But how could parents know? They never bumped me over this matter… I remembered how a while ago my aunt Zina came to my apartment in Moscow and when she was walking into the kitchen she managed to read a small part of the rules I wrote for myself on a piece of paper that I attached to the door’s glass so that I could see it every day and remember. The rules were as follows: do not masturbate; do not quarrel with mom; do not talk to yourself (stop fantasizing when it is not necessary); educate yourself and learn something new. The order might have been a little different, but masturbation was definitely in the first place.

I think at this point I should get a little ahead of myself and say that my parents never talked to me about sex at all, and therefore did not explain anything to me. Perhaps they even once saw me with the guy with whom we were fooling around out of childhood ignorance. I do not hold a grudge, but this is a lesson to other parents – you should teach your children about sex by yourself; but for that you need to know about sex yourself (I will talk about this important topic later in my book). At school, not only the teachers almost did not explain about sex, but also when in high school during biology lessons we were taught the anatomy of the genitals, many, if not all, students already knew about sex from the Internet, magazines, conversations with other people, and also from their sexual experience. Then the topic of sex caused some kind of weird smiles in adults, which psychologically had a certain influence on me, and I could not talk about sex as an ordinary thing that does not bother you at all.

At the dacha I tried to write something, but my head was constantly tired because of my imagination, and I could not work for long.

When I arrived in Moscow, I decided to go to a free lecture of one film producer from America. The only thing I took away from there was a saying about a cat sitting on the window, meaning that you should not give up if the first pancake came out lumpy, as they say in Russia. I also could not notice yet another blonde who came to the lecture with her friend. As it was usually the case with me in those years, I did not dare to go up to them and simply ask if they liked the lecture, for example, or whether they were writing something at that moment – in other words start a conversation.

That evening, when I barely walked a few hundred meters from the venue for the lecture, a blonde woman stopped me on the street and asked a question that seemed a little strange to me at the time, since I thought that she should have known the answer herself. After some time it dawned on me that perhaps she wanted to get to know me in this way, but because of the difference in age, or because of the facial expressions of my slightly strained face, or because of my lip – and maybe due to all three reasons – she did not try to continue our communication then. Of course, I understand that I can be mistaken about the real nature of the whole episode…

I think that because of the mixture of some religious texts that I read a long time ago in my search for the meaning of life, and because of the seemingly endless demands of my body to have sex, which often prevented my mind from being completely concentrated, I almost began to consider sex to be a sin and something bad.

Perhaps it was the above-mentioned events that caused the next dream, in which the merchandiser girl I liked and that not at all shy guy had sex. She lay on her back on a bed that was standing as if in pitch darkness, and his body was perpendicular to her – this was the same pose that Natasha and I tried for the last time, but then I still did not see this symbolism… I woke up and I had a very unpleasant feeling from that dream. There were several reasons. Firstly, I still liked that girl. Secondly, for a long time I tried not to think about sex since I already began to experience negative emotions when I heard from conversations of real people that they were having it. Then I thought that dream to be almost a mockery of me, not understanding its true meaning – that dream could have been another