If you’re a total noob, start here.
She did it again.
It was roughly 107 days later. Another triumph over evil and incompetence. Another lump of salt in time’s gaping wound. Joseph R. Biden, the nominal president, had flamed out like a California wildfire kissing the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Mouths forced open, cheeks clenched tight. Engorged tongues tangling like cattails in the briny muck of beachfront bliss. The low whine of steam clouds billowing breast-like over the horizon. Almighty nature tamed at last.
He was 81 years old. I was pushing 75. In some ways, Biden’s exit—and the public defilement that preceded it—was a metaphor of immeasurable profundity for my relationship with Olivia, aka the Journalist. The shining pistons of aspiration lay dormant—like the Santa Ana winds in a wet El Niño lull—strangled into submission by the inevitable sludge of corporeal decay. Our lovemaking had grown mechanical and uninspired on account of my knee brace and the hip-replacement operation I keep putting off. The less said about my blood pressure medication—and the barbarous abatement of my carnal trumpet’s towering refrain—the better.
Yes, I know I should have ended things the moment I found out about the Other Journalist, her fiancé. The same moment our ignoble president (metaphorically if not literally) befouled his American diaper on the debate stage. There is no lower feeling in the carnival of courtship than learning one has been cucked by the cuckhold one was cucking all along without one’s knowledge. The nadir of sexual humiliation. A professional athlete, I could understand. This fiancé, Ryan, was a washed-up blogger whose résumé included CNN, Politico, and that vaunted hippie scumhole, UC Berkeley.
I should have fled like the wildfire, devouring the rattlesnake underbrush acre by acre, burning evidence in my wake, never pausing to ask if the man who stopped to catch his breath in the cold, dark canyon below would be the same man who had leapt at the starter’s pistol before braving the flames, who doused his regrets in the infernal reckoning as it leeched the sweat from his ossified back. Who was this man? This crippled meta-cuck who dared not dine and dash; desserts deserted. Before the corpulent broad could empty her pipes. Before it was too late.
Alas, the high of Trump’s resounding victory had swelled my feeble veins and clouded my judgment. We resolved to work things out. We read a lot of Leonard Cohen poems about horny old bastards and their trysts with lithe lovers. She agreed to stop meeting with Jeffrey Toobin after midnight to “exchange inklings” about the “lewd memoir” he was supposedly working on. I ditched the knee brace after Googling “how to stretch.” I stopped taking the medication and filed a restraining order against the congresswoman from South Carolina. Our relationship blossomed like an heirloom orchid spawned from West Coast woodland ash. We conquered Disneyland on my senior discount. We teamed up to foil—or so we thought—a multinational plot to assassinate a beloved conservative firebrand.
That’s when I found the poems.
“My rigid stalk awaits your wetness,” Ryan had written his then-fiancée. “I am yours, the bamboo culm who craves your feral ooze. Tend to me, my Love.”
He continued, “Lest I sneak in through the patio and catch you in the bath. Such is my lust. For total saturation. For the sheen of your drizzled skin. My verdant architecture trembles with devotional resolve. Coursing cylinders of chlorophyll chaos beg for nature’s mercy and the symphony of your goddess gush. Drench me, my Love.”
Then came the really raunchy stuff. I was extremely hesitant to publish it here for everyone to read. It’s embarrassing for everyone involved, especially me. But truth and transparency are the bedrock of the foundation that holds in place the mighty pillars of America’s embattled democracy. Civic duty compels me to share what I know.
Are you ready for it?
Buckle up.
Unholy Irrigation Rituals
By Ryan Lizza
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