I elected to rest today. Saturday was a 🐻 bear as far activities went.

Saturday, driving down to Church for Confession, I noticed that the planned demolition of my old junior high school building was proceeding. Only when I think about it too much do I feel a sense of loss. It was at this school when I learned Kennedy (JFK) had been murdered 22 November, 1963. Here is where I got my nose broken in a school yard fight. Here is where we queued up one Sunday after Church to receive the Sabine oral polio vaccine. The building is now a pile of bricks. The memories can’t be torn down.

I went to Mass. Was glad I did. I prayed a Rosary this afternoon. I took a nap. I started an Audre Lorde novel Zami. Decided I wasn’t in the mood for lesbian identity fiction.

But I need to blog. I need to put out that I’m lonely, here first, then to J. I need to turn off the political brain, the ideological brain, the brain of rules and ligatures.

Fuck the calories, I’m getting a Coke tonight.

I wondered again if J was a little. Then, while making the bed, I saw, in the bathroom we don’t use because of her junk, a cap, from a bubble bath bottle she saved, fashioned to be the head of Tigger. Nothing odd in that behaviour.
So she is on the way home. She will be tired. Too tired for sex. Or maybe she has a kidney stone. Maybe I will just chicken out again in asking for my needs to be met.
Self-pity is never beautiful or cool.

I took my shower, put on a clean tee-shirt and my jammies bottoms. I took some Aleve. I ache. Going to sleep. Nite Everybody

I got up. I cranked up the pressure cooker, cooked the black beans, then the collards. I was surprised at how easy it is to fix collards in the pressure cooker. The rinsing, slicing and chopping take the most time. I froze roughly half of the cooked collards. I did a variant of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (Knopf, 2014) braised collard recipe. I had some herb and garlic infused olive oil that I used to braise the cooked collards in. When they were ready, I served them with hearts of palm. The flavors complement each other quite well.

Laundry was the major housework today in addition to the food preparation and cooking. All done until I take the sweaty clothes off, that I’m wearing now.

As the title says I went to Confession, acknowledging about nine months of bad behavior. A Priest friend of my sister says hearing confessions is like being beaten to death with a feather, meaning tht most of the transgressions confessed aren’t about horrendous deeds committed,just a slow accumulation of actions that pull us further away from God. But the slow alienation hurts us.

Dinner, with Cuban roast pork was satisfying. I used a different mojo criollojo than usual going with one used by the South Florida Cuban restaurant, La Lechenera. I prefer it over the Goya bottled brand, now that I have used it.

It is almost Eight PM. I am tired. I have to fix Waldorf chicken salad for J’s lunch tomorrow. Let me get the chicken breasts in the oven.

Here it is 6:06 AM. I’ve made my coffee, have black beans in the pressure cooker. Popeye the Sailor is on, in one of the Technicolor longer cartoons from the Thirties. It is an Arabian Nights story, the Fleischer Studios version of Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves. Now we have a Fleischer Studios version of Superman from 1941. Kinda cool. I have never seen this before. Seems to be the typical mad scientist story. It is a beautifully drawn cartoon, in the Fleischer Studios tradition.

J works her other job today, I’m having the collards, hearts of palm black bean dinner with Cuban roast pork. I could surprise her with tres leches cake for dessert. That would constitute serious spoiling. Better to wait till I get my Social Security money in eleven days.

Time to pack her lunch.

It was a good day. The usual activities figured into the mix, AA, swimming, laundry. J wanted to go out to eat so we went to a seafood joint, Awful Arthur’s. It is an ok place, locally owned. The food is good, not great, but good. I had the fish sandwich, J had scallops.

I put off swimming til around 630. My goal was to swim a mile 5 times this week. I swam 5 days on a row.

When I got home J wanted me to watch I Love Lucy with her, I did, through three or four episodes. I was aching so I got up, to apply pain patches, btush my teeth, floss, and use my fluoride rinse. By then I was wide awake. It is still early.

Now I am watching Bendita Tentacion, where Mexican women show sex toys and trashy lingerie. It is a surprisingly fun show. I suspect it is particularly interesting if one understands Spanish. Mexican women don’t seem to have many hang-ups about their weight, but I may simply be inferring that from the size of their models.

They have the usual sex toys on display, dildoes, harnesses, vibrators. Nothing is shown that has not been shown North of The Border.

I’m tired. Going back to bed.

This is what the sky looks like.

The other day, I bought some fresh collards at Food Lion. I have never fixed fresh collards before, but I saw where they can be cooked in the pressure cooker, if I don’t want to cook them on the stove. I’m going with the pressure cooker. I soaked them for an hour to get the dirt and any pesticide residue off them. I once had them in a restaurant in Roanoke where they served them with 💕 of 🌴 hearts of palm. I have hearts of palm and I am always looking for novel ways to serve them. They came with black beans and rice, too. It was kind of a Brazilian vegan place. Roanoke is a surprising city, with lots of artsy bohemian types. That should not be surprising, really. Artsy bohemian types can’t afford to live in places, like Greenwich Village, where artsy bohemian types used to live.

I am on target for my swimming. I missed AA today, but I did meet #1 son R for a cup of coffee. He is recovering quite nicely from the pancreatitis.

R and I were talking about Manhattan. I said the City is losing some of its mystique when prominent in the City are the same stores and restaurants one can find in just about any suburban shopping center. “I wonder if that Olive Garden is any different from the one three miles away from my house?”

There is a cool down tomorrow here. Tomorrow’s high will be 75°F (24°C). Today it was 97°F (36°C). Watching The Ashes, I was consumed with envy for the fans, players, and everybody else at The Oval in London today with their weather and delightful temperatures. Watching my rail cam in Ashland I saw a flash of lightning across the sky. The front is moving in!

J had a busy five days at Target. She got Tate’s Macadamia Nut Cookies for her treat tonight. I saw Snoopy Blue Flannel Sheets at Vermont Country Store. She would never ask for them. That is why she is getting them as a surprise. She loves surprises.

It is Wednesday morning. Train #98 the Northbound Silver Meteor was only 90 minutes late. I slept maybe five hours in toto. I will go back to sleep.

When I go back to sleep, the lawn mowing people will be at work. The recycling truck will drive through the neighbourhood. The Summer heat will build, hitting the mid nineties. Summer isn’t a season in the South. It is an eternity.

J is at work with her lunch, fruit salad, chicken salad, rice crackers, cookies. She will unload a truck, fill her shelves. And sweat.

I will wait at home, wonder about dinner, deciding a slow cooker chicken dish would be fitting for a hot day. I will find a recipe that will call for mushrooms too.

It is time I went back to sleep.

If I could predict when I would fall asleep and when I would just lie there, wondering if I ever would sleep again, it would save me a lot of hours of angst and worry. Such is the situation tonight.

I’m just plain lonely. J and I do stuff together, we love each other. I love her. She loves me. And yet…

If I knew why one minute I think the world is coming to an end and the next minute I realize life isn’t so bad after all, well, I guess you could call me enlightened. This is one of those days.

What was special about today is that I knew I needed to be around people. So I went to AA, just to see and be seen. I shared some thought on the topic of freedom. I quoted a line from Me and Bobby McGee, by Kris Kristofferson. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” (If you remember Janis Joplin had a hit with it.) so it is with not only our physical possessions but our emotional attachment to things.

We aren’t really free if we have to hold on to our status, our prestige, our fear of losing somebody’s “love”. (Never mind that true love can’t be lost.) But there I was, chillin’ with my drunk peeps. Not. Feeling. Lonely. The moral of the story: Get out the house, to AA, The Y, Daily Mass.

Speaking of The Y, I went right after the meeting. I swam 1800 meters and felt good. I saw my friends Pat, Steve, and Greg. The only exciting news was that Steve had somebody tear the door off his locker and steal his wallet.

Now I am home, waiting for J, reading blogs, getting caught up here.

This morning, as I was getting dressed, I just lay back in bed, beneath an open window and felt the morning breeze on my naked body. It felt incredible! Further exploring the realm of gratuitous sensuality, I went commando this morning, feeling the fabric of the shrink to fit 501’s against my, uh, personal bits. (Note to self, Do THAT more often).

That’s about it.