Hals Und Beinbruch; Break a Leg

Names have been changed but embellishments are few...

I got in late one night following work as a "clerical dogbody" at yet another "temp-to-perm" assignment when I checked my machine and found out that Ute had called and left a message stating that she'd like to see me before she went back over to Germany for the holidays. Mind you, I mercifully hadn't heard from her in a while since "The Deustchland Debacle" [see Cuckold Cocked] and the emotional imbroglio from a few years back had lost their sharp edges and, besides, it was Christmastime for chrissakes.

Since then, I'd been hit in a cross-walk by an old geezer that ran a red light - from which I had mended after 12 months of therapy - and had re-joined the workforce again via another (yes, another) agency assignment, this time my "walk-on role" would be that of a CSR (that's customer service representative to the uninitiated) in the billing dept of a credit card company; an environment that the Marquis de Sade would have had writer's block attempting to describe.

After two rigorous weeks of what can be loosely described as a mixture of "training, testing and herd-thinning," with a class that dwindled from 25 trainees to 10 "survivors," the case-group was then thrown to the wolves to fend for themselves while applying their newly-acquired phone-skills. Essentially unprepared for the rat-a-tat barrage of inane, fee-based missives of irresponsible and hostile consumers from Shreveport to San Diego, the setting quickly called into question whether any of those rationalizations I'd inaudibly chanted like a born-again monk about "things soon getting better." Hell, after about four solid weeks of settling the bill disputations of tornado-bait ensconced in the RV parks of the midwest and angry housewives on cell phones in Seattle -- some multi-tasking by slapping around their screaming progeny while cussing out people on the phone -- we all began to have second thoughts about our most recent occupational choice.

At about this juncture I realized that my skill set was wanting. I was ill-prepared to negatiate the onslaught of overdraft charge-fueled rage as these people would shriek ad nauseum into their wirelesses about why they didn't want to pay late fees on bills they claimed never came in the mail -- please people, it should be illegal to be drunk on the telephone; save it for David.

The monetary appeal really began to wear thin during that hundredth hate-filled phone that followed the beep in my headset after which I was instructed to chime in with "Thank you for calling "blah-blah-blah," my name is Chris how can I help you?" Seriously, how many toxic in-bound phone arguments can one person take before snapping out a la Tom Cruise (yeah, him again) in that breakdown/breakthrough scene in Jerry Maguire? "Help me, help you" I'd caught myself blurting during more than a few "you're robbing me blind" tirades made by customers placed on hold for more than twenty minutes at a clip and left to stew in their juices by an automated 1-800 "self-service" number ( fuck-you-very-much).

The ceaseless stream of vitriol can be daunting, to put it mildly; often I'd close a call feeling unclean or like I'd rather be dunked in egg salad and chained inside a crawlspace with a pack of starved dingoes tripping on "E." All the while I'd nurse the fact that sometimes in life you do what you must when the money's funny. So what? Bearing all of this in mind it's easy to see why I picked up the telephone when I saw Ute's name on the caller ID; I guess I aquiesced to yet another phone message picked up in a moment of psychic weakness. What the hell? Small doors open to large rooms...yeah, whatever dude.

Since Ute and I had last spoken, I'd moved to Pasadena because it was close to the job that I held at the time and Los Angeles proper was too far of a hike to make every morning by the MTA, Los Angeles' mass transit bus and rail system -- it used to be called the RTD which straphangers deemed the "Rough, Tough 'n Dirty" because of the unsavory characters that they had to stare at and deal with while shooting through the tubes -- I guess I'd just been harboring thoughts of returning to New York City on the Jungian level but that's niether here nor there. I lost that job but I stayed in Pasadena anyway but that's another tale, altogether: that's another tale. (fans of the movie "Airplane!" will get that joke).

According to her message, Ute wanted to meet up for dinner & drinks and I thought (yes again, I tells ya) "why the hell not?" So, like a lamb (a very feeble-minded lamb) being led to the slaughter house, I returned Ute's call and agreed to meet her on the following Friday but when I hung up the phone, everything that had occurred with "the Foil du Frankfurt" from a year-and-change ago came rushing back to me in vivid detail. I froze at the thought of another horrifying encounter with her, like one of those rabbits in Richard Adams' fairytale Watership Down. I had contracted a momentarily paralyzing case of "tharn," but being a man of my word trumped any inclinations to pull a no-show. Besides, I tried to call her back to cancel in my jack-rabbit's panic but she didn't answer; there was no turning back. I think she stood by the phone and watched it ring while dancing a little jig in a Lucifer costume -- pitchfork, horns, pointy tail and all -- she had plans for me

In the world of entertainment there's the saying "break a leg" which performers tell each other in a tone of esprit de corps. As lexicographers would have it, the colloquialism's history reaches beyond the circle in the round and extends back to German pilots and the aerial dogfights of WWI. As word-history maintains, after the big war, the saying was translated by European thespians who'd come into contact with their German-born counterparts while working the boards in the playhouses of Europe in the years that followed. Apparently, the saying had been appropriated from a German phrase which earlier had, in turn, been usurped into the popular German idiom from ex-WWI aviators who wouldn't dare wish good fortune on their comrades. The logic being, if you wished good tidings on a fellow pilot before he went off on a mission that could prove dangerous, it would "tempt" the forces of evil to stridently step in and cause mortal harm to their buddies; the inherent carnage of warfare was bad enough, so why go there? Just wish him "a broken neck and a broken leg" and he'd be sure to have the malevolent (and airborne) forces thrown off his flight trajectory, for at least a little while, and he'd return to base with his extremities intact.

The night of "The Main Event" began calmly enough. Instead of going home and coming back out, I left my gig and went over to a Mexican-themed bar to suck down a couple of pints with some chicks who'd graduated with me in my "class." After a full day's forced march into the savage hinterlands of CSR purgatory, embalming myself seemed to be on order plus one of my collegues offered to drop me off to meet Ute; it was a no-brainer. In spite of the promised curb-side service, I watched the clock like Dick Clark at around 11:59:50 on New Year's Eve. Clearly I was dreading the "summit" I'd agreed to partake in so I began double-fisting shots and oat sodas -- by the time the dust had settled, I had a brick in my hat and was full of courage.

I checked into the restaurant early and waited for Ute at the main bar and ordered a martini. Almost instantly I began to feel out of place; the clientele and staff were clearly not my type of people. I have nothing against patrician "trust-afarians" who take day-jobs on a lark to pass time between ski trips and skydiving but judging from the underwhelmed glances that the waitron were throwing at me like daggers, I'd been made.

As I sat on my barstool waiting for a tweed jacketed Donald Sutherland to walk in at any minute and begin screeching and pointing me out to the unwitting other pod people, like he did at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I ordered a Grey Goose Cosmopolitan to take the edge off; the effects of slugs I'd had prior quickly evaporated from the stink-eye that the busboys were giving me. As I gulped down my cocktail I realized that I felt like a total fraud and closed out my tab while wild-eyed thoughts of bolting for the nearest exit kicked into hyperdrive. "Punch it Chewie," bellowed Han Solo's voice in my head but just as I stood up to lunge through the well-heeled crowd of professional machers and back into the world that I knew, Ute slid up beside me like a veloca- raptor. The bone-chilling rememberance of a past encounter with another woman and her "precocious" female offspring simultaneously began to seep through my veins like absinthe. "Guten nacht, schotse," she droned in that Eva Brahn accent that I once found cute. She pulled me closer into her hardened-nippled, clinically enhanced cleavage while I shuddered from a second wave of that rabbit-like sensation of fight or flight that washed over me. Donald Sutherland failed to make an appearance that night and our meal ensued with minimal turbulence but true to form, Ute acted like, well, Ute.

It was during a toast that I realized that I cared very little for this woman who found it necessary to draw attention to herself like some idiot actress on a television sitcom -- although I grinned vacuously at her banal witticisms, I wasn't even sitting at the table with her anymore. Ever the drama queen, Ute decided to propose a toast, so with a pinky extended, she raised her glass and mono-toned with a stony Bavarian brogue "Hals und beinbruch," she said dryly. I answered with "Prost" and we threw back the remainder of our wine and rose from our table to exit the restaraunt and part ways -- I was certain, that this time it was forever and I was blissfully at ease with the prospect. As I broke bread with Ute, I had peered deeper into the looking glass than I had in quite a while and I saw exactly what I needed to see.

I'd been thrown off my guard in the past because I hadn't grasped the fact that dating beautiful women is akin to watching a beautifully plumed bird of prey soar overhead. It's majestic to behold and admire from afar but if that colorful raptor lands on a nearby branch and you walk over to touch its feathers, it might peck your eyes out...or it might not and that's the caveat most men fail to wrap their reptilian minds around. Close cover before stiking: eyebrows may be singed. It took me a long time to fully absorb but that night I did.

In spite of the gallons of alcohol I consumed, the revisiting of past dalliances had had a sobering effect on me and the stark contrast it unveiled shot across the skies of my mind as brilliantly as a comet during an solar eclipse. I knew right then and there what I wanted out of life; I'd spent so much time seeking validation in others that I'd lost touch with what really satisfied my soul, as Marley might've put it -- the process of writing; the research and joys of discovery buried deep within layers of letters, chronicling my thoughts through characters and reflections to maybe help those who come behind. To share them with like minded individuals, learn something, possibly; find some answers to my own personal enigmas, perhaps. Those momentary grasps on the truth that come maybe a handful of times in a fully lived life, maybe but whatever the case, it was always about the writing. It always was, I was just too chickenshit to embrace it. To get as much of it all down and winnow through the byzantine algorithm that is life -- that moment of clarity evidenced things that I knew already. I'd known it since I was a kid but hell, sometimes selective ignorace is bliss. I could not look away from the future of realization any longer.

"I'll meet you in the smoking area by the maitre'd's station, I've got to powder my nose," Ute said as I reflexively nodded in agreement, though the very sound of her voice sounded like short-wave radio static at that point. I waited for the duration it took to smoke a cigarette and my feet began to move beneath me, seemingly with a life of their own, taking me toward the train station. I guess they didn't care to wait a nanosecond longer. I stepped onto the crosswalk without looking back as I observed that I had come full circle both metaphorically and geographically.

As I walked toward the train station I realized that the restaurant I'd just eaten in was approximately one block south of the building that I worked in so many months ago; the same building where I'd met Ute on the job; yes, the same place where she'd cruised off of the freeway of love but this time I didn't fancy an emotional car-chase in the slightest. I walked by the edifice on my way to the subway station and, again, my feet took the wheel and pointed me northward, towards home. My mind seemed to comply and we all turned onto a fresh path.

I walked for what seemed like hours, thinking. I waded through emotional backwaters that I'd ignored over the years but they were sealed in amber like a swarm of toxic flies engulfed unawares in some Stone-age swamp; thousands of years old and perfectly preserved for proper scientific deductions to be made when the necessary technology for observation had been designed, invented and mastered. The flies swirled around in my mind like dark clouds and engulfed me as as I strode faster and faster, first up Colorado past the Norton-Simon Museum, then over the bridge on Orange Grove that crosses over the 134 Freeway and the further I walked the better I felt. My feet knew what they were talking about.

I continued my midnight odyssey and listened to my heart beating beneath my overcoat when I stopped dead in my tracks beneath the darkened freeway overpass on Lincoln Avenue; I wasn't alone. It's been said that if you don't pay attention to the signs in life, then you'll pay with pain. And I had payed dearly over the years while waiting for that little proverb to get itself fully immersed in my mind. I'd tithed more than one man's fair share of dues; I no longer sensed the chains linking me to past deeds gone wrong in my youth; some with the best of intentions and others out of unadulterated selfishness. I was atoned for my sins and I felt it innately; that sense of a nearby presence wasn't some living thing approaching, it was the exorcism of past demons leaving on the wing, like the cars whizzing by overhead on the concrete lanes of the freeway. They'd been perched on my shoulders for years like the stone goblins of Notre Dame but it seemed they had interests elsewhere.

Ute called me later that night from her cell phone to reveal that she'd, in fact, been driving around Old Town searching for me with a marked difference in tone that was the antithesis of what I'd winced through earlier in the evening, for a second she almost sounded chastened and contrite. The worm had turned and I think she felt it too. I never called her back; still haven't. When she told me to "break a neck and a leg" she laid to rest any illusion that I might've had about rectifying past wrongs. The truth is, they'll always be there in all their mortifying glory and the best thing to do in regards to that is to seperate the present from the past with a wall of positive accomplishments -- be they helping out a friend who's in a scrape or exploring the depths of my potential in what I take joy in doing...get on with it because time marches on and thus did I.

I realized that you can live your entire life perpetually frozen with the fear of having the starring role in a mundane existence and, in the end, all you'll have is just that. As a direct result of your nail-biting stay among the living, that grip of paranoia will invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. Inevitably, your life becomes as drab as dishwater when you spend it sitting around waxing philosophic about "coulda's," "woulda's," and "shoulda's." Garrison Keillor, the caterpillar-eyebrowed Minnesotan storyteller, once said: "An ordinary life is what we all get and it's good enough. It's good enough." Never have truer words been spoken...I'm feeling much better now..laters

Cuckold Cocked: The Power of Poon

Names have been changed, scenarios condensed... but all of this actually happened...

In the time I've spent on the planet earth, I'd like to think that I've managed to get a grip on the inner intricacies of male-female relationships in contemporary America but a recent chain of events have smashed my concepts and theories into a thousand pieces and scattered them to the winds. This chapter in my story began when I landed a J-O-B on the editorial staff of a dot.com in L.A. [see Walk Through the Fire post] As I settled into the groove with my new co-workers I began to hit it off with this older woman from Europe, we'll call her Ute. About eight years older, this lady was a hottie. She was single, divorced with no crumb snatchers to hold her down and she was flirting -- often a good sign.

Ute seemed to have it all together; she was decisive and sure of herself, in short, the antithesis of all the ladies closer to my age bracket that I'd pursued in the past. We began to hook up on the DL, a dinner here, a movie there, etc. Initially, playing our cards close was the rule of thumb and our workaday contemporaries in the office were none the wiser - it was perfect! I was having my cake and eating it too, no pun intended. By the third month, however, the cloak-and-dagger exoticness of the scenario began to dull around the edges.

One night over drinks in some Italian restaurant in Los Feliz, I committed a cardinal sin of the dating rulebook. I'd like to say that the combination of scampi bette and the wine weakened my resolve but I'd be a liar-in-the-wink. My faux pas was that I opened up emotionally to Ute that night like I never had before. My rationale was that coming clean was the next logical stage but man was I wrong.

Note to self: the woman will let you know when she's ready to go to the proverbial "next step" on the relationship stairway to heaven - so shut your trap, pay the waiter, keep grinning and enjoy the ride. After that night and a couple of sub par trysts later, Ute began to fade away with maneuvers that would make Herschel Walker proud. First at work, then on the phone and finally one day I looked up and she was in my rearview mirror taking the off ramp from The Freeway of Love - and she cruised on down to "It's Better-than-Ever Street."

What came next was that special kind of hell that can only be experienced during the emotional vacuum of remorse that follows a clandestine on the job poke-in-the-whiskers:
1.) I had to see her everyday at work, 2.) apparently this frauline possessed that whole German precision thing because in a few days she was already slipping off to lunch with some other schlub from New Accounts and lastly, 3.) it became readily apparent that our "classified ops" were now subject to the 2 week Post-Coital Freedom of Information Act - all that butter and no toast.

I felt as if I were laying on the muddy ground of a coliseum in a pool of my own blood while the hoi poloi swilling grappa watched me slowly expire from afar, like all of the vanquished gladiators in the battle of the sexes who went before me, I was forced to eat my heart out with a sullied spoon. Although I felt like a doofus maximus, after a few days I got it together. I ignored the wiseacres on the whisper circuit and did the "old focus on my work thing" while I silently licked my wounds.

One day one of my "concerned" female colleagues - one of the frauline's running partners that I'd dubbed "the ludaligen" - cornered me by the coffee machine to ask me what was wrong, because "I'd been acting differently lately," as she emoted with an I-already-know Cheshire grin. Staring straight at her, without missing a beat, I did what I'd advise any man in similar circumstances to do - I lied like cheap welcome mat while feigning the most earnest, Oscar-worthy facial expressions I could pull up from the within. I told "Scoop Newsworth" flatly: "I'm just getting my priorities straight and it was time to, you know (while tugging on my tie like Rodney Dangerfield), grow up and start getting serious about my career" as I threw two mini-moos into my coffee and got the hell outta there.

A few weeks later, to my surprise, the psychological scars did, in fact, start to heal. I began to venture out among the living again and embraced a new-and-improved mantra: "no more emotions." Since getting all Whitney Houston and emotional threw a spanner in the works, I decided to become a card-carrying member of the Four - F Club: Find 'em, Feed 'em, Fuck 'em and Forget about 'em. It was liberating. Like Superman in bizarro world I knew what my weaknesses were. If I could manage to avoid the rays of a red sun (oh, yeah and hidden vials of kryptonite), I'd be scott-free to do whatever it took to get some leg without all that pesky morality dragging me down - a small price to pay for "a whistle in the weeds." Rejuvenation! Master of all that lie before me! Like Caesar, I was looking for new worlds to conquer! I was rising from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix! I was all that and a bag of Funyons but alas, there weren't any new shores to plunder . I was up to my old shenanigans that rained down a monsoon of hurt. I still hadn't learned but this time I had, what I thought was, a more refined modus operandi. Little did I know I was about to be humbled (again) in one of the worst ways possible - by someone nearly a decade my junior.

A friend of mine from college called me up one sunny Saturday afternoon to tell me that I needed to forget about the "Deutschland Debacle," run for the border and get my ass down by the water. I complied and shot on over to Manhattan Beach to play it fast 'n loose while washing away the previous four months with whatever the guy passed out on the floor was having. That night, following a brief club crawl, everyone returned to the beach house and everything started to swing calmly enough - the standard L.A. glad handing and conversations out on the patio. Unbeknownst to me it would prove to be more than just a standard Southern Californian evening of pressing the flesh and puddle-deep bromides.

I got into a conversation with this younger lady we'll call Tanya. Through the course of our conversation, Tanya and I began to talk about the power of a woman's sexuality over the primal drive of the heterosexual male psyche. Quite sure of myself, I ventured to say that "every man has the choice to control any encounter with the opposite sex if he were of sound mind," which sounded appropriate theoretically as my mouth formed the words to say it. Tanya continued to entertain my naive musings for quite a bit out on the patio, biding her time no doubt and then she moved in for the kill.

About an hour after blurting out my self-assured declarative (was it the White Russians talking?), my new found friend began to break it all down to me in a series of moves that rivaled the fight sequences of a John Woo chop-sockey shoot 'em up flick. Tanya began to explain to me how a woman, especially the younger ones (her words), could control any man she chose to as I scoffed in her face with the snarky hubris of W.C. Fields in a prohibition-era speakeasy.

"Any man," she repeated clinically, "can be rendered a cerebral weakling by executing a simple series of touches to the chest, wrist, forearm and shoulders" Meanwhile she assumed a singular raised-brow demeanor not unlike Jack Klugman in the opening credit segment of an episode of "Quincy, M.E." - remember the sequence when all the hardened cops start dropping like flies while Q. pulls back the sheets covering a toe-tagged cadaver and starts nonchalantly slicing into it's icy-blue gullet like a turkey roast? Tanya began to demonstrate with live-at-the-cutting-slab overtones as we enacted a couple of scenarios with me sitting and her standing and vice versa. After about a dozen run-throughs, she had successfully managed to "overpower" me with subtle sexual ennui every time. Even when I knew what she would do -- I was so ill-prepared that she started warning me about what was coming in her summary examples. After employing a handful of stealthy moves she'd have me rendered null and void, in the palm of her hand -- do they teach this stuff in some secret underground bunker?

Although I was repulsed by this vulgar display of power, I was equally intrigued. I wondered "how could I harness this evil and use it for my own selfish and prurient purposes" but all for naught. As the party pulled to a close, and I stood there deep in my cups feeling like I'd been channeling Don Knotts [old one-bullet Deputy Fife, himself] from the great beyond when I got the zap on my dome and realized that I wasn't just dealing with a sex per se. I had, in fact, stumbled into a super-strong race of beings that only needed men around to extract y-chromosome solely for replication of the species. The onus was on me to find out where they came from -- I'd soon get my answer.

A few weeks after "The Quincy Incident" I got a call from a woman I hadn't heard from in quite some time, Tina. My guard was down because Tina was a single working mother making her way in the world, you know the whole Mary Tyler Moore / Ann Romano, "One Day at a Time" thing, so when I saw her name on the caller ID, I figured "what the hell" and picked up. Despite giving birth to a rug rat, Tina had retained her model-thin figure, she was definitely coming into her own and looking for a new sheriff to hold things down in Dodge City. BOING!

It appeared that Tina was "in a mood" to have a little grown-up fun and wanted to know if I wanted to go out for drinks. I was thinking that bagging her would be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel so, like a lion crouched on an Acacia tree branch surveying the savannah herds for does and calves, eyes slit, I closed in for the pounce and agreed to meet her. After hanging up, I looked in the mirror and cocked an air shotgun chanting: "Who wants some?!!" I should've known there was something rotten in Denmark when she wanted to hook up in a mall restaurant at 4:00 PM, near my house over in Pasadena.

I met Tina that Saturday outside a shoe outlet in the mall and she seemed genuinely thrilled to see me. We chatted for a few moments and then I asked her why she wanted to hook so damn early in the day - while that question was still hanging in the air, and as if reading cue cards offstage, her 7 year old daughter sashayed out to meet and greet -ouch. Who wants some? I guess I did, but that too is in the rear view mirror...now at least.

The reptilian side of my mind had assumed that Tina would've found a babysitter to watch over her daughter for the day but no sirree sir, she brought "Tina 2" along. As I felt myself slipping through the sticky plasma around the border between single life and parenthood I shifted into "familyman-mode" (no cursing, smoking, off-color jokes, etc.) which results in a steady stream of gaffes and unfinished sentences for those of us who don't interact with "the little people" on a daily basis. Like the three musketeers, or rather, Dorothy, Aunty Em and that schnook with the egg on his face, we all walked to a nearby restaurant for din-din. In spite of my "microphany [what I call small epiphanies] that there wasn't going to be any raunch-n-rawness in my immediate future, I put on my game face and settled in for what promised to be fast breaking coverage from the dreaded front lines.

A few minutes after the hostess got us situated into a booth, the waitress arrived with our first round of refreshments - a Chard for Tina, a glass filled with two hydrogens and an oxygen for the crumb snatcher and a strong Kettle One Cape Cod for yours truly. I sat on one side of the booth and the girls sat on the opposite side, the drinks arrived, we ordered grub and Tina and I segued into a conversation that was neither here nor there -- for obvious reasons. As Tina 2 became more comfortable being around me, she shed the shy kid act and slowly began to dominate the scene in that way in which only children her age can.

After fielding the same-ole, same-ole questions about school and the like from me, the littlest Tina launched into me with a barrage of questions, comments and character analyses that I couldn't possibly have answered honestly without breaking the rules of "tall-talk" which I think was a concept she'd already firmly grasped. She was having a field day observing my discomfort while the bigger Tina looked on approvingly at the expansive development of her daughter's conversational skills -- an expression similar to that T-Rex while watching its offspring tear that guy to shreds in Jurassic Park III. When our meal arrived I sucked it down, went around the horn and asked if anyone wanted anything else and promptly closed shop. I gave the waitress my card before she could leave, she seemed to know the dealio because she comped me with another double 'Cod on the house - I guess she'd witnessed this type of cruel and unusual carnage before.

Looking back on that dismal state of affairs, I've wondered if Tina chose to bring along the "date bomb" as a fail-safe from getting hurt again by yet another grubby man-type or if she was just scoring free vittles off the first schmoe who slipped and picked up one of her "let's get together sometime" cold-calls. But even more disturbing, I think she might've been introducing Tina 2 into that shrouded sisterhood of male domination that she'd inherit a decade or so in the future - a primer before the mystery bunker drills mentioned above, if you would. If I had my druthers, I'd say it was probably a mixture of all three but that just didn't help me at all at that moment.

On my way home from the "Episode of the Tinas," I was completely chastened. I felt born again in that I'd sank to a Jerry Maguire low (trying to shoplift the pooty) and still got sidetracked by the unknowable. Men of the world beware: they're making them faster, stronger and (apparently) smaller - they have the technology. The Tinas managed to clip my wings with "the old good cop bad cop bit" which I should've sussed out with ease but we all know that the whole point of said process is to throw off the third party (or mark, in my case) just long enough to roll him for the desired goods and make him want to run for cover- no fuss no muss, thanks for shopping at Target. The ruse worked, I paid, pecked Tina on the cheek, shook "Chuckie, Jr's" hand and I haven't called her since. No follow-up, no phone messages, no thank you - as Kenny Rogers said "You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table. There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done. " Amen brother, you're preaching to the choir. As I pulled into my driveway, I had a moment of clarity that I'd like to share.

Despite the above instances, I don't feel like a complete idiot - wait, I'm going somewhere with this - I realized that I lack the ability to see around corners or through brick walls. The specter of feeling like that old, bald guy who gets slapped over the head on "The Benny Hill Show" around the opposite sex has, in no small way, made us menfolk paint ourselves into a corner when we're forced into dealing with the fair sex. We got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide - they're on to us.

Further, I'd venture to say that I don't even think "they" were ever out of the loop in the first place, so sidestep that topical landmine if the lady you're chatting with brings up the issue - that is, if you know what's good for you. It appears that we have just cajoled ourselves into believing that maybe there is some koan of truth, some Rosetta Stone-like kernel of info that will help us weaken the tenacious vice-grip that biology has on our nads (and hence every decision that we make). Sadly, my brothers, there ain't one so stop squirming and take your medicine - acceptance of reality, as passively-aggressive as it may seem, is the only weapon that we have in our arsenal at this point.

I liken feminine power of poon to that of Jules Winfield, Samuel L. Jackson's gangster character in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." Whenever you want to seriously question who's in control of the relationship that you may have with any woman, you should reach down into the emotional grab bag and find the wallet that reads: "Bad Motherfucker"... and you better be ten times more charming than that little pig Arnold on "Green Acres"...laters