By the time I encountered the vagina in its natural habitat, I’d seen three types of pictorial representations: 1. The clinical line drawing in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex… 2. The open-faced corned beef sandwich variety in Hustler and 3. The angora panty triangle variety in Playboy. None of these prepared me for my first encounter with the real deal.

Once the neighborhood girl hipped me to the whole “getting naked then getting on top of each other” angle, I’d explored it further. By talking to schoolmates and hobos, I was able to conjure a rough approximation of the mechanics involved. Here is an illustration I’ve prepared to help explain:

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As a youngster, I was never given “the talk.” I have a hazy memory of asking my mother something that must have been sexual in nature and her handing me a copy of Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. At this point—I must have been eleven or twelve—she had long since checked out on the mothering front. In retrospect, I take her handing me the book as her way of saying “You can read. It’s all in here. Don’t bother me with that stuff.” Or, she may have actually said that.

At the time, everything I actually knew about about sex had been explained to me by a neighborhood girl whose name escapes me. Several years prior, I had been walking unaccompanied down one of the alleys that lined the houses on our block. Just off this particular alley, there was a thicket of bushes that were either hollowed out by hand or grew that way. Regardless, the opening in the middle of the thicket could easily accommodate several children. And it did. The neighborhood children and I had used it as a “fort” many times prior to this afternoon. It was like a cave made out of bushes, complete with walls and a roof.

I imagine I was kicking stones down the alley and thinking about being Batman when the neighborhood girl popped out of the thicket-hole and greeted me. She was older than I was and, as it turned out, considerably wiser. She said she wanted to talk to me and invited me in. (It’s becoming more and more difficult not to read any of these sentences as bad double entendres, by the way.) Knowing her as a chum from the neighborhood, I happily obliged.

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Taken this afternoon.

About a month ago, my friend Cookie and I decided we would drag each other out to do “grown-up stuff” on as many weekends as we could manage. I’ll let her speak for herself, should she choose to do so, but my thinking was as follows:

I’m old. I’m single. I do nothing on the weekends other than lay on the couch and listen to myself get fatter. I need to start doing things—grown-up things like seeing movies, eating at restaurants, shopping, seeing lectures, and so on. I have no desire to hang out in bars (not drinking will cure you of bars real quick) or go see live music (it all sucks.) I want to be in bed a reasonable hour.

The way I figure, no one ever knocks on your door and presents you with a certificate congratulating you on becoming a grown-up. You just do grown-up stuff enough that you start feeling like a grown-up. Fake it ’til you make it.

The most important thing you need in order to act like a grown-up is money. Grown-up stuff costs money and if you don’t have any money, you can’t do grown-up stuff. Well, you can, but it gets pretty boring after the fourth or fifth free lecture on gender issues in the Sudan. Luckily, I’m not destitute. I haven’t had to pawn anything or donate plasma in years. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not swimming in dough, either. I recently joked that if my apartment burned to the ground and I was able to rescue my cats and guitars, my net loss would be in the neighborhood of two grand and half of that is computer junk. I don’t have swank stuff, but it’s paid for. My rent is always paid on time and I own my car. My insurance pays most of the price of the drugs that help me live and not be crazy—not as crazy, anyway. I can’t eat out every night, but I can certainly afford to do so once a week if I want. In short, financially speaking, I’m a grown-up.

Another thing you need if you want to act like a grown-up is motivation. I don’t have much of this. Neither does Cookie. That’s why I’ve pledged to badger the fuck out of her to do this stuff. Now that we’re a month into our experiment, I’m fairly certain mine may be the last voice she wants to hear. I wasn’t kidding about the badgering. I am also adept at cajoling and am a pretty good hectorer. Sadly, the dearth of motivation between us means one of us has to step up and act as the pain-in-the-ass. I am that.

Lately, I’ve been badgering the the fuck out of her to get a computer. Not some hand-me-down piece of shit, either—a brand-new computer. Computering at home can be fun. You can look at what you want and you’re only wasting your own time, not your employer’s. It was the computer that caused us to embark on our latest outing: a trip into the swirling vortex of upscale consumerism—on the Saturday night after Thanksgiving, no less. If you’re gonna go, go big. That’s what I never say.

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Today, I had a morning meeting with the honchos at the Pigspittle County Democratic Party headquarters. I’ve been volunteering with them since the 2004 election. Bear in mind that when I say “volunteering”, I mean “doing just as much and only as much as will allow me to feel like I’m making a difference.” Turns out, that’s not much. My threshold for self-satisfaction is surprisingly low, actually. I need only make a few calls or slap on a bumper sticker and I’m good. Truthfully, scratch that—I’m too much of a pussy to put Democratic bumper stickers on my car here in Red County, Red State.

I cannot stand GOTV cold-calling. You have to sit in a hot, cramped room that smells like mildew and read from a dopey script to people who are hostile even if they agree with your political viewpoint. You’re bothering people. I don’t like to bother people, especially fellow Democrats. If I were calling Republicans and screaming “HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR THREE DOLLAR GAS, COCKFACE? WHY ARE SO MANY OF YOU GAY?”, I’d like cold-calling better. So, I just do the latter in my free time.

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Enjoy the turkey and football, folks.

See you back here on Monday the 26th.

When I was in grade school, back in the early seventies, I was a member of the safety patrol. I would stand on a corner near my house and block traffic with my orange plastic belt, shiny silver badge and long, yellow pole with an orange flag that read STOP on it. One afternoon, I was on my usual beat: the northeast corner of Fairview and Catalpa. A city bus was at the light preparing to turn northbound on Catalpa. When the bus began its turn, the back wheels jumped the curb and hit the fire hydrant on the corner. The hydrant bent roughly fifteen degrees and popped several bolts on its base. Immediately, water began to pool around the bottom of the broken hydrant. It was leaking pretty badly and would need repair. Luckily, there was a fire station on the northeast corner of Fairview and Catalpa.

So, I stuck my safety patrol pole in the gap between the sidewalk and the base of the hydrant and pried the hydrant the rest of the way over. The result was a fifteen-foot geyser of water spewing from where the hydrant had been.

It’s a good thing the fire house was right across the street because I hurriedly looked around to see if anyone had seen me pry the hydrant off. When I was confident that no one had, I ran home.

My mom asked me why I was so wet.

“Puddle.” I said.

I am the sort of person that prefers overcast to sunny days. I prefer Winter over Summer and Fall over Spring. To everyone else in the vicinity of Pigspittle, Ohio, the only word to describe Monday, November 19th, 2007 would have been “bleak”. Today’s gray flannel skies were broken only by an occasional spatter of ice-cold rain. Driving home, I was reminded of JMW Turner’s “Schatten und Dunkelheit: Der Abend vor der Sintflut” (seen above). I assume the translated title of the painting is “The Day I Decided to Kill Myself”.

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In the comment section of the last post, Miss Black said

I take it your stint at CCAD didn’t pan out in the end.

She was right. No matter how practical my grandfather’s proposal was in retrospect, I could not be persuaded to take advantage of it. The quantum awkwardness of his revelations combined with my utter disinterest in higher education—or any education, for that matter—sealed my fate for the next twenty years. I could not imagine myself living with my grandfather, nor was I particularly interested in art. I had a knack for illustration and “commercial art” but I was far more interested in the field of “Dicking Around with My Friends” and imagined my patrician grandfather would function as a massive cockblocker. (Of course, it never occurred to me that he would be gone every weekend, leaving the apartment to me and me alone.)

My grandfather died a decade later. At the time of his death, I hadn’t spoken to him in many years. My father, my then-wife and myself were among the first to arrive at the funeral home and asked my mother’s boyfriend, Bob—who had arrived first—if we were in the right room. “I’m wondering the same thing!” said Bob. My grandfather, in repose, was unrecognizable. Apparently, cancer had reduced him to less than half of his former self. He was dressed in a silk robe and pajamas. None of his clothes fit anymore, my grandmother later explained. None of us had seen my grandfather for years and this man lying in a casket looked nothing like him. A solemn funeral director wandered in and my father asked him if we were in the right place. The funeral director told him we were.

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I watched a year-end tribute program last winter that paid homage to several sports “legends” who had passed away in 2006. Each segment featured highlights and interviews with peers of the deceased. The interviews were often humorous and tender. Paying tribute to Golfer Byron Nelson was fellow PGA golfer Tom Watson. Tom Watson doesn’t have a humorous or tender bone in his body.

In a dull monotone, Watson relayed the story of how he met Nelson. He said Nelson had approached him at a tournament and said “Son, I like the way you conduct yourself.” They struck up a friendship and Nelson became something of a mentor to the young Watson. Watson, quite possibly the whitest man ever to don a pair of SansABelts, told several stories about Nelson that were as boring as a stump. Over and over, words like “conduct”, “honor”, “tradition” and “sportsmanship” popped up in the anecdotes. According to Watson, Nelson was the consummate gentleman sportsman who conducting himself honorably. No jokes. No laughs. No high-spirited goofs. Just droning tales of honorable conduct, firm handshakes, tradition and sportsmanship.

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