No Church in the Wild
a hypomnema of hypersexuality

Chapter 4

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Peaches Christ

Before Claire, I was drinking no more than an average professional, I suppose, given my age. I was at the office far too often to socialize on a nightly basis, and wouldn’t dare indulge if it were one of the many days of the week and weekend where I would have to wake the next morning and begin plugging away at work. But, more than that, I’d had little desire to get wasted on a non-social basis.

I’d never had much confidence in my ability to seduce anyone, but through a long line of relationships that turned on a friends-first dynamic like the one I’d had with Jamal, I got laid on occasion. I wouldn’t have listed chastity among my life gripes. And I’d fallen for people before Claire, of course. At one point I’d found myself so overwhelmingly impressed by one of my business school classmates, and seen so much in common between our playful lifestyles, that I’d even tried desperately to convince him that our Jamal-like sex-only relationship should be more. I daresay I made a huge fool of myself before realizing that he just wasn’t that into me. But because people, and men in particular, so often reacted to my personality with a decided lack of understanding, I couldn’t remember going into a courtship with any hope that understanding was forthcoming. Really, I’d had few courtships. People hit on me, but I was never sure how to hit on them (absent significant alcoholic motivations), and so my trial romantic interactions tended to be with people who didn’t interest me all that much. There were, of course, plenty of good people with interesting lives and substantial intellect among them, and I knew it was hardly thei
r fault that whatever I was happened to be more than they could identify with.

It was only with Claire, who was, in hindsight, sort of rude and rather inconsiderate, that I felt the novel tug of the potential for understanding, and that in itself intoxicated me to no end. When I was forced to acknowledge what Claire really was, that potential evaporated before my eyes, and I was left unreasonably despondent in my withdrawal. Never despondent for