Susan Hwang

I’m so excited about this, I can barely write.  Surely, it must exist already.  I was sitting on the train and looked over to where a boy was squiggling his finger rapidly on his device…  He startled me, but he was just playing one of those video games where you have to zap a bunch of things with your fingers.

I know and am related to people who know and love video games, and I had my time with the likes of Frogger and Pitfall and Tetris…  Pong too, sure, but in general, I much prefer to stare off into space than stare and poke at a little screen.  Besides, my fellow commuters give me plenty to look at.  Sometimes too much.

Something about that young man’s intense fingering of that screen made me think–my, if only people paid that much attention to pussy, they’d be really good at it.  It just takes attention, focus, practice, repetition.  Like anything.  If they made pussy into a video game, boys would be really good at it.  It would be an educational app.  You would manipulate your iphone va-jj until you hit your goal.  You would have to pay attention to the sound, heat, movement and swelling, and if you got really good, you would hit the bonus level of magical multiples where you earn points like crazy.  And each clitoris and vagina would would be different with different characteristics and different rhythms and different sensitivities, so even if you scored into multiples with one, the next time you played you’d get a completely different one and have to master that…  You can play with your friends..  at the same time, you know with the headsets like they do for those simulated flight games, right?  You could get very good at Virtual Vagina or Practice Pussy while playing with friends around the globe.  You can buy the plastic screen cover to protect from moisture damage for when you get to the oral manipulation levels which is really for experts because you can’t see what you’re doing.  Oral manipulation is a blind art.  It’s all feel.  Imagine, an iphone app that would help you develop feel (and a feeling other than addicted frustration that you’re not getting more messages and updates…).

Of course, the idea of this game is that you would get really good so you could go forth in real life with a certain knowledge and confidence and skill level.  I mean, people who play those flight games may never fly a plane, but we’re hoping that those who practice, hone and learn on the Virtual V-JJ go on to please many actual v-jjs into the realm of magical multiples.  It’s win win.

This is just an idea…  I wonder if this would take all the sexiness out of sex?  But then again, mindless fumbling with being too embarrassed to ask isn’t sexy either.  Or complete ignoring of because you’re a man and supposed to know everything.. that doesn’t get anybody going either.  What we really need to cultivate in this society is excitement about learning about sex, definitely about vaginas.  Vagina education should be the best part of the day or week.  I’ve always been very into learning in general.  Usually, I do it the hard way, but none-the-less it makes you feel alive.  And if you’re alive, you may as well feel like you are.  It’s such a jip to be alive but feel like you’re dead.  What a dumb joke that is.  No thanks…

Okay, it’s on this time.  July 20th in Propect Park.  Join us in the southern end of the Big Lawn in Prospect Park under the tree on top of the hill with the Teddy Roosevelt Boy Scout Tablet.  We’ll be the ones playing songs inspired by Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth.  

Sunday, July 20th, 3 pm
Prospect Park – Teddy Roosevelt Boy Scout Tablet

Performers: Pierre de Gaillande, Jessie Kilguss, Susan Hwang, Leslie Graves, Dave Voigt,Chris Rael, Don Rauf, Geoffrey Scott Diesel, Julie Lynn, Mark Lessereaux

It was just a haircut, but it was also a reflection of my evolution as a being.

I tell Hannah that I want Brigitte Bardot hair (the usual).  She gives me layering options.  We let the pendulum (Pendgie) decide on the classic cut/shape for me, and I head off for shampooing.

I’m met by a lithe young woman named Ford.  I’m a little intimidated at first at how lovely she is.  She’s effortlessly beautiful in her strappy white top and brown skin.  The kind of girl whose only needed cosmetic is a nice tan.  Her loveliness has this eternal quality to it.  Surely, she must be immortal.  I should have asked.

I normally feel like a truck driver around women this pretty.  This happens  a lot around French women who have a built in, cultural or genetic quality of impossible femininity.  Like Asians have this genetic connection to cute things–hence the creation of Hello Kitty and Hello Kitty-like things.  But the French women have this extreme, hyper, yet refined, femininity.  It is a force.  And around it, I always feel like a truck driver.  Actually, when I think about it, I often feel like a truck driver, whether I’m around the French or not.  It’s weird when I catch myself in the mirror and realize I don’t actually look like one.  I am, however, a very good driver.  And I can parallel park with the fearless abandon of an Olympic figure skater or um, Errol Flynn or Inigo Montoya (prepare to die…). .  I’d like to learn to drive camels and elephants one day, because I have a friend who says he needs a mahout.

So I didn’t ask if Ford is immortal, but I found out she has the hands of a goddess.  This is the view I have of her as she presses and rubs my head. Come on, mythic beauty.  You can see why I was questioning her mortality.  She does this amazing thing where she presses hard on the very top of my head.  Oh, this must be my reset button!  Ford, is making me new!  I make  sounds.  She asks if it’s too hard.  I say, you can’t press too hard on my head.  You just can’t.  And we talk about how expressions of pleasure and pain are sometimes indistinguishable.  I think, what a wonderful thing to give a person for a living.  Of course, she’s apprenticing to become a stylist herself there at Blackstones.   But I was thinking, if I could, I would give up my mahout dreams and just wash peoples’ hair, pressing on their heads until they felt like heaven.  I think that would be fulfilling.

So they start haircuts at Blackstones with ecstasy, which is a very nice

way to start.  And then I go to Hannah’s chair where you can bare your soul and be received with expert attention all while getting that much closer to Brigitte Bardot.

Speaking of bare..  yes, that’s a bear in between us.  And an antelope.  Or I guess a deer.

I tell Hannah that I’ve finally made peace with my forehead.  It only took about 41 years.  My whole life, I bemoaned my mediocre forehead.  I wanted it to be as large as Rita Hayworth’s Hollywood-altered forehead.  Or this.

Now this is a forehead.  This forehead is royalty.  And romance.  You can dream on this forehead.  Carol Lombard’s forehead is moonlit nights and mystery and the height of everything.

Hannah and I have had similar forehead issues.  We’ve both tried covering them up with bangs and strictly-enforced side parts.  For over ten years I had Bettie Page bangs, then various bang-like fluctuations, and then finally, in my forties, I’ve said, you know what, I’m going to just let my forehead be my forehead.  So what.  And you know, for the first time in my life, I love my hair.  I walked into the salon that day and said to Hannah (who gave me my last cut as well), I love my hair.  I don’t know why I’m here.  I love it.  I guess maybe trim it a little?  She did.  It was a touch up refresher.

I told her that I’m not married to my side part either.  She agreed–why be committed to a side part?  Yes, these days, I let the part fall where it may.. the middle, off from the middle, left right.  It does what it wants.  All the time.  Which brings me to my new motto:  Do What You Want All of The Time.

Honestly, anything else only gets you in trouble.

So see, sometimes it takes you 41 years, but you eventually get to learn flexibility and acceptance.  Even my hair knows it.

I’ll leave on this note.  Hannah is one of my heroes.  She’s one of the amazing young women I met working at Goodbye Blue Monday.  What I lacked in tips at the bar I certainly made up for in inspiration from the young people around me.  They were all (still are) like 15 years younger than me, but they moved me so much in how they shaped their lives into what they wanted them to be.  Hannah was working at the cafe, but wanted to be a hair stylist.  She got up the nerve to ask her favorite salon, and they hired her.  She worked her way up to being a top stylist/cutter there.  She transformed her life, and she spends all day transforming other people.  She’s all about making everything more beautiful.  I think that’s beautiful.

I feel like that generation of girls has less fear than mine?  Or maybe just less fear than me…  but I don’t think I’ve ever changed my life like that, where I get to do what I want most of the time.  I think it’s because I never believed I could, so I just let things happen instead of directing myself where I want to go.  I’ve always been a good driver, but if you don’t have a sense of where you want to go and the bravery to move in that direction, then you’ll just parallel park or sit in traffic.  Well..  better late than never.  And I have great inspiration from those friends I made at GBM.  My hair is already learning things like flexibility and acceptance.  Where is that elephant..