Childhood Memories

As I bit into my madeleines this morning I remembered a picture of a man holding his asshole wide open.

Actually, it was madeleine-flavored ice cream. According to a very bored dude, the madeleine’s structure prevents it from crumbling the way Proust described it. The ice cream is closer.

When you are a young male virgin enduring the varied humiliations of middle school, the dark and hypnotic world of internet perversion can come to represent the anguished sigh of the wounded human spirit. In instant messenger you send your acquaintances a hyperlink—invariably goatse.cx. After cringing like you did the first time, they look for something worse to send back to you.

In high school, I knew a boy who was excited to no end by goatse.cx. He had a remarkably creative mind, further stimulated by Ritalin, and he would loudly rave about the website during lunch. Once I encouraged him to watch a documentary about Noam Chomsky and he became equally excited.

Last I heard, he is in prison. He bought some cocaine for his girlfriend’s birthday, two days before his probation meeting. If his girlfriend had been born a week earlier, maybe he would be somewhere else.