sex – Page 8 – Hopeful Romantics

Death and Nonsense in the Spiritual Sweat Lodge

Years ago my grandfather went to the steam baths. These were not the steam baths of today, anemic cubes of tile with a little spritz of hot vapor every now and then. No these were the old time Russian Baths. These were the real thing. The steam was so thick you could barely see through the moist fog. It was hot in there, not warm and tolerable like the wussy steam baths in the modern health clubs. In the old Russian Baths, you really sweat.

The Russian-style steam baths permeated the East Coast. They catered to the European immigrants and the stout hearted Americans who sought them out for solace and comfort. Old men would sit in there for extended period, meditating in silence or talking silently with their friends and associates. Younger men, that is any man under forty, would also enter the baths, but they would leave a lot earlier than the older gents who could just suck up that hot, wet air. Some of these old time Russian baths are still around.

Sometimes I went with my grandfather. It was an experience, as a pre-teen or young teenage kid, watching these men sit naked or wrapped in sheets. There they were hunched over, save for the ones who for extra stimulation were bathed by some old guy who seemed to live inside the steam bath. He would soap up their bodies with a real sponge, and then swirl a bouquet of hot Eucalyptus leaves in the air and then rub them over the the wet, gleaming skin. It was good for the stimulation. The toxins would ooze from your pores.

Even junkies and assorted drug addicts visited the baths to sweat all the toxic residue from their pores. The steam bath population was comprised of a democratic society. In Los Angeles, as a somewhat older me, the Pico Baths, still remain, a homage to another era. The Pico Baths has the sauna, of course, they all did, but the real attraction was the steam bath. Hot steam. The real thing. Peel the plaster off the walls. No messing around.

I remember sitting in there and shortly before he died, John Belushi was being treated to the Eucalyptus treatment. There he was, splayed out on the wooden table like a giant white whale, getting soaped for treated for all to see. He didn’t care, and in the tradition of the time, no one else did either. It was his attempt to clean out, I suppose. If nothing else, the man knew how to live before he died.

Even before I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I knew the Indians had the sweat lodges. It was a cleansing proposition, clear the body so the mind and spirit had a better view. Sweat all that crap out of you. It made sense. I knew the story. And while I had Indian friends, I never asked to be part of a sweat lodge ceremony. I understood it was their thing and the Anglos who begged in were tolerated maybe, but still interlopers. I stuck with the health club, even though it was nothing like my grandfather’s Russian baths or the Pico Baths, in Los Angeles.

But here we are in search of spiritual enlightenment and chasing the buck. That’s the set up, it seems, for self-help gurus who utilize the sweat lodge so their paying clients can achieve some form of enlightenment. It is a way for some self-help gurus to demonstrate to their clients that they can achieve strength and confidence by mastering physical discomfort. My grandfather, on the other hand, walked across Europe to get on a boat to come here, so he could find relaxation and not adversity in the steam baths. He would have been surprised to find death waiting for him among the white tiles and hot steam.

But death came to some poor schmucks, sure enough. For close to $10 thousand apiece, for the “Spiritual Warrior Retreat, patrons had the rare privilege of seeking success by overcoming hardship, only to find out that they couldn’t quite pull it off. They died instead. One wonders why, when feeling a little woozy, they didn’t make for the door, or the lodge flap, whatever it was. Apparently, from reports listed both in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, they were dissuaded from doing so.

Now I subscribe to the age old axiom there is a sucker born every minute. In this case, no doubt there are people who benefit from the “spiritual warrior” experience. I can only imagine what lame souls they may have been before they saw the light of all creation, reaching that cathartic moment amid the communal B.O. where they realized, “hey, I can turn my life around.”

With the Search Sub Engine you can promote your business for as long as you wish viagra sale mastercard in it. You should stop excessive self stimulation. buy brand cialis Round of the clock directing administrations are accommodated the sale levitra patients for the quicker finding. That?s right ? many cialis without prescription https://pdxcommercial.com/property/3900-se-hazell-dell-way-canby-97013/ of the “household names” in the Internet due to the confidence of their personal data. And certainly enduring adversity is a big deal when you are training for special purposes. The Navy Seals, Marine Recon, Special Forces, must all training under harsh conditions to endure adversity. They are trained to anticipate the unexpected, to endure, and to prevail. But then they are trained by highly experienced men, part of a legacy, who impart the wisdom of generations of military people who have benefited from on the ground experience. Experience of the real kind. Exotic life and death considerations in the ever changing field of battle.

With self-help gurus, it seems the kind of experience takes some of life’s speed bumps and proclaim that any progress their subscribers achieve are to be regarded as great spiritual triumphs. Now certainly the argument can be made that life is an endurance trial. That one can only prevail by surmounting past mistakes and overcoming adversity. It is at best questionable whether adversity can be manufactured in a sweat lodge or any other controlled circumstances where the full impact of what you may face in the harsh world is never fully realized. It is adversity light.

Adversity is organic. Failure, embarrassment, and destruction are endured when the world comes down around us. We fail at business, get divorced, suffer the loss of a loved one, lose our jobs, watch Bernard Madoff walk off with our money, or we near retirement age only to find that Wall Street has turned our investments into garbage. You don’t suffer that kind of loss in a sweat lodge. You may lose your life, but at least you are not left to scrape up the shattered pieces of what used to be your life and try to reassemble them into some workable manner.

The Indians didn’t go to the sweat lodge to overcome adversity. They had enough thrown at them before they ever got near the sweat lodge. The Indians went into the sweat lodge for the same reasons my grandfather went into the Shvitz. They went to sweat, to purify themselves in small ways, clean the toxins, think and either share some camaraderie or to be left alone. It was a way of getting out of the house, losing the wife and family for a couple of hours so you could get your thoughts together.

My grandfather didn’t go to the steam baths to garner spiritual enlightenment. Besides the sweat and relaxation, he may have gone for business tips. These old cockers would sit around talking shop, offering financial advice in everything from stock tips to evaluating real estate and other prevailing markets. There were no business channels back then. Neil Cavuto, and Jim Cramer, the dozens of others, were not around to bolster the markets with bad advice. There was the Wall Street Journal and a few other things. That was it. And these men, sitting around in steam, talking investments, this was your financial network.

If they had only known that their daily practice of meeting in the steam baths would someday be an appendage to the whole self-help guru thing, an $11 Billion industry, they would have choked on the slimy mucous hockers they used to raise up from the back of their throats and spit into their sheets. These guys had lived tough and overcome all sorts of adversity to make their way in the world.

They had endured pogroms, plagues, the Great Depression, in some cases Two World Wars, and countless business challenges. They didn’t need to hear how to overcome obstacles from some wiseacre who had no clue what real adversity was all about. They would have looked at someone lecturing them, imploring them to become the spiritual warriors they were meant to be as deranged and in need a swift kick in the ass. And they would look at those who bought into this program, who paid thousands for the privilege of sweating, as a bunch of suckers with too much money to spend.

James Arthur Ray is the gentleman who presided over the sweat lodge sessions where three of his clients died. He has proved to the world that he, too, can overcome adversity and rise to the challenge. Despite the fatal loss of three of his flock, he has taken to the road again, where more lucky souls will benefit from the secrets of his success. As for the deaths of three people and all the negative headlines…hey…no sweat.

When You Still Want to Marry a Virgin

We are nearing the close of the first decade of the 21st Century. Yet there are men who still want to marry a virgin. Forget the bygone days when the mother-in-law or some other responsible party held up the bloody wedding night sheet to proclaim the chastity of the blushing bride. Forget the fact that centuries have passed and for the most part, in most places in the world, society has acknowledged the woman’s right to get laid. Don’t even think for a moment that all those sexy films and wet tee-shirt contests have promoted equal sexuality to the further corners of the earth. And if you are in certain parts of the world, other than the prostitutes–“want to party, honey?”– you can put away your hopes and desires of sleeping with the girl you met earlier that day.

In some parts of the world, that woman won’t have sex. She can’t. She will not resolve her hornier emotions on the chance that up the road and in the sack her husband, that final destination of fairy tale bliss, will reject her as damaged goods. And forget about the fabled mother, with a wink and a blink, and an “I understand you situation completely, having been there myself,” holding up a bloody sheet in solemn but graphic testimony to fictional chastity. Twenty centuries later, we men are almost wise to that trick.

But then, again, maybe not. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, the new Artificial Virginity Hymen Kit is more threatening to many male Egyptians than the triumphant return of Cleopatra. For a mere $29.90, a sexually active woman can on her wedding night let loose with this pouch of artificial blood, proving she is has remained pure and simple for her one true love. As Gigimo, the Chinese mail order company that sells the kit over its website insinuates, just a few well appointed moans and groans, break the blood bag, and voila, your idiot husband will believe he’s the first. Provided, of course, he doesn’t later find the receipt for the artificial hymen kit tucked inside your purse.

Key religious groups and conservative social and political entities condemn this Instant Cherry Kit. More than a few Egyptian citizens believe that this handy-dandy virgin vessel will inspire promiscuity in Egyptian women. Confident they can fool their grooms, they will also fool around. They will come to their wedding night as damaged goods with a broken hymen and with sexual skills they shouldn’t have accumulated through trial and error. Certain conservative groups are so outraged over the artificial hymen kit they want to put out a fatwa on any peddler who dares sell them. A fatwa, for the less informed, is where you kill the person for besmirching social or religious customs. Strong stuff.

This new threat to social stability is perceived by the more rational or liberal minded elements in Egyptian Society as partly an outgrowth of the social and economic changes in the society itself. Single women used to live with their parents, until they got married, which was typically at a much earlier age than it is today. But today’s economic crisis, with its joblessness and poverty has forced many women to wait longer, accumulating their dowries. So you have women single longer and dating longer. Things do happen.

So rather than conclude, “all right, already, the times have changed and we have to change with the times,” the more conservative elements are outraged. As noted before, they are concerned promiscuity will spread. And, you know, probably it will. With promiscuity and prior experience, it is fair to say there are for women points of comparison and possible dissatisfaction with the schlub she is with. In other words, there will be discord. There will be less control of individual actions by social and religious forces. Life will be chaotic.
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No wonder everyone is upset. Not that Egypt is necessarily the paragon of order and control. Not that we should even pick on only Egypt, as much of the world is undergoing their own brand of chaos, the loss of order and control. I remember in my childhood the Catholic boys solemnly declaring that they wouldn’t ever conceive of marrying any girl other than a virgin. This, mind you, was at the cusp of social change in this country, when sex, drugs, and rock and roll, dramatically replaced Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, as our social gyroscopes. So weren’t those guys in for a rude awakening?

Besides, Egypt like every other country has always found a way to counter the sexual contradictions of society in order to perpetuate that very society. Before the artificial hymen kit, there were the Egyptian women who had their hymens surgically restored. Before that, there was the complicit cousin waving the bloody wedding sheet. In short, people will screw around. It is just a question of how open we want to be about it.

As a world, we suffer from hypocrisy. It’s part of out nature. We preach one thing and do another. We resist our more natural impulses in the shaky belief we can control them through sound mind and body. Whatever that is. We invoke the celestial to give us guidance. Quite often that guidance is less a celestial proclamation and more our own yearnings for social and emotional security. And control. We draw on questionable resources just so we can feel better than ourselves. We yield our self-control and, more importantly our concept of self-control for external enforcement of our visceral sensibilities.

Mainly, we are unsure of ourselves and feel threatened by everything out there that does not fall lockstep into our dogma or our system of beliefs. Conservatives are threatened by one thing. Liberals are threatened by another. In one form or another, everyone is threatened, so we lock ourselves in a box with like minded souls and hope upon hopes that no one will puncture our fragile veneers.

Sometimes it is ridiculous. Like this. We order from the Chinese a thirty dollar hymen kit so we can proclaim and reinforce the righteousness of our own limitations. It’s amazing. Yet on one level we should be grateful. Seldom does our fragile emotional security come this cheap.

Time for a Mandatory Government National Service

It is time for the federal government to institute a national service. That is a service where it is mandated that younger people are drafted to service the public good for two years. This is not a military draft, mind you, but a system where college graduates can first apply their skills for the general benefit of the American Citizenry, and where high school graduates and dropouts can learn trades and other ways of becoming productive members of this society.

In my plan, people will have a choice regarding which service they care to enter. They can devote their newly learned business acumen to joining others in repurposing our neglected factories and manufacturing plants in the Rut Belt and Eastern Seaboard. Rather than rely on imports, we can once again rekindle our manufacturing ability that initially made us the dominant country in the world. A reconstituted effort in manufacturing would alleviate some of our natural deficit and reliance on trading partners we would rather not owe money.

Young people can use their cutting edge technological and business skills and combine them with seasoned business executives, many of whom are currently out of work in this dreadful economy, in redeveloping factories for domestic production and manufacturing. This would put the laid off factory workers back on the job and rekindle the economy in blighted parts of the nation. We would be servicing our fellow Americans and not just the bottom line.

Other younger folk can work with seasoned veterans in rehabilitating our infrastructure and developing alternate energy sources. They could work on environmental cleanup. They could work in healthcare where personnel are needed to serve our sub-income and even middle income citizens. They could work in legal areas and provide legal assistance to people in need. In short, they could work to improve the general health and economic well being of this nation, and not just a corporate bottom line.

Those who have such an affinity, can be drafted into military service. This is becoming essential. While an all volunteer army has its merits, and a professional army is a better performer, certain drawbacks to the notion of our volunteer army are starting to reveal themselves. Not the least of which is our shortage of troops and the constant reliance on our National Guard. This has caused the degrading of performance, despite all best efforts, as troops are cycled over and over again back into combat duty without adequate rest. Our troops are just exhausted. Should a real war erupt, where we need hundreds of thousands of combat ready troops we may find ourselves lacking.

Additionally, there have been those who have attempted to instill in our military the type of religious fervor that has no place in any government institution. It is one thing to have your beliefs, as we are all entitled, but when those beliefs are eclipsed by evangelical elements who all but enforce the doctrine of their own religious this is in direct contradiction to both our constitution and the wishes of our founding fathers. There are such incidents reports at the Air Force Academy and on Army bases around the world.

A drafted army would go a long way in ameliorating such religious fervor. People who are drafted for two years, would embrace the long honored military tradition of wanting to go in, do your tour of duty, and then go home. They will bring to the party, or the military, in this case, not only secular perspectives but the perspective other other religions. They will not look on their military duty as a religious crusade to smote the infidel but to protect and defend the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic.
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While I am not overly worried, history has dictated that an all volunteer army can become a mercenary army that is loyal principally to the people that lead it and feed it. This is a far cry from a good thing. Additionally, when civilian soldiers are involved, Presidents and political leaders are less inclined to commit troops for useless and misguided wars. Can we say Iraq? When there are civilian soldiers, there is a much greater chance of public outcry and the sort of protests that finally ended the Vietnam debacle. Simply put, people seem less concerned about an all volunteer army as they are when it is their family members that are part of a citizen army. In all, we should consider the long run ramifications our army.

What would a government national service do? Besides all the do gooder, stuff, it would serve to bring this country together. Despite all national media, the information on the Internet, cell phones, texting, and everything else, we are probably a more disparate nation than we have been in half a decade. Technology hasn’t served well in bringing us together. We are segmented and alienated from each other.

Since changes start with the young, it will behoove us to have a national service that not only augments our efforts to regain our national economy and sense of pride, but to share viewpoints on a person to person, intimate level. In short, it would benefit us all to see how the other half lives. MBA’s would be less eager to create the sort of business models that would leave a good segment of this country suffering as a result. Instead of a good portion of the country being numbers in a chart, they would be real people with real needs, hopes and dreams.

People would share in their efforts to rebuild this country. Sharing promotes camaraderie and is a boost to general morale. We would get to know each other again. We would get to work together. By starting this with younger people, acceptance and understanding would be infused into our culture, rather than forcibly spoon fed by the media and public school system. Mutual cooperation for the greater good would be for real rather than theoretical.

Call it the new, lemon scented, reconstituted WPA of the Roosevelt years. Call it the Peace Corps for the homeland, or Vista with Teeth. Call it whatever you want. But do it soon.

The Curious Allure of Suicide

With all this debate on healthcare reform and with much speculation about killing off grandma, I was reminded that more than 32,000 American adults take their lives every year. That’s right; 32,000 Americans elect suicide, annually. This may seem like a lot but when compared to other parts of the world, America falls somewhere in the middle of the rankings. Here is one place where we are definitely not number one.

In fact, Lithuania is the league leader with 68 suicides per hundred thousand people. Russia has 38 suicides for every hundred thousand people. There are in fact enough suicides in Eastern Europe that is considered either a hallowed tradition of a cultural problem. Take your pick. France has a significant suicide, rate, as does Japan. In China, the odd thing is more women commit suicide than men. And so it goes down the line with suicides increasing around the world.

As with anything else there are the doers and the dreamers. According to a new American survey, millions contemplate suicide and even go as far as to make plans to do themselves in. Over eight million adults, in fact, at least admitted to giving it serious thought. Two million or about a quarter of them went so far as the planning stages.

So around the world, there is a varied but definite allure to leaving this planet once and for all. Some I’m sure are choosing their own demise for physical reasons to avoid the pain for themselves and others due to fatal disease. But these are the relative few. For some it is the pain of the world, the desire to no longer endure another day of isolation, humiliation, frustration and the overall feeling the world is a lousy place to dwell. For some it may be some romantic notion, the supposed domain of artists and poets who end their lives and leave behind an enduring legacy. Or not.

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In any event, suicide has its own curious allure. There is a culture built around it, and a worldwide fascination, combining the lure of its comforts with the repugnance of the act itself. We can understand the act, in general, but are shocked when someone opts out by their own hand. It is like there is some built in, chemical mechanism that causes us to flirt with ending our own lives while at the same time finding the act deplorable and even sinful.

The attraction of suicide goes far beyond the attractions of, say, illicit love with another person’s spouse. Yet we may feel more guilty about an contemplating extramarital affair than contemplating suicide. Is it that one we find so remote and ephemeral while the other is so visceral and viable? It’s hard to say.

But for sure suicide is here to stay. As the world grows more complex and fewer find they have the tools, the headset, the emotional makeup to deal with the planet’s dramatic changes, the suicide rate will continue to increase. On a personal level, if it is someone close to us, we will wonder why they decided to take their lives. We will consider the finality and recoil in horror as we speculate on their pain and frustration. But we will also understand it. For us, as well as others, suicide will always pose a curious allure. Like sex, it is an urge we will confront one way or another.

Unlike the few million who responded in the survey, if we do consider suicide we will probably keep it to ourselves.

When You Wear Pants In Sudan

I have also quoted Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali for the less informed Ali grew up in the draconian circumstances of her native Somalia where she was forced to endure genital mutilation and the ignominies of an arranged marriage. She managed to flee to the Netherlands where she became a political activist and criticized Islam. Among other things, books, papers, etc., she wrote the screenplay and appeared in the controversial film, by Dutch director, Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh faced harsh criticism for his film and was ultimately assassinated by a religious zealot. Subsequently, Ali received numerous death threats. She lives in seclusion under the protection of the Dutch government.

Anyway, among her writings, the quote I so remember is that “The West refuses to recognize the obvious.” This statement in stark in its simplicity and so very true. It brings to bear Western History in the 20th Century where strategies of appeasement and distraction threatened the collapse of civilization as we know it. And once again, we are confronted by similar challenges.

I am reminded of all this because of the recent instance where a a Sudanese court fined a Sudanese woman $200.00 for wearing pants in public. A woman wearing pants in the 21st Century? Who could imagine such a thing? Surely the woman, Lubna Hussein, a notable journalist, is no shrinking violet. She is an educated woman who tested the law and understood the ramifications of her act. The penalty could have included jail time and the traditional forty lashes. Some places just love their traditions. I guess it is one thing to sing Happy Birthday, and quite another to deliver forty lashes for wearing pants. But in this case with the world watching, the judge expressed his leniency by merely handing down a fine.

Islamic law calls for women to dress modestly. In countries where Islamic law is in fact the law, the laws should be obeyed. We would expect the same here. Or do we? But in Islamic countries, traditions and laws are such that any real interference other than lip service results in invasions and nation building, and we have seen throughout history where that gets us.

I really find it hard to take issue that these laws are preserved with only a smattering amount of protest that is often mitigating by social pressure and outright fear for one’s well being. Nevertheless, it is their country and their laws, and it is up to their people to compel changes, if they so see fit. There are, after all, issues of sovereignty.

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We fake it. We pay lip service to ideas that we really can’t stand. We pretend that draconian issues require our understanding and we try to engage those who willfully and wantonly reinforce this culture. Simply put, we have given these practices enough credibility that cultures who practice the subjugation of women can somehow behave that way within Western borders.

We read periodically about men living here who kill and beat their wives because of the perceived shame they bring the family. We read about the guy who destroyed his TV because it was showing a woman’s bare legs. We pretend this is understandable and that those whom emigrate to the West and fail to adopt to Western culture are somehow practicing their ethnicity. Yeah, if it means following certain dietary customs. But it is not okay when men, especially men, can’t get used to the idea that their women have a greater freedom of movement in the West. That we can in fact criticize damn near anything with relative impunity, based on our constitutional rights.

We are the product of the Age of Reason. It is often forgotten here. We cling to our own arcane traditions, or what we believe are traditions, ignoring the thoughts and practices of our founding fathers. We praise them, vaunt them, but we really don’t have a clue or sense of the age they came from. But nevertheless, it was The Age of Reason. The Age when people quested after science, a logic.

So while we are unified as human being in one world, we are not unified by a single set of beliefs. And while we can tolerate the beliefs found in other nations, we don’t have to accept them as our own, make excuses for our own way of thinking, or pretend we are more equanimous than we actually are. We aren’t. We prefer what we have to what others have. We want to practice as we see fit and wear our pants around our heads if we so choose it. We don’t care for restrictions about religion. Hell, we don’t have much tolerance for dress codes. We like our women in blue jeans.

Hey, it’s obvious.