🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate a fiery August; it’s also 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day, and I am wearing not only my Swiss flag shorts, but also my Switzerland t-shirt (Hail Helvetica! and all that) — meanwhile, adjustments in medication and my diet, following my nephrologist’s directions, have brought me control of my blood pressure (which was scarily low for a long time, after a previous period of being too high): right in my target zone just now (4:20 am: 126/69, with a pulse of 73 bpm — my pulse rate had also veered wildly all over the map, from highs of 110 to lows of 48 — so YAY!)
In my 7/23 posting “A recovery landmark”, I reported on the return of my high sex drive (of 70 years’ standing) after a long period of sickness (prominently including my gall bladder surgery), during which my sexual instincts lay utterly dormant; the return of sexual desire is a reliable sign of returning health, and a cause for great celebration. And, once again, regular self-pleasuring (as we say when we want to be decorous — though I note that self-pleasure, noun or verb, isn’t in NOAD or AHD5).
Now, one common consequence of a sudden change in the body’s state is a period of overshoot, an overcompensation for the pre-change suppressed state. After weeks of lassitude, your energy returns — and then, for a period, you’re hyperactive. After which you bounce back and return to a more normal state.
A few days after the reappearance of my sex drive, in the middle of the night, I went into sex overdrive, and it was awful.
Sex overdrive. I go into sleep — at the beginning of my sleep time (between 4 and 5 pm), and then after each of my many whizz breaks during the night — with a variety of scenes or stories in my head: rocking gently in a boat floating in a placid lake, curled up around my man Jacques in bed, engaged in one of a small number of completely fixed gay sex stories that I can call up for a familiar pleasure (but I never get far into them before I slip into sleep and they morph into other things, most not sexual and many astonishing).
On sex overdrive night, the sex stories persisted through my dreaming, became more elaborate and incendiary, eventually waking me around midnight in a kind of sexual frenzy that I just couldn’t shake, for two awful hours. Leaking prostatic fluid and probably some semen, more or less constantly, with a fierce urgency (and no pleasure) and sexual imagery that belonged in 120 Days of Sodom, not my satisfying sex dreams.
Meanwhile, my Apple Music was playing several long albums by Joel Cohen’s Boston Camerata that included a large number of shapenote songs from the Sacred Harp, in a tradition that I’m deeply embedded in as a participant, so when I tried to fix on the music as a scheme to soothe me to sleep away from the sexual frenzy, I just became obsessed with the songs instead, in a kind of musical frenzy.
So I switched back and forth between the sexual frenzy (but with actual release denied, despite heroic attempts that just left my penis sad and sore) and the musical frenzy (equally devoid of any actual pleasure, while my actual singing provides me deep visceral satisfaction), for two hours, until utter exhaustion plunged me into sleep.
Sex overdrive never came back. May I never again be in its grip.
I guess it’s much like priapism, a persistent erection. You might think that if X is good, a lot of X is even better — but not if more X is painful, as both priapism and sex overdrive are.
(As a general rule, you should always be suspicious of appeals to the principles of More is Better. In particular, the veneration of huge penises (long and, especially, thick) among American men is grounded in fantasy, not reality: really huge penises can only be accommodated (in mouth or anus) with careful training and practice; otherwise they’s unmanageable, actually painful to take in your body. I speak from experience. Really big penises are mostly for admiring, as objects of wonder and fantasy.)
overdrive, the noun. From NOAD:
noun overdrive: 1 [a] a gear in a motor vehicle providing a gear ratio higher than that of direct drive (the usual top gear), so that the engine speed can be reduced at high road speeds to lessen fuel consumption or to allow further acceleration. [b] a function or setting that permits the exceeding of some normal operating level in a piece of equipment, especially the amplifier of an electric guitar. 2 [mass noun] a state of great or excessive activity: the city’s worried public relations group went into overdrive. [AZ: a metaphoric extension of the other ‘high setting’ senses]
The M noun (subentry 2) is the one in sex overdrive. Great or excessive activity, indeed.
The noun overdrive in popular culture. In many places, usually mixing the automotive and the metaphorical. Here, just two examples from popular culture — one from the movies, one from rock music.
The movie Overdrive. From Wikipedia:
(#1) Trailer poster for the movieOverdrive is a 2017 action thriller film directed by Antonio Negret, produced by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Pierre Morel and the screenplay was written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas. The film stars are [AZ: the tough] Scott Eastwood, [AZ: the cute] Freddie Thorp, Ana de Armas and Gaia Weiss. Principal photography began on 4 January 2016 in Paris and Marseille, France. The film tells the story of skilled car thieves who are sent to steal a crime lord’s luxury car.
The rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive. From Wikipedia:
(#2) Visual for the band’s Back in Overdrive tour beginning 8/15/23, incorporating their gear logoBachman–Turner Overdrive, often abbreviated BTO, are a Canadian rock band from Winnipeg, Manitoba, founded by three brothers: Randy Bachman, Robbie Bachman, Tim Bachman; and Fred Turner in 1973. … The band has sold nearly 30 million albums worldwide, and has fans affectionately known as “gearheads” (derived from the band’s gear-shaped logo). Many of their songs, including “Let It Ride”, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”, “Takin’ Care of Business”, “Hey You”, and “Roll on Down the Highway”, still receive regular play on classic rock stations. [AZ: and in my heart]
August 1, 2023 at 8:14 am |
“Overdrive” is also the name of a software company, and of their products, systems for libraries and similar organizations to manage the cataloguing and circulation of e-books and other electronic media.
August 1, 2023 at 8:20 am |
Yes, I was aware of that, and took care to say that I was going to post about just two examples of the use of the metaphorical noun. Cataloguing all of them would be a monstrous, possibly never-ending, task (since people are free to concoct new such uses all the time).