To the best of my knowledge I suffer from no significant diseases of the mind, yet from time to time I do like to drop into a carpet showroom to pet the deep pile remnants. They remain docile if you stroke them just the right way. Simple sensual pleasures are often stigmatized as fetishes by unimaginative therapeutic institutions, regulatory agencies of human weirdness, who want people to be successful instead of happy. I am neither successful nor happy but I could spend a gratifying evening with a nubby surface and there's nothing wrong with that. Just because I could date a foursquare ball doesn't make me a freak. What a hurtful word. Anyway, I don't need to feel things, I could live without it. Show me fixation. People should have the freedom to enjoy their voluptuous and disturbing preoccupations without having them reduced to dismissive psychosexual categories. When I was a kid I'd slip into Spencer Gifts to hear the deeply satisfying clack of the metal poster racks hitting one another as I "browsed" (naturally I was barely looking at the pictures), emitting audible moans between preposterous images of David Hasselhoff and Adrian Zmed as other kids tittered like idiots over an ashtray shaped like a butt. I loved to eat Hostess Chocodiles but I often bought Sno Balls, not for eating but for poking. I'd breathlessly press an index finger into one, slowly but insistently, to feel the spongy resistance, and then withdraw and watch the white coconut surface slowly resume its previous contours. Satisfaction of the deepest kind. I never saw a pink one till I came out west.