As you, dear reader, are well aware, I am of a different generation than Lo.  That doesn’t keep us from having fun.  Frequently I find myself at parties surrounded by people twenty years or more my junior.  For the most part, I’m a good sport about it.  However, there is one activity that these younger folk engage in that I simply cannot stomach: Playing “Cards Against Humanity.”  Call it a delicate sensibility or a prudishness of a bygone era, but I find this particular card game to be repulsive.  Luckily for Lo, I’m a good sport and see that, like all things on this big blue planet, there is something to be learned from it. 

            Perhaps due to my generational difference, not only was I of a dissimilar temperament than those enthusiasts of the game, but I found that I was also ignorant of some of its terminology.  Late one night, while playing this perverse pastime, I happened to pull the card that read: Anal Bleaching. 

What?

            I found myself having to inquire as to what the hell this meant and I was informed by my young companions that this is, indeed, a thing.  Women, it turns out, actually bleach their anus in order that it have the proper luminescent halo around it.  Ass angels, I suppose. 

            Well, my dear reader, allow me to tell you that one of the first times that Lo and I were engaged in a prolonged, pleasurable, and piquant entanglement of bodily parts with the lights on low (and on Lo), one facet struck me as particularly impeccable about her body. 

Later, in the delightful afterglow of my memory, I mentioned it to her one night as we were on the phone and separated by distance, but connected by desire. 

            “Did you like it?” she asked of our last tryst, as if there were any doubt.

            “Very much so,” I responded, seeing her in my mind’s eye.

            “What did you like?”  She’s a glutton for compliments.

            “Everything.”

            “Be more specific,” she demanded, needing to hear each dissolute detail. 

            “You really wish to know what struck me the most?”

            “I do,” she almost whispered in a seductive tone.

            “It’s a little embarrassing to say, especially over the phone,” I said, modest man that I was back then before Lo thoroughly corrupted me.

            “Say it.  The dirtier the better,” she instructed.

            “That’s the irony.”

            “What is?”

            “That it’s dirty, but it’s only dirty because it’s so clean.”

            “I don’t follow.”

            “What I want to tell you about.  What struck me when we were together,” I stumbled, “The thing that lingers in my memory,” I stuttered, “What I can’t get out of my mind is how incredibly clean your asshole is.”  There, I said it!  I could feel my face blushing.  Poet that I am, I could find no more refined way to tell her. 

            “Really?” she almost squealed. 

            “Yes.  Is that, er, inappropriate for me to say?”

            “No.  Not at all.” 

            Mind you, dear reader, this was early on in our relationship.  I had not yet discovered quite how debauched my little Ms. Down was. 

            “Do you want to know how I keep it so?” she asked.

            “I think some things about a woman should remain a mystery,” I answered. 

            Well, dear reader, now many years on, I can tell you that it was certainly not through “anal bleaching.”