East Lansing, Michigan. August 2, 2004: Twenty-three-year-old graduate student Aaron “Spanky” Cutter is fooling no one with his never-ending jokes and side-comments about his own auto-erotic lifestyle, friends and classmates reported early today.

“Aaron seems to think that his little remarks are taken as jokes or sarcasm,” Cutter’s long-time friend, Darren Cordell, 22, explained. “He’ll start off a story by saying, ‘So anyway, I was jerking off last night, and…’ and then he’ll smirk and give this little head-bobbing action, like a comedian waiting for a laugh.” Sometimes the chronic self-stimulator backs up the comments with a “just kidding,” or “no, but really,” while sometimes he just lets them hang awkwardly.

“I don’t think anyone doubts that he’s--unwittingly perhaps--being completely honest when he says that, though,” Cordell added. “He’s been doing it since we were sixteen or so, and it’s really pretty sad.”

“It’s just disgusting,” Holly Martin, 21, said emphatically, weighing in with her opinion from the Starbucks’ coffee shop where she works part time. “Whenever you call him, or even if he calls you…well, if you make the mistake of asking ‘so, like, what are you doing?’, he immediately says ‘spanking the monkey’ or ‘knocking the wood, if you know what I mean’. And then he laughs this weird, little laugh…but I know exactly what he means.”

Of the six friends and acquaintances of Mr. Cutter surveyed, all agreed that the young man masturbates at least as frequently as he claims to. “By his own admission, he’s going at it eight or nine times a day,” Barry Clemmons, a fellow graduate student at Michigan State’s School of Accounting calculated from the school’s library. “Yeah…it’s not something I want to think about…but he’s told me numerous times.”

According to those who know him, the only redeeming quality about Cutter’s habit is his creativity in terminology. “I think I would have ended our friendship by now,” Cordell explained thoughtfully, “but I can tolerate the constant, well, narrative on his sex-life, so to speak, because he comes up with some really creative euphemisms for masturbation.”

“Yeah,” agreed Clemmons. “My favorite is ‘Punching the clown’. That one always cracks me up.”

“Or ‘wrestling the python’ and ‘giving little Helmut the Heimlich’, or something like that,” Cordell responded. “He really mixes it up. He throws in the old classics, like ‘Jerkin the Gerkin’ and ‘beating the meat’, too.”

“I told him one time he should write a book some day and record all his masturbation slang,” Martin recalled. Then she gave a look of disgust and added, “but he just said something about how you wouldn’t be able to read it because the pages would be all stuck together.”