HUMOR ?

 I was thinking of calling my blog "Insomniac's Relief" because I often write in the quiet hours of sleeplessness.  Then I realized that just reading my Blog put me to sleep.... probably would put anyone to sleep. Fearing being overwhelmed with sleepless readers, or accused of medical malpractice, I thought my current title more peaceful and would allow readers the chance to discover good sleep on their own, while experiencing my tranquil texts.

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                                          Yes dear

          When I first got married my 89-year-old uncle from out of town called to congratulate us. After a brief chat he said I  know it is hard to know what you don’t know so I hope I am not out of line in offering you some marriage advice.  He said:  “Frankly as in every marriage you are going to have a lot of arguments. And in reality you are not going to win any of them.  The best advice I can give you is to learn just say “Yes Dear” to your wife and your marriage will go a lot smoother”.

About a year into our marriage, I concluded another conversation I had with my uncle by thanking him (with tongue in cheek) for that advice about learning to say yes dear.  He chuckled and said: “I see you are a lot smarter than I am because it took me 37 years of marriage before I realized the truth in that advice”.      : )
  95 / t.d.

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This is a story I wrote for a Craft newsletter I edited. It was picked up by Popular Woodworking Magazine and published in 1988. I think they paid me about $50.

Click on the two images to enlarge for reading:

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For Mature  Adults  Only!   : )   ....     The origins of Sex

                Hetero Erectus               

    I thought I would take this moment to discuss and explore one of the oldest yet unresolved mysteries still burning on the minds of modern man. First-time sex. No, not your or my first time sex, but THE first time sex. How was the sexual act discovered, how did it happen the first time?

    Let's begin with a little about my title Hetero Erectus.  I could have called it Homo Erectus, which has a more familiar ring. But thousands of years have pretty well proven that that approach hasn't been too successful in the sexual realm. I'm not trying to express a prejudice here about sexual orientation. Let's not confuse pleasure with procreation. In fact, I think that Homo Erectus surely predates the Hetero Erectus or at least was a part of the original experimentations. I could have titled this just "Sex" or other words including sex, but that would turn off most of my audience, except for anyone between the ages of 12 and 20, who would read anything about sex. This is not my intended audience. I want this to be a more mature and scientific discussion for a more erudite portion of the educated population. "Origins of the Species" would be a great title, but that title was already taken and used to cover a boring tome that is so yesterday thinking. My original title was "The Origins of Progenitor Coitus in the "Pre-Carnalithic Era". But with such a clinical title, only grey-haired scholars would even glance at it,  let alone understand this moniker. So "Hetero Erectus" seems to be a happy compromise that gives the proper mental image to attract my readers.

    Now we are going to need some characters for this story. Interesting characters always help lubricate a tale and create visual clarity.  While discussing the developmental stages of early sexual practices, we probably only need one character, but for the successful first coital act we will need two.... Let's see.... Names would help keep the characters' identities clear. Now obviously their names would be of some long lost aboriginal linguistic nature.... but let's just translate them into something easy and more conventional to modern ears.  Ummmm,   How about... for the male character, lets, for the sake of discussion, call him..... a ..  a.... yes....  Andy.  And for the female, let's call her..... Edith. Very original, these names have a nice ring to them.

    The proper time period we are discussing is that interval sometime after the invention of air and rocks, but before the discovery of coitus as we know it today. We know from the archeological evidence that the first act must have been somewhere in Africa. Obviously, it couldn't have been anywhere else on the empty planet, because there wasn't anyone anywhere else there to do it. 

    Who were these first peoples? What were they like? Most probably they were naked, both men and women. Now don't blush.... blushing is a modern invention created just before the invention of clothes, to create a demand for something to cover us up. Think of them, out there on the trail, hunting and gathering, sleeping on the ground, maybe in caves.  Bathing was unknown because Saturday night hadn't been invented yet. Without being too blunt, but by modern standard these people were dirty and smelly. If you wonder why they didn't invent sex earlier, this is the most plausible reason..... closeness was not an amorous attraction. We can understand this better by recalling the Italian catholic mothers who use to put cloves of garlic around their teenage daughter's neck to ward off evil spirits. It wasn't to ward off spirits, it was because the smell was so bad that no horny boy would ever come near them. Same effect with our smelly ancestors.... nothing new under the sun.

    So what were the early influences generating sexual behaviors?  We often hear the phrase “rubbing two sticks together” in reference to sexual activity, but really, how does that apply? One could spend a lifetime rubbing things together and find no joy in that. I spent years in cub scouts rubbing two sticks together and never once attracted any girls.  

    Then there is the “monkey see monkey do” theory. I'm sure early men and women had the ability to copy what they observed. Surely there were opportunities to observe sexual type behaviors in other creatures that surrounded them. Animals had figured this out long before we ever did.  So imagine some curious boy or girl (we know that it had to be a young person because all the elders were tribally bound to follow the tradition of the elders. "If it was good enough for my father it was good enough for me.... and you too!)”. Innovation always comes from the younger generation. So imagine our young Andy.... or Edith watching the animals around them. Surely on some dark and moonlit night, there was observed a saber tooth tiger mounted on the back of another. "Hey", our young Andy might say.... “that looks like fun”. So the next time he has the opportunity to see another saber-tooth tiger he jumps on its back. Well, I don't have to describe the results of that experiment. Andy was lucky to survive and imagine how embarrassed he was when he had to explain all those cuts and gashes to his parents. No, obviously there were many attempts to follow the example of monkey see monkey do, but as the before mentioned story illustrates, they were not the instruction manual for sex.

    Some of our best understanding of sexual practices of this early era has come from the discovery of the Erotistone, discovered by the French in an African dry creek bed and now housed in the Louvre  (wouldn’t you know it was the French). This stone was a valuable find because it had carved on it in three different languages which allowed the de-coding of the earliest written forms of language hitherto indecipherable. It had instructions on approved sexual practices of the day. You might call this the original sex manual  0.101. Within its text were instructions for "modern" sexual behaviors. Since coitus hadn't been discover yet, the best-approved method for sexual expression was for the young man to entice his female conquest into the grass and stick his proboscis (look it up) in her ear. Field tests (another coined phrase) were reporting that this was thought to create wonderful ecstasy.  No other sorts of physical contact were allowed as it was believed that any such behavior would make the men go blind and the women become hysterical. One portion of the Erotistone which is partially missing mentions that conservative elders were blaming women for violating this practice. They said that the women had found a more effective way to get the men to leave them alone and get them out of the cave so the men would go out hunting to bring home the bacon..... but since the key portion of the stone is missing, we can not be sure just what the women were advocating.

    Maybe the first act happened accidentally. Suppose Andy and Edith were out on the Savanna, following an animal trail. Edith, walking before Andy, suddenly bends over to remove some trail jam from her toes. Andy had never see Edith or any other woman in just this naked pose before and bingo a light went off in his mind. Sore from hanging his quiver on his otherwise useless erect johnson he thought this could be a good opportunity to try target practice, and like the Viagra commercial in today's world demonstrates how the man can hit the target, Andy thought he would thrust his projectile into the bull's eye (so to speak). Yes, a highly plausible scenario. 

    You might also wonder about early pick-up lines. Nothing ever changes. The roots of this social art must have begun about this time too.  "Hey baby, want to come over to my campfire tonight?"  You just have to wonder how the original Lucy and her prehistoric friends reacted to all this social pressure.....but I digress. An interesting side note is that male circumcision was invented about this time too. It was reasoned that it was the best way to keep young horny boys from getting too cocky (to coin a phrase) since cold showers nor real sex had been invented yet.

    Of course, the first sex act could have been much later in history. It's unfortunate that we don't have a lot of records of this type of behavior. The Bible gives some vague references to sexual type behavior, but mostly what not to do and who not to do it with. Maybe coitus still hadn't been invented by then. Hard to believe, but there is a lot of talk about virgin births in the Bible... could have been the mode of operation up to that time. Heck, we don’t have to go back that far to raise doubts about when were the origins of the first sexual act. My wife and I were watching an old 50's black and white movie and the loving couple that stared in the film were sleeping in separate beds. Don't laugh, think about it. You know..... my parents never had sex either. Did yours? In my generation nobody talked about sex. And there wasn't any sex education either.  

    I am convinced that sex was invented in the late 1960's.  After all, they did call it the sexual revolution generation. I can't be sure of this, but I think the evidence is mounting (to coin a phrase) that the hippy drug culture invented sex. The strongest evidence was Woodstock. Remember all that news footage with all the naked people and the mud.... perfect breeding grounds for new thoughts and actions... just like our stone-age relatives. But again, I can't be sure. I wasn't there. I pleaded with my folks to let me go, but they said no. "Something" might happen to me if I were there. "Something".  Ya know.... our parents weren't dumb.... a bit behind the times but not dumb. You Know how they seemed to have eyes in the back of their heads?.... Well, this could have been one of those premonitions.... just maybe they realized that that "something" might be the invention of sex. Well, this kind of brings us up to today. And we are still wondering if sex has been invented. My personal exploration of the beginnings of sex has pretty well stopped. You know, as wonderful as marriage is, it can put a crimp in one’s wide-ranging hedonistic investigations.

    Well, for those of you still reading, I think you will have to agree that this has been a productive and informative discussion.  You might be a little put off if you think I wasn't definitive enough. But why would you put so much pressure of expectation on me when you don't even press our politicians to be more exact. Imagine the campaign trail. "Mister candidate: What do you think of Sex in our society today?".  “Why yes, I believe in strong family values". "But what do you think of Sex education?".  "Why yes, I'm a strong believer that our country needs strong leadership and less government in our lives". Talk about avoiding the question and kicking the can down the road. So don’t hold me accountable for explicitness... and I'm not even running for office. Though running for the county dog catcher job has always appealed to me as a way of advancing my community involvement and my retirement plan. But I digress.

    As we take this little romp through history, we can see where many of our beliefs, practices and superstitions had their origins. One thing for sure, things haven’t changed much. Parents still worry about what their post-pubescent kids are getting into. The religious are still misleading us. Women are still frustrated. Men are still clumsy and ignorant. But we know for sure that for today’s Andy and Ediths the drive for sexual expression remains as fascinating a mystery as ever to be solved.   

t.d   5/12

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The Fuzz That Was

As I look through this tangled brush,

I see people so quiet, so hushed.

The people seemed to stare in awe, 

At the long thin hairs growing from my jaw.

They’ll never know what an experience it’s been,

having these whiskers on my chin.

People always stop, laugh and stare,

They don’t even realize I am there.

Friends that were can never be,

For they all left when I grew this tree.

A beard can’t last in this country,

The home of the brave, the land of the free.

So I must say with very great sorrow,

It’ hair today and gone tomorrow.

1967 t.d.

                                      

A poem written in a time when beards were very unpopular and I had to shave mine to get a job. It was published in the Clark College student arts magazine “The Egg”  1967

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                                                                                         The call of Nature

Click on picture to enlarge

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This is a true story of real love:

                                                Carpet Love

This was lust at first sight. Not love… that comes after the marriage. Lust is what gets you there. 

I never was good at pickup lines. “Hey babe, what’s your sign? “

Ever since that first dance, I knew she was the one for me. 

She didn’t know me from the air in her tires, but I had a plan. 

I’ll give her a call. 

Ring, ring, ring.

With my deepest salesman voice, I said: “Hello Ms. S?”

“Yes?”

“This is Harry Winks from Carpet Universe.”

Silence.

“I found out that you were new in town and thought you might be interested in new carpets.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, perhaps if you knew that we had this great sale on wall to wall carpets. The special is white with black stripes…. looks a lot like a zebra skin.”

“No thank you, I’m not interested in striped carpets.”

“Well, perhaps if the wall to wall carpets isn’t your thing, I have an even better deal and a lot cheaper. This plan involves you sending us a pair of your favorite shoes. What we do is cut out two pieces of your favorite color carpet and glue them to the bottom of your shoes. That way when you walk on your bare floors you feel like you are walking on carpets.”

“No, I don’t need that either. I have to go now.” Click.
Hmmm, she hung up on me. I’ll give her an hour to think things over and call her back.

Ring, ring, ring.

“Hello, is this “S”? “This is “T” from the dance class. I just wanted to say hi and how nice it was to meet you in class last night. Any chance we could get together for coffee for lunch? Oh, by the way, there is this scam artist calling around trying to sell crazy carpets. Be careful.”

“Did he call you too?”  she said.

Now Ms. S  has been my favorite wife for 35 years. Her gullibility is so cute.

Sure glad I didn’t use that pickup line, 

“Hey babe what’s your sign?”

      t.d.

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