The Hell With Politics - Let’s Have Some Sex

By TRB

Every once in a while writers have to back up (usually into their fake Queen Anne armed chairs) and change the subject. It seems that every time we go after some really big issue, some other furry, but dangerous, and of course fast, monster scurries past us in the dark. We are left with our bucket of stones to throw at the U.S. or the world, which seems intent on turning itself into a G-30 or 40 economics and trade system or something, equally mind-numbing.

The men are playing their games again. It is time to duck and cover.

And what of the diminishing dollar - what if the Yen replaces the Dollar as the world's accepted currency? This is a real possibility. Well then milk will be $500 a gallon and anyone would be crazy wasting time reading newspapers. Besides, you couldn't afford to read one. The possibilities are not endless anymore, if they ever were.

In fact in comes down to just two possible scenes. Either things are going to work out very badly for the U.S. Or things are going to go on like this for a while longer until things work out very badly for the U.S.

There is just too much talent out there today. The Japanese were defeated by the U.S. in 1945. The U.S. then gave them enough money to revive their economy and that, years later, nearly destroyed our automobile industry. The same with the Germans. General Marshall was maybe a little too generous with our money. I think of that every time I am seated in my ultra-modern German-engineered car. I think, good thing we never defeated the Russians or my liver would be shot right about now.

Will we turn the ugly scar called Afghanistan with its crazy leader (This guy has the papers to prove it.) into a "Land of Oz" on earth? Will Iraq become the gambling capital of the world? Why are we always inventing new competition for ourselves? Do we really see the world as one giant venture capital scheme?

Think of how stupid that would be. If we win, we lose. I can tell our world-wide venture capital activities are going really well because our clients (all those other nations) are beginning to laugh at us and some are even leaving the room. They have new things called a "middle class," for which they sometimes seek our advice. We had a middle class once for what seemed like ages.

Yes this would be the perfect time to make the argument that we gave all our baseball trading cards, including the Baba Ruth, to other nations. And now they won't play with us no more.

But frankly, I would rather write about sex in the suburbs. Something I actually know something about. Well, not first hand.

I was lucky in the Sixties. I was apparently immune to STDs, my girlfriends all believed I was too skinny and that maybe good food and even better sex would put some weight on me. Naturally I enjoyed every moment of the Sixties.

But recently I was going through a tunnel in a train and a sexual thought detached itself from a compartment somewhere deep in my brain and appeared before my eyes. A train. A Tunnel. What next, Freud? I swear, once we had made it to the other end of that tunnel, the other passengers, like me, seemed quite relieved, and even satisfied. Yes, we had a group experience. But this wasn't "Bob,Carol Ted and Alice" a goofy movie about sexual relations from the sixties. Is something happening here?

Didn't disco, Studio 54, a writer, Truman Capote, whose voice sounded like a wind-up kid's doll, Andy Warhol and the ultimate STD, AIDS, put sex in its place? Didn't those events revive a hazy type of Puritan era? And, on a more personal level, have I been missing out on a lot of perfectly good sex for a long time?

So, I was having a cup of coffee the other day with a friend, the kind of friend whose life is a movie which he re-writes daily. Yes, he is on meds. There was a lull in the conversation and my "end of the world" obsessions were seeping through, souring the taste of my already sour coffee. At about this time my friend began to describe a dress. It was I believe an off-white lacy dress.

As he began to discuss this dress I wondered if maybe he was losing it.

But then he started to discuss a set of legs that spent time in this dress, which was, incidentally, also a short dress. Naturally, I had to know just how short this lacy dress might be. One has to at least develop a picture of the situation, which, in this case was that he was falling in love with the married woman who lived across the street from him. He was married too.

He is describing these legs and I am almost transported back to the early dinners and all night sex parts of my life. These are a 55 year old woman's legs and they are, according to my friend, perfect in every respect. Did they make you want to see more, I asked him, Yes, he replied. So the short skirt still had its powers, all these years later.

I advised him not to have an affair. Really, after 30 years of marriage to the same person, if you are so untrustworthy as to jump on the first shapely leg that comes around, what does that say about your character?

Really, I sense a new "love generation" coming our way, coming being perhaps a poor choice of words. But nonetheless, there seems to be a sort of easing up in the area of sexual activity out there.

At least we'll have something to do as the Russians sell the Capitol Building.

Look at the bright side.