I was raised in a shotgun shack in the Mississippi Delta. My parents moved there from Greenwich Village to save me from the suffocating hipsterdom that was then called “yuppiedom.” They wanted me to live life in the real world, the deep south, the land of Faulkner and Hurston and O’Connor and Brown and Capote, a land where I could breathe deeply.

That dream lasted until it was time for me to start kindergarten, and they had to confront the reality of the Louisiana school system. Then it was straight back to hipsterdom—Seattle, no less.

In Seattle, I learned how to craft a sentence, cup an espresso, and ride a skateboard. I was in half a dozen bands, in all of which my main instrument was the photocopier. I was the PR bitch, the scrawny kid who’d hike up and down every hill in Washington State for a chance to stand onstage in a trashcan while a neo-Brechtian grunge tried to pretend they weren’t shamelessly aping Mother Love Bone.

I lucked my way into Yale with the help of a good SAT score and an ex-girlfriend of my dad’s who worked in the admissions office. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I went off to Connecticut and—like most Yale students—considered myself very gritty and real for going to college in New Haven instead of Cambridge. I even tried to get mugged, but the worst that ever happened was that the laptop containing the only draft of my novel/thesis was stolen. I had to redraft the entire thing in an all-night Kit Kat binge, and the result was just crazy enough to win me admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I didn’t think I needed them, though. I didn’t subscribe to my parents’ views that the best writing was done face-down in the loam. I now recognize that I should have faked my way through and used the connections to get a book contract, but hindsight is 20/20, or maybe bullshit. So instead I took a meaningless job in investment banking. It amused me and kept me out of trouble and paid really fucking well, and I boned my way through NYC like Patrick Bateman except with rubbers on my cock instead of on my wing-tips.

By my late 20s, I was bored. When I saw the ad for this project, I dredged up my old thesis and sent it in. And now here I am a year later, sitting in the middle of cold grey rural Minnesota with a corpse, a creepster, and a coward in my recent memory. Just like you always dreamed, Mom and Dad: I’m Capote, face down in the loam.

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1. Don’t do it in bed. The piss soaks into the mattress, and then you’re fucked—not in a good way.

2. Drink lots of water beforehand—and make sure your partner does too. This not only ensures that you’ll have a steady supply, it makes that supply much more palatable.

3. Keep it fun and loose. Pissing on someone does not mean mean humiliating or dominating them—unless they’re into that too, in which case go for it.

4. Doing it with clothes on can be hot—you get kind of a DIY wet t-shirt effect.

5. As with all other sexual practices, porn is not realistic in its depiction of watersports. They’re totally reloading between shots.

6. Careful if you’re into omorashi. You don’t want to go out like Jennifer Strange.

7. Wetting yourself in public is not illegal in most places. Don’t be intimidated.

8. Remember that if a girl asks to hold your dick while you pee, she might just be curious about what it feels like to hold a peeing dick.

9. Don’t be ashamed! If Ricky Martin can come right out and say he’s into golden showers, then so can you.

10. Never say “urolagnia.” There is no less sexy word in the English language.

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Being attacked by a dog. When I was a kid, I’d help my mom deliver the neighborhood newsletter. When I was about 12, I opened a gate and a dog ran out and bit me in the leg—right through my jeans, so my mom had to take me to the hospital. Later, I couldn’t stop thinking what if. What if they dog had just gone straight for my balls? It could have happened!

Doing drugs. I’ve never been worried about dying or overdosing on drugs, I’ve just been concerned that I might get a bad batch that would have some kind of freak effect on my potency. Can that happen? Don’t tell me.

Biking. If you sit on the average bicycle seat for longer than, say, an hour, you’ll start to feel numb in the genitals. If you try to bike all day, your cock and balls will go completely numb. That’s the last time I try to take a date on an outdoorsy adventure.

Getting grabbed. It’s nice that you feel the need to grab at me right here in the bar, miss, but you are drunk and don’t…quite…know…your…own…STRENGTH.

Having a pinched nerve. It was in my shoulder, but you can guess what I worried about. You never know! The nervous system is complicated!

Discovering that my balls are asymmetrical. I feel no shame about admitting this, especially now that I’m certain it doesn’t have any negative effects.

Pissing myself. Just kind of, one night when I was drinking a hell of a lot. I got home and dropped trou and realized (fortunately, I was alone) that I’d sort of pissed myself. Like, not emptied my entire bladder, but there was a really perceptible and embarrassing amount of urine in my pants. Was this it? I wondered. Would my colon have to go? No, as it turned out, I was just piss-all drunk.

Wearing skinny jeans. These are pretty much all you can buy now, but they really hold your junk tight. That can’t be good in the long term. Can it?

Apparently I’m the only one in this house who’s not an only child—but you wouldn’t know it, right? I never talk about my brother for a reason: because he’s effectively not my relative, if by “relative” you mean “someone who cares about you and who you can count on to give jack shit about your welfare.”

Brady’s five years older than me, and when I was a little kid, things were great: he took care of me when our mom went off the rails (or, more accurately, our mom took care of me during the brief interludes when she was on the rails). Then, when he was ten and I was five, something happened. I don’t know what, and he’s never told me, but it was something involving Mom, something Dad couldn’t or didn’t stop.

My brother told his best friend Joe’s parents, and that was enough for them to essentially adopt him: he moved out, and over the next eight years our dad signed whatever he needed to sign as Brady’s legal guardian. Then Brady turned 18, and that was it—he was gone for good.

Well, almost for good. I saw him four years ago, at our uncle’s wake. Apparently Brady had been keeping in touch with Uncle Eli, which I’d had no idea of: I saw Eli like once a decade.

I was sitting in the back of the funeral parlor checking my phone when I looked up, and there he was: my brother, who I hadn’t seen in six years. He looked exactly the same, which is to say exactly like me but fatter and with shorter hair. I think he actually has bigger boobs than I do.

I wan’t an asshole about it: after Brady walked by the coffin and paid his respects, I went up and said hi. He looked shocked to see me; I guess he hadn’t considered the possibility that his only sister might also attend his only uncle’s wake. I hugged him and he let me, but we didn’t even really say anything to each other. I asked how he was and he said fine, and then the priest asked us to sit down for prayers, and before prayers ended, he left. That was the last time I’ve seen him.

I don’t know how he’s doing now, or what he’s doing; I guess we’d somehow find out if he died, but he never contacts us. There’s an actor named Brady Coleman who Google-swamps whatever trace of him there might be on the Internet. He might even be using a totally different name, probably specifically to avoid us. I’m easier to find online now that I’m doing this shit, though lucycoleman.com belongs to a fucking FOUR-YEAR-OLD.

How can you be 33 years old and not give one shit about how your family is doing? I don’t understand. I pretty much hate my family, but I’m curious, and fuck it, I need them. Doesn’t he ever go broke? Doesn’t he ever get kicked out of the house by his girlfriend? Doesn’t he ever need a kidney or anything?

When I was sitting there next to him for 20 minutes at Eli’s wake, I kept waiting to feel something—to cry, to smile, to experience something via sitting next to my only sibling, the person who’s biologically and possibly psychologically more like me than anyone else in the world. But I didn’t feel a thing. Not one goddamn thing.

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10. Franklin W. Dixon, The Tower Treasure. How many generations will have to pass before dads keep trying to shove this racist, hackneyed crap down their sons’ throats? Reading the whole series would be like eating a hundred boxes of saltines.

9. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace. The beginning is great, but the whole rape-on-the-farm situation is a contrived embarrassment.

8. The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. The fact that she has her own line of Hallmark cards tells you everything you need to know.

7. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut is like the Ron Paul of literature—it seems like it should be really cool to be into him, just because he’s all impish and spunky and pithy. But that only works as long as you don’t like to think too hard.

6. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. You could say Tolstoy is like the Paul to Dostoyevsky’s John, but actually he’s more like the Ringo.

5. Bruce Chatwin, Songlines. I actually don’t think Chatwin is a bad writer, but once he had his name printed on more Moleskine notebook inserts than actual books, I couldn’t stand to read him any more. (I know, he’s dead, it’s not his fault—but if he hadn’t been such a caricature of himself even while he was alive, he wouldn’t fit so well into high-end stationery advertisements.)

4. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. She’s ugly, he’s ugly, we get it.

3. John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage. This is why no one takes the Pulitzer seriously any more, and Kennedy didn’t even write the damn thing.

2. Henry Thoreau, Walden. This was 1845. If Thoreau really wanted to go off the grid, he could have done it. He didn’t even leave the Boston suburbs, for God’s sake! This yawner could have been serialized in Real Simple magazine.

1. James Joyce, Ulysses. I’ll say this for the man: it takes some real cojones to shoot a load of this size.

I’m not going to get into it, but suffice it to say that if I wanted to tell a sob story, I could go there. I have at least one event—a series of events, really—that could fairly credibly earn me sympathy for being needy, unstable, insensitive, impatient, and generally fucked up.

Why aren’t I? Not because I’m “healed.” Not because what happened doesn’t hurt me every day, and not because I’ve somehow heroically overcome my past travails so that my life story can have a storybook ending. I’ve still got a lot of shit in my head, and someday, when I trust someone enough to develop a genuinely intimate relationship, I’ll let them in on what that shit is about.

In the meantime, I’m keeping it to myself and my therapist, and surrounding myself with positive energy. If someone starts pelting me with negative energy, then I cut them off. Maybe that’s harsh, but I need to take care of myself if I’m going to be any good to others, and something I know about myself is that I’m sensitive to people trying to bring me down.

By creating distance between myself and people who are hard for me to be around, I avoid being an asshole. I’ve seen other people parade their needs and make excuses and draw people into their webs of dysfunction. When you do that, people get hurt—and I don’t want to hurt anyone else. Having been hurt yourself is awful, maybe unforgivable…but it doesn’t give you an excuse to hurt others.

You have to be responsible for your own actions. If you’re not, then you might be “the life of the party”—but you’re not really alive. You’re a puppet of your past, and of the monsters who made you.

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One night over Christmas break, a girl made fun of me for wearing a button-down shirt, slacks, and wingtips. “Don’t be so boring,” she said. “Take a chance, man.”

The irony was that as she said that, we were standing in a warehouse at a 4 AM rave while she was coked up, I was wondering what was on that paper I just licked, and the cops were parked outside wondering how to handle the situation.

I used to think that I needed to dress different to be different. I went through an emo phase that involved wearing eyeshadow and bottom-shelf hair product, I went through a hipster phase during which I’d scour thrift shops for the most obscure community baseball team jerseys, and there was the brief “urban” phase that’s best not even mentioned.

Eventually, though, I figured out that dressing like a dad buys you more degrees of freedom. You’re going to be pigeonholed—nothing can prevent that—so you might as well be pigeonholed as “boring” rather than “desperate.” That way, people are always surprised when you turn out to not actually be boring.

There’s also the fact that by looking bourgeois, you win the favor of all the other/acual bourgeois—who (whaddya know, Marx was right) have the money and the power. When the cops finally did bust that rave, I strolled out without being so much as questioned. Further, it’s worth noting that there are many very attractive women—including very attractive women with bright green hair and lip piercings—who find a well-dressed man to be sexy. I won’t apologize for my Esquire subscription.

That said, I do occasionally have my doubts. It’s hard when people won’t even talk to you because they can’t even imagine that you have anything to talk about besides the stock market. I don’t really think there was anything I could do to convince that girl at the rave I’m not actually boring: my clothes made me guilty, with no opportunity of jury trial or testimony. She’ll never know whether well-dressed men are more likely than crustpunks to give head, but I suspect the answer is yes.

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In the horniest of my teenage years, I was forever seeking new objects to stick my dick into. I tried a watermelon (messy), a folded pillow (convenient, but unsavory to later sleep on), and even a plush Underdog I won at the fair (just too pervy). Nothing ever seriously threatened my penis’s long-term relationship with my hand, but I did have several affairs with easy chairs.

I got the idea from a short story in a zine I picked up at the coffee shop where I used to go and write in my journal while Nine Inch Nails and Tom Waits played at deafening volumes. The idea of fucking an easy chair immediately appealed to me: it seemed as though they’d been designed expressly for the purpose. That very night, as my parents slept, I crept down the basement stairs to pump some spunk into the scruffy old La-Z-Boy in the rec room.

It didn’t go well. For one thing, it was too low—I practically had to do the splits to get my dick between the cushion and the chair. Also, it was cold and dank, and my knees went numb on the linoleum as I made vigorous love to the overstuffed atrocity. Worst of all, that chair was just nasty. It smelled like beer farts and Old Spice, and even though I used a sock for sanitation, I felt like I was fucking my grandpa. I came, of course, but with no relish.

Though that initial liaison was uninspiring, I wasn’t ready to abandon my dream of fulfilling copulation with an assenting easy chair. The next day, when my parents were at work, I approached one of the cleaner, newer, more feminine easy chairs in our living room. I chose the one unofficially reserved for guests, rather than the one habitually occupied by my mother; it seemed creepy enough that my mother’s chair looked on as I buried my member in its companion, but I didn’t let that stop me.

That too, though, proved to be a one-time affair. The living room chairs were hard, and their cushions were relatively light, compelling me to push down on the cushion as though I was trying to suffocate my dick. I didn’t laugh during an orgasm again like that until the night in college when my TA farted on me.

I left my family’s easy chairs inviolate from that point on, but I didn’t let my dream die—and one day, months later, my dream came true.

I was cat-sitting for the family next door. Somehow, an entire week went by without my noticing, but on the last day I turned around and there it was: a big red recliner that was just the right height. My neighbors had just replaced their living room set, so the chair was brand new: it smelled like a fine suit. I stroked its arm, feeling its soft slipcover, and then I dropped my pants. I almost forgot to get a sock, and had to pull out at the last second to cover my aching dick. When I covered myself and plunged back in, I exploded into the chair with a gasp. Behind me, the cat meowed inquisitively.

The neighbors returned the next day, and to my frustration they remembered to ask for their key back. Later that year, their cat died, and they were too heartbroken to get a replacement—meaning that with that cat died my hopes of ever again achieving conjugal bliss with that one perfect easy chair. I hadn’t even thought to check the tag for the make and model.

Over the years since that unforgettable afternoon, I’ve fucked around with easy chairs occasionally, but it’s never been the same. From time to time, in fact, when I’m schtupping an actual sentient human being, I’ve found my thoughts drifting back to that one perfect chair, the very finest of my adolescence’s many and varied afternoon delights.

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Con: You have to buy your own food and drinks.

Pro: No mysterious creamy “salads.”

Con: Greatly reduced likelihood of gifts.

Pro: Greatly increased likelihood that the gifts will be cigarettes.

Con: Your friends’ ratty couch isn’t as comfortable as your family’s.

Pro: You can have sex on it.

Con: You don’t get to hear Uncle Ed’s stories about his job as a prison guard.

Pro: You don’t have to answer any of Uncle Ed’s questions about your love life.

Con: Vague feeling of loneliness.

Pro: Specific feeling of relief not to have to be around your family.

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Your ex will regret it. They’ll have second thoughts and flashes of guilt, and they’ll be tempted to hook up with you again—maybe even try to get back together with you. But fundamentally, they broke up with you for a reason; since dumping someone sucks, it was probably a pretty serious reason, and in the long run, they’ll most likely remember the decision as painful but necessary.

Your ex’s friends will talk him/her out of it. You were so much better than all their other BFs/GFs, right? They told you so. Their friends thought you were the best—look at how kind and caring you were! Surely the friends will want you two to get back together, and mightn’t they give strong advice to that effect? In fact, the friends may have liked you a lot, sure, but they probably know that getting back together would be a bad idea—and fundamentally, they’re his/her friends, not yours. Their job is to support their friend unconditionally, and they will. As for you, they’ll just be very friendly next time you happen to run into them.

Everyone will feel bad for you. Yes, for one day. You get one day of pity, and then that’s it: all your friends will want you to move on, because they have their own shit to deal with. Anyway, they’ll figure, if he/she was stupid enough to dump you, what’s the loss?

You’ve cleaned out all their stuff. Nope. You’ll be finding their stuff in your drawers, on your shelves, in your books, and under your bed for weeks, months—even years.

You don’t want to be single. You may be surprised at how quickly it feels fun to flirt with other people again.

You’re ready for another relationship right away. The key word, above, is flirt. Hook up a little, maybe. But if you actually try to date someone over the next few weeks or even the next few months, they’ll smell your ex all over you. It won’t work.

Your next girlfriend/boyfriend will be just like your ex, except for the wanting-to-break-up-with-you part. Some people have obvious “types,” but most people can be happy with a lot of different types. Your next BF/GF will probably be way different than your ex, and your friends will inevitably express surprise at the fact.

You’ll fall apart next time you see your ex. More likely, you will discover reserves of dignity you didn’t know you had.

You’ll get over it. Yes, in a sense. You’ll move on, get your life re-balanced, and eventually get excited about something new. But when you let someone get that close to you, when you trust someone with your heart and with your body, and then one day they say they don’t want you any more—that’s a hurt that will never entirely heal. It will be like an old sports injury: you’ll forget about it for long stretches of time, until one day you run into something and bam, there’s that hurt pricking or aching or outright throbbing, reminding you of how it happened.

Someday you’ll understand. You’ll try. You’ll talk to your friends, write in your journal, maybe even go to therapy. You’ll work out the reasons—and those are valid reasons, but every relationship has challenges. Fundamentally, you wake up in the morning and decide that you either want that person or you don’t. Whatever the reasons, whatever the challenges—they matter, but ultimately it’s a decision. You decide to be with someone, or you don’t. Your ex decided to dump you, and you’ll never really completely understand why. Maybe they won’t either.

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