NSFW 18+.This is an erotic work of my imagination. For Olivia.

I’ve been wakeful, then sleeping since Five AM. J is still sleeping. She will awaken around an hour from now. Train #89, The Palmetto, just passed through Ashland on its way to Richmond, ultimately Savannah.

My lustful mind spins a fantasy of taking the train to Savannah., perhaps not this train, but the Silver Meteor, where I can book a bedroom. In Savannah, a woman will join me. I will use her on the train, taking her body whatever ways it may please me.. I am a man, after all.

We will ride the train to its terminus in Miami. We will stay in an Art Deco hotel on South Beach, and pretend it’s 1938 and I am William Powell, the woman is Myrna Loy. We are Nick and Nora Charles, solving a murder between various couplings. Asta will not bark as I thrust into “Nora’s” luscious cunt.

We board the train Northbound. When it arrives in Savannah, the woman hikes her skirt, removes her knickers, then before handing them to me, rubs her pussy with them, her scent marking them, gifting me with the ultimate souvenir.

I’m sitting on the porch on a sunny day, with a bit of a chill. It’s is a perfect day for Autumn, moving toward Thanksgiving and Winter. My neighbour just pulled up with her boy friend. Her son, almost 3, is not with her. Maybe he is at his father’s, maybe his grandparents’. Who knows? It’s not my place to ask.

I’ve been in a similar predicament, a single part-time parent, whose concept of parenting and family life was ripped away. An intact nuclear family was a notion that was belittled and maligned in the wake of the Sexual Revolution. I was a willing participant in that “revolution”. Only now, half a century later, can I see the personal, cultural, and social catastrophe that the Sexual Revolution was.

Madness is very alluring. Giddy mania, perpetual Mardi Gras, is the endless season of our time. No Ash Wednesday ends the revelry, no fast, no penance comes to insert reflection about our sins. There can be no sin, if we deny there is a God, just inappropriate behaviour.

Jesus used his miracles to cure the demon-possessed, even casting demons into a herd of swine, who then proceed to run off a cliff. We make movies about our demons. Computer generated special effects make them real celebrities. The Hallowe’en creepy season offers an annual showcase of depravity

Virtue? What’s that? Power? Now we’re talking. Who can I control? What can be destroyed in the name of justice?

Dysfunctional families make for ideal prisons. Managing a life of shared custody, child support, sparking a new romance or coping with loneliness offers distraction aplenty. And a talking head will happily present a lie for truth. And we’ll believe that head.

Instead of an election in 2024, why don’t we allow the Prophet Samuel to anoint a king from the House of Jesse?

What makes time “Ordinary”? I’m too lazy right now to look up the ecclesiastical answer, and it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I went to Mass, and sat among these beautiful families, fathers, mothers, children of all ages.

My body doesn’t always cooperate. Pain centers in my lower back and in my left hip. I sat in the pew, hurting, but praying, listening, chanting the Gloria, Sanctus, Pater Noster.

Despite hurting, despite wishing those children were my grandchildren, I knew I was home.

We’ve spent a century pursuing the idols of hedonism. I’m glad I lived long enough to walk away.

That is the name used to commemorate the day the Armistice was signed , ending The Great War 1914-18. We limp along, bearing the cultural, political, and societal scars of this catastrophe, even today.

The legacy of that war is the carnage of its spawn, the brutal second act of 1937-45. Her memorials need only names to convey the horrors, Nanking, Katyn, Coventry, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima.

A peace that gave monsters free reign to wreak havoc was no peace at all. Yet the pipe dream that was Versailles continues to seduce us. We’ve moved the locus of reverie, from Geneva to New York and Brussels.

I don’t have a solution to alleviate the consequences of human sin. We might want to keep the swords in the scabbards, the drones and the bombers on the tarmac, and the aircraft carriers in port. But even those gestures are but more of the same simplistic fantasy. Maybe I will reread Auden’s September 1, 1939…….

And remember the compassion of St. Martin of Tours, whose Feast Day is today.

I’m tired, frustrated, lonely. I don’t want to leave my house.