Halloween-Inspired Tidbits

Here we go. Short little tidbits, sort of inspired by the Halloween season, but not necessarily directly related to them. Enjoy. IF YOU DARE . . .

Sexiest Monster Ever

About a week or so ago, I went up to the library, did my email stuff, did my blog stuff, looked at some of the other ‘must-check’ sites, and then logged into FetLife. I went to the ‘Groups’ heading and clicked around for awhile, seeking out some of the more interesting threads, choosing the SAVE PAGE AS option from the menu bar to load them onto my flash drive so that I could read them at home when I had more time than the library allowed for a single internet session.

One of these threads was “Who is the Sexiest Halloween Character?” It wasn’t a very large thread, a mere seven posts long. And three of those posts weren’t casting votes, but instead commenting on the posts of those who did. The remaining posters found the following monsters sexy: they cast three votes for vampires, and one for the seductress witch.

I was going to return to that thread on my next trip to the internet and post my thoughts on the whole thing, but by time that (once again very short) trip happened, posting on the thread skipped my mind.

Sexiest Halloween Character? Bride of Frankenstein! Wake up, people! It’s the Bride. Accept no substitutes. And I’ll explain why, right after going off on this little tangent.

I like “Frankenstein”. I think that Mary Shelley created something absolutely brilliant. I’ve read the novel, I’ve seen a bunch of the movies, and I just like the whole concept. One of the things that I like about it is how it’s so adaptable. It keeps getting reinvented. And it’s usually a reinvention of the source material, and not a reinvention of the most recent reinvention. I doubt that anybody saw the Mel Brooks movie “Young Frankenstein” and proclaimed that the Frankenstein mythos was now irrevocably destroyed. (More to the point, I doubt that anyone has tried to film or publish a reimagining of the Frankenstein mythos based on the elements as originally presented in “Young Frankenstein”)

Usually, when I say Frankenstein, I’m talking about the mythos. The books, the movies, the comics, and so on. But if I’m talking about characters, then if I say Frankenstein, I’m talking about the Doc. Sometimes Baron, sometimes Doctor, sometimes Professor, usually Victor, sometimes Henry, sometimes Charles, occasionally von, always Frankenstein. That’s the guy. That’s Frankenstein.

When I’m talking about the monster from the mythos, I usually refer to him/it as Frankenstein’s monster, or the Frankenstein monster, or something similar. Although, I admit, I’ll sometimes slip and refer to the creature as Frankenstein. It doesn’t cause the world to end, but it happens.

There are serious scholars of the work, however, who will jump up and down and pull out fistfuls of their own hair if you refer to the monster as Frankenstein. Sometimes if my OCD is in a strong upswing (or if I just want to be a jackass that day) I’ll actually correct people who get it wrong. But I’m not ever anything like the guys who take it seriously.

Which is why I wonder why I’ve never heard the term “The Fiancée of Frankenstein’s Monster”. Because wouldn’t the Bride of Frankenstein have to be a reference to Victor Frankenstein’s wife? It’s not. Everyone knows who/what we’re talking about when we say Bride of Frankenstein. But it’s just not technically accurate. And it’s not just the ‘Frankenstein’ part that’s wrong. The female monster – SPOILER WARNING – usually either rejects the original Frankenstein monster, or never actually gets animated in the first place (depending on what version of the story you’re reading/watching). She doesn’t become his mate, let alone stand with him before their gathered dearly beloved in a wedding dress.

Yet I’ve never been made aware that anyone has an objection to referring to the Frankenstein monster’s proposed mate as the Bride of Frankenstein. What the Hell?

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Sexiest monster ever. The fiancée of Frankenstein’s Monster. The Bride of Frankenstein. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about Elsa Lanchester sporting the Tall-and-Back fright hair with the almost electrical shock of white zig-zag at the sides from the original black-and-white movie. (Although, she is indeed kinda hot.)

No, I’m talking about the whole idea of the Bride. In the original novel, the first creature wanted companionship. Sure, he wanted it to be a woman because having a warm wet place to park the ‘little monster’ would be an added bonus, but he mainly just wanted someone like him to pal around with. But in nearly every other incarnation of the story, what the monster wanted was a mate. Which was code for someone to mate with. Almost universally, the Frankenstein monster possesses the following qualities: He is less than brilliant with base eat-sleep-fight-fuck-survive urges. He has can appreciate beauty. And he wants a mate.

What this means to me is that the ‘Bride’ has to have been built to be beautiful, horny, and also to be just an incredible fuck.

Unless they’ve made pacts with otherworldly patrons regarding their physical appearance, witches just run the sexiness gamut like regular humans do. Some are, some aren’t. I’m assuming that the same is true of vampires. Even if the bite and resurrection makes them all a little better looking, they still aren’t all going to be cover model quality. But the Bride? The whole purpose of the Bride was to appeal to the Monster. She was built to order, and that order was for sexiness.

Other things factor into her appeal too, depending on your kink/perversion level. She’s basically just picked and chosen from a pile of corpses, with some stitching, chemicals and a little electricity added. Much cheaper than a RealDoll, and actual flesh and blood. Sure, she’s (arguably) a soulless abomination, but is this something you really care about when you’re balls deep in her, ready to explode?

Depending on how you look at it, the Bride can be considered all about body modification, if that’s your thing. Sometimes the Bride has the classic Frankenstein monster bolts in her neck, which I think might appeal to the piercing and implantation aficionados. Sometimes the Bride is all pale skin and scars, which should cater to today’s goth and emo crowd. Drifting away from the classic renditions of the character, you can do all sorts of interesting things. Depending on the nature of the women whose corpses were used in her construction, you could end up with a Bride who was ‘born’ covered in tattoos. And for those who don’t really like the scars, the bolts, or the tats, there’s always the modern day versions of the story that use plastic surgery techniques to make her ‘perfect’.

It seems like there’s a version of the Bride for every sexual interest. I’ve never seen this, but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine anthropomorphic fetishists drooling over a version of the Bride where the Doc included both human and animal parts in her construction. And adapting the Bride for a cybernetics story isn’t just easy, it’s pretty much automatic once considered.

Sometimes she’s Jennifer Beals with not a mark on her. (“The Bride”, 1985 film starring Sting as the Doc, and well worth the price of rental just to see the original Monster played by Clancy Brown. After Beals’ Bride rejects the monster, Doctor Frankenstein looks her over and decides, “Hell, if you don’t want ol’ ugly, how’z’about hookin’ up with me?” It’s been ages since I’ve seen it, but I recall it having a weirdly happy ending that you don’t normally get from the mythos.)

So, to reiterate . . . sexiest Halloween monster? The Bride of Frankenstein. [Also quite possibly the poster girl for objectification of women, but that’s not the topic at hand.] Now: Does anyone have contact information for Doctor Frankenstein?

Ghosts and Dirty Panties

A couple of months ago, I was over at my sister’s apartment, and the television was tuned to the Discovery Channel or something with similar programming. I was busy looking up stuff on the internet (All Hail the Mighty Internet!), but I was sort of half listening to what the TV was talking about. And what I (sort of half) heard was some parapsychologist type talking about how what we call ‘ghosts’ are actually the psychic imprints of extreme trauma suffered by humans left upon a physical location.

I’ve heard the theory before. I don’t necessarily disagree with it. Although I’d like to think we’ll eventually discover that we’ve been throwing a bunch of stuff into the ‘ghost’ category that are actually several completely different things, Psychic Trauma Imprints being just one of them.

I stopped internetting for a few minutes to listen to him talk. And upon discovering that he had nothing to tell me that I didn’t already know (I used to be really into the more interesting aspects of parapsychology), I decided to get back to what I had been doing. So, I tuned him out, thought about dirty panties for a few moments, and then cleared my mind of the topic of ghosts and returned to my internet to-do list.

Are you wondering why thinking about ghosts made me think about dirty panties? Okay. I’ll see if I can explain it to you.

I always wanted a pair of CJ’s dirty panties. I know, I know . . . every stereotypical pervert wants a pair of dirty panties. On the occasions that I’d actually ask her if I could keep the pair that she’d worn to that particular meeting of ours (these oh-so-rare, accidentally platonic, third base but never home plate, full frontal nudity-to-full frontal nudity, secret trysts), she’d tell me, ‘No.’ And then, after making sure that I understood that the answer was no, so that I didn’t misunderstand her next question as her considering my request, she’d ask, ‘Why do you want them?’

The problem with answering her was . . . I honestly wasn’t sure. I KNEW I wanted them. I wasn’t 100% certain as to why. I’d spout impromptu verbal essays about why ‘guys wanted dirty panties’, then went back through point by point, explaining that most of those reasons weren’t mine. Did I want to sniff them? No, I don’t have a working sense of smell. Did I want to wear them? No, and couldn’t even if I wanted to, because I was like seventeen hundred sizes larger than her. Did I want to use them to masturbate with/in? No, . . . well, okay, maybe. But only halfway. I could see me wrapping them around my cock and stroking them up and down over it until I was nearing the point of no return, but I didn’t want to actually cum in them. I wanted the ‘dirty’ in ‘dirty panties’ to be hers . . . if I ejaculated into them, then the primary ‘dirty’ would be mine.

Yeah, I couldn’t really explain why I wanted them. Not to her. Not to me, either. I just did. Then came the day when I realized that not only did she not realize why I wanted them (not her fault), but she also didn’t realize exactly what it is that I wanted.

She was going to be housesitting for a friend of hers for a week or so, and decided to have me spend the weekend with her. She’d already been living there for a few days when she drove out to pick me up. Once we arrived at our destination, she gave me a tour of the place. There were a few (presumably dirty) articles of her clothing on the floor next to her bed, including a pair of panties. She saw me notice this, and said, “No, you can’t have those panties.”

I looked at her and rolled my eyes. “I don’t want those panties. But assuming that we’re going to fool around later on, I’m going to want the panties that you’re wearing now.” At which point, she looked all sorts of confused. So once again, she asked questions. Starting with . . .

“What’s the difference? Once I take the ones I’m wearing off, they’ll just be dirty laundry, the same as the ones that are on the floor now. I don’t see the appeal in either pair. What am I missing?”

I tried to explain it to her, and at the end, she still didn’t seem to understand. I didn’t want panties that she’d simply worn. I wanted panties that she’d become aroused in. More specifically, I wanted a pair of panties that she’d been in when I had done things to arouse her. Panties that she’d worn while I was playing with her nipples and rubbing her between her legs while whispering naughty things in her ears. Best option yet, I’d want a pair of panties that she been wearing when I’d brought her to orgasm. Or inspired an orgasm. (I would have been fine with a pair of panties she’d been wearing while rereading lust letters I’d mailed her. Reading with one hand while sliding the other down inside her panties to play with herself.)

What I wanted was an object (an article of clothing serving as a physical location, if you will) that contained something akin to a psychic imprint of extreme pleasure / emotion / sensation left behind by a sexy human female. An idea along the same lines as a Psychic Trauma Imprint, but with vastly different input parameters. I wasn’t exactly after a sex ghost. I wasn’t looking for a pair of haunted panties. But the stains of dripped (or gushed) biological female arousal were of lesser importance to me than other parts of her that she might’ve left behind while wearing them. Saying that what I wanted was the remains of the feelings she’d had that I’d aroused in her, now trapped in the fabric of her underwear A.) sounds kind of weird; and, B.) still isn’t exactly why I wanted them. (But it’s close.)

The eyes see and the ears hear. But neither comprehend language. Eyes and ears are just input devices for the brain. The mouth speaks, but it doesn’t come up with clever dialogue. The mouth is just an output device for the brain. Ah, that wacky brain!

They say that the most important sexual organ is (once again) the brain. And I concur. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the only true sexual organ humans have. Is the vagina simply an input/output device for the brain? (Yeah, I know, the clit is probably a more important input device, but the vagina still does have some decent input function, so pipe down out there.) When I’m laying on the floor coming out of seizure activity, my brain sends dumb jokes to my mouth. Output. When a woman becomes sexually aroused, the brains sends lubrication to her vagina. Output.

Okay, so there isn’t an actual pipeline of lube from the brain to the pussy. It just sends commands to lube up on it’s own. Lube up, expand, and so on. But is that all it does? Or is that just all that we’re aware of? I don’t know. All I know is that there’s a chance that it’s screaming weird soundless sex noises or flashing invisible sex auras or who knows what into the panties covering it while arousal takes place. And if the panties retain it, then I’d kind of like to have those panties as a souvenir. That’s all.

The Sex Lives of Skeletons

I used to pose action figures all over the place. Bizarre little scenes, rarely in character. Often sexual. (I had lots of Spider-Man figures for some reason, and between me and visitors who’d stop by, it was firmly established that even if Spidey wasn’t gay as far as other men were concerned, we was certainly gay with himselves.)

But the best spot in the house, action figure-wise was the video shelf. Built for paperbacks, I used it for videotapes, and there was a small section always left open where a couple of action figures would stand right at the edge. I’d write up some witty dialogue on blank sheets of paper, cut out word balloons around them, and attach them to the bottom of the shelf right above the figures with thumbtacks, and Ta Da!, I had a funny little scene. (Yes, this is indeed how people with no lives spend their time when they can’t get laid.)

One year as it was approaching Halloween, I’d picked up a big handful of five inch tall bendable rubber skeletons. I also grabbed a Frankenstein monster from the same line. When I got home with them, I got out the scale model dining room table and two chairs (dollhouse furniture someone found for me in the discount bin of the local craft store), and sat two of the skeletons down, then propped the Frankenstein monster into a standing position nearby. The two balloon conversation between the Monster and one of the skeletons went like this:

Frankenstein Monster: “Why . . . Friend . . . Sad . . .?”
Skeleton: “Because I don’t have anything to fuck with, and she doesn’t have anything to fuck!”

Oh, those poor horny skeletons!

Of course, those rubber skeletons also found themselves in poses much the same as Spider-Man’s. So, I don’t know. They either decided to simulate it, or figured out something that I still can’t quite fathom.

Time passes, I get internet access, and I eventually find animated .gifs, and some pieces of Flash animation, and even still images that pretty much all qualify as skeleton porn. One of my favorites being what looks like an X-Ray of a blowjob. (Skull down in front of the top of a pair of legbones, mouth open. Vague outline of muscle and flesh on legs, vague outline of cock in mouth.)

Most of the skeletons-having-sex pieces are sight gags that end badly for at least one of the participants. Doggy style from behind, bent over a table until he thrusts so hard that her skull pops off. On his knees erecting a massive bone boner until it over balances him, and ends up crushing his skull. This sort of thing.

I’ve got some skeleton characters in stories that I’ve got well planned out but, like the vast majority of my work, is as-yet unwritten. One is straight fantasy piece, categorized as a sword and sorcery tale. The skeleton character therein (Rion) doesn’t really understand the desire for male/female interaction. But he does find something appealing about one of the women he meets. And as near as he can tell, his attraction to her is based on her long hair. When he eventually decides to experiment with male/female interaction among his own kind, he has a necromancer raise up the bones of a medusa-like creature. The skeletons of the snakes mounted in her skull serving the purpose of long (flowing?) hair.

The other main skeleton character I’ve got is Boney. Boney’s stories also take place in a D&D type fantasy realm, but the actual literary category that I’m shooting for here is erotica. Or porn. Whatever. Boney’s schtick is his dick. He’s got a harness carved from dragonhide, that holds his bone. Carved scrimshaw-like from a long thick legbone into the shape of a long, thick penis, Boney’s phallic part was then taken to an alchemist for treatment. Did you ever do an experiment in science class where you soaked chicken bones in vinegar overnight, giving the bones the consistency of rubber? Yeah, Boney’s got a strap-on cock that’s much like the strap-on dildo of modern times, and it’s made of the same thing he is. I’m on my way toward eventually giving the skeletons some real action.

Enough of all this craziness. I’m off in search of candy corn.

Halloween

[Only two days late. Much better than that time that I skipped the entirety of September.]

October 25th. The first day of Halloween week. And so, it begins.

Time to buy your Halloween candy. Finish carving your jack-o-lanterns. Make sure that you’ve RSVP’d to whatever parties you’re attending. Or make sure that all the preparations are made for the party that you’re throwing. Make sure your costume is finished. (Or, if you’re me, start panicking because it isn’t yet really started.) Buy more Halloween candy because you suddenly realize you’ve already eaten all the stuff you bought at the beginning of the week already. Figure out new and inventive ways to frighten small children. The usual stuff.

And then, in your alone time, you start thinking about sweet young things (not too young, mind you) heading out to Halloween parties all dressed up as lusty vampire girls. Or deceptively innocent looking lasses wearing schoolgirl outfits with their hair done up in pigtails. Or sexy devil girls in red bikinis with tails, wearing plastic horns and carrying tridents. Or – ooh! – hot chicks wearing tight revealing clothing and clown make-up . . . I think of these women, and I suddenly NEED some alone time.

Women in costumes. You gotta love this time of year. And it’s not just the costumes. It’s everything. The kid in me loves the season. The adult in me loves the season. And the ‘adult’ in me loves the season. (That last one was the same ‘adult’ that’s synonymous with ‘mature audiences only’, in case you were wondering.)

But as much focus as I typically put into the whole costuming aspect of it each year, there’s so much more to Halloween than the simple masquerade.

If I had more internet time available to me, I’d do research and then ramble on mock-authoritatively about how Christianity decided to set All Saint’s Day around the same time as Samhain in the hopes of stealing converts from the Pagans. If that’s what my research revealed. I’ve heard that’s why Christmas is positioned so close to the winter solstice, and why the tree is a symbol of the holiday and whatnot. I’ve always assumed that the same was the case with Halloween, but never really bothered to check. I suppose that if you’re interested then I’ve just given you a fun little project of your own. Yay!

But at any rate, Samhain is (at?) the end of October. The last day of October is All Hallow’s Eve, which is followed by All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. And those same three days are also los Dias de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that all of us dangerously unilingual English speakers know as the Day of the Dead.

So, just according to the previous paragraph, October 31st is the following things: a Pagan harvest festival and Wiccan religious observance, a Christian go-to-church-and-pray-for-the-dead holy day, and the beginning of a joyous three day long festival that celebrates those who have passed on. Have I missed anything? Hmm . . . It seems like I missed one . . . Oh yeah! It’s also fucking Halloween!

A lot of people will tell you that All Hallow’s Eve and Halloween are the same thing. These are the same people who insist that Independence Day and the Fourth of July are the same holiday. (Independence Day is a patriotic celebration of the birth of our country. The Fourth of July is a barbecue holiday about pretty lights in the sky and blowing stuff up. They evolved from the same source, but they’re now two different things that just happen to occur on the same day.) Halloween is about costumes and trick-or-treating and jack-o-lanterns and candy and parties and so on. It’s also about haunted houses and monsters and black cats and bats and spiders and the like. Halloween is there for you to have fun.

The kids have fun at their level, the adults have fun at their level, and the ‘adults’ . . . heh heh heh! Well, you can pervert any of the major holidays with an overlay of kinky sex themes, but maybe none quite so well as Halloween.

The holiday owes much of it’s conceptual debt to Samhain. And while it was widely celebrated as a harvest festival at one time, the happy farmer just doesn’t seem like a good spokesperson for a scary holiday. Enter the witch. Another major celebrant of Samhain, she seems like a much more likely candidate for traditional Halloween imagery.

The iconic witch is ugly. Green skin, with a big wart on her nose. She’s also a cartoon. She’s an opponent for Bugs Bunny, or a cardboard cut-out you buy with the rest of your Halloween decorations at Wal*Mart. She’s not an accurate depiction of anything. (I think that her wardrobe choices are a weird permutation on the pilgrim-style clothing worn during the witch-hunt era, and the ugliness is there as a deterrent to young people seeing witchcraft as glorious. But then, that’s based on nothing but stuff rolling around in my head.)

The ‘modern’ witches are the girls from Charmed. Or hot redhead Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Today’s witches are non-pointy hat wearing, non-broom riding, pagan oriented, wiccan defined women of the natural realm. They perform ceremonies in the woods under moonlight, without the hindrance of clothing. Like Frank Black sings in ‘Goodbye Lorraine’, “She said if we’ll be witches / then there must be nakedness”. And unless you’re a nudist, naked means sexual, which tells you what the witch is really all about in the mind of the average male.

Where goes the theme of the witch, so goes the theme of the black cat, as the black cat is the witch’s familiar.

The cat (not necessarily black) was the symbol of Bast, the Egyptian Goddess of Hedonism. The Goddess of Doin’ It. Cats tend to slink around. In fashion, slinky things are sexy things. I could continue on, and make all kind of connections between sexuality/sensuality and cats (my God, they spend all day licking themselves!), but I’m allergic to cats, and am therefore not going to waste time singing the praises of a bunch of goofy snotmakers.

All Saints/All Souls. Day of the Dead. Any interaction between the living and the subjects of the immediately aforementioned holidays usually means contact with ghosts. Boo!

When I was first taking notes for this post, I remember having a sexual connection with ghosts in mind to discuss, but apparently didn’t write it down. And do you think that I can remember what it was? Nope. I do have a somewhat sexual-type theory that makes reference to ghosts, but that’ll be in another post later on in Halloween week. It doesn’t really fit here.

According the parapsychologists and ghost hunters (and popularized by the Ghostbusters mythos) when a ghost comes into physical contact with something, it leaves behind a gooey slimy residue called ectoplasm. A ghost taking physical form takes a form made of ectoplasm. Gooey and slimy. Like semen. Like lube. This isn’t the sexual connection that I had, but was something I was going to (and just did) mention as a kind of pervy side note.

Anyway, there are all sorts of monsters roaming about on Halloween. Ghosts, ghouls, zombies, vampires, werewolves, swamp monsters, mummies, things that go ‘bump’ in the night (scientific classification: Nocturnal Colliders), nameless things, shapeless things, nameless and shapeless things, Chihuahuas on stilts, and volunteers going door-to-door with political fliers. Creepy!

The classic “Universal Monsters” – named for a group of characters from monster movies by Universal Studios back in the black-and-white era – have become part of the accepted Halloween theme. The Frankenstein Monster, Count Dracula, the Wolfman, uh . . . who else . . . the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy . . . ? Yeah, I really couldn’t tell you. Frankenstein’s monster I’m absolutely sure was from Universal in it’s classic film incarnation, and I’m about 95% certain about Dracula. I’m pretty sure that the Wolfman was, too. If I’m wrong about the others, well, blame Wikipedia for not having a toll-free number for us internet-less losers.

I don’t know if the monster types that these specific monsters represented were part of Halloween monster ‘canon’ prior to these movies or not. Were little kids scared of vampires on October 31st more after the release of Dracula than they were beforehand? Same question about werewolves and The Wolfman? Mummies? Swamp Monsters? Abominations stitched together from dead guys? (Okay, so, the Frankenstein monster is kind of specific. But still . . . ) Which came first: Halloween vampires or Halloween Dracula? Monster chicken or haunted egg?

And isn’t it interesting that all of these monsters were incredibly horny? Demanding, seducing, or chasing after a woman or women? Dress up in a costume for Halloween and you can act like someone else for the night. Dress up like a monster – one of the classic monsters – and you’re almost expected to chase women. In a comedic fashion, if nothing else. A Frankenstein Monster mask and the phrase “Fire Bad . . . Woman Pretty . . . “ might be a nice icebreaker at a costume party. (At the right kind of party, look down at your pants and finish the phrase with “. . . Erection Confusing . . . “ then look back up at the woman like maybe she has an answer for you. Maybe she does.

The classic mummy leads us to thoughts of bondage. Particularly the whole encasement bondage thing. The complete mummy includes the sarcophagus, which is just another layer of containment for someone who gets off on that sort of thing.

Werewolves are primal. Primal is eat, sleep, fight, fuck. Eat, sleep, fight, fuck is sexy. Or, depending on how you combine those elements, really kind of kinky. And then if you’ve got the furry fetish, or lycanthropy fetish, or really any kind of major wetness or hardness for general anthropomorphism, then you’re good to go on other levels as well.

Vampires, in this day and age, seem to be the big draw. At their core, the vampire is all about sex. They seduce with a hypnotic glance. They dress well. And most tellingly . . . The fang penetrates and blood is a bodily fluid. Does that remind you of anything?

Bats followed vampires into Halloween because of the whole alternate vampiric form thing. Especially Dracula with his shifting into a bat (or a wolf, or fog, but usually a bat). Bats, rats, etc. Christmas has reindeer. Halloween has vermin.

I’m not actually into the concept of sex play with real animals. And I’m certainly no fan of rats under any circumstances. So trying to come up with a sexual context with the vermin took me a minute. But it’s the mindfuck. The phobia play. It’s asking the submissive, “What are you willing to let me do to you in exchange for me not unlocking and opening this box of rats and letting them run freely about this room that you’re currently tied to a chair in?”

Jack-o-Lanterns. The origin of the Jack-o-Lantern is usually a story about a man named Stingy Jack. And there are many, many different versions of this story. But basically, at some point in his life, Jack ends up either trapping the Devil and only agreeing to let him go if the Devil agrees to never take him into Hell, or else Jack simply pisses the Devil off and the Devil vows that he’ll never allow Jack into Hell. Then Jack dies, and discovers that he’s sinned enough that they won’t let him into Heaven. So he wanders limbo for awhile, and eventually gives up and goes to the gates of Hell, and tries to get in, with no luck. When he complains that he can’t find his way around in limbo, the Devil tosses him a small piece of burning Hell coal, which Jack then sticks into a turnip which he carves holes in and uses as a lamp.

So, people in the real world started hallowing out turnips, carving faces in them, and putting small candles into them. (I hope to someday write a story that has the wide-ranging effect on society that the story of Stingy Jack had on his audience.) These Jack-o-Lanterns would eventually come to be used to scare off demons and monsters on Samhain. Fairly cheap protection for your household from all manner of evil creatures that might be prowling the night.

Once the holiday came to North America, someone discovered how much easier it was to carve a pumpkin than a turnip. And thus, the pumpkin slowly evolved into the Jack-o-Lantern of choice. (I’ve never carved a turnip. I probably should, just for bragging rights. I have carved a Jack-o-Lantern or two out of the hide of the evil, evil watermelon, however.)

The Jack-o-Lantern has continued evolving. While the simple face is still prevalent, the pumpkin has become an actual artistic medium come October each year. Illuminated carvings of all sorts can be found adorning pumpkins of all sizes. And where there’s art, there’s also erotic art. That’s right . . . pumpkins can be a viable medium for porn. Carve some pumpkins to offend the neighbors. (Or possibly arouse your neighbors, and get an invitation to a neighborhood Halloween orgy you previously knew nothing about!)

And if that’s not enough pumpkin-based sex for you, then guys, try this – before cutting out the top piece or scooping out the guts, cut out the eyes and nose. Then cut a mouth based on the size of your erect cock. You can either stop there, or slice some eyelashes in above the eyes, giving you what I like to call a Jill-o-Lantern. Heat up the mouth area with a hair dryer. Slather some lube around her mouth (inside and out), and then penetrate. It’s actually not really all that fun at all. More painful than arousing, really. That thick pumpkin shell is hard. I would imagine that with a bigger dick than mine, you’d end up with more of it actually fucking the mass of pumpkin guts, which was kind of the sensation I was aiming for (and missed). I had to work like heck to actually achieve orgasm via the Jill-o-Lantern blowjob, but once I was naked on the floor with my hard cock in a hole in a pumpkin, I was committed. I figured the only way I could have felt stupider is if I didn’t finish. (Or if I’d been caught, I suppose. Thank God that didn’t happen. “He says, as he admits his depraved actions to the entire internet.”)

Ghosts are part of Halloween, and one of the places that they can be found is in a haunted house. So, the haunted house becomes part of Halloween. Both the ‘real’ haunted houses where unexplained phenomenon have occurred and ghosts have been reported, and spooky fundraising drives where you buy tickets to walk through a building all tricked out with various fright effects.

I haven’t been in a Halloween haunted house since I was a kid. When I was a kid I bought my tickets and walked through several. The things I remember the most was that at some point there was always an arm that came from out of nowhere and grabbed you. One room had chains hanging from the walls, . . . and life-sized skeletons hanging from the chains. There was usually ‘bloody’ torture equipment. A soundtrack of creeks and thumps was played from hidden speakers, alternating with moans and groans. That sort of stuff.

After having been in the temporary dungeon set up for KinkFest, all I can really think regarding haunted houses is that I want to see an ‘adult’ one. Real victims hanging from those chains. Torturer doms working over more victims, putting that torture equipment to good use. That sort of thing. You don’t need fake bodies and ketchup . . . you just need some decent security barriers and a couple of people into bloodplay.

What else? Trick-or-Treating began way back at the dawn of time, and was basically just poor people going door to door begging for food on holidays. Two of the biggest days for this was All Hallow’s and Christmas Eve. One would evolve into Trick-or-Treating, the other Wassailing (and later still it’s watered down form ‘Christmas Caroling’).

[I’d like to go door to door begging for sex. But all my faithful readers already suspect that, so let’s move this along.]

Trick-or-Treat. Sounds like a question you’d ask a prostitute, doesn’t it? Are you going to turn a trick here, or treat me to a freebie? Then we get the extended version from the playground. Trick-or-Treat, Smell My Feet, Give Me Something Good To Eat! Yeah, that one throws in references to foot fetishism and oral sex.

This holiday is (or at least can be) just out-and-out perverted! You’ve simply got to look for the clues.

Who Am I? (prelude)

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Does Craigslist Have a Weight Limit?

I want to have sex. I don’t have a girlfriend, I don’t know any women that I could get drunk and help to have their biggest drunken mistake ever, and I am practically a shut-in. Society’s advice to me, in this instance, can be boiled down to a single word: “Craigslist”.

I started paying attention to Craigslist earlier this year. Lurking. Reading the personals, but not yet daring to respond to any of them. Primarily because a lot of them clearly stated, ‘Zeitgeist the Clown need not apply.’ Oh, they didn’t use those exact words. They instead just insisted that respondents be HWP (which took me forever to discover meant Height/Weight Proportionate). Or employed. Or well hung. Or have no emotional baggage. (Ha ha! I’ve got a whole damn luggage cart full of emotional baggage pushed around by my own private bellhop! Whee!) Usually multiple combinations of the above.

I kept an eye out for ads from people who weren’t quite so picky. There were a few, here and there. But it took me awhile before I worked up the nerve to answer one of them. The first ad I ever responded to was posted back in July by a woman who wanted to have sex with a “large white male”. Not a hung white male. Not a male with a large cock. A large white male. So, I took a deep breath, and cut and pasted the reply-to address into an email, and asked for conformation about this.

The subject line was “question about your craigslist personals post”, and the email itself (without salutation or signature) was simply: “When you say 'large white male', are you looking for someone with a huge cock (not me), or someone who weighs 440 pounds (me)? Let me know.”

It was a week before I could get back to check my email again, and when I did, there was no response. I went back to Craigslist and found her ad again. And noticed something that my brain had kind of just glossed over the first time around. She mentioned that any replies without photos would be deleted without being read. Well, yeah, I’d seen that, but I had a question. My subject line said so. Surely she’d let me ask a question, before committing to formally responding to her post, right? (It was my first encounter with Craigslist. Go easy on me. I didn’t know what I was doing.)

The more I thought about it, the more it irked me. And the more I thought that she was probably after large-dicked and not large-bodied. But just in case . . . I went ahead and sent her a picture.

A couple of years ago my siblings and a couple of friends pooled their resources and got me a digital camera for my birthday. Not long afterwards, I started playing with the 12-second timer while not wearing clothing. (I was curious about my penis, which I hadn’t actually seen since the late 80s. Oh, I had felt it every day, but I wouldn’t be able to pick it out of a line-up.) As a result of which, I happened to have a handful of nude photos of myself tucked away in a folder on my computer.

So, I sent her an email containing the exact same text as the one I had sent before, but this time with a photo attachment so that she would actually open the stupid thing and read my question. The photo was of me. From the side. From my shoulder to just above my knee. Stark naked. (I didn’t get a reply, but I’d like to think that she was drinking Pepsi or Coke while checking her email, and that viewing my picture made her spray it out her nose.)

The second post I replied to was from a woman seeking a man with a foot fetish. Now, I’d been browsing the Craigslist personals, off-and-on, for months at this point, and this was the first reference to that sort of thing that I’d seen.

Her ad wasn’t really all that specific as to what she wanted. In fact, I remember it being incredibly vague. She did ask that we describe ourselves to her, and that if she was interested she’d get back to us and initiate a picture exchange and whatnot.

So, I sent her an email telling her that I was very interested in ‘that kind of thing’, and described myself. I held my breath and left words like ‘virgin’ and ‘small penis’ out of my description, fighting my OCD urges to the contrary. I did mention the chronic illness, and gave an accurate description which included the weight number.

And guess what? No response.

After that there were several posts that I was interested in responding to over the course of a couple of weeks, but didn’t. They didn’t explicitly state ‘no fatties’ or ‘no sickies’, but I wasn’t starved for rejection or anything, so . . . why bother?

But I still read the ads. And eventually found a woman seeking a man who was ‘chubby’. So, I asked, “How chubby? I clock in at 450 on the scales. Stand about 6 foot-ish, long and balding red hair and full beard, 37 years old. If that sounds like what you're looking for, drop me a line.”

It apparently wasn’t what she was looking for, because she didn’t drop me a line.

The next thing that got my hopes up was from a couple who wanted to hear peoples’ wildest fantasies to see if they spiked any interest. Looking for either a perfect fit, or something so wild that they would dare and goad each other into contacting the respondent and doing it (whatever it happened to be) with them. They didn’t care – according to claim – about the specific physical details of the person, but instead about the true and uncensored wild side of their personality. (Although, despite not caring what a person looked like, they still asked for a picture. Huh.)

So, I sent them a nearly 2,000 word response outlining a number of fantasy scenarios covering a wide range of kinks that I’d be more than willing to engage in with a sexually adventurous couple. And I sent a picture. (Fully clothed, nothing freaky).

They sent nothing in return. Again, I sat there with no reply in my in-box.

The most recent attempt at hooking up via ‘the list’ was when I replied to a BBW who was searing for . . . I kid you not . . . ‘a big fat man’. And in what had become the standard operating procedure, I read the ad, got excited, responded to the ad, and never heard back.

There’ve been a handful of other ads that I haven’t mentioned. Several other woman. Another couple. Once, when I was in a strange mood, I answered an ad for a man seeking a man.

And I never heard back from a single one of them. Not one.

I’ve seen furniture for sale in office supply stores with tags that read, “300 lb capacity”. There’s a limit to how much weight – how fat of a person – the chair can take. And the manufacturer is up front about it. And that’s what Craigslist needs.

Someone needs to do a study to figure out what the cut-off point is for fat people on Craigslist. I mean, I know that it’s lower than 450 lb. But I’d like to know, just out of curiosity if nothing else, what the exact weight limit for the Craigslist personals is.

“Craigslist personals have a maximum weight capacity of 320 lbs. If you weigh more than this, nobody will want to have sex with you or begin a relationship with you, so please, don’t waste either your time or ours. Thank you. The management.”

At some point in the middle of all of that replying to ads and never hearing back from the original posters, I got fed up with it. And decided to become a poster myself. I figured that since nobody was requesting a 450 pounder, then maybe offering one was the trick.

So there I am, sitting in my sister’s apartment (housesitting for the weekend – the same weekend from the previous blog post), drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade and formulating the ‘perfect’ (?) Craigslist ad.

My ad’s grabline was “450 lb man seeking someone into that - M4W - 37 (salem-ish)”. And, if you were curious enough to click on it to read the full ad, you’d find this:

“I'm 6'2", 450 lbs, white, d&d free (well, nothing I've got is sexually transmittable, and all my meds are prescribed). I'm looking for someone to play with. One of the (seemingly mythological) straight female chubby chasers would be nice. I could also have fun with a BDSM girl who's into the obesity as an aspect of humiliation play.”

I figured that if anybody WAS looking for that, then I could go into more detail about myself in our correspondence. You know, when I responded to their response. I posted this ad on Friday night, (technically, early Saturday morning) and then started compulsively checking my email for a reply every five minutes or so. I eventually went to bed, and there was still no response to my ad when I got up (later) on Saturday morning.

O.K. I paced myself, and only checked my mail every half hour or so. (Somehow ‘every half hour’ ended up translating to every 15 – 20 minutes, but that was a lot better than the previous day.) When I’d received no response by Sunday I started telling myself, “Well, you’re a specialty item. You can’t expect an immediate reply, because how many potential females with the ‘fat guy’ fetish are going to be reading Craigslist at any given time. The responses will come.”

They just didn’t come by time my sister drove me back home Monday evening.

Two days later at the library, I found a response in my email. (Note the singular: one response, and it would turn out to be the only one I’d get.) After reading it a couple of times, I checked to see when it was sent, and . . . wouldn’t you know it? After waiting all weekend for a response, it finally came about twenty minutes after my sister and I left her apartment headed for my place.

It wasn’t the email-sent-from-computer that I’m used to seeing. Instead, it was a text message, with a celphone number for a ‘return address’. And this is what it said: “R u still looking 4 a playmate? I am interested. How old r u? I am 35 and tall an”

No, I didn’t forget to finish retyping her message. That’s it in it’s entirety. My second thought was, “Maybe she’s just got a really short character-per-message count on her phone.” Probably not very likely. My third thought was, “Transmission difficulty. Somehow, only the first part of her message got through.” That’s what I decided had happened.

[Not having had any luck with Craigslist thus far, my first thought was that she’d thumbed in that much of her message before deciding it was a bad idea . . . but accidentally hit the button that sent the message instead of the one that deleted it. (I can’t tell you how many half texts I’ve sent to my sister when trying to backspace over a typo.)]

I’ve never been overly fond of the telephone as a means of communication (preferring face-to-face conversation or written correspondence), but the whole point of this was to have sex, and I now had the phone number of a potential sex partner. And the last thing that I wanted was to try and meet somebody via a series of text messages.

I waited until 8:00, and dialed her number. When she answered the phone, I introduced myself. Told her my first name, then said on Monday night she’d responded to an ad I’d posted on Craigslist. She told me that she’d only responded to the one ad, so she knew which one I was. Then told me that at the moment there was a meeting in her house, and the place was filled with little kids and their parents. Would I mind if she called me back? Would I still be up at 10:00? I told her that was fine, and said goodbye.

At 10:05 my phone rang. I normally answer the stupid thing on the first ring (I’m one of those people that cannot tolerate a ringing phone – it must either be answered, or blasted with a shotgun), but since she didn’t know that, I let it ring a couple of times. Then I picked it up, glancing at the caller ID screen as I did so. It was my brother. “Why did it take you so long to answer the phone?” Yikes. I got rid of him as soon as I could, all the time expecting the call waiting to beep through.

At about 10:15 my phone rang again. This time it was her.

Her name is D. (Actually, her name isn’t D. Nor does her name start with the letter D. But, ‘D’ is how I’m presenting her here in the blog.) She described herself to me. She’s 37 (not 35 as stated in her half a text message). Tall and fit. (Not just “tall an”.) Just past shoulder-length naturally brown hair with blonde highlights. Divorced with two children. And, occasionally horny. As she had been the night she saw my ad. She’s wanted some sex, and gone to Craigslist to find it. Something about my ad spoke to her, so she sent me a text, looking to hook-up. When I didn’t contact her within an hour or so, she turned to plan B, which was a toy she keeps in her nightstand drawer.

I described myself to her. Mostly. (In between calling her and her calling back, I talked to my friend Zorch (not his real name, either), and he informed me that if I told her I was a virgin or had a tiny penis during our first conversation he was going to kick my ass.) But I talked about everything else, primarily in the form of answering questions she asked me. (So glad that she didn’t ask me direct questions about whether or not I was a virgin, or about how hung I was.)

After we each knew some stuff about the other, I asked if she wanted to get together. “Absolutely!” I think that I may have actually gotten a little lightheaded when she said that. She told me that she was busy the rest of the week with some summer program that her kids were involved in, and that the next week she had out-of-state relatives visiting, but that I should call her after that and we’d set something up.

Then she asked if I could host. She didn’t mind meeting up at her place, but it was easier for her if we could just meet up at mine. I told her that my place wasn’t an option. Then I told her that I didn’t drive. “So,” she asked, “I’d need to come get you, and then take you back after?”

I told her that if I had a few days notice – if when we set something up it was for a few days from then rather than right then – I could get a ride out to her place. I could probably even get a ride back if she didn’t want to take me home afterward. She seemed okay with that.

We talked for over half an hour. I had more questions, but I figured that I’d ask them another time. Our conversation went well, and I didn’t want to do anything that would sound accusatory. (Do you always prowl around for sex on Craigslist? Why on earth did you answer the big fat guy’s sex ad?) After we hung up, I scribbled down information on a post-it note and stuck it on the calendar.

With so much of my Craigslist experience thus far having been sending an email and getting no response, it was such a nice change of pace two weeks later to be able to leave a voice mail . . . and get no response. Aaaarrgh! (Well, at least the medium was different, if not the end result, right?)

I called her again after yet another week had passed, leaving another message on her voice mail, and still got no reply.

For a brief moment there (actually more like two weeks), I had really thought I was going to have sex. And then it became the same old thing that Craigslist had been supplying me with from the beginning. Nothing.

I’ve been thinking about reposting my ad again on the Casual Encounters board. (Possibly slightly reworded.) Just to see if I do any better this time. But I’m also contemplating posting something a little different on the less fuck-and-run oriented Men Seeking Women board. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress. It needs a lot more fine-tuning than it’s gotten so far, but it will let you get the basic idea . . .

“I’m the exact opposite of what everyone else is looking for”

I’ve been reading the personals on Craigslist for awhile now, and it seems to me that these are the things that all of the women posting here seem to really want a man to be: HWP, healthy, physically fit, employed, financially stable, well-hung, and a good kisser. Oh yeah, and he also must love dogs. In addition to these qualities, the women on the Casual Encounters board require a man who is either able to host or able to drive. Preferably both.

Here’s my problem . . . I am exactly NONE of those things. I am obese (450 lbs). I am chronically ill (CFIDS and seizures). I am out of shape (a result of being obese and chronically ill). I am on SSI (social security disability). I am incredibly poor (the SSI doesn’t even cover my bills). I am not well hung. I am probably not a good kisser (never learned to kiss properly, plus I’ve got bad teeth). And in addition to being allergic to animals, dogs and I have a mutual hatred of each other. (Don’t look at me like that – they started it!)

There are three other main things that women seem to want in a man. They want him to be single. Which I am. They want him to be drug and disease free. Assuming this refers to STD and recreational drugs, then I’m d&d free. And they want him to be honest. I am, and more importantly, I just was. I know that I’m probably not anybody’s idea of the ideal catch. But as much as I want a girlfriend, I’m not going to lie about who I am to try and snag one.

Oh, there are other requirements that women have for their potential Craigslist-obtained mates. Funny. Caring. Willing to listen. Willing to share. Intelligent. (and so on). And I think that I qualify for these.

Take a chance. There are incredibly happy couples out there about whom everyone asks the question “Why on earth is she with him?” The heart wants what the heart wants. How do you know for sure that yours might not want me if you walk the other way?

Like I said, that ad is a work in progress. I’m not sure what makes me think that it has a better chance on Men for Women than my first ad did on Casual Encounters, but I’m driven to try.

And if none of those posts work, then I’ve still got one more shot to take. It will mean reining in my obsessive need for full disclosure. Maybe even fudging the truth on one or two aspects the situation. I’ve only got the subject line so far, but I think you can see where I’m going with this one:

“21 year old healthy and physically fit stud with nine-inch cock seeking blind virgin with no sense of touch.”

Joining FetLife.com

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More Reasons Why I'm Still a Virgin

When I wrote the first ‘Why I’m Still a Virgin’ post, I mentioned having Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS). Then I just moved on to things like finances and doing a zine. I think it’s because I knew I was quickly approaching an opportunity for internet time, and was rushing to get it done so I could post it along with the Introduction post rather than waiting a week (+/-) to get it uploaded.

I should have talked a little bit more about the disease for those of you unfamiliar with it. And then I should have talked about my other medical problems. But instead, my brain glitched and I wandered off in a whole other direction. Which tends to happen from time to time.

I really should take some time and discuss CFIDS here. But I’m not going to, because it’s really depressing, and coming out of a couple of weeks of medical badness (probably not a proper technical term, but do I look like I care?) I’m just not up to it. If you’re unfamiliar with the ailment – or if you think that it JUST means being tired all the time and are therefore horrendously misinformed about the disease – you should read the CFIDS entry on Wikipedia. You might also want to type “the spoon theory” into your search engine of choice. Its been awhile since I’ve read the original piece, but if I remember correctly it was written by someone with fibromyalgia. Regardless, her thoughts on day-to-day struggles with the disease work for CFIDS sufferers as well. [I’d provide hyperlinks to this stuff, but, well, I have no internet, and plan on posting this stuff hit-and-run style at the library with no time to find web addresses and everything. Sorry.]

Anyway, in addition to not expounding on CFIDS in the original “Why I’m Still a Virgin” piece, I also skipped a number of other medical issues. (Whoops?) Things like Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder, severe allergies, and an as-yet undiagnosed seizure disorder. (I’ve also got diabetes, paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, and acid reflux, but I honestly can’t see how any of these are keeping me from having sex, and only mention them now for a sense of completeness.)

Allergies

I am seemingly allergic to everything. Penicillin. Onions. Animal dander. Grass (lawn, not pot – although, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn I was allergic to pot). Dust. Bark dust. Every soap on the market except for Neutragena. Every deodorant I’ve ever tried. I could go on. (And on and on.)

And then there’s a sensory concern with my allergies. Sight. Hearing. Touch. Taste. These are the four senses. They are my ONLY four senses. The allergies have packed my sinuses with so much mucus and mystery detritus that I have not had a functioning sense of smell since before the age of twelve. (And, truth be told, my sense of taste is probably handicapped, as taste and smell tend to work in tandem.) This also leads to me not being able to breathe through my nose.

Let’s do a little quick math . . . a sweaty 450 lb man + allergic to soap + no sense of smell = ???. Yeah, there are occasions when the hygiene tends to be a bit of a concern.

The lack of a sense of smell has fixed it so that I’ve also never been able to use the phrase, “Mm, you smell so good . . .” Can’t do it. For all I know, she smells like wet raccoon. (Not that I’ve ever personally smelled wet raccoon. Not that I’d’ve been able to smell a wet raccoon if I’d’ve had one sitting in my lap.)

And then of course there’s Snookums to consider. Or Rex. Or whatever her lovable furry pet is named. If I had a cat, I’d name it Allergen Snotmaker. (Then I’d have to give it away, probably in the midst of a sneezing / coughing / wheezing fit.) Come on, people . . . what’s wrong with a nice goldfish? And I’ve always thought that the humble teddy bear was seriously underrated for companionship. But no, it seems that all women everywhere seem to live in houses and apartments that have been carefully mined with cat or dog hair. Does it make me more sexy or less sexy when my head explodes and I projectile blast large volumes of mucus all over the room?

(One of my more jackassy friends – and can you believe that my spellchecker has some sort of problem with the word “jackassy”? – recently told me, “Dude, no wonder you’re still a virgin . . . you’re allergic to pussy!” He then proceeded to laugh at his own joke for what seemed like twenty minutes, then wandered off to annoy someone else.)

Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder

The doctors figured out that I had OCD when I was in my early 30s. I’d thought I probably had Attention Deficit Disorder or something for several years before that. (I still might have. I could have both. Who knows?) There are enough similar symptoms that it was an either/or(/both?) situation, and I apparently fixated on ADD instead of OCD.

I’d had OCD behavior patterns since I was at least six years old. So why didn’t anyone realize it until I was in my 30s? Well, here’s the thing . . . even at six, I knew that the specific behaviors brought on by the OCD weren’t normal. The things that they compelled me to do weren’t being done by other people. Or if they were, they weren’t being done where I could see them. I don’t know if there was a logical progression that led from this train of thought to an actual compulsion, but one of the things that the OCD made me do was to hide my OCD behavior.

My OCD wasn’t as extreme as the case studies you hear about, or those of fictional characters like Tony Shaloub’s portrayal of Adrian Monk, or Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets” But I do exhibit some of the classic OCD behaviors.

I constantly check things. I know I locked the door, yet still I check it. I know I set the time record on the VCR, yet still, I check it. And so on. I’m big on symmetry – there are certain things (and categories of things) that if they touch my right hand, they also have to touch my left, and the like. There are certain odd little things I have to do a certain (equal) number of times if I’m going to do them at all.

I retrace steps. I can’t watch a door close or a drawer shut. Sometimes if something is being set down on a surface, I can’t watch it make full contact. I got all sorts of weird stuff going on. And a whole lot of these behaviors were in place when I was a kid. I HAD to do them, and since I HAD to keep it a secret, I had to do it all very, very subtly.

I was briefly in therapy in my late 20s for some weird medical stuff I had going on, and I told my therapist about my oddball behavior patterns. She just kind of shrugged it off (I think my therapist kinda sucked), but once I had opened up about it, the compulsion to keep it a secret no longer seemed to be there. Which is how I was able to write these last however many paragraphs about it just now.

Anyway, in addition to the typical compulsions I’ve got (and I’ve by no means listed all of them, nor will I), I’ve got some stuff going on in my head that really seems to screw me over when dealing with women I’m trying to meet.

Dating, as defined by stand-up comedians the world over, basically consists of two people lying to each other about themselves to one another in order to trap their counterpart into a relationship. And, by time the truths rear their ugly heads, it’s too late – ha ha! – you’re already my boyfriend/girlfriend. You can’t back out now, even though you just discovered that I’m not really a republican/dog-lover/well-hung/etc.

I always thought that the above was the stupidest commentary on male/female relations ever, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s true, because I’ve never marketed myself as ‘what a girl might want’ vs. ‘what I really am’ and, coincidentally or not, I’ve never had a real girlfriend.

If I were out there in the dating scene, and discovered that a woman had misrepresented herself to seem more palatable to potential mates, I’d like to think that I’d be forgiving, unless the lie was in a category like ‘being a devil worshipper/not being a devil worshipper’, ‘being a white supremacist/not being a white supremacist’, or ‘preferring Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over Babylon 5/being at least somewhat sane’. But if it’s just a little thing . . . pfft! Who really cares?

But that’s me. I can forgive and forget the little things. But what if the woman I’m courting can’t? That’s the big fear. Or what if she can forget the little things, but her dealbreakers are weird, and seem small and inconsequential to me? Plus, the truth is just so much easier to remember.

How does this fit into the section on obsessive compulsive disorder, you ask? Am I a compulsive truth-teller? Not hardly. (“I didn’t do it, honest!”) I’m not compulsively honest in my day-to-day life. And while I’m honest when talking to a woman I’m interested in, that’s not really compulsive. No, the compulsive behavior that I think sinks and dooms me when left on my own with a pretty girl is a need for full disclosure.

I’m not afraid of being caught in a lie. I’m afraid of being accused of perpetrating a lie of omission. “Holy crap, you didn’t tell me you weighed 450 lbs!” Didn’t tell her what my weight was, and if she didn’t ask, is it my fault? Well, maybe if I’m a big fat porker, then it kinda is my fault if I didn’t mention it. How am I to know. So, I have this compulsive need to give a potential mate all the information I think she’ll need.

I’m fat, I’m chronically ill, I’m poor, I don’t drive, I’m a virgin, my penis is small, etc. etc.

C.J., having met me through my zine work, knew that I was fat, sick, poor, and a non-self transporting near-shut-in before she ever contacted me with the intention of meeting me. This was all information to be found in my work. But I’d apparently won her over with my writing style, and so she wanted to meet me anyway. (And as we started corresponding erotically, she discovered the virginity and small penis thing right away.)

So there have to be aspects of me that counteract (or at least counterbalance) the list of faults that I keep shoving in people’s faces. That’s what I need. I need people to read my writing, become enamored of me, and then agree to have sex with me.

[Is this actually an ulterior motive I have in doing a blog? Oh, Hell no. There’s nothing ulterior about it. If you live in the general Salem, Oregon geographic area, are a female, and enjoy my writing, PLEASE, get to know me better!]

Without a large serving of my personality to go along with it, however, it appears that just being read off the items on the CON column of my PRO/CON list, prospective mates just tend to run off screaming.

I’ve tried to meet women. I’ve tried to start up normal conversations. But once an actual conversation takes off, the OCD kicks in, and the next thing I know, I’m shocked to discover that I’ve once again warned her about all the things she should know before getting to know me better. Conversation ends shortly thereafter.

What I need, when faced with meeting a woman, is to just be able to say, “You read my blog? Shiny.” And know that she already knows everything that she needs to know from here.

Diabetes

O.K., I’ve only had diabetes for a few years now. And I can’t actually think of any ways that it’s kept me from having sex. Once I realized that, I thought about removing it from this post altogether. But then it occurred to me that if/when I ever do have sex with somebody, the diabetes will keep me from licking chocolate syrup off of her nipples and toes. And that’s important, damn it!

[Actually, at that point, I’ll probably just ignore my diabetes and do it anyway.]

Seizures

I’ve been having full-blown seizures for about three or four years now. One moment I’m doing something upright, the next thing I know I’m sprawled out on the floor with my head pounding from where it had been (go figure) pounding into the floor moments earlier. As far as I can tell, nothing ever happens in between. Unless I’m all alone, there are usually people hovering over me. Usually strangers looking panicked or family members looking bored. Sometimes a mixture of the two. Although lately it will sometimes be my sister and her fiancé trying to hold identical goofy faces (as the first thing I’ll see) without cracking up.

According to eye-witness reports, what actually happens is that I’ll start twitching or shaking or jerking (it varies) and then either fall down (if I was standing) or fall over (if I was seated). By time I hit the floor, I’m flopping around like a fish out of water. Limbs jerking around, head banging on the floor. This lasts anywhere from 20 seconds to a minute or so. Then I just lay there. I either come to on my own, or someone rousts me. At which point the episode ends, or very shortly starts all over again. If it starts up again, it will sometimes cycle through over and over for a half hour or more.

During those lengthy episodes I sometimes have fuzzy memories of the spaces in between seizures. Other times I’m told that I ask the same questions and am given the same answers as if for the first time after each and every individual seizure.

As I said, the full-blown seizures have been going on for three or four years. Prior to the seizures, however, was the twitching. Almost always the left side of my body, and usually the arm. The classic ‘twitch’ starts with a sudden hard jerk of my shoulder that lifts my arm up away from my body through no intended command of my own. It will do this over and over again, every few seconds, sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for hours and hours and a time. And the twitching . . . well, that’s been going on for probably close to fifteen years now.

And back before that . . . the twitching seemed to develop out of an incredibly strong facial tic I’d sometimes get shortly after I became ill with what was eventually diagnosed as CFIDS. The facial tic went away, sort of morphing into the twitch.

Anyway, the twitching comes and goes. Sometimes I’ll have multiple twitching episodes a day for several days a week, sometimes I’ll go for weeks at a time with twitching at all. The seizures follow a similar patternlessness. (Sometimes a twitching episode will flow directly into a seizure episode.)

The doctors have no idea what’s causing the seizures (or the twitching, for that matter). They say that it’s not epilepsy. I’ve had MRIs and CAT scans, and all sorts of other tests. They removed my brain one time and soaked it in vinegar overnight, then played basketball with it the next day, but those tests were inconclusive. (O.K., I might have made up that last one.)

And there’s really no way for me to tell for certain when one is coming on. I’ve got a list of things that seem to make seizures more likely. Extreme temperature change sometimes does it. (Leaving the heated indoors during winter into the cold, cold outside, or leaving the air conditioned indoors during summer into the hundred degree weather). A lot of stress will sometimes bring one on. Very strenuous activity will sometimes trigger one. (Like lifting lots of heavy objects. I obviously don’t know if sexual intercourse would be a potential trigger, but I can say that to date, I have never had a seizure while masturbating. And I masturbate a lot, so I imagine that if it was going to happen, it would have by now.)

My doctor recently started playing around with my meds. Fiddling with dosages, adding additional anti-convulsants, and so on. There was a completely seizure-free stretch of about seven weeks there where I thought we’d found the right combination and dosage. I thought that right up until week eight, which brought me six major seizures over the course of four days.

So now the doc is back to altering dosages and swapping out prescriptions again. (Between the seizures, the diabetes, and everything else that’s treatably wrong with me, I’m currently on eight different medications, for a total of 19 pills a day.)

When the seizures are ‘acting up’, it gets to where I’m almost scared to leave the house. I have images of me cracking my skull open on the sidewalk. And It makes it kind of hard for me to meet women when I’m hiding in my house.

Plus, I’ve noticed that the natural reaction of potential mates who witness one of my seizures ISN’T “oh, how adorable!” It’s more along the lines of “Eeeek!” followed by them running in the other direction.

There was this girl that I think I was flirting with / was flirting with me at a party at my sister’s place. [I can’t tell when anybody is flirting, myself included, but that’s a topic for another time.] I had a seizure during this party. Following the seizure, after I was upright and no longer feeling wonky, everything that made me think she’d been flirting with me was no longer there. Plus, she looked a little bit scared of me afterward.

The more that I actually write this stuff down, the more I begin to doubt that I’m ever going to have sex.

September (or, "Excuses, Excuses")

My previous post was on August 28th. Today is October 12th. You’re probably wondering, “What the Hell happened to September?”

Yeah, that’s a good question. And to answer you, I have my list of excuses all prepared.

I actually felt like absolute crap on August 28th when I last posted something here. And the very specific kind of absolute crap that I felt like told me that the Bad Health Days were coming.

What I’m talking about when I say ‘Bad Health Days’ are the days when the Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome decides that it hasn’t been doing enough to keep me out of the game, and remedies that by upping the pain, the fatigue, the nausea, the dizziness, the brain fog, and a big handful of other various/varying elements for awhile.

So it’s not just that I didn’t do any posting in the first half of September. I didn’t to much of anything for those two-plus weeks. I laid in bed. I sat in a chair. I re-watched “Sports Night”. Tried reading, but gave it up because my brain wasn’t really retaining what I’d read from session to session. (How sick was I? I wasn’t even masturbating.)

Once I finally started to crawl out of the super ultra deluxe ‘Bad Health’ pit back up to my normal levels of bad health, I sat back down at the keyboard and started writing again. I wrote three entries to post here. (One about my health issues, one about the FetLife community, and one about Craigslist.)

Then I had the opportunity to spend the weekend at my sister’s apartment. You know, that place where the internet lives. This is usually the ideal opportunity to post stuff to my blog. Unfortunately, it was a spur of the moment trip. The phone call said, “We’re in town, and can take you back to Salem for the weekend if you can be ready in five minutes.”

My computer hadn’t even been turned on yet that day. And while I hadn’t timed it or anything, it seemed like it had been taking more than five minutes lately to go from OFF to FUNCTIONAL here lately. And, being one of the all-time great procrastinators of our time, I hadn’t copied the posts onto my flash drive yet. So, I grabbed clothing, meds, and other assorted miscellany, then went to Salem without the stuff to post here. (Also without my ‘Internet To-Do List’, or several other files I’d really needed to take with me.)

While at my sister’s, I decided that within a day or so of returning home, I was going to walk up to the library, and post the material using one of the computers there. It was, after all, now several weeks since my last post, and I didn’t like that. This plan was thwarted however, by the fact that my sister’s apartment is just around the corner from a Jack-in-the-Box location. And as I was walking back to her apartment from said fast food joint with my sack containing a meaty breakfast burrito and seasoned curly fries in hand, I took a misstep off a curb, and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the sidewalk having just wrenched my ankle.

After sitting there for a few minutes, I got to my feet as best I could, and hobbled the rest of the way back to her place, then collapsed on the couch. My sister played nurse, and wrapped my sprained ankle to within an inch of it’s life with ACE bandages, and I spent the rest of the weekend seated upon my big fat ass.

Once I was returned home, I continued to sit on the big fat ass instead of walking up the big steep hill to get to the library to post the next three entries. And while I had started work on a potential fourth post, I still hadn’t dumped anything to the flash drive.

Then my computer suffered a hard drive crash.

My computer has three hard drives. I would estimate that 99% of the content on the E-Drive is stuff that I’ve also got on either CDs or DVDs. Disks people downloaded for me, which I then loaded onto the drive. Stuff that is therefore easily replaceable. This is NOT the drive that crashed.

The majority of the stuff on the D-Drive is also stuff that I’ve got backed up on disks. The stuff that isn’t is mostly MP3s that I’ve ripped from my CD collection. Stuff which, if I lost, I could replace, simply by going through and re-ripping my CDs. Again. Time-consuming, but still . . . replaceable. This is NOT the drive that crashed.

The C-Drive contains – among other things – the “Projects” folder. The “Projects” folder is where the writing lives. Writing projects. Countless notes for writing projects. Journals. Blog posts. Correspondence. Everything. I try to keep this stuff backed up, but – procrastinator, remember – my last backup of this material seems to have been in July . . . of 2007. (Whoops.) The material on the C-Drive is IRREPLACABLE, and, you guessed it, this one IS the drive that crashed.

A couple of days later, I was back at my sister’s apartment, having placed my computer in the care of her fiancé. He ripped it apart, and managed to get partial access to the drive to try and retrieve as many files as were still accessible.

Far, far more were corrupt than not. The blog posts were among the corrupt and therefore gone. (As was one of my data DVD catalogs. I now have a series of DVD spindles containing disks numbered 01 – 132, with no idea what’s actually on them.)

Anyway . . .

I’ve got my computer back now. I’m starting new files as old ideas reoccur to me. But one of the immediate goals is to get back to work on this blog. I will probably rewrite as best I can from memory the three and a half entries lost in the crash, then continue from there. Definitely going to load each one onto the flash drive as I complete it. (I’ve already made a back-up of all of the files we were able to retrieve.)

Next post soon.

Cross your fingers.