Anonymous Sex, Motel Fetishism and Plato's Theory of Forms.

Sex, philosophy leaving handprints on the walls.

Dear readers, I’ve decided to up my output of articles so I can place some of the more salacious content behind the subscriber paywall. Not because I don’t want you to hear about the oft-ridiculous adventures I have, but because if I’m gonna tell you filthy stories the least you can do is pay the equivalent cost of a cup of coffee that the subscription costs. Christ… This probably means that the only people who’ll read this are my mother and the other writers on here who all subscribe to each other, passing each other’s monthly fee back and forth between us.

But know this, lovers… I will ALWAYS give you a taste first.

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I realised that I don’t just love a shitty motel, but that I might have “a thing” for them.

There’s something magical in their tired blandness. Walls the colour of dried out caramel. Industrial carpet so thin you might as well be standing on bare concrete. The sagging melamine shelving, the laminate bench-tops swollen from water damage, a wardrobe frame that someone just gave up repainting halfway.

Laying under a bedspread with a pattern you’d swear was modeled from a discontinued line of 80’s Bill Cosby sweaters you listen to the hum of cars on the highway. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to go for miles around. Too tired to sleep. To awake to rest. The roar of jets making final approach to the nearby airport jolt you awake and you wonder if you’ve been asleep the whole time.

These are liminal spaces.

Four walls and a bed. A door to lock you away while between worlds. The threshold between where you were and where you’re going. Motel rooms are the physical, emotional and metaphorical manifestation of “waiting”. The knowledge that this place was never anyone’s destination, just a stop along the way.

I think it’s why I love sex in shit motel rooms so much.

Just as these rooms are nobodies’ final destination, neither am I. I’m not what people are “looking for”, any more than a motel room is a “holiday destination”. But motel rooms are perfect for torrid love affairs… also just like me. The micro-relationships that last only a night feel perfectly at home in motel rooms. There’s the meet-cute, the flirting, the commitment to a union, the wallowing in the joy of discovery of a person and the eventual acceptance that it’d never work out between you. So, you go on with your lives separately. All just in a couple of hours, all in these cramped, dilapidated rooms. It makes the joyous, rambunctious fucking of motel room sex unique in its own magnificence. In a place like this you are out of your life, out of your place, out of your mind… You can be anyone you want to be.

Just like how every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings, I think that every time strangers fuck in a motel room it fulfills its destiny.