Part One
Childhood
If someone were to ask me why I have a sneezing fetish, what is it I find so sexy about sneezing, I honestly wouldn't know what to say. I don't know why exactly I have this fetish, and unlike many other sneeze fetishists (although not all), I haven't the slightest clue where it had originated from, other than perhaps I might have been born with it. I honestly don't remember any childhood experience that would have begat any kind of fetish, but then again, I'm not much when it comes to remembering things from my childhood. And the few things I do remember from my childhood are mostly bad things: Such as when I was chased up a picket fence by my neighbor's German Shepard at the age of eight, screaming and crying fearfully as I hung on to that fence because I couldn't think of anything else to do, while that dog barked and growled and roared ferociously at me. Or my overall fear of someone breaking into my bedroom at night and strangling or stabbing me to death in my sleep. Yet if there ever was a defining moment within my childhood, in which my sneeze fetish had manifested for the first time ever, I no longer remember any of it.
Having horrible allergies or being prone to colds in which they were sneezing every five minutes would not be something I would associate as a major symbol to any of my babysitters (I can only remember about two or three of them, really), nor did I take any pleasure whatsoever when my parents or anyone else in my family ever sneezed (although I was pretty strange in my own way when I was a kid as well-hey, who wasn't?). My father had allergies, but no one ever made a big deal about it. Just get on some medication, and it'll make all those wretchedly annoying symptoms go away.
I myself have allergies, which had probably been just as bad if not worse when I was a kid. Aside from allergies, a wide assortment of things and situations would irritate my nose and bring about a sneeze or two: Allergies. Swimming pools. Getting hit in the nose. Sometimes a sudden chill would do the trick. Perhaps a stench bad enough to burn my nose might get a sneeze out of me. All sorts of things (most of which don't work anymore, as my nose doesn't seem to be nearly as sensitive now as it was ten years ago, although I still have allergies). I don't think I'd gone a single day throughout my childhood without sneezing at least a couple of times, and in all honesty, I found it to be a real pain in the ass at times, though it really wasn't that big of a deal, looking back on it now.
Sneezing wasn't exactly something on my mind 24-7 as a child. I think I had perhaps some sort of latent "fixation" on it. For some reason, I know that in my younger days (five and under) I would have associated sneezing with allergies rather than with colds (whenever I sneezed as a child, I assumed it was because of my allergies). Later on, I figured out that it could be a symptom of either one. And let's face it, being allergic to something may not make you sneeze if you are exposed to that irritating substance-if you're allergic to pollen or dust and are exposed to that, then you would sneeze; yet if you're allergic to, say, a bee, and were stung by a bee, instead of sneezing (something that would be much more preferable to the alternative, don't you think?) you would most likely go into anaphylactic shock and possibly die.
Another aspect of this "fixation" would have been my ability to remember just about any character on any TV show I had watched at the time (something I can still do) that has ever sneezed on the show, the episode they sneezed in, and the cause of the sneeze. I never knew why I could do this, but I didn't care either. It was never anything I made a big deal about, whether to myself or to anybody else, and it was never anything I questioned or thought about either. Nobody knew about any of this because I saw no reason to ever so much as mention it.
The self-consciousness came as the "fixation" grew to fetishism.
Part Two
Adolescence
I believe that my latent "fixation" for sneezing blossomed into a fetish of some kind right around the time I began puberty, when I entered into my early teens. Even then it wasn't the most prominent aspect of my life or of my personality. I had at first assumed it was some kind of phase--like when a child displays abnormal behavior, the parents may take it with a grain of salt and think: "Oh, it's just some kind of phase/stage-he'll grow out of it eventually." It was like this with me, although that wasn't exactly my thought, verbatim. I simply assumed that this fetish (I hadn't referred to it as a fetish back then because the word "fetish" hadn't been introduced to my vocabulary at that time) was a temporary thing, something that I would indeed grow out of fairly soon, and after awhile may even forget about it completely.
But of course, I couldn't have been more wrong. If anything, the fetish only intensified, as I got older.
During early adolescence, I would sometimes find thoughts of sneezing floating around in my head at times, mostly during the time when I am lying in bed at night trying to go to sleep—it has always taken me quite a while to finally fall asleep—unless I am very, very tired. The concept of being so tired you can't sleep is so foreign to me as to seem completely absurd and absolutely meaningless. The more tired I am, the easier it is for me to fall asleep. But I digress...
Back to time spent thinking while I was trying to fall asleep: I make up stories in my head, little action adventure pieces, like an ongoing comic book series or something of that nature (at that age, I was a huge fan of comics. It is a hobby I still partake in, reading mostly Spawn-related titles these days, though my interest has declined at least somewhat over the past year or two); it was an episodic sort of deal (I have never told anyone of this, although have never had a problem telling people that I read comics in general). In many cases, some of the characters would sneeze for one reason or another; I never attributed it much to a love or a fetish-it just happened-although now I think it has a lot to do with the fetish, the sneezing part, I mean. None were in any way similar with the stories you will find on websites such as Serotica, Tarot Of Sneezing, or other sites of that nature. They just sometimes depicting characters sneezing, the sneezes themselves not at all central to the conflict, just circumstantial and not in any way the intended purpose. I was simply never hesitant to include them in-they had never been written down, so no one would ever see them.
Throughout my teen years, I would sometimes find myself, when bored, to look through encyclopedias, biology textbooks, etc. in the index section under the letter "s", just to see what they might have written inside regarding sneezing. I rarely found anything worthwhile, if anything at all, but I still searched nonetheless. I even looked through various magazines sometimes when I found them, skimming through the table of contents for a sneeze-related article, whether it dealt with colds, allergies-either one would have certainly grabbed my attention, no matter what the title might be. When I partook in such activities, it would always be when I was alone, or when I could be absolutely certain that no one would ever know what I was doing or what it was I was actually looking for. It was a private activity, something I not only wished to do alone but in secret, a covert operation. I had feared what the reaction might be if someone were to catch me, so I made sure not to leave any evidence behind of my brief endeavors. No one could know; no one could be trusted. And if I took that book, encyclopedia, etc. off a bookshelf, I made sure to put it back in the exact same spot I had gotten it from, and not an inch off target if I could help it. Can't be too careful, you know.
I'm not sure exactly of what my first instance of actually arousal from a sneeze on TV, etc. had been, but one of the earlier cases that I can remember comes from this cartoon called Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which had, I believe, aired on the FOX network. I don't remember that much of the show itself, or the names of any of the characters, and doubt this show is even still on or if anyone even remembers it or cares, but I can remember seeing the first episode. I had thought at first that the girl had a cold or something, sneezing on the opening scene and then having to blow her nose. As it turned out, she was some sort of creation born in a lab, half-tomato, half human girl, but despite her origin had been on the side of good. Apply salt and she becomes a sentient tomato, able to hop around or whatever. More salt transforms her back into a girl again, and she sneezes cutely once while in mid-transformation. She had done this about three times throughout the episode.
I had thought that the show was okay; the girl's sneezes had somehow kept me interested enough in between the first episode and the second one I saw. I may have tried to tell myself that the sneezes didn't matter, that I liked the show because I thought it was a good show, which may have been true to a certain extent-sneezing alone, despite my fetish, won't compel me to watch a TV show, a movie, etc. that I would otherwise absolutely hate or have no real interest in, and that has never been the case with me, yet it will definitely heighten my already positive or perhaps neutral opinion of that particular piece of media, which I believe was largely a part of my interest with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, as I was sadly disappointed when watching the second episode of the show only to find that the girl hadn't sneezed even once throughout the whole episode.
This isn't to say that the media has to contain a few sneezes for me to enjoy it. In fact, most of the shows and movies that I enjoyed at that time, as is the case now, don't depict any of the characters sneezing at all. I think that The Simpsons is the only show I watch right now-besides the "X-Cops" episode of The X-Files—in which anybody has ever sneezed, and even on The Simpsons, it only happens about once or twice ever two seasons, if that. Sneezing isn't a required field for me for any of that, nor is it one to guarantee my interest and fondness for any piece of media. Call it an added attraction, like a bonus question on a quiz or test.
This fetish for me has always been an enhancement to my sexuality and an excellent source of brief arousal every once in a while. I am a male heterosexual, with no other unusual kinks that I know of. I had had dreams with sneezing somehow incorporated into them, but none had ever really been of a sexual nature, other than this one dream I had once had in which I'd been kissing a girl and she had sneezed into my mouth. Otherwise, sneezing and sex had always remained separate and independent of one another within my dreams. The wet dreams I had had were of the usual, consensual breed that most boys have when they come of age.
Likewise, I had never before made a conscious connection between sneezing and sex before discovering the fetish sites on the Internet, nor would I have ever made any kind of comparison to sneezing and having an orgasm. There was never any conscious correlation, yet the sexual stimulation of having witnessed or heard someone, a young and attractive girl sneeze, was always there, nonetheless. And with that, comes the sharp distaste of a family member's sneeze, or that of someone extremely unattractive and perhaps nearly hideous to look at. I have always kept this revulsion hidden, maybe shuddering a little bit, very discreetly, but otherwise drawing no reaction, neither telling them to shut up, nor blessing them (in these cases, there is no desire or need felt to bless the sneezer). And thankfully, it is quickly forgotten.
And along with the distaste of family member's sneezes, there manifested within me a fear of sneezing in the presence of others. It started off with an awkward feeling of sneezing in front of my parents, a minor fear that I could never truly understand. It started out around the age of eleven or twelve (this is only a guestimation-in truth, I'm really not sure at what age it started off). As I grew older, this expanded, eventually getting to where it is now: an awkward fear of sneezing in front of anybody, but it's still a lot worse when it is a family member.
I never stifled my sneezes. Consciously, I never had a problem with sneezing in front of others. I remember overhearing a conversation at school, a long time ago when I was in tenth grade. I hadn't joined in or anything, just overheard a few snippets. I believe they might have been talking about how certain people stifled their sneezes, about how it was stupid because it was dangerous and you could blow out your eardrums and go deaf, or blow out your brains and end up dead. What the hell; so what if you sneeze? Big deal. It's just a sneeze. You wouldn't want to be deaf for the rest of your life because twenty years ago you stifled a sneeze. It made sense to me; I had never questioned the logic. Sneezing in front of others wasn't a big deal to me, consciously. You sneeze, maybe they'll say "bless you", maybe they won't, but after that, it's over. Everyone forgets about it and we all go on with our lives. No big deal at all.
Sure, I hate having sneezing fits, especially around other people. I can remember being in California about five years ago; my allergies were worse there than they had ever been in my entire life. I would sneeze in long fits of at least fifteen to twenty sneezes, and that was every time I sneezed, which had been all-too frequently by my standpoint. And every time one of these fits would occur, while thinking along the lines of "Uh-oh," or "Oh shit, not again!" I would bolt out of the room and away from anyone in earshot immediately. It would have been family members that would have heard and/or seen me sneezing in such abundance. Not wanting to sneeze in front of them like that hadn't made any sense to me, but I didn't care. All that mattered was getting the hell out of there. A fight or flight response. Run to the bathroom or run into the room I'd been sleeping in; it didn't matter. Just run. But I couldn't appear too obvious about it; I couldn't let them know I was trying to get away, otherwise they might suspect that something was wrong, and I didn't need that at all.
Funny that I would hate to be caught up in a massive sneezing fit myself, but would enjoy seeing others caught in one. I guess you could see the hypocrisy in that, and normally I hate hypocrites, but that's the way it is, I guess.
But why should sneezing once or twice bother me? It happens to everybody at least once in a while. Some people more often than others, but everybody sneezes at one time or another.
I could tell myself that all I wanted to, and I might have even believed it. It didn't matter one bit. When I was around other people, or within a large crowd, and I felt that tickle deep within my nose indicating an oncoming sneeze, the discomfort and distress soon followed, feelings that would luckily display no outward reaction whatsoever. Sneezing alone truly wasn't a big deal; it was doing so in public, or around anyone else that was.
These days, it seems, I am physically incapable of sneezing in public or around anyone else whatsoever. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, something that was the case only for about a year, a year and a half maybe. I understand how difficult it may be for some to believe, but it's true. The best way to explain it would be to call it some sort of mind over body thing, something I've never really believed in before but perhaps there just might be some truth behind it after all. The way it works is simple: I feel the urge to sneeze, but am in a crowd. I endure a long, seemingly endless torturous build-up, all the while feeling discomfort and uneasiness settling within me, wondering if what if this time I might actually sneeze? I even put my hands over my nose and mouth, both because it would be the polite thing to do and because if I did sneeze it might at least muffle the sound a little bit (my sneezes for the most part aren't that loud anyway). Of course, the sneeze never happens. I don't stifle it or suppress it completely. It just doesn't come out, simple as that. It suddenly goes away, the urge to sneeze, without me sneezing at all. Sometimes this may leave me feeling short of breath for a little while, but of course no one notices that either. Sometimes the tickle even returns, a residual tingling within my nose, lingering on and torturing me, teasing me, scaring me and then leaving me alone once more for at least a little while. Other times, it stays gone. Occasionally, I might pinch my nose shut for a second or two, and that may even take care of the tickle without all the torment and trouble.
I have long since given up trying to convince myself that sneezing in front of other people is no big deal for me whatsoever. Let's face it, I've never been very good at self-deceit anyway. Coming up with the lies is easy for me. It's believing the lie that's the problem.
Of course, when I am alone, and I have to sneeze, I sneeze without any problem whatsoever. And sneezing alone doesn't bother me at all.
But it is the sneezes from other people that get me aroused.
This fetish was just about the only thing that allowed me to derive any pleasure whatsoever throughout all the time I had spent in school-perhaps a little bit in Junior High, but mostly in high school. I never spent the entire hour during class looking for it, waiting and anticipating for someone to sneeze. I could concentrate on my schoolwork and taking notes, etc. just fine. And while it could sometimes be a frequent affair, it was never expected-I never knew when it would happen next. But I loved it when it did happen.
Naturally, I would hide the arousal by any means necessary. Normally the shy one anyway, and always hesitant, to say the least, to admit having a crush on someone regardless of who she was to anybody, I certainly wasn't going to admit having been aroused by a girl's sneezing fit under any circumstances. It was just too weird; no one got turned on by sneezing--no one but me. I couldn't tell anybody, because they would think I was a freak. I was a freak, for many reasons, not just the sneezing fetish. I'm prone to being stereotyped-I think that almost everyone who had ever known had at least one or more stereotypes of me. This fetish was and still is perhaps the only aspect of my personality that hasn't been corrupted or perverted by that. And it was always something I wanted to keep. Despite believing this to be an abnormality, something that made me a freak, I still enjoyed having this fetish, yet it was something that was private to me, something I didn't want anybody else to know about.
Sometimes I wondered what if someone actually did know about this fetish. Call it paranoia, but I sometimes feared that someone might notice my reaction, my arousal over some female classmate's sneeze.
A perfect example of this would be this one time in English class when I was in twelfth grade; there had been this girl whose name will remain anonymous. I think she might have had a cold, because she had been sneezing a lot during that class period and over the past few days in general. And I had thoroughly enjoyed every sneeze I'd heard from her. She sneezed; I looked toward her direction as the sneeze came, and then heard her muttering under her breath. I felt uneasy all of a sudden, and could have sworn that whatever she was saying was somehow about me. Why does he keep looking at me whenever I sneeze? I feared she might have been saying, or thinking. I'm not entirely sure what she had been muttering, although looking back at it now, I think she might have simply been getting frustrated with her cold and the way it kept making her sneeze all the time. Then again, maybe that's just wishful thinking...
Perhaps another appropriate example-this one in eleventh grade-was when another girl had asked me for help on something; I don't quite remember what. She began to explain what she need, when out of nowhere, she sneezed. Whenever I'd hear a female sneezing, I'd always hope for another one, and another one, and yet another one after that. I'm a huge fan of multiple sneezers-this girl tended to sneeze a lot, as I recall, and it was definitely an aspect about her that I really liked. And this one time, she'd been caught up in a full-blown uncontrollable fit, which would always make my day anytime. Each time she sneezed, she apologized-as though her sneezing was a bad thing-and then she started all over again, sneezed again, and apologized, and this cycle kept up and I was enjoying every minute of it. Each time she apologized for yet another sneeze, I wanted to say something like: Hey, don't worry about; no problem, everyone has to sneeze sometimes, right? But out of fear of sounding strange, I kept my mouth shut, except for saying, "Bless you" after each sneeze. Yet as much as I was enjoying this, as my as I wanted her to keep on sneezing, I also feared that the pleasure I was receiving from her sneezes might somehow show up in my mannerisms, that she might notice how much I was loving this moment. Of course, regardless of that, I never wanted this to end. I wanted her to keep on sneezing until the class was over (which she didn't). And besides, after a while, she was probably getting too embarrassed and too flustered to really notice anything other than the fact that she just couldn't stop sneezing. Another aspect of my life influenced by my sneezing fetish and by my fear of someone suspecting I have a sneezing fetish is my writing. Most of what I write is usually the kind with an abundant supply of profanity and graphic violence, filled with blood and gore, people getting shot, stabbed, torn open, and beaten up. I can be quite sadistic indeed when it comes to beating up my characters. Yet I also like to include at least a few instances involving sneezing from my characters as well. It doesn't have to be present throughout the story, of course, but I usually like to have it in there on some kind of a sporadic basis.
If it is the type of thing that I had no intention of showing another human being ever, such as a comic book series I had been working on between 1997 and spring of 1999, then I would be much less hesitant on incorporating sneezing into the many episodes of that series. Sneezing wouldn't be everywhere in the series, in every issue, or anything like that, but it was in a lot of them. Go ahead and put the sneeze in there if I felt like it; no harm in it whatsoever. Yet if it was the type of story in which I did expect people to see, or something that I might have vague plans on someday getting published, than I would be a lot more hesitant (keep in mind that not all of my stories have sneezing in them - only some of them do). Oh sure, I could sneak a sneeze in here and there in a story; just because I happen to be able to remember every sneeze that occurs in a story I read, or a movie I saw or on every episode of a particular TV show, doesn't mean anybody else would. But I feared that if I went overboard with the sneezing, people might notice a pattern, and then put two and two together and come to the conclusion that I have a thing for sneezing. I definitely didn't want that to happen. I knew I had to keep the sneezing in moderation to prevent that from happening. Incorporating sneezing into a story or two was okay; but like anything else, keep it in moderation and don't go overboard with it.
Happily, though, I don't think anyone would ever suspect I even have a sneezing fetish. I never gave any outward sign that I have a sneezing fetish, or that sneezing was ever the type of thing that I ever gave a lot of heavy thought to. And what they don't know won't hurt either them or me. It was a fetish, and I had never really seen any positive portrayal of fetishists in the media (nor that many portrayals of them for that matter), but still, I wasn't hurting any of them.
Of course, it wasn't until a few years ago that I had even thought of how I felt about sneezing to be any kind of a fetish. How could I identify this as a fetish if the word fetish hadn't yet been introduced into my working vocabulary?
I found out what a fetish was through an episode of The X-Files; it didn't paint the nicest light on fetishists in general. It was a second season episode, now on tape called "Irresistible" and was about a death fetishist who liked to work in morgues and funeral homes and collect the fingernails and hair off of dead women (Executive Producer Chris Carter wanted to have the guy be a necropheliac, but FOX wouldn't let him do it). Now how could I identify my sneezing fetish as a fetish through an episode like that, you might ask? Well, I didn't. I identified my sneezing fetish as a fetish quite a while after seeing that episode, after a lot of thought, reflection (I don't think it was entirely based on that episode) and looking up the word fetish in the dictionary a couple of times, I slowly began to regard what I have as a fetish.
And on yet another note: after identifying my fetish for what it as (this was about a year or two ago), I saw an episode of King of the Hill, which centered around Peg's big feet (size 16) and how she allowed them to be filmed for the purpose of putting them on a foot fetish site--this was the first time that I had ever heard of a fetish site on the web before. I knew they had porn on the web, but never thought of fetishist porn before then. It wasn't the most positive view on fetishists you could ever get (they seemed either like pathetic creatures or sick, perverted freaks), but I didn't care. What was briefly floating around in my mind as I watched it, though, was: Hey, wouldn't it be nice if someone made up a site like that for sneezing? But of course, I dismissed the thought as being completely ridiculous (Yeah, like that's ever going to happen!) and had eventually forgot about it.
Part Three
The Internet
Ah the Internet. I honestly can't understand why anyone would ever have a problem with the Internet. It's such a beautiful thing, wouldn't you agree? Well I love it. Okay, I'll admit that a few years ago, if someone were to ask me what I thought of the Internet, I would have said: "I don't like it much, really. It's just too complicated." But I quickly figured it all out, and that opinion no was no longer an accurate description of how I felt about the net. At first, my online activity was limited, because my access to the net was limited. I started out checking websites like ebay to see if they had anything that I wanted to buy, or looking through various online book and movie reviews on Amazon.com. From October to December of 2000, I downloaded each of the six installments of Stephen King's online serial novel, The Plant (and paid for each one of the installments through money orders) from The Official Stephen King Web Presence (and was very disappointed to find that he wouldn't finish the story for another two years). I even set up an email account at Yahoo! in September 2000, when I started college, But I hadn't been fully aware of everything that you could find and do on the Internet. But of course, the nice thing about the net is, no matter what you want, no matter what kind of information you're looking for, or whatever topic your interested in, chances are, you'll find what you're looking for online.
I had wanted to type "sneezing" in the search engine for quite awhile. I never expected any fetish sites whatsoever, nor would I have thought of the possibility of this online community's existence. I merely wanted to see what I could find in relation to the topic of sneezing, and whatever information I would have gathered would have satisfied me just the same. Yet the desire wasn't on my mind 24-7, and there were times when I had completely forgotten all about it. But despite being temporarily forgotten, it was by no means gone for good, just on the backburner of my mind for the time being, something I might tell myself that at some point, I was going to do it. There were two main reasons why it had taken so long for me to finally get around to it, though: For one thing, I hadn't had regular access to the Internet. And the other one was because whenever I did get access to the Internet, I didn't have the necessary privacy I would have needed. And so for many months, perhaps over a year, that desire went unfulfilled.
It wasn't until December 7, 2000 that I finally got around to typing, "sneezing" in the Netscape search engine.
I was at my on-campus job--I'm a typesetter for the college newspaper-sitting on the computer and just aimlessly surfing the net for whatever I could find because I had nothing else to do. Nothing needed to be typeset, so I was free to do whatever I wanted while on shift. I don't remember all of the sites I had found, but most of them weren't of much interest anyway. Just sites I came across pumping random words into the search engine.
Then the idea came to me. I could type, "sneezing" into the search engine. This was my chance. I could finally do what I had wanted to do for I didn't even know how long anymore. There were others in the room, but they were across the room, engaged in a game of Monopoly and with no way of seeing what was on the computer screen. Well, why not? I could do it now, and no one would know. If someone were to walk up to where I was, I could easily close the window, and that would be the end of it. So with that in mind, mustering up a great deal of courage, I did my first search on the word "sneezing".
At first, all I could find were pages on colds and allergies, pages giving advice on how to stop sneezing, and a page that explained why you shouldn't stifle sneezes and that "people sneeze for four basic reasons." That sort of thing. I expected to find nothing more than that, though, so I wasn't a bit disappointed. But I was very scared, afraid someone might decide to walk past me and catch a glimpse of what I was doing. What if I couldn't close the window on time? What if I wasn't fast enough? But I couldn't stop. I didn't want to stop. I had finally gotten this opportunity, an opportunity that, as far as I knew then, I might never get again. Besides, they were all the way across the room; I'd see them coming the moment they got up. I'd be prepared for such a contingency. And so I went on.
I don't know how long I was there for, but toward the end, I found something that I hadn't in a million years expected to find, something I hadn't even thought existed. One of the sneeze fetish sites. SneezinGirl's Sneezing Homepage (now sadly taken down by Angelfire). Of course I just had to click on it and see what was on it, not out of curiosity but because I was a sneeze fetishists myself, so a site of that nature would no doubt appeal to someone like me. All I really had time to do, though, was skim through the homepage before I realized it was already 3:15. I had a class at 3:30 - Crime and Criminology. It was best to wrap things up at that point, then, so I closed the browser, left the office, punched out and headed over to that 3:30 Crime and Criminology class, about a hundred percent sure that I was going to come back to that site very, very soon.
Class got out at the usual time of 4:45. Normally, I would have headed for my father's car parked in the visitor's section (best place to find parking because everyone else insisted on parking closer to the school) and drove home immediately. Not this time, though. Instead, I decided to head on over to the campus computer lab. There was that certain site I wanted to check out a bit more thoroughly, if I could.
When I reached the computer lab, I saw that, while there were other students there, it wasn't filled or very crowded at all. There was no one near the computer I was assigned to, no one in that "aisle" that would have been able to get a good look at the screen because they were seated too far away to see clearly what I was doing. Perfect! I immediately logged onto Netscape and did yet another search on "sneezing". I found SneezinGirl's Sneezing Homepage easily enough, and wrote down the URL in a small notebook I kept handy in my backpack for future reference. I checked the site out, particularly the stories section. Sneezing stories, I thought, I can write something like that. I wanted to read some of them, at least one or two. But I couldn't concentrate because I was too excited.
I was also terrified as well. What if someone saw what I was doing? Before, if someone was going to come toward me, they would come in only one direction so I would see them and be prepared. But now, I no longer had that security. They could come from literally any direction, catch a glance at what I was doing, and-it was just too horrible to think about! I watched everyone in the room like a hawk, their every movement. I flinched every time I heard footsteps, every time I saw someone even walking casually in my general direction to help another student. I didn't know any of these people at all. In college, I'm pretty much an anonymous figure. So, so what if someone caught me doing what I was doing? What did I care what they might have thought of it or who they might tell? They were strangers to me. I would probably never see any of them again, so what did it matter? But as true as that was, it didn't make a difference at all. I still did not want anyone here seeing what was on my screen or know of my secret fetish anyway. Even from strangers, who probably would never see me again and who probably don't care about what I do anyway, I fight to keep my fetish a secret. That's how deep the fear of exposure runs.
While in the computer lab, I also came across yet another fetishist site known as SNEEZING GIRLS. I clicked on the link and checked that site out as well. I had no idea how many other fetishists there were besides me at that point and never thought to ask that question. All I knew was that there were two fetishist sites (at least) and I had fallen in love with them both. The decision to submit a story to SneezinGirl's Sneezing Homepage had already been made. When I found the stories section to SNEEZING GIRLS, I thought that perhaps I might submit that story there as well. Why not? I wrote the URL down for that site as well. Now I could get back to both sites later on, and then checked out what was there as well. I left around 5:30 to go home for dinner; having stayed long enough, and luckily hadn't gotten caught either (you have no idea how relieved I was not to have been caught). And tomorrow, I planned to go back to both these sites, only this time, instead of on a computer on campus, I would do so at a much safer place.
The next day, I went to those same sneezing sites on my Dad's computer. I had known about the cache/history and that sort of thing at that time as well, I had already found out about it. And I'm sure that he would have known about it, too. One again I logged onto SneezinGirl's Sneezing Homepage, and went straight for the stories section. My purpose here was to print them all out, or at least most of them. I wanted to study them, get down the formula for such a story for reference when I wrote my own, but of course that was only part of it - and I probably don't need to explain what the other part was, now do I? When I finished there I then went to SNEEZING GIRLS as well and printed out a couple stories from there as well. I would have printed out a few more, but the ink cartridge had been running low, and I had already attained a total of four from both sites, so I decided that that was enough. With my mission complete, I made sure to destroy any and all evidence of what I'd been doing - they couldn't link it directly back to me beyond a shadow of a doubt if someone did find something, but I was still very uncomfortable with it being there regardless - my work had been finished.
A few days later I went back to the computer lab at my college and did another search on "sneezing", this time in the Yahoo! directory. And that's how I found the Diary of a Sneeze Fetishist and the Tarot of Sneezing websites. I had skimmed through the Diary first and then TOS but even less so than the other two sites. There were too many people in the room this time, too many people walking past me, and I found that whole situation to be very unsettling, and so I gave that up, went on a few non-fetish sites, and then left.
I spent the next month working on my sneezing story, "Amber", writing it down on a spiral notepad. I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to get it sent to any website at that point. I figured I would have to wait until I had a lot of time, as it would be required to type it all up onto an email message and send it to a site. But of course I would have to burn that bridge when I got there. For now, I was just going to concentrate on writing the story and then deal with whatever came next.
Part Four
Getting Involved
January 2, 2001: The beginning of a new year and, perhaps, the beginning of a new era of my life. I had discovered the online sneezing fetish community a month earlier, which had been quite the milestone in my life in and of itself, but it wasn't until now that I could finally get involved in it myself. I had typed up my story within no time on my new computer, which I had just gotten set up, and it was already hooked up to the Internet and ready to go. (My new computer ordered two weeks earlier - I originally planned to get a simple laptop for the purpose of being able to write my stories in private, but then, decided to simply buy a full-sized computer instead. The free year's worth of Internet access was thrown into the bargain.)
That's when my overdrive period truly began, when I began to search the entire net over for as many sneezing fetish sites as I could possibly find, getting my hands on as much material as I could. I submitted "Amber" under the pseudonym "Fred Burke" - because I didn't want to publish it under my real name and had no handle at that time - to SneezinGirl's Sneezing Homepage, SNEEZING GIRLS, the Tarot of Sneezing, and Sneezing Fetish Online. I had discovered Serotica through the Diary of a Sneeze Fetishist links section, and decided to submit it there as well, and am very glad I did because they were the only ones who had ever given me a response. I had also became good online friends with the Diarist early on as well. And I even signed Professor's guestbook, although hesitant to do so at first because I was still new here, and was also afraid that someone I knew might come along and recognize my name in the guestbook. Then again, that was a rather ridiculous fear, and besides, I didn't have to use my real name. I did of course sign that guestbook, and many others following as well, and I'm glad I signed it to, if for no other reason than because I had made friends with another online sneeze fetishist later on because of it.
Online interaction with other fetishists, other than a few emails here and there with a few individual fetishists, didn't really begin until around February. I started off with the message boards at Delphi.com, which, let's face it, aren't the most active ones available (no offense). I found the Feather Fever website, no longer up at this time, sadly, but the forum is still there. That's about the time when I officially adopted the Bondi user name for this particular forum (which is the name that "Amber", and my second story, "Love at First Sneeze" are now posted under at Serotica), simply because I felt I needed a name, all the good sneeze-related usernames I could think of were taken by someone else, and that was part of my email address, so why not? No one really responded to my posts at first, and they were probably largely ignored, but given the absurd and moronic nature of said posts, it isn't really surprising, now that I look back on it (oh GOD, I hope no one remembers any of my earlier posts - they were just so STUPID!!!) but as time went on I came up with more intelligent things to post and gradually blended in with the rest of the community, perhaps not the most well-known fetishist or the most respected, but still accepted into the community nonetheless, welcomed into the chatrooms, and all of that. I've even attained my own storyboard about a month ago, which has been going reasonably well, I must say, despite some of the various aspects of Beseen that I was unaware of when I first signed up.
To this day I still have no idea why I have such a fetish, although I have learned quite a bit about it through the Diary and through the forums and chats. Some consider sneezing to be a momentary and harmless loss of control, a moment of weakness, but without any negative consequences. Others think of it as the great equalizer among the human race, because everyone does it regardless of who they are. (Although a few years ago, when I saw a segment of Guinness Prime Time in which they showed people who have had parts of their face cut off and replaced with prosthetics, and they showed a guy who had had his nose cut off, one of the things that I wondered was: Would that guy still be able to sneeze with his nose cut off?). And others still apply more of an intimate or sexual meaning to sneezing, which is the category that I probably fall under as well, I suppose, though I can't explain that in much detail.
But regardless of the reasoning or logic behind it, I think a sneeze fetish is definitely an asset and a blessing, and a really cool thing to have, perhaps now more than ever. And while I still won't tell anybody about it unless they put a gun to my head, I also feel it best not to look a gift horse in the mouth either.