In about three and a half hours, I go to the internist for my semiannual physical. All of a sudden, I seem to have issues I never thought I’d have. Is that spot on my forearm skin cancer? Likewise that scabby thing on the top of my head has me wondering.

I’m not particularly happy with my diabetes’ management, which consists of taking more Metformin after every office visit. I’ve already gone back to Weight Watchers (WW), tracking what I eat. Maybe weight loss and exercise can turn that around.

I’ve got the idea that, at age 72, I’m too old to start anything new. So giving that mindset up takes work. I can’t sit in my house of clutter and junk and expect any positive changes that I want in my life.

“Daunting” is the word I use to break away from this suffocating status quo..

That sounds scary before you even know what it is. It’s more common name is “Wet Brain” Syndrome, dementia brought on by excessive consumption of alcohol.

As a recovering alcoholic, I come across sick people every day. Now I know of someone with “wet brain”. He’s hospitalized right now. I knew him when he had a long period of sobriety, even taught in a “12 Steps In 4 Weeks” Recovery Class. That seems ages ago. The last time I saw him he was a driving a van at a recovery house, that brought the newly sober to meetings. That was after he started drinking again and could barely string together a few weeks.

And now, he’s in a nursing home, and they’re housing him and tracking the downward spiral.

I learned this from his ex-wife, who is also an addict/alcoholic. Right now, she has 19 months , is working to become a peer counselor. She lost her nursing license because she used. She even convinced a gynecologist to perform a hysterectomy on her, so she could get the pain medicine.

This is a world a lot of you don’t know about. Sometimes I wish I didn’t.

“The time is out of joint, o cursed sprite! That ever I was born to set it right!” Hamlet Act I, Scene 5, line 189-190

That’s about all I can say right now. The world seems particularly crazy, whacko, out of joint.

I can’t go along with the general craziness of American Foreign Policy, transgenderism (the Eugenics of the Twenty-first Century), the evil machinations of the World Economic Forum.

There will be another large scale genocide. I may live to see it, if mass sterilization measures fail to provide a sufficient demographic collapse.

Right now, I am not a Sunbeam for Jesus.

Stories don’t write themselves. My mind has to open. Characters emerge from nerve cells. Sometimes I’m telling old stories, David and Bathsheba, Paris and Helen, Moses in the bulrushes. Lovers, adulterers, and warriors. Cuckolds and whores. Orphans and sisters. They all turn on the cycle.

Every family has a storyteller, a bard, who like Homer, tells their story to whomever listens. My mother was a storyteller, but her words never hit the paper in a typewriter,or the pages of a bound book.

Every word I place in the ether, this new vellum, are the words my mother never had the chance or time or freedom to tap out on the keys of her Royal portable.

So here goes.

In approximately one hour and forty-five minutes, I will sit before the Blessed Sacrament and contemplate, meditate, and pray. I will pray for a dear friend for whom I ask of God inner tranquility, happiness, and love.

I think our ideas of love are rather small, tumescence, moisture, tactile response, to fabricate a drama between our ears. Sometimes we attempt from the act of coitus to construct a bond lasting 50 or 75 years, until death takes a partner away. The realists, of course, know better. From what, or where, do they derive their wisdom?

We pledge before God our fealty to this bond. At the same time, our little minds are thinking of a way to opt out. Our infidelity, our partner’s infidelity, our alcoholism, their alcoholism, our mutual alcoholism all offer compelling reasons.

There are the damaged innocents, children whose scars are sometimes deep, always painful.

Tomorrow, I shall meet my divorced niece’s boyfriend. Or if I go to the family gathering tomorrow, I shall meet him. But the truth is I don’t want to go. Much as I love my family, this is too painful. The broken marriages, my own, my son’s and my brother’s, hurt too much.

I have been married to my current wife for twenty two years . We last had sex, maybe, twenty years ago. Must I relive this dream that always seems to morph into a nightmare?

The honeymoon is always way too short.

Insomnia sucks. The people who put their heads on the pillow, fall asleep and awaken refreshed eight hours are to be admired. And envied

I don’t know what else to say.

I don’t feel loved, although I know I am.

My wife needs to sleep. And work. She’s afraid of being impoverished.

This is a crappy feeling that’s always lurking below the surface of my smile.

I can remember days of being in no particular hurry, when staying home with a lover was all the luxury I could imagine. My son would be farmed off to his grandparents and sex with my lover would ease the pain of my failed marriage.

Back then I was a sorry excuse for a hedonist. I was too busy, in my head, rationalizing my fornication. My ex-wife’s adultery could give me some justification. I could tell myself I was “in love”, and might just marry this woman I was schtupping, but by God’s rule book I was still violating one of the Big Ten.

Fast forward about forty four years and I’m still mystified by the Judaeo-Christian rules of sex. The simple desire for orgasm trumps an awful lot of ethical treatises. Then again the ethicists keep harkening back to the children. And the children are pretty damned important.

But now, my breeding years are over. There’s no ovulation going on around here on my wife’s part. Somehow everything else we do is a priority. Everything. Lube is going to waste.

I’m going to have to take some risks, to break this cycle.

I feel lazy, more than slothful. Sloth refers more to a spiritual laziness, the lack of interest in matters of theology, but the alliteration counts for something here.

I took a shower and I’m lying nude on the bed in the other bedroom, fantasizing about naked women, more lustful than lazy, looking for reasons not to get dressed. There must be women who just wanna have fun in the friendly confines of an air conditioned house.

You know who you are.

Sometimes we use words because we have no tears.