Mer-Sex

...i'm so relieved...another mayan calendar was found that goes far beyond the 12.21.12 "end of the world" date...george lucas can now stop stockpiling chins...

...on to more pressing matters: an important conversation had between adam and myself last week...we were in the car--one of those rare moments when our daughter is still in daycare and we have a free hour or two to cruise...we're usually silent during these times, until one of us has an idea about a fictional event and whether or not it could really happen...over the course of our eight years together, we've tackled everything from "what if the death star hadn't been destroyed?" to "would a person bitten by a werewolf be just as powerful as a biologically-born werewolf?"...

...we're saving the cure for cancer for when we've gotten the most important things out of the way...obviously...



There we were at a stop light when Adam said, "How would a man go about having sex with a mermaid?"

The only thing I could think of to say was, "Well...mermaids would probably actually have to exist first."

We laughed so hard we didn't notice the light had turned green. Adam hit the gas and we lurched forward, joining the rest of the traffic. We fell into our comfortable silence again and I thought maybe that was the end of it.  Then Adam furrowed his brow and said, "No, really. Where would he put..." he trailed off, perhaps realizing how ridiculous we were about to sound (because by then we knew we were going to take this seriously).

"His ding-a-ling?" I said.

"Yeah."

Thanks to Disney, the only mermaids I could conjure were the scantily clad nymphs of "On Stranger Tides" and the scantily clad, sixteen-year-old daughter of Triton who marries a human prince. "I don't remember Ariel having a hole in her tail," I said.

"What kind of porn cartoons are you watching?" Adam said.

"The wrong ones, apparently. They're not helping with this."

We thought some more. "Don't mermaids, mythologically, have legs when they leave the water?" I said. "Isn't that what happened in 'Splash'?"

"That doesn't count. That's just like having sex with a real woman." There was some genuine disappointment in this.

"So you want the whole mer-sex experience."

"Yeah. I mean, if I'm going to have sex with a mermaid, I want to know I'm having sex with a mermaid." He furrowed his brow again. "Do you think she'd attack me and drag me into the ocean?" Hope returned to his voice.

At this point, I was so engrossed in the problem that I'd completely missed the fact that MY HUSBAND WANTS TO HAVE SEX WITH A MERMAID. It didn't occur to me later that this entire conversation might have been a ploy to get me to buy a (ridiculously expensive and completely impractical) sexy mermaid costume.

"Wouldn't you drown?" I said.

"T.S. Eliot thought so."

"That settles it. It's impossible to have sex with a mermaid because their voices will cause you to drown. Not the fact that you're trying to have sex underwater and they have no vaginas."

We burst into a fit of laughter so intense Adam doubled over the steering wheel. I'm sure anyone passing us along the highway would have thought our hysterics were brought about by plans to assassinate our bosses or blow up a government building--those minor plots that take a backseat to mer-sex.

"They have to have sex," Adam said. "How else would they make more mermaids?"

"Maybe they lay eggs and the men just squirt their stuff onto them. Or maybe they're like seahorses, the men just generate babies and spurt them out into the water. Something like that."

"That's boring."

"What do you want? They have to--" and it was at this point the conversation got really strange. I made my hands into the shape of two hand puppets facing each other and tapped my fingers together.

"What's that?" Adam said.

"Mer-sex," I told him.