Last night I had a kooky short story idea: a man grows fat, obese even, but all the excess goes to his penis.
It gets not only longer, but wider and fatter, till it’s like some sort of bloated beaver’s tail. He has to tape it to the inside of his thigh and wear long underwear because it eventually reaches to his knees, then his calves. He also has to wear especially baggy trousers. Eventually, he has to attach a fake penis to the other thigh to even things out, to hide the fact that he’s deformed like this. Symmetry, he hopes, will hide the obese deformity. Of course it can’t, since he remains slender everywhere else in his body. When he gets an erection, his normal-sized penis (trapped inside the fat) eventually can’t cope, stuck as it is inside this twenty, then thirty, then fifty pound mass of blubber. Initially, though, when it’s “just” ten pounds, he still manages to get it up, but the fat isn’t erectile, and everything beyond the engorged member itself droops. So it’s actually during erections that he’s really painfully reminded, via this visual clue, of his increasing deformity. Until then, he can still calm himself that maybe, just maybe, he has an exceptionally large dong. He doesn’t have a woman, lives alone, and has no one with whom to share this problem. When the excess weight reaches beyond the penis’s ability to hoist the mass, erections start to feel like bondage. It’s weirdly pleasurable, and now he really doesn’t know what to do. Should he see a doctor or not? All his dieting seems for naught. He has a truly bizarre “metabolic” disturbance. How to get back to normal? And what is the desire to penetrate, anyway? Or to feel that stimulation, unencumbered by thirty pounds of lard? Is it freedom, or is his unique fatness his chance to be uniquely free? I don’t know how to resolve or end the story at this point. Perhaps he meets a woman who has the same problem, except in her case it’s a progressive larding up of the vaginal canal, a damming (beaver reference again), and an extension outward to the hips and buttocks. These two would be mutually unpenetrating / impenetrable. He can’t. She can’t. Do they want to get to “can,” and why would they? Is that desire essential? What does it complete, if anything?
Well, anyway… In other news, we drove to the airport and fetched A., who was looking uncommon handsome in his elegant blazer. On the way home we stopped at A&J King for coffee and some kouign-amanns. Long walk after, but it’s still cold. Yesterday already it was getting very cold; this morning the level of frigidity has dropped by thirty beavers. It’s fucking cold–and we did have that brief snow squall, just the one, in the evening–and it’s so cold that its thin snow cover survived through the night, through the wind and whatever evaporation, into now, mid-morning. The sun is beating down on it as I write, the reflected light is bright and sharp, but even the sun can’t melt this stuff right away. It’s below below below freezing.
Last night, aside from the “fat dick” idea, I also realized, with an intensity that took me slightly by surprise, how much I want to live in a city, a real city, in a proper, well-built apartment close to interesting street frontages, shops, cafés, libraries, etc. And to travel, too. Or else live right in the country (but only if I were rich) and travel to cities frequently, or live in a city and get out at will, too. But this nonsense of suburban (but not suburban because conurban) life, in a small city overshadowed by the “big” city? It’s really not me. It’s like I’ve got this fat penis that doesn’t know how to get out into the world, doesn’t know where or how to stick it.