12/22
i'm thankful for perhaps my favorite holiday tradition, which is reading buzzfeed's list of the 50 worst things on the internet and sharing it with my family (i'm thankful to make clear that unless you want to see some really gross stuff and a lot of penises, you should not click this link)(sorry jenna). i'm thankful that somehow d forgot the trauma of reading the list with me last year and somehow also thought that it was a list of the 50 best things on the internet, which led to an even ruder awakening than it might have otherwise been. i'm thankful for the list, which though disgusting (or because it's disgusting), made me laugh harder and longer than i have laughed in a long time. i'm thankful for obscenely disgusting (and just obscene) things on the internet, which provide some kind of comic catharsis that can be very cleansing.
i'm thankful for probably my all-time-favorite example of this phenomenon, which is the cum box, and about which i wrote the following in my first newsletter, drafts, in 2012 (<3):
"The setup is simple; there are only two steps which each person in need of relief is required, at some point prior to the treatment, to undertake. The first involves finding, within this generally entertaining reddit thread about secrets that could ruin your life if they were found out, the entry in which a person, after telling an anecdote about stealing money from a funeral, nonchalantly mentions that he also has a "cum box," which we find out a few sentences later is a shoebox into which he has ejaculated each time he masturbated for the past two to three years. Then, after reading the entry, the second step of the setup requires clicking through and looking at the pictures that this person has posted of the cum box.
That's all you have to do for the setup. After that, any time that you or a friend or partner is feeling especially stressed, all that you need to do in order to help give you/him/her/them a momentary break from the crushing tension is to in some way invoke the cum box. For some stress levels, all that is necessary is whispering/gchatting the words "cum box"; the extra strength version is to wrap the url for the cum box pictures in a bit.ly link and email it to your patient with an innocuous fake description. You can use the cum box by yourself, as a sort of meditative medication, but, like most gross memes, it's more effective when it is sprung on you by surprise.
The magic of the cum box is that it is so completely and totally disgusting that, for a moment after its invocation, it is impossible to feel stress or think about any of the problems of your life; your brain is simply too overloaded with the cum box, with the idea that such a thing as a cum box exists and that a person has one and that you are looking at a picture of it or seeing the picture of it that has been burned into your retinas. While I would not recommend anything as extreme as daily exposure (which seems as if it would have some unpleasant side effects), I have not found anyone who is immune to this therapy and have seen no reduction in tolerance over time (as is often the case with other solutions, like benzodiazepines).
In conclusion, cum box cum box cum box."
i'm thankful that our friend texted us from the holidays with their parents in atlanta where they are miserable and we texted them supportive things and then d quickly drew a beautiful cartoon of them with their cat and sent them that, which i think made them feel a bit better. i'm thankful to dream of summer through one of her comics. i'm thankful that while it seemed for a while we were going to have a white christmas, it's actually going to be unseasonably warm on christmas and the day after. i'm thankful it is thursday and i have a three day weekend this weekend. i'm thankful for this dog's hobby.
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