You Might Be a Zombie . . . (19 page)

4. IN A POOL

Of course you could always dodge nature’s poo filter by having some good clean sex in a far more sanitary (looking) chlorinated swimming pool. What could be hotter than dipping your naked hide in clear azure water, while a pool noodle bobs obscenely along with your ungainly and hard-to-maintain humping?

It turns out pool sex has the unwholesome side effect of teaching you just how poorly water works as a lubricant while forcing chemical y treated liquids deep into easily infected regions. According to research by the University of California, Santa Barbara, if turkey basted into the wrong places, even chlorinated pool water contains enough bacteria to lead to yeast and urinary tract infections.

The aforementioned issue with lubrication leads to something science types cal
microtears
but that you’re going to be more likely to cal “tiny, painful rips in my junk.” That’s why having sex in a pool greatly increases the risk of STDs and, more disastrously, pruny zombie wang.

If you’re looking to avoid chlorine with some manner of ocean scuba sex, dive researcher David F. Colvard, MD, would like you to know that having sex underwater can lead to your losing track of important things like buoyancy. You could end up floating to the surface too quickly, giving yourself an embolism. Now, we’re not underwater sex doctors, like Dr. Colvard back there, but an embolism is probably a total will y wilter.

3. IN A CAR

The idea of getting nasty in a car, or
road head,
as Mom used to cal it, is a staple of the not-so-exotic fantasy life of many people. Back in the 1950s, everyone was taking their girl up to make-out point to pump her ful of babies on luxurious leather upholstery. As time went on, people apparently decided parked-car sex simply didn’t endanger enough lives and moved on to having sex while driving. Hey, who doesn’t like a little eroticism to break up the monotony of steering a fast-moving chunk of metal and flammable liquids?

How about the innocent bystander, whose last memory is being plowed into by a Subaru ful of naked humping yuppie? When a Connecticut woman

was charged with causing a car wreck that kil ed a man, she tried to use the fact that she was mid-blow-job in her defense. While it’s unclear what reaction she was hoping for (“Oh, she had a dick in her mouth, well, happens to the best of us I suppose!”), the argument only helped convince the jury that her mother and father had failed as parents.

Even humping in the back of a taxi carries risks beyond making a cameo on HBO. Unless you’re grotesquely double jointed, it’s pretty hard to wear a seat belt while having sex, and those come in handy when the cabdriver’s attention is being split between the road and the plate-glass divider ful of squeaking pink ass directly over his right shoulder.

2. ON AN AIRPLANE

The mile high club is the ultimate fantasy for everyone who’s still stuck in the 1970s and has a limited imagination. If porn is any indication, stewardesses of yore were tal , skanky, and whol y unqualified to do their jobs. Even in the nonporno universe, you’re in an exotic place, high above the earth, and sharing close quarters with nothing to do. Who can blame you for getting a little amorous?

Well, the police for starters: You can be arrested for joining the mile high club. There are also the potential safety risks. Plane sex is the only item on this list that combines the reckless risks of having sex in a car with the potential diseases of having sex in a location that’s teaming with poop. A twofer!

And we’re pretty sure the payoff isn’t worth it. Airplane bathrooms aren’t famous for their roominess. Joining the mile high club is like having sex in a kitchen cabinet, if your kitchen cabinet has a bunch of faucets and handles inside and an audience of total strangers sitting within earshot of your clumsy, apologetic humping.

1. THE WOODS

Few things are more romantic than packing up for a weekend, heading to the great outdoors, getting a fire going, pitching a tent, and then crawling inside with your honey for some awkward, claustrophobic sex on uneven ground.

Unfortunately, while nature enthusiasts may enjoy the freedom of humping under the stars, park officials say there’s some cause for alarm. See, you won’t just
look
like two sausages trying to fit in the same casing as you hump away in your sleeping bags. There are parts of the food chain where that shit smel s like dinner.

Specifically, the bear part.

Park rangers in bear country caution against having sex for the same reason they caution against dipping a fresh salmon in honey and putting it down your pants. A bear thinks the juices your body produces during sex smel delicious. The better the sex, the more likely that sound you just heard isn’t “just your pants. A bear thinks the juices your body produces during sex smel delicious. The better the sex, the more likely that sound you just heard isn’t “just the fire settling in for the night.”

And while we apologize for how difficult that’s going to make it to ever achieve an orgasm in anything even resembling an outdoor setting, why would you want to? While some sex may be worth getting arrested by an air marshal, we’re hard pressed to present a single sexual experience on record that’s worth a bear attack.

THANKS
to dedicated doctors and researchers, the number of common objects and activities you must fear has multiplied a thousandfold. Every day, medical professionals work toward a humanitarian goal centuries old: to catalog every possible way you can get sick and die.

5. ART

Stendhal syndrome is an “attack of dizziness, confusion, elevated heartbeat, or hal ucination upon exposure to great works of art.” It was first diagnosed in the nineteenth century, when Stendhal took a trip to Florence and got a face ful of aesthetical y transcendent disease. Since then, there have been 107 documented sufferers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The diagnosis’s stipulation that the art must be great raises a number of troubling and ridiculous questions. Do doctors in the general proximity of the Louvre have a list of the works that qualify as great? Do they throw up their hands in befuddlement when patients fly into seizures at the sight of art the medical establishment deems “pretty good” or “just aight”? Could it be that Stendhal syndrome is simply a snootier version of the syndrome that teenage girls have been suffering from at Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake concerts for years?

Until more is known, doctors recommend steering clear of anything that has shown even the slightest whiff of cultural value. Or they would if you couldn’t also get seizures from . . .

4. MARY HART’S VOICE

Mary Hart’s voice has always been known to hold tremendous power. It can determine what passes for tonight’s entertainment or sink a budding celebrity romance before it ever gets off the ground. But as recorded in a 1991
New England Journal of Medicine
article, it can also cause violent epileptic seizures. The article relates the case of a woman who, upon hearing Hart’s voice, suffered “an abnormal electrical discharge in the brain, disorientation, nausea, and headaches.” She only got the seizures when she watched
Entertainment Tonight
, and they stopped as soon as she switched stations.

Doctors cal the syndrome reflex epilepsy, and almost anything can trigger it. People have been known to go into fits after seeing Pokémon cartoons, looking at the logo for the 2012 Olympics, playing Nintendo, or hearing the Sean Paul song “Temperature.” Although most doctors agree that the last one was merely an appropriate response to the stimulus.

The fact is, you may not even know you
have
reflex epilepsy until you run into your trigger. One minute you’re asking the friendly clerk at IKEA how to pronounce the name of the duvet you’ve just purchased, the next minute you’re flopping on the floor trying to swal ow your own tongue. The only way to truly be safe is to keep a piece of leather clenched between your teeth at all times.

3. HULA HOOPS

That hula hoop col ecting cobwebs in your garage may wel be the deadliest plastic circle since the O-rings on the
Challenger
. In 1992, a Beijing man was hospitalized with a twisted intestine after “playing excessively” with a hula hoop. Chinese papers said that the case was the third in a few weeks and blamed it on a hula hoop craze sweeping China at the time. This also represented the first time the phrase “hula hoop craze” had been printed in a newspaper since the thirties.

Fortunately, the Beijing man was treated successful y and eventual y able to return to work (presumably deep in an unstable coal mine). Not so lucky was the Korean woman admitted in 2006 for a perirenal hematoma developed after six months of routine “violent hula hooping.” In case you don’t know what a perirenal hematoma is, that means the hula hoop
made blood come out of her kidneys
. It looks like you’re going to have to somehow resist the lure of violently hula hooping for long periods of time.

If you’re starting to think that the only way to avoid death is to shut yourself inside your house, don’t worry . . .

2. STAYING SAFELY INDOORS

Over the last decade or so, a wide range of seemingly unrelated il nesses have started to be attributed to sick building syndrome, which is basical y any disease you get just by being inside. Victims have reported everything from headaches and fatigue to hair loss and neurological problems, all tied to starting work at a new building or moving into a new house. Because their symptoms differ so widely, and because “coming into work makes me sick” sounds like the lamest excuse ever, the disease wasn’t even really studied until recently.

The current theory is that newer buildings, which are better insulated than old ones, may be too airtight for their own good, trapping toxic gasses and causing air to stagnate. And that air is filled with all the dust, gas, and molecular detritus left over from the construction process, as wel as whatever stray compounds the drying paint and setting concrete decide to contribute. Think of it like a bal oon ful of poison, except you work inside the bal oon, and instead of it being someone’s birthday party, your hair is falling out in clumps. Also, most people you tell about your illness call you a crazy liar.