by Jacob Clark
For most of the last year, Al has tried to get the videos and photos Amy posted of him off the internet. But they were too widely spread, and getting them removed is a very long process.
He finally gave up and resolved himself to knowing that the whole world has seen him in his birthday suit, getting his wiener whacked with a stuffed chicken.
He says he’s accepted it. His career didn’t seem to suffer any damage after all. He says the only down side is that every time he meets someone new or someone asks him to sign one of his books for them he always wonders whether they’ve seen him naked.
And that sometimes he doesn’t have to wonder. Sometimes they come right out and ask him about the chicken video.
We do feel bad for our good friend, but he is rather cavalier about the whole thing.
“I should have known better,” he’s quick to admit. “And I learned my lesson. No matter how much someone you love tells you they want to videotape you doing silly things to your wiener, don’t believe her. I never will again.”
So play. Experiment. Be silly and have some fun. You never know what might raise that sail and float your boat.
Just don’t let anybody videotape it.
Erectile Dysfunction Tool Box Thus Far: 6 Items
1. Frequent penis stimulation
2. Pin stimulation to penis head
3. Eat well. Diet is everything
4. Enlist your doctor’s help
5. A good selection of written erotica
6. Play. Experiment. Find new things to love
Chapter 8: Water is the most abundant resource on earth
And believe it or not it can help with your ED problem
There are a myriad of things which can either cause erectile dysfunction, or contribute to its severity.
One of the most commonly overlooked of them is water.
Or rather, lack of same.
Specifically, the effects that mild dehydration upon the body can extend to your ability to get an erection. Really.
Our bodies cannot function without water. Other than oxygen, it’s the single most important thing we need to keep us alive.
Even more than food.
That’s why, stranded on a desert island, we’ll die much faster from dehydration than from starvation.
That’s also why doctors and dieticians have been telling us for a very long time to drink plenty of water. Because literally nothing in our bodies works right unless we’re properly hydrated.
Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?
Doc: Drink more water.
You: Okay.
But when you walk out of the doctor’s office it goes right out the window. You forego that glass of water because you’re in a hurry and rush out the door. You could stop at that fast food place and get something to drink, but they’re way too crowded. You could stop at the market a few blocks from your house and get something, but you’re in a hurry to get home. There’s that ball game coming on in just a few minutes, you see.
You could get up and get something to drink, but your team is getting ready to score.
Then the damned referee robs them of the score with a terrible call, and you’re too angry to drink anything.
You’re way too busy yelling at the TV.
Any of that sound familiar?
The fact is, very few of us intentionally drink water because we know it’s good for us.
Nearly all of us wait to drink until we’re thirsty.
And therein lies the problem.
For medical professionals will tell you that the very state of feeling thirsty is in itself a distress signal from our own bodies.
A distress signal which is saying, in effect, “Hey dummy, you’re neglecting me. I need water.”
Here’s something that comes directly from the American Medical Association, and which might surprise you:
By the time you feel thirsty, you are already mildly dehydrated.
Thirst is, in effect, nature’s alarm system. It’s nature’s way of saying our body is recognizing what we’re ignoring.
It’s the body’s version of the “low fuel” light that lights up on your dashboard when you forget to stop at the 7-Eleven to fill up your tank.
Only this is more important, because we’re not talking about a beat up old Chevy with a hanging bumper and a dent in the fender.
We’re talking about your life here.
And while skipping that bottle of water or glass of iced tea will likely not kill you outright, mild dehydration can and will affect your body in a lot of ways. And over the long term, it can cause very serious problems.
Like shorten the lives of some of your vital organs.
Okay, enough talking of generalities. Let’s get into specifics.
Mild dehydration makes it harder for your body to process the food you eat. It takes moisture to force that stuff through your intestinal tract. Moisture for your stomach to break it down. Moisture to push the waste from your body. It makes your internal organs, pretty much all of them, work harder to do their jobs. And theoretically, shortening their lives before they start to wear out.
The problem is, even the experts can’t agree on how much water you should drink to stay healthy. Some say eight eight ounce glasses per day. For those of you who failed math as I did that’s…
Hold on a minute while I ask Michelle.
Okay, that’s half a gallon a day. Sixty four ounces. That, in our estimation, is reasonable, as long as it includes the coffee we drink in the morning and the Dr. Pepper we suck down with our lunch. And those two Budweisers we drink while we’re watching the ball game after dinner.
Ah, but there’s the rub.
Many experts say that sixty four ounces isn’t enough. Some say we need twice that much. Others say we need three times that much.
We don’t know about you, but the idea of someone placing a gallon and a half of liquid on our dining room table and telling us we have to drink it all before we go to bed that night is a little bit daunting.
Or maybe impossible.
To make the problem worse, many of the experts now say that caffeinated beverages shouldn’t count. They’ve known for quite some time that caffeine can actually dry out our system. More on that in a bit.
Still other experts say that alcoholic beverages shouldn’t count.
But if we cut out the coffee, and the soft drinks, and the beer, what’s left?
Just water. Plain, boring water.
If you’re like us, you don’t mind downing a couple of bottles of drinking water every day. There’s nothing better to quench your thirst on a hot day.
But downing twenty bottles a day to make some of the experts happy is a bit much.
Luckily, not all of the experts discount those types of drinks. We like those experts better.
You might be asking what water and dehydration have to do with erectile dysfunction.
That’s because mild dehydration can inhibit your penis’s ability to stand up and do those things you like to do with it.
Really.
You see, water does something else besides keep your organs working at peak capacity. It also lubricates the blood which courses through your body and into your penis to make it erect. When your body is dehydrated, the blood thickens. Yes, the change is slight and subtle. And slightly thickened blood doesn’t really affect most of your other bodily functions.
But it can restrict blood flow to your penis.
And it’s the blood flow, my friends, which make your penis hard and makes your wife happy.
You see, your penis consists largely of tiny blood vessels which contract when it’s flaccid and expand when blood flows into them.
Because the vessels are so tiny, thickened blood has a harder time getting into them. And if the blood can’t get into them the penis won’t get as hard.
The early bird may get the worm,
but the thin blood gets the dick hard.
Remember that. It may sound silly because, well… because it
is. But if remembering it will help remind you to drink plenty of water, especially on the days you expect to dally in the bedroom later, then it’ll serve its purpose.
Let’s conduct a little experiment to drive this point home before we leave it and go on to something else.
And you can do the experiment in your mind if you wish. It’s far less messy that way.
Say you take a regular garden hose and lay one end on the ground. Hold the other end about waist high.
This hose represents just one of the blood vessels in your penis. The ones which carry blood to the penis and make it hard (and there are hundreds of them).
Take a pitcher of water and pour it into the hose. Watch how fast the water flows through it.
Then take a pitcher of maple syrup and do the same thing.
See the difference?
Apply that to your blood. Well-lubricated blood in a body that’s well hydrated will have a much easier time filling those tiny vessels in your penis. And you’ll have a much easier time getting and maintaining your erection.
Seriously.
From Jacob:
Back in my Army days I was stationed at Fort Irwin, California, on the edge of the high desert.
My folks lived in Texas then, just outside of Dallas. This was before I met and fell in love with Michelle. I was single, young and stupid.
And I had a brand spanking new F-150 pickup.
No one feels more invincible than a young soldier in an F-150 pickup.
Looking back now, I know it was a stupid thing to do. But back then I had a different mindset. A devil-may-care attitude. A bunch of rocks in my head.
I drove from Ft. Irwin to Dallas at least three times a year. I got thirty days leave, and normally went for ten days at a time.
Some of my buddies gave me a hard time about spending all my leave to hang out with my parents. I didn’t care. I loved them. I wish I had them back. And besides, there was plenty of time on the weekends or down days to go hunting and fishing with my friends.
I know now that thirty days of leave per year is a rather generous amount. But back then I saw it as not enough. To me it was a precious commodity and I hated to waste a single minute of it.
The Army had a regulation that said when you were on leave you couldn’t travel more than four hundred miles per day. That was to keep soldiers from falling asleep at the wheel and killing themselves. It wasn’t necessarily that the Army cared much about us. But they spent a lot of time training us, and if one of us dumb clucks went and killed ourselves they had to start all over and train someone else to take our place.
I actually had a first sergeant who told me that.
The Army was so filled with love.
The same first sergeant told me that if I was stupid enough to die in a car crash on his watch, that he would personally beat my ass.
“I don’t care if you’re in a dozen pieces. I will super glue you back together just so I can tear you apart again.”
As I said, back then I had my own way of doing things, Army regulations be damned.
The way I figured it, if I only drove four hundred miles per day, it would take me two and a half days to get there. It would also take me two and a half days to drive back.
That’s five days. That’s half my leave time. I didn’t want to spend half my leave time on the road.
On top of that, I’d have had to stay at a roadside motel for two nights each way. That was two hundred bucks on an E-4’s pay.
And I was an incredible cheapskate. That wouldn’t do either.
I was fortunate in that my unit never asked to see motel receipts for soldiers returning from long drives. Some of the other units did that, but mine never did.
That was a godsend, for it allowed me to drive 2300 miles from Fort Irwin to my mom and dad’s house, stopping only for gasoline.
I didn’t even stop to eat. To save money I made a dozen baloney and cheese sandwiches, on white bread with mustard.
I put them on top of a layer of ice in a big cooler that rode on the seat in front of me.
Whenever I was hungry, I reached over and popped the lid on the cooler and took out a sandwich. When I got thirsty I reached beneath the ice and took out a bottle of Dr. Pepper.
Dr. Pepper was my best friend back in those days. I sucked them down like some of my friends sucked down beer.
At night I merely pulled my truck over on the side of the road to urinate. In the daytime I watched for the roadside rest areas and peed there whenever I could. When there wasn’t one in sight I pulled over and filled up one of my empty Dr. Pepper bottles, then disposed of it in the nearest roadside litter barrel.
It was a hell of a way to travel, but my logic was sound. At least in my own feeble mind it was.
If I did things the Army way I’d have had five days to spend at home with my parents and my old high school friends.
If I bucked the system and did things my own rebellious way I had eight days. Those three extra days were what drove me.
Yes, I was exhausted when I finally made it home.
And yes, when I finally got some sleep I generally slept for a lot of hours. And yes, I was a cranky son of a bitch for the first two days I was back.
But none of that mattered to me.
The one adverse affect my marathon drive did was cause me to lose my voice.
It happened every single time. Winter or summer, it didn’t matter. By the time I got to Dallas my throat was raw. I could barely get out a squeak. I learned to communicate in a very loud whisper. It was painful to do that, but at least my voice didn’t crack and only allow me to speak every tenth word.
I was baffled. My mom was worried. My younger sister, still living at home while she went to college, was pleased. My being unable to speak gave her much more time to rattle on and on about nothing.
The same thing happened upon my return to Ft. Irwin. My first two days I’d lose my voice for no apparent reason.
No one in my family had ever suffered from laryngitis.
So we ruled that out.
Mom was convinced I was allergic to something. But they still lived in the same house I grew up with, with the same flowers in her garden and the same pollens in the air. And it seemed too odd a coincidence that my allergy attacks were coordinated so nicely with the first two days of my visit. It didn’t matter whether it was winter or summer. And in my whole time at Fort Irwin, I never so much as sneezed. But I lost my voice the first two days I came back from leave.
Every time, without fail.
The mystery was finally solved when my supervisor said I was no good to him as a mime.
“Report to the infirmary and get some medicine. And goddamn it, you’d better be talking when you come back.”
Everybody knew that the doctors weren’t allowed to rat you out. Even if they were aware you broke some kind of rules to injure yourself, they had to follow the doctor-patient privilege and keep it to themselves.
That’s the only reason I was straight with him.
That and the whole losing my voice thing was driving me crazy.
Doc: So, you say you just got back from leave?
Me (whispering): Yes sir.
Doc: Where’d you go?
Me: A little town just south of Dallas.
Doc: Could be the air on your airplane. It’s recycled, and very dry. You might have picked up somebody else’s bug, or the dry air might have dried out your throat. Did you sleep with your mouth open on the flight?
Me: I didn’t fly, sir. I drove.
I remember him scratching his chin, just like they do in the movies.
Doc: I see. Has it ever happened before?
Me: Yes, sir. Every time I drive home on leave. And every time I drive back here.
I could almost see the light come on in his eyes.
Doc: Let me guess. You drove straight through.
Me (sheepishly): Yes sir.
Doc: How long does that take you?
Me: Right at twenty three hours i
f the roads are dry and traffic is light.
He whistled under his breath.
Doc: That’s a lot of hours. What did you take to stay awake? You didn’t get any speed from a trucker, did you?
Me: No sir. I may not be real smart, but I know better than to use drugs. I drank Dr. Pepper the whole way.
Doc: And how many Dr. Peppers did you drink, exactly?
Me: I got two six packs before I left and drank them all.
Doc: I see (he said “I see” a lot. The sucker must have had perfect vision.)
Doc: Were they cans or bottles?
Me: Bottles.
Doc. I see. That’s a lot of soda.
Me: Yes sir.
Doc: And that’s what’s causing you to lose your voice.
Me: Pardon me?
Doc: Caffeine does terrible things to the human body. One of them that isn’t well known is that it dries out the vocal cords.
Me: Wow! Seriously?
Doc: Seriously.
Me: I see.
I learned a serious lesson that day. First of all, that caffeine does terrible things to the human body. Some of them, like increased blood pressure and gastrointestinal problems, are well known. Others, like the vocal cord thing, took me by complete surprise.
And here’s a bigger surprise: According to my good friend Paul, who is also my doctor, there have been studies which appear to link caffeine use with… you guessed it. Erectile Dysfunction.
Okay, I rambled a bit. I tend to do that sometimes when I write. But I did have a point.
For your body (including your penis) to work properly, you must stay well hydrated. But there’s a right way to hydrate yourself and a wrong way. Drinking way too much soda or coffee is the wrong way.
Remember I mentioned earlier that even the experts can’t agree about how much water we should drink every day?
I’m going to give you a valuable tip, and a rule of thumb to tell whether you’re adequately hydrated.