Water, water everywhere and way too much to drink

Halloween’s a comin’, bois! Let’s just get slithering right to it:

Dear Howard: My boyfriend, a professional nutritionist, bitches at me constantly how I’m a physical train wreck and that I don’t have enough sex with him. Usually, this is after he’s been pounding away at me for a solid hour! “Stop, Kent, STOP!” he mimics. “I have a headache! Kent, please?”

But he never does. He just keeps on plowing sarcastically along, like a deranged robot. Kent insists the reason I’m turned off by him is solely due to my poor dietary habits — that I’m a junk-food junkie, a secret smoker, and, worst of all, I’m severely dehydrated.

Meanwhile, the worst “junk food” in our entire house is organic, non-GMO verified, gluten-free fresh berries; only second-hand smoke has ever entered my lungs and steamed greens (with, maybe, if I’m lucky a crouton or two) receive a lemon wedge and one speck of olive oil drizzled over them as a cheat-day treat. Extra virgin, always. Oh, and rafts upon rafts of water from faraway, exotic places — Eastern European caverns, the Alps, Polynesia: I must keep a bottle in-hand at all times excepting when Master’s worked up a new erection. “Eat well. Be free?
— The Master’s Mule

Dear Hoss: OK, it just so happens you’ve struck upon one of Howard’s biggest pet peeves: this whole hydration-hydration-all-the-time nonsense; apparently, one can, absolutely, lead a horse to be made to drink water. Easiest thing in the world, in fact. “Stay hydrated!” has metastasized into the motivational mantra for our entire millennium. One’s very life, we’re ceaselessly persuaded, depends upon guzzling, minimally, eight eight-ounce glasses of water per day. Horseshit!

Hoss, short of running a decathalon or being force-marched through the Sahara, all the body human requires is to simply eat when hungry and drink when thirsty. That’s it, kids. Simplicity personified. Professional nutritionists get paid, same as psychiatrists, for being corporate pushers (think the opioid epidemic). Twitter bots and the H2O/sports drinks’ industries constantly remind us, indeed, just how dire are the circumstances for our dangerously dehydrated bodies if we don’t have a Gatorade bottle attached to our esophagus every mincing step we dare make into the great Luciferian outdoors beyond our mailbox.

Kids, anything one consumes — be it but a trick-or-treat/orange-dye/number-4 marshmallow peanut, a bushel of candy corn or a silo of Poland Spring — replenishes water to our systems; moreover, there’s no scientific reason, whatsoever, for the obligational consumption of any beverages with added “electrolytes.”
It’s pure urban myth that one can never be too over-hydrated. Hell, waterlogged blood’s one of the leading causes of headaches, and most people — those who aren’t exercising intensely in excessive heat or suffering from a bout of Montezuma’s Revenge — get plenty enough electrolytes every day from mere food, alone. Smart water, my ass!

Bottom line: There’s literally no need to drink straight H2O except when thirsty. Not until the 19th century did humans barely even touch water at all, except as a last-resort liquid alternative — opting instead for meads, beer and weak wines — stuff that wouldn’t kill you. And your body will always tell you if you’re not hydrated enough.

So, children, stop overthinking everything that glides down your gullet, and especially stop overdrinking artisanal springs sourced in plastic. Truth is, your life doesn’t depend upon consuming a cup of blueberries every day, a mess of steamed kale and a gallon of Fiji water. Just as long as you’re not replicating the (obnoxiously lengthy) life of Keith Richards, or some fill-in-the-blank superstar rapper whose name is nothing but a posthumous bunch of fucked-up letters, then you’re far healthier than you’d ever think.
— Howard Lewis Russell

Dear Howard: I get into deviant sex. Taboo stuff. Understand what I’m saying? It always gets me juicing-out a total geyser in the moment — better, bigger and longer than any other kinds of sex I’ve ever had; yet later, like, this wave of nausea always rolls over me. It’s not anything normal people could ever see themselves getting into, I know — all the whimpering and baby-bawling I have to deal with! I feel practically dirty afterwards, but all tingly at the same time, too. Know what I mean?
— Charlie Chuckles

Dear Chucky: Yes, we have no bananas? Yeah, I don’t know what you mean. Naturally, on the other hand, ’course I do: I’m Ask Howard. Personally, taboo’s not my groove thing, but certainly nothing gooses me. Not even you. Nonetheless, I’d imagine a solid chunk of my readership may be completely in the dark regarding your chosen topic for public forum. Although I must add, Charlton, you’re giving short shrift to the imaginations of “normal people” by assuming they’re incapable of scudding into similar, Stygian slut-pits’ darkest corners, same as you.

Sexual Fantasyland, like outer space, has no perimeters. And zero boundaries. It forever just folds inward, deeper and denser — gloom sans the doom — upon itself the ever further outward one travels, the ever downward one permanently spirals.

Get what I’m saying?

Of course, I also presume you’re not referencing anything incestuously to do with real sex involving minors here, either. As you well know, Chuckles, “consensual” does not apply to individuals 17 and under; hence, via necessity, I feel obliged to provide my audience an explanatory, PG-rated backdrop to your favorite dungeon fetish — starting with the disclaimer that you’re skating on awfully thin ice here in the fantasy pond, slick; but, just so long as your partners are willing participants, not blood relations, and at least 18 years old (plus a day), then the margins of deviancy get magically erased. It becomes just a bedroom game that charges up all your stockpiled happy-juices with eruptions particularly splendiferous, and mutually consensual.

Note: Therefore, any personalized, sexually-brazen commitment to an escapist/excessive desire for physical gratifications involving “irrational” stimuli — whether it be an inanimate object or a daddy/son scenario broaching fantasy rape — isn’t necessarily perverted, per se, as merely cracking the ice of indiscreet kinky — along the lines of something rendering only a bit of flush-faced embarrassment if exposed to the light of your grandmother’s quilting circle? As Sheryl Crow of last century’s final days wails, “If it makes you happy, it just can’t be that baaaad/If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”
Cheer up, Chuck. It’s October!
— Howard Lewis Russell

Have a gruesomely uncomfortable question to spook Howard? Be careful. He may answer it at AskHoward@dallasvoice.com