Tag Archives: mental illness

STD Diary 2006: Tales from Non-Gonoccocal Urethrographic Oceans

20 Jun

I hope this is my last STD news until the warts show up. Negative for gonorrhea and chlamydia.

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Ooh— you little motherfucker. New job, new bathroom, new stage fright story. This disease makes me piss every fifteen minutes. My prostate is inflamed and it gets all swollen with urgency at these times. And so I go in there to take my piss and there’s a guy— nerdy, nebbishy looking guy, obviously a screenwriter, and again, I go in, give him a cursory head-nod, and he gives a subdued “hi.” Nothing wrong yet. Except now I’m about to piss and he starts going to town over at the sink, riding the fucking soap pump like it was a slot machine and activating— they have those stupid laser-activated sinks, and they give no hot water, and only this stingy one-second burst— and he’s waving his hands in front of it again and again. And then he grabs about fifteen c-fold paper-towels out of the dispenser and rubs them over every hand surface with great vigor, and then REPEATS the process— so at this point it’s clear that he’s an obsessive-compulsive. Continue reading →

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The Crustaceans

15 Jun

When I was a kid, I used to always have this vision, this sensation, that there were these slimy black crustaceans, kind of like a crayfish, visible only to me. They lived underneath everything. And whenever I would touch a wall or a chair or something they would latch on to my hands and fingers with their knobby little black pincers, first a few and then more and more until there were thousands of them swarming up my arms fast as fuck and eating me. They had prickly little pincer-legs, glossy black eyes on twitchy little stalks, rows of serrated little mouth-feelers rippling up to a weird spiny-armored alien mandible– and I would basically have to shake the shit out of my hands to get them off, so hard that my thumb would snap into my fingers and make a loud noise. That was the whole point: my mind wanted to make me do something loud so that other people would notice and I would be embarrassed. When I saw that other people could hear it and were looking the sensation would only get worse, more vivid. I could feel their sharp little serrated mouths chewing into my skin, and the urge to shake them off would just fucking amplify… and I would just be standing there like a dick, everybody looking at me, with my arms kind of hanging out by my sides like a crippled bird, shaking the shit out of my hands and snapping my fingers and thumbs together. This was from like 10 to 13.

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