Likes/Dislikes:
Like with most people, texture is
important to me. I don't think that it's unreasonable to have
preferences about what kind of material you want to interact with in
your life. I want to be transparent about who I am so potential
suitors can know what to avoid messing around with if they want to be
in my life.
I can't even look at cardboard. I get
this reflexive shudder that tingles through the roots of my feeling,
a prairie wind shivering through my brain's discomfort center. I feel
phantom rakes of cardboard passing in the softness between my fingers
and toes with a rough crackle, or sawing the backs of my knees.
Imagine gnawing on a crispy Styrofoam cup and trying to grind up that
squelching, rubbery mass with squeaky teeth. Picture etching on a
thick window with a metal strut, and the sound it would make. I can
feel the chirping friction moving through me like electric blood. My
brains taste the barking seal whimper of someone slipping in a
bathtub, that sound of rubbery flesh squawking against unyielding
vinyl: it's like a slurp of rotten juice right after a minty
tooth-brushing. Even describing it to you now makes all my skin
clench and thrill in horripulation like a shocking change of
temperature or an impending bowel movement. I recently saw just the
words “dry rub” on a spice packet and was enveloped in a sensory
field of chaffing, crunchy waves of texture: a hell-spa on a beach of
blasted asbestos where someone rubs packing peanuts against a
crumbling brick wall with an itchy hand, where powdery, flaking lips
brush a sun-bleached shell and splintered fingernails scrape a
desiccated scab, where a dehydrated sponge rasps dead skin off a
crumbling forehead. Sundered in this sea of violent texture, I am
reduced to a twitching nerve ending, a screaming chalkboard in the
night.
There's food stuff, too. It's the
chomping. That Bugs Bunny gristly bite like two glaciers battling in
my skull. Why even make food crunchy? The hollow, frictional
ca-chunka of some horse-mouthed pervert burying his fangs in
crispy matter is like a clawed hand tickling my balls from the inside
or a cold tooth hitting hot soup. It's like a hot blast of a strange
animal's breath into all your breathing holes or hearing part of your
own body snap. You ever see your dad crush a bloated roach with a
flip flop in '93? Don't wonder why I'm unable unable to eat hash
brown patties or pretzels or croquettes or stroopwaffles or felafel
or rice krispee treats. How do you tromp through this tactile
discord, oblivious and unbothered? Why not just see what your
fingernails feel like bent totally backwards or how far you can push
a chive up into your head through your nasal cavity? Why not bite a
fork or try or touch your eyeball with a toothpick?
Some people just have these things.
It's not all the cute synesthesic playground of these happy-go-lucky
ASMR sensationalists tingling away to the radio or some rolling
co-eds experiencing a whispery futurist playing with rain-sticks or
farofluid in a darkened gallery. I know a guy who gets mad whenever
he hears a harmonica and another who would throw up if you said “wet
cheese” to him. I've read about an heiress who sneezed at the sight
of butterscotch color and an uncle who soiled himself whenever he
smelled burning rubber.
So keep the TV on loud, slurp your
coffee, protest deodorant, just don't open a package around me. Keep
your skin properly lubricated and don't drag things or work with
wood. Watch your fingernails. Machines should stay oiled and alone.
Cereal should be left to sog. Velcro is unnecessary. Animals can work
out on materials away from the house. You are better off not
scratching yourself anyway. Rust should not be permitted. Carpet is
lovely; why leave a floor naked? This is not a thing that does it
for me. Why do people think if you hate something enough it must
be the key to getting your rocks off? Do you think drowning, or
headcheese, or war is sexy? You probably do. Well I'm not like that.
A wet friction is fine. I don't want you to bring sandpaper or borax
into the bedroom. I've got claws of my own and I don't need any dried
animal bones or bow drills in my life. I have in fact tried
meditation and medication, but you know what? There's a dryness that
cannot be tamed, and I don't plan on spending my time burning in the
fires of my disgust. I want to live my life with proper texture, not
screaming frisson dancing along my tightening flesh.
I'm also not really a dog guy.
