in my home office actually taping a Kyle Phoenix online video.  He mentioned that he'd had a ton of boxes in storage, found an old journal with my name and number in it and was giving me a call up, how was I doing?

The great thing about Carlos #1 was that he was always leaning in to have a relationship.  The bad thing about him was that he wasn't exactly boring---he wrote me a poem titled Emergency Sex (more on that later)----but I honestly wasn't that excitedly, over the moon, hate to see him go but love to watch him leave---attracted to him.  He was a hook-up that sort of just went on and on and on and on for lack of anything (one) better to do.

I have since learned, having graduated and survived my 20s that involved covens, trans folk, atheists, a Turkish prince, a Broadway producer, 100 internet dates to improve my skills in one year and a short time in jail for forgetting that I had melanin in my skin, in a melanin light township, that people, even relationships of a romantic slant boil down to Reason, Season or Lifetime.  

Carlos #1 was the atheist.  We met during my 100 Dates sojourn and hit it off----maybe we did, I'm never quite sure.  He seemed to have had a better time in discussions, late night dinners and in bed than I remember.  He was a Gemini.  He talked.....a lot.  Like so much that I now sort of scoot away when Geminis hit on me, afraid of the potential chatter.  He was educated, interesting but that was when I was Mr. Corporate working 16 hour days so a four hour late night date for 15 minutes of bad sex every other evening was a bit much.

Why was the sex bad?  
Because he never shut up.  
It was like going to bed with a sportscaster, with blow by blow commentating.  And I remember thinking  pf the hook up go wrong and long---am I the bad one here?  Other than the fact that I really didn't feel anything for him and he slept in the dead center of my king sized bed, he wasn't a bad guy.  

Ok the sex was....mediocre.  (I write like Carrie but I'm really Samantha....:) )  

The best sex we ever had was when he had to leave for work after dinner and suddenly he said---"We didn't have sex!" and I was like if you can shut up for 15 minutes, we can have emergency sex."  
He did.  
We did.  
It was actually pretty good.  
He enjoyed it so much that on the edge of the bed he wrote me the poem titled "Emergency Sex."  I framed it.  He'd been an awarding winning poet in his homeland.  However he was just Season, about 3-4 months.

Carlos #2 was sort of a one night stand that just sort of kept happening over and over.  He was almost 10 years younger than me though he didn't look it so I didn't take him completely seriously.  The fact that he was also a notoriously promiscuous by his own admission meant that I really wasn't ever going to take him seriously.  Until he broke down that he'd been trying to figure out how to introduce me to his mother.  (This fateful conversation came about one hot summer weekday that I'd taken off from work just to frolic and all the condoms had run out.....so we were sort of forced to stop frolicking and talk.)  His offer of a relationship came with the understanding that I accept that he was a serial cheater and whomever he was officially partnered with, he was probably cheating on.  No, you can't make this up.  I politely declined.  He was sort of my Sex Reason.  Reason?  he was very attractive, very smart, very fun sexually.  He was pretty.....and a little pretzel like in his contortionistic talents.  Not all Reasons are deep.  Don't judge.

Lifetime Men?
To date, there have been 5 serious---why I could marry you and watch you grow old and die relationships.  
They didn't accept/propose, and I didn't propose/accept but they have been present.  

• Carlos #1 technically happened before Lifetime Possibility #3 and briefly afterwards.  
• Carlos #2 occurred sort of along the long time courtship of Lifetime Possibility #4 and ironically they both had the same name.  

I looked at it as the universe allowing me to test out LP #4 with the Carlos #2, who he also bore a striking resemblance.  But with three other Carlos's---#3 who was an escort, #4 who liked to be spanked (who I had to give up because I liked him so much more than our sexual rendezvous were ever going to manifest into.....but Lord as my witness, he was fun!) and #5 who had a gang rape fantasy and ADHD that no one in their right mind would fulfill with him---I hear he later got it fulfilled...by someone not in their right mind, I started charting the men in my life as Reason, Season, Lifetime to get a handle on the distinction in feelings and therefore save my own heart.

• Sometimes the Reason was just fun, sweaty, what's your last name? sex!
• Sometimes the Season was wow, you're really great if I don't pay too much attention to.....your addiction, your emotional issues, your constant mentioning of your break up, your criticizing, your ADHD, your lack of follow through on your ambitions (to school, law school, a job), your other partner, your wife, your other partner AND your wife, your inevitable propensity through unsafe sex to not only bring back to me an STD but perhaps even a criminal charge.
• Sometimes Lifetime has been...I think you're The One....oh, wait, you're not....because of I have really, really intense feelings for you but I'm one of your Seasons, perhaps even one of your Reasons but not your Lifetime.

I learned along the way that there were men who possibly fit all three categories.  I also learned that I didn't have to be attached to mandating an outcome, that I was most swept off of my feet---well as close of an emotional approximation that I can come to that feeling---when I was honest about what we were doing.  

1. When I was honest with myself.  
2. When I was honest that I didn't love this person, and never would.  
3. When I was honest that I found another lacking or incompatible or even boring and wasn't interested in settling...even if they wrote me poetry.  

And I learned that one lives many lives within one's own lifetime, that what I thought was attractive 15 years ago doesn't even hold a candle to who I've had fun with and loved since.  That everyone has a college tale of heartbreak.  That every graduate degree has an ill fated relationship.  That having your own apartment and money in Washington Heights can literally make  you King of the man-hill.

I look forward to the next 50 years---some of them like the past ones, dates, loves, one nighters with an eager anticipation because following Marianne Williamson's advice---instead of arriving at men with a frame, that is adorned with rubies and diamonds---one's figurative blood and tears---I now arrive and just look at them as a canvas and wonder silently what kind of frame fits around them.  I also have learned to appreciate and like men and women and children in a way that doesn't seek to have them fulfill my needs as much.  

Again taking a note from Marianne I arrive with: "You've often prayed for a special angel to like and love you and here I am!  And my work is tell you how beautiful you are."

Wildly, as lovey dovey as that sounds, for even one's one night stands---exuding that acceptance and love, particularly to MSM has worked out nicely....I mean come on they're writing poetry about me! :)

Thank you for reading and if you liked this check out the other blogs or one my books on Amazon.com
Kyle Phoenix
Email: kylephoenixshow@gmail.com
Website: http://kylephoenix.com/
Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/
Amazon.com: simply type in Kyle Phoenix for over 25 paperback and digital books!
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on Facebook or Follow Us on Twitter!
Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) 

I Know Where You're Going To by Kyle Phoenix

For quite a few years I used to get up every morning, do my morning ministrations, dress in suits, shirts and ties and pack onto crowded NYC subways with thousands of others to go to some gleaming tower in Manhattan, sit at my cubicle and push a mental, financial, legal pebble uphill.  Don't get me wrong from my description of this special level of Dante's Inferno, I learned a lot.  I enjoyed being out and about in the world, trying new things for lunch and dinner and well, affecting a professional appearance in the big city.  Then something happened...a spiritual awakening, intensifying, enlightenment if you will and I shifted out of being a corporate cog about 12 years ago. I'm surprised---it's really been about 12 years that I got off of that path and I've embarked onto this one.

I look up old lovers.  Why?  Because Facebook, superior technical and investigative training from my corporate days, and several powerful computers in my home allow me to do so.  Sometimes I look up old crushes.  Once or twice a nemesis or two.  I was expecting....fame, fortune, perhaps even hoping for ruin.  No, what I was really looking for was the path that they were excited about when I knew them---whether that had manifested.  I was comparing not my life exactly to theirs but their lives to their former projections---if that makes any sense.

I seem to have slept with, befriended and nemesis-ed a fucked up lot.  They ain't done much.

Let me rewind to my year of this online Colombo game I've been playing.  I'd published articles and short stories for almost two decades since I was a teen but had held off from publishing a book.  A full book.  Fiction, I expected them all to be.  There are literally a dozen manuscripts in print and on my pc waiting---have been waiting off and on for years.  Some have been to publishers and editors back and forth with recommended tweaks.  But I just never got around to pulling the trigger.  It would be dishonest to say I was frightened or some dark childhood secret....meh.  I was busy trying other things out and learning about business.  And in this paragraph some of my neurosis about being prodigious, creative and having generated massive amounts of creative work are apparent between the lines.


I've always been smart, since I was a child.  Let me re-codify that---I've been testing at a 12th grade level since about the third or fourth grade.  I was able to actually sit out the 6th grade after my parent's divorce and a sojourn to North Carolina for 6 months, walk into the last few weeks of the 6th grade and test right into the 7th.  My mother didn't want me to skip grades, as many as I could've for fear of social alienation.  I'm still on the fence about whether I agree with that or not.  I can see all sides.  Also that's a pun on how my intelligence works---I can see all sides.  I see all possibilities.

Like a holographic probability machine if you say "Let's steal a car." my mind instantly absorbs, assesses, calculates, re-calculates, checks the wind speed, considers your ankle injury, looks at my present hunger, notices the two potential witnesses at the corner---and then I have maybe three or four outcomes to our action or inaction.  Sounds cool but really I've had to develop belief systems and a level of confidence in order to make choices---because I see ALL of the choices, at once.  Seeing so many choices can create crippling doubt.  At the same time I generally see the outcome of a situation, pretty much when I first meet you.  I have a mental notation of how long our relationship will last and how and why it will end---because I'm integrating all of the info between us in such a short period of time and calculating.  I've even said to friend or two one of the outcome possibilities, they generally don't hear or believe me....but it always comes to pass.  Foolish, hurt feelings, death, betrayal, all of it I see like little Post It note possibilities on a  blackboard and slowly as time goes on, the ones least likely to occur fall away leaving more and more of what will occur.  But from that, from you, I can also extrapolate your possibilities, where you're going, what will and won't become of you.

I know, spooky, right?

(Ironically, it's a talent--forecasting, arbitrage, strategic thinking and planning that made me useful in the corporate world.)

Back to my look ups of folk.  There were moments as their lover, as their friend, even as their nemesis when they said they wanted to be a writer or a dancer or a CEO or a business owner or a Rolling Stone magazine journalist when my "superpower" looked at them, into them and considered it---calculated the probabilities and saw it as possible or not possible.  I think because my work, manuscripts, a dozen spinning into publication now and a hundred more published, it's BIG....bigger than I have a concept of how to articulate but I see it's effects on others---I'm considering so many I've known.  Also a lot of my published writing now includes multiple timeframes in my life.  Some short stories are all the way back from 1992 to manuscripts created in 2013.  It's like I'm traveling through time, in my own lifetime (Quantum Leap!) as my work comes out.  Maybe the work itself is a solidification of that timeframe now.  Like a book as a time-brick to 1992, 1997, 2001, 2013...?


I know sometimes I speak or write in multiple frames of referencing reality to abstract to concrete.  It's how I think.  Indulge me, that's partially why I created this blog---to have a space besides private journals where I sort of shared without the usual social "clean up" I do to hide, clarify or make my intelligence, my thinking, palatable to others.

That's what it feels like for me being smart.  And further, the stuff I said I'd do, I've accomplished.  When they look me up on LinkedIn and Amazon and Facebook---it was an odd path but I've arrived at being an author, a filmmaker, an entrepreneur.  Most of them took my place in those little cubicles in Dante's Inferno---varying titles they all have, but cubicles they are.  But only one young lady, Jennifer Karmin became the writer, poetess, published, world traveler that she aspired to be.  It's funny because she was so committed but not overly ambitious, much like myself, I think in retrospect.  We did the work, focused, we're a bit obsessed and oddballs compared to all the "cool kids" and all the cool kids?---Dante's Inferno cubicles.

I keep hearing Diana Ross's "Do You Know Where You're Going To?  Do You Like The Things That life Is Showing You...........do you know? playing in my head as I write this.  But I'm pretty clear on mine.  I think maybe I'm looking at all those folks I've known, lovers, friends, even family and their disintegration into a sort of banal life.  I'm watching other people's dreams die.  Maybe that's the reverse scribble on the backs of the mental Post It Notes I had as the possibility for them.

Their dreams die.  They die unfulfilled.

Can one be sad for people in the past, now in the future?

Thank you for reading and if you liked this check out the other blogs or one my books on Amazon.com,

Kyle Phoenix
Email: kylephoenixshow@gmail.com
Website: http://kylephoenix.com/
Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/
Amazon.com: simply type in Kyle Phoenix for over 25 paperback and digital books!
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on Facebook or Follow Us on Twitter!
Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast