Miami (not really): Dinosaur Sex

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

Remember recently when I mentioned that devoted partner and I have a vehicular compulsion that necessitates our jumping in a car and driving places just cause? Our recent trip to Miami was no exception. It's true that I had taken perhaps a trifle more sun than I should have, but it's also a bit of hard work to sit slothfully under the sun doing nothing save reading, occasionally sipping from a pina colada, and cooling off in the pool or ocean from time to time. A day of it is terrific. Two days can also be good. But a ceaseless stream of doing nothing can get old. Since we're throwing ourselves in the water for a good solid week later in June, we decided to forgo a bit of Miamian diving in favor of a needless toodle (toodle=touring) to the Everglades.

We even splurged and rented the Mustang convertible.

We started the day heading west towards Naples and a lovely area run by the Audubon Society known as Corkscrew Swamp. Sounds charming, no? For those fearful of malaria, the Corkscrew Swamp folks have constructed a 2 mile boardwalk through their patch of the Everglades - this is also good for families and persons of limited mobility. While the adventurer in you or me might scoff, considering how putridly hot interior Florida is, having the route mapped out for you ahead of time with no possibility of becoming lost, isn't all that awful.

I was the expert animal tracker (to see the whole (unfinished) set, click here), discovering icky bugs, raccoons and the first alligator of the day. Feeling as though we had accomplished our main task, finding an alligator, we took the long way home, stopping for late lunch at a fish place (bad idea - out of season + flavorless + deep-fried = bland and bad for you), before heading back east.

And then we stopped for Bob. We were driving along an unremarkable and very straight road when we passed two people standing on the side of the road not hitchhiking. They were looking at something. We drove about 200 yards before turning the car around and going back towards the people who we had decided had spotted alligator. This was a fortuitous choice because we then spent the next half hour or so harassing poor Bob (the name we have the alligator) as he tried to swim and ignore fish and just get on with his afternoon. There were also some massive, and massivly attractive-hued, grasshoppers which are in the full (unfinished) set of photos.

Now that we knew what to look for - other not-stranded motorists on the side of the road - we drove the boringest road with more purpose. And this is how we discovered what we discovered. Alligators. Doing it. Yes, for my first non-local outing with the new camera, I was privileged enough to be confronted by some of the worst light, the darkest subject matter, and lizard humping. Do not be confused by the seeming innocence of these shots. These alligators effed one another. Underwater for the money shot and away from the MANY prying eyes, but you knew what they were up to. Then they went at it a second time. As we were walking away a charming blond girl of 3 or 4 came scampering up yelling, "daddy, daddy, alligators!" She turned to me and said, "I think it's a boy and a girl." I told her I thought they were married. "Daddy daddy the alligators are married!" "How do you know, honey?" I told the father it was that the alligators were VERY FRIENDLY. How's that for some serious Discovery Channel shit?

Tomorrow: la comida de Cuba.

Stuck on Planet Freud

I think I have discovered why I am so frequently at odds with others and it boils down to a basic misunderstanding of human motivation. I would like to know that the greatest possible number of people whom I encounter would like to have sex with me. I attempt to comport myself in ways (obviously the days when I don't shower or brush my hair are failures) that make the people around me think, "yes, that's the kind of person I'd have some sex with." I assumed you were doing the same.

This is why I am so flummoxed by picks-nose-in-public, puts-smelly-feet-on-seat, doesn't-say-bless-you-when-someone-sneezes, and doesn't-hold-doors-open among others. I had assumed that, like me, other people wanted to be seen as sexually desirable and would know that sexually desirable people don't pick their noses publicly.

But this makes me even more confused since pretty much every advertisement since time began was about making yourself more attractive in some way so that people would be desirous of sex with you. Have we stopped wanting to have sex? I can't imagine that is true. Mostly because I feel that advertising agencies would have cottoned on and developed different ways to encourage our spending. They're smart that way.

In fact even when I'm being dismissive of someone, it is generally dismissive with an undertone of, "you really ought not to think of relations with me as there is a zero percent chance that sort of thing will come to pass," which I guess presupposes that the person being dismissed was already on the sex-with-me train.

But I don't sense that level of involvement from other people when they act out towards me. For example: the 50-year-old suit who bodily pushes in front of me to get in or out of the train doesn't seem to be doing so to remind me that I don't have a chance of having sex with him; it doesn't seem that well thought out. He's pushing in front of me because it doesn't occur to him that it would be far more polite to let me go first - in fact, if he were smart, he would let me go first and say something like, "after you," so that I would reflect on him later as someone with whom sex would not be horrific.

Yet I do note that a number of these people, both men and women, are married, which presumes that, at some point, they wanted to be sexually attractive to someone. I find it acutely sad that, once paired up, this no longer mattered; at the same time it makes me wonder why they would spend so much on handbags and sunglasses.