We are at this point in life where it becomes increasingly difficult to mold our values towards our best self and our actions towards our personal values.

People are surprisingly willing to play with fire and watch dumbly as their skin bubbles. Photo courtesy of the author.

PART I

People enjoy messing with things they don’t understand. My father told me that I once dropped his disc player from the second floor to the first and played with my stool in the toilet. In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham explicates the rise and fall of Long–Term Capital Management by showing us the willingness of common man to throw caution to wind by dumping their life savings into hedge funds filled with American Psychos who “look” like they know what they are doing. I’ve learned from my cousin that some of the most basic financial instruments in America, like certain options, do not exist in China. 

There are endless derivatives and financial instruments that are counterintuitively structured. No matter the age—two or two hundred—people are surprisingly willing to play with fire and watch dumbly as their skin numbs and bubbles. This is just “nice for nothing.” Clearly anyone can easily invest in safer and more analytically reasonable securities but some trivially choose not to.

I will circle back to a couple different experiences where in each situation I want to know: if I were to be nice to them today…nice for what?

PART II

Northern California

Stealthing is the practice of a man covertly removing or damaging a condom during sexual intercourse. Photo courtesy of the author.

Those green bubbles should have been my first red flag. I had done this a dozen times: there is a quiet park near my hometown lake that is semi–public where I can get knocked up peacefully after my parents go to bed and I sneak out. Second red flag was when this dude pressured me into executing this whole routine in the afternoon while families were still out playing with their children in my fuck park. Third red flag was when he didn’t even bring a towel for me to get fucked on in the backseat of his car. He rolled on a rubber and put his dick in me, then lost his condom deep inside my asshole. Later, he drove me to Safeway where I had to discreetly expel the condom in the employee bathroom. I will offset this shame with confidence: I am an earnest twink at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to have a stable, loving, and understanding husband one day.

Ventura Beach

Why Have Massive Age Differences Long Been Common in Gay Dating? Photo courtesy of the author.

I remember kissing a boy my age on a Sunday morning facing an ocean. We stopped mid coitus because we were in public. I thought I had fallen in love. Chiaroscuro dictates focal vision through light and dark; I wonder if I fell in love with a similarly aged pretty boy on a beach because the night before I was so severely mauled by a man more than twice his age—must’ve been in his forties—on my parents’ bed. The guy was a fucking monster. Every time I squeezed my ass and let his dick pop out his eyes bulged like he was lifting a Mack truck. He looked insane. He tried to fucking buck me. He fucked me so hard I left a humongous green shit stain on my parents’ sheets. My ass dripping like Gushers, I moved the sheets from my co–opted bed to a washing machine where they—and my father’s favorite polo—became white once more. Thank goodness I finished drying the shit–stained sheets ten minutes after my parents arrived. While they were in the living room, I proceeded to turn on my faucet real loud. Then I took out their sheets, and fitted them over their mattress in two hot minutes.

Hong Kong

Raceplay is a form of sexual roleplay in which the players act out racially-charged situations.

Expatriates in tier–one Asian cities play with racism like my grandma does Mah–Jong: deliberately, for fun, and because they can. What was I at 19? Self–respecting? My right eyebrow still bubbled from the stitches I got at the Hong Kong Queen Mary Hospital, where I was admitted three days prior after drunkenly slamming my forehead into the bottom of a cocktail table while making out with a charming half–Singaporean man. On this particular night however, this midwestern expatriate wanted an Asian twink top. After three seconds of sitting on my erect dick, wild–eyed, he came all over my stomach and gave me the deadest stare I had ever seen in my life: “Whoops. Thanks. You can finish yourself off now.” I walked out. When the elevator arrived, I planted my right foot between the doors so it wouldn’t shut, then planted my left foot on his doormat and angrily urinated over his Welcome! carpet. Just as he emerged from his apartment, I descended the elevator shaft and regained my dignity.

PART III

Please don’t read this if you don’t want to. In hindsight, just as I had treated Tessie, I think this may all just end up stressing you out further. Maybe I should’ve warned you not to read this in the preamble; nevertheless, I’ve discovered real love, and I think I’ve discovered it from you.