My Ayn Rand/Nathaniel Branden Moment and Other Indiscreet Topics

I promised a few people that I would start a blog and write about my kids, their antics, and my responses to it all. However, I have had myself on my mind lately so that is what you get. This week, in particular, was a mentally long and bizarre week.

On Friday, for the first time in eight years, I ended up at a post-closing-time house party til five in the morning. The children were safe in the care of a Wisconsinite virgin that I found on Craigslist.

The house party was full of the motley crew of revelers that refuse to end the night when the bars close (AKA the hardcore alcoholics). Party Goer One was the late thirties party girl who in ten years will be Pasty Stone, but for now, she still oozes sexuality and funny jokes. Her sidekick, the owner of the house, danced out of tune to ELO and was definitely as Edina as we can find in real life. Party Goer One's sister, the Iowan housewife was there. Technically, she was an Iowan science professor, but she looked like a housewife. Number Four was the housewife's gay boyfriend, the Costa Rican with the lisp, the perfect jeans, and the beautiful scarf. Who knew Iowa allowed gay Costa Ricans? Number Five was the toothless, Wyoming rancher that no one seemed to have met prior to that night. Number Six was my brother-in-law, the charming English stranger, and although I am sure that Patsy or Edina would have loved him, I got to monopolize this beautiful, off-limits, impossibility in a corner for much of the evening. Number Seven was The Man, and I'm sure you'll hear enough about him if you keep reading this blog. Number Eight was Minger, and I'll let the Costa Rican describe me:

"Look at you. You are not fashion or style, but you are amazing. Everyone can see it. You are bursting with the sex." Well, it was news to me that my twelve dollar outfit, so new that it still smelled of thrift store was not fashionable, but it's the second part of the statement that is the most accurate.  

I am. I am completely bursting with the sex. My libido, dead for eight long years, has recently staged a massive rebirth. I had really worried that it was gone forever. At worst, I would go three or four months without feeling a flicker. At best, I could muster up the energy for staid, single position, marital encounters, once or twice a week. Now, hello! I am full of hormones, raging hormones that have resulted in the best, most genuine, desperate kissing, multi-positional, sustained marital encounters in the bed, on the floor, and over the couch.

However, now that the libido is back, it's about as discretionary as an eight teen year old boy's. It may look like I'm standing there talking to you like a normal person, but in my head, I am silently admonishing myself not to start rubbing against your leg like a dog in heat.

World, I am ready for my Ayn Rand/Nathaniel Branden Moment. Sadly, luckily, incidentally (I can't saddle this moment with adjectival judgement), there is no one to play Nathaniel to my Ayn. Even if there were, I'm sure there is no Nathaniel's wife to consent to such ill-mannered, anti-social consorting.

I use Ayn and Nathaniel because an Ayn Rand biography was the first place I had ever heard of permissible extra-marital affairs. I was completely disturbed by the idea then, but by the time I read the World According to Garp six months later, I had pretty much embraced the idea. I don't have to read the fact that Garp and Jenny's affairs ended by her lover's knob getting bitten off and their youngest child dying as a cautionary tale, do I? or do I?

However, as the old saying goes, "You can't pick up a date at Applebees. You need to go to the Polyamorous Supper Club." In case, you're thick, I will extrapolate on the meaning of this rule: We live in a culture dominated by monogamy. Therefore, you cannot simply think that it will work to pick up a stranger who will understand the strange rules of the non-monogamous game. You need to head to a place where everybody is playing a different game with different rules.  

The problem with that, however, is that although all the polyamorous people I have ever met have been lovely, they have also all been genre readers. Minger may have realized that she has capillaries in places she thought she had lost them and she may be having inappropriate thoughts all day long, but she still has some morals intact. One of those being that she has never, nor will she ever "love" a genre reader.

Who has the time anyway? To my great chagrin, we are not Bonobos so I cannot hook-up with a stranger in a tree while the kids play below, and I simultaneously nurse my toddler. I'm not comfortable with the other alternative either, "Here, kids, watch this Sponge Bob video while I indulge myself." And, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure that I want to play with fire.

So, I guess, I'll be here, folding laundry, trying to cool my ardor by throwing rocks in the river with the kids, bemoaning the fact that I'm too poor for a pool boy, and praying to the eight pound baby Jesus that the kids go to bed early and The Man comes home with some energy.

A quick prayer: Dear, Zeus, sluttiest of all the gods, and Aphrodite, born out of sea foam from Cronus's castrated balls, please don't ever let my libido be lost again. I may feel like an emotional and tragic mess with it here, but I felt like a sad mess without it.