I Want to Make it With You

Maybe I had too much caffeine yesterday; maybe it's some sort of bug; or maybe I've had too much screen time and feel computer queasiness. But I think the special treat bagel yesterday morning and the garlic toast I ate with my Caesar salad Friday night have given me the dreaded bread bloat and headache.

No-booze January may have to be no-booze-or-bread January after all. Booze-free January leaves me with a "Aw, that's not fun" feeling but Bread-free January leaves me feeling "What the hell am I supposed to eat!"



One thing is certain, I won't be listening to It Don't Matter to Me, If, and Everything I Own for the next 28 days. Or digging deep into the Bread box. And I definitely won't listen to I Want to Make it With You everyday while mourning my freshed baked goodness sacrifice.

The smarminess of that song, along with the alternate vulgar interpretation of the title that was good for a giggle in middle school, makes me think of another phrase I hate but had not thought about lately until it unexpectedly reared its head in two places this week. The first place was in Body Art, an A.S. Byatt short story for book club that I was already loathing.

She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred.

To give you a better idea of why I hated this story so much, that paragraph continues:

He touched her, with a gynaecologist's fingers, gently and found the scar of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple. The piercing repelled him. He thought irrelevantly of the pierced hands of the run-of-the-mill man on the cross.

And then last night, already feeling like the animated belly from a Pepto Bismol commercial, I read a review by Tom Bissell of the novel Season of the Ash by Jorge Volpi. Bissel says:

There are worse things [than hairbrained modernism]to plow into, and they are here too -- for instance, erotic passages almost Victorian in their prim tone: "Eva sat down next to him and ran her fingers over his sex." "Then she laughed wildly and threw herself over my sex." "I emptied another glass of vodka and sank my face into her sex."

I don't have a good alternative for the author who wants an erotic passage in a story. Some terms are too clinical, others too vulgar, and others too childish. I guess we can't always follow Gary Glitter's lead and just say:

There.
There.
You know where.