Posts tagged The Dice Man

The ‘p’ Phenomenon

After she left, I mused for a few seconds on what is called in the medical profession the ‘p’ phenomenon: the tendency of starched nurses’ uniforms to make it seem as if all nurses were bountifully blessed in the bosom and thus shaped like the letter ‘p’. It meant that doctors surveying the field could never be sure that a nurse they were flirting with was proportioned like two grapefruit on a stick or two peas on an ironing board. Some claimed it was the very essence of the mystery and allure of the medical profession.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

Diarrhea

I dragged myself to it with the enthusiasm of a man with diarrhea moving toward the toilet: I had a compulsive need to get it out but had some months earlier come to the conclusion that all I was producing was shit.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

To Avoid Arguments

My initiation into the mysteries of Zen Buddhism had taught me many things, but the most important was not to argue with my wife. ‘Go with the flow,’ the great sage Oboko said, and I’d been doing it for five months now. Lil had been getting madder and madder.

After about twenty seconds of silence (relatively speaking: Larry leapt up to put in toast for himself; Evie tried a brief burst of monologue on dinosaurs which was smothered with a stare), I (theoretically the way to avoid arguments is to surrender before the attack has been fully launched) said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Lil.’

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

Ego-less Polymorphous Perversity

I awoke a little before seven, cuddled up to my wife Lillian, who was accordioned up into a Z in the bed beside me, and began pleasantly caressing her breasts, thighs and buttocks with my big gentle paws. I liked to begin the day this way: it set a standard by which to measure the gradual deterioration that succeeded from then on. After about four of five minutes we rolled over and began caressing me with her hands, and then with her lips, tongue and mouth.

‘Nnn morning, sweetheart,’ one of us would eventually say.

‘Nnnn,’ would say the other.

From that point on the day’s dialogue would all be downhill, but with warm, languid hands and lips floating over the body’s most sensitive surfaces, the world was as near perfection as it ever gets. Freud called it a state of ego-less polymorphous perversity and frowned upon it, but I have little doubt that he never had Lil’s hands gliding over him. Or his own wife’s for that matter. Freud was a very great man, but I never get the impression that anyone ever effectively stroked his penis.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

A Typical Successful Married Man

My life before D-Day was routine, humdrum, repititious, trivial, compulsive, disordered, irritable – the life of a typical successful married man.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

Happy Boredom

Unfortunately, life seemed to get more boring. Admittedly I was cheerfully, even gaily bored, where before I had been depressedly bored, but life remained essentially uninterested. My mood of happy boredom was theoretically preferable to my desire to rape and kill, but personally speaking, not much.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

The Shore of Zen

My colleagues, and even myself, mumbling coyly by our couches, all asserted that my problem was absolutely normal: I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis. The assumption is that a limited and bored self is the unavoidable, all-embracing norm. And I was beginning to agree until, after a few months of wallowing in depression (I furtively purchased a .38 revolver and nine cartridges), I came washing up on the shore of Zen.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

Despair

In the midst of my cynicism I would occasionally daydream of the future. My hopes? To excel in all that I had been doing in the past: to write widely acclaimed articles and books; to raise my children so they might avoid the mistakes I had made; to meet some technicolour woman with whom I would become soul mate for life. Unfortunately, the thought that these dreams might all be fulfilled plunged me into despair.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

Unhealthy

Now the desire to kill oneself and to assassinate, poison, obliterate or rape others is generally considered in the psychiatric profession as ‘unhealthy’. Bad. Evil. More accurately, sin. When you have the desire to kill yourself, you are supposed to see it and ‘accept it’, but not, for Christ’s sake, to kill yourself. If you desire to have carnal knowledge of a helpless teeny-bopper, you are supposed to accept your lust, and not lay a finger on even her big toe. If you hate your father, fine – but don’t slug the bastard with a bat. Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)

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