John Updike.

When I was out last month catching up with my one animation professor friend from the art school where I used to work, we somehow got on the subject of favorite authors, and and I began talking about how my favorite authors back in high school were John Updike and Margaret Atwood, both of whose work features a disproportionate amount of middle-aged people having languid affairs amidst feelings of social sterility and inner emptiness, just over and over and over in different variants, and I pretty much kept picking up one after another of their books, for like all of my teenage years.

We then started talking about the Rabbit series, and it was weird, he remembered major plot points, and I more remembered the weird little bits like a guy standing next to the stove and rubbing out a load into a pan of scrambled eggs his wife was cooking up on the morning after the night of their honeymoon, or barging in on your daughter-in-law in the bathtub and seeing her bright red pubes.

I haven't thought of that shit in years, and though I only read that stuff once way back when, it stuck with me, after all of these years.

It's funny, I've said for a while now that these 4 interests travel together:

1) Cults;

2) Weird sex;

3) The historical Jesus; and

4 Serial killers. 

Looking back, I got my cults and serial killers interest from pop culture shit, and my interest in the historical Jesus from my high school religion class, but the weird sex stuff I might have gotten from John Updike, and also the Thornbirds (my plot summary of it: "a woman f*cks a priest in the outback").

Life sure was different, back before the internet.

I also remember that in the Witches of Eastwick, the devil's penis curved downwards, not up.