Bye-bye, love

I'VE DISCOVERED MY LIBIDO HAS TAKEN EARLY RETIREMENT

- ROBERT MASELLO

Tonight, all by myself, I engaged in a solemn ritual that was probably long overdue.

After about 50 years of service, some of it fruitful, most of it futile, I decided to put my libido away, once and for all.

No, no, I hear you say, don't give up quite so soon. There's always another bus coming around the corner, more than one fish in the sea and so on.

But I know when I'm licked (figuratively speaking only, of course), and so I have placed my libido, symbolized by a single blue pill, in a small but elegant mahogany box, sealed with a rubber band. Then, teetering on a step stool, I slipped the box onto the top shelf of the hall closet, right behind the Christmas wrap and the three urns containing the ashes of my dead dogs.

There it now rests, along with any lingering hopes I might have had for one last hurrah.

What, you may ask, prompted this decision? A good question, but one to which there is no simple answer. It wasn't any one thing, but more like a slowly mounting cascade.

Was it the dating-site mixer at the Mexican restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, where the one woman even close to my own age strode up to me, sloshing margarita in hand, with the opening line asked not as a question, mind you, but a declaration “So... you're retired”?

Was it the afternoon when, out with a much younger woman, I got winded on a street corner, and, while struggling to catch my breath, had to feign interest in the window display of a vacuum cleaner store? (“Well, will you look at that? Some of them no longer need a canister!”)

Was it the night when, despite my atrial fibrillation, I went for broke and surreptitiously swallowed a half-dose of generic Viagra?

Thirty minutes later, when it should have kicked in, my face was flushed, my sinuses were congested and the only thing rising was my blood pressure.

“Are you OK?” Alice asked.