Aching details the filthy experiences and bitter thoughts of a man who is consumed by sex, but who can’t manage to find a partner. He tries to be what he thinks a woman might want. Repeatedly, he fails. Antagonized by lust, he retreats to the sex industry: pornography, phone sex, video chat, strippers, massage parlors, and escorts. He explores the depths of his considerable perversion as he tries to satiate himself.
A narrative exists, but it is woven into the accounts of his dirty life and his diatribes against the human condition. Most of it is chronological, but some of it isn’t. He divides his anecdotes with essays about what life is like for a lonely, dejected man on the brink of functionality.
Some men are born with wiring that doesn’t let them connect with others. These men are weird to everyone else. They get weirder as the world turns them away. A few of them boil so much in their isolation that they become monsters. They devour filth to heal themselves, but the filth seems to make them worse. They are casualties and the natural result of rejection. No one owes them anything, but no one should be surprised they exist.
Aching provides a glimpse into the mind of the kind of man most people don’t want to know exists.