Category Archives: Naturalism

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The Sebaceous, and more golf transparency

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IMG_2202These are comedomes plucked out through the power of a magical adhesive developed by the Japanese firm Bioré, a division of the Kao Corporation. It is truly fascinating to see. My wife encouraged me to try a Bioré when they came out a decade ago, and will intermittently push it on me for some completely mysterious reason. Surprisingly, despite her enthusiasm for it, she is completely grossed out by the process (picture above) and is frankly mortified that I am sharing it.

Which leads me to conclude that the mysteries of our fairer counterparts includes this: a fascination/horror with natural processes involving their own bodies. For me, I’m just a few micrograms lighter.

handicap cardMy handicap dropped 0.3 points since the last update. My concentrating on the short game while steadying my swing axis is paying off. The most recent round of 89 was at Wakonda, and includes two triple bogeys and a double, and I missed three birdies by a hair, so my vanity round would have been to take off 8-11 strokes depending on how vain I felt. Good thing that I am not vain or self absorbed.

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15 Things Learned from 15 years of Marriage

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  1. I am not telepathic, but my wife apparently is.
  2. I have corrected eyesight, but apparently no vision, at least for car keys, my wallet, or for my wife’s inner thoughts (see #1).
  3. I am one of several things in a list that includes: 3 guppies in a fish tank, several potted plants and shrubbery around the house, my son (he’ll learn), bills, and internal combustion engine maintenance that she has to “take care of.” Gone from the list are our departed beta fish and hermit crab. I suppose I’ll join them one day, out in the garden.
  4. I drive too rough, too slow, too fast, and with far too little consideration of others, mostly her.
  5. My sense of direction aided by GPS, Google maps, and more GPS cannot possibly match her extraordinary geosynchronicity.
  6. She’s right, I’m wrong (repeat)
  7. There can never be enough retellings of all the family disasters that have occurred from the moment we met regarding my side of the family.
  8. She’ll put up with enough golf in my life, but draws the line at the Porsche 911 Turbo 4S in Darth Vader Black -but I really don’t care about that stuff.
  9. I’m good for opening jars of jam.
  10. She’s suspicious of all the time I spend writing, but generally refuses to read it -finds it boring.
  11. My memory for detail regarding emotions, clothing, people know, and minutiae of our intimate life are greatly aided by blogging so that strangers can remember for me. Hi guys.
  12. I proposed after a 4 month courtship because I kind of knew no one else would put up with me. I now know that men as they age, if they are without women in their lives in the form of a wife, a girlfriend, or daughter, look like nothing else but homeless men.
  13. I know she loves me because she’s still here of her own free will.
  14. I’m not as half-witted as she generally makes me out to be -I married her after all.
  15. I love her very much.
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The Smell of a Man

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SNC11907After a round of golf in the rapidly warming weather, I like to wash off and freshen up. Unfortunately, at the club, they only stock mens fragrances from the 50’s -officially “after shave.” I once went home after showering at the club, splashed on some Brut, and my wife went, “ewwww,” told me I reeked of “old man.”

I suppose if they wanted to move the clock forward, they could stock Hai Karate.

The amazing thing about these fossil fragrances is how penetrating they are -you can smell it from across the room. The irony is that these after shave lotions are exactly what you don’t want to put on your skin after shaving.

It’s like using aspirin for pain relief -you shouldn’t. It’s a much better antiplatelet agent.

My mother had the best use for the stuff -to keep critters away from the garden.

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The Apocalypse Garden

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IMG_0226Ever since I moved to Iowa, I’ve been practicing at gardening. It is one of the skills that came naturally to my grandparents who grew up and raised kids in the hardest of times. I have learned that pretty much anything temperate will grow well in Iowa whose growing season can be stretched with an early planting (risking frost), and a second one in July. The box garden above came about because the ground though once used as a corn field, was in fact fairly hard and difficult to manage, and the critters (deer and rabbits) were also very difficult to manage. It is basically pressure treated lumber, three 16x12x1.5 inch pieces, two cut in half, and one cut in fourths to create two adjoining boxes. The lengths were such that we could drive the pieces home from Home Depot in our Honda CRV. This creates 64 cubic feet of volume. The area was chosen because it was in the summer sun path between the homes -it gets full sun from daybreak to sunset. We’ll be getting unbelievable tomatoes this year (knock on wood), but also specialty Korean vegetables that are very difficult to get from the grocery. My goal is to eventually make kimchi from dirt.

The idea that we need to live locally is one that is gaining favor. I just had a plate of blackberries shipped in from Chile and bought from Costco. Though convenient and delicious, it is also a bit unnatural. Out of season, people would eat canned fruit or preserves, not unripe fruit shipped from the antipodes and ripened in a box.

The boxes took about a total of a half hour to build with an electric drill and wood screws. Each 55quart back of gardening soil is 2.1 cubic feet, so we’ll need to get another 15 bags to fill the other box -we filled one with about 14 bags. This is costly, I know, but who has time to get dirt, lawn clippings, and shit in a bucket for  a year to make your own topsoil -it isn’t that bad yet. The skills are not lost -just ask anybody over 70, and they all know how to garden and can to stow food for the winter.

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The Husband Keeper

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Login and face the music like a man

Login and face the music like a man...husband-man

One Monday on Facebook,

Me, status update: Working for a living.

My Sister-in-Law, comment: yes but at least you get paid for it.

My Sister-in-Law is an out of work Yale MBA currently staying at home with two small children. They live on the west coast with its inherent expenses.

Me, comment: I’d rather get paid for my thoughts on golf, technology, and the future. Or for thoughtful, heroic roles in important epic feature films. Or for inventing something on the scale of post-it notes. By the way, your work is not gratis.

  • Cook- 2000/mo
  • Chauffeur -2000/mo
  • Nannyx2 2000/mo
  • Sugar baby 1500/mo
  • Consultant -1000/mo
  • Cleaner -1000/mo
  • Gardener -1000/mo
  • Tutors 2500/mo
  • Room/board for all these people 3500/mo

I can go on. This is with no benefits -health or retirement.

My Lovely Wife, J, comment: Do you want a bill?

Me, comment: Yikes!

Sister in Law, comment: kee kee…

Guess now that you’ve convinced me I’ve earned it, I can afford to redecorate, treat myself to those spa treatments, and toss in that Marc Jacobs handbag I’ve been eyeing. I think we may also need to add Psychologist, Nutritionist, Hair Stylist and Health Care Professional to the list…

Me, comment, exeunt: You go girl. It doesn’t apply to J because she employs me.

This exchange made me think, which is the first step into getting into big trouble. Why do do women want to get married and stay married? If you look at the job description, the housewife takes on at least 5 or 6 essential jobs, goes through great deal of risk to have children, and starts having incredible headaches after about five years of marriage.

If the husband was the first domesticated animal (link), the husband-keeper was the first pet owner. Some husbands are useful and clever like the sheep dogs in that Samsung commercial (link). Others are more like those giant dogs people get when they’re small and cute, but are horrified soon to find that the dog eats food bought in fifty pound sacks and lays turds bigger than theirs. They’re messy, they’re high maintenance, and they’re horny.

So what do you do about a problem dog? You “fix it.” And that is what the husband keeper does to the problem husband. The fix involves:

  1. limiting access to non-family activities with the guys (hunting, fishing, golfing!) that increases testosterone driven pack behavior
  2. letting them overeat (to make them less appealing to other women and by increasing body fat, increase relative estrogens and brooding behaviors while tamping down on demon testosterone)
  3. making them drive ungainly automobiles that have the profile of pregnant women (minivans, Priuses, Lexus anything). Through  about a million years of monogamy, the original savage brute is transformed into the domesticated house-husband.

Being married, I clearly benefit by not having to employ an army of assistants while getting a leg up on unmarried people with the help of my wife. I am presentable because of my wife. The unattached, middle-aged man has the shelf life of a can of anchovies -more than a few years, but not more than about five to twenty. Being unmarried, unattached, or sadly widowed in your sixties or later is a formula for showing up sallow, unshavened, unpressed, and unwashed -a homeless man. There is good data to show that longevity is associated with marriage. Most guys who run off on their wives and families immediately turn around and get married and start another family -what were they running from?

What benefit does a woman get? Pride in ownership? Someone to kill varmints? I have very little insight into this question. I did kill a mouse in my NY apartment in 2003 -last time I did something tangibly useful for my wife. It is shocking to me that we are nearing our 15th anniversary and I look at my wife and nothing has changed about her and us. And maybe this two-happy-bugs-preserved-in-amber-for-a-billions-years thing is it: it is not one person’s benefit or the other’s, but the sum of the whole. By getting married, we enter a time compression bubble where one year can feel like seven but fifteen can feel like one. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, I am hers and she is mine.

Now about that Porsche.

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The Sugar People

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Jean Harlow, Sugar Baby

Jean Harlow, Sugar Baby

The NY Times Sunday Magazine featured an article (link) which I’m sure raised eyebrows throughout married households on East Coast. Or at least I thought it would. I tried to bring it up with my long-suffering wife, J, this past weekend. Trying to stir outrage, I asked, “Did you read that article in the Times about the website young, attractive women can go to sign up as sugar babies?”

Refusing to rise to the bait, she clacked away at her keyboard of her Macbook. I pressed, “I read this and think, why didn’t I come up with that?” I think I was meaning to say, “why didn’t I come up with that?”

Click, clack, Facebook post, clickety-clack, email, clickety clack, google search -“getting rid of pests.” No joy for me.

In medieval times, there was a spectator sport called bear baiting where you put a bear in the pit of a theater, and audience participants would jump in and poke the bear with a stick.

I poked, “Women can sign up for free and they get matched with a sugar daddy. It strips dating to its essentials.”

Every once in a while, I play this potentially fatal game of bear…I mean wife-baiting. It lets me push boundaries, probe for any weaknesses (absolutely none found so far, 15 years in May!), and bargain for man-stuff. Motives for this Sunday afternoon shenanigan?

  • Boredom from lack of golf
  • Desire to show that 15 years of marriage has not left me slowly turning gay (okay, so I use moisturizer, exfoliate, and watch What the Buck on YouTube -but it’s manly now because Esquire and Dr. Oz say so…….okay – show tunes are not gay).
  • Create an alibi for leaving http://www.seekingarrangement.com on my browser history
  • Final push for my next toy acquisition
  • Because I love her

I decide to invade Poland, “It’s outrageous! What do these guys think they’re doing, purchasing the attention, conversation, and comfort, of attractive young college-age women? It’s a terrible thing to see, America being turned socioeconomically into a third world country where middle-aged men with money can take advantage of women in need of college tuition (and Fendi purses).”

Clickety, clackety, click. The focus of this woman, my lovely wife, is mind-bending. I give up. She wins. Love, set, match – Sugar Mommy. I go to play with my son and his Lego Star Wars models.

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The Life, all thanks to the Wife

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Santa Rita of Cascia, Patroness Saint of the Impossible

Santa Rita of Cascia, Patron Saint of the Impossible

 

 

J, mysterious lady of wonders, gave the rarest of gifts to me a month ago. It’s a passport so rare that it has caused gasps of astonishment among my fellow married men. Yes, I got the green light to go on a golfing weekend road trip to Houston with three of my golfing colleagues from Des Moines. 

Why is this such a great gift? Because J gave it to me with no strings attached -no emotional collateral or labor based mortgages. It was a gift given from a wife to her man from the heart. That’s why my partner, DC observed to me yesterday, “You married a saint.”

Indeed I did.

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The Mandibulous -updated

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cate-blanchett-picture-5My grandmother told me that a person’s face determines their character and behavior. I thought it was one of many old Korean sayings and fables that have been handed downs since the Ice Age, but as I have lived these two score years, I do believe that she had something.

yinyang

Our development is a balance of hormones which like the yin and yang symbol to the right, the male hormones -the androgens, and the female hormones, the estrogens, both exist in men and women and play a role in behavior. Their longterm effects are written on the faces. 

chyna-talk-060700-02The masculine jawline and heavier nose and brow ridges (frontal bossing) is a result of androgen influences. Aggression and sex drive seem to be associated with androgens, as well as increased muscle mass and low body fat. That is why Chyna Laurer formerly of the WWF looks like a man -she was taking steroids and it shows on her face with the heavy mandible, the thicker nose -and where it doesn’t show is the 3 inch long clitoris growing into a penis and the labia majora growing into a scrotum. Mudflaps indeed! The testosterone increased her muscle mass and decreased her body fat (she required breast implants after her natural breasts melted away). It probably also made her aggressive, both sexually and in general behavior. 

Cate Blanchett shown at top has many of the cardinal features of the mandibulous female -the strong nose and jawline, the deep voice, and brooding eyes under sharp brows. If she is anything like the characters that she chooses to play, she is likely very aggressive and probably always trying to wear the pants (which she does in the movies). stone001

Natural aging brings on mandibulousness -note Sharon Stone in her youth and a more recent picture of her. The decrease in estrogens brought on by menopause causes a relative uptick in the androgens -and thus mandibulousness. It’s a fact, that as our women age, they become manlier -women losing hair and growing mustaches is one of the biological costs of living past our natural evolved age of 20 or so. But, even one of our founding fathers, Ben Franklin, noted that mature women are the ideal first liasons of a young man as they not only have the experience but the urge -mandibulous. Here are more examples:

 

Mandibulous, and likely hornier than on the left

Mandibulous, and likely hornier than on the left

Mandibulous indeed!

Mandibulous indeed!

The gals with the soft roundish features, the girly girls, are not the ones likely to have the high hormonally driven sex drives, and are the ones most likely to gather fat around the hips and thighs and have a high brooding index -need to roost and decorate the house obsessively, eat chocolate, and have strategic headaches. It’s the tomboys who are the aggressors, and it is the MILF-y cougar who is strong of jaw and deep of voice who will likely tear your appendages off.

Addendum 2-25-2009

This idea is well illustrated in the recent SNL skit Cougar den (link).  All the characters are deep voiced, horny older women. Though meant as a caricature, they get it wrong. It isn’t that they are desperate for lack of sex -they are desperate due to an imbalance of androgen to estrogen. This is why you can go to Wal Mart and buy a back massaging wand with all those nubbly appendages on its round vibrating head. Men with back problems are not purchasing these.

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The Inscrutable

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bonobo

They're Wrestling

New York Times Science articles rarely compete with Maureen Dowd editorials about Martians and Venusians, but when Science articles talk about what women want (link) the email links pop. The basic premise is this: you have panels of men and women, gay and straight, and subject them to images of man on woman, man on man, woman on woman, man masturbating, woman masturbating, nude man walking, nude woman exercising, and bonobos (above) fornicating. Yup, you got that last one. The men and women were surveyed for subjective response, and instrumented in the privates for objective response.

This is where it gets interesting. Men, gay or straight, responded in mirror image stereotypical manner to the presence of erotic male or female images, and had no response to the bonobos. Their physiologic response mirrored their survey responses. The women, across the board, rated the images lower than the men across the board, but, VERY INTERESTING, had a physiologic response to every image.

This astonished me for a while, but then I realized, that if this wasn’t the case, the species would have no chance of surviving. Women have to put up with men of all shapes and sizes, and may even settle with a five foot two billionaire with bad breath and worse taste. Men are, despite their reputation, fairly visual and choosy. Women -you never know for sure.

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The Wish List

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gift_sub1

I humbly submit this wish list to whomever has the luxury of extra time to read my poor blog. These are things I wish for when I am overworked, tired, or blue. I’ll put some bath salts into a tub of hot water, light some scented candles, pour some Mountain Dew into some rosé wine (the Pink Zinfandel), turn on some Peabo Bryson, and then close my eyes…

Top 10 Wish List

1. Porsche 911 Turbo in Darth Vader Black

2. Peace on Earth

3. Bacon without consequences

4. Private Clone Army

5. Book and movie deal about my life, be on Oprah.

6. Goodwill to man and his helpmate.

7. Lust without consequences, germs, or wifi.

8. Ability to transform myself into the shape of various animals, inanimate objects, and cars.

9. Elimination of flatulence as a source of humor

10. 2-handicap