To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity.” —
Narcissus
I changed my name. Titus now. Everyone has been very kind, but I still feel like a leper. —
Titus
Quite a long time ago, the medical profession graced me with a slightly glum prognosis about my long term health, and so I became in short order the habitué of a certain rather soigné gym. It behoves me to say a little bit about this establishment, since it is integral to much of the history to be chronicled in these pages. —
Pex ‘n’ Quads
Jacuzzi culture always exerted a peculiar fascination upon me, seeming to be comprised of the interactions and relations between certain definably distinct types. Our first exhibit, the nymph Hermaphrodite, having been massaged by the gods, and quite done with posing and preening and strutting and stretching before the ubiquity of mirrors, languorously unfurls a set of svelte limbs, and rises and pads like the ‘pard towards the spa’s metamorphosis suite, there divesting self of lycra impediments and pretensions to modesty. Nudity achieved, the hot tub will be approached just as Narcissus approaches the Erythromycin pool or something, whereupon the aforementioned limbs are lowered gracefully into the moiling turbidity. Echo homey! Herein the waters are perturbed by jets, and reflection correspondingly distorted. And yet, the nymph is ineluctably the nymph’s own study. Kismet: it is their fate. —
Hermaphrodite
Would that this were so for Psorietes the satyr and self-hater, who often finds himself sharing tubspace with these sexpots. He is usually quite old, Psorietes, or fat at least, and dermatologically speaking something of a ship of Theseus being as flakes of his weeping hide are wont to detach themselves from his person and cavort willy-nilly round the pool, at the behest of the notoriously fiendish dynamics of flow. Psorietes is painfully aware of this process, viewing it quite reasonably as a progressive loss of self. And yet still he is drawn here, to this well of loneliness, this maiouma of personal disintegration, to slump and to brood. —
Maiouma, Psorietes
The idyll is frequently disrupted by the presence of some sort of Caliban or Alph the unsacred, usually an unnaturally muscled lout from the basement, connoisseur of synthetic hormones, and Hermaphrodite’s nauseatingly over-confident swain. He is the living breathing anathema to all that is decent, and is widely and rightly reviled. —
Caliban or Alph
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