Of course, with that first admonishment the first seeds of shame were planted in a sandy soil, the true grit of my soul, and though the roots run deep to nourish from a wellspring of muddy guilt, my libido like a resilient scurrying little hungry for sex rodent burrows in. The landscape is a desert for inspiration but somewhere between the barren patches thorny fruits nourish my craving for something sexual, no matter how brittle and lacking in actual sexuality. A Sears catalog full of tons of crap an eight year old could care less about has just a few pages of brassiere ads offering scant but fulfilling enough nectar to feast my eyes on. Books by Freud offer suggesting tidbits but hide the tastiest morsels in Latin. (Years later I would spend a couple years learning Latin so as to be able to translate those passages… unfortunately I could never find the book again in my parent’s shelves.) Tough times, but I survive and learn to forage furtively.

In the scheme of things, arousal doesn’t necessarily inspire the spirit of courage but it can make one courageously curious on a quest for arousal’s inspiration. This became quite clear to me as I set out to more and more dangerous crags and crevices of the house to find whatever possible scrap where it may lay. Though the prospect of getting caught searching through my parent’s bedroom and their closets was severely unpleasant, the risk would ultimately merit the reward, but not without a few very, very, way too close for comfort close calls.

Of course, whoever thinks “what if… I get caught?”