Lust And Wonder - by Augusten Burroughs
Published:
Lust And Wonder - by Augusten Burroughs
Read: 2025-05-23
Recommend: 8/10
I like the way he draws analogies between different things. This is some skill that I like to learn as well.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
The swiftness and brevity of his reply caused me to instantly resent him. I felt deprived of suspense and the luxurious anxiety of wondering if I’d made a fool of myself by attaching a shirtless photo with my stalker note. Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn’t want because they were free.
I had long ago learned not to unload all of my sordid past on somebody during the first date. I had done this very thing in the past, and it hadn’t worked out well. When people find out your mother was mentally ill, your father was a chronic alcoholic, and you spent most of your childhood being raised by your parents’ eccentric and possibly insane psychiatrist in his run-down mental hospital of a house, they tend to back away. In order to make them lean in and want more, I had to polish certain elements from my life, while omitting others entirely.
The keys themselves had seemingly unlocked his negative, depressive nature and released it into the wild. I now suspected the wrinkles around his eyes were the result not of sunlight but rather scowling in misery for extended periods.
He reached down, and my dick was soft, which made me think, Well, yeah. But he was hard and grinding against my hip bone in a high-pressure spiral. His hot, wet tongue was frantically searching my mouth, looking for fillings. My tongue was crouched so far back in my throat I thought I might actually swallow it.
Mitch was very circular in his thinking and once on a subject would not let go of it unless you could manage to throw a bone in the other direction.
I was thrilled but also confused. It sounded like he was willing to lift a finger, but not two.
Four entire days is a painfully vast expanse of time if you experience each second passing like one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.
“A novel by Augusten Burroughs.” It said so, right there below the title. It was thrilling for maybe forty-seven seconds, and then the thrill drained right away. As I walked out of the store with my phone now in my pocket, I thought, It doesn’t matter what it is. We get used to it. Which is both good and bad.
My dick was already hard because, as insurance against experiencing another erotic void like with Mitch, I’d clandestinely ordered a bulk supply of Viagra from an online pharmacy. I had been taking one before each date in case the evening spontaneously turned into sex. Dennis had no idea that when we went to that club in the West Village and sat at a small, round table near the stage, the entire time I was pretending to love crappy jazz, I was sitting there with a raging hard-on, weirdly divorced from any sort of sexual attraction. Also, the room was tinted Windex blue, and all the lights had halos. This was an actual side effect of the medication, one I rather liked. It turned the whole world faintly blue.
Because I could not recall ever being among a group of such seemingly dead living people before. They were entirely joyless. Except for Stevie, who spoke in a kind of unwittingly comical gay slang.
What can you say? I said, “Thank God.” And I do not believe in God. Except, for this fleeting, thirty-second window of my life, I did, because he brought Dennis home unscathed.
The thing is, I wanted to be more like the person Dennis wished I was. Dennis had the soul of an accountant, and he was exceedingly good at cataloguing my flaws. And because I contained mostly flaws, it was daunting. I had good parts and pieces, too, but these aspects of my character attracted way less attention, possibly because they didn’t require renovation.
Construction took almost two years. The doors were solid. The trim was wood, not Sheetrock. The shingles were cedar instead of aluminum. From nature’s point of view, our new house was entirely edible.
Finally, I picked up, and the first thing he said was, “What took you so long to answer the phone?” I couldn’t just blurt out, “I was worried it might be one of your tedious friends, and I’d get stuck talking to them for even thirty seconds,” so I said, “I was cleaning the toilet.” Which wasn’t a lie, only a time shift, because I’d scrubbed it earlier. On my actual knees. “Well, I wanted to let you know I’ll be home soon,” he said. There was something odd in his voice that I couldn’t positively decipher. Something that reminded me of our early dating days when he was worried about slipping out of love with me, as though love was a pair of jeans and he’d been on a juice fast for a year.
He was looking forward to the museums. Which to me translated to: standing in line for hours only to then spend more hours standing around in front of walls. Museums were not my thing because it hurt my screwed-up back to stand.
By midafternoon, he was opening a bottle of wine for himself. I reminded myself, I am a free person in the world. I could just do it. There is literally nothing to stop me. I could drink right now. But I didn’t. I finished Anne Frank’s diary, feeling entirely awed by it. Awe, I discovered, was my favorite feeling. It was a rare experience, but when it happened, it was like an orgasm for the mind.
If I vacuumed the downstairs? Dennis would hear the vacuum and come downstairs and vacuum over again. If I dusted, he dusted the areas I just dusted. So I just stopped attempting any of these domestic chores because, frankly, I didn’t give a fuck if the house was dusty. We live in a universe filled with dust. To fight it is to fight against the flow of time itself.
So I imagine terrible things in advance of their occurrence to prepare myself. And when I was small, it’s true that one terrible thing after another did happen. And it was good, in a sad way, that I had been waiting, bags packed, ready for anything, no matter how sharp the blade. But as an adult and one with some success, the terrible things happened with less frequency. I’ve never been able to stop the blockbuster disaster film from playing on an endless loop in my mind. I see the terrible coming, whether it is or not.
There was a time before diamonds were widely known when pearls were considered the rarest, most precious gems in the world. In many portraits depicting early monarchs, the crown features pearls instead of diamonds. But if you dropped a pearl into a glass of vinegar, it would eventually disintegrate. That was what time did to life: it disintegrated it. Time was like low-grade acid that slowly worked against the shell of everything, splitting it apart into powdery nothingness. Alcohol did this, too. Whole sections of my life were splashed with liquid from a bottle and were now undecipherable, smeared and forever unreadable. Which I supposed was fine, because the past had been swallowed and digested. One must not write letters or leave voice mail for the pork chop one had for dinner four years ago.
Friends had come and gone throughout my life; so had lovers, jobs, money, youth, and hair.
The horrible thing about being sober is you lose your excuse for being so fucked up.
I used to love writing. In fact, I used to require time to write every day. If I did not write, I could feel mental illness flare up and spread within my mind like a rash.
When we gave the answers “Nowhere,” “No,” and “Nowhere,” I was able to count cavities in people’s mouths, they were so astonished.
My nights were usually spent two-thirds trying to fall asleep, one-third fitfully sleeping. First, I had to kind of decompress in the pillow, which frequently meant going over whatever slight injustices I imagined I incurred during the day and fantasizing about better courses of action I could have taken. Or sometimes my mind would just turn on its own TV, and I’d get caught up in a story of my own making, though it always seemed like it already existed and I was only watching. I also worried a lot at night, mostly about my teeth and skin rashes.