"You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want."
That was me, all right. Completely wasted, given the mumbling speech and fifth grade vocab. What the fuck had I done last night? I sat, somewhat heavily, on a pile of drywall before hitting play again on the nearly hour-long file.
"You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want."
Same thing, again. And then again. After each, a long pause before another repetition. Once, with a little hiccup at the end. Five repetitions later I noticed the hiccup again and realized the same thirty-second clip had been looped. I tapped the arrow key to jump through the file.
"You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want."
Same thing, over and over again. Finally, in the last two minutes of the file, a new instruction:
"You have no memory of conditioning yourself tonight"
Holy fuck.
-----
I had not been able to cope with my discovery, the night before - I had shut the computer, and gone downstairs to bed, where I tossed and turned for what felt like an hour. Finally, I had realized what keeping me from sleeping - the fear that I would repeat my drunken mistake out of sheer distress - and so I had gotten up to gather all of the liquor in my house and take it out to the neighborhood nutrition drop bin.
Now, though, sitting up in bed the next morning, it was time to confront what I had done to myself. There was, of course, the very small problem that I had drunk some of my own jizz, which to be honest felt a little gross. Then there was the much bigger issue that, if I had indeed been conditioned as my recording so clearly implied, that meant I was susceptible to my own effect - and much worse than last night could happen to me if I was not careful.
Well, maybe worse couldn't happen - maybe I'd messed myself up pretty bad already. Who knows what my intentions had been.
You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want...
- was I just trying to give myself a drunken buck-up session after a depressive night torturing myself for experimenting on Sara? Or had I been conducting an audacious pre-emptive strike on my own morality?
And my own now-lost intentions aside, what would be the effects of such a poorly worded instruction? It suddenly occurred to me I might be a ticking time bomb. What if I
wanted
to hurt someone, or worse? We all have someone who just rubs us the wrong way. What if I wound up wanting to snap the neck of that Federal Resettlement guy the next time he came around? Would I just do it? And worse, I had mind-bending abilities now. Good god, was I a comic book villain now? Persuasive cum and no impulse control? Was this how the world finally ended?
I was broken from my reverie by my phone ringing. It was Sara. Suddenly paralyzed, I let it ring. She must have hung up and tried again, because it went off a second time. This time she waited out the ringing and left a voice message. I left it. I was too hungry to think, and definitely too hungry to deal with feelings about what I'd done to Sara.
I stumbled out of the house to the Sheetz down the road and ordered a burrito on the screen before wandering past the freezers to pick out something to drink. The selection had really shrunk recently. In a funk, I leaned up against the cool glass doors of the refrigerators. I turned my gaze down to find my kryptonite: the Hostess Zinger. I immediately broke out in a sweat.
I know it's weird, but there was a time when I was addicted to the things. I had taken a box of them from a flooded grocery store when I was struggling through the Atlanta Swamp, and had carefully allotted myself one a week, as a treat. When I ran out, I missed them desperately. Later, when I was bouncing around the FEMA system, Zingers were in all the vending machines for some reason, and I had spent all of my meagre allowance on them. When I was finally awarded my house in Pittsburgh, though, I had made myself stop. My first month in the city, finally with disposable income, I had been able to gorge on the cakes, and gained a ton of weight. So I had sworn off them.
And now, for the first time since I kicked the little creme-filled fuckers, I was looking at one and not feeling any shame. I didn't feel that combination of hungry desire and meta-desire to not feel that hunger. My hand twitched, as if to buy the cakes, and I despaired for my newly cum-conditioned soul.
But then, miraculously, I stopped myself. I
knew
I shouldn't buy them. Just because I didn't have shame about something didn't mean I was going to do it. Through some feat of either logic or will, I turned and walked away from the Hostess display, feeling deeply relieved. Was this what therapy was like? Maybe I should go, I thought, as I picked up my burrito.
Stepping outside, I relaxed. I wasn't going to kill anyone out of a lack of self control, or otherwise cause the end times. My drunken self-conditioning had not eliminated my humanity - rather, it had just kneecapped the guilt I had felt for so many years. My worst fears assuaged by a standoff with an off-brand Twinkie, I turned towards home.
----
I got inside before the morning heat got going and sat down to eat. My phone beeped to remind of Sara's voicemail and I pressed play.
"Hi there - I guess you must be asleep still after last night!" Sara gave a soft giggle. "Just wanted to let you know I got to the Tube alright and we're boarding in a second."
Her voice got a lot quieter, and I could practically hear her blushing. "I really enjoyed sucking you last night." And then, louder than she had originally been as she grew flustered - "And, uh, the whole date! The Hilltop Inn was so nice." She trailed awkwardly off before beginning again in a more tender tone than I had expected. "I've really enjoyed the last few days with you, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in a week. Miss you already." She made an exaggerated kissing noise and the message ended.
In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be with her. And so I took out my notebook and began writing.
----
I spent the next two days planning and jacking off into little bottles.
The former, frankly, was kind of fun. Even though masturbating felt a little lonely without Sara, it was somehow novel to be jerking off
for
something. Nobody - well, other than sperm donors perhaps - had things they were trying to to
achieve
when they cranked it. So for me, jerking off for science proved to be an enjoyable experience - I set a schedule, and marked sessions on the little whiteboard by my front door. The only annoying part was having the presence of mind to jizz into the little travel soap bottles I had dug up out of storage. Aiming was hard when you were cumming.
