Please pay heed to this warning. I am going to speak of a subject which may make some readers uncomfortable. The subject in question is the involuntary nature of erections and the stubborn nature of such unwanted phenomena. If you do not wish to read about this as it pertains to an incident in my life this evening, please cease your reading at this time.

It is a well-known fact, at least among men, that an erection is caused when blood flow increases in the penis. What causes this increase in blood flow? Any number of things, actually. Sexual stimulation is but one of the many triggers of this event. A full bladder, for instance, can cause an increased blood flow, as can a bout of gas. Sleeping on one’s stomach is another popular cause. In my case, it seems that circulation increases when I start to become very sleepy.

Flashback: 1992. Spanish class. Third period, right before lunch, long enough for me to have used up any energy I may have absorbed from eating the one donut or english muffin of which my breakfast was typically composed. Combine that with a relatively mundane subject matter presented very dryly, and the result was a number of students nodding off. Falling asleep in class was no limited phenomenon. Indeed, it was widespread, and I was certainly one of the guiltier parties. But it was in Spanish class in particular that I was most susceptible to dozing off in class.

Perhaps it was because my lunch period immediately followed that class, allowing me some time for introspection, but at some point I began observing that I became sleepy in class at the same time every day; and moreover, the nodding off would generally be accompanied by what I started calling a “desk boner” or DB for short. The DB phenomenon would occur when one was sitting at a small desk which would be very narrowly suspended over one’s lap, and in the event of an erection, that already-tight seating space would become impossible to escape from, as the erection would either hook against tubing on the underside of the desk or be pressed very tightly against the desk’s flat underside. Any effort to escape would simply cause more pressure against the erection and thus simply make it stronger. The only way to escape the desk boner was to wait for the thing to go away, often as mysteriously as it appeared.

The DB was not an altogether unpleasant phenomenon; what made me start to categorize them as troublesome was the fact that they were accompanied by a very violent form of nodding off every ten seconds. So not only was I falling asleep in class and having to worry about staying awake, but also my oddly circulating blood was constantly causing my desk to tighten around my genital region. In terms of distractions from one’s lessons, that was a double whammy.

This happened to me with such frequency that I began to track it. I found that it was at approximately 10:33 AM every day that a major DB event would occur, more often than not brought on by nodding off and violently waking over and over. I shared this with a few of my friends, and they were very excited (although, you know, not in that way) to start keeping stats on their own DBs. It was tremendous fun. I recommend this activity to any high school student interested in learning more about human biology. It would no doubt make a fine science project.

I finished high school, and my body started to settle down a bit after puberty, but by no means did the DBs cease; college classes brought them back with an unparalled vigor. It would get so bad that I would sometimes be forced to excuse myself from class briefly and go for a short walk and wait for everything to settle down in that area. The feeling could be described as unpleasant pleasure. It felt good, but the good feeling was an irritant instead of what it should normally be, and only on rare occasions did it inspire sexual thoughts or activity. Of course, I can only speak for myself.

Years have passed, and while I am still affected by DB on a regular basis, it is no longer the daily scourge it had been in my adolescent days. I am enrolled in school once again and there is actually a considerable difference between the way my body behaves now as compared to then.

I was quite surprised then, at what happened on the train ride home from school earlier this evening. I was sitting with my backpack on my lap riding the Evanston Express, which has a tendency to travel fast. When we reached our top speed, the train began rocking, and my bag began bouncing up and down in my lap; thus beginning a curious new phenomenon, “Train Backpack Boner” or TBB. I was nodding off as the train sped along, and barely noticed the bouncing bag or burgeoning TBB.

When we pulled into the terminal, I moved to stand up only to discover that the bouncing bag on my lap had coaxed my TBB through the fly flaps of my practical yet sexy boxer briefs and down into the leg of my gunmetal grey summer shorts. I stood up, and the bulge was obvious. It looked a bit like I had an oblong object in one of my front pockets. In a sense, I did. As I changed trains, I noted how the TBB was very much like a DB except that it was a bit more portable. The fact that my TBB was an open-air variation made it that much more persistent and potentially noticeable. Fortunately, I had opted to carry my backpack by the handle in front of myself rather than put it on my back, which probably looked suspicious but was much better than the alternative. Three stations down the track, it finally went away.

I thought my readers who are unfamiliar with the foibles of male genitalia would find this fascinating, and hopefully the more johnson-savvy members of my readership found something in here with which to empathize as well.

My discussion of this unpleasant matter is now complete. And now, back to the family-friendly programming for which the Lucubus Network has earned renown.