Andy's Blog

WOW! I KNOW! It took me a long time to wrap this one up. And I stopped in a particularly awkward place for three months. But it is a good thing I stopped when I did, because I would have just wrapped this sucker up and moved on and it would have sucked.

I work crazy hours normally, and November & December are the worst. So right after our Christmas Eve service (we are talking 12:10 am on Christmas morning), I left for Indiana. For the next two weeks I did very little besides hang out with friends, play with Jadyn, and relax. It was great. I also picked up the new book of one of my favorite writers, Chuck Klosterman, entitled Chuck Klosterman IV. As always, it was incredibly insightful, particularly to the conversation we are having about pornography. I call this, this Steven Tyler’s Surrender:

In 2002, I interviewed Aerosmith's Steven Tyler about drugs and groupies, and he said something along the lines of, "Having sex with the same woman a thousand times is way more interesting than having a thousand one-night stands with a thousand different women, because those one-night stands are all the same."...Every aging rock god (except maybe Gene Simmons) eventually comes to this same conclusion; in fact, anyone (famous or not) who decides to get married is unknowingly agreeing with Steven Tyler. At some point, most people decide that sleeping with the same person improves the quality of their life, even though it eliminates romantic choice. We all unconsciously understand this. However, nobody consciously believes this is true until after the fact. If you ask any single man if he'd prefer to (a) have sex with a thousand different women or (b) have sex with one woman a thousand times, he will always stake option "a", even though he knows this decision is virtually guaranteed to make him feel awkward and alone.

Chuck Klosterman IV (page 210-211)

I could pretty much just let you read that, and it would say enough. But I am too stupid to stop there. This communicates what I was talking about in the previous post way better than what I said. And here's why: Steven Tyler's reputation. If anyone should know the "glory" of sleeping with thousands of different women, it would be Steven Tyler. But here, you have an aged rocker, admitting something so universally true, and so reputatiously alarming, that there is little you can say to disagree.

I think porn is like this. As I have admitted earlier in this post, I have seen thousands of images of porn. And I agree with Steven that, in the end, they are all the same. Really porn is just the allure of the interesting, but in actuality it is pretty dull and only alludes to the truly interesting, a healthy, fun, erotic, monogamous relationship with the same person for many, many years.

The question is going to be, am I going to be like Steven in continuing to feel akward and alone, or am I going to strive to live my life in full realization and trust that the God who created sex, knows how best to "do it" and surrender my life to Him.

Still to come:
Sat - What God has to say and steps to avoid using porn

P.S. I included the date of this post back in the August "week" so that when people read it in the archive, they won't notice there was 3-month gap between posts (until they read this of course).

P.P.S. For more incredible observations from Chuck Klosterman, and my theological insight related to it, click here