I've been, sadly, too busy for many flings so far this year, and while I'm capable of going awhile without nom-nom-nom, when I am doing so I'm always asking myself why the hell I should. It's like dieting when you're not fat. What's the point? Because everybody else is doing it? No! If you must diet, get fat first. Life is a feast. Sink your teeth in. Pick the crumbs off your fingers. Lick the plate. Obey no rule but the five-second rule!  By the time the food coma comes or you die of high cholesterol you won't care.  Trust me.

The hook-up is the amuse-bouche of sex — there is never any reason it should be anything but perfectly delightful.  And if it isn't spit it right back out!  The perfect hook-up, like an amuse-bouche, can look weird and combine odd qualities.  That's the point.  It can be insanely rich.  Or be made of stinky cheese.  You're not going to be eating it every meal for the next sixty years, bitches.   

Sure, a rich sex-life, just like a rich diet, is probably going to kill you in the end.  But we should be lucky enough to go out of this world as we came into it: fat and screaming at the top of our lungs.

Lovers — as fuckbuddies and friends-with-bennies used to be called — are a notch up on the food-chain.  If you want to stick with a food metaphor, they are not your dinner party fare.  They're the guilty pleasures of peasant food — blini rather than crêpes — what you eat after the party's over.  They aren't Saturday night, in other words, they're Sunday morning.   

It's lovers that make you fat eventually. 

(I've left out spouses, but they are the TV dinners of this extended metaphor.)

Anyway, I'm still working on the first course so far this season.  You get to my age and every scent, every flavor is evocative. It takes awhile to get through the starters.

I was out shopping the other day, and tried on a shirt at Banana Republic that someone had left his scent on.  He must have tried it on just before I did or been just utterly drenched in cheap cologne. 

But it was the same scent — or very similar to what my very first lover, a humpy wrestler at Indiana University way back in the day, wore.  A step up from Axe but still cheap enough to avoid being subtle.  Just my type.  I almost bought the shirt for all the memories it was, er, arousing in me.   

I chatted up an adorable twentysomething the other night online.  When we met in person the taste of cigarettes and mouthwash on him evoked memories of the East European flings of my restless youth. 

The richness of experience is built on layers of memory, like a baklava. 

And I intend to eat until I'm good and fat.