Intimate Psychotherapy

***INTIMATE PSYCHOTHERAPY***

I’d like to be able to stand on a mountaintop with my electrified staff raised high and yell, “I AM HOPE!” to all of my dearly beloveds. But in order for that to be taken seriously, I’d have to have some kind of god complex. Because I’m a writer who makes mistakes often and isn’t afraid to talk about them, I can’t afford to have a god complex. Part of the reason why I continue to fuck up from time to time (aside from being human) is because all of the romantic tropes from my favorite movies, books, and TV shows don’t work to my advantage the way that I thought they would. Manic Pixie Dream Girls? Gone. Changing other people through romance? Out. Damsels in Distress? Only if the trope is subverted somehow, which I guess could be said for any tired old trope.

But we’re not talking about those today, no, no, no, no. Today we’re talking about something even more controversial: Intimate Psychotherapy. You might know this better as the “sex cures everything” trope. Are you feeling depressed? Have some sex. Are you feeling anxious? Conquer your shyness and then have some great sex. Victim of sexual assault? Never fear, because the good sex will make you forget you’ve ever had bad sex. Well…to quote Theory of a Deadman, “All those flavors of the rainbow, too bad that shit don’t work, though.” I can’t confirm this due to my own virginity, but great sex releases an assload of endorphins in your brain. Masturbation does that too, something I have a little more direct experience with. But does this rush of endorphins cure everything? Hell no, not even a little bit. If you’re a victim of sexual assault, the “great” sex won’t erase your shitty experience. It’ll trigger you to where you can’t function anymore.

So where did I first hear about Intimate Psychotherapy? I do have a clear answer, but I don’t want anybody to misinterpret it as the sole reason why. Keep in mind that I don’t know the meaning of the term moderation. Every piece of creative fuel I absorb, I take to the extreme without questioning it. Not questioning creative fuel was my first mistake, especially since that fuel came from a movie called The Sessions. In this movie, a sex surrogate played by Helen Hunt is hired by a physically disabled poet to help build his romantic confidence via sex. Sex surrogacy is a legitimate practice, but when interpreting it as creative fuel, it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion. Yes, exposure therapy has benefits. Yes, being exposed to great sex can help awkward people overcome their fears. But is it a one-size-fits-all solution to everything? No!

If I, a socially-awkward schizophrenic, flew out to Reno, Nevada tomorrow morning (Corona Virus be damned) and visited a legal brothel to lose my virginity, I wouldn’t also lose my mental illness. It’s not like I could bust a nut and then suddenly flush my meds down the toilet. Remember, masturbation has the same benefits as far as endorphins go. If masturbation doesn’t cure mental illnesses, great sex won’t either. I’m sure there are prostitutes out there who have crippling depression. I’m sure there are strippers who have severe PTSD. I’m not saying every sex worker hates their own job, but what about the ones that do? You think they’re finding healing in what they do? What about victims of child trafficking? Now, we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole, but hopefully everything is clear to you by now.

The Intimate Psychotherapy trope in its most extreme forms could be disproved over and over again and there would still be instances of books and movies carrying on the misinformation. I will admit that it makes for a tempting story, albeit a misleading one. Sex can be enjoyable. Masturbation can also be enjoyable. The prospect of sex on its own can be very alluring to any consumer of media. Yes, I know Intimate Psychotherapy doesn’t work in the real world. Yes, I know how offensive it comes across in fiction. But what if there was a way we could subvert a trope or otherwise make it fresh? Don’t say, “This doesn’t work.” Ask, “How can we fix this?”

What if you’re writing a fantasy story and the white mage of the party a.k.a. the healer used sex as part of the magic? What if there’s an alien race in a sci-fi story that has medicinal properties in their semen? What if prostitution was seen as a vital part of the healthcare industry and the prices of which were jacked up to phenomenal proportions? You know, just like in the healthcare system we have today? What if sex was used as a truth serum? What if condoms were laced with healing salve? The possibilities are as endless as your imagination. The trope can work as long as you don’t blow it out of proportion and as long as you put your own spin on it. By itself, it’s offensive as hell. But under the watch of a truly creative soul? Wow…

Isn’t that how we should be looking at old tropes to begin with? Don’t get rid of them altogether, just put your unique touch on them. Manic Pixie Dream Girls could be femme fatales in a heartbeat. Or there could be an opposite of a femme fatale, where the seducer brings the mark to greatness and healing instead of danger and death. What about Damsels in Distress? We’ve seen that trope hundreds of times, but what if the kidnapper was a female and the victim was a male? Or what if the damsel was a dead body with a restless soul? The key word in creative writing is creative. If you recycle the same shit over and over again, your audience is going to notice. But if you freshen things up with that old creative fuel, they’ll notice it even more and might even love you for it. If they love you enough, they can cure your Impostor Syndrome with Intimate Psychotherapy! Just kidding! Or am I? Hmm…

I’m Garrison Kelly! Until next time, try to enjoy the daylight!

***BEAUTIFUL MONSTER***

Prior to writing this blog entry, I wrote chapter ten of Beautiful Monster and I didn’t have nearly as many problems doing so as I did chapter nine. The writing process went fairly smoothly. Maybe not so much in the beginning, but it didn’t take long at all to find my grove again. And by the end of the chapter, a slave-trader’s head was blown to bits and her brains were scattered all over a wooden stage. This message was brought to you by the Smoke Wagon XT, the same gun that was used to murder the slave-trader. Why does it have an XT at the end? Who knows? Who cares? Orphaned acronyms are a thing. But where does that leave chapter eleven? Well, after all the hoo-ha in Devon Bay dies down, Windham and Tarja finally get a room together. Shut up, that doesn’t mean what you think it means. Although sex is indeed a theme in this chapter, there’s nothing romantic or hot about it. It’s disturbing as fuck. It’s the reason why the story is called Beautiful Monster. Ugh…

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“Sometimes I feel I’ve got to run away. I’ve got to get away from the pain that you drive into the heart of me. The love we share seems to go nowhere. And I’ve lost my light, for I toss and turn, I can’t sleep at night. Now I know I’ve got to run away. I’ve got to get away. You don’t really want anymore from me. To make things right, you need someone to hold you tight. And you think love is to pray. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t pray that way. Once I ran to you. Now I’ll run from you. This tainted love you’ve given. I give you all a boy could give you. Take my tears and that’s not nearly all. Tainted love. Oh, tainted love. Don’t touch me, please. I cannot stand the way you tease. I love you, though you hurt me so. Now I’m going to pack my things and go. Tainted love. Touch me, baby, tainted love.”

-Soft Cell singing “Tainted Love”-

Rx

“I am so frickin’ bored. Nothing to do today. I guess I’ll sit around and medicate,” sang Nathan Toney as his heavy body sprawled across the living room couch. Getting off that couch was a feat of strength akin to power-lifting a small Japanese car. His eyes were glazed over like a frosted donut. The multi-colored afghan blanket did little to cover his flabby torso.

The coffee table in front him was covered in pornographic magazines and cigarette ashes. The center of this table represented his only two choices in this world: a steak knife to end his misery or a bottle of Floydicon to numb him out. Nathan gazed at the scars on his wrists with a single tear in his eye. He wanted to go through with it. He wanted any excuse he could to exit this world forever and free himself of the unnecessary pain. But the bottle of magic pills was right there in front of him.

“Eh, what the hell…I’m too lazy for this shit anyways…” said Nathan flatly as he opened the bottle and popped one of the large white tablets. Another five hour nap was on the horizon. What kind of weird ass dream would he have this time? Unicorns and rainbows? Teeth falling out? Being naked in school? But then again, who said anything about a dream?

Nathan’s eyes shot wide open and pulsated as he watched the rain outside come to a complete standstill. The drops of water just floated there and changed colors at random whether it was clear to green, green to purple, or purple to blood red. “What the fuck is this?” asked Nathan in a hushed voice. The lights flickered in his tiny apartment before completely blacking out and leaving him in the shadows. “Oh no…not this shit again…not again!”

“Yes, Mr. Toney, we’re doing this again!” belted an ophidian voice. Nathan held his sausage fingers over his eyes and slowly uncovered them to reveal a woman in a business suit with a cobra’s head and scaly green skin. The chubby depression patient shivered and cowered further into the couch while pulling the afghan under his double chin. “It was a simple offer,” the snake woman said. “You could have had a promotion. You could have been the boss’s boss. All you had to do was one small little favor for me.” That favor was clear the minute the snake boss licked her fangs.

Nathan trembled and stammered as he struggled to say, “You knew I had a family. I can’t just do that to them. I can’t go sleeping around with whoever I want!”

“What family? This family?!” shouted a scorpion woman in a nightgown with two crying daughters clinging to her legs as tightly as they could. Nathan pulled the afghan over his whole head, but the scorpion’s tail ripped it away and poked him in the bare chest. “I knew I was right to divorce you, you son of a bitch! How could you ever consider taking that whore’s offer?!” She shed bloody tears and wiped them away with her pincer. “We didn’t need the money that badly! We needed a father and a husband!”

“Man, fuck you little bitches!” shouted Nathan as he tossed the blanket aside and shot up to his feet. “I gave you all nothing but hard work and this is how you repay me?! By taking it all away and making me live in this filthy piece of shit apartment?! You’re all poison to me! Fuck you bitches! Fuck you all!”

The two crying daughters morphed into wasps and pointed their sword-like stingers at Nathan’s face, but the disgraced father wouldn’t be deterred. “We didn’t do anything!” they said in synchronized demonic voices. “We wanted you to come home with us! We never wanted this divorce to happen! We miss you! Come home with us!”

Nathan’s raging face softened into solemnity when he hugged the two wasp children and said, “I can’t come back anytime I want. Your mom changed the locks. She has an order against me. I tried to fight her in court, but she wouldn’t let me win.” The wasps poked him in the gut with their stingers and sent their father sprawling on the couch screaming in pain. “Son of a bitch!” he yelled while clutching his green bloody wound.

“So this is it, huh?” said an elderly toad woman with red slime dripping from her amphibian skin and gnashed flies between her teeth. “You’re just going to give up on your family like this? As your mother, I can’t allow that, Nathan. I raised you to be a real man and a real man takes care of his family! A real man fights for what he believes in! But if you don’t believe in your own wife and children anymore…” With one flick of her poison tongue, she captured the wasp children and devoured them while drooling a river of thick goop.

“No!” shouted Nathan. “You can’t do that! You can’t take them away from me!”

The scorpion wife, cobra boss, and toad mother spoke in unified demon voices, “We can do whatever we want to you, Nathan. You gave us permission when you walked out on us. You gave us permission when you gave up the fight. All you had to do was see a psychiatrist about your…little problem! But you couldn’t do it, could you? You didn’t have the guts to do it then and you won’t do it now!”

“Little problem…” whispered Nathan with growing fury in his voice. “Little problem?!” He pointed to his brain and roared, “You call this a little problem?! Newsflash: I’ve been living with this shit for nearly all of my fucking life and all you three bitches did was make it worse! You all did this to me! I don’t owe any responsibilities to you pieces of shit anymore!”

“Do something about it!” said the three creatures. With every repetition of that phrase, their monstrous auras grew brighter and their voices grew louder. Nathan covered his ears and crouched down to the floor, yelling for them to shut up, but they never did. They tormented him further and began to form a circle around him. They danced and sang their demonic tune while Nathan’s eyeballs were glued to the steak knife on the coffee table.

“I know what I have to do…you want me to do something about it…you’re damn right I will!” Nathan scrambled for the knife and held the jagged blade to his throat while the horrifying ladies taunted and teased him some more. He made one small incision and a tiny droplet of blood hit the carpeted floor. He made another cut and smeared even more blood on the floor.

The blade made a full on slash and the monsters around Nathan were dropping dead one by one. Their bones snapped and their own slimy blood mixed with his. Nathan struggled for oxygen, but all that would come up in his throat was his own life juices. His stomach grew queasy at the thought of his death coming so soon and he barfed up what little oxygen he had left. All that was left of Nathan Toney and his demons was a mixture of biological sludge that made chemical plant explosions seem mundane. The goopy red rain fell once more and washed them all away in the storm.

A lightning bolt flashed across the sky and awakened Nathan Toney from his drug-induced haze. He pulled his face out of the toilet and coughed profusely until he could breathe fresh oxygen once again. He gazed around with bloodshot eyes and saw that his apartment remained in the same messy state as when he first took the Floydicon. He placed his fingers to his throat and saw that a nasty scar had developed there, but it wasn’t bleeding heavily like it was in his high.

After a while of shaking heavily, Nathan steadied his body long enough to pull himself to his feet using the rim of the toilet. He limped his way out to the living room and spotted the bottle of Floydicon resting conveniently next to the steak knife. With an expression of boiling fury etched on his jowly face, Nathan marched over to the coffee table, grabbed the medication, and stomped back to the bathroom to flush the pills down the toilet.

“What kind of dip-shit takes these kinds of pills anyways?” Nathan vengefully whispered. “What kind of doctor prescribes this shit to begin with?!” He eyeballed the label on the bottle and saw that the medication was prescribed to him by Tri-Circle Enterprises, the company he used to work for. “Figures…it fucking figures!”

He discarded the bottle in the trash and marched back over to the coffee table to grab the steak knife. Instead of holding it to his throat or his wrists, he held it like a samurai warrior and gnashed his teeth together like a rabies-infected wolf. “I’m taking my family back one way or another,” Nathan vowed. “If I have to kill every last one of those motherfuckers…so be it! No more lawyers! No more judges! No more courtroom bullshit! Ass-kicking is what’s called for!”

“But first…I need to get out of these god-awful clothes…” He spent the last few days in pajama pants and a 3XL white T-shirt. The clothes had seen pizza stains, cigarette ashes, and liquor spills of the worst kind. They smelled as though he’d been shit on by a horse in the middle of a burning junkyard. He changed into fresh jeans and a red polo shirt with black combat boots on his feet. His boss always told him to dress for the job he wanted. With a steak knife tucked firmly in his back pocket, his new job was corporate assassin. He could have done this the legal way, but it didn’t take a tripped out Floydicon user to know the law was one big conspiracy against the underdogs anyways.