TMI Thursday: A little me time

It's TMI Thursday my friends. For more stories that will entertain and disgust you at the same time, go to LiLu’s place for this week's full list. And now, on to the fun!

Let’s not beat around the bush here, so to speak. We’re all grown-ups, we’re all adults and, if you’re not, you really shouldn’t be reading this anyway.

It’s time we talked about masturbation. Yes, I said it. And I’ll say it again in many different and creative ways: Spanking the monkey. Rubbing one out. Pounding the pud. Wanking. Jerkin’ off. Jacking off. Pulling your peeter. And, I believe, the Catholic Church likes to refer to it as the sin of onanism. You know, I just thought about it, all of these refer to boys. I can’t think of a single one for the ladies. So tell me, what cute little euphemisms do you girls have for those times when the rabbit or vibrator comes out or, should I say, goes in? (C’mon girls, don’t be afraid, I wanna hear them all.)

Anyway, the scene: It’s lunch time on the third day of a four-day hiking/camping trip in the Monongahela National Forest in West “By God” Virginia. Three brothers and a friend are relaxing in a beautiful glade for lunch.

Here's a map, just in case you want to visit someday

After lunch, the youngest brother, and most recent of the three to don the Scarlet and Gold of the United States Marine Corps, gets up to do what many of us do after eating. This leaves his older brothers and the friend to lean back and relax after their hearty meal.

During some point in the post-meal conversation, about 10 or so minutes after the youngest brother wandered into the nearby wood, the topic turned to the topic above. Don’t know how it happened, it just happened.

The friend, let’s call him “Eddie,” then made one of the more patently false statements I’ve ever heard a man make, aside from “I won’t cum in your mouth” and “Baby, she means nothing to me.” This is what he said:

“Dude, I haven’t done that since, like, eighth grade.” Yeah, it was the mid-90s, people were still saying dude. Even 24-year-old men who denied masturbating.

When the two brothers laughed at him and called him a liar, he asked the middle brother (his former college roommate), “Why, when was the last time you did it?”

“Last night.”

“In the woods?” Eddie asked.

“Yep.”

Stunned by this knowledge, he turned to the older brother, “What about you?”

“Just this morning, down by the river while I was washing up,” the older brother said as the youngest returned from his sojourn in the woods.

Incredulous, Eddie looked up, pleadingly, to the youngest brother for support. “Did you know your brothers have been jacking off out here in the woods?” he asked.

With a smile only the youngest brother could give, he looked at Eddie and responded, “You don’t really think it took me 15 minutes to take a shit, do you?”

The race to 270 begins...

After a long journey we’ve finally come to the penultimate day of the election. There’s nothing left for me to say that hasn’t been said by countless voices during the past two and a half years.

This election reminds me of Otto von Bismarck’s quote: “Laws are like sausage, it’s better not to see them being made.” The soon-to-be-completed campaign makes me think of sausage. Incredible sums of money have poured into the campaign grinder, nasty things have been said on both sides and yet, the end product will be a symbol we can hold up to the world’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Come January 20, there’ll be a parade down Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues, a celebration led by the American military. But none of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in those formations will have had anything more to do with the selection of our new president than you or I.

And to me that’s the greatest beauty of America.

What do I mean by that? We’ve had 43 presidents in the last 232 years, but our government hasn’t changed. Every four years since 1786 when our fledgling republic chose George Washington as its first president, we’ve selected a new leader and we’ve done it peacefully.

Name me another country that has, over more than two centuries, moved from one leader to the next every 5.3 years on average without a shot being fired? No matter what happens tomorrow, we can sleep safely Tuesday knowing we’ll wake up Wednesday with the same government we had the day before.

We’ll have a new leader of the executive branch, and several new members of Congress, but the same government. A government that could use a few tweaks here and there, but overall one I’d choose over any other.

And, finally, for those of you thinking this has been a nasty election, I direct you to the 1824 contest between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Jackson won the popular vote and, unlike a certain candidate in 2000, he also won in the Electoral College. But, because there were four candidates, he didn’t have a majority.

So the vote went to the House where Henry Clay, who came in fourth place in the election, was the Speaker. The House voted for JQA on the first ballot… and Clay became Secretary of State.

Jackson was, history tells us, more than a little annoyed at the outcome. But don’t worry, he came back to easily beat JQA four years later.

Whoever wins tomorrow should remember what JQA’s dad told him after his defeat of Jackson. John Adams, our second president, said this to his son: No man who’d ever been president would ever congratulate another on winning the office.

Vote early. Vote often (kidding about the second part, I grew up in Chicago).