"The month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise every lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May." — Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)

Weatherwise, it's been a pretty soggy May so far.  It's too bad, really, because the lilacs and crab-apple trees, both intoxicatingly fragrant, are in bloom, but you don't get to enjoy it when all your days are rained-out.  I've been sneaking out to the garden between thunderstorms every chance I get, and just breathing.  That's my chief form of excitement right now: breathing. 

We needed the rain, of course, and almost overnight the garden's gone from straggling along to puffed-up and lush. So I'm not complaining, really.  We always want it both ways, though, don't we? This time of year, so much is happening so fast you just want to be able to be there all the time.  Everything's coming to life, and naturally, we want to, too.


And May is the month, if you're going to do it.  April is childish: temperamental, and prone to tantrums. But May is the horny teenager of months.  Nature's big growth-spurt kicks in and we're off!  Blossoms are bursting and so is libido. 

Although I have to admit I'm personally feeling less lusty than in past years, yet.  It may have to do with May being a month of deadlines for me, or it might be the solemn reckoning that comes with turning 40, which is right around the corner. Or it could be swine flu.  I've narrowed it down to those three.

The forty thing is already a little on my nerves.  I really don't mind it myself — no, really, I feel fine!  What few complaints have come with age can still be cured with mild tinctures and salves, and always provide a good excuse to see my sexy pharmicist. And not to toot my own horn (but this is a blog, after all), I think I'm holding up OK (the chassis, at least)...


...but — and I am not fishing here — we all know it has nothing to do with looking good and feeling fit.  It's all about that new car smell.  Save your protests!  You and I know it's not true!  It's Society's fault!  Because we know that some men are like fine wine — they get better with age.  We know that the patina of experience can add mystique and a touch of exoticism to a man.  We can name a whole slew of middle-aged men who are hotter than most men half their age, and probably hotter than they themselves were at half their age.  Hugh Jackman, who is also 40, wasn't named People's Sexiest Man Alive until age 39!

But even Hugh is looking a little desperate all buff and flexing his vanity muscles in his new movie.  I mean, what he had to go on a radical diet, hire a team of tormentors, get up at four every morning for six months, and turn the gym into a full-time job to achieve, a teenager with the same genes could've done with a little Muscle Milk and an old weight bench in the garage.  And do you think Hugh Jackman would've gone to all that trouble if they hadn't offered him twenty million dollars?

God bless him, but none of us wants to end up Iggy Pop.  The secret to aging well is to mellow.  Otherwise, you open the bottle expecting wine and get vinegar instead.  The bottle may look good, the label promising, but it really is what's inside that counts. 

Good health and good looks are certainly not the exclusive province of the young, but being young is.  And despite decades of aging Boomers' cultural dominance, we still live in a society that equates beauty and youth, and not, as the wise-beyond-his-years Mr. Keats famously posited in his Ode to a Grecian Urn, beauty and truth.  It's impossible not to reflect on what age means — socially — in a society so utterly obsessed with youth. 

Society sets up its milestones in the game of Life, doesn't it?  That can be a source of considerable stress if you're prone to obsess on the status quo.  But if you're smart you can spin the fact that you're still single, under-employed, and renting a room in a glorified flop-house as a measure of your unflinching integrity and uncompromising character.  I mean, I'm not People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive but at least I'm not a sell-out, right? 

No, I'm happy for Hugh Jackman.  And I'm jacked enough myself for my own satisfaction.  But with each passing year I'll admit I do feel more like I have something to prove, physically.  Your health and looks start to acquire qualifiers at forty.  He looks good... for a man his age.  He's in great shape... for a guy in his forties. 

Unfortunately, I don't think libido necessarily declines with age — at least not at my age — so much as gets tamped down by the cost-benefit analysis that inevitably attends it.  People rightly become more pragmatic the older they get. As it becomes more and more obvious that you simply can't follow your every whim — you have to carefully choose which whims to follow.  And if you followed enough of them in your youth — and I certainly followed my share — you form a rough idea of what outcomes certain whims will yield.  This is why so many middle-aged people wind up on Atlantis cruises, and considerably fewer in The Peace Corps.

Life is all about those trade-offs. And while youth is all about new and unusual experiences, the ease with which the world reveals its open secrets, middle age is more about appreciating the patterns that emerge and enmesh us over years, the cycles of seasons.  The ebb and flow over the Sturm und Drang.   And as for life's deeper secrets.  Well, I figure they're secret for a reason.  Do we really need to know exactly what kind of guts go into the great sausage of life?

The most profound change in perspective that comes with age, in my experience, aside from the intimations of mortality, is that you start to understand that the mystery is not in what's hidden or absent in the here and now, it is the here and now itself.  It's in what is present, visible, tangible.  That's what's really incomprehensible: that we are here at all. 

But we were talking about libido.  I have a feeling it's sneaking up on me this year.  It's like returning home after a few months abroad.  The memory has rearranged things: I swear this room was bigger when I left.  Wasn't that armchair a different shade of green?  I mean, I'm seeing guys I've been looking at all winter and thinking, he wasn't sexy two weeks ago.  Did he all the sudden grow sex appeal, or am I just hornier than I was two weeks ago?

There's this skinny Greek kid— twenty-two — a teller at my bank.  There's something a little John Krasinski-ish about him.  We've had this little thing going since he started there — nothing big, just our own little thing, and all the sudden — like, last Friday — I started actually looking forward to seeing him.  Not in a weird way.  Just, whenever I'd think about making a deposit, I'd find myself thinking: "oh, I hope I get P— for my teller today, instead of J— or L— (especially not L—)." 

And then you have guys at the office — they've got a little color now — they look alive again.  There's this thirty-something guy from two floors down, and he came up to see me — business, mind you — and aside from the bluest eyes you've ever seen I noticed for the first time how hairy his arms were.  He's one of these hairy blonds, and he's got really thick, curly hair on his forearms.  Two months ago, I'd've been like: animal.  But it's Spring, so the rest of the afternoon was a parade of naked hairy arms, legs, and ass-cheeks in my head. 

But I still feel kind of detached from it all.  It's still just in my head, and hasn't made its way through my blood stream, through my nervous system, to the surface of my skin.  I'm a little out of sync this year.  About a month ago my winter funk kicked in, and all the sudden I was like: "sex: ooh, ick." Not so much the thought of it as the feel of it on my skin. 

It happens periodically that I don't want to be touched.  And then, if that goes on long enough, the idea of touch starts seeming strange.  By now, I'm having trouble conceiving why anyone would want to be touched at all by anyone else. I still have no trouble touching myself, of course, but that's different.  I can't put my own tongue in my ear, and hope I would have the good sense not to even if I could.  I certainly don't want anyone else up in there. 

Sexuality ebbs and flows.  Libido has its eddies and reverse currents — it's not all Viagra Falls — just ask Manny Ramirez.  We feel things more acutely at certain times — physically and emotionally, even if we don't always realize it.  We have seasons ourselves.  But society needs us to be consistent despite them. In a culture of ruthless leveling we're supposed to work 9-5 in climate controlled offices under artificial lighting all year round.  And men, at least, are supposed to be horny through it all. 

Men supposedly think about sex once every 52 seconds.  But frankly, sometimes it's spread out over the day, and sometimes you get it all in in a marathon session in the morning.  The originator of the once-every-52-seconds hypothesis, by the way, is, not surprisingly, a female.  And I'd have to quibble with her terminology.  "Think" is the wrong word entirely when you talk about men and sex. 

Men do have a porn video running in their heads in the background more or less all the time. That much is true. It's an alternate universe where every ordinary workaday life scenario turns into a porn scenario.  But it's not like we're thinking about it.  It's just on in the background, like old people and their TVs, to comfort us, and make us not feel so alone. 

I tend to get all my sex-thoughts in in the morning.  If you add up all those seconds of pleasure it only amounts to about 27 minutes a day men think about sex, which is more than enough to pop in a video, and do what has to be done before getting on with your life.  Think of it as power yoga with a happy ending.  It's got your weird postures and rhythmic breathing, relaxes you, and helps you focus for the day ahead.

Because frankly I've got better things to do this time of year than think about sex every 52 seconds.

I was trying to explain the dynamic of my last big long-term relationship to a younger guy I've been palling around with recently, and said: "sometimes I just didn't want to have sex with my ex." 

My young sidekick looked at me screwy. 

"It seems to me," he ventured with a slightly sententious mien, "that if you're really in love someone, at the end of the day you want to have sex with them."

Which is the same argument my ex always used (substituting "me" for "someone" and "them").  My ex suggested antidepressants.  But I refuse to see my moods as a "mood disorder" or the rhythms of desire as a dysfunction.  There are times in an intimate relationship when the connection is deepened by other forms of intimacy.  If you're really in love, you're probably desperate enough to roll with it. 

Men may seem like sexual gluttons, but the truth is many simply lack the education in desire to train their appetites. Like dogs, they'll eat whatever you put in front of them, so long as it'll fit in their mouths, or even part of it will fit in their mouths.  Sexually, many are stuck at the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy, just desperate for a nut.  But moving up the pyramid of needs is the natural course of events in a long-term relationship. 

It's no coincidence that culturally, we're stuck wanting, too.  Our sexuality is just one more way, if more keenly felt, in which the wanting is manifest.  Anything that comes in the path of our steamroller version of life, where we've got to be on when everyone else is on, where we are either tops or bottoms in the big scheme of things and what binds us is want, is spun as a source of dysfunction.

Most people with mild to moderate so-called Seasonal Affective Disorder are actually responding normally to shorter days and less light, when sleep patterns would ordinarily change.  There's a good chance that if we allowed them to do what their body was telling them it wanted they would be fine.  We think of eight hours a night of uninterrupted sleep all year round as normal.  But throughout most of human history it's segmented sleep that's been the norm.  Throughout most of history, sleep and wake patterns fluctuated with the seasons. 

As with sleep "disorders", so it is with the ebb and flow of libido.  But it's useful to ask why we're so insistent on strict consistency — what amounts to stasis — when most of us live in dynamic environments with extreme fluctuations throughout the year to which our bodies obviously respond.  Of course, our answer with sleep "disorders," "mood disorders" (like SAD), and sexual "dysfunction" is to medicate to an imaginary baseline.  It's no wonder we call them "disorders," since they're our bodies' rebellion against an artificial, enforced order which is further reinforced by labeling the body's normal responses as disorder.

But Nature teaches us: what rises falls, and rises again.  We are allowed our periods of dormancy, our dark nights of the soul.  And when we blossom, we can be glorious.  Some of us may be a little out of sync with the seasons — or society.  A season may even pass without a bloom.  But don't worry: there's still plenty of spunk in the air to go around.