the solution

The Solution

         Finally they got the Singles problem under  control, they made it scientific.  They opened huge  Sex Centers-you could simply go and state what you  want and they would find you someone who wanted that  too.  You would stand under a sign saying I Like to  Be Touched and Held  and when someone came and  stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and  Hold  they would send the two of you off  together.             At first it went great.  A steady stream of  people under the sign I Like to Give Pain  paired up with a steady stream of people from under  I Like to Receive Pain.  Foreplay Only-No  Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only-No  Foreplay matched up its believers.  A loyal  Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign  Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a  Sheet, because that's the only way it was legal in  Berkeley-but he stood there a long time in his lonely  blue law coat.  And the man under I Like to Be Sung  to White Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been  there weeks without a reply.          Things began to get strange.  The Love  Only-No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only-No  Love was doing well, pair after pair walking out  together like wooden animals off a child's ark, but  the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly,  shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or  Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up  everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet-No  Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.            The din rose in the vast room.  The line  under I Want to Be Fucked Senseless was so long  that portable toilets had to be added and a minister  brought for deaths, births, and marriages on the  line.  Over under I Want to Fuck Senseless-no  one, a pile of guns.  A hollow roaring filled the  enormous gym.  More and more people began to move over  to Want to Be Fucked Senseless. The line snaked  around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into  the fields.  More and more people joined it, until  Fucked Senseless stretched across the nation in  a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they  had to name it they named it,  they called it the  American Way.     

Sharon Olds