Every day on my way home from work I pass the local library, and every day I do my best to resist the urge to go in and browse.

“But Y?” you axe, “reading is gud!”

True. Reading is “gud”. But perhaps, it is a little too good. I try hard to keep my reading under control but the fact that I just made the statement “I try hard to keep my reading under control” is pretty solid evidence that I have a problem.

I’ll read everything, up to and including the labels on however many of Mistress’s shampoo bottles I can reach when i’m taking a poopy, but I vastly prefer genre fiction. I like science fiction, and I like fantasy. I enjoy them because spaceships and magic are fucking sweet, and also because the real world is dumb as hell. In the real world I have to do distasteful things like go to work, and grocery shop, and pay child support. When i’m reading a good book however, i’m no longer stuck in the real world. I’m living in whatever fantastical, outrageous, fictional realm the author du jour has created. I willingly immerse myself in this sweet escape as thoroughly as possible, and I deeply resent anything that pulls me back from it.

This is the root of my problem. Once I begin a new book, I want to finish it in one uninterrupted session. If i’m forced away from it for any reason, even if it’s for my second favorite activity, which of course is sexy sex on top of a mountain of cocaine, I grow surly and unpleasant to be around. If I’m reading a longer body of work that simply can’t be inhaled in one sitting, I tend to be withdrawn and distracted while i’m stuck doing other activities, since i’m just counting down the minutes until I can crawl back into my fortress of solitude and forget the world again.

As you can well imagine, this tends to put a strain on my relationships, since my reading process is usually to grab as many books as I can carry, and cloister myself in my reading lair for days at a time, surfacing only infrequently for snacks. Mistress understands this about me, and does her best to cater to my absurd habits, but even a saintess will eventually grow tired of having their boyfriend turn into a cranky hermit every time he discovers another mangy old paperback.

I love reading. If I had no outside obligations and an endless supply of new literature, I know I would happily spend the entirety of my existence doing my best to escape from that self same existence by reading ceaselessly, until I physically turned into an amorphous meat beast, and died alone and pitiful.

That is why I hate myself when I read. Am I the only one?