Not everyone likes overnight guests.

I'm sorry to admit it, but I'm one.

After years of having to share personal space with those I didn't choose to share it with -- from brothers and sisters in cramped bedrooms in my childhood to my fellow soldiers in barracks -- I am kind of obsessed with having my own room, my own space.

After all these years, I love being able to come home and take off my clothes and just do what I want.

When you announce that you're coming to see me, and expect to be put up for a night or more, it disrupts my carefully planned schedule: waking up at a certain time, coming downstairs to put on the coffee, then reading the newspapers. And not getting dressed.

Suddenly you show up, and all that is thrown into disarray. Do you need breakfast? What do you eat? What don't you eat? Do we have the kind of oatmeal you demand? Eggs and bacon? I can cook it, but I need to know ahead of time.

Once you're here, I'm perfectly ready and willing to show you around all day, but if you're going to be here for long(er than I want you to be), you might consider renting a car and showing yourself around. I probably had things I wanted to do before you came, and I probably still have them. We can provide meals, but only up to a point. After a couple of days, you should buy some groceries or spring for a dinner out.

In short, come and see me, and we'll drink and laugh and have a great time, but when it's time to go nighty-night, please go somewhere else.

Bedtime is total relaxation time. It's when we get to take off our clothes, not bother with our hair or make-up, put on something comfortable, and lie down -- with or without a similarly undressed partner -- to watch TV or read or just go to sleep. It's when we're at our most vulnerable and most ourselves. Most relaxed.

And the last thing we want is someone else in the house.

The common accepted practice, from time immemorial, is to welcome anyone into your home any time they showed up. I'm not sure where that got started, probably back when we were all destitute and living in caves or lean-tos or crude cabins and welcomed any other human, just for the company or maybe when we knew they were on the run from the Huns or the Nazis or whoever and that we had to take them in or they'd die.

But times have changed, and most of us now aren't hunted unto death by predators, human or animal, and we can make travel plans ahead of time, meaning that we can let potential hosts know when we might be in their neighborhood and give them some warning -- and ask if it's okay for us to drop in.

It's especially hard on those of us who live in states that people like to visit on vacation. I guess the natural inclination is to say, "Who do we know there who would take us in?" Then comes the email: "Hey, we'll be out your way in June, and we look forward to spending time with you. Can you put us up for a few days?"

Well, maybe yes, maybe no.

If I invited you, yes. If you invited yourself, maybe not.

There are two classes of people who can always stay with us overnight and even for a while longer if it's not too long: family and good friends. Family meaning mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and grandparents and grown children. Period. Good friends meaning those who know they're always welcome because they've always been, and who always welcome us into their own homes when we're in their towns.

If you don't fit into either of those groups, ask first. (In fact, ask first in any case.)

Staying overnight -- especially for more than one night -- at someone else's house is more of an imposition than many of us think. The entire family schedule of those we're visiting is disrupted. You don't mean to do it, but you do. There is someone else in the house, who needs his or her own bedroom and bathroom space.

I know that there are those among us who love houseguests, who yearn for them -- who maybe are lonely for company -- but lots of us aren't like that. We have developed daily routines that suit us and don't like to have them interrupted by guests with other routines. Come to see us -- if invited -- but respect the orderly business of the home your staying in. Make no special demands. Try to fit in. And if you're visiting for more than a day or so, make yourself scarce for big parts of the day and give your hosts as much of the space they're used to as you can. Be invisible unless summoned.

We all know the dictum that visitors and fish stink after three days. Observe it.

In the meantime: So nice to see you! Do come again! Can I pack you a lunch to take on the road with you? Bye bye now! Be sure to write!

I like people -- really, honestly like people -- but in small doses. I want to see you, my old friend, but not every morning in my kitchen for a whole week! And you don't want me in your kitchen for a whole week either, right? Especially if I invited myself!

Put me down as cranky and crotchety, but that's just who I am.

I respect and even honor those who give up their personal space willingly, graciously, to others. They are better people than me. Granted some of them are desperate for company, but others really are just the kind of people I'm not. I thank them for taking you in when I don't want to.

So go stay with them. I'll meet you for lunch, okay? My treat.

Celibacy is not normal.

There are only a few requisites in life, things we have to do: breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex. (I may have forgotten something.) Yes, we should exercise, but you won't die if you don't do it. And we should work for a living, but lots of people don't have to and get along just fine, even better than fine.

There is no disputing the first four -- breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping -- but the problem arises at number five: sex. It's necessary for the species to keep re-generating, but is it essential to your or my individual life? Can such a fundamental urge be suppressed by any of us?

It is, in various ways and for various reasons, but with mixed results. There are certainly people among us who don't have much of a sex drive, but I'd bet they're in the minority. Most of us yearn for it even before we know what it is.

But among those who choose not to have sex, probably the most prominent are the religious types who take a vow of chastity along with their professed faith in God. Be they priests or monks or nuns or whatever, they spend what I would have to guess to be a big part of their next years -- when they're just coming into the prime of life -- doing their best to keep their almost overwhelming urges -- those down there -- at bay, while secretly praying for sexual release. Of course it's forbidden by the church -- sex outside marriage, and you not allowed to marry --so what's a frustrated nun or priest to do, knowing these urges are not going to just go away? How do you come to terms with that?

Well, you do or you don't. You either learn to relieve yourself "that way" or you have to be super-human about pretending those desires don't exist -- and here's your Oscar for Best Actor/Actress . Or, in the worst case, you act out your sexual fantasies on kids who have no idea what you're doing until it's much too late. Maybe years later.

I'm sure that most of the priests and nuns of the world -- and their celibate counterparts in other religions -- are upright and moral to the highest degree, but there are some among them who can't deal with the ban on sex. The sexual urge is just too strong.

And I'm not, of course, only talking about religious people when I'm discussing those who don't have sex but desire it to the point that it involves children. They're everywhere among us, our fellow citizens who never had a satisfying adult sexual relationship and who will never know the joy -- and sorrow -- it can bring. Maybe they were abused as children and introduced to sex way before they knew what it meant by monstrous predators. Or maybe they were raped at a young age by somone older. Whoever they are, victim or predator, they're locked into a pre-pubescent state where the sexual urge is just starting but where sex makes no sense. They don't associate sex with flowers and candy and tender touches.

They're crazy.

Right up until my day of death -- assuming I'm not run over by a truck while riding my bike --
when I'm lying on the bed in my home, a very old man, hospice workers shooed away, wishing my gathered relatives the best while sucking down my last breaths -- I will never understand any religion that doesn't allow its men to marry its women. To do anything else is inviting trouble. A man who loves his wife and his children is much more likely to render a just judgment on any miscreant who comes before him. And he's also much less likely to take out his sexual frustration on a child.

Any man or woman denied sexual satisfaction for a lifetime is a bomb waiting to explode.

To refuse to acknowledge and even honor sex is the height or depth of irrationality.

It's built into us and can't be denied. The best any of us can do -- individual or religion or parent -- is to channel it into a form that won't hurt women or children.

Pardon my being graphic, but a boy's penis is, at some point, going to get hard, and something in his primal brain tells him that he needs to insert it into the private parts of a girl. He knows nothing about those parts or how his part will fit in there, but he's got to do it.

Girls and women: if you don't want sex with a particular guy, don't let things go too far. If you've decided that this guy is not for you, shut down the date before his penis gets hard. Sorry to be so blunt, but that's how it is. Guys past a certain point are crazed animals. It's who they are, who I am, for better or worse. Biology did it to us. Of course we can override biology, being intelligent beings, but that takes a really smart and disciplined guy. Is the one you're about to have sex with smart and disciplined? Or is he someone you just met in a bar?

The repercussions are likely to fall on you, not him. Are you ready for all that?

(I'm not addressing homosexual urges/yearnings because I don't know about them, but I'm pretty sure the same principles apply: sex, after all, is sex.)

A not-so-radical suggestion: Why not train our daughters to jerk the guy off?

(Not so radical because smart girls have always known about it.)

All it takes, at that age -- maybe at any age -- is a few quick up and down motions, and the stressful moment is over. The guy needs a few seconds to regain his senses, then looks embarrassed, hauling up his pants. He can't believe what just happened -- probably is grateful to you for it -- and nobody got pregnant or a disease. Make him kiss you to show how grateful he is.

That scenario, of course, leaves the girl un-satisfied. Maybe she was getting aroused, was ready for that penis to be put into her vagina, to see what it felt like. But she was too smart to let it happen, knowing that he didn't have on a condom. Now she's gotten him off -- and maybe even been kissed -- but is still aroused. What to do?

Lots of women use vibrators which stimulate the clitoris, but I would recommend your own fingers. It's what a smart guy would have done for you -- what older guys with more experience will do -- but you can do it yourself. Just buy a tube of that jelly stuff (K-Y?) and think of Brad Pitt or whoever and bring yourself to satisfaction. You know where your center of pleasure lies.

Let me repeat: celibacy is not normal. We're supposed to have sex. Ideally with others about our own age, and willingly. If necessary by ourselves. All living beings except for a few weird uni-cell ones have sex. It gets us into lots of trouble, but it's unavoidable, and I think it may get us into even more trouble if we try to deny it, to pretend it doesn't exist.

As the old map-makers used to write of the unexplored world: "There be monsters."

The un-expressed sex life is a kind of unexplored world. And there be monsters indeed.

Let's figure out a way that we can all -- pardon the vulgarity -- "get off" when we need to. If we take the lid off sexual frustration -- let it spew, so to speak -- we'll eliminate most if not all of the sexual offenses against women and children.

Praise the Lord, salvation is just a hand-job away!

If it was that easy, everyone would do it.

Yes, it's a cliche, something you've heard over and over until you're sick of hearing it, even though you know it's the truth. That's the definition of a cliche: we know it's true but don't want to hear it anymore. Yadayadayada, right?

So let's look at this one: "If it was that easy, everyone would do it."

What is the "it"? Is it something everyone would WANT to do?


Take skiing. It's popular, for sure, but lots of us don't want to do it because (1) it's too damned cold and (2) it's expensive, what with all the ski rentals and trendy winter clothes you have to buy, and (3) sorry to repeat myself, but it's too damned cold! Sliding down snow at high speeds is just unpleasant for some of us. But to others, it's an adrenaline rush well worth the expense and the hassle.

If it was easy, we'd all do it, right? Maybe, maybe not.

What about ballroom dancing? Lots of us klutzes -- mainly guys -- would love to know how to do it, if just to please our wives and other women we know, but as seen on TV, it's almost an athletic event, with lithe younger couples trying to out-maneuver other lithe older couples, doing things most of us would never attempt on a dance floor. Even watching old shows with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, most of us think: I could never dance like that. It's supposed to be inspiring but is actually kind of intimidating. It's a wonder any guy ever tries it, much less gets good at it.

But we can all learn to dance, right? Not that flamboyance but basic steps. Unfortunately, there are brief windows in our lives for learning how to dance. Pre-teen, early teen, later teen, early twenties (maybe) -- and then forget about it. I didn't learn when I was young. I had two older sisters who might have shown me some steps, but they both got married young and moved away. And I wasn't privy to the Country Club, where young men and women are trained to enter proper society. My inability to dance, not knowing how, has really been a minor sorrow, as I've had to pass on more than one romantic possibility because I didn't know how to.

If it was easy, everyone would do it, right?

So what about spelling? Not as romantic as skiing or dancing, but something we're all called on every day to do, whether we like it or not. If you work on an oil drilling rig or drive a truck or play baseball for a living, you may not have to deal with spelling every day. But for those of us who have to turn out reports and memos, spelling is a real bugaboo.


And the American English language is notorious for not following logical rules. Think of the word "laugh". Look at it. The "l" and the "a" lead you forward, but then you hit the "g". That stops you. A "g" is usually hard, as in "gag" or "gorge" or "got". What's it doing in a word after "a" and "u"? And then the "h," which doesn't seem to belong there. A "g" and then an "h"? We're okay with words like "no" and "yes" and even "President" because the letters present themselves in a way conducive with pronunciation, but "irregular" spellings are a problem for most of us. And our language is full of them. (Not sure why. Somebody Google it for me, okay?)

If it was that easy . . .

The same could be said for the more difficult parts of our lives -- getting and holding good jobs, marrying the right person, staying away from dangerous substances, having children, etc. If it was easy, we'd all do it right the first time, wouldn't we? And live happily ever after.

We'd all have those good jobs and be married to just the right person and have children who loved us unconditionally and grew up to have good jobs and marry just the right person. But we know it doesn't always turn out that way. We struggle, we try to adjust, we sometimes go off on the wrong path and then try to recover. So do our kids. So did all the people and their kids who came before us. Life was never all that easy and likely never will be. It's just our lot in this only life we know.

So what to do?

Understand that most things that look hard to do really are. Not just skiing or dancing or spelling but the really important things: living our lives, trying to keep it all together. Lots of our fellow humans can't manage and make huge mistakes that cost them their jobs and their marriages and sometimes even their freedom. If it was that easy -- but it's not. The life we're given is challenge enough for most of us, too much for some.

Size yourself up and determine what you can do and can't, what you want to take on or not, and then get one of those blood-pressure monitors you can strap on yourself at home to see if you're pushing yourself too much. Be the best you can be, but don't kill yourself trying to be someone else. Lots of people do.

If life was that easy, everyone would live to be old and contented. It's not. And they don't.

Let's bring back fistfights.

When I was a kid growing up in small-town Texas, guys used to face off and slug it out. They weren't very skilled -- lots of hay-makers thrown more or less at some other guy's face -- but once it was over, they usually made up and decided that whatever their beef was with each other was settled. Often they even became friends. The worst injury I ever saw, besides a bloody nose, was a broken jaw, and the guy who administered it showed up later at the hospital with flowers (at the insistence of his girlfriend). Guys pummeled each other, over all kinds of disagreements, but nobody got seriously hurt.

But something happened somewhere along the way. Guys got guns. Not just grown-up guys but teenagers. And arguments over turf or girlfriends became lethal. Whoa! Maybe it started in the big cities, where life and death is more pronounced than in the heartland, but it's spread. A promising couple of black college grads were gunned to death at an intersection in Denver a few years ago, allegedly by someone who thought his eventual victim had witnessed him shooting someone in a Denver park. (The dead girl was just in the car at the time. They were to be married soon.)

Two young lives snuffed out in a few seconds. Bang bang bang!

The guy who was arrested was no older than the couple he shot to death, in his twenties. Now he's facing life in prison. And his victims are dead.

Why couldn't he have settled his quarrel with his rival with an old-fashioned fistfight? Why the gun?

Let's ressurect the fistfight, okay? Two guys going at it in some parking lot, with friends and foes looking on, cheering for one or the other, maybe even putting money down on the outcome. I am not at all in favor of anyone hitting anyone else -- it hurts! -- but it did used to solve disputes without anyone being killed.

There's a great old video that shows the leaders of America and the USSR, both middle-aged guys, having a fistfight. It's painful to watch: two older guys punching each other over and over. In the end, they're both spent, as they should be. And nothing has been resolved.

But no one was killed, and no nuclear devices were detonated.

The famous Western movie "Shane" has a fight scene that defines others to come. If you haven't seen it, you should. Ouch!

Maybe it's time to get back to those old days when guys faced off, for their honor or whatever, and just hit each other instead of shooting each other. The punk is the one who can't face a foe in a fistfight but has to pull out his pistol. Shame on him!

You think you're tough? Okay, go face to face with your opponent. Keep your gun in your baggy pants. Anyone can shoot anyone. Can you face your opponent man-to-man? Just you and him?

It's well-known that many of today's best boxers came from under-privileged neighborhoods. Mike Tyson, the most feared boxer of our time, came from a place where he had to defend himself every day. He found an old guy, Gus Damato, who tried to teach him not just to fight but to be a better person. Unfortunately, Gus died, and Mike became again a punk. It happens to kids in lots of neighborhoods every day.

Let's train more of our young men to stand up for themselves, in the gyms where older men know what it was like to grow up there and can help them develop skills that will benefit them not just in the ring but later in life. Some of those old boxers, well past their primes, have lessons to teach young toughs. And young sissies, too. They're very smart men, but also very tough, and, in their old age, easy-going. They've seen it all. Bring it on, young stud! You have the instinct, but I can show you skills and techniques. Or may you're afraid of guys who threaten to beat you up. I can show you how to defend yourself and avoid all those life-long traumas. If you're confident of your stance and your reflexes -- which I can teach you -- a stiff jab to the eye will discourage almost any bully. And you'll know what to do next. When we're done, you won't need guns.

Should we teach all our young boys how to box? Probably not. But if they're growing up in cities and parts of cities where it's required -- just to hold your head up in your neighborhood -- then I say yes. As I said before, if you know how to drive a left jab into a thug's eye -- something he's not expecting -- and follow it up with a right to his jaw, he's going to be thrown off-balance, at the least. If you want to stick around -- if he's reeling -- and follow it up with a right to his temple, you'll likely knock him out. And this applies to girls as well as guys. A sharp punch to the side of the head, up high, just above the ear, knocks almost anyone out. Remember it the next time you're mugged, okay? Put your left fist in his face to distract him, then follow it with your right fist to anywhere on his face, then hit him on the side of his head, and he'll go down.

Then run like hell!

The old one-two followed by a killing blow to the temple. Basic boxing skills. It's any boxer's dream to deliver just those blows, in that order.

The simple truth is that young men are always going to be physical and even brutal. The male of the species is bred that way. It's up to the females, the smart ones, to tame their mates, to bring them back into the mainstream. It can be done, and often is, but it's easier when the males are older and tired of fighting. Pick a young one, and you may have more fights on your hand than you bargained for. On the other hand, you may be able to train a young stud to be gentle and responsible. Toss the coin, no?

But, in any case, let's put away our guns and bring back the fistfight. It used to be the chosen venue for settling differences, and it could be again. It can be brutal, for sure -- guys hitting each other as hard as they can isn't pretty-- but no one dies.

How often does that happen in drive-by shootings?

Let's bring back the gladiator spirit and make it personal again: face off against each other. If you think your adversary is the better man, so be it. Don't fight him. If you do fight him, do it fairly.

But don't punk out and shoot him.

That's not the way real men settle their differences.