the song between her legs

She sings from somewhere you can’t see

She sits in the top of the greenest tree

She sends out an aroma of undefined love

It drips on down in a mist from above

-DEVO “Girl U Want”

In Greek mythology, Sirens were beautiful women who lured sailors to their doom with their enchanting song. Beautiful, they would plop down on their rocky coastlines and sing away and even the strongest of men would be led to make poor decisions and end up in a watery grave.

Sound familiar?

The Greeks called them Sirens, these days we just call them vaginas. You can dress it up however you like, but the same forces are in play.

While I may not always admire the English language, you do have to give it some respect for grabbing the word siren and making it mean alarm, warning, danger and/or distress. You can’t say the language didn’t try and warn men. I’m surprised that the police and firemen across the country don’t have their sirens blasting out of giant replicas of vaginas. Men would certainly take more notice and somehow I think the ranks of neighborhood watch and volunteer firemen would swell.

Even though the way Sirens were represented in folklore changed as time went by, the fascinating mix of temptation and charm persists to this day. Beguiling vaginas whose song makes us forget our native lands.

Although I didn’t feel like a sailor at the time, I remember there were a couple of ball fields where we would play baseball when I was a kid. Because we were kids we would hit ten times more foul balls than we ever put into the field of play and, because we were kids, we were poor and needed to find every one of them. A task made that much more difficult by the heavy woods that lurked right behind the fields. We would try and follow the flight of the ball and go hurling ourselves into the shrubbery in pursuit but more often than not we were unable to retrieve it.

The funny thing was, the next day I would take a bucket and just poke around behind the fields and find upwards of a dozen balls. Some of them sitting right out in the open.

I guess when you’re not after a particular one it’s easier to find them.

That’s the thing about women. Emotions make them like foul balls, difficult and arbitrary.

Depending on how hot she wants her porridge on a given day, she might choose “Aye Papi” Bear, “Hot Mama” Bear or “Ooo Baby” Bear and there’s squat we can do about it.

And yet we go plunging into the woods or sailing into the rocks just the same, hypnotized, never sure if we’ll find the ball or a ball and even more unsure if, in the long run, it makes a bit of difference.

Myself, I’ve found that the act of sex doesn’t help clarify things. I never found a correlation between the physical attractiveness of the woman and my performance, both in and out of the bedroom. I’ve spent my life assuming that the hotter the girl is the less adequate my sexual prowess would be when the time came to step up to the plate but the evidence does not bear this out. In fact, at times it’s almost an inverse relationship. I have been a stallion with beauties and disappointing with very ordinary girls.

Ordinary physically anyway.

And now what fresh horrors await us as this newest Siren, the internet, takes a hold? Our subconscious laid bare to anyone who happens to glance at our browsing history.

I recently had my penis fall asleep for the first time in my life. I must have been sitting very oddly because all of sudden the music stopped. My mind was flooded with fractals, geometric patterns and topographical dimensions and then I adjusted my leg and the blood flow started back and all of that melted away.

The singing resumed and I suddenly remembered this old movie theater I used to go to. It was small and old fashioned but it held a certain place in my heart so I would go there when all of my other friends would go to the big multiplex down the road. Eventually it closed down and fell into disrepair. I would sneak inside every once in awhile and sit in the darkness and the quiet and miss the old days.

Then, when it got to be too much of an eyesore, they tore it down completely and left nothing but a flat piece of pavement. Maybe they meant to rebuild something on the site but never got around to it.

So I would occasionally sit where the theater used to be and pretend it was still there. In my mind’s eye I could see the screen and walls and even smell the popcorn. I was there, occupying the same space as always, but it wasn’t.

That’s the thing about foul balls. If just a few things were different they could have been Homers.