your own dick, conversely, is seen as some great feat of sexual braggadocio, when actually it should be seen as similar to being one of those IT nerds who upgrades his usual handjob technique to work in a Pocket Pussy®: ‘I have given up on convincing another human being to touch my junk,’ the Pocket Pussy® owner is saying, ‘the touch of this rubber fuck toy is the only joy I will ever know.’ A cursory glance at the search string ‘do you have to remove your ribs to suck your own dick’ paints a bleak, stark truth of the rumour. ‘Manson did not get that done,’ reddit user zaikanekochan says plainly. ‘Grow a bigger dick.’
I was at university the last time I tried it – my method this time was to bob my head down towards my crotch at great pace, like a sudden cobra strike, hoping to catch my body off-guard and accelerate straight from head to dick – but sadly, obviously, it didn’t work. I had another realisation, there, stripped to my pants in the grey light of my bedroom, neck cricked down towards my crotch: talk to some girls, maybe, go outside, stop expecting flexibility to somehow secretly develop within you, maybe convince someone else to take this job on. Ribs are there to protect your heart and lungs, obviously, but they also act as a sort of built-in rev limiter: without them, mankind would become a dick-sucking ouroboros, dick to mouth and mouth to dick, and we wouldn’t talk to women, or procreate, or do anything, really. If I could suck my own dick I wouldn’t be writing this, right now, because I’d be too busy sucking my own dick. In the Bible, Adam gave his rib up to create Eve, and there weren’t any explicit passages about her sucking dick but you have to assume it happened at some point. That’s the sacrifice, there: God showed us the way before we even knew it. And, I suppose, this is what I’ve learned about myself: that I’m glad I’m not Marilyn Manson, ribless and pale in the smoked-out back of a 1999-era tour bus. That I’m glad I have so many ribs. And hey: I guess this is growing up.
In no particular order:
I.
Bridges. This one is justified: when I was an early teen I had a sit-bolt-upright-with-the-cold-sweat-dripping-off-you nightmare where – on an old grey concrete bridge that connects Chesterfield town centre proper to the train station nearby, one that runs over an A-road and so is extremely fun to spit over – I was walking along the bridge, in a dream, and then for whatever reason and in a perfect one-two-three motion I put one foot on the kerb of the concrete, grabbed the railing with both hands, jumped off the edge of it and exploded on the road like a melon. In the dream the remaining pulp of me got run over by a truck, one final indignity, and I don’t think it’s unrelated that ever since then I have been very cautious on bridges. This isn’t so bad: I just try my best to walk as close to the exact centre of it as possible, so whatever kamikaze autopilot that spins like a top inside of me at all times doesn’t tilt over and override all sense and logic and I just leap forever off the bridge, to death, but it does make me wary. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? Who can you trust? But yeah: the main takeaway of that nightmare 17 years ago is I’m really very irritating to go for a nice meander along a canal with.
II.
Speaking of nightmares: for some reason the greatest and most frightening nightmare I ever had was when I was five years old and the blood-red velvet curtains that were in my bedroom (apparently I grew up in a fucking haunted Victorian mansion owned by an eccentric doctor and not, like, a normal terrace in a red-brick street in the Midlands?), so yeah the blood-red velvet curtains formed in their wrinkles a face, enormous and frowning, and in a deep voice the velvet face shouted at me for not tidying my room enough and for generally being a Bad Boy. I think it says a lot about my formative neuroticism that the main nightmare I had as a child was not a Frankenstein monster or some vampires but my own curtains telling me off for being naughty, but the result was the same, and that result was: I pissed the bed in fear and woke up screaming. This necessitated a particularly high-stress intervention by my father who had to unhook two heavy velvet curtains from the rings about my bed at 3 a.m. while shouting and surrounded by the ammonia-like smell of fresh piss, plus all the sheets needed changing, and though I’m not saying I’m scared of curtains exactly, I would say I am very careful around them, because I know now what they are capable of.
III.
Dogs. Listen: I am fully aware that dogs are fundamentally perfect wholesome little animals, essentially human hearts full of love and made dog-sized – just pure heart-meat, dogs, right to the core – and that being afraid of them is ultimately absurd when their primary function is to love and adore. I get this. However, when I was a small meek child at my mother’s knee on a rare trip back to London to see the old friends she had left behind there a decade before and introduce them to the grown child that had ruined her life in such a way that she had to leave them to raise it, I was taken to a large grand house where all the adults drank wine and smoked and laughed very loudly, which when you’re a small meek child is a high-stress situation anyway, because all you really have is a box of orange juice and you’re in the kind of adult house where they have absolutely no prearrangement for children (‘Oh you want … something to. Do. Okay: would you like to read this encyclopaedia?’). When I was there, amongst the smoke and the adult cackling, their medium-sized Rottweiler jumped towards me and barked, and I instantly realised that dogs aren’t hearts with fur on at all, they are pure prime muscles constantly ready and prepared to jump up vertically and bite you on the dick, and my instinctive reaction to this was to sob – obviously, I thought, the dog was going to gnaw my dick off in one smooth primal bite, and I would have to live a life without it, a sort of modern eunuch, and they would call me Dog Dick Boy – and then everyone had to stop drinking wine and smoking and instead calm the hysterical child down, and in the cab home there was definitely A Silence between my abruptly sober mother and I, and it was pretty clear that me being suddenly afraid of dogs had entirely ruined the evening, and I’m not sure our relationship ever truly recovered from that, really, and I have been cautiously wary of dogs ever since. Cute, yes, but very capable of biting you on the dick.
IV.
Maybe I just have a fear of losing my dick in some sort of dick accident, actually.
V.
Sudden rushes of fear were an oddly common phenomenon of my childhood. As a kid I deeply loved escalators, almost to the point of mania: every time we encountered an escalator, in a store or mall, I would demand to ride it up then down, then beg to go up then down again, a lone passenger on the world’s lamest rollercoaster. Then, one time at the big M&S in the centre of town, I sprinted towards the escalator filled with glee that quickly turned to horror: watching as my mother went up the machine ahead of me, I realised suddenly escalators were just stairs made of monstrous metal teeth, ferrying you unrelentingly towards the top of them, where you would be crushed and gnawed to death by the spiked outer workings of the machine, at which point I stopped abruptly, foot hovering over the killer belt beneath me, and started both yelling and crying at the same time, a little like this noise: ‘HUAAAAAAAAAH.’ I kept sort of yell-crying while my mother floated up away from me, bent backward screaming ‘WHAT?’ and ‘WHAT IS WRONG?’, until a kindly woman lifted me up above her head and carried me, gurgling and shouting and crying in one perfect triptych howl, to the top of the stairs, and the rest of the shopping trip passed otherwise without incident. Again: I’m not now afraid of escalators exactly, but I am very cautious.
VI.
(Other things I loved deeply as a child to the bafflement of everyone around me: hub caps, the protective-cum-decorative plastic shields on the wheel rims of cars, which I developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of when I was a kid because I liked cars but couldn’t see from my short height any particular part of them other than the wheels, an obsession that led to a point where I would collect discarded hub caps we would come across in the street and I was able to identify vehicle make and models only by their hub caps. Sample conversation from my childhood: ‘Hey Dad! Dad! This Volvo has newer hub caps than the one on our street!’ and my dad would say, wearily: ‘Yes’.) (I have since almost entirely gone off hub caps.