Yo dude I’d totally fuck that book, and her sister

As a younger straight man, like many younger straight men, I had occasional fantasies of, uh, let’s say romantic physical contact, with two women at the same time. As a man approaching forty this appeals to me much less. I think I respect women now. I’d like to think so, though I think that’s more up to the women in my life to say. Certainly I do more than when I was a teenager. And so the young man/older adolescent fantasy breaks down (most men, by the way, are aging adolescents, this is news only to men, aging a little in the sense of maturing and a lot in the sense of rotting in the way over-ripened and bruised fruit does if left to sit too long in the sun) because the fantasy as I had it was fundamentally one about being self-centered while other people are the object of my attention, or rather, give attention entirely devoted to me. As in, it wasn’t a particularly mutual fantasy is what I’m saying, at least the way I had it and the way I heard it expressed by other young guys in locker rooms and in study hall and at punk shows and on the top bleacher at high school football games and at all night movie marathons. I’m more mutual now.

I’m also more worried now. I can’t even host a birthday party without worrying that I’m not spending enough time talking to each guest and wondering if everyone’s enjoying the cake, and since cake sounds so much better than anything my body can provide, and being neglectful sexually sounds so much worse than having a friend be bored at a party, and having a friend not like your birthday party sounds so much less ego bruising than having a friend not like your threesome, that I am sure I would spend any such sexual event fretting the whole time to one partner about whether or not the other was having a nice time (“would you mind asking her for me? I’d hate to intrude, and, you see, you two are closer than she and I are”) and both would no doubt conclude they’d be better off just having cake now and waiting to have properly enjoyable sex after I left and/or fell asleep. And I’m more tired now. It all just sounds like so much work, both birthday parties and fucking. Like if there happen to be two young women reading this who are both interested in me, that’s gross, you need therapy, you need to be protected from yourselves, but if you happen to find out where I live before you’re apprehended, what I’d really like from you is a cup of coffee and a nap.

So, I can say with utmost sincerity, lack of multi-partner sexual opportunities does not bother me, and I am at peace with the fact that I am absolutely sure I could not satisfy two women at once. (I am not entirely sure I can satisfy one woman at once, and by the way, I wasn’t sure how to phrase that, umm, phrase - ‘satisfy two women at once’. I had a vague sense that I had heard it said - I think it was ‘chicks’ rather than women, and I don’t like that term but if I’m being really honest I couldn’t use that phrase - two chick at once - even if I wanted to because, feminist concerns aside, that word is harder to say in an at all sexual way, even when quoting, because I’ve been reading so much E.B. White lately that the work ‘chick’ makes me think of literal hatchlings which in turn reminds me of when I took my kids to Rural King the other month while I was buying bird seed. My older kid made me buy four pumpkins because Halloween was only six weeks away. They had chicks for sale there too, chickens I think though they might have been ducklings. Adorable. And after this and similar experiences it is now simply impossible for me to hear the word chick with any sexual connotation whatsoever without thinking of darling little beaks cracking eggs, and of my older daughter demanding I buy her a bunny. Sexual content can not exist in that mental environment. It shrivels up, so to speak. Where was I? Something about poultry? Damn it. Oh yeah. I wasn’t sure about the phrase ‘satisfy two women at once’ because ‘satisfy two chicks’ sent me down the rabbit hole of (or at least past a rabbit cage in) my memory (wait, rabbit? way to mix the metaphor, douche, it shouldn’t be rabbit cage but chicken coop, surely, though by the way at the feed store there were baby rabbits right next to the baby chicks - do other people say it that way? ‘baby chicks’? I always do, I dunno why - and baby bunnies were so cute I seriously considered buying one and lying to my wife and saying it was free and how could I say no to a free bunny… I had bunnies as a kid, my first was when I was three, I got it for xmas, a lop-eared bunny, I named it after my mom’s friend, my friend Jan’s mom, Ashley; I picked up the box from under the xmas tree and put my ear to it and shook it really hard and my mom shouted “no! don’t shake it!” and I tore a small hole in the paper and bunny popped it’s little head out of the hole and looked at me and I’d never seen a lop-eared bunny before and I shouted “MOM! YOU GOT ME A PRAIRIE DOG!” and it is my earliest memory of delight. so yeah. bunnies. memories.) and with all of that rattling in my head I wondered for a moment if I had made up the phrase altogether - the phrase is ‘satisfy two women at once’ in case you don’t remember. Keep up. Does anyone use that phrase? I wasn’t sure. So I googled it. It is indeed a phrase. Note to self: decide which is faster and less painful, explaining to my wife why this term is now in the search bar and browser history or deleting the search bar history or admitting that I’m not sure how to do that and will have to google to learn that as well.)

So, yeah, like, multiple sexual partners at the same instance? An issue that does not bother me and is not on my mind whatsoever, as you can tell. What does bother me, what is weighing on my mind - like the weight of a partner’s hips sinking down … uh… I … Never mind. Books is what I’m talking about. What’s been weighing on my mind is books.

Sex? Whatever. I’m old. Not a big deal. Or I mean, I’m okay with the sizes of deal it is. Like I am okay with the range of how okay and not okay I am, with the set of emotions in my life about my ugly stupid body and its mediocre capacities and what I and other people may or may not want and be able do with it. I can live with all that. No big deal. What bothers me, what I am not at all at peace with, what I sometimes feel I may die from, is my lack of ability to sustain the reading of two or more books at the same time. (Is there an objectifying colloquial term for books? Like, women are to the term chicks as books are to the term…? What? This is important you guys.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been around the block, so to speak. In fact, I am regularly and more often than not in the middle of more than one book at once. Lately I have been in the middle of a collection of E.B. White’s essays, a collection of Charles Schultz comics, a short story collection by Daryl Gregory, another short story collection by an author whose name I forget right now, and a book by another author my memory has anonymized (a book I thought was about capitalism and insomnia but is really about, well, I’m not sure what, other than a lot of name-dropping of theorists I either don’t care about, haven’t read, or both). I was happy with that reading whenever I was actually doing it (ha ha, doing it, ha ha) but whenever I started to think about it I would fret, especially late at night as I was gathering stacks of books to bring into the spare room to read a bit before washing the dishes and going to bed, and early in the morning as I packed my backpack with something to read at lunch. In both moments I had to decide what I was going to read. I punted that decision, taking more than one book. I punt this way regularly when packing for travel of any kind. (“I’m going to be gone for five days, so… eight books? Is that too many? I suppose so. I’ll cut it to six, which will lighten my bag as well, making room for this magazine!”) I like to keep my options open. [Flicks hair over shoulder.]

But really, I don’t. I hate options. [And I don’t have any hair, not on most of my head anyway.] Fuck options, right in their beady little optional eyes. (That’s an allusion to skullfucking. Hi Erin!) I don’t want options. Options require decisions and decisions exhaust me. I take multiple books with me exactly because I resent options and the way they make me have to choose. Instead of choices I want to read all of the books at once, right now. I pack those eight books, or six books and a magazine, in my bag for travel - and those two, or three, or four, or, I am not too proud to admit it, some days five or six books in my backpack that I carry on my one mile walk to work where I will read at most half an hour, if at all, during my lunch (at the moment, I just checked, there are two books in my backpack for tomorrow, and on top of it a stack of four more, and in a small outside pocket there’s the kindle I got for christmas) - because I want to read all of those books right away and I don’t want to wait, and I don’t want to have to pick what to read in what order. Because picking makes me tired and because I just know whatever I pick is the wrong decision. Shit I should just start flipping coins.

It is possible to eat more than one dessert at a time. I am, and I know this with the conviction of experience, man enough to handle two desserts at a time. Hell, I can take on six at a time - give me a slice of cake, a cookie, a brownie, a bowl of ice cream, a donut, and a piece of pie - and I’ll keep it up as long as needed. I can go all night! (Err, sorry, the metaphors are getting a big jumbled here. I’m trying to allude to my stamina when it comes to over-eating. I am not talking about fucking any food.) But multiple books? It just doesn’t work. Does this make the eyes superior to the mouth? Or inferior? I know I’d certainly rather be kissed with a mouth than an eye, and I’d rather someone’s lips on mine than someone’s eyeballs on mine. I guess that’s unfair because I suppose I could cut my books up into one mishmash like that brownie-cookie-cake-pie-donut-sundae I am now imagining (it would have hot fudge and whip cream on top, ooh I think I must be hungry because now I’m wondering what I would eat for dinner before all of that sugar and carbs and fat. Some tofu, I guess) but books don’t work that way. Maybe it’s books that are the problem, not the eyes. They have to be taken in one at a time (books I mean, not eyes, you could probably eat eyes by the half-dozen, by the dozen if they’re children’s eyes, especially if they’re deep fried) and it’s that one at a time quality that I object to. I want to be simultaneously reading E.B White and what’s his name’s book, and what’s her name’s too, and the E.B. White biography I just got, and the book about E.B. White’s prose style, and the new Nancy Kress and…

Ugh. Sometimes I look at all the stacks of books, and lists of books on my kindle and amazon and goodreads and on notebook paper and post-it notes and I despair. I’ll never be able to read all the books. Not even all the good books. Not even all the books that would amaze someone with my particular mix of interests and tastes. The goodness of the world bibliosupply exceeds my reading capacity. This could be cause to celebrate. There’s such an overflowing of wonderfulness! But mostly I just feel like whatever happens I’m gonna miss out on something that would have been good, and probably would have been better than whatever it was I wasted my time on doing instead. In those moments I want to just stop reading altogether, take a nap or go for a walk, or stare into space. Other times I don’t despair, I get mad. How come I found out about good things so late in life? How come others get good things I don’t? Still other times I feel inadequate. Everyone who is anyone knows about the good books, knew about them way before I did, and while certainly everyone misses out on something - since life is failing and falling short, though I know intellectually it’s not only that - still I bet other people read enough good books to know they’ve read what they needed to and feel secure in what and who they are and where they are in their lives and as people. Those jerks, with their good life choices and their happiness. Fuck ‘em.

Speaking of fucking, the old teenaged boy fantasy I started with, that fantasy was in part, at least some of the time and at least in the way I had it and in which it was circulated among young dudes I know, a fantasy about being man enough - hence the importance of ’satisfy two at once’. (Don’t think about ducklings and bunnies. Focus.) It’s partly a fantasy about having achieved a kind of masculinity that’s not in question anymore. I don’t care much about that anymore, for some positive reasons - feminism, sources of self-confidence other than stupid machismo - and partly because I’ve just aged out of the kind of lifestage where that kind of thinking makes sense. But I still have an impulse to brag like ‘yo I totally could fuck two books at once, bro, I could read all night and in the morning they’d thank me and make breakfast’ which would be a lie because I couldn’t, I can barely follow one book at a time (hell I can barely write one sentence and think one thought at a time), but see I want to brag like that because I want to be able to actually do that and I want to feel secure the way I imagine dudes do who have brains of above average length and girth.

And that’s all dumb. I think some of it’s feeling old and realizing a sense of passing and limited time. I’m not even that old, really, but old enough to know I won’t read all the things I really want to read in my lifetime, and probly also having a mild version of the ‘I feel old so I bought a red convertible and threw expensive gifts at a woman I just met who I am lying when I say is half my age’ thing that some genuinely old men go through. (I’m not gonna do that, I’ve got too much dignity and confidence in myself, plus I’ll be too busy throwing my back out carrying fat fucking stacks of books home from the library and crying because I now need the large type setting on my kindle.) Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Books, man, amiright?