DENVER — A 39-year-old regional marketing director has now been staring silently, motionlessly, and with what one observer described as “cold-blooded determination” at his own flaccid penis in a hotel bathroom in downtown Denver for approximately forty minutes.
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The marketing director, in town for a two-day industry conference and mid-first-date at a hotel bar downstairs, had, ninety minutes earlier, made what he described in a subsequent text to his best friend as “an incredible connection” with a woman he described as “genuinely, like, the best conversation I’ve had in years.”
She was, sources confirmed, upstairs in his room. She was still, sources also confirmed, upstairs in his room.
He was in the bathroom.
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The bathroom door was closed.
He had been in there, at the time of this reporting, for nearly three-quarters of an hour.
“We’re doing this,” the marketing director told the mirror at approximately 10:47 p.m., his voice low and steady, arms crossed, staring downward with the flat determination of a man about to break a horse. “You and me. Right now. I’m not going out there until you do your fucking job.”
His penis, sources confirmed, did not respond.
“I’m serious,” he said. “I will stand here all night. I will stand here until the sun comes up. You think I won’t. I will.“
The marketing director, who has been divorced since 2022 and has spent much of the intervening period, in his own words, “getting back out there,” has been on the current dating app for seven months. He had matched with the woman upstairs two weeks earlier. They had, per the timestamps in the exchange, exchanged 340 messages before agreeing to meet. She was, by every measure, the exact kind of person he had been hoping to meet.
She was also, at this moment, sitting on the edge of his hotel bed, fully dressed, checking her phone.
She had been checking her phone for, sources confirmed, thirty-eight minutes.
“Come on,” the marketing director said quietly to his penis at approximately 10:52 p.m. “Come on, man. Please. This is the one. This is the one I’ve been talking about. This is literally the one I told my therapist about at the last session. Do you remember my therapist? Do you remember what we said?”
His penis did not remember his therapist.
The marketing director, at this point, tried a range of tactical approaches — including, according to his subsequent post-mortem, “walking away for a second and then whipping back around to catch it off guard,” “thinking about a woman he had a crush on in ninth grade,” and, at one particularly desperate juncture, “just, like, aggressively glaring at it.”
None of it worked.
By 11:03 p.m., his penis had begun, in his estimation, to look at him with what he described as “genuine fucking contempt.”
“You are actively working against me right now,” he said. “You understand that, right? You are undermining me. This is a betrayal. I have spent thirty-nine years feeding you. I have spent thirty-nine years, like, housing you. And this is how you repay me. In the single most important moment of my entire post-divorce life.”
His penis remained, by all available measurements, exactly the same size.
A soft knock came at the bathroom door at 11:11 p.m.
“Everything okay in there?” the woman asked. Her voice was gentle, patient, kind. He would later describe it, to his best friend, as “the voice of an actual angel.”
“Yeah!” he called out, in a voice one octave higher than his natural speaking register. “Yeah! Just — a stomach thing. From dinner. I’ll be right out!”
There was a pause.
“Okay,” she said. “No rush. I’m just going to — I think I’m going to head out, actually. It’s getting late.”
The marketing director closed his eyes.
He heard her gather her things.
He heard the door of the hotel room open and close.
He remained in the bathroom for another eleven minutes, staring at his penis, which had, in the wake of her departure, become approximately 40% more engaged than it had been at any point during the previous hour.
“You asshole,” he whispered.
At press time, the marketing director was lying face-down on the hotel bed, fully dressed, texting his best friend a long unpunctuated message that read, in part: i cant do this anymore this is my life now this is who i am
His best friend replied, six minutes later, with a single word.
bro