Today is my husbands Birthday.

[smile]

You're excused from any more posting obligations for the night.

[wink]

My second wife (partner if you like), is quite delightful, and fully 16 years my junior! She makes me feel both young and old (we have 9 month old twins).
When I'm unreasonable, Kerry always remains bafflingly unruffled. Confronted with such equanimity, I soon find myself sidling up to her and begging forgiveness.

Foxy,
I'm on your side; my home is my favourite destination.
...Though I do enjoy a spot of whaling with Ishmael and Quiqueg, or tarrying behind on foot with Sancho while the Don makes a fool of himself.
I do like your stanzaic form btw

Here is a first instalment of a favourite essay by Gore Vidal that seems apposite: "The Birds and the Bees"

Recently, while assembling forty years of bookchat,
I noted with some alarm--even guilt--that I had
never really explained sex. True, I have demonstrated
that sex is politics and I have noted that the
dumb neologisms, homo-sexual and hetero-sexual, are adjectives
that describe acts but never people. Even so, I haven’t
spelled the whole thing out. So now, before reading skills further
atrophy, let me set the record straight, as it were.
First, the bad news: Men and women are not alike. They
have different sexual roles to perform. Despite the best efforts
of theologians and philosophers to disguise our condition,
there is no point to us, or to any species, except proliferation
and survival. This is hardly glamorous, and so to give Meaning
to Life, we have invented some of the most bizarre religions
that . . . alas, we have nothing to compare ourselves to. We are
biped mammals filled with red sea water (reminder of our oceanic
origin), and we exist to reproduce until we are eventually
done in by the planet’s changing weather or a stray meteor.
Men and women are dispensable carriers, respectively, of
seeds and eggs; programmed to mate and die, mate and die,
mate and die. One can see why “love” was invented by some
artist who found depressing the dull mechanics of our mindless
mission to be fruitful and multiply.

....Apparently, the first human societies were tribal-extended
families. Then the pre-nuclear family was invented. Skygods
were put in place--jealous ones, too. The monotheistic religions
from which we continue to suffer are fiercely grounded
on the only fact that we can be certain of, Man plus Woman
equals Baby. This, for many, IS the Natural Law. Inevitably,
if unnaturally, natural lawyers thought up marriage and monogamy
and then, faced with the actual nature of the male
and the female, they created numerous sexual taboos in order
to keep the population in line so that the senior partners in
the earthly firm could keep the rest of us busy building expensive
pyramids to the glory of the Great Lawyer in the Sky.

(“It’s all in the vagina, dear”) Freud, noted, all those
fierce do’s and don’ts have created discontents, not to mention
asthma and date rape. In fact, everything that the Book
(from which comes Judaism, Christianity, Islam) has to say
about sex is wrong. Of course, practically everything the Book
has to say about everything else, including real estate, is wrong
too, but today’s lesson is sex.
The male’s function is to shoot semen as often as possible into
as many women (or attractive surrogates) as possible,
while the female’s function is to be shot briefly by a male in
order to fertilize an egg, which she will lay nine months later.
Although there is nothing anywhere in the male psyche that
finds monogamy natural or normal (the scientific search for
monogamous, exclusively heterosexual mammals has been
sadly given up, while our feathery friends--those loving
doves, too--have let the natural lawyers down), the monogamous
concept is drilled into the male’s head from birth because,
in the absence of those original tribal support systems
that we discarded for the Book, someone must help the
woman during gravidity and the early years of baby rearing.
If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a
patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny,

...then
one begins to understand why men and women don’t get on
very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as
many babies as possible with as many different women as he
can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off
from her busy schedule as astronaut and role model to lay an
egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different
sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any
book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted
from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of
us serial killers, killers of our own true nature.
It is a fact that, like any species, our only function is replication.
It is a fact that even the dullest and most superstitious
of us now suspects that we may have overdone the replicating.
Five and a half billion people now clutter a small planet
built for two. Simply to maintain the breeders in the United
States we have managed to poison all our water. Yes, all of
it. When I was told this by a member of the Sierra Club, I
asked, so what do we drink? And he said, well, some of it’s
less poisoned than the rest. Despite the fulminations of the
Sky Lawyer’s earthly representatives, some effort is being
made to limit population. But the true damage is already
done, and I would not bet the farm on our species continuing
in rude health too far into the next century. Those who would
outlaw abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, while extolling
the family and breeding are themselves the active agents of
the destruction of our species. I would be angrier if I had a
high opinion of the species, but I don’t, and so I regard with
serenity Pope and Ayatollah as the somehow pre-programmed
agents of our demise, the fate of every species. Hordes of furious
lemmings are loose among us; and who would stay
them,

particularly if they have the Book to throw?
But while we are still here, I suggest a change in attitude
among those few capable of rational thought. Let us accept
the demonstrable fact that the male has no exclusive object
in his desire to shoot.
The Day America Told the Truth is a recent book in which
a cross section of the population expressed its ignorance on
many issues and confessed to some of its most dreadful deeds
and reveries. Since 91 percent of the population admit telling
lies habitually, I can’t think why the authors should take
too seriously the lies new-minted for them; but then, lies often
illustrate inadvertent truths. A majority of men and women
like oral sex (as the passive partner, presumably). Next in popularity
was sex with a famous person. Plainly being blown by
George or Barbara Bush would be the ultimate trip for our
huddled masses.
Although the authors list twenty-three sexual fantasies
(such as sex in a public-pubic?-place), they do not ask
about same-sex fantasies, which tells us where they area, as we
say in pollster land, coming from. But in what peopled do,
they report that 17 percent of the men and 11 percent of the
women practice same-sex. This strikes me as low--even mendacious.
It is true that in the age of AIDS both sexes are very
nervous about same-sex or even other-sex, but not, surely, in
experimental youth. In the pre-war Southern town of Washington,
D.C., it was common for boys to have sex with one
another. It was called “messing around,” and it was no big deal.
If the boy became a man who kept on messing around, it was
thought a bit queer--sexual exclusivity IS odd and suggests
obsession-but no big deal as long as he kept it quiet.
If he didn’t, our natural lawyers would do their best to deprive
him of his inalienable rights. In any case, I don’t think
the folks have changed all that much since 1948, when 37 percent
of the men told Dr. Kinsey that they had messed around
in those years.