Not getting a hard-on isn’t the worse thing that can happen to you. My old roommate had this friend, Gino, who was a rich manager for some oil company at the ripe age of 26. We’d go to parties at his apartment, and he’d annoyingly brag about his expensive TV and stereo system and expensive lines of the *best quality* coke.

Then one day he started smoking crack, gradually pawned his stuff, and for the next two or three years I saw him every time I went by the homeless shelter, in tattered rags and shit. He’s probably thirty, thirty-one, and he looks like he’s fucking eighty. Last time I was in Calgary, I ran into him on the street and he told me that he was going up north to run one of the oil-rigs. Judging from his smell and lengthy neck-beard and crack-head eyes, probably not.