Every day I get the op-ed page from The New York Times in my email. The editor is a chap named David Leonhardt.

Each time I read the first few words, I ask myself

Who cares?

It has been a long trip down the road to irrelevance for The Grey Lady.

And New York. Art Deco, I fear, is but Woody Allen’s memory.

It’s all gone. Like The Old Penn Station.

Jerome Kern,The Gershwins, Cole Porter, The Talking Heads, by golly, replaced by Disney musicals.

Nobody speaks Yiddish anymore, goes to The Catskills, or does piece work sewing.

The great grandchildren of these seamstresses live in. Westchester, work on Wall Street or publishing.

Their measure of success has moved beyond escape from tenement.

And this City lives more on its memories than its dreams, just like everywhere else.

How do I articulate my loneliness, without leaving my house, to my wife, my partner who sleeps, who cringes at any sudden move or disturbance of the space?

The night almost alwsys features a period of wakefulness for me. I become more and more alert. I use this time to read or enjoy the silence while I drink my decaffeinated coffee. Then I think again about my sleeping wife, with her worries about me.

Pleasure between spouses is not her “language”, to use a current metaphor. She chooses worry over fellatio and cunnilingus. Did she ever surrender to anyone, besides Jesus, in the baptismal pool at some long forgotten church?

Will I ever know?

It is going to take every fiber of my being to dispose of the accumulated chaos in this house, to make it a home.

God I’m lonely. That is a prayer.

I am not a basketball fan. I can tell you who everybody else is talking about and that the Raptors won the NBA Championship last year.

But I an genuinely saddened about Kobe Bryant’s death. Just sad.

Got up. I slept pretty much OK. I told J I would fix a frittata for a brunch this afternoon. She works til noon, maybe. They sometimes give her more hours on Sunday, usually because somebody doesn’t show up.

I’m wearing my new flannel shirt and black long sleeve tee-shirt I ordered from Land’s End. A picture will follow. My Dad had a shirt in a similar tartan to this one, only it was wool. His birthday is Wednesday. He would have been 99, more about Dad later.

I’m reading Best Lesbian Erotica Of The Year, Volume Four. Women write better erotica than men. I don’t know why. I find the characters more empathic.

I am going to sleep some more, I think.

Later.

It is a rainy Saturday morning. I just finished a warm croissant with fig preserves that I enjoyed with my coffee. I’m trainspotting now. #88 Northbound just left Ashland, headed to New York.

I think I could pay for my trip to New York in March by bringing two cartons of cigarettes and selling them on the “grey market”. But I won’t, because I don’t know anybody who could access said “grey market”. Oh well.

I’m thinking this question this morning. What do we risk for love?

Being in love with someone should take us out of our “comfort zones”. Huh? What is that? It is a term we use that we think other people understand, but, I suspect, don’t. Being outside such a zone suggests discomfort, sometimes physical,but other times that our sense of social or relational conformity is stressed. Think meeting your future in-laws for the first time, or asking that hottie if they would like to go out.

Being in love is about being uncomfortable. Eventually the edge of discomfort wears down. That usually means we are taking that erstwhile hottie for granted.

This is too much time ruminating, even for me, on this lazy Saturday. More. Maybe later.

After dinner and cleaning the kitchen I went swimming. Right now my body aches, but I am grooving on the silence in my flannel jammies and warm socks.

I’m kind of tired. But I need to find my optimal sleeping position.

Later

Just food that is. I had some leftover roast beef. I sauteed onions, garlic, celery, carrots and mushrooms, added the roast beef and made a gravy with a roux and a can of beef stock. Serving over egg noodles. Was really easy. Just lots of slicing and chopping.

Would a BJ be an appropriate gesture of appreciation, assuming the meal is sufficiently satisfying?

I went to bed at 11:00PM, slept til 1:00AM. I dressed, came downstairs, washed and sliced strawberries, washed blueberries (from Chile) washed and pitted cherries (Chile again) for her snack at her break. She only has a four hour shift; a full lunch isn’t necessary.

I went swimming yesterday. It feels more like a regular day. I’m experiencing the general a soreness present after I swim along with the lower back and hip pain. I have been using a cane some, mostly to take weight off the bad leg. None of the discomfort feels as bad after I swim.

So I am blogging. I feel the need to sleep some more. Back to bed.

Here I am awake, watching my Ukrainian metal detecting guys survey a newly plowed field. They find the usual stuff, coins, buttons, spent cartridges, religious medals, and cutlery. Some of their funds are nearly one thousand years old. Some were left by Die Deutsche Wehrmacht almost 80 years ago. We can only imagine the horror visited upon this earth not all that long ago, as the Germans sought this land for Lebensraum, living space.

The dirt of Ukraine is the famous “Black Earth”, the source of its fame as a prized agricultural region. Only about thirty years ago, under Communism, the agricultural production model was the collective farm. When the collective farms disappeared, the jobs in the rural economy went away also. Villages were depopulated and there are many abandoned houses. Eerie.

I made some decaf. I will sit and drink some of it as I watch the lay faithful, the monks, and the clerics do their Christmas festival. Now the people are singing Silent Night in Ukrainian Russian. This comes from monastery at Sviatogorsk Lavra in the Don Bass region. The people sing over there. Truly moving.

The peoples of Russia and Ukraine had their “revolution” over a century ago and found it wanting. They embrace their Orthodox faith and its customs and traditions because they experienced the spiritual desert of secular atheist Marxism. A lot of Westerners need to see how fervent their rejection of secular agnostic materialist values is, Pope Francis, for starters.

J had this experience of sadness yesterday that I managed to feel also. We need to talk. Again. That’s the thing about relationships. The partners need to talk more than once. Who knew?

Time for me to get really intrusive. Maybe her health isn’t good. Work exhausts her. I don’t know any more. It’s hard living with someone whose principal activities are work and watching cable and broadcast TV.