17 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
Today at lunch when I was about to get a scene by scene summary of a particularly tragic death that was the subject of a TV show, I told J I did not want to hear about it, nor do I want to hear about any murders, adultery, infidelity, or suicides at lunch any longer.
I feel completely liberated from that junk. Never again.
17 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in History, Uncategorized
I don’t know precisely the right word to describe what someone in The Netherlands did with their movie camera over 100 years ago. They filmed a busy port of Amsterdam, freighters, passenger ships, lighters, warehouses, quays, trams, freight trains. Now I see a lateen rigged schooner pass through the camera’s view. It is a busy harbour in a city that would escape the catastrophe of The Great War.
The women wear long skirts in the Edwardian style. The men wear suits, ties, bowler hats, flat caps. There is no litter on the street. That suggests either a cultural value of fastidiousness, or a society that did not produce items deemed unworthy of retaining. Were there no pop bottles, beer bottles, potato chip bags, cigarette packages, newspapers?
The scenes had moments that looked like a scale model train layout. Now there is ferry taking a horse and wagon across the harbour, now a ship in dry dock.
We could call it modern. Children filmed in these movies could have lived into the twenty-first century, suffered under Nazi occupation, seen the transformation of the Dutch East Indies into Indonesia, the advent of passenger automobiles, air travel, satellites, women’s emancipation, radio, television, computers, artificial hormonal contraception, antibiotics, just for starters. Oh, and nuclear weapons. Let’s not leave those out.
We have our eye on the future and whatever it may bring, but we should always remember that the old culture was not that long ago.
16 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
I went swimming as usual. What a difference swimming makes. I did 2500 meters. My distance for the week 10/9-15 is 12,100 meters or 7.5 miles.
The frustration and self-pity go away. Plus the much-sought after “aerobic” or endorphin high kicks in. Sweet.
The H.A.L.T. factor, I wrote about yesterday is making itself felt. I don’t feel out of sorts right now, in contrast to the drama of earlier today. Right now I’m not interested in eating through my feelings. Big victory.
Life is good.
15 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
Dear Porn Writers & Erotic Bloggers:
I know it’s a basic fact of human sexual physiology that the vagina lubricates itself in anticipation of sexual activity. I know it’s important, ya da, ya da, ya da. Still it gets a little tiresome, post after post after post. Now I know you women out there are strongly pro-lubrication, lady parts-wise. Who can blame you? Not me, that’s for sure.
Still, wet cunts are as common in porn as Green Bean Casserole made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and French’s Onion Whatevers are at Thanksgiving Dinner.
Just a hint. Broaden the repertroire. OK?
15 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
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So J gets off work. She wants to go out to lunch. She’s paying. What can I say? We go to Longhorn’s. They have a reasonably priced lunch menu. I get grilled chicken sandwich and a Caesar salad . She gets a cheeseburger and a baked potato. She then proceeds to tell me about a movie on TV last night, featuring adultery, jealousy, and murder, the kind of entertainment porn haters don’t mind watching. Go figure.
Meanwhile I sit through this ordeal, wondering if I could distract myself by cutting my hand off with the steak knife.
I want to have sex with this woman? Celibacy isn’t so bad, all things considered.
15 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
Odd sleep patterns do not easily disappear. I went to bed around 11:30 last night, woke up at 1:30, switched out the dishwasher, prepped J’s lunch (Fruit cup. Tuna salad), went back to bed around 3:30. I was up again at 7:00, and now, I feel bedtime coming back again.
I will sleep, awaken to get to AA round noon.
15 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in alcoholism, Uncategorized
H. Hungry A. Angry L. Lonely. T. Tired
Alcoholics Anonymous is chock full of pithy sayings intended to support persons in recovery from alcoholism. One such saying is HALT, outlined above. I smugly thought that my emotional sobriety was in good shape, until I compared how I felt according to the HALT yardstick.
Hungry. I didn’t let myself get hungry. No I was eating at every chance and weight that I lost was coming back, and I never thought feeding my upset was a sign of emotional dis-ease.
Angry. I thought I was justified in the outright anger around issues I’m powerless over, like politics and the Roman Catholic Church. Add to those the petty resentments that I have toward J about the sexual desert.
Lonely. No sex. Need I say more?
Tired. I would sleep at every chance I get.
Here I was, trudging through life, with one issue after another, never thinking about drinking, but attached to the grievances of life, feeling like I deserved to hold all these resentments. Wrong. They were taking a toll.
In all likelihood, none of these circumstances will suddenly disappear. But you know, I don’t have to let them run my life.
14 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
I learned just how lonely I am. I had this realization sitting in the AA meeting that I need to connect with people. I can’t do this at home reading or watching sports, porn, and YouTube.
Actually I saw my porn viewing today, as directly related to my loneliness, I watch three particular videos over and over of the same couple making love, having sex, or whatever it is they re doing when they’re going to town. Not that it matters, but they are lesbian. They look like regular people, no fake tits or impossibly small asses. In my fantasy, they are a real-life couple and they really are in love. How they make love is how I want to connect with J, minus the strapon, fully, completely, and surrendered. Both of us surrendered, to each other.
The pain of loneliness hit me like a ton of bricks this weekend. I need people, much as I like to think I don’t.
14 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
I had plans. First, I went to Mass at 8:30 with my sister and her husband at St Benedict. They are attending St Benedict now. They like the priest, the liturgy, in English, is dignified and reverent. They got tired of the priest at their old parish, who is really good at telling jokes. So good, in fact, he abandoned any real meaningful content in his homilies. This happens. It isn’t stand-up, Father.
After Mass, I came home, ate breakfast, slept. J came home. She had six boxes of sun care products to get to Fed Ex. I went with her. We had another late lunch/early dinner. I came home, slept some more.
Now baseball. Tie game right now. I love watching the Yankees’ middle inning relievers. They are as tough as nails. The Budweiser commercial with Superwoman at the bar, showing the boy bar flies how to shoot pool, throw darts, and arm wrestle, all while holding her bottle of Bud, was just on. Stupid. Annoying. But that’s TV. Americans will put up with all kinds of nonsense to watch a good game.
I did not get to swim today. Bummer. The odd sleep patterns are getting to me. But I’m focusing back into doing what works, diet, swimming, meetings. So working through interruptions, like getting boxes to Fed Ex, the lunch out afterwards I was not expecting, are part of the drill.
Now let’s get this game over.
12 Saturday Oct 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
I went with the Russian Orthodox Liturgy. There was a funeral from Svatagorsk Lavra in Eastern Ukraine. This area recognizes the Moscow Patriarchate for ecclesiastical jurisdiction rather than Kiev. This will give you some context, for Ukraine is very much a fractured country, with language and ethnicity differences between Eastern and Western Ukraine. Many ethnic Russians live in Eastern Ukraine. Anybody remember the Civil War from a few years back? The Ukraine-Russia conflict is centuries old, with genocide in the 1930’s figuring into the tragedy.
The women in their babushkas, the priests in their rich and colorful vestments carry on with the ancient liturgy, through Romanovs, Bolsheviks, and oligarchs, worshipping the eternal power against the temporal grasps for worldly control. They know, I suspect, what really matters. It is a knowledge that Rome has forgotten or chooses to ignore. Look no further than the Amazonian Synod, the current and latest travesty of the Bergoglio Papacy.
I shifted over to trainspotting, in time to watch a freight pass through Ashland. It looks like mixed freight with plywood, potash, and trash among the commodities hauled. I miss the caboose at the end of a train. It gave a sense of completion to things, like a pitched roof on a building. I hear another train horn. It could be Amtrak #98, running an hour late. It is, passing through now.
J should be up soon. Her sliced fruit is packed in her blue-striped insulated lunch tote. She will shower and leave for work soon. I will be alone. Again. I believe I reverted back to my 20 mg dose of Prozac (fluoxetine) too soon. The pictures of night, darkness, interspersed with street lights, headlights, the interior lights of passenger cars seem to fill my viewing. It is a sterile desolate world. I need to switch back to the Technicolor© world of Bugs, Elmer, Porky and Daffy. Or simply go back to bed.
Dispatches From Dystopia 