Just finished an A&W vanilla cream soda. Man, that tasted good. I had an A&W root beer with my lunch out on the job today, and that got me on this A&W kick. I have another bottle in the fridge. In fact, I'm going to open that bottle when I read over this post before submitting it.

Always loved root beer. There used to be a place on 42nd Street, the Grand Luncheonette, just a counter next to the Selwyn Theater, that served 2 franks and a fine root beer for something like $1.75. A tip-top lunch. Or snack, after a sleazy action-horror double feature.

Sometimes it does a man good to see sleazy movies and eat cheap food.

Yeah, it was a commuter day. I read a little more of Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary? on the subway and bus. She writes about how male readers frequently email her at the Times, asking her to read stuff they write, or watch them on tv, or hear their lectures. Apparently, female readers rarely do this. There is a subtle putdown in the way Maureen talks about all these guys, giving the impression she thinks a lot of them are kooks and wannabes. Or ineffectual cyberspace pick-up artists. And, if Sir Cranky were to email her his thoughts, he'd be joining that elite fraternity too! Wheeeee!! At the same time, Miss Dowd sounds like a homely girl at a nineteenth century ball, showing off a surprisingly full dance card. "I have Chester for the waltz, and Lewis for the polka, and..."

I have the ability to be quite nasty. Am I a hypocrite if I restrain my tongue, or is it merely an exercise in civilized self-control?

Let me just say that seventy-seven pages into the book, Miss Dowd sounds both lonely and repellent. Exactly the way I always fear that I myself will sound, when I get so passionate about the relations between the sexes (or the lack thereof) that I can't think straight, or write with a clear head.

I hope that reading her book is not going to forever damage my enjoyment of her pithy columns. It is one thing to make fun of big shots--that's her journalistic stock-in-trade--and it is another thing to ridicule men in general.

Men have a tough enough time competing with other men. Why did feminists think that men would be more copacetic about competing with gals? That strikes me as the height of delusion, if not arrogance. Or a manipulative move in the chess-game between the sexes.

Can there actually be a connection between the stridency of modern career women like Dowd and her pals, and the meteoric growth of strip joints? Maybe I'm not the only guy who wants a harem or a geisha.

HOW MUCH STRESS CAN A MAN TAKE????

On p. 74 she quotes Gloria Steinem's famous line: "Women need men the way a fish needs a bicycle." I always thought that was a thought on same profound level of thinking as Hermann Goering's "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver."

Men and culture. Different targets for different ideologues.

Yes, friends, gender politics makes Sir Cranky VERY CRANKY. He loses his cool. In fact, I'm afraid I'm raving.

Too bad I can't put a lock on the capital letters, like a parent puts a lock on the naughty channels so Junior doesn't see nookie time on cable.

Better that Junior sees Lois Lane in bondage on The Adventures of Superman.

Maybe Junior will grow up to want to be in bondage just like Lois--or like Jimmy Olsen? Or the daffy punchdrunk thug in the episode entitled The Birthday Letter?

So let me switch gears. I mean, I could revise the fury out of what I just wrote, but I won't.

I admit I don't have a sense of humor about this stuff. It stirs up a primal feeling of utter abandonment--like Mommy saying, "You're not so cute after all, baby boy. I'm giving you back to the stork." Baby packed off to the nasty "refund" stork, never to be seen again.

Bad baby boys rusting away in limbo, like old cars in a junk lot.

Mean Mommy has spoken!

Okay, enough. Let's move onto a turf I can navigate with more confidence and less agitation: the strip club.

One thing you see in strip clubs is how much men like to kiss women's hands.

I bet Maureen Dowd doesn't know that. I mean, she's probably acquainted with hand-kissing from traveling in international circles, but I'm talking about hand-kissing done by the average mug in a tittie bar.

I always liked that word "mug." You'd hear Jimmy Cagney call himself a mug, or maybe John Garfield sometimes too.

"I'm just a mug."

Anyway, you often see it, men greeting their favorite dancers with a hand kiss, or kissing the girl's hands after they pass over a tip. I enjoy kissing a woman's hand when she is dancing for me.

Being of a chivalrous and somewhat sexually submissive nature, I find it a sweet homage to perform.

In particular I enjoyed kissing Angela's hand. Angela, my favorite all-time dancer, since retired. Only did it a "handful" of times (sorry), but I loved it.

She looked at me with such a wonderful Mona Lisa expression as I pressed my lips to the back of her palm.

I knew Lily might have the stuff I've been looking for when, as she lifted her leg while dancing for me Friday night, I kissed her knee.

By the third time I did it, I could see she was expecting it...wanting it. Demanding it?

And I haven't even tried to kiss her hand yet. A future delight.

My point? Chivalry between men and women has erotic elements as well as those of courtesy. No surprise there. There was a lot of sublimation going on back in the days when "knighthood was in flower." It wasn't exactly easy for Sir Whatever to "hook up" with a lady then (although wenches were probably available), but communicating one's tingle through gestures and rituals was apparently a popular pastime in the more tony circles.

Like, whatever happened to those ladies' scarves after the tournaments, when still in the possession of those noble, triumphant knights?

Their gracious ladies could be contemplated with zeal through a most tangible token of esteem.

To me, hand-kissing in the so-called "seedy" surrounding of the strip club proves that despite the deluge of ego-shredding satire and testosterone-depleting venom injected into American men by ideological feminists and their cohorts--a thirty-year catastrophe vividly evoked in Dowd's pages--men STILL worship women!

Like Galileo, we men refuse to give up our core beliefs, despite being attacked for them by authoritarian forces. Yes, just as Galileo in the privacy of his heart refused to recant his theories, men still worship women with their eyes, their thoughts, their words, and all other available instruments of expression!

Maybe we ARE nuts!