Sins of the Flesh

The mind can play tricks but the body just tells you lies. Big fat hormonal whoppers. There are endless stand-up comedy routines and cartoons putting forward the idea that a man's penis has a mind of its own. But this is just a quaint fiction put around by men to hide the true horror of the situation. A man's mind IS his penis. Or at least its influence is far more instantaneous and difficult to resist than any cute picture depicting a dialogue with it would have you believe. I was walking past a strip club on the edge of Soho once. There was a girl in the window trying to drum up trade. As I walked past she caught my eye. I don't quite know what it was she did. But she was obviously very practised at it. She sort of stared at me and widened her eyes in this super sexy fashion , instantly tugging at something well below my heart strings (I don't know if it's possible to voluntarily dilate your pupils, but that's what she seemed to be doing). This is the kind of thing that if you were sending your daughters to Swiss finishing school, you'd hope they'd be teaching them. They'd never go hungry. Never mind that setting the table, addressing the servants, how to eat a pear with a knife and fork nonsense. Huh? No. Sorry. No idea where that tangent came from. I appear to be being sent telepathic messages by a Maltese brothel keeper. Now where was I?
    She wasn't even that good looking, plainish-looking in fact and fully, almost frumpishly clothed. This woman was obviously a professional, obviously sitting there for no other reason than to pull in the punters. When not tempting drunkards to their penniless doom with her industrial-strength come-hither looks, she seemed to be posing for a painting called "The Face of Boredom". But what flashed through my mind? "Maybe I'm different from all the others, maybe I've got a special something that attracts her. Maybe she really does fancy me..." Of course, the thought didn't last long before it received a terminal kicking from my common sense, but even so, the fact that it made it as a thought at all shows just how easy it is for our nether regions to punch the rationality override button. And ah yes, I suppose it does reveal in startling detail what a pathetic creature worthy only of utter ridicule I am. Ah well, too late now.
    As you can see, I worry an awful lot about these random, unaccountable, dark and daft thoughts. But when, as sometimes happens at the end of a long evening with an old friend, we begin volunteering confidences, and I start to stutteringly confess them, I always get the same reaction - "Yeah, yeah, everybody wants to do that," or "Really? That's your dark thought? That's the worst you can do?" and then for a few minutes I find my self in the weird situation of worrying that perhaps my dark thoughts aren't dark enough. Then I realise how drunk I am and go to bed.