Hank

Hank was my best friend in secondary school, and we spent a lot of time together. The summer I was 14 and Hank was 15, he was old enough to work, but no more than 4 hours a day and no more than 20 hours a week, so he took a job as busboy at the Nighthawk Steak House on Highway 79.

After he started, I didn't see him for several weeks. Finally, he called on Saturday we got together and I asked where he'd been. He said a college student had come in for lunch his first day and had told him she was doing a research paper on small town America, and asked him to help. He showed her a boarding house where she could stay, she'd pick him up every morning and take him to work, saving his mum the bother, and she'd pick him up after work and they'd explore everything there was to see about our little village and the surrounding villages, how people lived in small town America.

She'd gone home to visit her parents for the weekend, so Hank was free to see me after his shift at the Night Hawk. Hank asked me if I'd heard the nasty rumours, but Hank was always my source for rumours, I didn't know anyone else who'd share rumours with me. Hank said they were saying he was not showing the college student small town America, but only the bed in her room at the boarding house, and the rumours were completely false. I believed Hank, since he was my best friend.

That fall, Hank had to quit his job as busboy to go back to school. Every teacher asked a student to help tidy up his or her home room after school, and the chemistry teacher asked me, and the new art teacher asked Hank. Hank was quite a good artist, and was taking the advanced art class, something I avoided like the plague, having no affinity for art at all. The new teacher had just gotten her license, after the course in art and teaching art at a teacher's college and a year as a supervised teacher.

Again, Hank asked me if I'd heard the rumours, and again I said 'No,' It seems most were saying Hank was cleaning other things than the art teacher's home room. Hank said not to believe the rumours, and so I didn't.

The next year, Hank and I went out regularly into the woods where we'd build a fire and roast hot dogs. My sister asked if she could tag along, and we said, 'Sure.' I got the job of tending the fire, and Hank and my sister went to get more wood. When they came back, my sister's trousers were on inside out. She said nature had called, she'd taken off her trousers as females are wont to do, and, since it was getting dark, she'd put them on backwards. I believed her, but suggested she go put them on right side out.

***

We graduated secondary school, and after several years of going to different universities, quitting to work for awhile, and then going back to other universities, Hank and I ended up at the same university for a year, and we shared a 2 bedroom flat. Hank was between wives.

And then I saw that women queued up to have sex with Hank. One was in the bedroom being serviced, and one was waiting in the front hall watching TV with me. I was curious. 'I thought women all wanted a man who was just hers, who never looked at another woman. Yet here's Hank, with many women. What gives?'

She said, 'If I caught my husband looking at another woman, I'd divorce him the same day, but Hank is different. He's the only man in this town worth having sex with. Every woman in this town desperately needs to have sex with Hank. I couldn't go on if I didn't have Hank once a month.'

I asked, 'What makes Hank so attractive?'

'Hank? Attractive? Hank is not at all attractive. You're much more attractive than Hank. But I don't like sex with attractive men, I only like sex with Hank. The only drawback is that tonight, I have to have sex with my husband just in case I get pregnant. I hate sex with my husband, because he just doesn't have what Hank has. But I'll do it, because I have to.'

Hank and the other woman finished, she left, and the woman (who wouldn't tell me her name) went into Hank's bedroom.

It was a few weeks after that that I needed a book. I called Hank, who was in his office on campus (this was long before cell phones) and he said it was in his bedroom and I could go in and get it. So I went into Hank's bedroom for the first time and saw box after box after box filled with women's unmentionables. All different sizes, shapes, colours, materials. Some large, going from the knees to the navel, others barely covering anything, but all used, not clean ones stolen from a clothesline (a hobby with some college boys, for reasons that escape me, but Hank didn't need to steal any, he was given them in payment for his service).

I still figure Hank was telling the truth, that it wasn't the college student's bed in the boarding house, because they had a rule that, if a man was in a woman's room, she had to leave the door open. But there were lots of abandoned farms, many with abandoned beds, and the woods had lots of leaves one could gather to form a bed.

And I figure Hank and the new teacher found some place private, not her home room. I'm not sure how far my sister went with Hank, maybe just petting.

Hank got divorced. Twice. Women told him he was not attractive, so he figured all women always want sex and do it with whatever man is available, so he figured his first two wives were cheating on him. By that year we roomed in the same flat, he knew he was somehow different. He asked some of the women if I could help out, since there were so many that sex was not a pleasure for Hank, but a chore, but they all said, 'Absolutely not!'

One time, Hank said he'd had four, and was with number five, but he was tired. All the men he knew spoke of taking a woman out to an expensive restaurant and hoping for some kissing afterwards, but the women mostly said, 'We don't feel like kissing now, let's just talk.' So they talked for however long the woman figured she owed the man for the expensive dinner.

Hank asked the woman if they could just talk.

She answered, 'I have to pick up the kids from school, buy groceries, and fix dinner for my husband and the kids before he gets home. I don't have time to talk. I need great sex, and I need it NOW!'

And Hank said it was difficult, but he managed.

Hank didn't know why all the women in the village where we were going to university wanted him and no one else, and when he asked, they couldn't explain, but they had to have Hank.

I've met a very few more like Hank. One was Chris, and all the women where we worked were desperate to have sex with Chris, and no one else. But no one seems to know what it is that those men have. I figure about one man in 200 has it, whatever it is. And all the women want it, whatever it is.

The 199 men out of 200 who don't have it wish they could get it, and I've seen people offering to sell it, but Hank tried, and all the women desperate to have sex with Hank said there was no way they could possibly have sex with someone who looked like me, no matter what I said or what I did. Not even if Hank begged them because he was too tired, they just couldn't.

So, when I see the ads, 'Do this and you'll be irresistible to women. Send us $50 for the secret,' I know it wouldn't help to send them the $50. I'm still tempted, but after long talks with Hank (may he rest in peace), I know nothing is going to give me the je ne sais quoi that Hank had.

Liars

The establishment media all say Trump has told more than 12,000 lies since taking office 20 Jan 2017, while Obama always told the truth.

As usual, where they get this escapes me. Basically, Trump may have told 12,000 lies, but he's still a piker compared with Obama and the mainstream media.

Obama said one must treat Hispanics with dignity and respect, and he was only deporting those convicted of the most heinous, violent felonies. Liar, he was Deporter-in-Chief.

Trump says we must get rid of all the Hispanics and he'll do everything he can to build an impregnable wall to stop new ones coming in (not one centimeter has gotten built since Trump took office, while hundreds of kilometers got built when Obama was president) and to deport all the ones already in the US (but he's deporting at about 3/4 the rate that Obama deported Hispanics). Trump managed to convince Hispanics that, while he promised to deport them all and Clinton promised 'dignity and respect', she was lying through her teeth (she was) and would be just as anti-Hispanic as Trump, but would lie about it. They believed Trump, and sat out the 2016 election (where they'd all believed Obama and voted for him), so Trump won by paper-thin pluralities.

Likewise, global warming. Obama gave speech after speech about how important it was to fight global warming, and he was doing everything he could to stop it, while working hard to double US fossil fuel production. So Obama lied.

Trump says global warming is a hoax, and it's stupid to fight a hoax.

A simple regression says it's more than 99.999% certain that the world is getting warmer, and it's probably too late to stop the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from falling into the ocean and raising seal levels by many meters.

But what good is it to say it's important to fight global warming if one does absolutely nothing to fight global warming?

Trump is wrong to say global warming is a hoax, but he's doing less to promote more fossil fuel production than Obama. And it's not clear if he's lying to please his base, or if he really believes it's a hoax and is just misinformed (to lie, one must know the truth and speak what one knows to be false; to repeat false information that one believes is not lying).

And still, the establishment media says Obama always told the truth, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that he seldom if ever told the truth, and that Trump always lies, when he may be too stupid to be lying.