Geoff Harkham



I try to stay on top of things, but I can’t tell you how surprised I was this week when I looked at a calendar for the first time in I don’t know how long and I saw that we’re almost all the way through August. August! Can you believe it? I mean, here I was thinking that summer had just started, and it turns out we’re closing in on the end of the year! I guess it really is true what they say: Time flies when you spend every waking hour feeding an addiction to internet pornography over which you no longer have any semblance of control.


Seriously, isn’t it amazing how quickly the days go by when you’ve become a powerless slave who spends every moment gaping at hardcore erotica? It’s like, you blink, Monday turns into Tuesday, Tuesday turns into Wednesday, and the next thing you know you’ve consumed hundreds of thousands of videos of women debasing themselves for your perverted gratification, a mindless and never-ending exercise in sexual depravity that no longer gives you any real pleasure and now serves as nothing more than an empty, joyless compulsion.

It’s pretty crazy.

And the years can really sneak up on you, too. One day you’re living a healthy, well-rounded life in which your casual interest in online smut hasn’t yet destroyed your family and personal relationships, and then, in a flash, a decade has passed and there you are, devoting every ounce of energy to seeking out and staring at an uninterrupted image stream of barely 18-year-old girls masturbating on camera. And you just have to ask yourself, “Where did the time go?”


It all just happens so fast. The seasons change, every month you get a credit card statement clogged with subscription fees for the increasingly graphic gang-bang footage you now desperately crave, and before you know it, your kids are all grown up, you’ve got more than a few gray hairs, and you’ve transformed yourself into little more than a frantic, pathological collector of gaping orifices and tanned flesh.

I think we all know that feeling.

Honestly, it can feel like life is passing you right on by! I mean, there’s only so many hours in a day, and in between calling in sick to work until they fire you and huddling by your computer in a darkened room watching an endless parade of nameless women have anal sex in a van, there just isn’t enough time to go around. You know how it can be: the days tick by, the weeks turn into months, and then you miss your daughter’s birthday party yet again because you were in the middle of a horrific, 36-hour amateur facial binge with your pants at your ankles and the phone off the hook.


It really makes you think. But then you go right on back to watching pornography. And then you jerk off, again and again and again, always hoping to coax just one more strained ejaculation from your chafed and embattled genitalia. And sooner or later you’re convulsing in tears because you’ve somehow managed to exhaust Xtube.com’s vast archives of BBW squirting clips in another delirious porn bender that you won’t even remember later.

And when you do manage to gain an all-too-brief moment of clarity, you sometimes can’t even remember everything that’s happened to you since you came across that first low-resolution thumbnail of a woman baring her breasts on Playboy Online. Sure, you can sort of picture the big stuff—your wedding, your pathetic attempts at rehabilitation that never lasted longer than the time it took to power up your semen-flecked laptop, your divorce—but everything else is just a blur of browser tabs and live feeds of Eastern European women urinating that feels like a snapshot from someone else’s nightmarish life.


Because, like it or not, you can’t just put life on pause. The sun will rise, the sun will set, you’ll bolt out of bed at 3 a.m. and mindlessly stumble to your computer in a feverish attempt to appease those twisted desires that even the most depraved corridors of the internet can no longer sate, and the fact of the matter is this: No matter how you might try to slow it down, time marches on at its own steady pace, and you are a monster.

But, hey, that’s just the way it goes! You live, you die, you want to watch porn. You want to watch it so bad, maybe just for a minute or two, then you’ll get back to writing. Yeah, just a couple minutes, just to calm yourself down a little. You’re breathing so fast. Just a few videos, maybe. Click on that one. Good, good, now click on that one. Yeah, good, okay. Now click on that one. No, no good, not good enough. Click on that one. Watch that one. It’s not loading fast enough. Fuck! It’s not fucking loading! Wait, no. Oh, God. Help me help help.