SLIPPERY SLOPES...
While I am only too aware that 55 hardly qualifies me as elderly [my grandmother is still alive and kicking in her 90's], I have started to experience the decline of bodily systems that decidedly confirms the long-distant end of youth.
I am thinking in particular of what I term "after-dribble." The other day I caught myself congratulating myself on not having let any after-dribble hit the toilet seat as I stood up from a break at work. As anyone who wastes his time thinking about such things could tell you, when your joys in life begin to revolve around the fact that your body still functions, or your ability to perform gymnastics that result in the impression that your body still functions some of the time, you have crossed some kind of line. And you are probably not 20 years old any more...
Not that being 20 offers any particular protection. When I was 18, I had a drinking buddy who used to constantly voice his deep sorrow at the fact that, statistically speaking, sexual potency peaked at 16, and here he was, past his prime at 17. It appeared to be a serious issue for him, but my take on it retrospect was that he was living in a city far from home and wasn't "getting any." He was in any case being completely ridiculous, whatever the cause, and however true his statistic may have been.
I think the real issue was his desperate need to express sufficient despair that he could feel free to wear black turtlenecks, sit in cafés, smoke Gitanes, drink espresso, and be deep, even if he could not actually reach all the way to "profound." He is also the source of the dictum on female breasts that whatever didn't fit into your mouth was wasted; I have since run across a number of Europeans who have made a similar statement, but invoked a champagne glass [obviously not a "flute"]. I would be inclined to file all of this away under adolescent silliness, but I can recognize the outlines of a fetish pretty clearly now; anyone who is still waiting for the Chinese gymnastics team to show up for the weekend should be careful what he says about other people's tastes...
Which brings us to the subject of next weekend. This weekend I have a regional meeting of my do-good society's far-flung emmisaries, and I will be taking shit and lugging shit-buckets all weekend. My hyper-relaxed boss is balanced out by the well-developed mania of the regional director, who orders his board around and threatens to resign whenever they show the least sign of disagreeing with his current agenda. I don't deal with him well -- call me spoiled by my immediate surroundings -- and I am quite delighted that [a] these confabs only happen two or three times a year, and [b] I will be bowing out of this job altogether whenever I move out to the Big Woods (apart from whatever portable work my boss decides to send out after me).
The Goat, meanwhile, is off meeting his sportscar buddies in the Frozen North, which I find mildly amusing on several counts. The one thing you cannot do in the FN in the winter, no matter how clear the roads are, is drive a sportscar at a speed that makes a sportscar worthwhile, or at least, worthy of the name. The other thing is that he is off to meet a bunch of other sportscar geeks, many of them gay, right around my mother's neck of the [non-Big] woods. Who knew things like this were going on right under our noses?
Next weekend, however, brings the long-awaited return of the Goat to my own pasture. And that is something the toothbrush he left here in September and I have been waiting for for some time. Now I have to worry about getting all the food lined up, the house cleaned, enough laundry done that I am not interrupting our idyll to tackle the mountains currently at hand, and generally getting my act together. I am even being granted two days off from work to celebrate. Yes, I know I'm spoiled, but I think my boss regards my romance as her particular responsibility... either that, or she is thrilled to cancel the extra hours I accumulated last year by giving me unpaid days off... Either way, it works for me.
So, wish me luck this weekend, and wish me joy, as the Great Sonneteer said, the following Saturday... I guess I can pretty much count on the latter, so maybe you should stick to the "luck" business.
Hang in there, all.
C
I am thinking in particular of what I term "after-dribble." The other day I caught myself congratulating myself on not having let any after-dribble hit the toilet seat as I stood up from a break at work. As anyone who wastes his time thinking about such things could tell you, when your joys in life begin to revolve around the fact that your body still functions, or your ability to perform gymnastics that result in the impression that your body still functions some of the time, you have crossed some kind of line. And you are probably not 20 years old any more...Not that being 20 offers any particular protection. When I was 18, I had a drinking buddy who used to constantly voice his deep sorrow at the fact that, statistically speaking, sexual potency peaked at 16, and here he was, past his prime at 17. It appeared to be a serious issue for him, but my take on it retrospect was that he was living in a city far from home and wasn't "getting any." He was in any case being completely ridiculous, whatever the cause, and however true his statistic may have been.
I think the real issue was his desperate need to express sufficient despair that he could feel free to wear black turtlenecks, sit in cafés, smoke Gitanes, drink espresso, and be deep, even if he could not actually reach all the way to "profound." He is also the source of the dictum on female breasts that whatever didn't fit into your mouth was wasted; I have since run across a number of Europeans who have made a similar statement, but invoked a champagne glass [obviously not a "flute"]. I would be inclined to file all of this away under adolescent silliness, but I can recognize the outlines of a fetish pretty clearly now; anyone who is still waiting for the Chinese gymnastics team to show up for the weekend should be careful what he says about other people's tastes...
Which brings us to the subject of next weekend. This weekend I have a regional meeting of my do-good society's far-flung emmisaries, and I will be taking shit and lugging shit-buckets all weekend. My hyper-relaxed boss is balanced out by the well-developed mania of the regional director, who orders his board around and threatens to resign whenever they show the least sign of disagreeing with his current agenda. I don't deal with him well -- call me spoiled by my immediate surroundings -- and I am quite delighted that [a] these confabs only happen two or three times a year, and [b] I will be bowing out of this job altogether whenever I move out to the Big Woods (apart from whatever portable work my boss decides to send out after me).
The Goat, meanwhile, is off meeting his sportscar buddies in the Frozen North, which I find mildly amusing on several counts. The one thing you cannot do in the FN in the winter, no matter how clear the roads are, is drive a sportscar at a speed that makes a sportscar worthwhile, or at least, worthy of the name. The other thing is that he is off to meet a bunch of other sportscar geeks, many of them gay, right around my mother's neck of the [non-Big] woods. Who knew things like this were going on right under our noses?Next weekend, however, brings the long-awaited return of the Goat to my own pasture. And that is something the toothbrush he left here in September and I have been waiting for for some time. Now I have to worry about getting all the food lined up, the house cleaned, enough laundry done that I am not interrupting our idyll to tackle the mountains currently at hand, and generally getting my act together. I am even being granted two days off from work to celebrate. Yes, I know I'm spoiled, but I think my boss regards my romance as her particular responsibility... either that, or she is thrilled to cancel the extra hours I accumulated last year by giving me unpaid days off... Either way, it works for me.
So, wish me luck this weekend, and wish me joy, as the Great Sonneteer said, the following Saturday... I guess I can pretty much count on the latter, so maybe you should stick to the "luck" business.Hang in there, all.
C
Yes, we're all getting older. And that last drop more often than not now falls in our pants.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm not sure that I consider "whatever didn't fit into your mouth was wasted" as adolescent silliness. I find it a rather mature acceptance of things.
(snicker, snicker) After-dribble. You crack me up.
ReplyDelete