easy to be hard Most mornings I am awakened by a tiny, wanting voice. "Hold me," it demands. "Hold me now!"
It is my dick. This is its story.
Like every man, I had boners in the womb. Like every man, I'll get one as I die. In the years between, our penises receive a workout that could cripple Jane Fonda. Knowing this, and knowing she needed to keep things simple for the brutish sex, God endowed men with an arousal gauge that even a blind person can read. "Why yes," we say, "the spongy tissues of my penis have swollen with blood. We may proceed." One of my female friend admits envy. "I always thought it must be wonderful to kiss someone and feel your penis grow in your pants."
It is wonderful, unless you wore skin-tight corduroys during your formative years. Flashing pain is the only memory I have of the boner that accompanied my first kiss. My girl and I sat close, our lips touched, and my cock immediately filled with enough blood to stock a M*A*S*H unit. Stiffly, I hobbled down the bleachers to shoot baskets; she must have thought I was nuts. My nuts were the problem: They huddled in danger of being crushed as my erection burrowed down my pants leg. My penis had seemed so innocent before, just a garden hose I'd used to shoot pee into the toilet.
From that moment, life grew complicated. I soon discovered that wearing your shirt untucked was the best method to veil random woodies. But what to do when a boner appeared and receded like the tide and wiggled through the seams of your underwear? Easy: Tuck your shirt, then rearrange the furniture. It's not surprising, with all that tucking and untucking, that my female friends recall being horrified of the unseen erections surrounding them like movie Indians around a circle of wagons.
The girls had their own traumas; faced with bleeding through my jeans, I'll take a surprise boner anyday. But while my sister and her classmates were told their periods and budding breasts were natural, it was tougher to convince boys that random erections were a sign of emerging manhood. Frequent surprises during puberty convinced me, at least, that a man and his erection are like a boy and his dog: It might be on a leash, but it can pull you anywhere. "Men seem to walk a step behind their dicks," observes a woman I know who always speaks eloquently about penises. "Erections seem like something a guy should be able to screw on and off."
Wouldn't that be great? How about a clapper version? Instead, men from an early age admonish each other not to "let your dick run your life." Perhaps those sneaky appendages do have minds of their own. Call then FrankenDicks—they're always coming to life when you least expect it. They appear as we watch sexy foreign films or drive over bumpy roads. They awaken when we're chilled or enjoying a warm shower. They sit up like clockwork every 90 minutes while we sleep, even if we're having staid dreams.
Fortunately, FrankenDicks have short chains. Most of the time, erections provide men with a sense of well-being, of power, of renewal. We create erections as the earth makes volcanoes—much of a man's arousal can be seeing his penis gather and hold its form. In fact, intercourse for many men never tops that moment when a lover's hand slides down to caress his penis, to say she finds it beautiful, attacking the myth that his erection is somehow "indecent" if exposed.
Many of my female friends say they were terrified of the first erections they encountered—those mysterious, primordial forces they weren't sure how to control. I've heard more than one tale of a moron lover who insisted on dangling his organ in a woman's face. More amusing are men who perform triumphant post-coital penis dances, their sagging erections twirling like diviner's rods. Not all of us dance (I'm afraid I'll become dizzy and hit the dresser), but we do share a certain reverence for our cocks. Boners are that proverbial solid piece of wood to grab when we feel weak, and also when we feel strong. In other words, we grab them a lot.
Some women have asked what an erection feels like for a man. I suspect it rivals what a woman feels when aroused, but "it's like getting your clit worked" doesn't have the poetry I'm after. So I told one friend it was like the electricity of a gathering storm; I told another it was how your fingers feel bunched in a warm mitten on a bitter cold afternoon. They nodded politely, but I knew corny metaphors couldn't convey the mystery of those few inches of blood and muscle. Like sex, death and parallel parking, erections only look simple.

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From Steve Clemmer:
I got a woody every day in high school just from the friction of walking.