I go to analysis three times a week, in the mornings. I’ve been doing this for a year with my current analyst, who happens to live in the Financial District, which I consider to be the most alluring and beautiful part of Manhattan. Why is that? Well, I’d first comment that the streets are often narrow, and that they don’t always proceed at right angles to one another. There is a coziness to a street that was designed to be traversed with horse-drawn carriages, and there’s a coziness to walking between tall buildings, to being in their shadows, as if they were a collection of trees in some boreal forest. When you walk through FiDi on a weekday morning, you see processions of people walking in the same direction, ostensibly to work, maybe in stock trading, maybe in banking, maybe in publishing (Condé Nast is in 1 WTC), maybe for the government. I love being among the flock, some of whom dress in standard professional attire, some of whom wear avant-garde “edgelord” clothes. But these two minimal categories themselves don’t account for the variegation of each face and each color or cut of fabric, and I’m endlessly grateful, really, each time I walk those streets.

I entered three-times-a-week psychoanalysis a little over three years ago, with a different analyst, whom I met on video call. I was hurting a lot from gaps in communication with the man I was in love with and I was starting to question whether I should be living my life as a man or a woman, or what the status of my academic research would be, given that I was becoming increasingly skeptical of its professional aims and stylistic conventions. Going to some form of therapy felt acutely necessary at the time and the promise of radical change brought about by the intensive frequency of psychoanalysis led me to follow through with it. It did change my life, rather rapidly, and I soon found myself packing all of my belongings in boxes and leaving my graduate program to move to Brooklyn and pursue psychoanalytic training. Within the first several months of living in the city and beginning the training, I started to wonder if the analysis I was in was really “working” or if it was necessary, given how much better my life had become. I wanted to, and ended up changing analysts, in part because my institute did not approve of my first analyst as a “training analyst.”

Not surprisingly, in retrospect, my current analysis continues to be rife with the question of what I am doing in analysis; I no longer consider myself to be extraordinarily unhappy and so what is it that I am doing there?

Often I find it to be a zone of fermentation, where I can tell stories without committing to a finished presentation. There is always a special quality to the speech that’s addressed to your analyst, who listens and who does not comment in the empathic or identificatory ways that your friends or peers might; in other words, there’s no attempt to say “I can imagine how you feel, I feel you.” And the truthfulness and humility of the analyst’s stance, which is more like “I cannot know what it is like to be you, so I sit here and listen to what you have to say,” is immensely liberating and more or less irreplaceable. For this reason I think of analysis as good even when I feel I’m failing to make much of it.

Anyway, recently I noticed that I seem to derive immense pleasure from telling my analyst about what happens before and after the session. More specifically, I seem to talk a lot about my commute. About what happened immediately before and immediately after the session. And I do, really feel, acutely aware of what happens before and after, and what it’s like to go and leave, some of this is roughly thematized around my love of the Financial District, some of it has to do with partners whose apartments I’d come from and go to, for instance Sam, who lives a few blocks away, or Adam, whom I used to live with, whose place was an 18 minute run or a 14 minute bike ride away from my analyst’s office.

It just so happens that the day I spoke about this in front of her, I made a small deviation in my commute home. I tend to bike one way to analysis, and take the train back, or reverse this by riding the train with my bike, and biking home. But this time, I rode the train home both ways, even though I had my bike with me. I felt tired, I guess, and I wanted to conserve more of my energy for camming.

Then I saw a man get on the train; he sat across and at a lateral remove from me. I saw a flash of intense blue eyes, and airy curls. I couldn’t get a handle on what it was, that made him so attractive to me, because no one part of his face stood out as the center of attention. It was a very compact, well-balanced face, he was also rather slight, I’d estimate no more than 5’9'' and quite possibly shorter. I tend to find darker haired men more attractive, so the fact of his blondness struck me as one worth investigating. Soon after he sat down he lifted his shirt a little to refasten his belt, revealing a nest of golden hairs emanating from his belly. I then noticed a hole in his jeans, a few inches away from the crotch seam, a hole colored in with bright red underwear beneath, like the red underwear they sell in Sunset Park around Lunar New Year. It was inadvertently slutty; he was simply and obviously absorbed, urgently, in a task: he took out a little green notebook, the color of construction equipment, and pulled out a laptop, and started typing vigorously. He placed his green notebook on the screen to transcribe what was written in it, and as he turned the pages, I could see that what he was transcribing blocks of prose, written in cursive. I suppose he looked like a software engineer, wearing a black pullover and medium blue washed jeans, but given that he was taking the train into South Brooklyn around 11:30 AM, I could presume he didn’t have a 9-5 job, and that he was quite possibly a ragged creative writer.

The man never pulled down his shirt, it remained a little bit above the first two or three inches of his belly, with its nest of golden hairs. He looked up at me once, we made eye contact, and twice, the second time, as I was smiling as I looked up from my phone; I had been texting my ex, A, about this man.

“He’s your DOUBLE,” I said. I was aware that much of the sweetness of my appreciation of this man’s beauty came from the fact that he reminded me of A. They were both small, blond, intense, and their littleness, to me, reflected the extent to which they were constitutionally driven to work hard at processing something symbolic. I imagined that they had spent far more time awake late at night during adolescence than the average taller man, reading and writing.

“There’s also a cute doggie on the train, he’s your TRIPLE,” I continued.

The dog was small, a spitz-type, white with a reddish mantle and reddish fur on the top of its head. Not so fluffy and grotesquely cute as a Pomeranian, but in the same family of physiognomies. It looked quite foxy, cute, and a little confused.

Caught in the polygon formed by the beautiful man, whom I’ll call my “Aphrodite of the Subway,” the cute dog, and Adam, whom I’ve become increasingly close to the more that I cam, I experienced the pleasure of its clean and geometrical form. It seemed that the beauty of the three together was what made each element beautiful, and that each intensified the other without having any knowledge of the other. The three entities were strangers to one another, but I had managed to bind them, I had managed to observe a wonderful mirroring.

My slovenly workaholic scurried off the train at Church Ave. He looked hesitantly through the windows for several seconds, as the train stopped in the station, and then hurried off the train, as if he had missed his stop and needed to backtrack now. He didn’t put his laptop away, and so he ran off the train in a funny little squat, before sitting against the wall of the subway platform to continue typing, or to put his computer in his backpack. I couldn’t see the end of it, but it was a magnificent exit. It was then that I decided to call him “Aphrodite of the Subway,” as if his exit into the tunnel with his laptop still out, just like the hole in his pants and the exposed midriff, were all slant references to Aphrodite’s birth from seafoam. Instead of being born of the sea, he was born of the subway.

And instead of representing fertility through his beauty, he represented the withering of man into the symbolic, or the endurance of man’s beauty through the gauntlet of work. Maybe I identified with that ardor for work, now that I’ve begun to work so hard on CB. But I still find it mysterious, this question of what drew me to the figure of the slight, beautiful man so wrapped up in transcription.

The spitz and its owner continued on with me to my station, and I was able to take some photos and videos of its funny, confused gaze, its lopsided tongue.

I had an excellent afternoon of camming afterwards. One of my viewers called me “Parthenope” in his tip notes during the last stream. I glowed in appreciation, and felt particularly connected to the idea of him as a bodily entity sending me something real in the form of words and tokens. Another high tipper with a very kind-looking face sent me more music recommendations, some of the minimalist classical music sort. Now I have multiple musical “plugs” coming from CB.

It’s funny being so often told that I’m beautiful or attractive online, because it makes looking at beautiful people offline a much more emphatic act for me. When I see someone beautiful, I’m often in transit, sometimes walking, sometimes biking, sometimes sitting on the train. I’m not paying to make them engage with me, and they’re not trying to get me to engage with them. But I think about how beauty can provoke the flow of currency, and I think, when facing the Aphrodite of the subway, isn’t beauty amazing? Isn’t it amazing to be impacted by a scene, with which I have no tangible involvement? Which might, to others, be entirely mundane or unnoticeable? Then I’m reminded of the notion that the engagement I provoke and receive on CB is really a sort of gift, a tribute, and not a transaction based in utility; we are really just celebrating beauty there.

My Aphrodite of the Subway elicited in me a real will to live, a real will to masturbate for hundreds of strangers online. I orgasmed twice on CB after I saw him, at the ends of my shows. I no longer thought of him, he had evaporated and remains here only as a context for reflection. The orgasms that I experienced this past week felt indubitably like the orgasms of “irl” sex: surprising, and the result of someone else’s involvement. Who am I coming for, I often think before I come on stream. It isn’t just the individual user who participates, it must be G-d, in a way, who is in everybody, and not a specific individual. Nevertheless, a little rolodex of names still comes to me as I ride the crescent zafu, a buckwheat-filled pillow typically used for meditation. I think of lovers I’ve specifically wanted to cum for, whom I’ve felt unquenchable desire for. But in the end I realize it is this abstract notion of a G-d who is indifferent to the final outcome; he is there to observe everything that happens, but he will not impose upon us a specific result.

Let me lastly mention that on Friday, I received first contact from a patient who was referred to me by my institute’s clinic. I wonder what it will be like to be “used” as what Lacanians call the subject-supposed-to-know. Stay tuned for more writing on the complementarity between sex work and psychoanalysis.