This morning, there is a voicemail from my friend Scott, whom I visited Friday. He leaves a message that his father, who had been vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, had come down with COVID-19, on Saturday.

So I have been vaccinated, with the Pfizer vaccines . What do I do now? Through Scott, I have indirect exposure to a person who has COVID-19. I have been vaccinated. But so had Scott’s father.

Now I am questioning the value of the vaccines and every directive the government has ever made about this disease. Does the government know what it is doing? Are there facts backing the decrees?

Answers, please.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve seen too much. There are too many things I cannot unsee, the tawdry, ostentatious displays of wealth that some people flaunt and others covet. There are the photographic ghosts of Berlin, Verdun, Stalingrad, Hiroshima.

Some images are immediate. There is the image of the EMTs desperately attempting to resuscitate my neighbour, as he is dying from an overdose.

There is the blue tattoo of numbers, a German “7” prominent in the sequence, of a survivor of the Shoah.

It takes only a little while to see too much. And a lifetime goes by attempting to forget.

I am awake at 0245, have been awake for about an hour. I feel weep-y, not sad, necessarily, as if there are tears needing to be shed. Possibly this is nothing more than an allergy.

I went upstairs last night, told J she could pick out a DVD of I Love Lucy episodes. So she picked one from the season where Lucy moved to Connecticut. Not my favourite, but she likes it.

At Nine AM, my son is coming over to thin the day lily beds. His Mom is bringing him over, so I feel like I should have some scones ready for them. Not a big deal really, My son is recovering from a Traumatic Brain Injury, and doesn’t drive, so she’s bringing him over, as if he were 5 rather than 45. I’m giving the lilies we thin out to her, for her garden. The irony is that these lilies came from the gardens of my now deceased ex-wife #2, the woman I married after we divorced.

What goes around comes around. This applies to the good as well as the not-so-good.

This sleep won’t return. I won’t let it. I have to make my self suffer a little longer. I can’t go to sleep beside my wife, much as I want to.

She goes back to work at 1:00 PM, making sure the shelves at Target have products on them for the “guests” to buy. She returns home to me at 6:30 PM.

I’m drinking chamomile/lavender tea, hot. I can taste the lavender this morning. I want and need no more caffeine.

I suck at self care.

I count the days from now to when I have my Social Security Benefit deposited into my checking account. Ten days, from the 18th to the 28th.

I’ve been up about ninety minutes, staring at the railroad tracks on the Ashland Railfan You Tube site, reading obituaries, the popular biographies of everyday people, reading Word Press blog posts, and wondering why I am awake.

I can’t bring myself to go to Mass. I feel more “sinful” than usual, caught up in anger and lust, impure thoughts and selfish thoughts. I need to go to Reconciliation and lay my sins bare.

I worry about my son.

I can’t express to my wife the depth of my loneliness, so it comes out in inappropriate singing.

How do I rid myself of books I will not read? How do I mourn the loss of a self-created fiction that my life is? Maybe we all present characters to the world, whom we hide behind, such that our authentic selves, that soul who answers to God is but the shadow to the world, but the substance to God.

Overthinking is one of my specialties.

Almost midnight, I reflect on this day, these days, wherein I am dealing with my elder son’s Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), the oppressive summer heat, and the continuing issue of my wife’s hoarding.

I’m stressed by any one of these issues on its own. Combine them and I am exhausted, demoralised and weary.

My son is a high-functioning autistic and bipolar. He feels threatened and is very defensive. He doesn’t trust his wife to care for his interests. This is a delusional conclusion on his part.

All of this is hard on me. That’s all I can say really.

Sexually explicit writing. 18+ Oh Hell maybe 70+ NSFW!!!

A finger to start, that’s all. Lubed slick and shiny , to push into the rosette of your asshole then flex it a bit to stretch you.

What if you like it, you ask yourself, at first, afraid you will, then ashamed that you do.

Then another finger joins the first and you feel your asshole stretch. You feel the pressure elsewhere, and are disappointed when both leave.

“If my friends knew…”

And the latex and lubed covered cock presses at your hole, pushes in, settles as you stretch

“That I want, don’t want this, makes me crazy, as my lust joins yours.”

And in the background Sinatra sings Strangers In The Night.

I had a weird dream about surviving a shipwreck and needing to draw all of my loved ones close to me.

There is anger I feel toward politicians and bishops and generals. Everyone who makes life for the humble difficult, who offer cruelty, rather than comfort.

It’s a long slow road to insanity for me. I did not sleep with my wife last night. I started in our bed, but moved to the other bed where the dreams rolled through my head as J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion Played on the CD player.

Today they remember the martyred Czar Nicholas II in the Russian Orthodox Church. We have elections wherein we hold the politicians accountable to the people. They give the people access to drugs, whores, gambling. They vote to bankroll the weapons of war and then authorise the wars themselves . Then we delude ourselves that protecting our freedom means killing peasants on the other side of the world. Absurd.

Freedom isn’t free, but we shouldn’t be overcharged for it either.

I want to go back to bed, sleep some more , maybe have restful dreams and hope the spectre of loneliness not afflict me.

Last night I went to bed before midnight. I did my “personal hygiene chores”, as my autistic friend Scooter calls showering and brushing one’s teeth. I put a Seinfeld DVD in the machine, the voices and stories lull me to sleep most nights . I was really too wired to sleep and I had slept most of that day anyway. Retirement has done that. I sleep when I feel like sleeping. It is a deleterious habit and one I hope to break, but I can tell you it won’t be any time soon.

I awoke around 0315 this morning. I did not easily fall back to sleep, to which this blog post testifies. The trains grabbed my attention and, by accident, I started reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in my Kindle. It struck a few common chords. Both his family and mine are “hillbillies”, his from Kentucky, mine from Tennessee. I will post more about this common thread as I delve more deeply into his story. I will say this. That there are sizable numbers of poor people in this country who happen to be white, who are afflicted with similar, if not the same, problems as Blacks and Latinos. This inconvenient truth does much to discredit Critical Race Theory. So I’m suggesting we listen to other voices in the current domestic debacle playing out before us.

What I do want to say is that American propaganda dictates our perception of our current crop of seemingly intractable problems. We are told what to think about everything, from COVID-19, to economic policy, to foreign/military policy, to race issues. Today the traditional media outlets, the pawns of the public relations industry, are losing their power to control the stories and what to think about them.

Now I’m tiring again. Drinking chamomile tea, as opposed to coffee, has assisted in stoking the fires of Morpheus. There are other things I want to talk about. For example, American Myths, not in the bastardised sense of that word, that equates myth with falsehood, rather than with deep and profound truths. Think Joseph Campbell.

I’m really just too tired to say anything more.

It is Uncle Wally’s birthday, as well as Dr. B’s. Both these men were profound influences on my life. I think of Uncle Wally and his cigars and the old-fashions my cousin Kenny would fix with a hunk of cheddar cheese in it. I think of Dr. B and his laugh and his obsession with pornographic novels. He would give me a lawn and leaf trash bag, filled with them. It finally occurred to somebody in his family that this wasn’t healthy, and they gave him some pills to deal with the obsessive/compulsive behaviour. He died not long afterward.

Uncle Wally was also a man of his appetites, whiskey, cigars, and, at one time, politics. He was big into Republican politics, even ran for Congress way long ago. He was an attorney and he told me lawyers were “parasites”, because they don’t create anything original or new. He was right. His own father, my grandfather, could build a house with the knowledge in his head and hands.

Yesterday, for the first time since the pandemic, I ironed some shirts and trousers, even a couple of bandannas. By the end, I was hot and sweaty and tired, but also deeply proud of those starched shirts and the creases I ironed into those trousers. It was after midnight when I finished. I used up an entire can of spray starch.

Before I went to bed, I showered and shaved around my beard, then trimmed my beard back a little, so I would look more “presentable”, as my Mother would say.

Mother had a birthday too, on 6 July. She was 102, although she’s been dead since 1995. She was the High Priestess of Crazy in my family, chronically depressed. I absorbed her depression, like a sponge takes in water.And I would drink alcohol, so I could soak up more.

Finally, on 10 July, 1994, I quit drinking. A new world opened up for me. It took me years to face my obsessions, all of them little reservoirs where pain was stored. Porn, as with Dr B, was big for me. These little distilled experiences , penned by authors, who could turn words into tumescence.

Now I read “erotica” where the longing turns into mental pictures and poems, where the characters want to connect, and share a life , if only in the moment of a fuck.

Dawn is here , another day of heat and sweat, with water to replace it.. I haven’t slept long enough. I will sleep some more. I will hope for a day where I wear my starched clothes and look powerful, with gravitas, filling the clothes with every inhalation into my lungs.

Bedtime, y’all.