my cock weighs a ton

excerpt from 10:04 by ben lerner:

we talked about the latest NYPD brutality for a while and then he said, you know how when you're a kid and you go to the bathroom with other boys, i mean you're standing side by side pissing -- i was a little worried where the protester was going with this -- the big thing was looking at the other kid's dick out of curiosity, and as you got older that became more and more of an offense, could get you called a faggot or whatever, and so that stops at some point, unless you're cruising maybe, i don't know. but then sometime in middle school or maybe for some people it's high school there is this kind of performance that starts when you take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.

i was laughing because i did know what the protester was talking about, knew exactly, but had somehow never noted the widespread practice consciously. countless instances flashed before my eyes -- in locker rooms in kansas as a kid, more recently in airports all over the country and in large restaurants, two of the only institutions where i now urinated in company, because at school i always entered a stall; many men, maybe the majority, would act, as they took themselves in hand, as if they were grasping, at the minimum, a heavy pipe, and others as though they were preparing themselves for a feat of superhuman strength, often then making a show of supporting their back with the free arm if they held their penis with one hand, or grasping their member with two hands, as if either of those postures were required by the weight. i tried to recall if i'd seen this in other countries. regardless, we were both laughing by this point, laughing as hard as i'd laughed in a long time, because now the protester stood and started miming perfectly there in my dining room the midwestern man's premicturition ritual display.

i saw my dad do it and my coaches and my friends and i did it basically without knowing it, had done it all my life, the protester said, catching his breath, and then the other day we were in the mcdonald's bathroom by the park where the manager lets us go and my friend chris was just like, when are you going to quit acting like it weighs so much, man? do you need help with that or something? and that was the first time i even realized i was doing it, realized that all these men were always doing it, and i just stopped. i mean, i know it's not the point of occupy, but i'm telling you that now i don't size men up in terms of fights all the time and i don't act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?