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Friday, April 04, 2003 Last night: feel asleep around midnight. Woke up around 3. Could tell I wouldn't be drifting off again right away, got up. Fired up the computer, coasted around the web a bit. Came across a short news article about Adrian Brody's Academy Award lip lock with Halle Berry, which got me thinking about the whole kissing thing. What an invention, kissing, huh? So intimate, so expressive, so sweetly revealing of one's kissing partner and yet relatively uninvasive (assuming both partners are willing and into it). When done right, it's a means of intimate exploration and nearly endless pleasure. Lip to lip, lip to cheek, lip to ear, lip to neck, lip to shoulder. A lovely, tender means of expressing affection, appreciation, love, desire. Sometimes light, in passing -- a kiss on the top of the head or lips brushing the side of a face. Sometimes ardent, more intense, communicating passion, deep feelings, longings. Sometimes comic, producing a good larf between partners. Sometimes just a nice moment of greeting. (I exclude air kisses here, a social gesture I have no interest in. In fact, one of the most captivating moments in my first couple of weeks in Madrid happened when an acquaintance introduced me to a women he was with and she immediately gave me a kiss on either cheek. Real ones, nice ones, providing a sudden rush of sensation. I wasn't, at that time, aware that the two-cheek kiss was customary here, so that the moment took me by surprise -- a sudden instant of closeness with an attractive woman, our cheeks together, the feel of her lips, her scent, the glancing sensation of her hair against the side of my face. And then she and my acquaintance were off, leaving standing in Madrid's summer sun, sparrows cheeping nearby, the abrupt blur of sensation remaining with me for a few seconds before giving way to full awareness of where I was, post-moment. In comparison with that, air kisses are silly things -- empty, meaningless, blahblahblah.) And then there are all the possible accompanying sensations involved in deep kissing -- the body contact, the feel of arms around you, maybe a hand on the back of your neck or in your hair or touching your face. That amazing feeling of opening up, of allowing in that happens when a partner relaxes and softens and truly puts their arms around you, truly surrenders to a smooch. The awareness of their breathing, of their body heat, of the muscles moving beneath their skin. And their odors, natural and otherwise, from skin, clothes, hair. Tthe feel of a partner's tongue, the ways it can be used to explore (or not). And of course, the feel of the partner's lips. They're funny things, lips. Mostly innocuous, taking up little body surface-area (save the few Jagger-esque, overendowed individuals out prancing about the landscape), yet unbelievably sensitive when used in certain ways, probably packed with nerve-ends. Extremely expressive. Portals as important as the eyes can be in terms of glimpsing or experiencing a partner's deeper self. Great stuff, kissing. Deceptively deep stuff. And there's Adrian Brody, laying one on Halle Berry, her husband out in the audience, probably going, Hey, wait a minute.... Yeah. Er... where was I? Right -- up in the middle of the night. So as I sat here at my ‘puter, the friend who's been staying here these last couple of weeks returned from a long night out. We're talking 3:30 a.m., something like that. Brief hellos, I shut down my laptop, returned to bed, where I didn't really get back to sleep until 6 a.m. or so, and even then it was one of those half-awake sleeps. So that when I rose to meet the day, it was a bleary, knackered me doing the greeting, one who's remained thick-headed and not entirely awake since then, despite coffee, food, conversation, a walk. The gym helped some. Maybe getting out to class will. And after class it'll be Friday evening in Madrid, the streets crowded with people, restaurants and tapas bars busy, the air filled with the sound of voices, of people moving along the sidewalks, of traffic going by. Maybe even with music or wacky impromptu street happenings. That'll help. Later. rws 11:40 AM [+]
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