There are some advantages to being built the way I am, that is built like a pit-bull. Advantages other than the obvious being wicked sexy. The pit-bull swagger is not an arrogant sense of entitlement; it’s more of a rock solid sense of belonging. A center of balance that is immovable. One can type that there are seven directions, East, West, North, South, Up, Down and the center, where you are standing. Nothing or no-one holds the center direction quite like the pit-bull body type.
Also, I’ve typed pit-bull four times now and even just in print some of you have the association of, at bare minimum and hopefully bare maximum, it’s not a shape you want to mess with. I mean I hope after damn near fourteen years of being the breeds lay ambassador I’ve gotten across that a dog is pretty much a dog the way a person is pretty much a person, though of course it’s advantageous in colder climes to be shorter, hairier and live near the water. None of the magical attributes of a pit are true, no organic critter has the five thousand to five billion pounds of pressure someone has told you a pit bull has in their jaw. There are a lot of dogs with bigger jaws, all of them are hinged like mammals; they don’t lock and the muscle is made out of meat like all other organic machines; meat and bone. Snakes can unhinge their jaws, but, as far as I know, not the kind of snake that bites, just the kind that squeezes.
What I’m getting at is that I’ve been collecting Lampe Berger effusion lamps and starphucks coffee mugs, and here, on this website, you may make jokes at my expense for extreme and extraneous foo-fooness. In person you might balk at the notion that you’d like to test whether my bark or my bite were worse. I mean when you can get over the wicked sexiness. You’ll have to, it’ll go easier on you, and whereas my body isn’t exactly a temple it certainly isn’t a rental property.
Herschel, my dearly departed lo these many moons and the best dog ever and, at his discretion, a good dog as well, was fastidious. Though he liked a good joke at his expense and probably would thought Metro-canine-sexual would be a real paw slapper (especially if you worked the word taco in there somewhere) no one ever did that (though I did leave the property without digging up the back yard, I doubt any of the full skeletons were Herschel’s handiwork, and Levi never left anything whole ever). In theory pit-bulls aren’t supposed to top fifty pounds or stand five hands or higher. Levi held up the low rider part of that, Herschel did not. Neither one of them hit a year old with less than sixty five pounds of dog in their dog suits; at a year they started filling out. I’m a tad heavier and insist on walking, mostly, at least when sober, on my hind legs, swinging my forepaws like nobody’s business. And I collect Lampe Berger Effusion Lampes, La Tee Da effusion lamps, and possibly the skulls of them what titter at the French whore house scents that waft about me. Ok, French whore attic.
Sans French pimps I think French whores do well, the phrase, at least in American English, isn’t denigrating the prostitute, using a more proper phrase like brothel will get you beat up in any of the sort of places where you might be moved to utter the phrases “Smells like a French whore house”. I honestly don’t know what American whore houses smell like; I am not a whore monger. It’s not a point of pride or moral turpitude, and whereas I am not curious here in my dotage I am a little surprised I wasn’t curious pre-dotage. Herschel would not have gone into a whore house, hell, he wouldn’t pick up a tennis ball if it touched dirt, Herschel would bark “Dude, don’t put that thing in your mouth, you don’t know where it’s been. And it smells like a whore house.”
I’m not that fastidious, I am wholly lacking in a reasonable fear of the law, I don’t think saying “I don’t have to pay for it” has any real meaning to it at all (I’ve always assumed that a guy who brings the subject up and then says that is scared out of his wits of the law and the feminine mystique. I could be mistaken but I’ve yet to be disabused of the notion. Guys in general are pretty happy about getting laid, downright giddy; money is never a point of pride, lack of money is a point of shame, so much so that you wouldn’t mention it. Yeah, I don’t know what guys mean when they say “I don’t have to pay for it” but I know it’s one of those things that aren’t really literal at all no matter how prosaic they sound. I could legitimately say that, though I’d take the judgment out and say “I haven’t paid for sex, you know, so far”.)
If I had to guess at my own lack of this transgression it might have something to do with being a fucking romantic (which really should be a bigger insult and be followed with a snarl and not a chorus of ahhhhs or awwwws). Middle of June when I was still taking the ancients to the Senior center, one of the traveling thumb drives hit a Van Morrison mix, and my father who had been scat singing to The Violent Femmes and the rolling Stones (because he didn’t know the words) could actually do harmony, because Van repeats things a lot, like the song where he goes; the love that loves to love the love to love the love that loves for like five minutes. My Dad had that song down. He also liked the Led Zeppelin song that ends with two minutes of “Yea-ah, No-ah, Yea-ah, No-ah …” which, honestly, is the foundation of all rock and roll. Yes and No. Those zany mop tops stormed the shores of American pop culture with Yeah, three chords and a few nouns and verbs in between the yeahs.
Oh, shit. How did ‘fucking romantic’ stray that far off the tracks? I want the love that loves to love the love. You’d think I’d be tired of that shit (not Van Morrison, you might have to get ready to throw down if you think Van is shit. Van is not shit, he might be the shit, you will be respectful). Or you’d think in my heyday of no-bridge-uncrossed I would have left romantic in a brown paper bag and crossed that bridge. You’d be mistaken. I worked with prostitutes when I was a methadone counselor. We barely talked about my job let alone there’s and my job was the sole reason we had anything to talk about at all. I certainly know how to find dope or prostitutes in any city on this continent. If you find yourself in those sorts of dire straits and can’t follow the signs, go to the bus station. Don’t buy dope or sex at a bus station, but ask the locals who are selling dope and sex there where they guy. It helps to look like a pit bull, to swagger not with a sense of entitlement but a sense of belonging. It’s really the key to any social situation; you belong there so relax into it.
I’m thinking most people are like that, some exaggerate it, some try to diminish it, but mostly the most growly, ten billion pounds of pressure in the jaw man jack of us (or female Jacqueline) is a squishy, gooey romantic. Intimacy peaks Maslow’s little hierarchy of needs pyramid, I don’t even think sex is on there, y’all know why I’m not googling so I can state with authority right? I mean I don’t have to go through that every time? There’s something awfully lonesome about the whole john/hooker idea and so, I assume, the experience. I don’t think the hooker is any less romantic, she just knows that it has nothing to do with the transaction, I have a feeling a lot of johns don’t. I mean I hope they don’t, it’d be powerfully cold otherwise.
I don’t have any moral think about fucking for the sake of fucking, I don’t think that leaves a gaping hole in the psychic unity of man or even the little trail that is the individuals life. I’ve woken up a time or two in a real shitty mood after doing that, but I assume it had as much to do with the other circumstances involved. I do try to mitigate shitty moods as best I can. I don’t think the issue of money would have tipped the shitty scale to one side or the other.
I was a little shocked when I first got here and my buddy the anarchist and I went for an existential hike (that’s like a regular hike but with singularly weird ass conversation) and, being new again to the area I asked him what he did about intimacy. I wasn’t being cagey or casting a wide net to see what I could drag in, if I meant anything other than face value it might have been ‘… and does she have a sister?’ He said “I visit prostitutes”. I mean he said that verbatim, not whores, or any of the other thousand derogatory terms. What shocked me was the resignation, he continued before I could frame it “… I’m just not very good at relationships” Yes. Of course. Our entire generation isn’t very good at relationships. The half century mark seems the wrong time to give up. I mean I’ve got a lot invested in sucking this bad, it’d be a shame to give all that up to be a novice at not sucking, you know? Weird as it sounds that’s sort of what makes quitting alcoholism so tough; you practice at being a nonfunctioning fall down drunk, and get pretty damn good at it, and though everybody is so supportive of you getting sober, they’ve all been practicing standing up sober and you have to start as an amateur. I could say it more eloquently, but not more true. Seems vain and petty. Most of us are mostly vain and petty; I mean most of each of us, not ‘that large group is vain and petty, us, huddled in this small group? We’re --- um, the opposite of vain and petty’. Most of us sweat the small stuff, even when a trusted buddy or family member says directly “Don’t sweat the small stuff” and we sniffle and nod and bury our snotty face into their shoulder.
I don’t know. I haven’t seen the anarchist since then. If I had a north facing window in this attic I could see his neighbor’s house blocking his house from here, it’s less than a hundred yards away. The few times I reached out he had other things going on, I think they were legitimate, I don’t think they were excuses, but, it’s been seven months since he said “I’ll get back to ya”. I sort of hope he went home, I mean left this shaggy mausoleum and went back to the place he raised his child, his own private Oregon, which, oddly enough is Philly. Granted, I don’t know Philly well, my mom’s people were from there, so I probably know it better than other people who have stopped for the night, but, um, I’d just as soon be here. That’s not the point, but it is a point, I think Objectively, my Oregon is grand, expansive, beautiful in broad strokes and fine details. Philly would take some work, you’d need an emotional attachment, objectively it’s not pretty at all. Not Oregon Pretty. But, you know, it’s where his heart is, I’d be much cooler with him being there and the possibility I might not ever see him again than I would with a phone call, an admission that he thought I was judging his whore mongery, a hug and a beer and everything’s groovy. I might have been judging his whore mongery, but not the exchanging money for sexual favors part. Ok, I’m spent, hallelujah.
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