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.”

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.

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.

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.

Anybody married has at one time or another pondered however briefly the idea of doing away with his or her spouse or long term lover.   It’s natural.   You can lie about it and claim self-righteous indignity, but I seriously doubt if your spouses demise wasn’t at least cause for a flash of speculation.   Except maybe if you are Mother Theresa.  But then, she wasn’t married.

Let’s face it, killing one’s spouse is an historic tradition.    It has peppered history.  It has moved fortunes, and it has realigned nations.  It has also disrupted families and left us to ponder the illogical.  But prevalent.  As it is difficult to pick up a paper and not discover the periodic and often sensationalized story of one significant other reaching the dramatic conclusion that the other significant other is not so significant, after all.

Spouse killings are big news.   Scott Peterson, a pathetic nebish of a man with a lust for other women, a deep seated hatred for his wife, and a bad murder plan, made headlines for months on end, after he killed his eight months pregnant wife, Laci, and tossed her body into the San Francisco Bay.    His turgid story practically made careers.   Talking heads babbled on and on as if this idiot had killed the Archduke Ferdinand and set off the First World War.   But interest in that little catastrophe in distant Europe pales in the face of spousal murder.

I remember as a kid hearing my parents discuss Ethel Kravitz who awakened her husband one morning with five shots into his sleeping body.   She was early in the game and didn’t get the headlines, the book and movie deal she would have today as she explained to all who would listen of her mental torture at the hands of what’s his face.   And then not long ago there was the woman in Texas who as taped by security cameras running her Mercedes over her cheating husband’s body.   Like fifteen times.   Surely her way of declaring the marriage was over.

But then Texas has always been intriguing with its spousal murders.    I remember living there some decades ago when the “crimes of passion” ruling was still hanging around.   Come weekends you would get the murder scores like the ball scores.  The first being how many drunken rednecks not yet accustomed to urbanization shot up the bar and killed some other barfly in a heated dispute over the superiority of  the Ford or Chevy truck.  I remember one incident where one shot another for taking his hat.  Not quite like taking his horse or his truck, but it got him shot just the same.

But that was nothing when compared to the time honored Texas tradition where spouses who shot the wife, husband,  lovers, whatever,  claimed they did it in the heat of passion.  The heat of passion laws were still on the books back then, and more than a few judges paid homage to custom and gave the heat of passion plea notable credibility.   The loving couple may have not spoken to each other for months,  not had sex for decades, but suddenly that old passion blazed inside and blammo, there was blood on the Karastan carpet.    I remember one husband shooting his wife’s lover because he thought he was a burglar.  A burglar standing naked over his straying wife.   And these, mind you, were hardly the trailer trash whose collective insignificance meant their tales of  murder and betrayal was a mere footnote to the upscale crimes of passion.    It wasn’t like today where any half-assed ne’er do well could make big headlines by only killing his or her spouse.  If you were of the lower classes you had to at least kill a whole bunch of people and not just your spouse before any self-respecting journalist would waste news space or air time on your sordid and pathetic story.  But then, that was before there was a 24-hour news monster that had to be fed.

Yes, more than a few of the wealthy and successful have traveled the rickety path from the appearance of reputable citizenship to homicidal celebrity.   There are any number of physicians who choose to do in their wives to avoid the inconvenience of divvying up community property.   Sometimes there is a lover involved, and sometimes it is just a stand alone venal gesture.   Such was the recent case where according to the Los Angeles Times, a man was charged with arranging for his wife’s murder back in 2003.   Only now, are they bringing charges, which speaks well of the tenaciousness of the Los Angeles Police on this murder case.   The murdered spouse was one of their own, after all, and had been a secretary in the Internal Affairs Division.   Police considered among other leads the killing was job related.   But ultimately the motive enveloped the estranged wife discovered assets her husband didn’t declare in what had initially been an amicable divorce.   It came  to light that it was a hired gang member who murdered her with a shotgun, outside a Mexican Restaurant.   At the alleged behest of  her husband.  Her husband had taken there because a friend had told him the guacamole was something special.

But speaking of killings, there are the celebrity murders that seemed wrapped around restaurants.  Something about eating a decent meal that makes one want to kill their beloved.  There is the Robert Blake who was brought up on murder charges for allegedly killing his wife in North Hollywood, outside their favorite Italian restaurant.   He wasn’t convicted.   O.J. Simpson, was also found not guilty, wink-wink, was charged with killing his wife after she, too, returned from a then trendy Italian restaurant in Brentwood.    But Phil Spector was found guilty.  Took two trials to make it happen, as the evidence of his having blood all over himself, powder burns, and claiming to his driver “I just killed someone,” made it a tough call for the jury.    Alright, technically she wasn’t Spector’s wife, but some woman he had picked up in a restaurant.  Nevertheless, Spector deserves some honorable mention here, if for no other reason than his past exploits with former wives and girlfriends.     All those years of trying shouldn’t go unnoted.

There was the celebrity chef, Juan Cruz, who was arrested for arranging his wife’s murder.    And now  Mexican authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Bruce Beresford-Redman, former producer of  ”Survivor,” some irony there,  in connection with the killing of his wife.   Beresford-Redman has denied any involvement with his wife’s death.   Saturday Night Live featured player, Phil Hartman, was  shot by his drug addled wife.    Years go, women were best known for poisoning their victims.   But now they have modernized and have exchanged poison for bullets.    And you get to know the outcome of your actions much sooner than poison would allow. You’ve come a long way, baby.

Speaking of shooting, Jean Harris who, yes, wasn’t his wife but his lover, spent  time in the poky for shooting down Scarsdale Diet Doctor, Herman Tarnower for seeing other women.   She shot him four times and claimed it was an accident.  Oh, the rich, they will sell you anything, including the accidental four shot explanation.  Some poor slob who shoots his wife is damn well sure to be sitting in line for lethal injection.  But, hey, Harris and Tarnower made for a fabulous story, because what could be better than sex, murder, and a diet book all thrown into the same Movie of the Week.  It’s tough to ask for anything more.

Age doesn’t seem to be a factor when it comes to killing your spouse.  Spousal murder is fun for all ages.   The young do it, think of Ryan Jenkins, former reality show contestant, who killed his ex-wife, Jasmine Fiore, a former swimsuit model.   Brain child that he was, Jenkins pulled out her teeth and cut off her fingers to keep the police from identifying the body.   He forgot about the serial numbers in the boob job.  Oh well.  At least Jenkins had the decency to hang himself in a Canadian motel and save the state some desperately needed bucks.

And then there is my former neighbor and strange but brilliant fellow, Ira Einhorn.   Combining actual research with actual bullshit, Einhorn was a charismatic soul despite the fact he appeared to  wash every new moon and gave Mr. Dirt a serious run for his money.  Nevertheless,  he captivated the new agers, academicians, and corporate folk alike with his mighty spiel about the expanded mind and the future of everything.   Even when convicted, many still backed him, in fact supported him with money and other assistance as he eluded authorities for close to twenty years.   In fairness, Ira didn’t kill his spouse but the young woman who loved him and then found him overbearing and controlling once she grew up and out of her infatuation stage.   Ira didn’t like that, couldn’t stand the fact that she had left him, and forever sealed their bond by beating her to death with a hammer and then keeping her desiccated body in a trunk inside his funky apartment.   He had convinced the more gullible it was all a set up.  That despite the smell coming from his apartment, he was working in mind manipulation and telekinetic communication.    But the less gullible, like the jury for instance, wasn’t buying it, and convicted poor Ira in something like two hours.  They probably took so long because one juror had lingered in the bathroom.

Okay, enough of the gruesome facts.   There are certainly enough to get  the picture, and the list or spousal and lover murders is far too long for any reasonable person to want to absorb.  Beside, I will live that up to Nancy Grace and the Crime Network.  But spousal murder still remains its own kind of killing.   Jealousy and avarice may be the top two ingredients to set someone off to killing their spouse, that’s true.  But, still, we are referring to a pretty dramatic and reprehensible act here, all to save a few bucks or justify a lover on the side.  Or to nullify that lover on the side.   Whatever.   It is some recourse for what appears an intractable condition.

While we have for the more religious the Biblical depiction of fratricide, there is little I can think of that explains in any detail the killing of one spouse or another.  You can find it in blues songs and in country music, but not in the Bible.    But then I have never been much of a Bible reader, so I might have missed something in class.  And then if I had missed the spousal homicide bit, pop culture would have reared the parable in whatever dumbed down  lyric form so I would at least be aware of it. No going there.   But then not everything in the Bible.   I am Western and think in Western thoughts.   There are  special creeds where the ultra religious somehow still feel justified,  in killing their wives.    But say no more as they tend to get upset when you remind them of it.

Was spousal homicide just inconceivable back in Biblical times?   Doubtful  Or was it that women were considered property or chattel and their sudden demise  at the hands of their self-righteous husbands was nothing to write verses about?   I don’t know.   But then there is no real Biblical listing of wives killing husbands, either.  And they might have been more justified, given the oppression of the times.

And what prompts one spouse to kill another?    Rich and intelligent people commit to spousal murder the face of all probability they will be caught, convicted and sentenced to a place far removed from the golf course?  It is amazing that to avoid giving up material possessions one would stoop to the unthinkable.    Or because they want to leave their spouse for another lover.  Or the spouse doesn’t want them leaving for another lover.   It”s a stone, cold fact yet still amazing that greed and jealousy leads to the kind of  thought  that leads to murder.

I can understand the true crime of passion when in a jealous rage one spouse or the other snaps out and stands there with the smoking gun or dripping knife.  Dumb but understandable.  But most often jealous rage is not the the case.   Most often spousal murders are premeditated and calculated.    Most of the time there is a trail.   There are motives and documents, telephone records and complicit email.   There is often the actual killer, the guy who did it,  arrested on a different charge and now willing to tell all for a lighter sentence.   Or for an appearance on Larry King.  Few get away with it.  But still the beat goes on.

I would love to attribute it to our social programming and blame the media for egging us on.   I would love to cite loose morals, the ever growing need for self-aggrandizement.   I could opt that we read enough headlines, see enough movies, and read enough books to perhaps make some of the more demented start to think spouse killing is an easy fix to a bad marriage.   But it is not the media.   The media may fan the flames, but there is something inside us that leads the charge.   There is that chemical impulse that leads to premeditation, that causes some to cross the line between rational thought and plotting and scheming their spouse’s murder.   Yes, it is in our chemistry.  Damn it.

So I guess we should take into consideration the old Dupont slogan, “Better Living Through Chemistry.”  Or not.   Perhaps it is better said that we are just dumb enough to be human.

The head of the Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau for the Hong Kong Customs Office, recently reported that eighty percent of the counterfeit drugs seized are  used to treat impotence.  This means that despite all the diseases out there that require treatment, from heart disease to restless leg syndrome, the main concern is penis performance.   The heart arteries could be blocked, and the diabetes count could be four hundred and change; lungs could be like toasted marshmallows from years of cigarette smoke, and the brain riddled with mad cow disease, but if the penis works, then all is well with the world.

Stiffening the penis is big money wherever you look.   Between the lap dances and the porn sites, the sex junkets to Thailand, even the somewhat tame Victoria’s Secret Catalog, much of the international marketing thrust is designed for Chubby.    There are colognes promising sex attraction through Pheromones and monkey sweat.   There are any number of herbs and foods considered to be aphrodisiacs.  Where the penis is concerned, the world is its oyster.  We are not talking a few bucks here    We are talking mega-billions.

In fact the manufacture and sale of imitation Viagra and other such drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction generates more profits than any other drug sold in China.    Much of it is also exported.   But there is for the world wide boner effort, plenty of pills to go around.   Viagra and Cialis are the two most pervasive counterfeit drugs confiscated by customs officials.  Needless to say, these drugs are not regulated, so they either consist of harmful adulterants that can give the user damaging side effects, or they are merely placebos that have little affect whatsoever.   In all, it is a gamble that most customers are willing to take.   The hope of a hard on is more promising than the fear of, say, a liver disease.

I find this remarkable on at least one level.    The fact that consumers will take health risks for elusive or ephemeral benefits is really unremarkable.  In fact, it is commonplace.   People will use Botox in spite of some of the possible nerve damage it can cause.    They will smoke, drink, take drugs to excess.   They will  have themselves peeled and snipped and will disregard any possible dangers.   Hell, they will overlook all the warning signs of transmittable disease and come closing time go home with a disaster just waiting to happen.   So, I suppose, why not at least have a pharmacological  erection to accommodate that ill fated night you may long remember?

No, nothing remarkable about this.   What is remarkable is the fact that after hundreds and even thousands of years of the Chinese pursuit of the heavenly hard on, they are resorting to Western medicine to achieve their desired erections.  All those centuries of eating everything from deer antler, tiger penis, bear bladder, and even gall stones has not compared to the majestic little blue pill.  Or the yellow one.   So has all the years of imbibing Shark’s Fin Soup, Bull Dick and Testicle Soup, Ginseng,  Rhino’s Horn, Sea Cucumber and Bird’s Nest Soup not produced the results that we were led to believe?    One has to wonder if the desire for Western treatment for erectile dysfunction is because all that other crap doesn’t work, or it is largely the notion that downing Tiger Penis is a much tougher project than swallowing one small pill.   Even with hot sauce, it is hard to imagine what culinary delights the Tiger Penis has to offer.   Common sense would dictate it’s a lot easier to take the Viagra or Cialis and leave room in your stomach for some veggie fried rice or a nice, juicy steak.   But then the exotic lure of Tiger Penis is something that has escaped me, to date, so maybe there is in the end an acquired taste.

Chinese medicine has been venerated for a fair number of years.  Skeptics of Western medical practices, and there should be, believe me, have often extolled the virtue of Chinese Medicine.  We are not just talking acupuncture here, but the herbs and foods that offer curative power.   Chinese medicine is regarded highly in holistic circles as both reputable and in certain ways advanced in its understanding of the human body and the way certain diseases should be treated.   I have used Chinese Medicine.   So why, when there are nine million herbs, body parts, food sources and whatever that are over the centuries devoted to raising a woody, have the Chinese decided to eschew all that and switch over to the pill?

Perhaps it is the nifty commercials where a boomer band sits around singing “Viva Viagra,” at the top of its bar band  lungs as if a group grope at closing time is their collective reward for playing bad cover songs.  Or the kinder and gentler Cialis commercials where “when the moment is right for you.”   Yeah, like painting a room might suddenly inspire the two of you to put down the rollers and climb down off of that ladder.   I have wondered if the suggestion behind double bathtub commercial is that once the Cialis takes hold of Johnny Wonder it will drill through one tub into the other.    Better than Popeye’s spinach.

You would think with all the Viagra buying, the Chinese would have  a lot of sex on their minds.  The idea of buying counterfeit Viagra, or Cialis, or Levitra, for that matter, I would think is to keep the cost down.   If you are messing around just here and there, what’s few bucks more for  the real thing.   Okay,  one reason for buying counterfeit may be the confidentiality.   In China, where losing face, or whatever, is a big issue, the Chinese man may want to keep it on the low down that his thingie ain’t working.   It’s not like here where we are not only singing about it, but bragging to our friends.

Perhaps it is a quantitative thing and Chinese men have become a bunch of horny souls who thanks to the national surge in their economy are looking for love in all the wrong places.   It could be they went from the bitterness of short money and a lot of starvation to feeling flush everywhere but down below.   Deer Antler letting you down?  Try Cialis.   So there in the need for quantity comes forth the need for economy.  Viagra and such is expensive.   Counterfeit pills have to be a lot cheaper.  But then it is more than a tad ironic that a nation trying to retain population control is defying the odds of pregnancy that is strongly propagated by  an insistent erection.

But the Chinese have for at least the modern age been largely a prudish nation.  Movies are often censored.   National policy forbids pornography.  Yet when it comes to illegal brothels the government looks the other way.   Usually, the illegal brothels are fronted by a hair salon.  What a rude awakening for the unsuspecting soul ventures there for a cut and perm.     And since the “hair salons” proliferate Chinese cities, perhaps a pocketful of Viagra is necessary to just to work your way down the block.

In fairness, every nation has had its aphrodisiacs.   There are oysters, chili, dog meat, yes, dog meat, more oysters,ginkgo, turtle eggs, and  the skink.    After awhile, it seems just about everything but liquor and ice cream will help men get it up.   Of course, Western culture being what it is, nothing makes more sense than a single pill you pop an hour before your are ready to roll of the sofa and turn off the TV.   Can’t argue with that.

Although there are certain Westerners who are taking issue with the Viagra culture.   As the Daily Beast has dubbed them The Viagra Brigade, here are the women who at a certain age have had their sex drives diminished to levels of  a more  sedentary convenience.   Now here they are, content to pursue other interests, coping with a horny husband.  Some  of these men make increased demands on these women, depending on the size of the prescription.   And some go astray, complicating long term relationships by jumping the reservation and heading for the younger women world  for that one last time around.

Geezers with an attitude.   And then there are  the younger women who married the wealthier older man for security, companionship, and a lot of nice things his money could buy her.   Sex wasn’t really part of the package.  but now she suddenly has to perform.   Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Maybe had a way of telling us to slow down.   Maybe, in the original master plan,  with aging we were not about to reproduce so there was not much need for erections.   Maybe, after a certain point, the penis may be working with a little help from its friends, but the rest of us is not quite up to snuff.    There are aches and pains.  The aging body hurts just when you get up in the morning, yet alone when you are having sex.  So maybe we are in defiance of nature and the master plan.

But then again, maybe not.  Maybe the crap we put into our systems that we call food creates diabetes and assorted ailments that are well known to cause erectile dysfunction.  It’s possible being obese or a least a couple dozen pounds overweight may have something to do with the way the blood travels through the body.   Maybe the sedentary life and our self-absorptions, preoccupations and worries, real and imagined, impair the sexual reflect.   One could justify that screwing in the face of age and adversity is a grand act of defiance and of telling impending mortality to kiss our collective ass.   Maybe after the BMW and the decorator everything sex and its resultant pleasure is one of the only things that really matters.    After all, we have how many sexual thoughts per hour?  I have long lost track.

So for the horny Chinese and the horny rest of us around the world, if you can’t take the heat, stay in the kitchen.  Viva Viagra.   If nothing else, it is one of the few things in this world that actually works.

Los Angeles has always been a city of contradictions.   For one thing, most of its citizens share a love hate relationship with the city.   It is a Western City, populated at first by New Yorkers and Mid-Westerners, and now with people from every part of the globe.   It is an American city with an Hispanic past.   Its major products are agrarian, technology, and dreams.

It has been ridiculed of its tackiness and referred to as Tinsel Town.  Yet with the suburbanization of most cities in America, with their endless grids of  unremarkable houses in predictable tracts all punctuated by a series of shopping malls and big box stores, the City of Los Angeles, has become incredibly unique to itself.  On one hand when you live in Los Angeles you are aware that this may be the vanguard of American living.  If only the rest of America didn’t despise us so much.   You live here at the far end of America.  When you visit anywhere else you feel more like you have been living on the moon.

The City of the Angels one of the most populous urban areas in the nation.  Yet it’s odd and endless grids are offset by a large array of year round foliage, replete with any number of exotic plants, desert vegetation, oaks, maples, Bougainvillea, Jacaranda, and the occasional Willow.  The houses themselves are a flurry and mix and match of architectural types, with Tudors standing next door to Spanish Mission, next to mid century modern, next to the sleek, contemporary pronouncements of the twenty first century.  All encapsulated by an endless ribbon of freeways, highways,  boulevards, and narrow, winding canyon roads.   A city with extreme wealth and extreme poverty, luxury landscapes and urban blight, all embraced by the Pacific Ocean to the West and Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountain ranges to its north and east.

LA has probably the worst urban gridlock.  It is a once flat city going high rise.    Yet in some parts of the city urban sprawl is being witnessed by decidedly non-urban creatures like deer and coyote.  This is in addition to the opossums, snakes and wildcats, vying for space with major street gangs and gangs of paparazzi.   It is some mix, and confused chroniclers of the city have labored for years to analyze the contradictions.

In my twenties, I remember when the richest part of Beverly Hills, the rich flats resplendent then with celebrities and wealthy replicants of  the post-Ozzie and Harriet era,  living just across the street from the Wonder Bread Factory.  Here were houses envied by much of a nation, to say nothing of the Beverly Hills City Hall and Police Station, all enduring the smell of sugar and yeast from what was then the biggest bread maker in the country.

Los Angeles has long been denigrated for its lack of culture and abundance of nut jobs.  But meanwhile, it has long been the political sanctuary for creative refugees, be it the Mexican artists, fleeing the Mexican Revolution, or the Europeans fleeing Hitler’s scourge.   Despite the long standing and tired joke that the main culture here is in yogurt, the art scene flourishes as one of the most dynamic in the world.   There are many literary luminaries living here, and a media and entertainment center it is second to none.   As for the nut jobs, there are many, but the city’s financial and legal centers impact greatly the economics of Asia Pacific and global economics in general.

LA is the world-wide capital for self absorption.  It is a powerful city, where many adults still dress like children.  Yet it is for the most part a bastion of liberal politics, and more ethnically diverse than just about any other city.   LA is a city where people don’t care much about your background, the color of your skin and to which religion you cast your prayers.   They care instead about what you do and what you drive.   They care about how you look and what you wear, and whether you are smart enough to seize on opportunity when it air kisses your front door.

So it is small wonder, that at least part of the consciousness of Los Angeles would be symbolized by the Hollywood Sign.  Why is this a contradiction?  At least for a city that likes to knock things down and build things new things in their place, thus reinventing itself and nullifying history, the temporarily constructed Hollywood sign remains a part of our permanent history.  But maybe not for long.

The Hollywood Sign sits on Mt. Lee.  It was constructed initially in 1923.   It wasn’t built to honor Hollywood, movie capital of the world.   No.  The sign was an advertisement for a new building development known as Hollywoodland.   The sign was studded with light bulbs, some 40,000 in all.   It was garish and tacky, so very LA.

In 1949 the City Council in its great wisdom ordered  the “land” part of the sign to be removed so it could become the enduring symbol of the center of the earth, as least as far as the motion picture industry was concerned.   But structures made of wood and  sheet metal were not meant to endure, and the sign fell in and out of disrepair.  Its durability wasn’t helped any when people crashed their cars into it, vandalized it, and even jumped from it; as in one case where a failed and forlorn Hollywood actress jumped from the letter “H.”

Like many actors of a certain age, the sign may have looked good from a distance, but up close it was looking aged and worn, and perhaps only worth advertising that the once glamorous Hollywood proper was now populated by hookers and junkies, and tourists still gaping at the concrete feet of celebrities outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

In 1978, the sign was in such disrepair that the city launched a fund raising drive to replace the letters.   In steel. At the time, the cost of replacement was $250,000 or so.  Alice Cooper donated a new letter “O” along with his manager at the time, Shep Gordon.   To garner donations, pieces of the old sign were embedded in Lucite and sold or given away.   A friend gave me one of those, and to this day it still adorns one of my bookshelves.   Despite the passing of years, I still find it oddly reassuring, a relic of accidental permanence in an impermanent environment.

More work was done on the sign in 2005 and 2006.  Like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, it needs maintenance.

So where is the big contradiction?   Okay, if it is not a contradiction, then its is surely ironic.  The Hollywood Sign started out as an advertisement for a housing development.  And now, Fox River Financial Resources, Inc, wants to disrupt its solitary presence by putting up a housing development on the 138 acres of surrounding land.    The real estate development will either jeopardize the Hollywood Sign or make it awfully damned ugly to look at with a bunch of houses in its perimeter.

The City of Los Angeles and its Trust for Public Land has but three more days to raise an additional $2.8 million of the $12 Million in total needed to buy the land from Fox River, which bought it from the Hughes estate in 2002 for $1.7 Million.  A nice profit.   For what Los Angeles considers one of its historical treasures.

Personally, I want to see the sign saved.  A few luxury houses on the mountain crest will hardly substitute for the sheer beauty of the mountainous area, a rare bit of space unmolested by our problematic need to build on every piece of vacant land.   As these are to be four luxury houses developed on this parcel, the abusively rich can find another place to park their ass.    We would miss the sign, but hardly the cretins intent on their fiefdoms.  The Hollywood Sign, after all, does symbolize Los Angeles.