December 23rd -- Happy Birthday to Me!

Three days from now? The celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

One day from now (aka “tomorrow”)? The celebration of the birth of Zeitgeist the Clown.

Why December 23rd?

Mom was a good Catholic girl. No sex before marriage, and all that. Well, almost.

I’ve been told that I wasn’t born prematurely. I’ve been told that I wasn’t born late. Which means I was born pretty much when they were expecting. My birth took place just a little over eight months after my parents’ wedding. And if I wasn’t born prematurely, then I was conceived before rings and ‘I do’s were exchanged. Hmm.

The most interesting piece of information uncovered while ‘doing the math’ regarding my conception? I was born nine months – nine months to the day – after Dad’s birthday. I think I know what Mom got him that year.

Yeah, But Two Days Before Christmas?

Okay, two days before Christmas is an absolutely stupid time to have a birthday. Sure, it could be worse. I could have been born ON Christmas. Or on Christmas Eve. (I’ve actually got an aunt who was born on Christmas day. She says she doesn’t recommend it.)

Two days before Christmas (just one day before Christmas eve), everyone is far too busy to really pay close attention to my birthday. There are still Christmas presents to wrap, last minute shopping to do, baking to finish up, and so on and so forth all the way down the incomplete holiday checklist.

This sucked beyond description when I was a kid. I’ve never had a real birthday party. And the number of gift-wrapped objects I’ve received accompanied by the proclamation, “It’s a birthday AND a Christmas present!” is just staggering. Is it the size of two gifts? No. The complexity? The value? No. Does it make me feel like my birthday was an afterthought? Yes.

(And don’t even get me started on birthday presents wrapped in Christmas paper.)

Status Changes

I know, I know. Ever since I started this blog, I’ve done nothing but bitch and moan about the fact that I’m a 37 year old virgin. I’m a 37 year old virgin, and I desperately want that fact to no longer be true. Well, tomorrow that changes. But it changes the wrong fucking way!

I wanted to lose my virginity. Not my thirtysevenness. (Huh. Spellchecker didn’t complain about ‘thirtysevenness’. I hadn’t known that was actually a word.) The point of all my bitching was that I wanted to be 37 and sexually active.

Now I’m going to be a 38 year old virgin, and I’ll have to start my bitching all over again. Sigh. A guy just can’t catch a break.

WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE HAVE SEX WITH ME SO I CAN GET THIS OVER WITH ALREADY?

Yikes.

In Good Company (More or Less)

A long, long time ago, I discovered that soap opera mainstay Susan Lucci (Erica Kane on “All My Children”) was born on December 23rd.

Since then, I’ve discovered this thing called the in-ter-net, and it has informed me of other people who share my birthday. Harry Shearer, for one. Actor, comedian, writer, musician, radio personality, and best known – at least among the people in the circles I travel in – as one of the voice artists contribuing heavily to the supporting cast of the Simpsons. Harry Shearer provides the voices of Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, Mr. Burns, Smithers, Lenny, Reverend Lovejoy, Otto, Kent Brockman, and many others.

Les Moonves (president of CBS, and one of the architects of the merger of the CBS-owned UPN and Warner Bros’ The WB into the CW Network) is also a December 23rd birthday boy. As is Eddie Vedder, giving my birthday some much needed alternative/grunge cred.

[Okay, my spellchecker has no problem with ‘Moonves’, either. Or ‘in-ter-net’. As a test, I decided to type in ‘glorpavetch’. And it seems to be fine with that, too. Now I know that glorpavetch isn’t a real word. I think that my spellchecker may be on the fritz. So please forgive any glaring typos in this post.]

And, since Akihito, the current emperor of Japan also came into the world on December 23rd, my birthday is celebrated as a national Japanese holiday.

On a less famous, but more personal note, Penny (of Sue, Rabbit, Penny, Dot, and CJ fame) was born the same day I was. Dad had an old fishing buddy who was born two days before Christmas like rest of the people on this list. And I know yet another guy who shares my birthday (a friend of a friend – an annoying little weasel whom I personally can’t stand to be around).

Theoretically (and ignoring the fact that people fuck more at certain times of the year and less at others), as many as 1/365th of the population could share my birthday. That’s a lot of cake. And I probably won’t get a single slice.

Attempts at Relocation

As stated earlier, two days before Christmas, everybody is far too busy getting ready for Christmas to stop and be bothered with my birthday. I have, therefore, spent most of my adult life trying to get my birthday relocated.

Not the actual birthday so much as the observance of it. I don’t have the necessary technology (at minimum I’d need a time machine) to change the date that I turned a year older on each year. But I figure if Washington and Lincoln can move the observance of their birthdays to a an always-on-Monday ‘President’s Day’, and the government can similarly shift around the observance of certain holidays, then I should be able to observe my December 23rd birthday in early August. Right? Right.

I finally got some agreement on this from people last year, and celebrated my first August observance of my birthday. Both of my siblings agreed it was a good idea, Dad agreed to play along, Zorch had no problem with it. Everything seemed on track.

Come the actual day, my sister and her fiancé (then boyfriend) took me out to dinner and a movie. Then gave me a present. No one else showed up. No one else participated.

When December 23rd rolled around, Dad got me a present. Some of the other people (who had completely ignored my early August attempt at a birthday ‘observance’) now ignored my actual birthday as well, saying, “Well, I thought you’d moved your birthday to August?”

(Johnny Dirtnap didn’t get me a birthday present in either August or December. No Christmas present, either. Not even his old standby ‘combo gift’. But, come to think of it, he hasn’t actually gotten me anything for my birthday or Christmas since he died back in ’95. I wonder if it’s something I said?)

Similar crap happened this year when I tried it again. It will be interesting to see if anyone bothers to try celebrating my real birthday at all.

In attempting to move my birthday, I seem to have ended up splitting it into two less-than-half-apiece birthdays. Weird. (I just wish I got a cake on both dates.)

Birthday Wish(es)

Having a birthday this month means that I’ll get to make a birthday wish at Darklady’s New Year’s Eve party (assuming that I’m able to find a ride – none of my usual transportation providers are able to accommodate me, and thus far, I’ve been unable to find a carpool or ride-share heading in that direction.)

On the one hand, you’re supposed to go to Darklady’s parties to enjoy yourself, and not with the expectation of hooking up with someone for dirty sexy fun. On the other hand, I have obsessive compulsive disorder, and my brain won’t let go of the notion that if I make the right wish I’ll have the night of my life.

I’ll have fun either way. At the very least I’ll get to watch exhibitionist type people having sex. A live action version of porn. But man-oh-man . . . I want to BE one of those people that night.

I don’t think that I know what my exact wish is yet – mainly because I want too much. I want to lose my virginity. But I have my doubts about anyone stepping up to fulfill that wish, even if I made it.

What do I want? I want to fuck my first pussy. I want to finger a woman (or women) – fore and aft. I want my cock sucked (ideally by a woman’s mouth, but I’m not picky). I want my ass fucked (real cock or strap-on). I want to pinch a woman’s nipples until she can’t take it any more. I want to write naughty things on naked girls with a magic marker. I want to suck on some bare female toes again. I want a woman to give me a reverse birthday spanking (that’s the one where she bares HER ass for the birthday boy to spank however many times he is years old). I want to be the the center of my own little vortex of debauchery.

I’ve sent Darklady an email asking for advice on picking my birthday wish, and (as I sit here writing this post on the 19th) I’m waiting to hear back. The closest that I’ve been able to come to a workable ‘wish’ is “I want to gain some sexual experience”, which would really cover any and everything that a potential partner would be interested in granting me, wishwise.

Year 39

Tomorrow I’ll be 38 years old, meaning that I will have lived for 38 whole years. Which also means that I’ll now begin living year 39. Having a birthday eight days before the end of the year sort of renders the whole ‘New Year’s’ thing meaningless. Why bother celebrating the purchase of a new calendar when your whole life just advanced into a new year?

I’ve always had a problem with the concept of the ‘New Year’s Resolution’, and I think it was because deep down, I thought it was a concept that belonged linked to the anniversary of one’s birth rather than January 1st. It took me quite a while to actually realize that, though.

Back in November, in a post entitled “The Top Ten List”, I talked a little bit about Uberlists. Specifically about how after having put together my usual Uberlist for the year, I went ahead and put together a second Uberlist for my Zeitgeist the Clown persona, consisting almost entirely of goals having to do with sex.

Upon it’s creation just prior to New Year’s 1995, the original Uberlist was “95 Things to Do in 1995”. It was 99 things to do in 1999, 100 in 2000, 101 in 2001 and so on. This upcoming Uberlist will be “109 Things to Do in 2009”.

Well, last year I discovered that 108 sex-type things is a ridiculous goal for a chronically ill, almost completely shut-in virgin. I pared it down to a Top Ten List (only one of which I’ve managed to check off so far), and left it at that.

But now I’ve started thinking about it again. I’m probably going to do my regular boring non-sex based Uberlist that I’ve done for the past few years. But I want to put together a second Uberlist for Zeitgeist again. Only this time, I think that I might have found a way to make it somewhat more managable. The trick? Ignore the calendar year. Focus instead on my age. “39 Things to Do in Year 39:”

#1? Lose Virginity. I’ll get back to you about the other 38 items in a later post.

Incommunicado

Okay. The other interesting piece of information about tomorrow is that it’s the last day that the library (the source of my internet access) is open until January 5th.

Like I said, it’s the 19th as I’m actually writing this. The hope is to get several more posts written for auto-posting between now and the 23rd, so that the blog continues to bring you new material throughout the rest of the winter holiday. Whether or not that actually happens is anybody’s guess.

But the plan is that I’ll continue to blather on and on via autoposting throughout, and actually be back with you . . . well, not ‘live’, but at least more close-to-presstime on January 5th.

So despite the fact that the posts hopefully aren’t going away, I’m taking this moment (Dec 22nd, not the 19th) to say, “Goodbye, and I’ll see you next year! Happy Holidays! And a Happy Birthday to Me!”

Dirty Old Man Claus (Kinky Advent, Week IV)

And here we are. The final burst of Kinky Advent-y goodness. Week four starts off with the question . . .

Who Is Santa Claus?

Most people consider Santa Claus to be a children’s character. And in the traditional sense, you don’t really assign sex lives to children’s characters. Of course, a lot of people consider comic books to be strictly for children, and I spent all of the previous post talking about a comic book superhero’s penis, so . . . ‘Time Delay’ is not bound by tradition.

Most people are wrong, anyhow. These people who dump Santa Claus stories strictly on the children’s shelves? Very short-sighted. (And as for these lamebrains who haven’t picked up a comic in 40 years and think that all comics are for kids – I just fear that some doddering old grandfather is going to stop off somewhere to buy some funnybooks for his cute little grandchildren, buying an issue of Donald Duck, an issue of Spider-Man, and an issue of something written by Warren Ellis.)

The main thing about Santa is that, as a character, he is completely untethered. There’s no copyright symbol behind his name. No trademark notice. He’s not a corporate-owned character. He’s public domain.

And unlike some of the more classic characters that pretty much anyone can tell stories about these days, he didn’t originate from a single author. Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s brainchild. Tarzan was Edgar Rice Burroughs’. The Land of Oz was the creation of L. Frank Baum. Sherlock Holmes was all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. For most of these characters and mythoi, you can look back to the source material and gauge some kind of author intent when attempting to craft new tales. [And if any of the above mentioned characters aren’t actually public domain, well then . . . whoops. That’s what happens when I’m writing a post at home at 10:38 pm after the library closed at 5:00. No library, no internet. No internet, no wikipedia. No wikipedia, no fact-checking.]

Santa doesn’t have this single origination point. Santa’s got certain traditions. General character traits and tendencies. But there’s no such thing as the ‘official’ Santa Claus story.

Sure, Santa Claus has a basis in reality, being to some degree a fictionalized version of the 4th century Bishop Nicholas of Myra (later canonized as Saint Nicholas). Of course, he’s also partially based on Odin, All-Father of the Gods from Norse Mythology. He’s also based on things that might sell products in December. And things that rhyme (or that facilitate rhyme). Okay, Santa Claus is a ridiculous mish-mash and hodge-podge of all kinds of this and that.

The answer to the question ‘who is Santa Claus?’ is in the eye of the beholder. Or the mouth of the storyteller. Maybe both. Possibly neither.

Which basically means: Anything goes.

Does Santa Have a Sex Life?

Does Santa have a sex life? Well, for the sake of Mrs. Claus, I certainly hope so!

Seriously, though . . . he’s usually depicted as a healthy (if a little overweight) adult male. Either an older gentleman, or just one whose hair has gone white. I’ve seen no reason why he wouldn’t be sexual. (And even if Santa is an old man, this is the era of Viagra, so . . . )

Anything goes. Do you want Santa to have a sex life? Then he does. Would you prefer that he didn’t? Then he doesn’t. (Although if that’s your view on the subject, you probably shouldn’t read the rest of this post. Come back tomorrow, I’ll be talking about something else.)

The next question is: If you want Santa to have a sex life, then just how kinky would you like it?

I, personally, have my own take on Santa Claus. But I’m not going to share that here. My goal is to talk about the kind of things that you can do with the Santa Claus mythos – sexually – and if I start giving my stuff as examples, the next thing I know that’s all I’ll be writing about here is MY version of Santa.

I bring it up only to say that my version, my preference for Santa’s erotic life does not in any way, shape, or form include or condone any sort of sexual interest in children. I wouldn’t dream of sullying Mr. Claus’ good name and reputation by suggesting that his interest in children is anything other than pure of heart and noble of intent. Not to mention the fact that pedophilia is on my very short list of THINGS THAT ARE UNDENIABLY WRONG.

That disclaimer out of the way, let’s see what we can do about sexing up (and kinking up) the man in the red suit, shall we?

Components and Aspects of a Dirty Old Man

Santa Claus could quite easily be considered a dirty old man. The seeds of this exist in some of his classic attributes and trappings.

The lists are a big giveaway. Who keeps a list of people divided by whether they’re naughty or nice? It’s like a little black book with stars next to the names of the girls who put out.

Some of the classic illustrations of Santa from the early 1900s show a telescope in his home or the workshop. The intention of the artist was that this is where Santa would sit while making the lists. This magic piece of peeping tom equipment was powerful enough to see anywhere in the world. And when I say anywhere, I’m not just talking about distance, but also through little obstacles like doors and walls.

People write letters to Santa, letters that were half virtue résumé, and half wish list. That’s the breakdown of the letters written by good little boys and girls, anyway. What about the naughty people? Did they not bother to write? Did they write in and lie (knowing full well that Santa knew better)? Or did they write in and attempt to bargain? Sweet young things on the naughty list (just turned 18 high school seniors) writing in to Santa saying, “I know I haven’t been very good, but I really want such-and-such for Christmas. My dad cheats on my mom because she won’t suck his cock anymore. Does Mrs. Claus still give you blowjobs? My boyfriend says that I give great head. Want me to show you? If you stop by on Christmas eve to put the things I want in my stocking, I could show you some amazing things that I can do with my tongue . . .”

And, “Come here and sit on Santa’s lap” kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

What Are Santa’s Kinks and Perversions?

Age Play

As I stated before – and I can’t actually emphasize this enough – Santa’s sex life does not involve children. Now that I’ve reiterated that, I’d like to say that Santa is all about bringing joy to children. He’s a big jolly guy. And there are very few adult humans in the traditional background characters of the Santa Claus mythos. Ignoring the elves, the flying reindeer, and the occasional talking snowman, the majority of Santa’s interaction with humans is with children. And – at heart – Santa is just a big goofy kid himself.

So when it’s time to strip down and climb into bed with an equally naked Mrs. Claus, it seems to me that age play would be a natural fetish for Santa to participate in. Santa and his wife sitting on the bed, playing with each other like children do. Non-sexual toys and games as a sort of pre-foreplay leading into I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Which leads into other games of exploration and a lighthearted and youthful rendition of lovemaking.

And then the next, semi-related question is this: Does Santa have an open marriage? If Santa and the Missus are swingers, then Santa’s likely to see some age play in some of the other partners that he encounters. Most people who come face-to-face with Santa Claus would probably react to him in the only frame of reference that they have. Which is from their childhood. Which is a framework that Santa’s got to be used to by now. When Santa is at an orgy, I’m pretty sure he never asks, “Hey lady, could you please ride me cowgirl style.” I think that the actual question is, “So, little girl, would you like to sit on Santa’s ‘lap’?”

Voyeruism

“He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” My friends and I would sometimes finish that verse, “He watches while you shower and it makes him masturbate.” Not an exact rhyme, but it was dirty, so what did we care?

Going back to that big old peeping tom telescope I mentioned, Santa Claus IS a voyeur. Regardless of whether or not he’s aroused by voyeurism. So if we’re going to sexualize Santa, we might as well let him get off on it when he spies naked adults romping around. Or a single naked adult masturbating. Or while he watches you shower.

Foot/Stocking Fetishism

Santa is going to bring you presents on Christmas eve. Just stay in bed if you hear me in your house. Oh, and leave your stockings where I can find them.

Yowza.

What more need be said?

Spanking

Coal for the naughty girls and boys. A bundle of switches for the really naughty girls and boys. According to those traditions, Santa condones spanking as punishment. But does he also provide (or possibly receive) it for pleasure? He and the Missus are usually depicted as being the sort that would have nice plump buttocks just begging for a sensual impact of some sort.

Toys

Toys. Santa has got anywhere from a workshop to a series of workshops to a factory or factories producing toys. If Santa’s workshop can produce kid’s toys, they I’m sure it can produce adult’s toys as well. Even if your version of Santa only hands out handcrafted wooden toys. The modern plastic, silicone, and jelly dildo is the evolutionary descendents of the stone, wooden, and leather olisbo. Wooden toy? Leather toy? Easy for a handcrafted-style workshop. Same with anal beads. Nipple clamps. All sorts of fun things for kink-minded adults.

Wax Play (and other Festive Fetishes)

Down south of the North Pole, we decorate our houses for Christmas. Wreaths, ornaments, trees, candles, and so on. I’ve often wondered if these are year-round decorations where Santa lives. And if there are decorative Christmas candles in the Claus’ bedroom, if Santa ever tips one over to drip hot wax down on his wife’s erect nipple. (Or if she drips wax on him.)

Over the last three Sundays, I’ve talked about all kinds of different fusions of kink and Christmas. Wax play was one, but there were a bunch, everything from decorative cutting to food play to suspension bondage to blindfolds and sensation play and a whole bunch of others.

Any and all of that could be stuff that Santa’s into. Not even necessarily the specific fetishes themselves, but maybe just the Christmasy festive aspects of them.

Fisting

Santa’s job requires him to fit his big old body into tight little spaces. Fat man, little chimney. Does that convert into a sexual desire to stick other large parts of him into tight spaces? I don’t know, but given that I’m turned on by the thought of fisting a woman, I’d certainly like to think so. “How does Santa fit down the chimney?” On the middle school playground, the answer to that question was always, “Vaseline”.

Santa’s Got Fetishes All His Own

And then there are probably things that Santa is into that we can’t even conceive of.

He can deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls in the world in one night. Figure that ‘one night’ means from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am, and take into account that every time he travels west into a new time zone it gives him an additional hour on the clock. That gives him a ‘one night’ that’s something like 31 hours long. It still doesn’t seem long enough for the kind of massive delivery run that he’s doing.

Which means that there’s more to it than we understand. Some kind of magic, or technology, or mutant power, or combination of the above that allows him to get it done within the timeframe allotted. Something to make him move faster. Something to make time move slower. Something to make both happen at once, maybe. Who knows? All I know is that when I sit around daydreaming about having time travel powers, more often than not those daydreams turn into sex fantasies. There’s so much a dirty minded individual can do with control over time. And if Santa has even limited control over time, what kind of time-based fantasies have been building up in his dirty little mind as a result of it?

“He knows when you’ve been good or bad, so be good for goodness sake.” How does he know? Does he have an incredible espionage network gathering information? Or does he have psychic powers? Does he know your good/bad status simply by looking at you? Huh. What kind of weird sex desires would that ability bring out in an individual? I can’t even begin to guess.

Santa Claus is sometimes presented as existing as an immortal being. What does immortal mean? Unable to die of natural causes? Unable to die at all? Unable to age? Unable to get sick? Depending on how immortal he is, Santa might not have to worry about things like STDs. (And if Santa’s an immortal, wouldn’t the Missus be, too?) What kind of kinky sex would stem from immortality?

Santa Claus – Sex Symbol

The man doesn’t just have a sex life, he’s an actual sex symbol. Which explains all of those guys on street corners wearing the suit and ringing the bell. All the guys in the shopping malls posing for photos with squirming, crying kids on their laps. Everyone else who puts on the uniform and performs some sort of seasonal duty each December.

They’ll tell you that they’re Santa. If they call you on it, they’ll admit that they’re really just one of Santa’s helpers, authorized to act in his stead. But if you want the truth . . . these Santa impersonators are just after some of the Santa fetishists that are horny for the big man with the sack of toys.

And if I had a Santa suit, I’d be right out there with them, trying to pick up a hot little Mrs. Claus wannabe for some Festive Fetish Frolicking.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Yes, Brodie, There Is An Orange Rock Dork

Once upon a time (1897), there was a little girl named Virginia. Virginia was eight years old, and having a crisis of faith, because her friends had been telling her that Santa Claus wasn’t real. So, she asked her dad if Santa was real. And her dad – as the story goes – wanted to neither lie to his little girl nor break her heart. So he passed the buck. To the New York Sun newspaper.

He told his daughter that she should write a letter to the Sun, asking them whether or not Santa was real, and then watch the paper for a response. Because if it’s printed in the Sun, then it’s true. So she wrote them a letter, and was eventually rewarded by an editorial (down near the very bottom of the editorial page) with the now-famous headline, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus”.

Now that we’re closing in on Christmas, I thought that maybe I should start off a post with a similar headline. “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” is an oft-referenced, oft-parodied piece of Christmas lore, and I think it only appropriate to commandeer it’s magic for my hinky little sex blog.

Fortunately, there’s been this piece (essay, column, blog post, what-have-you) that I’ve been wanting to write for years now, with a working title that parodies the “Yes, Virginia” headline. My intention was to create a piece in the tradition of Larry Niven’s classic essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” (wherein he examines the reasons why Superman could never had sex with Lana Lang, Lois Lane, or any normal human female). Only my subject matter hails not from the mythos of DC comics, but instead from their competition, Marvel.

The question I want to address has been asked by comic book fans since the dawn of time (well, more accurately, since 1961). It’s been asked on playgrounds, in treehouses, in comic shops, in (illicit) smoke-filled dorm rooms, in chat rooms, on message boards, and other likely places. But the most famous occurrence of the question was in Kevin Smith’s 1995 film “Mallrats”.

At one point in the movie, comic book fanboy Brodie Bruce (played by Jason Lee) meets Stan Lee – creator (more accurately co-creator, but that’s a tangent I don’t want to go off on here) of Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, and countless others, as well as being the original architect of Marvel Universe – in a shopping mall. In between gushing bursts of hero worship, Brodie asks some of the questions that he has always wanted answers to. (Him and countless other perverted little fanboys.) Including this one:

“The Thing – Is his dork made out of orange rock like the rest of his body?”

Stan Lee, not really wanting to get into it, answers by simply saying, “It’s a superhero secret.” What a cop-out.

Well, just like the New York Sun in 1897, I’m here to give a definitive answer to the question. And my answer is, “YES, BRODIE, THERE IS AN ORANGE ROCK DORK”.

The (Sexual) History of Benjamin J. Grimm

Before examining the Thing’s sex organs, post cosmic irradiation, let’s take a quick look at his sex life, pre cosmic irradiation. Ben Grimm grew up in poverty on Yancy Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His older brother Dan – whom Ben idolized – was the leader of the Yancy Street Gang. Ben snuck out of the house one night to follow Dan, only to watch him get killed during a fight with another gang. Ben later joined the Yancy Streeters, and eventually became their leader, just as Dan had once been.

Ben’s parents were killed in a car accident when he was still a teenager, and he was given into the custody of his Aunt Alyce and Uncle Jake. They lived uptown, which forced Ben to move, and abdicate his position in the Yancy Street Gang. It took awhile, but Ben’s new guardians finally won him over, and convinced him to shape up and try to make something of himself. He decided to finish high school, and discovered his football talents in the process – talents which earned him a college scholarship.

In college, he quickly became the school’s star quarterback. (College was also where he first met and roomed with Reed Richards – Ben’s future Fantastic Four teammate “Mr. Fantastic”.)

After college, Ben joined the military, becoming a pilot. He first flew combat missions, but then shifted from there to test piloting, becoming one of the best in the Air Force. Eventually, he entered the astronaut training program.

And, after being trained to pilot a spaceship, Ben got a phone call from his old pal Reed Richards, who was building his own spaceship and wanted Ben to fly it. (Originally, in the 1961 version, it was to have been the first manned expedition to the moon. The story has since been updated several times, and – last I heard – is now intended to have been the first manned flight to Mars. Although at one point in the late 80s, the original flight was to have been mankind’s first interstellar jaunt.)

This leads us to the origin of the Fantastic Four, but I’m not ready to jump right into that just yet.

Street gang leader. High school football star. College football star. Hotshot test pilot. Astronaut. When I look at this list of occupations, I see one commonality. (Well, two if you include the obvious “Positions Once Held By Ben Grimm”.) That commonality? Easy access to pussy.

I’m sure that gang leader doesn’t really scream ‘sexy’ to everyone. But it does to people living the whole street gang life. Fiction always seems to depict the leader of the gang as having his either his own girlfriend (or even just moll), or sexual access to any of the girls affiliated with the gang. I have to assume that as leader of the Yancy Street Gang, Ben was having regular sex. Then he left that when he moved, and refocused on high school . . . to become a football star.

Can you say, ‘cheerleader’? Again, not necessarily in reality, but definitely in fiction, high school football stars (especially the quarterback) are just rolling in cheerleader pussy. And once the full ride kicks in and they become college football stars, they start getting the college girls.

In college, Ben met Alynn Cambers, who became his first steady girlfriend. We don’t know at what point he met her, so I’m going to assume that there were plenty of college cheerleaders, drunk sorority girls, and friendly party chicks that he went through before finding her. I couldn’t find my copy of “The Thing” vol. 1, issue #2 (although how much of a geek am I that I know what title and issue number her story was in from memory) to reread all the details, but she dropped out of college to go to Hollywood to chase the dream of becoming a movie star. Successfully, I might add. When she did, Ben followed her with an engagement ring, and proposed. But she turned him down. She loved him – but not as much as the lure of stardom. I don’t know when during Ben’s college years that happened, but I’m also going to assume that he recovered before school was over, and did some more dating before joining the military.

Test pilots are chick magnets, aren’t they? Don’t women love a man in a uniform? And astronauts are cooler than cooler. Again: rolling in chicks.

Recent revisions/updates/retcons give him another steady girlfriend/possible fiancée (Dr. Linda McGill) during his astronaut days right up through his transformation into the Thing.

The point that I’m trying to make with all of this is that prior to being Thing-ified, Ben Grimm got his fair share of sex. The man always seemed to be in a position to make the best use of his penis. Which, depending on the specific details on the answer to the whole orange rock dork question, makes his life as the Thing an even bigger tragedy than is typically depicted in the comics.

The Origin of the Thing (and Three Other People)

So Ben agreed to pilot Reed’s rocket, not knowing that it would be the absolute worst decision of his life.

Ben started hanging out at Reed’s rocket base in Central City, California to specifically train on the rocket his pal was building. He renewed his friendship with Reed, and even formed bonds with Reed’s girlfriend Sue Storm (who Ben actually had the hots for himself in most versions of the story), and her little brother Johnny.

Then the government decides to cut their funding of the project. And even with pouring the last of the Richards’ fortune into the project, it won’t be enough to finish what Reed is trying to do. He tries to get the government officials to change their minds, but they just won’t see things his way. So, Reed decides that something drastic must be done.

A test flight. An unauthorized, middle of the night, sneak onto the base and steal our own rocket ship test flight. Sue and Johnny insist on going along, and Reed lets them. (At first, just because it was sixties comic book storytelling. Eventually because the rocket needed a four person crew.)

Everyone was willing and eager . . . except for Ben, who didn’t think that the rocket was ready. His specific concern was the radiation shielding. He was worried about the effects of the cosmic rays.

But Sue called him a coward and goaded him into piloting the rocket despite his reservations. They flew up, and proved that the rocket had insufficient radiation shielding to protect them from the cosmic rays. Oops.

The rocket crashed back to Earth, and all four of the crew discovered that they had undergone mutagenic changes. Superhero class mutagenic changes. (In a comic book story? No way!)

Reed could stretch his body. Sue could turn invisible (and later on, developed the ability to project force fields). Johnny could burst into flame, control fire, and fly. Wow! How cool does it get?

And then there’s Ben. Ben mutated into a super strong monster, with thick orange dinosaur-like hide which would eventually turn into a set of scales that looked and felt like rock.

They vowed to become superheroes (Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, the Human Torch, and the Thing), and the rest is comic book history.

Common Speculation About Just What’s In Those Big Blue Trunks

I’ve had the “what do you think the Thing’s cock looks like” conversation with people before. (I used to run a comic book store. I’ve had conversations that you wouldn’t believe.) I’ve also read speculations on the internet about the state of Ben Grimm’s genitalia. And let me tell you, there are a lot of theories floating around out there.

One of the more common theories is that the Thing simply has no penis. Which always strikes me as an odd premise. We’ve seen him eat, we’ve seen him drink. He’s obviously got buttocks, and nobody’s saying that there’s not an anus in between them for the purpose of taking a dump. How do these people think that he urinates?

I’ve actually asked that question of people in the “The Thing’s Got No Penis” crowd, and their answers range from, “His urethera isn’t in tube form, it’s more like a girl’s” to “His bodily fluids just kind of seep out between the cracks in his rocks” to the much more common, “Oh – uh . . . hmm. Hadn’t thought of that.”

I’ve also asked why they thought that the cosmic radiation would have robbed him of his penis, and I get a variety of answers, most of which are so unmemorable that I honestly can’t remember them. One sticks in my mind, however. And while it makes pretty much zero sense biologically, it makes such great stylistic sense that I had to include it in this post. The theory is as follows: The average human male has five digits on each hand, five digits on each foot, and one digit between his legs. Poor old Ben Grimm, post cosmic irradiation, has four digits on each hand, four digits on each foot, and do the fucking math. If the cosmic rays are going to snatch one digit from each hand, and one digit from each foot, why wouldn’t they snatch one digit from between his legs? And since he only had the one digit there to begin with, he’d now have none.

Like I said, it makes no sense from any kind of physiological standpoint, but it’s a brilliant esthetic theory, isn’t it? (And just for the record: The cosmic rays also stole his ears and neck, and did a number on his nose.)

Other people think that the Thing does still have his ‘male part’ down below, but that it’s only remaining function is peeing. No sexual intercourse for the Thing.

Still others believe that – being made of rock – the Thing does indeed have a dick, and that it’s always hard. Not exactly the normal priapism aliment, but just a cosmic ray induced fact of life for Ben. The phrase ‘hard as a rock’ being a literal description in this case.

I’ve heard theories that the Things genitals were mutated more than the rest of him, and are now just . . . different. Such that he’d be able to have sex with a female version of his cosmic ray altered form, but not with a regular human female.

Like I said, lots of different theories among the people who sit around and ponder this sort of question.

This Month’s Creative Team . . .

Really, the true details of the Thing’s genitals can only be answered by the writer. Well, writer and artist, I suppose. The problem with this is that the creative team changes. More and more often, these days. And with each new creative team comes new theories on how all this really works. Subplots are abandoned in favor of new plotlines, character traits are suppressed to reflect how the writer thinks that the characters would really act, and the question of whether or not the Thing is capable of a fulfilling sex life shifts seemingly randomly from “yes” to “no” to “maybe” to “beats the fuck out of me”.

One writer will have the Thing wandering around the streets, thinking about his longtime girlfriend Alicia Masters, and internalizing a lengthy thought-balloon soliloquy about how he “can’t even be a man with her”. Another writer will imply that Ben and Alicia have sex. I have my own beliefs about the Thing’s sex life, and if I’m ever hired by Marvel to write the Fantastic Four, those beliefs will be how it really is. Right up until the next writer takes over the title.

Different writers depict Ben differently with regards to his relationships to women (especially the girlfriend – classically the blind sculptress Alicia Masters). Different artists even depict him as looking somewhat different than their predecessors had him drawn.

80s era FF writer/artist John Byrne said that his version of the Thing was built less like a human and more like a starfish. Still a bimanus biped – two arms, two legs – but a noticeably different body shape when running around. (And I always got the sense from Byrne’s stories that sex wasn’t a viable option for Ben, meaning that the orange rock dork either didn’t exist, didn’t work . . . or was mutated past usefulness.)

More recently, in the first issue of writer Mark Waid and artist Mike Wieringo’s first issue on the title, there’s a scene where the team (and an observer) are in an interdimensional transport en route to a routine scientific mission when this verbal exchange goes on between Johnny (the Human Torch) and the Thing in the ‘backseat’.

Johnny (more and more insistently over several panels): Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Ben: Ha! I knew it! Reed toldja t’drain the lizard before we left, Matchstick!
Johnny (with a hand raised): And this is your business how? All those who even remember owning a reptile, raise your hands.

I read this and thought, “Oh, no . . . not another ‘Ben has no penis’ writer . . .”

Several months later, Mark Waid appeared at the twice-yearly Portland Comic Show. This was about the time that my brother was starting to get into comics, so he decided he wanted to go, and asked if I wanted to tag along. I took a stack of comics with me for some of the writers and artists to sign, and as Mark Waid was signing a couple of the issues I’d brought, I asked him, “Just out of curiousity, are you writing the Thing as not having a penis?”

He lifted his pen up from the book and just looked at me for a moment. (Apparently not a question he gets asked often, I guess.) Then he smiled, and continued signing. “No,” he told me. “I’m just writing the Human Torch as being a complete jackass.”

My Possible Theories

First of all, it’s important to note that the Thing is not ‘made of orange rock’. He is, according to Marvel, “covered in an orange, flexible, rock-like hide”. This is usually expressed by the writers as Ben’s flesh being covered in scales with the look and texture of stone (although we do occasionally hear other interpretations).

The early evolution of the Thing had his skin start out looking like dinosaur hide, which slowly (over the course of many issues) refined itself (as Jack Kirby slowly refined how he wanted to draw the character) into the craggy, stone-based character we all know and love.

(Also, back in 2002, Marvel revealed that the Thing was Jewish. So thankfully, we don’t have to concern ourselves with what an orange rock foreskin would look like, and how it would function.)
I have my own theory as to what the effects of the cosmic rays were on the Thing’s cock. (Which I’ll get to when we reach the next subheading.) But I’ve also got some back-up theories.

The cosmic rays mutated the Thing. The most obvious (clothed) mutation was turning his skin into an orange rock looking hide. But as I noted earlier, that was the end result of an evolutionary process. The first immediate change to Ben Grimm’s flesh was to turn it into what amounted to dinosaur hide. That early version of the Thing was also big on rage. Now, obviously, anyone going from handsome chick magnet astronaut to monster is going to be a little pissed off. But were the Thing’s early rages just his inner human trying to cope with his outer monster . . . or was it something more? Could the cosmic rays have mutated his brain a little, giving him the kind of propensity for rage that wild animals have?

Dinosaur skin, wild animal rage, . . . why not animal penis? The kind that retracts inside the body when not in use. We’ve never really seen much of a bulge in those shorts he wears (of course, most superheroes are prancing around in spandex with no tell-tale bulge, so that really doesn’t mean much). Maybe the Thing actually doesn’t have an orange rock dork all the time . . . just when he needs it. I accept that it’s possible that the cosmic ray transformation left him with interior testicles, and a retractable penis that dangles when he needs to pee or when he’s aroused, but crawls back up inside of him otherwise. That’s theory number #4.

Here’s theory number #3: The Thing’s got a big cock, covered in the same orange rock-like scales as the rest of him. Probably the more flexible type of scales, like the ones on his face surrounding his mouth. And while there’s a difference (mainly in weight, firmness, and the direction it points) between it’s flaccid and erect states, it’s pretty much the same size and shape either way.

I went to school with a guy who joined the military after graduation. He ended up stationed at a base on the east coast, and while there, he befriended one of the civilians in town. This guy was described to me as being a big beefy cabdriver, and during this little story, I’m going to be calling him Fudd (not his real name).

Fudd was openly bisexual. My friend was straight, but wasn’t homophobic, so they had some interesting sexual discussions. When talking about his own endowments, Fudd said that he was a little under four inches limp, a little over seven hard. Fudd once told my friend that he knew a couple of guys who were between nine and ten inches when erect. But that the most interesting thing about them was that they were also between nine and ten inches when limp. Arousal made them harder, but not bigger. Not really even that much thicker.

I don’t know – and it doesn’t really matter – if that’s the kind of equipment that Ben had pre-transformation. The little cosmic radiation storm evolution that worked its magic on him would have (according to this theory) altered the Thing’s cock to that format when it covered it in his trademark rocky hide so that it would function properly. Otherwise he might have ended up with something like . . . well, something disastrous, like the penis from theory #2.

“What’s so bad about theory #2,” you ask? Hmm. Take one flaccid penis. Completely cover it with a series of interlocking stone-like scales. Then arouse it’s owner.

Ben gets excited. Blood rushes down to his groin, and starts to fills his corpora cavernosa. Pre-transformation, this would result in an erection. But post-transformation? Post-transformation those interlocking scales covering his penis define it’s size parameters. Not it’s minimum size. Not it’s maximum size. It’s ONLY size.

So now the Thing is standing there with his rocky hide keeping him from getting an erection. The same exterior effect as being impotent. But oh-so-much worse in reality, because he’s still physiologically able to get hard every step of the way right up until the actual expansion of the penis.

The interior of his penis is trying to become erect, and ends up trapped inside the now-too-small exterior formed by the scaly exterior. Blood may be thicker than water, but it’s not stronger than orange rock.

It’s like those cosmic rays were into some serious BDSM, and transformed Ben into not just a monster, but a monster with a built-in male chastity device. Only the ‘gates of hell’ have nothing on the Thing’s little predicament.

Any time that the Thing gets aroused, it’s not just frustrating. Not just sexually frustrating. I’d have to imagine that it’s incredibly painful.

And that’s what’s so bad about theory #2.

My Actual Theory

Which brings us to my actual theory. Theory #1. The explanation of how the Thing’s penis would officially function if I was writing the Fantastic Four.

Take one flaccid penis. Completely cover it with a series of stone-like scales. Not interlocking stone-like scales, just stone-like scales. What we’re talking about here is the effect of covering the dork in question with individual orange rocks instead of a flexible single sheet of orange rock. Then, once you’ve covered the penis in the stone-like scales, arouse it’s owner.

Blood flows into the corpora cavernosa, which has the physiological effect of making the penis expand in size. It gets longer. Thicker. Harder. And as it does this, the ‘rocks’ covering the cock – the rocks which provided perfect cover for his small, limp penis – push apart from each other like a rapid form of continental drift triggered by a massive expansion of the Earth. (It’s normal to reference geological phenomenon like continental drift and the expansion of the Earth in essays on sexuality and penis size/function, right? Sure it is.)

Ben’s penis, now fully erect, still has orange rock on it, but – depending on his flaccid-to-erect ratio – they’re either evenly scattered little islands of rock on an ocean of dick, or a landscape of orange rock containing a great many canyons and chasms where they separated from one another during the erection process.

(Either way, it doesn’t seem ideal for a potential partner. If ‘ribbed’ is for her pleasure, then what the fuck would ‘jagged’ be for?)

And as for what the dork looks like in between the orange rocks? Hmm. If I had to guess (and since I’m writing about this, I suppose I do have to guess), then I’m thinking that we’d be looking at red raw meat. Those orange rocky scales function as his hide – his outer layer. On the occasion that he’s lost one in battle (depending on who’s writing the story, and what the plot purpose is in him losing a ‘rock’) he either starts gushing out blood, or is simply left with an exposed section of meat that looks like body tissue with some of the flesh (at a minimum the outer layer of skin) removed.

Ben Grimm, more than most men, is going to need a condom. Kevin Smith tells a story on “An Evening With Kevin Smith” (can’t remember if it’s Vol. I or II – you should watch both anyway, they’re hilarious) about having sex for the first time with his future wife while sporting a open ‘zipper wound’ on his white flesh dork. I seem to recall a hearing the phrase, “it felt like dipping my cock in battery acid” or something similar during the story. With lots of his normally completely rock covered dong now exposed to the elements, protection is a must. Of course, I’d imagine that getting a condom on over that field of craggy rock without it ripping or tearing might be next to impossible.

I suppose what he might actually need is a custom fitting appliance of some sort that fills in the gaps. Turn his ugly and dangerous cock into a far more usable sex tool. Of course, you’re probably asking the question, “Where would he get such a phallic add-on?”

Gizmos, Doohickeys, and Frammistats

Or

“I Get Off With a Little Bit of Help From My Friends”

(My spellchecker doesn’t recognize the word ‘frammistat’. It offers no spelling suggestions. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually seen the word used outside of the Fantastic Four comic book, or other comics in which the Thing appears. In Ben Grimm’s vocabulary, the technological results of Reed’s genius tend to be gizmos, doohickeys, and frammistats.)

One of the key character element of Reed Richards is his guilt over having been responsible for turning his best friend into a monster. Reed’s main research project (under most writers, anyway) is finding a way to reverse the transformation that turned Ben Grimm into the Thing.

(Of course, I said main research project, not only research project. Reed’s always multitasking multiple experiments at once. Saving the world with technology. Building devices as the plot develops a need for them. Maybe even building actual plot devices. Who knows?)

In addition to trying to find a way to turn Ben human again, Reed also tries to find ways to make Ben more comfortable as the Thing to improve his life until that cure can finally be found. And while I very much doubt that Ben ever came up to Reed, pointing down at his crotch and saying, “I can’t fuck anybody with this – can you help me out?”, I’m equally sure that Reed has built his best friend some kind of gear to ease his sexual tension.

The previously mentioned appliance to smooth out the surface of Ben’s cock and protect the raw penile meat left otherwise exposed would be a good example of this. Reed’s always making Ben stand under scanners for hours at a time while he takes various readings and measurements and runs tests of all sorts. He could easily have found out everything he needed to know about the state of Ben’s manhood without ever asking a question, built the appliance, and left it in a box with instructions in his room. No need for either to ever mention it. But suddenly Ben can look into getting his groove back.

Most writers interpret Ben’s condition as having limited tactile senses. Not a lot of sensitive nerve endings in orange rock. While he might be able to learn the alphabet and become fluent in it’s use, I doubt that the Thing would ever be able to read Braille with his senses-deadened fingertips. So: Is his cockhead in the same sensory boat as the rest of him? And if so, what would Reed’s technological response to that be?

I envision a high-tech cockring that emanates a sensory augmentation field, flowing down past the scales to find nerve endings, and transmitting sensations from the form-fitting energy field surrounding his penis down to them, giving him back sexual pleasure.

(Of course, I also imagine Reed building a series of sex toys with similar sensory augmentation equipment. It’s hard to masturbate if you can’t feel your cock.)

What Does He Do On Dates?

Ben has had several girlfriends since his transformation into the Thing. The longest (and seemingly default) girlfriend is the blind sculptress Alicia Masters, daughter of Fantastic Four villain the Puppet Master.

He fell for an alien (humanoid, but officially extraterrestrial) named Tarianna on another world, and upon his return to Earth from that series of solo adventures, met a woman named Sharon Ventura who was Tarianna’s exact duplicate.

He chased after Sharon for awhile, but didn’t actually become seriously romantically involved with her until after a cosmic ray storm (temporarily) mutated him even further . . . and mutated her into a female version of the Thing that they ended up calling the She-Thing.

[And that’s all that I’m saying about the She-Thing here. I’m already over 5000 words, and talking about Ben’s sex life with Sharon would make this already long-assed post just ridiculously longer. Anyway, even though I’m not even finished writing this post, I’ve already started considering this to be just the first draft of a more involved work somewhere down the road. An illustrated essay, if I can find the appropriate collaborator. An illustrated essay with scary, scary pictures of orange rock dorks. There will be room for weird biological theories on Ben mating with the She-Thing in the longer version of this piece.]

He dated an executive from Damage Control (this is the company that keeps rebuilding New York after the big super-hero brawls keep tearing parts of it down) named Kathleen O’Meara. And Ben flirts with (and is flirted with by) a whole slew of other women.

So, according to my theory, Ben has a functioning (albeit problematic) penis. Ben has a good friend who’s a scientific whiz capable of building all sorts of sexual gizmos to deproblematicize the penis. Sex with the girlfriend should be no problem.

Of course, I could be wrong. My theory could be in err. The orange rock dork could be non-functional, or too dangerous even for Reed’s tech to render usable. So what happens if that’s true?

Well, he’s got fingers and a tongue, doesn’t he? Depending on who’s drawing him, his fingers are huge. Some artwork depicts his digits as being bigger than the average penis in length and girth. For safety’s sake you’d want him to wear a rubber glove so that no delicate vaginal folds end up getting pinched between his rocks. But he could definitely give most women a thrill just with a simple fingering.

And I don’t know how long the Thing’s tongue is, but we’ve seen it in his cosmic ray altered mouth when he yells and hollers, and it’s both thick and wide. Could make for some interesting oral sensations.

The Inevitable Stupid and Sophomoric Musings

Among Ben’s ‘titles’ (mostly self-granted) are: The Idol of Millions, Mama Grimm’s Baby Boy, Aunt Petunia’s Favorite Nephew, and – by far the most common – The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing.

Ever-Lovin’: Could this mean “always making love”? A subtle clue to all and sundry that once the big blue trunks come off, he’s still all man, and ready to fuck at the drop of a hat (or more likely, the drop of a pair of dampened panties)? Or is it an ironic nickname, like calling a huge man ‘Tiny’? Something to ponder, I guess.

And finally, when Ben is at the brink of orgasm, does he holler his battle cry? When he’s balls deep in Alicia (or getting that accomplished sculptor’s handjob, or whatever) and just about ready to cum, do the neighbors suddenly get to hear that “It’s Clobberin’ Time!”?

Anyway: Yes, Brodie, it does exist. Orange. Rock. Dork.

Watersports - A Jar of Piss vs. What I'm Actually Into

It always takes me by surprise when I discover that not everybody thinks the same way that I do. (What the fuck? What do you mean that there exists an opinion other than mine?) I had one of these moments back in March at KinkFest.

One of the workshops I attended there was on the subject of watersports. The woman in charge of the whole presentation talked about urination as a D/s activity: A dom(me) pissing on his/her sub, making the sub drink urine, watching people pee, etc. All sorts of piss-play related things, including what’s healthy/safe, and so on. She also answered questions that the attendees had. One of the first questions asked was about the best ways to store urine for use in later play. And just how long you could store a big jarful of piss before it went bad.

“What,” I asked myself, “Would anyone want with a jar of piss?” It was a rhetorical question that I was being asked by myself. I knew some of the watersports uses for piss by the jarful. And I know that everyone has different kinks, and different preferences within categories of kink. But I was at this workshop because watersports turned me on. And being confronted early on in the hour-and-a-half with the concept of the jar of piss made me sit there thinking, “Ew! Gross!”

My Initial Interest

The first place that I ever encountered the concept of pee-as-sexual was (surprise, surprise) in a couple of letters published in Penthouse magazine. After reading the first letter with a golden shower theme, I found myself thinking, “Yikes! I had no idea that people did that.” Then after noticing the read-out on my arousal barometer (yes, the one in my pants) I remember thinking, “Now I want to find a girl to do that with.”

I’d occasionally find other letters in Penthouse (or similar publications) on the topic, and they were usually letters that I’d end up masturbating to.

Years and years later, I was over at Johnny Dirtnap’s apartment, watching some of the new additions to his porn collection. One of the tapes he’d just gotten was a really low-quality product. It looked like somebody had just filmed some fucking while fooling around with their camcorder and decided to market it. The action was a big massive orgy taking place in someone’s house. The camera operator apparently just wandered around from room to room, filming various people fucking before getting bored and moving on to the next couple (or threesome, foursome, or moresome).

And just when we were about to give up on the tape, the camera suddenly follows a woman as she heads out of the house into the backyard. Once outside, she squats down with her knees bent and her left hand on the ground behind her, giving her a tripod’s balance. She spreads her knees apart, and spreads her pussy lips open with the fingers of her right hand. As she’s doing this, I’m thinking to myself, “What, she had to leave the busy orgy so that she could masturbate in private?”

But then I got it. Because a stream of liquid shot out of her vulva. She leaned back a little, and let fly with a fairly impressive arc of piss. She continued pissing until her bladder was empty and my corpora cavernosa was full. I turned to Johnny Dirtnap, motioned toward the remote in his hand, and said, “Can we see that again?” (We did. Several times.)

I’d eventually find other porn that included peeing scenes. More watersports letters in erotica magazines. Then I saw what almost looked like an opportunity to do more than just fantasize about the act.

Shortly after my correspondence with CJ turned sexual for the first time and we had started occasionally getting together for naughty foreplay-type activities in between rounds of lust letters, she mentioned having had a longstanding fantasy of letting a man ejaculate onto her face. It seemed like such a dominant action for a man, and such a submissive thing for a woman to allow. It turned her on. And while I wanted to cum on her face (and did a few times as our physical encounters continued over the years), my initial response to her confession was to agree that she was right, and that it would be a very dominant act. But . . . if that’s the kind of thing she was interested in, how would she feel about submitting to an even more dominant act. She’d let me spray her face with my jism . . . would she consider letting me spray it with my piss?

She eventually informed me that she would indeed let me do that at some point. (And just for the record, that point never actually arrived.) In correspondence, she was willing to let me pee on her. She was willing to let me watch her pee. She was even willing to consider peeing on me, if I wanted it. Outside of the relatively safe framework of letter writing, however, she never wanted to get into it. “Not this time. Maybe next time.”

Which, of course, made me want it even more.

Atypical Reasons

The tendency to pee on somebody during sexplay is usually considered to be a BDSM activity. Specifically, a subset of D/s play. The typical reasons to urinate on somebody are to dominate them. To assert your ownership of them by ‘marking’ them. To humiliate them.

Those are the typical reasons. I’m not typical. While I do have the occasional watersports-based domination, ownership, or humiliation fantasy, that’s not the way I typically view the whole ‘peeing on your partner’ thing.

While the use of watersports is obviously kinky, most of the fantasies that I’ve had about it are almost totally removed from BDSM. I’m either just there for the activity and none of the usually D/s symbolism attached to it, or the symbolism that I’m getting from it is one of connection rather than establishment of hierarchy.

One of Mark Twain’s (seemingly infinite) quotations is: “One of life’s most over-valued pleasures is sexual intercourse; one of life’s least appreciated pleasures is defecation.” Now, I have no interest in scat play whatsoever. But I understand the sentiment. Nobody ever really goes on about the pleasures of taking a shit (except for maybe my brother, who goes on about it way too much sometimes).

Pissing feels great. Waking up with a full bladder and racing from your bed to the toilet? Or the race from the front door to the toilet after a much-too-long car ride? Oh, God, once you get there, letting that urine flow just feels incredible. It’s a relief. It’s a release. It’s fun!

Sex is supposed to be about pleasure. It’s a pleasure to pee. I’m not saying that you should turn urination into foreplay simply because both peeing and fucking feel good. But, hey, if the thought arouses you at all, it’s definitely worth discussing with your partner.

And then there’s the connection symbolism that I mentioned.

I quoted Mark Twain earlier, now I quote the Beatles: “Oh, please, say to me / You’ll let me be your man / And please, say to me / You’ll let me hold your hand / . . . / And when I touch you I feel happy, inside / Its such a feeling / That my love / I can’t hide.”

The first time that I held the hand of a woman I was in love with, it was electric. All I was doing was sitting beside her, holding her hand in mine, but I felt connected to her. Of course, this is Dot I’m talking about, and so it turned out to have retroactively meant nothing, but still – before that, I’d never understood what was behind this romantic ‘nonsense’ of just wanting to hold someone’s hand. Now I yearn to find a woman whose hand I can hold. (Sure, I also want to do other things to her, but I want that feeling I had when sitting there next to Dot that first time, her hand in mine.)

Are you going to think that I’m completely weird if I say that I consider lovers peeing on each other to be similar to hand-holding? (Wait – do you think I’m weird anyway? I’ve probably already said some pretty strange stuff in the past couple months of blogging. Maybe I’ve already blown my chance to be seen as normal. Oh well. So be it.)

Here’s the thing: The human body contains a lot of water. (There’s a common misconception that this number is somewhere in the high 90 percentiles, but according to several seemingly reliable sources on the internet, it’s actually closer to 60%. Blood is 95% water, which may be the origin of the other statistic, but I couldn’t say for sure.) The human body also is a complex interweaving of systems. Blood courses through us via the circulatory system. We are bio-electric systems. The pathway from the mouth to the urethra is a system of it’s own.

So the human body is bio-electrical and is filled with fluid channels. Liquid conducts electricity. To my way of thinking, if you let liquid flow out of you and onto another human, you’re forming some sort of circuit. And even if it doesn’t work that way in reality – even if the bio-electricity from one body isn’t channeled through the fluid being carried to the other person’s bio-electric field, even if the stream of liquid isn’t interacting with the liquid composing the majority (60%, remember?) of the other person’s body – then there’s still an abstract connection. It means something because it could mean those things. I could argue that you could almost find a spiritual connection in the concept.

All of that is the result of sitting down one day long ago and analyzing my attraction to watersports. (“I’m turned on by the thought of peeing on girls? And having girls pee on me? How sick must I be? Why on Earth would I want these things? No, really, I’m asking: Why?”) I honestly couldn’t tell you whether the above reasons are the subconscious reasons behind my basic interest in it – or the best justification for wanting what society deems gross, dirty pee-play that my brain could come up with. Either way, it’s how I see it now.

And at it’s core, if it’s about connection, then while it can be a BDSM thing – the dominant connecting with his submissive – it can just as easily be an act performed between equals.

Double Standards

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe piss-play is automatically a dominance and submission thing after all. I don’t know how everybody feels about this, after all. I just know how I feel about it. Maybe it is everything that the typical reasons for it say it is, and I’m just one of those ‘exceptions that proves the rule’ kind of guys.

Or, to look at it another way, there’s a weird double standard at work in my brain regarding the subject of watersports. Maybe it is all D/s. Maybe if I piss on a woman, I absolutely am dominating her. Okay, fine. I can live with that. Maybe peeing on her does mark her with my scent, and does make her ‘mine’. Sure, why not. And maybe anyone that I urinate on is unquestionably humiliated by it. Embarrassed, shamed, mortified. If that’s how it truly is, then that’s how it is.

However . . .

That’s what happens when they are pissed on by me. There’s a whole other standard for the turnaround.

If a girl I like takes off her panties and pisses on me, is she dominating me? Pfft. No. Of course not. If we’re not equals in the whole sex play thing, then I’m the Dom. You can’t dom the Dom. Not even by pissing on him. Her pissing on me is just . . . sexy and arousing. Rawr! Well then, is she marking me with her scent? Is her peeing on me binding me to her? Huh. I don’t have a functioning sense of smell, so I wouldn’t know about things like that. Am I hers? We’re either ‘ours’, or she’s mine. This just leaves humiliation. Say that she does urinate on me. Am I humiliated by this? Let me ask you . . . does it sound like I’m humiliated? I didn’t think so, either.

The Watersports Category

Pee-play. Piss-play. Golden showers. Urolagnia or urophilia. (Urophagia if we’re talking specifically about the fetish for treating urine as if it was a tasty beverage.) What am I all talking about when I say ‘watersports’?

Traditionally, if it’s a kinky activity that involves urine, it falls beneath the watersports banner. Urinating on someone. Urinating in someone. (Getting urinated on, getting urinated in.) Wetting your pants for the erotic thrill. Watching someone pee. Piss drinking. Using urine as a lubricant. And so on.

That’s all watersports. Assuming that it’s all done between consenting adults, then I would consider it all kinky sex play. Dirty, naughty fun.

Not everything on the watersports menu is on my ‘to do’ list. While I can understand why a person could get off on peeing in their pants, I can’t imagine that it would do much for me. (And I’d much rather watch a stream of urine shooting out from between a pair of naked pussy lips than just watch a wet stain slowly spreading across her pants.) I really don’t see me drinking anyone’s pee, either.

The Humiliation Play Category

I used to work with a guy who could occasionally be heard to say this about the boss: “I wouldn’t piss in his face. But only if he was on fire.” (I think that we all pretty much felt that way, it’s just that none of us ever seemed to express ourselves quite so poetically.)

Outside the realms of kinky sex, pissing on someone has always been at the very least a major insult. (Possibly the reason you give the judge for having killed a guy in the restroom of a bar.)

Peeing on a person who enjoys being peed on is watersports. Peeing on someone who is repulsed by it is humiliation. So, according to the weird little dictionary in my head, only half of naughty sex-based urine games are watersports. The other half falls under humiliation (under a urination subcategory).

For someone who isn’t really into you pissing on them – but will submit to anything you want to do to them anyway – urine is humiliation. For that matter, someone who does like you pissing on them, but feels shame for liking it . . . also, humiliation.

There’s a big difference between you and your partner peeing on one another, and just forcing your sub to get down on their knees and bow their head beneath your yellow stream.

There’s also a big difference between someone wetting themselves because they like how it feels, and wetting themselves because their master denied them access to the bathroom, and they simply couldn’t hold it in any longer. Shame. Shame and humiliation for pissing your pants there.

(I’ve also wondered if people ever make their humiliation fetishist submissives the subject of parties based on the concept of bukkake, but using piss instead of cum.)

Shortly before my humiliation fetishist email penpal dropped off the face of the Earth, she had asked me to start giving her dares to perform. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I dared her to do three things. In the last (very short) email I received from her, she informed me that she had done two of them, and would tell me what happened in great detail when she had more time to write.

One of those dares was just a cute little exhibitionist thing I had her do, and isn’t relevant to this post. But the other one . . . the other dare started off with her drinking lots of fluids. Once she had to pee, she was to drive to her local Wal*Mart, sit in the parking lot, and drink some more. Then the conditions of the dare had her going into the store to purchase a single item – a package of adult diapers. She was to pick a check-out line that had several customers in it already. And once the checker was finally ringing up the person directly ahead of her, she was then to go ahead and empty her bladder. While standing there.

Now, the last thing I wanted was to be responsible for someone having an accident (a ‘slip and fall’ accident, not a ‘wet your pants’ accident – I was obviously eager to have my dirty little friend have one of those), so once she was finished, she was to alert the checker that, “Someone must have spilled something,” because the floor was all wet. Of course, saying this with a huge wet spot on her jeans and piss running down her legs while purchasing adult diapers would probably clue the checker in to just who it was, and what they had ‘spilled’.

That little dare? Definitely intended to be humiliation, rather than just watersports.

Getting Back to the KinkFest Workshop For a Moment

At one point during the Watersports workshop, the discussion was on using urine as a lubricant. Sure, pee isn’t as slippery as Astroglide, but it’s definitely slipperier than water, so there are watersports enthusiasts who use it as an addition to a woman’s natural wetness, or who use it when they don’t have a tube of store-bought lube at hand, or who simply use it because they really like pee.

So, upon hearing this, I raised my hand. And when I was acknowledged, I proceeded to invent (conceptually, not chemically) what just may be the single greatest fetish product of all time: Urine-Based Lubricant. I mean, hey, everybody already uses water-based lube. If urine starts out slipperier than water, then it stands to reason that urine-based lube would be slipperier than the water-based stuff.

Half the crowd laughed, the other half just kind of went, “Ooh . . .”, wishing that they had a couple tubes of the stuff. (Which made me feel like my job there was done.)

What I Want

I want to find a woman who will let me pee on her naked body. I want to urinate into her cleavage, and between her legs. I want her to spread her legs and hold herself open for me so that I can piss directly on her clit and try to make her cum like she was a 70s housewife masturbating in the shower with a waterpic. I want to pee on her ass. (And in her ass.) I want to pee between her shoulderblades and watch my urine run down her bare back. I want to stand behind her as she kneels and piss on the soles of her sexy bare feet.

I fantasize about pissing in a woman’s open mouth. This isn’t a fantasy of making her drink my urine. She doesn’t swallow – it runs back out of her mouth and flows over her chin, down her breasts, and beyond.

I want to find a woman who will pee on my naked body in return. This isn’t a desire to have urine on me. It’s a desire to have a woman urinating on me. Yes, once that has happened, there will be urine on me, and I’m fine with that (because, really, the stuff just washes right off). As I’ve said earlier, it’s all about the connection. It’s about the stream of liquid issuing forth from her urethra, it’s source her bladder inside her body. Once it’s become separate from that, it’s no longer of any use to me.

If she were to pee into a jar, then the contents of that container would no longer be eligible for the kind of watersports I have in mind. To me, watersports is a zero degrees of separation thing. Pee traveling from urethra to skin? Sexy. Pee traveling from urethra to container, then from container to skin? Gross.

I want to watch a woman urinating. I could probably sizably inflate the word count of this post by giving you reasons why, but honestly, it all boils down to this: I’ve seen women peeing in porn, and I like it. So I have to believe that if I were to be able to see a woman peeing in real life, it would be even better.

The more thought I devote to humiliation games, the more I think I want to find a woman into humiliation. If I had a submissive or play partner who was into being humiliated, I would probably use urination as an aspect of that.

(And there is the deep, dark fantasy of owning a slave, and waking up with a full bladder in the middle of the night. Do I get up and use the bathroom in this fantasy? No I do not. Instead I wake my slave and have her take my penis in her mouth, forming a tight seal at the base. Then I relieve myself, urinating down her throat until my bladder is empty.)

All of my watersports fantasies take place either in a bathroom or outside. Or possibly in a specially prepared area with things like tarps, kiddie pools, or rubber bed-sheets. In none of my little scenarios am I ever walking into a woman’s house and just pissing on her while she’s sitting on her couch. Ease of clean-up is always in mind when I’m thinking about this stuff. (The majority of the fantasy images I have take place with the peed-upon participant in the bathtub – which makes sense, because where else would you take a shower . . . golden or otherwise?)

Well, I’ve been sitting at the keyboard for quite some time now while writing this piece, and now I’ve got to go pee. (God, I need a girlfriend. One who’s into, you know, getting peed on.)

Who Am I? (Part Two)

I love Christmas. I love the themes and symbols. I love the decorations. I love the food. I love giving presents. I love getting presents. I love the music.

I actually covered Christmas music pretty well in my previous “Who Am I” post, which focused on the types of music I’m into. And since we’re now in the middle of December, and the Christmas music thing seems like an ideal segue, this installment of “Who Am I” is “Who Am I at Christmastime?”

Christmas Presents

I’m always bitching about not having enough money, but my status as one of the destitute never bothers me more than at Christmastime. Because I’m a gift giver. I love getting people Christmas presents. I don’t even mind the actual Christmas shopping all that much – depending on just when during the crazy-assed ‘must-buy-presents’ countdown frenzy we’re talking about. My dad’s been known to have me help him do his Christmas shopping, which often starts on or around the 22nd of December. Not the ideal time to be facing crowds of other desperate hopeful gift-givers. But earlier in the month? No problem.

The good thing about having an incredibly tiny social circle is how short the list of people you need to buy presents for is. Even with a small list of people to buy gifts for, some of them went without last year. Last Christmas kind of sucked, during the whole “opening of presents” portion of the holiday. I hated skipping people. I hated making excuses even more.

This year, however, is economic stimulus package year. I set the check aside when it arrived in the mail. When the first of December rolled around, I hadn’t even cashed it yet. Woo-hoo! It’s not like back when I was still reasonably healthy, and had a job that brought in real ‘paycheck’ quality money all year long, but it’ll definitely be my best Christmas in years!

Making lists, buying presents, getting out the wrapping paper, scotch tape, scissors, and duct tape for when I’m feeling mischievous (nothing like wrapping a present in duct tape) . . . oh, yeah. THIS is Christmas.

Wrapping Christmas Presents

Now, when I talk about wrapping something in duct tape, I’m not talking about using duct tape instead of the regular scotch tape to secure the pretty wrapping paper in place. No, I’m talking about putting the gift inside of a disposable box, or plastic sack, or even just pre-wrapping it in newspaper . . . and then mummifying it in duct tape. Once you can no longer see any part of the package that isn’t covered, it’s wrapped. You write your ‘To:’ and your ‘From:’ on the tape with a Sharpie, and then chuck it underneath the tree.

I’m not the only person among my friends and family who occasionally does this (although I’ll admit it – I’m the one that started it in my social circle). The key difference between them and me is that I use one single (long) continuous piece of tape. And before adhering the far end of it down, I’ll fold a corner of it under, so that there’s a spot that they can pull the tape back up. Then it’s just a big long sticky unwinding job. My brother, on the other hand, wraps a present in duct tape with the premise that you’re not getting into it. Ever. Not for as long as you live. Unwrapping a duct-tape wrapped package from my brother requires very sharp blades and assurances as to the gift’s breakability levels before the ‘unwrapping’ can even begin.

Another family wrapping custom is ‘the surprise’. If you wrap a DVD, and it’s still the size and shape of a DVD case when you’re done, then where’s the surprise? Sure, they aren’t going to know the title, but they’ll be pretty sure of the format. When I was growing up, Mom put anything with a distinctive shape into a larger box before wrapping it. And while the inside-of-a-larger-box concepts works just fine . . . it’s not really all that creative, now, is it?

I’m not always over-the-top goofy with my present disguises. I use my fair share of the larger boxes myself. But every now and then something just screams out for a more elaborate touch. I bought my brother a t-shirt for Christmas one year, and didn’t want to just box it up before wrapping it. So I folded and rolled it into a rough cylinder about the length of a paper towel tube. I wrapped a couple of strips of brown packing paper around it so it would hold that shape while I opened a new roll of paper towels. And then I proceeded to transfer the entire continuous length of paper towels off of the cardboard tube and onto the t-shirt. Reel-to-reel style, rolling them onto the tube-of-shirt from the paper towel roll until it was empty. Then I wrapped that in standard Christmas wrapping paper.

Every time my brother was digging around under the tree checking out presents that year, he’d spend some time boggled by that one. Weighing it in his hands. Squeezing it. Shaking it to check for sound. He kept saying, “If it wasn’t so thick, I’d think you’d just gotten me a roll of paper towels.”

I’ve guess that everyone does stuff like that to hide the true identity of presents until Christmas morning (or Christmas eve, or whenever). The best time I ever had wrapping a present produced a package about three feet long by two feet wide by about four inches thick. It was fairly lightweight, and when you shook it, it made a noise like . . . like . . . well, now that I think about it, I don’t think that anything else in the history of existence ever made a noise like that package did. In addition to wrapping paper and scotch tape, it also made use of two full sheets of foam-core board, a stack of paper drinking cups, part of a bag of marbles, a few jingle bells, and lots of duct tape. The paper cups were cut down and glued to one of the foam core boards, each one containing either a marble, two marbles, or a jingle bell. The foam-core board was set on top of the cups glued down to the first one, and then I enclosed all of the edges in newspaper. Before enclosing the final side, I dumped in some loose marbles and a couple of jingle bells. Then I reinforced the newspaper ‘walls’ with duct tape. Then I wrapped the big bastard.

You’d pick it up, and a bunch of marbles and bells would run to the bottom (ricocheting off of the paper cups like a pinball game), making a lovely noise. While that was happening, the captive marbles and bells would move back and forth in their cups, rolling in circles (or back and forth in half-circles) whenever the package was tipped so that they rested against one end of the cup or the other. It was great. Nobody had a clue what that present was. (Actually, I did that basic wrapping job twice. The first one was a CD, centered on one on the pieces of foam-core boards. The second time, it was a paperback book.)

Christmas Eve or Christmas Morning?

When I was a little kid, we used to open our presents on Christmas morning like everyone else. But at some point before my teenage years, a family decision was made to change the big gift-opening extravaganza to Christmas Eve. So, from that point until my siblings came along and grew to Santa-aware age, it was the night of the 24th. Then it switched back to the morning of Christmas day, because how could you possibly open presents before Santa had flown by to deliver them?

Eventually my brother and sister grew up enough that it went back to Christmas Eve. Presents on Christmas Eve, stockings on Christmas morning. Until mass impatience on all sides broke out, and it was declared that stockings could be given out on Christmas Eve as well.

The Christmas Stocking

When I was a kid, Mom would put together Christmas stockings for me and Dad. Mom herself wouldn’t get one. I asked her once why Dad didn’t ever do a stocking for her, and she said that when they first got married, they’d always do Christmas stockings for each other. The stocking she did for Dad would always have all sorts of neat (and well thought out) little gifts. The stocking Dad got her would always be a few candy bars and an orange that he’d grab on his way home from work from anyplace that was still open on Christmas Eve. Eventually, Mom just made a point of talking to Dad about what would be in my stocking, and then – surprise! – presented him with a stocking on Christmas morning as well.

Didn’t seem fair to me. So, when I was about twelve, I did a Christmas stocking for Mom. She was overjoyed, and I then proceeded to give her a stocking every year right up to the year before she died.

That year before her last Christmas, Mom said that she wasn’t going to be able to do a stocking for everybody, and wanted to know if we each wanted to do a stocking. The idea went over well, so we all drew names, and everybody put together a stocking that year for one of the other participants.

It’s been that way ever since, with the minor exception that instead of having Dad draw a name and probably putting together a two candy bars and an orange stocking for that poor unlucky sucker, me, and my brother and sister collaborate on an additional stocking for Dad in addition to whoever’s name we draw (a list of names which also now includes my brother’s wife and sister’s fiancé.) .

Christmas Decorations

Every year I set up a lovely little Christmas scene. It’s a fairly traditional piece of imagery. The sleigh and eight, all ready to go, Santa in the driver’s seat, Mrs. Claus at sleigh-side, and the elves loading in the last of the presents.

Okay, when I said it was ‘traditional’, I meant mostly traditional with a few minor substitutions. Santa and the Mrs. are a set of special edition Spider-Man and Mary Jane action figures wearing Santa hats and boots. (A Toys R Us clearance item in the mid-90s that I just couldn’t pass up.) Instead of reindeer, the sleigh is being pulled by eight buffalo. The bags of toys are represented by my dice bag (no D&D for me in December). And the ‘elves’ loading the sleigh are actually a bunch of Jawa action figures. Hey, nothing says Christmas like Spider-Man, Jawas, and Buffalo.

I don’t have a Nativity set, but I’ve given thought to putting together an action figure nativity scene. A lot of the Marvel Legends figures convert right over if you’re strange enough. Doctor Doom, the Sub-Mariner, and the Black Panther are the Three Kings. (Well, maybe not THE three kings, but three kings, at least.) You can put Angel in as an Angel. Things like that.

Then the Star Wars prequels came out, and I briefly thought about doing a Star Wars action figure Nativity scene, simply because since there was no biological father involved in Anakin’s creation, he could serve as a baby Jesus figure. And all of the Episode I Anakin figures were so tiny! But then I decided I didn’t want to be quite that blasphemous, and gave the idea up completely.

I’ve thought about the traditional alternative to the Nativity scene: The Christmas village. My problem with the modern Christmas village is that all of those tiny little houses are fairly expensive. Especially when buying a whole village worth of them. So when I finally set mine up, it will be built out of LEGOs. Oh sure, LEGOs are expensive, too, but at least they’re multipurpose.

O, Tannenbaum!

I’m allergic to ‘real’ Christmas trees. Mom and Dad always had a real tree at Christmas, and I could never really breathe in December. I never actually put two-and-two together until the first time I walked into their house at Christmastime after having moved next door to live with my grandmother. Yikes!

So the first Christmas tree I did on my own was an artificial tree. I did the standard artificial tree thing for a year or two, and then I decided to get clever. Artistic. Weird.

It started out when I got a small (3’) artificial tree on clearance in January one year. The following Christmas I set it up, and decorated it with the standard lights, the classic red and blue balls . . . and all of my Batman action figures. A couple of Batmans (Batmen?), a Robin and Nightwing, and then a whole slew of villains. No star or angel, instead having Man-Bat atop the tree, his wings spread wide.

The next year was the one everybody still talks about. The next year’s tree was invisible.

Every time I mentioned having an invisible Christmas tree when I was outside of my home, whoever I was talking to just kind of raised their eyebrow at me, expecting a joke. They figured that if they came over, I’d point at a completely empty space, and say something like, “That’s my Christmas tree. (It’s invisible.)” or something equally lame. Which actually made it ten times better, because when they finally did stop by to take a look, what I actually had was so much more impressive than the punchline they had been expecting, that it blew their minds.

I had gotten Casper to help me with this project. We put a hook in my ceiling and a circle of ringbolts in my floor, then strung fishing line from top to bottom until we had a wirework cone. We then wound several strings of Christmas lights around the structure, attaching it with more fishing line and ornament hooks, and afterwards, hung ornaments all over it. (Mostly from the light string.) Leaving us with lights and ornaments attached to a tree-shaped framework who’s base structure you had to get up close to actually see. The invisible Christmas tree.

My favorite Christmas tree was the result of abandoning the tree shape altogether. I had gotten hold of one of those folding wooden clothesracks used for drying your laundry. I also had several bundles of tree branch garland (once again, purchased the prior January out of a clearance bin). “This,” I thought to myself, “has the makings of a fine Christmas tree . . .”

I spray-painted the clothesrack green. After it dried, I started winding the garland around the framework. When I was finished, there was literally none of the wooden frame that was left exposed to the naked eye except for the very top four wooden rods (which would be covered up and out of sight according to my plan.) Then I started winding the lights up and down and around it. I added ornaments, and when it was done, it was time for the topper. Since it didn’t come to a point like a classic tree, I didn’t use a star or angel. What I did instead was cover a board with white fabric and cotton batting snowdrifts, set it atop the ‘tree’, and that’s where I set up my traditional buffalo, Spidey Claus, and Jawa Elves Christmas scene that year. It was a thing of beauty.

As with all of my other projects, some of the greatest trees are the ones on the ‘someday’ list. Ideas I’ve had, but haven’t been able to try and pull off yet. I’d love to build a full size Christmas tree out of LEGO bricks, but I’d have to win the lottery first. I’ve also thought about constructing a tree out of empty Mt. Dew cans. (I don’t drink the stuff any more, but it’s still part of my personal history. It used to run through my veins like blood.)

And of course, one of the main goals is to get a manikin and dress it up in camouflage fatigues, then add tree branch garland and artificial swags to it here and there. Then add lights and decorate. Spy/assassin/undercover cop as Christmas tree. Presents piled around its feet.

The Lights

Christmas lights have always been another holiday favorite of mine. I love seeing all the houses decorated in the colorful little lights. Non-tree based indoor lights have somewhat lost their holiday-specific meaning for me. I put up some indoor lights about two years ago. Never took them down. As they burnt out, I replaced them with other sets I had bought before Christmas merchandise left the stores. Why? Because all through that first Christmas with them, I could sit here with the Christmas lights on, all the other lights off . . . and it was bright enough for me to see what I was doing, but not so bright that I needed the otherwise ever-present dark glasses. Christmas lights are now ‘home’ to me. Year round.

Things to Cram into Your Face

Ah, Christmas goodies. Diabetes be damned, I’m going to eat me some Christmas goodies.

All of the good homemade stuff that Mom used to produce each December (most of which now issues forth from my sister’s kitchen). Red and green sugar cookies. Peanut butter cookies with an embedded Hershey’s kiss. Little powdered sugar coated cookies with a chocolate star in the center. Fudge. Rocky road (made with dry-roasted peanuts . . . a recipe I got from one of the customers on my old paper route after they left me a holiday tip of the best rocky road I’d ever eaten). Toffee. All sorts of wondrous homemade candies and baked goods. My blood sugar rises just reminiscing.

Then there’s the store-bought stuff. Candy canes. Chocolate-covered marshmallow snowmen. Hot chocolate. Hot spiced cider. Odd Christmas-y baked goods from the local grocery store’s bakery department.

I’ve never been a big fan of eggnog. But Mom would sometimes whip up a batch of moose milk for me to guzzle while everyone else was chugging eggnog. (Moose milk, or at least our family’s version of it – there are infinite variations – is half milk, half melted vanilla ice cream, with nutmeg and cinnamon. Like the classic eggnog, it’s also supposed to contain rum, but not being big drinkers, ours never has.)

Christmas . . . But Not to Me

Eggnog isn’t the only Christmas classic that’s never really been a part of MY Christmas.

I’ve never been Christmas caroling. (No big deal. It’s not something I have a burning desire to experience, it just seems like a classic Christmas activity, and I’ve never done it.) I’ve also never gone on a holiday hayride. That’s something I wanted to do when I was younger. I had opportunities, but I also had hay allergies. So, nope. Not for me.

I’ve never had sex underneath my freshly decorated Christmas tree. Which people tell me is a fun activity, and the best part of the whole “trimming the tree” experience. (The cruder males include the obvious pun as well, but I’ll skip it.) I’ve got to get me one of those ‘girlfriends’ people keep talking about.

I was raised Catholic, but I’ve never really considered the whole midnight mass thing to be Christmas for me, either. Mainly because while everyone else attended, I stayed home. I have vague memories of attending when I was younger. The story is that I’ve been to midnight mass twice. The first time I went, I had a massive asthma and allergy flare up, and had to leave. Mom took me to midnight mass again the next year, and the exact same thing happened. That’s when and how we discovered that I’m allergic to incense. (Which is probably what kept me from pursuing a career as a hippie.)

And then there’s snow. I love snow. I definitely consider snow to be part of Christmas. It’s just that we never seem to get any of it. Seriously. If it’s snowing in my general geographic location, it will snow everywhere except my town. Almost to the point of snowing right up to but not beyond the city limits on all sides.

On the years that it does actually snow here, it rarely sticks. And if it sticks, about half the time it will snow enough to stick, then rain enough to turn it into non-snow-like slush, then freeze into a solid sheet of what-the-fuck?

On the Other Hand . . .

I love Christmas. I’ve got no idea why. By now, the onset of the Christmas season should just scare the Hell out of me. I should be standing on the rooftop with a shotgun, warning the holiday away. “Take a step back there, Yuletide. We don’t want none of your damn holiday cheer ‘round these parts.”

Why would I say this? Well, there’s been this weird tradition of tragedies at Christmastime. Over the last dozen years, Dad’s gone into the hospital during the Christmas season for one medical problem or another (everything from massive diabetic infection to congestive heart failure) at least five times. I’ve thrown my back out three or four times. One of my best friends and his pregnant wife lost what would have been their first born children a few days before Christmas (ON my birthday, as a matter of fact).

One year I went to the doctor in mid-December, and before I left his office, he had his vampire suck a twelve-course meal of blood out of my arm for testing. I then get a phone call from his office a few days later, telling me that the test results have come back (I had no idea what he was all testing for), and that doctor needs to see me in his office as soon as possible. Yikes! That’s enough to scare the crap out of you right there. So, I tell her to set me up with the next available appointment, only to discover that the doctor’s already left for the day . . . which was his last day in the office until after Christmas. So there I am, standing somewhere in the ‘teens on the calendar with the phone in my hand, being told that the first available appointment was going to be something like December 27th. Let me tell you: That will ruin Christmas. Maybe even moreso than an actual diagnosis will, because at this point, it could be ANYTHING.

I didn’t have a whole lot of fun that Christmas. All I could think about was that I had something more wrong with me. (Like CFIDS and my other traditional ills weren’t enough?) And the more time passed, the worse the eventual news was going to be. I couldn’t sleep at night. I wasn’t looking forward to Christmas coming, I just wanted to get the post-Christmas doctor’s appointment over with.

When I finally got in to see the doc after my thoroughly ruined holiday, he sits me down to break the bad, bad, terrible, horrific news to me. The look on his face is not a good one. Before he even tells me what’s wrong, he opens my chart, so he can consult the exact numbers of the test results . . . and as he looks them over, he all of a sudden looks confused, and says, “Huh. Well, that’s kind of odd.”

Then goes on to explain that when he told the receptionist to call and tell me to get in as soon as I could (and, you know, after he was done with his Christmas vacation), he’d been looking at a print-out of test results. And the thing that troubled him – the thing that had led me nearly to the brink of a nervous breakdown – was actually a name on one line and a number of the test below it. He’d read the wrong results for what he thought he’d been looking at. I don’t even remember what it was he thought was wrong with me. All I know is that he’d done something completely insane, like mistake my blood sugar level for my cholesterol level, or some equally retarded example. Aaaaaaarrrrrrgh! Merry fucking Christmas to you, too, Doc.

And Finally . . .

I want a Santa Claus suit. A good, well-made one, not just a Wal*Mart Halloween costume quality suit. I’ve got many reasons for this. First of all, like the guy on “Miracle on 34th Street”, I could fill one out without needing a pillow or other padding. I think I’d look good. Might even dye my hair and beard white (or possibly platinum blond) for the holidays. I’ve already had young (very young) children in shopping malls freak out when I walk by, pointing at me and yelling, “Santa!” when I’m in an everyday black sweatpants and t-shirt combo. (Leaving horribly embarrassed parent or parents trying to shut the kid up without catching my eye. “Don’t call attention to the obese man, honey.”)

There’s some kind of Santa-Con / Running of the Santas-style event in Portland each year that I’d love to attend, but never have for lack of the required wardrobe.

And every year at some point I threaten to go buy a Santa Claus suit and ruin Christmas for somebody . . . I’m a horrible, horrible person. And before I even explain my hideous plan, let me say that I would never actually do something like this. It’s just a fun thing to threaten to do.

I want to go to a shopping mall. Enter at the end opposite from where Santa is set up taking pictures. I’ll be wearing my Santa Claus outfit. I’ll have a fake cast and sling on my arm. I’ll be walking with a crutch. And I will stop and apologize to every child I see . . . because since the accident when I crashed the sleigh last week, my doctor has told me I can’t make the run on Christmas Eve, so there will be no Christmas this year.

Gasp! Shock! How incredibly mean can a concept be?! Who thinks up crap like this?

In a completely different scenario, I’d also like to charge into the mall down to Santa’s throne wearing the Santa suit and a set of burst ropes, loudly proclaiming him to be an imposter. Demanding to know why he kidnapped Santa, tied him up, and kept him locked up in the trunk of his car. After riling all the kids up, and telling the bad, bad man that his name will be on the naughty list for ever, I’d probably then proceed to fight him. Probably WWE style, hitting him with a steel folding chair.

Okay, then. Goodnight everybody!