Second Best

How To Pick Up Girls! - Now For Sale

2010-08-26T12:20:00.002-04:00

The book that started it all, How To Pick Up Girls, as well as several of my other titles, are all available for sale again. Every copy is in brand new condition, straight from the publisher. Visit www.pickupgirls.com for more about each book and how to buy them through Amazon.

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My Wife Is Trying To Kill Me

2010-07-20T17:05:00.006-04:00

My short story, "My Wife Is Trying to Kill Me" has just been published in the online literary journal Slow Trains. You can read it here:

http://www.slowtrains.com/vol9issue4/webervol9issue4.html

There is strong language and sexual content, so if that's not your cup of tea, you may want to skip it.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

My Wife is Trying to Kill Me

It is a Tuesday afternoon in winter, and in less than an hour it will be dark outside. In Arizona, where we have a house on the fifth fairway of Cochise Golf Course, it is just a little past two. And if I were out there right now I would probably be finishing up the front nine with Posnick and Hanratty and Lerner.

But I am not in Arizona, I am in my attic office in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where the thermometer just outside my window reads twenty-two degrees and there is half a foot of snow on the ground. No, I am not in Arizona because, as with so many other couples in their middle years, my wife’s career is blooming just as mine is nearing its end.

So instead of golfing, a pursuit which comes easily to me and to which I am hopelessly addicted, I am at this very moment trying to write a short story, though I haven’t a publisher, nor an agent, nor am I convinced I have anything much to say –- just a vague desire to wear a houndstooth jacket in the front of a classroom of adoring coeds sitting in a semi-circle on the floor, the prettiest ones in short skirts with their legs crossed at the ankle.

I am suffering from a slight head cold and have chosen not to do my usual half hour on the Exercycle. So I bathe earlier than is my custom (I have taken to bathing now that I am “semi”-retired), shave, and by the time I am finished dressing for dinner, it is only 5:45 and I have a whole two hours to kill before Miranda gets home from the office.

I pour myself a Glenfiddich on the rocks and start the Times’ crossword puzzle. My nose begins to drip copiously on the puzzle itself, and so I take a Benedryl, which soon mixes nicely with the scotch. Miranda phones and says she’s running late and doesn’t feel like cooking, so I should meet her at 8:15 over at the club for dinner and that the Dittricks and some friends of theirs are joining us. I finish the puzzle, pour myself another Glenfiddich, and watch “Access Hollywood” and then the first forty-five minutes of the Woody Allen clarinet documentary on the Independent Film Channel.

Stirring vaguely in the back of my mind is a question: Is this how I will spend the rest of my days? While I worked, there were dramas. Would I land the Home Depot account? Would Uncle make me president of the family business, or would he pick one of his own children? Would I leave Miranda for the young art director who designed our product brochures and with whom I was having an affair (or should I say screwing on the side) and start a new family?

If there are any, what will the new dramas be? Will Dolly, our eldest, get into med school? Will the stock markets suddenly tumble, forcing me to go back to work? Will Miranda leave me for one of her partners, the surprisingly handsome Rahim Sen Sharma? Will I be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis?

Don Dittrick’s friends turn out to be the young bond trader, Eric Handelsman. He has jet-black hair and an imperious air. Although I am at least a decade his elder, I find myself playing to the man, just as I did to my father, another imperious man with dark hair. I plan on ordering a salad and the swordfish, but when the waiter comes I can’t bear the thought of an entire meal that I won’t really enjoy. At the last second, I switch to the French onion soup (after all, I have a cold), and the New York strip.

“The eight ounce or the fourteen, Mr. Phayer?”

“The eight,” Miranda answers for me.

“No, Edgar, make it the fourteen,” I say. “I had a salad for lunch,” I tell Miranda, and she raises her eyebrows skeptically.

All evening long Miranda leans over and touches Handelsman on the arm; and though I try not to look, I am mesmerized. What is it with middle-aged women? They do so much more pawing than they did in their twenties and thirties. Are they marking potential new mates in case their present one dumps them for a younger woman, or is stricken with pancreatic cancer? Do they live in such dread of spending the next twenty-five years alone?

In my agitation, I drink a third and fourth glass of cabernet and then cap the evening by ordering a double Courvoisier V.S.O.P., straight up. Edgar brings me a giant snifter that must contain eight full ounces of cognac. I plan on drinking only half, but as we get up to leave I notice I’ve emptied the entire glass.

When we get into bed and she turns out the light, I tell Miranda she touched Eric Handelsman on the arm (I pick a number out of the air) eighty-three times.

“I did not,” she counters.

“You did, too. Every time you sit next to a guy with a lot of money, you touch his arm. The more money he has, the more you touch him.”

“That’s absurd,” she says.

We’ve had this discussion before. I know I’m not going to get anywhere, but I take a perverse pleasure in irritating Miranda nonetheless, like working a scab. In the early years, like most young men, my jealousy consumed me. Perhaps it was all the testosterone. Now I rather enjoy it. Would I really want a woman who only had eyes for me?

Miranda pulls the blanket over her shoulder and turns her back to me. I work my way under the blanket until I am pressing my crotch against her bare behind. My stomach feels bloated with steak, and I don’t fit against Miranda as snugly as I do in the morning.

“God, I ate too much,” I groan. “I feel like an anaconda who has just ingested a peccary.”

“What’s a peccary?”

“A small, wild boor. Like a javalina.”

“What’s a javalina?”

“It’s in the peccary family.”

I begin to rub Miranda’s belly. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks.

“Mmmmmm.”

“I thought you were getting a cold.”

“Just the sniffles.”

“Well, just don’t kiss me,” she says, rolling onto her back. Some friends confide they have absolutely no desire to have sex with their wives anymore. Others joke about the savagery with which their wives squelch their advances. I’ve always been pleasantly surprised at Miranda’s compliance.

Sometimes I think that when we married, we struck an unarticulated deal: she gives me sex, I give her money. Only now, with Miranda bringing in more money than I, how does that affect the contract?

I roll over on top of her, and she moistens the tip of my penis with her saliva and guides me into her, centimeters at a time. “Slowly,” she says. “Slowly.”

Why have I initiated this? My erection is half-hearted, and clearly Miranda is not even remotely aroused.

I have trouble reaching orgasm and cast about for my never-fail icon. The night we met, Miranda, a stewardess at the time on the overnight Northwest flight to Tokyo, instructed me to meet her in the first-class lavatory. Upon entering the tiny bathroom, I noticed she had already taken off her royal blue silk panties and bunched them on the counter next to the sink. The image has stuck with me.

I pump harder and faster, but the panties are not having their usual effect.

Miranda says, “It’s okay. You don’t have to come.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“My first appointment’s at seven tomorrow.”

“I hear you.” I begin thrusting furiously, still without much feeling, and then I picture Handelsman pushing aside the crotch of Miranda’s little blue panties and inserting his fingers between her lips. There is a stirring. I thrust away, faster yet, and the feeling, which had felt the far side of a canyon, inches closer, still weak in intensity but now suffusing my genital region so that finally I am able to pump out a small, anticlimactic little dribble of an orgasm.

I slump across Miranda like a sea lion, my heart pounding frantically. I roll onto my back to give it greater room to beat. There is a launched quality to its racing, as if I had to work to get it up to speed, and now it will keep on galloping on its own accord like some kind of perpetual motion machine.
I lie on my back in silence, listening to my heart, no, feeling it pound away, while Miranda once again rolls onto her right side, pulling the blanket over her shoulder, her back to me.

“Man,” I say. “This is scary.”

“Raymond, you woke me,” Miranda fibs.

“My heart won’t slow down. It must be beating 190, 200 beats a minute.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous. You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Now that she is a licensed orthodontist, Miranda can’t help but act the junior physician. She pulls the blanket tighter across her shoulder. “Now go to sleep. I’ve got to get up at six.”

“Listen,” I say, “it’s really racing. I know how it feels when I’m on the Exercycle and I get it up to one-forty and this is faster. Way faster.”

“Well, relax. I’m sure you’re okay. Just stop eating so goddamn much red meat.”
Poor red meat, the whipping boy of our times.

I probably wouldn’t have thought much about that evening again, for you know how it is with disturbing events, we tend to put them behind us, their power and intensity ebbing geometrically with each passing day, so that a week or ten days afterward, they’ve been pretty much swept under the rug, just another of the little shadows that make up our pasts and dimly haunt our present.

But the very next week, after dinner with friends at Jean George that included much wine and several glasses of cognac, we return home past midnight and again I feel a sort of rote impulse to have sex with Miranda. As the expression goes, my heart isn’t in it, and I have to work much harder than usual to reach orgasm. At which point my heart is far more into it than I want, beating wildly and showing no inclination to slow down. I lay there in silence, my finger on the pulse in my neck, checking the clock every two to three minutes.

“Miranda,” I whisper ever so softly, “what would happen if I died while I was having sex with you?”

Silence. Miranda is pretending to be asleep, her traditional response whenever I bring up an unsettling subject in the middle of the night. I repeat the question.

“Raymond, go to bed. I’m exhausted.”

“My heart is doing that thing again,” I say. “Listen.”

Reluctantly, she places her head on my chest. “So, it’s beating fast,” she says. “We shouldn’t have screwed in the first place.”

There is something about her body draped across my chest, and the smell of the cigarette smoke her hair has picked up in Jean George’s bar, that re-excites me. I find her lips and am surprised when she kisses me back rather passionately. She rolls on top of me.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“You had your orgasm. Now I want mine.”

“This isn’t like you.”

“How do you know what I’m like?”

“What about my heart?”

“What about it?”

“It’s beating like a maniac.”

“Good,” she cackles. “You’ll die in the saddle, just like Rockefeller.” She lifts her nightie and finds my stiffening member.

I wake up at 3:15 to pee and shuffle back from the bathroom half-asleep. But when I lie down, I am suddenly fully awake. I am worried about my heart. I am excited but alarmed by Miranda’s sexual aggressiveness. I am shocked at the callousness of her Rockefeller reference. I am surprised she is even aware of the rumor.

Normally, if something is bothering me about my health, I am loath to visit the doctor, for I am always afraid of having my worst suspicions confirmed. But having a second heart episode in less than a month is a bit more alarming than I can bear, and so I go to see my internist Alfred Priestley. He listens to my concerns in all their details and then asks a myriad of questions. He nods sagely, scribbling little notes as I speak.

“It’s the cognac,” he says finally. “It’s a notorious stimulant of the heart.”

“You’re sure?”

“Who’s ever sure,” he answers.

I insist he run every manner of test on me, and so spend the better part of the day both in his office and over at Valley Hospital on treadmills, in MRI chambers, having blood drawn. In the end, although my cholesterol level is a touch high, Priestley finds absolutely nothing wrong with my heart. My blood pressure is normal, my arteries unclogged and elastic, my overall cardiovascular system, he assures me, that of a man a full ten years younger than myself.

My difficulty in achieving orgasm is simply a byproduct of aging. “When we’re young,” he says, “we ejaculate before we want. When we get older, we ejaculate after we want. Be happy your wife still lets you have sex with her.”

I leave Priestley’s office joyously relieved, given a new lease to pursue a vigorous and active life. When I get home I sit down at my laptop without my usual sense of futility and am actually able to eke out a few paragraphs that somehow, for once, don't seem fatally trite. The phone rings. Miranda wants to know how my appointment went. I am a bit surprised, because normally she views my little health crises as nothing more than an eruption of hypochondria. “I’m fine. Priestley says I have the arteries of a man in his thirties.”

“Oh, that’s great, Raymond.” Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I detect just a hint of disappointment in Miranda’s voice. Could it be possible? Could the woman with whom I have just celebrated our silver anniversary want to be rid of me? Why not? Have I not contemplated which of our friends’ wives I would seduce were Miranda, God forbid, to be killed in a car accident. You can be sure of one thing: if you are thinking it, so is your mate.

When Miranda gets home from the office that night, I find myself devising a little experiment. We are sitting up in bed, Miranda watching a rerun of Friends, I doing the crossword puzzle. “Actually,” I say, “Priestley did find a little something he wants to keep an eye on.”

“Really? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to get you alarmed at the office. It’s nothing much really. He thought maybe he saw a little valve deterioration on the echo cardiogram.”

“What does that mean? Valve deterioration?” This time I think I hear in her voice a touch of excitement, of optimism.

“He said not to worry, it’s probably something I was born with that they’d just never picked up before. The equipment is so much more advanced these days.” I speak matter of factly, my nose buried in the puzzle.

“Are you supposed to do anything, take anything?”

“Uh uh. He just doesn’t want me getting my heart rate up too high. Easy on the Courvoisier, that sort of thing.”

“Well, that’s true for everybody, for God’s sake,” says Miranda.

Friday night we are invited into the city to the Lerner’s for dinner, a couple we met two years ago in Arizona. Sarah has marinated a butterflied leg of lamb which Ethan barbecues on a brand new state of the art Weber gas grill on their deck overlooking Central Park. He opens a bottle of ’86 Lafite Rothchild from his collection, and it complements the lamb magnificently. The meat is tender, the marinade subtle, and I make a big show of eating seconds and thirds.

After dinner Ethan and I play a game of chess, while Sarah and Miranda clear the table and bring out dessert. Ethan opens a bottle of Napoleon brandy, and I let him pour me a more than generous amount. I think I see Miranda watching me out of the corner of her eye. I bring the snifter with me into the bathroom and pour the brandy down the sink. When I return to the chessboard, I let Ethan refill my glass. On the drive home, I say, “God, I hate myself. Priestley told me to lay off the cognac, but who can resist the Napoleon?”

“You should really do what the doctor says, Raymond,” responds Miranda with, to my ear, very little conviction.

While Miranda performs her evening ablutions, I, whose nightly bathroom ritual is considerably shorter, spritz on a bit of Eau Sauvage, something I normally do only before going out at night. I get into bed and turn off the light. Will she? Or won’t she? It’s true that during the course of our marriage Miranda has only very rarely been the one to initiate sex. But if, as I suspect, she finds herself intrigued at the thought of getting my heart rate up too high…

I hear Miranda’s heavy end-of-the-day step thudding toward the bed. She climbs up onto her little footstool and flops onto the mattress. I hear her setting her alarm clock. I roll onto my side, facing her. Perhaps the wafting of my aftershave will catch her attention. It is as if the entire surface of my skin is reaching out to her, willing her to caress it. I feel on the very precipice of something, I know not what. I want more than anything for her to sidle over and press herself against me, for then won’t I be clever, the master manipulator. And yet am I not terrified that my plan will actually work?
I feel the sheet being pulled taut as Miranda rolls onto her side, facing away from me. Within moments I hear the soft melodious little snore that signals Miranda has fallen asleep.

Two weeks later it is Lobster Night at the country club and we take a table with five other couples. For sixty-five dollars a person you can devour as many lobsters as you want. As luck would have it, Miranda winds up sitting next to her little crush, Eric Handelsman, the bond trader, and the two of them chat animatedly and laugh abundantly, never once, to my eye, turning to the dinner companions seated the other side of them.

I sit directly across the table from them, downing two three-pound lobsters and a bottle of chardonnay all by myself. At one point, Handelsman says something that Miranda apparently finds uproarious and she leans forward and touches him on the thigh, by my estimation, no more than four to five inches from his cock. I wonder what’s going on in her panties. I feel a rush at the thought that the dark-haired Handelsman might, however unwittingly, be abetting my scheme.

After dessert I employ my increasingly familiar gambit, telling Edgar to bring me a double Courvoisier straight up. I try to speak loudly enough for Miranda to hear, but I’m not sure, what with her infatuation with the bond trader, that she even notices. I leave the cognac untouched.

As we climb into bed, I tell Miranda that she has to help me withstand my passion for cognac. “You know what big glasses they pour at the club. I must have had a pint. My heart feels like it’s going to explode.”

“I’m sure you’ll be okay,” she replies, curling into sleeping position. I can’t stand it and snuggle in behind her. “Please, Raymond, let’s wait till the morning. I enjoy it so much more when I have more energy.”

“This is Eric Handlesman’s dick pressing between your cheeks,” I say.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait till the morning, Eric. Good night.”

I lie on my back till I hear Miranda’s breathing ease into sleep, and then I masturbate into a tissue experiencing the most intensely felt of orgasms.

I realize that making a public display of drinking a whole lot of cognac is not going to do the trick. I must turn up the heat.

“Your ass is looking a little big,” I say, as she stands on the first tee at Ridgewood, about to hit a drive.

“You’re starting to get a second chin,” I declare over breakfast. “Maybe you should get a consultation with Danny Baker. We went to high school together. I’m sure I can get you an appointment.”

And when she gets home from a particularly long day at the practice, “Honey, I think you must be working too hard. You look positively haggard.”

I think of things that will disgust her: Getting into bed at night without brushing my teeth. Not flushing the toilet after a particularly gruesome dump. But these ideas disgust even me. Besides, it’s not so much that I want to repulse her, I want to antagonize her. I want her to hate me, or should I say, discover how much she already hates me, has always hated me.

We are invited to a small dinner party, six couples counting our hosts. I have two Glenfiddichs while waiting for Miranda to dress. On the way over in the car, I remark that her smart new Prada black suit, which cost well over $2,000, may be trying a little too hard to say “young.”

Upon our arrival at the Stillman’s, I quickly down two double Dewar’s; and by the time we are seated for dinner I am a bit woozy to say the least. During the salad course, I hear Tom Marino clear his throat, wait for a lull in the conversation, and then pointedly address Miranda, who is seated directly opposite him, all the way over on the other side of the table.

It is as if everything is developing in slow motion, as if I had anticipated this was going to happen one day, and now it actually is, just as I somehow always knew it would. “Lizzie got her braces off today, and I tell you, Miranda, her teeth look absolutely perfect,” declaims Tom. “The kid’s in ecstasy. Her self-esteem is virtually skyrocketing.” Personally, I’m getting sick of kids with soaring self-esteem.

Ellen Marino chimes in, “I mean, if you told people that just fourteen months ago this kid who had an overbite that made King Kong look good…”

Ellen is joined by a fusillade, no, a barrage, no, a virtual chorus of hosannas – “Little Alan’s smile lights up the entire house,” “Rebecca has just become engaged to a resident at Boston General,” “Get this, a photographer in Chelsea has asked our Justin to do a Calvin Klein catalogue,” and Miranda’s face turns from one dinner companion to the next so as to sop up every last drop of praise. Who can blame her?

They say that one mark of those who achieve greatness is their ability, when the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself, to recognize that moment and exploit it for all it is worth. I can tell you that in my nearly thirty years in business my timing was never that good. An offer from Uncle Harold to take over operations on the West Coast, a chance to pick up a retro design of 1860’s screwdrivers from a small Canadian toolmaker, an invitation from Uncle Harold’s chief competitor to come over as head of their European operations – I shied away from all of these opportunities because, I suspect, I did not have the resolve it would take to turn them into the gargantuan successes they eventually turned out to be. I did not, as they say, “step up.”

But this time is different. This is like an eighty mile-an-hour fastball with no movement on it whatsoever heading right down the middle of the plate. My bat is cocked. My eyes are focused. This is my turn, and this time I am going to drive the ball deep, deep over the center field fence.

The symphony of praise finally trails off into a melodic little hum, and Miranda sits there in its afterglow like a bride, and it is into this communal love fest that I plunge. I clear my throat. The entire table turns my way, their faces expectant, anticipating the husbandly valedictory, the maraschino cherry, if you will, that will crown this evening with the perfect salute.

“Isn’t she wonderful,” I say. “Isn’t Miranda great?” And there is just the tiniest trace of irony in my voice so that the more alert in attendance find themselves, without quite knowing why, ever so slightly on guard.

“When you think how far she’s come, it really is amazing.” I nod my head, amazed.
Miranda flashes me a small but ferocious warning with her eyes. I am undaunted. “You know, you probably don’t know this, but when Miranda and I first married, she could barely read. I’m not kidding. I mean, not even the funnies.” I turn to Miranda. “Isn’t that right, dear?”

Miranda simply stares at me, her eyes beaming pure hatred. The rest of the diners are looking at their plates, their hands, the walls.

“It’s a sad commentary on our schools,” I continue, “but they just kept on promoting her from one grade to another till before you know it she was graduating high school with” – I look over at Miranda – “what was your grade point again?”

She glares at me like a statue, silent and unmoving. I shrug and go on. “I don’t know, a C plus average, I think. Something like that. Can you imagine? A kid who is virtually illiterate graduating high school and being sent out into the world totally unprepared to do anything? What do they call it these days? Social promotion?

“Which is okay I guess but what about those poor kids who don’t have Miranda’s looks, her legs – ” I chuckle to myself – “her tush.” I catch Tom Marino’s eye and wink. “You know what I’m talking about.

“Of course, I didn’t really know any of this till after we’d actually tied the knot – not a clue. I can remember it like it was yesterday. We’re sitting at breakfast, reading the paper, and I say, ‘Sweetie, do you want the entertainment section,’ and she says, ‘Raymond, I can’t read.’ Just like that. ‘Raymond, I can’t read.’ No warning. No, ‘Honey, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’ Just straight out. ‘Raymond, I can’t read.’

“I think she’s kidding, of course, like, maybe she means she doesn’t like to read, or she’s not particularly good at it, so I hold up the front page of The Times, and I point to a headline – OPEC To Cut Production – and I say, ‘Read this.’ Well, she sits there for about five minutes and finally she goes, ‘Oppy, ah-ah-ahpee-ckkk…’ and then she just dissolves into tears. She can’t read it, and what’s worse, she has absolutely no idea what it means. She doesn’t even know what OPEC is, and slowly it dawns on me that this is so much worse than I could ever have imagined that I’m actually thinking about leaving her.” I look over at Miranda. “Isn’t that right, sweetie?” Ice.

“Well, of course, I don’t. Who could ever leave a face like that? But I do insist she go back to school. She doesn’t want to and fights me like a banshee, I mean, the crying, the carrying on. But I won’t have any of it. I’ve always believed that you’ve got to face down your demons in this life, look ‘em straight in the eye and say, ‘Get ready, pal, ‘cause here I come.’ Anyway, in the end I prevail, and we get Miranda a spot at Fairly Ridiculous. I know, it’s not Yale, it’s not Columbia, it’s not even Rutgers, for Christ sake, but it’s an accredited college, and besides this is a kid who has a lot of ground to make up.

“ At first, it’s not easy. The kicking and screaming continue. She cuts class. She drops out. I make her go back. She doesn’t want to. I bribe her – Mikimoto pearls to the tune of $18,000 a strand. She takes a biology lab. I get her a tutor. It helps. She gets a B-minus. There’s a bit of positive re-enforcement. I get her a physics tutor. She gets an A-minus. We discover she has some ability in the sciences. One success builds upon another. I say, ‘Okay, now you’re into it a bit, you need to pick a field of concentration.’ Again, there’s massive resistance. She says she wants to ‘experience a little bit of everything.’

“I won’t have it. My philosophy has always been: pick something you’re good at it, then give it your all. Miranda says I’m ‘suffocating’ her. I get an inspiration. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘you’re good in science, you’re good with your hands, you like people, what does that say to you?’

“She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. ‘Come on, think,’ I implore. She shakes her head. ‘Dentistry!’ I say, and her face lights up like she’s just won the lottery.”
I look around the table as if I expect to be the absolute focus of eleven pair of adoring eyes. “So when you think about it,” I conclude, “Miranda’s not the only one you have to thank for all those beautiful smiles.” I wait a beat. I hold up my snifter. “By the way, who do you have to fuck around here to get some more of this delicious brandy?”
Miranda won’t talk to me on the ride home, nor as we fan out through the house, checking the answering machine, locking doors, turning off lights. Nor in the bathroom as we wash our faces, floss, brush our teeth, do the Water-Pik. As usual, Miranda is still creaming herself as I depart the bathroom. I climb into bed with an extraordinary sense of optimism, of having knocked one out of the park.

I turn out the light and wait in the dark, my whole nervous system poised like a panther’s. I can hardly wait to hear the bathroom door open and Miranda’s slippered feet begin to pad toward our bed. At the same time, I feel as patient as a Sphinx, for I have accomplished exactly what I’ve set out to do. Surely, it will take Miranda time to find the courage to do what she knows she has to do. But I have all night long.

I don’t know whether I have been asleep for minutes or hours, but I am awakened by the warm, cozy sensation of my cock in someone’s mouth. I can only remember this having happened once in my life before, the night I presented Miranda with her three and a half carat engagement ring. I put my hands on her head and gently play with her hair. “What’s got into you?” I whisper.

She doesn’t answer, in fact is absolutely silent as she climbs on top of me, shimmying her hind quarters toward my cock like a bee backing into a flower. Suddenly, she begins bucking wildly, and it isn’t long before she draws out of my quite still body a long and intense orgasm with a monumental climax of her own.

She rolls off me in silence. I put my hands under my head. My face feels flushed in triumph and horror. Miranda snuggles close and lays her head on my chest. I sense her trying to position her ear over my heart.

“Are you okay?” she coos.

“My heart is fucking flying,” I say. “I’m freaking out.”

“Do you think you can go again?” she asks. “I think I have another orgasm or two in me.”

Without words or planning, we fall into a pattern. We get home from dinner, and I am the first one finished in the bathroom. I don’t sit up with the crossword puzzle anymore but almost immediately upon getting into bed flip off the light and pretend to be asleep. I hear Miranda in the bathroom, peeing with the door open. Instantly, I get a hard on. Soon she will be finished washing her face and creaming her skin, then she will tiptoe into the bedroom and ever so quietly push herself beneath the covers. She will lay there for a few minutes, very still, then ever so slowly, inch by inch, begin to sidle closer. She will actually believe that I am asleep. Or maybe not.

And I? I will lie there like an addict, ashamed and broken, a prisoner of Miranda’s treachery and yet so wildly excited by it. I can barely contain myself knowing that in mere moments Miranda is going to be all over me, grinding her snatch against my thigh, holding her cunt-scented fingers under my sleeping nostrils, all in the misguided belief that she is somehow going to be able to fuck me to death.

BREAKING OUT OF THE "FRIEND ZONE" (PART IV)

2010-03-18T08:59:00.003-04:00

TECHNIQUE #4 - LOGIC

I know, logic is one of the least sexy words in the english language. The French, at least, say logique. But just like a lawyer or a dork on the debate team, you can build an irrefutably logical case for why your "friend" should go to bed with you.

To wit: she knows you and knows you're a trust-worthy guy; knows you're not going to hit or hurt her; knows you're respectful and fun; knows you're not a pathetic nerd, because if you were she wouldn't be hanging around with you; knows you're not a stick-in-the-mud, stay-at-home cheapskate because the two of you often go out to dinner or the movies together; knows you went to a decent school (you did, didn't you?); knows you're a good dresser, because if you weren't the two of you certainly have a close enough relationship that she would have said something to you about your clothes; knows you're clean; knows you have a decent job; knows you give a great massage, because up until now you've been so deep in the "friend zone" she's actually asked you to massage her back, her neck; knows that you're anxious to please, so that if she said stick you're finger up my ass you'd be happy to oblige; knows that if having sex with you somehow caused her to fall in love with you, you'd be there for her. After all, you've been hanging around all this time without enjoying the benefits of sleeping with her; she's already slept with dudes that don't even compare to you and it made her embarrassed and miserable. With you, she'll wind up feeling like she's taking good care of herself - which seems to be way more important to a woman than a man.

In short, you're the perfect candidate for her to have sex and fall in love with because you're a well-liked, known quantity. You've been tested in the field and found to be a great friend. Fucking together is the next logical step. And if she counters with, "But sleeping together could ruin our great relationship," you shoot back with, "Wrong - it will only make it better. Much better." And that's the truth. Although sometimes a little awkward and embarrassing when you first get into, sex with someone you know and like most often explodes into a sexual delight as all the pent up feeling of friendship and caring about each other suddenly rushes to the surface, free at last to be expressed and acted upon.

Hooking up with you could very well blow her mind - in a good way. Wow, she thinks, whoever thought good old Jimmy here would be the greatest lay I've ever had. I want more!

So get to it, pal. You're already got to the place where you're discussing it openly - the elephant in the room has been acknowledged. Now it's time to build your case, step by step. Write down all your pros, don't leave anything out, and read 'em to her. It's going to be a convincing array of facts. Try it. You'll be fucking amazed at how effective it is. You'll be kicking yourself for having taken so long to unveil your case. Shit, you may even find yourself applying to law school. Talking your way into pussy works!

Okay, next columns are about PERSEVERANCE, TIMING, AND AN OFFER SHE CAN'T REFUSE THAT YOU'LL BE ONLY TOO HAPPY TO GIVE!

BUSTING OUT OF THE "FRIEND ZONE" (PART III)

2010-03-17T06:17:00.002-04:00

You're obviously a guy intent on sleeping with a particular woman who's relegated you to the "friend zone." That shitty, sexless, fucking - or should I say fuck-less - friend zone! Well, we're not going to take it; and so if any of the previous techniques haven't worked - and if they haven't I swear it's because you're not executing them right - they're fucking brilliant and devious and manipulative and guaranteed to work - however, if you fucked them up and they're not working then we're going to have to apply others that I know for a fact to be equally brilliant. So without further ado, I introduce Technique #4 - Irreverence!

Irreverence is the antidote to pussy-whipped. If you're a guy who's been hanging around with a girl who won't go to bed with him, you are, in fact, pussy-whipped. Whipped by a girl, a Pussy. You've become her bitch, you'll do anything she wants, including NOT go to bed with her. You're simply too well-behaved, and as a result she probably has nothing but contempt for you. You're her bitch. How do you stop this?

By rebelling. By behaving in a way she's never seen from you before. By disagreeing with her. By making fun of her. There's nothing like a little insurrection to give a man back his macho, his brio, his balls.

Let me tell you about something that happened to me when I was a young guy - in my early twenties. I had been taking out a girl from Sara Lawrence College for a period of six moths. Very pretty, very petite aspiring poet from Minneapolis who informed me early on that she was fucking engaged to some dude at Harvard Law School. Man, how fast did that put me in the friend zone. I'll hang out with you in Manhattan because I'm stuck here in school, but it has to be platonic because I'm engaged.

Oh, and I bought it. I wanted to be around her because she was so damn hot-looking. I thought maybe somehow she'd relax her role as fiance and come across with a little nooky. But I was too afraid to make the first move. What if she said, "I thought I was being clear, ass-face. Don't you know 'engaged' means you don't mess around with other men?"

So I did nothing, date after date I did nothing. Out to dinner or the movies, then straight to the train at Grand Central to catch the train back to Sara Lawrence. Do not stop at Eric's bachelor apartment.

On about our 12th date, I couldn't stand it anymore. We were having a beer in a bar near Grand Central, prior to her getting the 11:15 back to Bronxville. At the time the girl's uncle was mayor of Minneapolis and for some reason she was always going on about him. "Yesterday, my uncle the mayor kept all the schools open even though there was a foot of snow." Or, "My uncle can always get us tickets to the Vikings game - right on the 50 yard line."

I guess I'd had an extra beer or two, and I found myself saying, quite without rehearsal, quite spontaneously, and maybe knowing instinctively that it was the right thing to do to break the awful log jam, "You know, you're uncle's an asshole."

At first Carole looked shocked, amazed, almost insulted!! But then I gave her a little smile and she burst into a roar of laughter. "You know, sometimes he is," she admitted. "He's so fucking pompous."

And just like that we were connecting on a whole different level. I was a dude. I was funny. I had balls. Instead of putting her on the train, we jumped into a cab back to my place. I promise you, we were having sex within five minutes after arrival at my apartment, about he amount of time it takes to get your clothes off. Apparently, that engagement wasn't quite as sacrosanct to her after all.

Irreverence, baby. Your ally every time you feel yourself slipping into Ms. Nice Guy. Okay, in the next few days we'll discuss Timing, Logic, and Persistence. And after that, I want to hear about RESULTS.

HOW TO GET OUT OF THE “FRIEND ZONE” (part II)

2010-03-13T06:59:00.005-05:00

Okay, we've already discussed the single most important element in changing your platonic relationship into a sexual one: you address the problem immediately and directly. You've told her, in no uncertain terms, that it's an unbearable -- borderline unacceptable -- hardship that she doesn't want to sleep with you. Good, it's out in the open now. She's heard it with her own ears. You want to go to bed with her. You're not just hanging around for her friendship.

At least on an unconscious level she's been smart enough to guess it. Now she knows it for sure. It's the real reason you hang with her.

What I love so much about this technique is that you now have license to discuss the issue, brainstorm it, address her concerns, make adjustments, work directly to change her mind. No more need for pussyfooting around about it, half afraid that if she finds out you're real motive, she's going to order you out of her life.

It's out there, baby. You want to make love to her. It's just about all you ever think of.

So, how do you make it happen?

Here's Technique #3 - BEGGING

Every single day of the year, millions of things are gotten through begging. In cities all across the world beggars, hands out, are handed tens of millions of dollars just by asking for it. Little kids are given toys, dogs, trips, money just by begging their folks. "Please, ma, please can we go to Disneyworld. Pleaasssseee." And mom gives in.

Try it on your friend. "Please, Lisa, please, please, please will you go to bed with me. Just once. I just want to see how it feels to lie next to you once. Haven't I been there for you when your mom got sick, you got fired, didn't get into the grad school you wanted. I'm always there for you, it's the one thing you can do for me. I'd appreciate it more than anything in the world." Even be funny about it. "I'll be your best friend, your BFF." Really plead sincerely enough, really mean it, and don't be surprised if she says, "Oh, what the hell. Sure." And as she pulls back the covers, "Come on, get in. We're only going to do this once."

Technique #4 - BRIBERY

If begging doesn't work, or you sense she's weakening but not quite there yet, turn it up a notch. Offer her something she really wants. "Please, just once, Lisa. I'll buy you a present. I'll get you tickets to 'Wicked,' I'll take you to dinner at The Palm. I'll buy you that dress in the window of Bloomingdale's."

"You're crazy," she'll say. "Why would you want to spend $225 on a dress for me? I don't believe it. That's ridiculous."

And you'll reply: "That's how bad I want to make love to you. That's how important it is to me. Shit, I'd fly you to Paris for the weekend if you'll go to bed with me. That's how beautiful I find you. That's how incredibly sexy."

You're out of the friend zone now, pal. You're talking sex. You're talking seduction. You're the man and she's the chick again. And watch how fast you start to change in her eyes. You've got a dick and it's talking to her! Yeah, baby!

Bribery works like no other technique in the world. Although not a popular way to put it, the fact is it's at the heart of just about all male-female love relationships. So if you've offered the bribe, be prepared for two things. To really spend the money you've promised. And to get laid, right then and there. On a purely materialistic basis, of course, she lusts for the item you've been smart enough to offer. After all, you know her well. But more importantly, your offer symbolizes the depth of your feelings for her, the intensity of your attraction.

(more coming soon)

HOW TO GET OUT OF THE “FRIEND ZONE” (Part One)

This is for all you guys out there who have somehow let yourself become best buddies with a woman without getting your mitts on her. You should feel bad but not too bad because it happens to millions of men on an ongoing basis – Christ, it’s probably happening to thousands of guys right now – they’re bringing a date home and not taking her in their arms and kissing her good night.

That’s how it starts most of the time – you’re worried she doesn’t like you enough. That she doesn’t find you attractive. That you’re not good-looking enough.

I call this thinking like a girl. Hah! Not good-looking enough. That’s not your job, pal. You’re a guy. You’re not supposed to be the good-looking one. That’s her job. That’s why there’s cosmetics, eyebrow pencils, eyebrow pluckers, G-strings, face creams, push up bras, red dresses. That’s why women spend literally thousands of hours in front of the mirror every year. That’s a woman’s role: to be the good-looking one.

You’re supposed to be confident. Strong. Self-assured. Somebody who can get out there, slay the dragons, bring home a decent living, and give your woman the fucking of a lifetime. So, for fuck’s sake, stop worrying about being good-looking – it can only get you in trouble.

Now there are sages out there who will tell you once in the friend zone, never in the end zone. I say bullshit. It’s not necessarily going to be easy, but with a little ingenuity and balls you can break free and develop a fantastic sex life with the woman you fear doesn’t want anything more from you than a kiss on the cheek. And I’m going to tell you how to do it right fucking now. I’ve done it myself. And if a 5’ 5” round-faced gnome like me can do it, shit, a dude like you should be able to fucking sprint out.

Alright, here’s the dope. 8 simple but brilliant ideas for turning your friendship with a woman into an intensely sexual relationship – starting now!

BE DIRECT: Don’t let one more date go by without confronting the issue. Say, “There’s an elephant in the room that has to be addressed. I want to have a sex life with you and you have consigned me the role of friend. I love hanging with you but I can’t stand not being able to take you in my arms and make love with you. You’re just too fucking desirable, too sexy, too hot, too beautiful. I have to go to bed with you."

In rare instances, the very act of confronting the subject will unleash her suppressed desire for you – she’ll be so turned on by your courage in bringing it up. Ironically, she herself may have actually felt like the one trapped in the friend zone, thinking you didn’t find her good-looking enough. What a relief it will be for her to discover that you’ve been dying to get your paws on her. She’ll pop right into your arms. This will happen, but rarely.

More likely, a woman will admit, usually with politeness and a sense that she wishes it weren’t so, that she’s just not physically attracted to you. This, of course, has been your worst fear all along, and probably the biggest reason you’ve been afraid to make the first move. You didn’t want her putting the kebash on the whole situation and telling you you just don’t turn her on. For many guys the mere thought of it is just too damn painful.

I say do it anyway. If it’s the case she doesn’t find you handsome, now you know what the issue is. Now it can be addressed. You get a new haircut – now do you find me handsome enough, you say. You work off 20 pounds in the gym. Don’t tell me I’m not sexy enough now, baby. You get a cool new shirt, tight new jeans. How hot are you now. Keep at it. It’s on the table. It’s being talked about. In fact, you’ve been given an assignment. Get handsomer. Do it. Work at it. And flaunt the evidence in her face on a constant basis. I’m wearing a sexy new eau de cologne. Here, smell. Pull her close and press her face to your skin. She’ll be impressed by your aggressiveness. She may suddenly and quite unexpectedly find herself sexually aroused by the whole experience. Give it a shot.

FLATTER: Tell your good-looking female friend that she is the most beautiful, sexiest person in your life by far – no one even comes close. Be elegiac, worshipful. Her nose is like that of a Greek statue – look one up on the web, find a statue with a great nose, and use the name on your friend. Point out how guys stare at her when the two of you are walking down the street, sitting in a Starbuck’s. Wax eloquent about the beauty of her breasts, ass, hair, waist, face. Never stop. She’ll become addicted to the compliments, excited by them. They may actually be making her wet. There you are, sitting over coffee with her, telling her what an unbelievable hottie she is, and down below the table she’s creaming in her little panties. And you don’t even know about it. Believe me, pal, extreme, and I mean extreeeeme flattery makes a woman feel transported, elated, finally living life the way she was always meant to live it. She ceases to worry about the guy who’s laying it on and just sits back and luxuriates on the laying on part. At this point it could be anybody - she's ready, pounce on her.

The second part of this FLATTER section is what I call the close. You’ve put her in a fabulously receptive mood by telling her how lovely she is – now take advantage of it. Close the deal. Tell her you simply can’t stand the idea of never seeing her under the sheets, never getting a chance to appreciate all her physical beauty, never feeling what it’s like lying next to such a soft, curvy body, next to such extraordinary breasts.

Believe it or not, she’ll actually start to feel sorry for you. She’ll think, Gee, we are really good friends and if he’s this attracted to me I really ought to throw him a good fuck once. I mean, the poor guy, going his whole life without experiencing the beauty and pleasure of lying with me. What’s the big deal. “Come on, Charlie,” she’ll say. “Get over here. I’m only going to show you how to do this once.”

Of course, if you do a good enough job and don’t come in two seconds, chances are she’ll start balling with you on a regular basis. So don’t fuck it up.

Okay, gang, it’s 4:37 a.m. and the ambien I took half an hour ago is starting to kick in - see, I take ambien just like Tiger, so how come I suck so bad at golf - so I’m going to get back in bed. Rest assured, there are 6 more techniques to be discussed, but they’ll have to wait till whenever I get up the inspiration to write them. They are: Bribery, Begging, Timing, Irreverence, Logic, and Persistence. And they’re incredibly important techniques for breaking out of the friend zone and into the end zone. Stay tuned.

WHY DON'T WOMEN WANT TO FUCK MORE OFTEN??

2010-02-22T22:57:00.002-05:00

It's weird -- female orgasms are way more pleasurable than men's. We, the world, are obsessed with them, their sound, their intensity, their multiplicity. You hear their sounds woven into rap songs, movies, porn.

A guy has one lousy orgasm and lets out a little grunt. Women, conversely, have as many as half a dozen at a time, and they scream and moan and shriek and holler as if it's a feeling that is both exquisitely painful and deliriously pleasurable. A woman's orgasm can last so much longer than a man's.

Given that, why on earth are women so fucking resistant almost every time you suggest sex. "I'm sleepy, gotta get up early with the kids, have a tough day at work tomorrow, we did it last night, I don't want to."

Why -- when they apparently have so damn much fun once you're finally able to talk them into it?

Not content just to ponder this conundrum, I asked 20 women this very question: why do you so often resist something that is so fucking thrilling?

Their answer, plain and simple: it's just so much work getting there. The thought of all the effort they'll have to expend to overcome their natural lethargy and lack of enthusiasm often defeats them -- and you in the process.

What can you do about it?

You've got to employ every possible tool at your disposal. Among the very best are flattery, a shower, talc (on you), an after shave or eau de cologne they like, massage, lots and lots of massage, little kisses of the head, ear, hair, foot rub, shoulder rub, more flattery, promises of jewelry, weekends at a nice hotel, theatre tickets, skilled and endlessly persistent cunnilingus, bringing home flowers, chocolates, the usual bullshit.

You get the picture. If you want more big O's from your lady, you've got to use all the artistry, creativity, generosity, salesmanship, and romance you can muster. And when all else fails, never forget: begging is under-rated. I wish you great success.

Your mentor, e-man.

YET MORE HAIKU FOR YIDS/GOYS

2009-12-11T03:53:00.005-05:00

The goy comes home from
walking his black lab to eggs
fried in bacon fat.

Sunday morning the
goy takes communion still drunk
from the night before.

Once a month the goy
goes to work under his wife’s
plaid flannel nightie.

The yid plays golf at
the goy’s club where the members
are sure he’s cheating.

REMEMBER, 5 syllables/7 syllables/ 5 syllables:

Broke yid sells his benz
buys a hundai and is thrown
out of the golf club.

Soon as the yid hits
the skids his wife fellates her
psychoanalyst.

Yid gets wife to scream
during sex fucking her ass
wiping dick on drapes.

Beautiful shickse
offers snatch to yid who asks
what's in it for me.

goys don't chew rather
eschew jew foods like matzohs
kasha varnishkes.

the goyim golfed on
velvety fairways for them
and their kind only.

tall shickse women
glided by little yiddles
sowing longing, angst.

the goyim stamp their
Feet waiting for the liquor
store door to open.

the goyim fight over
the last piece of pork throwing
the bones to their kids.

two yids came to blows
over how to pronounce the
hebrew word for peace.

Yids and goys and pork
Roast rampant she'll never let
Him shtup her standing.

After the clams and
The pork liver appetizer
The goy ate pussy.

8 inches the jew
told wife when reality
measured 3 hard.

Jew screamed the la crosse
team chasing mordechai with
beloved Nike sticks.

The goy vagina
has clean taste notes of cumin
tempts yids, then forbids.

New Short Story in The Cortland Review

2009-11-23T00:09:00.003-05:00

This month my short story "The Pact" is being published in the online literary magazine, The Cortland Review. You can tap right into its appearance in the magazine by clicking on the link below. I'd be thrilled if you take a moment to read it. It is an excerpt from a novel I've been working on titled "Outliving Emily." Would love to get your feedback, even though I know you're all too fucking lazy and withholding to give me any. e

http://cortlandreview.com/issue/45/weber_f.html?ref=home

L. COHEN, GIRL PROBLEMS, A JERSEY CHRISTMAS

2009-10-26T04:24:00.003-04:00

* Saw Leonard Cohen at Madison Square Garden Friday night -- best single concert I have ever seen in my life. And I've seen the best: The Stones numerous times, Joan Baez, Dylan all over the world, Ray Charles tearing down the place at the Newport Jazz Festival. No boring down moments with Lenny. Man's 75 year old voice better than it's ever been. Spectacular side musicians, beautiful girl singers, Cohen a powerful, charismatic, deeply moving singer. Must see -- very few tour dates left. Worth flying to Cleveland or Ashville or Vegas to catch the remaining shows.

* The video I conceived and directed for my son's band and song, both called GIRL PROBLEMS, won a big award at a gay and lesbian video festival. Time to check it out at youtube.com/girlproblemsmusic.

*If you're worried about losing your job in this relentlessly "stuck" economy, please send away to amazon for my new book, The Indispensable Emloyee: Recesssion-Proof Your Job. I've written 30 books on how to better your life. Except for How To Pick Up Girls, this is the best

*I have a new film just now going into distribution: A Jersey Christmas. It presents a vision of Christmas in a post-modern America, where a large percentage of the population -- made up of Jews, Moslems, Hindus, atheists, budhists, et. al. -- don't celebrate Christmas. The film is set in a Christmas Store, one of those places that pop up overnight in a blue collar neighborhood, and disappear sometime in early January. The boss, a cruel and compulsive gambler, gets informed by the mob that if he doesn't scratch together $45,000 my midnight, Christmas Eve, they're going to come back and break his legs. Needing every last penny, he forces his staff to keep the store open till after midnight. There is open revolt among the Christian kids, who have all made Christmas Eve plans. So the non-Christians tell them to get lost -- they don't need 'em, they can handle the store on their own tonight. The film is a comedy about all the wonderful slackerness, sex, crime, sacrilege, and fighting that goes on among the staff and customers on this most holy of evenings. I think you're going to love it.

Did It Work On My Wife??

2009-09-30T06:24:00.002-04:00

When last we communicated, I told you I was heading off to my bedroom to seduce my wife using Lynn Freed's techniques: going to tell her she fills me with overwhelming lust. I'm a biker who just happened to be riding by and I simply had to have her. So, how did it turn out. Well I tiptoed into the room, fearful of waking her up. I knew she had her alarm set for 8 to get up and work out with her trainer, and it was now only 7:15. She positively loathes being robbed of sleep she fully expects to get. It's like taking money or jewelry from her. So I stood looking at her in bed, sort of paralyzed, not quite sure what to do. She was lying on her back and her nightie had ridden about half way up her thighs -- very tempting.

And then I had an inspiration. Normally, I approach my wife from the right side of the bed, my side. She sleeps on her back on the left side. I decided to shake things up. Though there was almost no room to the left of her, I, nevertheless, climbed in on her side and lay down straight on top of her. My instinct is that I would seem more like a stranger coming in from this little used side. It worked. She embraced me, didn't resist, or whine, or push me a way at all. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me. "I'm the bellhop, Miss," I said. "I brought breakfast from room service, but when I saw you lying there I just had to get in with you. You are the most sexual woman I have ever seen. I have to have you."

I'm not going to go into the most intimate details -- Christ, if my wife reads this even the way it is now I could go 6 months without getting laid. But I just want you to know how it unfolded...and that I believe Lynn's strategy for seducing women is a good one. Later that day without any prompting from me, my wife allowed how it was somehow very sexy that I got in on her side of the bed. So give it a shot. Let me know how you do.

By the way, I have a new book out from Berkley Press titled: THE INDISPENSABLE EMPLOYEE: HOW TO KEEP YOUR JOB IN TOUGH TIMES. It is terrific, practical advice, full of simple ideas you can put to work immediately to secure your job. Give it a shot. It's going to help big-time.

best idea ever for turning women on

2009-09-18T05:33:00.003-04:00

I recently spent two weeks at a famous writers' workshop run by Middlebury College called Breadloaf. The writer who led my particular workshop is Lynn Freed, a fascinating woman in her mid-60s, a South African Jew who grew un in Durban and now lives in Sonoma, Calif.

We talked a lot about our favorite subject: the difference between how men and women feel about sex. She gave me some fascinating insights. Lynn says the thing that turns a woman on most is when a man is WILD about her. She loves the idea of his being crazy with lust for her. So if you've been hiding your lust, worrying you have to go slow, sneak up on a woman -- and it's not working -- maybe you want to try being honest. "I have to see you naked. The sight of your body, your breasts, your ass, turn me on like I've never been turned on in my life before. The thought of having sex with you gives me the biggest hard on I've ever had." I love the concept and since it's 5:40 a.m., E.D.T,, I am going, with some trepidation, back to my bedroom to wake up my deeply asleep wife and tell her that just thinking of her body as I was sitting at my MacBook writing my blog has filled me with lust to the point that i've had to come in and wake her up. I'll let you how this dangerous mission turns out.

2 other quick points from Lynn: 1) women often love to travel way more than men and the reason is that at least on an unconscious level they associate it with erotica, with having sex with exotic men, getting away from their predictable old husband and doing a Corsican on the beach of his faraway island.

And that relates to point 2. Women marry, fuck, and have children with appropriate men -- accountants, engineers, dentists. And while they're doing it, they're thinking about "inappropriate" -- men, bikers, hit men, brawlers, vagabonds, gypsies, rastafarians. So if your lady is resisting your advances one night, paint her a fantasy: it ain't you she's about to screw but a dirty, bearded pirate from the South Seas. If you paint a vivid enough picture, you just might get laid.

Okay, heading back to my bedroom. wish me luck. e.

OBSERVATION ABOUT WOMEN

2009-08-24T19:51:00.002-04:00

I have a wonderful woman in my life who reports in at least a dozen times a day on her condition: I'm sleepy, hungry, freezing, starving, exhausted. It's hot in here, noisy, stifling. I feel full, lazy, like vegging out. I'm bored, scared, pissed, really furious.

It suddenly occurred to me that I, who have all of the feelings described above, almost never report them. Just doesn't cross my mind to do so.

It makes me wonder: Is this a gender specific thing? Do women report in on what they're feeling on an hourly basis, while men don't? And if so, why? Is there a difference in the way boys and girls are raised that encourages spilling one's guts or keeping mum?

Anyone out there who has knowledge, scientific or otherwise, on this subject, please enlighten me.

SHOULD YOU MARRY HER? A SIMPLE TEST

2009-07-02T04:21:00.000-04:00

I meet hundreds of guys in a real quandry: they sort of like a girl they've been dating, but when she starts putting pressure on them to marry, they're not sure if she's the right choice. Not certain they love her enough. Not ready to give up on all the thousands of girls around who are prettier and hotter and more exciting. What's a fellow to do?

I've got the acid test for whether or not you should blast through your misgivings and marry the woman: Can you countenance the thought of her porking another guy, one of your friends, for example. If the answer is no; if the thought of her screwing your best friend Ralphie drives you to distraction, then she is the girl for you. This simple primal drive to keep her for your own is, in my carefully thought out opinion, the most basic form of true love.

If, on the other hand, you don't really give a shit, if your feeling is, hey, I don't particularly like the idea but it's not going to devastate me, then don't marry her. You don't love her. You don't quest for exclusivity. That's not love.

Parents and friends blabber on about compatibility, shared interests, similar backgrounds, suitable backgrounds -- it's all bullshit. The acid test is this: does the image of your pal Tony slipping his hand under her panties fill you with an almost psychotic rage, with terror, with the feeling that if it happened your life would be wrecked for ever after, you love the lady. Go ahead, marry her. And, remember, you heard it here first. From your pal e-man. Never forget: e-man may be a loser, but it doesn't stop him from knowing what's going on.

10 BEST THINGS TO TELL A WOMAN

2009-06-17T09:36:00.000-04:00

WHAT TO TELL WOMEN YOU'RE TRYING TO GET INTO BED:

1) You're so much fun to be with.

2) (If she's really pretty) I think you're the smartest person I know.

3) (If she's not so pretty) You're the sexiest woman I know by far.

4) I love the way you carry yourself, your posture, your expression, your attitude -- confident but approachable. Nothing is sexier.

5) Love the sound of your voice, throaty, sexy, mischievous.

Don't restrict yourself to just one of the above. Fact is, just when you think you're overdoing it, she's just starting to hear you. If you keep on complimenting her, making her feel unique and special, then even if she's not that attracted to you, she'll become addicted to being around you -- after all, you're the guy who makes her feel so good about herself. If you're eloquent enough, she just may slip out of her panties for you.

WHAT TO TELL WOMEN WHO'VE BEEN GOING TO BED WITH YOU FOR OVER 4 MONTHS:

1) Did you see that good-looking guy at the party -- he was trying to look up your skirt all night long.

2) My friend Donny (your handsomest friend) thinks you're really hot.

3) This is Johnny Dep (or her favorite actor) slipping his hand under your skirt. (It's good old you, of course)

4) You've fallen asleep on a pile of coats at a party, and I'm a sexy stranger who's snuggling up next to you.

5) I'm not so sure I want you wearing that tight blouse anymore when we go out at night -- it gives me such a hard on and I'm sure it's doing it to every other guy in the room, too.

The point is, once you've been sleeping with a woman for a few months, she's going to get bored, way more bored than you. That's just how women are. If you want the fucking to be great, you're going to have to feed her sense of fantasy. If your nose is going to get all out of joint at the thought of her fantasizing about other guys, then, pal, you're condemned to a shitty sex life. On the other hand, if you're willing to indulge her a bit, she's going to squeeze your cock like it's never been squeezed before.

THE GASMAN'S WIFE

2009-06-08T03:35:00.000-04:00

Posnick was wandering through Debbie and Artie Van Nostrand’s expansive first floor looking for somebody to talk to. He’d left Stella in the kitchen chatting with two women from her Thursday golf group whose names he couldn’t quite remember, both of them wearing their hair cropped close as a man’s.
This is something he’d run into quite a bit over the past several winters in Scottsdale. He called them The Man-Wives of Desert Vistas. Slim, toned, sinewy women wearing little makeup and their hair in crew cuts. He wondered what they and their husbands did, if anything, in bed.
Posnick wasn’t quite sure what he was on the hunt for. A young, pretty woman with blond hair, bare shoulders, and slim arms? A landsman with an equally strong sense of irony about finding himself living among the golf-loving goyim of Arizona? A tall, slender WASP with a single-digit handicap who might offer to include Posnick in one of his high-powered golf games?
There was an empty seat on the L-shaped couch near the fireplace, and Posnick placed his plate on the coffee table and sat next to a gray-haired woman with a handsome face and a long, regal neck. Her skin was tightly pored and without wrinkles, yet there was something about her that suggested late sixties, even early seventies.
“….documentary on one of the cable channels,” she was saying to the elderly man to her left, “ and they were interviewing this woman whose husband had just died and she was saying something about getting on with her life, not curling up into a cocoon just because the man she had shared the last 48 years with had passed. I thought to myself right on.” The woman was talking with what sounded to Posnick’s ear a slight southern accent.
This was not the kind of company Posnick had been seeking, but something about the woman’s powerful sense of self appealed to him. It was clear that even at this age she was accustomed to being beautiful. Yet there was nothing arrogant about her. Some people are born with a musical ear, others with an ability to scoop up grounders, still others with fine features and eyes in which richly colored hazel irises sit in unusually clear pools of white. Accidents of birth.
“I don’t know,” interjected Posnick, “I’m kind of hoping that when I die my wife takes to her bed for the rest of her days, reading the classics and occasionally weeping over my absence, never once thinking about making love with another man.”
Posnick. Always the provocateur. The woman swiveled her head toward him with astonishing grace. She focused her hazel eyes directly upon his. “Why would you ever want that?”
Because I’m a conniving, pathologically jealous sneak who wants the run of the walk for myself while I monopolize every waking moment of my wife’s life, who, it turns out, cuckolded me with her boss in the very first months of our marriage. I lost my first born son, who made me happier than I have ever been in my life, in a car accident and ever since have been unable to sleep more than an hour or two a night. I’m out of the house before dawn, wandering the fairways on which he brought me such pleasure, hoping against hope, since I am a life-long atheist, that he will emerge from the early morning mist and make my life worth living again.
Posnick blinked, mesmerized by the woman’s gaze, reaching into the far corner’s of his brain for a response that might rescue him. “Because…” Posnick vamped, trying to make it seem as if he were searching for the absolutely perfect way to express his thought, “…because…I would never want some other man to hurt her.”
The older woman smiled. “Well, I guess that’s okay,” she allowed.
“Are you two guys married?” Posnick asked, knowing that there was no possible way she could be the wife of such an ordinary looking old man.
“We’re on a blind date,” she said. “He’s Deb’s father. I live up the road.”
“Wow, a blind date. I thought those only happened when you were seventeen.” Posnick stuck out his hand. “I’m Alex Posnick.”
“Good to meet you, Alex,” said the older man. As he reached across the woman to shake Posnick’s hand, his elbow grazed her not insubstantial bosom. Posnick was buoyed that she neither flinched nor pulled away. “I’m Pete. Pete Peterson. And this is Joelle Norsgaard.”
The woman simply nodded without offering her hand. Posnick, feeling an overpowering urge to touch her, stuck out his hand. She took hold of it, and shook it with neither firmness nor slackness. Posnick noted her long fingers and large, square-edged nails coated in clear polish. He felt her begin to withdraw her hand, and held it for an additional moment, not wanting to let it go.
“So how’s it going?” asked Posnick. “Any sparks yet?”
Pete shook his head. “She’s in love with another man. I’m very disappointed.”
“I would be, too. What’s he like?” he asked the woman.
“I’m not sure I can describe him. I knows he’s tall, which is important because I’m 5’ 10” and he just towers over me.”
At 5’ 6”, Posnick felt hurt to the quick. “He must be younger, right?”
“No, he’s 78. But he’s not in love with me.”
“Oh, he must be thinking you’re not in love with him. Just like in high school. Everybody feels that way,” said Posnick.
“How could he not be in love with you?” said Pete.
“He doesn’t return any of my calls anymore. We went out for about four months, and then he let it be known he really wasn’t that interested.”
“He told you?”
“He said it was a long drive up here to Desert Vistas. He lives way down in Tempe.”
“Why doesn’t he stay over?”
“He did – once.”
Posnick couldn’t contain himself. “Did – did he stay in your bed?”
Joelle nodded. “Yes.”
Posnick was drilling her with his eyes, willing her to reveal more. He looked over at Pete for some kind of support. The older man shrugged.
“Did…you…make love?”
“No.”
“No?”
“He didn’t seem to want to.”
“Oh.” Posnick waited for her to go on, but she said nothing. He realized she was not being coy, that it was simply not in her nature to volunteer information.
“You wouldn’t have had that problem with me,” said Pete.
Nor me, thought Posnick. “You’re still sexually active?” he asked Pete.
“Well, I would be if I had anybody to be active with,” he answered, then burst into a rush of laughter.
“Well, why didn’t you initiate things?” he asked Joelle. He was beginning to feel increasingly like Havelock Ellis.
“I’ve never done that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure I would know how.”
“Just grab the guy by his Johnson,” chortled Pete. “That’ll get the ball rolling – no pun intended.”
“Wait a second, I want to understand this. You’ve never once in your entire life initiated sexual intercourse? Not even with your husband?”
Joelle shook her head.
Posnick turned to Pete. “See, that’s what happens when you’re so beautiful. You never have to be the aggressor.” He turned his focus back to Joelle. “When you’ve got a puss like mine you’ve always got to be the one who gets things started.”
Posnick really didn’t think of himself as ugly at all, but he was hoping to wring some kind of compliment out of Joelle. She simply smiled.
“Her husband was a Texan,” added Pete. “Maybe that explains it.”
“You’re from Texas?” asked Posnick.
Joelle nodded. Posnick remembered his first sales trip to Houston, walking from boutique to boutique in the Galleria showing his fall line of sportswear, his head spinning as one after another tall, blond, full-bosomed, wasp-waisted, long-legged Houstonian sauntered by. So this is how they turned out.
“What kind of business was your husband in?”
“Farm equipment. Daddy was in the same business. Edward bought him out. He came to Daddy one day and said, ‘George, I want to buy your business and marry your daughter. He was 32. I was only 17 at the time.”
“Like out of an Edna Ferber novel.”
“I don’t believe I’ve read anything by her.”
Pete stood up. “I’m gonna see if Deb needs any help in the kitchen. Anybody want another drink?”
“I’ll have another red wine,” said Posnick.
“You can bring me one, too, Pete.” Joelle handed him her glass.
With Pete gone, she turned her body around to face Posnick more directly, giving him the she sense she was glad to be rid of her date for the moment. Perhaps she was enjoying being the focus of such an avid interviewer.
“So let me get this straight, you’re 17 – a junior? A senior?”
“Just finishing my junior year.”
“What year was that? You don’t have to tell me, I just find this fascinating. Trying to set the time in my mind.”
“1949. Truman was president. God, did Daddy hate Truman.”
Posnick thought, holy shit, I wasn’t even born yet. He did the arithmetic in his head. The woman was seventy, exactly twenty years older than himself.
“1949, smack in the middle of the Korean War. And your father comes to you and says, ‘Joelle, Mr. Edward Farm Equipment here wants to marry you and I think it’s a good idea.’ I mean, what did you think? Oh, good, he’s so handsome. Or, Damn, and I was gonna be captain of the cheerleading squad next year?”
“I’m not sure I was thinking much of anything. Mama and Daddy knew I’d be well taken care of and it just seemed the natural order of things.”
“Didn’t you want to go to college or anything?”
“Well, in those days not that many girls in our part of Texas went to college. I did finish high school, though. And as a matter of fact, I was captain of the cheerleading squad.” She smiled broadly for the first time, revealing just a suggestion of a sense of humor that Posnick hadn’t been sure was there.
“Really?” The image of a short pleated cheerleading skirt flying up over her panty had blood pounding in Posnick’s temples. “Alright, so you’re a married woman walking through the halls holding your books against your bosom just so…” Posnick held an imaginary book to his chest, “…the way girls did back in those days, and like how do all the other girls treat you?”
“Oh, a whole dozen or so of us must have been married. We sort of were a clique. We’d joke about it. The M.G.C. – married girls club. Two of the girls were even pregnant.”
Pete arrived and handed them each a glass of wine. He remained standing. “I’m going to turn in for the evening, Joelle. Do you mind? Maybe Alex’ll give you a lift home.”
“Sure, no problem.”
“I’ll see you at the Navaho course at about 10.”
“We’re playing golf tomorrow,” Joelle explained. “Great, see you at 10.”
Pete leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks, then disappeared down the long hallway in a defeated sort of shuffle.
Posnick said, “This is extraordinary. I mean, you have to excuse me for being so nosy, but this is so different from how I grew up.”
He watched her put the wine glass to her lips and take not a gulp but a rather long sustained drink. When she put the glass down it was less than half full.
“So you’ve got this new husband whom you barely know and now you’re sharing a bed, a bathroom, meals together, and yet he’s almost twice your age. It must have been weird.”
“Not really. Edward was a very good businessman, very strong, very forceful, and when I graduated high school he bought me this big brick house in the nicest part of Houston. A few months later I was pregnant with Edward, Junior. Edward was away on business most of the time and Mama lived just down the road and she helped with the housework and taking care of the baby and it was all very nice and normal. Then this big national chain offered Edward a whole ton of money for the distributorship – way more than it was worth according to Edward – and he retired. Wasn’t even 40 years old. Got himself a plane and a big Harley and souped up an old ‘55 Chevy. He loved to go roaring around all over the place. He’d grown up poor and had always dreamed of owning a ranch and so he took a whole bunch of the money he got for the business and bought a 3 thousand acre spread in Louisiana, just over the Texas border. So we left Houston and moved out to the ranch, Mama and Daddy as well, and by now I had all 3 kids, Edward Jr. and the two girls, Mary Pat and Jolene. And that was it.”
“And during this whole time, you, uh, never once cuddled up to him in the middle of the night and got things going.”
“I cuddled up if I was cold, and then sometimes he would start the process.”
“Oh, sort of passive aggressive.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.”
“After we were on the ranch about 12 years, something weird happened. Edward discovered there was natural gas on the land. He had an instinct for these things. Without really trying, almost everything he touched turned to money. Anyway, the Baton Rouge Power Company bought the drilling rights, and we began getting royalties, and Edward set up trusts for the kids and all, and then Edward died and I don’t think he had any idea how much money would come rolling in.”
“Sounds like he was a good man.”
“He was a wonderful man.”
“You must miss him terribly.”
“Not really. I don’t know why. I just don’t. When I saw this show on cable about this widow who got right back into life, I admired her so much. I thought that’s the way to do it.”
“Maybe there was just too big an age difference.”
“I don’t know, Alex, I really don’t.”
“Do you mind if I ask something very personal?”
Joelle shook her head. “Ask me anything. Doesn’t mean I’ll answer, but it’s okay to ask.”
“I mean, this is really personal.”
“Go ahead.”
“Did you guys have a good love life?”
“I think so.”
“ Were you…orgasmic?”
“There you are.”
Posnick whipped his head around to see Stella coming toward him with a cup of coffee and a plate of desserts. “I was looking all over for you.”
He leapt up and gestured for Stella to sit. “This is Joelle….”
“Norsgaard.”
“Joelle, this is my wife Stella.” Stella was wearing a black décolleté dress with a satin-edged slit up the right thigh and Posnick hoped that her stylishness would boost his value in Joelle’s eyes.
“I thought you’d want to try some of these cakes. They’re yummy.” She held the plate out to Joelle. “Would you like to try some?”
Joelle picked up a petit fours. “Don’t mind if I do,” she said and popped it into her mouth whole.
“Have you been sitting here the whole time?” Stella asked.
“Just about. Joelle is on a blind date with Deb’s dad.”
“Oh, how romantic.”

They drove six blocks north of the Van Nostrand’s, then made a left turn onto Cochise Trail, which stretched up into the most exclusive section of Desert Vistas.
“Next driveway,” said Joelle, and Stella turned the Toyota pickup with the extended cab into a sweeping circular driveway in front of a house that seemed every bit as long as a football field.
“It’s beautiful,” said Stella.
“You live here alone?” asked Posnick.
“I have a Mexican couple that lives in the casita.”
“Ah,” said Posnick.
“Alex, walk Joelle to the door for goodness sake.”
As they walked among the shadows of the front walk winding through the palla verde and the saguaro, Joelle hooked her arm in his. The cool night air of the desert filled him with a sense of possibility and optimism. They climbed several steps to the front door, and Posnick could see his truck gleaming in the moonlight. He wondered if Stella could see him as clearly, but the several glasses of red wine seemed to have dulled his sense of caution.
“Well, it was really lovely talking with you, Alex. You certainly have an unusual way of looking at things.” Joelle held out her hand, and as Posnick took hold of it he pulled her to him. He had to raise his head to kiss her, but felt a sudden rush as he realized she was offering him not her cheek but her lips. He held the kiss two or three seconds longer than was polite, hoping somehow to ignite a passionate response. He didn’t, but then she didn’t pull away either.
When they got into bed and turned out the lights, Stella hooked her leg over his. As often happened on nights when he had consumed more than his usual quotient of alcohol, Posnick had trouble reaching orgasm. He ran the usual cast of characters through his mind, Tarni, the Indian friend of his daughter, Mrs. Kershaw, his 8th grade teacher with the sculpted ass, Merril, the 14 year old daughter of his wife’s best friend whose tiny pink nipples he could see through the sides of her bikini top. Nothing showed promise, and then he replayed the kiss with 71 year old Joelle Norsgaard on the front porch of her stone and steel palace in the bracing desert air among the palla verde and cacti and he was off in a moment, thrashing about wildly atop his dark-haired wife. As he collapsed at her side, he wondered whom she had been thinking of. Intercourse is a union of four people. Sigmund Freud.
Although he kept his eyes peeled in the stores, restaurants, and supermarkets around town, on the driving range, pro shop, golf courses, mixed grill, he didn’t see her until six weeks later in the fitness center at Desert Vista’s main clubhouse.
She was lying on her back on an exercise bench, pressing a weighted bar repeatedly into the air. Over navy tights she wore a short-sleeved maroon workout suit. Her mane of silver hair hung down toward the floor. Posnick watched her for several minutes from afar, his eyes running up and down her legs, her arms, her torso. Certainly, she was not a hard body, but her limbs were long and toned, her waist narrow, her bosom full, her shoulders wide, rib cage small. Posnick couldn’t help but think of his own poor mother at 71, a plump, hunched woman with enormously heavy upper arms and thinning, patchy hair. Even their names were in stark contrast. Joelle and Florence. Whom would you rather fuck?
He came up behind her. “Would you hold my ankles down while I do my sit-ups?” he said.
She had sat up and was wiping her arms down with a towel. She looked up and smiled as if she weren’t quite sure who he was.
“Hi, Joelle, Alex Posnick. We met at the Van Nostrand’s party.” Awkardly, he stuck out his hand.
“Oh, you don’t want to shake my hand,” she said. “I’m all sweaty.”
Sweaty. Posnick felt his member beginning to stir.
“How are you and your lovely wife?” she asked.
“Stella’s back in New York for the week – shopping.”
“Oh, I’d love to go to New York. Edward and I went once for Christmas. The store windows were so beautiful.” She stood up.
“You should come and visit us. We go back for the summer. It’d be great showing you around – the museums, the theatre, the restaurants.”
Joelle simply smiled and began strolling toward the front desk. Posnick fell into stride beside her feeling ridiculously short in his lumpy sweat suit. “Would you like to have an ice tea or a cup of coffee?”
“Thanks, but I really need to shower.” She took two towels from the pile on the front counter.
“Don’t be silly, I like my women on the gamey side.”
She shook her head.
“Come on, I need to shower, too. We’re even.”
“I don’t think so.”
Posnick put his cards on the table. “Joelle, I’ve been looking all over for you for the last six weeks. I finally find you, and you blow me off. Come on. One ice tea, fifteen minutes. I so enjoyed hearing all about your life.”
She tilted her head. “My life? You must be starved for entertainment.”
They sat on the back deck overlooking Renegade Canyon, the rising April son taking the chill out of the morning air, the sky azure and cloudless and stretching forever.
Posnick thought, this at last is how life is supposed to be: money in the bank, health apparently okay, no job or fear of being fired from one, wife back in New York on a theatre spree with a few girlfriends, weather perfect, sitting with a tall, beautiful, dignified shikse, albeit one slightly older than I had in mind. “When last we met, you were telling me all about life with the gasman, the private plane, the royalties rolling in.”
“When last we met,” she said fixing him with her exquisitely clear hazel eyes, “when last we met you had just asked me – I’m trying to remember your exact words – if I was orgasmic.”
“I said that?”
“You’d had quite a few glasses of wine.”
“I can’t believe I said that. It’s not like me.”
“The answer is, I’m not sure.”
Posnick nodded his head as if giving her response great consideration. He took a sip of coffee. “Then I’d have to say you’re not. Or let me say you haven’t been. An orgasm,” Posnick declaimed, “particularly a woman’s orgasm, is the culmination of a build up of an enormous amount of blood and electricity in the pelvic girdle.” I am pulling this out of my ass, he thought. “At a certain point the build up is so great, the neurons in the area are so charged, that a synapse occurs. Like lightning leaping from one pole to another. That, Joelle, is an orgasm, and there is no other feeling like it in the world.”
“I guess I haven’t had one then.”
“Maybe that’s why you so admired the widow you saw on TV. There’s something you still need to accomplish before…”
Joelle smiled. “Before I die.”
Posnick shook his head vigorously in protest, but Joelle said, “No, you’re right. It’s probably what I’ve been feeling all along. I enjoyed sexual relations with Edward – sometimes – but I can’t say I was ever in ecstasy.”
He was about to ask, Do you masturbate? but a quartet of four women in exercise clothes sat down at the table next to them. “Well, thank you for the ice tea, Alex,” she said, pushing her chair back. “I really have to be going.” Joelle stood and this time it was she who proffered her hand.
Posnick hastily scribbled his signature on the check. “Wait, I’ll walk you back in,” he said.
Joelle checked her watch. “I’m going to shower at home. Talking to you, Alex, I lose all track of the time.”
“Then I’ll walk you to your car.”
Her car was a gold-hued Bentley with a convertible top, spotless, gleaming in the sun now high in the sky. She put her hand on the door, but Posnick stood in such a way that she would have had to ask him to move in order to open it.
“When can I see you again?” he asked.
Joelle looked confused. “You’ll see me around.”
“No, I mean, not just bumping into you.”
She stared at him for a few seconds. “Are you asking me out on a date, Mr. Posnick?” He detected a touch more of a drawl in her voice.
“No, not a…date. Just two adults grabbing a meal, seeing a movie together. My wife’s out of town, your husband’s…passed as they say these days. I’m lonely. I got nothing to do tonight.”
After what seemed like an eternity, she nodded her head slowly. “I guess a movie’d be okay.”
It was odd waiting on line with her for tickets. Posnick had been so thrilled she had accepted his invitation, he hadn’t anticipated that the obvious disparity in their ages would be an object of curiosity to others. True, she looked a bit younger than her years. But Posnick, too, was lean and fit, an exercise buff ever since he’d sold his dress business five years before. And then there was the Jew/Gentile chasm, Posnick with a classic New York City face, big nose, curly hair, and Joelle tall and slender-armed, with a nose that all the reconstructive surgeons on Fifth Avenue would have been proud to achieve for their patients. Posnick found himself drifting a few steps away from his new friend, looking up at the stars, pretending to be lost in thought.
But once in their seats in the darkness of the theatre, he felt the full gravitational pull of her being. He kept glancing at her profile, her long legs, her arms, her hands. He placed his elbow on the armrest between them, leaning toward her, hoping to feel her arm touch his. He was concentrating fiercely, willing her to inch her way closer, wondering if she were feeling the same mad attraction. Her right hand was resting on her thigh, and though it was the one part of her which most clearly evidenced the ravages of time, he wanted terribly to take it in his own. He made a few tentative movements toward it but could not summon the chutzpah to forge ahead.
All these ruminations absorbed him totally, and when Joelle asked him afterward if he’d liked the movie, all he could manage was a kind of blank, “It was okay.”
The 12-plex was housed in a sprawling upscale shopping mall, and on their way toward the brew-pub they passed a Brookstone’s. “Wait here,” Posnick said suddenly. “I’ve got a surprise.”
He dashed in, found a salesman, and minutes later came back out with a small, gift-wrapped package. They had cheeseburgers and pale ale. Posnick watched with awe as Joelle finished every one of her outsized french fries. Over her mild protestations, he ordered each of them a second pint of ale. When the waiter returned, Posnick waited till they’d drunk a few swallows before presenting her with the package.
“This’ll help you have an orgasm.”
“Should I open it?”
Posnick shook his head. “Not here. Maybe in the car. It’s a personal vibrator. They’re unbelievably effective.”
She shook her head. “You are something.”
“Listen, I take this very seriously. You told me yourself, you’re 71 years old. Skiing the Alps, watching your kid take his first step, meeting the love of your life – nothing, nothing compares to a good orgasm. There is no other feeling like it in the world. If you were to pass into the great beyond without having had one, I would feel like I let you down. I know about the problem. It’s my responsibility to fix it.”
Once again, she took his arm as they navigated the long walk from Posnick’s pickup to the front door of Joelle’s house. She had unwrapped her gift in the car and was now holding wrapping paper, ribbon, and massager box while rifling through her handbag for her keys. Suddenly, the door popped open, and there stood a tall, powerfully built man about Posnick’s age.
Posnick recognized in an instant the resemblance.
“Oh, Edward, what a surprise? When did you get here?”
“Landed in Carefree less than an hour ago.”
“Edward this is Alex Posnick. Alex, this is my son, Edward Junior.” The man had dark brown eyes, almost black, and they bored into Posnick as he reached out his hand. Edward Junior was standing in the entranceway, a full step above the front stoop, and this coupled with his natural height advantage made Posnick feel as if he were a young child shaking hands with an adult. A very stern, unsmiling adult. The man’s hands were gigantic and muscular and it took all Posnick’s resolve not to whimper.
“Come in, Alex, join us for a drink.”
“No, no, thanks. I’m exhausted, and I don’t want to miss Stella’s call.”
“Well, then, thank you so much. I had a wonderful time.”
Posnick sensed her moving her lips toward him and he quickly reached out and took her hand, shaking it firmly, keeping her literally at arm’s length. “Good night,” he said, “Nice to meet you, Ed.” And he went down the steps, two at a time.
“Oh, wait, I didn’t thank you for my present.”
“Think nothing of it. Bye.”
As he scampered down the walk, Posnick heard the son ask his mother what present.
“None of your beeswax,” she snapped, and then the door closed behind them.

“How can you stand going to the movies alone?” asked Stella.
“I don’t mind. Never have.”
“What’d you see?”
“I don’t even know. Some stupid chick flick.”
“A chick flick. You never go to chick flicks.”
“I was in the mood for light and frothy.”
“Which one was it?”
“Sweetie, listen, can I go to bed? I’m absolutely exhausted. I haven’t felt right all day.”
“Are you okay, Alex? I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine. I just need sleep, is all.”
“Alright, but take some Tylenol. Sure you’re okay?”
“I love you, Stella.”
“Love you, too.” He heard the phone click off and was instantly sorry he hadn’t prolonged the conversation, for almost immediately upon hanging up Edward Junior’s penetrating dark stare once again began boring down on him. And there was nowhere to flee.
He recalled the amusement/repulsion he’d felt years ago when he’d come across a turn of the century poster in a book on anti-Semitism. It read, ‘Jew Hollywood Producers Want To Seduce Our Daughters.’ The poster depicted a caricature of a short chubby man in a beret chasing a beautiful tall blond around his desk.
They were right, he said to himself. We did want to fuck their high-assed, wasp-waisted, blond-headed, blue-eyed, pretty-faced daughters till we couldn’t walk anymore. And the mamas that went along with them. He could picture the revulsion with which Junior would discuss this with his golfing buddies over bourbon and water in the men’s grill of some understated Louisiana golf club. Can ya’ll ‘magine presentin’ a goddamn vibrator to somebody’s mothah! – the incident stoking their repugnance for Jews a thousand fold.
Posnick lay in bed with a novel and the Times’ crossword puzzle spread out about him. He sipped periodically from an oversized goblet of red wine. Three pillows supported him from behind as he stared blankly at the wall on the far side of the room.
Suddenly, he pushed the book and newspaper onto the floor and reached over and turned off the light. He just sat there against the pillows, sipping his wine in the dark, for he knew it would be useless to lie all the way down. There would be no sleep for him tonight.
He began composing a speech in his mind, trying to be honest, trying to find the precise articulation of what he was feeling. Joelle, I am sorry for having stepped over the line. I feel like an ogre, hateful, perverted, ugly, selfish beyond normal human self-interest. Your beauty and your exoticness have inflamed me. All my life I have fantasized having sex with a tall, slender, beautifully-shaped blonde gentile woman. Who knows why exactly? It is theorized that a varied gene pool makes for a stronger species. There is no question that I am attracted to your differentness in a way that possesses me. I have never known a woman named Joelle before. I have never even heard the name before. I have never slept with a woman taller than myself. I have never kissed a woman with natural gas wells or a Texas accent or a house that must be over 15,000 square feet or with hands bigger than my own or –
The ringing of the telephone startled Posnick and he grappled with the receiver before getting a solid hold of it and bringing it to his ear.
“Hello,” he said tentatively. He checked the clock. It was 2:53.
“Alex?”
“Yes….” He thought he recognized Joelle’s soft drawl, but was far from sure.
“Alex, this is Joelle.” There was a long pause. “It worked.” She was speaking in little more than a whisper.
“What worked?”
“The personal massager. I had an orgasm. In fact I had three orgasms.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Thank you so much. It was wonderful. Who would have believed it’d be so easy.”
“That is so great.”
“I just feel this tremendous sense of loss over all the orgasms I’ve missed. Must be thousands.”
“You’ll make up for lost time. I’ll – I’ll help.”
“You’ve helped already. You’re like…like my guru.” The way she pronounced guru in her Texan accent made him heartsick with love.
“Come on over, I want to know all about it.” He was picturing the vibrator sitting on her night table. He yearned to hold it to his face. “Bring the massager.”
“Don’t be silly, it’s three o’clock. I can assure you, Edward Junior’d want to know where his old mother’s going at three in the morning.”
“I told you I could help.”
“You were right about that, doctor.” She laughed at her joke. “Well, I’m going to go to sleep now. I’m plum exhausted. You didn’t tell me these orgasms took so much out of a person.”
“I’m so anxious to hear all about it,” said Posnick.
“I will call you in the morning. Good night.” She hung up.
Posnick lay back and masturbated to his own deeply satisfying orgasm, visions of Joelle’s writhing on her bed dancing in his brain. Moments later he fell into a deep and undisturbed sleep.
He hung around the house the next morning waiting for her call, killing time by doing the laundry, rearranging the clothes in his closet, doing the New York Times Friday crossword puzzle on line. At noon, however, he left for the golf course to meet the guys for their usual 12:26 tee off time.
When he got home a little after six, there was only one call on the answering machine and that was from his friend Howard back east wanting to know if he’d gotten 17 down on the puzzle.
By 8 o’clock he was in despair, enough to give him the courage to dial her number. A man’s voice said, ‘Hello,’ and Posnick immediately hung up, hoping they didn’t have caller I.D.
Two weeks later he and Stella were being led to a table in the back room of Joe Steak when he saw her unmistakable head of silver hair. Posnick stopped at the very next table and said to the hostess, “How about right here?” Stella looked at him curiously.
“I like being able to see the fireplace,” he explained. But what he really enjoyed, although it caused him no small amount of anguish as well, was being able to watch his beloved Joelle without her realizing he was there. She was seated next to a man with an equally thick head of silver hair, combed to the side with a neat, even part. He was at least as tall as she and was wearing a white shirt under a blue blazer. From behind anyway, he had the bearing of a senator or CEO of a large corporation, signaling for the waiter with a quiet authority.
Joelle touched his shoulder and arm frequently, and twice during the meal they turned to each other and kissed. After the busboy cleared their table, the man in the blazer got off his banquette to let Joelle out. She had her pocketbook with her and appeared headed for the ladies room.
Posnick whipped the wine list in front of him, burying his face in it, for he knew that if she should recognize him and stop to say hello there would be no way he could disguise the brutal disappointment that was presently engulfing him.

new music video

2009-04-26T08:39:00.000-04:00

girls will be boys, boys will be girls in the crazy mixed up shook up world

of a new music video i shot for the band GIRL PROBLEMS.

Check it out at:

youtube.com/girlproblemsmusic

if you enjoy please pass on to like-minded people

thanks, e.

also, mother-fuckers, instead of just constantly plundering my blog for the occasional amusement, how about leaving a comment once in awhile. your lethargy disgusts me.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT NURSES (new story)

2009-04-08T16:04:00.003-04:00

What They Say About Nurses

Hanratty is standing amidst a crowd of twenty-somethings, sipping from a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, eyeing a slender girl sitting alone at the bar. She looks to be no more than sixteen years old with a sweetness of face that to the young man’s unpracticed eye suggests lack of sexual experience.
Does he want to waste yet another evening talking to a girl who at best will neck with him guardedly in the parking lot in the back seat of his mother’s ‘47 Chevy while Posnick and Phayer and Lerner are all slipping their hands under sweaters and skirts, maybe even getting laid?
He and his three friends, college boys all, are doing what they call Posting, hitting one of the many road houses along the Boston Post Road in the hope of having sex with the secretaries and shop girls who go there to drink and dance of a Friday night, hoping somehow to meet a guy to marry.
It has been his pattern, picking out the religious girl, the tea totaling girl, the girl who finds herself curiously apathetic toward boys because she does not yet realize the depth of her attraction to women.
But tonight, tonight perhaps, will be different. Always the reader, Hanratty has recently come across an article in Girl Parade, one of the men’s pulp magazines, that posits that cutting back on masturbation will dramatically increase a fellow’s success with the opposite sex – ironic advice indeed considering the dozens of photos of bare-breasted women scattered throughout its pages. And so it has been two weeks since Hanratty last jerked off, a long stretch for a twenty year old male without a girlfriend.
However, by half past eleven, after failing to get up the courage to talk to any of the girls in tight skirts with slits up the side or clinging sweaters exposing great swaths of cleavage, he slides in next to her and orders another beer. Glancing down at the glass in front of her, he is surprised to see what appears to be a double whiskey on the rocks, encouragement enough to get him to mumble, “How come nobody’s snatched up a pretty girl like you?”
He delivers the line haltingly, woodenly, to the side of her head and is immensely relieved when she swivels on her seat, turns her face up to him, and smiles. “You really think I’m pretty?”
Up close like this he can see she is pretty indeed, with ebony hair and skin so pale he thinks it must be a coating of make up. But all she is wearing is very red lipstick and a little eyebrow liner, no more.
Years later, Hanratty will think back on this moment and wonder if it occurred to him, in that instant that his eyes first met Emily’s, that the computer that is our brain read, in what?, a quarter of a second, less perhaps, that the curl of this particular female’s lip, the twitch of her eye, the shade of her hair, whatever odors that were emanating from her feet, her pussy, from under her arms, the shade of her hair, the denseness of her lashes, the slope of her shoulder, the hint in her eye of pride and skittishness, selfishness and desire to please, that she, Emily Gilligan, was perfectly designed to be his ideal mate and competitor for the decades they soon would begin spending together, in bed and out, in sickness and health, triumph and failure. Did he somehow sense on some primal level, far, far from consciousness, that this was both the right team mate and opponent for him – not so strong as to over power him, not so weak that he would sweep her away, leaving him bored and restless. Was a similar instinct taking birth in her limbic brain – this is a man I want to be locked in lifelong battle with, a companion for the long haul.
“You’re not bad,” he replies, regaining some semblance of equilibrium.
“Most guys think I’m jailbait.” She takes a deep drag on her lipstick stained Pall Mall, blowing out the smoke expertly in a long, thin stream. “I’m much older than I look.”
“What, eighteen?”
“Twenty-five,” she declares with obvious relish. “I almost have my nursing degree.”
“Holy cow.” Hanratty is only twenty. He squints, scrutinizing her face for wrinkles. She stares back at him openly, unafraid. He wants to say something smart, modern, a trifle combative – a talent that usually fails him around women.
“You know what they say about nurses,” he manages to eke out, then worries he has been too forward.
When the girl smiles, Hanratty feels relieved. “No,” she says, “What do they say about nurses?”
What they say about nurses, at least in this case, turns out to be resoundingly true. She lives with two other nursing students near Portchester General in a one-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle three-story boarding house. One of the roommates is away, the other asleep on the daybed on the far side of the room. Still, the girl seems to feel no shame in pulling him down beside her. She unzips his fly, taking him in her hand, and he comes instantly, an unexpected downside of the no-masturbation plan.
“That’s okay,” she whispers gently. She stands, and he watches as she slips out of her clothes in the shaft of moonlight streaming in through the uncurtained window.
She is tiny, not five feet, hardly ninety pounds. Aside from small, budding nipples and a shockingly large black triangle, there is nothing to suggest a sexually mature woman. She helps him undress, then begins sucking on his penis till it grows hard again. Pushing him down on the bed, she straddles him, finding his cock with the practiced ease of someone who has done this before, perhaps often, letting herself slide down over it. He is aghast that such a tiny creature can have within her a canal that engulfs him so comfortably, so eagerly, so, so – familiarly.
Once again, despite a desperate attempt to call up car accidents, his Grandma Lorraine’s breasts, which he accidentally saw on a family outing to Jones Beach, and other orgasm-postponing imagery, he comes in seconds.
They make love thrice that night, the girl clinging to him with an odd intensity in the in-between times. Hanratty is lying on his back, his hands under his head. The girl has curled against his side, her head tucked in his armpit. He can’t wait to get together with the guys to compare notes. Slowly, he slides from under the covers. He hears the girl stir in her bed, sensing she is watching him as he pulls on his pants and socks in the dark. He pretends he doesn’t know she is awake. As he is leaving, she says, “Wait.” She writes a phone number on a torn piece of notebook paper and places it in his hand. He feels he should kiss her; but when he had trouble reaching orgasm on their last screw, she took him in her mouth. He bends down, steering his lips past her proffered ones, kissing her on the top of her head.
“Call me,” she says as he steps out the door.

“She looked like a high school freshman,” says Ray Phayer.
“I have bigger tits,” says Alex Posnick.
“Hey, he fucked her three times,” says Ethan Lerner. “Cut the man a little slack.”
Tim Hanratty and his friends are sitting in the Hartsdale diner. It is where they gather at the end of almost every weekend night, no matter how late the hour, no matter what the evening has held in store.
“Somehow I get the feeling she wasn’t a virgin,” says Phayer, by far the most ironic of the foursome.
“How would he know,” says Posnick.
Phayer has picked up a sausage with his fingers and moves it back and forth between his lips, simulating a blow job. He winks at Hanratty.
“Believe me,” says Hanratty, “this was no virgin. We fucked with her room mate right in the same room.”
“What a slut!” says Posnick.
“You’re not kidding,” says Hanratty, although he feels curiously disloyal the instant the words leave his mouth.
In the ensuing weeks, Hanratty hits the local bars and dance halls with his friends with a new sense of confidence, with heightened expectation. He is one of the guys. He has lost his virginity. He no longer reaches the end of the evening without having approached one single girl.
His success rate, however, is little better than before his conquest of the nurse. He is too thin for his height, his jaw too big for his head. He wears glasses. Unlike Posnick in his leather jacket, Phayer with his classy good looks punctuated by a premature streak of silver hair, and Lerner with his Tony Curtis prettiness and curl, there is something hopelessly bookish about Hanratty. His off-beat sense of humor, which so tickles the guys, either puts women off or goes completely unnoticed. He enunciates like a college professor. His attempts to slur his words sound inauthentic, like a theatre actor trying on a Southern accent.
He has abandoned his no-masturbation policy and almost always comes now to the memory of the nurse straddling him. In his mind’s eye, she looks like someone’s kid sister as she lets herself down over him. There is something forbidden about it, her pale pink nipples, her guileless face. Hanratty is no dummy. He realizes that her child-like appearance is part of the appeal.
One night in mid-May, Hanratty and his pals stop in at Ed’s Outpost, one of a dozen roadhouse bar and grills on the outskirts of Portchester. He sees her right away, sitting with several women friends in a large booth, a pitcher of beer in the middle of the table. They are all smoking. Hanratty catches her eye, but she looks away. He watches with dread as a group of guys approaches the table. Over the next hour or so there is a pairing off ritual, with different combinations of males and females trudging off to the dance floor.
From his perch at the bar, picking at the label of his ever present Blue Ribbon, Hanratty observes with a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach, a crushing sense of doom, certain that at any moment she will return from the dance floor, one of the young men in tow.
But when the dust settles, and the coupling is complete, the nurse is sitting there all by herself. Although prettier than her companions, perhaps other men have come to the same conclusion Hanratty had: she looks too young and innocent to be sexually active.
“Tim, for Christ sake, go ask her to dance,” says Lerner. “She’s pretty.”
“Nah,” says Hanratty, “no tits.” In truth, he’s not sure she will remember him. He’s frightened of her sexuality. It is six weeks since he has last seen her. How many men has she brought home in the interim?
“I like the no tits,” says Posnick. “It’s like fucking your little cousin.” Hanratty watches as Posnick walks briskly over to the girl and leads her to the dance floor. Taking a seat at the bar, Hanratty turns his back to the dancers, locking his eyes on the jukebox on the far side of the room, determined not to turn around. He imagines Posnick and the girl swaying imperceptibly to the languid ballad coming over the speakers, eyes closed, bodies straining against one another. He is shocked when Posnick’s deep harsh voice cuts into his fantasy. “What a dog,” he says. “Bow wow.”
Hanratty tries but cannot keep from glancing at Posnick’s crotch. He has an obvious hard on. “She’s just young looking, that’s all,” says Hanratty.
“You can have her,” says Posnick. “Hey, Mac,” he hollers at the bartender, “bring me a Cutty on the rocks. Make it a double.”
Hanratty climbs off his stool.
“Where you goin’?” says Posnick.
“I don’t know. Just want to get some air.”
With a mixture of tremendous relief and yet a feeling that he is somehow settling for second best, Hanratty walks over to the table and says, “Hi, um, how’ve you been?” As he reaches for her name, it strikes him she has never told it to him. Nor has he ever asked for it, nor volunteered his own.
“I’m okay,” she says, swiveling her head around as if expecting her friends to be arriving back at the table at any minute, as cool and aloof as if they’d never met. He stands there, hovering over her. Hanratty is hoping she will say something, but she just keeps looking around, not meeting his eye. Finally, because he can think of absolutely nothing else to say, he asks her to dance. Without saying yes or no, she stands up and follows him to the dance floor.
It is a slow song. The six foot two inch Hanratty holds up his arms in the rather formal style he learned back in seventh grade in Mrs. Scoville’s dance classes; but the girl simply ducks underneath, wrapping her arms around his waist with that same sense of intimacy as the night they’d made love. After a few seconds, Hanratty asks, “How’d you like my friend?”
“Which one?”
“Alex. The guy in the leather jacket.”
“Not too much. He was pressing his thing into my stomach.”
“Oh,” says Hanratty, pulling back a little because he is doing the same.
“I thought you were going to call,” says the girl.
“I was going to. I just had gotten around to it yet.”
“That’s okay,” she says, pulling him closer and snuggling her face against his chest.
A sudden, almost staggering wave of pity washes over Hanratty as it occurs to him how much more battering it is to be an unpursued female in one of these places – particularly at the age of 25 – than a male with little courage to pursue. He nuzzles his nose in her bouffant of hair, inhaling deeply, recalling how much he had loved her aroma.
“I’m Tim,” he announces into the top of her head.

“Yeah, I know. Your friend told me.” She doesn’t say anything for

awhile. Then, as an after thought, “I’m Emily.”

porn song

2009-04-08T16:03:00.002-04:00

the band GIRL PROBLEMS has a great new song called THE PORN. think you'll enjoy it -- and maybe even recognize yourself in the lyrics...

The Porn

before the internet came out
I used to get my work done
I wasn't the type to stand in line
in some greasy grimy store
sure I looked at a penthouse
or flipped through a hustler
but always felt kind of wrong
that was then
but things have changed
since these websites came along

the porn the porn awakes me in the morn
by afternoon I'm forlorn cause I've been watching too much porn
I'm torn I'm torn
cause believe me
I coulda sworn
I intended to read of mice and men
ended up watching porn

can't remember what I did years ago
with all that extra time
guess I went to yoga
did community service
went shopping for art supplies
maybe I checked in on elderly neighbors
went to church taught sports to kids
but now that I bought a macintosh
my life has hit the skids

with scorn with scorn
would you look at me with scorn
would you look at me with scorn
if I told you I'd been watching porn
I'm torn I'm torn
believe me
I coulda sworn
I intended to read grapes of wrath
but ended up watching porn

now I know it's an industry built on exploitation
and most of the girls were abused when they were young
the videos, they're just a crude expression
of misogynistic and violent fantasies
but as I try to slip
quietly past my computer
and on to the sun-dappled street beyond my front door
I swear it whispers so seductively
come on baby
just...one more

you see all the beauties walkin down the street
they're all so hot
but all so out of reach
you wanna ask them out but you're paralyzed
by low esteem, doubt and fear of being chastised
it only makes sense to hurry back home for a beer
and watch clips of these lovelies with ankles behind their ears, yeah

MORE DISEASE NAMES

2009-03-02T04:41:00.005-05:00

Alright, you lame, unimaginative, passive moochers, who never come up with squat. Check out these new entries sent in by a few exceptionally bright and nerdy readers -- people, apparently, with so little to do that they actually sat down, alone most certainly, and came up with a few absolutely brilliant additions to my list.

Sis Titis; Hy Bloodpressure; Jen Italherpes; Al Coholism; Cole Itis; Carson Oma;

Art Eriosclerosis; Ann Urysm; Ann Giofibroma; Mal Ignancy; Rene Alfailure;

Sis Ticfibrosis; O. Taharasyndrome

And my favorite to date: ERIC TILEDYSFUNCTION!

WHY YOU DO SO SHITTY WITH WOMEN!

2009-02-08T03:40:00.000-05:00

Song titled GIRLS LIKE JERKS:

girls like jerks
guys who smirk
dicks and cops
pricks and fops

girls like mobsters, pranksters
rocks stars, gangsters

cocks, schmucks, cheaters, snobs,
hitters, burners, guys named bob

girls like tough, girls like rough --
silent, manly, all that stuff

girls like assholes, cowboys, greasers, hogs
oafs, clods, insensitive slobs

guys named fred, guys with dreads
muggers, sluggers, gropers, feds

girls like jokers, kidders, killers, tackles
guys who posture, guys who cackle

dopes, mopes, dems and dosers
scoundrels, schemers, scammers, hosers

guys named duke, guys named tony
guys who eat macaroni only

girls like goons, girls like grunters
they're the guys they let touch their cunts, sir

they like bullies, thugs,
inconsiderate lugs
agents, winners,
grinners, sinners
hipsters, actors --
not chiropractors

girls like guys who hardly speak
the strong, the burly, not the weak

jocks, they like, bikers too
brawlers, maulers -- just not you.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

2009-01-27T04:43:00.000-05:00

When I was a freshman at the university of wisconsin in 1960, i sat next to a lusciously shaped girl in french 101. She appeared soft and sensuous, large breasted and raven-haired, not skinny and scrawny like the anarexic models of today. Her skin was flawless, a creamy off-white, and her face sculpted with the perfection of an ancient greek statue. Her name was Susan Potash and I was helplessly, hopelessly in love with her. i fantasized about her every night as i passed into sleep, imagining the most carnal yet romantic intertwinings of our body and souls and holes. i ached to be spending the rest of my life with her on the island of corfu.

She was completely out of my league, of course. I was a nerdy little guy from New Jersey, she a political radical who had grown up in manhattan. She was militant, a warrior for justice and against the bourgeoisie, of which i was so obviously a charter member. she had dirt under her finger nails and smelled of pot. Her long thick black french braid curled down her back and sometimes even around onto her desk like a living sexual organ.

at the same time as i was taking french with susan, i was taking philosphy 101. For some reason i enjoyed it, digging ever deeper into the essays by kant and hume we were assigned every week. i found by reading it over and over again -- something i had never done in past courses and would never do in future ones -- that the impossibly dense prose would begin to yield meaning. i was good at it, which at the time was about the only thing feeding my much battered self-esteem.

somehow i wanted to communicate my expertise in philosophy to susan, my feeling being that though i lacked height, looks, confidence, charisma, and hot sexual experience, she would be impressed by my intellectual brilliance. it suddenly occurred to me that if i could come up with THE ANSWER TO LIFE, she would be so impressed she would step out of her panties for me, a garment she probably changed only every third day. oh, how i longed to collect her discarded pairs.

so i lay in bed everynight imagining the headlines in the wisconsin badger, freshman philosophy student comes up with the meaning of life. freshman figures it out -- the answer to life. and susan coming to class that morning, her enormous dark brown eyes misty with love and lust for me. the only glitch in this most delicious of fantasies was that i could never actually think what the answer to life was. i knew it was out there somewhere, that it was achievable, more than that, just around the corner. but i could never quite wrap my arms around it.

Well, you know what? 48 years later i finally have. the purpose of life is to prolong life, to figure out how to extend life, not just its length, although that's paramount, but its quality. i want to be playing great fucking golf at 127 years old, fucking my hot 126 year old wife every night, wringing chandalier-shaking orgasms out of her that put 19 year olds to shame.

Impossible? Fuck you. If we took all the fucking billions we spend on defense and warfare, the best minds on our planet would be figuring out how to work magic with genes. the average age of death for men in the 1920s was something like 57. it's now about 75 -- an advance of 18 fucking years! and we know so much more now than we did then.

So that's it, friend, the meaning of life: IT IS TO BE EXTENDED AS LONG AS IT CAN. We're the only species on earth that knows it's going to die. What's the only rational reaction? to put the inevitable off as long as is humanly possible. you read it here first, pal. now get your ass out and spread the word. if you don't, you'll be staring death in the face before you know it.

DISEASE NAME-GAME

2009-01-11T22:32:00.016-05:00

Alright, how many reasonably realistic names can you make out of diseases?

NEW ENTRIES FROM READERS: Lara Engitis; Lou Gehrigsdisease;

Amy Otrophic-sclerosis; Ginger Vitus; Basil Cell; Al Zheimers;

Ann Hedonia; Al O. Pecia; Peri Carditis; Klaus Trophobia;

Ed Ema; Rosie Ola;

---------------------------------------------------------------
MY LIST:

Paul Zee; Di Abetes; Ann Gina; Ann Eemia; Lou Pus;

Lew Keemia; Anna Rexia; Beau Lemia; Sy Kosis; Colin Cancer; Mel Anoma;

Em Fazima; Paul Aigra; Clem Idia; Hy Poglocemia; N. Demitriosis;

Chick N. Pox; Arthur Itis; Perry Tonitis; Pan Creatitis

Mack Uladegneration; I. Ritis; Rick Etts;

Ray Naudsyndrome; Rue Maticfever; Scarlet Fever; Hy Drocephalia;

Sy Attica; D. Lirium Tremens; Sy Nusitis; Paul Io; Di Aria;

--- Anyone out there who comes up with more names than on my list wins one hundred bucks, even if you're an m.d. good luck,e

7 FAVORITE RELIGIOUS RATIONALIZATIONS

2008-12-23T02:51:00.003-05:00

1) GOD WOULD NEVER THROW AT ME ANYTHING I COULDN'T HANDLE

Well, what about a blood clot that strikes in your sleep, cutting off all oxygen to your brain, leaving you a virtual vegetable for a few months before you finally waste away from a raging pneumonia? Did god throw you a high hard one that somewhat got away from him?

2) SOMEWHERE UP THERE, MOM IS LOOKING DOWN ON US

How do you know? Did she send an e-mail? Text you? Somehow upload shots of herself in angel's attire and lyre on O-photo? Face it, pal, when your sweet little mommy plowed drunkely into the old oak on your front lawn in the flimsy little Kia, the only car she could afford after your father took off with his 19 year old secretary, it left her mutilated body dead beyond doubt with precious little energy to ascend to heaven. Besides, even in death she was still drunk. Heaven doesn't go for drunks.

3) MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER

You show me a Jew who's good with a hammer and nails, saw, sander, awl and adze, and I'll show you a white Russian trying to sneak out of the Motherland in yarmulke and prayer shawl. No, your boss more likely is a tough, demanding Italian whose about a hair's breath away from firing you because you have the attention span of gnat and the carpentry skills of a man with parkinson's.

4) GOD OPERATES IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS

Totally agree with this one -- he lets guys like george bush live in big houses with sharp cars, full security, lots of money, while in Darfur poor defenseless people, thousands of children among them, are left to die of starvation, machete attacks, cholera, AIDS. This is some cool cat, this God. Dude with a lot of compassion.

5) THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH.

Yeah, but only after the strong have stripped-mined her clean of gold, platinum, uranium, steel, aluminum, and anything else they needed to set up their towering pleasure palaces on Venus. Not to mention that the strong have already made off with the only space ships that can make it all the way to Venus where they've set up a life style so decadent, so genuinely sexually stimulating and versatile, that the meek wouldn't have a clue how to fit in had they actually been able to find their way there. It's kind of like saying, One day the meek shall inherit Detroit.

6) GOD LOVES YOU.

He do? Sure has a funny way of showing it. I don't test well -- never get in the high 70s, much less the 80s, and the 90s are simply out of the question. I have a weak chin and thinning hair. I know beauty is supposed to be only skin deep; but, still, the only girls I get to fuck are ones I have to pay for, and they lay back, smoking, talking to the girls on the other beds while I'm eeking out my scared, hurried orgasm. And these girls? They have so little beauty I actually find jerking off way more stimulating. At least this way I can fantasize a beautiful girl. And if he loves me so much, how come I have really bad asthma, poor self-esteem, a grating, strident voice that drives away the few friends I have, the body odor of a goat, and spend just about every week-end night alone at my parents house giving serious thought to killing myself. The only time I ever felt even a smidgeon of god's love is when my Dad shamed me into throwing a ten onto the collection plate. Made me wonder: is god's love actually for sale??

7) GOD IS EVIDENT EVERYWHERE WE LOOK

Right, like the homeless lady sleeping on the church steps in her own urine in 24 degree temperature, wrapped in little more than a blanket, possibly frozen dead by morning. Or the Senegalese immigrant hawking watches on Madison Avenue, perhaps selling one a day at 25 bucks, living in a rooming house with a dozen compatriots per room, sending precious little money back to wife and children in Senegal, with no money here to live beyond a subsistence level, no money if he gets sick, no money if he can't work because he has such a high temperature he can't see straight. Sure, we can see god everywhere, in the sick, the disturbed, the crippled, the ostracized, the aging, the dying -- man, god's all over the place.

"Mette" by Girl Problems

2008-12-04T16:45:00.001-05:00

The new video for "Mette" by Girl Problems.

Visit www.myspace.com/girlproblems for more.

12 WAYS TO FISH FOR COMPLIMENTS/REASSURANCE:

2008-11-02T09:32:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to think all those sessions with my personal trainer are a waste of money.

My colorist made my hair too blonde, didn't he?

I think I should have cooked the steaks a little less.

Are these jeans too tight in back?

I didn't explain that very well, did I?

This dress makes me look fat, doesn't it?

This is my girlfriend -- it's not a very good picture of her.

I just wish I weren't so short.

I'm not sure green is my color.

I know what you're thinking, I've lost a little hair since the last time you saw me.

Ah, come on, Ma, Scarlet Johansen would never want to go out with a guy like me.

I came too quickly, didn't I?