Stuck

I haven't written—anything—in a while.

In the middle of October, I traveled for a week and a half. I visited Debbie at her home with her family (Mattie and her husband and their two boys, Debbie's grandsons); then I flew on to a city in another state, where Marie was attending a conference. I got back home a week ago.

My last post for this blog was something I wrote on my phone, during the outbound flight. My last post for the Patio was back in July, when Joe Biden was still a candidate for re-election to the Presidency. You may remember that I have a blog about professional topics, under my real-life name, but I wrote that ahead through the end of October so that it would still post while I was out of town. Consequently I have written nothing since that post introducing Fawn. Nothing in the last 18 days. Nothing.

Dinner with Fawn

This dinner (Monday, two nights ago) may mean nothing in the long run, or it might be a chance for me to introduce Fawn. What's not clear to me is whether I need to. But I spend so much time alone these days that I may have forgotten how to distinguish people I'll see again from those I won't.

Fawn belongs to the professional association I do, and a few years ago (when I hosted a few pizza get-togethers in the wake of COVID-19) she attended one of them. I didn't remember much about her except that she was extroverted and friendly. A couple times since then, I'd gotten emails from her about future events (of which there have been pathetically few), and finally one or two saying explicitly that she'd like to see me again ... in a social way, presumably.

I did wonder a bit about this. Was she just being friendly? It didn't seem possible that there could be anything more behind it. (And now that the dinner has happened, I can confirm there was no hint of romantic intention from either of us.) In the meantime, I have been trying to find people who are willing to help with the Section leadership next year. So I told her, Yes, let's have dinner; we can catch up on news (if any) provided I can try to talk you into a leadership position. She picked a very nice restaurant.

The short version is that she spent much of the time talking about her unorthodox health conditions, why she can't lose weight, her troubles with doctors over the years, and the cancerous tumor they pulled out of her brain last year. (Except for that last, it could have been a conversation with Wife from the old days.) We both talked about our divorces (or separation, in my case), and our kids. She explained some things about herself that she doesn't understand but wishes she did. I even got a few minutes to talk about our professional association. 

Mostly I don't expect Fawn to have any relevance to the topics of this blog. But she seems like the kind of person I sometimes befriend in spite of myself. So let's see. Right now I've mentioned her like a bookmark.

The end of the trip

Then there is the end of the trip.

This actually happened on Sunday, September 15. I'm posting it a couple of days later because I'm splitting up the elements of this trip into separate posts. No other reason.

I think I mentioned that I took the train this time, instead of flying. This year there has been a little too much drama in the news around air travel, and the train was a relaxing interlude. Mostly the trip was uneventful. There were only two exceptions.

When I got to the train station to go home, there was a man who got to the line at the same time I did. He insisted I go ahead of him. All visible patches of his skin were covered with tattoos—this means both arms plus his face.  At one point I inadvertently stepped on his foot, and apologized. Then he started to complain to me about everything that had already gone wrong for him today. (It was still morning.) I joked, "And then I stepped on your foot!" but he waved it away. He pulled down his pants to show me a spider logo on his underwear, and a matching logo on his shirt. (I don't know what this logo was supposed to tell me.) He didn't appear to have a seating assignment, and I debated with myself whether to remind him of this or to let the Amtrak staff do it. Then suddenly he stepped out of line and joined another line instead. I lost track of him shortly after that, and did not see him onboard the train after we left the station.

The train trip took something like 32 hours, but finally we got to my town and I reclaimed my suitcase. Then as I walked away from the station, my right foot stepped crookedly on one of the train tracks I had to cross. I lost my balance, and for one terrifying moment felt myself lurching forward. I was sure I was going to plant face first on the empty track, possibly rolling just enough to smash the computer in my backpack.

Then by some miracle I staggered a couple paces and did not fall. I don't know how that happened, and I walked very carefully the rest of the way home.

Right now I'm just grateful for miracles.

The trip was otherwise uneventful, but I got home somewhat shaken. 

Marie and Walter

Another thing that happened while I was visiting Marie … well, I mentioned we went to a bookstore. While there, I picked up a stack of second-hand movies. So one evening, Marie and I watched The Big Lebowski.

Marie had never seen the movie before. She found it very funny, and immediately connected with the character Walter. It's interesting, because she doesn't normally approve the kind of casual violence that Walter threatens, and I'm certain she wouldn't endorse his accommodating remarks about Nazism. ("Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.") But clearly there was something in Walter that sparked a kind of recognition in her. Maybe it was just his insistence that "There are rules!" in so many areas of life. I asked her if that was it, and she laughed.  (Compare, for example, this post here.) 

 

Talking with Marie

What did we talk about during the visit? 

We never discussed politics, or almost never. I think she mentioned a couple of things she had heard recently—once she said she'd heard that Donald Trump was going to round up LEGAL immigrants into concentration camps, along with illegal ones—but I just let them drop or made a joke.

The week before my visit, Debbie came to town briefly for something unrelated to me, but she and I had dinner one evening. Afterwards I sent a note to Marie because I remembered that I had promised always to let her know whenever Debbie and I were together. But I asked her, did she really want to keep hearing about these events, even if (as always) Nothing Happened?

During my visit, she said No, not any more. Marie explained that when I first visited Debbie, her insecurities were so severe that she assumed, As soon as he sees Debbie he's going to remember all her virtues and contrast them with all my weaknesses; and right away he will break up with me to be back with her! In the ensuing eight years, of course, none of that has happened. And I reminded her that Debbie and I have agreed we do better without the added complication of sex and romance. For her part, Marie said she finally realized that even if I did ever fuck someone else, that wouldn't have to mean that I'd break up with her. So she has finally decided not to worry about it.

In practical terms, this isn't going to mean anything. I'm pretty sure my fucking days are over at this point, as noted above. And it's not like any of my girlfriends ever overlapped any of the others, except for the brief period when my involvement with D overlapped my marriage to Wife. (See this post. For the sheer comedy of it, compare also my remarks about D's jealousy of Wife here and here.) But in the abstract I suppose it is nice to know that she's finally not worried about possibilities that could never have hurt her to begin with. Does this count as progress, even if it is meaningless?  

Visiting Marie

I've just been visiting Marie for a week. Now I'm on the train headed home, and I'm thinking about the trip. What worked, and what didn't?

Marie lives in a dingy apartment. She has furniture she doesn't use, which is generally clogged with junk and whose surfaces are all scratched to ribbons by her many years of cats. (In the terminology of the current election cycle, Marie is definitely a Childless Cat Lady, with all the political predilections that term implies.) The furniture she does use is scarce and spare. There are two mismatched chairs (one an office chair, the other an overstuffed living room chair with gashes scratched in it) flanking one small glass-topped table. Her setup is clearly fine for one person (who can use the glass-topped table alternately as a dining table or a desk); when both of us are there, we can use the table together after a fashion, but there is no opportunity to serve an elaborate meal because there simply aren't enough square inches on the table.

The comparisons with my space are unsettling. I too have enough furniture for one, but it is awkward for more than one. I do have a usable desk that is different from my dining table; and I have extensions that I can put in the dining table if I'm going to seat more than three people. But I have no sofa; my chairs are all dining chairs, which makes them not very comfortable for long sitting; and my living room has stacks of junk that I keep meaning to deal with. (Compare, for example, this poem from eight years ago. Nothing has gotten any better since then.) On the other hand, I don't have cats. (You may remember that Wife got the cats we owned back when we separated. They have both died since then, and she's gotten another. I've never had any.) Briefly, Marie and I both live like graduate students (only without the classes, or scholarly productivity, or promise that it will all get better after we get our degrees and get jobs). 

Her apartment seems (from the times I've visited it) to be often dirty. Of course there is always cat hair on everything, no matter how often she cleans. And of course there is a litter box in the bathroom, which means that there is often cat litter sprinkled across the floor. When I arrived a week ago, the sink and counter in the bathroom were scummy, though it seems that she cleaned them a day later when I wasn't looking. And she started vacuuming the carpet my second day there as well. She did dishes very often while I was there, so the dish drainer was always overfull. Nonetheless there were open containers of food scraps or other oddments that she was collecting—I think to use as mulch for the miniature garden on her porch. Her toilet has long-term stains on it.

Again, the comparisons with my space remind me how far I am from where I'd like to be. When I first moved into my apartment (eleven years ago) I set myself a schedule of vacuuming once a week and mopping the kitchen floor once a month. It has been a long time since I have stuck to that schedule, or—realistically—to any other schedule instead. Maybe when I get home I can take the inspiration to give the place a deep clean. My toilet is always clean, or at least it has been ever since Kimberly Steele issued her clean-toilet challenge. My counters are usually clean, and I don't cultivate homemade mulch. But I've got to do something about those floors.

What else did I notice?

We went swimming a couple of times at her local recreation center, and I couldn't swim nearly as far as I did the last time I visited her. I have let myself get flabby and out of shape.

We had quite a bit of sex, or at any rate she did. At this point I can't get hard enough to enter her, and the only way I can come is through masturbation. So there wasn't a lot in it for me, but it was (as always) gratifying to be able to do so much for her.

I've been trying to teach her lately about whiskey, so she bought two bottles this week. One of them we finished off between us Wednesday night (along with a bottle of wine); the predictable consequence is that we did very little on Thursday. Friday night we had just one glass each (an ounce or two, judged by sight), with much better results. I reminded her that whiskey is something to drink slowly.

We went out and about, though we managed to miss a couple of the sights we had in mind to visit. We also went to a bookstore, which was a reliable entertainment for both of us. Last night we went out to dinner with some of her friends.

Also we visited a cemetery. Nothing profound and there was no one in particular whose grave we were visiting. We looked for the oldest graves we could find (mostly from the late 19th century) and read the inscriptions. One of them reminded me of a story that Florence King tells in her memoir Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, but Marie hates Florence King so I avoided recounting it. 

So from the perspective of writing a travelogue, there's not a lot to say. From the perspective of general observation, I'm made uneasy by how she is living, and by how closely it matches how I am living.

I don't know if there's more. Maybe after I have mulled a while longer.

    

Fortieth anniversary

Earlier today I checked quickly, and yes—sure enough—I posted something ten years ago today, on the occasion of Wife's and my thirtieth anniversary. 

Now it's ten years later. Our fortieth. And since we are still legally married, I suppose that technically it counts as an anniversary. But this time around I haven't heard anything from her.

Ironically, I even sent her something, though I didn't look at the calendar when I ordered it, and so didn't think of it as an anniversary present. But I called her a couple weeks ago. (Well, it was on July 30, a day after this post.) I was still puzzling over the way that the job offer had dropped into my lap, and I wanted to ask if she had worked magic for it without telling me. (I was thinking of this story here.) She said no, but we talked for a while longer. Then she did a Tarot reading for me on the phone, and told me that I was confronted with two paths and would have to make a choice between them. (Gosh, thanks.)

But after I hung up the phone, I remembered that I had thought more than once that she might like John Michael Greer's The Witch of Criswell. It's a mystery novel, it's about the occult, and the heroine is a young adult. (Does that make it a YA novel?) Wife likes all three of those. So I went online and ordered her a copy … without, as I say, looking at the calendar.

When I got the order confirmation, they estimated delivery on August 12. Only then did I do a double-take, and chuckle.

I sent her a text message to let her know it was coming. She ignored the text message until I followed up with a hand-written letter via snail-mail. I also asked her to let me know when it arrived.

I haven't heard anything from her today, but the online service sent me an email announcing that the book had been delivered. Maybe she'll send me a text tomorrow, or maybe I'll have to send a hand-written letter to get her to acknowledge it. I'm not sure why she won't reply unless shoved. Maybe it's a problem with her phone, but I'm inclined to guess that she has just become so self-absorbed that it never occurs to her to reply to the messages she gets.

(Sigh.)

Yes, I know I'm making uncharitable assumptions about her. At this point I'm pretty sure I have a history of that.

You'd think after all this time it wouldn't be so easy for her to trigger me, wouldn't you? I would. But I guess I'm wrong. 

               

"I find out what I really want …," 3

A while ago, I wrote you about the possibility of a new job that had appeared on my horizon. I interviewed via MS Teams with the recruiter and the hiring manager, and then with the two senior employees in the department. The company made plans for me to fly there at the end of this week, to meet everyone in person and look around at the city. (You remember that this job is about 400 miles away from where I live today.)

Then this morning I sent an email to the recruiter and the hiring manager, saying that I'm really not prepared to move that far away, so I'd like to withdraw my application. I thanked them for their time, and said I was sad to miss meeting them in person. But it wouldn't be fair to let them pay for my travel if I knew I wasn't going to take the job. They were very understanding, and the hiring manager even added, "Wish you the very best in all your future endeavors. You never know, our paths may cross again." 

I had been tending in this direction for a while, and in fact I wrote the email last night. (But then slept before sending it.) What I was not prepared for was how much relief I felt after I clicked Send. Normally I think that words like "it washed over me" are just picturesque and a little over the top. But that's exactly how it felt.

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously." (Ender to Miro, Children of the Mind, chapter 3, by Orson Scott Card.)

The Red Shoes

A week ago, I visited Mother. We talked all weekend, as usual. Partly we talked about this potential job that I've been mulling, because I wanted to assess how tough it would be on her if I moved 400 miles away to take it. Her answer was basically what Brother had said: it would be sad to have me farther away, but not devastating. (And, knowing my Mother, it would have to be pretty damned devastating before she would ever admit it.)

But somewhere along the line she mentioned casually that "The Red Shoes" (1948) had been Father's favorite movie, back when he was alive. Whenever it came on the Late Show on television, he made sure to see it; and then he would talk about it long after. She said she thought it was deeply meaningful for him.

It must have been. But what does that tell me about him, that I didn't already know? Is there anything?

Well, maybe. Of course he was an actor, not a dancer. And he was dedicated to his craft. Even if he was playing forgettable roles in silly, summer stock shows he approached them with professionalism: to portray the character the best way he could, and to give the audience more than they had paid for. I remember the theater critic who wrote for the local paper when I was in high school used to roast the local theater company for failing to bring out the subtleties of "Charlie's Aunt" or "The Mousetrap" … and he always qualified his scathing remarks by saying, "… except for [Mr. Tanatu], who delivers, as always, the solid, polished performances we have come to expect from him."

He loved the fine arts. In a sense it's funny to say that, because I don't remember him going out to art galleries a lot. And while my parents had a large collection of LPs [that means "long-playing vinyl records to be played at at 33⅓ revolutions per minute," for those unfamiliar with the term] it seems like they played a lot of music when I was a baby or young child, and not so much when I was older. It is as if their music-playing dropped off sharply when they reached their mid-thirties. (Maybe there were external factors involved, because of things going on in their lives. I can only guess.) But I know that he thought of himself and described himself as someone who loved the fine arts, so I'll give him credit for that here. (That self-understanding also caused him problems in other ways, as I discuss in this post here.)

Answer to Kimberly

Last Saturday, I left a question for Kimberly Steele about this job that has come up through my former employer, BehemothCo.

Kimberly, bless her, responded here rather than just deleting my question.

I replied to her answer: briefly here in a comment on her blog, and at greater length in a post here on mine.

So far, so good.

And then, in a burst of generosity not to be imagined, Kimberly replied to my blogpost in a comment here, which runs as follows.

Kimberly Steele here, thanks for sharing this. It seems to me your Tarot are telling you the same things as my Ogham. From what I can tell, you sincerely want to take the job and you want to move away, but both your Tarot and my Ogham are saying you would come to regret it. If you need to take the job and relocate because it is your heart's desire, then go ahead. Sometimes we can only learn certain lessons the hard way.

You also have other choices -- one is taking a local job or joining a local volunteer group or other Meetup for structure. You could also look into living and working in someplace that is not related to this job. The point is you have options even if you feel emotionally blinded to them right now.

Pause with me for a minute to appreciate what this comment means to me.

The frustrations of divination

I told you all about the possible job that I've been discussing with a recruiter from my former employer (affectionately nicknamed BehemothCo for the purposes of this blog). At this point, I have spoken to the recruiter, to the hiring manager, and (just this afternoon) to the two most senior employees in the department.

I have also—this should be no surprise—been consulting divination. The problem is that the message I get from divination is consistently different from the message that I get from my regular human interactions. But of course divination doesn't speak English, and there's always the possibility that it's not true. But I remember enough times in the past that it has described reality that I am reluctant to dismiss it. This means that I am stuck.

What do I want?

Yesterday I spent several hours reviewing my resume and preparing for my interview. I had the interview. Then I wrote up my notes, looked up some relevant data online, went to the store, and talked with Brother on the phone for an hour afterwards. It was a very productive day.

Today I accomplished bugger-all, except for sending a couple of (very belated) thank-you notes for the interviews, and going to Sangha in the evening. Maybe it's just a reaction against having actually achieved something yesterday, but I also think that my compulsively doom-scrolling Twitter might be a way to avoid thinking about what I really want.

Do I want a new job? I don't know. But I do think I have stumbled on the worst way to find out.

A new job?

About a week ago, a recruiter contacted me out of the blue. Normally I ignore recruiters, because I think of myself as retired. But this one had a very unusual story.

• In the first place, she works for the same global Behemoth corporation that I used to work for up until our office closed in 2021. 
• In the second, place, she wasn't calling because "my background matched her needs" blah, blah, blah. She was trying to contact me personally, Hosea Tanatu, by name.
• In the third place, she represents a location which was just recently acquired by BehemothCo, and which is in the process of being integrated. This definitely sounded interesting. I have been through two corporate acquisitions in my career to date, and I'm starting to think that navigating that unusual terrain is something I'm good at.

So I took her phone call last week. Then she set up an interview with the hiring manager: that happened yesterday. Where do things stand now?

I'm still kind of interested. It involves work that is similar to what I used to do, but not quite the same. So I'd have to learn something new. It involves setting up a whole new program, which in turn means I'd have to navigate the BehemothCo bureaucracy to get things done. But I got good at that, back in the day. 

It also means I'd have to move. The new plant is something like three or four hundred miles from Beautiful City, and the job is necessarily on-site. Now of course I moved when Wife and I separated and we sold our house. But that was just, … like, … across town. (Well, strictly it was from the suburbs into town. In any event it wasn't far.) I have lived in the general area of Beautiful City since Wife and I moved here in 1990. That's thirty-four years, for the arithmetically-challenged. More than half my life. I own a lot less stuff than the two of us owned when we were moving out of our house, so it shouldn't be a big deal. But emotionally it's a big deal, because Beautiful City has become home to me in a deep way.

Also this move would put me farther away from Mother. I spoke with Brother last night and he thinks she is pretty stable. So from his perspective the main consequence of my moving farther away would be that it would be "sad" I wasn't around more. But I want to discuss it with her directly, as well.

Oh, … I asked the hiring manager where she had gotten my name? Turns out she was meeting a lot of people in BehemothCo who work in her area, and one of them was the guy I called "Bill" in this post here. He and I were never collocated; but over the years we worked together a fair bit. And apparently he told her, "This is a long shot, because I don't know if he's even working any more; but the guy you really want to hire is Hosea Tanatu, and here's how to find him …." So that was flattering.

The flattery is probably another reason that I'm interested.

Anyway, I don't know what the hiring manager is thinking right now, and I don't know for sure that I'll take it if offered. But I'm mulling it.  

               

Alone

There is no one I can discuss this election with.

I'm not sure when I first realized this. But my friends—I mean Marie, Schmidt, and Debbie (I don't have a lot of friends)—and my family are all 100% wrapped up in the Dominant Narrative: Joe Biden may be old but he is the Savior of Democracy, Donald Trump is a would-be authoritarian, and Robert Kennedy is a nutcase. 

Me, by contrast? A couple years ago I started following Bari Weiss and Scott Adams on Twitter because I thought they sounded intelligent. But you know how it is with gateway drugs. Pretty soon I had added Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Abigail Shrier, and Robert Kennedy. Sure, I tried to soften the impact by also following John Cleese, Bill Maher, and James Surowiecki, but it was never enough. It was only a matter of time before I was following CatGirl Kulak, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dave Portnoy, and the University of Austin. You know—the hard stuff.

This doesn't even mean that I have been completely red-pilled. Mostly it means that I have come to know—like Socrates—how little I really know about what is going on in the world. When I read accounts from the Right about What Really Happened on January 6, 2021, or about the cartons of documents in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, I realize that the political parties in this country are divided not by values but by basic facts. One side will assert that this-and-that happened, and it was bad. You would expect the other side to argue that it was good, but No! In fact, the other side agrees that IF this-and-that HAD happened, it would have been bad; but in fact what happened was something else totally different!

Not a normal election

This afternoon, Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and someone took a shot at him. The shot apparently nicked his ear, which means it narrowly avoided doing much worse damage. Trump stood up again to gesture to the crowd before the Secret Service dragged him to safety.

People are saying, "That's it—he's won the election." Maybe, but the election is nearly four months from now. That's a long time in politics.

Other people—mostly Trump's political opponents—are saying loudly that "Political violence has no place in America." Clearly these are people who don't understand America very well. I've discussed this point before: for example, here and here, and to a lesser extent here and even here. Sorry, but in some ways we are all about political violence, even as we repeat the motto that "Ballots are better than bullets."

Blast from the past: Gossip

This evening in Sangha we talked about gossip and I suddenly remembered a habit from early in my marriage with Wife.

It didn't start out that way. But for our Dharma study, we read the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. Then as we began to discuss them, someone (maybe I can call her Annie, in case she needs a name) commented that she had a problem with the Ninth Training.* Specifically, it's not that she thinks there is anything wrong with the behavior that it recommends—"We will … [refrain] from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence …. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure"—but that she has a lot of trouble living up to it. Fundamentally, she enjoys gossip! She added that she doesn't really know why she likes it so much, but there it is. It's just a fact of life that she has to deal with.

Of course I had (and have) no idea why in particular she enjoys gossip, and I didn't pretend otherwise. But the whole conversation put me in mind of the early years of my marriage to Wife. So when it came around to my turn, here's the story I told the Sangha.

What was Flora like, anyway?

This is not a picture of Flora! This is a royalty-free
picture of a dark-haired woman from the Internet.

While I was writing the previous post, I scrolled back through my old emails looking for a couple of data points. In the process, I stumbled across an email from Marie back in 2020 that included the following description:

It suddenly occurred to me … that there are in fact certain obvious points of similarity between my mom and the woman who occupied most of my erotic imagination for years, long ago.

(Put differently, between the two very different women who occupied most of my erotic imagination during my youth.)  

Beautiful, check.  To men, check.  Dark-haired and a bit exotic-looking, check.  A bit of the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" glamour, check.  Brighter than most of her contemporaries, check.  Unwilling to settle for provincial dullness...

Ulp.  Hosea, love, this is sort of unsettling.

So maybe this helps you picture her.

I also found that way back when Marie briefly re-contacted Flora—when Flora's reply confirmed that she had a new boyfriend (now that her husband had died) but hinted tactfully (at least to my ears) that they weren't monogamous yet—I did indeed call that implication to Marie's attention. Marie, for her part, thought that I was overthinking things.

               

Flora and Marie

I talked with Marie this morning, and we discussed Flora a little bit. I told her that I had looked online for an obituary, but all I found was a date of death. (Last December.) Marie said, "There was a time when I would have known when it happened, but that was years ago."

"Do you mean you would have known without reading anything or being told in any way?" (Compare, e.g., this post.)

"Yes."

"When I was searching, I did find an obituary for her husband a few years ago. [He was a good bit older than Flora.] It said he left three children. Were they hers, or was she a second wife?"

"She was a second wife. Actually she wanted children of her own, but I think they were adults by the time she married their father so she never got a chance to raise them as children."

"And her husband didn't want any more at that point?"

"Or they decided not to have any, yes."

So I guess I can add Flora to the sad list from this post here: marrying a significantly older spouse, and no children. But wait!—as the ads say—there's more!

Another classmate died

I got the latest issue today of my college alumni magazine. Another classmate is dead.

That makes five, now, that I know of: not all the same year, but close enough. Many of us hung out together, at least from time to time.

Today's news is about a woman I've mentioned a few times before. When I first wrote about her I called her "L" (not to be confused with the sex-blogger formerly known as L!), but at this point I think I have gone back and changed all those references to call her "Flora" instead. So "Flora" it is. And I've written about her in a number of posts: for example, she shows up in some of Marie's recollections (here, here, here, and here) and also in one of mine (much tamer, here). 

Flora was a science major, back when we were all undergraduates. Somehow (maybe because we were all young) many of the stories I remember about her have to do with sex. 

• When I got to know her (through R–, one of my circle of friends), she had already had an affair with one of the science professors. 
• During the time we were in school, she settled into regularly fucking both R– and Mac (q.v.)—though to be fair, I learned not long before graduation that R– and Mac were both fucking each other as well. (Yes, they are both guys. It's amazing the things people will say casually when everyone's on MDA.) 
• She wanted to fuck Schmidt, who really wasn't interested. He had determined that "Everyone who fucks Flora goes crazy," and he didn't want to go crazy. He later said that at one point he had to make a point to fall asleep at a strategic moment, while she was trying to seduce him.
• Marie remained friends with Flora after that time, and fell in love with her for a while. Marie tried to go to bed with Flora, but it never worked out—as she describes (with some anxiety) in the selections linked above. 

Not long after Marie and I got back together, she [Marie] contacted Flora to ask her some questions about relationship-management, and to catch up. It turns out that in the intervening decades, Flora had married and her husband had later died. At that point she was seeing someone new. The way she described it to Marie was delicate, but to my ears it translated as "We are fucking but we're not monogamous yet—or at least I'm not." (I don't remember if I ever discussed this with Marie.) I never heard Marie mention her again. I thought of getting in touch with her independently, but it felt like Marie discouraged that.

Anyway, now she's dead.

Debbie is in town

Debbie has been in my state since the 12th, visiting family and friends. She has been here in Beautiful City since a week later, arriving the evening of the 19th. 

Whenever Debbie and I see each other, I always notify Marie ahead of time. But this time I somehow forgot to say anything until we texted each other the morning of the 20th about getting together later in the day. Then I suddenly thought, "Oh shit!" and sent Marie a quick email with all the plans that I knew about up till then.

Hey love,

Just a note that I forgot to mention before. Debbie's visiting [this state] for a couple weeks. She was in [another city] for a while, and last night drove all the way [here], where she's staying in the house of some of her friends from [the UU church that hosts our Sangha]. I have not seen her yet. 

I got a text from her this morning, and she has come down with a cold (ugh) but is testing negative for COVID. So we might have dinner or something, if we can find a place with tables outside. I forget how long she is in town, but this is not her last stop. (Sometime next week she'll go on retreat with a Buddhist Fellowship that she's connected to, down in Big City.) But I think she's here for a few days.

As I say, I didn't think about it when you and I were talking, because it was driven clean out of my head by our exciting discussion of [your current writing project]. (Actually I mean that seriously!) But when I got her text a few minutes ago, I remembered that I should drop you a note before seeing her. (And as noted, if we can find a suitable set of tables that probably means dinner-time.)

So far, so good. And all of it was true, as of the time I sent it. Marie replied briefly.

Oh, thank you for keeping me posted, love!!!

Very considerate of you.  I hope you do get the opportunity!

Blast from the past: The Baptists and the rest of us

I've explained how Wife started attending Christian churches, and how she ended up at an Evangelical Baptist church. (OK, strictly speaking I don't have a story about how she ended up there in particular. But she was church-shopping, and that's the one she settled on.) I've told you a story which let you know that the Senior Pastor was willing to go out on a limb and try something unusual. How did the rest of us end up there?

[What follows is an account based on a long email I wrote to Marie in May of 2016, with minor additions or adjustments where suitable.]

Once Wife settled on a church, she started asking us to go with her. The boys had no special interest, but they were still little kids at this point. Clearly it wasn't up to them. I had no special interest either. Wife insisted that it made her look bad if we didn't come with her. I told her this was silly, but I didn't have the vocabulary to explain that the whole idea was absurd. Really, Babe, it's not all about you.

Now, this was while I was out of work. [Let's call it 2003.] And Wife was being particularly unsupportive: indeed, it felt like not only did I have to be looking for work 8 hours a day but I had to be managing her anxiety (and her consequent shrewishness and regular threats to divorce me) something like 16 hours a day. It wasn't much fun. Anyway, I finally sat her down to talk earnestly, and made a deal with her: I would attend church with her (and put the boys in Sunday School) if she would commit to behaving in a Christ-like way. (And of course I meant this in the sense that her church was teaching her to understand the word "Christ-like": I certainly didn't want her to behave like the rabble-rouser who smashed up the tables of the money-changers in the Temple!) She said she didn't think she could possibly do that; I said "Of course not, not under your own power. So if you succeed in doing it anyway, that's proof that God is helping you; and in that case God must be real and I'm willing to go to church." Well, the bargain didn't hold forever—after a while she had started an everything-but-physical-sex emotional affair with the Lead Tenor in the church choir—but for a while it bought me a bit of peace. So sure, hell, why not? Besides, this gave me a whole new vocabulary with which to try to talk her out of her crazier and more destructive behaviors.

 [Now that I think about it, I give the details of the contract itself in this post here. Go read it. But I don't talk about the aftermath.]

Blast from the past: Stigmata

Strictly speaking this story isn't necessary to explain how we ended up attending a Baptist church for a few years. That story will be adequately covered by the previous post and the next one. But it fits nicely between them, because it took place after Wife had started regularly attending the Evangelical Baptist Church near us, and before the rest of us started attending as well. And maybe—just maybe—it might help add some layers of nuance to the generally dismal and dispiriting picture that I have painted of Wife in this blog. (See also, for example, this post here.)

One Sunday morning, Wife left for church at the normal time. By this time she had passed through the Pentecostal churches of he church-shopping phase, and had settled down at an Evangelical Baptist church not too far away from us. While she was gone, the boys and I did whatever we did. I assume they played in the back of the house somewhere. I might have done the breakfast dishes, or just sat in the living room to read.

At more or less the usual time, Wife's car pulled back into our driveway, a little sloppily. A minute or two went by. Then Wife opened the door and came out of the car, stumbling and lurching as if she were drunk. She got up to our stoop, came in the front door, and lurched her way into the living room, where she collapsed on the sofa. Her speech was not very coherent. And when I went over to ask if she was OK, I saw that the palms of her hands were a bloody mess.

So I wiped off her hands—I don't remember seeing a visible wound, or at least there was no fresh blood coming out once I cleaned them off—and asked her what happened. What follows is her story, as I remember it.

Blast from the past: Wife and the Baptists

Did I ever explain how Wife—who started our marriage as a Wiccan—ended up attending a Baptist church? I don't remember if I ever did, but it looks like I didn't. On the other hand, the other day I was looking through some of my old emails, and I found one of my old emails to Marie in which (among other things) I discussed about half of it. At the time I thought I should paste that into here, and then I realized I should go one step further and give you the whole story. Or as much of it as I can remember these many years later.

So this all started in … well, I think it was the early 2000's. Wife started getting terrible migraine headaches. Or rather, she'd always had migraine headaches from time to time, but they were getting worse and more frequent. So she went to her doctor, who ran some tests and finally took images of her head. When the images came back, he informed her that she was suffering from pseudotumor cerebri. This is a condition where some blockage in one of the vessels in her brain stopped the spinal fluid from draining out the way it should. So she was developing a pool of spinal fluid in her brain, that was acting like a brain tumor. It wasn't a real brain tumor, because it wasn't a growth of excess brain tissue. It was just a pool of spinal fluid. But it put pressure on the rest of the brain just like a brain tumor would have done. Hence the name "pseudotumor cerebri."

Great, so now Wife had a diagnosis. Heaven knows she collected diagnoses the way some people collect baseball cards, and now here was one more. So she asked her doctor what could be done about it? 

Her doctor suggested that she put her affairs in order.

Bad habits, 3

A couple days ago I got an idea for a post to write here, and it turns out I've already written it—or at any rate the first half of it. (You can find it here.) It was going to be about how I've gotten into a lot of bad habits lately. Self-destructive or suicidal habits, if I don't correct them. Habits that are guaranteed to shorten my lifespan. I'm too isolated from others. I don't exercise enough and I'm putting on weight again. My alcohol consumption is on its way up. (In 2021, I averaged 3.3 drinks per day; in 2022, 3.6; in 2023, 4.1; in 2024 to date, 5.2.) I do some volunteer work for the professional society that covers the profession I used to follow, but I feel grumpy and alienated about it. It's been months since I cleaned my apartment. And so on.

Why do I feel no push to do anything better?

Well, in a sense I do feel a little push. Otherwise I wouldn't feel bad about it and write you now. But it's not a strong enough push to overcome the lethargy that holds me in place.

Most immediately, I don't have anyone in my face, that I have to report to. I don't have anyone making me do anything. I'm sure Marie would be happy to offer to nag me if I asked her to, but I don't want to ask her to.

Besides, when I bang this drum too loudly there's another side of my brain that fights back. "Geez, what do you want, anyway? I already set myself a major life goal, and I hit it. Isn't that good enough? Can't I relax now?"

I think the answer is No, it's not really good enough. I think the answer is that, as long as I'm alive I should keep pushing forward.

But it sounds like a lot of work. 

          

Paying Alfred

I wrote you about getting a call from my old college buddy Alfred, who asked me for a couple thousand dollars. It took me a couple of days to come to a decision, but in the end I wrote him a check for $500. 

My analysis of his situation continues to be that there is a lot he isn't saying. As I explained in my last post, the story he gave doesn't work because the timing is wrong: he says he spent a bunch of money looking after his mother, but she died several years ago. What has he been doing since then, that has gotten him into a financial crunch NOW? The first time I asked this, I got an artful non-answer. When I pointed out that he hadn't answered—and also said, Fine, don't tell me, I don't need to know"—he added that yes, there was more to it: his tutoring business had fallen off during the pandemic. I did not bother to remind him that the pandemic was four years ago, so this explanation is as bad as the other. The timing is wrong. So one way or another, he is not telling the whole story. And if it is that important for him to hide parts of the story, those parts must be pretty ugly. I assume that it's probably something like drugs, gambling, or—at the absolute best—skull-cracking financial stupidity.

How did I make my decision? Partly I just sat and mulled. And partly I read Tarot for it. You recall that I started reading Tarot something like three years ago. What's more, even if you think that the cards really are random, there is an advantage for someone like me—who is often afflicted with indecision—to use an external tool like the Tarot to come to closure. Sometimes, after all, any decision is better than no decision. (For a more thorough account of the mechanisms by which divination works—including at least two mechanisms that even the most hardened skeptic would acknowledge—see this article from October 2016 by John Michael Greer.) I won't reproduce pictures for all the cards that I laid out, but I asked a number of questions and the answers seemed pretty consistent.

If you think that reading Tarot is dumb, feel free to skip the rest of this post. (Though there is a little more narrative towards the end.)

An odd phone call

I got a peculiar phone call yesterday morning. It was from a guy I knew in college—so, forty-some years ago. We were buddies then, but I've really had almost no communication with him since. Oh—one exception: when I went to my fortieth class reunion two years ago (as mentioned briefly in this post), he was active in planning the event so I communicated with him a fair bit in the run-up to the reunion. And we chatted several times at the reunion itself, catching up on the last forty years. Although … now that I think about it, he really didn't tell me much about his life, or his circumstances. But he was good at asking conversational questions.

I'm going to have to give this fellow a name, so let me call him Alfred, after the great Alfred E. Neuman. (There are … reasons … that this isn't a crazy name to choose.) Anyway, Alfred sent me a text message Friday asking for a call over the weekend. He said he wanted my advice urgently on something. So we set up a call for 10:00 am on Saturday. He was cordial and pleasant, asking after my news and then asking what other college alumni I'm still in touch with. I told him I talk to Marie and to Schmidt, and he asked about them. Then he asked about my professional work, and about my professional opinion about a topic that has been in the news a lot lately. By this time we had spent almost an hour in conversation, and it felt like we hadn't gotten to the point yet.

Then he asked me for money.

Why publish?

This post follows on from one I wrote two months ago, called "Why Write?"

I woke up at 3:30 this morning and toddled into the bathroom. While I was there, I put something together.

You all know that I've long had a fantasy of writing and publishing stuff. (See, for example, oh I don't know, maybe here and here—or, more recently, here and here.) You know that sometimes I have played with the idea of letting it all go and forgetting about it. (See, for example, here.) And you remember that more recently I have gotten external advice that says, No, you actually need to get your ass in gear and do it. (See especially here.) Not that I've made any progress, but it's the latest input I've gotten.

But why? In the long run, what does it matter? In my earlier post "Why Write?" I quoted one expert on self-publication that there are two reasons to publish: Money and Fame. But I don't really need the money (though of course it would be nice). And remember what Anne Roiphe says about fame:

That is the moment I began to despise the idea of fame. What does it do for the bearer of the laurel? Who cares if your name is in the paper? Who cares if you are mentioned as one of the top-ten cyclists, boxers, batters, painters, poets, artists, fly fishermen in the world? Who cares if your name is written in history books? …. Jack wanted to be Michelangelo painting on the ceiling, lying on his back on the scaffolding. Good old Michelangelo. Good for us who stare up at the hand of God reaching toward Adam. But actually Michelangelo doesn't know that crowds line up and pay good money to enter the room to see his masterpiece, and if he had known, would his breakfast have tasted any better, his loves been any stronger, his life any longer?

So why bother? Who needs it? And in particular, why does Kimberly's ogham say I have to get it done?

I think it's not because there's anything special about writing, nor about publication. It's not because there's necessarily anything special about achievement, per se. The problem is with me.

Jack and Jill have moved away

Jack and Jill moved out some time last week or the week before. I'm not quite sure when. Today the couple that used to be my downstairs neighbors (in this post, for example) started to move into their place.

Of course it's more complicated than that. The couple that I'm calling my "downstairs neighbors"—they need names, so how about if I call them Rick and Rory?—moved away a year or two ago, because they needed more space. When they moved out, Jack and Jill rented the apartment that Rick and Rory had just vacated, to use it as a "guest room" when one or the other set of in-laws visited. So actually it has been empty much of the time. 

Then a few months ago, Jack and Jill finally bought a house. Coincidentally, Rick and Rory were going to have to leave their new place for some reason that I don't remember. They posted on Facebook to ask if anyone knew of a place they could rent. Jill saw their post and called them to ask, "Hey, do you want our place? We bought a house, so we'll be moving out soon." And so it worked out.

There's more. You remember the apartment downstairs from me, that Jack and Jill rented as a "guest room"? They haven't relinquished that yet. See, they want to do a bunch of remodeling on their house, but the permitting process here takes forever. So they have moved into the new house without the remodeling done (so that Rick and Rory could move in); but when the permits are finally approved (maybe in a few months more) they plan to move out of the house and into the apartment while the remodeling and reconstruction is done. Then finally, when all the dust has settled (literally and figuratively), Jack and Jill will move back into their house and relinquish the apartment downstairs from me. When she described all this to me, Jill estimated that that transition might be a couple years in the future yet.

What will this mean for me? I don't know. Of course it means that the crazy parties Jack and Jill regularly throw will all have a different venue. But that won't really affect me because I haven't been going to them for a while. There was a while when I was sneaking out of them (such as here and here); and then, logically enough, Jack and Jill stopped inviting me. I don't resent that: it was the obvious thing for them to do, and I'm less uncomfortable as a result. I don't remember Rick and Rory socializing quite as ostentatiously when they were here before, but the have friends. And those friends did visit from time to time. I guess we'll see.

Of course, I've become such a hermit these days that it really doesn't matter how much or how often they entertain. It's not likely to affect me one way or the other. I'm coming to think this profound solitude is a bad thing, but I don't know what I want to do about it.

               

This ad really happened to us!

I saw this advertisement—for gun control, apparently—yesterday or the day before. Probably it was on Twitter, though I'm no longer sure. But it really happened at our house, when Son 1 and Son 2 were little.

Fortunately the dildo in question wasn't as … shapely … as the ones in the commercial. It was purely cylindrical, with no distinguishing features. Yes, it had batteries, but the boys assumed that it was "an automatic sword!" (I think they meant "electric," but no matter.) Anyway, they found it under Wife's side of the bed, and started jumping on our bed playing with it. Wife was out of the house somewhere; I think I was in the study paying bills. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that after a minute or so I shooed them out to play somewhere else on the grounds that jumping on the bed was against the rules. They dropped the "electric sword" and I put it back.

I forget whether I ever told Wife what happened.

                

Do men profit from marriage?

The second depressing article I read this evening was a long LinkedIn post under the heading "LES HOMMES NE PROFITENT PAS DU MARIAGE" ["Men don't profit from marriage"]. The English translation runs like this,

MEN DON'T PROFIT FROM MARRIAGE

1. He's 70 years old.

2. He has retired from active work.

3. He worked all his life to raise his children.

4. He has deprived himself of the pleasures of life to pay for expensive school fees and living expenses for his children.

5. They are now well-off in Europe, Australia, America, etc.

6. His wife, 62 years old, moved to live with their children.

7. He stays alone at home.

8. His children hardly call him.

9. He must start the single life again.

10. He fights high blood pressure and other ailments related to old age.

11. How long will he survive alone?

12. This is the reality for most monogamous working-class men: their old age is often lonely and, in many cases, sad.

13. No matter how good the man is, women tend to love their children more than their husbands. The older he gets, the less they seem to serve him.

14. So, what do men really benefit from marriage?

15. They sacrifice so much but receive little recognition for their hard work, while the woman seems to reap all the benefits.

It's a man's world, they said, but it's really for women and children. Dear men, this could be your situation over the next few decades. What are you doing about it? What is your retirement plan?

Take care of yourself as much as your family. Love yourself.

Learn or perish.

Again, really depressing—not least because there are elements in the description that could apply to me and to my life.

Does divorce make women hotter?

Wow, browsing the Internet this evening I ran across two really depressing articles.

The first is from The Free Press. It's an article by Kat Rosenfield that asks women, "Does Divorce Make You Hotter?" And apparently there is a whole theme in our culture today dedicated to the proposition that divorce is empowering and "badass". Not some divorces, mind you. Not divorces from abusive bums who put their wives' lives at risk. But all divorces, divorces in general, Divorce as such. And it is empowering because once divorced, a woman can attend costume parties in her lingerie, drink Jell-O shots, and look for handsome young men to fuck. I guess this is what empowerment looks like.

To be fair, the author of the article doesn't buy this definition of empowerment, and recognizes that divorce can come with a lot of anguish and regret as well. Some of the comments on the article seem to assume that she is endorsing the opinions she describes, but honestly she makes it obvious that she is merely diagnosing.

For my part, I can't imagine why anyone would find divorce exciting or empowering. It might be necessary—I still believe that my own separation from Wife was necessary—but it is always a kind of failure. It is true that I have written about the virtue of normalizing failure (see here, for example), and at a philosophical level I still think that kind of detachment can help. But that is a far cry from glamorizing or celebrating the thing.

Maybe I don't have a lot to say that the author hasn't already said, or at least implied. But I find it depressing that this attitude exists in the world for her to write about.