Dark Love

there has never been sunlight for this love,
like a crazed flower it buds in the dark,
is at once a crown of thorns and
a spring garland around the temples

a fire, a wound, the bitterest of fruit,
but a breeze as well, a source of water,
your breath—a bite to the soul,
your chest—a tree trunk in the current

make me walk on the turbid waters,
by the ax that breaks this lock,
the dew that weeps from trees

if I become mute kissing your thighs,
it’s that my heart eagerly
searches your flesh for a new dawn.

~ Francisco X. Alarcón

To my love on the Feast of Valentine.

That's Amore!

This little video seems to have gone viral, and if you watch I think you'll see why.Even my friends jim and Lisa, hard-headed realists that they are, were captivated (which is where I found this - thanks, guys!)

Anyway, you know I'm a sucker for romance, so I'm getting viral like everyone else. But...in a sense, this is both sweet (since this guy obviously wanted their engagement to be really, really memorable) and scary. Because this little skit took dozens of friends and must have taken hours of rehearsal; who the hell has the time and energy for that?

After they have kids they're gonna look back on this in wonder; where the hell DID all that time go..?

Sex in 500 words or less...

I've spent a couple of days thinking about love, and sex, my country and how we seem to think about and act about these things, having started off with the post I wrote about the bizarre attitude the GOP seems to have taken towards the whole business of sex as it plays out in the politics of birth control.

We seem to have a very, very hard time with all of this. And I'm not sure why; it all seems pretty straightforward to me.

Let's look first at the physics of this stuff.On the one hand we have feelings, our emotions; love, tenderness, caring, the affection that we feel for another person. Although we think of them as the adjunct of sexual love - more of which in a bit - these aren't exclusive to adult lovers; we feel them for our children, our parents, sometimes our friends, occasionally (and frighteningly, perhaps) for people we barely know - the obsessed fan believes he or she truly "loves" the object of the obsession, and how can you possibly draw a bright line between that love and another, when all are the product of our own emotions?On the other we have physical desire, lust, the wanting for and need of bodily intimacy. That is - hopefully - both a mutual attraction as well as between adults of the age of consent (unfortunately it's often not) and is one of the most powerful of human inclinations. One of the main reasons I consider the mainstream religious and political hissy about sex as completely moronic along with irritatingly useless is that trying to harness something that has wrecked lives and destroyed great nations by simpering "Oh...but thou shalt not..!" is like trying to sop up a typhoon with a fucking tampon.The West, the Christian West, anyway, has tried since Rome to consciously bind these two - love and sex - together, and then put a bird on it by neatly wrapping them both up with marriage.

Now I've been married twice. And I can tell you that in my experience when a marriage is good it is a wonderful thing.But all sorts of things make a marriage good. And - while sex is a part of them - you can have good times in a marriage when the sex isn't great. And while love is part of them, too, you can have incredible sex during times then the marriage isn't doing so well with the Love Connection.

Sadly I can report that when both of them go to hell there is no hell quite like it.

But for all that we usually take the Love-Sex-Marriage Axis seriously, I'm not so sure that we're doing ourselves a favor trying to wrap the heavy machinery of sex in the pretty shiny paper of love and marriage.Or...no, wait. Let me come at this another way.Love.

Love is an emotion that we can feel for many people, in many different ways, even for places, and things. Love is infinitely adaptable; I can love my children in something of the same way that I love my wife, and I can love her in something of the same way that I love my friends Brent and Julie, say, or my friend Lisa even though Lisa and I have never stood face-to-face, and I've known my wife as intimately physically as a man can know a woman.So love is a sort of universal solvent for human interaction.

Marriage..?

Well, there's a lot of reasons for marriage and when you come right down to it, almost none of them have anything to do with love.

Or sex, for that matter.

Really. Think about it.Does a scrap of paper, or a birdshot spray of words from some prelate, mean that I love my bride more, or less, or differently? Does it place a physical impediment, or remove some real barrier to our making love? Will our sex be better, or worse, or different, because we're swiving in socially accepted approval, humping to the applause of Church and State?

No.

Marriage is a property transaction, frankly, a social and legal convenience. It's about inheritance and bastardyand the lust directly involved is the tumescence of litigation that inspires lust in attorneys.

Marriage is something we've made sentimental and tried to tie into love and sex, but its fundamental purpose is purely to confine all that messy love and sloppy lust in a nice fenced social, economic, and legal corral that the prelates and politicians can feel good about.

I like being married only because of the promise it implies; Western marriage is worth a moment's consideration only in what it requires of the parties - a promise of fidelity, of emotional and physical exclusivity.Now that's a lovely idea, and a lovely promise.

But let's be honest with ourselves; how many humans can make that promise with confidence that they will mean it a year, five years, ten years from now? How many of us live up to that promise? How many of us try and fail?

How many don't really try?

My personal belief is that the real infidelity is not of the body but of the mind and soul; if you can't or don't intend to be monogamous - don't be. Don't say the words. Don't make that promise. If he or she takes you on those terms? Fine.

The lying is what makes the sin. To me. Breaking your word.

What you do with your body afterwards is just an insult.

But...back to love and sex.So. I think a big part of our troubles come from trying to tie a big pink bow around all this entropy of love on the one hand and wild rumpus of sex on the other.

We're trying to mate together water and fire; the ocean of love with the burning fire of lust, trying to convince ourselves and, in particular, our kids, that the water and fire are really one, that love and desire are Janus-faced, and that they always will arrive and depart together.

And I think this is a huge, enormous, monstrous mistake, and one that has produced more problems for us humans than sweet malt beverages and bad pop music combined.Not because people should have sex without loving and caring for each other, or that love must go with love-making.But because our bodies and minds, dirty things that they are, will produce all sorts of lascivious and lusty feelings for other people regardless of who those people are, how well those people would be for us, whether or not we should be making the sign of the two-humped whale with them.

And...

If you convince people that if they desire someone there must be love - real love, committed love, deep, intense, long-term love - around somewhere you're going to end up with a LOT of people who mistake their groinical itches for emotional attachment and the fulfillment of their genital desires with enduring love. Because you've told them that it MUST be love because it feels so good...And...just my personal opinion you also do sex a disservice when you chokehold it to love.

Physical congress is a chancy thing. It is wildly dependent on moods, health, rest and vigor, settings, and more than anything on an interplay of communications, experience, and sensitivity.You may love someone desperately and be utterly incapable of making love to them adequately.

And that failure - sadly - is often taken not for what it is; a bad night's rest, an upset stomach, the clumsiness of ignorance, the haste of youthful excitement, but for a failure of love. A mismatch in emotion. You wouldn't be such a bad lover if you really loved me..!Let me confess; when I was in my twenties I had a lover who was a woman who knew her own wants, knew something of young men, and was unafraid to patiently explain what pleased her to a young man whose knowledge of the female body pretty much stopped at "Tits!"

And then later in life I married - and am still married to - another woman who had the rare gift of understanding love as a gift, as a blessing, as a union while understanding that sex is a craft, a delicately brutal dance, a thing at once maddened, and delicate, and perhaps the most importantly, unlike love in that it can and sometimes often needs to be looked on as any other physical skill that can be bettered with practice, coaching, and communication.But I know that many, many people never get this luck. Like ignorant armies, we wrestle and gasp in the dark, and from our misfortunate collisions draw out emotional heartache we don't deserve.

Because sexual intimacy can be, should be a delight, a gift, a benediction. To reduce it to mere friction, to the bullish satisfaction of immediate needs, is to give away the gift. Because when I enjoy my beloved's body, when I immerse myself in all of the intimate scents, sounds, tastes, and textures of her, I find within them with a closer knowledge of her, a sweeter tenderness for her.

Sensual thing I am, the physical closeness to her brings me unending delights, delights I want like cool water and a warm bed at night.

I want to sit up in the pale morning light beside my lover and watch the shadows cross her hair as she sleeps and throw the intricate angles of her chin and point of shoulder into a Dürer chiaroscuro.

I want to share coffee and crullers and the morning paper and then kiss the pastry crumbs off her breasts.I want to laugh as she does a silly dance dressed only in her woolly socks.

I want to linger over her wrist kissing, feeling the heat of her body, her pulse through my lips, inhaling the scent of her warm flesh, watching her blue life move beneath the skin.

I want to listen to her explain hemstitching to me as I contemplate the deft workings of her ankle.

I want the feel the soft weight of her when she drapes herself over my shoulders and feel her warm breath on the back of my neck in that way that makes me shiver, thinking of the pressure of her hips against mine, of the way she gasps when I kiss her in that gentle crease between the top of her thigh and the swell of her belly, of the dark moist warmth of the back of her hair when we lie together after making love.Because in those moments, as close as we can be in our minds, and hearts, in the complex strands of the web we weave with our bodies we bind ourselves together in ways that the voices and eyes and minds and hearts cannot.Update 3/11: Here's Erick Loomis with a bit of late Victorian sexual curiosity; the history of the vibrator.

I can't say I agree with all of his connections between Victorian "morality" and the sudden recent outbreak of "OMFG-wimmens-are-sexing-without permission!" in the election debate, but the general concept that certain (types of) people want to banish the notion that women enjoy the physical aspects of sex and both desire and should get orgasmic fulfillment as a socially acceptable starting point seems a reasonable conclusion.

Ten

I'm here, sweetie.

What was it? Was it a bad dream?

Yes, I hate those, too. Even when you know they're not a really real thing, they're still scary. Here, let me wrap you up a little and I'll sit with you for a while and tell you a story. Would that help?

Okay, well, it's sort of an old story, but it's about you so I think you'll like it.

Ten years ago today your mommy and I were all excited because it was your birthday. Your mom was excited about today that day, but I was excited about tomorrow.

Your mom, who is a very much more sensible and realistic person than your dad, was excited because that day was the day you were going to be born. She'd carried you around for nine long months and she was so ready to have you come out and meet her. Being pregnant with you had been tough for her, and she wanted you to be born. She was ready to be a mom rather than a baby-carrier. She was ready to be YOUR mom.

I was more excited about tomorrow, though. Because I hadn't been able to do anything with you - you were inside your mom's belly and all I could see was the funny shapes you'd make on her tummy when you moved - I was so excited to be able to do stuff with you. Dads are funny like that - we like to do things; tell stories, and tickle-fight, and run and kick footballs, and scare boyfriends, and talk with you.

Yes, you, with that funny look in your bright button eyes, just like I'm talking with you now. That's the sort of thing dads like, and that's what was exciting for me about today-ten-years-ago.

So I went to the hospital all excited about tomorrow.

But tomorrow never came for us, did it, lovey?

Because something happened, and you never woke up like you woke up just now. Somewhere inside your mom's belly you passed from that darkness to another darkness, a true-life scary dream, one that no hugs and no stories could chase away.

So there were no tomorrow kisses, were there, little girl?

No nighttime talks, no bedtime stories, no tears to wipe away, no soccer games, no boyfriends, no tomorrows at all. Ten years of no tomorrows.

All that remains of you are gray ashes in the little urn beside my bed and this, these sorrowful nights when I dream that you sit up in the bed you never had, your dark hair all atousle from your pillow, your skinny little-girl arms wound around your knees and your eyes shining in the darkness as I tell you about the dreams I had that, as dreams often do, faded into formless nothings in the light of day.

Are you sleepy now, lovie? Are you ready to go back to sleep?

Of course you can give me a hug. No, no, I'm not crying. Just something in my eye.

Snuggle down now.

There. Alright, goodnight, sweetie.

Happy tenth birthday.

Sleep tight, lovie.

Goodnight.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar 3/1/02-3/2/02

Wars and Lechery

So I'm driving to work this morning and, working where I do and living where I do, I pass the Acropolis "Steakhouse Plus" down in Southeast Portland just north of Milwaukie.First let me explain something; Portland is the nation's Strategic Titty Bar Repository.

I'm dead serious. I'm lived in some of the United States' most noxious hives of scum and villainy, from Balboa when it was part of the Canal Zone to Southern Pines, North Carolina, where cousin-marriage is both sport and tradition. And most of these places featured the usual line-up of scummy businesses; tattoo parlors, dive bars, pawnshops, check-cashing and payday-loan grifters, and girlie joints ranging from just dive-y-er bars with a pole where the bored employee would occasionally perform a bit of indifferent gyrating in hopes of attracting an otherwise unused five-spot into her undies...all the way up to the full-on, all-nude skanky juice bars where a former grocery cashier from Kuala Lumpur will attempt to corkscrew herself onto your belt buckle for a hundred bucks and an overpriced glass of Jamba Juice.

But not one of them had as many topless and nude dance places as Portland.

Because...well, first of all, because the Oregon state constitution of 1859 says "No law shall be passed restraining the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write or print freely on any subject whatever." This has been interpreted by Oregon's courts to include public performance, and to include public performance whilst clad only in Nature's garb. A number of attempts have been made to variously limit or regulate the ecdysiasts working across the Beaver State, but the beaver has resolutely remained...unclad.

And then, of course, there is the inexorable Law of Strip Joint Supply and Demand; men with money will demand women's saucy bits, or at least a look at them, and women with that equipment and no money will supply them, or at least a look at them, in return for money.Talk about the Invisible Hand. Sheesh.

I should say up front that I've never really enjoyed most of these places. The food is usually bad, the drinks are, too, and expensive, as well. The women clearly either pity you, loathe you, or could care less about you which, in my opinion, is a fairly sound attitude seeing that you've turned up for no better reason than to look at them naked for money.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post. The point is that no matter where you go in Portland, you're going to pass these places. You just get used to them, which is either sad or just sort of expected, but there it is.(The above photo is of the old "Sandy Jug" that is now one of them called the "Pirate's Cove". Last time I drove up Sandy their sign said "You'll treasure our chests". Well, okay, then.)

But the thing I noted as I went by today was that, along with the typical "Steak Special $5.98", and "Wow 54 Taps!" and the "Cherry Girl School Teacher!!" (okay, I made the last one up...) the Acropolis sign advised that they were "Open at 7".

Now.

Let me say that while I don't consider myself some sort of satyr I suspect I'm as lusty as the next guy, and that while my wife is not a supermodel I believe, and my casual observations reassure me, that her breasts are as lovely as the next woman's.And as it happens in my marriage as in most marriages, several relationships, and even more than a few casual hook-ups, I have had the rather pleasant experience of encountering my bride while un- or barely-clad in the early morning not long after waking.

And I am afraid to admit this, but as ravishing as she is, sashaying down the hall in Eve's raiment on the way to the bathroom, the sight of her pulchritude is unlikely to get more than a brief grunt of appreciation out of me before my first cup of coffee.

So I can't imagine why I...I can't imagine why anyone...would drive down McLoughlin Boulevard at 6:45 in the morning to look at some stranger's breasts at 7 o'clock. My inamorata's breasts? Maybe. Sure. But some boobs-for-hire? A pair of rent-a-breasts?I just don't get it.

Maybe I'm missing something. But I can't think of what.

And speaking of missing something...

The woman who works in my office is a Boston Bruins hockey fan, and that is how I come to know that after the Vancouver hockey team lost this year's Stanley Cup a part of the hockey crowd there tore up the center of the city and had to be chased off by the local constabulary after doing some free-lance burning and looting.Apparently they were upset about the outcome of the series.

You all know that, in the words of the song, I am a Timbers fan and I am an Oregonian. I know I want the Boys in Green to win, and I'm disappointed when they don't.But...it's a game, for fuck's sake. A hobby, a pastime, an entertainment. I don't actually KNOW any of the Timbers, I have no deep emotional stake in their fortunes. I love the sport, I love the team, I love to go to matches and sing and chant for them.

But to burn up my town, the city I love as much as I love both sport and team, because they lost?

There has to be something deeply wrong with you to do that. I'll bet the LaBatt's helped. And the hard times; if I was out of work and on the dole I'll bet there's a lot better chance I'd use the excuse of a lost championship to try and stuff the red flag up your hole...but...probably not.Perhaps I'm a bit overcivilized. Perhaps I'm just unwilling to spend the night in the carcel with the other drunks. But, like staring at titties at seven in the morning, there's something there that just seems deeply wrong to me.Let me know if you can figure it out.

I should add that one worthy thing did emerge from the flaming wreckage of downtown Vancouver; this snapshot.I've heard that some viewers have already stated that they dislike this image intensely, and when a friend of mine posted it and the link to the Vancouver Sun story about it on her Facebook page it drew some fairly scathing comments about drunken hoolies, public indecency, and the general decline in Western Civilization.

Again...maybe it's me, but I love this little image. The way I see it, the moment it captures helps restore my faith in human nature.

Here these two people are, caught, possibly by intent but just as likely by accident, in the midst of a sudden outbreak of violent stupidity. Just moments ago they were part of some sort of liquored-up mob whose intelligence, like all mobs, is the intelligence of the stupidest individual in the mob divided by the number of the people in the group. The mob was angry, the cops were angry, the cars are burning, the (from what I recall) pleasant city of Vancouver has become a fucking mess...and what can a man and woman do about that?

Make love, of course.

There's never a bad time to kiss, never a wrong moment to gift your lover with a tender word, a fierce embrace, a warm, strong hand, whether that hand is on a cheek for comfort, or a thigh for lust.

There's never a wrong time to get a little sugar for your bowl.So maybe there IS a reason to get up and drive down McLoughlin to see breasts...if the breasts belong to the one who can make you forget everything around you except how they make you feel. Perhaps these two felt that way. I hope so.

And I hope that perhaps they will grow old together, pass through the hard times and the dark times together, make themselves a mainland together, and in the end look back at this moment when they were the only sane and sensible people in a world gone mad and share a smile as full of savor at the memory as a midnight is dark and a silent pool is deep and still.

Love in the time of cholera

I've been reading Doris Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" off and on this spring. It's an interesting story in itself - the history of how Abraham Lincoln the politician first finessed his political foes into the Republican nomination and then coopted them into becoming members of his first Cabinet - and the telling is as worthy as the material. Goodwin has a flair for popular history and writes well, using small touches to illuminate a landscape as vanished as the Pliocene to most of us.And that's an important part of any history. Because it can be difficult, especially when the time in consideration is at some remove, to get a sense of the people of the time as...people.

The temptation is to see them either as moderns dressed in period costume, or as some sort of freakish antique, acting and thinking in ways impossible to any "real person" the reader knows.

And in understanding how they acted, and why, how they thought, how they saw the world around them, is crucial. A historian writing for the general public has to be capable, in a handful of sentences or a paragraph or two, present the past life both in itself and in its context so that the modern reader can grasp both the qualities of the person discussed and their standing with the person's times. Was she an especially bold woman, an iconoclast, or was she more typical of her contemporaries? Were his acts, or thoughts, likely to be the product of his surroundings or owe more to the inner daemon of the man?Obviously most histories are written about dramatic times and "great" events - few histories are written about the daily lives of vanished people in humdrum times. So the questions become; how did this or that person fit into the tenor of his or her time? When they acted, did they follow opinion or lead it? Did they act against the grain of their own era, or in conformance with its strictures? Did what they did tell us something useful about people, and events, and societies, that we can use in our own lives?

Goodwin's account is no different, and thus she spends some time early on establishing the characters of the central figures; Lincoln himself, obviously, his principal "rivals" (Ed Stanton, Will Seward, Sal Chase, and Ned Bates) and their various parents, wives, sons and daughters, as well as their political cronies and associates.It's a good tale, and it doesn't hurt that pretty much all of the main characters are fairly colorful. Lincoln is an ediface, a man recognized even in his time as a singularity. Stanton, Seward, and Chase are all men with immense egos and strong wills or they wouldn't have gotten where they did.

The one who's sort of the odd man out is Bates.Here he is, a Victorian patriarch and stern paterfamilias there ever was one. You can't picture even his friends calling him "Ed" or "Eddie" or "Ned". He's a "Edward" if ever I saw one.

But that's the interesting thing. He wasn't. Ed Bates was a man passionately in love with his wife, and desperately in need of his family. Goodwin keeps on about this; Bates married Julia Coulter in 1823 and spent the rest of his life falling in love with her. He kept his hand in politics because that what what a man of his class did. But he was miserable when he had to leave his home for D.C., and his letters to Julia are full of longing and his own loneliness and melancholy apart from her.

The Bates' marriage seems to have been more than just a spiritual one; Julia bore sixteen children (sixteen! My mind reels (and my pelvis sches) at the thought...) over the next thirty years. Here she is as a sturdy matron in her forties, but her husband seems to have been just as gaga over her as the day she put on - and took off - her brideclothes.

One of the most difficult parts of human life to transport over the distance of time is emotions and the way we express them. Certainly some elements, the biological ones, are fairly immutable; so a man or woman in Celtic times, or in ancient China, or in modern Peru, must certainly feel physical lust. That desire is a built-in designed to keep little humans coming along, and certainly the Roman man looking at a comely puella, or a Victorian woman glancing at a handsome lad must have felt a touch or more of the same visceral stirrings down in the libidinous regions that you or I would.

But the difference is in the detail. What sort of thing would a Roman find intriguing...as opposed to titillating, or mysterious, salacious, or challenging? We've read about how the mere glimpse of a shapely ankle could send a straitlaced Victorian man into a paroxysm of desire. But could it, really? Does having your inamorata always covered in draperies make the ankle an erogenous zone...unless it would be for you, anyway?

Because, apes that we are, we're a very visual species. We like to look, and where people are concerned, we like to look at the people we're attracted to for the things that attract us. Being not just apes but thinking apes (well, at times and of a sort...) there's more to attraction than JUST what we see. But we still place a great deal of importance in the physical aspects we consider pleasant.

Fortunately for the species, those aspects are pretty flexible. Whether Victorian or post-modern, some of us delight in the familiar, while others are drawn to the "different". Some find certain traits desirable, others the opposite, so while one woman finds a small, neat, blackavised man to her liking another gets a frisson of pleasure looking at his lanky, sun-fair friend.

But...here again, as people's manners and mores have changed through time, so have their standards of beauty. The difficulty of trying to understand someone like Ed Bates or Julia Coulter is trying to get a clue for how they thought about each other. What was "love" to them? How did they say it? Or did they? Certainly the Victorian standards of public behavior, so much more elaborate than ours today, would imply a great disparity in the intimacy a man and woman could show in public as opposed to within the privacy of the marriage-bed. But to what degree? Looking at the man, could Julia have been calling him "Mister Bates" even in their most unguarded moments?

And what of him? Could the dignity of a Victorian gentleman relent to the pure sensual enjoyment of his beloved wife; of an endless moment with his face buried in the scented darkness of her hair, every nerve-ending shirring beneath its satiny heaviness, hearing nothing but the sound of her breathing, touching his brow to the dear curvature of her head, the one he cherished because it held the vital spark, the life and thoughts, the whole essence of the one so dear to him in that fragile orb.

Well, as I read through the section about the Bates' marriage I came across something very like this. Edward was in D.C. when his first daughter Nancy was born. His letter conveys his longing and regret at putting his office before his child. And he asks Julia to tell him all the details of "how she is - what she is - what she is like...whether she has black eyes or gray - a long nose or a pug..."

And then he writes an odd little thing. "...and above all..." he implores, "..whether she has a pretty foot." for unless she has a foot as pretty as her mother's she "could never make a fine woman."

And it was this bit of parental and husbandly foolishness that caught me. Because I am a bit of a fool for a woman's hands, and her feet. I've always enjoyed holding hands, feeling the intricate textures of bone and sinew that can hold such character.

A woman's hands (or a man's, for that matter) can speak as or more eloquently than her face, her body, or even her words, of the nature and quality of her. Well-worn or pampered, slender or square, smooth or muscular...it takes a lifetime of living within her hands, of walking the roads her feet take her, to make them, and her, the woman she is. If you cherish the woman, than every line and muscle that makes her her, becomes dear in ways that are hard to express.

Or, hell, maybe people like Ned Bates and I are just queer for feet...

But whatever the reason, that little paragraph helped me see them not as stiff pictures in a book but people, people-people. I could vividly picture this long-dead couple, these vanished people preserved in silver salts and black back in the days of their happiness, perhaps lying lazily abed with her "pretty feet" in his lap as he gently rubs them after a long day. Enjoying the feeling, enjoying the moment, just enjoying each other.Silly, isn't it? And yet, it was that little detail, as one who has often admired my own wife's neat and strong feet as I worked the lotion into her sole and heel-ball and soothed out the aches and stiffnesses of a day's work, that connected these strangers to me, that made me feel like I understood him, and her, just a bit, and through them a bit more of the time and the tides of the world that had borne them up, he and his beloved, on the long swells of a dim-lit sea an ocean of time and a world of lives ago.

And if that's not how a good history works, I can't think of a better.Let me leave you with the words of the Victorian lover himself;

"Oh! How I long to press you to my bosom, if only for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision - I see you with such vivd and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye. O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine."

Her arms long and small

I made Mojo this little valentine and liked the result so much I wanted to post it.The inspiration for the graphic were these lines from William Wyatt's "They Flee From Me":
"...but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "dear heart, how like you this?"

My love seemed to like it almost as well as the gift card from Sock Dreams. I like that, too.

Dear Chief - Putting the Agony in "Agony Aunt"...

The letters just keep coming. Here's the latest to call in to the All Night Fire Direction Center of Love to ask for relationship advice.

"Dear FDChief;

I need a man's HONEST opinion on something....

Do all guys go to see strippers? Do some just not go, either because they just don't like them or out of respect for their woman?

Not that this is happening in the case of my boyfriend, but if it comes up with him am I being completely unrealistic in expecting him to NEVER go to a strip club, like with his buddies??

Because most women don't want their man doing that, but let's face it...they do anyways!

I would rather be honest about it and not have him feel like he needs to hide it from me.......but it's also not a quality I would want in a man...one that goes to strip clubs, you know!?!

Anyways, I would love to hear your perspective when you get the chance.

Thanks,

Stripless in Seattle""Dear Stripless;

Hmmm.

OK, let's break this down.

First, regardless of whether he goes to the titty bar or not, let me put your mind at ease - YES, he IS checking out her rack. He DOES look at porn. He probably has a fantasy about a tub of Crisco, Sarah Palin, knee socks and a turkey baster.

Or Princess Leia's metal bikini.

Whatever. I hate to tell you this, but we ALL do it. We don't like to tell you about it, but we do.

That is - we do if we love and respect you.

Don't laugh (or shriek, or cry...not sure how you feel about this)! It's true, and there are three kinds of men; the ones who don't because they have the sex drive of a tortoise, those who do and those who lie to you about it.

The thing is we're hardwired for reproduction. Our sexual motto is "More! Better! Faster!" We LIKE the idea of harems, of orgies, or "more than one" – that’s why when we get the law or religion on our side (religion is better – who argues when God says “He gets you and you and you, and you only get him.”?) we give you stuff like...harems, polygamy, orgies... Sorry, but we're that way when we aren't mature enough to control our little head.

That's the whole reason that titty bars and the Internet exist - to cater to our pervy obsession with laying multiple women without actually having to learn their names and stuff.

Those of us who DON'T respect you will just go and DO it - we'll cheat on you, lie to you, and then swagger off without a second thought. We'll give you chlamydia and the clap, get you pregnant and abandon you...we can be utter shits that way. And the malfunction there is US, not you.

Look at this woman; tres hot, no?

Jeri Ryan, spandex-ly-clad alien sexbot from one of the goddam Star Trek shows (and no, I don't remember which one, they're all over the place like fucking hamsters). What's she famous for? Her then-husband wanted her to go to a sex club and get all kinky and/or jiggy with other men.

See what I mean? Christ, it's like our penises are stuffed with Stupid Juice.It's those of us who really want you, who love your unique and special qualities, who confine ourselves to merely fantasizing and looking.

I do it, your boyfriend does it...we do. And I will be the first to admit that it's skeevy...but it's LESS skeevy that being a cheating bastard or a liar or a man-slut.

So. Even if he doesn't go to the Backswing or the Viewpoint or whatever trust me - he's fantasized about his hot third cousin Rachel in her push-up bra.

Are we OK so far?

Now - the titty bar thing. For me, the issue is one of respect. Not so much "respect" in the sense of "abandoning me for another woman" - like I said - he thinks about other women already. But if he loves and respects you, that's ALL he does.

No, the titty bar thing to me is about lacking respect for you by spending time he could be spending with you with some skeevy tattooed dancer.It's one thing to spend that five minutes sipping his coffee and watching the pretty girls, or peeking at "alt.binaries.brunettes" while checking the e-mail - it's another to spend a whole evening stuffing twenties into some skank's undies when he could be a) getting his own personal table dance from you, and b) spending that money on a nice bottle of wine for you (or the movies or whatever...).

I had a friend who used to do this all the time - go right from work to some nasty strip club and hang over the railing for hours. And this guy had a really smart wife (who had sweater puppies that would have made those skinny hags' run screaming for cover!) - I once suggested to him in a sort of nasty way that his wife had a gorgeous rack, and if he asked her nice she might even dance for him if he'd shove some of that money in her scanties.

He didn't get it.

I, personally, don't like the money-for-nothing atmosphere in the places, I don't like wasting time there (on some woman who probably either pities or despises me) that I could be spending with my family...but I do understand that sometimes a guy's pals arm-wrestle him into going, and he has to go to be a pal.

In a case like that, I'd hope he would call you and say "Aww, shit, honey, Joey and the guys are all about this strip place. I'll try and not look, OK?" and you could both laugh about it.Or - if he was REALLY slick - he'd call you and nod, and smile, and then shut the phone and turn to the buddies and say; "Gee, boys' I'd love to - but my girl says she's got a new routine that involves two parrots that peck away at an outfit that's made of nothing but balloons, so I'll see you tomorrow at work, 'K?"

And then he'd come over - and you WOULD!

So here's a free bit of relationship advice:

One wonderful thing we love is when our lover becomes that "someone else" for us. Whether you dance for him and keep your hat on - and nothing else...or wear a blond wig and sing "Cabaret"...

...or try seducing him with a funny accent...or parrots and balloons. That way we can be in love with you - AND scratch that little polygamous itch we all have...

And remember - this works both ways. What's fantasy sauce for the gander is perfectly good for the saucy goose when HE gets to provide YOU with the same service. He's not the only one with desires, right?

So go out there and break a leg, Stripperella!

FDChief