| the ax files |

April 29, 2008

A tip for the ladies

Don’t be so quick to think you
know what you want in a man

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE

your capacity to be surprised—and delighted—when you least expect it. Maybe you should pare down your wish list and see what happens. “Refine your search,” advise the Personals, “by selecting fewer ‘must have’ criteria.” Take a look at those guys in the background, in your peripheral vision, the ones who don’t get all the attention. Leave room to be thrown for a loop.

IT’S TRUE

A bird in the hand is indeed worth two in the bush. Because the other two are not in your hand. They’re busy preening and ruffling their feathers to show off their colors. But you’re not paying attention, because the bird in your hand sings so sweetly, a song just for you, that you are enchanted.

My column wants to write itself. It got me up at 6:33 on a Sunday morning to do so.

Well, OK, have at it.

It’s a many-splendored morning. The sky, the sun, the air, are splendid. Splendiferous, even. It’s a good day to live. Maybe on another morning like this it will be a good day to die. But this day is not that day.

THE CRUELEST MONTH?

…breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

April, you have not been cruel to me. I have not looked with despair upon the burgeoning earth and found myself lacking. I welcomed you, I called for you to take your place in the pageant of days. It would be a hard month, when all about you is birthing, to feel hopeless and ruined. But I do not and will not. Memory and desire stir my dull roots with spring rain.

By the way, “The Waste Land” is a crashing bore. Despite some beautiful language and imagery, I’d rather have a root canal on vacation than read the thing again. I don’t have to look at things like an English major any more. I don’t have to write a paper about a book; it’s all reader’s choice. I get to say, “I don’t care what this means!” as I snap the book shut, “you pretentious ex-pat prig in a stuffed shirt and starched collar.”

”JAMES JOYCE ON ESTROGEN”

A reader’s appraisal of my “mind journeys.” Where does my mind want to wander to today? In the hallway at high school one time a guy said to his friend, “I wonder what this day will bring?” I found that hysterically funny. Must have been the earnest tone of it. Probably called his dad “Father.” Well, that day brought me the guy who said that, because I think of it nearly every day in spite of myself. I, too, wonder what the day will bring? as I lather my hair. On this fresh and lovely spring Sunday, first order of business is a breakfast bagel and latte with a friend at the Café out on the internationally colorful patio.

Second order of business, go back home and sleep off my hangover.

THE MYSTIQUE OF LOVE

I had thought to tackle today. Not everyone falls prey to it. Once I asked a friend if he was in love with his wife. He was driving us around L.A. in his little powder blue Metropolitan. He said, “I don’t use that terminology.” Wow, that is flat as Nebraska. (They were later divorced.) Merv Griffin once played a word association game with Melina Mercouri, and she paused at the word “fear,” and said “Not in my vocabulary.” Spare me the husband who would tell me love is not in his vocabulary. But I wonder how many marriages don’t use that terminology. If you’re married because you don’t want to be alone, raise your hand. If your marriage is “close enough” to what you’d had in mind, raise the other. Do you still have a concept of the Real Thing, even though you’re married? OK, you can put them down now.

”THE PLEASANT CONFUSION

which we know exists.” That’s how Thurber & White define “love” in the glossary to Is Sex Necessary? “Loving” is “Being confused by, or confusing someone.” Let’s not dwell on the flip side of pleasant. Confused may be as good as it gets.

LOVE AS POP CULTURE

People are always singing about it, writing poetry and the blues about it, making tv shows and movies about looking for it, finding it, not finding it, falling in and out of it, and advertising the products that will draw it to you. If we weren’t so media-saturated by fictive portrayals of love, by tales of Prince Charming foisted upon our impressionable children’s minds (the fairy tale theme of a woman being rescued by a man) would we heap so many expectations upon love? It’s got a lot of weight to carry.

Most adults feel entitled to have love of their own, and kvetch about it ‘til they do. Plenty of others have love in their lives. Why shouldn’t I? Where is my fair share? When is the someday my prince will come? What’s taking him so long? Is he stuck in traffic?

LOVE,

as J. Geils put it, stinks. Except for when it doesn’t. It flies, it soars, when it’s the love of legend, the love everyone’s after. Look! There it is, high in the sky! It’s crossing the sun! When that love swoops down on me, everything will change. I won’t be in Kansas any more. But it seems so far out of my reach. Perhaps one day, when I least expect it, it will land on my hand, and sing me a song. And I’ll feel the excited heartbeat of the dove of love pulsing in my palms and realize, “This is what it’s all been about.”

Could be.

MANY DO HAVE LOVE—

just not the way they want it. People say, “if you really loved me you’d…” Bullshit. That’s so unfair. If you loved me, you’d remember the anniversary of the day we met! If you loved me, you’d fulfill my romantic expectations. OK, so he doesn’t. Now what? What you want that person to do or be is a construct of your mind. Your lover is failing you because of some idea about love you have in your head. It’s the idea that’s the problem, not his failure to embody it. When he disappoints your expectations, cut the guy a break and let him be himself, not your vision of what he should be, and talk as equals. It hurt my feelings that you forgot our anniversary, I’m disappointed. No hurled accusations needed.

“HUSBANDS…”

wrote Thurber and White, “leave things lying around, or track in dirt, or forget to shut the refrigerator door. None of these faults is, after all, of very great importance, and they should be lightly dismissed. If they are presented as heinous crimes, the husband is going to be liable to the inception of a Persecution Complex and the slow deterioration of mind and spirit incident upon claustrophobia.” If the direction of the toilet paper puts your panties in a twist, I think you’ve got something else up your butt.

THE “YOU’RE NOT A FRIEND” VARIANT

“A friend would never blah blah blah; if you were truly a friend you would so-and-so.” Again, expecting others to conform to your idea of friendship will lead to disappointment. Maybe what that friend did IS what a real friend would do. Just work with what’s in front of you. It’s reality that will bring you joy.

EVEN THOUGH

I like Maureen Dowd and read her New York Times column, I didn’t even pick up her book Are Men Necessary? when I saw a table full of it at the airport. The title immediately infuriates me. To ask it at all posits an implication that they’re not. It’s instantly demeaning, a question that can provoke anger, conversation, laughter, or a slow deterioration of mind and spirit. Apparently women are the ones who get to decide if men are necessary.

WELL GUESS WHAT!—THEY’RE NOT!

Breaking news! Within ten-to-twenty years, say Tonight’s Experts on Nightline, women will not need men to procreate. A hocus-pocus genetic transaction takes place, and the egg gets fertilized—but the baby will always be a girl.

“Maybe our only hope as men,” said reporter Nick Watt, “is that women decide to keep us alive for their own amusement.”

Men do more than amuse me, they amaze me. I love, love, love men. I love the veins in their necks, the hair on their fingers, their beard stubble, their snoring, their solidity and virility, their humor and smarts, the warmth of their arms, the depth of their voices, the power of their muscles. I love them because they’re not women. There is nothing more beautiful than a beautiful man at your breast, your fingers entangled in his sandy hair…

I’ll stop there.

A beautiful man the author loves.
If you don’t know who he is,
she won’t tell you.

c. www.DRURY.EDU

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Short Attention Span Poetry Corner

I love

The veins in your neck
when you turn your head
Your gentle snore
as you shift in bed
Your stubble on my lips
when I kiss your cheek
Your conquering virility
leaves me weak
The warmth of your arms
your endearing charms
The depth of your voice
when you read me J Joyce
Your humor and smarts
your miscellaneous parts
The power of your muscles
as you steal my breath
I love you in life
I’ll love you in death

When I think of love
I think of who?
When I dream of love

I love

You
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May reality bring you joy.
4/29/08

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