If there were no obsession with the sex act, then evolution might suffer,

especially in humans; evolutionary success is reproductive success. Sexual and genital obsession is normal, but most people aren’t honest about it, as if there’s something dirty about it, or simply childish. Humans rule the earth, not necessarily because we’re smarter, but because we fuck like rabbits. We have to compete with bacteria, after all, and their turn-around time for a complete generation is about a half-hour, depending on your deodorant. We can kill them, of course, but they can kill us, too. Does increased intelligence coincide with increased sex drive? Mine does. The hornier I get, the smarter I have to be to drive the point home to some unsuspecting victim, usually my wife. It’s a game. They say some of the people with the highest IQ’s are prostitutes and other so-called sexual degenerates. They say the root word that gave birth to the word ‘sophisticate’ originally referred to prostitutes, the original Greek Sophists I supposedly. The Thai word for such, presumably derived through Sanskrit, ‘sophenee’, would agree with that. Somehow I think it all got confused with the concept of ‘worldliness’. Either you’re impressed or you’re not. That’s probably why Jesus admonished his followers to be as children. Once you think you’ve got it all figured out, then you’re in real trouble spiritually. If you think you’re clever because you’ve figured out that you can make money with your moneymaker, then think again. You’re getting paid to do things others won’t stoop to, things others won’t take lying down, things others won’t sit still for. It has little to do with IQ. There were already a lot of pragmatists on the streets these days; now there are sophisticates, too.

When the day’s all done, you’re still and always alone;

the only question is to what extent and by what design. Is it of your own making or a death sentence? Little by little you build your empires one brick at the time, wall by wall, room by room, just to watch it all fall down in one broad sweep of the cosmic broom. If you don’t tear it down yourself, then someone will do it for you. Love is scary, staring into the great unknown, big brown eyes connected to infinity. It’s that falling feeling that I crave, that bottomless pit in the stomach, that sudden drop on the roller-coaster ride of life, that lack of center, that makes me feel most alive. Machines and their machinations only delay the inevitable. Space is comprised of singularities, impure and infinitely dividable, recombining at random with anonymous partners. Still mechanical sex is only as good as the mechanics behind it, and nothing compares with that tractor beam of pure attraction between two would-be lovers making the leap from conditional tense to indicative. That’s the force that maintains the race, to reproduce and evolve, by bits and pieces, little ones crawling underfoot and reeking.

The love between a man and woman can’t be trusted.

Asians have long known that. The only love that can trusted is essentially that between blood relatives, particularly between mother and child. You don’t trust your choices; you trust your fate, whether cruel or not. Sex implies possession as much as it inspires love as if the very act of penetration were as much a birthday bow as a ribbon tied, a gift-wrapped prison. Every penetration is a key inserted and turned, whether to the right or left, open or closed, is left to chance and the dance of the dice. But possession is only a contract, real or imagined. Blood is your self, interpolated and extrapolated, from the past into the future, like a poker hand laid out to show. We look at the past with the microscope of the present as if men had always thought the same way, as if they’d always loved their wives and kids or anything else long considered sacred. They didn’t; it had to be learned just like everything else. The thing a man wants most in a wife is a good girl who also gives good head, and likes it, a Brownie who knows who to use her brownies, a woman equally at home with her biscuits in the oven or her buns in bed. Many a prostitute can polish a mean knob, of course, but that doesn’t count, not in the modern day and age of democracy and free enterprise.

Never give more than half of your self to someone else

or she just might take it all, and not even give change. Half a love is plenty, especially when you’ve got nothing. Sometimes it’s hard to ‘break up’ even when the situation seems like it has a limited future. You can’t make it better, and you can’t shut it down, so what do you do? If you’re a traveling man, and creative to boot, you make it a part-time gig, as long as the little lady’s cool with the deal and as long as you still enjoy the sex. If there’s nothing else on which to base a decision, and money is not an issue, then let it be sex. That’s only natural. Couples that ‘stick it out’ long after the physical love is gone are accomplishing less than they could otherwise. ‘Sticking it in’ is more important. The couple that lays together, stays together. The sexual act is penetration of another dimension, natural selection in process, the choice of life.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it having the wife, the kid, the three-car garage.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it having the microwave, the DVD, the five-liter fridge. I sleep best with a ‘vacancy’ sign flashing outside my window and the roar of the freeway in the distance. I feel best at about five hundred miles an hour, not looking down but looking up, beyond atmosphere and trivial pursuits, to the level where the sky fades to black, just like some predictable movie selling soap to bored house husbands. I need love but not in my face. Just knowing it is there is usually enough. Once it descends into the Hell of internecine squabbling and righteous indignation, then I’d rather be alone, just me and the elements, air earth fire water. I just need to know it’s out there, waiting for me, just like I’m waiting for it. It doesn’t have to be reduced to chores and snores, shopping lists and rent receipts, and jockeying for bathroom rights. Love’s better than that. Save love for the sublime and the subliminal aspects of existence, the passage of solids into vapor without the intermediate phase of liquid, the passage of matter into spirit without the intermediate phase of thought, bodies making love in mid-air without so much as a glance downward, suspension of disbelief. Let the idle mind do the dirty work of handling liquids and scrubbing cracks. Let the hired hands change the tires and splice the wires. Let the experts fix the clocks and deal the stocks. Love should be pure and powerful, a force to be reckoned with, not a force to reckon with. Lovers should meet under waterfalls and rainbows, not under storm and stress. Lovers should meet between silk sheets and satin shirts, not between rushed dinners and hushed desserts. Love should be placed right on the pedestal where the Romans put it, posed and poised, romantic to a fault.

Why do I put myself through it?

Why do I stick it out just to get it whacked off time after time after time? Why do I go through the motions just to be left there hanging when it’s all over? These are the questions to which ‘love’ is the answer. I do it all for love, all for the future, all for the great unknown, ink tracks on a blank slate, a palimpsest washed over many times by angry waters and casual surfers. They know nothing of the fine line I walk every day just to maintain a delicate balance between the void on one side and chaos on the other. The created world in the center is the world that I love, a world of frequencies and tendencies to exist, uncertain by definition and dependent on the good graces of history. Divine intervention has already occurred, and the result is a spectrum of color and a symphony of sound, a profusion of life busting at the seams of my jeans. It’s an incredible time to be alive, witness to the end of an era, testifying to the ignorance of our self-appointed leaders. Armies of the night fight the good fight and lay low during the light of day, awaiting instructions from below, gut reactions unerringly accurate.

Beyond all the silly songs, beyond all the eye contact,

the late nights and jockeying for underwear rights, there’s just something unassuming yet overwhelming that drives the entire history of the universe, and the history of organic life especially, and the history of humans particularly. The modern age needs it most acutely, the cuter the better. It’s love, simple and pure, the original entertainment, something to hold you between acts, someone to hold you, on the coldest of nights, in the twilight of life. Old men need it special. It can expand you to unlimited horizons or reduce you to statistics. Sometimes you’ve got to second-guess yourself. What you want is not always what you need. What you want is not always even what you think it is. Just because I need someone there doesn’t mean that I always need her here. I just need the warm wet feeling in the back of my mind.

No matter how hard the West may squeeze the rest of the world by the balls,

individually a single man has no assurance that anyone loves him. The more that the world fragments and splinters, the more that people need simple unequivocal love. This is the Achilles heel of even the cruelest warrior, the need for certainty, the need for absolutes, the need for loyalty, the need for love. Empires of love all crumble and fall without warning nor welcome, just like empires of the map and empires of the soul, systems and constructs looking for reasons to return home to entropy. Still we need it, like we need belief systems and religions, insurance companies and bank accounts. We hedge our bets as fast as we can make them, joining hands with our enemies and rejecting our allies simply by the natural laws of turbulence and motion. We can only unite in something larger than us, the overarching umbrella, the golden parachute. Catch us if you can.

Sex runs in the family.

The love you feel for a parent and the love you feel for a spouse is the same, giving new meaning to the term ‘motherfucker’. There’s nothing dirty about it, unless you actually go through with it, of course. Then it’s pathetic and disgusting and punishable by law. Maybe the memory of suckling at mother’s breast is always there, exerting an influence the psychological equivalent of gravity. Most memories do. I know I wish I could forget some things. The love you feel for your wife is the same as the love you feel for your mother, obligation that is, unless of course, one of you breaks it off. My mother disowned me, for murky reasons that would never hold up in a court of law. The punishment hardly fit the crime. She died about six months later. I always thought that I willed that to happen, flattering myself, obviously, to imagine that I have that kind of power. Now I realize that her failing health is what made her so hateful in the first place. She was always borderline resentful, of what I don’t know, probably my freedom. Almost all the women in my life have been. The approaching end pushed her over. No matter how much she resented my freedom, she acknowledged my responsibility. When her father was senile and unable to care for himself, I got the call to care for him when my own father was unavailable. She knew whom she could trust, even if she was incapable of true love. Love gets lost in the shuffle of a stacked deck, a rigged game, a foregone conclusion. The last words of a dying man or woman are seldom repentant, much less inspiring. They specialize in denial. Death ain’t pretty except for the newborn for whom this world of biology is the dark side with its eternal struggle. The need for closure tends to close everything in its wake regardless of truth or consequence. I love them all, despite it all, someone else’s mothers, someone else’s kids.

The first stage in domestication of animals

was probably corralling for subsequent butchery. If the animals show themselves to be manageable, then you consider other possibilities, like sex. Then you consider still other possibilities, like a long-term relationship. Jorge used to refer to sex as “killing the cow”. Jorge never had very many good relationships, or none that I knew about at least. He and I fell out over some perceived slight or oversight. He was right, but didn’t like apologies, not even mine, much less his, so what could I do? Somebody called out my name as I was walking down the street in Guatemala City and there he was, just like old times in Berkeley. You’d think that was a sign, or something. Things like that don’t happen often. We spent a pleasant day around Guat City, but he never came back, as agreed. It still hurts. I hope he’s OK. He was driving VW vans from California to Guatemala after having driven eighteen-wheel trucks for a living in the US. Strange career move, but who knows? The secret to having many good friends is not getting too close to any of them, then things like this don’t happen. He may have had a secret crush on Lupita all that time, and couldn’t see why she was with me. Who knows what really goes on in the hearts and minds of men? I haven’t been to Guatemala since 1995, so that was then or before.