BACKYARD SELF-PORTRAIT

Karen was feeling creative. She'd made French press coffee in the morning and as she poured the water, she caught her own reflection in the kettle. It was late morning on a weekend, and she hadn't bothered to put on clothes. She liked the idea, but knew she needed more light than in her tiny kitchen. She didn't know if any of the neighbors would be up or see her step out into her back deck. Her yard had a high fence--so she was pretty sure she'd have enough privacy. Still, the idea of being totally naked outside was thrilling. She stepped outside with her camera and holding the camera in one hand and the kettle in the other, she snapped her first nude self-portrait. She didn't have time to see if it came out--just then she realized her neighbor was gardening in his yard. She dashed inside.

Looking at her one photo, she decided she could do better. She could wait for her neighbor to leave, but knew he'd probably be doing his thing all afternoon. Oh well, she thought. It's my yard, after all. I'm not breaking any laws. If he spies on me, he's the one breaking the law. So she stepped back onto the deck and finished what she'd set out to do.

HIRED HAND HELPS WIDOW'S DAUGHTER

Sometimes the most cliche things are the truest. They have to start somewhere, and repeat enough, to enough people, to stick, right? At least, this happened to me.

One summer, to help pay my way through school, I went to work for a man named Irv in the Clarno Basin. He was a widow with a teenage daughter. She was pretty cute, but I kept my distance. Irv was a nice man, but I didn't want to cross him. He always seemed to have a bottle of vodka. He was stoic, like most ranchers, but I think the death of his wife pushed him into himself. He drowned his grief. I don't blame him, but the result was his ranch was slipping (that's why I got hired on), and his daughter was growing up practically totally isolated.

I could tell she was starved for attention, especially form someone practically her age. I wasn't really sure if she even went to school during the school year. My guess was that she'd stopped with the death of her mom and maybe never went back. It's not uncommon in these parts for kids to drop out of high school to help on the ranch. Some go back and finish up. Some get their GED. Some get pregnant and start up families. A generation ago, 8th grade was the highest level of school.

Anyhow, Samantha, who went by Sammy, had taken on all the household chores of keeping her dad--all the cooking, dishes, cleaning, laundry. I felt sort of sorry for her. When I'd wrangle the horses at dawn, I'd see her inside the kitchen window fixing up breakfast. When I rode back to the ranch in the evening, she'd be hanging out a load of wash on the line.

She'd look at me and smile. I'd smile back. It was pretty clear she wanted me to come over and talk. I had work to do, and you never knew when Irv would roll back from town. He'd go to town nearly every day to get a "part" for the tractor or baler. The part could usually be found in the bar.

A month passed, then another, and Sammy and I had remained practical strangers. Then one day my horse threw a shoe. I turned back and rode to the barn, where I had shoes, nails and the anvil. As I rode back, I saw Sammy fetching eggs in the coop. She might have seen me in the distance coming up. For whatever reason, she disappeared into the barn.

When I rode up, dismounted, and stepped into the barn, I had to blink a few times to let my eyes adjust. Coming from outside on an August day to the inside of a barn is blinding.


When my eyes could see, I noticed Sammy standing not more than 15 feet from me, wearing nothing but her smile. I stood, shocked, taking notice of every auburn fleck and mole of her pale skin, all the way down her belly and between her legs, where goosebumps raised across the smooth landscape of between her thighs. She'd shaved herself bare. I didn't know if she was far more sexually experienced than I'd assumed, or if she'd done it in anticipation of her surprise.

I took a step nearer in an error of judgement. My curiosity was little excuse for trespassing into a situation I'd promised myself I wouldn't dare. I was breaking a societal rule, I knew. It wasn't right for me to take advantage of my employer's daughter. But my moral quandry was soon broken when she stepped forward and kissed me on the lips.

She locked me in a hug, and laid kisses on me and tore at my clothes. Now, being a hired hand, I'd say I was in top physical shape. But one thing is true: farm girls are strong as anything. She soon had me in the hay, on my back, straddling me, her soft, small breasts hanging down and grazing my sweaty chest. And it took my brain a while to sort this out.

By the time I could really get a handle on what was happening, she was already on top of me, and my pants were at my ankles, bound by my boots and spurs. Her soft, shaved skin was rubbing up and down the length of my rock-hard erection. She was slippery wet and with a shift in her pelvis, my tip was positioned at her enerence. I looked into her eyes--they were blazing and said yes, take her, now.

With a thrust, I was inside her, gripped tightly. She rode me fast and hard. I managed to finally buck her off before I came and rolled on top of her. I could control my pace. She spread her legs wider as I pumped into her. The barn smelled of hay, dust, and mouse droppings. But it was very erotic. She clawed my back as I pumped. I knew I was going to cum and I pulled out just in time to shoot a thick wad over her stomach and breasts.

She giggled, and looked at me with dreamy eyes. Just then we heard the sound of gravel under truck tires and knew her dad was returning from town. We leaped up, brushing off hay from sticky skin. I yanked up my pants and snapped my shirt as she whipped on her cotton dress, just as her dad pulled up, and stumbled to the barn.

As he stepped in, he blinked, letting his eyes adjust. "I threw a shoe," I managed to blurt out.

He looked at me, then at his daughter, then at me.

I could tell he was drunk--you could smell it wafting from him. But could he see our faces, flush from making love? Could he see the hay still in her hair, or that I'd missed a snap in my hurry? Could he smell our sex as surly as I could smell his booze? I hoped it was too dark for him to see the droplets of my cum in the cleft of her cleavage. I tried not to think of my cum, dribbling down her stomach, slipping down her shaven mons pubis, and with no hair to catch, dripping form her pussy lips, rosy and swollen from our fucking. She was standing there, literally dripping my semen in the hay. I knew her dad had a 30-30 on the gunrack of his truck. Loaded.

"Threw a shoe," he repeated. Then he grunted and swayed out of the barn and up to the house.

Sammy and I both exhaled a sigh of relief. Even drunk, he had to have gotten the picture. But for whatever reason, he'd given his unspoken blessing.

After that, for the rest of the summer, Irv would head of into town to fetch a "part" for the tractor, and I'd head to the barn because my horse threw a "shoe."

HER SISTER'S SECRET
The girls in class always bragged about who was the most sexually mature. In 6th grade it was who had their period and who stuffed their bra. In seventh grade it was who'd played spin the bottle and truth or dare. In high school, it was who had a boyfriend, and how far would they let him go.

Ashley didn't have a boyfriend. She didn't play truth or dare or spin the bottle. But she had a secret the other girls didn't. She had found her older sister's vibrator. When no one was home, she'd sneak it from its hiding place. Downstairs, in the basement, was the TV. She could turn it on to hide the noise of the buzzing. She'd sit on her bean-bag chair.

VANESSA (1977)

The tale of a nymphet who is whisked away from her life in a European convent (complete with spanking nuns) and delivered to exotic Hong Kong where she slowly discovers Hong Kong’s sexually underbelly. There’s no shortage of lovely and inspiring views throughout, landscapes or otherwise in this erotic classic as well a healthy share of black magic, rice dancing (this requires viewing to understand), and lovely natural nudity.

If you're looking for plot and it seems as if there is only the thinnest thread of a story-line, with the actors making up their dialog as they go along, then you'd be correct. The movie was contracted in the height of the Emanuelle sensation. The producer hired a German director and camera crew, which they flew out on a 30-hour flight to Hong Hong. Only one problem: the script was little more than an outline and no one wanted to touch it.

So the crew rolled with it, scouting locations each day, and improvising scenes. Knowing this is not a spoiler, but rather helps set the film into context to be enjoyed for what makes it truly memorable: the debut of a young German actress, Olivia Pascal. She has a classic flower child look, a natural beauty with small upturned breasts and puffy nipples, a thick full bush, and unshaven underarms. She alone is worth adding this one to your netflix queue.

COLORFUL LIGHT

WET

HONEYMOON

Everyone knows what happens right after a wedding: the honeymoon! And everyone know what that means: sex.

The origins of the term honeymoon are debated. Some say the term comes from an old northern European custom in which the guests and relatives would give to the newlyweds enough mead to consume for their first month. (Mead being a dietary staple in the middle ages and a brew made from honey.)

Others claim that the word honeymoon is actually a vulgarization of the Norse word hjunottsmanathr. After kidnapping one's bride, she was kept hidden away until pregnant or her family stopped looking for her, which they say, lasted usually about a month.

The first literary reference to the word honeymoon was in 1552 in Richard Huloet's Abecedarium Anglico Latinum. It held that the word honeymoon “was a sardonic reference to the inevitable waning of love like a phase of the moon.”

The English poet Samuel Johnson wrote of first month after marriage, "when there is nothing but tenderness and pleasure." 

Here is the image every new husband wants to see. Here is the image each of his groomsmen secretly imagined. There is somethign extra sexy about a woman who is transitioning from the informal status of girlfriend to the "off limits" status of wife. On the day of her wedding, she is the center of attention--the woman all the other women want to be, and the woman all the men want to be with.

A CO-WORKER'S PROPOSAL LEADS TO PRIVATE SHOW

I recently went over to a co-worker’s house for some drinks after work. We were pretty sauced by the time her husband Dan got home. We had been talking about sex (of course), but the sexual dynamic suddenly changed. Joanna was suddenly very flirty, and kept saying how pretty I was. Her husband agreed. I had been single for a long time and the breakup was a bad one. My bf had cheated on me. My self-confidence was pretty shot. It felt nice to have the attention and praise lavished on me.

There was something definitely going on, because you could feel the sexual energy. Both Joanna and Dan seemed turned on—you can tell when couples give each other that look. Apparently they’d had the conversation between them for a while: they wanted to spice up their sex life.

They’d long talked about bringing in another woman, but the reality had remained a fantasy until they could find someone they actually knew, trusted, and were both turned on by. Joanna did the explaining, since we were the closest, and having the conversation female-to-female seemed easier than if Dan had brought it up. If he had, I would have wondered if he was putting Joanna up to it, but I could tell she was sincerely interested. I appreciated how up front she was. She told me about their desire to improve their sex life and how they thought I could help.

I was flattered, and wanted to help them, but honestly, I wasn’t ready to get involved on that level. I still had a broken heart and really the idea of having sex with Dan was a little weird. He was attractive, and nice, and all. But you know, there’s a huge difference between thinking a guy is attractive and actually going to bed with him.

Still, I wanted to help, and frankly, I was totally buzzed, and horny. It’d been more than half a year since I’d had any sort of sexual interaction with anyone.

I told them that I was uncomfortable having sex with them, but that I felt bad and wished I could help their sex life. Joanna came up with a suggestion that surprised me. She said that they’d gone to strip clubs together, and that it had turned them on a lot and lead to some amazing bedroom sex, but that frankly, they didn’t find the strippers with the fake tans, balloon boobs and bleached hair physically that attractive. Joanna said that she and Dan had both talked about how amazingly sexy they found me, and wondered if I’d put on a private show for them?

Under any other circumstance I would have said no way, but perhaps it was their sincerity, matched by my own neediness for attention and affirmation, as well as the wine…but I said yes.

I said as long as we had the same rules of a strip club—no touching—I would give them a little show.

Of course I was nervous as hell, but also giddy. I slipped of my panties and gave them peeks up my skirt.

It was awkward at first, but soon my modesty passed and I was really enjoying feeling their eyes all over. They saw me as the hottest thing possible, and it made me feel hot. It was really positive for my self-image. I ended up getting totally naked for them, and so turned on that I masturbated in front of them. I don’t know who got off more, me or them.

One thing was certain, I left that night soaring with self-confidence, and they shut the door behind me with a newly rekindled love life!

DIY!

DIY is the acronym term for an "Do it yourself." Today it's a huge social movement, taking root in hipster hideouts like PDX.

The DIY movement has strong echoes of the grassroots activities of the 1960s counterculture, and 1970s "Back to the Land" movement, however, it can also trace it's influence back to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many modern DIY subcultures embrace the early Arts and Crafts movement's rebellion against the perceived lack of soul of industrial aesthetics and critiques modern consumer culture, which emphasizes that the solution to our needs is to purchase things, and instead encourages people to take technologies into their own hands to solve needs.

The phrase "do it yourself" came into common usage in the 1950s in reference to various jobs that people could do in and around their own houses without the contracting of professionals. Today, the term DIY is often used in the context of home improvements and home projects. The term DIY has taken on a broader meaning that covers a wide range of creativity, especially DIY media, DIY music, self-publishing in podcasts, blogs or zines, and especially the traditional crafts, such as knitting.

AVIATORS

"She had a West Coast strut that was sweet as molasses,
But what really knocked me out was her cheap sunglasses..."
--ZZ Top

FAREWELL, MY POLAROID

Oh Polaroid, how I miss you.

RUSTIC BEAUTY

I grew up in the Mountains. My ma and grandma were born there, as was my great-grandma. She was born in 1900. Her brothers went off to fight WWI. Her parents and grandparents and great grandparents lived in these mountains. We even had a small plot on one of the forest hills of family graves. Some dated back to "the war." When you say, "the war" in the mountains, they don't mean the world war--they mean the Civil War. That's how it is in these mountains.

We grew up in a farm house in the bottomland. That's the bottom part of a valley where a river leaves its soil to make for pasture. We lived on the fork of Williams Creek and Rock Creek. Up the hollow the woods got deeper. Plenty of old cabins up there, abandoned. Some of them at some point were moonshiner cabins, back in Prohibition. In fall, sometimes they shelter hunters. In summer, sometimes they harbor teenagers looking for a little privacy. You see, in farm houses, the rooms are small, the walls are thin. You can hear laughing, crying, cusing, fighting, and mattress springs.

When you're old enough, you want to get out something terrible. One summer, I spent as much time as we could steal up in a cabin in the hollow. I'll always remember the heat in August, and how I'd strip down. Swim in the creek, and at night listen to the whippoorwill.

TULIP MORNINGS

Waking up, spring mornings, we can hear the birds. The light is soft, not yet summer. The spring clouds moody with rain or sun, or both. We wake, slowly, stretch, and roll into the day. Coffee and old clothes. A good day to start the garden. Apple blossoms drift past the window.

FRECKLES

CANDY-O

Candy-O is the second studio album by American new wave band The Cars, released in 1979. (It peaked #3 on Billboard chart.)

Drummer David Robinson, the band's artistic director and a collector of pin-ups, approached perhaps the greatest living pin-up artist, Alberto Vargas. Vargas name is synonymous with the style he helped propel to the status of American icon known for his paintings of pin-up girls that appeared in Esquire and Playboy magazines in the 1940s and 1960s. The 83-year-old Vargas had retired several years earlier but was persuaded to take the assignment by his niece, who was a fan of The Cars.

To get a photo that Vargas could use as a guide, Robinson set up a shoot at a Ferrari dealership in Beverly Hills and asked the Elektra art department to hire a blonde with "a nice figure." The model's name, ironically, was Candy. She briefly dated Robinson afterward.

Vargas came to see a Cars concert in L.A. "He just said it wasn't his kind of music," said Robinson, "but he was impressed because he could see that we worked really hard. And he said there were beautiful girls all over the place. He liked that very much."

A lot of other guys in the 80s liked it as well. I can't tell you how much that album cover and images like it become the look of our boyhood fantasies. My tastes may have evolved significantly since "hot chick on hot car." It's still a classic, nonetheless.

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF MY PARENTS' POLAROIDS

I can't believe I'm writing this. When I was a teenager, I found my parents' hidden stash of porn. Actually, it happened very easily. One day, I was home alone for a few hours after school, and I was bored and snooping around the house. You see, both my parent's worked, and I took the bus home, let myself in. I'd get the mail. Once a month was a magazine in a black plastic cover. Being a teenager, I knew two things: first, that it was "adult" related and not to be looked at by me; and secondly, that I couldn't risk letting them know that I knew. Stealing it would raise suspicion, as would a torn package. Kids are smart that way. It was clear that as long as my dad thought his delivery was safely anonymous in the stack of mail, he'd continue his subscription. And long as he did that, it gave me ample time to find the next logical thing: his hiding spot.

Under beds has got to be in the top three most common (and most obvious) hiding places. Under their bed, I found a stack of Penthouse and a tube of KY jelly. I noted if the magazines were facing cover up or down, and which order, allowing me to look at them one by one, and return exactly as I'd found them. It seemed to work, because after school, I always found them in their spot. Page after page, the world opened up to me. Beautiful Penthouse models, and rediculous, but arousing stories from "readers."

I also realized that the issues under the bed were always the last three or four months. That meant one of two things: either he threw away the magazines after he was done with them, or he had an even more secret stash of back issues. Of course, I hoped that he threw them away. That might seem counter-intuitive, but you see, if he thought he was ditching them for good, he'd never look for them again. All I'd have to do was fish them out of the trash (and taking out the trash was already one of my chores). I knew, however, that his Scottish temperament wouldn't allow him to discard anything of any real or imagined value. He was far too much of a miser to part with older magazines. So that left the only conclusion possible: another hiding place.

Now as a kid, I'd read my share of Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe (and watching Scooby Doo); I was fully prepared to start looking behind picture frames from hidden safes, looking for hollowed books on dusty shelves, or pushing in parts of the woodwork to reveal secret passageways.

Sadly, all I had to do was turn to the second most obvious hiding place in a house: the bedroom closet. It took me absolutely no time at all to discover that behind the neatly folded sweaters was at least three of four years of Penthouse magazines. This was as thrilling to a teenage boy as King Tut's tomb was to Howard Carter in 1922. It posed a unique danger, though, the complexity of maintaining the piles exactly as they were, and the sweaters, folded, returned as they were.

After school, I'd go straight to the closet, gently pull out the sweater stack, note exactly how they looked. Then reach back and carefully with draw a stack of magazines. After I'd read through the first stack, I'd have to move more and more to get to the older ones. It was like digging deeper into a mine, following the vein. The deeper you get, the risker it gets.

But that's when I discovered the book. It had a red cover and-to my surprise and delight--the title read: "The Curse of the Caine Under Captian Queeg. I cannot tell you how my heart was racing. Having grown up on tales of pirates and buried treasure, this was surely a find. I knew the name Queeg--the captain of the Caine, who's crew mutinied becuase he could not give the decisive order in the face of a hurricane. All of my nerves were on alert for any sound in the driveway. When you're looking at something you know you shouldn't be looking at, it feels like someone is watching you. Carefully, I inspected the book. And literally (I'm not making this up) I checked to see if the cover had been rigged with a strand of hair to indicate a breech.

The inside cover was creme with a sea chart of islands, but I only noticed that afterwards. At the instant I opened the book, dozens of polaroid pictures spilled out. I panicked, because it'd never be able to put them back in the exact order they'd been stored.

I finally began to breathe again. Of course, taken by my parents, they were of my parents. Part of me felt the natural and universal revulsion of being confronted with one's parents' sexuality. And then part of me was a teenager, full of curiosity. Curiosity, when one is a teen, always wins over revulsion.

In the images, I saw graphic details of sex completely unlike the pretty, soft-focus Penthouse centerfolds. These were in sharp detail, with absolutely no layer of art or modesty. There was my dad's cock, long from fucking. My mom cupping her big boobs. My dad's cock penetrating her. Her on her back on the bed, spreading for the camera. Her on her knees, her butt in the air. I soon saw what the KY was used for. I had not only seen my first visual of intercourse, I saw my first images of anal sex. I was shocked, and disgusted, and yet could not stop looking. They were so bold, so real.

You have to try and imagine the world before the internet. Before even DVDs and cable TV. In those days, Porn came to the average American home in one of to forms: Playboy or Penthouse. My friends and I had stolen copies and seen what those glossy pages had to offer. Some of my friends claimed they'd spied on their sisters changing or maybe on a neighbor girl--but you could never fully believe them. But here, in my hands, was the most hard-core porn possible.

I'm sure any Freudian would have his theories about the psychological damage it caused me. But in some ways, it was the best sex ed my parents could have given me. After seeing the images, I had few questions left. It wasn't two actors performing the cliches of porn, but an actual, middle age, middle class, married couple doing what they do in the bedroom.

Naturally, I put the images back exactly as they'd been, replaced the magazines, and gently pushed the sweaters back in place.

SLOW SUNDAY

Slow Sunday morning. Wake up, set the kettle on the stove to boil for French press coffee. Still nude from bed, still sleepy, stretch out like napping cat in window.

WOOD FLOOR

UNDER WHERE?

Semi-transparent underwear is so sexy. Just a hint at the lovely bush of this sexy gal.

THE SECRET SWIMMING HOLE

There is a place in the national forest only a few folks know about. It's the kind of place so special that those who do know about it, guard its secret, and only pass it down to those who they are certain can keep their secret. A friend of mine, Teresa, once showed me.

Even if I wanted to tell you how to get there, I couldn't. The directions are more from memory than actual place names; there are no addresses in a forest. You first get out of town on the Interstate, but soon turn off it at the river, tun up the river--then it gets complicated. The main road continues to climb up the mountains while the river cuts deeper and deeper, and slips away, out of sight. There's a turn at the old store. and then another turn, and then a turn onto a gravel road that maybe has a number on a map, but certainly has no posted sign. Then you park at the wide spot of gravel. Once, when we parked, there was another vehicle, but the other times, we've had it all to ourselves.

Once you park, there's a small, unmarked trail. It drops quickly down the slope, switch backing about a mile deeper into the forest. As soon as we had begun to hike, we were both sweating. It was a hot summer day, even in the mountains. Teresa stripped off her shirt, hung it over her backpack, and continued. the move was bold, and surprising, and beautiful. I knew I was in store for something very special.


I know return each summer, at least once, to the secret spot. This past year, I shared it with my girlfriend. I knew of course she's comfortable being naked around me, but would she be comfortable stripping nude, as Teresa had on my first visit? I my mind, I was worried that maybe somehow the place would not be as magical, as remote and special if she didn't have the same sort of awe, and child-like innocence of this special place.

After the first mile, the trail flattens out and winds through a patch of old growth. Then it breaks out onto a gravel and sand beach. When we got there, we stripped down. We were both soaked with sweat and ready for the cool mountain water. The water of lakes and big rivers is always opaque, but mountain water is crystal clear. Sometimes you can see deep as 15 feet to the rocks below.

There's a spot on the upper side of the swimming hole where you can dive off, about a 10 foot drop. I pointed it out to my girlfriend, and she was eager to try. Once you dive in, you can swim in the deep, clear pool. The current gently tugs you down, back toward the beach. There's a rock you can climb out of the river and sit on and soak up the sun to get warm and dry, and then hot, and then ready to dive back in. Wet and dry, wet and dry, the cycle of summer days by a river.


Hair tangled, feet sore from walking barefoot on river rocks, not yet summer tough. Shoulders getting sunburned, and eyes flashing with the water's reflection. It is a perfect way to spend a day.