Life Without Socks

Bi or Lie, you be the judge.

Here's a riddle for you: What do you call someone of the female gender who sleeps with both men and women? A lesbian. NO, IT'S NOT A JOKE AND IF YOU SAID IT WAS DUMB OR DIDN'T MAKE SENSE, I'M TOTALLY WITH YOU!

This, however, according to my good friend and person who thinks she is the boss of me- is exactly what a lesbian is. My question is.... when did that happen?! I'm not kidding. I keep running into self-identified "lesbians" who, for whatever reason, sleep (no, not like Doris Day ZZZ sleep) but actually have sex with men- males- real penises.

No, these are not women who USED to sleep with men and then realized they were lesbians. These are not women who used to sleep with women, then slept with men, then went back to women exclusively. No, these are more like women who sleep with men occasionally- like having your oil changed but occasionally having the high mileage, heavy duty, hard-driving crude oil put in. You know, just once in a while when you think that the 30/30 won't do.

And that's fine, I believe in giving every dog it's day- you want to use thicker oil? Go for it- but for heavens sake, tell everyone that works on your car what you've done! Don't pretend your a strictly 30/30 kind of gal and don't be mad if your mechanic lets other mechanics know what kind of oil you use! AND DON'T CALL YOURSELF A STRICTLY 30/30 KIND OF GAL!

I know there are people who don't believe in the benefit of that hyped-up type of oil, and I know there are others that do, but if you use it, whether on a semi-regular or just an occasional  basis, I think it is extremely important to identify this fact.

The same goes with bisexuality (or not) as the case may be.

I had the privilege of being at an old girlfriend's sisters house talking with her sister and family. When asked, I identified someone we all knew, someone who had recently "dated" a straight couple, a convicted male rapist, and a guy in a photo booth, as bisexual. I was speaking casually. It is the term I would have used for anyone who "dated" both men and women within months, days and sometimes minutes of each other. I was trying to keep emotion out of it, and political correctness in. I was trying to minimize the fact that she had been seen with all of these people and gone into great detail about her "dating" of them. All of them. Minute detail (if you know what I mean).

When my OG (old girlfriend) and I left her sister's house, she launched in. "How could you have used the term "bisexual" for Hilda!?!" (obviously a code name- even if someone tells you her name is Hilda for real, it is a code name, trust me). "She hates it when people call her bisexual. She is a lesbian."

I thought of the people Hilda (remember, just a code name) had slept with when she lived here and I thought of the hundreds of people that knew about it from Hilda's own mouth.

Are you kidding me?" I asked incredulously. My natural sarcasm settled in immediately "I meant to come up with something different- something that would adequately describe a woman who sleeps with both men and women repeatedly and boasts about it- but I didn't think "Lesbianly challenged" would work. "Horn dog" didn't seem good either and "lack of discretion" seemed kind of rough.

The OG just glared at me. "Well, I think that using the term bisexual just confuses the issue."

What?

"You know, when your dealing with family and stuff, it is better just to get them used to the fact that so-and-so is a lesbian, whether or not they sleep with men."

And that was it. That is what I had heard before- several times- from self-proclaimed, man-sleeping lesbians. "It's a sport" "It's recreational" "I just need to do it sometimes to blow off steam" "I like a little dick once in a while- it doesn't mean I'm bisexual".

WELL, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Somebody tell me, because I am quite confused. Bi- meaning two, and sexual- pertaining to the physical act of... it wasn't as if I had said "Bi-emotional". Then maybe I would have been wrong. Maybe Hilda is Homoemotional and sex with a man is just a way to "blow off steam"- isn't she still Bi SEXual? I think of my own family members- I can't imagine that identifying someone who they know dates both men and women as "bisexual" is going to confuse them any more than calling that woman a "lesbian". My mom blushes when she has to fill out a form and comes across a box with the word "sex" next to it- meaning gender. She certainly isn't going to ask me how it is that a lesbian is sleeping with a male teller at the One Minute Photo Booth. She is just going to assume that all lesbians sleep with men. Then she is going to spend the rest of her natural born days setting me, and the rest of my lesbian friends, up with nice guys named Edmund. No, I think I will continue to identify known two-gender-copulation-preferring women as "bisexual". It's just shorter and easier to say.

Love me, love my town

Have you ever had the experience of falling in love (lust, infatuation, momentary attention) with someone, only to wake up, several months to years later, realizing that somewhere within that euphoria you've quit your career, sold your house and moved into the upper story of an M Night Shayamalan movie? You know, your living in a house, surrounded by crop circles, green aliens are jumping up and down on your roof in the middle of the night and your dog is dead?

Okay, maybe not that extreme, maybe more like a scene out of Deliverance, a old-man-boy playing the banjo while looking funny at your sister, or maybe more like Footloose,"dancin? We don't allow no dancin' in this town.."

Whatever your scenario, mine was bad enough to be a combination of all three! I didn't know what I was headed for. It was love for goodness sake. Love isn't rational, love isn't predictable, love also doesn't have eyes, ears or an anus for dumping out the "S***t"that someone tells you about the "quaint, village life" of their home town. I'd like to say my youth and inexperience played into it, but I had owned my "house on the hill", the one with cathedral ceilings, skylights and a view of the lake and rocky mountains for 18 years. Not a ton of youth there unless you think I bought the place simultaneously as the obstetrician was spanking my naked butt on the day that I was born. Not so, of course. I was a full-fledged adult when I bought my cosmopolitan dream-home, in my cosmopolitan dream-town. I built a career where my hours were 3-6 every day and two months off in the summer. I had a dog or two, a child or two and a car or two. I had a swimming pool and a Madame X who, while not a red-hot fling, was fun to watch movies and go to bookstores with.

Then along comes a temptress, a siren, (okay, a round gal who looks somewhat like the chick on the old Nestle Coco ads) and crash! I've fallen. This woman lives states away. "States away will never work long term" I reason. We talk on the phone and meet up once or twice. I begin driving...weekends....all weekend. Once I stayed for 45 minutes only to turn around and drive home again in order to make it to an Easter Egg Hunt for my kids. I am insane. I am certifiably insane and not able to make rational decisions when I am offered the deal of a lifetime: "Move to my quaint hometown, buy a house and live here forever."

"OKAY!" I jump without even so much as checking into the school system. I begin house-hunting, not even noticing that every other person in the town has no chin. I start negotiations with a Real Estate agent, paying no attention to the fact that a vortex is beginning to open right in the middle of town square. I put money into a local bank, not realizing that the Jr. CEO of that bank is Nathan from Children of the Corn or that all of the children have blond hair, red eyes and no expression.

I did try to rethink things for a minute or two while I was trapped in my car by a giant rabid dog, but once the Hitchhiker came by and shot him with a concealed weapon and a few local zombies dragged the carcass off to eat it, well, I forgot all about it. As a matter of fact, I reveled in the idea of small-town life. I loved the way all of the straight women wore aprons, smiles and big hair- of course, I never saw a live lesbian, only a sign burned into someone's lawn that said "GIT OUT DIKES" but I didn't think it pertained to lesbians as "dyke" was spelled incorrectly- I actually was so insane that I thought the sign was a protest to the idea of impinging Dutch water systems.

So, I sold my house, packed up the kids, and moved to a quaint duplex. It was located just down the street from the Alzheimer's retirement center and overlooked a mom and pop auto-wrecking lot. The Real Estate agent (his name was Jason or Freddy or something like that) assured me that it was in a nicer part of town, several miles away from that crazed, chainsaw-welding guy I may have read about. Thank heaven's for that!

Soon after, I bought a nice little coffee shop downtown. As the former proprietor (not from this town) caught her tires on fire as she was speeding out of the parking lot after throwing the shop keys at me while leaving my final payment for the shop on the counter, I began to question the wisdom of this move.

I had started to notice things. Things like, how come most people in this town were never seen during the day but the Walmart was packed at night? How come the town seemed to be enclosed perpetually in a gruesome fog and there were no health food stores nearby? How come everyone had signs in their yard that said "Bush for 4 more years"? And finally, how come bats keep circling my neighborhood and what the hell were Nutrias?! I could have tortured myself with these thoughts and others- but instead I just decided to move. I rented the house to a nice man who claimed he was the servant of some kind of Doctor from Germany. I sold the coffee shop to someone planning to turn it into a coffin shop (which was a good thing considering I never had a customer come in for coffee in the six months I was there) and finally, I left my infatuation in San Fransisco (along with my heart, as the song goes) during a Rockabilly concert she forced me to go to along with 157 of her cousins, all with blond hair and red eyes.

Call me a prude and stuck up- but as the saying goes, you can take the goul out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the goul.