ATOMIC DOG
The Laughter of the Damned
by TC

I really need to make it clear that Peter loved his wife. Loved her! I'm talking about gushy love! Nauseating baby-talk love!

He'd met her 4 years earlier while he was vacationing in Australia. He'd seen her at a coffee shop and was seized by a desire to shove the lovely two-legged female jumbuck in his tuckerbag and waltz her back to America.

They got married soon after and nine months and about one minute later, Patricia pezzed out two clones — one perfect male and one perfect female.

Peter loved the kids almost as much as he loved his wife. He loved his job, too, and he loved their Southern California home. And he had no complaints about their sex life. Peter thought privately that maybe Australian women were unique, kind of like the marsupials. Okay, so she didn't have two vaginas, but damn if that little Aussie hardbody's one solitary vagina wasn't as good as two run-of-the-mill ones.

When passers by shouted out, "Hey Pete, how's it going?" he always replied, "Great!" And unlike most people, he really meant it.

The dinner that Friday started out no different from any other (they always got a sitter on Fridays and went out to eat). Tonight it was sushi. Patricia looked great (she always did) in her little tangerine-colored shirtdress and matching pumps and Peter was buzzing after his second gaijin-sized Sapporo.

He'd just lifted a piece of maguro to his lips when he saw her.

She was...incredible. While Patricia was dark, this girl had long blond hair that looked like spun silk. When she tossed her head to get the hair out of her eyes, he could swear it happened in slow motion like one of those shampoo commercials that promise fantastic hair — hair like this girl.

Suddenly, he understood those perverts with a thing for hair...what the hell do they call that? Tricho-something-philia. Whatever, all he wanted to do was wrap that glorious mane around his pecker and make a hair burrito.

Where Patricia's body was athletic, this girl was lithe with a tiny little waist that just begged to be picked up and twirled around the room by something with an enormous erection that batted all her knickknacks and ceramic figurines off the shelves.

Everything about her was perky: perky breasts, perky ass, perky smile, and perky walk. She was wearing a summer dress decorated with big red flowers. While the short-sleeved bodice was tight and form fitting with a fashionable amount of cleavage showing, the skirt was short and loose but not so loose that you couldn't see the tight outline of her singularly heart stopping butt.

Neither was it so short that it betrayed her modesty (if she had any), but it bounced and slid tantalizingly against her tanned thighs as she glided out the door of the restaurant.

Just before she left, though, she turned towards Peter and smiled. He doesn't remember for sure, but he thinks he stopped breathing when he saw her face full on.

Applying the word beautiful to these rare seemingly supernatural creatures isn't totally accurate. Oh they're wondrous to look at, but beauty is too delicate; a single blemish can destroy it.

Likewise, cute is too weak a word. Cute lacks the heart-stopping impact of beauty. Instead, this girl was the combination most deadly to the male heart; she was so cute she was beyond beautiful; she was cuteiful.

The eyes of this rare species are typically a little bigger than normal, while the nose is often, conversely, a little smaller than normal. The lips are usually full but the upper lip often has a slight, pouty, upward tilt. The cheekbones, though, are generally right out of classical sculpture.

It's as if these girls were created from spec. A team consisting of Hugh Hefner and some Disney cartoonists drew up the blueprints and passed them on to the Almighty for a limited production run.

Peter hadn't seen her for more than 15 seconds but he'd already lived an imaginary lifetime in her pants. Patricia had been fumbling with her chopsticks and trying to pick up a piece of ahi and hadn't noticed a thing.

But it wouldn't have mattered if she had. All Peter knew at that moment was that he'd give up anything to have the girl who'd just walked out of the restaurant. If someone had offered her to him for just an hour in exchange for his wife, kids, job, and home, well he'd have thought it was a pretty fair deal.

He had to fight the urge not to get up and follow her. What he'd have said to her, he had no idea. All he knew was that it was the most animal urge he'd ever felt.

Peter didn't get up, of course. He went home with his wife and resumed his life, but for the next few weeks he was hugely confused. Was his love for his wife and kids so flimsy? How could his existence be so fragile as to be thrown into tumult by the brief sight of a goddess in espadrille sandals?

Too bad that Peter didn't know what he experienced is pretty common to men. Granted, his experience was a little stronger than most, but certainly not unheard of.

Sooner or later, most of us get hit by what the Sicilians call "the thunderbolt," that moment of instantaneous sheer lust that threatens to triumph over common sense despite a potential shit load of mess and heartache.

These Circes are everywhere, and you'd gladly let her turn your friends into swine if you could just have free access to that divine ass.

Peter's case poses a slightly different problem since he's married and thought that he was perfectly content. Obviously, men and women stretch the ties of matrimony all the time. Oftentimes there'd arise a strong compelling urge to stray, an itch if you will, after a set amount of time.

Back in the 50's, psychologists referred to it as the "7-year-itch" because that's typically the amount of time after marriage in which spouses would get bored with each other. The term even spawned a movie of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe as the psychosexual irritant.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, however, just released a study that suggests modern couples get bored with each other after only 4 or 5 years.

Apparently, there are now increased expectations of relationships and what a happy marriage should be like. According to Anastasia de Waal, head of family and education issues a Civitas, a London research organization, "In a climate of media-enhanced instant gratification, the stakes have been raised as mere contentedness is no longer enough in a marriage."

Sure, what human with a Tivo or a high speed cable access to Red Tube doesn't have high expectations regarding passion or sex in general? Television, where everybody, even the nerds like the hero of Chuck get laid by beautiful women, where average schmoes of both sexes can have a shot at Tila Tequila, where life is one constant orgasm with jism flying in the air like the issue from Moby Dick's blow hole.

Speaking of sea faring creatures and lust, there's a new study performed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh that suggests your choice of women might be determined by your thirst for omega-3 fatty acids.

Really. I'm not kidding.

It seems that women with a more extreme hip to waist ratio might have a posterior that was plumped up by omega-3s, and omega-3s are essential for proper brain development and ipso fatso, smarts. You lust after the women with the Vida Guerra butt because she'll give you smart children who'll win scholarships and get great-paying jobs and buy you a big bass boat for your trouble.

At least that's how the theory goes.

Clearly the mother of the next Einstein.

Of course, in the case of Peter, his lust for the blonde stranger may be his parent's fault. There are fairly bulletproof studies that seem to confirm the existence of something called "name letter preference." People are more likely to buy brands that begin with one of their initials.

The theory seems to hold for more important choices, like grades in school, professions, and even the strikeout ratio of major league baseball players. Researchers from the University of California and Yale found that you're more likely to get C's in school if you're named Chris or Carl, while Barry's and Andy's are more likely to be on the Dean's list.

Likewise, Davids and Denices might be statistically overrepresented in the field of dentistry and there are lots of Mikes in Memphis. Baseball players whose names start with a K — for the sport's shorthand for a strikeout — tend to whiff at the plate more often.

While critics have tried damn hard to find flaws in these studies, they've yet to do so.

As such, Peter's penchant for pussy might have more to do with the P in his name than anything else. And maybe it explains why so many guys named Bruce are gay, as B is for butt love.

Okay, I don't buy name letter preference or omega-3s as a factor in lust, but what constitutes lust, particularly the kind that struck Peter, isn't really a mystery. He wasn't unhappy with his wife and he wasn't bored and he wasn't — at least consciously — hungering for some variety.

Anthropologists have long speculated that love, or at least strong pair bonding among humans, typically lasted only about 5 years. The theory is that the male — the protector — was supposed to stick around until the offspring was at least a little bit ambulatory and could scramble out of the way of a mastodon.

Fair enough, but there are no mastodons today, so men might feel more at ease about leaving a relationship early. Besides, he can now just plop the kid down in front of a TV that's running an endless loop of Pooh or SpongeBob DVDs. Kid can't get in much trouble if he's sitting glassy eyed in front of the screen for a year or two.

Of course, after indoor plumbing (and regular bathing) was introduced, strong pair bonding was replaced by something called romantic love and couples ended up sticking together a lot longer.

I gotta' think that prior to indoor plumbing and good ol' soap and water, there was no post coital snuggling. There were no love poems. Who wants to write a love poem to a girl who smells like a sweaty fat guy's navel lint?

And that's probably what made the difference with Peter. Primitive evolutionary strategy might be telling him that it's time to move on and plow some other fields, but evolutionary strategy didn't account for romantic love. In Peter's case, romantic love won out...at least for the time being.

It might have been the first time he felt the need to run after something in a flowing skirt, but it won't be the last. He'll suffer the same torment dozens or even hundreds of times before he dies. In simplistic terms, it's just another struggle between the brain and the testicles.

So married or single, we deal with these disruptive urges by clenching our teeth and trying to laugh, but it's not a heckuva lot different than the laughter of the damned.

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT:

Want to really show someone the depth of your love? Buy them "Atomic Dog: The Testosterone Principles" for Christmas.

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