Archives August 2024

I have two daughters, so it is widely accepted that their parents have had sex twice.

As a novelist, I have considered inserting (poor choice of words) a sex scene or two into my work. I have not done this.

This is because I have actually, like everyone in the world over a certain age, had sex more than twice. So I have experienced enough “things” that would allow me to write a scene about intimacy. I have not done this.

I have not done this in fear that three of my readers might a) vomit after reading one of these scenes, or b) in the case of reader number three, wonder where on earth the activities in said scene originated. I know, fiction writers use their imagination, but would reader three really understand that?

My problems in writing the scene would entail (not an intentional pun)

• Arranging the location for the scene. Would it be inside? A hotel, or maybe someone’s seedy basement? Or would it be somewhere in the glory of the outdoors, say along the banks of a pebble-strewn stream or in a bosky dell?
• Would the participants be young and lithe, or more in my age range, complete with arthritis, cellulite, various sagging parts, etc.?
• Would it be an affair? If so, an air of stealth and anxiety at being discovered  would have to be a part of it. The anxiety could cause erectile dysfunction, and frankly, I don’t want to go down that road.
• What kind of sex would they have? Vanilla (I am a sort of expert in that area of carnal activity), or more kinky? I have read other writer’s sex scenes involving props. Toys. I have to admit that everything in a brown wrapper coming to me has been from Amazon. I would have to do some research into “toys.” Again, I am not sure I am ready for that.
• And the act itself. Arms, legs, faces, buttocks. How does one write about the arrangement? Sex involves a lot of thrashing and sometimes it’s very unruly. Sweat and other liquids. One participant might be into biting. Biting what? Oh, and foreplay. Where should I have them start? In the hallway of the hotel? By the pool, very surrepticiously?
• Who faces in what direction? Arms caressing cheeks or hands exploring inside underwear? How do they get their clothes off? And then what?  Will one of the lovers swoon, or will one pass gas? That stuff happens. The act itself–discuss or leave it up to the reader, to fill in as desired? How explicit is too explicit?
• Do I want to sweep my readers into the scene to the point that they lose themselves and emerge at the end of the chapter sweaty and exhausted, or uplifted and deeply moved?
• And will they reach nirvana simultaneously, as they do in just about all romance novels, or will one partner become delirious and the other resentful?

It’s something that I never have come to grips with (another innuendo I didn’t mean) as a novelist, and thus I write what many classify as “young adult” fiction.

This is a complete cop-out on my part, because who is it that is having all the sex? Yup. The young adults.

I think Colleen Hoover can handle this. I am going to end it with her.

After dinner, we settle down to watch TV. We don’t watch anything that is on network TV. We prefer the mystery series that are on the streaming. You know the ones–they surround a crime, usually murder, and they have at least six episodes.

It requires two people to watch these, because these shows are so crammed with red herrings, a cast of thousands, and so many blind alleys. This is how our evenings in front of the TV go:

HIM: “Wait. Pause it for a minute. Who’s Larry?”

ME: “Larry is Maurice’s brother.”

HIM: “The one with the false eye?”

ME: “No. That is Tony. You know–Tony runs the coffee shop. Larry is Mary’s father.”

HIM: “So they think Larry did it? I thought he had an alibi. He was eating pizza with Don and his wife–what’s her name? Violet?”

ME: “Larry’s alibi may be shaky. He is sleeping with Violet, so she is probably lying for him.”

The show continues, and we watch as some new characters emerge, and a plot detail from the first episode comes up big time. Neither of us remembers it.

ME: “Wait. The mailbox??”

HIM: *rewinding* “See that? She put a letter in the mailbox.”

ME: “Who? The next door neighbor?”

HIM: “Yeah.”

ME: “So she is important to all of this? Is she a suspect? Wasn’t she the one who moved back to London in the first episode? I thought she was just Violet’s roommate from college.”

HIM: “Yes, but she must be important. Maybe the letter has incriminating facts in it.”

ME: “Or maybe not. She could just be mailing a letter.”

HIM: “Is this the show where the girl got raped on roofies?”

ME: “No wonder you are confused. No. That was the last show–the one with the body in the lake beside the boy’s boarding school.”

HIM: “Oh, right. This is about the poisoning.”

ME: “Yeah. So maybe the letter is a flashback. Or, maybe the letter has the poison.”

Why we watch these is the real mystery, because number one: the guilty person is always the one you least suspect, so just pick the most ridiculous cast member, and you will be right ninety percent of the time. Remember Tony, with the false eye? HE did it. The fact that he appears in the first episode for exactly three seconds is the giveaway. Who would guess Tony? We would. But wait, is it Tony??

Number two: The same famous actors, like Olivia Coleman, are in all of these shows, so we get confused. Olivia was the good true woman in the last show we watched, and then she is in a show  sending nasty letters to everyone in the village. We just can’t keep it straight–is she the good one or the bad one?

Of course, there is always the plot twist. Or worse. Tony, whose eye gives us the creeps, turns out to be a former priest. A man of God, who just looks like someone who might be a murderer. The actual murderer is Violet, whom we would have never suspected, because she has such a small role. They elevate her in the last episode, when she tries to push DCI Bradley off the roof, because he is on to her for murdering Ralph with the poison. Ralph, the seemingly innocuous schoolteacher.

After the last episode, we both shrug. We knew it was coming. The person you least suspect.

HIM: “But what was in the letter? It wasn’t poison, because Violet kept the poison in her purse in that little bottle. What was the letter all about?”

ME: “Something unimportant. They wanted us to get confused.”

HIM: *nods wisely* “Of course. Remember the brother in the chicken suit? THAT WAS CONFUSING.”

ME: “That wasn’t in this show.”

HIM: “I know that. But it was still confusing.”

We turn off the TV, shut off the lights, and go to bed. Just before he starts snoring, I sit bolt upright.

ME: “But wait! Violent and Tony were both threatened by the London mafia! Violet murdered  Ralph to protect Tony! Ralph was mafia; remember the black gloves? They were setting us up for Season Two!”

HIM: “The chicken suit was so confusing…”

I have a lot of time on my hands, it’s true. Some days, I look around from the fourth episode of 48 Hours that I have seen without a break, and I think to myself: “Molly, you should do something productive, like Swiffing the hall. I don’t, but I think about it before switching to 20/20.

Today, I turned off the tv and decided to look online for things that people with time on their hands do. Things that I might take inspiration from. Have you heard of Rajiv Surendra? He has a YouTube channel that I love to watch. Rajiv is so adorable. The problem with Rajiv is that what he wants me to do is wash my window wells, clean my baseboards, or make my own silver polish with things I already have in my pantry. I gave my silver to my daughter, and I took one look at my window wells and decided to put off cleaning them until 2030. I simply ignore my baseboards.

But today, I stumbled onto a thing. A thing that people do who have completed all of Rajiv’s projects and long ago surpassed Martha Stewart. This is the truth:  they decorate the inside of their refrigerators. This is so that when the fridge door is opened, the person looking for a cold snack instantly forgets hunger and is transported by the beauty of the interior of the icebox. It’s beautiful. It’s aesthetic. It’s color coordinated. There’s a bouquet in there, on purpose.

Here are my questions:

• Why?
• Is the bouquet real, or can you use plastic flowers?
• Will your husband open the fridge door and after saying “WTF?” immediately want a divorce, because the sock drawer is one thing, but this crosses the line?
• Are you trying to make your friends jealous?
• What do you do with all of the milk jugs, egg cartons, mayonnaise jars, and juice bottles that you replace with decorative containers? Trash them? Who takes out that trash? Oh, right–your husband–the one who wants a divorce.
• How often do you open the fridge door to admire it?
• How do you get your guests to do the same? Or do you throw open the fridge door at every opportunity, saying something like, “Would anyone like a cold drink out of this antique jug I picked up during our last trip to Spain? It’s food safe!”
• Do you need a hobby?
• Did you get this idea from Joanna Gaines?

I guess I should clean my baseboards.

We are all very busy. I am way too busy to read every single news story out there. I rely on the headlines to keep me up to date with things. Especially the Olympics-all I need to see is, for instance, JORDAN CHILES MUST RETURN OLYMPIC BRONZE AFTER COURT RULING to know all I need to know. I feel for her, but I don’t want to soak myself in the whole traumatic story. That is enough.

But  just a few minutes ago, I saw this headline: WOMAN STEALS 1.4 MILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF CHICKEN WINGS FROM SCHOOL DISTRICT. Really? I went to get a quick glass of water, and when I came back to my Google feed, the story had disappeared, to be replaced with other more newsworthy items, like 100 YEAR OLDS SHARE WHAT THEY ALWAYS EAT. I know the answer to that; it’s kale.

But back to the chicken wings. Try as I might, I can’t figure out why anybody would want that many chicken wings. Wouldn’t this woman’s family get sick of them after, say, $100 worth? And my God, how many chicken wings add up to 1.4 million dollars? Chicken wings are inexpensive. I buy two packages whenever I make noodle soup, and they run me about six dollars for a dozen wings. So I can’t wrap my head around fitting 1.4 million dollars worth in the trunk of my car.

So, okay, you are saying. She stole them over time. Of course she did. Again, how many years does it take to steal that many wings? Ten, maybe? And back to her family–still eating the damn wings, for ten long years? How many ways can a woman cook wings, anyway? You say, No. She sold them. Who did she sell them to? How? Door to door? Her neighbors would get suspicious, wondering why Ethel (I made up her name; the headline didn’t identify her) pedaled wings all the time. I mean, I can see it if she decided to become a drug dealer, but to my thinking, there is just not that much demand for chicken wings. But of course, school lunch rooms don’t serve cocaine, so I guess Ethel’s choices of things to purloin and then sell were limited.

Ethel must have had a plan. But what was it? She couldn’t sell them to restaurants–what restaurant would buy wings from some random woman who showed up at the kitchen door with bags full of them? There might be a dive in some shady neighborhood, but again, we are talking 1.4 million dollars worth of wings.Ok, then.  Did Ethel have big parties? Really big parties? I can just see her friends, rolling their eyes and saying, “My God, Ethel just invited us over for the Fourth. But I cannot stomach another chicken wing.”

Could Ethel have an addiction problem? The kind where at first, ten wings a week, nicely barbecued, were enough, but then ten weren’t enough, so Ethel had to increase the amount of wings just to achieve the same wing high? Like from ten a week to twenty, and it went from there? I did the math. If Ethel ate 20 per week, that is 1,042 wings a year. For just Ethel. Now if her family is factored in, as sick of wings as they would get, then maybe Ethel’s fam could ingest four thousand a week? Not possible. Ethel couldn’t cook that many wings a week.

So what is Ethel’s game? Your guess is as good as mine. But her wing spree is over, because as the headline said, Ethel was caught. I can just picture the other lunch ladies sending anonymous emails to the Superintendent of Schools, noting the lumpiness of the pockets in Ethel’s aprons every day on her way out of work, and perhaps seeing an errant wing escaping from her purse. It’s a mystery.

I wonder how many years in jail Ethel will have to serve. Knowing her type, Ethel will become a kingpin in prison, the head of a chicken wing smuggling ring. The food in prisons is terrible, due to most accounts, so hot wings would be a luxury. Those inmates would not mess with Ethel. A good wing is hard to come by in the slammer.

We are like the rest of America. Schlubs. We love to watch the various Olympic events from our comfortable chairs, and man, do we JUDGE.

But here’s the thing: I want to know how coaches find these athletes. Yes, it’s easy for the runners. Your kid runs very fast. So you put him or her in track and field. And skateboarding kids are everywhere, so the good ones stand out. They self-train for the Olympics.

But the high jumpers. Who discovers them, and how? Most kids I have ever known don’t jump over things backwards. So who discovers their talents? I watched the women’s high jump, and besides wondering how these girls figured out that they could do this, I also noted that they were all gorgeous, with lots of makeup, and Eleanor Patterson approached her take off with a very sexy strut. What??? I guess because they don’t get hot and sweaty, they can come out of the locker room looking like models and stay that way throughout the competition.

How do they find pole vaulters? I assume in gym class, the teacher hands out poles? What about Badminton? Who plays Badminton competitively these days? I confess I think of Badminton as something they play on the vast lawns of Downton Abbey. Where are today’s Badminton players found? Do they scout stately homes?

To change the subject slightly, there are sports in the Olympics that are completely confusing. Unless you have taken part in Judo, how does it work? How is a winner decided? All I could see was a lot of grabbing and leg pretzeling, and then all of a sudden, they were on the ground. A split second later, a winner is declared. While they were down there, what did the winner do? The judge did give warnings. What the warnings were for was unclear to the two of us eating popcorn and reclining. My husband thought maybe it was for using the F word while down there among the knots of arms and legs. Made sense to me.

I loved the surfing, but it took so long for them to decide which wave to take. But to me the most boring sport is soccer, where they run back and forth for eons and nobody scores. Golf: forget it. I also am not a fan of the shooting, although that casual guy in street clothes with his hand in his pocket was a refreshing break from all the other shooters. But shooting. We don’t need shooting in today’s gun riddled world, do we?

I can’t wait for the breaking. And the “artistic swimming.” Now these are competitions that call for extra popcorn.