… but how you move your ‘Mind’

I am not, believe it or not, given to salivating over ‘good looking’ by any of the usual ‘ripped’, ‘buffed’, bonkable, spray tanned common garden variety standards. For me, eye candy is of the third eye variety.

So much so, one day … not so long ago, I was in the car, passenger side – trying to stay awake, probably after working night shift talking to people contemplating their next evolutionary step. This must have been during the Pre-Mortgage Era when Clangers and I were crazily rushing around Melbourne trying to get to property viewings before some off-shore entity put in an offer, site unseen and helpfully pushed up the price of a home, out of reach. I know right?

Anyway, imagine my bed red haired unkempt self, slumped grunge-ily against the passenger side window. Possibly there was drool. It was hot – let me tell you, and not just the ambient temperature on less than four hours of daytime sleep after working all night.

Definitely I was facing the existential angst associated with being a perpetual renter. Mine eye twitched awake as I caught something inspiring on the horizon of the end of some dusty industrial bitumen-ed streetscape waste land in North Melbourne. I espied a man person advancing and I thought to myself, uncharacteristically because I barely notice physical prowess most of the time, some excited and carnivorous version of

“Whoa! He’s Hot! Who is this man?!”

I rubbed my dry eyes open, blinked in a vain attempt to focus. The more I focused, the more attracted became as this man began to materialise in manner of Red Sea parting. Then finally my Frontal Cortex caught up with the pace my Limbic System set and realisation dawned, t’was Clangers with the F@#KING Property Listing. Forget oysters! Home ownership – the new Cat Nip!

What is sexy for you? What ‘starts the engines’, gets you plotting and plucking? Sexual feelings make themselves very clear during adolescence when bodies and identities change rapidly and the mysteries of the feminine and the masculine appear to be all about whether you are a man or a woman.

I never really understood this stage of life, I think to NOT comprehend this stage of life is just about meeting this developmental milestone. I was used to boys teasing me, water bombing me, stealing my stuff, pulling my hair … generally having a crack. It was explained to me that this meant they ‘liked me’. The double speak of this still eludes me. All of this chicanery came to a head when I was about 16 or 17, on the bus, in Summer – season of pheromones plus newly acquired hormones. I coped with all of this external chaos by burrowing even deeper in to the pages of something Russian, difficult and extreme. I felt invisible behind these pages, and I assumed I was also invisible to others. Not so!

A football playing tall version of myself from the other side eventually sat down next to me, on the back seat of the bus in the complicit conditions of balmy Brisbane, and said distractingly and deceptively,

“What are you reading?”

Briefly, in less than the time it takes for one second to pass, I thought I was not alone. I briefly imagined experiencing the unbridled passion reserved for soft porn (I’d heard about this) and literature (the delights of the Story of O were still hidden and Fifty Shades of Grey thankfully not yet conceived, but Libraries – I was totally down with Libraries) before … well, I attempted nonchalance and casually raised my book to meet his courageous advance before I sadly watched his eyes glaze over. He wobbled but did not fall, not yet. He swallowed, almost imperceptibly, then said,

“What is it about?”

I was only 16, true – but I knew a thing or two about the biochemical cascade of ecstasy that follows an orgasm . Thinking of this I looked in to his eyes, as in – Vulcan Mind lock, penetrating, ravenous, certain – my gaze, like all first sexual encounters, was brief. I saw. I knew, a thing or two – about myself and what I wanted, even then. Have you ever tried to light a gas stove in the wind? Well – there are some similarities between what went on, on the back seat of the bus that day and the desire to light that fire. Then I decided, or rather – I knew what would happen between him and I. In less than a second I saw the whole thing play out in my mind. So I said to my football playing suitor and not without some measured regret, I said …

“It doesn’t matter, are you playing this Saturday?”

That was Union, not AFL – we were in Queensland after all. Back on familiar ground, the tension on his face shattered like a glass mirror but he never saw me, never met me and would never know me. He never even knew what had happened. I forget the position he played in, or the great moment from the game he played the week before when he single handedly turned the fortunes of his team around, or his vague but appropriate concerns about his potential performance and the effect this would have on his team’s fortunes looming large in the very short term future.

He smiled. I smiled. I might have even laughed. This tentative tete a tete concluded with a water fight of sorts. I got doused with a bucket of water on a subsequent steamy Friday afternoon. The drama of the danger, the pursuit, the chase continued as the whole bus was driven back to school and we all got detention. It continued, a little like the tide coming in and sooner or later it ended with a contemporary version of Netflicks & Chill. The Sun did rise but the Earth did not move. This takes a different kind of power and a different kind of knowledge than the biochemical inheritance all of us crazy humans receive as we fumble our way through adolescence.

There is so much to say on why we crazy humans are drawn to and become obsessed with the one we love, the one we absolutely must have but to be brief and cut to the chase … the one you feel absolutely and completely compelled to catapult and bungee jump in to the sack with, at the earliest possible moment – will ‘see you’, look at you in a particular and very specific way.

The secret of sexy is not what you do with your body, although – there is always room for development in this department. The secret of sexy is how you move your mind and more importantly – how you ‘see’ the ‘other one’.

All of us are driving mostly unconsciously and somewhat consciously towards wholeness. We want to feel the rest, the peace, the clarity of completeness. But to get to this state of nirvana – we must, if we are to believe Freud and Zen Buddhism, pass through and burn out all human desire.

The one, you absolutely cannot get past, look over, move on from, stop thinking about … I predict knows something or sees something about you, that you are as yet – unaware. More than that, this person wants to connect to this part of you. If you are caught in this kind of headwind, this gaze of the ‘other’ is Cat Nip of the Volcano kind. You will be transformed, just do not look away and at the right moment … let go!

Good Times! Remember condoms!