I Want To Have Sex With Everyone (And Other Reasons Summer Is Nice)
By Jeremy Glass
I’ve recently started taking Prozac to curb the leftover depression my Klonopin dosage doesn’t take care of. For the most part it’s working, as I no longer feel the distinct urge to tongue-kiss the third rail of any participating train tracks. Prozac works by killing whatever part of your brain makes you feel depression and replacing it with sweet, sweet okayness. The kind of fringing-on-nihilistic sense of mediocrity that’s slightly better than sadness and a step below robotic. I like it, because it’s nice. I go to sleep feeling nice and I wake up feeling nice. Prozac kills the sex drives of those who regularly take it. It takes your erection hostage, stabs the absolutely shit out of it and dissolves the body in lye. That being said, any semblance of sexual desire these days is met with shock and awe.
So you can imagine my surprise when the first warm day rolled around and I found myself crippled with arousal from the many, many beautiful women flaunting their perfect bodies in the streets of New York. On paper I am ogre. A blunt, sadistic, womanizing scoundrel. In real life, I think I’m a relatively swell guy. I don’t make fun of people to their faces, I don’t whistle at women, I don’t make dirty jokes…in the winter. Summer is a beast that brings out a different side of humanity. The side where you’re in a car, rolling down the street at 3 miles per hour in hopes of seeing the hint of an ass-cheek from the cutie in the short skirt down the block. It brings out the side of you where every night is a chance to end up in a massive, sweaty orgy, pending the drinks are cheap enough. Like my title suggests, summer makes me want to have sex with everyone.
I was actually in some bullshit coffee shop the other day. There was the typical crew; NYU loser writing his bad screenplay, disgruntled hippie writing his bad short story, guy eating almonds writing a bad love letter, and your humble narrator — drinking the cheapest thing on the menu and writing a bad article. A woman walked in wearing white high-top Converse, which I consider the accoutrement to an entree of full-on sex appeal. I remember her ordering some type of green tea drink with honey and whole milk and I couldn’t stop from staring. I opened up my notebook and wrote down everything I loved about her: white converse obviously, smooth shapely legs, rotund bottom, childbearing hips, the ability to order a drink with mannerisms of Nora Ephron and the specificity of a chemist. I realized right then and there that I was in love with this woman. I looked at her and I saw a future. Off-white colored picket fence, a dog named Spooky, a fish named Russ, a house with our collection of quirky knick-knacks, and an adopted Haitian son named something Haitian sounding.
She was probably the third or fourth woman I’d fallen in love with that morning. Still, sparks flew in that bullshit coffee shop as I wrote my bullshit article and had that bullshit fantasy. It was hot outside, which made me hot inside. Summer trumps everything. It removes the somber from the somber-laden, rejuvenates the spirit, stirs the vapors, and trumps the prescription meds. As I said, my real life endeavors aren’t crass by nature — not nearly as crass as my writing suggests. I don’t think I’ll ever be at a point in my life where I could go up to a woman and tell her exactly how I feel. Not unless I wanted to spend the rest of the day with a red hand-shaped welt on my face. Still, I often wonder if the same thing happens to women. Not necessarily about me. I don’t think anyone walks down the street, looks me up and down, and goes: “Damn, I want to eat that Jew up.”
I’m a born and bred diehard New Englander. I bleed goddamn clam chowder. I have a friend who argues Connecticut isn’t a state, to which I respond in garbled shrieks that she’s wrong and deserves to be frozen in carbonite à la Han Solo. Regardless, I’m a New Englander ‘till the day I die. And as a New Englander, I’m no stranger to miserable winters and sweltering summers. The winter months are long and bitterly cold, typically dumping feet upon feet of snow upon our little farms and cities, which we determined folk plow through and try our best to ignore. Winter doesn’t get us down, but it tries pretty damn hard. Admittedly, I fall victim to this seasonal shitbath and often find myself in reclusive situations, doing my best to hibernate in my room from late October to whenever the Earth tilts back towards the Sun. It’s kind of like living in a world where there is, and always has been, just winter. Then one day, the snow melts and you can wear t-shirt and you’re like: “ohhhh yeah, I forgot that was a thing.” It’s like a light switch goes on and you remember everything that happened so long ago. Sunshine! Dresses! Short-sleeved shirts! Pretty girls in white high-top Converse! I don’t know how I forget, every year, that winter ends.
So what am I going to do with my rehashed love for society (especially the female portions of society) who I can’t stop fantasizing about? What shall I do every time the Internet tells me it’s going to be “short-shorts weather” outside? How do I deal with a brain so hopped up on pheromones and aphrodisiacs and arousal and erotica and passion and infatuation, and off-white picket fences and dogs named Spooky, and fish named Russ, and collections of quirky knick-knacks, and adopted Haitian sons named after whatever Google tells me Haitian names sound like? What do I do? I don’t know, what do I do. Go with it? It’s summer, I’m invincible.