Looks like a big year

It looks like this is going to be a big year.

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I went to the Ecosophian Convention in June. That was big, right there.

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I mentioned a while ago that I'm back to work on my book. My goal is to self-publish successfully this year. I don't expect to make a lot of money at it, although it would be nice if Fate proved me wrong. But it explains an obscure, niche topic. The natural audience is probably not large, and I've never been very good at publicizing myself. The goals that I hope to achieve include:

• proving that I can set and achieve a long-term goal;
• learning about the self-publication process, so I can plan to publish some of the other stuff bubbling in my head;
• opening up the possibility for my sons that they can achieve things in life above and beyond holding a regular job, because it is always easier to do a thing if you see someone else do it first. (To be clear, my own father was rather weak on the "holding a regular job" part, so that was the first thing I wanted to model for them!)

But there is more. Turns out that the world doesn't revolve around me. 😀

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Wife moved from living with Son1 to living near Son2. Son1 and Son2 organized the whole move between themselves, and are handling the aftermath.

Son1 will be moving in with Dorcas soon. Son2 proposed to Beryl.

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Debbie has had multiple spells of atrial fibrillation. Already this year she has had a device inserted into her heart to help regularize its behavior, and she is on medication to help with that as well. We still talk regularly every Friday afternoon, but more and more those conversations tend to drift over to talking about death. She's still making plans for the future, but more and more she talks about wanting things to be in order by the time she is no longer there to order them.

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Because Debbie has been thinking about death, she has been pushing our Unitarian Sangha to establish a Care-Taking Council. I wrote about the very first steps ... setting up an exploratory committee to review the idea ... back in 2025. But most of the activity will take place this year.

Also related to that, this spring our Sangha held its first ever Day of Mindfulness. We are slowly stretching out of a fixed and unchanging shape that we've held for some 20 years.

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Marie's favorite nephew was arrested by TSA. Turns out he was on a cruise with his parents (Marie's sister Cuñada, and her current husband). TSA explored his tablet, and found pornography on it. Some of the pornography involved subjects below the legal age of consent. This translates to five years in prison—automatically—without the possibility of parole. Marie is beside herself—partly at the fate of her nephew, of course, but partly because of the nature of the offense. She has not said so, but my guess is that years ago (before we got back together and she started to re-evaluate her attitudes towards sex), she would have approved of such a law. Today she hates it because it endangers Nephew. There are probably other complexities as well ... Marie generates emotional complexity effortlessly.

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I'm in a fight with my professional organization. I don't know why I care, and some days I don't. It's not like I'm working any more. My membership expires this month. Maybe I'll just let it go. Still, if I do, that's another milestone for this year.

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At the end of June, Schmidt wrecked his car. He described it this way:

"Driving to town for groceries and prescriptions.  Just a mile or two out of town, got distracted trying to let a wasp out the window, drifted just enough to hit a mailbox that (due to prior vandalism I suppose) was anchored with steel and concrete like a damn skyscraper and totally wrecked the car.  Flipped, rolled, slid... good thing I'm in the habit of doing only 60 on that part of the road!  Seat belt & air bags did their job and I crawled out the (pulverized) passenger side window with just some cuts and bruises.  Somebody came along just as I got out and used his cell phone to call 911 -- I was still dazedly trying to collect myself and wondering how to use my phone without  my glasses (knocked off and god-knew-where).... Cue EMTs, Highway patrol, tow truck -- tow operator finally found my glasses for me (way in the back of what's left of the car) so I can see again."

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My former boss wrote me that he is afraid of being laid off, because the huge company that we both worked for is doing lots of business except not in his country.

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Numerologically, 2026 is a "1-year" because 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1. According to John Michael Greer, 1-years are: 

"Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year."

All-righty then!

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Have I forgotten anything? Maybe. Probably

Is there more that I don't know about? Gosh, I hope not!

           

What was and what might have been

This post is a little different from everything that has come so far—over 1500 of them. This post is deliberately, consciously fiction. But that shouldn't be so strange. I've used this venue to make forays into poetry, philosophy, armchair psychology—even meming, for heaven's sake!—in addition to all my usual whining. Why not fiction?

"Roughly he grabbed her heaving shoulders,
pulling her down onto the bed and ...."

So to be clear, what I have linked in the pages below never really happened. It is purely fiction. More than that, it is actually pornography, or at any rate an attempt at pornography. I don't know if it really works, but that's how it should be graded. If it doesn't work, leave me a comment to let me know why, or what I need to fix.

Having said all that, the story is nonetheless based on an event that really happened. Back in the summer of 1992, Marie undertook a cross-country road trip. She stopped in for one weekend to visit Wife and me. (I mention the visit briefly in this post.) The visit was fun, but its long-term consequences poisoned my friendship with Marie for a while, because Wife told her lies about us that led Marie to offer to be my side-piece. I was already uncomfortable with Wife sleeping around, and I was pretty sure I was in favor of monogamy on principle (even though I also wanted to get into the pants of Girlfriend 1, who wanted nothing to do with me). So I was troubled and confused over the issue, and this meant that I handled Marie's offer very clumsily. She was hurt, and took my rejection very much to heart. When we finally got back together in 2016, we had a lot of damage to work through.

But recently I began to wonder, What if Wife had just told Marie the truth? And then what if, on top of that, she had been a lot more cunning and skillful at human relations in general? Could we have had a different outcome?

The story that follows is one possible answer to that question.

Bad at chess

I was talking with Marie today, and she mentioned in the course of the discussion that she had never learned to play chess very well, not past the most rudimentary level. Neither have I, and it was no big deal. But then she told me why not: she found that she had a very low tolerance for losing! And of course the only way to learn to play chess well is to play a lot of it even though you start off playing badly; and that, in turn, means accepting that you are going to lose an awful lot of the time.

She also acknowledged that this low tolerance for losing might have made her life harder in other ways, but we didn't pursue it too far. (I still remembered sitting up talking a few nights ago, and didn't want to push anything too hard.) But I did start to wonder—silently, in my own mind—how far this preference had affected her other choices in life? In a post last year, I toyed with the idea of picturing Marie as a kind of atheist nun; but is it possible that she chose that path simply in order to reduce the number of direct contests she would have to fight? After all, if you never enter the arena, you can't lose. (You can't win either, but it doesn't feel to me like winning is nearly so important to Marie as not-losing.) 

Or consider her fears for many years about my continued friendship with Debbie, fears that seem only to have been put to rest recently. Of course it is more or less typical for a girlfriend to worry if her boyfriend keeps in touch with one of his exes. So maybe what is interesting is all the things that Marie didn't do. She didn't force the issue, or give me any kind of ultimatum. She didn't ask a lot of questions about Debbie, though sometimes if the subject came up she would cautiously ask one or two things before dropping the subject. Only once do I remember her ever criticizing Debbie (when I told her about how Debbie contracted COVID-19 ... I guess I never told that story here); after that I was careful to say less about Debbie and for a while she was careful to ask less. And she never overtly tried to compete.

In other words, Marie lived in fear that she was going to lose to Debbie, but she never did any of the common things that would have forced the contest out into the open. And maybe this was because she was afraid she might lose, and couldn't handle losing.

So what about me? I have remarked before that Marie and I have a lot in common, and that one thing we share is that our accomplishments are far smaller than our talents would lead you to guess. Do I share her unwillingness to lose?

It's possible. And after my ruminations last year on the concept of the Jungian Shadow (see here and especially here), I want to be careful about dogmatically asserting that I don't have this or that unappealing trait. There's always the risk that I have it but don't want to admit it.

At the same time, I don't think the data support it. Am I fearful of other things? Heavens, yes. But maybe not losing, at least not per se. When I was in high school, for example, I joined the cross-country team because I wanted to get in shape. I always came in last in all our races, but I knew in advance I was going to. It wasn't a problem. And in my long marriage to Wife, I learned that when she worked herself into a towering rage, the best thing I could do was to lose the argument. When we separated, I lost the marriage. I have put myself in the position of losing things a number of times—not as often as it would take to learn to play good chess, maybe, but still. So it is at any rate not obvious to me that this specific liability is one of mine.

Of course I have plenty of others, so there's no risk I'll run out. But it was interesting to think about.  

 

Sexualized politics

Marie and I had the strangest argument tonight ... admittedly after both of us had had way too much to drink. On the one hand it gave me what I think are some useful insights into how she thinks about politics. On the other hand, it made me despair of ever reaching a common understanding with her on the subject. It's not just about correcting this or that factual misunderstanding that she might have picked up somewhere along the way. For her ever to understand the way I see American politics—or as an alternate goal, using the famous Straussian criterion, for her ever to understand her opponents as they understand themselves—will require a total demolition and reconstruction of the furniture in her mind related to politics. It would have to start with massive cognitive dissonance and proceed through total breakdown. I don't want to inflict that on her, and I don't foresee it. But this means she will be a prisoner of her peculiar delusions for the rest of her life.

It all started when I was talking about something else. I was describing how people interpret moral topics, and I said that people respond far more than they realize to the intuitive picture in their head. So when a Malefactor does something bad, you get some people who see him intuitively as a saber-toothed tiger or a cave bear—that is to say, as a lethal threat to their friends, neighbors, and children. Then there are other people who see him as an erring child who can learn better with a little education. These two groups argue with each other over what to do with the malefactor; they quote studies and statistics, and delve deeply into academic criminology to argue their cases. But all this sophistication is window dressing. What really motivates the two groups is their intuitive picture of what is going on. Is he a saber-toothed tiger, or an erring child? On that question hinges the pragmatic decision whether he should be killed straightaway, or rehabilitated.

That was the theoretical point I was trying to make. So far, so good.

Marie stopped me to say that sometimes the roles switch. She said that in cases of rape or sexual crimes, Liberals are more likely to condemn a Malefactor as irredeemable, and Conservatives are more likely to wink and let it pass on the grounds that "boys will be boys."

Now, I had never used the words "liberal" or "conservative" in my discussion. So what I should have said is. "OK fine, that's one more example of what I'm talking about." Perhaps I could have reminded her that I never used words like "liberal" or "conservative" because I was trying to talk about a general disjunction in how people treat Malefactors, and not to make a political point. Then I should have steered the discussion resolutely back to the most general level possible.

The cat-whisperer

Last week, I was back in farm country visiting Schmidt again. I spent all day on Saturday the 9 driving there, and all day on Monday the 18 driving home. Marie visited too during the exact same stretch, except that she went back home the next day. We visited some, listened to music, watched some old movies, and generally hung out. Some notes follow.  

What was the occasion?

Schmidt had hernia surgery scheduled for Monday the 11. His doctors told him not to lift anything heavy for six weeks after. Schmidt had already explained to us that he had no intention of following this instruction literally, because he knew ways to use leverage to make the work easier on his healing incision. And he made a big point of saying that he could manage by himself if he had to. But he needed someone to drive him home from the hospital, because he would still have a lot of opiates in his system then. And yes, he supposed he could use some help with a few tasks around the farm in the early days.

So Marie and I came to visit. We drove him home, and we fixed dinners for a week. When we all went out shopping, I carried the big carton of cat litter that he bought (to supplement one he already owned). He pushed the cart so that he could lean on it. So I guess we helped in little ways. We also kept him company.

The cat-whisperer

Schmidt discussed his approach to training cats. (See also this post and this one.) He actually used the phrase "cat whisperer" for himself, as an allusion or hommage to the work of Buck Brannaman (see also this documentary), who has been nicknamed "the horse whisperer." Schmidt's basic point is the same as Buck's: it is your job to understand the animal you want to train. You can't expect the cat (or horse) to understand you, or to think like a human being. You have to think like a cat (or horse), and use that insight to encourage the behaviors you want. Schmidt went on to say that the conventional myth about cats being arrogant and uncooperative is just that—a myth and no more. He said that using his methods, he has had geat success—within reasonable limits, of course—getting his cats to do what he wants.

Schmidt and Marie talked about cats a lot. I didn't have much to contribute to those conversations.

Why do I court failure?

At one point back in 2016, when we first got back together, Marie told me that decades earlier—when we knew each other in college—she had been racking her brains trying to figure out why we got along so well. That sounds like a strange thing to say, but here's what she meant by it.

By the time she was in middle school, Marie's home life was hopelessly dysfunctional: her father had committed suicide, and her mother was a blackout drunk who had once molested her all the way to orgasm (back when Marie was 12 and didn't understand what was going on). See, for example, this post and this one. And when Marie looked around at her friends, the only ones she felt naturally at-ease with were the ones whose home lives were equally dysfunctional. So she just figured that's how it was: she was messed up, and the only people she could really relax around were equally messed up.

Then she met me, and right away felt at ease around me. So she tried to create conversational openings to let me explain how my family was dysfunctional, while she shared how her family was dysfunctional. She figured it would be a bonding exercise.

Only I never took the bait. On the one hand, I had long since internalized the rule that you Never Talk Your Family Down to Others. And on the other hand, I genuinely didn't understand that there was anything dysfunctional about us. By conventional standards we were all pretty normal. My dad sometimes drank a lot, but not to the point that he ever lost his job or got into fights. My parents stayed married during ten disastrous years of running a business that they hated and didn't understand (or not at first). We didn't have a lot of money, but somehow we got by. So I never had any lurid tales of dysfunction to share with Marie, and she was left baffled. How can I possibly feel so at ease with him when he and his family are so normal?

In the first couple of months that we were back in communication, she kept probing at this point until I finally asked her to stop. Also after a couple of months we started fucking, and we had better things to talk about.

Over time, of course, I have come to have a clearer understanding of some of the mind games that Father played ... mostly not, I think, out of actual malice, but in an attempt to placate some of his own demons. And I've talked about how he interacted with me using a power dynamic that felt very sexual, even if we both had our clothes on. (See, for example, this post and this post; for a more light-hearted approach, you might also try this post.)

But just this evening, I thought of a neat formula that summarizes the profound ambivalence—and that's putting it nicely!—that I feel about great achievement.

Father forced me to feel pride in my achievements in the same way that Marie's mother forced her to feel orgasms.

I'm not sure I have stories to back that up—well, I've got one but I'm not ready to share it yet. Other than that one, I think it mostly took the form of little remarks here and there by the way, bits and bobs that I probably can't remember accurately or at all but that contributed to an overall ambience of expectations.

But the end result for both of us was very similar. 

• For years, Marie could not take pleasure in sex, or at best she could take only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure. 
• For years, I have not been able to take pleasure in my achievements, or only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure.

What does this look like in practice?

• When people praise Son1 and Son2, I agree that they have both grown into fine young men; but I insist that parents don't have a lot of influence on that, and that the credit goes to them for choosing to become so good. The only parenting victory that I will own is my forcing Wife to let both boys go to boarding school, in order to get them away from the two of us!
• Back when I was working, my greatest victories at work were the kind of thing where I could easily say, "Everyone came together as a team and did their parts really well. All I had to contribute was a little organization, and taking minutes." And you can bet that's exactly what I said.
• I have confessed to you lot (who would never tell a soul, and besides I'm hiding behind a mask) that yes, in odd moments I have occasionally felt little wisps of pride in my ancient academic achievements, back during the Buchanan Administration; I have also said that those wisps of pride feel like "a really degrading sexual fetish," or like "masturbating in public." And of course you remember the cartoon I posted about it all. 

So honestly I think it's a pretty good analogy. It captures just how slimy and unclean I feel around the whole topic of achievement.

And how much cleaner I feel around failure, by comparison. 

P.S.: I think this insight helps explain much of the ambivalence I have around school and anything that looks like it. I've talked about that a lot over the years, but see especially this post and this one. Now I'm wrestling with the question how much of this post about Marie applies to me too. I think any simple answer will be wrong, and that the true answer is "Not 100% but also not 0%."

  

Feeding a coyote

Sometimes fate arranges the perfect metaphor. If only I felt I could take advantage of it!

When I talked with Marie a week ago, she was solemn and worried and upset and frightened, all over the deportations that the Administration has recently started enforcing. Mind you, Marie is a natural-born citizen. Her parents were natural-born citizens. She looks White, though apparently if you go far enough back one ancestor was Chippewa. In other words, there is about as much chance that she'll be deported as there is for Melania Trump. But that doesn't stop her from worrying. I've mentioned before that Marie suffers from TDS somethin' terrible, so naturally she believes the very worst it is possible to believe.

What does Marie know about immigration? She is friends with two different families who both think they have to leave the United States proactively before they are deported. In one of these families, the husband in English and the wife is Canadian; their son is a natural-born American. In the other family, the husband is American and the wife is Mexican, though you wouldn't guess it unless she told you. In both families, all the paperwork is in order and has been for many years. Again, these people are not the targets of any deportation effort. But try telling them that.

So I spent our weekly call a week ago trying to talk Marie down from what seemed to be—figuratively or emotionally speaking—a very high cliff.

When we talked yesterday, she was in a much better mood. It seemed that she had forgotten her earlier worries. But buried in her chit-chat about what had gone on the previous week was the news that she had seen a hungry coyote.

Marie lives in the suburbs. This is not normally coyote country. There are wild areas within driving distance, to be sure. But for a coyote to wander all the way into Marie's neighborhood, it must be either desperately hungry or else really bad at directions.  

And Marie has been leaving out food! What's more, she has seen the food disappear. So while she can't be intellectually certain that it's the coyote who has eaten it all, nonetheless she is morally certain that she has saved the coyote from starvation!

I asked her how long she plans to keep leaving out food? She didn't give a date, but in general she wants to keep him alive until he learns to hunt for himself.

Really? How's that going to work?

Childless cat ladies

Sometime while I was staying with the Schmidts last month, I started thinking about the trope of the "childless cat lady." Of course the phrase got a lot of attention during the last election, because the news media pointed out that some years earlier (before he was a candidate for anything, let alone an officeholder), JD Vance had used it in an interview with Fox News. So in a sense cat ladies had their moment in the sun last year, just as "bad hombres" did eight years earlier.

But what, I began to wonder, really is the distinguishing characteristic of a childless cat lady, and why do they get so much grief? 

Why do people look down on childless cat ladies?

I tried googling this question, and all I found were articles saying that childless cat ladies aren't nearly as bad as everyone thinks. Here's a collection of them:

• The Guardian, "Claws out! Why pop culture clings to the crazy cat lady," April 16, 2018
• NBC News, "JD Vance doubles down on 'childless cat ladies' dig: 'I've got nothing against cats'," July 26, 2024
• City Journal, "About Those 'Childless Cat Ladies'," September 3, 2024
• Ipsos, "Why America's childless cat ladies are more than just Taylor Swift," September 11, 2024
• The Cutprice Guignol, "On Childless Cat Ladies," September 16, 2024
• The Conversation, "‘Childless cat ladies’ have long contributed to the welfare of American children − and the nation," October 21, 2024
• The Guardian, "Fur and loathing: do America’s ‘childless cat ladies’ hold the key to the US election?" November 3, 2024

And that's great to know—don't get me wrong. I guess it's reassuring to hear that the stereotype is incorrect. But I wanted historical information on where the stereotype came from in the first place—and, more particularly, on what the image means in the popular psyche. A couple of articles waved vaguely towards the idea that the condemnation of childless cat ladies was a holdover from the ancient fear of witches. But that doesn't sound likely to me. 

"What the hell is happiness anyhow?"

Marie is being confounded by philosophy.

You remember that last month she agreed to receive formal transmission of the Five Mindfulness Trainings. Since then she has been thinking about them regularly, which is good. (Surely that must be one of the points of receiving them formally, no?) At the same time she's had a routine share of bad luck, including a trip-and-fall accident at her work that banged up her knee. And of course she joined me at the Schmidts' farm a couple weeks ago, to help with Ma Schmidt's decline.

Yesterday she wrote me an email that ran, in part:

I am in a little pain today from my knee (I didn't elevate it last night, and apparently I still should have!), and yesterday it really hit me how sad I am that Ma Schmidt is dying. Oh, and the sweet potatoes I put in the soup I made for lunch today aren't very sweet, so the balance of flavors is off a bit.  Whine, whine, there's always something!

So, I am thinking of the Second Mindfulness Training, the part that goes "I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude and not on external conditions, and that I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy."

I'm going, ok, so I can be happy while being sad at losing Ma Schmidt, and while experiencing pain, and.... um, what the hell is happiness anyhow?

Yes, exactly.*

I replied:

You talk about whether you can be happy while losing Ma Schmidt, and I remember while we were there she would regularly say (trying for sarcasm), "Gosh, this must be a great vacation for you, looking after your buddy's old sick mother!" When she said that I'd always try to say something reassuring, but I never told her what I was really thinking. What I really thought, as a reply, was, "Yes, actually it is. Not in the sense that it is FUN, exactly. But I can't think of anywhere else I would rather be, under the circumstances." (And of course I never said that out loud because it just didn't sound like the kind of thing you can say out loud.)

Does that mean I was "happy"? Or does it mean that the vocabulary of happiness is too small, and is missing a few dimensions? I vote for the latter choice, and maybe that option works for you too.

And actually she agreed:

Yes on the "nowhere I'd rather be."  If someone I love is dying, I want to be there; and if someone else I love is overwhelmed because their mother is dying, I want to help.  But you're right, that's hard to say.

Yes happiness may need some redefining.  I am thinking of water again, the surface and the depths.

__________

* There's actually a long philosophical discussion of exactly this question. Epicurus maintained that the wise man could be happy, even on the rack. Aristotle, for his part, said this is nonsense. (Nic. Eth., book VII, chapter 13, Bekker page 1153b.)       

Marie receives the Five Mindfulness Trainings

A day I never thought I'd see.

I've mentioned that sometimes—fitfully and irregularly—Marie will visit by Zoom the UU Sangha that I attend regularly here in town. She tells me she enjoys it, but she'll skip if she thinks she hasn't been living up to Buddhist principles lately. (Wait, isn't that like saying you won't go to church as long as you are still sinning? But I'm sure most churches would tell you that's exactly the time you should show up!)

The last few weeks we've had a guest joining us while he's temporarily in town, who is a Certified Dharma Teacher in the Plum Village tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh. This means that—among other things—he has the authority to transmit the Five Mindfulness Trainings to aspirants who want to receive them formally. (This ritual isn't quite the one he used, but close enough.) "Receiving the Five Mindfulness Trainings" sounds simple enough. But it commits you to recite or repeat them once a month, and to live by them as far as you can. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago he announced that he would be willing to transmit the Trainings while he was in town, if anyone was interested. Last week we watched a video about living with them, and tonight was scheduled for the ceremony of transmission.

I didn't really expect Marie to take up the offer, but she was interested. So we talked about it a little: what's the difference between formally receiving the Trainings and just knowing about them? I pointed out that when you receive the Trainings formally, you accept an obligation to repeat them once a month—preferably in company with a sangha—and to try to live by them, although it is understood that your compliance may not be 100%. How much difference does the commitment make? I reminded her of the conversation between Elrond and Gimli, during the Council of Elrond, as they assemble the group of Nine Walkers who will accompany the Ring south. Elrond says that everyone is going freely, and no one has any oath laid upon him except only Frodo (not to give up the Ring to the Enemy). Right away, Gimli objects:

‘Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,’ said Gimli.

‘Maybe,’ said Elrond, ‘but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.’

‘Yet sworn word may strengthen quaking heart,’ said Gimli.

‘Or break it,’ said Elrond. 'Look not too far ahead.'

Wrapping up last year

I keep thinking I should write something about the last … gosh, I guess three months of last year. I keep not wanting to do it. Not that there's anything bad about it. I just can't summon the energy.

This is an omnibus post. The only common theme is that I'm too lazy to break it out into multiple different posts. Or maybe I should say that empirically I have already observed a strong tendency not to write it. So tonight I figured, "Better to get it all written than to worry about the details." I count 14 different tags or labels on this post right now. Maybe I'll add more later. That should be a sign that it really does tell multiple stories.

October

Actually I guess I've already talked about a lot of it. In October I traveled to visit Debbie for a week, and we went on a silent meditation retreat. (The retreat lasted just a weekend, so we also spent time visiting her family.) Then I flew on to another town where Marie was attending a conference. I appeared with her at the big dinner, as arm candy, and otherwise wandered around town while she attended multiple sessions. I think I talked about this trip in this post here. (See also this one, for a slice of life around Debbie's family.)

November

In November, Mother and I joined Brother and SIL in driving all day to visit family in another state over, for Thanksgiving. I talk about some parts of that trip in this post here. There were other parts of the visit as well, but I don't remember anything so important that I need to remember it or write about it. Stan was better behaved than he was five years ago, and easily distracted with Monty Python routines. This time it was his little sister who was the terror, but not as destructively.

Marie and me

Just now I was scrolling through my Downloads folder looking for a picture I know I saved a while ago, and I ran across this. It seems that I saved it back in the middle of November. I have no recollection where I saw it, what the context might have been, or any of that.

It describes my life all too well. Also Marie's. I always knew we had something in common.

  

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.

    

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!

Echo chamber, 3, "Lines you can't ever cross"

No, we haven't had another conversation about this same topic again. I just can't let it go.

You know, when Marie says "there are certain lines you can't ever cross," maybe I shouldn't get irritated or feel judged. Maybe I should just feel grateful that she has led such a charmed and sheltered life. Of course she has had bad things happen to her, like we all have. What I mean by the words "charmed and sheltered" is that maybe, somehow, she has reached her sixties without ever having to face her own capacity for evil.

Meeting my Shadow, 2

Just a quick follow-up to this post from New Year's Day.

Ten minutes ago I was on the sidewalk out in front, stretching my legs for a few minutes, and I thought about this ongoing argument with Marie. And suddenly it occurred to me: one reason that Marie's moralism drives me so crazy is that I used to do the same thing. (Maybe I still do, but I try hard not to.)

At the moment that the thought struck me, there was an example to hand as well. Now, ten minutes later, I don't remember what it was. Oh wait, yes I do.