I first suffered erectile dysfunction seven or eight years ago, and it really freaked me out. I responded to this by telling my friend Eric, who made it clear to me that this was a completely normal part of being a single guy. Emboldened, I started telling everyone else I knew about my erectile dysfunction, only to find that every single one of them had been through it. It was around that time that I developed my open source personality, which is to say that I keep no secrets, and in fact I broadcast my transgressions and insecurities out into the world. In so doing, I
a. confess. so therapeutic! catholicism blows, but this they got right.
b. make anything a potential topic of conversation. nothing says I won’t judge you like an open source personality.
c. have come to appreciate that all of my perversions and inadequacies are out there in numbers, so I don’t feel so bad, which makes it okay to talk about, which gives me access to everyone else’s perversions and inadequacies, which makes me feel not so bad.
d. benefit from the world’s suggestions and improvements to my personality. A living, breathing wikipedia is what I am.
highly recommended. postsecret operates on this principle, except that it’s anonymous, so you don’t benefit from parts b or d. bottom line is that if you haven’t killed or raped, whatever’s lurking in your mind and past that you think is inexcusably horrid or unredeemably pathetic is actually within two standard deviations of the mean. if you’ve killed or raped, that’s fucked up. keep that shit to yourself.
I have never suffered from erectile dysfunction. I have the opposite problem. I am constantly confronted with unwanted, poorly-timed erections. Like the phone and the door bell ringing at the same time while something’s on the stove. (The erection here would be a little guy in a tattered overcoat at the door). They eventually go their own way. Intriguingly the more you think about them the longer they hang around. As if the corpus spongiosum is filled with thought. This is certainly not the case as everyone knows. “Thinking with one’s dick” is just a figure of speech.