SITTING ON A CHAIR

When taking the bus down to Chinatown one notices elderly Chinese ladies who, when a seat becomes vacant, may gingerly perch on the very edge of the warm vacated seat, or hover nervously within inches of actually making contact with it's surface. It makes one consider butt cooties, and the real possibility of gaseous karmic slime. From previous occupants.
Of which there have been many untold thousands.
All sitting down upon it with their bottoms.
Anonymous nether regions.

Surely after all that it's diseased? At least while still warm. Once it has cooled down, the icy posterior of the elderly auntie will ensure no rebirth of the miasmatic effluvia and creepity-crawlies, one hopes, but one cannot possibly descend upon that hot pulsating plastic surface!
It's suggestive, and nasty!

Hover, hover, hover ..... !

Tension!

Rather than delving any further into the operational paradigm of an aged Asian auntie paranoid about catching something by means of a seating device, let me allow two fine Englishmen to explain it.


Here's Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore discussing procreation.

IT WAS NECESSARY ...

[SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9_kTOgjT3E.]

[If the video disappears because trademark owners force youtube to remove it, look for Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, and 'Dirty Uncle Bertie'. Seeing the video is part of your essential cultural background.]


I can remember my own father explaining what he thought was needful to know about sex to my brother and myself. He knew that we were well aware of the mechanics involved, because a few years before while at the breakfast table he had witnessed me explaining the function of the sperm once it has entered the female uterus, and how only one of spermatozoon will survive the competition for the egg.

Whereupon cells start dividing, the endometrium thickens.
Nine months of dietary peculiarity.
Jack in the box!

I was eight or nine at the time, and it was in that period that I got into trouble at school for drawing the urinary system and explaining the role of the kidneys and bladder to my schoolyard companions. Complete with Latin words. The headmaster explained to me the next day that they did not need to know Latin words, it upset their parents.
Leave Latin to religion.

Obviously my brother and I did not need to have the details explained. And he remembered how my brother kept trying to change the subject, and scarcely touched his breakfast that morning.

Tobias stopped eating breakfast shortly after that.

So it was the socio-cultural context of sex that he touched upon, as a conversational gambit, that after a few sentences would end with my brother either running from the room looking green, or angrily stating that he did not want to hear another word!

"If you masturbate, hair grows on your palms!"

Once the desired effect was achieved, my father would usually change the subject to politics or something. Entertainment at the expense of the older son's composure should be enjoyed sparingly.

The younger son (me) had already discovered the pornography emporium a few doors down from a tobacconist in Eindhoven (where I purchased snuff - Singleton's Menthol, primarily) as well as Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (there are some lovely scenes in Ada), and had read Voltaire's Candide and The Memoires of Fanny Hill all the way through in order to discover more about the breasts (and meaty thighs) on the covers of those books.
I was disappointed by Voltaire; hardly anything there.
Fanny Hill was repetitious and unimaginative.
Reading is profoundly sexual.

[I should also mention the big multi-volume engineering and scientific encyclopaedia in the loft, which I went through lovingly. Such delightful words! The best. They were multisyllabic and exciting. I've often wondered what became of that once I left for school back in the States. I miss it.]


In his discussions of sex with his two sons, my father concentrated on rhetorical effect and painting word-pictures, rather than imparting mere dry facts. The social environment of an academic highschool filled with smart-alecks was exposure enough to the mechanical data, and sports, obviously, did not alleviate the frustrating side.

Sex could become an engaging situation or event.

We'd eventually discover that.

He was certain.



I frequently sit down nowadays, even on the bus.
Please don't think anything of it.




AFTER THOUGHT

The reason why this comes up now is because I really wish that he had explained more about the process of dating. A very nice young woman with whom I was in conversation down at Embarcadero 4 ended up hugging me several times this evening, before disappearing in an Uber, and while the possibility that she was extremely glad to meet a rational human being of liberal bent in San Francisco (she's from New York) is distinctly possible, there might of been more to it than that.

While on the bus back home (sitting!) it struck me that either I have the kavorka (see Seinfeld episode in which Kramer loses his cool), OR my grumpy self might even be just so darn cute and lovable.
I have actually never thought of myself as 'cute'.
Perhaps it was just my stylish briar pipe.
And alluring tobacco aroma.




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