Road 2 Elsewhere, Excerpt #43: “I indulge myself a little more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do it"

How the legendary diarist Samuel Pepys invented hands-free masturbation, and I avoided getting crushed between protesters and cops on the Rue du Four in Paris.

ON THE LAST DAY OF SEPTEMBER,1978, on my calendar, I wrote out a snippet from William Wordsworth: “Five years have passed….” 

I had been recording notes of my days for sixty calendar pages at that point, with no hint of stopping. And my journal was just about to begin. October 12th bears these notices: “Letter from Mom. Daily Journal begun.” I was a pipsqueak Samuel Pepys, who wrote avidly in his famous journal from 1690 to 1699, and then ceased because he feared blindness. 

It was probably all the masturbation. 

Pepys mastered hands-free self-pleasure in the Church of St. Olaf’s, in London, while training his Male Gaze upon his smokin’ fellow worshippers. He prided himself on not even blinking at the climactic moment.

“The truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and, out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure…