The Index of Shitty Mornings

Before I met my wife, I lived in a college town where the women loved a good listener. Hang some political art, put on the most obscure band you can find, and after an hour or two of asking the right questions, you got laid.

I listened to the craziest shit in exchange for sex. Rebirthing, palmistry, something called the ‘memory of water’. One lady had me wearing these yellow-tinted sunglasses for a week with little runes scratched on the earpieces.

The runes were meaningless, the sex astounding.

Feigning interest in nonsense is a pretty tame dating strategy, as these things go. It also has the advantage of working more often than not, with no one in harm’s way. Daredevil acts on motorcycles or cramming into stupid shoes can land you higher on the Index of Shitty Mornings than smiling when a gorgeous woman wants to talk reflexology.

The thing to keep in mind is striking a balance. Orgasms are very nice things to have, granted. But barring some serious Tantric shit they never outlast the consequences. With luck, the harshest sexual karma a baseline American can expect is an awkward Monday at work, and that’s a trade I’ve made with a clear conscience. But at times our species’ pathetic grasp of basic sexual economics makes this old Darwinist weep.

There is always a morning after and sin has nothing to do with it.

In a more convenient, caring universe, every human being would awake on the morning of their fifteenth birthday with a laminated wallet card in their fist. Printed across both sides would be a table of sex and consequences, with moral or intellectual compromises on the left and their accompanying flavors of awful to the right. In calligraphy, the busy angels of this friendly alternate universe would label each card, “The Index of Shitty Mornings”.

We would be genetically compelled to consult this card before fucking. Glance at it before chatting up strangers in bus terminals, or going under the knife to shave a point or two off the odds of rejection. Those little laminated cards would save our people a shit-ton of grief if they were more than a thematic container for musing on your rotten luck.

Sorry, primates. I’m the best you’ve got.

Start by cutting out the poetry and defining our terms:

“Orgasm is the conclusion of the plateau phase of the sexual response cycle, and is experienced by both males and females. Orgasm is controlled by our involuntary, or autonomic, nervous system. It is accompanied by quick cycles of muscle contraction in the lower pelvic muscles, which surround the primary sexual organs and the anus. Orgasms are often associated with other involuntary actions, including vocalizations and muscular spasms in other areas of the body, and a generally euphoric sensation.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Takes the mystery out, doesn’t it? Let’s pare our working definition down to “a few moments of seriously intense bliss”. All that stuff about your anus jumping like a galvanized frog is beside the point and easier to accomplish with a twelve volt battery and some gator clips.

What are you willing to trade for a moment?

To bring up and dispose of the best-case scenario: neither of you did anything morally wrong or just plain stupid on your way to bed last night. Quite the opposite. It was practically fucking destiny: the thrumming rightness of meeting your truest ally in a confusing universe. And if you see each other again- sometimes just knowing the other exists is enough- it will be at least as caring acquaintances, allies of the pillow. You’ve found something unique and wonderful together no smart ass like me can understand. Never precisely what you knew, that night.

Some poor bastards never see a night like that in their lives. Unworthy as I am, I’ve had three- and I blew the first two relationships because I honestly wasn’t worthy of them at the time. It took me years to understand that; years I wasted blaming the ladies or circumstances instead of becoming a better partner. Ego defense just gets you over the last heartbreak by setting up the next one.

If you are unprepared for love, proceed with caution. Love is a live fire exercise.

Monogamous love has another major perk: if you’re honest about it, you get to throw out your copies of the Index and go bickering off into the sunset. For the rest of us, there’s scary shit lurking on the low end of probability. Pick the wrong partner, cross the wrong line, and all manner of things can happen that are more comfortably read about than experienced.

Sex is not a sin, but we often sin for sex.

Leave aside the obvious crimes of rape and molestation as the province of defective humans, unworthy of this discussion. The most commonly committed sexual transgression is gamesmanship, followed closely by adultery.

Players objectify the opposite sex and are assholes. The sin in gamesmanship is assuming that half the planet draws breath, eats, and muddles through solely to keep players supplied with moist orifices to conquer. Whatever diseases they pick up adding notches to their belt are just reward for the trail of trampled feelings and broken relationships they leave behind.

If that sounds hyperbolic, allow me to posit a hypothetical: if I said you only grew a mouth for me to stick my dick in, would you feel differently?

Gamesmanship is among the most absurd lines people cross for an orgasm, giving up on meaningful relationships with three billion people in an endless quest for fresh partners. Players also open themselves up to the full range of the Index’s suggested consequences, if only as a function of the law of averages. More partners and less selectivity yields a rising tide of bad news.

Orgasms fade, hepatitis sticks around.

Adultery is the second most common dirty tactic featured on the Index, and easily among the most heartless bargains. The cheater loses track of the value of their partner, to put it lightly. To put it honestly, they’ll inflict the dizzy pain of betrayal on those who love them most in exchange for a furtive moment of bliss.

Maybe you got that moment cheating on your wife (you asshole) and she’s gonna raise the kids to piss on your picture. In yet more extreme cases, you won’t care the kids hate you- you’ll be too busy mourning your severed cock, lying somewhere along a Virginian highway in the tall grass.

Until the crows eat it. Caw, caw, what have we here.

If you’re in a relationship where you feel entitled to betray your partner, just to have something of your own, you need to get out. You aren’t happy, okay. I get that. But do it right. Break it off, or fix it. Sleeping around will not help.

Penectomy is a fringe event, I’ll admit. Statistically, you’ve got pretty good odds of keeping your equipment intact if you steer clear of gorgeous psychos. Yes, madness is alluring. Yes, crazy people tend to have room on the old dance card and access to interesting drugs. But be advised that they can and will do crazy shit, sometimes to you.

I’ve been duct-taped, fucked, and abandoned in northeast Philly by gothic hotties. Once, I kissed a presumably sane lady and left her to shower at my place while I headed to work. I came home to my back door nailed shut, my front unlocked, and a missing pillowcase. The pillowcase I almost understand, but why nail one door shut and leave the other swinging open? I was almost relieved when her boyfriend got out of jail, though I never asked his feelings on the matter. Last I heard, they’re married again.

Still and all, I’ve been lucky. Dangerous lunatics tend to trust me and open up with their little secret straight off. In return, I tell them I’m saving myself for Jesus and we go our separate ways. Often at a dead run.

The Index is unkind to those who fail to sanity-check their mates. We’re in the world of Eddie Gein and Albert Fish, of cloying obsessives and erstwhile Juliets out to press-gang a Romeo. Some gray days I’m set that the last girl-next-door went off her meds while I was out buying roses, and there’s no one left who’ll kiss me in the morning without slipping a mouse trap under the pillow.

There’s no end to the auto-craziness, either.

We are the species, after all, that still practices foot-binding a good hundred years after the last blighted fetishist died of some richly deserved pathogen he picked up coming between his concubine’s mangled arches. Nowadays, while decrying the Chinese of old for hobbling their daughters, Western women can pay five grand a pinkie toe for elective amputation to better fit their absurdly pointy shoes.

I’m not making this shit up.

Men go in to get their erectile tissue stripped out and replaced with hand-pumped balloons, or hinged steel rods. Women… there’s no end of options for the flensing and reordering of the female form. And while modern sterile technique guards most willing victims from fatal surgical complications, there’s a more poetic consequence on the Index: loss of sensation.

Think on that. Surgically increase your odds of getting laid and you might not feel it when you do. Breast implants, penis enlargement, and vaginal sculpting can render your bits plastic doll pretty and just as responsive. This has to be the clearest example of chasing an orgasm only to end up fucking yourself.

And that’s what it means to have a shitty morning, in this lovely, lousy little universe of ours. There’s no real Index to consult, no hedonic calculus of the price per orgasm. Humanity is left to rely on the good sense and proportion coded into our genes and memes to measure the balance- something we aren’t terribly good at in the best of times. It’s a skill we must cultivate in order to keep sex untroubled and beautiful. To cherish, and never regret, that moment of bliss.