What Would a Sex Advice Column in Nashville Look Like?

I think the going opinion is that it couldn’t be done; you couldn’t have a sex advice column geared to Nashvillians and other Middle Tennesseans.  I’m not so sure that it couldn’t be done.  I’m just not sure how long a life it could possibly have.  It seems to me that there are probably only three basic types of questions Nashvillians would ask a total stranger about sex and once you cover those, there’s not much more folks would share.

Those questions are:

1.  Where do I put my eyes?

“When driving around Musica, is it worse to look at the naked people and thus see, you know, naked people who are not my spouse, or to not look and never know what the fuss is about?”

“I think I saw my pastor’s car parked outside of the Hollywood Hustler.  Should I have slowed down to take a closer look?  And, if it is him, what do I say to him at church on Sunday?”

“My neighbor sometimes takes her pitbull out in the morning wearing nothing but her nightie and some really crappy sandals.  When she says ‘Hello’ is it okay for me to check out her tits?”

2.  Can this make me gay?

“I refuse to have a prostate exam because I don’t want anything up my ass, because, what if I get turned on?  Will that mean I’m gay?”

“My wife stuck her finger up my ass while she was giving me a blow job and it was so awesome.  Does that make me gay?”

“Sometimes, I look at the penises on the Musica statue.  Can that turn me gay?”

3.  Who is it okay for me to heap scorn on in public?

“My church group often protests outside the Hollywood Hustler.  When the clerks there come out to bring us water or to ask us if we’d like to use their restrooms, is it more appropriate to call them sinners who will burn in Hell before we take the water or after?”

“My neighbor is a whore.  She’ll sleep with anyone.  Shoot, I’ve even slept with her a couple times.  I think having her around is a bad influence on my kids, but, if I call her a filthy whore in front of my kids, what if she tells them about what I did with her?

“I am a bleeding heart liberal gay man.  I only sleep with straight Republicans.  How can they fuck me and still be so homophobic?  I have half a mind to go into his office and tell everyone what a hypocritical cocksucker he is.  Is that so wrong?”

See?  Once you’ve covered that stuff, what’s left?

Edited to Add:  El gato is completely right.  I forgot the fourth type of question:

4.  I do this, but I’m still a virgin, right?  Because, I signed a pledge.

Squirrel Queen, Don’t Think Your Cuteness Is Going to Get You Out of This

Birthday Girl, the Squirrel Queen, has trained her squirrel minions to do her office work.

And, I suspect, she thought no one would find out.

Luckily, I read Cute Overload, so I keep abreast of important news like this.

Someone Alert Radley Balko!

Vanderbilt University has a SWAT team.

I have no words.  Didn’t they just get permission from the city to be real police recently?  It’s been since I’ve been here.  Shouldn’t there be more than a handful of years between becoming a real police force and getting a SWAT team?

Does Berry Hill have a SWAT team?  What about Belle Meade?  Shoot, let’s all get SWAT teams.  I want to be the person who yells, “Go, go, go, go, go.”

Thinking Out Loud

So, I had to go to this meeting last night, but I couldn’t get to the elevators.  The building was set up kind of like a “C” with offices all along the curve and a huge glass wall up the gap and to get to the elevators, you had to walk out to them on a little walkway, because they ran up the middle of the open part of the “c”, which was open up and down a number of floors.

Even telling you about that makes me feel stupid because there are two levels of things I don’t do.  Things I’m afraid of because I’m a giant baby (like riding on the four-wheeler or whatever) and things I just can’t do, like go to the elevators in that building.

And they’re very different feelings.  One is I’m just afraid, like you would be at a scary movie or on a roller coaster, but I can physically do it.  The other has all that body rebellion tied into it.

I consider things in the first category to be charming quirks and they don’t bother me because I know that, if I just stopped being a baby, I could do them just fine.

But the things in the second category really upset me, not just because they happen, but because, more than anything, I want to believe that, if I just stopped being a baby, I could do them just fine.

In other words, as usual, I really want to be normal and this just reminds me that I’m not.

But I hadn’t really made that connection for myself–that there’s a level to the ridiculousness of this whole thing that is about me feeling bad that this means I’m some kind of freak who can’t just buck up and get with the system–and so I’m starting to wonder if that’s not making these incidents worse for me.

And so, that’s what I’m going to work on–just accepting that this shit happens and that it is a charming quirk (or somewhat debilitating phobia, whichever), and to just be upset at that level–that the panic is setting in and that I either have to find some work-around or just not do the thing in question–and then let it go, instead of the incessant scab-picking I tend to do instead.

I have never been a “cutter,” myself, but I think I’m starting to understand part of the impulse.  Here’s this thing I can’t control that freaks me out, so, instead, I focus on the familiar nonsense of how this makes me a freak no one could possibly love, and instead of being the freaky fear that just wigs me out, I’ve channelled it into a familiar kind of pain that, though pain, is something I know well and can function with.

That’s the detour I do have some control over and that’s what I need to work on stopping.

It’s funny.  I don’t have any problem telling people that they’re going to have to slow down if they want to walk with me and explaining about all my breathing issues, but god damn if I can learn to accept this mental quirk on the same level.

I still do think that, if they made a Valium inhaler, so I wouldn’t have to take it all the time, but could just take it when I felt a panic attack coming on, I’d be set.

Once You Bring Dairy Queen Into It…

Okay, so maybe i has a hotdog is slowly finding its own voice.  I laughed at this anyway.

When I lived in North Carolina there was a billboard for Dairy Queen that said, “Kids, Holler ’til your Dad stops!”  Which, in retrospect, seems a little nefarious, but at the time, I thought it was very cute.

Did I ever tell you about the vacation we took where, for three days at the end of it, we stopped at every Dairy Queen we saw?  You’d think a person might never want to see a Dairy Queen again (it was years before the Butcher could eat Oreos again after the weekend he ate 40 pounds of them), but you’d be wrong.

If you have to ask yourself how a person such as the Butcher eats 40 pounds of Oreos in a weekend, you haven’t been reading this blog very closely, that’s all I’ll say.  Now, if you excuse me, I think the Butcher left his Bob Marley record playing…