Tag

It will be obvious to the diligent reader that your author uses these pages as a tonic to cleanse his soul of some of the dark forces that assail it. Does he really feel so very much animus toward the current occupant of the White House? Of course not. His antipathy is theoretical, if not feigned. It has no power, no effect, and no real life. It has to do purely with ideas and judgments. If astrology were real, it would be like that: Obama has as much influence on our lives as the moon, or, say, inevitably, Uranus. There's nothing we can do about fate, except to make free will choice in conformity with our natures ... or to act randomly, which is as much as to say the same thing.

I have been attempting to purge anger by expressing it in this harmless medium. It gives me an opportunity to vent, to sublimate, to luxuriate in the indulgence of spitting venom at a target I cannot reach. Where's the harm?

As for what I'm really angry about, well, it comes and goes. I'm angry with myself, mostly, for not being strong enough, wise and healthy enough, man enough to just move on, get over it, the thing, these things that have crippled me since I was young enough to form character out of temperament. I don't think I've really indulged deeply here in a forthright explication of my malfunction. The diligent reader will have discerned my sense of privacy. For all my circumspection, I am honest. But I am frequently silent where people think they hear meaning.

I just came to the idea that the way we are sexually is the way we really are. Courteous or selfish or twisted, robust, intimate, repressed, virginal, alone. Eye-contact. Mechanical. For my part, I remain silent. My intimations may very well be games, ironies, not half-truths but incomplete, like chapter endings in a murder mystery. What is explicit is that I am emotionally unengaged, isolated by inertia and distrust.

I would really like the love of a good woman, a new and growing family, this time two or three kids. Sort of the reverse of what my father did, with his first family of three boys, all of whom he disrespected, and does, and a wife he discarded when he found something younger. And later, another wife, whom he also cheated, and made into an enemy, and an only, new son, given my name, whom he has not seen since 1994. You'd think sometime during that span the boy, now closing in on 30, would have visited. But I went 15 years without visiting, too.

I'm waiting for them all to die. Then it will be too late. But I'll be free of obligation, if not guilt. Something to be said for that.

That's another reason I need a wife. I am completely unsuited to take care of myself. I've been developing phobias for years now, and I need the anchor of a sane person who respects my strengths and helps me through my weaknesses. I know, it's an unrealistic dream. Hope is the last thing to die, though. I got lucky, in a way, with my first wife, who simply outlasted my craziness until I could love her. Turns out she had her own issues, but I was lucky to get as much as I did. She didn't harm me, and she was a good mother. Next time, I'd just like to be, you know, actually loved.

Somehow I've gotten a new laptop. It only really works when it's operating off battery power, and I don't get wi fi internet free gratis out of nowhere at home the way I used to, and I've fallen out of the habit of having a computer, and out of the habit of regular writing, which is a bit of a problem, since that is one of the things I was born to do. And I have a work-related iphone, which yesterday malfunctioned so that no one can hear me, and it has a sort of internet that uses up gigs everyday, which exceeds the plan, and I don't understand that, and fixing these things pushes into my place of phobias -- just don't ask. It's one of the ways I'm measurably nuts.

Sometimes I worry about myself. What will become of me. I'm too proud to live in somebody's spare room, and I'm too unvested to think that I can buy a property somewhere, you know, like a home. I'm a steady guy who has been violently unsettled by a few of life's arbitrary if not impersonal upheavals. Makes it kind of hard to trust in the Steadfastness of a Benevolent Providence. A moment of betrayal undoes a lifetime of faith. Hence the term, sucker punch.

Hope you had a pleasant Sunday afternoon. The weather here is delightful.

J