YOU CAN’T STOP THE BODY ROCK

novel excerpt, POES, sharting in therapy

7/3/24

“I feel the need, the need for speed … but not for us.” Tom Cruise and Franz Kafka were both born on this day.

You need to go to Oylesburg for meds today. You don’t want to but tomorrow is the 4th of July.

You had a “prestige” last night. Don’t speak Marquis de Sade? Translation: you jerked off, and now predictably feel like garbage. You’d think you’d learn to avoid that but if you thought that you would be ignorant of the mechanisms of the Noah Turbot CNS. After being celibate from masturbation and orgasm for a while, the delusional thought emerges (it’s a light delusion, you might say – or is it the heaviest of them all?). The delusional thought develops that it might be different this time. Retrospective falsification, as the doctor explained it at the sike hospital you went to after being dumped by CH. A lack of insight about the emotional continuity or discontinuity that occurs, when something takes place with your body that is as shattering as an orgasm seems to be with you. “Surely you deserve to feel good just this one time. Give in to your lust.” And once again, the prestige is a trap. And the double trap is setting out on an intellectual excursion to understand it. That’s the most lethal part. There’s no travel companion stout enough or wise enough, no hobbit valet to carry you on your way to destroy the ring, to help navigate the journey or avoid the snares. Nobody has ever heard of this problem. Trina Flood, your sike nurse practitioner, who prescribes your sike meds, was going to call on the retired Dr. Blurryfingers, who had talked to you about it before and suggested “prolactin” although that seems doubtful, at least to Trina Flood. But her expertise is not all it’s cracked up to be. The next step is asking an AI assistant to search through every medical record known to man for “post-orgasm emotional syndrome.” You don’t want to do that because you don’t want some AI entity, connected to who knows where and who knows what government office, knowing you want to jump off a bridge after busting a nut.

Wash your black jeans today. They’re encrusted with splattered cum. You have this image of Vaughan, the death-defying bisexual cult leader/hustler from Ballard’s novel Crash in mind, that he is some hero to emulate. It’s psycho, it’s sexy, it’s punk, it’s messy. What it is, though, may be sinful and demon-summoning. The devil named MTV/HBO locks onto your signal when you have a load in your pants. You must wash yourself too. “My ablutions are the solution to my dilutions and my pollutions.” Head itching, filth and dead skin cells building up, the trash piling up on the sidewalks of your body, not being disposed of properly. Out of self-hate.

The laziness of not cleaning the dead sperm off yourself. But it’s you, it’s all you. Humans can live in their own mess, is what you’re saying. They have for millenia. Why not you too? You are surrounded by book drifts, not To Be Read piles which are at least neat stalagmites of books growing up in your man-cave. No these are book drifts. You could make book angels like kids make snow angels in wintertime. It’s a detritus incited and created by inner madness, bibliomaniacal in nature. You can only joke about it, but jokes are not remedies, not solutions. Never that. And there you go again, wanting to check for the digital applause of likes on your social media posts, writing something clever or funny as opposed to something repellent. Like a speed freak. (One like was there, from a French film scholar, a young woman. Maybe she couldn’t read.)

Where would you go in Oylesburg today? To get meds, but anywhere else? You are drawn to the library, but you may get there and feel tired and hungry. Not optimal. To the Re-use Recycle Center. But why? The post-orgasm emotional syndrome (POES) got you feeling like you’ve been robbed of motivation, ambition. It’s micro-depression. Bodily pains, quotidian in nature and plentiful in number. Doctors have never heard of it and swear it must be sike-ological, not real in other words. You fear that the quotidian pain will become all-consuming and life-threatening. And no AI nurse sifting through medical databases can help you.

You could save up so much money if you did not buy books. It would be such a good feeling, a feeling of freedom. But you are not likely to ever know that freedom, just as you will never know it from masturbation no matter how long you retain semen. SPENDING is your problem, spending spirit, spending money, spending precious attention. Like dwindling coinage the attention bank dries up. Unaccountable, no accountability. Who will drag you to debtor’s prison for your bankruptcy of attention, mind, spirit, life-force? Money is just a signifier, life and time and soul are the signified. It’s funny to think of all that Marxist metaphorical weight which burdens your thought and your writing, in this diary and elsewhere. A comprehension of capital, partial and pathetic though it may be, infuses your mind sometimes. You don’t throw bombs but you hate the building of yourself.

You recall the one time you sat commando in Dr. Blurryfingers’ office in Cooperstown at outpatient sike-iatry. It’s a long drive to Cooperstown and you shit your pants on the way, you couldn’t help it. The only time that’s ever happened. You stopped at a diner along the way and asked to use their bathroom and to get a cup of coffee, pants full of so-far undetected shitty drawers. You took your boxer briefs off in the bathroom and stuffed them into the trashcan with layers of paper towels on top trying to mummify the trashcan and seal it. You said prayers of shame over the trashcan mummy. Went out and bought a coffee and left. The diner people were very friendly, not knowing what was in store for them when they went into the bathroom. They seemed like “Here’s a traveler from the road, nneding to use the facilities and get a coffee. He’s a rambling man. Respect.” You never went back there again, the place was burned down, not literally but burned down in the sense of spy-speak. Your cover was blown, you could never show your face there again.

So in therapy you sat commando, no underwear, in the office of Dr. Blurryfingers and you had tried to clean yourself up. It was the day or so after the shooting in Sandy Hook, those kindergarteners shot to death, and the teachers, and you wept for the kids slaughtered. Blurryfingers extended a little humanity to you while you sobbed into a Kleenex. Your body was on deck that day, your body at the behest of other forces. You forgot.