WHY I AM SUCH A GREAT LOVER

The Art of Strangling Women & Tips on Male Grooming (that your baber wont tell you about)

Samson Slays a Lion, Gustave Doré

I’m growing my hair out again. I cut it last year. Buzzed myself completely bald. It’s at that terrible border-area length where you can’t quite do a ponytail, and you have to resort to either the indignity of a topknot or looking like a mess.

I like having long hair. Looks good on me. But I couldn’t stand looking good any more. I couldn’t stand looking like him.

The Young Guru.

I wouldn’t have ever met the Guru, if it wasn’t for his prey. Prey was a roommate of mine for a short while. She helped me once, at a time where she stood to gain nothing and I had lost everything. She is also very pretty, compassionate and honest, and as a result, easily exploitable.

The Guru and Prey were an item. It was an on-again, off-again, turbulent thing.

The Guru was tall, slender, had long brown hair and just the right about of unshaven stubble. Everything about him was a conscious decision to appear gentle. Soft. He was a good looking man, and he was good at looking innocent. Exploitation wasn’t so much a plan as an instinct.

He made his living by leading “breathing workshops” at exorbitant prices, which varied in reverse correlation to the IQ of the people he was selling it to. It involved telling people to remember to breathe deeply for 45 minutes in a slow sexy voice as a sort of spiritual titillation, designed for the kind of over-sexed and emotionally void 20-somethings who can’t quite afford or dare to go on a trip through Europe to find themselves, or emotional prostitution working as symptom treatment for post-30 single women’s loneliness.

Along with his core audience, there were a few tag-along men. The sort of men that follow in the wake of such women. Im certain that he resented them for doing so, despite taking their money, and pretending he loved all his children equally.

He was very good at it. He had an uncanny ability to shower you with warmth and compassion the instant you met, overwhelming you in the sort of closeness and tenderness you so desperately ache for as the atomized, rootless Strong Independent Individual that you are.

If he had been more slightly more greedy and slightly less horny, he would have had a weekly newsletter about male self-improvement you could sign up for.

The few times we talked alone, it was very clear to me that he didn’t think or plan much, but acted mostly on instinct; for all the lies he told, being authentic was not one of them. His every moment was improvised, and he thrived on constantly balancing on the edge of being found out. I don’t think he knew why he lived like this, but I can let you in on a little secret, and tell you:

It’s because it gets you really, really high.