THOSE PORTLAND DILDOS

Are those hot water dildos for cold nights?

I’ve been thinking about anatomical metaphors now that people are throwing dildos over the powerlines in Portland, that ladylike gray city (once) where Dorothy McCulloch Lee wore a hat to work. She was the mayor, elected to break up corruption, which she did.

There are a lot of photos of the danglers, now higher than they’ve ever been, and I noticed that they had balls. I hadn’t seen that before, so I googled dildos. Sure enough, they come that way. You probably already know that you can buy a set of balls for your pickup. In this state when they castrate all the male calves that aren’t going to be used for breeding, there is generally a testicle festival about this time of year where the harvest is fried up for a picnic. Lots of laughter over the bad jokes.

What does it mean that interest has shifted from the “shaft” to the stones? Has the ability to just take a purple pill to get hard (rather harder longer than might be comfortable) undercut a man’s own personal supply of testosterone and libido being of any importance? I see online ads for “mystic crystal healing dildos.” They just look like nice smooth rocks to me, so I hope the people who claim being “hard as a rock” is a good thing are pleased. No vibrators, though. No butterfly attachment.

In my AC days (70’s) one of the officers was a male equivalent of dumb blonde. Handsome and lovable but somehow not very hip. It was animal control day in the county courtroom and we were all sitting in a row, waiting to testify. One of the perps was being, well, a “dickhead,” and our handsome officer said, “What a DILDO!” You know how you sometimes say something aside in what you think is a quiet voice and there’s a sudden silent gap in the conversation so everyone hears? Later we educated him in the locker room. Then he wanted to know what a “merkin” was and none of the guys knew. They always said “beaver.” Of course, now the convention among the demimondaine is to shave and the women apologize to their gynecologists if there are any signs of pubic hair.

Since this sort of thing is so floating and plastic that people invent metaphors all the time, I think I’ll start a new trope. I notice that big powerful guys are being called “swinging dicks.” (One of the teenagers at a talent show for a summer conference of UU’s that enjoyed being risque sang “Wild thing! You make my dick swing!” No one was shocked, which disappointed him.) No doubt Cheney thinks he has the phrase trademarked, but if he’s paying attention he’s probably a little puckered by now.

So I want to start a female version, since my boobies are certainly swinging these days. A really powerful woman — who is generally over fifty — can thus be considered to have “swinging boobs” instead of balls. I expect those who are irritated by Hilary will adopt that phrase right away. And they cannot be mistaken for “perky” appurtenances.

But lest the women driving pickups (lots of them around here) feel left out, maybe someone should invent big pneumatic or hydraulic round bumpers for the front of the vehicle: "truck knockers."

My mother, a farm girl at heart, set the pace for this sort of joke. She had a mastectomy before I had real breasts. She used to say, “Tit for tat and I have the only real tit in this family!” And sometimes she called herself, “One Tit Strachan.” That was parallel to my father, who was “One Trip Strachan,” because he was always trying to unpack the car after a trip with everything at once balanced so tightly he couldn’t spare a hand to open the screen door and had to call for help.

If you read early accounts of Blackfeet or even the obits in the Glacier Reporter, you’ll soon realize that such nicknames are common here, and often based on some physiological or character feature, not always flattering.

No doubt I’ve been a bit corrupted by the three CSI shows I rotate watching when I’m too burned out to either read or write. MANY corny and tasteless jokes about body parts, which are sometimes separated from the body. Last night a guy was caught because he drank champagne from the navel of the drugged mistress of his boss and left enough saliva for CSI to get a genome read-out. One wonders what’s on the shelves of the writers of these shows. Animal control cases would probably give them some ideas. But you have to be careful — people are far more likely to get upset about animals than about sex.

For some reason we admire pushed-in faces and short legs on dogs (not women), though they make the animals suffer. In fact, as we breed cows to have bigger and bigger udders (boobs) they must wear bras to be shipped because otherwise the jostling will tear their tender membranes. Some actually drag on the ground. We don’t mind distorting people either, but they often go straight to surgery. People will voluntarily pay to have their faces converted to masks of tigers. We’re used to the tattooing and piercing of bodies. Inflate, deflate, augment, reduce.

At animal control we got a phone call from a distraught woman who wanted us to impound the family cat because her husband would only have relations with it, not her. She sounded too hurt to be faking, so the shelter attendant gently advised her to seek family counseling. But then one day I saw Howard Stern’s competition for the smallest penis — they were VERY small and dozens of men were willing to show them! It’s a serious flub in the genetics. But on the other hand, a story on dildos revealed that they are sold in many sizes, up to a twelve-incher. It was so big that a person could just swaddle it in a baby blanket and skip the intermediate steps.

I’ve also read a story by a famous porn star who was formidably equipped. He said that it was not that convenient and sometimes not comfortable at all. This guy was so friendly, generous and likable that would probably be best to ignore his appendage and be friends with the rest of him.

They didn’t say what was the smallest size dildo the store peddled, but I suspect if they were size of micro-penises in Stern’s competition, the squirrels would be stealing them off the high wires and hiding them in their nests. Anyway, why spend good money and then throw it away, chancing interference with communication. When it comes to advice about dildos, I think Goldilocks would be the best consultant. Not even the Wichita Lineman.