good vibrrrations

(originally posted 11/1/2014)

Dr. Conner Ryall is a brilliant man.

What he does isn’t considered so brilliant or even considered at all. Well, by most people anyway. Those that take the time to consider such things appreciate him. Usually in short bursts of appreciation.

You see, Conner Ryall manufactures vibrators.

His idol is Rupert Sheldrake. Mr. Sheldrake is a parapsychologist, biochemist, writer and lecturer who seems to rub most scientists the wrong way. The principle way he does this is with his theory of “morphic resonance.” Instead of explaining what that is, it’s probably easier to explain what it has to with engineering a better vibrator.

None whatsoever.

Or so everyone else in the world – except Conner Ryall – believes.

While he has spent his career cranking out new and exciting vibrators, his real passion has been trying to come up with one that could tap into the collective sexual memory that hypothetically exists in each of its users.

He has been married and divorced three times and none of his wives’ vaginas were ever the same after the endless testing and tweaking of his battery-powered creations.

When he left college he entertained going into the standard academic pursuits, but seeing how Rupert Sheldrake was dragged across the coals for his widely-loathed “pseudoscientific” pursuits, he lost his taste for conventional research. Instead he attempted to mix science and entertainment with a local cable program called You’re Wrong! … With Dr. Conner Ryall. The premise, getting leading intellectuals to present their ideas and then have Conner screaming at them the reasons they were wrong as they sat there dumbfounded, failed to connect with the public. The slightly revamped What You Fail To Understand … with Dr. Conner Ryall fared no better and he was forced to seek employment out in the real world.

So he did what so many eighteen year old attractive women do; he went into the sex industry. There he found the money to be good and rules to be as loose as the women themselves.

Eventually he built himself a sophisticated manufacturing space that also doubled as his laboratory. As long as he kept new and ingenious vibrators and related sex toys coming out, the research money kept coming in and he was unfettered by nosy colleagues or government regulations. Some of the things that went on in that building were terrible and some were wonderful, but most were terribly wonderful.

Outside his plant stood a two hundred feet tall gold statue of his best-selling vibrator to date, the Intruder 5000. When the sun caught it at the right angle, it was glorious to behold. It could be seen for miles.

While all around him the depraved party raged on, he was a man consumed. If String Theory was to be believed then the universe is made up of tiny little writhing strings. Somehow it was all connected and he was going to be the one do bring it together in one mind-blowing orgasmic interconnectivity.

Then one day Mother Earth had her say and she did everything short of curling her toes.

When the first tremor hit, he could be excused for not noticing as he was getting on in age, showed early signs of Parkinson’s, and worked in a facility that never had less than a hundred vibrators being tested at any time. His was a trembling world.

When the second one hit, he alone was oblivious and continued walking amidst the giant pallets of products while visions of revolutionary sex toys danced in his head. His workers fled from the building like so many rats off a sinking ship.

Though it was nobody’s fault, the factory was built on a huge fault, so when the big earthquake did hit there was nothing anyone could do but watch the whole thing get torn in two and collapse. When it was over only the very base of the gold statue out front was visible, the rest had plunged deep into a dark and ironic crevasse.

Rescue teams searched everywhere for Dr. Ryall but with no success. They even tried locating him by calling his cell and listening for the ringtone but, quite predictably, he had it on vibrate.

Dr. Conner Ryall was a brilliant man.