Why the best sex is when you're ugly and she's not.

Let's face it. There are better looking men than me. Sexier men, even. Ok, better looking and sexier. Better, sexier manlier men than me. Alright, I make Jack Black look like Jack Nicholson. Fine, I make Jack Nicholson look like Jack Nicholson 1978. But I've got my charms. Hell, I've even been laid a few times. And now I'm in a damned-fine, committed, loving relationship with an angelic sex-kitten who's so far out of my price-range I've had to take out no-interest loans with the World Bank conditional on liberal economic reforms and the cessation of my long and persistent history of human rights violations.

But let's leave all that one side for the moment. I'm human: bleed if pricked, laugh if tickled and all that...and I'm a thousand miles away from the warm and comforting body of the one I love. What's more, there is still some of that early-adolescent semen kicking around in me, and I'm lustful. Now, I'm not so stupid as to act on this vaguely directed dick-headedness (not that there is a queue of willing, limber, highly-trained virgins forming outside my door to take up the task), nor do I, in any important sense of the word, WANT to. To want something like this is to want it metaphysically, spiritually, i.e. to want the whole shift in the state-of-affairs of the universe that comes with it. This is the last thing I want. There is no sheer quantity nor quality of TNA which can be measured against what I now have with my girlfriend (her TNA, of course, included). Rather, I want as the baby wants from mother's teat, as the dog wants from the bone, as the Republican wants from a Bush victory: the raw, unthinking, visceral bliss of instant gratification, unencumbered by any higher-order reflection on consequence or reason.

But if I'm really honest with myself--and why not, it seems the consensus on the best place to vomit forth one's soul has shifted from the shrink's couch to the blog's html prompt--what I want is simpler still. I want to be wanted. That's why when the few and far between advances come (usually from sweet, tipsy British girls who've always wanted an American teddy bear) the id is tempted even where the ego is strong. For the blessed few among us, this narcissism is satiated in high school or the heady, post-breakup days of freshman year. There, if you are of the Ubercrombie, or captain of the team, or always have the best ganj', you can count on a steady diet of beer-tinged hookups and mediocre blowjobs. But the rest of us have got to earn it. And in the end, its the earning that makes it great. Like so many Stephen Daedelii, with nothing but exhile, cunning and silence to fend for ourselves, we push our wares, work our small miracles, and from the ashes of adolescence build for you the man you can desire; not for his abs but for his guts, not for his dick but for his balls (and his dick).

Closer in figure to Buddha than Adonis, more of a mind with Tacitus than Ovid, we nevertheless somehow find the words, the gestures, the deeds to win you to our cause. And before you can say Cyrano de Bergerac, you are lying, bathed in moonlight, naked and breathless and quivering on our bed...

I assure you, my friends, that there is no greater ego boost than leaving a sexually spent woman to wash your face, and, in catching your reflection in the mirror, thinking "what the hell is she doing with me?"

-Fostanova