Yet another observation...

I think of myself as a fairly well-educated person, if any graduate of the American system of education can actually make that claim, and I like to think that I have a fairly robust vocabulary for a man my age, so it was with no small amount of discomfort that I had to ask what the word spectrophilia meant upon hearing it yesterday for the first time in my life.  Spectrophilia, for those of you who are now as ignorant as I was yesterday, is a sexual attraction to ghosts, goblins, spirits of the decidedly not Scotch variety, and other phenomena of the paranormal. I did not know this was a thing until yesterday, although I suppose I should not be surprised that such an obsession exists.  Kraft-Ebbing was very detailed in its analysis of 19th century sexual obsessions and as time marches on I presume that the need to find new ways to obsess about sex must march on as well.  After all, buggering bunnies, like Putin's foreign policy, is so 1875 that it isn't even funny anymore. And nowadays we have cute vampires for the teenaged girls to thrill to and zombies for the teenaged boys to mow down with their Xboxes, so an attraction to metaphysical phenomena seems only the logical next step in the progression leading to robot sex and Bolshevism. I do, however, wonder why someone needed to coin a new word in order to describe this sort of thing. When I was a boy, back when dinosaurs and Richard Nixon walked the earth, everyone called having sex with someone who wasn't there masturbation. It still seems like a perfectly serviceable word to me, so I wonder why they, whoever they are, had to change it. Spectrophilia sounds more like the name of a lousy 80's glam rock band than an improbable perversion, or at least I think so; your mileage may vary.

The Situation

It has been seventeen years since the populace, including, in the interests of full disclosure, your humble correspondent, re-elected Bill Clinton President of this our Great Republic. I bring this up not to say anything negative about Bill Clinton or his administration--at this point, I am sure that neither you nor I have any interest in that--but to point out that it has, in fact, been seventeen years since his re-election, and here in our happy burg the arrival of the seventeenth year means one thing and one thing only: the cicadas have returned. Yes, they have, billions of the ugly little bastards, swarming up out of the ground in never-ending waves and shrieking from sunrise to sunset for sex. That’s all it’s about, kids, just sex morning, noon, and night, a fact brought home forcibly to me when I found two of the loathsome little bugs having at it on my windshield wipers.  I was late for work that day, so I just drove in with them still having at it the whole way in.  They were not there when I went home, so I am assuming that they toddled off after a post-coital cigarette and maybe a cup of coffee. I also assume that the guy involved bragged to all his friends about how he made the earth move for her.  That these damn things are going at it hammer and tongs is fine by me; a species must do what is necessary to preserve itself, after all, but I would prefer that they not use my car for such purposes and I would really prefer that they keep quiet about it, which is not at all what they are doing.  The decibel level of their shrieking varies from place to place, I’ve found, and one of the places the horny little bastards are shrieking the loudest is in the woods around my house.  Because of this, I can’t hear myself think in the morning, thanks to the hormonal jackhammering going on all over the place. It’s like being stuck at the junior prom with the heavy metal freaks for weeks on end.  People tell me that all of this shrieking will end in just a little while, when the cicadas are all done mating or the birds and the squirrels have finished eating their fill of them, which is what they were telling me a month ago and it still hasn't happened. To tell the truth, I can’t wait for them to go away, a trait they share with the former junior Senator from Illinois, although I am already feeling a bit sorry for the last one out of the ground.  He finally makes his way to the surface, climbs a tree, molts his exoskeleton, dries his wings, and then starts shrieking, “Yo yo yo, the situation has arrived, where the babes at,” only to have the katydids and the grasshoppers tell him that the party’s over, dude, and you missed it. That really must suck big time.

Narrowing the way, or the shad run, whichever you think more important

The American shad is a pelagic fish, which I understand has nothing to do with the fourth century heresiarch Pelagius or his denial of the orthodox Christian doctrine of original sin, a belief that led St. Jerome to call Pelagius an ignorant liar stuffed with Irish porridge, amongst other negative things, and everything to do with the American shad’s preference for living in the open sea far from the sight of land, where calls from telemarketers, bill collectors, and mooching relatives need never trouble them.  Living in the open sea is a good thing; I’m sure the shad think so or they wouldn’t bother living there, given the property taxes out in that neck of the woods, but every year the American shad wearies of this near idyllic existence and gather together in great schools several hundred thousand strong and then head for the rivers and estuaries of North America’s eastern coast like so many Rotarians, Elks, Odd Fellows, or the fraternal organization of your choice going to their organization’s annual convention in Las Vegas.  The shad head for the East Coast of America for pretty much the same reason that our Rotarians et al go to Vegas—sex—although the shad make less of a song and dance about their reasons for heading for shore. The shad, after all, are not leaving the little lady behind to keep the home fires burning; nope, the old ball and chain is going with the guys and aims to have just as much fun whooping it up as they do.  There’ll be no sexual double standards here, thank you very much; this is a Democratic Party stronghold and don't you forget it, buster.

For those of us who live near a river on the eastern coast of the United States, and yes, this category includes me, the arrival of the shad is one of the great signs of spring, along with allergies, baseball season, gnats, and having to do your income taxes, and no sooner does the shad run commence than the highways and byways of our happy little burg become lined to the danger point with cars, vans, pickup trucks, SUVs, and such other conveyances that will hold truly prodigious amounts of fishing equipment.  This annual invasion of dedicated sportsmen is annoying in the extreme for those of us who live here, as our Izaak Walton wannabes seldom bother to look both ways when crossing the streets.  What’s worse, or at least I think so, is that these people apparently believe that carrying a fishing rod and a tackle box conveys upon them some form of immunity from the vehicle and traffic laws of the Vampire State as well as an exemption from the laws of physics.  So if any of you people, and you know who you are, are reading this, please be aware that waving your fishing rod at my thirteen year old Ford will not stop the car dead in its tracks; fishing rods are by no stretch of the imagination magic wands and this trick will no more work with my car than it will with a locomotive coming down the line.  Except, of course, if I run you down, you know the law says it’s my fault, no matter how stupid you were, whereas if the train hits you and smears your dumb carcass over a mile of railroad track scores of people, including me, will read your obituary and mock you for trying to stop a locomotive with a fishing rod, and we will be happy that you have chosen to remove yourself from the gene pool.  Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life to improve the species.  It’s a small victory, but they add up, you know, yes they do.

Arterialscerlosis is the order of the day on the Internet these days as well and I trust I didn’t hurt your neck with that segue to another subject, but I cannot help but notice the increasing narrowing of the information superhighway.  For example, whenever I go online I must face a plethora of ads that promise to teach men fifty years old and over, yet another category that includes me, unfortunately, Spanish, French, and/or Italian with one simple trick.  I know why this is happening; I have been going to my local public library and using the online French language program to teach myself a little bit of the language in preparation for a proposed expedition to the City of Light later this year.  I have not been studying the language assiduously—I do nothing assiduously, I fear, except whine about my fate to all and sundry—and I can categorically state that after two and a half hours of not very intensive study my French is somewhat less good than my Spanish, a language that I have not been studying assiduously since high school.  So I guess there’s hope for me yet. Also, I am not sure that this trip is even possible at this point, and to paraphrase Will Rogers, I am wasting no time on a prospect.

In any case, these cyberlinguistic Burma-Shave signs promising me deliverance from the drudgery of learning French irregular verb conjugations with one simple trick invariably come with a photo of an attractive young lady of uncertain national origin whose primary assets are her nice looks, her nice smile, and her overly impressive bosom, which I do not understand, since everything about this young lady is designed to make me forget the various conjugations of avoir (to have) faster than I learned them. I therefore suspect that she is not the one simple trick the advertisers promise I can use to unlock my inner Cyrano de Bergerac; if she were, then Hugh Hefner would, by definition, be able to speak all the living languages of the Earth and most of the dead ones, including Pictish and Akkadian, high school foreign language programs would require their students to read Playboy as homework from one end of this our Great Republic to the other, and Viagra would replace Ritalin and Prozac as the pedagogical drug of choice in the nation’s schools.  That Playboy is not required reading tells me that learning French and Spanish is more difficult than this one simple trick can handle and that the purpose of the young lady is to distract my attention while these jokers loot my checking account.  The thing, of course, is that I’m not fifteen anymore.  When I was fifteen this dodge would have worked in a New York minute; when most of your body weight is testosterone almost anything sounds sensible if presented in the right package; but a couple of generations have come and gone since high school, I fear, and most of my body weight is cholesterol now, a substance not nearly interesting as testosterone, as I am sure a good many people out there can verify.  Avoir, aurai, avais, ayant…I haven’t gotten the present tense yet, but I’m working on it.

The Rhinoceros, a meditation on theft and the modern world

I do not wish to complain here, a statement which, if you have been following these screeds for any appreciable length of time, you know to be an untruth somewhat larger than the dog ate my homework and a bit smaller than a campaign promise, but I do believe that petty thievery is a nuisance as well as a misdemeanor and that someone should do something about it forthwith. I am referring to my missing copy of the National Geographic, specifically the October 2012 issue, which a certain someone who shall remain nameless [yes, if you’re reading this, I mean you, smartass] lifted from my bathroom not too long ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, the cover story reported on the plight of the rhinoceros in our modern world. The rhinoceros is a homely beast, as Ogden Nash quite rightly pointed out many years ago, and for human eyes he is not a feast, but as long as our prepoceros rhinoceros retains his horn, poachers will overlook the beast’s homely visage in the same way a down on his luck gigolo will overlook the girth of a three hundred pound heiress with a falsetto voice and a diamond-studded wart on her nose. 

The rhinoceros has fallen afoul of Adam Smith, yes it has, and now the poachers’ inexorable need for specie is threatening the species’ existence.  There is a huge demand for rhino horn in Asia, where people believe that ground up rhino horn will cure just about any disease you care to use the stuff to cure, and in the Arabian Peninsula, where guys think that rhino horn knife scabbards are chick magnets.  That a rhino’s horn is nothing more than a really stiff bit of hair does not affect anyone’s belief in the medicinal value of the thing, although I suspect when the poachers run out of rhinos to send along, the buyers in Asia will start buying up the sweepings off the floors of Chinese barbershops and selling that as rhino horn.  Hair is hair, after all, and if a rhino’s horn can cure your colon cancer faster than a speeding surgeon then why can’t your own hair do the same thing at half the price?  I also suspect that until the fashion changes, the guys in Yemen and other wild places will not give up their scabbards, and waiting for men’s fashions to change is like watching Bill Clinton give a speech; you know it must come to an end eventually, but you also know that the continents are slowly drifting towards one another and that North America will smack into Asia before Bill finally says the words, in conclusion, with any degree of veracity.  Fashion rules the world, people, and don’t you ever forget it; the Yemenis will give up their rhino horn scabbards when fashionable American women give up their Manolo Blahniks and not before. 

But I know that our Artful Dodger [and yes, I know who you are, smartass, don’t play innocent with me] did not purloin the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic so that he learn of the plight of the endangered rhinoceros, or if he did, he is a much more sensitive young man than his behavior; he thinks passing gas should be an Olympic event and routinely practices for the event at every opportunity; would otherwise suggest. I think, however, that we can skip this possibility; it does strain my credulity more than you can imagine; and go straight to the heart of the matter: Rio de Janeiro.  Along with the other articles in that now-vanished issue, there was a long essay on modern Rio, and as with any long essay on modern Rio, there were any number of photos of very attractive young women at the beach wearing bikinis.  For many another city, the prevalence of photographs of very attractive young women wearing bikinis might seem a shameless attempt to use sex as a municipal marketing tool—one can hardly imagine such a strategy working for Boise, for example, or for Des Moines, although it might work for any ski town in the Grand Tetons, especially if you’re French—but Rio is a tropical beach city and so the presence of photos of very attractive young women in bikinis is not only in keeping with the subject matter, but a necessity if the National Geographic is to portray life in the Brazilian metropolis accurately.  An accurate portrayal of life in modern Rio de Janeiro is not, however, why this junior league Jesse James, this flatulent little Billy the Kid wannabe from down the street swiped my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic, no, it isn’t.  He wants to look at the pictures. 

I don’t want to sound unduly harsh here, which is another whopper like the one I started this jeremiad with, but the boy’s parents are devout Roman Catholics, very devout Roman Catholics, which is why they get on so well with my mother.  They tolerate me because I’ve been helping the kids with their history homework for free and it makes no difference what deity you worship or what language you speak, getting something for nothing sounds good in all of them, a fact that explains the ongoing popularity of socialism despite that philosophy’s never-ending record of failure in every country that has tried to implement it.  Now, the parents are devoted to their kids, even the gassy goniff, for reasons that I am not sure I fathom, and they want them to do well in school.  But while the boy does well in math and science, getting him to remember what happened on 7 December 1941 is a bit of a struggle; he knows that someone attacked someone on that date, but he isn’t sure whether that was the day our German allies attacked China or if that was the day the South won the Civil War at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  It was something like that, you know, and it was all so long ago, you know, what difference does it make [actual sentence, folks, straight from the kid’s mouth. Sort of makes you wonder what the hell his history teacher is doing to earn his/her/its salary, doesn’t it]?  So the kid was in my house just after Thanksgiving trying to get my help explaining the effect of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso on Napoleon’s decision to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States for chump change [the answer, in case you’re interested, is none; Napoleon couldn’t have cared less about any promises he gave the Spanish in that treaty. He needed the money].  I’m not sure how or when the kid made his move; it may have been when I was in the bathroom, or when I was on the phone to my alma mater, explaining why I was not going to send them a donation this year; but whenever it was, at some point when I wasn’t looking, he made his move. 

I’m pretty sure I know why he took it; when I was his age, and I know that nothing causes the eyes of the young to glaze over more quickly than someone prefacing their remarks with the phrase, when I was his age, I’d steal copies of Playboy from mailboxes in the apartment complex over the hill from us. The sap was starting to rise and I wanted to ponder the reason why the sap was doing anything at all; I was very interested in science at the time. And then there are his parents, who would probably chastise him heavily if they caught him with a copy of Playboy in his room. The parents are very nice people, don’t get me wrong here, but I’ve been to their house and it is a bit like going back to the Catholicism of my youth. The place looks like a Catholic tchotchke shop, what with rosaries and candles and portraits of the Blessed Mother draped all over everything.  There’s no Internet in that house, and no magazines that show too much skin, nor blasphemous books nor books with four letter words beginning with f in them; there’s just righteousness, godliness, and Roman Catholicism in copious amounts from the cellar to the attic and everywhere in between.  And while righteousness and godliness are good things, no two ways about it, there’s only so much of the Good Book you can read before you want to read a Bad Book, which leads directly to the theft of my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic. If you can’t find a Bad Book, you have to make do until you can find one. 

I suppose I should be amused by the 1951 of it all; in an age where thousands of young women routinely negate any chance they may have had of achieving high elective office here in this our Great Republic by appearing in Internet porn, there is something curiously retro about someone stealing a National Geographic just to look at pretty girls wearing bikinis. And yes, I suppose I should be amused by the curious workings of postal karma, in which I, a magazine thief in my youth, am now victimized in the same way that I victimized others forty years ago, completing the cycle of yin and yang, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, so on and so forth ad infinitum.  I suppose I should be, but I’m not, so here’s the deal, you pimply faced farting machine: bring the damn magazine back or I will tell your mother that you’ve got it, at which point I will enjoy watching your mother kicking your flatulent adolescent rump into low space orbit. I am not kidding, buddy boy; cough it up or else!

SEX AND THE MODERN TEENAGER: Recently at a small social gathering in New York, a teenager asked a prominent American social philosopher what, in his opinion, was the major difference between adolescents and adults in their outlook towards life. The philosopher, a kindly man always willing to give the young the full benefit of his long years of study and reflection on a wide variety of subjects effecting life here in this our Great Republic, thought for a moment and then said that the major difference between the two groups was that teenagers obsess about sex, whereas adults obsess about money. There are always exceptions to the rule, of course; it is definitely possible, as recent history has shown, for adults to obsess about sex and money with equal intensity, but in the main, the sex/money dividing line holds up to all the rigors of statistical analysis.
We all know that adults obsess about money because they have to; bills do not pay themselves. Why then do teens obsess about sex? Everyone knows the conventional answers about hormones and growing up and all the other pat answers people would have us believe, but these reasons do not hold up under close scrutiny. The real reason, however, that adolescents obsess about sex is because they can. Your average American teenager lives in one of the very few socialist entities still extant: the nuclear family. This entity provides the teenager with clothing, food, shelter, medical care, transportation, and free laundry services with little or no monetary input from the teenager.

Indeed, many a teenager no longer sees these services as services that someone must pay for, but rather as rights that they are entitled to by virtue of their adolescence. In return for these benefits, the teenager whines, complains, refuses to clean up their room, listens to what passes for music amongst his or her cohort at an extremely high volume even when told to turn the noise down, and obsesses about sex, which they usually imagine to be a recreational activity without much biological consequence, like trying to get a tan or cracking a match near their bare backsides after having too much to drink and then passing gas. With all of their material needs met by their parents, the average American teenager can lay back and let the tidal surges of hormones drift over them unabated, allowing their minds to wander aimlessly through endless scenes of reproductive biology too baroque for any pornographer who wants to stay out of the slammer for a long time to re-enact.

This may also account for young people’s enduring fascination with socialism. A social system where all material needs are met, all social divisions are torn down, is just the sort of thing that would appeal to an idealistic teenager, the ideology combining all the benefits of adolescence, some of which are mentioned above, and few of the negative aspects i.e. the dreaded teenage pecking order. The problem with this system is, as adults know, that it doesn’t work, but that’s all right with teens—they don’t work either and somehow or other the money keeps coming in.
Adults know that this sort of adolescent attitudinizing is all poppycock, when it is not busy being balderdash and codswallop too. Teenagers can have black and white attitudes towards life and society because they are without adult experience and so have not learned that the world is largely immune to their notions of fairness; you can ask any Cubs fan about fairness and you’ll get an earful about the unfairness of life. In our modern world, a person knows that they have left childhood and adolescence behind and finally reached the semi-fabulous state of grown up when they know, deep down in their hearts, that these two statements are and always have been true: that life is not fair and that there is no free lunch. Somehow, some way, at some time, someone is going to have to pay through the metaphorical nose for the free lunch. This is simply the way it is, this way and not some other way, as Cormac McCarthy put it, much as some teens may not like to hear it.

Some adults fight the logic of this, of course, usually those who have done well in school and see no reason why their early scholastic success should not entitle them to lord it over the scruffy kids in shop class for the rest of their lives, and when they find this is not possible, they become academics. This is probably why socialism and its apologists exist only in the academy; a system that promises people whose sole qualification in life is that they were good at doing their English homework in the eleventh grade and ran twice for the student council complete and utter domination over every aspect of a given society’s social, political, and economic life will attract those people like loansharks attract deadbeats with a hot tip about Mile High in the fifth race at Aqueduct. That’s just the way it is, I guess, some things will never change.