The Layoff

And so I was hurled into the shitcan, seeing briefly my parabola recreated in the chrome lid before it raised like a respectful cap to admit me into the cozy darkness of unemployment.

Waiting too Long to Eat

When you are hypoglycemic, waiting too long to eat is a form of intoxication. Both the experience of reality's gentle recession into that gray tunnel and its vivid happy return as you finally tackle your meal.
Perhaps you are in a meeting, putting in your oar, throwing in your tuppence, all the while in a certain corner of your mind you are perhaps dreaming of a certain tupperware containing a chilled salad -- of course you don't bring your lunch to work, that is too much trouble, but tupperware and tuppence must be thematically connected in your mind and you wrestle with this absurd problem while the conversation before you fades into the background. You take idiotic pleasure in batting away the balloons of hunger while solving impossible puzzles. You remember there is a latin phrase for "one of a kind" or perhaps "in a class of its own" but you cannot recall it. You begin to devise tricks and traps via which you can tease it away from your miserly brain. All the time you are conscious that most of your personality has left your control, and that at any moment you might say or do something absurd, or worse. You remember two incidents which fill you with delicious fear: once in a meeting you heard that a certain manager named Deborah was going to attend a meeting in the third-largest city in Texas and these elements fit into the title of famous pornographic film and despite yourself you uttered that title, were immediately suffused with terror, but nobody had noticed. And further back, in your schoolboy days, when you had missed lunch for some reason and then torn the top from your desk in a blood-sugar blackout and come awake under a ring of laughing faces, your hands held like claws before you.
That all of this madness, this tragedy, this grandeur, could be resolved with a baloney sandwich seems the best joke of all. And so you put that lunch off just a little bit longer...

SSRIs

I took SSRIs etc for a while. I never liked the side effects particularly that cottony sensation in the groin which no amount of stimulus could overcome, but I took them...
Goodness, I was a strapping young alcoholic back then and I cranked and flailed to the very limit of my strength but nothing resulted and I would be left starting down at that crimson cyclops, my own miniature Bartleby who despite the immense pressures I had brought to bear would still prefer not to.

Bernard's Problem

And now, as I a prepare to disrobe, I should return to an idea at which I hinted long ago; this malformation of my forelimbs, the twisted musculature of my forearms, had another significant effect on my development. As it was nearly impossible for me to grip anything tightly for more than a few seconds, as I was unable to sustain any task that required digital manipulation, I had always been frustrated in my attempts at self-pleasure and in consequence my penis, which is after all a muscle, suffered from arrested development. When the rest of the boys were putting their male organs through vigorous nightly workouts my penis lay there unmolested, pressing with timid, tremulous sensitivity into the sheets, seeking blindly someone to thrash and cuff it into a hot plash of surrender. I won’t go into the various ways I tried to pleasure myself. Some were quite ingenious. Fruits, bottles, lengths of hose, an electric motor from a belt sander, all of these and more were employed in my quest. I was occasionally successful, but the preparations were complex and I was in constant danger of discovery as all my methods involved the noisome and frantic thrusting of the hips into some stationary object. I walked through my days plagued by a double consciousness; on the one hand there was ordinary life with its breakfasts, lunches, classroom bells, homework, and so on. On the other, there was this constant sense of penile retardation. I fantasized about some insatiable whore who would put my member through intensive remediation with her quick hot hands. I cast jealous glances at the generous portions of hairy meat which my classmates spilled out before the urinals. Whereas their young, slack monsters twitched and spat at the gridded drain near the floor my alabaster nubbin, the size and tensility of a door stopper, fired its steam at a right angle to my body where it exploded against the ceramic; a shower of rebounding droplets tickled my hand (whose involvement was purely decorative) and wet my trousers.
I sometimes dreamed that my brainwaves could mash together a golem who would take me in her clayey clutches and grind me into orgasmic death. I pressed myself against telephone poles, the cool metal of hallway lockers, the rug on my bedroom floor. If longing, if absolute fixation, could bring some event into reality, then I would have been rescued by some quick-fingered angel, and, as life with its zest for a good joke will do, I was presented with what appeared to be this very deliverance. I was in the 10th grade. Standing outside a Taco Bell, waiting for mother to finish her meal – she’d developed an obsession with chalupas – when a sky-blue Buick Regal pulled up next to me, its engine chuffing, and a tinted window disclosed two middle-aged women in a haze of incense and alcohol fumes. They were still eating; the passenger was attempting to bring a stray shred of lettuce into her mouth. The driver asked me if I liked to “scrump” and when I began to stutter she laughed and told me to get into the car. My scalp prickled with terror and joy. I looked around, determined that my mother was still absorbed in her meal, and then dove into the leatherette backseat. I was given a wine cooler. Then the passenger, a big woman with long frosted ringlets, turned to look at me. She wiped her flat, purple mouth with the back of her hand and then, with a voluptuous sigh, thrust a stippled leg over the seat. In another moment she was on top of me.
“Do you like to scrump?” she said.
I could only nod my head. I am afraid my excitement got the best of me and I was finished almost before she started. This development prompted an explosion of ribald laughter inside that parked, smoky car. I feared that I would be put out. I begged for another chance and the woman, with a kindly, gap-toothed smile, shrugged and, after wiping herself with a Taco Bell napkin, remounted. The ladies – my date’s name was Roberta Brennan and her friend was Jolene Mattheson – declared themselves impressed at my stamina and said that very few men or boys could have managed to do that three times in less than ten minutes. I begged them to meet me again here at the Taco Bell or anywhere, I begged them to give me their phone numbers before they put me out of the car and Roberta finally relented with an indulgent smile, saying that she could meet me here in a week, same time. I came back for three months, rain or shine. I waited, but they that Buick Regal never returned. Even now when I see that model rolling down the street a hand squeezes my heart.