SEX IS DEATH. (When self-pleasuring becomes self-destruction)

The latest in a continuing series.

I came to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lusts. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something. —St. Augustine, Confessions




How do you know it's tv sweeps time? Your local station does a story about autoerotic asphyxiation. (Leave out the masturbation part and it becomes The Choking Game, or just another way for kids to get high. The eight year olds probably aren't into the auto or the erotic yet anyway. And speaking of cutting off oxygen to the brain, this one's for the homosexuals in the crowd: Are poppers still the drug of choice for easing your pain and greasing your skids?)

This one may be the shortest distance between sex and death yet devised.

A part time computer programmer and full-time mother comes home from the office early on Friday afternoon to share a video and a pizza with her 15 year old son, Lance. His bedroom seems unusually quiet on this afternoon. Absent is the din of his favorite Smashing Pumpkins CD. She saunters down the hallway while calling his name, pushes open his bedroom door and then collapses on the floor in a flood of emotions launched by a graphic scene displayed in the room before her.

Lance's lifeless, semi-nude, bluish-white body hangs by the neck from the closet rod. The floor is littered with pornographic magazines, a bottle of hand lotion, and several articles of women's underclothing. Though he hangs from a bar that would only meet him at eye level, his knees are bent and his full weight hangs from the Disney necktie he wore to his eighth grade graduation. The knot cinched up to his larynx resembles the bow that one typically uses to ties one's shoes. The first two fingers of his lifeless right hand still grip one bow of the knot.

This is what happens when clever boys are too clever by half.

(Did you notice how I discretely passed over the Disney necktie? Oh...yeah. Never mind.)

Part 1: SEX IS DEATH. (Stories for Boys) is here.
Part 2: SEX IS DEATH. (Distaff Death) is here.
Part 3: SEX IS DEATH. (Joyously dispensing death) is here.
Part 4: SEX IS DEATH. (Sex is depression) is here.