It's going to be a short work-week in America (coming up on the 4th of July Holiday) and traffic was reflecting that this morning in being relatively light. So, when I got to Malibu this morning it looked like this:
Almost looks like there was a gigantic splash down from this angle. Additional views, first to the left and then to the right.
Just a lot of breezy scenes here. It was hot in L.A. over the weekend. Very humid. That kind of weather works as an off switch on me in my middle age. Hope you got something done because I sure didn't.
For those of you who don't know, the community band I play in is an LGBT organization, the Gay Freedom Band of Los Angeles. I am not represented by any one of those letters (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), but they allow me to play with them anyway--the letters in their case indicate inclusion, not exclusion. I joined them (about 10 years ago) because I was looking for an ensemble to regularly play in and they just happened to rehearse up the street from me.
I remember telling the tenor sax player Bob who I regularly sat next to that I was concerned that I would not be welcome and he thought that was so laughable. I also wondered if I would be mistaken for a gay man, but he said "We all knew you were straight about 30 seconds after you walked in the door." They've accepted me ever since and I have enjoyed their camaraderie and musicianship ever since.
I bring them up since they are a pretty active Facebook bunch and they have been a pretty post-happy set of yahoos following a big civil rights win for their constituency with last week's Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality--this has been a major item on the LGBT citizens' agenda for a long time. Yay them, yay the USA.
Recently I was on jury duty and I had an opportunity to chat with one of my fellow jurors during those long periods of waiting in hallways that civic duty seems to enable. He was a man who was a professional pop and blues music composer and arranger. The topic of sex came up, as it frequently does when men chat casually, and he told me about a news story where a highly placed man in conservative politics was exposed as being a member of a clandestine sex ring where married men would book blocks of rooms in fine hotels and have multiparty orgies. He remarked how disgusting that was, but I certainly noted the intensity of interest and the attention to detail he had while relating that story.
He went on (predictably in my experience), to say that while man-on-man sex was wrong, he was perfectly fine in watching two or more women get it on. I guess that admission gave him pseudo-progressive points in his own mind. I must give him some points on consistency there. He made sounds like he was a Christian, and the Bible is silent on lesbian sex--so it's a virtual green-light in many schools of interpretation. Thank God masculinism seems to work in women's favor someplace.
I told him it was probably a good thing then that we were moving toward a society where homosexuals would feel free and open to just live, date, and marry like anyone else. That it would create a lot more honesty in general. That guys like these guys in the orgies, would not have to pretend they're straight and lie and cheat on the women they really don't want to be with. And being a gay man would lose this "bad boy" cachet and just become kind of banal. Unfortunately the hotels would lose the orgy trade, but sacrifices must be made.
I just wonder what kind of deviances, fetishes, and deceptions would ensue if we forced heterosexual males into the closet in the same way that we do homosexual males (... OK, OK, I mean BEYOND what there is already, there's plenty but I think there'd be more ...). I mean, the male sex drive is so compelling it is amazing the sacrifices that guys go through to satisfy it. The main sacrifice is the thing that is subject of last week's news, marriage itself. The bargain that men make is this: You get to have sex and lots of it, but it has to be with ONE person (that's the essence of marriage). Because guys make that bargain, it allows civilizations to be built. If and when we produce a generation of males without a sex drive, everything will crumble.
What of the female sex drive? Beats me. I know nothing of it other than what females are willing to tell me and what I observe. So I can't be an expert. But I strongly suspect it was a female who concocted the marriage bargain, she told all her friends about it and it just caught on. And because of that very first girl who decided she wanted to get an exclusive on that one guy who was so nice to her, we've got great stuff like mortgages, 2-week vacations, 40-hour workweeks, Apple computers, atom bombs, psychotherapy, constitutions, PhD's, and social security.
Well, I'm happy to see us move toward being a more libertarian culture, where rational lifestyle choices can be made without fear of civil (if not religious) reprisals. It's a nice step to be seen taken as we head into Independence Day, where we remind ourselves that we are a country founded on rational principles of liberty, not culture, ethnicity, religion, or tradition.
Have a great, short work-week, and be free.
Love,
Pops
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