It is a sad fact that my alarm goes off at half past six in the morning, and even more so that I set three more – six forty-five, seven o’clock and a “you’re late!” sort of mockery at ten past. It’s my reminder to get up, pick up the first clothes that I see, make some sort of assemblage of myself and then go to join the milieu of drudging humanity.
As I was saying to my pretty colleague the other day, that’s the hard part. Once you’ve done that, the rest is easy.
I am, of course, awake well before those alarms go off. I’m not a good sleeper, as we all know, and I wake up with the slightest of disturbances. Sometimes this is for a good reason – midnight sex is always welcome, as is a 4am departure for a cross-country sojourn to Eroticon 2012 – but, sadly, the majority of times it is not. I merely wake up and then find it impossible to go back to sleep.
I’ve also been finding it difficult to be horny for the past few weeks. It’s been happening, of course (this is, after all, me we are talking about), but at the most inopportune of moments – while in the general mess of human society to which I am tethered, for example, or while in conversation with others, or at my table at work attempting to battle off the sleep that evaded me the previous night. It’s much less easy, for example, to suddenly be struck by arousal when sitting in my computer chair in an otherwise-empty flat. In that situation, as one can imagine, the blinds go down while bits of me go up, and there’s a rather efficacious conclusion to events.
But that’s not been happening either.
I’ve been getting horny in the early mornings. If I’m awake at five, or six, I’ll inevitably be doing so with a very noticeable version of morning wood (despite the fact that it is not, yet, the morning). I’m even finding it easier to remember the dreams which are getting me there – not exactly the traditional ‘wet dream’ (although I’ve had one of those in the past year, which only ever happened once in my teenage years), but close enough to. They’re not my usual rambunctious, plot-driven rollicking adventure stories either: just a short vignette with mainly sex.
It’s so unfair.
Do I sound ungrateful? Perhaps. In a way, I should be a little relieved that this happens; it shows that the important bits of me are functional and that I remain the sexual being I worked hard to become. It’s also possible that I shouldn’t be worrying about this in my late thirties and focusing more on such priorities as “getting the fuck back to sleep”.
But in the early mornings, what can I really do? I have excess horn and I can’t really deal with it. I’m not enough of a dick to wake my wife up to show her my penis, nor am I brave enough to venture out of bed (into the cold – and my flat, I’m finding, is very cold), get onto my computer, masturbate to orgasm and then return to my bed for slumber. The logistics of doing all this, alone, would be a knightmare. I’d probably end up halfway through Scandal: Sex@Students.edu when my alarm goes off, and that’s my cue to stop doing everything else and scream.
I have no other choice. I listen to what my body says and jeopardise everything else for a cheap and dirty orgasm (or several), or I wait with my throbbing erection until my alarm shocks me back to reality.
As I scrabble around to make myself presentable, I remind myself of why I’m doing this. My co-workers are waiting for me. My clients rely on me. Even my pretty colleague is probably stocking up on coconut milk so we can make our coffees at the same time in the morning.
Where does my horn go?
I genuinely have no idea. But, by the time I’ve left and vanished into the amorphous mass of British urban throng, it too has gone its way.
