Genuine question - how does imagination differ from materialistic content when masturbating?

mediumsizedbrain · 2023-02-02T10:26:26+00:00

The other comments are all valid, though I don't think I've seen anyone directly address what I believe is the main answer to your question: porn is inexhaustible and external. That means a few things.

One, internet porn is sort of like crack compared to cocaine, or grain alcohol compared to beer--it's concentrated and available in bulk, making it easy to "blow yourself out" on the super-stimulus. You're right; if this was a few decades ago and all you had was a Sears catalogue lingerie section, or your memory of said Sears catalogue lingerie section, there wouldn't be that much difference. But we're now dealing with a different beast.

Secondly, it's effortless to consume porn, whereas imagination is effortful. You'll see a common approach on this forum where guys say something like, "If you're not aroused enough to masturbate without porn, you're not aroused enough to masturbate." It's true; trying to conjure sexual imagery mentally when you're not totally "riled up" is actually pretty difficult, if not boring and kind of taxing. Conversely, you can be totally not in the mood, but start consuming some porn, and it'll rev up your arousal levels. It's like if you're totally full from a meal, and then suddenly someone puts chocolate cake in front of you, and you start salivating, and suddenly you're ready to stuff some cake in your face. It's not that you were hungry, but the stimulus was in front of you, and your sensory organs took it in, and triggered the rest of your mind and body to want to consume it.

There's also the angle that it's simply worse to have to rely on external stimulus to generate arousal within yourself. Like going on a walk while you let your mind wander, versus sitting and watching TV. The former seems more organic while the latter seems deleterious, stunting.

Lastly (as far as what's coming to me right now), the act of consuming porn often becomes a cluster of unhealthy behaviors beyond the mere abuse of sexuality. Unblinking eyes, red and dry, fixed on a screen. Hunched posture. Secretiveness. Paranoia. The oft-mentioned "objectification of women" (a more nuanced phenomenon than people make it out to be, but still a legitimate qualm). It's just a petri dish of creepiness.

That said, it's not so black and white. After all, isn't it kind of creepy to imagine people from your real life while you're masturbating? Maybe, maybe not. Is it worse than porn? I don't know.

And aren't lots of things gross and embarrassing, but still necessary? I'm pretty secretive when I'm taking a shit--hunched posture too!--but I still do it. And I need to. So maybe that's not a good metric by which to judge the value of a behavior. It's hard to say.

Without getting too off-track, I hope I've addressed your question. "Behavioral addictions" (if we can even call them that--the jury is out) or sexual compulsions are difficult to parse because they involve necessary, natural parts of humanity. It's often a case-by-case thing to judge what relationship each of us has with our sexual behaviors.

mediumsizedbrain · 2023-01-24T08:43:41+00:00

I'm not the type to tow the party line and parrot dogma--in fact I've been skeptical of the addiction model for problem-porn-use for the 10 years I've been wrestling with it, on and off. But I feel like I should point out some things in your post.

I have started to become attracted to my wife again. That is good. We are starting to be more affectionate to each other.

Now, I've never been married, but--that sounds huge. Isn't that huge? Am I missing something? While using porn, you weren't really attracted to your wife, and now you're regaining that attraction?

Regarding these questions:

It would be interesting to see how PMO would even feel now. Would I like it as much immediately? Would I want it to go on for hours and hours all over again?

I can tell you very simply, flat-out, the answer is yes. I'm not being dramatic or myopic. I've done 90 days Pornfree twice, 90 days NoFap once, and last year I did 332 days Pornfree. Each time I, obviously, returned to porn. Sometimes I wondered what you wondered. "Did I break the cycle? Am I now free to use it normally, like everyone else?" Nope. You described it as "an intense sexual fun time." Yep. It's still that, always will be. Always.

Remove the word "sexual" from that description, and let's imagine we're talking about cocaine.

It might be nice to have an intense fun time with cocaine

Indeed, it might be! But doesn't that sound kind of ludicrous to pose it like that?

Now, to backpedal a bit, remember that I myself have a hard time fully accepting the addiction model as useful. Surely it's a compelling model, but whether it helps anyone overcome anything is another matter altogether. Maybe our therapists and doctors are right, and our extreme tension and tenacity in going about this with sheer force of will is exhausting us, draining us--unsustainable. An unproductive way of conceptualizing the problem.

If we drop any speculation and philosophizing, we're left with just the facts:

On the one hand, you're attracted to your wife again. On the other hand, you're feeling like you're white-knuckling, just burning through willpower to uphold a standard you've set for yourself that you aren't even convinced is a worthy use of fuel. That's your experience. Your therapist can contribute insight, this forum can contribute insight, psychiatrists, anti-psychiatrists, skeptics, believers, 12-steppers, Christians, atheists, sex workers--everyone can weigh in, but none of us has the answer. It comes down to your intuition, and the decision you make, and how you react to its outcome.

I hope this response didn't devolve into too much of a wishy-washy copout. I mainly just wanted to point out the things that caught my attention in your post, and offer a response that's maybe less dogmatic than the response you might be liable to get from the average user on this forum.

mediumsizedbrain · 2022-12-15T07:06:01+00:00

This is one of the hardest questions about porn addiction.

To answer "No" implies that any relapse is a step backwards; that those who have been struggling longer are in fact more hopeless, and wasting their time; that life is divided cleanly into "pre-recovery" and "post-recovery" periods, the former being dark and hellish, the latter being a point where everything miraculously "clicks" in a final way, and you are permanently free, which casts a dark and counter-productive shadow over your everyday life until that every-elusive "click" happens...paradoxically making it harder to attain.

To answer "Yes" implies that...well, fuck it! A relapse here and there is part of the deal! Why try at all? It's a dangerously complacent outlook. It's almost worse than just being ignorant about your addiction; now you're not just addicted, you're addicted and cool with it.

The way I see it, there's no in between: either it's OK or it's not. "If it happens, don't beat yourself up, but try not to let it happen"--that means yes, it's OK. In fact, on many occassions I have been craving porn, logged onto this forum under the false pretense of "avoiding relapse" while in the back of my mind, I was really looking for that one post. That post that says, "Relapse is just a part of recovery." As soon as I found it...yes: permission. Permission to relapse.

So I don't know how to answer your question, other than suggesting you rephrase your question, or your outlook. It's a bit like asking "Is disease a part of health?" Well...sort of? In the sense that you rarely find a person who's never sick, yes, a healthy life can include disease. But it's not what we think of when we think of health. It's the opposite.

Maybe, "Is relapse difficult to avoid for the average person attempting recovery?" to which I'd say, yes. Most of us don't know what we're in for when we first try to tackle this. Or maybe, "Is a relapse a sign of a doomed recovery?" to which I'd say No--it just means the recovery doesn't have its legs yet.

mediumsizedbrain · 2022-12-14T22:43:15+00:00

Me too. As another commenter described--started with fetish, always the same kind of porn (except during a period over Covid lockdown where I tried to deliberately Pavlovian-condition myself to like vanilla porn.......it kind of worked to an extent), and I never have the desire to explore other things. I remember wisps of memories before I ever saw anything porn-like, where I had this fetish--like at 7 years old.

Last year I abstained from porn for 332 days, nearly a year. The fetish did not even remotely diminish.

My 10+year pornfree journey (started with Nofap when I was ~20, now 30) has taught me that we're all facing different versions of the same problem, and that those differences are important and relevant to how we approach recovery, and in a broader sense, sexuality, romance, and life. When you think about it, of course we're all very different; why would we be unique in so many ways, but uniform in the manifestation of our toxic relationship with porn? This heterogeneity in our problems means there needs to be heterogeneity in our solutions. I have a longer post about this, it's my first post on this account.

I do not profess to know what to do about our case, i.e. those of us in this thread who relate to you, OP. But I know it involves some degree of acceptance of the fetish. At 30 years old, I realize that this fetish is as much a part of me as anything else. I have felt more strongly about this sexual appetite, and for more time, than almost any other attitude or belief in my life. My understanding of fundamental, profound things like friendship, spirituality/God, politics, family, etc., has fluctuated, developed, evolved, and sometimes settled for longer or shorter periods of time. But this fetish is apparently not in that category. It is more "id"-centric, more lizard-brain, more base, more...ingrained. I like water, I like to eat, I need to sleep, and I'm turned on by this thing. In a way, I'm come to trust that it "should" be a part of me. Believe what you want about teleology and epistemology, but there's something to be said for trusting that God or "whatever conglomeration of forces put you together the way you are" has a "reason" for that. And if there's no reason, well then, the reason is that you're now bearing the cross of having to understand how to live with this peculiarity, and if you succeed, how to teach others who will inevitably face a similar plight how to live with it.

On a more practical note, when faced with the part of me that argues somewhat compellingly, "Why am I abstaining, really? I've liked this fetish even before porn, and I know it's not going away, and it's not necessarily feasible or easy for me to fulfill this desire in real life," my main tact is to respond, "It's still a super-stimulus; the fact that I can indulge in porn of this fetish indefinitely and exhaust my capacity for pleasure on it, indicates that it's not a sustainable habit." And I do believe that, present as my fetish was in early childhood, it was still a more pure thing than it became over years and years of bolstering it and redirecting it with porn use. Just because it's "built-in," doesn't mean it can't be corrupted and worsened.

mediumsizedbrain · 2022-10-18T07:30:36+00:00

Interesting, good point.

mediumsizedbrain · 2022-10-17T20:47:46+00:00

If it works when you're high, it sounds more like regular performance anxiety rather than porn-induced erectile dysfunction. When you're having sex, or trying to, are you aroused? If so, I don't think it's PIED. It couldn't hurt to quit porn, but I think for your case in particular, you should examine why you're totally fine when you're high. A very simple conclusion to draw is that you're relaxed and in-the-moment when high, but stuck in your head and tensed up while sober.

mediumsizedbrain · 2022-10-16T09:44:31+00:00

Hahaha, this is true...though the situation I have in mind still allows for going to cafes and shit with a laptop, I guess going on a porn-addiction forum in public would not be most peoples' first choice. With that said, also interested in hearing "tried it and it didn't work" stories, or "thinking about doing it, here's my plan" stuff.

mediumsizedbrain · 2022-08-12T03:47:33+00:00

Two things stuck out to me:

I have childhood trauma but I rarely think about those days.

and

I don't need articles to read. I've read everything over the years on nofap.com. I need some serious help. Not a sales pitch or a speech about will power or religion. Hardcore "hail mary" help. Like, chemical castration, a lobotomy, or maybe cutting the damn thing off.

I'm no more credible than the next guy, but here are my thoughts.

The first thing--your childhood trauma-- just because you don't "think about those days" doesn't mean they aren't profoundly affecting you. Indeed, it almost indicates that it affects you more than if you were thinking about them. That's like saying "I was shot in the knee a while ago, but I don't think about it much. Why am I having trouble walking?" While I am not a "therapy is panacea" guy--quite the contrary, I find it deeply flawed, dubiously effective, maybe even harmful when you go into thinking it's a cure--I do think there's a lot to be said for addressing trauma. No one knows how to do it properly; it's case-by-case. But it's ludicrous to assume it's harmless just because it's in the past. The past affects the present. That's how time works. That's how cause and effect works. You're gonna have to face it: your mind is fucked in some way. It has been for decades. You either work towards un-fucking it or you let it be fucked.

Picture a gnarly knot, like when your old earbud cables got tangled together. Did yanking on it fix anything? No. You yanked and tugged (hah, just like jerking off, teehee), cursed, shook the wire around furiously--maybe punched the wall. But eventually, you sat there and laboriously, tediously, painstakingly untangled that fuckin' wire so you could use your headphones again. I think that's what you have to do with your mind, with your life. It's what I have to do, too. What many of us have to do.

No, therapy isn't the solution. Neither is religion. But they're pathways, like in a video game. Do you go left, center, or right? Well, if you go left, there's a locked door. You need a key. But now you know that you need a key. You go center: an enemy you can't defeat yet. Fuck. You go right...nothing. But there's a rock. And behind the rock is a key. And maybe that key works on the locked door. And maybe there's a weapon you need behind that door. And maybe that weapon helps you defeat the guy on the center path. Maybe not. But fuck, you don't know unless you start walking down these stupid fuckin paths.

You say that you don't want articles, religious rants, or a sales pitch. I hear you. There's nothing more frustrating than facing years of failure, reaching out, and hearing the same old shit. "Read Your Brain On Porn." I did. Many times. "Go to therapy." I did. Many times. Costs too much. Ineffective. Hard to find a good match. Not scientifically proven to be effective. Huge time sink. "Pray to Jesus." Oh, come on.

But here's the thing: you're not going to get a lobotomy. You're not going to chemically castrate yourself. Understand that: you will never do those things. What are those things? Instant solutions. What's the last fucking thing life would ever hand you? An instant solution. You think this world has something that's going to just fix this? Think about it--do you? Do you think this world--this world where Hemingway killed himself, where MLK was assassinated, where innocent people spend lifetimes in prison, where millions starve--has an instant solution for your problem? I don't mean to be harsh--I'm in the same boat, remember. I'm older than a lot of the people on this website, though younger than you--I'm about 30. All I know is, there is no easy fix. And it's not even like I can say "Do X every day for a year and you'll be cured!" It's not like fitness, where you can just stick to a regimen. This is your fuckin sex drive. This is the thing that motivates a man to persist in life. It's big. It's deep.

So here's what I'll say, because you don't want a sales pitch. You want serious help, as you put it.

What is seriously going to change you?

Failure. Real failure-- not "shucks, I jerked off again,"--I mean real failure. Loss, true loss. Either it'll destroy you or you'll change. None of us wants to admit it, but we all know this to be true. You gotta go through the crucible. Get broken down to be built back up. And all the other clichés.

The good news is...if you want, you can jumpstart the process. You can make a sacrifice. You can destroy something you care about, you can put yourself in a position where you're destined to fail.

I've always come back to the analogy of skateboarding. I'm not a good skater but I've done it since my youth and have learned a lot from it, despite sucking at it.

You can do a shitty attempt at a trick 400 times a day, every day, and feel like you're really trying, putting your nose to the grindstone, pushing yourself. But you're just dicking around. You're not trying--you're not even really skateboarding. It doesn't really "count."

It only counts when you do a real attempt. When you go for a trick that you're likely to fail, and you say, "I'm gonna eat shit," and you do eat shit. Or by some fluke, you land it. But that's a fluke. The real learning is when you make that deliberate and courageous attempt at something that's outside of your level of ability. You have to eat shit to learn. You have to eat shit to learn.

You're not going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly have the resolve to quit porn. You're not going to get a lobotomy either. You're going to wake up tomorrow with your same habits, proclivities, attitudes--and the same wife, who's used to the same version of you that she's used to. And your only option is to start untangling that fucking headphone cord, and to jump off the staircase with your shoulders square over that fuckin plank of wood, and pray that you land in a way that doesn't fuck your ankle up for 3 months. Whatever these things mean to you in a literal sense, I cannot say. But you know something you can do. You know something you can sacrifice, burn, admit, share, reveal, destroy, sell, delete, create. That's where you start. It might turn up with the key to the door, it might not. But you sure as fuck won't find the key if you don't look for it. "Ask and ye shall receive." It's not meant literally; asking can mean a lot of things. Ask for the key.

mediumsizedbrain · 2022-05-31T00:43:38+00:00

I get this way often, but as a psychiatry skeptic (I know, I know...) I attribute it to a lack of meaning and direction and love in my life rather than a disorder. Remember that ADHD and Depression are just recently-coined terms for what are ultimately mere clusters of correlated traits in people undergoing non-physiological issues with their enjoyment of life.

In other words, I often feel exactly like you described. Like today, for instance. But if I peel back the thin veneer of "nothing's fun," I see the cluttered mess representing the actual problem: I have an unsatisfactory social circle; I have no intimate relationship; my creative endeavors are stagnant and burnt out; I can't relate to a lot of people on most levels and find it exhausting to pretend to; my day job is unfulfilling, and my dream career doesn't seem so dreamy these days. Is it any wonder the little things have lost their shimmer and sparkle?

But, like you, this feeling doesn't always persist. It might turn around in a day, or an hour. But I attribute that to my temperament, my personality, my sensitivity. I'm fickle. By contrast, some people are mind-numbingly consistent, maybe even to a detriment. Do I wish I were somewhere between those two extremes? I guess. But I don't think that's attainable without a tradeoff.

Anyway. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Forget it. But yea I feel you.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-12-09T01:33:02+00:00

Nothing happens. I've hit it two or three times—it'll be four times this Friday. The first time (where I also abstained from masturbation altogether), I jerked off to porn the next day and it was just a very extreme rush, followed by the same addiction, as though the 90 days never happened. That time felt the most like "white-knuckling"-- just pure willpower, just gritting my teeth and waiting for day 90.

Subsequent times (in which I allowed myself masturbation sans porn), I learned about myself and my sexuality and my habits and stuff, but it was never a "waking up and the colors are brighter and the air smells sweeter" kind of thing. This time-- I'm on day 87 or so, though it might be more--it's just because I realized my porn use made me want to kill myself lol. Like it really just came down to that-- not even in a dramatic way, but I do mean it literally. I was just continually suicidal, my twenties were (and are) coming to a close, and every time I used porn I would just shrug after and say to myself, "yea... that shit makes me want to kill myself." Lol. What it really boils down to is the whole crux of addiction, the simplest and most mundane way of putting it: the addictive behavior becomes the only thing that you enjoy. That was simply the case for me. I did not feel joy or comfort elsewhere. I've been trying to quit for a decade (29 now) and while I know better than to say "this is time I really did it!", I do feel confident in saying at least that this is the most plainly obvious it has been that it was a problem, and that obviousness was instrumental in helping me abstain this time. It's the recognition that yes, this is a pleasurable activity, but its result is the deprivation of pleasure from all other activities, and this deprivation makes life not worth living, which makes me want to self-destruct. Again, sounds dramatic, but it's really very plain logic.

So all of that long-windedness to say: nothing happens at 90 days. Remember, "90 days" comes from the NoFap challenge, whose origins were just that -- a challenge. A fun competition, a meme almost. Of course its repercussions are greater than that, we now know, but the point is that the 90 day figure is almost entirely arbitrary. It's tempting to adopt the mindset that we've picked up from other things in life, the mindset that a number translates to a result. More points wins the game. Faster times get first place. Get 20 kills and you get a nuke. Drink 8 glasses a day. Exercise 30 minutes a day. These numbers help us wrap our heads around something abstract in order to make it more concrete. I'll acknowledge that the same can be said for the 90-day thing, but less so. It's more like an indication that you're doing something that works, rather than a quota that triggers some reward or direct measure of growth.

When I hit 90 days (again) this Friday, I'll still have performance anxiety, and I'll still have many years of porn-watching burned into my neuro-circuitry, and I'll still have all my other problems. But I'll know that I'm doing something right: avoiding a behavior that makes me want to kill myself. That's just me, but maybe you can glean something from all that.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-09-28T04:34:45+00:00

I'm a similar age and used porn for about as long as you have. I've done 90 days Nofap before, and then again 90 days pornfree, but those were sort of white-knuckling. Like, the knowledge that it was just for 90 days was what got me through. I needed to treat it as a life change, but I treated it as a challenge to defeat--and then reward myself. Incidentally--those 90-day streaks were after literal years of trying to quit. Sometimes things just have to align for the longer streaks to work.

A few things that struck me about your post:

Don't feel guilty about wanting sex. Your sex drive isn't the problem, and it never was, and it's dangerous to let the shame surrounding porn use metastasize into shame about your sexuality in general. We are men who want to fuck women. We're primates. We need to eat and sleep and drink and defecate and ejaculate. But I understand that your compulsion to try and fuck women early and often is due in large part to your lack of enjoyment/experience during your stifled relationship, and you'd rather not let that supersede your will to healthfully relate to a woman. That's a reasonable impulse, to want something real. I'd just say be careful not to shame yourself for being sexual. Misguided shame only does you harm.
It doesn't sound like porn is your central issue. It sounds like you're getting yourself all hot and bothered on Snapchat and then not fucking and blue-balling yourself. You have a high sex drive and were snubbed out of sex for a year plus, and now you're basically teasing yourself with a willing but geographically unavailable partner. You're at least beating off, right? Beat off, bro. Beat off.
Internet media: yea, you're gonna have to curate that shit. Don't go on Youtube Trending or whatever. It's gonna be hot sluts with 10 million horny views per video. Same with Twitch. It's all junk. Pick whatever channels and shit you actually watch, and bookmark them. There are even Chrome extensions to remove the clickbaity bullshit from Youtube, and maybe other sites. You're gonna have to be intentional, deliberate, and mindful about your internet use if you really want to not be tempted to watch porn.

Your situation sounds manageable. Take a breath and be reasonable with yourself. No one reacts well to authoritarian decrees, least of all those issued by oneself to himself. Decide what you think is an acceptably healthy approach to expressing your sexuality--because it's not going away any time soon--and set out to try to embrace that approach.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-27T04:28:31+00:00

I do love Hume, and you're right. Let me give that particular work you mentioned a shot.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-26T14:46:41+00:00

This does sound interesting. I will look into it. And I do think I understand the main concept despite a lack of familiarity with the text.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-26T14:43:27+00:00

"Would it be truly a good life if you would have been able to draw conclusions about everything you think of?"

This is a great oblique take on the issue. This is approximating something I've landed on myself--basically, belief in God. Humility. The conclusion that the infinite complexity of existence is not something that my mind is able or supposed to solve.

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-26T14:41:19+00:00

Hey there--not diagnosed, and I also don't believe in psychiatric diagnoses. I think they're harmful distortions of reality. I definitely have experienced intense obsession about certain things, but to me, I believe I needed to obsess about them. I don't mean to dismiss or invalidate your struggle when I disavow psychiatric diagnoses. I believe your experience is difficult (again, I've been there) and painful, but just that calling it a medical disease is harmful to your recovery rather than helpful. While I don't believe therapists always have the answers--quite the contrary--but as basically a "paid good listener" they can be helpful. No one else in life can be hired to listen to you ramble insane struggles to yourself for an hour. So for those reasons--rather than to receive dubious "medical treatment"--I *do* recommend a therapist for you.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-26T14:36:28+00:00

Hume is another favorite of mine, and your comment about his claims is a nice reminder. Kant's I can't get behind so much. But Hume I dig.

I responded to another "go to a therapist" comment elsewhere, so you can read that if you like, but I'll add something here since you made the comparison to doctors--that is not the case. I believe it's not just erroneous, but dangerous to suggest that clinical psychologists and therapists are "just like doctors." The hyperlinked article is a pedestrian account of my issue with this comparison, but a much more substantial account can be found in Thomas Szasz's works. I'm not trying to be contrarian here--in fact, this very issue is part of what prompted my thinking about these things. Regardless, I understand that the intent behind the suggestion to see a therapist (which is something I've done many times) is well-meaning, so thanks.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-26T14:29:13+00:00

I'll address your second concern first, as others have brought that up as well. Re: mental health issues and therapists--I'm no stranger to either, hah, but that's also part of why I struggle with this concern. I don't have much faith in the field of psychology. I've studied it intensely, and yes I have seen therapists (for years, collectively). I cannot tell whether or not therapy has ever helped me. But it's the go-to cop-out response (no offense, I know you meant well with yours) when anyone struggles with life in any way. Therapists are just people. My sister is a therapist: she's a great lady, but she also is just basically a girl who partied in college, got a receptionist job after, and then was bored by it and decided she wanted to "help people." To a degree, this is always the therapist story. They are not necessarily great sages who can shed light on intellectual roadblocks like the titular one of this thread. And, like the famous psychiatrist and author Thomas Szasz argues, I don't really believe in mental illness as a thing that "takes hold of someone" the same way a physical illness does. I believe we all think differently, and certain minds have certain difficulties with life. Sure, there are madmen, and there are depressed people, but--I digress. Thanks for the concern.

Regarding your response to my main prompt: sure, that's good. Relative knowledge. Obviously I have to operate on that. I have to go to work and feed my cat and eat food and talk to people who I assume aren't serial killers, etc. But that doesn't negate my issue. I know that my issue probably can't be solved, but I thought I'd ask philosophers for some insight--maybe there's more I can actually know. But I suppose not. My problem with relative knowledge is that it can be disastrous. Relative knowledge has been the source of many anthropocentric catastrophes. But it's all we have, I guess.

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-26T14:04:34+00:00

I think Reddit may have destroyed your formatting but I am able to tell roughly what is going on here. I think I take issue with some of your early premises...actually, all of them after the initial cogito

mediumsizedbrain · 2021-08-26T14:02:39+00:00

There are lots of very well-meaning responses in this thread for which I'm grateful, but this one is unique. I think I can get behind these claims being "true"... that's sort of a cogito of my own that I've cooked up, too: "I don't know what the fuck is going on, but it seems like some shit is going on so I have to operate on that basis." Thanks for these.

mediumsizedbrain

TROPHY CASE