Thanks to everyone who read my first story. I decided to get this started in chapters as a way to keep the ball rolling.
Tom
I read a lot. It's not what people expect when they first meet me, but I can't totally control first impressions, so I gave up trying a long time ago. For a bookworm, I'm kind of big and rough looking: tallish and a little burly. I exercise enough to keep in shape and relieve stress and I even play on an Ultimate Frisbee team to try to stay social. But mostly I read.
When I'm bored, I read adventure. When I'm sad I read comedies. When I'm feeling lonely, I'll even read love stories. Most of the time though, I read fantasies: magic, wizards, epic love, power struggles, archetypes of good and evil.. All the stories are huge, elaborate imaginary tales of great quests or generations-long battles for principles greater than one person. In the stories I really enjoy, characters are willing to give their lives, sacrifice their needs for the good of something bigger than themselves. There's love, romance, maybe a little sex, and everyone is gorgeous and the right people always fall in love. With all that, why bother with reality.
I can totally relate to people who get hooked on video games and movies. Often fantasy is much more compelling than real life. Who wouldn't rather be a strong knight questing for ultimate truth rather than a forty-hour-a-week guy who scrapes to pay his student loans. A battled-hardened hero struggling to free the weak and oppressed is so much more rewarding and exciting than remembering to take out the garbage and call your Mom on Sunday nights. While video works for some people, I like to read my fantasies. And I seem to read almost all the time.
Still, I'm a pretty normal guy. I work, exercise, hang-out with friends. But when I'm not doing those things, I dive into a world of my choice.
Lately, I think I must be a more than just lonely, because my fantasies of choice have been a little more graphic in nature. When I get like this, instead of looking at porn, like I imagine most men do, I read of course. There are raunchy porn stories about anonymous partners in risky places, loving romances with life-long partners, fraught angst-ridden pieces about guys who think they might be gay but aren't quite sure until they find the right guy. But it's all a fantasy, and I greedily consume it all, depending on my mood.
These stories have some things in common: all the guys are good-looking; one of them is usually mostly hairless, except for a perfect treasure trail leading down to his above-average sized cock. It nearly makes me laugh that everyone has a huge dick. If everyone's package is so huge, then that means that average is huge, right? But that's the fantasy part: just suspend my disbelief, and all the boys are gorgeous and available-at least in print. And each man can come at least twice, if not three times night. A man can come without even touching his dick, if his lover is good. And his lover is always that good. Cum shoots off at the same force as a geyser, spraying everything in a three mile radius. And in porn, everyone can find their prostate and everyone swallows.
If I think about it too much, it just makes me laugh, but since thinking is the last thing I want to do when I'm reading, I usually love it all.
After a week of sitting in my cubicle I like to reward myself with a trip to the library or bookstore. Like an addict visiting his dealer, I need to load up to get my fix all week. Since I had just gotten paid, I decided that this week I would head to the bookstore. A book I'd been waiting for was just released. A new book, a quiet chair, a yummy coffee drink and maybe some surreptitious scoping of good-looking eye candy would suit me just fine.
This week, the trip to the bookstore was turning into a total bust. With the parking lot crowded and the rain coming down, I was forced to park so far from the door that I was soaked by the time I finally pulled open the door and walked inside. The place was packed with folks who obviously had the same idea as I had, except that these people were all the middle aged Moms getting away from their families on Mommy's Night Out, or something. I'd been hoping for some intellectual hottie to gaze at and all I got was women who reminded me of my Mom. Add to that, my book wasn't on the shelf. Not on the regular fiction shelf, not in Sci Fi, and not in fantasy. I wandered around new releases and finally realized that it just wasn't there. This wasn't turning out the way I had expected at all.
At least the coffee was tasty.
I sipped my drink for a while and finally decided I would ask someone for help. This is not a thing I do lightly, since it usually just ends up with me being even more frustrated than I was before. Most customer service workers aren't any smarter than I am. I mean, a company doesn't look at its most prized employee and decide 'Hmm, I think you would serve us best by helping idiots who can't see what's in front of them.' So when some high school student just looks on the same shelf where I just looked and tells me they don't have what I'm looking for, I sometimes have a hard time not ripping their puny head off.
My attitude toward CS workers isn't something new. In general, I don't like talking to strangers and I avoid it whenever I can. Those self-serve check-out lanes at the grocery store are the best invention since voice-mail. The only problem is when you have to weigh stuff and you don't know the number. The last thing I want to do is go over and ask someone for help with a price code. So I fixed that by peeling the stickers off the fruit and putting them on my list next to item. Apple, apple sticker: easy solution to aggravating social communication.
The fact that I was ready for what was inevitably going to be a frustrating and pointless exercise just shows how desperate I was for this book. What a total nerd! Anyway, I walk over to the little desk where the book store plants its best and brightest and wait my turn. Behind the desk is a blond guy who looks a little too tall and a little too thin to be called good-looking. He's helping a Mom find the newest Oprah pick. I hope my sardonic snort isn't too loud. Tall-and-thin walks over to a table not twenty feet away and hands her the book in a friendly way. How can he be so nice, I wonder? It's a good thing I work with computers, where no one expects me have manners.
