When shaving the bikini line, especially if you’re going to shave it all, using yummy, decadent Shea body butter instead of shaving cream leaves the softest, smoothest, sweetest finish. Definitely got a lot of growly mileage out of that. Just sayin’.

Is it weird to be turned on by the idea that David Duchovny is a sex addict?

I asked him what that makes me, knowing that, and he didn’t seem to think it was all that strange to be affected by it. So why do I feel like a geeky stormchaser on tornado night - amped up over something, a force of nature gone awry, that’s capable of causing someone else harm?

I know there must be considerable suffering in Duchovny’s life, for him and the people around him, but I can’t help it: the idea of anyone being that unfailingly needy for sexual contact makes me a little dizzy.

Perfectly timed - this arrived in my RSS feeds this afternoon, tempting enough to make me fork over the $16 and change for it. Because, you know, I don’t have enough books to read in the 12 or so boxes of them that we are still unpacking.

But this was irresistible:

“The study of sexual physiology—what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better—has been going on for centuries, behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, Alfred Kinsey’s attic, and, more recently, MRI centers, pig farms, and sex-toy R&D labs.  I spent two years wheedling  and conniving my way behind those doors to bring you the answers to the questions Dr. Ruth never asked.  Is your penis three inches longer than you think? Is vaginal orgasm a myth?  Can a dead man get an erection? Why doesn’t Viagra help women—or, for that matter, pandas?”

For a geeky grad student of semiotics (how we assign meaning to symbols/words/stimulus) and cognitive science, it doesn’t get any better than this. I can think of at least two of you who would enjoy paging through it, too, and I can pass it along when I’m done with it if you’re interested.

Anyone who’d like their own can find it here.

He and I split for four days in September. It was an odd break-up; neither of us really wanted it but I was at a loss for how else to get unstuck and move forward. When it happens that way, I have to physically go off into the world by myself for awhile.

But after intense days of talking by phone and stating our cases, he knocked on the door again on a Monday afternoon, I opened it, and the rest is a much more satisfying story. It needed to happen; the bumps we’ve lived with for years are gone because of it. I’d do it again if I needed to.

That night we had some of the best sex of our seven-year relationship, and in the nights following we enjoyed (understatement) an unbroken string of 23 straight days of either fucking or getting each other off - sometimes more than once a day - before unintentionally skipping a night last week when we crawled into our tent at 1am and, mid-thought, fell asleep on each other.

Ah, well. The next day we picked up where we left off.

The need is unrelenting, and we had to get a little creative on the trip. On the 31-hour train ride, sitting next to a couple in their 50s, I waited until they dimmed the lights for sleeping then reached under the fleece jacket he was using as a blanket and jerked him off. Then we switched.

Monday night we had the hotel suite in Denver and made good use of it.

Tuesday night we arrived at the campground after dark and, assuming we had it mostly to ourselves, had some pretty loud moments only to wake up the next morning and discover there were other tents dotted around, one within about 100 feet. Oops.

Wednesday night was the night we passed out before we could get our hands on each other, but we made up for it on Thursday at the hotel in Salt Lake City.

Friday we drove 10 hours straight to get home, and somewhere near Battle Mountain, Nevada, I pulled off a lonely exit, got out of the moving truck, went over to the passenger side, opened the door, and jerked him off in the middle of the desert as the highway traffic rushed past. I was tempted to set up the camera on the tripod 20 feet away and take a very candid photo of it as it happened. I chickened out.

Worse than honeymooners, we’re like teenagers. We cannot keep away. Our relationship has always been very sexual, but this constant, constant undercurrent of irresistible urge day in and day out is new.

I like it.

We’re having a lot of those moments lately.

Me: “Testosterone levels have been shown to be responsible for the vividness of imagery someone achieves during masterbation. In other words, more testosterone = more vivid sexual fantasies.”

Him: “Interesting…”

Me: “I really am surprised I don’t have back hair.”

This wasn’t feeling right. I was forcing myself, for the sake of what I thought everyone else wanted to see here, to write topical, scheduled entries about sex and sexuality and that’s just not how sex works for me. It’s unpredictable, exploratory, tangential, strange. Intensely personal. So from here forward this blog will be that, too. Because all I really wanted was to talk candidly about sex and explore on “paper” the unexpected streak I’ve kept for the most part under wraps, the things I’m curious about, get turned on by, want to indulge in, the stories I want to tell.

While I’ve pulled a small handful of trusted friends into the fold, I’ll be writing anonymously so that I can write freely.