Last night, I propped up my laptop, the laptop I am writing this on, in my bathroom sink and put on some porn. I looked at myself in the big mirror for a moment and took my dick out of my pants and just stood there. Then I raised the pistol in my right hand and pointed it at my head. I looked at myself in the mirror again and then looked back at the porn. I grabbed my dick with my left hand and laughed, realizing I would have to awkwardly flip my gun hand and my cock hand. Interestingly, although I can only jerk off with my dominant hand, I can pull the trigger of a handgun with either.

The first time I looked at myself in a mirror with a gun in hand was not long ago, maybe a bit more than a month. It was the same mirror in the same bathroom with the same gun. I was not, however, watching porn the last time I did this.

As I shuffle my hands, I decide to check and make sure the gun is loaded. I hesitate ever so briefly as I do this. Do I want to die? Do I want to risk accidentally shooting myself with my dick out and porn on? I let out the most cliched exhale of my life and decide that while I am unsure of the answer to the first question, I do not care about the answer to the second. It is a 1911 Colt .45, a good gun. Big, heavy, dependable. There had not been a bullet in the chamber like I had thought, but there is now. I put it in my left hand and point it at my head again, looking at myself in the mirror. My cock is about halfway erect, and I realize how ridiculous I look standing there, barrel to my temple with a dick limping over the side of the bathroom vanity. I take a few pictures with my phone for posterity’s sake.

But if I had wanted to focus on self-loathing, I would not be watching porn, so I look back down into my sink. It’s good, the porn, and my cock starts growing again, rapidly. I let it get completely hard before I start jerking off. I had been watching porn for hours before this moment, so once I start stroking, I am practically ready to cum. I pause and look at myself in the mirror again.

Somewhat to my surprise, I am still there. The gun is still pressed firmly to my head, finger on the trigger. My undershirt still looks thinned and dirty and my dick is hard and hovering above the sink. It looks out of place, almost as if someone photoshopped a dick into a “just before the suicide” photo as some kind of grim joke for 4Chan. My brain is all mushy from the porn, and the weirdness of it all really jumps out at me. Why is this goofy kid jerking off with a gun to his head? Why not just jerk off or kill yourself; who does both at the same time? It is a fair question, especially coming from the guy who is doing it. The answer is not coming, though.

I think about the last time I was here, pointing this gun at my head in this bathroom earlier last month. I have felt better since then, quite better. There have been so many ups and downs. But here we are again. The house always wins, patriarchy always reigns, etc. Nothing productive will come of me staring at myself like this, so I look back down into the porn. It is still there and still good.

There is a scene in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls where Robert Jordan briefly recalls his grandfather’s gun. It was the gun he had used in America’s Civil War (Robert Jordan, you will recall, is actively fighting in Spain’s last Civil War). It was also the gun Robert Jordan’s father (the gun’s owner’s son) used to kill himself with. The memory is fleeting and not dwelt on again. As best I can recall, how Robert Jordan’s grandfather himself died is never said. Nor is the reason for the suicide ever explained. Jordan just notes that, “He understood his father and he forgave him everything and he pitied him but he was ashamed of him.” It has always haunted me. The book’s ending does not help with this problem. As I get older, I keep going back to the fact that at a certain point in their lives, both my father and his mother decided to go on antidepressants with no intention of ever stopping. My father started in his fifties, holding out longer than my grandmother, who started in her forties. Both of them had started and stopped having children by the time they surrendered to the embrace of chemical-induced okayness. That detail has always struck me as meaningful, hard to say why. I read For Whom the Bell Tolls before I knew any of this. I read it before I saw my dad try and kill himself too. Or did I read it right before that? It was right around then, anyway. No matter; my gun does not have such a rich history, I just got it from a buddy; don’t know where he got it from. I think about all of this as I stand there and jerk off slowly, with the gun to my head gripped as firmly as my cock.

It is likely time to go on the meds, too, I decide. Unless, of course, this gun goes off first. It wasn’t long after that musing that I came. I had thought the jolt of cumming, and how it tenses the whole body, might be what it took to get that trigger finger just tight enough, but it was not the case.