Despite the chill in the air there was a big turn-out for the first park clean-up of the season yesterday. All my favorite gardeners were there, many of whom I had not seen all winter. Gardeners are wonderful people. And what I like most about them is that they generally don't stand around shooting the shit. They're down in it. So, to properly socialize with gardeners you have to know but one thing: when to STFU.

I got there a little late — but, honestly, 9 a.m. on a Sunday? — and things were in full-swing. Everybody was in The Zone. Quite a change from the autumn clean-up where about ten of us showed and it was a little like a death march. Folks are obviously all fired up and ready for spring. And there were several cute newbies, too, which is always a plus.

I have to admit that I did more socializing than actual work this time out, but it was so nice to see the old gang again. These are my peeps. And some of them are pushing seventy! It's one of the most wonderful things there is about a community garden. That you get to be socialize with folks of all ages.

I have to say, though, that the ipod zombification of the Fens is well underway. I encountered a twentysomething newbie, with all the necessary accouterments — seventies hair, sloppy tats, stapled face — at the special needs garden gate — I on my way out, he on his way in — and despite my holding the gate open for him, he did not look at or acknowledge me. I was, like, two feet from him.  No one else around.

That is very Boston, of course, but it's not very Fens, I'm afraid. Sorry, but we're still somewhat human here. I know it's old-fashioned and naff, but that's why we call it a community garden, not an igarden. If you want one of those, go to wherever it is they sell those virtual pets. One look at him, and you can tell his tomatoes are gonna shrivel on the vine. Pod people suck at gardening.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention seeing Tony, for those of you familiar with His Evil Gnomeness, among the rabble. Evil as ever, fresh-shaved and snarling to beat the band. Apparently picking up used condoms and syringes is not his idea of ushering in the spring.

It was getting colder rather than warmer as the morning went on, and kind of raining, too. And once the coffee and donuts were gone, I knew it was time for me to take my leave as well. I'd taken the subway, anticipating nasty weather. My latest Goodwill Book Club selection and T reading of late has been Milan Kundera's Slowness, a book I decided to read slo-o-o-o-owly. I remember talking about it on a doomed date almost a week and a half ago, and it's only about a hundred and fifty pages long (I'm currently on page 97).

I feel a little out of date reading Kundera, I have to say. I looked around on the T the other day and there was a Jonathan Franzen to my right and a Manil Suri to my left. Granted, across from me was one of those hot MIT geeks clutching his tattered copy of Dune, but that didn't make me feel any better.

Kundera's kind of an eighties author. And in precisely the way novelist James Collins describes in a recent article in the Times about highly literate people with lousy sex-lives:

"Collins was 'infatuated' with a woman who had a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being on her bedside table," the article explains. "'I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, "Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat," and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened).'"

Come on.  Anybody else get the feeling she totally rejected his ass, and he's trying to get back at her in the New York Times? Mee-ooww!

But this is why I make it a point to date people who don't, won't, or can't read. I don't care what's on your bedside table, as long as there's a bottle of ID Glide and a twelve-pack of Trojan Magnums. My latest beau picked up a book from off my night table and said, "what's this?"

"It's a, um, book."

"Spell it."

"B-o-o-k."

"Slow. Down."

"B..."

"As in?"

"Boy."

"Go on."

"O-O-K."

"Hmm."  He turned it over in his big, calloused, workingman hands.  "How's it work?"

I said, "You open it."

(Which he promptly did, adding: "I knew that.")

"And now you, um, read it."

He screwed up his face.

"And then what?"

"And then you tell people you read it."

"And then what?"

"And then they tell you they read it, too."

"And then what?"

"And then you fuck."

He looked skeptical.

I said, "but you don't have to read it to say you read it."

"So why read it?" he asked. "Why not skip it and just fuck?"

"Precisely," I said.  And we did.

I don't read to fuck anymore. Not since my student days have I really been interested sexually in intellectuals, whether self-styled or board-certified. Not to say that I didn't end up in bed with my share.  A few have gotten through the rigorous vetting, somehow.  It's unavoidable when you're dealing with the kind of numbers we're dealing with here.  But it always ends badly.  In fact, it usually begins badly, too.  Come to think of it, the middle's not too hot, either.

Some years ago I met an ambitious translator in one of Budapest's seediest bathhouses, a little remnant of the Turkish occupation that hasn't been cleaned since, called the Király...


...Andras was his name.  He had the face of an angel.  But when your come-on line is "is that a categorical imperative under that towel or are you just happy to see me?" — well, you could tell there was way too much going on upstairs.  It's not a problem to have a lot going on if you can manage it, but I had my doubts from the get-go that he could.  Brilliance is one thing, managing it something else entirely.  You've got all the ingredients for a twelve course meal, but can you cook?  To put it another way: the place came furnished, but do you have the feng shui?  If not, your chi's gonna fuck with you. 

Sometimes it can be like trying to fit all the furniture in Buckingham palace into Thoreau's little cabin.  It can be done, but you have to build a particle accelerator first. And that's hard to do if you don't have any friends, which a lot of brilliant people don't, because their chi is fucking with them hard.  And, let me tell you, this little dude had some squirrelly-ass chi. 

What made it worse for everyone was, he also had an enormous wang.  When I first saw him frolicking in the soup I thought, what is he, riding a dolphin?  Let me just say: brilliant people should have small penises.  It's too much to have so much going on upstairs and then all that going on downstairs, too.  It's like driving while talking on your cell.  You have to have twice the skillz to manage it all.  Merely smart people (we're talking IQ in the 110 to 130 range) can have big ones and handle it sometimes, but above 130 forget it.  It might as well be a fish on a bicycle.

So, right off the bat I could see the kid was a total freak show.  And I had to do him. 

So there we were in the soup, getting busy, and kissing was just what you'd expect from an onion-breath intellectual with a squirrelly chi: it was like I'd accidentally eaten a little deep-fried animal — tongue darting all around, like a frantic little rodent, a cornered vole, looking for a way out.

Three dates later (yes, I am insane, thank you very much) we had this huge hairy blow-out on a point of grammar. 

It all started when I said, "so I met this guy at the bar."

He was like, "w-w-w-whoa whoa WHOA. What guy?"

"I'm about to tell you what guy," I said.

He said, "you cannot say 'this guy' unless this guy has already been mentioned."

I said, "you bet your ass I can, and I just did, and I'm gonna say it again. I met this guy at this bar, and then we went to this cafe on this boulevard and we had these delicious cakes."

He was clutching his head and grimacing and groaning in great mental pain.  This was rocking his world. 

I said, "you don't believe me, do you? I mean, that you can say that.  Or is it that you don't understand?"

He said he understood but didn't believe me.

Hmm.  Trust issues. 

Well, of course I'd much rather it were the other way around.  So that was that.

Truth is, by this point I was just looking for an easy out. You meet someone at the bath, you don't have to worry about their hygiene, but when I met him again some days later, it was obvious there was a serious mind-body problem going on.  Really, really smart people probably shouldn't even be entrusted with bodies, if you want to know the truth.  Just toss their brains in a vat of protoplasm, and set them next to the lava lamp on the end table.  They'd be perfectly content. 

But back to Kundera.  I'm reading him on the T, and he starts banging on about Apollinaire's ass hole.  This is why I love this guy.  This is what I love about literature.  It doesn't shrink from the sordid.  It shines a light on Apollinaire's ass hole.  Actually not Apollinaire's, but one of his lover's, Madeleine's, which Apollinaire hails as the "supreme portal."

Lemme back up here.  It all starts when a character in the book picks up a beautiful young entomologist at a conference, absconds with her, and in the first stages of seduction, bewitched by her beauty — "the beauty of a fairy, a beauty that surprises him, new beauty ... a fine, fragile chaste, inaccessible beauty" — "suddenly he cannot even tell how it happened, he imagines the hole of her ass.  Abruptly, unexpectedly, that image is there, and he will never be rid of it."

"Ah, the liberating ass hole!" Kundera swoons.  "He has an enormous desire to tell her: 'I'm stroking your breasts, but all I'm thinking about is your ass hole.'"  Just so you know, ladies. 

That's when Kundera starts in on Apollinaire.  He's particularly interested in Apollinaire's change of heart — while in the trenches during the first World War, Apollinaire wrote two poems to two of his mistresses, odes to their various orifices.  The first, written in May of 1915, reserved the highest praise for the vulva.  But half a year later the ass hole had taken the top slot.

Kundera sees Apollinaire's time in the trenches as vital to his "revelation" that "the ass hole is the miraculous focal point for all the nuclear energy of nakedness."  And goes on:

The vulva portal is important, of course (of course, who would deny that?), but too officially important, a registered site, classified, documented, explicated, examined, experimented on, watched, sung, celebrated.  Vulva: noisy crossroads where all of chattering humankind meets, a tunnel the generations file through.  Only the gullible believe in the intimacy of that site, the most public site of all.  The only site that is truly intimate, whose taboo even pornographic films respect, is the hole of the ass, the supreme portal; supreme because it is the most mysterious, the most secret.

So he's a little out of date.  I mean, I don't know what pornographic films he was watching back in '95 when he scribbled this out, but welcome to the golden age of triple penetration, dude.  It ain't sex these days unless all your holes are plugged.  Air-tight.  We wouldn't want you springing a leak, now, would we? 

Is the female ass the new face of feminism?  Or is this the gaying of straight sex?  Is the rectum still the grave? Or have we transcended the taboo? 

Whatever the case, female performers in straight porn are paid as much as two times what they make for vaginal sex to take it up the arse.  You could say the extra is a hardship allowance, but the truth is it pays more because it's worth more.  To someone, at least.  Is it worth more because it's taboo?  But if it's taboo, why does everybody talk about it?  Even Oprah!  Why is everybody doing it?  It's "rampant," according to this article in Slate.

Now these are the kinds of questions you want your bedside reading to pose.  Your T reading, not so much.  But it's all good. 

When I got home I opened a can of Wolfgang Puck's signature soups — this is not an advertisement, but I've got to say, his chicken pot pie soup cured me of my pleurisy just like his beef burgundy with egg noodles cured my gout. I saw the Virgin Mary in a can of Italian-style Wedding.  They're on sale at Shaw's. Do yourself a favor and grab a couple cans. It'll cure whatever ails you.

Soup is such a wonderful thing. It's on my list of perfect inventions, along with the windmill, the aqueduct, the push reel mower, the aluminum tube web chair, the sandwich, and the book. Try to imagine life without soup. I'll wait...

YOU CAN'T. Because life started in the soup.

It's the simple things, the fundamental things in life, innit?  A little gardening, a little reading, a little sex, a little soup provide compensation for the pretensions of civilization.