Doctor my eyes...

"Boss, the plane, the plane!"

Why can’t the reality of something, just once, measure up to my fantasy expectations of it? I am so tired of disappointments. I’m an old man with not many vital years remaining to me. My fantasies are about all I’ve got left to live for and I’m tired of seeing them lying crushed and broken at my feet. What happened you ask? Well...

Last night as my wife and I are lying in bed waiting for sleep to come she asks me, “Honey, I’ve got to get a new bra. Would you like to go shopping with me to pick one up? We could go out afterwards and have a nice dinner.”

Dear readers, words simply can not convey how quickly a thousand and one Arabian Night fantasies flashed through my hot and feverish brain.

In my very best not-wishing-to-appear-too-eager voice I replied, “Uh, I guess that would be okay.”

“Well, don’t stay up too late playing video games and we’ll get an early start tomorrow.”

Sleep? How could I possibly get any sleep with the scantily clad visions now dancing in my head? Oh, the expectations I had. I’ve seen the television specials. I know what goes on in these establishments.

Would Sting be performing live? Would I wind up in the V.I.P. lounge doing a few “lines” with Kate Moss? Runways filled with gossamer covered angels of heavenly beauty. Would it be just like the pajama party frolics I’d imagined in my youth? Would it be okay to take a camera?

Oh, be still my trembling heart...

How quickly hope dies in the heart of the male member of the human species. I knew the moment we pulled into the parking lot that my fantasies were in serious trouble. There were no spotlights sweeping back and forth across the heavens. There were no limousines dropping off beautiful people at red-carpeted-photographer-lined entrances.

There was a girl with a shopping cart over by the trash dumpsters that could have been Kate Moss. She was snorting something.

Dear friends, this was not the glass and chrome palace of my gossamer fantasies. This was not even the castle of pretty panties and eye candy come true for good little grown up boys. No, this was an industrial factory where the welders of steel combine with the makers of fabric to produce brassieres capable of supporting Mother Earth.

This is where they measure a woman’s bra size by first assembling a scaffold around her belly and then sending a trained team of Alpine climbers to the summit armed with batteries of heavy duty tape measures. It is dangerous work.

I’ve never seen so many pregnant women together in one place...

I may be scarred for life.

I was the only man there...

Why am I always the last one to learn?

There are feminine secrets a man should never know and this is one of them; Fredrick’s of Hollywood and Victoria’s secret are a lie. Real women do not purchase bras from these places. Kate Moss and her cocaine-dental-floss-girthed chippies maybe, but not the women who are our wives and the mothers of our children.

No, they are sent to darker places.

And it is an injustice to these women who are beautiful because of the hearts they possess and the love they pour into our homes on a daily bases. These are the women who deserve the lingere palaces, not Kate and friends.

If you are a real man, like me, do yourself a favor and stay home when your wife goes shopping for under garments. It’s not pretty.

Stay home and watch the television specials or thumb through the pages of that sports magazine and keep your candy-coated dreams alive. Trust me, it’s better for everyone that way.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going up to my room to cry over the loss of another adolescent fantasy.