Private parts

In spring 2004 I developed a passion, almost an obsession, for two things: climbing on mountains and masturbation. I was still living and studying in Innsbruck at that time, which is a city surrounded by amazingly high mountains. And when I say surrounded, I don't mean that you can see them from afar, I mean that whereever you turn and look, you see mountains and they are so close that you can actually not tell where they start and the city ends. I began climbing them like mad, sometimes getting up very early in the morning to do a quick one hour ascendency and come back just in time to go to classes. I was intoxicated by the sheer, breath-taking effort, the sweat literally pooring down my body, the feeling of my muscles being sore even days after. Keeping to only three or four different routes, I entered into a competition with myself, trying to beat myself, while doing it just for the pleasure of doing it, keeping my eyes and my mind to the path before me, hardly ever looking up to take in the view. Completely sucked in by this useless exercise that consists in killing yourself to get up to the peek, just to turn around and take the same way down again; no direction, no goal other than pure physical movement. I was alone. I was alone with my body. And with the mountain.
I discovered masturbation that same summer, in an almost unbearably hot night in Southern France and while/because of reading a Paul Auster novel (so should you ever read this, Mr Auster, thank you so much). When I say that I discovered masturbation, I don't mean that I rediscovered it in the sense that I came back to something I had forgotten or not done for quite a while. I mean that I had my first self-induced orgasm when I was 24, and it was a pleasure so strong and fierce that my immediate reaction afterwards was to literally explode into a laughter. It was a laughter not only of delight, but of simple disbelief: I just couldn't believe that something like that was possible, freely available to myself whereever and whenever I wanted to. And I couldn't believe that I had lived so long without it. I felt like I had a lot of things to catch up with. I started masturbating like I climbed on mountains: almost methodically diving into this forlon, physical pleasure that had no direction or goal or use except this one: my body. Or rather: if there was a goal at all, it was climax - and I still chuckle at the unintended way in which both these activities, albeit in different ways, are about reaching the peek. I wonder if Sir Edmund Hillary has a similar story to tell.