Monthly Archives: August 2019

Life. And Then There’s Life.

08 Thursday Aug 2019

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There is the way we would like things to be and there is how life is. We plan, daydream, fantasize or simply dream in our sleep. Then we wake up in the morning or afternoon or even in the evening. We remember those dreams. Sometimes the dreams aren’t nightmares, but when they feature firearms in a display of rebellion, they aren’t exactly the kind of dreams where I wake up with an erection (assuming you are male, females, insert the appropriate physiological response).

I have hit something of a barrier. It is probably no taller or more substantial that that little boundary fence on a cricket pitch, but for me, right now, it’s like the Great Wall of China.

It comes down to this, the difference in how I spend my time doing what I do versus what I want to do. And, of course, hitting the “Reset” button for the change of direction has to be a massive, all at once shift, complete in its totality. This attitude is a prescription for failure.

So I interrupted writing this post to fix J’s lunch. I made more Waldorf chicken salad, sliced some more strawberries, and staged the other components for packing in her lunch kit.

I accomplished something.

I do like writing. I actually like writing erotica. It isn’t quite the same as making love, having sex or fucking. Among those three I think there are distinctions. I’m not up for discussing the differences tonight.

J is upstairs watching those twin brothers, Drew Scott and Jonathon? Scott on HGTV. They are OK, as far as house people go. I am watching the dusk creep in on the railcam scene in Ashland. A train eventually will arrive or pass through.

Hmm, J and I are different. She has to be at work tomorrow at 0430, (0 dark 30). So she’s winding down to go to sleep. I get it.

She plays a mental chess game with herself, around me, wondering what I’m going to do or say and hoping what she does or says won’t upset me. That isn’t exactly setting the stage for spontaneity. I will bring that up. Then again, I have to work on the phrasing, because she doesn’t take criticism well.

“Never go to bed with someone whose problems are worse than your own.”- Nelson Algren.

To Sleep, Per Chance To Dream

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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So I woke around Two, after sleeping about two hours. I am sleepy again now. J has left for work. She will be through around 1100.

What else is there to say? Summer drags on, as it always does. When I was a kid, we would get the Sears Fall & Winter Catalog about this time. I would look at pictures of coats and boots and flannel shirts and know the season was approaching a change. It made the heat a little more bearable.

I feel the tears bottled up inside, for all who suffer. My cross is loneliness. The weight is unbearable at times, but I will get through. I think it is a disease of our time, like addictive behaviors.

Back to bed.

Love Comments

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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When I was a lad, those many years ago. I had a “pen pal”. His name was Werner and he lived in Mannheim, then in the Bundes Republik Deutschland, or West Germany. Mannheim is on the Rhine. I don’t know much else about the place.

I have no idea what happened to him, but I get the excitement when my favorite bloggers post a blog,or leave a comment on my blog. Marvelous excitement. I feel like I’m understood.

Sometimes when one of my posts exposes what I perceive as a vulnerability, like a sexual memory and it is “liked” or commented on, I feel particularly validated. The awful truth is I don’t feel loved. I know cognitively, I am. I have a good marriage, especially compared to my earlier nightmares, I mean marriages. I’ve posted this before. I’m just feeling that invalidation again.

Better Day For Sure

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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We just came back from a birthday dinner for my Stepmother. She is 94 today.

We had barbecue from TD’s, a classic hole-in-the-wall take away BBQ joint that are a tradition in the American South. The great unifying elements of Southern Culture are evangelical Protestantism, mainly Baptist, American football, and food (BBQ). Most Southerners, black or white, intersect on at least two of these common interests.

Food was good. Barbeque and greens, turnip greens, I think. Then we had Angel Food cake. Nice food. My brother-in-law coaches softball, so we chatted about softball and cricket. Both sports and baseball, too, get the power from the batting swing from the batter’s, or batsman’s core muscles, not just the shoulders.

I went to the Y for the first time in a month. The pool had major maintenance and repairs done over the past month. Good to be back. I really missed my swimming. I could have gone to another Y and swum, but didn’t. I got a 1 mile plus swim in.

So I’m feeling better. The world looks better. We have problems we can fix.

So there.

Early To Bed, Awakening, A Confession.

06 Tuesday Aug 2019

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So I went to bed at 7:00 PM (1900 Hrs). And I slept a solid five hours. Then lay in bed another hour. Finally I climbed out of the rack, dressed, and came downstairs to fix J’s lunch, a reprise of yesterday’s lunch.

Now I’m watching a WW Two newsreel/training film. It is something I have never seen before.They would show the films to show to soldiers in training camps.

I’m thinking about going back to bed. I was watching some sexually explicit videos, lesbians making love. They look like people, not silicone androids. It’s the faces I find most interesting; the faces show the emotion, the feeling. The bodies are interesting when they are real, imperfect. I have been watching pornography, reading pornography for over fifty plus years. I find it simultaneously appealing and appalling. It is a metaphor for my loneliness. There are encounters with true beauty, when the couples “connect”. When I watch, it’s the humans I see. Maybe I’m a creep. Oh well.

Almost Three now. I will have another cup of hot tea before I go back to bed. If it is too cold, it will be the makings for the day’s iced tea.

The day seems better than yesterday already.

Detached

05 Monday Aug 2019

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Sometimes I have to detach from the pettiness of life, from the need to “win”, from the internal validation of being right.

I’m feeling that right now. I will see posts in my feed from bloggers with whom I’m certain I will disagree. And my comments don’t matter. They don’t care what I think or if I challenge them, they will dig in their heels, ever more inflexible. There is no movement, no real dialogue.

Meanwhile, while I was out on my day excursion yesterday, Australia took a commanding lead in their innings at the first of the Ashes Tests. The English have a target of 398 runs. We shall see what they can do.

When J was getting ready for work around 3;30, I woke up. Not I can’t get back to sleep. The caffeine from the pot of coffee doesn’t help. The cricket commentators are having a technical discussion above my knowledge of and limited grasp of the game. But it’s a sunny day in Birmingham, so it’s not all that important.

I should make the effort to go back to sleep. But I sit here, in awe of this boys’ game that became the glue of Empire.

I could go back over to YouTube, to watch war time newsreels, or trains, or strippers. But the partnership of Jason Roy and Joe Root has my attention, more than newsreels. Or sleep.

Lunch Prep

05 Monday Aug 2019

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I had this frenzy of activity fixing J’s lunch. She likes the Waldorf Chicken Salad I prepare, so I made a batch, dicing the chicken breast and red delicious apple and adding raisins, currants and slivered almonds. I bind it with mayonnaise. I sliced strawberries for her. With hummus and a Sargento Balanced Break, she should be in good shape.

I cleaned up. Now I’m sitting, tired again.

Half-Day Tripper

05 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in Family, food, Gentrification, Uncategorized

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Tomorrow is my brother-in-law’s, birthday. J’s brother. We met R and D, his wife, in Fredericksburg this morning. Fredericksburg is a quaint, but gentrified, city about halfway between Richmond and Washington. They live in Leesburg, to the west of Washington. So Fredericksburg is a good mutual rendezvous point.

Did I say Fredericksburg was gentrified? That is understating it. The housing prices have been bid up astronomically. There are the ubiquitous converted loft apartments. The downtown has been given over to antique stores, restaurants, and boutique shops. We ate at a restaurant called “Foode”, located in a converted bank building. Truthfully, it had lots of charm.

Across the street from “Foode” is St George’s Episcopal Church. The building with its distinctive steeple can be seen in pictures of Fredericksburg from the Civil War era. The area was of critical importance to the Union’s strategy to capture Richmond, the Confederate Capital. Volumes can and have been written about Fredericksburg in the Civil War. I will stop here.

R has his 76th birthday tomorrow. We had a lovely gathering, fully enjoying the overpriced, but satisfying food. A plate of eggs scrambled with cheese and squash was about $9. Not bad, all in all. $3.50 for a cup of coffee epitomizes the mark-up.

I volunteered to take a group picture for a lovely Muslim family out for brunch. A lesbian couple was not at all reticent about holding hands as they strolled down Princess Anne Street. Just typical scenes of our time.

We checked out a kitchen shop that had a nice selection, including Lamsonsharp forged knives, an American brand in the quality knife market. There were cutesy hand towels with sayings like “I’ve lost my mind. I think my kids took it.”

After the kitchen boutique, we browsed through an antique shop. It was the usual collection of soft drink bottles, furniture, Mid-Century Modern paraphernalia and fussy china. The stereotypical African-American racist kitsch, think Aunt Jemima, from the early part of the Twentieth Century, stood out among the kiosks in the store.

We drove home on U.S. Route 1, a road running roughly parallel with I-95. It was a storied road running from Calais, Maine, at the U.S./Canadian border, to Key West, Florida. There were restaurants and “tourist courts” running the entire route. Today it is all-but deserted. The restaurants were iconic brands like Howard Johnson’s, Hot Shoppes or Stuckey’s. They are all gone now. The tourist courts were the precursor to the motel. They consisted of a grouping of two room cabins, a bedroom with a bathroom. You can still see them, always repurposed to something else like antique shops and always, always shabby and run down, lost time in frame or brick. To take Rte 1 is a relief from the madhouse of traffic that is I-95. One can’t help but wonder what it was once like, back in the day.

Given I have had very little sleep in the past couple of nights, I was an even less enthusiastic traveler than I usually am, which is to say, I wasn’t thrilled about going, but I went. I very much like R and D, I just don’t feel like traveling much any more. I drove a lot in much of my working career. Going somewhere other than to Church, AA, or the Y has little appeal.

When we got home, I took a nap. Now I am writing, watching an Army Signal Corps newsreel from World War Two, dealing with Operation Market-Garden, the failed airborne invasion of The Netherlands in September 1944. This was the subject of the book and film, A Bridge Too Far.

Now I’m watching a segment about DDT, which 75 years ago, was a wonder substance. Now we know as a damaging and dangerous compound, affecting the survival of birds. Then DDT eradicated disese-carrying mosquitos.

I had a phone call from my elder son. He left his gruelling and unsatisfying job and, at age 43, is discerning a new career. We are having lunch tomorrow.

That’s about it.