Sobjectification : (n) feeling sad that you feel bad about yourself for sexually objectifying people around you.

Lee’s body was shaking, his shoulders aching.  He woke up at 2:12 a.m., feeling aroused and disappointed.  Why had he objectified the women in his life yesterday, the old defense mechanism that almost went away but showed up again unannounced?

His body only shook like this when his set of states of energy were rattled severely — at the end of running a marathon on a 25 deg F day, the first time he kissed a woman and the first time he kissed a man, the first interview for a real desk job, the first time he made love to a married woman, standing in a funeral home parlour greeting friends and family of his dead brother in-law.

At his age, shaking could be the early signs of many neurological disorders, not just psychoemotional moments.

Lee’s chest felt like a tree trunk being struck by a hammer.  He needed something to calm his nerves.

He turned to the script to check where in the current round of world politics his thoughts were supposed to be aligned…

23 November 1957. Open Letter to Eisenhower and Khrushchev by Bertrand Russell,” published in the New Statesman, followed by a response from Nikita Khruschev on 21 December 1957, with a reply on Eisenhower’s behalf by John Foster Dulles, published on 8 February 1958.

Lee’s shudders got worse.  He wasn’t supposed to see he was stuck in an endless tape loop, the sound quality deteriorating playback by playback, his thoughts disintegrating into repetitious nonsense.

Shouldn’t he care where he stood on the alpha male hierarchy of his times?  “To know is to do” he was told by the advice of history.

If the universe was here for Lee’s entertainment, why wasn’t his body as entertained as his pondered theories of social engineering?

Why did he revert to objectifying women’s bodies just when he was making a breakthrough?

Why did he let his wife’s withholding of her body for sexual activity influence him in any way, make him feel unwanted, unused, unworthy of attention by the opposite sex?

Was his body’s uncontrolled shivering related merely to caffeine withdrawal?

Yesterday, Lee was sitting in a room with his wife and two people interested in closing a deal to manage Lee’s finances for the rest of his life, taking his hard-earned millions and returning to him an annual “salary,” pension or annuity as a monetary security blanket to hold until he died, depositing his funds in a bank that contains the wealth of others in the entertainment business, from Hollywood to Nashville.

Money had no meaning to Lee.  Never had, never will.  He only understood purchasing power.

Money never bought Lee happiness.  Lee was always happy in his pursuit of knowledge to aid his quest to reorder the words in his vocabulary, long ago knowing that something as mundane as the changing patterns of dust on a wall could entertain him for days.

Money bought Lee new knowledge — he could overwhelm his senses with knowledge or he could add to his knowledge base one coal pitch drop of tar at a time.

Nervousness had crept into Lee’s thoughts yesterday that he had shifted into the habit of sexual objectification to give himself the false impression he was above the petty feeling of being nervous, one of his passive-aggressive attitudes he wanted to change.

What if he had told the investors that he was nervous about his life’s fortune being managed by complete strangers and hadn’t turned to seeing one of the investors, who happened to be female, as sexually desirable at the very moment he needed to concentrate on third sigma distributions of financial risk management and Monte Carlo simulations?

What if he had told his dance partner, who complained of aching body parts, that he wanted to say he’d rub her foot if she’d rub his because his foot was really hurting but he was afraid admitting his foot hurt would sound like a weak excuse and worried, too, that the request to barter one foot rub for another due to his lack of cash fluidity would be mistaken as a sexual come-on because he couldn’t get the confusing sexual objectification out of the thoughts of the new Lee?

Self diagnosis of one’s thought patterns in the mental game of self therapy could or could not be as slow or fast as professional psychosocial therapy.

Lee was a cheapskate.  His visions of life were not grand enough to include hoarding vast sums of institutional level financial security.  He knew he had to depend on someone else’s financial expertise to keep him out of debtor’s prison but it didn’t mean he had to like the idea or be able to sleep fear-free at night.

How was Lee going to deprogram his sexual objectification when he was nervous?

He finished a mug of Earl Gray tea, never quite sure if the caffeine calmed his nerves, his writing calmed his nerves or if an unknown script writer gave the actor Patrick Stewart a character named Jean-Luc Picard who moved a lot of people to drink Earl Gray tea because they really believed that they themselves discovered it tasted better than other flavours of tea, coffee or sources with “natural” stimulants.

Lee mentally apologised to the women he saw yesterday, setting in motion his newly-minted curmudgeon self to tell the next woman he saw, “Look, I’m a bit nervous.  Either I can share with you what’s really going on in my thoughts right now, which are really not socially-kosher at this moment, or I can stare at your boobs and ass.  It’s your choice.”

Suddenly, an image of the J.K. Rowling character named Dobby riding a wrecking ball while nude and speaking Russian passed through Lee’s thoughts.

Lee smiled, the shaking subsided but not completely gone.

History may repeat itself but Lee was going to enjoy the ride, even if it meant he was going to throw up because he was dizzied by the scenery flashing so quickly through his thoughts.