our faces made smacking sounds and i couldn’t understand why kissing was important. it wasn’t that i was unhappy to be kissing her - i was happy - but i would have been at least as happy to thumb-wrestle, and even happier to play slapslap, if slapslap or thumb-wrestling signified what kissing signified.

for a second it seemed like maybe i was a homosexual.

i thought: are you a homosexual? maybe you’re a homosexual.

i didn’t want to be a homosexual. to be homosexual, i’d’ve had to like wangs, and wangs looked dumb to me: blind, fumbly animals needing sonar and lacking it. and also i’d probably have to like nuts, which looked even dumber - how they bulged out the sack, the way they’d flop and sway and that scarry line in the middle when it was cold. they were like brawn to the brain that was atop them, and barely even that, for even when thinking of it as a personified animal, it was hard to grant the wang much beyond a basic invertebrate nervous system, let alone a brain capable of leadership, so the nuts thugged for wangs that were but stooges themselves; minions to lackeys were the nuts. it would’ve been too hard to be a homosexual. and plus i was in love with june, a girl.

still, kissing her wasn’t great. and if it wasn’t great for me, then it could not have been so great for her, and it was obviously my fault.