Were you literally hiding underneath her bed, or is that a metaphor?

ANYONE I KNOW??

my fuckingspacbar isbrokenjustin

"Much of the 20 hours was speechless"

...you? speechless? ya right. :p

oh Justin, SCORE!!!

I mean, that's the spine of it all.

re: Hiding under the bed - when duty called her and I had to excuse myself, this was the plan I hatched to be allowed to stick around - out of sight until her duties passed.

re: speechless - the hours spent smiling wordless staring goofy giggling happy came after hours of talking discourse heavy subjects with a joyful touch - ready honesty!

Elly - you don't know her, yet, I imagine. Though if you think we send ourselves out when we sleep to commune with spirits you probably have hung out.

Lol J. - Justin got laid ! That's about it.

That was poetry.

dw

"when duty called her" "until her duties passed" ? sounds like you are on a spiral into some kink-o-rama since the CLore put you in that plastic bag thingie...!

p.s. thanks for posting that stupid zombie photo of me after i specifically asked you to delete it... guess i was naive to ask you to alter your art, mannn.

dude sorry WB - I had taken a bunch of pictures of you two and that was the only one with decent lighting and composition. I done took it down!

As for kink, I would say the only kink here so far is happiness. It's very strange, actually!

i really liked your "raw feelings" post a couple earlier. such a neat idea. this one was interesting but seemed less "raw." but i liked how happy your expressions are. i'm just another internet stranger, but i admire the consitency of your openness and honesty, even when you doubt yourself. the "teacher" part in this post was a little over the top, but hey, why stop now!

I have been reading here for a few years, and in the beginning I admired Justin, but recently have grown disillusioned with his perpetual adolescence. Every so often Justin is "In Love!!," and it is always lighting speed and recklessly intimate. The first few posts with Jane and Amy sounded exactly the same. Then after a year and a half, he callously dumped Jane's ass as soon as there was real responsibility involved (like her needing support during her family crises) and then had the nerve to blame her for "not being independent enough" or some such bullshit (God forbid someone should depend on her partner following a death while in a foreign country!), leaving her depressed for months. At least, that was my take as an outside observer.

Intimacy isn't when you have a deep conversation with a near-stranger or when you recklessly bare your soul on a first meeting. Intimacy is definitely not making bad porn with strangers in latex bodybags. These things are just games people play with trust, like those games in high school where you have to fall backwards and you have to trust someone to catch you and it feels somewhat exhilirating.

While playing such games shows you the excitement and intensity that a feeling like "trust" can produce, and is a nice preview of it, it's not the real thing. The real thing happens when there is a real reason to believe you can bare your soul to this person. For instance, that they've been there for 1000 days already. That they did the right thing when you bared one small detail, and then one medium sized detail, and after a year, you *really* trust them with the big details.

It seems like Justin's only trust experiences are these fake ones: "Look, I just had anal sex with a stranger!", "Look, I can tell you really personal things even though I don't know you!" Rather than building real trust, these things do the opposite. They show that Justin has no respect for the boundaries in life that allow you to become very close with one person (or several), and comparitively less close with the rest, and thus create intimacy. Intimacy means you also come to need need someone for something, like as a person to trust more than the rest. Doing all this so quickly shows the same lack of respect. It shows no respect for the gravitas of a trust relationship (and the pain of breaking it, if it is a real one). It shows he's not making a careful and deliberate investment, but is after an easy high. If you knew what a million dollars was worth, you wouldn't spend it on a business investment you'd researched only for a day. Justin throwing around intimacy shows that he doesn't know what it's worth.

If I were a woman, I'd run like the wind from Justin. Then again, maybe I'm getting too old for this site, and after a youth of several 20 hour first dates with sex at the end, as an adult I find that I prefer 20 weeks of 1-hour dates with sex at the end. Or something along those lines.

Let me get this straight: At some point during all the deep intimacy, you said, "Hang on a sec. I have to snap a photo of myself for my blog entry about our encounter..."?! Was that before or after the under-bed chicanery? And when you say "duties," do you mean, like, a husband, or kids, or both? Sheesh. Maybe you should've gone to that strip club after all. Well, I hope it works out for you, J! xoxo

Q - you make stirring points. I can't help but think I've been skimming the surface on intimacy some, as you intimate.

But there is much unpublished. The broader narrative of search is clear; the motivations and affectations are incompletely stated. My relationships have a resonant depth for me. At times I feel something sorely lacking; don't all humans have those moments? I have no long view of a single face, and perhaps I could know something more meaningful from more interpersonal patience. I've been looking for that partner; the lesson, seems to be, me. Sit still boy!

"I've been skimming the surface on intimacy some, as you intimate."

"...the motivations and affectations are incompletely stated."

okay Q I've been thinking about this some more actually it's all I'm thinking about and it's pain and rain and ho hum alone again

so this is what I've come up with - I can write about myself or others. I used to do both. over years I pulled the focus off of others because it was not my place to judge and pin them down here i felt except in certain circumstances I've become much more circumspect.

which leaves my page to be a reflection of my ideals in a vaccuum. I met someone I like! I cry. And it lacks the contours of any evolution except perhaps as you care the pick them out of my diction. in fact I think there may be some progress here towards understanding intimacy but without sacrificing intimacy I share with those partners I can't be intimate here. so this is a flawed project! so i'm working on a solution and I'm not very comfortable.

Long time reader, first time commenter. Word of advice from personal experience: I find it pretty counterproductive to share things about yourself as they relate to what you feel for other people period.

Whenever I'd talk even in the roughest contours about difficulties with a then-boyfriend on my crappy journal that only friends would ever look at, but those friends too, regardless of intentions, would seize on it. Over time, I found myself having more fights caused by common friends of both of us who'd "poor dear" me, and for whatever reason (envy, desire, an unrequited crush or two?) would end up creating and amplifying the conflicts I'd already have with my SO, than any other kind. It got so bad that I had to make a bargain with myself, and it involved vowing to never speak to a couple of those friends again as an alternative to keeping them in my life and hating them for the complications that they brought with them.

I understand that the search for intimacy is a dimension of your life, as with most adults, but I would most definitely reccomend not sharing much of it it with others. These kind of relationships are a dual-type closed relationship, the minutiaes of which are going to be pretty hard to understand from the outside. You open up and share with friends and strangers alike, and it will create misunderstandings outside and inside that relationship. You should have learned that by now.

ah! it seems like there are two sets of issues here. one is justin's behavior and decisions about certain areas of life in general (offline), and two is his choice to discuss said life *online.*

It seems like it's a bit surreal to discuss the second part at all, right?

Struck by this whole business of "going dark" -- or "going searchbox," I guess is the more accurate way of putting it. I wanted to see what you had written so I was forced to rummage around in my mind and think of what your most recent postings had been about.

Why did you do this?

James, I'm not sure exactly what's happening, except that I'm having an intense experience of turning inward. I guess my web site design now reflects that. It's difficult, but it's not unpleasant.

where's links.net opening link? i had done the same with my site once. 'cept it wasn't a friendly go ogle search thing but an over expanded blackened website. justin mentioned it. i'd never had so many hits. thousands and thousands flocked to see a 'dark' website.
what is it with the internet?
what is it with the mob?
links.net is thought to be a personal website with almost daily updates prior to something called blog. folks still trying to explain blogging -- so much so that bloggers may actually have the same rights as journalists . . . .
my guess is presenting misinfo or info to the internet becomes more of something the lazy can do.
Q says, "i've been reading here for a few years." b says, "i've been reading here for a DECADE." justin says, " I can write about myself or others. I used to do both." b says, "justin, you can write about anything." maybe your 'writing' and you and your friends expectations of you as a 'writer' are making you question ''why is this project a failure -- what can i do to be more comfortable''
failure, comfort, boundaries, anything perpetual, adolescence, intimacy, maturity, love. sometimes, mosttimes, i forget to realize these words occur to any human, and our movement in and around these words just reminds us of humanity. perceiving each of these things, now and over time passing, as they change. good, bad, indifferent. change. simple.
justin asks of friends, "me go to film school?" and they don't relish the rehash, the same soul searching or upheaval they produced 9 or 10 months ago when asked initially about "film school." are we backing up? are we done with the push?
more soul searching has to occur when one goes on holiday; and mom, ( breastfeeding aside ) with her broken wrist, it brings me down, as does chicago weather, as does tyring to find something to occupy huge gaps of time until school resumes. but somehow links.net provides some type of optimism for me. i'm not sure i want to figure out why.
so justin found 20 hours of something, someone, sometime, somewhere (north) and shared it. reading the account wasn't anything like a penthouse forum article.
still, we readers of links.net, get some form of intimacy out of the reading. some take it too base -- j got laid. maybe that's it, but that's too simple. others ask for definition of metaphor.
but none of us really knows the details of sharing or sacrificing of this intimacy -- save the author
the reader's perceptions are far from the share or the sacrifice ( and please don't pin anything on me me me)
the writing here scares most -- how can justin actually divulge these details . . . .
justin's films can be just as scary -- friendly as asphyxiation . . . a class project, or should i say a school project, maybe even a film project.
trust. it certainly isn't. maybe that's Trust. it certainly is.
i could go on and on, but i've got searching to do

While we're reflecting on links.net's odd darkness ...

I remember my first discovery of Links.net. I was engaged in my typically aimless, lengthy web perusal and I stumbled across one of Justin's red-background pages on his Japan travels. Something about the page turned me off; I just thought, "typical spoiled, globetrotting hipster, in search of thrills to write about on his website," and I moved on.

Then, later, I somehow stumbled across it again, and discovered how vast the site was. I was drawn into it. I have said many times, and continue to maintain, that this site is an amazing work of art. I love it. Rarely does a day pass that I do not read something here.

Justin's site is not simply a study of the power of personal revelations: it raises questions about paradoxes of web aesthetics. Often the most ramshackle, slovenly websites are the most beautiful to me, because they reveal the work of human hands. A crisp, perfectly consistent site held together with masterful CSS holds little appeal to me. Links.net, with its geological strata revealing different time periods and different fashions in web design, is tremendously exciting.

Justin's site reminds me of something I read in Rudolf Arnheim's Dynamics of Architectural Form, in which he described walking along a sidewalk in Cambridge Massachusetts. The fact that the bricks were imperfect, some of the broken, others missing, and that they were arranged in a somewhat uneven pattern, increased their beauty to him. That same quality of beautiful imperfection --- also remarked upon by the Christopher Alexander in his writings on architecture --- is what I see as the tremendous power of Justin's work.

(For another example of a huge, rambling, messy, interesting site -- by a guy quite unlike Justin! -- see Rich Geib's site.)

"It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others." -Jane Austen

It just occurred to me ~ is Justin's Journal supposed to be 100% real or is it partly fictionalized? If it's the latter that would explain a lot.