Survey: Sex books à do you read them???

 

Aha, caught your attention, didn’t I? 

 

Curiously, this was a recent survey at the Bookreporter.com: Do you read books about sex?

 

I think they’re lying.  Well, at least most of them.

 

Or are they getting all their information off the internet now, how-to’s on relationships and sex?

 

Good God, that’s no better than the help we got from our mates in the schoolyard!  It's a wonder we ever figured out how to put peg X into slot Y!

 

  7:30:40 PM    comment []

And just another day in THIS neighborhood

 

Phone rings at 11 am Tuesday morning.

 

Hey.

 

It’s Hubby.

 

Hey, what’s up, coming home for lunch?

 

Maybe.  Have you been watching TV?  Is there something going on?

 

I feel a dull pressure in my chest, like a fist pushing me.  Last time I heard this phrase was 9/11.  I grab the remote and start surfing the channels, phone pressed into my ear to listen for telltale background noise.

 

No, I’ve not been watching, why, what’s up?

 

There’s something BIG going on.  I can see a lot of cop cars, local, county, state cars.  A news truck has pulled up too.  Just wanted to know if you heard anything.

 

What?  No, nothing, and I’m not seeing anything on local or national channels.

 

Well, something BIG is going on a block or two from the office.  We don’t know whether to let anyone in or out for lunch.  Worse, we’ve got a Blood Mobile here today for a blood drive.

 

Damn.

 

Hubby’s office and plant is located in a rather mixed light industrial/low rent residential area in an older part of the city.  His machine-tool facility, a pickle plant and a railroad museum are all located within a four-block area, in the middle of an area filled with hundreds of older homes built between 1890 and 1950.  

 

Our home is about 10 minutes away in a suburb.  It’s a typical middle-class area, excessively homogenous racially, most white collar, too many SUV’s.  The twain don’t meet much, city and suburb, separated by an odd corridor between them of service businesses and a couple of golf courses.

 

When he goes to work in the morning, hubby goes to a separate world, a very different neighborhood.

 

Hubby comes home at lunch; I’ve just left him a voicemail, telling him local news has just broadcast from a location about a block from his plant.  A drug bust or something went bad, two policemen shot.  Nearby schools possibly in lockdown.  He tells me he’s gotten this information from someone at the plant already, but he left the plant anyhow.  What a nut, I think…but then, maybe he just wanted to find a respite for lunch.

 

I don’t ask too many questions, just fix lunch for him.  He’s surfing the channels to see what the different local stations are broadcasting.  We don’t get this kind of thing here, never seen anything quite like it.  And especially not near his plant.  It’s obvious the newscasters aren’t well prepared for this either, they’re bumbling a lot on air (“Want me to get this live? Oh, we’re on?” ).

 

It’s not as if we have our heads in the sand.  The neighborhood around the plant is low rent, badly down at the heel and attractive to the kind of people who can’t or won’t be concentrating on lawn care or home improvement.  We know there’s drugs here, we’re not that naïve.  But it’s a sleepy little area, a slowing decaying part of a fading city, giving up the ghost the way it gave up lumbering and then automotive industry. Nothing happens much here except chipping paint and overgrown lawns and the occasional vandalism and petty theft. 

 

While hubby eats his lunch, the newscasters fill us in.  A DEA agent shot.  A local police officer from our suburb, on loan to a drug enforcement program, shot.  No wonder all the cop cars; it’d be the same anywhere else.  Cop shooters are very bad news.

 

Hubby goes back to work, and I stew all afternoon.  Nothing more on the local stations except a confirmation that the two closest schools are in lock down.  What must be running through the minds of those parents, I think to myself.  I’d be panicky in their shoes.

 

I can’t watch for more information any longer, I’m going buggy.

 

Hubby calls late afternoon, tells me he’ll be late but that everything’s quiet now.  Nothing more now on the news other than the injured officers are being treated at local hospitals.

 

The newspaper comes; it was a "raid".  It’s just plain bad stuff.  The 11 o’clock news says the same thing, a "raid" gone bad.

 

The paper comes the next day; it wasn't a "raid" or a "drug bust", but the outcome of a "drug investigation" that went wrong.  This mess is tied in with the discovery of a LOT of cocaine in Nebraska.    Somehow this world is both larger and smaller at the same time, expanded from a city block to half a country a way.  And then some -- cocaine isn’t exactly what they’re growing in Nebraska.

 

Last night, the paper spills more.  This may have been an attempted drug robbery that went bad, the cocaine from Nebraska intended for delivery here.  Two suspects were both killed during this debacle.  Both ex-convicts, one was recently released after serving time for an armed robbery.

 

He’d robbed a country market-liquor store a few years ago – a stored owned by one of our suburban friends -- and went to prison for this particular crime.  Now dead.

 

The world shrank again.

 

It’s a hell of a neighborhood we live in.

  11:27:20 AM    comment []

Just another day in the neighborhood

 

The passing of Fred Rogers brought introspection to many of us this week.  While my household never watched Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was always nice to have that option reserved, a little quiet something in the back pocket tucked away for a time of need.  We’d catch it once in a while, particularly when a tour of a factory caught this household’s eye.  Calm stuff, pull, not push; the kind of programming that encouraged kids to be more hands on than vegetative.

 

Certainly, his program will continue to be aired, but the tranquil, creative genius is no longer with us.  Rogers knew our children need a steady, stable, omnipresent energy; how comforting to know it was there if we needed it, like a security blanket on air.  Let’s hope that PBS continues to encourage this kind of alternative programming for children.

 

p.s.  PBS can’t do it without funding; make a donation to your local PBS station soon.

 

  11:08:28 AM    comment []