3 Times Sweating Ruined My Life
I sweated my way out of a job, a date and, nearly, a relationship.
The Day of 100 Handshakes
I was off to my first day on the job and I was in the same ongoing rush I have been in since my hasty birth. There was time for exactly none of my eight non-negotiable minutes to cool off outside. So with a ‘fuck it’ under my breath, I fastened on my work personality and braced myself for the piping-warm reception.
My new boss appeared and faltered for just a fraction of a second as she took in the specimen dripping into her employ. The introduction sunk. I couldn’t exude any charm along with the prickling sweat. After a suction-grip handshake, my boss felt it was high time I was introduced to the team. “Great!” I said. “Great.” I thought.
Like a bashful toddler dragged away from a game of 40-40 in, she walked me up to an island of desks at a time.
“Guys, this is Sam. He’s our new shirted globule, and he’ll be sweating with us, over in the Odious & Rank department.”
“Alright.” I pursed out, through the waterfall. 6 or so at a time, they turned away from their screens and their blank faces filled with pity. They all switched on some scripted work patter, like ‘We’re all a bit bloody Cer-RAZY down here in R&D’ and in response, I sweated more.
On and on the tour went. Each batch of stale intros stoked my embarrassment, keeping my body boiling over.
That morning I had hurried into a light blue shirt, because it met all the criteria: it was both a shirt and there. But, light blue does not go with a skin type that seeps.
The sweat patches first surfaced under my armpits. “Alright.” I clamped my arms to my side and offered out robotic, short-range handshakes. “Alright.” The moisture speckled on my chest, then my back. “Alright.” "Alright.” "Alright….”
The awareness of my dampness was hanging so thick in the air, you could damn near drink it with a spoon, but it was absolutely not up for discussion.
My very first day and I bagged the first prize in the staff wet shirt contest, but as the only entrant, I also came last too. A few litres later, I had greased the palms of the whole office floor (apart from a few women who experienced a rare upside of institutional sexism), and I breathed out. It was over.
“Right! Upstairs, now!” Rather than face the entry-level embarrassment of acknowledging that I was drenched through, she thought it better to parade me through 3 more floors of pained interactions.
Somewhere on the 2nd floor, I decided this was my final day here. Reframing all these introductions as farewells made them a lot easier.
Hot Sex
For sweaty fuckers, Summer Lovin’ is nothing to sing about. Nothing quite gets a trickle-on like supporting your own body weight, while throwing it into another warm-bodied mammal.
On a hot day, my sexual style is: porous walrus. Trust me, I'm not producing the silky beads of passion from a Mexican art house romance. More, blobs of cascading effort that pool in the eyesockets of anyone unlucky enough to be involved.
Sex underneath me is like being mounted by an apologetic, albino Blastoise. Actually, maybe Blastoise looks a bit too sexually dominant, with that randy glint and all that Big Turret Energy. Probably, more like an evening in the slippery clutches of a plucky mid-level Wartortle, flapping away inside you.
The furnace of my desires burns too hot for this world. In hot weather, subjecting my girlfriend to sex is as unsexy as sex can sex. The sweat is a moment killer, via drowning. In the height of Italian summer, in one slapstick cross-room sex transition, I went bone-over-tit in my own manmade puddle. Well-a, well-a, well-a, HUH!
Hot Date
The date was going pretty well so far, probably because I was yet to arrive. But the fucking whereabouts of this fucking place did not seem to be where I was about, and a fluster was rising in my cuffs.
I had chosen a long camel coat to disguise myself as a person who wears a long camel coat. Oozing cool was the hope - oh and ooze I did, alright.
As rehearsed, my coat and me swished around the corner, and we met and I totally kissed her square on the cheek. Then I removed the coat, with all the relief of someone taking an actual humps ‘n’ all camel off their back.
The bar was full of other humans emitting their safe levels of body heat, but I am not what they are, so I started doing my thang, profusely. I drew attention to the facial drizzle to try and own it, but a damp brow is slippery ground to start flirting on. She was outwardly sweet, but inwardly already not responding to my texts.
Cold booze lessened the flow and my focus was just moving back to her, when she suggested we plug our holey convo with some music downstairs. My reply: “No. That slight change of temperature will bring about a great flood that will obliterate any of the remaining scraps of attraction you may have for me,” came out as “yeah, sure, great, sounds good.” The affirmative quartet of a desperate, desperate, sweaty man.
Down in the venue, I seeped to the Irish folk music, which is a fairly jaunty sweat output. She danced, and I did something about as close to standing as dancing gets. My only agenda was pivoting our conversation under the sweet relief of the air vents.
“Do you.. do you maybe want to go somewhere... cooler?” In that moment, how I yearned to lay my head on the fresh steel slab of a local morgue, where death’s ice-cool embrace could chill this experience from me. "Yeah, please," I dripped.
At the end of the night, we both took part in a dry-enough kiss. We’d both persevered, and it seemed like the right thing to do. Safe to say I never heard from her again.