First of all, seven months til Christmas. I guess Hallmark Channel will start the Christmas movies soon. 

It was a strange day after our brunch. I did my walk. I saw a couple of vultures picking over some road kill. Not the kind of bird watching I get stoked about. 

I came home, showered. We picked up some fruit and cookies for J’s lunch. Right mow, at 430 AM, I am awake and kind of frazzled, as if I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in several…..years.

J worked a five hour shift and is home, too wired up to sleep just yet. We avoid having sex. No wonder I haven’t slept well in years.

It is one of those Sundays I fancy in my dreams. Brunch is ready for whenever J decides to get out of bed, shower and join the ranks of the conscious.

The day is quiet as only a day where there is no place for most people to go can be. The birds are chirping and singing. A chipmunk showed up a while back.

I have my flag out for Decoration Day. Maybe I will find that eponymous Charles Ives piece and listen to it.

For all of you in the British Commonwealth, Decoration Day, now called Memorial Day, corresponds roughly to Remembrance Day, November 11. We honour our (ever growing number of) War Dead. We use November 11 to honour all of our veterans.

The custom of putting flowers on the graves of the war dead, “Decoration”, began after the Civil War. Until about fifty years ago, the day celebrated was May 30th. It became a “Monday Holiday” so people could have a long weekend.

One of the neighbourhood white squirrels obligingly posed for a picture the other day. I’m posting it here

And here flies the National Ensign.

Life is good.

I’m still up, mesmerized by a stream of photos on YouTube. I need to go back to sleep. Why am I still up? Maybe I’m exhausted. The pictures evoke nostalgia and Weltschmerz.

Who loves me?

I woke up around 4:00 AM for no particular reason. I thought I would sleep in the other room, but gave up and came downstairs about 4:30.

Right now, I’m looking at a collection of historic photographs on You Tube. Celebrities like James Dean, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis.  There are also pictures of Paris, New York, the Golden Gate Bridge.

The celebrity pictures remind me of my childhood, where the weekly arrival of Life magazine was eagerly anticipated. There were pictures of Marilyn, The Beatles, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, just for starters. The Kennedys, Nixon, Dr King, Malcolm X, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater filled out the pantheon.

I remember reading in Life of how Burton and Peter O’Toole, during the filming of Becket, went pub crawling in Cambridge, I believe, drinking boiler makers. I thought that was cool. I could not have been more than 13. It turned out to be a dark foreshadowing of my life. I so wanted to be famous when I was a teenager. Still do secretly, to be honest, but now realize it is no big deal.

The weekly picture magazines, Life and Look fostered that culture of fame in a way that TV or the Internet can’t. The images stayed around the house for weeks, not disappearing like a television or computer image. 

And, of course, the celebrities, moving in and out of marriages, weren’t exactly reflections of my family’s Calvinist values. I think I was traumatized by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s divorce. That divorce shattered my sense of security as if they were my own parents.

The magazines always hinted that there was something more that could be attained by buying Coca Cola, Marlboro Cigarettes, Cadillacs, Playtex foundation garments, Clairol hair dye. It was a sick fuckin’ world. The rise of Playboy,merely focused the envy and acquisition lasers on sex.

The imprinting, no brain-washing, took me years to reject. It took sobriety, 12 Step work and a reaffirmation of traditional Judaeo-Christian morality for me to turn the corner. That doesn’t mean I’m Mr Straight Arrow Normal, but dying drunk or from an overdose have no appeal for me any more.

I am sitting in my chair, staring at the camera view of Ashland, Virginia. There is a microphone that picks up random snatches of conversation, plus music from a radio in the background. “Soul” hits from the Sixties can be heard

“Hey there Lonely Girl….” I think that was Little Anthony and The Imperials. If it wasn’t, it should have been. There are more Sixties hits playing, pre-Beatles. Maybe Motown or Phil Spector. Now we have dropped back a decade. Buddy Holly is singing Peggy Sue.. You don’t hear many girls/women called Peggy Sue any more, or Mary Margaret, Madge, Bertha or Midge.

The person with gender dysphoria is riding their bicycle. Why not? The sun is out for a change. A train passes through, # 89, the Palmetto, bound for Savannah. I imagine a train, full of people, all headed to Savannah to visit Olivia, author/blogger of Olvia Submits.

It has been a morning of sleep, laziness, lethargy. I am going back to bed.

On my walks I notice the trash on the side of the road. First of all, there isn’t that much litter. There once was old white stuff, padding or chair seats, that was the most prominent litter. I suspect it blew off a truck or something.

Today I notice latex and nitrile examination gloves on the roadside and little “airplane” liquor bottles, mostly for brandy, cheap brandy, like E & J. A Bud Dry bottle has lain on the path at the same place for almost a week. I consider it a trail marker now.

It was raining lightly today and I came home soaked. It is a great feeling to power walk or run in the rain. Add the lovely sweet scent of honeysuckle (wood bine) and a power walk is a sublime experience.

And there are clean sheets on the bed.

I’m going full bore into reclaiming my masculinity. I have been too nice for too long. For too long I confused being sensitive and understanding with being wimpy denying who  I am and what my needs are. 

All tact aside, I like to fuck. I am sexually attracted to my wife. Hence I want to fuck her. Yet I have been considerate.,which means buying into her reasons for not wanting to have sex. It has been pointed out to me that, in marrying me, that’s what she promised to do. So I’ve been  hiding my masculinity, that I was self-conscious of it to the point of embarrassment and shame. Don’t want to offend her sensitive tastes.

This afternoon, as I put on my walking kit, I walked in on J wearing  only my jock. She grinned, finding it amusing that I had my cock and balls encased in the supporter. She finds it funny, me with my junk in the jock. .But she’s going to get used to a man, unashamed of how he looks.

The other garment which she finds threatening, is the athletic shirt, aka, wife-beater.   Dammit, I like to wear them. Years of swimming have given me pretty strong arms. Guns. When other women compliment them, even calling them “guns”,  I’m not hiding them any more.

Now the shirt got the name “wife-beater” because your stereotypical    blue-collar tough guys, usually Latino or Italian, wore them. Think Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.

” Stella! “

I’ve been working for a couple of hours tossing out crap. And “crap” is what it is. I assign importance to a brown glass jar that B&M Baked Beans come in. It has now a place of Honour on the ledge above the kitchen sink, beside the Los Palmalito Guava Jelly jar labelled with a colorful but completely worthless plastic ” shrink wrap” label. I suppose if I put all of my “valuable” cans, jars and bottles in a water tight box and buried that box in the back yard or stuffed it in a corner of the attic, my son could decide what to do with this crap after I died.

The quarantine has imprisoned me with my frustrations, sexual, intellectual, physical. The “gaoler” is my conception of myself, what I can or cannot be or do. So I hold onto stuff to think I can make something out of them and hence make something out of me.

Crazy? Not really, if “completing” with it, i.e. tossing it out, helps clear away the rubbish the keeps me dissatisfied and unhappy.

Enough pop psychology and psychobabble.

I remember the old Roller Derby from the Sixties with Joanie Weston. Is there a modern iteration of Roller Derby?

I miss it. There was even a Roller Derby movie K C Bomber starring Raquel Welch. It was filmed in Portland, Oregon around 1968.

So here it is 03:22 AM. J is at work. I am awake. I am watching a Time Team episode about Boudica, the female warrior queen who led a rebellion against Roman rulr. She was a bad ass.

Time to go back to bed. Night all.

I’m constantly tempted by television, YouTube and the rest of the cyberworld. The temptation is for diversion. A laugh, a thrill, an illicit peak at “inappropriate content”. I’m setting a goal to read more, preferably real books.

I just finished a walk on a pleasant, but warm, day. I walked 64 minutes, probably 4 miles. I saw a bluebird! So that was a victory.

Shower time. Let me strip the sweat-soaked Tee shirt off. And be about my washing.