Hiatus

Banality Fair has been on a bit of a hiatus the last coule of weeks and will continue to be on one for a couple more. Lot of work travel, little access to a computer (I'm old school)...

Asexual Mike

I just heard from one of my best friends growing up, this kid named Mike. When we were ten years old, we transitioned from thinking that girls were icky to wondering if Rog's foxy new girl from an episode of "What's Happening" would hang with some bad-ass, righteous cats like us.

Mike even went so far as to track the actress down and write her a letter. He enclosed a picture of himself wearing a fedora, boa and a three-dollar moustache and goatee set we bought from a local novelty store. At the time, I thought the "DYN-O-MITE!" T-shirt he was wearing in the picture made him look a bit immature. Mike, a budding Marxist at the time, claimed that comment reflected the fact that I had been brainwashed by capitalism to hate the poor, symbolized most poignantly by our main man J.J. Evans from "Good Times." I just thought he would look more like the eighteen year old he claimed to be in the letter if he wore a suit.

She eventually sent us back a beautiful, autographed head shot, and we both fell madly in love with...well, whatever her name was. Our infatuation turned to lust, and fueled our budding obsession with learning all there was to know about sex. We enlisted the aid of the most knowledgeable kid on the subject, a Lithuanian classmate named Radjan who, for fifty cents, would let the fellas in class sneak a peak at a copy of the December 1977 issue of Playboy. Radjan agreed to let us see it for free because we knew about his "dirty little secret" (he had this weird habit of peeing into jars and keeping the jars in his locker; there might have been some connection between that behavior and the fact that he was constantly sniffing White-Out). We thought we knew what we were in for, but the whole "hair down there" thing mortified and utterly confused us.

Mike was especially taken aback. He went so far as to ask his father, an obvious sign of desperation. His father told him that he would tell Mike about it when he reached eighteen. Still bewildered, yet mollified by what his father told him, Mike refused to discuss sex with the fellas until he had that talk with his father. Unfortunately, his father ran off with a concert violinist when Mike was sixteen, and the conversation never happened. The shock of his father's desertion and the fact that three of our high school buddies contracted chlamydia squelched any desire on Mike's part to learn about the topic.

The summer between our junior and senior college, Mike finally let me tell him about sex. He became so obsessed with what I told him that he took a year off after college to study tantric sexual techniques at a Costa Rican ashram with this narcoleptic yogi whose main claim to fame was that he could lift various heavy items with his privates.

Mike, now a urologist living in Milwaukee, is on his third marriage, his latest wife is a former Nigerian adult film star. My life is really, really boring.

Flashing For Babies

According to this article, women tend to flash more flesh when they are feeling fertile. So does that mean the belly flashing I have experienced periodically at my office mean that these women want to breed with me? In at least one instance, yuck.

Salty Brother-In-Law...To Be

I dislike weddings and funerals equally. To me, they are unnecessary ceremonies reflecting natural events. Consecration of love, the passing of life.

My family is in hyper-wedding preparation mode. I am extremely happy for my sister. I would have had no problem if I could just go to her wedding and sit in the back of the church or at a table set discretely in the back of the reception hall. But, apparently, there is some sort of tradition that the brother has to be part of the wedding party. So, in a couple of days, Joseph K becomes groomsman number 5.

I have a lot of good friends who are married. Most of them didn't have groomsmen or didn't ask me to be one. Either way, I was stoked. I don't like being the center of attention at social events. At work, I have no problem playing that role. It feeds the type A in me. When it is all about pleasure, I want to blend in with the crowd. The inner introvert takes over

I like my brother-in-law to be a lot. It is nothing against him. I think he and my sister make a wonderful couple. I just want to applaud the union from a distance. The requirements have made me kind of a grouch these days. I have become a less pathetic version of Pagliacci's clown. Happy on the outside, grumpy on the inside.

Girlfriend K, to her immense credit, has been working on me. She's excited about the wedding. She's got all kinds of appointments to get herself ready for it. She realizes all the romance and joy of it and tries to get me to see that. Today, she asked me the wrong question.

"So, are you going to be this much of a grouch at your wedding?" The initial silence lasted too long for her taste. "Probably not," I finally said. For a second, I was pretty sure I lost her. Then, she did what she tends to do. "We'll just need to work on that."

And, she's right.