A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

Brain Games
In the months after my stroke and brain tumor diagnosis in
1998, I experienced weird headaches. When I tried to have sex, I
was fine for the first few minutes. But as my excitement
increased, I involuntarily "bore down," and the pain in my head
began to skyrocket. It got so bad I had to stop whatever I was
doing immediately.
A couple of times, before my neurologist warned me not to
do this, I tried to "go through" the pain. It was impossible – even
when I was able to, aherm, finish, I experienced a migraineintense
pain that dwarfed whatever release the orgasm allowed. In
fact, the two sensations merged, and the orgasm became
unambivalent agony.
I did not take this well. To lose such a thing, and to not know
how permanent it would be – it made me want to keep trying. So I
kept hurting myself. I even tried doing it alone, trying in vain to
find a way around the pain, to complete the act without "bearing
down." Friends, you would need to be some kind of superyogi,
with total breath and reflex control – in which case you probably
wouldn't be hot to have sex anyway.
So one of the first results of my stroke and tumor was to
make the act of love physically intolerable. It pitted that part of
me that most wanted to be alive with that part of me that most
wanted to stay alive. It was like a computer dividing by zero; fatal
error.
The next residual side-effect was memory loss. Months after
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