1.10.2011

boobs, good ol' boobs

Remember the days when kids who had just hit puberty had to weasel around to get their mitts on pictures of naked people doing raunchy things? When I was a kid not only did I have to walk through the snow for miles to get to school but I had to be sneaky and find time alone to read about what happened at the doctor's office when the buxom nurse came in. How was it that these people found a doctor who's office wasn't chilled to a goose flesh inducing 58 degrees? And how did the nursing staff maintain such a high level of patient satisfaction all day? They worked an eight hour shift like everyone else, no?

In the new millennium, some really innocent sounding Google searches will produce images of the most atrocious things in people's keisters. Gadzooks! Who posts this stuff? Very little of the crazy weird porn floats my boat, but I am a really big fan of naked ladies. I can't get enough. If you want to careen off the road while I'm driving just mutter, "Naked people." We'll fly headlong into the gravel shoulder as I whip my head around trying to spot the aforementioned flesh while hollering, "Where? Where! I want to see naked people!" Naturally, with my particular orientation, I'd prefer the naked people be ladies... in their 20s or 30s... and jumping around... maybe wearing squirrel masks... Ahem... I could spend hours piddling around looking at boobs, good ol' boobs, and "Pictures of Lilly" by The Who could be my theme song. Other parts are good too but honestly the porn these days makes me grimace within the first few minutes after the initial excitement of, "Naked Ladies!" I don't know, I just miss the days when people still had some hairy bits and the porn was just kind of embarrassingly dumb. Now, so much of it is embarrassingly violent... and embarrassingly available. Plus the giant boob thing was more of an occasional side show and there were no inflate-o-chests with painful looking balloons sitting just below the collar bones. I'm not going to claim that the porn of yesteryear was less exploitative, more socially responsible, or that it had any resemblance to real human sexuality. The stuff has always been kind of ickified, but the old dirty magazine under the bed at least seemed contained... kept at bay... like it knew it shouldn't be out in public.

When I was five or six I laid eyes on one of my first boob pictures. It sticks in my head because it was on the cover of a High Society Magazine that I would encounter again years later during puberty. My first encounter with that issue didn't get beyond the cover photo because I didn't know what porn was yet and my dad was in the room when I spotted the thing. It had been left out in plain sight and I stared for a minute at the woman sitting there cross legged on a beach. Being cover art, she had sand demurely piled in front of her crotch and her arms were over her head as she had just pulled off her surf soaked shirt.

Boobs.

I don't think the cover gave me the intense funny feeling of excitement that I would have later but it made me stare anyhow. My dad noticed my focus and asked matter-of-factly, "Well, what do you think of that?" He neither waited for a response nor expected one. I just went blank as he encouraged me out of the room. I guess he didn't buy these magazines very often or trash any of them because this same issue along with a Penthouse or two and a couple of Playboy were what I would later seek out in a pubescent stupor when left alone in the house. That issue, by the way, also introduced me to the idiot fantasy of lewd nurses. In this case it was a dentist office thing. I think I realized right away how absurd the whole thing was, but that didn't stop me getting kookie thoughts when the hygienist leaned over to floss my teeth and her soft bits were mashed on my arm.

Dad and I never had the serious talk about sex, but the subject was not taboo so I managed to glean things here and there. Having two older siblings provided more chances to listen in. Then of course there were a couple of books left around the house in easy access bookshelves. Where Did I Come From? was cartoony but it got to the point, and Man's Body: An Owner's Manual was crazy technical but it answered all the worrisome questions. If you want to know about the reading material that did me the most good in the sack... lesbian erotica takes the cake, but you've got to be sure you're getting the stories written by and for lesbians. I had to go find it on my own when I went to college, but I have to say these are some people who know how to write about exactly what to do. If you want to help your young heterosexual son feel more confident, this is the stuff.

Dad could occasionally blurt out some astonishingly crude sexual things. Most people wish to avoid thinking of their parents as sexually active or even interested in that sort of thing. I was never really horrified by the thought... still, I think I ignored most of what I heard going on or at least didn't make much of it until later. Putting two and two together, hindsight revels that they were fooling around fairly often, and my dad's occasional explicitness made obvious his active libido. Once, when I was helping him with some carpentry project involving six inch lag bolts we found that cranking the socket wrench was getting too difficult. Dad showed me the old carpenter's trick of rubbing bee's wax on the threads of the lag bolts to ease the friction. "You know what this is called?" he asked grinning. "Love lube. You know why?" I resisted an eye roll. He couldn't help himself, "Because you put it on before you screw!" HA! Good one dad. This was far from the most crude thing I heard him say. The whoppers usually came along when he had other nutty engineer pals around. A few would take me years to decipher.

Out in the garage in the back of a drawer I stumbled onto and old deck of cards when I was deep in the teen angst. I wish I knew what happened to those. They were a 1940's cheesecake boob fest, but the deck had disappeared when I thought of them again later as an adult. I'm certain I could have made a small killing on Ebay, and I often wonder if that deck had been ferreted out of my grandfather's stash in another ignored drawer years before. The ladies all had something or other covering their happy place, but the boobs were all front and center. Some of the gals had the most awkward expressions like, "What the hell am I doing?" Some were making the most goof-ball cross-eyed fish-face nutty expressions. At least they seemed to be having fun, and I think they gave me the green light to think sex was amusing. And here I am married to someone willing to laugh with me after the deed.

I still favor the rare porn with people who look genuinely happy (and who still have their fuzzy bits). This tends to be older stuff so I guess I'm out of style. I get the biggest kick out of the photos of naked ladies who clearly were very fond of the person behind the camera. Boobs are always a really good thing. Present them with smiling eyes and a big grin, and you've got the best stuff on earth.

1.04.2011

need a pocket in the shower? you're free to be you

Pop didn't look anything like the model here but the guy's sporting the bath skirt thing! As I've mentioned before, dad had that nutty engineer thing in his brain and he tended to do things his own way regardless of convention, social norm, or personal safety. Freedom was precious to him and this was often applied in novel ways like... a terry cloth bath skirt as casual wear. Bein' free, as it were, was typically the first order of business at the end of a busy day. Get home, hot shower, careen out of the bathroom naked as a jay bird, and at last get into something more comfortable... bath wrap (that's what the trade calls 'em as copious research on the subject determined) and a V-neck T-shirt. (I get a real kick out of having two in a row capital letters hyphenated to short words.) Then it was time to watch Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser and let out all the day's pressure. Dad was a champion fog horn when it came to farts. The cat's pupils would dilate and she'd slink out of the room real slow-like and close to the ground.

But I digress... the terry cloth skirt, with handy pocket in front and snap or Velcro fasteners at the hip, made the most of a comfortable weekend working in the garage shop. In the garage dad could proudly wear that skirt with slippers and a plaid flannel shirt while cutting threads on a new piece of three quarter inch galvanized iron pipe for the water heater, metal shavings and cutting oil dribbling on his toes, and not give a damn. Still brilliantly etched in my memory are the few perfect weekend days when one last critical piece fell into place and he was submerged in his element. The religious folk would stop by to proselytise. Honestly, I never could understand why they didn't have a map with red marks for the houses to avoid... the places where they would be hounded with outrageous logical conundrums and soul searching ineffable enigmas.

Ah, just picture it... The big garage door is up (by the way, it was nothing like your garage door. No way! This door pivoted on huge pin hinges about a third of the way down and was counter balanced by lead blocks. Uh huh, I told you, it's that da Vinci "I do it-a my wey!" thing.) Anyhow, it's a sunny afternoon, the garage is open, dad's in his comfortable place busy beating the living hell out of some sorry piece of metal that wished it had never seen the light of day, and a couple of well dressed folks walk up the driveway hoping to spread the word and be on their way. Instead, they are confronted by our cur of a rescued stray dog at the end of his steel cable tether and a guy in a terry cloth skirt mashing something with repeated blows from a six pound hammer. Wham! Wham! Wham! crunk... "Shit! Hi folks, how are you?" he says innocently without really looking up from his mashing whatever it was helplessly clamped in the huge bench vice. "Run you poor idiots!" I'd shriek in my head, but the words never left my lips, it was too late. It was too late when they came to our neighborhood. It was too late when they took up whatever faith they had innocently paddled their little leaking boat into.

The dog gave his usual mixed message, growl-whimper-bark-wag, and pulled his dead weight a little closer to the visitors. Another fine invention of dad's... tethering the dog with a stiff steel cable to a big hunk of rusted scrap steel thing-a-ma-bobber. It was heavy enough that the dog couldn't get far but could drag it along instead. His short tether didn't get wrapped around things and he wasn't constantly getting stuck. It had the added benefit that the dog was free to menace visitors with out being able to move fast enough to bite them on the butt. Like I said, dad valued personal freedom, but the dog was not really the thing the poor slobs had to worry about. The barrage could last for hours. As long as dad had work to do in the garage he was happy to coolly slash jagged wounds in the peace and love offered by the proselytisers. Oh, the agony.

"Why don't you folks give it a rest here and move on down the block?" I'd wonder. The chilled venom, piss, and vinegar had a bottomless source and I have gleaned some bits of explanation over the years. It seems that there had been at least two cases in my dad's life of people he cared about doing what he viewed as incredibly dim witted things based on religious belief. In one particular case it amounted to suicide by refusing basic medical treatment. Well, to each their own. I know my dad believed this too, but when anyone walked into his space to tell him what he needed to believe in to be saved he figured they were asking for it. And deliver IT he did, between the continuing loud hammer blows, all while his junk had plenty of room to dangle in that bath skirt!... and you thought I had forgotten about the skirt.

Mind you, I'm not making fun of the skirt. On the contrary, I have had my own weirdo clothing flings and I too am a big proponent of doing your own thing. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree I suppose, but sometimes the apple doesn't wear terry cloth. I have yet to adopt the bath skirt, in spite of my spouse's joking suggestion that she buy one for me.

Inevitably, the religious folks would look at their watches, pat down their hair that had been blown all cocky-whompus by the gusts of diatribe, and walk backwards down the driveway muttering blessings. I hope none of them took it personally. I can't imagine it didn't leave a few scars, and dad never even raised his voice above the din of his hammering. You can believe in whatever you like but a guy should be allowed to proudly wear terry cloth in his own garage and fart loud enough to scare off the banshees.