Louis C.K.

There is a woman on our work network who would not want me using her name (just as I wouldn’t want her trotting mine around neither). We were talking and the subject of the comedian and fallen idol Louis C.K. came up. She was saying that she once believed very powerfully in the whole culture of standup comedy and improv workshops and that she never really stopped believing in the whole vaguely emancipatory ideal, it was simply that she’d more or less stopped finding anybody all that funny. Something especially miffed her about the relative success of the objectively pitiful Eugene Mirman, then she had a very ugly personal encounter with David Cross, and finally, because she has a trans sibling, she was disgusted with Louis C.K.’s trans material precisely because it was too lazy, unimaginative, and self-righteous to even be transphobic. Like, step out of yourself for a second, buddy. I brought up the matter of C.K.’s chronic unwanted masturbating-in-front-of-people. She said she couldn’t really understand it. Like, she lacked that critical point of reference or whatnot. Who does that? I really had no choice, I had to tell her. It happened to me. What?!! A good friend of mine was sitting across the room from me…a good ways away. We were talking and we were high. Suddenly he whipped his cock out, it was fully erect, and he started stroking it while looking at me with the entreaty of some half-assed geisha. He was five or six steps away from me at best and there was no chance in hell I was getting up. What he saw me looking at him with was a different sort of challenge. But it all resolved politely and without fanfare. The woman on our work network said I probably better not ever tell that story to anybody else.