I gasped back to life.

The alarm is ringing. It’s 5 a.m. Time to get to work.

I dragged myself to the desk, which was just right next to my bed. The night before I made sure I got everything prepared—laptop, pad, post-its, pens and bookmarked books. Distractions gone, wi-fi’s off, and I’m all ready to go.

But my heart just wasn’t in it.

“I don’t know about this,” my heart said. “I’m just not inspired. Perhaps if we read something spell-binding while watching the city unveil with colored vapors I will—”

“Nigga, please!” my penis stiffly said. It was always up before anybody else. “It’s cold outside and my balls are all shriveled up over here. We’re staying indoors and we’re watching porn. Wake and wax, that’s what we’re gonna do.”

“Silence, you filth!” my heart shot back. “We did not make our way from worm to man just to sink to your level! We shall not do this again! Today we break the habit! Today we ascend to our full potential and achieve that supreme moment without any interruptions from you, thank you very much!”

“Eat shit and felate me, bitch!”

Suddenly a frightening frenzy crossed my eyes as I felt my guts gurgle underneath.

“Yall be talkin some bullshit up there,” my asshole said. “We already eat laak shit. Ah mean this all protein diet’s got me shittin bricks for reals. And in case yall didn’t get the memo, ah ain’t doin my job again without fiber. Ah mean last time it felt laak ah was bein ripped asunder! Laak ah was bein shanghained to Satan!”

An argument ensued between my heart, penis and asshole. Get inspired, jerk off, go to the bathroom! Get inspired, jerk off, go to the bathroom! Get inspired, jerk off, go to the bathroom!

Then my brain booted up and brought order to the court. “ORDER! ORDER! ORDER!” It commanded. “What seems to be the problem here? Haven’t we all discussed this before? What’re all these time-wasting nonsense?”

Everybody pointed at someone saying, “he started it!” But before another squabble could erupt my brain proceeded to take command.

“The only questions we should be asking ourselves are: How many pageviews will our content generate? How will we bring traffic to our website? Do we have a keyword density of 3 to 5% with relevant semantic indexing? Now we’ve looked at the stats, studied the system, and we know how this works. By now we should have on-page SEOs. We should have keywords in our titles. We should have H-tags spread across our articles and we should—”

“Stick a finger up your ass and rub one out!” the penis cut in.

“What did you say?”

“Keywords, traffic, SEO, who gives a fuck?” The penis cracked with ice in his laughter. “Whatever you wanna call it and however you wanna micro-manage it, we’ve all become whores. That’s what we are and that’s all we could ever be. So I say just go ahead and keep jerking me off!”

An annihilating silence filled the room. Like a sudden realization, the truth slowly and severely became clear.

How could I lose track of things? How could I lose myself and forget what this was all about?

“I hate to admit it,” my heart said. “But penis is right. We’ve all become slaves and panderers. We have joined the ranks of the sick and the perishing, the decaying and the poisoned ones. We have forgotten who we are and have become something in-between a corpse and a clown.”

“Look I understand you’re all upset,” my brain began troubleshooting. “I know you’re uninspired. I know you’re sexually frustrated. But these are the sacrifices we have to make. We knew this coming in, didn’t we? These are the things we have to do in order to win, in order to give value, and we can’t do this without working together. Now you know I’m always open for suggestions. What did we miss? How can we solve it? What’s the problem?”

“Neglect,” my asshole piped up. “Ah mean at some point everybody just stopped listenin to each other. Laak no one cares about fiber n shit. But you know they say that ‘the most despicable man is a man who can no longer despise himself,’ and that’s exactly what’s happenin here. Neglect. It’s the father of all affliction. I’m just sayin.”

Absorbed in disinfecting thought, my brain pondered all that was said. It was true. Somewhere along the way I lost perspective on what I held sacred, and I forgot why I started this whole thing in the first place. I forgot to have fun.

“Yeah, man,” my penis shook his head. “We have no social circle, we haven’t been laid in a while, and we haven’t even shaved our balls for the last six months. Now I feel like shit, like some stepmonkey or something.”

“I concur,” my heart agreed. “It was never about being sensational and vicious just to please others. It’s about speaking your neighbor’s devils, your love and anguish with magnificence! It’s about speaking your war with the diction of God!”

“Yeah, man.” My penis nodded. “It’s all about the feels. Feel it in the plums.”

With fire in my eyes I filtered out what was real and what was not. It had been there the whole time, I just neglected it.

But then, with the force of an earthquake, my asshole sounded the alarms. “RED ALERT! RED ALERT! EVERYBODY OUT!”

So I got up, went to the bathroom, bombed the Taliban, jerked off, got inspired and did what I was supposed to do all along.