Idyllic swimming.

On Monday when I finally got to the beach near my house around 6:45pm after having wanted to go swimming all day, it started drizzling, but since I had a book with me (Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina) and it wasn't that bad, I sat under a tree on my towel and red, and there was practically no one around and I could watch the rain on the lake, which was very nice.

Then, after like 30-40 minutes, it cleared up, and the sun blazed through the clouds, and all of a sudden to the right was this giant full rainbow, and the sunset was this blazing yellow, and the city was visible against the water and the dark clouds north of it, and so I called to this early 40s black couple sitting on a park bench under the tree and facing away from the rainbow to turn around and take a look at it -- they did and yelled back a big "thanks!" -- and then I went swimming then with all that in the sky as my background.

Karaoke - on Sat.

Last Sat., though, was hipster karaoke again.

The host opened up with Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man", only on one verse he changed the lyrics to -

that's who I am
karaoke man

- then, a few songs later, this fat hipster girl in black who's a really nice person and actually showed up her boyfriend who opened up the night with a forgettable version of "Bette Davis Eyes" sang "Dream a Little Dream of Me", at the opening notes of which the retired hispanic vet bartender went nuts and clapped his hands and shouted "Sing it, baby!", and which she did, very nicely, and then towards was like -

Dream a little dream
for Rory

- (since the host's name is Rory, and though that stuff usually annoys me, here it didn't at all.)

My one friend from Mississippi who's quite good at karaoke probably did his worst performance ever, and couldn't find the key, and when he did, he was in the wrong octave, and I have no idea what the song was, it was something country.

Then, I got up and did a very good performance of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit". I stood with my hips kind of slung to the side like I was on drugs, and swayed back and forth to the trippy opening bass and guitar and snare drum part with my eyes resting on nothing, and the fat girl in black, who was at the table right next to the mircrophone whispered loudly to me, "Start it low!", and then the words started and I stared straight ahead for the opening lines of -

one pill makes you larger
and one pill makes you small

- and when I got to the next line -

and the pills that mother gives you
don't do anything at all

- I really did this restrained snarl on "mother".

I also made sure to hold my eyes straight ahead, and to not blink as much as possible, since that makes people disconcerted without them knowing why.

The host, who sometimes does very appropriate and not-annoying antics behind the singer, took out a strobe light and held it around me flickering, which I didn't notice for like a minute, though my friends said he did it pretty much the entire song, and inches from my face.

Unfortunately, the song gets just out of my range on the climactic lines -

remember
what the dormouse said
feed your head
feed your head

- and it was strained and lost power, and I will have to have them throw the key down a notch or two if I ever do the song again... I don't think it affected things too much, people really clapped and this older woman (a Vietnam veteran's wife?) in a brown bowling shirt stopped me right after the song as I was walking back to my seat and was like, "You were groovy!"

A little later, this one guy who had been there last month came up to me and said that he and his girlfriend is new in town and he loved me and my friend's stuff, and he's looking forward to hearing us here more, and that he could tell that we were regulars.

Unfortunately, the night was dominated by karaoke jackasses, who were this group of three frat boys (one [black]) who would get up and sing together, and like four extreme sports-looking girls, and a group of hipster girls who my one friend who is a petite fashion-conscious brunette from Buffalo who studies India and was with us said they used to be sorority girls, she could just tell.

Anyhow, the extreme sports girls were obnoxious, and 2 did this awful awful awful very self-absorbed version of "i wanna sex you up", and I turned to my friends and said that that was surprising, since men are the ones who are always karaoke jackasses, but I guess feminism worked, and I playfully pretend-punched the arm of my female friend and was like, "Baby, you've made it."

At that, my one female friend was like, "They're having fun in a way that they're comofortable with," which I found very diplomatic.

Later, my friend from Mississippi redemmed himself and did this fantastic job of "got my mojo working", and people were up and dancing in the aisles.

Shortly after, this fat blonde girl in a white shirt and melon shirt got up to sing "Me and My Bobby Mcgee" and she had a great voice, but she mugged ironic faces through it all, such typical hipster bullshit, so I went to the bathroom to ignore her.

Later, too, the drunker the fat girl in black got, the more her face showed her emotions, so as the obnoxious frat/sorority/whatever people got up to sing, you could just see barely-disguised contempt underneath all her jowls.

Then, oddly, this frat boy got up by himself and sang "Cecilia" and it was very genuine, and the fat girl in black lit up and clapped after, just like us, since she, like us, approved. The guy's girlfriend then led him out by the hand (good karaoke is hot).

Then, oddly, this extreme sports girl got up and sang some Stevie Wonder, also very genuine, and the face of the fat girl in black shot forth rays of vehement hatred, which I interpreted as jealousy since the extreme sports girl was thin and athletic and hot, but before she was a jackass and couldn't sing, so the fat girl in black had probably been telling herself, "Well, I can sing," all that time, but now her peculiar talent was being threatened - at least, that's how I interpreted it.

At some point this really out-of-it half-Mexian Vietnam vet ("Angel") got up and gave a rambling intro to his song, but then busted out into "Sunshine of Your Love" and did an excellent job.

Also, the host did these ticking clock motions with his hands behind someone sing Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time", and then did them in the opposite direction as if time was being turned back, and then just turned his hands around and around quickly, as if time was really being turned back fast.

The night was getting bad again, though, because of the extreme sports girls - one grabbed the mike out of the hand of the hispanic veteran bartender when he reminded everyone to tip the karaoke host because he hosts karaoke for free to keep the post alive and just works off of tips and it's a nice thing he does, and she was like, "And it's the fucking best time ever, WOOOOOOO!!!!!" - and then the hipster host, who skips down the list to pick out new people, was like, "T-Rex, is there a T-Rex in the house?", and it turned out to be one of the extreme sports girls who had already sung twice but then did the most jack ass-y thing you can ever do at karaoke in the world, put a song in under another name than the one you've been using, and her song was so bad I chugged my beer and made my friends leave, even though I had "Weekend in New England" in... The moment had passed, it was time to leave.

On the way out, we passed the frat boy who sang "Cecilia" and his girlfriend talking upstairs, holding each others's hands and looking into each others's eyes.

Karaoke -- Catch up.

So, I was going to karaoke some during my swingers's bbq series, but nothing too much notable happened except -

1) The host at hipster karaoke said he had added in Barry Manilow's "I Made it Through the Rain" into his repertoire since I had last come and sung it, since the song works so well (and also because, I'm assuming, it starts out with a verse that has the word 'dreamers' in it - "we dreamers have our ways/ of facing rainy days/ and somehow we survive" - and he calls all his karaoke singers 'dreamers'), and then I kicked off the night with Barry Manilow's "Could it Be Magic", which I did okay at, though the first 18 measures of instrumental were excruciatingly slow... Later I did the Buggles's "Video Killed the Radio Star", that a friend says was "faithful" (which I take to mean "good but uninspired").

2) At the gyros lounge, I tried out Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" (good but uninspired) Gene Pitney's "Every Little Breath You Take" (tougher than you'd think), and Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" (people started dancing and I was nailing it, and then I discovered that they shortened it up and there was no middle verse to drop down on and be all breathe-y and be like, "There's another song for me/ and I will sing it...", AS I WAS GETTING READY TO TRANSITION TO THAT PART!!!).

Sex Study (2nd part).

So, what I went downtown for on Sunday when the janitor was ripping apart my drain, was for the 2nd part of the sex study, the MRI part.

Overall, it was relatively uneventful. I went downtown, rated some masturbation clips on a scale of 1 ("not appealing") to 4 ("very appealing"), and then they threw me in the MRI and had me watch the same. The workers were these research assistant girls who I had never seen before, and seemed to be on the masters level.

One of them ("Rachel") asked me about what I studied, and then was full of questions about what books she should read so as to understand modern religion, and I recommended "Heaven's Harlots". She said she would get it, though she was Jewish and really didn't understand Christianity in any case.

I then asked her about how they controlled the porn for how some people are attracted to different types of people (e.g. different races, different hair colors, etc.), and she said that that was a good question - we talked a lot because there was a scheduling mix-up and I had to wait around for like 40 minutes - and she went in back to talk to someone about it - I had said she didn't have to, it wasn't that important, but she said that it was interesting and she wanted to know - and then she came back and said that they didn't, since they were testing heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual men, and they figured that reactions to porn wouldn't be affected that much by that variance, since they had enough subjects and enough different types of people in the porn to get participants aroused to something, and they figured that the biggest source of difference would be with whether it was a man or a woman in the clip they were looking at.

She also said that they were designing a study on pedophilia, since everyone talks about it but no one ever researches it. She said the biggest trouble was determining how to induce arousal in pedophiles, since kiddie porn was off limits (10 years in prison if they procured it), so they were thinking of finding pictures of kids in swimsuits from ads.

I then said I had always thought of pedophilia as kind of like a fetish, only with children instead of shoes, and she said that that was actually right, because unlike homosexuality or lesbianism, pedophilia is considered a "paraphilia", which means an odd attraction to a sexual object, and paraphilias (paraphiliai?) often come in 2s, so if someone is autogynophilic (i.e., they're a man who loves to dress up as a woman and masturbate to themself), they might be attracted to shoes or something on top of that, and pedophilia usually pairs up with something like that, whereas lesbianism and homosexuality don't.

Drain.

So, this past weekend my drain, which has been clogging up of late, clogged up permanently and wouldn't go down at all, even when I left the water overnight. I mentioned this to my friends, and the one said that suntan lotion can put the nail in the coffin on an already-clogged drain, so my sunbathing so much this summer and the SPF30 that enables it is probably at fault.

(This morning, too, when I put some of cheap pomade on, I realized that that couldn't be good either, since it's basically Vaseline with some artificial scent.)

Anyhow, on Saturday I called the janitor in my building, and the liquid plumber-equivalent he used didn't work, even though he let that sit overnight - I had taken a bucket to the tub and gotten rid of the excess water for him before he started work -and then on Sunday he had to take out some panel and use some snake thing, which didn't work either, and when I headed downtown for some shit, he had removed my radiator on the other side of the wall from the tub so he could get at a panel that would let him get at the plumbing.

When I got home that night, it was fixed, so I wrote up a thank-you note and dropped it at their office. It seems like the repairs where a nightmare, and that I fucked up majorly by not alerting them earlier. I'm so ashamed, causing them all that work.

Movie and social hour updates.

Here's the scoop on the sex doc movie nights and social hours that I passed over while writing my swingers's bbq series -

1) One was on feminist pornography, followed by an independent porn film about an older couple where it was 40 minutes of them talking about their relationship and sex life, and then them fucking for like 20 minutes (edited together, of course, for maximum variety of positions).

I thought it was nice b/c the people took care of themselves but didn't have porn star bodies, and said this during discussion group how it was a happy medium for porn that wouldn't cause people to have body-image problems by watching it, and the discussion leader, herself a local feminist porn producer, said that they had had people tell them to use more normal people in their films, and then when they had as an actress a woman in decent shape who had just given birth a month or two earlier, people started asking them why they didn't have better people in their films.

2) During the one social hour, the older guy who used to be a thug in an Italian neighborhood but then became a sexologist started telling this story about how group sex used to work back on the workshop circuit back in the 70s - 1st was the workshop, then a nude massage following the workshop for whoever wanted to go, then at some point word would get around and everyone would decamp to someone's house offsite to have group sex. He then started telling me about how they used to go to this one house on the northside that was a big apartment that had been combined from two smaller ones, and people used to hang out in the central room and then go have sex in the bedrooms, but that was the beginning of the evening, and towards the end people would be having kinky sex in the bedrooms and then "be in piles everywhere" in the main room.

"And you know, it was there that for the first time I ever had an experience with BDSM," he was like, and he started telling me about how this woman in the back bedroom asked him to hit her.

"And let me know if I'm repeating myself," he was like, and I nicely told him that he was, though I realized that that was the most endearing thing ever, because old people always repeat themselves about something or another, and with him, it's about the 1st time a woman ever asked him to hit her.

I also think it's funny how old people sometimes have one great idea that they always go back to, which is in his case how everyone should be massaged in the nude by someone when they don't know if it's a man's or woman's hands touching them, which he brings up about once or twice a conversation.

He also said that he hates the homophobia of swingers, and that there's less with people into group sex, and that in any case men should get used to being uncomfortably propositioned and saying no, since women have to do that all the time, and every once in a while you do get hit on by someone good.

3) The last movie night (this past Tuesday) was about a BDSM photographer, and people turned out in droves. I sat in the back with my friend who I went with, so I could go out unobtrusively if I got sick (I had to turn my eyes away at the needles through the woman's nipples, and the razor-cutting scene).

The discussion was marred by the fact that the host was a BDSM guy who asked to start out how many people had participated in BDSM - the UU sex educator and me and some other people were pretty uncomfortable with the question, since that might force people in the audience to self-identify or not, and that was out of bounds.

Other than that, the only interesting part of the night was how this whole rehab house of like 6 people showed up for the movie and like half the discussion and had a lot of wandering comments, including one black dude who said over the course of like 3 or 4 minutes how he once hit his woman since he needed money for drugs and she ended up calling the cops and he ran out the back window, but it wasn't sex, or nothin'.

And, there was this guy who said he went to a BDSM party in Houston that was crazy, with gouging and sanding and everything, and people were doing a lot of coke and heroine to deal with the pain, and he was dropped in the middle of it, and all the BDSM people there looked at him like he was a freak, since BDSM people usually have absolutely no drugs or alcohol at their parties, for safety reasons.

And, too, someone mentioned how BDSM culture overlaps with nerd culture, but she didn't know why, and this one guy who had a short-sleeved shirt on and sandals and black socks and a nasally voice said it was because that kind of sex is intense and you need to know how to build things.

Favor.

The other week I was sitting having coffee outside at a Starbucks downtown, and this kind of late 30s on-the-fat-side white blonde woman with a summer blouse and a small dog that she obviously focuses her life on because she doesn't have a boyfriend walks up to my table and is like, "I'm just going to tie her here for a minute while I run in, and she's going to start to scream, but don't worry, that's okay, that's just normal for her."

"If that's the case," I was like, "Would you mind tying her up somewhere else? I'm studying, and don't want to be disturbed."

The woman looked blankly at me for like five seconds, then was like "All right," and turned to walk away, and then as she walked away was like, "How rude," purposefully loud enough so I could hear.