You are in a support group, for people whose sex lives have been forever bent by the dimensions of meth-sex. A year after cleaning up, you’d be in a mall, say, or a parking lot, with your girlfriend, and you felt like a goat with a suit on, walking on hind legs. After going full-animal, for so long, you couldn’t just come back. After that, even the most mundane behavior—basically, anything that did not involve having sex or taking narcotics (sucking or fucking) just did not make sense. How did people go to the post office? The counselors call it “re-entry issues.”

In the old days you’d have to chemically arm yourself against the ubiquitous Muzak—what was Nirvana beamed into the housewares aisle without a chemical stimulant to make it all mean something—instead of just feeling like the end of the world, if the end of the world turned out to be a non-stop loop of blatant product placement and bad reality show out-takes designed holographically to look like your life? You never liked Frank Sinatra, but you could never forget his line about going on the wagon. “I can’t understand people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” There’s something to that.

“America has become a Nation of Chronic Masturbators. Speed and internet marathoned the merely chronic into the non-stop. Lots of Americans had nothing to do. Hands went into pants, among Americans who still bothered to wear pants. You didn’t have to, if you were unemployed; you didn’t want to, if you were on speed. The United States of Sore and Poor.

Now, those other great mobile Americans, big rig jockeys, steered sixteen wheelers for days straight (wait an extra day and the price of diesel could rise) one-handing it the whole time. A new malady was bringing them into hospitals—the five day penis chafe. Product of non-stop cross country tugging. The prevalence was so overwhelming, emergency room nurses had to come up with a name for it. They settled on Truckers’ Leather.

Rape was also on the rise. But maybe there was an overlap between rapists and masturbators. Go watch Law & Order: SVU. Keep up on the news! Law & Order reruns are actually a subset of Tweakers. At any time of day or night, in the universe of cable, you can tune into Law & Order. Another way you didn’t have to deal with life—or the reality that you didn’t have one. You can’t snort Jerry Orbach.

When life becomes sub-human, sub-humans come alive.

Speed Self-Abuse was a subject dear to truckers, where the first depictions of Ebola-chafe AKA the aforementioned Truckers’ Leather, started showing up in a truck stop men’s room graffiti. The Legend of Hemorrhoid Bob. The real old school pros called their dicks “trucker clocks,” cause it always told them when to take a break—and it was always twelve o’clock when they spotted something to fuck. Jackballers would crack wise about the staph infections they got from rubbing themselves bloody on cross country jaunts, smacking the mackerel to old school Dark Brothers porn on the dashboard, from Bangor, Maine to Needles, California.