Note: the web is rife with New Years resolutions right now, and we figured the only tolerable way to add yet another “this is the year!” snoozer to this fetid pile of banality was, to paraphrase New Jack City soundtrack stars Color Me Badd, “sex it up” a bit. We ask that our readers with more delicate sensitivities please bear with....

PICTURE YOUR LIFE IN 2004 as a neighborhood dive bar that could close at any minute. Imagine yourself alone at a stool by the beer taps, killing yourself with a stiff glass of cheap whiskey. There is a girl in the corner you noticed when you came in, with striking eyes, a dazzling smile, perfect body, and gorgeous flowing hair—and she keeps looking at you. She too is alone, and she is suffering. You see it in the longing pitch of her eyebrows, the tentative steps she makes across the room to use the bathroom. She is strong, but she needs you.

You have wasted the whole night on idle gossip with friends you hardly know, on bar games—pool, darts—you will never master, on repeated perusals of the well-stocked juke box. You play Creedence, Wilco, Pavement, Death Cab for Cutie, Lynryrd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, the entire White Album, and with each listen you are at the bar, head nodding, avoiding her gaze.

But you do KNOW the bar will close, you can picture the bouncer bellowing from the entrance—"guys, lets go!"—you can see the chairs being flipped and hoisted onto the tables in the rear, you can smell the mop bucket as it slops along the floor, taste the last hurried swig from a luke-warm bottle and the last ashen drag of a cigarette, feel the sudden cold of night rush in to pull you out, out into the void of a lonely city. But you do not approach her.

Who are you to lay claim to her? She has a boyfriend, she is a lesbian, she thinks your hair looks funny and can’t stop staring—but certainly she is not into you, she does not NEED you.

As you steal another gaze, however, you realize this is no ordinary girl. In her hair you see mighty trees and power lines, in her skin warm beaches and sweeping freeways, in her face jagged peaks and glinting metal skyscrapers. A convoy of tanks and Humvees hurries down her chest into the nether regions of her cleavage, a flock of sea gulls descends down the crack of her ass and into her panties, a trio of comets darts up her ankle and into her jeans. And then it hits you: this girl is the World.

Yes, somehow this Girl sitting at a lonely stool at a lonely bar in the lonely city is the entire Manifest realm Herself, the infinite jeweled net of the Reality, with all of Her insides and outside, groups and individuals, movements up and down. Her every cell pulses with the cries of joy and shrieks of terror of countless generations of beings, from the very first quarks to entire civilizations linked together by wireless, instantaneous communication.

When She asks the bartender for another whiskey sour on the rocks with a twist She is intoning the collected desire of the whole winding, brutal path of evolution. She is asking for food and water, guidance and magic, status and power, meaning and purpose, knowledge and opportunity, caring and community, balance and spontaneity, yet the watered-down drinks she receives are thin stew indeed. Your eyes catch Her eyes and the collected pain of 14.5 billion years of Life comes rushing at you, pummels the heart trapped in your chest, flattens your lungs to the inside of your rib cage, and lifts you from the ground with Her endless, violent misery. Teardrops are falling into Her drink—She is terrified to die.

You step into the harsh overhead lights of the bathroom to regain your breath. Your dick stiffens as you pull it out and empty the night’s poisons into the hungry, grateful urinal. You want to take her home. You want to stumble down the drunken streets arm-in-arm, talking about the bands you love and the people you know, stopping at the pizza place for a quick slice of chicken and tomato, or pineapple and ham, or hot peppers and onions and garlic. You yearn to fumble, to fumble with your keys as her hands slide down your pants, to fumble through your dresser for the condoms you bought so long ago, to fumble across her naked body as you whisper promises you will never keep, intentions you will never honor. The neighbors below will hit the ceiling with a broom handle, you fumble for the stereo and crank up "Sweet Child O’Mine."

But when you emerge from the men’s room, She is gone. You stare across the cave of smoke-haze and beer-mist dumbfounded, defeated, depressed. Another night taken for granted and wasted completely, another forty dollars donated to the libations industry, another—

But She is not gone. Her dark liquid eyes, slightly-upturned nose, and proud cheekbones and firm breasts are staring at you from every corner of the establishment, for everything is Her! Every bottle of every brand of liquor behind the bartender, every napkin soaking up Labatts Blue and Guinness Stout and Grey Goose and Johnny Walker and Rosemont shiraz and Walnut Crest merlot up and down the bar, every tattered vinyl stool cover, every dirty black and white tile on the floor. Her voice is in every bloop and bleep of the Galaga game in the corner, in every note of N.W.A.’s "Fuck Tha Police" blasting from the juke, in every thhhhhh-wack of darts striking the bullseye.

And She—the Girl, the bar, the world at large, everything that has ever been done or said or made or born or grown or loved or tasted or died since the beginning of time—is horny. She wants dick, and She wants it now. The walls of Her Kosmic vagina writhe and vibrate all around you, yearning to be stroked, to be touched, to be loved, to be thrust upon and in and upside down, a great thunder of flapping, oozing, pulsating skin.

And you are inside Her.

Your flaccid body, your pointless life, becomes hard with purpose. Your dick-body pulses and throbs with the collected wisdom of the great expanse of human inquiry, the vast fruits of man’s endless quest to know Her fills the chambers of your dick with power and blood. The remains of your life stretch out before you, and you have but one reason to exist until the minute it all ends: to soothe Her pain, to ease Her torment, to serve Her every desperate need. The bar will close at any minute, and She wants you to fuck Her brains out.

But to thrust, oh to thrust, to push it in and feel the exotic thrill of your body-mind mushroom cap deep inside Her wet, slimy infinite cooch, means that you must leave Her, you must pull out of Her, you must exit the World of Her again and again—but how?

You do what has always been done. You fall silent, you fall away, you detach from everything that is Her, you close your eyes and let it all settle, let your Self rest in the pure desert of Nothingness where all manifestation has ceased to exist, where She is no longer found… Emptiness, Emptiness…

…and then you RUN your shaft BALLS DEEP into the disorienting city of Her feminine form, you CHARGE with all the JOYOUS EFFORT you can muster into the DIRT, GRIME, and SWEAT of the CESSPOOL of all LIFE that She EMBRACES. But just before you are lost in dark hot fetid nightclub Her, you close your eyes and return to Emptiness again, for Her pleasure comes not from you being inside of Her, nor from you being outside Her, but from your balance of both.

And She moans, moans in ecstasy as you push in with compassion and pull out for the fresh breathe of wisdom, and you thrust and bite and claw and poke and prod and caress and use your full awareness, every talent and gift and multiple intelligence, hand foot ear nose knee, to ravish her full and endless splendor, striking and illuminating and bringing to full arousal every level of Foot/Matter, Limb/Body, Vagina/Mind, Breast/Soul, and Head/Spirit.

"PHYSIOSHERE!" She screams out as you thrust as though to crack her cervix.

"BIOSPHERE!" She cries as you pound to pop her punani.

"NOOSPHERE!" She bellows as you ram the rod right through her backside.

"THEOSPHERE!" She shrieks as your entire body-mind rubs itself raw and explodes with–


It’s 2004. Your life is a bar about to close at any minute, and the World is staring at you from across the room. Go talk to Her.

Paul Salamone resides in Boulder, Colorado. He needs to get laid.