pretty dumb things

not fade away

I went to only one Grateful Dead show. It was such a perfect experience that despite having chances to go again, and despite trying to prolong that perfect Dead-space by driving around in my '80 Sirocco and listening only to bogarted tapes from some Red Rocks concert that I didn’t even attend, I never went to another. It was at SPAC, this natural outdoor amphitheater a few miles outside of the bucolic town of Saratoga, and I had gone with this other boyfriend and a few friends. We’d all piled in someone’s car, and we’d all dropped acid, everyone except whoever it was who was driving home.

The show was sold out. We parked in a field and hiked to the metal gates of SPAC, and someone kept watch for renta-cops as the rest of us clambered over the seven-foot fence. A tree helped. When I hit the ground, the acid hit too. I spent the next few hours somewhere near the Dead’s sound board, transfixed by the lights going flashy-flash, the noodle-dancers’ languid arms, and the music that echoed my very soul itself, man.

The last song was The Crickets’ “Not Fade Away.” “A love for real, not fade away,” and the last few chords echoed into oblivion well after Jerry and the boys had left the stage a glittering blank, all but its magic carpet and the violence of flowers strewn as at a bull ring.

This past Saturday night, I got an email from an ex-boyfriend, a man whom I’ve not seen in almost thirty years. I dated Ben when I was twenty; he was sixteen. It was in lots of ways both the last teenage relationship of my life and the first adult one. When I rifle through my internal Rolodex, I realize that Ben was the first man I fell in love with (not, however, the first human; that was Marta), and he’s one of the very few whom I continue to love, across time and distance and absence and all that goes with nearly thirty years of time passing like a sludgy quicksilver second.

So there it was, an email in my box with Ben’s name. I read it with that crawling horrorsloth of delight doing that frisson dance in my entrails. It’s an eldritch fucking experience to have someone reach out and touch you from decades away. As it turns out, it’s really rather painful to have the first man you ever loved, a man who wasn’t a man then but given his Gmail profile picture of a graying dude a bit wispy at the temples clutching a baby like a life-raft in a storm is a man now, email you out of the digital black. As it turns out, even when he writes to you lovely things, things about how lucky he was to have you introduce him to sex—and you did, you were his first, but then he was yours too, you just didn’t know it then—even when he writes lovely things like that, it turns out it's really rather painful.

As it turns out, when you get a series of emails (only three, but three makes a series, at least it does in serial killings and baseball; you need at least three, not all at once, to make a series) and one after another laves you with the love and the language, the quirkiness, the remembrance of making out in police cruisers, and the whimsy that made you fall in love all those years ago, as it turns out it’s really rather painful.

So the analytic part of the brain kicks in. You look at the picture of the man white-knuckling his new babe and the time-stamp on the email, and you imagine him and his baby and his new baby’s mother and you know how it is with sex and men and new babies. What with the crying and the leaking and the general ambiance of what-the-fuckedness. The past glows extra-Polaroid rosy when you and yours have been sleepless, or he and his, to be clear. It’s no small eight-pound red-faced squalling nothing that drives a man to wonder what the beauty he to whom he offered his virginity is doing these days. Or nights. Whatever.

And so too kicks in the part that defends with the well-shined armor of snark. It’s hard to pull the dead humor punches when you’re returning emails to a man whom you loved and he’s hoping that your writing is thick with love because that is the word that still gives him the internal flicker-flips. You find it hard not to get your inner Brit on and respond with the humor so arid-it’s-acid. You do your best not to. You do, but it’s so goddamn painful.

And you distance yourself with pop music and too many episodes of mindless television that you boot like heroin, if you had ever done heroin, which you didn’t. It’s not a classic lost weekend, but it’s lost all the same. Because there’s nothing like the email in the dead of night from the first man you ever loved to bring it home that you’re home alone. Another Saturday Night and you ain’t got nobody. Your use of the second-person pronoun is tiresome even to you.

The vampire movie The Hunger came out when I was dating Ben. It played at the one independent movie theatre that Burlington, Vermont had. We walked past the marquee and read the tagline for the film. “Nothing human loves forever,” it said.

I do, I mean I will, I said to him. Ben laughed and told me that was impossible. I’d forget him, he said. He broke up with me a few weeks later. It wasn’t his fault; I understood that the time had passed. I was still in love with him, and so my understanding was shot through with hurt. I got it, but I still loved.

Buddy Holly wrote “Not Fade Away” for his band, The Crickets, when he was twenty. He had the luxury of dying young. 

 

in praise of roman men

For those of you who like it aural, I made a voice recording of this post. Forgive the vocal stumbles toward the end; I couldn't bear to read the whole thing again.

4_3_11 9_36 PM

 If walking through Rome doesn’t make you want to divide and conquer, you need to take a look at your testosterone. Those hills undulate around you like a heaving bosom, like parted thighs, like dimpled buttocks. The cypresses stand proud and erect like so many martial pricks. The river runs through it, wet and mossy smelling. I have spent the past two decades in New York, a city that wafts faintly with the funk of sex, but only Rome has made me wish I had a cock.

Italy is, of course, sexy as fuck. I’ve now traveled up and down Liguria and journeyed all over Tuscany’s hills and dales. This next week, I’ll venture into Trentino-Aldo Adige, Friuli and Piedmont. Next month, I’m going to Umbria, Campania and Sicilia. I’ll have seen a goodly portion of this absurd country by the time I return to Gotham in June. But judging solely from the slender share that I’ve seen thus far, I can say that Italy lives up to its sexy reputation. The land is beautiful. The food is beautiful. The wine is beautiful. And the women are badass. But what really makes this country hot as hell is the men, and nowhere are the men as smoldering as they are in Rome.

Thus I genuflect and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I give praise to the men of Rome.

If we as humans like to project our complex and often conflicting sexual desires onto the body of women, the personification of that woman is the city of Rome. Its terrain, its buildings, its topography, its strange creative anachronisms so complex and mind-bending that they make steam-punk look like child’s play: Rome is a singular city, if one with a dual consciousness. To be succinct: Rome embodies the violated virgin and the wanton woman. It both looks as if it wants it, and it looks away, more terrified than demure. Everywhere—from the ruins that punctuate the landscape with the scattered littered look of children’s toys to the fascist white birthday cake that is the Monumento Vittorio Emanuele II—the city has the aspect of a victim and of a mistress. Only the outskirts smack of the Borghese wife. It is a landscape that you can’t help but objectify, and as much as it makes you feel dirty to do so, it nonetheless makes you feel empowered.

You want to take Rome with vigor, and you want to make it cry for more. 

On one of the buildings of the piazza surrounding the Musei Capitolini Roma is a frieze of some mythological figure or other. The god may be Neptune or he may be Zeus, but whoever he is, he looks intently at a large, horn-like implement. It looks like nothing as much as catching a man in deep conversation with his cock. In a similar vein, the Piazza del Popolo holds two basilicas separated by an obelisk. Which, from a distance, looks like nothing as much as two giant testicles and a long, if spindly, phallus.

Cocks abound in Rome. You can’t swing a dead pussy without hitting a dick, or something dick-like, a building reminiscent of dick, or a dickish monument. It might be that this city, home to the Catholic church and thus invested in the extreme regulation of sexual behavior, might be the testament to the veracity of the theory that Michel Foucault laid out in his History of Sexuality: the discourse that works to prohibit sexuality in effect incites sexual activity. Or it may merely be that the only place that could possibly house the Vatican was the most testosterone-driven city on earth. In any case, the defining visual characteristic of Rome is the penis, and, as far as I’m concerned, bully for Rome. God bless it and all its phallic glory.

For it’s really as simple as this: the men of Rome are things of beauty. In other places and at other times, I’ve lamented the fact that men have since the Industrial Revolution forsaken their plumage. Like the Gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I feel that men have given up something important when they relinquished their right to wear scarlet trousers. The choice to dress in clothes as dull as starlings is one that makes eyes glide off men as if they were coated in Teflon. I like clothes that extend an implicit blank check to let my eyes linger. And that is why I cherish the men of Rome.

The second day I wandered Rome, I walked to the Jewish quarter, where I had the questionable pleasure of enjoying the cultural tradition of the fregatura romana, or the Roman rip-off. This is when a restaurant sizes up a customer for the exact usurious limit that he or she will pay without raising too big a fuss, and charging it. My limit, it turned out, was €33, or about $45 in American dollars. It’s not merely a lot for a lunch, it was also a giant gutload for this specific lunch. But I knew when I got the check what the score was, and I had to hand it to the host; he had pegged me correctly. I would pay this bill even knowing full fucking well how much I was being ripped off, and I would do it with not unpleasurable chagrin.

Sitting down in Rome long enough to pick at a plate of food and drink some not bad Kosher Vermentino, I had the chance to confirm what I had suspected for the past couple of days. Roman men were hot. More than hot, they were smoldering. They dressed without fear, and they oozed cool upon cool. They were, as a group, the most solidly stylish bunch of men I’d ever ogled to my loins’ content. 

And ambling past the Pantheon down the Via del Corso to Piazza del Popolo and then back up the Via del Babuino, I had the sublime experience of having that suspicion validated again and again. Old men, young men, middle-aged men, men in suits and men in jeans, men on bikes, men pushing strollers, men leading packs of track-suited athletes—they were everywhere and they looked amazing. They strutted with all the smug satisfaction of peacocks; they lolled like well-fed lions; they strode with the iron-thighed cool of silver-backed gorillas. They were fucking men, and they dared you to look.

Tight pants have an insouciant charm. They invoke the gaze. Your eyes are drawn to that golden bulging triangle. It’s a thing, and you want to see it. American men tend to choose pants that do all but erase their masculinity. American men wear pants as if their towering pubic mounds were mere bumps, smooth and burnished as a Ken doll’s. American men, at least the ones who dress coded as straight, tend toward pants that don’t fit. Italian men, however, like pants that show what their poppa gave them.

 I like it, in short. I like the gift that my imagination keeps on giving. I like the permission to objectify. I like that I’m not only constrained to women’s décolletage for my sexual imaginings, or to fashioning some full-fledged three-D phallus out of some pale and pallid flap of fabric. I like the invitation, and I’ll take it. I can’t say that my short stay in Rome did the conflagration of my libido any favors. It was one prolonged giant clit-tease, and yet I wouldn’t take the experience back for all the dildos in Dallas. If anything, I want to move to Rome.

It’s hard to say how much the energy of a place is the fabrication of all the mythologies of that imagined space. How much of my phallic vision of Rome is the combined force of every Antonioni movie I’ve ever watched, every Verdi opera I’ve ever listened to, every bottle of Sangiovese I’ve ever drunk, every Forster novel I’ve ever read, every Vespa or Ducati I’ve ever wished were snuggled tight between my thighs? How much of it is the weight of my high school, college and grad school Latin and all of its rapacious syntax? And how much is simply intrinsic to this mythical place, this city built and ravaged and built and ravaged and built and ravaged and built again, a cycle of Greeks and Gauls and Visogoths and Fascists and so on for millennia? How much of it is the ineffable magic of the lemon-lavender light that lingers over Circo Massimo, this light that glows with the aura of Aurelius? How much of it is there, and how much of it nestles quietly in the succulent grey matter between my ears?

It’s hard to say. You can never extract the empirical real from the subjective experience, and that, when you’re talking about an eternal city, is a good thing. It’s a thing of magical hardness and velvety softness and the quicksilver scent of musk and smoldering glances. It’s a thing of kinetic electric and atavistic mysteries and beautiful, beautiful men. Long live the Roman man, there in that eternal city. When they and their mythic potency are lost, then we truly have reason to weep. In the meantime, let me rejoice and linger and remember those men and their cool air and their hot, hot trousers.

If you like these pictures, you might want to check out my photo blog from time to time.  All the cool kids tumblr for you.

 

 

 

someone thinks my writing is elegant: younger men and tight prose

So I've a new piece up on Filthy Gorgeous Things. It's about why I like younger men, and it's called "Robbing the Playpen." Totter on over there, read it, and return. I'll wait. Here's an excerpt:

But my preference for a man is younger. He used to be a standard eight-to-ten years younger (and, indeed, this is the age bracket I like for a relationship), but now he’s a lot younger than that. He is, if you look at my last ten years of sex history, anywhere between a seemly ten years to a rather staggering twenty. I admit it: I quake when I could have gone to high school with my lover’s mom. It makes me feel weird and, well, really old. Age is not just a number. Size matters. And you’re not only as old as the person you’re fucking.

But fuck them I do. Most recently, it was this creamy dish of an Eastern European of uncertain descent. He possessed a mind of dark beauty and a cock as long, straight and narrow as a ruler...

The man described above is the man over whom I suffered tristesse and then wrote about it. He and I email one another from time to time. He feels flattered, which I think is sweet and which junction of flattery/sweetness probably sums up the relationship between muse and artist more than it does the relationship between younger man and older woman.

Though what the hell do I know? I've never been a younger man.

I have, however, been written about, and it is flattering and creepy in equal measure. That frisson probably goes a long way to explain my extreme singleness. 

For some cosmic crash of events, I've had sudden uptick of readers here on my pretty dumb things. Even when I haven't posted for months and months, I maintain a tidy 300 or so pages read a day, primarily because of this particular post on deep-throating. I am, apparently, a blow-job queen, an empress of fellatio, a doyenne of deep-throating, a consort of cock-sucking. I knew I enjoyed the activity, and I've always taken pride in it, but I never considered myself that much of an authority. Apparently, the Internets sees me as the Martha Stewart of knob-slobbing, and I suppose that's a good thing.  At any rate, it keeps my page-count consistent.

That chart to the left or above (depending on the size of your window) is empiric evidence in the form of search results that brought people to my pdt. You can embiggen the image and count it up, but I'm guessing about 3/4 of this list (it goes on beyond the scope of my screen) has to do with sucking cock. I'm not entirely sure about the person who searched for "SEXY MEN DEEP TROATING LADIES SUCKING COCK," but who am I to rain on another human's consensual fantasy? Likewise if you're the person asking "how often should i suck black boyfriends cock," I'd answer "as often as you want and he's willing." Not to presume, or anything. 

Regardless of what brought them, it's always really gratifying to take a quick look at my stats and see that someone is devouring my archives. This is my 801st post, give or take a few. If you consider that most of my posts average a bit shy of a thousand words, and then if you times the numbers and carry the one, you'll see that I've written quite a lot. I have a metric shit-tonne of archives. There is, in short, a lot to read. And it looks as if there will be yet more. (But you'll find the anal stuff here and the oral stuff here, you beloved smut-seekers.)

For a variety of reasons too excruciatingly boring to tell, I've recently fallen in love again with my blog. My blog also has undergone a subtle refurbishment at the hands of 3Design3; I'm quite fond of the work this company has done. I'm not sure which came first--my falling back in love or the refurbishment--but I do like the new look. Even if this confluence of events suggests that I am at heart a shallow, superficial, Oscar Wildean kind of girl. 

I ramble. Forgive me. I had some really bad news today, and it leaves me wanting a big tumbler of brown alcohol. Thanks for reading. Even you trolls. You love me, you really, really love me.

I could just swallow you whole.

PS. I forgot. A friend of mine also has a piece on FGT about her time working as a hostess at sex parties. You have to pay to read it, but it's worth it. This woman is no slouch as a writer. Watch her, seriously. She's all that and.

wherein it's complicated (but not meaningless)

Late Friday night, dressed in my jammies, I went to an expensive mid-town hotel and had sex with a virtual stranger. I’m less interested in reflecting upon the sex right now. However, as it is conceivable that the man with whom I mussed that expansive hotel bed may read this, I do note genuinely and sincerely that the sex was lovely. He’s a champion hair-puller, no mean feat indeed. He has an atavistic understand of sexual cadence, of play and release, of teeth and lips and tongue, of nails and fingertips. His body is long and white and thin, a lovely creamy thing, and his cock is similarly tasty. More than that, he’s smart as a whip and twice as honest. He’s hard not to like as a person and a lover, and I do.

He probably thinks this post is about him, but he’d be wrong. It’s about me, and about melancholy and the billowing not unpleasant melancholy that comes with fucking a virtual stranger.

This man was one of those men that I clapped my eyes on with great delight. It’s not merely that he’s a beautiful geek. It’s that he’s cynical, funny and smart. His mind visibly goes tick-a-tick-a-tick and his words sometimes come out garbled and weird in his intensity. These are things I like in a human. He stuck out his hand upon meeting me. I clasped his long white fingers in my own and got greedy with lust. It’s one of those things that blindsides me from time to time, though recently a lot less often than it once did.

He is, as is my wont, younger. And I suppose that youth is part of the melancholy that I’ve been marinating in so willingly all weekend, since I left that broad white bed around 7:00 on Saturday morning and cabbed home to my Gotham apartment. The youth is so significant as to be overdetermined, but mostly what it seems to be screaming with is the press and clutch of great loves of my past.

Three years ago, I broke with the last of those loves. I’ve healed. I no longer pine. I left pining behind a long time ago. Pining is so far retreated in my rearview that I saw Donny last December. We went to a play together, and it felt much like visiting your old high school does. Everything seemed a lot smaller than you remember it. It felt a lot like closure. But although I’m over that last broken relationship, it’s written on my body and in my heart. My next love will walk past that relationship’s mirror; it’ll get caught, refracted, however briefly. That lost love marked me. It was there; then it was gone; I hurt; and now I don’t. But the chalk outline, blurry and ill-defined, remains.

These days, I’m fine. I’m alone, single, and I’m fine. I had a brief, moderately horrid ill-calibrated relationship with a man last winter, and when it ended, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I haven’t dated since, and I didn’t date before the moderately horrid ill-calibrated relationship. I’ve been alone, fine, single, content with my friends, who are undeniably fabulous.

I’m fine and I’m fine and I’m fine. I ignore the call of my wild libido. I masturbate like I wash the dishes: efficiently and matter-of-factly. Flirtation rolls like tumbleweeds through the ghost town of my social life. I really am ok living on my onesie; I’m not even angry at Sunday afternoons. I’ve achieved a zenlike calm about my solitude.

Nothing wrecks that calm, shreds the tissue of my self-delusion, or shines a Klieg light under my bed to illuminate the dustbunnies of my love life as fast as six hours spent in the cool confines of a high-end hotel utopia wrapped in the hot limbs of a stranger. I left the hotel striding the earth as a Colossus. I sauntered down that dim corridor and sashayed into a taxi. Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of bright white 7:00 a.m. sunshine. I had been tumbled, rogered roundly. I had fucked and it had been good. I was still sticky with come. All was shiny delight.

Then the endorphins left the building, and I fell cowering in their wake, a raw mess. The man I’d fucked loomed large and became the silver-flecked screen for all my most filmic projections: the Zeffirelli haloed glow of infatuation, the Hawks chiseled relief of witty banter, the Altman clarity of real adult love, the Allen jitter of insecurity, the Carpenter blood-splattered horror of rejection. I got hit with the ice truck of melancholy, and it was all I could do not to write poetry. Nothing should drive me to poesy.

I've been fortunate to have had two great loves in my life. The luck, the loves, and the history are incontrovertible and intrinsic. I don’t dwell on the loss—my life is as my life is—and my current state is one of content solitude. But the flesh knows. Like the way my body can recollect the choreography of dances I learned twenty years ago once the music starts playing and I let my conscious mind hang numb, so too when I’m having sex does my body remember what it’s like making love with a man whom I love with every nerve ending, every dendrite, every particle, spark, byte and bit of matter that is me.  It’s not unpleasant, but it is disconcerting.

The keening truth of the matter is this: I miss being with someone and being completely. I miss the trust and the eddying swirl of feelings. I miss making plans and breathing the same air. I miss snuggling warm at night and waking up sticky. I miss knowing someone's body and feeling secure in the knowing that he too knows mine. I miss shared history and the sanguine hope of shared future.  When I haven't had sex, when I haven't kissed and touched and felt my breath catch in the back of my throat, when I haven't felt the sharp loss of an inch of space or the fluttering hush of anticipation, I don't acknowledge that bricolage of losses. I can fool myself into feeling fine alone. And mostly I am fine. But I'm not plush with the rush of love.

It’s Sunday, the day of the couple, and I’m still melancholic. It’s not unpleasant; it’s just complicated. I’m glad for what I did and what I’ve done and what I’ve felt. I just wonder if that is all there is, and if that’s all there is, my friends, I suppose I’ll just have to keep on dancing.

 

a meditation on why Dockers are a blight upon mankind

I've a new piece on Filthy Gorgeous Things, and in it I undress men with my eyes. And then I dress them with my words. And then I undress them just because I can. And then I hold outfits up and go, "hm," thoughtfully. And let them stand around naked, fidgeting.

It's a piece on male dressing for FGT's ornament issue and it begins thusly:

I once fucked a man solely because I saw him changing from his civvies into his bartending clothes and caught a quick and dashing sight of him in his purple low-rise bikini underwear. It was 1984, and at 21, I had never seen a man in anything but either my previous boyfriends’ white Jockeys or my dad’s frighteningly ugly flappy boxers. That bartender’s provocative grape bikini undies got him laid, if only that once.

And yet even as these grape bikini manties held a magical power over my jejune erotic imagination, they also neatly represent a paradox, and that is this: It’s simply easier to be half-naked and hot as a woman than it is to be half-naked and hot as a man.

If you want to read the rest--and I strongly suggest that you do--go here and continue. Then come back here and leave a comment because I care what you think. I also like it when you follow me on Twitter because sometimes all that stands between me and total meltdown is how many followers I have. 

(Photo is of Milan designer Isabel Mastache's now infamous penis pants. I found the photo here, but it's all over the Web.)

14, 2, 18 and 99 matters of time

I am woman who is decidedly not a mathlete, yet I am obsessed with counting. This post is about numbers, those theoretically pure empiric indicators of time’s passage and all that goes along with the slow counting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on to inaccurate infinity. Pythagoras and his mystical manipulations might have been misguided in believing that numbers hold an intrinsic magic, but there’s no denying that they carry unassailable power.

On the surface, they’re just figures. 14 years. 2 years. 18 months. 99 days. But as with make-up, linoleum and Potemkin Villages, a pretty façade can hide a Midas load of loss. This final week in April marks a series of anniversaries. Fourteen years since my ex-boyfriend Will placed a significantly dog-eared copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta on the floor, entered his closet, put a needle in his arm, and shot himself up with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Two years since my long-lost biological father sent me that digital bolt from the blue and claimed his stake in my life. Eighteen months since my ex-almost-fiancé Donny and I split. And 99 days since we last spoke.

what is a man? read this, print it, staple it to your forehead and thank me later

In response to Esquire's essay of the same title published in its instructional May 2009 "How to Be a Man" issue.

A man carries cash, or at least a debit card. Maybe a handful of loose change, which he puts into a bowl of assorted change at the end of the day. Or perhaps the man just throws it on the coffee table. Because a man owns a coffee table. Also coffee mugs. But not demitasse spoons. A man wouldn’t be caught dead with a demitasse spoon. Unless he is Jonathan Adler, in which case he proudly carries his demitasse spoons with him.

A real man fears Jonathan Adler. He knows that Jonathan Adler will cut you, motherfucker.

A man builds things. Bookcases out of bricks and 2x4s. A coffee table out of a deer crossing sign. A fort out of his mashed potatoes. A mountain out of a molehill. This is his way of escaping mortality. Also of escaping Alcatraz. A man knows how to tunnel out of a maximum security prison using only a toothbrush and the cardboard from the center of a toilet paper roll. Steve McQueen was a man. So is SpongeBob Squarepants. You can tell because they both wear pants. That’s where they carry their cash and maybe their demitasse spoons.

A man can look you up and down and tell whether you’re wearing pants. Before you say a word, he’s figured out the pants situation. That’s because a man is fearless about scoping the crotch every once in a while. Even if he gets busted. From your shins, from your loins, from your button fly, a man infers.

A man owns things. That is why Buddha is not a man. Maybe he was when he was alive, because he probably owned that sheet thing he wore, but let’s face it. Buddha didn’t have pants. So he had no place to carry his cash, his keys or his demitasse spoons. What kind of man is that. Not much of a man. He would have been stuck in nursery school, never mind Alcatraz.

A real man loves the human body. All of it, but especially the delicate skin at the base of a throat, the swoop and curve of the left instep, the ineffable squishiness of the medulla oblangata, and the entire lymph system. A man, a true man, appreciates the glorious beauty of lymphocytes. When his woman, or his man, or, hell, even his dog, bends over, a man sees the beauty of the initial lymphatics, the prelymphatics or lymph capillaries that specialize in collection of the lymph from the ISF, and the larger lymph vessels that propel the lymph forward. Seeing this, he feels a thrum that only a man can feel.

A man doesn’t point out that he has a pimple.

A man looks out for children. Makes them stand behind him. Especially at parades. Because a real man loves a parade and doesn’t want any goddamn children blocking his view.

A man has had liquor enough in his life that he can order a drink without sounding breathless, clueless, or obtuse. Also without sounding obsequious, purple or clairvoyant. When in doubt, a man panics and orders a Slo Gin Fizz. Because they’re yummy, dammit.

A man welcomes the coming of the apocalypse. It frees him. It allows him to use the Lord’s name in vain because, fuck it, after that thing with that underage stripper that one time and the cheating at Russian roulette he was never going to make it to heaven anyway.

A man writes in short declarative sentences. A man knows that dependent clauses are for pussies. Only the weak need more punctuation than a period. Fuckers.

A man owns tools and knows how to use them. But a real man always abides by common safety precautions including the use of safety goggles. A man puts the tools back where he found them. A man also puts the lotion on its skin. Or else it gets the hose again.

A reciprocating saw, incidentally, doesn’t quite do what its name implies. Still, it’s a very good saw if you’re fitting windows, cutting down saplings or dismembering a body.

A man knows how to eat frisee without it sticking out of his mouth like he’s some kind of latter-day Apatosaurus. Speaking of which, a man enjoys the oeuvre of Judd Apatow. A real man would like to share a turkey sandwich with Judd Apatow. And then maybe a cuddle.

A real man knows the emotional value of some man-on-man spooning. Also possibly man-on-man forking.

A real man is flexible. He can touch his toes and those of others.

A real man will dance, but only to Huey Lewis and the News. Or Zeppelin.

A man shapes his opinions as carefully as he shapes his pubes. A man puts the “man” in “craftsman.” A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition.

Quiet and introspective, boisterous and extroverted, crenulated and caespitose, a man likes to watch stuff. Stuff is what he likes to watch. All kinds of stuff. Anything, really. A real man just really, really likes stuff. This is not so much collection or meditation as obliviation. Men watch stuff and imagine that it’s blowing up. Because if there’s anything a man likes more than the creation of stuff, it’s the destruction. Also the deduction, especially if the man is a tax accountant. Men also enjoy the construction. A man also likes paper. A man refracts vision and gains acuity. But if he’s a Battlestar Galactica fan, the man re-fraks. A man is not ashamed of his Cylon fantasies. In this way, a man is like the Terminator, both captive and free, both man and machine, both artificial and intelligent. You cannot take your eyes off a man when he is like that. You shouldn’t. The hell if you know what he’s thinking, who he is, or if he has his demitasse spoons.

I'd like a date: or je voudrais fixer une salade d'épinards

If by “date” you mean a social appointment with an individual with whom there is a shared interest in potentially pursuing an amorous relationship, I’ve not had one in over a year. In the interest of full disclosure, I have seen my X, Donny, a fistful of times, and while those times could fall under the heading of “social appointment,” they didn’t quite meet the rest of the criteria. They were more like social appointments of two individuals between whom there is a shared interest in disengagement.

I have also had quasi-hook-ups with two men. One happened last April with a man who is both in a committed, if elastic, marriage and lives many, many thousand miles away from me. The other took place last August with a man far too young to be taken seriously. While I’ve written about the first hook-up, I’ve chosen not to write about the second because it was a fiasco of such depressing dimensions that I’d prefer not to relive it. I suppose that I did date-like things with both of these men, but though adult beverages and food were consumed, and though walks were taken, I don’t consider them dates. No future, no date, not to my thinking anyway.

A year and a couple months after becoming single, I suppose I’m ready to start thinking about dating.

of mutts and men

“Men are dogs,” people say in order to disparage the males of our species. Men are like dogs, presumably, because they tend toward the promiscuous, the easily distracted, and the eternally hunting. Like dogs, men will sniff all tails, hump anything animate and inanimate, eat trash with gusto, and do it all without any visible (and proper) shame. Men would lick their own balls if, like dogs, they were anatomically predisposed to doing so. Men would prefer to be low-down, lazy and dirty, like dogs. Men and dogs, above all, share an insatiable yen for pussy. And thus, men are dogs.

I actually like the men who are most like dogs. Think of it this way. Linguistically, the to-be verb “is” enacts the equal sign and, as we all know from algebra class, flipping an equation does not affect it. If A+B=C, then C=A+B. Therefore, if men are dogs, then dogs are men. (Likewise, if love is war, then war is love; if diamonds are a girl’s best friend, then a girl’s best friend is a diamond; if life is a bitch, then a bitch is life. And so on. Try it at home, it’s fun.) But as anyone who has ever stood on her head knows, what a difference an inversion makes in a Weltanschauung.

The concept “men are dogs” cherry-picks from a dog’s least desirable attributes (or those least desirable to human interaction; these traits seem to work just fine for canines). The sniffing, smelling, chasing, humping and indiscretion of dogs become those of men in the conventional metaphor. Flip the order and suddenly men are imbued with a whole new set of qualities. They’re trustworthy. They’re faithful. They’re noble. They’ll tell you when Timmy’s down the well, save babies from burning buildings, travel thousands of miles of treacherous terrain only to be with you, sleep happily and protectively at your feet, mourn when you leave, and jump with joy when you return—even if you only went downstairs to get the mail.

In my twenties, I considered myself a cat person. I looked askance at the dumb devotion of a dog. I mistrusted the unquestioning commitment of a canine. I derided the mute submission of the mutt. Why would I align myself with any creature that obligingly came when called? Give me the twitchy-tailed and haughty. At least cats were cool. I couldn’t imagine wanting a dog, even though I’d grown up with them and loved them.

Nearing thirty, I found myself changing, and I got the Legendary Spencer. He was everything I could ever want in a dog—smart, beautiful, connected, playful, funny, obliging, obedient and unequivocally mine. When he died, I was distraught, and then I adopted Boswell, who is as much like Spencer as he is different (he’s smart but neurotic, playful but frenetic, obedient but challenging, beautiful but a total goofball), and I realized that I am a dyed-in-the-wool, never-look-back dog person, and I’m good with that. More importantly, I realized that many of the qualities I love in my dog are the ones I desire in a man: intelligence, connection, commitment, affability, and a love of napping.

I do not, however much I like them both, want to treat men like dogs. I don't believe there's value in the wash of self-help manuals that suggest you can "train" your man using a metaphoric collar and leash, nor do I believe there's much value in the book that argues you can find love if you "pick your breed of man." Google the phrase "men are dogs" and you'll see a plethora of this kind of codswallop written with the intent to make women feel...something. If you want to train something, get a real dog. If you want to establish an equable relationship, find a real man.

I have written before of my Wookie fantasy. I recognize the embodiment of what I like in both men and dogs in Chewbacca. I suppose that doggy-man thing also explains my affection for Fedor Jefticheff (pictured above), Sirius Black from Harry Potter and my love of Oz in Buffy, especially Oz, the werewolf played by Seth Green. I would initially consider myself a Spike girl, but really the man who personifies the man I want is Oz—a whip-smart analytic dude whose offbeat cool masks the primal beast yowling beneath, the man who would literally go to the ends of the earth to find a way to be with me. Oz’s guitar playing would only be the icing on the dog biscuit.

Language shapes the way we think, and neither clichés nor metaphors are an exception. In my mind, men should be dogs: great, big, smelly, hairy, loving, wet-tongued dogs. I’m all for bringing out the mutts in men.

(And, yes, I updated this post in response to Pete's comment below. Thanks, Pete.)

what I'll do for money, honey; or "power, sex, and money" rewrite

I have been utterly felled by a vicious flu. I've had a fever, which is really rare for me because, like a reptile, my basal temperature hovers around 96 degrees. I'm weak, shaky, befuddled, and beset by vague ailments like the way my hair hurts and how I'm aware of my elbows. Plus, my brain has been racing whilst doing a scansion and a close reading of Dorothy Parker's "Résumé"; tell me that won't keep you awake.

Naturally, I've scheduled myself for a reading for this writers' group that I apparently belong to. I'm not much of a joiner. I am far too misanthropic and cynical, and yet joined this group I have. Moreover, I decided to go to a meeting of all single writers, and I've volunteered to read this piece I'm preparing to submit to the New York Times "Modern Love" column. (If you're not familiar with that particular column, go here for an idea.)

Anyway, I'm feverish and addled-headed, and I have to read this thing that's a rewrite of my earlier Vampire/mistress piece. If you feel like reading it, I've placed it below the fold. It'll give you an idea of how I revise, which right now I'm thinking is not nearly enough.