Five Knuckles, Shuffled

Consider the scene:

A computer screen glows in a darkened room. With a desk chair leaned back and pants discarded in a heap, a young man clicks through link after link. Unfortunately, the search is a slow and frustrating endeavor. Is that Smashing Pumpkin’s “Today” in the distance as a car races past? He doesn’t know because he's tuned out the rest of the world ... he’s found something. Ever-so-slowly a photo reveals its secrets - bodies entwined in wicked ways our scavenger has yet to try, or even imagine. He reaches down to touch his cock. He’s ready, he needs this. Is one image enough? Back to the mouse his hand flies. New picture, better than the last. His penis strains with need, so he reaches down, for a couple minutes this time. The need to see more wins out and his hand, once again, returns to the mouse.

Lathered up. Repeat. No Rinse.

***

I know there are far more significant problems in the world, but for a time, I was really confused about how I wanted to masturbate. You see, I’m a fella in his early 40s. I grew up with old-school porn: magazines and, if I was super lucky, videotape. Lots of wrinkled pages and even a few broken tapes from repeated viewings. These were the best it got because the Internet wasn’t even a thing in my formative masturbatory years. Those were special times, I tell you.

I reveled in these mediums because I didn’t even own a computer until I inherited a 286 in the final year of my university career. When I finally plugged in, I discovered message boards and naturally drifted to sex-themed spaces. It wasn't long before I'd found those first pornographic images on the screen. This was a thrill! I’d grown up on the prowl for print and videotape, doing whatever I could to get my hands on either. Yet with this new whiz-bang of a contraption, I could whiz-bang my own contraption in the comfort of my own home.

My Personal Problem With Online Porn

But here’s the rub: I’m a righty. Like, I am fully and completely right-handed. I can do very little with my left hand. I do use it to catch baseballs and, if I’m completely honest, it would occasionally be used to play with other balls as well. However, that's it. If I can use my right hand, I will. So, it should be no surprise that my natural impulse is to use my right hand for both mouse and masturbation control.

Seriously. It's a conundrum!

When I finally realized this might be a problem (and it didn’t take long), I resolved to improve my left-handed mousing skills. Can’t be that hard, right? Well, after many distinctly difficult and awkward sessions of trying to upgrade my lefty navigation skills, I was frustrated. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I would inevitably be unable to control the arrow, I’d click the wrong link and something less desirable would pop up. This caused some major self-love let-downs. Remember, this was the 1990s. To parahrase a line from "The IT Crowd," sometimes it did take hours to see just a handful of sexy images. Clicking the wrong link was a sad thing.