couples – Page 2 – Hopeful Romantics

Reflections on The Constant Travellers, Now on Kindle and EBooks

The Constant Travellers, a novel by me, Gordon Basichis, has journeyed a long way over the years. Since it was first published by G.P. Putnam’s its film rights have been optioned twice by two motion picture studios, Twentieth Century Fox, and MGM. The Authors Guild adopted it as part of their Back in Print Program at the beginning of this century. Originally, it has been recognized as a quirky Western Epic Fantasy, full of humor and philosophical insight. It was seen as a metaphysical book, embracing and also satirizing some of our more sacred cows.

Some people loved it, and some people hated it. Most agreed it was a mixed genre type of novel that fell into a lot of categories while never being pigeonholed by any single one. One critic called it “the West that never was.” I don’t think she was trying to flatter me. But, nevertheless, I still took it as a compliment. History for the most part is never as it was. So in the arts, why not take it to a much further, illogical extension?

It was my first novel. There was one before it where a publisher bought it but a regime changed aborted its release. But The Constant Travellers came out with a lovely cover, at a time when covers were replicas of such exotic things as original oils. In this case, noted artist, Ron Walotsky, painted the original oil that became the cover. Ron was kind enough to sell me the painting, and it hangs on my wall to this day.

I am proud of this book. It was truly a labor of love and a work of fiction written by a young writer who knew almost nothing about the exigencies of the publishing industry with all its precepts and machinations. I never pitched it or really wrote an outline for it. One day the first couple of sentences popped into my mind and off I went, working out the story as I progressed. I loved writing that way as the characters and story was always filled with surprises. I knew in my efforts I would try to deconstruct time and space and demonstrate for the children of fate and circumstances there really are no accidents. Life has its meaning not in the greatness of the celestial or in eternity, but in the people you meet and the things you learn from them as you wander down the road. True enlightenment, as I believed then and still believe today, is not handed down by a higher order but through the experiences gained from human interaction and where you take them from there.

Children are taught specialized techniques and methods to cialis prescription prices reduce the effects of andropause. What is Kamagra? cialis free sample It is a treatment suggested by Dr. Meds4world is a place where you can Buy Shilajit ES capsules from reputable online stores. viagra cialis It is better if this will is made in the USA and claims to be totally safe and discount viagra levitra free of side-effects. Life for some is more serious than others. Life may be serious, but it is the humor and irony that we discover in the events of our journey that serves to lift us to a greater recognition of our very finite place in an infinite universe. Without our eliciting the quirky elements to even the more sober conditions of life, we are doomed to a very prosaic existence.

Anyway, The Constant Travellers, has arrived in the twenty-first century and made it to Kindle, Sony Reader, and soon will be on IPad and other epublishing channels. I am happy about this. The money, fortunately, is not so important at this juncture in life. But to see a newer readership, a mixture of younger people and former drug taking, sex having Boomers who may see this book as a life once led, there is much gratification. I am glad to see it out there.

What a trip it has been.

“ Ebook Description

“Sex, drugs, and the West that never was. In this funny and philosophical tale, young Shelby Lopez encounters Thunderbird Hawkins in post Civil War America. The Indian shaman teaches Shelby of the Great Necklace and the Great Book. Their journey leads them to wisdom and an understanding of man’s destiny. While set in the Old West, the novel’s modern idiom is as contemporary as if it were today.”

Will They Serve Frozen Yogurt At The Next Revolution?

All rhetoric aside, revolutions are not started by the poor. The poor may contribute later on, or pile in and take the revolution to certain extremes, but they are not the ones who start it. I realize it is romantic to think of the poor rising up to break the yoke of poverty, but it is simply not the case. It could be argued that if the poor were that well organized, then they would get it together enough not to be poor.

It’s the disaffected bourgeoisie, the merchant class, the middle class, that always always gets the ball rolling. If at first it is not the middle class directly then it is their progeny, their erstwhile sons and daughters who grow restive in the coffee houses or on the job, in the schools, where discussion leads to protests, and protests leads to violence, or the series of incidents that set it all off. Robespierre, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, was from a family of lawyers. Castro, in Cuba, was from a wealthy middle class family and also a lawyer.

Lenin was also an attorney; his father a director/inspector of the public school system. Trotsky was raised in a family of wealthy farmers. Che Guevera was from an upper middle class family and was himself a doctor. Mao Zedong’s father may have started life as a peasant, but by the time Mao was still a young boy the old man was doing just fine as a farmer and grain merchant.

The American forefathers were largely merchants or gentrified farmers. Those frocked coats and powdered wigs cost a few bucks, and none of them have been cited as showing up in a peasant rags. In the case of most revolutions, the leading intellectuals and rabble rousers took their cues from principles and doctrines in the literature of choice. The French and the Americans cited passages from the Age of Reason, while the Russians and Chinese took their cue from Karl Marx. Most peasants weren’t reading Marx at the time, and the literature found in Age of Reason or the Enlightenment was mainly accessible to those that had money, and certainly those who could read.

Another misnomer is that revolutions occur out of principle. That they are driven by the abstracts of ideology and their anticipated application. Revolutions, at least successful ones, are based in economics and not the more higher minded principles as some would believe. Most successful revolutions emanate from self-interest and economic necessity before being disseminated to a greater mass through rhetorical ideology. Even in today’s world where even the most complex strategic considerations are boiled down to simple jargon and sound bites, embedded at the root core there is short and long range self-interest and its related economics. The higher minded rhetoric, all that stuff about liberty, equality…whatever…comes after when you need more bodies to sacrifice themselves for the greater cause.

I think about revolution not because I am encouraging it. I do ponder at what point the middle class once again decides it has had enough of the chicanery and double dealing that leaves it holding the bag. I think about the Tea Party and realize that some laud them while some mock or hate them, fearing the worst from the dregs in their lot. But the Tea Party thing didn’t come out of nowhere. People are pissed off. The middle class is pissed off. These are the people who have lost their houses, their jobs, their dignity, and their chance to make life better for their children. While with the Tea Party all that anger is being channeled almost entirely to the wrong places, the frustration is real.

Their jobs are going offshore. Their trades skills if not obsolete are being transferred to other countries, leaving crafts people to work in humiliating call center positions where they try to accommodate those as pissed off as they are. Small businesses have watched the stimulus money get kicked back to the larger banking and financial interests. They have watched the money go offshore so domestic interests can make nice with foreign interests, so everyone is happy for the next financial shell game. Many small and medium size business owners realize they are in a game of musical chairs, and when the music stops they may lack a place to plant themselves. The less evolved make irritating claims about wanting their country back. Few realize that while there were always virtues there were also the ugly elements of sexism, racism, and the economic leverage of the Robber Barons that is not at all unlike the way things work today.

But the smarter souls realize the middle class is dissolving. It is a species facing extinction, or if not extinction then certainly a serious depletion among their ranks. It is becoming increasingly evident, at least to me, that both the right and left are creating a permanent underclass. The Conservatives may be more calloused and venal, willing to exploit cheap labor, and under the guise of free enterprise ship people’s livelihoods to other places, in order to serve their bottom line. But then the Liberals or Progressives, or whatever they are this year, in offering meager entitlement without any real job training or actual support of industry have policies that may keep people alive but eliminate their chances of obtaining the skills that will empower them toward gainful employment. At the end of the day, it is really two sides of the same coin with both sides pandering to their bases. One caters to the rich, and the other tries to garner votes from the poor. The middle class pays the tab and then finds itself ignored.

Common sense would be that rather than just hand people money, it would be wiser to re-purpose factories, even in the supposed archaic industries. Develop a modern version of Roosevelt’s WPA where younger folks can form in teams to employ modern technology with seasoned business sense to make stuff. No country survives by merely shuffling paper around. You need to make stuff. Even in a global economy you cannot constantly suffer trade deficits for goods you can be making here. Or, more to the point, you can not do it and survive. Re purposing factories would allow the government to supplement production. The factories might even operate at a loss to stay competitive, but that loss would not be nearly as costly as just laying out billions for stand alone entitlement programs where nothing comes back to the coffers.

But then some argue, why bother with outmoded industries? Well, for one thing not all of our citizens are technological geniuses. Some of the work may be mind numbing, but it is a living, and a better living than either the call service job that has filled in in many blighted cities, or the government check that covers close to nothing. It is better to have people working at something, especially products that would reduce our imports and overall deficits, than not working at all.
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We talk about what great innovators we are. We love to revel in our inventions and our technological brilliance. We boast of our start ups and how great technological achievements have originated from that humble garage workshop. It may be true. But as Co-Founder of Intel, Andy Groves, points out in his terrific article on Bloomberg Business Week, entitled How America Can Create Jobs, even when we innovate through the start ups we no longer scale these companies but instead the big outfits buy them out and ship most of the work offshore. There is little chance for a new Microsoft or anything else when either that fledgling company is left to fend for itself, having no access to the kind of capital that would enable scaling to competitive levels. There is little chance when that nascent company is bought up by the big kid and its resources moved offshore.

And both sides of the aisle are equally culpable. The conservatives bark about free enterprise and the lack of government intercession. These were the same people who couldn’t wait for government handouts from the bailout, where many suffered little or no consequences for their duplicity and lack of sensible business practice. On the other hand, we have the current majority in government boasting of its reforms. They boast of a financial reform and a bill that has no teeth. Companies too big to fail are still too big to fail. As for much of the legislation, five minutes after its passing any corporate interest with a team of lawyers and common sense has figured out a way to beat most of it. There is little pressure for this current or any future administration to reduce or eliminate tax credits for shipping its jobs offshore. There is little incentive via added tax credits to encourage even foreign companies to set up shop over here and hire American laborers.

So, in all, minus the rhetoric from both sides and all the concomitant window dressing, you have people either out of work or working jobs so meager they can’t support their families. Credit extension to the regional banks who would in turn provide funding for local businesses is little more than a passing topic of conversation. The economy is once again stalling. Consumers are reluctant to make purchases. There is talk of a double dip recession. There is talk the housing market could slip even lower with increased foreclosures.

And the middle class? I have to wonder at what point does the toxic mismanagement reach critical mass? It is one thing to wear a ridiculous hat with tea bags draped from its brim. It is another to consider the twenty-first century version of tarring and feathering, vandalizing, and otherwise making life miserable for those who have reduced this country to a shadow of itself. I think about this recent little fiasco in the California City of Bell where it was recently discovered that four of the five council members were getting paid about $100,000 for their part-time jobs in the blue collar city of 40,000 people. The Bell city manager, who made nearly $800,000, which is roughly three times the salary of the President of the United States. For the City of Bell.

Why did it take so long to figure out that these conniving individuals were getting paid so much for so little? The salaries were only made public after a Los Angeles Times investigation, based on California Public Records Act requests, uncovered the ugly fact that the city payroll was bloated with six-figure salaries. Since the discovery, some of the grand city officials have resigned. Others are defiant. Attorney General, Jerry Brown, is contemplating criminal charges. There is much rancor about their very generous pensions.

But supposed they hadn’t resigned. Suppose they all remained defiant and the state government ignored this outrageous transgression on the public trust. One has to wonder at what point do the riots start where some of the city officials are dragged into the street? Maybe never. Maybe the citizens of Bell all toss back a beer and a Zoloft and go back to American Idol. But suppose this incident or an incident much like it does get out of hand. And then suppose in other parts of the country the citizens there think a little tar and feathering of sorts is not at all a bad idea. You know, little local and regional things that suddenly erupt beyond the point of control.

I know it is a lot of supposing here, but if history tells us anything, major changes gestate for years before breaking out to a greater order. History demonstrates it takes just a series of minor incidents that evolve from miniature rebellion to considerable revolution. America had its Boston Massacre, it’s Tea Party, and Lexington and Concord. Russia had its riots in St. Petersburg. France had the storming of its much hated Bastille. And so it goes.

I am not saying we are about to see a full scale revolution, replete with Civil War and all the other accouterments that give new meaning to dangerous living. No extreme sports are necessary when you have massive rioting and killing in the streets. But we are not a country that angers easily. On the top side of our national persona, we have an embedded sense of law and fair play that if it doesn’t hold us back from theft and duplicity at least burdens us with guilt.

On the down said, we are spoiled, fat, lazy, and have far too many distractions. A revolution is hard work and takes focus and a great deal of concentration. Between channel surfing, texting and gossiping, focus and concentration is not particularly our strong suits. It may be difficult to sustain anger when you take mood elevators and believe your critical assignment is attacking the nearest buffet. We are out of shape and eat a lot of frozen yogurt. It could be argued that unless Fro Yo wins the concession for the next American Revolution, turnout will be minimal at best. And if there is a turnout, then is everyone proclaimed a hero? Does everyone get a trophy? Hard to say.

But then that anger is growing out there. It is diffuse and misdirected, concerned with petty concepts like racism and people’s sexual preferences. It is concerned with lifestyle choices and religious beliefs or lack of them. But then we aren’t there yet. We aren’t at the place where that slow to anger big dog finally gets off the porch where sensibilities start to galvanize and find articulation. Where the middle class declares, “enough of this,” and decides that voting for the same thing regardless of party cannot turn it around. When it becomes clear that it is not an issue of wanting one’s country back but moving it forward. Against the deliberate intransigence. And in the face of those who wish to keep you right where you are.

The Planet of the Wanton Geriatrics

Life can be cruel at times. Life can be filled with contradictions. Contradictions that become paradoxes in our day-to-day lives and as the years progress leave us wondering, what the hell happened? The cruelty part is that there is no going back, no modifying the order of things or adjusting priorities. Despite all good wishes and inspiring messages to the contrary, in pure existential terms we are left at the end of a cycle in possession of our triumphs and losses, our insights and misgivings. Life in hindsight becomes a mathematical puzzle of sorts, but with escalating complexity as our perception of events and their outcome is constantly mutating, leaving us to readjust the pieces as time goes on.

There are different versions of assessment and readjustment, each filled with mixtures of satisfaction and regret. I am not talking about the macro stuff here, the atrocities and eco-disasters, the flagrant disorders of the world. Catastrophe is relatively easy to assess and reconcile on the macro level than the universal eventualities that sooner or later enter our lives. Aging is one such area where the large, universal picture eventually makes a very lasting acquaintance. With aging comes its usual accessories, health issues, frailty, culminating in an intimate howdy do with our own mortality. Such concerns are all out there, until that one day when you look in the mirror and start to think, “do I know you?”

But like it or not, we have all been programmed to deal with aging and mortality. For the most part we think happy thoughts. You turn on the TV and there is some saccharine commercial to remind you of all the tender moments you experience with friends and family in your approaching dotage. We get the Lion King Circle of Life Routine , and we are encouraged that our brief blip on the radar screen may be filled with meaning and purpose. We take heart in the acts of familial succession and the belief we will reincarnate as we have before. We project in the back of our thickening skulls that upon our return we will access the lush life, refusing to believe that in past lives and the ones beyond it we were meager peasants whose greatest triumph was now getting trampled by the noble’s horses.

Without all this concern for mortality and the afterlife there would not be much of a market for religion and corny movies. All those Hallmark Cards and Kodak Moments may be selling at a discount on the dusty back bin of the Dollar Store. Mortality is perplexing. It gives us food for thought and a sense of spirit and a glimmer of eternity. It keeps us in line. Or it doesn’t. But few ever scoff at the notion that somehow, in some way, I am paying the price for my deeds and misdeeds.

But honestly, this is all the easy stuff. Life and death; there’s nothing to it. Whether you are stuffed in a hole or return again to repeat the same mistakes or make different ones, this concern is really a piece of cake. Because at the end of the day your beliefs may give you comfort, offer solace at that heavy trafficked intersection of doubt and faith. But the morning after, whatever you believe becomes moot. Unless you hit the jackpot by guessing correctly on the Eternity Betting Pool and then your journey to the other side rests comfortably on auto-pilot.

What isn’t easy is sex. Sex is fraught with cruel paradox as if the great creator did some custom body work on Adam and Eve as if for the purpose of a practical joke. Doesn’t really matter if it is Adam and Eve, Adam and Adam, or Eve and Eve, or any combination therein, the fact that each group is victimized by biology and its staggered time frame for sexual desire. It is no secret that men are more interested in sex at an early age, their late teens and twenties. Men have sexual thoughts about once every twelve seconds, barring distractions like earthquakes and fires. And even then…. Women on the other hand may have sex at an early age but according to one study in the British Medical Journal that was also reported in Time Magazine, that for women that full blown libidinous activity doesn’t kick in until their late twenties. The article reported that women are not having more passionate sexual fantasies between 27 and 45 but they are actually having more sex than women 18 to 26. Sounds hard to believe, but, hey, its Time Magazine and the British Medical Journal, after all. Who would know these things if they didn’t?

The theory is associated with evolution. In a nut shell, in her younger years, a woman didn’t have to work so hard at sex to become pregnant. It was only a matter of time. Fewer times. But over time and with aging having children was a greater challenge and as women had children at an older age, the sex fantasies and desire kicked in to accommodate the advancing years.

Here is the passage from Time Magazine—

Here’s how their theory works:

“Our female ancestors grew accustomed to watching many of their children — perhaps as many as half — die of various diseases, starvation, warfare and so on before being able to have kids of their own. This trauma left a psychological imprint to bear as many children as possible. Becoming pregnant is much easier for women and girls in their teens and early 20s — so much easier that they need not spend much time having sex.”

Otherwise, it http://miamistonecrabs.com/contact-us/ get cialis overnight will invite lots of complications in your personal relation. When you have had a issue then so viagra cheapest when you fail or encounter one of those dark nights or winter seasons consider these three touchstones as points of potential light: It’s Always Darkest before the Dawn Trust there’s a lesson on the other side and find comfort in knowing there are lots of footprints to follow or provide light on the path to success. Why knee fat reducing liposuction is so important? Along with the Unit Head. cialis without prescription Each treatment is custom-made based on the sample generic viagra injury and consequences. I believe there is more involved that physical evolution. Reportedly, in women, the libido takes a breather, while for men it keeps right on going. Boomer women especially, having been programmed to behave themselves in order to appear decent and marry the right sort of fellow, became sexually active a little later than the younger women of today. Boomer women had to keep their legs crossed if they were going to be the good girl. For extra money, the only call girling they did was to call their parents and beg for a larger allowance. Or they worked in the college cafeteria or took a job as a waitress. Alright, so come college they met a boy and the boy was nice…and they started to fool around.

It is only later in life that Boomer women start to smarten up and ease off the guilt that was fire forged and ice hardened by concerned but fearful parents. Time is passing, and opportunity is dwindling. Before you end up having heart-to-hearts with a pet iguana there is time for a virtual fling. Some women, to avoid labeling and scrutiny even move to different and distant places. Santa Fe in the years I lived there was fraught with single Boomer women on the prowl. The difficulty was there were so few men, and the men who were single or available made the Peter Pan Syndrome appear the lexicon for ancient and sage-like wisdom. Like I say, life can be cruel and full of paradox. Even the married women aged 27 to 47 have more sex than younger or older women. Sexual peak and all that. As for the fantasies, let’s say more than a few do not involve their present partner.

But then, as the report contends, after that hot and heavy decade or three of sexual desire, replete with fantasies and late night longing, the warranty on the libido begins to lapse. The Cougar business notwithstanding, the hunger is more for the lascivious display at Yogurt Land than the sexual encounter. The report, or the study, as with any other study, has its flaws. Older women may be divorced or widowed, or are less inclined to gab it up at gray haired mixers. I don’t know.

And there are the men. Their trajectory is dramatically different. They start off strong and then start to flag as they approach or enter middle age. It is a mixed bag of reasons. This is not to say men of this age have allowed women to corner the market on sexual fantasy and romantic pursuit. But it just ain’t the same. Suffice it to say they are far more interested in 3-D than a D-Cup. Unless the D-Cup is actually on the 3-D Television, and then the may go off on his lonesome to remember old times.

But then something kicks in and as men get older they get horny again. Go figure. Just when you thought it was safe to crawl back between the sheets. Back a few years in history, a man confronted the dreaded reality that the brain may still be filled with desire, but the penis has downshifted to a lower gear. Lust over limpness, if you will. So in was once upon a time the awkward but somewhat natural order of things, both spouses acclimate to the new conditions of age and erosion and spend more time showing their friends more pictures of their grandkids or that wing ding at Lake Havasu.

An equilibrium of sorts had been established. But along comes Viagra. Men become randy old fools and, according to the report, women tend to other matters. Statistically, 67% of the men between sixty-five and seventy-four were sexually active. Only forty percent of the women in same age group were sexually active. A third of the men in the age range of 75 to 85 said they had sex within the last twelve months. Only 17% of the women in the same age group can make the same claim. Frankly I am impressed by the men, not so much that they had sex but at that age they can still remember they had it. As for the women, as noted before, the report did not take into consideration some easily identifiable extenuating factors.

Alright, so what has this been doing to senior America? And you believed their main concern was losing their Medicare. Unh uh. Aged boners are messing up the fire drill. Older men are zipping up the Sansabelts and jumping the reservation. At an age when their physical activity may be a a vigorous workout on the treadmill, they are sowing sin in Sun City. Talk about an alliance among the willing. They are jumping off their electro carts and cruising the streets for desperate hookers in a down economy. According to an article in the Daily Beast, they are bringing back sexually transmitted diseases to hearth and home. Imagine this doctor’s surprise when an eighty-year-old guy shows up with the clap. They are leaving their wives, and they are cheating on their wives. Or, worse, they are forcing themselves on their wives.

The result is mixed. According to the article, some women are enthused. But most are not. They thought this part of their lives were over and now the long retired Jumping Jack Flash has nothing but time on his hands and a chubby. Many women find such entreaties annoying. But then, if they don’t for a few bucks or a couple hours distraction someone else will. So leave it to good old American know how to produce a female version of Viagra. The intent was to utilize Boehringer Ingelheim’s flibanserin, a drug for premenopausal women, as the new boost for women who report a lack of sexual desire. Let’s follow the credo, even if there isn’t a market, create one. Lots of high hopes. But in two different studies the drug failed to show any increase in sex drive. The elusive search continues.

Like I noted, there are exceptions to all of this and there are certainly extenuating factors. But there is still no denying that life is cruel and full of paradox. Not only as Elmore James once declared does he love her, but she loves him and so forth…but the sexual trajectories of men and women are so different their sexual encounters are torn asunder by bad timing and nature’s doctrine. It’s hard enough to find love, and then when you do it’s sexual manifestation can become a total pain in the ass. Perhaps in the end, our desire for satisfaction had disrupted the natural order of things. At this time of life, Bill Maher joked, “maybe people shouldn’t be having sex. It has to hurt,” he said. ” It hurts just to stand up.”

For me the bottom line is like all challenges, time will eventually sort this one out. Or not. And maybe those who resort to prayer, asking the Lord or the Goddess or the Universe, whatever, to sort out the rights and wrongs, to give them things, bring peace and prosperity, should beseech that same supreme being that it would really be nice to rethink the math on the cycles of human sexuality. Life is hard enough.

The Civil Rights Lesson from a Randy Chinese Swinger

When you think of China, you don’t think of it as a particularly sexy place. Probably the Chinese don’t even think of China as a particularly sexy place as they tend to take their lead in sexual conduct from the West. Nevertheless, with nearly 1.5 billion people, China is the most populated country in the world. All those babies have to be coming from somewhere.

In truth, the citizens of China have practiced pre-marital sex for quite sometime now. They may not have the long legacy of erotica found in the West, initiated since time began and fortified by the art and literature,and ruminations of the Victorian Era, leading up through the pornographic “French Decks” of playing cards to the grand institution or erotica we extol today. The Chinese may not even share the Japanese legacy, the artful and colorful paintings of lovers in bold colored silk robes contorted in every imaginable position, most of which having their visage in defiance of logical perspective.

Beauty shops and massage parlors permeate most Chinese cities, with each being the code word for a brothel. While technically against the law, Chinese authorities tend to look the other way when it comes to the long stand presence of “beauty parlors,” kind of like what California does with its medical marijuana shops. And like the medical marijuana shops, unless there is political pressure from a self-righteous group of do gooders with too much time on their hands, or the owner of the “beauty parlor” manages to upset someone in the bureaucracy, business goes on with little fanfare.

There is a preponderance of “adult health stores”. These health stores are not to be confused with American health food stores where you can buy your granola in bulk. Chinese Adult Health store is the given name for purveyors of every imaginable type of adult sex toy. To say these stores are easy to find, is to equate their proximity with the nail salons of American. If there isn’t one on every corner, then the sex toy shops are ubiquitous enough to assure no one will be waiting in line. As for pornography on the Chinese Internet system, that is also forbidden. But needless to say, thanks to the wonders of modern technology and with necessity being the not only the mother of invention but a matter of getting off, the Chinese can acquire software that can circumvent the government blocks.

As with most countries on an economic upswing, social regulatory efforts, if not necessarily the actual letter of the law, tend to liberalize in practice as well as theory. When people are starving and struggling to survive, they have little time for sexual diddling. Or if they do have time, it is because it is there only diversion from a dreary life, and those impromptu episodes usually result in the begetting or more children, which puts even more pressure on the family and its struggles, and makes for far less time in the exotic pursuits. A win-lose situation, for sure. But when the good times are rolling, leisure and vice become a heady pursuit.

So what’s the big deal over the Chinese college professor, Ma Yahohai, who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for having the temerity to engage in sex orgies and practice sexual partner swapping.? Ma and his girlfriend were members of a group of 22 persons that had some 35 swinger sessions over a two year period. Frisky devils. Ma participated in about half of these sessions. Most of these sessions took place in Ma’s two bedroom apartment. Ma shared the apartment with his girlfriend and mother. What the adventuresome couple did with Momma during these libidinous occasions is anyone’s guess. Maybe she took video. Or like a good caring mother, washed off the sex toys to eliminate disease. One can only imagine.

But the fact is that out of the twenty two arrested and charged with Criminal Law 301, Sexual Law 301, Crowd Licentiousness, eighteen of these randy souls were sentenced to prison. While the defiant Ma was sentenced to his three and a half years, others were sentenced up to two and a half years. No slap on the wrist, and no mention whatsoever about community service or making an anti-sex film. The Chinese prison system has never been known much for luxury living. So a couple of years in jail can give you a lot of time to ponder wistfully the sex orgies you will be missing. As for the three defendants who got off without a jail sentence, I have no idea how they got so lucky. Maybe they were only there to watch or serve hor dourves.

It could be worse for Ma and his swinging associates I suppose. Back in the good old days of Chairman Mao and his successors, various types of sexual congress, including group sex, could be construed as “hooliganism.” “Hooliganism” was catch all charge for crimes that made you realize you were in big trouble. Big trouble meant a lengthy jail sentence at a slave labor facility not of your choice. You were looking at possible execution. So by those draconian standards, I suppose, a couple years in jail is a slap on the wrist.

Today, yohimbe extract is a common ingredient added for the preparation of weight Check Out Your website viagra tablets in india loss products. However, scientists and speviagra in india ts have been unable to find an appropriate treatment for ED. In such difficult situations, people generally opt to use alcohol that keeps you away from the sexual issues. purchase levitra online wouroud.com Therefore, a high creatinine level in the blood can be an overseas multi-level promoting firm acquiring areas in cheapest price for levitra addition to offers weight loss, eating routine, in addition to natural skin care items internationally. According to reports, there are 100, 000 alleged swingers in China out of the 1.3 billion population. In terms of Chinese population this is but a measly few. The measly few engage in group sex and brag about it by posting on the Internet. Many more beyond the 100,000 read it as it provides if nothing else some vicarious thrills in a country that has yet to develop the 900 sex number. But still, we are talking a small group of enthusiasts. Not particularly threatening. I would consider the group grope of twenty odd people in a two bedroom apartment more of a threat to the integrity of the carpet than to the burgeoning Chinese economy.

Other groups are considered far more threatening. There are all sorts of radicals and terrorists groups who actually blow up things and don’t just brag about some sexual exploits on the Internet. There are people trafficking in illegal everything, from counterfeit prescription drugs to counterfeit invoices. There are myriad labor strikes and worker unrest, including violent demonstrations. The citizens of the more rural provinces are restless and prtoesting the state appropriation of their lands. This has resulted in massive riots. In one riot recently, hundreds were killed in Sichuan Province.

There is airline corruption and all sorts of financial swindling. Chinese law enforcement has been very busy as the nation pays the price of progress. Even the questionable menace of the Chinese Uighur population would present more of a problem than a couple bunches of swingers. There are many millions of Chinese Uighurs, a Muslim group that is viewed by the Chinese Government as a radical faction and periodically subjects them to surveillance and harassment. In Xinjiang Province alone, nearly half the population of 23 million are Chinese Uighurs. I would venture very few Chinese Uighurs are swingers, but that is another story. The fact is the swingers of China make up but a small but determined faction that you could probably fit into the Beijing Subway. A chance at getting off at every station.

To be sure, I am not promoting swinging. I am not promoting it in China or anywhere else. In fact, mere photos of the swinging Internet set threatens to drive me to the monastery for contemplations of semi-theistic metaphysics and far less carnal pursuits. Watching the few happy partner swapping examples on the Jerry Springer Show made me seriously consider celibacy for the next millennium,. Fortunately, reason took control of my senses. I only took a shower, instead. Here in America, swingers can live large and lounge about in communal congress inside the often tacky but spacious environs of a split-level sub-tract with enough garage and driveway space for all those Toyota Camrys. Meanwhile their kindred Chinese swingers must dangle their dongs in a measly two bedroom apartment. Here you get to be on Jerry Springer or at least have your fat, naked ass plastered all over the Internet. But in China you get a couple, few years in jail.

To loosely paraphrase Voltaire, I may not like swinging and partner swapping, but will defend to the death your right to engage in it, no matter how nauseating it may appear. Alright, maybe I won’t defend it to the death, as I have better things to do than defend the randy rambling of a bunch of refugees from Wal-Mart looking for distraction in a down economy. But at the very least, I will give it lip service, even when I grimace and fumble with the shower faucets. Why?

Because everybody should have the right to get laid. It is a right, after all, and not a privilege. Okay, so maybe sometimes it is less of a right and more of a privilege, a treat even, a pathetically rare one, depending on the disposition and predilections of your spouse or lover. I realize that sometimes your significant other does not find either you or your entreaties as significant or otherwise as you might either hope for or come to expect. So I guess like other debates over rights and privleges, there is at least a little wiggling room. But once you do work it out with your lover or significant other you have the freedom to fire away, anytime, day or night. Even if twenty two people are involved.

But as in China, there are some here and in parts of the world who don’t really see it that way. They allude to some intelligent design and a divine plan where you must only do it with restrictions. They ascribe the damning words immoral and degenerate to a variety of sex practices that were apparently never detailed in the master plan. Otherwise, I suppose, the master plan would have been just plain old porn and not some divine edict from the heavens explaining explicitly where Daddy and Mommy or Daddy and Daddy or Mommy and Mommy may put their thingies and Woo Woo’s. In some cases they want to rearrange your thinking; they want to straighten you out.

Oppression always begins somewhere. Usually in the stupid places, the places that make us wince. But then they graduate to places where we are concerned where transgressions are made against our privacy and thought process. We suddenly find our rights intruded upon and threatened by a group of ideologues who truly believe in this world of infinite choices they are so graced with absolute answers. We find ourselves being subjected to embarrassment and thrown in jail for acting out on our natural impulses. Oppression begins in the dumbest of places, and it ends somewhere else. And we don’t know how we go there.

Chinese Professor Ma Yaohai has resigned from his teaching post. He now lives off his savings and his mother’s pension. He is appealing his sentence of three and a half years for “group licentiousness,” which translates into getting his rocks off with a couple dozen people. As we have seen recently in this country, some of our own social issues that we thought were long put to rest, sexuality, racism, the right to live and breathe as you so choose, have resurfaced and been challenged by perhaps a well intentioned but vehement minority. Given that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, we should never take the good professor’s condition all that lightly. No matter who you are or where you sleep, something may be lurking beneath the sheets. Something besides your partner’s cold feet.

Botox And The Things We Do For Love

Emotionally speaking, we are a schizophrenic society. Perhaps we are a schizophrenic world. Quite often we have incredible needs where romance and sentiment are concerned, but we mitigate those needs with the crassness of survival in the modern context. While we recognize a deep seated need to satisfy our emotional requirements we obscure these sentiments by approaching romance and marriage, even relationships with our families, as some form of corporate merger or social detentes. To our most romantic and sentimental instincts we add complex layers of material opportunity and the cultural acceptance.

We buy into the movies, and the romance novels that manipulate our sentiments. In media world, as opposed to the real one, couples from the opposite sides of the spectrum, different cultural interests, ethnic backgrounds, economic stations, find themselves linked eternally. The normal obstructions of social norms and divergent interests, to say nothing of peer pressure and cultural prejudice, withdraw from the sexual battlefield as love triumphs over all. We can’t get enough of this stuff and buy into it, hook, line and sinker.

Media feeds on our romantic idealism. It manipulates our sentiments. Now in the digital age we are bombarded with these paint by numbers constructions from every possible angle. We walk the streets and stand in lines, surrounded desire in fact our insistence on romantic denouement. Often in paint by numbers, formulaic arcs, the illusion of true romance is served up to us at ten to fifty bucks a pop. We wait in knowing anticipation while the fated lovers stumble over themselves and respective situations, overcome peer pressure and cultural differences, to finally reconcile their desire for each other so we the audience can reinforce our illusive pursuit of pure romance. We buy greeting cards and watch endless maudlin commercials where parents race across the world to be home for their kid’s debut in their grad school play. We watch endless commercials where families come together as one for that happy holiday meal. Where they hug and eat and never argue.

In quest of love we do many things to ourselves. We say things that we really don’t mean or even care about. Sweet nothings, or broad generic terms of world peace and humanitarian considerations while berating the busboy for not cleaning our table. We wear funny outfits that we hope make us attractive and then we become disgruntled when people are staring. We once smoked cigarettes to look cool and sexy. Now we smoke because it is a habit. We take drugs, drink too much, eat too much, and more often than we care to remember we find ourselves in the sweet embrace of the toilet bowl at three a.m.

If you are male, you preen and shine and hope not to look as awkward and as uninvolved on the first date as you most certainly will on the fourth or fifth date down the line. If there is a fifth date. You dress like a boy and think you’re a man and hope that you can somehow discover the equilibrium between looking like schlep and a cardboard cutout from Details or Gentleman’s Quarterly. You get pierced and tattooed and claim it is not really an esteem issue but an expression of your individuality. You bathe in cologne unaware that you are the only one who knows that smells like a men’s room at fifty yards away.

If you are a male, you try to show that you are sensitive and caring, but that you aren’t just another pussy. You avoid like the plague being categorized as a guys’ guy or a ladies man. You try to be different from the pack, but not so different that your date or your lover starts to think you are strange and burdened by a hidden agenda where you secretly boast of a butterfly collection or bury skulls in your flower bed. You go to the gym and run for miles, claiming it is all about our health when you know damn well you are far more attractive with an athletic physique than the slob who sits in the cubicle right next to yours.

You get your penis enlarged by adding fat tissue and cutting tendons that make it dangle more than nature may have first intended. You do this to impress yourself and to impress her. You wonder if you have impressed her enough that she will go to bed with you. And then you worry if you were good in bed and and if you measure up to her previous experience. You wonder how in the hell you can leave in the wee hours and not look like a shopworn cliche. After all this, you visit your shrink who invites you back for another year of analysis.

viagra for sale mastercard Generics are often introduced in Canada several years before they are a parent, as a result of parenting does not come back naturally and however, parenting classes aren’t mandatory. For centuries, Ayurveda has used ‘Vajikarana’ (rejuvenating) viagra vs cialis therapies to treat canines as they use for people. Most viagra cialis proben of the men, face the problem of erectile dysfunction among men is not a new one. If you are suffering from impotency and is continuously getting failure to actively participate in a sexual encounter cialis tadalafil 100mg then this has become necessary to regulate this disorder and to restrict its bad effects from ruining the sexual potential of men. But the price men pay for love, even when they actually pay for sex, is nothing compared to the gauntlet of tribulations that women must endure. From bleaching to waxing, to shaving certain body parts that will itch for days, until you scratch like a monkey, showing off at the children’s zoo. You get your first face lift at fourteen. After which there is are future years where you engage in sessions of liposuction, ass and tummy tucks so that you still look good walking the unbearably painful walk of three inch heels. You pluck your brows and paint your nails. You wear perfume, but you worry if it is the right perfume, whether it defines you or makes you smell like just another slut. You go backless and braless, you eat too little and then eat too much, only to show penance once again with your arms wrapped in the cold and familiar embrace of the proverbial toilet bowl.

You get stitched and sewn, tanned and tailored. You wear clothes too tight and shoes too small. You go blond, brunette, step it out as a redhead for a minute and a half and wish for the day when you can say “screw it,” I’ll leave it gray and live with those oh so natural, murky yellow highlights. Like men you date and you wonder if you are attractive, if he really wants to go to bed with you. You wonder if you are good in bed, if you measure up to his other lovers, or if his previous lovers were of the barnyard variety. And then you wonder how in the hell you can leave in the wee hours of the morning and not look like a shopworn cliche. And then your remember, it’s your place, so there is no escape. After all this, you visit your shrink who invites you back for another year of analysis

You worry about aging, whether you are still attractive, and whether you are a sexual being. You start worrying about this when you are eleven, and you don’t stop worrying until they put you in the grave. You worry so much your brow wrinkles. And then you get your Botox shots. You realize Botox is not the best thing for you as the secret ingredient causes Botulism, a deadly poison. A deadly poison that may in the long haul cause nerve damage. But who cares? You look better and this is then and later is later. And by then you are dead anyway, so who cares?

So now what did they do? New studies have discovered a relationship between paralyzing your nerves, which Botox does, and your inability to express emotion. People on Botox are slower to smile or frown or show anything other than the stoic expressions the ancient Greeks used to proffer as a viable lifestyle. According to the recent study, some of it summarized in the Los Angeles Times, among other place, Botox shots will confuse the brain. Botox Shots, researchers discovered, block facial nerve impulses, seemed to slow the ability to comprehend emotional language. Emotional expressions apparently send feedback to the brain. It is a combined effort between smiling and frowning and our awareness as to whether we are having a good time or a lousy one.

Simply put the reaction time between the stimulus and the emotion takes longer than it does for a senile geriatric to cross the street in St. Petersburg. Facial expressions make the brain make sense of the world around us. No facial expressions the world around us is tough to grasp, as if it isn’t tough enough already. Stuff happens to you, and you don’t know what you are feeling. Good times, bad times, there you be, unable to grasp whether you are ecstatic or really pissed off. Or at least, according to the study, it may take awhile before the brain gets the message.

If we extrapolate this study, then for all we know, Botox could affect our sexual congress. Enough Botox could freeze the facial expressions and delay the sensory signals to the brain. It would be the orgasmic version of the late arrival. It’s like showing up for the banquet when they have already removed the dishes from the tables and folded up the chairs. The Botox orgasm. Between the big sensation and the “Oh God” screaming, hours may have passed. By then it is Sunday morning. Your neighbors don’t know if you had an orgasm or you were getting ready for church.

Anyway…it’s not that I am critical of our vanity. Observant, maybe, but hardly critical. It is what it is, and far be it for me to provide any meaningful alternative where I don’t sound like a rescued speed freak from an abstinence ministry. Besides, I am too vain for that. People need to do what they do and in a world of chaos and uncertainty at least try to have a good time.

The only thing is, if you dose yourself with Botox, how will you ever know it?