Watson in Hand, Crick in Neck

My C-5 and C-6 vertebrae are fucked up. They're crooked and they hurt. I know the former because I've had multiple x-rays. I know the latter because I wake up in pain almost every morning.

It would be easy to chalk this injury up to years of competitive tennis and soccer, but like I said, that would be easy. Unfortunately, I believe the real explanation is much more complex and depraved. It goes a little something like this:

As I reported in a previous posting, my teenage years were graced with a giant satellite dish that provided 24-hour porn from all over the world. The dish was connected to a receiver in the basement which in turn was connected to one of those pre-modern, 60", flat screen Mitsubishi TV's that literally weighed close to a thousand pounds. The layout of the basement was such that to access this temple of filth one had to walk down the stairway, pass through the laundry room, and then walk through a door-less entrance way. This is not unnecessary reporting. The fact that the TV could only be viewed once inside the final antechamber is in fact the nexus of this story and in all probability the reason for my injured vertebrae.

You see, for all the hours I spent pleasuring myself down here, I lived in constant fear of being caught. And so I devised what seemed liked the perfect plan: Draping my lap with a blanket, I positioned myself in a lay-z-boy directly in front of the TV. With the remote control in my right hand and my swollen adolescence in my left, anyone entering the basement would be easily detected and I could change channels before they could enter the room and see what was on the screen. It worked gangbusters. From ages 13 to 23, I must have pleasured myself (365 days in a year, multiplied by ten years..) 13,457 times?

Time went on. I moved to Ann Arbor to New York to Atlanta to San Francisco to Los Angeles. I got married, had kids, even grew up a little bit. I left a lot behind. But not everything. To this day my masturbation posture remains exactly the same as it began: right leg bent at 45 degrees, left hand on my purple mushroom top, and always with a pronounced lean to the left. Always. For 23 years I've been beating off with my spine and neck sloped downward and to the left. For over two decades, often twice a day, the most delicate track of bones in my body is unnaturally contorted. Not from playing too much tennis, or rough housing with my children, but because I lack the self-restraint to keep my hands off myself.

And so I ask you— When the pain in my neck became unbearable and I finally went to the doctor for help, shouldn't I have shared the aforementioned details with him? Surely he would have found them beneficial in making a proper diagnosis. Is this really any different from a repetitive stress injury a computer programmer suffers from in their wrist?

Lord knows I've tried to correct the problem on my own. Alternating knees, switching hands, lying on my stomach, etc. But it just isn't the same. I'm a creature of habit and my habit is touching my creature.

Crookedly yours,
A.G.