My First Time

This one is good


This one is a little better

both for narrative-arc reasons, and for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows me.

And I must say I have seen more good, smart, funny political ads this year than at anytime I can remember.

My first time?

It was a disaster.

I had what I thought were three poor choices, but I knew if I wanted to face my boys the next day with swagger I had to man-up, march in there – incompetent or not – and TCB.

And so, well-researched (or so I thought) but not really having the slightest idea what in the fuck I was doing, in I dove.

And if memory serves I was rushed and flushed, and shaking like a hypothermic gibbon in third-stage heroin withdrawal the whole time.

Also I might have been a little drunk.

The lights were way, way too bright – like a 7-11 at a stoned 2 A.M.

The print on the little thingy you have to use was too small and my hands were sweating like a coupla little Nixons.

There was no real privacy, and I was positive I could hear murmuring and snickering all around me, extending for miles and miles in every direction.

Everyone else in the Universe was smarter than me. More confident. More able.

I…I didn’t know the right way to put it in, OK!

And I also discovered at the crucial moment that every movie I had ever seen that even touched lightly on the subject had left me completely unprepared. In cruel flash-retrospect, I realized they never, actually, showed you how it was done. Or what goes where. Or how long it should take.

I mean, what’s the friggin’ protocol!

No, they always went right up to the edge, pulled the curtains, dimmed the lights, rolled stock footage of trains and computers, and then showed the hero, some indefinite time later, in satisfied repose.

Bastards!

And the “educational” films they show you in school? Worse than useless!

Grainy, flap-A-in-slot-B crap that focused entirely on mechanics and plumbing and not on the emotional cliff off of which you step when you finally find yourself face to face (if you’re doing it right, although later you discover there are so many other terrific variations) with Your First Time.

Oh the adrenaline! Oh the shame!

Oh how finally squeezing myself into a tiny space with this primal thing made my fight or flight reflexes go berserk, pouring panic chemicals into my blood, washing all of my naïve practiced moves and rote memorized sophistication right out of my head in a roar of existential white noise so that, in the end, I was really only positive about two things:

1. I had to go through with it. It was what I had come for, and what I really wanted despite my dreads.

2. There are times when reciting the “Litany Against Fear” and out-loud and in a squeaky voice makes things much, much worse. And,

3. I was damned sure not going to ask the sweet little old lady at the front desk for instructions.

And then it was over. I made Hobson's Choice, and I left. I hadn’t imploded, and it was all I thought about all day long.

And the next.

I was in the club.

Now, with more mileage on the odd-ometer than I had then, I can be more gourmet and less a hasty, starving hog-shoveler of teevee dinners. My eyes are clearer and they know what to look for. My touch is surer and my tongue more agile than in days of old. I can be more realistic in my expectation, more skilled in my execution, more discerning in my choices, and more subtle in my technique.

The Earth will definitely move…for a moment.

Will it last? Nah.

It’ll budge a little bit and then whine and fight and claw that it wants to go back to where it was.

And you work to hold what you have and push back again, and again the world will change a little.

Because if elections are trysts, reform is tantric; a slower pleasure that dances to a more geological beat.