Inventing the future: 18 years without sex!

I'm always trying to better my life, right? And to make the world a better place. But how? Deep breath.

"Look back over your life," said Marilee Zdenek on her audiotape. "What is it you do best?" Sex? Don't laugh. I was a flower child. That's what we did.

We studied sex. We did research. We read Mantak Chia's classic instructions on how to draw the power of sex up our back bones and into our minds. We hung Tibetan Buddhist posters of Padmasambhava and his consort up on our walls. We sought inspiration from peyote and mushrooms and LSD. We found cute long-haired hippie boys, radical black men out to save the race and lonely Asian nerds FOB. We practiced on them. We studied. We learned. We thought of sex as medicine. We thought we were doing good deeds.

In Greenwich Village, London, Taos, Mexico City, Paris, Berkeley and Montgomery, we sought meaning in life through sexuality and we took our studies VERY seriously.

Now, like some steel worker whose job has been outsourced to a foreign country, we find that our skills are obsolete. A 62-year-old geisha? Vey es mir. All that training down the drain. I shoulda gone to med school instead. Then I could be off helping the poor in Haiti.

What can be worse than having your professional equipment rust before your very eyes? Ladies, don't go there. Stay in school! (Actually, forget I said that; going to Cal in 1968 was EXTREMELY educating.)

So. Here I am. 62-years-old, listening to my "Inventing the Future" tape. Thinking that it's not too late to learn new things. There are so many people out there in the world who are needy: Refugees in the Sudan, disabled vets, children without homes, taxpayers getting screwed by corporate welfare queens.... There is so much need.... I may have been downsized from my original skills -- and learned the hard way that indiscriminate sex is DEFINITELY not good medicine -- but the world still has a need for me.

While I'm trying to figure out what my new skills should be, however, I still keep that old photograph of me on the front cover of the Berkeley Barb hidden in a corner of my back closet where the grandchild won't see. I had horribly misplaced and wasted my ideals and skills -- and, in this modern world of sexual predators and AIDS, would NEVER advise any young woman to do what I did -- but, boy, do I have memories....