This tiny little common incident triggered so much that I wish I was a better story-teller to convey it all.

I’m in a bus. Bus 50. It takes me from Pilsner where I teach English to my home where I teach Dutch. I enjoy my job(s), it’s just all the travelling that makes it exhausting and annoying.

I don’t mind working hard. I have this kind of engine inside of me. I’ve long thought I was unbelievably lazy, but my wife has come to the conclusion: ‘if you sort of like a job you will do it even when you’re delirious with fever.’

What I’ve discovered about myself is that I would be truly fine with many aspects of life, IF on the side of all this working I could easily roll from one woman’s bed to the next.

And that’s where it becomes tricky.

First of all, I’m married. And I don’t want to be married to anyone else. My wife is uncommonly tolerant, but I know that I can’t push it too far. Plus it’s almost impossible to try and hide anything from her. Believe me I have tried. The older I get the more aversion I feel towards lying and hiding stuff.

Second of all, ever since, anno 2008-2009, a black sore of dissapointment has burst inside me, I’ve become almost entirely unattractive to women. The more this sadness has festered inside me the less attractive I’ve become. It’s so bad that I have started avoiding mirrors. I even shave without looking into a mirror. This is a vicious circle. The less attractive I feel the less attractive I become.

Third of all, I’m definitely in the wrong country to go and roll from bed to bed. Although Slovak women are almost invariably super nice and thoughtful towards me, almost always willing to go out with me, we simply don’t vibe. Especially here in Slovakia I seem to only attract the extremely intelligent ones. Unfortunately the extremely intelligent ones are rarely -it’s not impossible- the kind that send my hormones into overdrive.

This fact makes me feel like I’m some sort of simpleton. Yes, it’s true that most of the time I’m thinking of anything that has some sort of complex system to it. Politics, the economy, warfare, strategy games, psychotherapy, marketing, office politics, you name it. The weird thing is that the day I spotted this girl in the bus someone whose opinion I value had sent me an email in which he claims I’m a genius. Even the title of his email is’ ‘you genius’ When I told my wife how absurd this was, she only said: ‘well, in a way you are a genius.’

For me the discussion ended when I spotted this girl. I doubt very much that a genius would face this situation so many times. It’s a scourge to be in this country.

So what convinces me I’m definitely no genius?

This girl gets on. And she just shatters me.

I couldn’t find any picture online of a girl that resembles her, the picture I chose is the closest I could find, and it would be pointless to try and describe her. It’s just exactly the type of woman that makes the ground like dissapear from under me and makes me boil with an unbearable energy. Black hair. Slender. Long legs. A certain facial expression that floors me, but I can never describe it, I can never explain what about it affects me so much. My guess is that it’s connected to some very early childhood experience. That’s the only thing that explains the force of it. It’s ridiculous how determined we are by our early experiences, as though we are the slaves of our childhoods.

Scenarios run through my head of approaching her. I try to find things about her that I don’t like. Isn’t she a bit too slender? I know that if my first impression is wrong, if I discover that upon closer examination she turns out to be far less attractive than at first glance, this raging, stomping, flagellating energy will quickly fade. But from the corner of my eye I can’t find faults. It’s my imagination that she KNOWS she is having an effect on me. They always know, don’t they?

It becomes obvious that we will be getting off at the same stop. A manipulative voice inside me says: ‘this is a sign. You have to talk to her now’

But an other voice says: ‘this can’t possibly go right. She will turn out to be a bitch. You’re in Slovakia, there’s NO WAY she will react positively to a stranger suddenly talking to her on the street’

And a third voice says: ‘Even if she responds favorably, you will have to lie, you will have to hide, it will require the usual insane logistics to do anything more with her. With your current schedule it would make you into a sleep deprived zombie to pull it off’

Getting out of the bus right alongside her I throw a last glance at her and decide that yes, maybe she is too slender and not as attractive as I thought, so the storm inside recedes again. I suffer for a couple hours more, but then eventually I’m back to asking myself why the Minoan culture declined, or if the libertarian economist Thomas Di Lorenzo is correct in his criticism of President Lincoln and if I can ever truly find out what caused the American Civil War (an abnormal, unexplicable obsession I have had since I was a child).

But the simple, stultifying truth is that not losing myself in rampant, deviant, debauched sex, drugs and rock and roll makes life for me not worth living. This is not exactly a characteristic of a genius. I’m fairly good at distracting myself from this mortifying truth, by keeping my brain occupied, but there’s no way around it,

I’m so shockingly basic that I cannot imagine to feel truly alive without regularly tasting, licking new pussy, to put it as bluntly and clearly as possible.

And when I think about that I sigh in despair: God, I’m such a simple creature.