Saturday Morning

Partly cloudy, fairly sunny, with a sweet autumnal breeze blowing. All three cats dozing on the patio. I am the only one who is up and about in the house, so far, and I am contentedly engaged in my reading session, going over Kafka's parable of the Law's gatekeeper. It is my kind of morning. And some good music makes it perfect.

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Perv

There is a new book out: "Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us" by Jesse Bering. It does not seem to be quite as fun as one might think. In the book review, however, we are given some interesting results from animal studies. The reviewer notes that Freud may be largely discounted these days, but you cannot really deny that our earliest experiences can have a profound impact on our sexual cravings.

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Scientists can’t readily tinker with the upbringings of broad samples of human children and track the sexual outcomes. But they can carry out a study in which newborn rat males suckle from mothers whose nipples and genitals have been painted with a lemony fragrance. Such rat pups grew up to be adults that could get fully turned on and climax quickly only with females that had been dabbed with the same perfume their mothers had worn.

Or scramble baby sheep and goats so they’re nursed by the opposite species, and then, when they’re old enough to seek out sex, let them choose between their foster and biological breeds. The grown males in this study tended to ignore their own kind; sheep spurned sheep and goats gazed past goats. They lusted instead for the species that had reared them. The females wound up much more flexible, yet still their desires were shaped by the experimental condition. Unlike a female control group brought up by its natural kin, the switched infants became adults attracted equally to sheep and goats.

To this pair of experiments, Bering adds the case of Lucy, a chimp raised more or less like a human child in a psychologist’s home in the 1960s and ’70s. She developed no interest in male chimps. “Once she’d blossomed into a young adult,” as Bering tells it, “a favorite hobby of Lucy’s was masturbating to the nude human male centerfolds from the latest issue of Playgirl magazine by carefully spreading out the pages on the floor and then placing her swollen genitals on the image of the man’s penis.”

-- Daniel Bergner, "Acquired Tastes" in The New York Times

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Long, Bushy, and Gray

I am stuck in my long hair and bushy mustache & beard phase. When Pop went to Shiner a couple of weeks ago, I intended to get this ball rolling. I was going to shave and then ask Pop for help on the barber's fee, but I mowed the lawn instead. I am kind of growing comfortable with it, and maybe I will just let this go for ... as long as it goes. And just clearing a hole around my mouth every once in a while.

Don't get me wrong, though. If I could just snap my fingers or click my heels and then my moppy hair would be cut down and my face shaven bare, I would happily snap or click away. But it is not that simple. It is not just the money. It is a trip out of the house, it is having to deal with people, it is time and stress. I really have to steel my nerve and backbone and crank up the engine.

Having all this growth on my head, it is kind of stunning to see so much gray hair on my face and atop my head. I am forty-eight, but I would have thought that I could wait until my fifties, even if we are talking about the early fifties, before I would have to see this stark change. It is a hard reality check. My time has passed and nothing really good happened.