DOITYOURSELF

In Belize, I saw a “DOITYOURSELF” heart-shaped slogan decorating the walls of a San Ignacio coffee shop. We took a much needed break there during the afternoon of the Shoulder season when the heat lingered and the humidity concentrated in the shift from summer into the rainy season. While ideal for exploration with few crowds, the oppressive weather warranted periodic lazy days when the only agenda was comfort. The sparsely-decorated coffee shop had two main attractions - air conditioning and decent coffee. The longer we stayed, the more we realized how it emblazoned the very loud and proud Belizean culture. At least, the small subsection that we saw running through the veins like brilliant calcite crystal snaking its way through this country’s Mayan bones. The coffee shop stands out like a yellow plume against this country’s lush backdrop.

The decor had the theme of a foreign entrepeneur who visited an indepentendly owned coffee shop in Fargo, North Dakota, and returned inspired. After all, they chose the brown plasticized booths with accent stripes in browns and cross-hatch textures of every shape and size. While the cushions felt like bus seats, they invited you to torment your spine and collapse like a preMahogany tables designed to allow maximum sprawl ate up so much space they could have doubled their occupancy and still feel spacious. The huge aluminum and glass window belonged on any dollar store trying to keep costs low They mounted power outlets mounted in the middle of the wall so each table traded function for easily-accessible form. All of the design decisions preferred practicality over aesthetics, but the deliberate wall art and the Chinese characters depicting the shop’s name in gold, polished glyphs with hammered filigrees set admidt a field of symmetrical, shining stars, left an indelible impression of a cultural conversations even more than the four different groups of customers and employees having four conversations in four separate languages before conducting their business in well-practiced English.

The matron of the establishment held court from her supervisory position fenced off by a wall of cafe supplies and the Simonelli espresso machine. In rapid, loud Cantonese, She ordered around her children employees who carried the mixed heritage of strong Asian decent mixed with strong Kriol descent. They, in turn, enacted her every command with the scurrying promptness reserved for the children of military parents or stereotypical old Asians. The kind you don’t want to generalize but then who publicly model themselves like Mrs. Kim from the Gilmore girls. Whatever her motivations, she ran a tight ship and her children make one hell of an Americano.

Enumerating this woman’s bold aesthetic rev

My mother caught me masturbating twice. Once, when I was a kid. Once, when I was an adult. To appreciate it fully, you’re going to need some context. We’re going to have to go deep into my psyche. Bring a tarp and some sex toy cleaner.

I was always weird ever since I started reading Mists of Avalon and other fantasy sex scenes crept into my developing mind. I matured in the 90s. I had a computer. I had Compuserve. I had telnet. If none of that archaic tech excites you, that’s fine. You missed the glory days. The internet sucks now. An algorithm chooses our porn and chat rooms have devolved into discord.

The internet back then, was, shall we say, a bunch of nerds with fetishes. Through a rapid process of cultural adoption, this collective group of techno kinksters had to welcome an awakening populous of people who heard about computers on the news and figured it was a pretty good thing.

They had to start sharing all their toys. We’re talking old school. The BBoards, the IRC chat rooms, the publicly traded FTP hosts where you download anything you wanted. Provided, you knew how to use a terminal and a really complicated chat client. Until things got user friendly. Until Microsoft and Apple took away all our buttons, one by one, until we could only tap our screens and not understand how much we have traded for simplicity.

At first, it required a basic amount of hacking. In exchange, you got the onramp to an every growing library of information. Already distorted and problematic, but who says the library has to be filled with truth. Most of the books in the library are either misguided or fiction and often both. Regardless, it was an invaluable resouce.

Especially for home schooled kids like me. This was an essential and formative part of my education. My parents got me a computer with a modem. The first thing I was upgrade the processor. Then, I upgraded the modem because I wanted that 56k baud goodness. I was a teen and a nerd and had an all access pass to the library.

Soon, I had access to the entire internet and growing mastery of connecting to all its parts. Including the worst parts. The parts of the unregulated internet before the dark web was even a necessity.

Now, I am not yucking anyone’s respective yum. I use the word, “weird,” here, as a stand in for “outside the perceived social norm.” It’s the weirdness of what is not acceptable, to say, strict catholic mothers. Anything not vanilla, and even a few arguably vanilla things, was weird.

Those DARPA folks were weird. Picture every brilliant person you know. I guarantee they are into some weird shit. While my personal theory is that everyone is into weird shit, so no shit is weird. You know you got some weird shit. That thing you only tell to trusted partners.

That, but online for the first time. All those bulletin boards run by the people who build the internet and then, like any good enterprise, found a way to get off on it. They found a comunity of whatever weirdness and asstr.org was born. Usenet, folks, usenet. Those who know, know. Those who don’t be thankful you never had to try to decode a binary file into a low res pinup pic.

Now, give a repressed catholic boy with a penchant for tweaking his computer and you have the fertile ground that was my digital pubesence. I could use all those tools with aplomb. I could spend hours in the basement, yes, the basement, for that is where my family kept the computer. Church on Fridays and Sundays, but the internet every chance I got.

I was a repressed Catholic because, you see, my mother was so very Catholic. While my father’s version of the sex talk was a hand on my shoulder and a “Don’t get a girl pregnant,” my mother would not approach the subject unless it was crucial to correcting my behavior.

My mother’s came to me the first time she caught me masturbating - in the middle of the common area. Her chair in fact, right in front of the fireplace in our country home’s kitchen.

“Why would I jack off in the kitchen?” is the logical first question. It’s because I was scared of my bedroom. I lived in a 18th century farm house with antique furniture, lacey curtains and dead-eyed figurines.

My mother’s taste in her forties was best described as “needful things.”

She married a rich man and literally bought the farm. She decorated like she cleaned out the stalls at the state fare of every ceramic chachki depicting pastoral life.

Fragile dairy cows, check. She had these pigs. They were so delicate. They were on my book shelf. My book shelf shook everytime I had to fight with my bedroom door that was over 200 years old and stuck in the frame. Needless to say, it was not condusive to masturbating.

Plus, I liked the way the old chair’s cushions felt on my ass. It, my back and my scalp are basically the only parts of my nervous system that aren’t a dead elephant.
I forget how I made the discovery. I think I sat on it naked once when my parents weren’t home.

I have always been a weird kid, but I don’t judge myself and you’d be kink-shaming me if you did. Remember, You got something deep inside that both humiliates and titilates you.

It’s cool. I am convinced we all do. As long as it’s safe sane and consensual, I am down to give it a go. Consider it my stations of the cross. My sex pilgrimage that started when the catholic church told me I was irrevocably broken from the start. I had a lot of theories to test out and my response to Catholicism in my adult life was to do the exact opposite of what I was supposed to do.

So, there I am wanking in the chair and my mother walks in. She gasps. I thought she wasn’t home. I was wrong. It was a farm. You’d need to go on patrol to look for her car parked in the barn.

The inevitable scrabble ensues and I run to my terrifying bedroom and hide with shame. Oh, I knew it was wrong. Let’s just say that Catholics REALLY have in for prepubescent boys in a variety of ways. If it isn’t the priests getting handsy in the sanctuary, it is the unilateral mission of all Catholic mother figures to root out the sin of their boys.

I was in catholic school before I was homeschooled. While they had replaced the nuns with actual qualified teachers at this point, they were still staunchly catholic and under the oversight of the nuns. They still drilled into me, at a very young age, was that my sexuality was a bad thing. You had to get it before it took root. Mastubation was the first step on the road to perv-dition, after all.

The day after my mother caught me masturbating on her chair, she sat me down and very earnestly asked me, “You know what you did was wrong.”

I nodded meekly. I can still feel the motion in my neck, after all these years. I can remember sitting at the kitchen table as she gave me the one and only sentence that would be my private sexual education, “You know what you did was wrong?”

The second time happened decades later when I was visiting. This time she straight out walked in on me when I was practicing self-love like any adult with a penis. All I had to do was forget that this used to be my sister’s bedroom.

“Not again!” she threw up her hands and slammed the door.

I lay there with my head slammed into the pillow and shouted through the old tongue and groove walls, “It’s perfectly natural, Mother.”

So, there you have it. How my mother realized I was becoming a sexually-awakened being. She just didn’t have the internet to tell her how to do it.