Joan Didion Gives Me Cock Ring Measurements

Mrs. Didion: “We tell ourselves narratives in order to survive. The Instagram fitness model takes her pictures to raise “awareness.” The prince drinks LaCroix in solidarity with the common man. The local barista is a deeply embedded performance artist. We search for the lessons that makes sense to us, deciphering the most comfortable one. We endure by overlaying these stories across the variegated realities of our experience. Yet, this is only a quick fix, a way to cope. In the end, we all begin to doubt the stories we tell ourselves.”

Me: “Uhh, yeah. I agree...should I just start to get undressed or what? I’m sorry I’ve never done this kind of thing before. Is it always so devastatingly incisive and personal?”

Mrs. Didion: “In the late sixties, I was squatting in an unfinished mansion. This twenty-four-thousand-square-foot house had been approved by the Sacramento City Council as a “pad” for visiting dignitaries. Fifteen million dollars and approximately two Jim Morrison visits later, the project had been abandoned. It is a curious structure, a dream home envisioned by bureaucrats for the idealized V.I.P. This person, whomever she may be, must enjoy bidets for the house is equipped with twenty seven of them (I’m happy to report that they are all functional). The house is painted a stale orange cream color both inside and out, in deference, ostensibly, to the orange rinds that support the California economy. That is part of the problem this mansion presents, of course.”

Me: “Hmm, is that a metaphor for wood because I read online that wooden cock rings are in vogue right now; they’re more masculine. Plus, they’re more sustainable than silicone. I don’t want my cock ring to outlive me and be passed down through the generations, you know. So, yeah, I’d definitely prefer wood, unless you suggest otherwise.”

Mrs. Didion: “Petals on a wet black bough. The line by Ezra Pound haunts me for no particular reason.”

Me: “So wood?”

Mrs. Didion: “A hot wind blew through the summer of my youth. It was not until I went to the movies to escape the heat that I understood its provenance. There I saw him walk, heard his voice. I was overwhelmed by a searing blast when John Wayne said, ‘Saddle up.’ His very breath seemed a concoction of rattlesnakes and blue skies dissolved in J&B. Everywhere he walked was man’s country, and even at night his paunch would cast a shadow.”

Me: “I get it. You’re trying to chub me up, so you can measure my full girth. Smart.”

Mrs. Didion: “Time brings strange mutations. I had thought of my life in many ways, but never had I thought I would be sitting at a table with a shifting phantasmagoria of ex-mother-in-laws.”

Me: “Keep…going”

Mrs. Didion: “About twenty scattered days a year the bad wind blows down through the mountain gorges and across the dry hills of Southern California. The Santa Ana wind brings calamity with it; disaster is a quotidian meteorological condition in Los Angeles. Yet, when the Santa Ana comes, the city seems to burn. Lawyers dance in the street. Babies wrest themselves from their car seats and clamor for the wheel. Tweens do nothing but the unspeakable.”

Me: “Okay, I’m ready. Go!”

Mrs. Didion: “Four by one inches with a circumference of two.”