"The Man (er, Wife) Who Came to Dinner"

Every Saturday evening we have something fun for dinner and watch a movie. Tonight it was pizza and "The Man Who Came to Dinner." And I think I have found a fictional character who adequately captures Wife's total self-absorption. Surely there is no better match (along that dimension) than Sheridan Whiteside. I'll grant that the comparison isn't perfect in other respects -- Sheridan Whiteside is rich and famous and witty and endlessly entertaining besides being an egocentric baby. But in this one respect, ... well, you could pick worse.

In fact, she threw a fit over dinner this evening that exemplified this Whiteside-like self-absorption perfectly. Candor requires me to admit that I probably triggered it, and I certainly fueled it by refusing to take her seriously. But it's not often that she gets on such a roll that the boys both tell her to chill out and relax because it's all going to be OK, and they did tonight.

Let me back up and try to describe what happened.

I was out and about, doing the week's grocery shopping. Wife suggested that I pick up a pizza for dinner -- one of the places that we shop sells pre-made, uncooked pizzas that you can take home and bake yourself. Now, for as long as I have known her, Wife has railed against pizza as a food that she loathes. No surprise, the boys love it. So when Saturday rolls around and we are going to have "something fun" for dinner, they always lobby for pizza and Wife generally nixes it. The few times she actually recommends it herself, I notice because it is pretty remarkable.

So I got to the store, picked up a few other things we needed, and wandered over to the counter where they keep the pizzas. How many do we need? Hmm, good question. For myself, I knew that I had been eating rather too much bread lately and needed something like a salad instead, to kind of scrub things out. (Sorry, too much information.) And I figured that Wife might not really be that excited about pizza either. So I called home and asked her, "How many pizzas do you think we need? Will one large be enough? I think I am just going to have salad." Wife answered, "Well if you get sausage and pepperoni then I sure don't want any! I hate sausage and pepperoni! If you get that then I'm just having a salad too!" I looked at the shelf, and -- sure enough -- sausage and pepperoni was the only variety they had there. So I got one. I figured we didn't need two, because one large pizza should feed two boys and it sounded like neither adult was planning to have any.

But I also realized just how bad it has always made me feel to listen, day in and day out, to Wife's steady stream of hatred. She hates this, she hates that; nothing is ever right or good enough, and everything is somebody else's fault. It is always up to somebody else to make things right for her, and then she hates what they did for her and are forcing her to put up with. It is just incredibly demoralizing. And the longer I thought about this, as I shopped, the more I disliked the idea of going out of my way to feed her something special. Fortunately, I had never offered to make her a salad. When she started ranting about how much she hates sausage-and-pepperoni pizzas, I said quickly "OK, I'll just get one," and hung up on her. So I figured I would bake the pizza for the boys; I would make a salad for me; and then I would let her make whatever she liked for herself.

And that is more or less how it went. When I got home from shopping, she had (very belatedly) cleaned up the kitchen so I had room to put away the groceries, and she was back in bed lying down avoiding the world. I put away the food, put the pizza in the oven, made myself a salad, and then came and told her she should probably make hers because we'd be eating in a few minutes.

Wife: What do you mean?

Hosea: You said you wanted a salad for dinner, so you should probably go make it.

Wife: Why do I have to make it?

Hosea: To make sure you get exactly what you want in it.

Wife: How hard can it be for you to make me a salad?

Hosea: Well I have already made mine, but I only made it for one because I didn't know what you wanted in it.

My God, you would have thought I had told her she was going to be boiled alive and served up in a pudding. How could I possibly single her out like this? What did I mean by making dinner for everybody else in the house but not her? How would I like it if she made dinner for everybody else in the house except me? Didn't I realize that she had cooked dinner all last week and all the week before? Didn't I realize that she had done laundry those weeks too? And now, when it was my night to cook [huh? It's Saturday -- we have fun food, nobody cooks.] I made a point of singling her out by not feeding her? What on earth could I be thinking? What could I possibly be punishing her for? How could I possibly be so thoughtless and inconsiderate?

Here I interjected a comment. "Actually it wasn't thoughtless or inconsiderate at all. I gave it a lot of thought and consideration before deciding that this was the best thing to do. If you ask me at a more convenient time, I'll be happy to explain it to you -- but not now. You can't ruin Saturday night over this. Ask me tomorrow morning when you are all calmed down and the boys aren't waiting for dinner, and I'll explain exactly what I had in mind."

At this point, you or I or anybody else would have shelved it until tomorrow morning ... maybe seething, maybe bitter, maybe resentful, but every one of us would have realized we'd be gettng nowhere tonight and would have dropped it. But not Wife. She went back to the top of her litany of complaints about me and started them all over again, pretty much without variation.

By this time the pizza was done and I was telling the boys to wash up. And of course if Wife had spent all this time throwing together a salad instead of complaining, she'd be done too. But she hadn't, so now there was one more element to the complaining -- viz., that we were all ready to eat and she still had to start making her dinner! In great bad humor, she pulled things out of the refrigerator and began throwing them together. She sat down with a thump, then immediately got up again to get a drink. Then: "Where is the wine bottle?"

Hosea: Which wine bottle did you have in mind?

Wife: The pinot grigio that I opened earlier this evening, that was sitting in the door of the refrigerator right here.

Son 1: Mom, it's on the table right in front of your place. Come on, sit down, it's OK.

(I should add that we have trained the boys that nobody starts eating till everyone is at the table.)

Wife: What about salad dressing?

Huh? Salad dressing? Well personally I had put oil and vinegar on the table; and while she had been tearing up her lettuce, I had poured them both over my salad and added some salt and pepper. Wife came back to the table again, saw that my salad was all dressed, and commented bitterly, "So you made up some dressing too, but only enough for one? You even have to be that snotty over the dressing?"

Son 1: Mom, he just put some oil and vinegar on it. Come on, sit down. Relax, it's OK.

Wife went back into the kitchen yet again to make up some "Italian" dressing from a mix she keeps in the pantry. And finally, only after that -- and after commenting acidly, "I'm not sure I even want to share your table" -- did she sit down to eat with us.

Nor did she stop commenting even then. The comments were all the same as before, just repeated in a different order. Whenever she got to the part about not understanding why on earth I would do anything so despicable, I would add in, "Yes, I know you don't understand. Ask me tomorrow morning, but meanwhile let it go." But this was like asking a starving dog to let go a beef bone, and she kept gnawing at the subject all the way through dinner.

The boys and I built a conversation around her -- something light and airy, with lots of laughter and silliness in it. Son 2, who normally sits next to Wife, surreptitiously scooted his chair over till he was almost at the far end of the table, to put room between himself and her. Finally everybody was done eating -- Wife had made too much salad for herself and had to throw out about half of it -- so we all got down from the table. Wife made a point of stopping me in the kitchen to tell me in detail how despicable she thought I was being; I added a little more than I had before but basically told her to leave it alone. And why should I get to tell her what to do?

Hosea: I shouldn't. Feel free to go find an apartment somewhere, so that you can run your own life exactly the way you see fit.

Wife: Oh right, on the money I get from Social Security. That's rich.

Hosea: Fine, don't. But make a choice. Do you want independence, or do you want me to pay your bills? You have to pick one, but not both.

I added that I never wanted to have to make her decisions for her, and that I would be very relieved when I no longer had any obligation to. But in the meantime ....

She kept grumbling, all the way until we started our movie -- grousing about our marriage far more openly to the boys than she has done before (at least when I have been there). The boys more or less ignored her; and I noticed that Son 2, who usually cuddles with Wife during movies, made a big point of cuddling with me instead before he got tired and toddled off to bed.

At least I don't have to worry about whether the boys know there are problems in our marriage. (Ya think?) And I don't think Wife is winning hearts and minds quite the way she probably wants to. It's sad, in a way.

Bicker, bicker ....

Last night as we sat down to dinner, Wife and I were bickering over something trivial -- I don't even remember what, any more. And the boys asked, "Have you two ever sat down to dinner without bickering?"

I answered, "Sure, lots of times."

And they shot back, "Yeah -- when you are travelling for work and Mom is here."

The tower and the bathroom

This evening, Wife passed out in the bathroom.

We were in the bedroom talking. She was standing, holding a cup of water and fidgeting with her evening medications. Halfway through what she was saying, she swallowed her medicines fairly absent-mindedly, and went on talking. Then after a few minutes she started to slur her words. I told her she had better start getting ready for bed.

She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and when I looked in (a couple of minutes later) she was half-squatting in mid-air, holding onto the sink with one hand while she tried to brush with the other. Then she halfway put away her brush and tried to cup her hands for water, to rinse her mouth. But it is pretty hard to cup your hands when you are also holding onto the sink with both of them for dear life, so in fact she was clutching the sink while her knees slowly buckled beneath her and she watched the water from the tap flow freely down the drain. I encouraged her to wake up and stand up, but I was reluctant to lift her and push her through the rest of her evening drill. As I tried to explain to her, "There will come a day soon when you'll be on your own and have to do this for yourself -- so you had better be able to do it now." Her response was to stare vacantly and uncomprehendingly, and then to slide slowly but inevitably down to the floor where she lay back flat, head in the shower and feet at the door, totally insensible of anything.

I was still reluctant to do this all for her, so I let her lie there for five minutes or so while the boys brushed their teeth in the other bathroom and got ready for bed. Then I came back and spoke to her. She roused herself to a half-sitting position, as if she were doing a spider-crawl. She tried several times to pull herself up to a sitting position, but could not do it. I suggested that she might want to scoot over to the bed and then lift herself on that. FInally, slowly and after infinite pains, she did so. She pulled off her rings, tried to set them on the end table, dropped one, but then found it after I turned up the lights. She took off her watch, after long minutes spent futilely fumbling with its catch, and gave it to me to put on the dresser. She undressed -- although this was far more difficult than usual because she was hunched over even on the bed. And she pulled on a nightgown, though she got stuck halfway through and had to back up and start over. All in all, it must have been something like a half an hour that she was not very functional, although I have abbreviated the account significantly here. Then she let her head crash onto her pillow, and she was out.

My guess is that it was the medications, or rather those plus the wine she had with dinner. And in fact, our conversation had begun around the end of dinner with her expressing frustration over the low-grade infection and constant pain that she has had (she tells me) for something like two years now. She said one doctor has proposed to take out her tonsils, but at the same time admits that he is just guessing and that her tonsils don't look red or inflamed or infected in any way. Wife's guess is that her lupus is acting up, but her rheumatologist says that can't be true because her tests all look good. In any event, she went on, she is in constant pain and nobody seems able to do anything about it; so she is steadily using up her stores of Vicodin (which she had stockpiled in quantities seemingly planned to get her through the next ice age), she is chasing the painkillers with wine, she knows that she is "self-medicating" and that this is a bad thing, ... but she feels so rotten she can't bring herself to stop. And my guess, as I say, is that it is this combination which knocked her into oblivion on the bathroom floor.

Ironically, the rest of the conversation was about the positive signs in her life. She says she is trying to lend a hand around the house, and indeed I have seen as much. She wants to take a class, or go back to playing a musical instrument with somebody. (She used to be pretty good on the pipe organ.) She is making and keeping appointments, and she wants to make friends who are real, live people, friends in the flesh and not merely voices at the other end of a phone (like Friend) or an IM chat line (like Boyfriend 5). She has even started saying "thank you" pretty frequently -- maybe not Nobel Prize material, but progress all the same.

Then she spends a lot of her time alone reading. She has also tried to meditate or hypnotize herself as a way of dealing with the pain; on the whole this hasn't worked too well. And she has been reading Tarot cards for herself and others.

I have never explained this before, but Wife learned to read Tarot cards years ago, somewhere around the time we got married. Of course sometimes she deals them and gets random noise, but on the whole she has been (by her own reckoning) pretty accurate. I asked what results she has gotten for the boys; she said she never gets very consistent results, which she interprets to mean that their futures aren't very well determined yet. The only trend she notices is that Son 1's readings show a lot of cards representing friendship (like the Three of Cups), and she figures this is a fair representation of his life right now. In the readings she has done for me, she says she sees a lot of Major Arcana, which makes no sense at all. (According to what her teacher told her, that would mean -- if it were consistent across multiple readings -- that my life was being shaped by cosmic forces these days, and I sure can't see them.) She also said that she has seen the Page of Cups show up for me several times, a card that she interprets as a seduction of some kind. (Her teacher did a reading for Wife that featured the Page of Cups prominently, not long before she met Boyfriend 1.)

And for her? All she told me is that she regularly gets the Tower (pictured) showing up in her future somewhere. What does that mean? Most textbooks say that it represents major change, sometimes catastrophic or overwhelming major change. But Wife's teacher, all those years ago, always insisted that the Tower was the one card she considered a reliable predictor of death.

Of course, maybe there is nothing to Tarot cards in the first place, and it is all just silly.

Spirituality causes sex!

OK, this is priceless. It also explains the alleged paradox about D that I tried to address here -- namely, that she is at the same time so deeply religious and so powerfully sexual. It turns ot that the one causes the other.

And it has to be so. I mean, Science says ...!

Here is the link:
http://www.livescience.com/health/090930-spirituality.html

Hope this encourages everybody's ... ummm, spiritual life.

Asshole aftermath

The aftermath of my temper tantrum Monday night has been mixed. At home, there hasn't been much. Wife has said nothing. As for Son 1 and Son 2, by the next day they both seemed back to normal. Son 2 was quirky and affectionate; Son 1 was uproarious and sarcastic. Same as always. So if my lost temper scarred them for life, they don't show it.

My interactions with D, on the other hand, have been rather more awkward. It hasn't helped that the holidays jostled our routine of communicating with each other regularly, so that our letters have already been "off" in one way or another. D blames this on my depression inhibiting communication. Maybe so, I don't know. Maybe I don't have a lot going on in my life right now (apart from the normal press of work) so I don't have a lot to say. Maybe I get a hair crosswise when she replies to getting three letters from me the same day by saying that if I am going to be so uncommunicative then obviously I want to be left alone, for reasons unknown. Who knows?

Probably the easiest way to explain how this has progressed is just to let the conversation speak for itself. As always, D is in blue and I am in green. It started with me writing (on Monday evening):

This wasn't a good evening, but I don't think I want to write about it. I mean, there were some good parts. [Digression where I explain some mundane news.] But other parts of the evening were less good, so I'm going to close there. Maybe some other time. Maybe I'll do a little work for my job before going to bed.

Sorry I am not feeling my usual eloquent self. It's nothing to do with you; I'm just not up to writing a lot right now.

To this, D replied:

Gosh; can you tell me this morning what happened? I am so sorry things did not go well. I would gladly sit with you and listen with compassion and love. Or just kiss you and we could go to another place altogether.

Of course I didn't want to tell her what happened, and I still don't. Even though I am sure I did no actual damage to Son 1, I am certain that D's experience as a guardian ad litem will dispose her to take a singularly dim view of my hitting him. On the other hand, this letter sounded better than I had anticipated, and I answered:

The kissing sounds nice. The rest probably isn't important in the long run. Certainly not as important as good kissing. (smile)

But I guess I jumped a little too soon to the conclusion that she was going to drop it. Ooops.

I am not comfortable with this response, because when I try to get away with the same, you nail me. I suggested listening first...

I got that one in the middle of the workday. By the end of the day I had not replied yet, and suddenly I found a follow-on note in my Inbox.

Things have been difficult between us; last night's short letter was just the latest of several 'not quite right' communications from both of us. Lots of reasons; I have been faced with a crisis at home, while you have been depressed and alone. Sigh*

One of the blogs I read mentioned this poem from Rumi, and it expresses exactly my dismay and discomfort with your lack of communication, both on the phone (and I know depression overwhelms your ability to speak easily) and in your resolute decision to just shut down last night.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
[S]he may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Perhaps it might be possible to re-think a bit. Perhaps we could be just a little kinder to ourselves. That generosity might give us the chance to let the other person know all of the elements about us that we fear and reject — the painful and dark feelings, our shadow side, the things we do that we don’t want anyone to know about. If we are going to be genuine friends, we need to tell each other about our multiple inner characters, the angels of kindness and the demons of anger and impatience.

Rumi’s poem commands us to make space for the whole range of guests who might arrive – the feelings we experience that we push back, resist, numb ourselves to – which might come bearing gifts. The inner witness is the part of ourselves that can be fully present without anxiety, that can offer acceptance and welcome to whatever knocks at our inner door. I am not that inner witness, but I love you beyond measure. If I can't console you, I can always listen. And I can celebrate the goodness and life struggling to be born, the guests that destroy your furniture and leave you with a new way of seeing both yourself and the wider community.

This is probably all wrong, but the silence seems more wrong. May God add his blessing to all your endeavors.

What do I say to that? No idea. Very late that night, here is what I tried:

It's late and I'm tired. I could have been writing for the last 90 minutes, but I have been dithering and poking about pointlessly. I don't know why. After dinner -- at which I ate too much -- I went for a walk for over an hour. This was a good thing, as it helped settle my dinner and it allowed the wine I had at dinner to "evaporate" if you will....

I didn't really know what to say to your earlier e-mail today, so I just worked instead. I figured I would think of something later, and meanwhile there was plenty to do. (I got a lot of phone calls this afternoon.) Then you followed up with this email [that I quoted above], and I'm still not exactly sure what to say. I don't really want to spin a long, extended narrative about yesterday. It was just a bad day. The boys were particularly irrepressible all evening, and I found it particularly difficult to cope with, and I lost my temper in ways I'm not proud of. If you were still talking to Wife for two hours every day, I'm sure she could bend your ear extensively on how this just vindicated everything she's been saying about me all along. But I'm not sure how informative the full story would be, except to verify that "Yup, Hosea looks pretty bad in that story. Dam' shame." And I can tell you all that part right now....

I don't know how to take Rumi's advice, to welcome everything that comes into my soul with equal good cheer. Most of the time I think I can understand how to accept what comes into my soul with equanimity (at any rate), by reminding myself that at a sufficiently great remove it doesn't matter. (This is the old principle, "Who will care in a hundred years?") But joy and good cheer and welcome all seem something of a stretch. But then, it is no surprise that Rumi is more enlightened than I am.

I don't know what more to say. I'm sorry if this isn't right. Even if it isn't, I *do* love you. Good night now, may you be rested for the morning by the time you read this, and may tomorrow be a fine day for everybody!

This morning she wrote me:

It's hard to express how I feel...or to welcome the quiet knowledge that my experience does not make me unique, but rather joins me to everyone else. Naomi Shihab Nye writes, in part:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness....

The poet says you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing besides kindness. That way, you can open the door to kindness, to a heart, that like Rumi, welcomes everything with love.

And I said:

I'm not sure I understand the fullness of what Nye is saying about loss, apart from a superficial level; nor am I quite sure what to say about the windless spot into which our boat seems to have drifted at the moment. I have a very strong feeling that we are right now at a point where words themselves are not the most useful things, and it is a great sadness that they are all we have. I think we could communicate a lot better right now, just the two of us, by sitting wordlessly together over coffee, holding hands, watching each other's hair, feeling the sun and the breeze. I don't think words are near as useful, by contrast.

But they are what we have right now. And so we suffer on with badly imperfect communication, hoping for a puff of breeze to nudge us back on course.

I am gazing at your face as I type, and feeling your hand in mine though we are so far away. I do love you, even wordlessly, ever and always.

I haven't heard anything more from her today. I'll have to wait and see where this goes next.

Violent, or just an asshole

Not a good evening. The kind of evening that makes me look like a real shit, in fact. Probably fairly.

I just wrote D that, in effect, I wouldn't be writing her tonight. (I write her most nights, at this point.) I didn't say why, except that it wasn't a good evening. She'll worry, but I don't want to attach this narrative -- dumb as it is -- to my real name. I probably wouldn't write it here, either, except I figure I had better record the facts somewhere in case Wife comes along later to accuse me of something a lot worse.

It's not even dramatic. Just stupid.

It's the first day back at school after the Winter Break. As usual, the boys come to my office after school. I'm in meetings till late, and then I have e-mail to mop up for a while. The boys are both in high spirits, which somehow makes them both very loud. All the way home, they are making the small car echo, singing and chanting highly repetitive nonsense phrases, or words out of context with no meaning. I don't do well with repetitive noises, and ask them to stop. Then I start insisting that they stop. Again. And again. And louder. Finally I shout, and they stop ... until, a couple of minutes later, Son 1 utters one of the words they were riffing on -- "moose" of all things -- in a low, quiet, monotone. He isn't even making an obnoxious noise at that point, but the semantic repetition was just too much. We are only a couple of blocks from home at that point, so I stop the car and make him get out and walk the rest of the way. (In fact, he beats us home by a few seconds.) Not that it accomplishes anything, but I am hoping to make a point.

Wife is fixing dinner, so she and I talk about the day while she finishes up in the kitchen. Then we all sit down to eat, and it begins again. Wife and I try to maintain the veneer of a civilized conversation during the meal, meaning a conversation that includes the boys as well. But the boys keep up the banter, the echoing repetition, the annoying voices, the hysterical laughter ... all this stuff that was so getting on my nerves in the car. They are having a blast. The meal goes on. The meal winds down. The boys are still riffing energetically off of each other, having a wonderful time. I can even tell it is fun. If it weren't making my whole nervous system go TILT! I would probably want to join the game. But as it is, it is making me absolutely crazy.

Finally I send them both away from the table. I explain, somewhat peevishly, that I just can't take any more of the noise or the echoing repetition. They won't go. I have to raise my voice and insist: "Get down from the table, bus your dishes, and go wash up! Enough already!"

Fine. They get down, bus their dishes, and head off to the bathroom to wash up. I am holding my head and trying to maintain. Then suddenly Son 1 comes bouncing back into the room, feet together and hands together, being a kangaroo. I lose it. I chase him back into the bathroom. (He is squealing with laughter all the way.) I put my foot in the door before he can shut me out. And then I make a fist and start pounding him on his head and his back, as he sits down on the toilet and curls up to protect himself. In all, I probably hit him four or five times, no more than six. And I am pulling each blow -- I can guarantee on oath that they might cause pain but there is no way that any of them can possibly do any lasting damage. But still, my hand is a fist and they are blows.

A hundred years ago, nobody would have noticed, of course. But times have changed.

I probably don't have to add that the noise stops, almost instantly. The boys wash up, brush their teeth, all that sort of thing. A few minutes later, Son 2 comes out of the bathroom and just stands there, staring at me. Finally I ask, "What? I didn't hurt him." He says simply, "You hit Son 1." I reply, "But I didn't hurt him!" Son 2 walks away.

I go talk to Son 1, who is sitting on his bed reading. I ask him, "Are you wounded?"

"It hurts."

"But are you wounded?"

"No, I guess not."

"Can you tell your brother that?"

A few minutes later I go back in. Son 1 is still sitting on his bed, reading. I say, "Look, I'm sorry I hit you. I don't want to do that, and I don't want us to get to the point where we can only communicate by hitting each other."

Silence.

"Really, I'm sorry."

Son 1 grunts.

"But can you please do me a favor?"

"What?"

"I need some way other than hitting you, to let you know when I have really had enough and I can't take any more. Right now, I don't know how to do that. I don't have a good method. But I need some way to communicate that to you, so that next time I don't hit you again. Can you please think about it, and tell me something I can use? Something that will work for you, so you understand that I really can't cope with it any more? You don't need to tell me right now, but please tell me something. I need something I can use. Please."

Son 1 grunts again. And I leave his room.

Over the next 15 to 30 minutes, everybody else in the house goes to bed. Son 2 finishes his shower. Son 1 brushes his teeth. Wife decides that she is really exhausted and has to turn in early. Almost nobody speaks to me, nor I to them. Honestly, I am too ashamed of myself.

I also figure that this is the kind of event that will transmute into one of Wife's amazing stories about what a brute I am, and how I am always violently abusing the children, and how they live in constant terror of me. It could happen. Hell, it will happen. It is only a matter of time, and not too much time at that. Just you wait.

Oh well, what's the worst that can happen? I guess the worst possible case is that the authorities take away my children forever and lock me up somewhere as a menace to society; and at that point, at the very least, my life will be a lot simpler. So there is a silver lining to even the darkest cloud. Oh yes, and if we are constructing a worst case, then let's assume also that Wife divorces me and takes everything (because I am such a brute), and that D never wants to see me again. Hell, why not? If I'm imagining a worst case, why not go for broke? But then think of all the things I'd never have to worry about getting done. If you look at it right, the inevitable upcoming catastrophe has its positive side.

Oh, and let's also assume that all of you get disgusted enough nobody wants to read anything more that I have to write. That's always possible too, while I'm at it.

I suppose nothing is truly "inevitable." But some days it feels like it. So, how has your day been?