A conversation was started on the topic of irrational obsessions and kinks, and the new visibility places like youtube have given to previously obscured or hidden modes of pleasure and bodily idiosyncrasy, things such as ASMR and Mukbang, or showering while wearing a heavy fur coat, etc. etc. Svankmajer’s film “Conspirators of Pleasure” gone mainstream? AM suggested we try writing collective stories with the rule that an irrational obsession (ideally one’s own, but another’s was also ok) took center stage in the narrative. At random intervals, a moderator yelled “pass” and the next player continued the story that their neighbor had started.

Players: SC, HC, AM, JF, LL

VELVET SOFA

I love to feel velvet sofas. Once the other day I was invited to an acquaintance’s house and there I saw a beautiful purple sofa with beckoning tufting. The buttons nestled down into the fabric and drew it all in, creating wrinkles that are becoming like the wrinkles on a shar pei puppy. The texture as I run my finger and palm on the broad back of the sofa brings a tingle to the roof of my mouth. I gaze upon the seat with anticipation. I want to savor this. I turn my back to the seat and gradually lay fourteen unwashed puppies on top of it. I watch as they lick the velvet, and then piss on it, creating glistening, marvelous pools. Inside the pools I notice little sea monkeys. And so, I count them. I lay with my eye close to the fabric and the individual threads loosen. The softness has become a forest. A tiny world, which my gaze inhabits. I can almost see the native inhabitants.

VIBRATION

I like vibration. I like my whole body to be shaken at different frequencies.  Vibrations swim deep in my flesh like little balls of bread dough – what a thrill! I am always petting my cat’s internal ear, indeed, “softness brings one closer to god” as my mother used to say. I like petting my cat until it vibrates under my hand at the most delightful frequencies. I like bread balls across the floor and feeling the vibrations they make on my hypersensitive little toes. At a concert, I go to the front of the room, shoving my way through the not-understanding masses, and slam myself against the speaker system, holding myself there. Gahhhh! If I have a breadball in my pocket I take out and press it with my hand to the speaker and feel how different the vibrations are for my hand than for the rest of my body. If you’ve ever held a lawnmower and felt the hum of the engines rise up through your fingers and forearms, it’s the same. A string plucked in harmony with the resonant frequency of the world. I wish to oscillate alongside it.

TWO FINGERS

I always tap my index finger to my thumb twice to gain good luck. And good luck has always resulted when I have done this. It is also good for averting potential bad luck. For instance I might have to choose between two paths. In order to negate an unlucky path, I can touch my index finger to my thumb. I touch like this to save the earth. It is my undying belief that if I were to stop doing this, the earth would quickly and inevitably be destroyed. Touch! Touch! Touch! It gives me the sense of milk in a bowl, of a ring being danced around. There’s a wholeness to the ring that I carry in my hands. If I can bring the ring together, the world will be one as well. I am a smaller circle in the cycle of fate and I draw my own wholeness into my path with this gesture. My hand has multiple fingers. My fingers are the whole world. Touching and separating, over and over again, forever. The cycle of life…

THE SHOWER

Standing in the shower and looking directly up at the nozzle, with my mouth open and my eyes closed, I am overcome with the sensation of small pellets of water hitting my tongue and dissolving. It has to be warm. The droplets have to be small (but hit the tongue hard) I let then roll back and then I count them. 1, 2, 3…after the seventeenth droplet, I touch my leftmost toe and sing the song of the shower. I cup my ears with my hands and let the water hit them. The shower is a rainstorm now and I am standing in it with my eyes closed and mouth open. I am a little frog. I am in the rainforest. I belong here with the fairies. Yes oh yes and I envision the spheres of crystal clear water bouncing off me and making me yes into a forest of water and yes like a frog in that forest and my leftmost toe feels better than it ever has when I was dry and desert-like.

THE PERFECT SPACE

I just love spaces that I would fit in perfectly if I backed into them. I see those spaces and I want nothing more than to back into them. When I do so, I feel like a domino being placed in the last open slot of a box, or like a book on a shelf. It’s essential that I back into the place – not front ways, or sideways. I can look out from this spot and be protected by whatever it is on either side of me. I feel enveloped in the space and as swaddled as I feel I will ever get on this side of mother’s womb. Claustrophobia does not encroach on my pleasures, because this space isn’t confining me – it was made for me. I fit. I finally fit. Like a puzzle piece…I don’t have to match the space. I don’t have to conform to the surrounding space. Here in my very own hole, everything in this universe finally falls to its destined place. Everything is where it should be, where it wants to be. I am everything and nothing now, I am a dust mite, a god…