A second summer of Rona

“Well in, I’d say!” goes the punchline to the world’s oldest honeymoon nuptials’ joke: At long last, the virgin bride’s conjugal evening has arrived — you’ve all heard this one before, kids — demure timidity and blushing purity personified is our fair maiden, breathlessly anticipating promissory fireworks and exploding stars! Her handsome new groom mounts her. She braces for newlywed lift-off.

The mattress begins gyrating, the bed posts start rattling, yet … with no rocket launch discernible: An emergency abort? “Bunny Puff”? she inquires delicately, emotionless. “Apollo, are … you in yet, my sweet?”

“Well in!” I’d say, indeed, during this — our second, melted-down summer in a row of euphoric expectations versus reality tumbled down a rabbit hole.

Here we are, bois AND girlz, returned once more to the raggedy butthole end of August, with Rona having invited her even virally uglier sister Delta along to this summer’s beach blanket blastoff! Hope you haven’t thrown out your masks, kids!

Globally, and biblically, it becomes easier every month to concur the end days are nigh. And not least presciently assuaging is the Book of Revelations’ little reminder that wicked mankind’s second annihilation shall arrive in the exact opposite form bestowed by Genesis; hence, in case you haven’t noticed, folks, our whole fuckin’ world is ablaze! Be it literally, figuratively or both — bizarrely, in particular, Earth’s most traditionally rainy and/or most frozen regions — the Amazon Basin, the Pacific Northwest, Siberia — have turned powder-keg first.

Meanwhile, everything down here in the Great Plains this summer is (per Texas-in-August usual) merely torpid. However, as the running joke goes, Dallas only has two seasons anyhow: summer and roadcrew. Oh, but did I mention every hospital’s emergency room nationwide is once again bursting at the seams? And just where’s our own, modern day anti-Noah for this new, ungodly era? Come on, man, hurry up and get here — things are starting to feel a bit, um, toasty!

Unanimously, my East Coast friends all gasp the same utterance about my living in Texas: “My God, Howard, but the heat! How do you even stand it?” To which my stock answer usually goes, “Dallas is actually a very beautiful place to live from October through June; it’s only the other three months you gotta pay for it — which perhaps explains, guys, why I’ve been receiving a bit of overly zealous bitchery here recently, regarding just how ‘tame, politically correct and practically PG-rated rated’ my columns have apparently become. Really, now, bois?

This is the bone you wanna pick?

Granted, there was about a 6-month spate last year (during Rona’s crested lockdown peak) when I felt it just a trifle inappropriate to answer any of my usual rafts of cheating-dick questions or tawdry, assorted other sludge-mongering inquiries. Nonetheless, if it’s to the gutter you wish to return, kids, then a veritable Stygian trench of feces-flecked, felched and snowballed spooge shall we again flounce through — kicking straight-off with Howard’s number one most frequently asked question of all time. So, let’s just jump jizzily right in it, shall we? Don’t you worry, bois, the bitch is back!

Dear Howard: How many calories are in an average blast of spunk?
— Rawnonymous

Dear Rawnon: For some cryptically unrelenting, weight-watchers’ logic of girth control I’ve yet to figure out, this is (by far and away!) the single most oft-asked question I get. I’ve already answered it at least, oh, four or five times previously. So why not make it just a sugar-free/gluten-free half-dozen? A semen calorie-count of anywhere between 30-to-50 is the (presumably researched) correct number of empty calories you’ll be guzzling from any given esophageal sperm deposit, dependent, of course, on whether you’re the lucky recipient of your date’s first master-blaster load of his day or whether you’re further down the scum-dance pole, sans any reservoir of recharging sleep he’s had in between.

Dear Howard: I teach freshmen high school English. School just started back, and it deeply saddens me to discover that four of my entering 14-year-olds this year are critically hospitalized. No, and it’s not COVID that’s culpable, either. It’s AIDS.

The standout horror here, to me, is that all four of them are fully four whole years away, still, from any adult being legally allowed to have sex with them, at all! In my opinion, Howard, in this day and age just one case of AIDS involving a minor would be an aberration.

Two cases would be cause for alarm. Three cases would alert a disturbing trend. And four cases bode a crisis!

Also, for whatever it’s cryptically worth, I don’t think any of them are even gay! Howard, have you been hearing any underground reports such as these from any of your other readers? Honestly, I don’t believe my fellow high school staffers have even connected any these dots.
— Screaming Primal

Dear Scream Machine: Indeed, there’s a reason why “taboo” porn (i.e., Daddy/Son incest) out of all other fetish categories, has taken a surgent jump here lately to become the sudden, single most-popular gay brand, or genre, rather. Everything else — from plain vanilla to the scatological and all tastes in between — eats its dirt. Curiouser, still, the Daddy/Son taboo-vogue commonality seems to have leapt from “underground deviancy” up to universal acceptance at warp-speed across the entire pansexual board.

If you ask me, the ever-fluid categories of porn’s popularity fetishes are the easiest, quickest and best societal-bellwether indicators of where Tomorrowland in the bedroom is headed; hell, I’m old enough to remember when AIDS first received its name — AIDS collided exactly with the very year I turned 18 — both milestones occurring in apocalyptic 1982, as for the next 20 years my subsequent adulthood would be defined by knowing any day could be the beginning of my swift end.

I distinctly remember all the blonds died first. The dazzler kind — vivacious, fearless and flirty. I was blond. And in my peer group of Birmingham friends, I alone lived — which I attribute to moving to NYC back in 1985 — back when AIDS was still a far away, sub-culture disease not anything relevant to the good people living in Alabama.

That’s the way all problems we couldn’t control used to be solved: If something went hotspot, we just packed up and sought refuge elsewhere. What do we do now, though, you ask, when everything’s gone hotspot — when everything’s shocking, electrifying no one?

Yes, our wells may all maddeningly-well indeed be running permanently dry; thus, why not give vigil to a sharp-tongued, tea-party-hosting milliner? During a psychotically global break, where else better to turn? Whether one calls it stumbling down a rabbit hole or a romp through Wonderland, ‘Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible’ … and began very cautiously her plotline concerns regarding the story-telling Dormouse’s mirthful tea party entertainment — an off-the-cuff tale invented of three sisters learning to draw, all of whom lived at the bottom of a treacle well.

Asked Alice, “But I don’t understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?”

“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter, “so I think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well — eh, stupid?”

“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark. ‘Of course, they were,’ said the Dormouse;’ — well in.”

Thus, children, how does Lewis Carroll bring us well into our contemplative thought for the day, pray you ask? Well, try a swallow of this tea: The average human lifespan consists of a but a pitifully mere 4,000 weeks — as I helplessly learned myself only yesterday, courtesy self-help guru Oliver Burkeman’s newly-published, tongue-in-cheek scoffing at what, exactly, do self-help books help one achieve?

Personally, I’ve already burned through more than 3,068 of my own paltrily allotted 4,000-weeks’ Earth-time. Now, if only I could remember just where in the treacly-blue blazes could I have misplaced my bucket list, that I’d only just now finally begun a good start at taking things all so seriously with, anyhow?

My, August, but how coldly detached you do burn.

—Howard Lewis Russell

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