I like work: it fascinates me.

There is not much in the world more pleasing than a good oxymoron. Even hackneyed examples - military intelligence, folk art, social science, popular culture - are worth a smile. Sometimes oxymorons rise to the level of art - perhaps the best instance here is the etiolated richness of The Who's '5.15'. But some oxymorons are so deeply embedded in the orthodox conceptual scheme that they pass by entirely unnoticed - inconsistencies that are so central to a culture that it is impossible to imagine that culture surviving once the inconsistency is revealed and addressed. The culture therefore moves to restore the self-contradiction to its central place, shedding what is incidental, but retaining what is essential. And that is how, forty years on, the sexual liberation movement has ended up as a struggle to win for gays and lesbians the right to enter into the same stultifying 1950s sit-com set-up that the 1960s were supposed to free us from altogether.

The oxymoron occupying me at the moment, however, is 'work ethic'. I think there used to be just one of these, the Protestant one, and though Protestants who espoused it were admired for their industry, they were also regarded as in the grip of a rather particular, and peculiar, set of values. But in the United States (and sadly, this is true increasingly in other countries as well) this work ethic is now construed ecumenically and even secularly. Work is an ethical activity, underpinned by ethical motivations, hedged about with ethical constraints. Someone who works to live rather than lives to work is a dangerous amoralist.

If life cannot be all work and no play, then the work ethic requires that play be turned into work, a transformation that is almost complete. The gym is not a place to play, but to workout; lying out on the Sheep Meadow, I can work on my tan. Sex is one of the last holdouts, a site of play. This blog records my playtimes, times when I am playing with other people sexually. Nothing is achieved, no growth is accomplished, the world is not altered or enriched or bettered by this play. After the play is over, things are just as they were before, for playing (like philosophy) leaves everything as it is. I think it is for this reason, and not to do with that other (perhaps allied) oxymoron, sexual morality, that the acts and emissions recorded here incite distaste, disgust, and disapproval. All play and no work makes Jack a dangerous boy. I do not particularly mind working when I have to, but I do not think that people who really enjoy their work are luckier than I am. Poor sods, they work harder than they need to, and for longer, instead of spending time playing. The response that, because they love their work, they are playing while they work, is nearly always crap. Banking or lawyering is not playing, because it is not pointless, as play is. Derek Jeter doesn't work at all, though I am sure he works out a lot; he is paid to play. If I could be paid to play, that would be great, but it wouldn't make my playtimes times when I was at work.

Work gets its mucky hands everywhere, spoiling play and pleasure, and the US is undoubtedly the worst place in the world in this regard. I know of no other country where a waiter or waitress will ask, of a plate of food that is not entirely consumed, whether the diner is 'still working on that'. No, I am not still working on it, I never was working on it; if I was working on it, wouldn't I be getting paid? You might as well ask me, towards the end of three hours with D at the Kew Motor Inn, when I take a little break from fucking and am just idly fingering her ass: 'Are you still working on that?'

One reason why sex is limitless is that it is not work. The job is never finished because it is never begun; it is not a job at all. Because it is not work, effort is unregulated. Physical exertion in play is a delight. In work, while it may be enjoyable, exertion is directed towards an end. In sex there are no ends, and if there are goals, they are like goals in soccer - occasions for cheering and uproar, perhaps even a way of keeping score (in which case, if it is orgasms we are counting, D usually crushes me 10 - 2).

The playfulness of sex is under constant assault from that oxymoron, sexual morality, but also from the insistence that physical intimacy and emotional intimacy are correlated and connected. This is not a stupid idea, unlike sexual morality. But it is nevertheless used continually to lift sex out of the category of play and place it somewhere else, where it can then be regulated by therapists and counsellors, or by those with whom (hey! check out the 'whom') one is emotionally intimate. Playing with another person is necessarily intimate, and trying to find someone to play with, asking them to play, requires courage, and can be very difficult. It is easy to read Craigslist's 'Casual Encounters' as a vast playground where the kids are trying to find others to play the games that they like to play, or trying to join games already in progress, or at least to keep loneliness and exclusion at bay by asking, again and again: 'Can I play with you?' And like any playground, there are mean girls and popular boys, kids who get off on saying 'No', and kids who are just hopeless and you don't want to end up on your team even though you know it is not their fault and you feel sorry for them.

I enjoy playing, though sexual play is one of the few kinds of play that I do enjoy. I also find ways to play while working - the other day, for example, I wore D's thong to work. I can't think how I could easily work while playing, given my kind of play - I don't think, for example, that anyone would pay to watch me fuck D (but if anyone is out there who would, do get in touch). The trick in life is to reduce the worktime and increase the playtime, not because work is bad or evil or pointless, but because work, unlike play, is not done for its own sake.

Fortunately for me, most people do not put play ahead of work, as the world might cease to function if my advice was followed. I am not sure that makes it bad advice, but it does at least put a question mark beside it. Meanwhile, I can play hard, and others can work hard, and it averages out nicely.

[Ok, too much thinking and not enough fucking in this post - I will try to redress the balance in the next.]