Strip Clubs: Love ‘em.

I’m a regular patron at The Local Strip Club. It’s not a really great place, more of a B-list sort of dive. The dancers are, well, OK I guess. Most of them are pretty darn young but not really that good looking. A couple of them are a little older but much wiser. Since I’m not young (mid-forties) myself, I prefer the older ones to the younger ones since they can at least talk a good game.

I went there during my lunch today, a Friday. Fridays are usually not so good because it’s too crowded and too hectic even during lunch. My usual lunch arrangements fell apart due to meetings and such so I found myself with an hour to kill and nobody to join me. Off to The Local Strip Club I went. Grabbed a sandwich at 7-11, ate it in the parking lot, and then into The Club.

I had a good time, too. My favorite all-time dancer – Heidi – was there. She’s in her mid-thirties, slim and tall with large (but obviously fake) breasts. She's quite beatiful but what I really like is her style and her intelligence. They’re a bigger turn-on to me than all of that other stuff. Even though it was busy she made an effort to come and see me and I appreciated that. Appreciation, in this case, takes the form of a twenty-dollar couch dance. While we do the thing, she tells me stories. I just love that. Stories about how she got started as a stripper, stories about the time she made love in the back seat of a car, stories about shopping for stripper clothes. God, I love those stories! Sitting on the couch with a sexy girl in my lap, a couple of beers under my belt, listening while she whispers these little tales in my ear: it just doesn’t get much better than that.

September 12

It was a very emotional day yesterday. The act of writing down my feelings helped some even though it was just shouting into the dark. I spoke with The Wife last night. She had been amazed all along at my reaction to the events of 9/11, how I seemed unshaken by them. Was I just bottling the emotions up only to have them burst open five years later? I’m not sure but I think I put my emotions aside back then so I could concentrate on the intellectual aspects of 9/11 without my emotions clouding the issues. I really, really wanted to understand what happened, why it happened, and what America should do about it. Unfortunately, things aren’t any clearer now than they were then.

September 11

All though the events on September 11, 2001 and every day since then, I’ve managed to take everything with a long term, philosophical perspective. Yes, they did this and we did that. Is the problem just with a few radicals or is there an issue with Islam overall? What could America have done differently to avoid the tragedy? That kind of stuff. Never did I find a personal take on the tragedy, until today.

This morning I was browsing through the news and I came across this article in the LA Times about the people in the WTC calling their families and saying goodbye.

“I love you” they said to wives.
“I love you” they told their children.
“I love you” the said to families.

This morning, at work, sitting in my cubicle, tears welled up in my eyes and I started to cry. After five years, it took these simple and heartfelt sentiments to let me finally mourn for the victims of 9/11. Now I feel like the walking dead. I’m going through the motions, living my daily life, but I feel so sad inside. The sadness is mixed with anger of course, and a resolve that the bastards that did this will not triumph.

So, I’d like to put my anger to paper and give a hearty shout-out to these people: FUCK YOU OSAMA BIN-LADEN. You twist young, impressionable minds and fill them with hatred and violence. That makes you one of the most vile and evil people on earth. Some day you will be dead and America will still be standing. Your dreams of world dominance will never bear fruit. FUCK YOU MICHAEL MOORE for twisting these events to fit your political agenda. FUCK YOU MARKOS MOULITSAS for being the intended audience for these horrible events. Osama is trying to split America and you’re doing your bit to help. FUCK YOU BILL CLINTON for kicking the ball down the field instead of dealing with the problem. Look at what it got you.

The Spiteful Rich


I read this article entitled “Soaking the Spiteful Rich” on Just One Minute and also followed the linked articles within it. The whole discussion centered on a post by Brad Delong with the central point being “…a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor”. Mr. Delong followed his original post up with another post that claimed “…one reason that America's rich today live the expensive and ostentatious lifestyles they do (rather than spending much more money on charity, or philanthropy) is that it is a way of making other people feel small and unhappy”. This idea seems so intuitively wrong to me that I just have to make a few points.

• When you start guessing about other people’s motives, you say more about yourself than you do about them. We barely understand our own motives and we understand others motives even less. When you speak of an entire group such as America’s rich, you are certainly going to wrong about the majority of them.


• The decisions that people make are usually motivated by more than one concern. If, for instance, I’m trying to pick a new car to buy, then I’m interested in its style, performance, reliability, utility, comfort, economy, etc. Even if the status associated with the car is one of my acknowledged criteria, it’s only one of many. So to say that I buy a car to make other people feel unhappy is just ridiculous.


• People are by nature status-seekers. Given any group of people brought together for any reason (anything from a nation of people down to a small church group), they will instinctively look around and start comparing themselves to each other. They’ll find ways to compete and establish a hierarchy of status within the group. It could be grade-school boys competing to be the king of the schoolyard, high-school girls competing for boys, or suburbanites competing for the best-kept home. It doesn’t matter: form a group of people and you’ll form a group of competitors. America being so fond of money and materials, we compete for economic status. That shouldn’t be a surprise because it’s inevitable. Now, all of the competitions are relative. If you’re living in a mud shack while everyone else is sleeping under palm fronds then you’re the winner. You can feel good about yourself while everyone else wishes they had what you have. Even if you were to tax the heck out of the rich and reduce the income gap between rich and poor (regardless of the consequences to the economy and everyone’s overall welfare) the rich would still be rich and poor will still be poor. Thus it has always been and thus it will always be.


• Finally, when did it become the job of the government to guarantee the happiness of its citizens? It’s so obviously an impossible task. The best the government can do is to provide for the safety and security of its people so that we can get about the task of making lives for ourselves.

Dirty Jokes

I can never remember dirty jokes. I'm probably not alone in this because dirty jokes are like snack foods: quickly consumed and quickly forgotten. The only one I can remember is the one they used over and over on the sitcom “Night Court”.

A priest had been living a secluded existence in a monastery for most of his life. He never got out and was completely innocent in the ways of the world. One day he decides out of the blue to walk into the city and check it out. As he’s walking through a beaten-down neighborhood he passes a prostitute on the street. She calls out to him, “Hey preacher, you want around the world? Twenty Bucks!” Now, the priest has absolutely no idea who she is or what she’s talking about so he just smiles and keeps on walking. Later, he can’t figure out what it was about so he goes to the convent next door to talk to the Mother Superior. “Mother Superior”, he asks, “what is around the world?” She replies, “Twenty bucks, same as downtown”.

They used to use this joke a lot on Night Court. They’d cut back from a commercial and someone would just be finishing the joke: “Twenty bucks, same as downtown!” It’s such a standard now that you don’t have to tell the joke, just the punch line.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Bourgeois Boy. This is my first attempt at a blog so please bear with me while I get my thoughts in order. My very first thought is: why am I doing this? My intent is to speak plainly about my thoughts and my situation, so why should anyone be interested in that? I don't really know the answer. On one hand the thoughts and opinions of another aging boomer aren't really of interest to anyone. On the other hand maybe someone will be interested into looking under the cover into someone else's life. Mostly, though, I just want to write down how I feel. It forces me to think about my life and that's always been good therapy for me.