It’s just something that you have to overlook.

 . . . Can you say “I get intellectually erect”? Do you have to have suitable pauses such as “I get . . .  uh . . . intellectually erect. . . Is it o.k. to be hungry afterwards, specifically for let’s say enchiladas or maybe the #2 combination plate. This most likely means you are going to have a beer also. Not a corona or something silly like that but at least a Negro Modelo. Can you say that . . .

. . . Does it depend on the relationship that you have with that person? If you are writing does it matter? I rarely sign my name to anything, it’s like that trust-funder who doesn’t work, but who sits in the Late for the Train with a Rucksack for God’s sake, not a backpack but a rucksack, drinking an Americano and responding with a pen and whatever paper is handy to Bumper Stickers that he sees on cars. He will tell you, if you catch him stuffing a piece of paper – his response – under the windshield wiper of the car, that it’s a compulsion, that he doesn’t have anything against the person driving the car, it’s just that, well the person DID ask a question, intruding on his HERE and NOW, by placing that bumper sticker on that car. Is that an intellectual erection or intellectual motivation?

In one of these instances, when he had been caught in the act, I was able, as an innocent bystander (the indignant car owner almost demanded it) to read the response. He used the word torrid - it had been in response to a bumper sticker that asked “Did he know Jesus?” it was housed amongst some others about visualizing a vegetable and something about a carpenter but those did not ask questions, they were statements and did not interest him -  He used torrid he thought for a reason.

Later over a beer at the Pay and Take I asked why? He had moved in his thinking but thought that it was probably to indicate a sense of hot, or sweltering, maybe even stifling depending on where his world view was at that point, he actually meant it to mean cool . . .  and well . . . hot in a torrid kind of way, but wasn’t that his right? The question had been asked, had intruded upon his consciousness.

This is my point . . . It’s like when you’re in from out of town at a party and people are peeking at you from just outside the doorway . . . all kind of shocked. Maybe it’s a little to much for them, and afterward, maybe the next morning, over coffee talking with people who KNOW they tell you  . . . those people . . . they wish. It’s just something that you have to overlook.