You had to treat your porn like a commodity back in my day. It would get traded and passed around. You would show up at a buddy’s house with a shopping bag full of porn magazines and trade them like baseball cards. The aforementioned Dave of the Shave Dave party worked at a convenience store, so he would often pilfer porn (among other things). I’d go to his place and turn it into the floor of the New York Cock Exchange. There’d be heated negotiations. “One Gent for two Milkin’ and Poppin’s? Are you nuts?” At one point, it got so tense that Dave’s roommate, who worked the third shift, came out and shouted, “Can you keep it down!”

And you’d have to hide your collection. It was a nice treat when you’d put it away for a while and forget about it, only to rediscover it a few months later. That’s a pleasure you’ll never know. One night, back when porno used to be on VHS tape, after a couple glasses of red wine, I stumbled across my stash and saw one that was named Head Cleaner. I got excited until I realized it was an actual head cleaner for a VCR. I still beat off.

And you’ll never know the awkwardness of visiting the porn section of the ma-and-pa video store. Now everything streams wirelessly onto all of your devices simultaneously. When I was a teen, there were little local video stores that had the porn section shoehorned into the corner. The entire place was nine hundred square feet, so they took a four-by-four corner and hung Western doors, beads or a shower curtain in the opening. It was like the world’s worst — or best — voting booth. If there was anyone else in the store, you’d have to pretend to read the back of the box for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre while you waited for them to walk out with their rental before you ducked into the porn section.

One time, I was in that section and an Asian guy came in. It was uncomfortable, because I didn’t want to offend him by looking at the Asian section. So I meandered over to the blacks and lesbians. Who knows, I could have been looking at his sister on the box of Charlie Chan in Her Can.

And God forbid you had to call in advance to find out if they had the title you wanted. I interviewed the great Ron Jeremy on Loveline when he was promoting a movie called Spank Me, Fuck Me (featuring number-one Asian big-boob queen, Minka). Given that cast, I had to see it. So the following day I called my local video store. It’s the first and last time I ever did that. I used to just wander in and pretend that I’ve never even heard of porn. “Hmm, what’s in this section behind the beaded curtain? Pornography? Okay, I’ll try anything once.”

So I called and uncomfortably asked for Spank Me, F’ Me. I didn’t even want to say the full fuck. The guy didn’t know what I was talking about. So I had to ask again, I got really formal. “Spank Me, F’ Me… It’s an adult feature.” As if that was going to make it better. The guy said “What?” again. After one more round of this I finally said, “Spank Me, Fuck Me,” and the guy hung up. He must have thought I was making a prank call. But I’d say this, Vivid, you lost yourself a sale with your stupid title.

As weird as it is to think about, porn used to be a marker for where we were in our cultural evolution. Looking at porn titles now shows that we’ve lost all sense of nuance and subtlety in our society. I was skipping through Pay-per-View and looking at the porn titles recently, and it was all MILFs Who Crave Black Cranks and 18 Year Old Anal Loving Asians. Huh, wonder what those are about? I’m intrigued.

What happened to porn titles where you used to have to use your imagination like Emmanuel or Behind the Green Door? You knew it was porn, but you didn’t know what type. But you and your penis were going to find out.

It’s not just porn titles. It’s everything. We used to have sandwiches called the Reuben and the Monte Cristo. They used to name sandwiches after celebrities. Now the burgers are “The Double Angus Mushroom Cheddar Bacon Bar-B-Q Thing Between Two Buns That You Put In Your Mouth Sandwich.” Everything has to be completely described and on the nose because everyone is a checked-out idiot.

Eventually every porn title is gonna end with “. . . that you masturbate to.” In the future, we can look forward to seeing Barely Legal Lesbians Use a Double-Ended Dildo (and Then You Masturbate to It).

Now, let’s have a talk about the mess that comes with beating off. I was asked once during a live podcast if I could possibly complain about orgasms. And guess what? I can! If guys were like chicks and could have multiple mess-free orgasms the world would be our oyster. Imagine the VIP room at the strip club if nothing came out of your dick at the end of a spirited lap dance. Actually, we’d probably never leave those strip clubs and society would crash to a halt, but still. Women don’t realize how important orgasms are for us. They can’t appreciate it. For women, orgasms are like solar energy, they’re a renewable resource. For men, they’re fossil fuel — there’s only so much we can put out. Orgasms are awesome, but a moment later it’s like someone hocked a loogie on your belly. You can get hummus out of shag carpet faster than you can get jizz out of thigh hair.

There’s no science to where the stuff ends up, either. Once in a blue moon, when you take a piss it goes forked and hits the seat, but it’s not like when you take a shit it circles around and hits you in the back of your head. Male ejaculate is just too unpredictable. And it makes double-teaming a chick with a buddy really dangerous. If you get your load on the other guy, your friendship ain’t coming back from that. In fact, it will probably lead to a Hatfield and McCoy — style generational dispute. You know what the Bible says: “An eye for an eye, a spooge for a spooge.”

Before this gets any creepier than it already is, and before your mother rips her eyes out from the images I’m putting in her head, I’ll wrap up with, as promised, my sacred rules for the Art of Spunk Shui.

One of my great accomplishments in life is having this defined by the Urban Dictionary:

Spunk Shui: Coined by Adam Carolla: The philosophy of setting up a room or area of the house for masturbation with the intent of not getting inadvertently caught by friends or loved ones.

I realized this spiritual calling one day when I was at Bill Simmons’s house and he was explaining how he was going to set up his guest house/office. He said, “Ace, I’m going to put a wall of TV monitors here and I’ll put my computer there.” Bill had ignored the first sacred rule of Spunk Shui: never turn your back to the door. I said, “Bill, you’re going to tell your wife you’ve got a column to put to bed but you’re really going to be burning the midnight Jergen’s because you came down with a bad case of writer’s cock. Then the wife will decide to show her support and bring you a cup of tea. The way you have this room currently configured she’s looking at your back and the monitors’ front, which has the back of some chick in her barely legal debut.”

There is both an art and a science to not getting caught beating off. This has happened to me and I don’t want it to happen to you, my boy.

When I was eighteen and living in my dad’s garage in North Hollywood, I was having a spirited session. Of course, I didn’t have any materials at the time. There was no VCR in that garage. There wasn’t even a wall. The wall was simply the closed garage door and a little Henry’s Roofing Sealer along the bottom. So, as Willy Wonka said, I was entering a world of pure imagination. I was Willy Wank-a. In a masterpiece of bad timing, my buddy John decided at that moment to pop in for a visit. And I mean literally pop in. He was an energetic guy and decided he was going to kick open the side door and do a John Belushi “Ha!” entrance. He didn’t know at the time what I was doing with my dong; he was just trying to startle me. Well, boy did I have a surprise for him. He, unintentionally, timed it perfectly. I was right at the moment of completion, past the point of no return. His “Ha!” went straight into “Ahhh!” I’m sure it haunts him to this very day. And it definitely traumatized me. I didn’t beat off again for a good four hours.