It is 2:33 AM on a Thursday night. I am limbered by a double tequila nightcap. It's chasing two hours of the seasonal IPA delivered on round trays by pretty girls draped in black screen-printed singlets at a Southern California public house projecting sports affairs on large flat-screen televisions.

Upon leaving the bar, I retired home and indulged in conversation with a roommate over two, slow-burning American Spirits on a shadowed back patio. After bedroom doors closed at the other end of the hallway, I found myself alone, contemplative, desperately existential and ravenously hungry.

What followed was a spiritless attempt to satiate my late-night pangs with a handful of shriveling blueberries floating in rice milk and spooned from a cocktail tumbler [because there were no clean bowls in the cupboard].

Five minutes later, I was neither full, nor fulfilled.

I reclined pathetically to the glow of the laptop, discontented by the stark realization that the provisions on hand heartily failed to serve as comfort food.

Come to find out, comfort food is such a universal indulgence that it has its own Wikipedia entry. And it was through tonight's applied understanding of the colloquially collegiate commodity that I found thoughtful acceptance of a similar, but slightly more intimate, convention: comfort sex.

I believe my appetite for comfort sex to be as honest and unsophisticated as my craving for hot, glazed donuts.

The fact that ‘comfort sex’ is not already utilized with commonplace regularity catches me unawares.

Consider the description of its sister inclination:

Comfort food is food consumed to improve emotional status, whether to relieve negative psychological affect or to increase positive feeling. One study divided college-students' comfort-food identifications into four categories (nostalgic foods, indulgence foods, convenience foods, and physical comfort foods) with a special emphasis on the deliberate selection of particular foods to modify mood or affect, and indications that the medical-therapeutic use of particular foods may ultimately be a matter of mood-alteration. The identification of particular items as comfort food may be idiosyncratic, though patterns are detectable. In one study of American preferences, "males preferred warm, hearty, meal-related comfort foods (such as steak, casseroles, and soup), while females instead preferred comfort foods that were more snack related (such as chocolate and ice cream). The study also revealed strong connections between consumption of comfort foods and feelings of guilt.

I wonder if there is a warm-blooded person on the planet who can read the aforesaid description and NOT assimilate it to their desire for the person(s) with whom they most want to bed when feeling general emotional/physical/sexual/cerebral emptiness.

It strikes me that the idiomatic “drunk dial” gets a bad rap when really, the heart of its stimulus lies in a natural desire for élan vital and an instinctive hormonal response as [bio]logically linked together as Pavlov and the pork chop.

In these abandoned hours when nights can seem darker than winter’s cold, I feel ironically connected to humanity through my insatiable desire for French toast, potato bake, cheesy mac, rice pudding and [above all] the familiar scent of a woman.