Italian psychoanalyst Laura Colombi makes an important distinction between imagination and fantasy: imaginative reality is the productive and important thing we encourage in children while flight into fantasy is the negative compulsion that happens in adulthood if there was maybe a bit too much unregulated imaginative reality in one’s childhood: 

Instead of the pleasure of links and of thinking, of authentic, imaginative, representational creativity, a ‘preference’ develops for the pleasure of omnipotence that creates, in turn, dependence...the almost dissociated character of the flight into fantasy becomes a sort of automatic mental activity that, as a substitute for the working-through processes necessary for development, deprives the individual of the internal tools for coping with life.

It is true that you are often alone, shaking your head at the world in disapproval or dumbfoundedness or sheer lack of giving a shit because it all boils down to nothing at all; there is nothing at all you can do to cope with life so you disassociate—recede and hang your shaking head and send your mind gliding into the carwash with a naked woman on your lap.  But if you can do it just this once, fully immerse yourself in the fantasy and actually get yourself fucking in a carwash then maybe Colombi will need to revise her thesis to include the possibility that flight into fantasy enriches existence over time even if it is temporarily destructive and maybe all the rules of life will need revision so that a man daydreaming for ten years about sex in a carwash is not a pariah but a sage.

Fundraiser Wash

Just the other day you pulled into one on Speedway Boulevard in Tucson: teenage boys and girls looking to raise money to attend a conference in Los Angeles.  If anyone explained the nature of the conference you missed it because you were trying to figure the age of the girls and whether or not it was legal for so much of their ass cheeks to be visible in public.  And more than ass cheeks: practically naked—the boys all shirtless and most girls in bikinis though a few had merely knotted their shirts at the midriff and cut the legs (even pockets) off their jeans so there was only waistband and the zipper and a strip of denim in the ass crack like a Canadian thong.