Pond Slime

There are some things that you don’t think of as sexy. Some things that would never pop into your head and make you think of getting jiggy. For example, filling out your tax return, Woman’s Realm, John Prescott … you know what I mean.

So take pond slime. Grab a stick and thrust it into the bottom of the local duck pond, when you draw it out it will be covered in green and brown accretions consisting of single celled protozoa, algae, alluvial sediment and duck shit. And it’ll smell pretty bad too, especially the bubbles that you’d liberate as the rotting vegetation on the bottom of the pond releases trapped pockets of methane and sulphurous gasses. Very un-sexy and not a sensory experience that one would wish on anyone but their worst enemy.

Now remove the smell and imagine sensing the swirling green and brown sludge, punctuated by jewel-like bubbles. Imagine that slowly evolving mass of colour merging with the peak of your orgasm and spreading across your body from your groin like a second skin.

To you it may sound gross but it’s probably the most accurate way of describing my synaesthesia I can come up with at the moment. My experiences are not always like that, the colours vary slowly over the days and weeks, but there is a certain palette. They are not what you’d classically think of as sexy colours, for the most part the past few weeks have been brown and green with a little vibrant blue thrown in. It’s rare that there are reds or purples, what you’d perhaps think of as “couleur de l’amour”, but they do make an appearance occasionally.

Bear in mind I don’t see the colours either, I feel them. The “colours” have a kind of three-dimensional quality, now I can’t explain it any better than that, they have a texture and character. I suppose it’s the mixing of the sense that makes them more than the sum of their parts. If I find a way to better describe them I’ll let you all know.

The reason I mention the pond slime is that I just got that swirling earthy mix of hue when I reached orgasm this evening. A very intense orgasm with a very strong synaesthetic experience to accompany it.

Tags: Synaesthesia, synesthesia, John Prescott