ice cream, love with the proper stranger, & other temptations...

Andy (Lost In Middle America, or simply Ab on my list of favorite bloggers, check him out) has written a terrific essay on making choices.

Temptation is, indeed, present everywhere, but I have to admit, until recently, I’ve been pretty successful at compartmentalizing my guilty pleasures. For example, although eating a pint of Cherry Garcia and having unsafe sex are similar in some ways...they’re both physical pleasures, and (like most physical pleasures), both tend to seem like a great idea in the heady moments of anticipation prior to indulging in either of them...they’re also very different in some ways: e.g., the possible repercussions of occasionally eating too much ice cream are very different from the possible repercussions of having unsafe sex, even once. (And yeah, I admit I’ve done both and managed to have no regrets in the morning, what does that say about me? Other than that I’ve been lucky, I mean...)

I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “My candle burns at both ends” from the moment I first read it, and I felt the same about Kerouac’s words: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time...” And then there’s Langston Hughes: "She lived in sinful happiness and died in pain...she laughed in sunshine and danced in rain...”

In many ways, those poems were a sort of mantra for me, and yet...I’ve always thought there was a world of difference between Delbert McClinton belting out, "I feel an old weakness, coming on strong..." and TS Eliot's cool words, "Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go..."

But is there?