Words I'd Thought I Would Never Type...

"Al Gore" and "Sex Scandal". In the same sentence. Allegedly.

Though I struggle not to form some mental picture of the Goremeister wrapped in a towel, rivulets of white, doughy flesh hanging over the tuck, my inner eye has just such an image burned into it. The very thought is profoundly disturbing, and if I don't keep my guard up, it pops, unbidden, back into my tortured mind and activates the gag reflex. I've thrown up into my own mouth so many times in the past week that no amount of toothpaste or Scope will wash away the lingering taste of involuntary bile. Even Cayenne and Jalapenos have not scoured the residue of nausea away.

The scene my subconscious insists on creating has me on the verge of committing a violent act, as if the release of all that pent up disgust and rage will somehow scrub the grey matter clean of the mental version of ring-around-the-tub. I shan't link to any of the stories floating on the Web because they'll only make you projectile vomit, but all the highlights of this sordid..ahem...affair (allegedly) are included. It's always the same unwanted vision running through the diseased landscape of my inner mind:

"...His swollen, puffy, corpulent body lay stretched out upon the masseuse table, face-down. A towel covers his flabbier parts, but he's still clenching his butt cheeks together in an attempt to leave the impression that there's still a few remnants of sinewy youth there beneath it all. His manly back, covered in a thick, Brillo-like fur, was glistening with scented oils and lotions. Somewhere in the background, Barry Manilow was softly playing; the Muzak of the Rutting Bore. Manilow knew how to make chicks cream. Al had selected it exactly for this purpose. The masseuse, a vision of early-middle-aged American womanhood -- thrice-divorced, a stray hair protruding from the mole on her chin, face frozen in a mask of permanent surprise from the combination of poor eyebrow-pencil skills and Botox, the Low-End-Store-Brand-Danny-Kaye-Auburn dye job -- leaned over the Beached Whale of an ex-Vice President in that starched, institutional-green smock that always turned him on because it reminded him so of the Good Old Days of Soviet Communism. She was rubbing away the knots and strains of the rough-and-tumble universe of The Sanctimonious Bullshit World Tour, and the absolute Roman-Coliseum Fishbowl that was the Modern Indulgence Selling that used to characterize much of pre-Reformation Christianity, but which still smelled slightly enough of capitalism that the rubes hardly even noticed.

Her strong hands, much like her donkey-like Slavic ankles, swollen from so much water-retention that she had been unable to file the Last Wedding Ring from her finger -- even though her last divorce was finalized five years before -- found a tender spot. The Gorebot winced momentarily, and then relaxed as her expert digits rubbed the tension away. He sighed, a sound that was almost half-seal-bark-half-phlegmy-rattle. She paused to pluck an errant, wire-stiff back hair or two from under her fingernail, and in that moment, the former Vice-President-in-Litigation made his move. With a great deal of grunting but less struggle than usual he had turned over on the table, and a hint of his manhood became visible as a bump under the hospital-white towel, like a miniature Washington Monument caught beneath the the thick, cold layers of another Ice Age. But that was an illusion: were it not for the triple-layered rolls of belly fat that slid past his waistline and sloughed off between his spongy, varicose-veined thighs, there just might be a whole whopping four, perhaps four-and-a quarter, inches of pulsing Inconvenient Truth lurking beneath that linen.

She was taken aback. She caught her breath, a staccato-sigh of surprise, nay, perhaps even fear. She tried not to look, but couldn't help herself; for even laying down the Vice-President's boobs were strangely bigger than her own, with great, fleshy, earth-toned nipples and the same thick, stiff hairs pointing out of them. They strangely reminded her of Sputnik for a moment, and she was caught in a web of confusion, embarrassment...and lust? She flushed and appeared faint, the first sign of the coming glow of perspiration began to darken the smock beneath her armpits. Her slightly fried-onion-y underarm scent aroused him further -- but this hunter liked to play with his prey first.

"They all react that way...at first", said Al. His dark eyes looked into hers. They were hypnotic, but she could not decide if it was because he was such a magnificent specimen of Old-Money-Hypocrite-middle-aged pork, or because even when he spoke in short sentences he was still such a dashing figure of bone-crushing boredom and banality. She stepped away from the table, but he grabbed her wrist -- gently-yet-firmly and still somehow clammy-and-slimy. She was strangely aroused and repulsed, all at once.

" You know", Al begins., "I was the Inspiration for Love Story..."

Her Drug-store false eyelashes fluttered, her face reddened, and she nervously licked at her lips. Al knew that he had her now; they all fell for that line. Tipper fell hard for it --- that and the inherited Controlling Interest in Standard Oil. So did that Naomi Wolff, that little vixen. He began to remember fondly the six...no...seven whole minutes he had held Naomi in the sodden grip of flop-sweaty passion. It had been his crowning achievement, and had infused him with a sense of manhood that he had not felt since the days when he was writing for Stars and Stripes and pretending to be fighting the War in Vietnam until Daddy could pull enough strings. He remembered the blazing fire of the assault upon Tipper's head on the campaign trail, when he appeared so passionate and devoted to her that he almost sucked her into his being as if he were sucking the Bavarian Cream from the center of a doughnut.

Yes...panting feminists and women in prisons everywhere around the world mailed him their soiled underwear for months after that. Not even Clinton got that sort of love. But that was all in the past; the future, for at least the next three-to-five minutes -- more if he could manage to contain the raging Beast Totem in the Towel -- was now there before him. She was panting now, her chest ( with one breast hanging four inches below the other, and the thick, reinforced underwire of her brassiere became visible beneath the fabric ("Steel-Belted Radials", All liked to call those. He wondered, "Front-loader or back-loader?) was heaving like the stormy North Atlantic.

The Goremeister had caused a Storm in her Maidenforms. She was dead in his sights now.

"Don't be afraid, Yummymuffins. I may have invented the Internet, but no one will know of our passion. It will be OUR guilty secret...".

She wilted at that, delivered as it was with a slight Southern drawl and that sibilant-yet-slightly-effeminate "s" of his. She was now all his. He pulled her closer and began to negotiate the towel so that his throbbing, massive-relative-to-your-average-cocker-spaniel Pelvis Bazooka -- the Green Hornet, as he liked to call it -- could be unleashed in all of it's glory. Yes...she was well-and-truly his, and She would be yet another notch in his ever-expanding belt. There was a flash, like lightning. A quick stirring in his loins, an explosion of ecstasy that caused white-hot spots to float before his eyes, and which made him slightly dizzy thanks to the Watered-Down-Canadian-Healthcare System Viagra he had been taking, and he had marked her forever with a hot load of Environmentally-friendly Man-Milk...all over that sexy-as-a-Phony-Carbon-Credit-Sold-Under-False-Pretenses (allegedly) starched smock. "Mark your territory well", Bill had always told him. It was a valuable lesson. He held her gaze for another seven, maybe ten seconds, so that she could bask in the afterglow. All women needed to bask. Al knew this, being the quiet, passionate, unselfish type who always saw to a woman's needs.

"I'll bet you keep that smock forever, Snugglelumps. No one does it like ManBearPig". She sighed, and was about to speak. "No...not another word about it", he said as he pressed his thoroughly-gooey finger gently across her lips. "We must part now, and keep our Runaway Passion a secret, for those parts of the planet that manage to avoid being flooded by sea-level rise, de-forested by the Inhumanity of Mankind, the shores piled waist-deep in drowned polar bears, all destroyed in the Name of the Internal Combustion Engine, burned to the ground by Acid Rain, or frosted over by the Next Ice Age could never understand what passes between us...".

With that, Al Gore, The Love-em-and-Leave-'Em Ambassador of Mother Gaia, wiped his sexed-up hand upon her cheek, hitched his towel back into place, and in a motion that was reminiscent of a crippled walrus trying to refloat itself from a shingle beach, swung the massive U.S.D.A. Grade-A hamhocks he called legs off the table, and waddled to the door, leaving a tangled mat of greasy back hairs on the smooth, vinyl surface of the table. An Oil Slick of Romance. He paused to give her one last, piercing come-hither look from his watery-yet-still-somehow-smouldering eyes, that bulged out from beneath his Just-for-Men-treated eyebrows, only to find that she was vomiting copiously upon the floor.

It was always the same. Al always had that effect on women; he made them all sooooo fucking hot -- hotter than a rapidly-heating atmosphere burdened with the excess carbon dioxide of a civilization intent upon it's own doom -- that their bodies just could not withstand the onslaught. Now that his Inner-Beast had been Unleashed, he set about seeking more nubile prey. There must be a sixty-plus-year-old T.V. satirist's wife just dying to be Gored by Gore...."

And now you know why I've been puking for a week...

Me and my goddamned imagination! I won't sleep for a year.