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I am not a sex-advice guy, nor am I an expert on intimate relations. I’m just a regular married guy, trying to tell it like it is from my point of view. I’ve got to get something out in the open, though, and it’s going to sound kind of obnoxious. OK, I’ll just say it: Married women don’t enjoy sex enough. I don’t mean they can’t; they just don’t. (I also don’t mean to generalize, but what the hell, I did it anyway. If you’re an exception, lucky you! Write a letter and tell me about it.) But I think there is a very easy solution to this, uh, widespread problem.

Men have long had a reputation for being selfish about sex. We want it, we gotta have it, we resent foreplay, we want to cut straight to the main attraction, and so on. (A corollary of this, by the way, is that women make love as a “favor” to their husbands—a favor they are happy to withhold, if necessary, in the usual give-and-take of the household. Can you imagine a man doing that? Not me.) Well, here’s a secret for all you married women: Men, despite (or perhaps because of) their somewhat simple wiring, are turned on by a partner who is turned on. Married men are too polite—and often too desperate—to say so, but it is not much fun to make love with someone who either isn’t enjoying it, or isn’t letting on that she’s enjoying it, even if she is your soul mate. Sub-secret: We tend to assume that she is not enjoying it, if she doesn’t make it fairly obvious.

Ironically, men are so selfishly focused on the finish that we assume women are incapable of faking it for the long haul. Even setting aside the orgasm issue, the fact of the matter is that it is easier for a woman to tolerate bland sex than it is for a man, just as it is easier for her to fake enjoying it. You could consider this just another example of male pig-headedness—he wants proof from you that he’s an irresistible, orgasm-inducing sex machine. Or you could take the opportunity to let yourself go and have more fun under the covers.

I freely admit that this may merely be a “reporting problem.” In fact, we all tend to be self-conscious about expressing desire and pleasure, in the heat of the moment. I know that most of my friends have worked really hard most of their postcollegiate lives to be sensitive to the women around them, maybe especially in our most intimate moments. We don’t want to be perceived as boorish or self-centered, and we don’t want our women to feel threatened or turned off by aggressive sexual behavior. But is it possible to be a good, liberal, sensitive male, and still be noisy and naughty in bed? A lot of us struggle with this, and we’d like a little help from our women.

Ladies, one of the nicest gifts you can give your beloved is to tell him—better yet, show him—precisely what it is that turns you on the most. We are so accustomed to being secretive about pleasuring ourselves that ironically we won’t do it in front of the one person we entrust to do it for us. It’s like: You own that beautiful instrument, but I’m the only one who ever plays it! I’d like to see how you play.

The underlying assumption here is what therapists and couples’ counselors have been saying for decades: Make a special effort to do it the way your partner wants to do it. Get outside yourself, amd try to speculate what might really turn your lover on, and then do it. But in my opinion, this suggestion should be directed squarely at men, not women. Women need different, opposing advice: Figure out what most turns you on, and then beg your husband to do it for you, and then, for once in your life, ignore him. I don’t mean forget him, but let yourself go a little bit, and don’t worry so much about whether he’s enjoying himself. If he’s a real man, your pleasure will directly fuel his.

If he isn’t that kind of man, find one who is. Love, marriage, and sex are a two-way street, and you owe it to each other to be honest about what really turns you on. You owe it to yourself to go ahead and do it. Life is too short and difficult to be shy in your own bed.

In the end, sex is one of those strange human transactions where the sum of the parts adds up to more than it should. Our mutual pleasure is an exponential thing; it’s a turn-on to participate in someone else’s turn-on. I’m certainly not expert enough to figure out what part of my pleasure is made up of my lover’s pleasure. I just know that, like a good movie or a funny joke, it’s a lot more fun when you can share. Here endeth the lesson; go forth and multiply.

When I was in the throes of young motherhood, raising three little kids and editing a parenting magazine from home, I signed up for a bunch of email groups for moms. I wanted to tune into what parents were talking about and arguing about. I wanted to know which issues packed the most punch among mothers like me. The flood of email that began arriving helped a lot in terms of story ideas and even finding contributors for the magazine, but it also got me wondering about where some of these women found the time to contribute so voluminously to so many email groups while also pulling babies away from outlets and wringing out the cloth diapers we were all so dutifully committed to. Some of those moms, I came to think, were actually addicted to email and the escape it must have offered from the isolation of being home all day with babies. I thought someday I might write a feature story on this topic, but it never materialized.

Since then, my work and family life have changed. The kids are busy with school and sports and music lessons, and I’m busy teaching most of the day. Although I’m still writing, I use email less than I used to. But I still like it quite a bit, and probably depend on it more than I should. It’s a habit born of many years of being self-employed and working from home. I check my messages first thing in the morning and last thing before bed, and multiple times in between. I’m always hoping for some piece of good fortune to arrive in my inbox. It could be an acceptance letter on a query I’ve sent out, or a kind word from a reader, or a letter from my sister or a friend. It could even, these days, be a note from one of my kids. Even though it’s usually just a lot of work-related documents crossing the transom along with offers to enlarge my penis, I still check with a sense of inexplicable anticipation…which usually ends in disappointment.

So now, it’s Google I turn to most for the possibility of enlightenment and surprise. I love Google. Oftentimes, when I should be working, I find myself Googling instead. I can’t be bothered with advanced search techniques involving signs and symbols. I prefer a more esoteric approach, based on a belief in serendipity and fate. I have Googled everything from “good ideas” to “meaning mystery life.” I particularly enjoy Googling for obscure beauty secrets and the diagnoses for any ailments that might arise in the family. With Google’s help, I have accurately identified everything from ingrown toenails to more complicated problems, such as hair dye gone wrong. I know that my stepdaughter Lily was especially grateful when I Googled her green hair and determined that professional intervention was advised. My son Max was less impressed when I misdiagnosed his poison ivy as ringworm, but the mistake was quickly remedied by our corner pharmacist. No lasting damage was done, except to my credibility.

All this Googling is decadent, I’ll admit, and usually an extravagant waste of time, but sometimes it pays off. About a year ago, in the midst of Googling the day away, I stumbled upon a potential client for my grant-writing business. I fired off a letter of interest and within twenty-four hours had secured the largest single deal I’d ever made, plus a stream of ongoing work that continues to this day. Sometimes, since then, I Google words like “jackpot” or “lots money little work,” just in case. I can’t deny that a couple of times I have Googled myself, but, as often seems to be the case, results on my big sister are more impressive.

Something tells me there is a limit to the usefulness of Google, and I might be approaching it. But it’s not easy to quit. Real life is full of complicated situations with no apparent answers. Families are hotbeds of emotion and need. The political world is highly complex, to the point where I often feel powerless in my efforts to get true clarity and effect meaningful change. Work is a reliable source of anxiety, as are questions about whether or not I’m doing enough well enough to hold my own in a competitive economy. For God’s sake, the male fish in Britain are turning into females and the microbe responsible for mad cow disease is proliferating in our food supply as we speak. In a world that seems increasingly out of control, Google is an escape of sorts. It’s a place where answers are free, easy, and instant—if only I can stumble on the right question.

The 1992 telling of this anti-holiday tale on National Public Radio launched the career of author and commentator David Sedaris. His look at Christmas from the perspective of a verbally abused adult, one wearing the curly-toed shoes and green tights of a Macy’s Christmas Elf in New York City, is hilarious and uniquely Sedaris. Bryant-Lake Bowl’s version of his modern classic will make you think twice before you stand in line to sit your kids on the lap of a strange fat man. 810 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-825-8949; www.bryantlakebowl.com

If you’ve always thought of jazz dance as a bit too, shall we say, jazzily mainstream, then you haven’t seen Danny Buraczeski. Steeped in dance history, he has been called “the thinking man’s jazzman.” His desire to share that history and his many years as a teacher bring a distinctive character to his choreography and his performances. This time out, his troupe performs “Blue on the Moon,” set to music by Sidney Bechet (now casting his own shadow instead of standing in Louis Armstrong’s); and “Ezekiel’s Wheel,” a signature tribute to James Baldwin. And while last year’s “Swing Concerto” contrasted “Old World” Yiddish folk with new-fangled swing, here Buraczeski unveils a new work exploring Swing’s late period and its transition into bebop, with a score by Mal Waldron and Thelonious Monk. College of St. Catherine campus, 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul; 651-690-6700

Though we usually tend toward the testosterone, we’ve been getting in touch with our feminine side around here lately. Manicures and massages, girl-power nights—we even broke in our new “Smart Women Make Changes” eraser by rubbing out the groveling ex. So we’re eager to see this theatrical take on the sexual revolution, blending fact and fiction and told variously by a fifties-era psychotherapist, his wife, their daughter, and a contemporary single mom. Picture Freud in a nightie: It’s got nothing to do with the performance, but it sure is funny!

My blood is just slightly tainted. I’ve never tried to hide my HIV-positive status, and I am, if anything, a little embarrassed by how useful I’ve found it. In my defense, one works with what is at hand—it’s not as if I sero-converted simply to get some good material. But then what? What can I say about blood that makes me more interesting than anybody else? Emily Carter on blood. Better than Emily Carter on drugs, I say.

But I have another alibi, or an excuse, or at least an inspiration. It all started with Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. In that movie, blood was beautiful, and so was death, and so, in fact, was everything else, including the title, The Blood of a Poet.

“The blood of a poet.” I want it—the phrase, not the blood—for myself. The glamorous and distant idea is, of course, that someone would actually allow her blood to be spilled for poetry, for beauty, for freedom from cruelty. I sit in my warm little office, my computer playing a radio station from Cape Verde, and I contemplate blood. Meanwhile, it’s being spilled on the floor.

That’s what the news reports said about the video of the terrorists terrorizing all those Russian schoolchildren and their parents and their teachers. Blood is clearly visible on the floor. You can see blood on the floor. For something that’s supposed to be kept on the inside, blood is certainly beautiful. It is scarlet, perhaps to call attention to itself. In nature, bright color is reserved for mating or warning. The little frog that looks like a jewel is often poisonous. Even, and especially, the birds know this. Bright colors tell you to stay away unless you want a painful death. There is no such warning on the human label. Terrorists, for example, look exactly like human beings. Their blood is no more a warning (or an invitation) than anyone else’s.

I watched the video of the schoolchildren and the blood on the floor because curiosity is stronger than choice. I’m no more of a ghoul than anyone else, and the desire to see what shouldn’t be seen is only human. Blood on the floor, hair on the walls, that’s the promise used to get my attention. You can see blood on the floor. The blood seeps into the tiny moats between the tiles, and threads its merry way along a maze-like path of cracks, just like it did that lunchtime twenty-five years ago, the trickle escaping from the gashed head of a boy who’d just thrown himself off the third-floor balcony and into the stairwell. Bright red blood running through the black and white marble.

I remember the face on Brenda, the school psychologist—frozen half-smile, whispered curse—before she bolted to the emergency phone. It was a small school for disturbed but talented adolescents and it didn’t take long to get the word that Brenda and the fallen boy—a Zappa-worshiping, Tuinal-gulping kid from an outlying suburb—had been having an affair. The whole school was crazy; I have no idea whether or not it was true. I just remember marveling at the fact that the boy was still, somehow, alive. The human body, that eggshell full of guts, amazed me with its strength. Even when the inside got outside, the way it was never supposed to do, that thing can take a licking and keep on ticking. It’s true, or we’d all know even more people who had driven themselves to death at an early age.

Anyway, that certainly was not the blood of a poet. It was the blood of a messed-up adolescent boy who, the story went, had just been dismissed by the beautiful older woman who no longer found his services necessary.

There’s actually not much that’s poetic about blood, a liquid medium in which basic processes occur. Respiration, mitosis, meiosis, whatever. It’s just not that exciting a substance, in the end. It fades, for one thing. All those handkerchiefs dipped in Dillinger’s blood were splashy red to start with and ten minutes later were nothing but faded brown, instantly sepia-tinged and historical. Blood fades as fast as the shock of seeing it. The first decapitation video, I was transfixed. I was about to see a human head removed from its body, to look at death. Naturally, the tawdry mess of it is what stays in the mind, the inept sawing, the face with no particular expression, as if surprised mid-thought. In the pornographic light of poor production, the blood looked almost black. That was only the first video. The others appeared, one after the other, in a toxic flurry. It has been a year of death presented like two fat hookers faking sex with each other for rent money. No elegant vampire would want that blackish, sticky, clotted substance.

The blood of a poet, in other words, oozes prose-like out of the body. It carries no potent charm; in the societal power structure, the poet is less significant than the plumber, who, at least, is a hero when he last-minute fixes the pipes everybody thought were going to be frozen all weekend. The blood of a poet is worth less than the blood of a plumber.

So, oh well. So be it. I am no poet, but I am poetic, and my blood carries a little something extra. Gugu Dlamini’s blood carried the same virus as mine. She, however, lived in South Africa in a place where your HIV status didn’t get you any grants like the one for HIV-positive writers I just applied for. What her HIV status got her, when she disclosed it, was stoned to death. Her blood was the same color as mine, but she herself made a brighter splash. She knew that in her town, disclosure meant death, but she disclosed. She was sicker of the denial than she was from the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus, the kind of sickness that makes one ready, almost eager, to have her own blood spilled. Which is what I call transgressive, which is what I call “edge.” I don’t know if I have it, and, God willing, I’ll never need to know. I can picture the red brushstroke painted by the first stone, however, a gash splitting her eyebrow like a signature. There was nothing to protect her. “Can’t you see,” the poet Akmatova exclaimed, “I am naked, vulnerable, while the rest of you have armor?” There was someone who was not afraid to let it spill. I like to think of her and Gugu in heaven, laughing, happy and drunk upon the blood of so-called saints.

A friend recently pointed out the hypocrisy in how I love bloody, mobbed-out films where people get whacked with a ball point pen in the jugular—and yet nearly have a nervous breakdown when I see a squirrel smashed in the street.
I don’t know if this requires serious examination on my part but it is true. Even though I can watch Scar Face without flinching, I have to turn away when they feature animals on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Throw a dude in a wood chipper, fine. But don’t show me a cat with his head stuck in a drinking glass.

I imagine this is hereditary, as I’ve repeatedly heard the story of my mom, out for a stroll one summer day, finding a stray dog who she claimed was “dying of thirst.” She promptly went up to someone’s house, filled her shoe with water from their hose spigot, allowed the mutt to wet his whistle from her sensible navy pump, and was on her way without a second thought.

This is also the woman who toasts bread for the birds in winter. Kind-hearted or insane? Maybe both.

Whenever some grisly story hits the news about a psychopath who has bludgeoned his wife with a ball-peen hammer and run off with the babysitter, the first thing my oldest sister will say is, “Oh no, that’s terrible—I hope he made provisions for someone to look after their dog!” Somehow she believes that a man capable of cold-blooded murder surely also he had the good sense to find a responsible caretaker for “Winky.”
Same goes for the occasional circus-elephant-rampage story. My family will undoubtedly rationalize that “Jumbo,” in a moment of elephant clarity, looked down at the tutu and roller skates he was wearing and thought “The hell with this!” So what if he snapped and mauled a family of four? Did his sadistic trainer really have to swat him with a stick during the act?

I know to some this sounds rife with contradiction. How can a self-professed animal lover be so cold and indifferent to people? I don’t have an answer, but I’d bet my Sopranos DVD collection and a lifetime’s supply of Pounce that there are people who feel the same way I do.

E-mail Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.