Lemondrop

As you get older and come to terms with the dwindling of your time on this planet, you realize there's some stuff you really need to do before you check out. For some people it's climbing K2, for others its reading "Don Quixote," starting a charity, having a child, or curing cancer.

I'd just like to bone a girl outdoors.

Here's the hitch -- I'm one of those people who thinks too much about stuff. Sex in public presents inherent problems for us, as we immediately conjure every potential insane scenario that will ruin the moment or get us fired/arrested.

A public bone-sesh is something most guys want to check off their lists. But honestly? A lot of us are too scared. I need to know if anyone out there has a remedy for us that doesn't require a prescription.

Let's talk a walk under the boardwalk and through the vast shoreline of my insecurities and figure out a way to make sex in public happen, for you and for me. Perhaps you, or whomever you have sex with, have some of these same fears. Perhaps we can work on this together, and this will be the summer we finally have that sweaty romp atop the hood of our neighbor's Volkswagen. (Hey, it literally means "The People's Car"!)

Fear One: Other People
Sex in a park? Why, I'd love to have sex in a park! Only I'm convinced that the one time I'd choose to have sex in a park would be the very evening a middle school was on a nocturnal field trip to plant begonias. There I would be, red-faced atop a gal prone upon the pachysandra, only to look up and to see a furious seventh-grade teacher and the perplexed, tiny mugs of her 12-year-old charges. They'd all be clutching flowers, staring into my Missionary Face. They would never recover.

I mean, I don't know about you, but the "thrill" of possibly getting caught is actually just terror for me. I don't want a kid to see my junk, and I really don't want some drunk lunatic to come bumbling through the park to get high behind the bushes and happen upon us. People who access public parks late at night are often up to no good. The Zodiac Killer is still at large, friends, and guess where he loved to kill people?

OK, so maybe it's just that public parks are a bad idea. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the setting. Which leads me to ...

Fear Two: Performance Anxiety
Let me be awkwardly honest with you again -- as a man, sex in public puts a lot of the onus of performance on me. In private, lots of things can be done to get everyone where they need to be, but sex in public is much more results-oriented. Sure, maybe you can have the sexual experience of your lifetime on a baggage claim carousel at JFK, but my feeling is if you're doing that, it's about saying you've done it and not the pleasure of the experience itself. So for me to be in a position where it's like, "Come on, get aroused now, a baggage handler approaches!" is a nightmare. Who needs that kind of pressure?

I like the idea of being the kind of guy who has sex in public, sort of like how I liked the idea of joining the Peace Corps. But moving things from theory into practice can be daunting when manual labor under an African sun or the physics of having sex on a merry-go-round is involved. Nausea is not becoming to sex.

I think the way to balance this out is to make sure your public session isn't some rush job. Of course, you can't spend hours dribbling chocolate sauce on anyone's hips, but you also don't need to pick a place that requires you to carry a stopwatch, track pants and cross trainers, tightly laced.

Fear Three: Poor Planning
Also, I feel like public boning is probably a spontaneous act, like you just have to have the person then and there, but that means there's no planning, no forethought, and the potential for disaster increases exponentially. Do you really want to go from an impromptu Secret Thread position to thinking, Sh**, I forgot the M15 bus comes right by this gazebo on 6th Street?

Public sex should be something you do because you really, really want the person, bad, but simply going around town exposing your genitals willy-nilly is madness. And planning will decrease your chances of getting caught, but it takes a lot of the fun out of it, no? It would almost render the entire act pointless. Who the hell plans to have sex in an alleyway? We're not superheroes. At least I'm not.

And what about sex in Public, with a capital P? There's the cliché of joining the Mile High Club, but with the FAA's ever-increasingly strict on-flight rules in place, it seems like a way to end up in plastic cuffs. And a good way to emit more fluids than you're currently allowed to carry on. Besides, airplane bathrooms are the size of movie theater seats: who can even have sex in there, save gymnasts or people with incomplete rib cages? Sex while in your seats? Right. You might as well march into the cockpit and try to do it on Sully's lap. Oh wait, Sully's retired? See, this just won't work.

I know -- sex while on a hike! Hiking sex makes a lot of sense. Finding a secluded spot along a trail, doing it where the bears do it. Who hasn't at one time or another in their life thought, Well, hell, I want to do it where the bears do it? Hold on, guys -- there are bears there.

I don't want to have sex near bears.

Fear Four: That Face I Make -- You Know the One
Look, I'm sorry to do this, but I need to take my neuroses on this subject to their logical conclusion. There's something else that could happen during public sex that would just be impossible to get over: getting caught during the act's climax. That's a face only a select few people should ever have to see, and one of them most certainly should not be a gas & electric night worker who happens to be inspecting a power box.

I don't want to be lame or a coward here who's afraid to relieve myself of my trousers and service a woman in the apothecary section of a Pottery Barn, but I also don't want a grandmother who happens to be in the market for high-end furniture to have the misfortune of seeing my balls in motion.

Gang, who out there has publicly boned, and how did you pull it off?

[Redacted] Guy is the resident Single Guy writer for Lemondrop. He loves spaghetti, outdoor concerts and acting like old ladies have never seen his testicles before.

You can send him hate mail and love letters here, and follow him on Twitter.