Hey folks, I'm surprised that so many of you liked last week's story. That only means that a lot of you probably won't like this one. But it's fine. As I warned you guys a few weeks ago I'm on a storyteller's vacation. For a few weeks I just wanted to throw some crazy ideas out there and get away from the typical "I came home and she was screwing the neighbor" stories. Don't get me wrong, those stories are the bread and butter of LW. We all love them. They're real and there's power in a situation that any and all of us could experience. The masters of this genre, guys like DQS1, Rehnquist, JPB, SWMO hermit all do these stories so well that they've defined LW. Their stories are classics and will probably never be equalled. That's why the best of the newer generation of story tellers like CPete, Girl in the moon, AA Nemo, Saxon Hart, FD45, Brit tease, UKresearcher and so many others including me have to try to stretch occasionally to make a name for ourselves when compared with those giants. This story is a little bit crazy and I admit I stole the idea from a movie that hasn't come out yet. To make this worse, this week I didn't have the benefit of having my usual ace editor guarding my back, and I really miss her. So expect, bad grammar, terrible punctuation and a lot of fuck ups. SS06
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As I walked towards my work station a couple of the guys in the office tried to engage me in their conversation. I'm not a big talker. But, failure to participate in the typical office bullshit can sometimes be more costly than the few minutes you lose doing it. I also don't want to be thought of as the one guy in the office with a stick up his ass. So I joined in.
"Hey, Tyler, are you excited about the Rite?" asked Perry Joseph, one of my few close friends at the design firm I worked at."
"I guess," I said nonchalantly.
"Yeah I guess the thought of some other guy porking your wife does take the thrill out of it for you married guys," he said.
"Bullshit," spat Kramer. Kramer whose last name was also Joseph wasn't related to Perry. "I'm married and I love the Rite. I love both the Spring Rite and the Fall Ritual. They're the best fucking times of the year."
"Shit, for a guy as ugly as you are," chimed in Whitford Bradly from across the room. "They're probably the only two times when you can get laid, married or not."
I used the laughter that followed as my chance to escape the conversation and get back to work.
The real truth of things was that I hated what would happen this Saturday night with a passion. I always had. I saw the Rite of Spring and the Fall Ritual as being the worst examples of how far we as a society had fallen.
It had all started back in the early part of the century. In 2015 a year synonymous with bizarre changes, the divorce rate in America had finally surpassed the 50% margin. That was a very bad thing because it meant that marriage in our country was less than a gamble. It meant that the odds of a successful marriage were less than one out of two.
People simply stopped getting married at all. That led to a decline in families and a decline in the number of children being born and overall morality also seemed to decline sharply. No one gave a shit about anything anymore. America became a place where people spent millions of dollars to maintain a perfect online appearance, but in reality they didn't look anything like their carefully composed social media profiles.
A woman, who online appeared to be a paragon of virtue, might be in real life giving blow jobs on the street. People paid far more money to be photographed wearing a famous designer brand so the pictures could put on their facebook page than the items actually cost. It didn't matter that they didn't actually own the items, it was only important that they be seen wearing, using or driving them.
Congress took a strong look at marriage. Several famous scientists and committees were paid outrageous fees to come up with studies that detailed the factors responsible for the breakdown of the family and morality.
It all came down to one three letter word; S-E-X. Hormone driven sexual attraction was the main reason a lot of couples got together in the first place. Pleasant regular sex kept them together and bred children. Sexual boredom led to a lack of interest in both sex and the relationships. It also led to infidelity and divorces. Congress mulled it over and asked for solutions.
It took a while, but twenty years ago in 2020 we first started the Rites. The term "Rite," came from the Pagan ceremony, the Great Rite and bears no resemblance or similarity to any Pagan ceremony or any fertility ritual of any religion or society before us.
The Rites are more akin to a correction or a balancing maneuver than anything else. It's like the difference between our calendar and the true solar cycle. Since our Calendar is off by a few hours each year, every fourth year we have to add a day.
The Rites balance out the fact that most people are simply not honorable, moral people no matter how many rules or laws we enact. So twice a year, we allow them to become morally ambiguous when it comes to sex. The Rite doesn't allow them to go out and commit crimes, but it does allow all adults to take a walk on the wild side when it comes to sex.
Sex involving minors is still prohibited and is prosecuted severely, as in the death penalty, but almost anything else goes. Over the years the process has been fine-tuned until it is fair and equitable and it works for almost everyone. There are, as with most things some people who lobby against it but after twenty years, we've all come to accept it.
Why would a supposedly enlightened society accept and embrace what amounts to a public orgy twice a year? That's easy. The only answer necessary is the fact that it works. And it actually works far better than expected. In fact over the twenty years that we've had the Rite, the divorce rate has reversed itself to the point that last year the divorce rate among married couples was only thirteen percent.
Being divorced once again carries a stigma about it. People look at divorced men and women as failures. They're also legally required to post their status on any social media sites as divorced so any possible future partners both personal and professional know beforehand that the person seems unlikely to maintain partnerships.
A lot of the things that tore marriages apart in the past have been if not ended, at least mitigated by the rite. Remember those cases where a man married a woman or vice versa, but was secretly or simply unknowingly fighting a same sex attraction? It doesn't matter now. Because of the rite, the closeted nonconventional can make the marriage work because twice a year he or she gets to go out and let their freak flag fly, and there are no repercussions to the marriage when they return on Sunday morning.
Remember those women or men who sought sex outside of their marriages because they had sexual needs that their partners, no matter how much they loved them, couldn't or wouldn't satisfy?
It doesn't matter because those men and or women can go out and become the biggest whores on the planet, twice a year and come home that night or the next morning with no harm done to their marriages.
With the chance to legally go outside of their marriages and do whatever the fuck they want a couple of times a year most individuals are able to make marriages that seems like death sentences actually thrive. With the increase in the survivability of marriages, more marriages are producing children and the family unit has grown stronger and more connected. Society as a whole has benefitted from the increases in morality. It may in fact be the Rite that has saved America.
Nothing of course is perfect and the Rite has brought on entire industries of specialists and companies that deal with the fallout from the few problems it has brought. Several laws have been enacted or strengthened as well.
Then of course, there are always a few individuals who simply believe that the Rite, no matter how much good it does for society, is wrong.
I guess, I'm one of those.
As I stared at my computer screen, I tried to put all thoughts about the Rite, out of my mind. I was working on a computer assisted multi-port/multi-shot nitrous system. One of the problems with today's cars is the lack of passing power. Except for the late sixties, which was just before the oil crisis of the mid-seventies and of course my favorite time, the mid 00's through 2015, the government and wusses everywhere have been on a campaign to destroy cars.
In the late nineteen sixties, which was the classic muscle era the auto manufacturers were in all out warfare. They produced car after car to try to gain dominance over a population that was in love with cars. The Camaro, the Challenger, the Charger, the GTO, the Firebird, the Barracuda, The road runner, the Electra 225, which was known on the streets of course, as the deuce and a quarter were all highly regarded as being in line for the crown that was worn by everyone's favorite Pony car, the Mustang.
Performance was the driving force for all of these cars. The funny thing about it was that the formula worked. They weren't luxury cars they weren't packed with thousands of wasted dollars- worth of frills and bullshit. They were unabashed street rockets. They basically took a small car and stuck a big assed engine in it and watched them fly out of the dealerships and down the roads.
The only thing that stopped the muscle car era was the oil embargo. Overnight it ground to a halt as Mr. and Mrs. America decided that with gas prices rising quickly, a huge engine that got 10 to 12 miles to the gallon wasn't necessarily a good thing.
Ford basically turned its show pony into a gelding by releasing what was basically a rebadged pinto and calling it the Mustang II. I still cringe when I see one of those things in a car museum now. Ford did get their head out of their ass in the early eighties when they started with the Fox body Mustangs and started to chase performance again. But Muscles cars simply weren't selling and Ford had to go it alone as most of their competition dried up and disappeared. The Charger, the Challenger, the Camaro were all gone. Only the Mustang lasted and every year became more potent. Special versions and variants were there, but always on the fringe of a mainstream that seemed to prefer boring foreign made econo-boxes.
Then in 2005 in a time when many thought the era of the muscle car was gone, when many expected Ford to simply bury the Mustang the way so many of their competitors had buried their muscle cars and tried to copy Europe, Ford said, "Fuck it."
They put out a Mustang that looked like a Mustang and with that one shot, started the war all over again. GM and Chrysler quickly erected their barricades behind similar throwback versions of their own. For ten years high-tech retro versions of muscle cars with ridiculous amounts of horsepower ruled the streets.
That was my favorite time. While everyone was whining about making the planet green, Ford and Carroll Shelby were putting out monstrous Mustangs with up to and over a thousand horsepower.
Ford started the war and it took Ford to end it. The 2015 Mustang with its four cylinder ecoboost engine was more of a Mousetang. They may as well have called it the Mustang II jr.
Nowadays the typical street car boasts a one or two cylinder turbo-boosted engine that usually puts out the equivalent horsepower of the lawn mowers from twenty years ago. With the Government standards mandating at least 75 miles to the gallon, these cars struggle to maintain the forty five mile per hour freeway standard.
When we think back to the early part of the century when cars cruised the freeways at 70 and all of the horror that accidents at that speed caused, it's a wonder anyone survived. At least that's what they tell us.
I still drive my classic car. It's a 2013 Boss 302. My car is midnight blue, with the white hockey stick stripes on the sides. The car is twenty seven years old and has over a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. It only has that few on it because I don't drive it in the winters or when it rains. The car was built when I was fifteen years old. One of my uncles bought it brand new and treated it like a baby. When he died, he left it to me and I've kept up the tradition of babying the car.
