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Dispatches From Dystopia

~ "What man by worrying can add one cubit to his span of years?"

Dispatches From Dystopia

Tag Archives: Relationships

What If?

05 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

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Tags

love, Relationships

Love doesn’t look like what we think it should look like or feel like?

We all run around with ideas in our heads about love, or,more accurately put, sex and relationships, that we get from movies, TV, romance novels and, especially, pornography, of what we think love is.

We come across a human being that we like and we aren’t afraid of them and they haven’t hurt us yet, so we pursue this relationship, really not much more than carrying on a verbal and nonverbal dialogue. If the person doesn’t blow us off, we continue the pursuit, the inquiry as to whether this person, might actually love us or fall in love with us.

But are we in love, do we want to fall in love, or are we merely pursuing validation that we are not the horrible person that we are afraid we are in our most private and destructive thoughts?

Maybe finding True Love is the Search For The Holy Grail. As a goal, it is unattainable, but we will not be deterred.

How would we know if we found True Love, by the intensity of the orgasm, names together on a deed, children? All of these are questionable indicators. Yet we press on. Perhaps the best we can do is take what the other has to offer.

Watching The East River, Thinking

20 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

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#Beauty, Relationships

You can find most anything on YouTube. The other day I found a live cam that looks across the East River, from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The visual centerpiece is the Brooklyn Bridge in all its magnificence.

A bridge is something we take for granted in 2020. We cross rivers, lakes and bays without a second thought. Rarely are we touched by the beauty. But the beauty of a bridge derives from its functionality.

This post is more about the thinking than the East River or The Brooklyn Bridge. Tomorrow is Fathers Day. My son is coming over to assemble the gas grill he sent me that is my Fathers Day gift. Truth is, for me,the gift is just him being here. We will talk, joke, commiserate.We think alike. We’re father and son after all.

That was the first tier of my thoughts tonight. A little further down comes the “should haves” and “could haves” around why my life turned the way that it did. The images of ex-wives stream by in my mind, as if they were floats in a parade. I think about the sex I once had that I’m not having now, the thoughts I don’t share with J, because her life is about comparing herself to others and to some idealized version of “wife”. It is best to keep quiet.

A little deeper are the observations that I am looking for some sublime experience and then when I have it, want to immediately have it again.It is found most frequently in The Search For The Perfect Cup Of Coffee. I have a cup of coffee that is just hot enough, strong enough, flavorful enough. Once finished, I want to have it again, that same perfect cup of coffee. But it hardly ever comes back again, at least, not right away.

I went through two marriages looking for The Sublime Sexual Experience. You know the one where we both have world-shattering orgasms and promise to love each other forever, but end up divorced anyway, the rubble of our failures comparable to Berlin in 1945. .

I was dreaming a new dream earlier, with J, the laughter, the sweaty sex, the orgasm, the Eternal Pledge of Fidelity and Trust. And I was ready to risk it all.

Again. Why not?

The Breakup And The Surprise Meeting

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by David in Adult Children, Depression, Love and stuff, Smartphones

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Emotions, Family, Politics, Relationships

I finally broke it off. With Facebook.  I had had enough of the politics, the misinformation presented as fact, the snarky remarks from and at the people who don’t agree with the poster.  I let it get to me and decided I did not need Facebook.  I don’t need to seek the approval of total strangers  and to look for the “like” on a post as if it meant something more than mild agreement. So I deactivated my account. The next day I had a session with my counselor. He’s worked with me for almost 2 years.  I told him of the breakup and he thought it was a good idea.  He shared I’m not alone; that FB is crazy-making for a lot of  his clients.

So after my session, when we agreed that my hyperactive stomach may not be all nerves, I was on my way to the store to buy some omeprazole to handle the physical problems of hyperacidity.  On the way to the pharmacy, I realized I needed to stop by the auto repair shop to see if some knobs for Mrs CorC?’s Honda that my mechanic had ordered had come in. As I pulled in, whom should I see there but RBA, my elder son!  I did not recognize him at first, because I wasn’t expecting to see him there. He was supposed to be in Hickory, North Carolina where he was transferred about four months ago.  His wife told me a couple weeks earlier that he was negotiating a move back here. Evidently, he had accomplished it very recently.

Had anyone told me forty years ago, when RBA was an infant, that seeing my adult children would make my day, I would have looked at them in disbelief.  But it’s true. When RBA or CD come over, or even if I see them by chance, I am floating on air.  A lot of my sadness clears up.  The issues that dog me, e.g. no sexual intimacy in my marriage, fade to the background.

Mrs CorC? came home. We went out for dinner.  I read when I got home.  I purposely left the smartphone downstairs to keep it from tempting me when confronted with boredom when I went upstairs to listen to the Ten O’Clock News news, silently wanting it to end.  The hard truth is that the smartphone within easy reach has morphed into kind of a cyber-cigarette, to calm my nerves, to keep me from truly being with people.  I guess being secondary in a relationship to a tiny little computer just might generate a resentment or two.

With any luck, I will grow up before I die.

Off She Goes

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by David in Classical Music, Love and stuff, Sport

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amtrak, Catholicism, Communication, Feelings., Insomnia, love, Montreal Canadiens, Relationships

Monday, I wake up around Six. I fell asleep in the other bed, in the other bedroom, around Three. At least I guess I did. Earlier I woke up around One A.M., lay in bed, the big queen size bed, till I finally acknowledge my need to urinate. I climb out of bed, walk to the bathroom, flick on the light, raise the seat, and void.

I go downstairs, decide a cup of decaf is in order, start one with the Keurig machine, listen to the pressure push the stream of hot water through the plastic pod, then take my cup of hot Dunkin’ Decaf.  I sit in my leather recliner,check football scores, the arrival/departure status of Amtrak trains and sip the coffee.  I start to feel tired again after reading and  pondering the state of the world. I say a Hail Mary, putting emphasis on the phrase “Full of Grace”, being too lazy to get out the Rosary and invest the twenty minutes it takes me to pray five decades.

Back upstairs I go. I position the pillow against my back, start the CD with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert Lieder. I last remember the fourth song. Next thing I know it is Six A.M.  I brew some real coffee with caffeine, read the obituaries, (my mother’s morning habit), then the sports page. Les Habs, the Montreal Canadiens, lost last night 3-2 to the Blackhawks.  I start a DVD (CBS’s World War I), paying half-attention to Robert Ryan’s narrative of the Pershing Expedition to find Pancho Villa in 1916.  I text with my friend in Connecticut over nothing in particular.

I hear Mrs CorC  moving about upstairs, starting her shower, then trudge upstairs to chill with her as she gets dressed for work.  I tease her about the foods she dislikes, veal, lamb, okra (gumbo), promising not to put okra in the soup I’m planning to fix in the next couple of days.

She is dressed for work, her teeth brushed, her I-Pad charged. She kisses me good-bye, half-heartedly, fearful this morning, of infecting me with some imagined virus.

She did not remind me to be a “Good Boy” today. I never ask what would constitute bad behavior, (looking at porn sites perhaps?)  If she only knew of the porn playing between my ears whenever I wished to imagine it, she would realize the futility of her admonition.

One day, in our ongoing but sporadic dialogue of why we don’t make love, she stated that menopause stifled her libido.  I can only speculate as to why she has made no inquiries with doctors, or psychotherapists, or even friends on how to restore said libido.   She is not, after all, singularly, uniquely, and solitarily afflicted with this dilemma.

“Why, my Beloved, am I NOT worth the effort?”

Off she goes……

Back, After A Brief Absence

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by David in Health Issues, Love and stuff

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Tags

Hallowe'en, love, Relationships

Here it is All Hallow’s Eve. We have yet to have Trick or Treaters knock on our door. We are lacking a porch light due to the exterior siding job currently in progress. We have little Paydays and Butterfingers ready to distribute as our contribution to The Pediatric Dentists’ Boat Payment Fund. Having a Registered Sex Offender in the neighborhood tends to depress our turnout. 

This is a tough time of year for me. It is the first anniversary of Ex-wife #2’s death. I miss her.

We are also coming up on the first anniversary of my spinal fusion. There is some happy reflection with this that centers around getting closer to Mrs CorC?. We would hang out in the bed watching Seinfeld, Andy Griffith Show and I Love Lucy. DVD’s. 

Close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and relationships.


Streaks

20 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by David in Love and stuff, Sexual Identity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Fears, Feelings., Pope Francis, Relationships, Streaks

Love is nothing without forgiveness and understanding.-Pope Francis

I wanted to tell the story of my two cousins, now deceased, who were both born on 21 August, but 10 years apart. That is going to have to wait.

I have to write about streaks. We all have them. There are those times when everything is going well, or not so well. It seems that the good stuff, or the bad, will go on forever. Then it stops. All of a sudden, our mojo isn’t working any more or starts again, just as enigmatically.  I was cruising along, swimming every day, dropping weight, feeling good , taking my vitamins. Then it stopped. You might say I got too deep “in my head”, wondering.   I’ve been feeling not so good since the colonoscopy. My first swim after the procedure the following Monday ended at 100 meters when some nausea  came on. The next day I did a decent workout. The next day, Wednesday,  my  younger son and I had dinner at my sister’s and I was all jazzed up about seeing him.  Then Thursday brought the trip to Baltimore.

Baltimore includes The Things  about which I haven’t written. How I wanted to reconnect sexually with my wife. How it did not happen.  Is she afraid? Am I? Are my fears in a dance with hers?  I am afraid she will reject me sexually, verbally,  with finality, and I will be left with pieces of a life to reassemble at age 65.  I am afraid, in that case, I lack the courage to move on.  I am afraid that my sexual needs, wants and desires  diminish what we do have. Laughter. Conversation. Family.

Then again,  how much longer am I going to step over the garbage? Literally. That’s what it is when you live  with a slob. And slob-ness is infectious.  There is crap accumulating in my respective micro-habitat. Kitchen has crumbs. Trash can is full. Sinks and toilets need a once over.

What’s up? Swimming with tears in my eyes, for sure. Coming back home, doing something to make the house a little cleaner.  Avoiding the pop psychology “Self-Esteem” game, but, rather, doing the next right thing,  whether I feel better afterwards or not.

This  morning on Instagram was a post from Pope Francis, not that he went online and posted it himself.  “Love is nothing without forgiveness and understanding.” Thank you, Holy Father, for another  growth experience.

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