Taxing Sex In Outer Space
The lottery was played out.
No one was likely to purchase indulgences.
What was left: sex and outer space.
Newlyweds, spend a weekend blasting off with your beloved.
What could be more romantic?
Feel the surging of thrusters.
Find that cosmic zero g spot.
Join the 100-mile high club
and practice safe re-entry.
Fads are catchy. Suddenly, everyone wanted the ultimate rendezvous.
Of course, they didn’t call it a tax. They called it a docking fee.
And the upper echelons could also escape to the upper atmosphere
in order to elevate their infidelity and impress their mistress.
Once people determined this was a must purchase
they didn’t even have to make it a law.
It paid off the deficit and put a down payment on the next war.
As it turned out, most people, especially newlyweds, couldn’t afford
the overpriced, first class, gravity enhanced, position friendly spacecraft.
That forced most folks to accept the econo-pod and the “marriage attire,”
a baglike tube to keep the couple from drifting apart.
Word eventually got out (and the government secretly encouraged it),
the economy space pods were not comfortable.
Besides, sex and weightless go together like a force disparaged.
Too much motion without gravity can cause nausea.
Men experience localized shrinkage in zero gravity.
Lower blood pressure means less enthusiasm saluting the queen.
The physics of thrust, an equal and opposite reaction to action,
make that certain rhythm, let alone satisfactory angles,
difficult even with the help of Velcro.
The government offered a solution: the pod package.
For the same fee the couple could have their experience simulated,
tastefully preserved on video and in a picture album.
Then, off to a beach resort via an air force jet.
The government claims that any additional profits
gained by remaining Earth bound will eventually be used
to fund terraforming. Your love will grow a plant on Mars.
Gravity never seemed so good, and now there is a way to tax it.
The Earth is a circle. All ashore that’s going ashore.
—Jim Price, Osceola Township, WI
