"My eyes are burning!!" or, local happenings

A few weeks ago, my mother and I were driving to the gym and we saw a car stalled out by the side of the freeway. Two men were working on it; rather, one man stood idly by while another was down on his haunches, fiddling with a tire iron, his ass crack hanging out a good six inches.

I was waiting at a red light on 5th Street, and for the entire light, I watched as a lone construction man gripped a jackhammer. He vibrated away on the concrete, his ass crack shucking and jiving out of the back of his jeans.

The other day, a coworker bent down to grab something, and she came frighteningly close to showing off a great deal of her ass crack to the line of public waiting behind the counter.

Just today, a salesgirl was helping a young guy at a shoe store, and as she bent over to remove the paper jammed up into the toe of a pair of Pumas, a good four inches of her butt hung out of her pants. The guy, I'm sure, wasn't going to be too sure about what shoes to buy for a good while.

Now, I know that butt cleavage has been talked about, over and over. With the massive popularity of the thong, it only makes sense that if a woman is willing to have a piece of fabric cutting into her buttcrack all day, she might be willing to show off the top of the thong (thank you, Ultra Low-Rise jeans!!). The next logical step is straight up showing off the crack, no underwear involved (or "low rise" bikinis involved, which lend themselves perfectly to this troubling phenomenon when the woman wearing them fails to hitch up her pants before getting down on her haunches).

But now, the trend has obviously come home to roost. We have ass cracks running all around Duluth, coming out of hiding, letting themselves be seen (and aired out), and not just by portly guys who forgot their belts, but also, more commonly, by young women. And now, the owner of the old Norshor Theatre, Eric Ringsred, wants to turn it into a strip club. The humanity!!

For those of you who are out of the loop, the Norshor is the historic theatre in downtown Duluth, and it's been abandoned, reclaimed, sort of fixed up, closed down due to fire code violations, opened up to show movies and have raves (and other random events), closed, opened, closed... it's obnoxious, really. And now, after the Norshor has been closed for a good while (fire code violations, natch), the Ringsred has come out with a new business plan: strip club or bust!! (No pun intended. Honest.)

Of course, people aren't pleased by this. They don't like strip clubs. Women get naked in them. Seedy people want to see the naked women. Seedy people drink and watch the naked women, and their testosterone gets all whipped up into a frenzy, and then drunken and disorderly behavior occurs out on the sidewalks, scaring the little old ladies who are leaving the Fond Du Luth casino after spending their monthly pension checks on bingo.

Thankfully, there's some sort of random state law that the city attorney or one of his lackeys digged up to squash any hopes Ringsred might have had for turning the Norshor into a bona fide bordello of bare body parts. Mostly, though, it reassures the pius Duluth citizens (ahem, their wives) that no man will be able to see naked boobies and have their testosterone whipped into a frenzy. They'll just have to go down to Canal Park's Club Saratoga, or head online to do a Google search for "Naked Boobies." Wait... they're already doing that? Noooo...

As for the ass cracks, we'll just have to wait for the trend to pass. Maybe those high-rise 80's jeans will come back in style... hello, stone-washed Gitanos!!

The Penis Balloon

I'm standing in a fairly long line at Michaelangelo's Coffeehouse in lovely Madison, WI, waiting for my honey to get done running a half-marathon in scorching 80-degree heat. A shorter guy, probably Bangledeshi, is standing in front of me. He's wearing a subtle tropical-print dress shirt (if tropical-print can indeed be subtle) and green slacks-- an all-around clean-cut kind of guy, well-groomed and all.

I notice, however, that he is holding a penis balloon in his right hand. It's one of those mylar balloons, and the kicker is that it is the exact shape and size of an actual twig and berries. It's also flesh-colored. The manufacturers were definitely going for "realistic" with this thing. I couldn't help but wonder where it came from, and why the guy was holding it on a Sunday morning at 8 a.m. in a coffee shop.

When our part of the line passed the little creamer-sugar counter, the guy put the balloon on it... and kept going, like it wasn't even his, like I totally didn't see him with the balloon and didn't know it was his. For a few glorious minutes, I watched out of the corner of my eye as various people saw and commented on the penis. Two ladies had a rapid-fire exchange in Spanish over it. Another younger guy saw it and did the classic double-take. I ordered my coffee and paid, and when I turned around, the balloon was gone. Did someone take it? Was it simply swept into the garbage like so much trash? As I was dumping creamer into my coffee and pondering these questions, double-take guy brought his girlfriend over to show her. The disappointment was clear in his voice as he said, "Man... it was just here!"