There's an old Zen story that goes like this. A Zen master walks by a butcher shop. He overhears a customer asking the butcher, "Please give me some fresh pork." The butcher throws down his cleaver, places his palms together in front of his chest in the manner of a Buddhist monk and says, in a very respectful tone, "Sir, do you see any unfresh pork in this shop?" The passing Zen master, hearing the butcher's sincerity and graciousness has a deep insight into the truth.

Back in those days in China, butchers were considered a particularly low form of life because they made their living by violating the first Buddhist precept, the one about not killing. It was a pretty hypocritical stance since the "Buddhist" folks who looked down their noses at butchers still went to their shops to buy meat and get leather for their shoes.

So in any story from that time that paired a Buddhist monk with a butcher it was expected that the monk would represent all that was true and holy and right while the butcher stood for ignorance and sin. In this story, though, a butcher enlightens a monk by sincerely and wholeheartedly fulfilling his station in life, doing that most un-Buddhist of jobs with a Buddhist sense of wholehearted commitment. He has transformed his scorned humble work into Buddhist practice.

These days we don't look down upon butchers. But we do look down upon lots of other people for the work that they do. Like people who work in the sex trade -- especially if they happen to be female people.

Back when I lived at "the Clubhouse," that rat hole in Akron I shared with several other broke musicians, Nick, the drummer for Dimentia 13 who lived upstairs had a girlfriend named Lesa, a stunningly beautiful woman -- she looked just like a young Teri Garr (see photo, kids) -- who was a stripper. Nick really hated what Lesa did for a living and constantly gave her a hard time about it. Now there are lots of reasons a guy might not want his girlfriend to be work as a stripper -- strip clubs tend to be sleazy places run by sleazy people and frequented by sleaze-bags so it's easy to imagine some kind of harm befalling a nice girl working there. But for Nick it basically came down to macho pride and not wanting his woman to be seen naked by lots of other men.

Me, though, I thought it was kind of cool. And not just in a "heh-heh I'd like to see Lesa naked" kind of way (not that there was none of this in my attitude). As far as I was concerned, she was a fellow performer, a fellow artist even. I mean, we were both doing essentially the same thing in some way, which was going up on a stage in front of lots of people and doing something we enjoyed but was potentially embarrassing in order to elicit some kind of reaction from an audience of onlookers. In my case, I was trotting out the pure stupidity of my naked psyche for all to gawk at and pairing that with a minimal talent for making interesting sounds come out of a guitar; while Lesa just took off her clothes for them. Lesa's approach struck me as enviably more straightforward. Bodies or psyches, we were both kinda saying: "Here's what people look like when they're naked. Deal with it." (pretty much what this book is about too, when you get right down to it). Lesa did it far more directly and with far less pretension than most musicians I knew. Plus she made way more money.

Lesa was an intelligent woman who took up her career as a way to save up enough money for college. But she wasn't ashamed of her work. It really hurt her that Nick could not appreciate it. We used to talk sometimes and I knew Lesa liked the fact that I was one of the very few people in her life who didn't think less of her for what she did.

So one Tuesday, about eleven in the morning I was sitting in my room brooding over the fact that the Summit County Board of Mental Retardation had once again failed to call me in. I was a substitute instructor which meant that if not enough regular instructors called in sick on any given day I did not work. The phone rings and it's Lesa looking for Nick. Nick was out at his day job.

When I told her Nick wasn't home, Lesa said she was at work on her break. We talked a bit and she asked me if I'd like to come by and see her perform. Gulp! In the first place, I was really surprised that people stripped at eleven in the morning. But apparently her place was open all day and all night. I made excuses. As much as I wanted to see Lesa naked, the whole thing sounded incredibly embarrassing and a little bit iffy. I mean, who goes to a titty bar at eleven in the morning?

But Lesa persisted. I said I didn't have much money and she said she'd leave my name at the door and I could get in for free. I told her I was about to go out for lunch and she said, "We have pizza." Knowing I was vegetarian she even said she'd have the kitchen make me one without any pepperoni or sausage. That would be on the house too. That pizza's what clinched it for me. I was seriously strapped for cash and free lunch was something I could not refuse. If I had to see Lesa's boobs to get it, well then, so be it.

The place which turned out to be a non-descript little brick building on a dusty rural back road in the no-man's land between Akron and Kent. It was one of those places where out front in gravel parking lot they have one of those light-up signs with movable type and misspelled words--"Beer, Piza, and Stripers All Day Long" or something. I parked my Chevy Shitbox next to a couple of mud encrusted Ford pick-ups and Kawasakis and went on in, nervously giving my name to the big guy with the beer gut who guarded the door.

It was a dank little dive reeking of Marlboros and barfed-up Pabst Blue Ribbon with about four or five lonely looking guys sitting at tiny tables around a little stage with a runway that ran back into the dressing room. The speaker system blasted out vaguely suggestive heavy rock tunes like Foreigner's Hot Blooded or Like a Virgin by Madonna while a nice looking brunette did what looked like an ancient fertility ritual around a pole. She gave me a look like maybe Lesa'd said something to her about me. I didn't really fit in with the rest of the clientele. I turned away all embarrassed. I mean, that's what polite people do when there are naked people around, right? It's rude to stare!

My pizza arrived, piping hot, covered in mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes. It was actually a damned fine pizza too which I certainly hadn't expected. The brunette left the stage. I started to applaud, but stopped after two claps when no one else joined in. The music changed over to something vaguely "punky." Maybe Blondie's Heart of Glass. Something like that, anyway.

Lesa stepped out dressed in a white baby doll nightie and high heels with long white stockings and garters. She gyrated languidly to the music coyly removing each piece and smiling at me to make sure I saw. When she was down to nothing but a pink lace T-back panty (no bottomless stripping allowed in Summit county), she stepped off the stage, over to my table and proceeded to treat me to a thoroughly jaw-dropping lap dance. Or maybe it was a table dance since she didn't actually sit on my lap to do it. I'm not up on the terminology. I tried to slip a five into her garter, but she wouldn't have it. At the end of the song she gave me a sly smile and trotted off back stage.

In short order another girl was up on stage taking off her clothes. But I was too dazed to pay any attention. After a few minutes, Lesa came out with a robe draped over her shoulders and asked me if I'd enjoyed the show. Without getting too graphic, I'll tell you that during the lap dance she had danced closely enough to be able to -- er -- assess my enjoyment of the show. But I told her yes anyway.

Buddhism as a whole is a bit schizophrenic on the subject of sex. On the one hand, celibacy is practiced in the certain orders of Buddhist monks and nuns, mostly those in Southeast Asia. Some aren't even allowed to shake hands with the opposite sex. On the other hand, some sects in ancient India even developed the art of boinking into a kind of meditation. If you ask me, though, these nominally "Buddhist" practices ignore the basic Buddhist principle of treading the middle way and instead go to the same kinds of absurd extremes the middle way is intended to avoid.

While most of us can usually see the logic of practicing moderation in most things, we tend to put sex into a special category where extreme reactions of all kinds are not only acceptable, we consider them almost inevitable. We're either way too hung up on getting it or way too hung up on avoiding it. Either our sex drive is too great and we try desperately to control it or it's too little and we start popping Viagra®. What's the deal with that stuff anyway? Does everyone's sex life now have to measure up to some kind of Penthouse Letters inspired fantasy? They make that stuff up, you know...

On the other side, religions tend to advocate various ideals of sexual purity. And this often leads to trouble. Whether it's Roman Catholic priests fondling choir boys or Indian gurus bedding movie stars, it seems like the religious world is rocked every couple of years by some kind of sex scandal. The Buddhist world has had a few sex scandals too including one involving a well-known American Zen master (not me - at least not yet...).

It's easy to see why this is so. Religious leaders are always presented as something better than ordinary people. To true believers, these people are seen as manifestations of the Divine. They are the living embodiment of some kind of ideal.

But what are ideals, really? They're something we create in our minds, but they don't actually exist outside of our brains. When we project our expectations about what a Divine Being ought to be on to real people, what else can we hope for besides disappointment? Of course, it doesn't help matters a bit that so many people are perfectly willing to be thought of as manifestations of the divine. Still, it is only the worshipers of such people who deserve the blame for their own disappointment. Without any followers guys who think they're God's messengers are just delusional. But when they've got crowds of worshipers around them, look out!

Ideals are always matters of mind. And in the pure world of mind, unsullied as it is by messy things like bodies with wee-wees and pee-pees attached, there is no sex. So divine beings should not boink. When we find out that the folks we considered divine are in fact boinking away like mad our dreams are shattered. In fact, it is precisely because these guys are trying to live up to an impossible ideal that they so often turn sex crazy. It's an unbalanced way to live and nature has a way of balancing things out by tipping the scales in the opposite direction. I'm not saying celibacy in and of itself is impossible. But it isn't just celibacy we expect from our representatives of the Divine, is it? It's purity. And that's where we get into real trouble.

People who are "into Zen" often tend to misunderstand the point of Buddhism to be the destruction of all desire including the desire to get one's rocks off. But this religious attitude towards sexual purity just replaces society's extreme views on the matter with another set of equally extreme views. The real problem -- the fact that we permit ourselves to act so extremely with regard to anything at all -- remains unaddressed. To view sex as a vile act which the pure of heart dare not even dream of is, in its own way, just as unbalanced as spending all your time energy and cash on trying to get some hot man-meat or some tender nookie (or both if you're so inclined).

To practice the Middle Way means to apply that view to all areas of your life without any exception. You can't establish real balance if you hold certain areas of experience apart and say it's OK to go to extremes as long as it has to do with sex, or with skee-ball or with whatever it is you're obsessed with. Constantly moving from one extreme to the other is what got your brain and body into the mess they're in right now. How can you expect to get at the real root cause of your troubles by doing the very thing that caused them in the first place?

Not being a total sex freak doesn't mean you have to swing the completely opposite direction and try to live your life as a sexless robot. Deal with the sexual desires you have in the most reasonable way you can.

When you're boinking, just boink. When you're not, just don't.