Sick . . . To Death.

“Sick Person by Van Gogh,” as imagined by me and performed by Dall - E.

Hello. Today’s Gene Pool explores the greatest mystery of life, but first, a Gene Pool Gene Poll about pleasuring oneself sexually.

This has some history behind it. When I began hosting chats for the Washington Post in 2001, I asked for permission — this is back when I needed to ask for permission — to poll readers about how they groom their pubic hair. The permission was denied. The question was officially deemed … unseemly.

The request was renewed every year. It took roughly thirteen of them (years) before permission was personally granted, if dubiously, by Executive Editor Martin Baron, a giant of American journalism if for that reason alone. In one minute of one day, a wall of silly propriety fell. It made news. The world snapped to attention. I don’t want to compare this to what happened in Berlin on November 9, 1989, because that would be … unseemly. I leave that to you.

More years passed. Events occurred. And here we have it, the inevitable outcome as Substack begins to rule the world and Anything Is Possible. There are no rules anymore.

—

We need questions for me to answer in real time. Wrap them in the plain orange bag below.

Here is how I met my friend Tom Scocca, exactly 20 years ago.  One morning I fired up my computer and was immediately notified, by Google Alerts, that someone had written something about me.  For a columnist, this is only sometimes good news.  Warily as always, I clicked on the link, only to discover I was a slimeball.  A columnist named Tom Scocca, writing about comic strips for City Paper, the alternative newspaper in Baltimore, noted in passing that  he didn’t like me because of “something scummy” I had once done to a friend of his.   I had never heard of Tom Scocca, had no idea who his friend was, and had no clue as to what the hell he was talking about. I reported this in my chat, calling him a “dork.”  

Only then did I email him for an explanation.   He told me that a feature article I had once written about a brain-dead girl in Worcester, Massachusetts – a girl in whose presence religious statuary was said to be weeping blood and tears  – contained a several-paragraph section plagiarized in tone from his friend Ellen Barry, who had written a story about the same girl in the Boston Phoenix a few months before.  I was big-footing her, he said — an established journo stealing an idea from a relative unknown.

I compared the two stories and saw no plagiarism or big-footing, but Tom stuck to his deeply incorrect contention, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, with the stubbornness of a mule’s grandfather.  Eventually I called Ms. Barry, who would go on to become a star international reporter for the New York Times, and she said she saw no foul, and that Tom was a complete maniac.  (I made up that last clause – she didn’t say that – but he is.)  Anyway, I later  had lunch with Tom.  He opined that the media – BUT NOT HE HIMSELF – was ridiculously sanctimonious in condemning alleged plagiarism; he said it was as though, suddenly, some bank robber starts indiscriminately blowing away tellers, and not even taking the money, and all the other bank robbers in town start shaking their heads, and saying, "what's the matter with THAT guy'?   In short, Tom is a funny insane maniac who won’t back down, which is why we became good friends, almost immediately.  Not long afterwards, he sent me this this haiku he had written about his beloved Orioles:

Grounded to Bill

He flips to Cal for one,

To first—two!

I told him it was only okay, if a bit feeble, and then he explained to me, as to an idiot: “It’s a haiku, but it isn’t the classic 5-7-5 syllabic meter, but 4-6-3, which is the number of the second-to-short-to first double play in scorecard notation!”  As though this should have been obvious to anyone.   As I said, he is a funny, insane maniac.  These days, Tom is a freelance journo, a media critic, and the writer and editor of an excellent Substack newsletter and podcast called Indignity, to which you should subscribe for reasons you will soon understand. 

Just last week, I was shocked to see that Tom had written an extraordinary cover-length story in New York magazine about a medical maelstrom that had befallen him.  I read it.  I hadn’t known about it.  It is a cascading descent into hell that is not over yet.   I am filing a little early this Tuesday so you will have time to read it, if you have the fortitude, before we begin. 

Okay, now we are beginning.

Me: Are you game for an interview? 

Tom:  Sure. 

Me: First, I have to say your New York magazine story was scummy. Sorry, I just feel that way, and I’m not backing down.  

Tom:  Acknowledged. 

Me: I want to make you feel better about things. Better by comparison. I am 72, twenty years older than you, and currently dealing once again with a periodic  unexplained medical phenomenon. It generally lasts three days. My left knee, crafted from titanium and swaddled in aging muscle and ligament, starts barking so badly that I have to mince up and down stairs like a centenarian, literally at half speed, left foot then right foot on the same step.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Sometimes I forget the foot that one must begin on to better avoid pain when going up and down stairs (they are the opposite feet), so I created a mnemonic device to help me remember --  Right, Rising; Left, Lowering -- but often forget the mnemonic because my short-term memory has shorted out.   

Tom: Okay. 

Me: A typical event in my life: I will be writing something on my computer, then suddenly get a once-in-a-lifetime inspiration on a new topic.  So I hit Control-T to open a new screen, but this single, reckless, inexcusable mechanical act of digression instantly wipes the new idea from my mind, sometimes forever.  Because I often get writing ideas in my dreams, I have vowed to always keep a pen and notepad beside me in bed, but always forget. So when the idea comes and wakes me, I have to shuffle to the bathroom, babbling the idea out loud, as a mantra, so it doesn't run away during the 20-foot trip to the john.  Then I write it down with the only writing instrument available, soap on the bathroom mirror, just a few words to jog my memory. I often cannot interpret it the next morning, and it seldom returns.   

I can still recite almost all of the uniform numbers of the 1960 Yankees and related trivia (Clete Boyer started the year as number 34 but then switched to number six) but I am sitting here typing this and cannot remember the color of the underpants I put on a half hour ago.  I believe they are black.  Hang on, checking.  

Red.   

Lately my  blood pressure has been pogo-sticking up and down for no apparent reason.  I have described the phenomenon this way: They are numbers that might alternatively be achieved by a swimmer of the English Channel, and then, a little later, by a dying fat guy who had stroked out and is at the bottom of a swimming pool. No reason is medically evident. 

One day a few years ago I began having trouble coming up with words, and I was un-drunk or otherwise chemically impaired.   These were not fancy words that I could not recall.   I told my girlfriend "I need to find that thing.” She: “What thing?” Me, exasperated by her denseness: “You know, that thing.  The thing. It’s long. It’s food.”  It turns out I  had meant my eyeglasses. 

Hospital. No solid diagnosis.   

My point is, my friend, you’re doing fine, by comparison.  Relax.  At 52, you are still a child, with the world ahead of you, and all its possibilities. 

–

Tom: Seems like you should just transfer your old grudges and your anxiety over decrepitudes, transfer them to your puny  short-term memory and let them evaporate. I was impressed that you could recall all these things going wrong with yourself, but then I remembered that you're a trained hypochondriac. 

Keeping track of my own body's failings has been a real chore for me. Up until last year, my relationship with my physical existence and with medicine worked like this: One time, I stubbed one of my smaller toes really hard, so hard it swelled up and turned purple and black and stayed that way. I went to a doctor, and the doctor told me it could very well be fractured, but I'd need an X-ray to tell for sure. He also told me the treatment for a broken toe would basically be to just wait it out and try to walk around as normally as possible so it didn't heal weird. I walked as normally as possible to the elevator, carrying the referral to the downstairs X-ray place, rode straight past the X-ray floor to the lobby, and went on out. I had stuff to do. Soon enough, I forgot all about the toe.

I'm far from being any sort of stoic or tough guy. I just find it exhausting to think about your body as an endless warning system about what's wrong with your body. When I first developed middle-aged lumbar pain, my favorite treatment was to slap on one of those giant adhesive patches laced with capsicum—the principle behind it being to inflict pain across the whole area, so the specific pain nerves that had been complaining before got confused and shut up. It worked! I also endorse putting a pinch of salt directly onto a canker sore, which may or may not speed healing by killing germs, but which definitely causes a brief burst of searing pain, after which the previous pain level feels like sweet relief.

How could you stand paying attention to this stuff all the time?

–

Me: I can’t.  But for much of my life, I have had no choice.  God has visited on me a plague called “somaticism,” which means I feel the goings-on in my body with greater clarity than most people: I feel my pulse.  I feel food moving through the alimentary canal, and such.  With the proper pessimistically neurotic mindset, which God also granted to me, this can be diabolical.  

Once, when I was a young adult, I shifted weirdly in a chair, and felt a stabbing pain in my scrotum.  Other men do this to themselves multiple times – trust me, ladies, physically, we are doofuses  – and just ignore it.  The dedicated hypochondriac cannot ignore such things.  I suspected testicular cancer.  So for weeks I became focused, minute after minute, on whether my crotch was hurting.  Your entire being becomes a telemetry system – analyzing, computing, uploading to the brain.  The expectation of pain fuels the sensation of pain.  You start to walk a little oddly, to compensate, which awkwardly re-aligns your body, adding to the pain.  Eventually, I went to a doctor, who examined my privates, took some tests, and then, oddly, asked me about my life.  Taken aback, I unloaded:  I said I was worried about my romantic relationship, and anxious about maybe losing my job, and that I felt I had no integrity, no ability,  and no future.  The doctor looked at me and delivered his diagnosis: “You are a young man.  Enjoy your life.” And the pain went away.  

But let’s not dwell on this disturbing subject.  Let’s discuss Death.  

I suspect you have recently become more acquainted with the world of this subject than you have ever been before (I have been a denizen since the age of 14.)  

I find myself thinking often about a Pulitzer-prizewinning book from 1973, “The Denial of Death,” by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker.   It makes the argument, quite disturbingly and persuasively, that Freud was mostly right, but erred in one of his basic conclusions:  The human brain is not all about anxiety over sex, Becker said, but anxiety over the inevitability of death.  We cope with this potentially paralyzing fear through denial.  We busy ourselves with things that take our minds off the horror that awaits us all.  We follow sports teams, take up cooking, get married, raise children, etc.  Becker argues that the sanest of all of us might be the insane, who have succumbed to the horror of the truth that nothing means anything because we are doomed to die and be forgotten.  

Nice, huh?

So, share your thoughts on this, with the benefit of your recent experience. 

Tom: Hmm. Before you get up off the couch, there, having established your lifelong awareness of the frailties of the psyche, let's consider the other message you sent me before that one, a personal one apologizing for how late your response arrived, telling me you "feel bad" because you "like to meet deadlines." Dead-lines, you say. Our little recurring appointments with finality.

Do we really spend our lives on the run from death? What knocks me awake at night and keeps me there, lately, is life—the sheer scramble to keep up with what had seemed, before this, to be the steady and stable flow of days. This disease doesn't seem to be trying to kill me, at least not quickly. Barring misadventure, I still probably have another quarter-century of paying bills and counting out pills, trying to fend off entropy, like the unhappy moth in Norm Macdonald's joke, its misery rising to Tolstoyian torment, imagining itself a spider, "just barely hanging onto my web with everlasting fire underneath me."

And as my grip slips and the flames get closer, I've been struck by the insidious power of denial not about death but  about everyday things. Before I got sick, I used to make sure to make the bed every day. I caught myself skipping it, and then I realized that in my mind, the gloss I was putting on this behavior was that making the bed was not as big a priority for me as it used to be. Horseshit! I was avoiding making the bed because the comforter is big and cumbersome and the muscles that used to give me leverage to flap it up and spread it around were now withered and feeble.

Once you catch yourself lying to yourself, you realize how easy it is. I just happened to develop a subtle shift in my clothes preferences, in which I wasn't as interested in wearing the pants in the very bottom of the closet rack, where I would have to bend my stiff and weakened hips to reach them. My work got a bit more absorbing—so absorbing that I didn't have time to get outside for a walk, especially with the days as short as they are. In truth, the back of my mind, where the decisions get made, was counting the flights of steps out the door and back again, and preferring not to go.

I'm not sure sports is much of an escape from the war of the self against the self. One thing I did a lot, my first week in the hospital, was watch playoff baseball; one thing I did not do, on my regimen of yogurt and pureed food and inactivity, was take a crap. By the seventh night, my beloved Baltimore Orioles—who'd won 101 games despite cheaping out on the pitching staff—were, as the expression goes, on the brink of elimination. They trailed the Texas Rangers two games to none in a best-of-five series, and were behind 3–0 in the bottom of the second inning, after a two-out, two-run double. And then I watched as Dean Kremer tried to get a fastball by Adolis Garcia and Garcia contemptuously swatted it 418 feet to left field on a high arc, admiring it as it went. It was 6–0 and there were still seven-plus innings to go. I clambered out of bed and wobbled off to the bathroom to spend the next few innings in grim, mostly futile combat against my own digestive tract. It was painful and disgusting, but it kept me from watching the game.

Does your obsessive scorekeeping of your body's failings keep you from falling into the trap of self-deception? Or when your knee starts barking, do you suddenly discover that one floor of your house contains everything you really need, and that venturing upstairs would really, if you think about it, be a waste of time? 

Me: The latter.  In my case, it involves deciding that contrary to my prior opinion, the upstairs bathroom in my house is just as inviting in the mornings and evenings as the downstairs bathroom is.  That one is two staircases away, but contains a high-tech bidet that cleanses your behind with a warm, surprisingly gentle firehose-nozzle of comfort, tranquility, and hygiene.  (Tom, Please note that we both, instinctively, under pressure, have reverted to the easy, go-to male subject of the banal anal. )

Not to criticize your observational trenchancy vis a vis that of Ernest Becker, I would like to point out that when beset by mortal fear, you resorted to watching sports.  Yes, the O’s collapsed  like a souffle in an earthquake.  But that was the point at which you … departed. You could not tolerate the knowledge of impending … death. 

However, we are running out of time.  Word-limits approach.  We have to move this along into more profound and dignified realms.

Still, I have to tell you what happened to me this past Saturday.  Because I am involved in a unwise, neurotic crash diet owing to my weight, which pogo-sticks up and down like my blood pressure but is more evident to outsiders (I am currently at my perigee, five nine-and-a-half tall and 188 pounds thick – but, judging from your photo in NYM, this sort of thing does not seem to be a particular problem for you, you scummy fuckstick), Rachel brought home some mercy candy for me.  Specifically, it was a no-sugar version of Werther’s Original hard caramels.  They were shockingly delicious.  I overindulged and about two hours later was visited by something awful.  Later, after an hour of excretion, I looked up this particular confection online only to determine it is ridden with isomalt, a sugar substitute infamous for its scouring laxative effect, inducing a condition I call dire rear.  One online commenter, a woman, said it made you “uncontrollably pee out your poo hole,” which is an elegant and accurate use of language that I endorse. 

Now we really have to approach those profound and dignified realms. In fewer than 100 words, please describe the principal philosophical realizations your recent medical travails have disclosed to you.  

Tom: I would remind you that the photo in New York magazine reflects my experience of losing 30 pounds in six months, the last 10 of which came off in two weeks in the hospital. In that sense, and only that one sense, I've recovered what it felt like to be 25 years old again. 

Philosophically? We're all vulnerable, all the time. The sense of self that gets us through our days is as contingent and fragile as the workings of our bodily tissues are. Get a booster and wear a mask—for the sake of people like me, and because you're one turn of luck away from being people like me, too.

Me: Whoa, I just now discovered that there’s a respected scientific report out there that reveals, through brain scans, that we might actually see our lives flash before our eyes in the moments before death overtakes us.

I’m not sure I’d look forward to that. I survive psychiatrically via the nimble manipulation of guilt and anxiety and self-loathing, and I think what might flash through my eyes is a litany of my most painful bathroom experiences.

One of my favorite topics is how humor is, at its heart, a means of taming the existential terrors of life: You have to either cry or laugh. Thanks for laughing with me.

Tom: See you in Hell, eventually.

---

Tom Shales, the great, great former TV Critic of the Washington Post, died last week. He was 79. Here is my favorite lede of his:

BOB HOPE has reduced life to terms so simple a shark would envy them. He performs, he plays golf. And like a shark, he has to move, apparently, to stay alive. He has almost pathological need to keep working; an amateur psychiatrist might say this maniacal drive has something to do with dodging the old grim reaper. Hope will be 80 in May.

There is something terribly impressive about the way Hope keeps up this breakneck schedule. There is also something a little mortifying about it. But seriously, it's hard to turn down an interview with Bob Hope because, who knows? The next time he comes through town, you might be dead.

—

So. We have now arrived at the real-time Questions / Observations portion of the Gene Pool. Today’s subject will be heavily influenced by a question I asked in the Weekend Gene Pool: What was a moment when you decided you were getting too old to understand hip, modern culture? If you are reading this in real time, please remember to keep refreshing the screen to get in touch with, y’know, the latest.

Q: I was at Office Depot mailing something that weighed maybe five pounds, because at the time Office Depot took U.S. mail. The clerk, young looking, put my stuff in a cardboard box, taped it up, put an address label on it and then very carefully affixed one Forever U.S. postage stamp onto the box. I look at him. A moment passes.

Clerk: What?

Me: Um…one postage stamp is not enough.

Clerk: why not?

Me: Because postage is calculated by weight.

Clerk: Oh. Well, I’ve never mailed anything before.      

That was when I knew I was seriously out of touch. —Tracy Thompson

A:  Love this, Tracy.   I had a similar experience when trying to order blank checkbooks at my bank.  The banker lady looked at me and said, amused, “Why?”

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Q: Back in the olden days, when our kids were undergraduates, I was lounging in the family room watching the Thanksgiving game. The kids were huddled with their cousins, drinking coffees at a table there. I heard them discussing cocktails, specifically Old Fashions and something called a Cookie Cutter. Just to show I was cool with these mostly underage college kids discussing booze, I called over that “ my parents used to call them highballs.” After a pregnant pause, my daughter laughed, “ thanks dad, watch the game.”

Later, sitting around and sipping wine with my Boomer siblings and in-laws, my brother’s wife who kept au courant with the patois of the young and horny remarked that she thought it was funny that the kids called handjobs “Old Fashions” and mini-skirts “ Coochie Cutters.”   – Jon Ketzner 

A: Haha.   It will not surprise you that this is the first time I’ve heard these terms. They are now part of my lexicon.  

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this right now, on an email: Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Sick … to Death”) for the full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

Speaking of observations and questions, send ‘em here, to this grotesque orange button:

Also, you could upgrade your subscription. But that would only make sense if you like this newsletter a lot and want to allow less prosperous people to enjoy it for free. Think of it as paying $4.15 in taxes each month so beautiful, intelligent vulnerable orphans don’t have to starve.

Q: If Donald Trump is sent to prison, what are the odds that Melania would visit him there?

A: I think it would depend entirely on how long the sentence was.   Two years, with time off?  She visits him.   Ten years?  No way. Not even once.

Q: Years ago I read your book about hypochondria (and your very real health scares.) I suffer from mild hypochondria. How's yours these days?

A:  This question arrived last week.  I believe you have your answer today.  

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Q:  Forty years ago I recall feeling old and overeducated (miseducated?) when I had a part-time job at Crown Books (no refunds, exchanges only). A kid came in and said he was looking for Calvin and Hobbes and I was surprised, told him I doubted we had any, and walked him past a mountain of Scientology books over to the tiny nonfiction area. I looked for John Calvin and then Thomas Hobbes and told the kid we didn’t have any. A little while later I was at the register and the kid came up with a large, colorful Calvin and Hobbes comic book he had found in a large pile of them. I felt stupid and old.

A: Holy wow. 

Q: I can get blueberries for 99 cents at the grocery if I use the so-called QR code. I ask the cashier every time how to do that. I wonder if the store has calculated the value of making things more complicated vs. the cost of paying employees to explain it over and over to old people.

A: I regard those things, the QR codes, especially at restaurants, as an “innovation” made entirely for the convenience of the company, not the customer.  Another is when you cannot get a human on the phone b/c the website is desperately trying to get you not to speak to a human, but to access their website “for your convenience.”

Q: Gene - as far as I can tell, I have been the only David Koronet in the world all my life. There are exactly six people with the last name Koronet in the US (it was 8 when my parents were alive): my brother, his wife, my wife, my kids, and myself. There are, however, other things named Koronet: a pizzeria in Manhattan not far from the campus of Columbia, a pub in Southport in the UK, a Russian missile (heaven help everyone if I knew about that as a teenager- "hello, baby, I am Russian missile"), and a beer made in Belarus (where my forebears, Kornetskys, were from - we must have left one hell of an impression, having a line of beers named after us 100 years after we left).

A: Thank you for sharing this.   The pizza place seems to be a New York chain, with several locations, and the pizza looks like old Bronx style, which is the greasiest, thinnest crusted, and best pizza in the world, IMO.  Rachel is the only Rachel Manteuffel in the world, as far she can determine. 

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Q: On your basketball poll from last week,  you’re right! I have no expertise, but thoughts. When I was young, I dated a seven-footer who had played ball for a major college team. He was gloriously tall, and of course a great defender (miles of arms). But he was not fast. Big men can be fast! But not consistently so. A smaller point guard with speed and agility will get around the big man. So I think a whole team of them, who I assume will be consistently fast and flee will trounce a team of big men. I’d watch that game with great interest - there is nothing more glorious in this world than a room full of centers. 

A: I can think of a FEW things that are more glorious.  Finding true love late in life?  Surviving a serious illness?  Really good mint chip ice cream?  A coochie cutter convention?  

This is Gene. Just want to observe that the percent of readers who are declining to answer today’s insolent poll is exactly the percent of readers who declined to discuss their pubic hair tonsorials a decade or so ago.  

—

Q:  I remain intrigued with your interest in horology --- at least the repair end. Have you ever told us how you got into it ? Not something I would have guessed. Do you usually disassemble and clean the mechanisms ? Apart from the actual repair, what gives you the most satisfaction ? Hearing it tick or chime (if it does), or just watching it keep time properly ?

A: It’s being able to repair something made in, say, 1858, when Lincoln was alive, and getting it working again.  Sometimes, it’s been 100 years since the last repair person had taken it apart.    The mechanical clock was one of the most ingenious inventions in human history, and with a design that never appreciably changed since roughly 1657, with the invention of the pendulum.  There is a awesome beauty in that. 

See next question and answer. 

—

Q: I have been paying the Stupid Tax monthly for the past few years. I moved my mother's stuff from her house to a storage locker, because I had no room for it in my house, but I couldn't just dispose of it. It had to be kept for when I *do* have room, or sold if it's not all that important to me. While pulling out some items this weekend, then putting them back because my family did not approve, I came across an old mantel clock. Maybe you can tell me something about it, from your vantage point as a connoisseur of ancient timepieces: a Campanile #2 clock from Sessions Clock Company. It hasn't run in years, probably decades, but I don't know if it CAN'T run, just that it hasn't. Is this clock valued highly enough to justify the thousands of dollars I have spent so far on storage?

A: Sadly, no.  I believe I know this clock – at least I know the Campanile #1, and suspect the number 2 is a slightly later variation.  It is what is called a tambour type, or a  “camelback,” because it is shaped like a hump.  It is a simple, elegant clock, likely made in the early 1900s.  It has a bim-bam chime, which means instead of chiming the hour – one chime per number, so five chimes, say, for five o’clock – it chimes twice per number.   Five o’clock is BING-bong, BING-bong, BING-bong, BING-bong, BING-bong.   Very classy, resonant chime.   I like the clock for its simplicity, and Sessions made mechanically fine clocks.  I have one on my wall that has been running steadily for 40 years without servicing.

Alas, you can buy a Sessions camelback for about $150, because philistines prefer the ornate. 

Plus, once you decide to keep it, a good repairer will charge you $300 to overhaul it.  You are screwed. 

—

Q: So just for clarification, and I assure you, the expression on my face is both befuddled and vaguely hateful as I write this, you only have our word for who we are by the name we put down in the body of our questions?

Sincerely,

Tucker Carlson

A: Thanks, Tuck.  And yes, as the system is now set up, I don’t know the identities.   For all I know, this IS Tucker Carlson.

—

Q: I have paused after the poll before reading the rest to anonymously comment. I feel like the answers here are going to be heavily skewed by relationship status and gender. For example, I as a married woman would answer "rarely or never" because if I'm in the mood, my partner is more than willing to oblige every. single. time. However, the answer would have been very very different when I was a single adult. I feel that straight men may not have partners that are always willing to oblige their desires and may have vastly different answers than women. Personally (and I recognize this is an outdated view by many women), I have always approached this in my marriage as a delightful duty, but a duty still. I've asked him to remain faithful to me meaning I'm the only one he's allowed to seek this attention from, so I will not deny him of it. I may delay at times (like if I feel ill) but it is rare and I always give him a time limit on the delay (usually within a day) and we have agreements about times when it is just a no-go, but my spouse knows if he would like release, I will always oblige him. Likewise, he's never turned me down, but has delayed a few times when he was recovering from minor injuries. I don't think it's coincidence that our marriage is one of the happiest I know of. We both know that the other puts their needs on equal footing as their own. And before anyone says something like "you must not have children," I have 3 of them. You make time for what matters to you and my spouse and my marriage matter.

A: I could be wrong about this, but I remember reading, years ago, that masturbation, at least for men, is completely unrelated to the availability of one’s partner . They are two separate things that coexist.

—

Hey, this is Gene again. Scocca is running our interview on his Indignity newsletter simultaneously, and you should click over there if for no reason other than the art, which is drawn by Alex Fine, my former cartoonist.

—

Q: In your poll, by “roughly”, do you mean approximately ? Or are you speaking to technique?

A: Haha. One must never be rough. One can be respectfully aggressive.

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Q: From the start, the SI under the Czar's watch tried to challenge the editors/censors/wet blankets on some edgy topics. [I love that you persisted for 13 years - Allah be praised.] What were some of your faves that you got by them, maybe in the small print? We read the little things just to seek your wins. :)

A: I will answer this on Thursday. I have to think about it. Your question is grand and deserves rumination.

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Q: This is not a question, but an observation on the poll result about masturbating: a plurality refused to answer. This is in line with my theory that the profound shame almost everyone feels about sex is related to the fact that deep down, we know -- and have done everything we can to repress and deny -- that we are all basically animals, as unable to resist the evolved urge to mate (and related activities, like the one under discussion) as a dog is when it goes into heat. This utterly wrecks our conception of ourselves as rational, enlightened beings. Sure we are -- except when we are horny which is, for most post-adolescents, just about all of the time.

A: This is a point I have made in the past, and with gusto. It is the engine of much humor — we THINK we are evolved and chivalric and whatnot, but consider bathroom needs and sex. Just look at the faces human animals make when copulating.

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Q: Ignoring for the moment the time that receiving socks for Christmas made me really happy, my most sudden and dismaying realization of codgerdom took place in the early 2000s when I had just started working for a magazine whose main focus topics were travel and fashion. 

One day the fashion editor, a woman about ten years younger than me, was at the next desk going over photos from a recent shoot with the art director. Walking behind them for a trip to the coffee machine, I noticed that her thong underwear was showing in the back – and not just showing, but protruding a good six inches above the waistline of her fashionably low-cut jeans. 

I was shocked. I was mortified. I began weighing her presumed embarrassment against how weird and inappropriate it would be for me -- a relative stranger and the only straight guy in the office -- to tell her that her panties were hanging out. Fortunately I decided that I didn’t know her well enough and kept my mouth shut.

A few days later I was at my local wine store, where I happened to be in line behind two young women wearing low-cut jeans with thong underwear protruding six inches above the waistline. Only then did it FINALLY dawn on me that this was not only intentional but trendy. Followed immediately by the thought, “Oh man, you are o-o-o-old now.”

A slap in the face from a whale tail…

A:  I’m so out of it I was unaware of this fashion, though, being a wonk-nerd, I do remember that Monica Lewinsky once displayed this to Clinton, according to the Starr Report.  Whale Tail is an excellent term.  It just occurs to me, though, that a better name MIGHT be the scientific term for the whale’s tail, which also describes the fairly brief fashion trend: a Fluke.     

Q:  A recent WaPo article noted that there’s a nostalgic resurgence of interest in VHS tapes, and it reminded me of this, from Anthony Jeselnik. “I remember when I found my father’s porn stash in the back of the attic. It was the best. The worst was when I found my mom’s porn stash… in the back room at the video store.”

A: Thank you. 

Q: Did you know that many palindrome enthusiasts are also employed in sports leagues? It's an unusual correlation, but it's true. However, due to fear of injury they rarely play the games themselves. Rather, they prefer to be in logistics positions, often taking charge of scheduling which games will be overseen by which impartial officials. That's right. Ref assigning is safer.

A: Thank you. Some people will get this.

Q:  I am a subscriber (it says to at the top of the page), but I have not been able to vote in a Gene poll since the renewal date. Am I the only one? I mean, my mother thinks I'm special, but I have learned that nope, I'm not that special.

A: If you are a subscriber, you should be able to vote.  Please send another message IN WHICH YOU INCLUDE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS.  Can’t help you if you don’t do that.  Is anyone else having this problem? 

Q: I just saw a news photo with an all time great Aptonym - The Fire Chief in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin is Lieutenant Les McBurney. However, as I was double checking to be sure this isn't a spoof, I found that his name was featured on "Jimmy Kimmel's "Perfectly Named People" segment."  

A: I had mentioned him years before Jimmy.  I am the world’s greatest curator of the aptonym. As an aptonym, Mr. McBurney is in the Pantheon of Ten. 

Q:  I'm reminded how old I am every time I read about a new Avengers movie, and then realise it has nothing to do with John Steed and Emma Peel.

A: Thank you. 

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Q: I am the anonymous poster commenting about the poll and in response to your response, I immediately texted my husband. "Listen, for research purposes..." He indicated that during the times of our life when he didn't desire to wake me after I unceremoniously passed unconscious often still in my clothes after wrestling a child to bed after a full day of work and a previous night of interrupted sleep from small humans, that's the only time he really bothered. Since our kids are old enough now that I can delay sleep by a good half hour without ill effects knowing I'm not going to be up trying to soothe a teething baby, he only would bother if I was out of town as I do occassionally travel for work. I do not care if he does, he's his own person and may do with his body parts as he wishes within the confines of our marriage vows to each other. But he swears in his case he just prefers to wait for his wife to come to bed. Perhaps if your reading is true, I've married a rare breed.

A: Or, he is lying. But if he is lying, he is doing so for the best possible reason — love of a woman and no wish to distress her — and is to be extravagantly forgiven.

Q:  I'm a geriatric millennial who follows pop culture headlines avidly. I'm no longer on social media and never joined TikTok, though, which doesn't bother me because I'm very happy for the "extremely online" drama to pass me by. But the moment I realized how removed I am from Gen Z is when I saw this sketch last year. It was more the fact that I was learning young-person slang from SNL, rather than not knowing the slang itself, that brought it home.

A:  Indeed, or Gen Z hospital 

Q:  Cindi Caron here, Pawleys Island, SC 

So in the late nineties, I had my first "generation gaffe" moment. I was working at a restaurant and a bunch of us were setting up for the shift in the kitchen and telling jokes. I told a joke about a cowboy captured by Indians. Here goes: 

The Indians offered him one last request before they were to burn him at the stake. He asks to speak to his horse. The horse is brought over and the cowboy whispers something in it's ear. Immediately, the horse takes off running. The Indians look at one another in bewilderment. A few moments later, the horse returns with a beautiful, naked blonde on it's back. The Indians are surprised, but pleased, and they proceeded to ravish the young woman. When they approach the cowboy again, he begs to speak to his horse once more. The Indians think that's a great idea. Again, he whispers in the horse's ear and  it runs off again. This time, it returns with a beautiful, naked brunette. Again the Indians are pleased and pleasure themselves at length. Once more, the Cowboy asks to speak to his horse. The Indians are all for it, but when they bring the horse to him this time, he grabs the horse's face with both hands and looking him straight in the eyes and shouts, "I said POSSE!"

Everyone laughed heartily except one teenaged boy, who looked completely puzzled. Then everyone started laughing at him for not getting the joke. I was thinking to myself, "Please don't let me have to explain this to this child!", when one of the guys explains, "The horse thought he said...". "Oh, I know what the horse thought, but isn't a posse a Jamaican gang?"

A: Nice. Hi, Cindi.

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This is Gene, and I copy us down. A fine discussion, and I was a bit overwhelmed with questions. But I need more for Thursday. Please keep sending in questions and observations here:

And, finally, as always, I ask for your patronage, not on my behalf — I have enough savings to retire semi-comfortably, scrimping where possible — but on behalf of the memory of Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet spy who saved the world from nuclear annihilation by leaking secrets to the USA during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was executed for his humanitarian efforts. Upgrade your subscription for him.