This Week's Guest: Brent
You know that saying about finding a job where you love what you do, and you'll never work a day in your life? My guest this week did just that when he became a country radio DJ and a sex worker in a tiny midwest town.
Brent was a fresh-faced young cub, just out of college, and somehow word got around to all the closeted married men that he was available -- for a price. And while the hookups were fun, it was a relationship he wanted. But he couldn't possibly have imagined the form that some of those relationships would take.
This Week's Recommendation: A Hairy Prone Companion & Brain Candy
Thanks again to Brent for joining me. And guess what -- in the time since we did this interview, he actually did start that podcast! It's call "A Hairy Prone Companion" and he shares weekly stories about fascinating kinky sex. You can find it everywhere podcasts are podcasted.
I should probably just warn you that A Hairy Prone Companion is an unflinchingly frank look into some particularly intense practices and undergarments, to the point that at times it may be challenging for those with a delicate constitution to listen. But I do recommend that you give it a listen, even if you're the type to clutch your pearls, because pushing your boundaries is how you grow as a person.
And that's why my other recommendation this week is for the movie Brain Candy, from the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe where the character Buddy originated. It's a brilliantly funny and woefully under-appreciated film about an anti-depressant drug that forces the brain to focus solely on the happiest moment of their lives to the exclusion of all else. But as it turns out, a constant good mood is not without its consequences.
The fear of feeling unhappy, or uncomfortable, or afraid can hold a lot of power over us. We'll sometimes go to great lengths to avoid those feelings, whether it's altering our brains in the movie Brain Candy, or trying a new fetish you heard about on a podcast, or how I will hide in the grocery store to avoid talking to someone. But those feelings only have power over us if we let them by ignoring them. Like a bad infection, negative feelings have a way of spreading out the more you ignore and avoid them.
And confronting those feelings -- doing something you don't want to do -- is the best way to rip up the roots of that weed. I'm not saying you should step outside your comfort zone because you might learn you like it. Chances are, you're going to suddenly enjoy being sad, or start sounding every night, or look forward to making grocery store small talk. If you think you're not going to like something, you probably won't.
But liking negative feelings isn't the point. The point is to get used to them, to lose your fear of them, to learn to control them so they don't control you.
Clips of Stuff we Talked About
Music
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/