Carnivals

Today I went to a local carnival, celebration thing, a festival focusing mostly on food, but with music and rides and games and things. It was a real feast for the eyes. Labor day weekend, the unofficial end of summer, and all the women were breaking out their most revealing blouses and sun dresses to wear them one last time before they get put away for another year to make way for sweaters and heavy wool skirts (which are nice, too. I look forward to sweater season, as I look forward to all seasons, because, really, there's nothing to complain about. Reminds me of a little verse:

My love in her attire doth show her wit

It doth so well become her

For every season she hath dressings fit

Winter, spring, or summer.

No beauty doth she miss

When her robes are on,

But beauty's self she is

When all her clothes are gone.

Or something like that. Sometimes I say these poems so often, I kind of make up the words.)

But it was beautiful: scoop necks with little lacy frills around the decolletage; dresses in bright colors with narrow straps, and full skirts; tight pants; shorts that were so short and tight they threatened to suddenly become wholly inadequate skirts at any moment. Women in sunglasses of all shapes and sizes, broad sun hats, and even one who struck me as singularly beautiful in a revolutionary cap, with her hair pulled back very tight to match the dramatic energy of her walk. Not to mention the one with a jewels nestled in her cleavage. All colors: purples, reds, blues, and lovely greens. Purest white to gothic black. Delightful, not necessarily for itself, but for the memory it inspired in me, the memory of the first time I felt almost overwhelmed by my lust for women.

I was in middle school, aged 12 or 13, and I was traveling with a couple friends of mine. One of their mother's had a business conference in Anaheim, so we were invited along to keep him company and go to Disneyland.

I don't know what exactly happened in me, but suddenly the world was like a smorgasbord: girls! Girls! GIRLS!! Everywhere I looked, there was some attractive girl or woman, somewhere in age between, I don't know, eleven and fifty.

Obviously, I was in the throes of puberty, but why it should suddenly hit me so powerfully and so suddenly, I don't know. But most of my memories of the trip are of looking around with a desperate longing at all the beautifully arrayed women. I was more shy then than now, but still I tried my hand at flirting whenever the opportunity arose. There were a couple of promising contacts, but neither of my friends were interested (it turns out one of them was gay), so the promise never came to more than a smile, a wink, a glance over the shoulder.

We stayed in the park until quite late, after the electrical parades, when almost everyone had left, when there were so few people that you could ride the rides again and again and again. By the end of the day, I became so bitter with frustration that I would sit down on a bench and just look at the garbage strewn here or there. They did a good job keeping the place clean, but I focused on what little bits slipped through the cracks. I got a little cynical. All of society, I thought, was just a thin facade, a lie, painted over the desiring beast within us all.

Since then, my hormones have obviously mellowed, and I'm married, and I've had, if less than my fair share, a healthy dose of sexual exerience, so things like this don't upset me as they used to. But sometimes I miss that bitterness, because it was companion to a pure hope that I'll never feel again. The hope that true love and great sex, completely interdissolved, ever-fresh, and all-renewing, can be mine if I can just get this girl--this girl--to look at me and smile.