PRETEND YOU’RE UNCLOVEN

I don’t know if this has anything to do with the arrival of my new hammock and the netted wombness of my new personality, but Melody and I have decided that she should go to Nashville for the half marathon with Jamie and her boyfriend Larry (on the 29th of this month) by herself and leave me at home. Maybe it was my suggestion. I am getting the feeling that Melody needs time by herself. We all need that. I am very sensitive to a woman’s moods and feelings, especially when that woman vents through her God-given vents. Do not think badly of Melody. I yell and cry as well, but usually in the sanctity of my office. When I try to put my fist through my door at various times and for various reasons, it is a sanctified time. I must have quiet and the angels in attendance. I must have a somber and holy place in which to heave pocket change. It is within the confines of my priestly vestibule only that I throw potatoes against walls and clean my desk with my forearm. Remind me to tell you sometime, in detail, about how I clean my desk during times of great stress. It is a most rapid and most efficient method—involving the forearm—and I am thinking about utilizing it at all other times, due to its rapidity and efficientness.

I would not want to be a woman in this life unless I could do it while preserving my male understanding of sex. But neither would I necessarily want to line up with 23,000 other people in Nashville to be segregated into “bins” and walk 13.1 miles over a carpet of paper cups. I love my wife and I need her, just as Jamie needs Larry and Larry needs Jamie. Larry says that Jamie is “so beautiful,” and she is. Jamie is beautiful. But Melody is beautiful, too. The first thing that attracted me to Melody was her eyes, but that was only because the first picture I saw of her framed her neck and head. Had she been framed from the neck down, my eyes would surely have gravitated toward her ass.

My wife has a beautiful ass. It is better than Jamie’s, I think. Does that offend Larry? Does it offend Jamie? Does it offend my readers? Does it offend the Maker of the Female Ass?

(It will offend Melody, I'm sure. She did not approve the use of this photograph, and did not pose for the sake of this blog. I talked her into this shot a year and a half ago for inclusion in my marriage book, Shagah. I was studying the waist/hip ratios of women and the effect specific ratios have upon males. Hey. Somebody had to do it. Melody eventually nixed the photo for inclusion in the book, and so did my agent at the time, who was a woman; she was probably jealous. But I'll be darned if this photograph is going to collect dust in a box in the closet.)

No doubt Larry will say that Jamie’s ass is better than Melody’s. That’s fine. Of course he would say that. He must say it. Is it true? I don’t know. I admit that I have not analyzed Jamie’s ass. To do so would be improper. I have a feeling that it's probably terrific. I do not wish to call in an objective party. If I did, I would call my friend Jim. But he thinks that his wife has the best ass, so there you go. To each their own asses.

Or, if you wish, you can choose not to discuss it. Or to appreciate it. Or to write about it. You can go ahead and call your own ass a “hindquarters.” Or “a butt.” Call it "a tush," if you want. You can call it an Oreo, for all I care. You can call birds “women.” You can call women “birds.” You can call chipmunks “birds,” if that’s what hangs your hammock. You can eat lots of food and make your ass grow to the size of a zeppelin, if that’s what you want to do. You can refuse to exercise your God-given ass and park it instead on a couch for the remainder of your transfatty days. Or you can pretend that you don’t even have an ass; pretend that you’re uncloven back there; whatever. Pretend that God didn’t cleave you there.

Go repair a lawnmower, if that’s what empties your sweeper bag. Inject cream into Twinkies with a cream gun, if that’s what wrings your sponge. Call the cream gun “a cream gun,” if that’s what you want to do. Or call it “an orange peeler.” Or call it “a Kirby vacuum cleaner,” I don’t care. Make up whatever euphemism you want for the cream gun. Pretend it doesn’t exist, for all I care. “There are no Twinkies in the world.” Fine. Repeat that like a mantra and fall asleep to it in your own personal twilight, if that’s what forks your hay.

Work on lawnmowers for a living, for all it matters to me. Analyze the different sizes of spark plugs, or whatever. Laud the gasoline engine, for all I care. Work with grease and poop. Catch the poop of cows into a trailer and sling it into fields with automated forks. Write about the spark plugs and call them “spark plugs.” Or call them “gangplanks.” If you’re that removed from reality, why not go ahead and call cow poop, “manure.” Whatever. Whatever it takes to untangle your Slinky, go ahead and do it. Or don’t call the poop anything, if that’s what strains your beets.

Or don’t even write about it. Or don’t write about anything, if that’s what you want. Don’t record anything, for all I care. Leave everything alone, if that’s all you can take. Unhandle the untouchable, if that’s what you can’t touch. Or touch everything. Or don’t touch anything. Or record everything. Or don’t record anything. Or leave everybody to guess, if that’s your God-given bent. Or dip people into their common humanity and make them face it, if that’s what frosts your honey bun. Or become a surgeon and lay out the intestines; somebody named the duodenum, you know. Or join a religion, if that’s what cores your pear.

Do what you will under this great sun of ours because it is imperative that you do so.

© 2006 by Martin Zender