hot action

I sat down to write a post about how many women I've had sex with. In the middle of writing, a complete stranger emailed me to ask, "So how many women have you had sex with?"

For a second I considered writing her back to ask, "How many women have you had sex with?" But the fact is, I don't really care. I don't think the number reveals much about someone's personality.

What's with you people and the numbers game anyway. I told you... I didn't study math in university. I studied poetry. What matters to me is, how many of them were really good? How many of them were really bad? How many of them would make good stories? And what are those stories?

There's an old joke that says if a woman asks a man how many women he's bonked, the man should divide by two and subtract four. I can tell you that, in my case, the result is divisible by three, and if you reverse the digits and subtract the smaller number from the larger, that result is also divisible by three.

Got that? (I have a dozen monkeys in the basement with abaci who worked that out for me.)

It might sound like I'm being a typical evasive male, but seriously, asking me how many people I've had sex with seems a bit like asking me how many people I've had lunch with. Like, I don't know, and what difference does it make?

But that's a bad analogy, you say. Sex is an important connection between two people.

Hey, lunch is pretty important to me. Theoretically, I could live without sex (for six weeks, at which point your balls explode); but I couldn't live without lunch. Mmm. Lunch. I love lunch. I almost named this website "Hot Lunches" but I didn't want to give certain people the wrong idea. I'm thinking about some delicious egg rolls right now.

I should just go downstairs and slam some egg rolls into that hot, hot oven.

Dear Mr. Hot Lunch: how many egg rolls have you eaten in your life? Honey, I have no idea... does that make me a bad person?

Helpful monkeys notwithstanding, I would suggest that ever actually knowing how many ladies I've slept with borders on being theoretically impossible.

Here's why. Since I failed to keep a running tally from the start (no notches on my crotch, sorry), then I would have to count. Counting involves remembering. Remembering involves calling up a mental picture.

Any mental pictures generated in this exercise are bound to be pornographic ones. And what happens when you cause a man's mind to fill up with pornographic images?

He becomes... distracted.

Let's say I decide to start counting from the most recent encounter and to work backwards. Hmm. That was... yummy. I think I'm still a little sore from that one. And then there was the time before that. Wow. The Ass of Destiny. And before that... Mmm. The way she reached up and grabbed her breast and held on to it, looking at me like that, just before I came... And...

What are we up to? Like, four? And I already have a boner. By the time we work all the way back to mid-December, I'm gonna have to run to the bathroom and do Number Three.

Perhaps the solution is to do my counting in a public place. Someplace where I won't be able to follow the whims of my hormones that easily.

I could go the mall. Did you know that there's a store in Halifax Shopping Centre called "Tall Girl"? Tall Girl. A whole store. I could just go to the mall and stake out Tall Girl. No, that wouldn't work. I'm getting sidetracked here. Maybe the Park Lane Food Court would be better. I could have some... lunch. Just sit and eat lunch and crunch numbers whilst watching people come and go from Nubody's Gym.

Nubody's. New... bodies. Lots of new bodies. Hot, fit, sweaty bodies...

Maybe that wouldn't work so well either.

I need to find a place that's public, where there are no gorgeous women around to distract me. Maybe some kind of macho sporting event? Hockey's definitely out, too many cute girls like hockey. Plus there are all those puck-loving single moms out with the kids. Hmm. Maybe horse-racing?

I grew up on Parkhill Drive in Saint John, New Brunswick, just up the hill from the Exhibition Park Raceway. I remember the racetrack as a smelly, dirty place. Lots of old men smoking cigars. Hard to think of a less sexy place than the track, really (my name, Philip, is Greek for "lover of horses" but I try not to take it too literally).

That settles it then. I need to start going to horse races in order to figure out how many women I've slept with.

We'll see if I can still pick the ponies like I used to. "And they're off!"

To preserve focus, I will try to refrain from drawing any sexual parallels with the sport of harness racing and I thank you for doing the same.

...Although my new favourite word for vagina is "quinella."