A Letter To...
Entry by: michaelsykes
1st May 2015
Dear Libido, I have been wanting to get in touch with you for some time now. I have the greatest admiration and enthusiasm for the many ways you've enhanced my life, from adolescence to the present, and have no intention of abandoning you for such things as sublimation, projection, or replication. But I wonder how you move though my body as I age and grow older.
The twin powerful forces of memory and desire have stood me well, and I can look back on my life and recall, with great clarity, how you’ve influenced my manner and behavior, in the best possible sense. To say that I’ve had my share of sexual experiences would be to vastly understate the matter. I can remember my first kiss, at the age of 6, with a girl my own age, dressed in winter clothes, beginning our kiss on a sled at the top of a hill and kissing all the way down to the bottom as the sled careened over the snow. This was not necessarily the libido at work but experimentation based on observable facts. The same could be said of the cavorting with my first cousin when we were about 10 or 12 and were at some cocktail party involving our parents and other adults. All their coats and jackets and scarves had been tossed on a bed in one room (perhaps another winter experience) and we burrowed deep into the pile and began kissing and pawing each other with great enjoyment, pretending we were Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, or some such characters, the adults sipping their cocktails and socializing in the other room while, unbeknownst to them, the kissing cousins were busily entertaining themselves.
The next six years or so, the late elementary, junior high and high school years, were increasingly dominated by your powerful influence, what we often refer to as “raging hormones,†which is physiologically true but which doesn’t account for your overarching presence. The advance of adolescence, with its concomitant hormonal effect, was steered by the libido into what our parents would surely have considered restricted areas but which they fully understood, having wandered into those same areas when they were our age but which they may have conveniently forgotten as they “matured.†I was very much interested in girls of all ages at an increasing rate, and took every opportunity to express myself with as much enthusiasm as the situations allowed. In many ways, the fervent desire and steamy pleasures of adolescent sex were perhaps more exciting than anything else that may have happened as I grew into adulthood and immersed myself in complete and fully expressed, as well as complex, sexual adventures. The so-called “heavy petting†and happy foreplay we indulged in during our adolescence was like opening doors into hidden rooms that revealed their contents in surprising, if not amazing, ways. By the time I had sexual intercourse for the first time, at the age of 16, within a month of getting my driver’s license and the use of the family car—two key ingredients for success—at a hotel in Boston (the name of the hotel escapes me, but it has since burned down) where I brought my girlfriend up from the Cape and sneaked her in through a side door, I was well on my way to a life of sexual experiences, if not excesses, which I believe they indeed became. After the “first time,†whenever I went to school, my junior and senior years in high school, I would try to imagine how many of my classmates knew what I knew, and envisioned a red dot over their heads to indicate that they were part of the new secret society.
Now, more than fifty years later, I see that your effect still has a considerable influence in my life, but not over my life, as it may have been during all those industrious years. Actually, I see that libido refers not only to the sexual urge or instinct, but psychic energy generally, and the overall human tendency is to be greedy, never satisfied with what could well be enough but always in search of more, more of anything and everything, but in regards to sexual activity, specifically the orgasm, and that this greediness is governed far more by the ego than any functional necessity.
In fact, the increasing greediness of males as they grow older far outshadows any basic need of women, who are far more interested in tenderness, kindness, comfort, and security. The male prances on like some maddened Pan, always in search of another conquest, another salve for the ravages of the libido, which leaves behind it a wasteland of exhausted, if not ruined, souls.
As I say, I have no intention of abandoning you at all, but would rather add in a more generous helping of psychic energy generally than run myself ragged in pursuit yet another fountain of fluid that really proves nothing more than that it is still possible, useless though it may be in terms of procreation, the embedded spermatozoa weakened with age and having a proclivity to produce genitally-deformed or otherwise abnormal embryos.
I would appreciate your views on this, and, once again, can’t thank you enough for all the adventures, and often misadventures, of a most remarkable life.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Sykes
The twin powerful forces of memory and desire have stood me well, and I can look back on my life and recall, with great clarity, how you’ve influenced my manner and behavior, in the best possible sense. To say that I’ve had my share of sexual experiences would be to vastly understate the matter. I can remember my first kiss, at the age of 6, with a girl my own age, dressed in winter clothes, beginning our kiss on a sled at the top of a hill and kissing all the way down to the bottom as the sled careened over the snow. This was not necessarily the libido at work but experimentation based on observable facts. The same could be said of the cavorting with my first cousin when we were about 10 or 12 and were at some cocktail party involving our parents and other adults. All their coats and jackets and scarves had been tossed on a bed in one room (perhaps another winter experience) and we burrowed deep into the pile and began kissing and pawing each other with great enjoyment, pretending we were Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, or some such characters, the adults sipping their cocktails and socializing in the other room while, unbeknownst to them, the kissing cousins were busily entertaining themselves.
The next six years or so, the late elementary, junior high and high school years, were increasingly dominated by your powerful influence, what we often refer to as “raging hormones,†which is physiologically true but which doesn’t account for your overarching presence. The advance of adolescence, with its concomitant hormonal effect, was steered by the libido into what our parents would surely have considered restricted areas but which they fully understood, having wandered into those same areas when they were our age but which they may have conveniently forgotten as they “matured.†I was very much interested in girls of all ages at an increasing rate, and took every opportunity to express myself with as much enthusiasm as the situations allowed. In many ways, the fervent desire and steamy pleasures of adolescent sex were perhaps more exciting than anything else that may have happened as I grew into adulthood and immersed myself in complete and fully expressed, as well as complex, sexual adventures. The so-called “heavy petting†and happy foreplay we indulged in during our adolescence was like opening doors into hidden rooms that revealed their contents in surprising, if not amazing, ways. By the time I had sexual intercourse for the first time, at the age of 16, within a month of getting my driver’s license and the use of the family car—two key ingredients for success—at a hotel in Boston (the name of the hotel escapes me, but it has since burned down) where I brought my girlfriend up from the Cape and sneaked her in through a side door, I was well on my way to a life of sexual experiences, if not excesses, which I believe they indeed became. After the “first time,†whenever I went to school, my junior and senior years in high school, I would try to imagine how many of my classmates knew what I knew, and envisioned a red dot over their heads to indicate that they were part of the new secret society.
Now, more than fifty years later, I see that your effect still has a considerable influence in my life, but not over my life, as it may have been during all those industrious years. Actually, I see that libido refers not only to the sexual urge or instinct, but psychic energy generally, and the overall human tendency is to be greedy, never satisfied with what could well be enough but always in search of more, more of anything and everything, but in regards to sexual activity, specifically the orgasm, and that this greediness is governed far more by the ego than any functional necessity.
In fact, the increasing greediness of males as they grow older far outshadows any basic need of women, who are far more interested in tenderness, kindness, comfort, and security. The male prances on like some maddened Pan, always in search of another conquest, another salve for the ravages of the libido, which leaves behind it a wasteland of exhausted, if not ruined, souls.
As I say, I have no intention of abandoning you at all, but would rather add in a more generous helping of psychic energy generally than run myself ragged in pursuit yet another fountain of fluid that really proves nothing more than that it is still possible, useless though it may be in terms of procreation, the embedded spermatozoa weakened with age and having a proclivity to produce genitally-deformed or otherwise abnormal embryos.
I would appreciate your views on this, and, once again, can’t thank you enough for all the adventures, and often misadventures, of a most remarkable life.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Sykes
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