“I see dead…oh. ew.”

According to scientists, there are five senses: Taste, touch, sight, women’s intuition and feel. As for me, I’m both blessed and cursed with a sixth sense: The sense of knowing if someone has masturbated in a room simply by stepping into it.

It comes on first as a faint, white specter hanging about the room. A presence. Then it sharpens slowly and rhythmically into a distinct feeling of needing to wash my hands. The feeling keeps intensifying, welling up inside of me. Up. Up. Up. Finally, it washes uncontrollably over me. I see women, children, politicians, pilgrims, prehistoric American Indians, the first humans. All masturbating. I can see their grimacing faces, the damp palms, the bunched tissue paper, the crinkled Penthouse or, in the case of the American Indians, the crude pornography scratched onto birch bark or deer hide. It is a threesome. Two men and a women–or is it the other way around? Who knows. The images are already gone. But in that short moment, I will have learned more about these ancient masturbators than even their wives or children or archaeologists could ever know.

But like I said, this gift is also a curse. For one thing, my sixth sense means that I have to avoid certain places: Public highschools and libraries, men’s locker rooms and the entire state of West Virginia. In these places, the overwhelming power of millions of masturbators past would just be too much to handle. Once, I had to leave a tour of the Whitehouse early because I was so disturbed by the image of Lincoln jacking off into a chamberpot while whistling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, a polished mahogany crutch supporting his massive log.

My sixth sense is a pain sometimes, sure. But if I had to be born all over again, I don’t think I would change a thing. See, I never had many friends growing up. I spent hours alone in my room playing with Legos, but I never felt lonely. I always had constant companionship in the sweat-stained faces of the thousands that had once stopped there–however briefly–to masturbate.