Damn! They almost got me to fall off the wagon again this morning. I came within a pubic hair's breadth of reading an entire story about John Edwards' sex life. That's actually closer than just a hair's breadth.
Today's story mentioned Lisa Blue, the Dallas lawyer and widow of Fred Barron. For a split-second, I thought, "OK, I have to read this whole story about an officeholder boinking because it involves a prominent person in our city."
But I was able to stop myself. I asked myself, "After you read about an officeholder making the two-backed beast with another human being, what will you know?"
Yup. I put that newspaper down, drew a deep breath and went on to the story about baby brain research.
I made up my mind some months ago I was going to totally swear off reading stories about other people boinking other people, even if they are singers, actors or office-holders. My motivation was two-fold.
First, in spite of our culture's national obsession with sexual intercourse among singers, actors and officeholders, reading about it has never gotten me anywhere.
And secondly, obsessing and feeling outraged about other people having sexual intercourse -- even if they're just janitors or journalists or something -- feels kind of pervy.
What do I care who, how, when or if other people screw? Why would I expend personal energy plunging into long newspaper stories about whether or not total strangers to me are screwing the right way? What right way? Is there a government manual? Would it change anything if the stories were accompanied by a lot of really good pictures? Video, maybe? Do I really want to see John Edwards with his haircut sweaty? OK, this is getting perved-out again.
Fine, all of you fire-breathing, spit-slinging, sexually judgmental commenters out there, go ahead and blast me with comments saying it's not about John Edwards screwing. I know, I know. You will insist it's all about campaign contributions and political integrity, whether Clinton lied under oath, the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, and, hey, doesn't this make Newt Gingrich a hypocrite?
No, it's not. Quit kidding yourself. It's not about any of that. Bullshit. It's about people screwing. And if you think otherwise, you got a problem. You're sitting around working yourself into a very weird lather day-dreaming about how other people screw, and then getting mad about it. Think about that. Other people screwing makes you angry? You need to see a doctor.
Can you find something naughty in other people's sex lives? Obviously. If you devote all kinds of energy and gunpowder to an investigation of how other people screw, you will come up with evidence of deceit, narcissism and profligacy. That's why they call it screwing. It's not called marching, is it? It isn't yodeling.
People don't put on their Sunday best and their bowling awards to do it. Well, they might start out that way ... no, stop with that, Jim. Just stop. Perv alert. We're not going there.
Public media-driven government-backed mass prying into how other people screw is sicker than sicker than sick. It's maybe the Big Sick. We all need to put up a mental hand and say, "Stop with the stuff about how other people do it. We must insist on the public's right not to know."
And anyway, I always thought that was what the movies were for.
