Adventures in social distancing, 2?

A few weeks ago, a new neighbor moved into the apartment next door. I've tried to wave and smile, but I'm also trying to wear a mask and keep six feet of distance between me and other people. It's hardly the most auspicious time to forge any new social bonds.

My neighbor seems to have no such qualms. He had a lot of family or friends over to help him move in, and he's had visitors since. I don't mean there are people visiting every day, but most of us have been pretty isolated these days, while he and his girlfriend have not. I've seen none of his guests wearing masks.

OK, fine, whatever. After a while the world will go back to normal and we won't have to worry about it, right? And in the meantime I can just hole up and not think about it. Right?

You'd think so. And then last weekend my neighbor set up his portable barbecue in the middle of the parking lot, and started barbecuing beef and chicken. Back up in his apartment his girlfriend was cooking up rice and refried beans, and warming corn tortillas. He had a bunch of friends over, kicking back, relaxing, and talking.

And as I walked past them on my way somewhere he waved and called out, "Hey! How ya doing? Want some food when it's ready?"

It's not that I'm a glutton. (OK, sure, I'm a glutton. What I mean is that it's not just because of that.) But the offer of sharing food calls into question all my interior defenses. Six years ago I wrote about "the spirituality of the dinner table." (At the time I claimed I'd written about it even earlier than that, but it's late and I'm partway drunk and I don't feel like hunting for it just now.) That's why I volunteered at a place where I could serve food [same link] up until the COVID-10 pandemic made them cancel all their volunteer help. Offering to share food with me is just a little bit like offering to share water with Valentine Michael Smith, except I don't think it has ever led to sex afterwards. (Damn shame, I guess. We can discuss whether this dinner or this lunch are counterexamples, but in either case there were months between the table and the bed.)

So of course I said Yes.

I thought maybe I'd go hang out with all of their friends (none of whom I knew, of course!) when the food was ready, but by that time they all seemed to have wandered into different places. I was in my apartment with the door open, when my new neighbor popped in for half a second to deliver a paper plate full of food and then popped out again. It was really tasty, but even nicer would have been the people to go with it and there were none of them.

So I ate. As I say, it was really tasty.

I had offered them a bottle of wine to open and share, but they had said, "We're not wine-drinkers." (There was beer but I didn't have any to contribute.) So the next day I went next door and gave them some homemade jam to thank them for the barbecue. One jar came from a nearby persimmon tree (I've written about this jam before) and another was marmalade from a neighbor's tree. At least it was something.

I wasn't wearing a mask when I delivered the jam, so a small corner of my mind continued to worry. But neither of us coughed on the other, so in reality I'm sure it's fine. They had more guests over this weekend for another barbecue, but didn't offer me another plate (which is fine). But at least we have said Hello.

Why was this story worth telling you? I guess it's all about the food.
              

Celebrity gossip can be terrifying

A couple of months ago I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw a post by Chris Ryan about Woody Allen, who has lived under the shadow of child sexual abuse accusations since 1992 (almost 30 years as of this writing). This was never a case that I was terribly interested in, but I knew in a general way that Allen had been long ago convicted of Doing Bad Shit in the court of public opinion. So I was a little surprised by what Ryan said.

Then a couple of days later he posted a link to a blog post by Moses Farrow which discussed the whole sordid story in detail and rejected all of it.

Moses Farrow's blog is here. 

Why do I call it "terrifying"? Because for years I lived in fear of Wife making exactly the same kinds of accusations against me, and in fear of her getting away with it. Maybe I had a warped notion of how the legal system worked, but it was not until I finally got my own attorney that I could even imagine that the Court might not automatically take Wife's word against mine, or that reason and evidence might stand a chance against her self-proclaimed identity as a Woman Abused. I don't know where I picked up these ideas: maybe from the Internet, maybe from listening to my father's troglodytic opinions on sexual politics, maybe just from my own generic insecurities. No idea, really. But this is part of why I wanted us to stay out of Court when we separated, even though by then I was a lot more confident in my ability to survive the process.

At one point Wife did tell her pastor and a teacher at the boys' elementary school that she thought I was too violent with them. The case got referred to a local Social Services office (I don't remember the exact department name after all these years), so that she and I had to make an appointment to go sit in someone's office and explain What Really Happened. She had based the whole story on some event that really had taken place a few days ago, though she had twisted elements of it to make it sound far worse than it really was. I described what happened, she didn't contradict me, and the official dismissed the whole event with a vague irritation as clearly not having been worth the time and effort. 
 
I don't know if she was trying to play some kind of three-dimensional chess by getting my name on a record somewhere so that she could use it against me later? Or maybe she didn't even know why she did it? Honestly I don't know. If she had really believed the children were at risk, surely she would have made some objections when I described what really happened in a way that exposed how small a molehill this really was. Wouldn't she?

I also remember that one time when the boys were playing with her very rambunctiously she got a bruise on her stomach from one of them careening headlong into her. She took a Polaroid photo of the bruise right away and kept it in her dresser. Whenever I asked why she gave an answer that told me nothing. I always assumed she was going to claim I had hit her and that she had the photo as proof.  

In any event it seems like she stopped trying to build this kind of a case against me after the night she was arrested. That whole business cost us lots of money, but if it made her decide there was no point in trying to make me look bad, I suppose that was an unexpected benefit. 

I've wandered a long way from talking about Woody Allen. As I say, I was never very focused on the story in the first place. But reading Moses Previn's blog was terrifying in retrospect, for much the same reason that I found "Gone Girl" so scary. And I guess I'm grateful that Wife never actually did any of those things to me in real life. For whatever reason ....
         

Blast from the past: Trying to cut a deal with Wife

[Here is something else I found in the old files on my computer. The document that I reprint here is dated September 23, 2003.]

Back in 2003 and 2004 I was out of work for a year and a half. Oh, I spent plenty of time every day looking for work. I must have clicked "send" on 800 applications, and I had lots of interviews. But one way or another it just took a really long time for the penny to drop. (Wife had stopped working and gone out on permanent disability because of her lupus just a few years before.)

During that same time, Wife had been church-shopping, and she had found a Baptist church that appealed to her. So she started attending it regularly, and kept asking me and the boys to come along ... not for the sake of our souls, but because she felt that it reflected badly on her to attend a church but not have her family with her. (This reason sounded crazy to me at the time, but I did not yet know the word narcissism.)

Somewhere along the line she told somebody in her small group about the trouble I was having finding a job, and also about how she couldn't persuade me to join her. They told her, Ask him what he needs from you. It's your job as his wife to support him through this trial, so get him to write out a list of what he needs from you: retyping his resume, making dinner, doing the laundry ... whatever it is. Then make sure you do everything on the list as well as you possibly can. And then you can ask him to join you at church in return.

So she asked. I thought about it for a while, and this is what I came back with. You can see from this that getting my resume retyped or dinner made was not exactly where I thought the problem was. 
____________________

What I want from you

High priority

Right now, I am told by everyone that my highest priority needs to be finding a new job. (Everyone except M---, who says I should also spend 2 hours a day writing; and somewhere in there I should also exercise.) But I often feel like my real job is negotiating major emotional upheavals between us. This can take hours a day, and it leaves me in no frame of mind to hunt for work. The best way to support my job hunt is therefore not to make my PowerPoint slides for me, but to lift this particular burden from my shoulders.

1. Be a walking example of a Christian:

• Let the love of Christ keep you happy, even – no, especially – when you don’t get what you want.
• Let God handle vengeance in his own time and his own way – therefore do not harbor grudges.
• When life dumps mountains on you – and it’ll happen! – rely on God’s infinite power and love to turn them into molehills.
• Trust in God, even when what he is doing is very bizarre.
• If Christ is with you, then the bastards can’t grind you down – so be not afraid that they might.
• Whatever happens to you – and sometimes it is pretty bad and horribly unfair – remember that Christ knows exactly how you feel and is suffering there with you. He too suffered from injustice, and his divine power could have left Golgotha a crater like Sodom and Gomorrah. But he didn’t. Let his friendship and en­courage­ment help you bear the troubles with a good heart.

2. Hold to the Truth as to life itself.

• When we get into big arguments (which I hope will be a lot rarer), you tell me about things I allegedly said and did that bear little or no relationship to anything I remember.
• Sometimes you can even quote whole conversations back to me that never happened, and I will be able to tell that the conversation grew out of one or two words that I did utter but that meant something totally different in context.
• When this happens I become truly frightened.
• I don’t know if this ever happens when you talk to others about things, and it may be out of your power to do anything about this; but so far as you can please try to hold fast to what really happened instead of allowing your memory to embellish it to what “should have happened”.

Low priority

(There are probably a bunch of these and – like any husband –I could probably keep adding to them if I took the time. But they are not central. If you can tackle them, great. If not, OK fine. I have not bothered trying to choose only the important ones because these are all lower priority.)

1. Remember that just because I yell about something doesn’t make it important. 

2. Eat foods that are good for you, at times that are good for you.

3. Don’t let yourself be helpless unless through illness you really can’t avoid it. (This means don’t let yourself be a victim of other people’s thought­less­ness, even if it is mine. For example, buy fruit if you need fruit and I haven’t gotten around to it. It doesn’t mean “Don’t rage against victimization,” because that is already covered under high-priority item #1 above.)

4. Do what you can to keep the kids occupied while I am job hunting. (You really already do this to a very large extent, so I’m not asking for any change here; I just need to mention it for the sake of completeness.)

5. More sex would be nice. (smile)

6. Let’s make dates to go to the gym a couple of times a week, regularly.

  

There will doubtless be other things I might want to ask until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

What I will offer in exchange

1. I will go to church with you every Sunday. Not till Christmas. Not till Easter. I will go to church with you every Sunday as long as you carry out item #1 on the “high priority” list in the other column – because as long as you can carry that out successfully, it proves to me that Christianity is not a fraud. If God’s infinite power can’t help you to accomplish item #1, then Christianity is a fraud and it’s not worth my time to play along. [I'm not sure this actually follows, but it is the reason I gave her at the time.] If you do your best but stumble because we are all fallible … let’s discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

2. Ditto with sending the children to Sunday School, for exactly the same reasons. Same caveat.

3. When I yell, I will commit to getting over it right away, and to apologizing to the person I yelled to.

4. If you need to eat while I’m fixing another meal, I will not complain providing you eat foods that are good for you.

5. I will commit to exercising a minimum of twice a week, and try for a third time, whether or not you choose to join me.

6. I will drop the issue of Boyfriend 2 once and for all, permanently. (Notwithstanding this, I’d like to know who we get to do the repairs around our house or hear the kind of gossip I might hear about our other friends … if you feel inclined to share such gossip and not otherwise.)

There will doubtless be other things you would like to ask of me until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

____________________

Her friends at church thought this was a wonderful offer on my part, and a great opportunity to rope me in. In the end she wasn't all that successful at being Christlike, but I guess it was worth a try ....
   

Did I have green teeth? ... or did she?

The title comes from this post twelve years ago. It was one of several (including this one and this one) where I tried to understand why Wife was so absolutely not sexually attracted to me, why she appeared to find me sexually loathsome.

Well yesterday I was rummaging through some old files on my home computer -- looking for the notes that I published as this article on the Patio -- and I found where I had saved so many of Wife's IMs with Boyfriend 5, back when she spent all day texting him and then I'd stay up at night and copy them into hidden files for later reference. I paged through a few of them, just for the sheer self-flagellating discomfort of it all, I suppose. I even found one where she tells what appears to be the exact same story I told in this post, only from her point of view:

Hosea's version: The other morning she was sitting on our bed wearing nothing but a skimpy nightie, and I told her how genuinely attractive I find her ... still, after all the years we have been married. Her response was to curl up in a ball in fetal position and beg me to stop saying it. 

Wife's version: [addressing Boyfriend 5, about me] Yes, I admitted that he's closer to me than anyone. He said "If only you could see how sexy you are" and I lost it. I just grabbed my nightgown strap out of his hand, wrapped my arms around my knees and put my head down on my knees and cried.

And as I browsed the texts just before and after this, I think I saw something of an explanation. It doesn't contradict any of the hypotheses that I spun in the posts I reference up top, but it adds some detail.

In the first place, Wife hated her own looks. Just a few lines farther down in the text message above, she told Boyfriend 5, "I look at my own body and find myself hideous." And I think the next step was that, if she was hideous and I still desired her anyway, I must be a pathetic loser. When I tried to act in ways that (so I hoped) would reassure her and make her feel loved, she read it as neediness, pawing at her, clinging to her. And I suppose that if you start from her premises, that's logical; anybody who would treat a hideous gorgon as if she were desirable must be doing it out of desperation, ... right? But we all know that desperation is a turn off. Desperate, needy, clinging people are never sexy.

In short, I think that by telling her she was sexy, I guaranteed that she would think I wasn't.

This is consistent, too, with her hating to let me see her orgasm. On the one hand, like any of us, she had to get the release any way she could. If she could close her eyes and shut out the world, if she could pretend she was totally alone, then she could concentrate on feeling the squishy arousing wetness and the explosive ecstasy in her loins. On the other hand if anybody could see her, then all she could think of would be her own (presumed) ugliness reflected back in their eyes -- an image, I have to guess, of some grotesque, chancred hag wandering alone in a blasted wasteland and dementedly strumming herself. Uncouth. Brazen. Revolting.

I hope I'm wrong, but that seems too consistent with the data to be all the way off base.

What a terrible way to live.
        

Narcissistic Personality Quiz, take 2

I was scrolling through some old posts this afternoon (sheesh, don't I have anything better to do with my time?) and I came across this one from five and a half years ago. Unlike the 7-deadly-sins quiz, where I think I am settling into a routine (my most recent instance is here), I hadn't taken this one again in the intervening time. So sure, what the hell? I tried it again.

You can find it here: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm. 

Remember the scoring criteria:

Between 12 and 15 is average.
Celebrities often score closer to 18.
Narcissists score over 20.

This time I scored a 12, so it's nice to know I have worked my way up to normal. I wish I could remember what my answers were last time, so I would know what I had changed.

Something I didn't make a note of last time -- and maybe this is an enhancement to the quiz -- is that the scoring page also gives a breakdown of how I rate on several different components of narcissism.

Quoting from the website, those components are:

Authority

Authority refers to a person's leadership skills and power. People who score higher on authority like to be in charge and gain power, often for power's sake alone.

Self-Sufficiency

This trait refers to how self-sufficient a person is, that is, how much you rely on others versus your own abilities to meet your needs in life.

Superiority

This trait refers to whether a person feels they are more superior than those around them. You scored particularly high in superiority, suggesting you feel you are superior to most others.

Exhibitionism

This trait refers to a person's need to be the center of attention, and willingness to ensure they are the center of attention (even at the expense of others' needs).

Exploitativeness

This trait refers to how willing you are to exploit others in order to meet your own needs or goals.

Vanity

This trait refers to a person's vanity, or their belief in one's own superior abilities and attractiveness compared to others.

Entitlement

This trait refers to the expectation and amount of entitlement a person has in their lives, that is, unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with one's expectations. People who score higher on this trait generally have a greater expectation of entitlement, while those who score lower expect little from others or life.

And here, I think, is the explanation for the paradox that I noted last time I took the quiz, when I had so much trouble reconciling what feels to me like extravagant conceit with my (even now, comparatively) low score on this quiz. Because I scored particularly high on my sense of superiority, pretty high on authority, but low on exhibitionism, vanity, and entitlement. And I scored a flat zero on self-sufficiency.

This is pretty much what I said before ... conceit tempered with timidity. I think one of the differences compared with last time is that I gave myself a few more points for authority, based partly on Marie's observations to me about "the Tanatu charisma." (She came up with the phrase after meeting both my sons and learning that none of the three of us has ever been able to disappear into the wallpaper.)

I suppose it is nice to know I'm still not at pathological levels ....
      

In case I die ....

Some day I should get around to writing a will. [Whenever anyone tells you "Some day I should" that is an exact synonym for "I will never in my life...."] But in the meantime at least I have written a letter to my boys that sits in the front of my filing cabinet that tells them things like where to find information about my insurance, etc., and how to get into my computer.

But I am torn when it comes to my two blogs (this one and the Patio). I already discussed this topic once here. But what do I do? I can tell them that the blogs exist, so at least they can read them. I don't know if there is a risk that BlogSpot might take them down if I go too long with no activity. But I don't want to give them the ability to delete it all while I'm alive. Hell, I'd just as soon they not be able to delete it after I die. Export, sure; delete, not so much.

Anyway, I was thinking about it today while updating that letter I mentioned. I try to update it once a year, just after Christmas, so you see I'm only half a year late. (sigh) What I settled for doing this time was just to list the two URLs down at the bottom of a page of people to notify in case I'm gone ... list them totally without comment. So maybe they are blogs I read? Or whatever. But then if the boys have any curiosity at all, it's easy enough to plug them into a browser to see what pops up. And I assume it will be pretty easy for them to figure out that it's me, once they start reading. The diary entries (especially the early ones) are often about events that included them. And then there's this. On the other hand I won't have made an overt statement, so if there's anything where plausible deniability is needed, maybe it's available in a stretch.

Or maybe I shouldn't be so damned subtle. Maybe I should spend less time communicating like Leo Strauss, for heaven's sake. It's not like anybody could ever tell what Strauss meant, either ....