watering holes

I like to wander in and through data sometimes. It’s like a digital skinny-dipping session.

To show you how much my mind is going, I couldn’t come up with “skinny dipping,” although it was a very common term growing up in the country. Lots of people did it, or so they claimed. I never did. Too vivid an imagination, I guess. I always envisioned everything turning into some teenage orgy all asses and elbows and neighbors with flashlights and pregnancies and repentance and girls going to nun factories and boys to boot camp (none of which happened); or night sea creatures no bigger than four- or five-foot eels or water moccasins snatching innocent feet, wrapping around legs, performing colonoscopies, boys crying for help, girls giggling, dead bodies found the following day, sleepless nights, and prolonged silences followed by memorizing books from Tibet, shaving all body hair, and moving to LA to sell flowers at the airport (none of which, to my knowledge, happened). No, nothing good could come from skinny dipping.

To grasp the term within my present mind again (and all the horrors of yesteryear), I googled “swimming nude night.” There it was up top. But also lurking at about 3d, I learned that Hibiscus Coast Sun Club has such fun events as nude volleyball, nude swimming, and nude pizza.

Nude pizza. D’ja’ever get hot cheese or sauce on a body part? Why for a split second would I expose my ankle spanker to hot food? Makes no sense. And think about it – we’re all sitting around here naked, “hey, nice tits,” “yeah, you said that ten times already,” sex has got to crop into it somewhere. So how do we build up sexual tension? With pizza? Tomato sauce? WTF, that’s gross! Although I can just hear the naturalists – “It isn’t sex, you pervert, it’s all about freedom” – freedom, my ass, Nat-boy, you’re either gay or pounding as many women as you can (for real or through your right hand alone in your bed at night).

Oh, I get it! Maybe the pizza is like a designed “turn off” thingey. Like a decompression chamber. You fear getting bobo scalded with hot cheese, she drips sauce and looks like instant menstruation. I get it. OK, makes sense.

So I back the URL away from the calendar of events to the HBSC homepage. I’ve got this picture in my head of teenage-years venues: lakes with beaches, moonlight shimmering on rippling water, dark woods with defined paths. Man, was I wrong. This pic is not a joke. Just go to the link above.

WTF? Your “nude swimming” nights are in rather close quarters, eh Nat-boy? So Nat-girl rips one and everyone giggles? You with your quick wit and care-to-wind attitude add, “Somebody had pizza!”

Go to the “About Us” page. It reads, in part, “There are bush walks and glow worms at night.” I think its code. Perverts. Put your pants on. No, animals are not nude – they got body hair. You don’t. Get dressed. Your mother know you’re doing this? That’s her over there? Oh, gross. “Ma’am, excuse me, you should be ashamed of yourself … OMG! Lady! You’re an octogenarian – matching nipple and clit rings?!? I’m gonna throw up.”

How’d I get on this topic? Let me backtrack in my mind … ah, somehow or another I was City-Data.com for Lutherville-Timonium, MD. I found it to be an odd name and was curious. Must be a merger of two towns, but, c’mon, no one could come up with a better name than stitching together the old ones like some Bride of Frankenstein?

So anyway, the map was a bit misleading on scale. Seemed to be further away from Baltimore than it actually is. Quite close, actually. Towson right there. Lots of higher ed. Older population. Maybe a nice bedroom community. Then to my initial shock and horror, I see this entry:

Likely homosexual households (counted as self-reported same-sex unmarried-partner households). Lesbian couples: 0.4% of all households; Gay men: 0.2% of all households.

I was struck because the first thing I thought of was Nazis and Communists and lions and tigers and bears, oh no! The word “likely” really threw me. Felt like “round up the usual suspects.” Had I wandered onto some secret webpage being used by deep-cover algore types who preach tolerance and inclusion by day but target for torture and assassination social nonconformists by night? I had to test my theory. First, in Lutherville-Timonium, MD, having twice as many dykes as stick-boys just didn’t ring true; also, collectively 0.6% on a population of 15,814 is 95 “alternative people.” Ninety-five sounds made up – afterall, being the paranoid social defect that I am, it is not lost upon me that Interstate 95 is amazingly close to the target area. Maybe Lu-Tim is just flying under the RADAR of the Social Deviance Police. Let’s go to a place we know is replete with gay men and see if the SDP has it in its sights …

San Francisco: Lesbians, 0.7%; Gay men, 2.0%. Now that’s funny! I knew more gay men in SF than the 2.0%, and I never even went to the bath houses! Well, except that one time … to pick up a friend … I don’t mean “pick up” like that … gee, it’s not like I’m gay or anything like that … he needed a ride, a-hole, that’s all … IN MY CAR! A RIDE IN MY CAR! … well, yeah, I stayed for a while … NO! I did NOT lay down in a little room with a jar of Vaseline next to me! … well, yeah, I saw the glory holes – NO! I did not! This conversation is OVER!

corpses

I was thinking about the sun as I sat outside with my dogs. Its surface is about 11 million degrees. We’re about 93 million miles away (mean distance because, duh, we are an elliptical orbit). Absolute zero is about 459 degrees F. Electromagnetic waves toss energy under our tropopause. Gravity holds us through the curvature of space in this pocket. All that stuff – heat loss traveling through space, the troposphere holding what gets here, gravity making sure we maintain a livable distance – all lead to a narrow band of temperatures that means my dogs don’t fry like two really large corndogs. I hoped they enjoyed chasing butterflies and pissing on my yard.

Had Stouffer’s Mac & Cheese tonight. One of those big frozen ones that is dubbed “family size.” I think “impacted colon” and “enough sodium to stroke out three otherwise healthy adults” are more accurate labels. If I wasn’t about to go hypo I would have thrown up the first bite and thrown away both the remaining portion and the bowl that held it. Just the thought of it processing through my intestines is enough to make my hands shake. Good thing I work at home – tomorrow morning’s movement will rival the worst of the Baroque period, something akin to Peter Paul Rubens on bad mushrooms.

Have you ever been to one of those living museums? Where people dress up and make brooms? I often wonder if there is someone there that everyone stays away from because he is “too into it.” Like he’s a Nazi about the people that use Charmin, insisting that only leaves and newspaper (post-Gutenberg) could be used to wipe your ass. If you hung along long enough, I bet you could smell him in a crowd. See how he walked funny from perpetual Pimple Ass.

One thing I enjoy about visiting old settlements is how low the doors are. I am 5’10” (or used to be – 5’9” now?). I would have been a giant. I could have walked around and … well, I would never have walked around. My childhood disease would not have been cured. I would have been a footnote in one of those families – 17 kids, 8 died before maturity, 1 of which died in infancy.

I sat in a restaurant in Chicago this past Wednesday night. My coworker stayed at some dumb hotel that messed up their shuttle so he was late. I waited an hour, but that was fine. For a while, I sat on a bench just inside the door. It was interesting to watch people come and go. This woman walked out of the eating area. A man was several feet behind her. She left the restaurant, and did not hold the door open for him. There was a vestibule, and she blew through those doors as well. They went to the same SUV, and she got behind the wheel. He was whipped; she was just a bitch. All sorts of people ignored old people approaching the doors. Not everyone, of course, but just an incredible amount of people was absorbed in their own worlds. Does not play well with others: Check. Needs to be more aware of those around him: Check. Needs to be less of an asshole: Check.

I shaved for the first time today in almost two weeks. Took my first shower since Thursday. Did I say that out loud? Damn.

Did you ever wonder who was the first person to think about frying an egg and eating it? I suspect one fell on a rock in some god-forsaken furnace of a locale. Sounds logical. But then who thought about using uncooked egg whites and oil to make mayonnaise? And then to take that white slime and put it on bread with decaying animal flesh? And people wonder why they have loose stools – go figure. The colon is just saying, “I’m not even going to bother firming this stuff up, just – get – it – out – of – me – now!”

I’ll be driving to Virginia this week. I hope the weather is a few degrees warmer than it is here. We have frosts just north of us. I wore sweatpants and sweatshirt today. Undershirt for the first time in months. Last time I went, I had two dozen raw oysters for dinner. Will probably do the same this time. I actually dislike eating in restaurants. I am much more comfortable with my pots and pans, my spice rack, and groceries that I bought. I was out once and ordered some soup that would up having dead pig in it – couldn’t believe it. Talk about truth in advertising. It was a personal dinner, not business. I vaguely remember being yelled at for making my point to the waitress that not everyone eats corpses. Even more vague to me was when I was reminded that I ordered the same thing at the same restaurant and made the same complaint. I have learned, I do believe, to just eat what I order and always smile. It is so hard for me to learn manners.

I need to do some things …