2001-09-24 - 1:48 p.m.
Leave it to Salon to connect sex and terrorism and then make both things banal, all in the same article.
"Terror sex"?
Just try saying it out loud with a straight face: "terror sex."
I shouldn�t make fun, I suppose. Human beings act in all sorts of ways during crises, and some of those ways are going to strike me as silly. (Just to be clear, it�s not sex that I find silly, but the writing of navel-gazing essays for Salon that I find silly. Of course, that�s always silly.) Plus, fear makes people horny. During the Blitz Londoners fucked like gerbils--it�s a well-known historical fact. And one of my friends from college used to claim he was conceived in a fervent episode of lovemaking during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why his parents saw fit to share that bit of TMI with him, I never worked up the nerve to ask.
But ... "terror sex"? I always thought that was when the condom broke.
***
I am soooo glad I work at home right now. Almost everyone I know is reporting water-cooler conversations about Sept. 11 that range from mind-numbingly stupid to downright scary. I don�t think I could spend eight hours a day hearing stuff like, "We should just take all them Afghanistanis and turn �em into a big sheet of glass," without hitting someone. Sartre was wrong--hell isn�t other people. Hell is coworkers.
Still, it could be even worse. One friend of mine who works in a state government office told me that, on the Friday after the attacks, her supervisor rounded up everyone in her department and made them join hands and be silent for five minutes in what was referred to as a "healing circle." She didn�t say whether "Kumbaya" was sung, but I wouldn�t be a bit surprised. Welcome to California.
***
Had a very mellow weekend. I�d planned on heading up to L.A., but the backlog of work that I didn�t get done the previous week put the kibosh on that. I decided on Friday to stop worrying about what was going to happen next and to get back to enjoying my life. By now the news coverage has degenerated into an endless stream of TV chatterboxes and op-ed writers serving up a wide variety of worse-than-useless opinions (worse than useless, because they and/or their audience don�t get to vote on what happens any more than I do). Meanwhile, the folks whose opinions do mean something seem to have the situation in hand for now, and even President Bush (who I never thought I�d praise for anything) appears to have settled into his appropriate role, which is to give stirring speeches and let the smart people do their jobs. So, in between working, I caught a show at the Casbah, went to the bookstore and came home with Bruce Campbell�s autobiography, If Chins Could Kill, and bought tickets for a Rocket From the Crypt show in October. So long as there is Rocket, there is life.
No one offered me any "terror sex," though. Goddamn it.
At the Casbah one of the bouncers told me about how, late one night last week, some yahoo in a pickup truck came weaving down the street out front at about 60 mph and yelled either "Arab fuckers!" or "Arab faggots!" (the bouncer couldn�t tell which) as he drove past. Now granted, "casbah" is an Arabic word, and the sign out front does look vaguely Middle-Eastern--in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon version of the Arabian Nights sort of way--but no one would ever mistake the pasty-white cig-smoking punks on the sidewalk for devout Muslims. Unless you�re a drunk, testosterone-crazed dickhead, that is.
But then again, maybe he knows something I don�t. The Taliban now claims Osama bin Laden is "missing." Maybe he slipped over the U.S.-Mexican border while the INS wasn�t looking and has now set up operations in the restroom of a punk club in San Diego where he�s busy plotting his next attack while getting blowjobs from a succession of well-oiled and hairless Nubian slave boys.
OK, maybe not.
But it�s an amusing image, no?
No?
***
Once more, with feeling: "Terror sex."
***
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