Sometimes Everything Looks Like a Penis

Ron's out of town, and I'm randy. When I was 29 (or 39, or 49), I didn't expect to be sexually active, and well, horny at the age of 59. I thought the day would come when sex just wouldn't interest me anymore. That's not proving to be the case. The desire remains strong, even if the implementation isn't always exactly on target.

That's a blog entry in itself. When Pfizer put Viagra® on the market, it changed my life. Although the drug doesn't create or increase sexual desire, it makes the result of sexual desire obtainable. After decades of having no follow through whatsoever, Viagra was an epiphany, and an enabler of possibilities, and it probably kept my interest in sex active because it made the possibility of sexual connection with other men real. When I couldn't get a hard on, I always felt that I had let the other guy down. Now that I could actually have a much larger sexual repertoire (with Viagra's gentle, insistent help), I felt a sexual validation that I had not experienced in decades. Of course, that's in my head, and I should probably be talking to a therapist about that.

I used Viagra yesterday. I had a happy afternoon with Tim. We enjoyed the completely undignified time with each other. Sex like this reminds me of who I am.

This morning I was still a little blissful. I was walking past the Discovery Building in Silver Spring, on my way to the farmers market to pick up some produce. The Discovery Building has this huge mural along the sidewalk that combines themes of Prometheus, the Tree of Life, Neil Armstrong, Hal, and the Ultimate Answers of Physics (that's my interpretation). And the mural has a lot of penis-shaped objects in it: the Tree of Life, flaming planetoids streaking, fish of a sort, and a starry universe heading out to the Big Chill, penises everywhere, and it didn't take a huge amount of imagination for me to see them! They are there. I saw them with my own eyes. And I'm cutting my dosage in about half.

What's Going On?

In the debate over health care and health insurance reform, legions of voters are packing town meetings to harangue their congressmen and senators about the perils of reform. If the protesters are anything like the population at large, many of them are uninsured or underinsured. Some of them are, no doubt, unemployed. Some of them have exceedingly costly health plans, and the rest are covered by their employers or by Medicare.

What puzzles me about these town hall meetings is the anger and incivility of the protesters. These meetings aren't about discourse, or about debating health care options, the meetings are about embarrassing and hounding Democratic office holders. If this is the political discourse of the future, I don't want any part of it.

The protesters should be heard, and the legislators do need to answer concerns. But I'm really amazed at the naïveté of the protesters, and perhaps the legislators, too. The protesters were demanding to know if their legislator had read every part of a bill that is thousands of pages long. I suppose the legislator could ask the protester whether he or she had read the Bible cover to cover, or some similar nonsense. People were demanding to know if the costs of the legislation were known, or why the legislation included death panels, or whatever scare tactic the right-wing wackos could concoct in the proposed bills.

The protesters are scared. They are afraid of an unknowable scary future, but you know what? That future is going to come to pass one way or another. You can angrily shake your finger in the face of your congressman, but at the end of the day, you're still unemployed without health insurance or any kind of reasonable access to health care. You can decry escalating costs and the moral problem of passing grinding debt to our children, but you still have a system that denies millions of people access to basic health care. You have a system that rations health care to those who can afford pay for it, for those who can afford private insurance, and for those who are covered by employer plans or by Medicare.

You can scream at your legislator that health care reform is socialism, but that doesn't fix our broken system of getting health care to those who need it.

The rhetoric around this issue is damaging, and may torpedo any meaningful reform. That would be a terrible outcome. I am confident that we have bright minds that can devise innovative solutions to really tough health care problems. Yes, health care is expensive, but it doesn't need to be nearly as expensive as it has become in the United States. We need to tone down the rhetoric and get a bill passed that will cover everyone, focus doctors on patients rather than procedures, and prevent American families from bankrupting themselves through astronomical health care costs.

Something New Around Here

I just got around to it, but I've merged all of my commentary blogs (my recipe blog remains separate). I did this so that all my fans could find out all the dish about me in one convenient location, Doodle Today. I haven't completely revamped the navigation on this blog, but that will be done soon. In the meantime, I'll try to keep you informed of all the interesting crap that happens to me, like I'm having another cystoscopy in a week or so. Undoubtedly, you'll find all of the details here.