Sex in India

Being a sexually active, (for a given value of active), male of reasonable stamina and density,  7 decades of experience, is, it pains me to say, a bit on the meh side of the ledger. That is to say, satisfying but in a been-there done-that, job done, pass me the towel please, sort of way. Pleasant enough, but...

See, here’s the thing, most of the aforementioned 7 decades of life have been spent outside of India, (my present domicile), in more socially uninhibited Hendrixian environs. Environs that allowed for non-judgmental honesty in which likes and dislikes could be explored, or at the least considered, especially if there was any sort of nice-nice bumping going on. Rather more rule oriented, India seems to be.

Scholarly caution forces me to add that the data (India) gathered for this study were limited to my age demographic, er, spread, to include a cross section of the class and economic mass. Any attempts to broaden the age data base have been met with polite and insultingly judgmental disbelief. However, hope, among other things, quite often involuntarily, springs.

But, I digress. And it might happen again, given the philosophical nebulosity that characterizes meh and attempts to quantify it. Pity, but what to do? It is like that only.

Anyway, as I started to say, my explorations have led to some conclusions, which, I hasten to add, are subject to modification and if necessary, and I’m afraid it probably will be, physical proof of assertions and contradictions.

                Conclusion 1 – First time sex requires an appropriate amount of sidle and when it happens must appear almost accidental. The direct approach, irrespective of reciprocity of interest, will be met with affront and a fair degree of thoo in the body language.

                There are, I’m sure, a myriad reasons, just as I am sure that they all boil down to the notion that post menopausal women ought not to get horny unless, of course, they are those kinds of women, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Ooopsie, word count limit,  TBC, I guess...

Kids and the Things They Teach

While thinking about the things I have learned from my daughter, I overheard a friend refer to TV as an idiot box and I was reminded of why I disagree.

FLASHBACK/1983

I’m wandering through the den, on my way to my office, my head desperately looking for something that can be sustained through more than a sentence or two of wordsmithing.

So far, a walk in the garden and its determined experiencing of the glories of nature, to include an attempt to understand animal behaviour in the persons of Idli and Chutney, Great Dane and Rhodesian ridgeback, respectively, has proved, you should pardon the expression, fruitless. Both the dogs were unequivocal in their averment that wandering aimlessly through SoCal semi-desert scrubland on a hot summer morning was not on their agenda. I had left them to their somnolent arrogance under the porch and went to find my wife. Now, you’d think that a woman who has said, sometimes publicly and none too quietly, that she knows me better than I do myself, you’d think she’d be able to tell me what I could write about on a given morning, wouldn’t you? I’d say fruitless here as well, but I can’t, ‘cuz, y’know, the kid and all... Anyway, she had, in no uncertain terms, sent me from her side, unaided; hence my journey through the den; which contains, among other things, my daughter, inelegantly sprawled across the couch facing the television.

I grump my way to the couch and dad-bully her into making room for me. She grumps right back and does so.

The television is awash with the emotions of a group of impossibly beautiful young people wrestling, hair and makeup intact, with some sort of seemingly intractable issue that necessitates much emoting. My grump had found a place to roost.

After a desultory, naam ke vaaste, attempt to make sense of the happenings on the screen, my grump morphed into the parental whine of idiot boxes and their time wasting ill effects, culminating in asking her why she was not, instead, reading a book and thus improving her mind and putting time to good use.

Her universally understood time-out gesture put a stop to the whine.

“Is a picture worth a thousand words? she asks.

“Give or take” I respond.

“Then how many words am I reading in a 30 minute program?” she asks, a touch too triumphantly.

We then go on to discuss the relative merits of what is available on TV and in print. My insistence that all that is available on TV is unwatchable, unworthy, junk, is somewhat deflated by my admission that there is only a small proportion of all that is available in a bookstore that I deem worthy of my time and attention

My balloon gets punctured when she wordlessly hands me the remote control.

FLASH FORWARD/ today

The very pleasant memory of my daughter snuggled up next to me as we watched a National Geographic Special on the doings of a small, rare, and important fish that lives in the Red Sea and her Master’s degree in Marine Biology.

The other evening, the niece I have acquired on my way to perdition notified me of her desperate need to write. But, her outraged text message squawked, she did not know about what. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a little-girl foot-stamp of a demand that I, her Uncle, (n.b. upper case), do something about it. It should be noted here that upper case avuncularity imposes a host of responsibilities that include, Wisdom, Good Humor, terry-cloth clad shoulders, and the willingness to pick up the tab for an occasional evening of blues, booze and bullshit.

My response, something to the effect that desperation was not the same thing as wanting and that reason could be relied on to greater affect, was, I thought, all of the above, and more, what with having to deal with text speak and all.

Then, this morning, as I sit, transfixed by the accusing blink of the cursor on a pristine New Document (untitled) screen, I have realized that I was being altogether too glib and in so doing might well have distracted one whose attention span has been likened to that of a meth addicted butterfly. Although, it now occurs to me that the glibness did have a kernel, perhaps even more than one, of truth in it. Desperation is of the emotions and smells of, y’know, teen spirit, all feelings, hormones and incoherence; not a particularly successful recipe for, well, almost anything, leave alone literature. Simply vomiting one’s emotional stirrings into prose ...well, what you end up with is Joyce’s Ulysses; comprehensible, one supposes, but only in an n-dimension m-brane sort of way.  Not exactly my cup of scotch but then again, if I’m so smart how come I’m not rich, eh? Desperation, it seems to me, is wanting gone rancid from too long an immersion in the snake-brain.

That’s what I should have said to her; and let her work out the rest for herself.

In a break from established part of the daily ritual, the housekeeper, the chatelaine of my manor, if you will, appeared at my office door, a mug of tea in hand, with, unusually, a mildly strained look in her eye.  A glance at the clock on the screen told me I was late. Absorbed as I had become in the doings, ravings, and ratiocinations, of netizens of varying degrees of literacy and coherence, I had not noticed how time had flown while I was having fun.

Accepting the proffered mug, I gathered the rest of the walk-in-the-the-garden paraphernalia, namely, smoking materials of one sort or the other, I quit the premises, her protestations notwithstanding, hurriedly.

I should probably explain.

Em, the housekeeper has been keeping my house, which is to say, doing, and re-doing, all those things that I as a single male, living alone, find onerous, or at best, postpone-able; to wit, dusting,  folding, fluffing, and putting things back where they belong. Not, I’ll admit, an insubstantial body of work. And she has been doing so for a good many years. With nary a complaint and only the occasional, now infrequent, strained-eye hints that there was behavior that could stand a re-think.

Which doesn’t make things very much clearer, does it?

It’s like this...Em’s pre-departure routine is as follows – 1) make the appropriate sounds that let Saar (I sometimes worry about how much that word sounds like the vernacular for gravy), nonetheless, let Saar (Sir, for the linguistically challenged among us) know that it was time to vacate the room. 2) place mug of fresh tea on table by the door, so that Saar can grab it on his way out the door. 3) use the smaller of the two smallest rooms of the house in decent and discreet privacy for the necessaries. 4) leave.

And there’s me, lost in the UTC ether.

I couldn’t even apologize for the thoughtfulness ‘cuz, y’know, that would be an acknowledgement of her need for the bathroom.

Why she can’t use the master bathroom I am unable to understand beyond murmuring cultural artifact to myself. Sigh.

Okay, here's what i think we, the President ‘heaven’s-preserve-us’ Trump, realists, should do.

First, what we ought not to do. We need to quit beating the drum for the Trump Resign tune. A presidential resignation puts Pence in the Oval Office and life, liberty, and the pursuit, is going to get Crusader Bloody. Not unlike Iran, the US will, from the oh so aptly yclept bully pulpit of the Oval Office, proclaim that the Church IS the State; and that would be a shoulder swaying bummer. ‘Cuz, y’know, but I’m going to say it anyway, Religions, upper case alphabet encompassing Religions of all persuasions, are so not about life and liberty and any intellectual curiosities about their precepts are actively prohibited. And that is going to make for four years of bad days at Black Rock.

Me? I think we should allow Jan 20, 2017, happen. Force the Pence/Ryan/McConnell cabal think that the weak kneed, gun laws advocating, queer loving, subversive perverts have caved to the might of Right and allow them to concentrate on managing the Orange Ego towards the ends of their divinely inspired governance. Then, while they are busy with that we ought to sow seeds of discord in those freshly ploughed fields of Righteousness. Shouldn’t be all that complicated, actually. I mean, on the one side we have Big Daddy Trump who wants to be ‘bigly’ loved by everybody, everywhere, every when; a thought process, (I know, trump/thought oxymoron but...), that necessitates a high degree of moral plasticity. On the other, God’s messengers carrying the flaming swords the One True God and His way. Much potential for subversive manipulations, I’m thinking.

But then, if I’m so smart, how come I’m not rich?