Monday, January 31, 2005

Mondays and Sunny Days

We have both today, thank god because we have had way too much rain this month. Northern California is not like southern, we get a real rainy season, starts October and ends around April. The good thing is during the winter it is beautiful and green, right now the grass is thick, the flowering trees are in full bloom and it is just breathtaking. Better news, no snow, no sub zero temperatures (unless you want to travel to the Sierras to get your winter fix).

But you can get very long stretches, sometimes it can rain almost solid for a month. You can play in snow, go sledding, Skiing, throw snowballs. All you can do in the rain is get soaked and deal with mudslides. California is a place of extremes, in return for generally beautiful and benign weather, you have to deal with earthquakes, firestorms and mudslides. Of the three, mudslides are the most insidious, they are frequent, unpredictable and uninsurable.

I suppose paradise always has its down side, karmac balance and all.

California is rife with karma and coincidence, at least for me. I was not born here, my home is Pennsylvania, Harrisburg to be exact. I went to school in upstate New York (SUNY Ithaca, for those that get the joke). I spent years in Rhode Island, New York, Virginia, and New Jersey.

But, I was in California the first time I was married, I was an officer in the Navy and my ship was stationed in San Diego. My first wife was Texan, but also a Navy Nurse. We were married on base and had the reception on the beach. We left California when I was transferred to instructor duty, back to Saratoga Springs. Two years after we left the Navy, I took a job back in California, and soon after we were divorced. My second wife is a Californian, we were married in SLO town and had the reception on the Beach.

And I was divorced here. A second time.

And Now I am getting married in Marin, in California, to a New Yorker, born and bred.

And we are getting married and having the reception on the beach.

What the hell is a Pennsylvania boy doing living this kind of life, in California of all places.

And I am not even a movie star.

This is going to be a busy week, so I might not get too many posts it. I want to thank all my new readers for all their wonderful comments, it is great hearing from you guys. SSW, Zenboy, Beastie. And of course, Bad Girl and Kayten. I will be heading to your blogs this week when I need distraction, looking for a bit of wisdom or just entertainment from you all.

One more twilight zone moment. I have developed a fondness for Bad Girl and Kayten, I think mostly because their honesty and genuine goodness shine through their postings, and reading them brings a lot of perspective to my life and thinking, and for that I am always grateful. I think I am doing the same for them, as we all do for each other in blog space.

Yesterday I noticed our ages

Bad Girl 23
Kayten 34
Me 45


We are spaced out 11 years a piece, half generation plus one differences, to a tee.

Hmmm.....


Thursday, January 27, 2005

Swing Dancing

The best New Year's eve to date was with the ex some nine years ago at the San Francisco Symphony New Year's Eve Concert. They do a great gig, for one price, you get a performance, in that case it was Wagner's music, "A Night in Old Vienna". After the performance, they make Davis Hall over into a Party Zone, plenty of food and enough alcohol to float an aircraft carrier.

The Symphony has a group of musicians that form up a Big Band, all Glenn Miller and the Andrew's Sisters and every one dances the night away to the tunes of the 30's and 40's, Swing, Foxtrot the works. At midnight they drop balloons. The ex finished the night in her little black dress with a big balloon doing the bubble dance, and a good time was had by all.

She was a lot of fun. Nutty as a fruit cake, but fun.

The fiancee, for the record is also a lot of fun. Just not pathologically self destructive.

I love to dance, and the Fiancee and I are pretty damn good together.

I love Swing Dancing.

And so...

A good friend of mine confided in me tonight that he and his wife are swingers. Funny, I have know them for three years and never guessed. The first time Fiancee met them, she pegged it cold. So much for my Holmes like powers of observation.

In my last job, my engineering manager also confided in me that she and her husband were in the Scene. Actually, they were in the BSDM scene and the swinging scene. Reports were that work parties at her house were quite a scene. I was never invited, for good reason. She and I loved working together, and she and her husband and my ex and I double dated a couple of times, but there are some practical limits on sex and employer/employee that need to be maintained. I am very cognizant of that reality and keep very strict boundaries where work and fumblididdles are concerned.

Of course, her husband was hoping beyond hope that the line would be crossed. The ex is a looker, no doubt, and a firecracker when inspired. But Engineering Manager and I had too much respect for our friendship and working relationship to ever let that happen.

Still, it made for interesting happy hour conversation.

Kayten made a request tonight for stories of people with hot sex that are in love and together in a licit (as opposed to illicit? does licit really exist as a word? It should, by George!). I do not feel the need to go into details, but Kayten, if you are reading, the Fiancee and I have serious hot times, and we have only just started exploring things. Valentine's day presents by agreement will be flowers, cards and kinky sex toys (Chocolate would also be on the list, but we are on the wedding dress diet!). I tend to make my intentions clear, and she has on occasion declared a go home from work early day to make sure that intentions get, well, intentional.

Back to the meet of the matter (or the moot). Swinging. Swapping. Group fumblididdles. Making the three backed or four backed beast with you, your spouse and two or more of your favorite people not married to you. This is territory that I have never trod. The closest I ever got was when I was 15 and a buddy and I made a grope and kissing sandwitch with a girl in our church confirmation group. It has always seemed to me to be fraught with perils and problems, a great way for a sticky situation to get sticky. Also, the likely canidate for this in my life to date was the ex, but she had a very strange slut/shame/prude relationship with her sexuality.

(Actually, when we were living together, before marriage, the cute 32 year old gal next door was dumped hard by her boyfriend, and she was in a dry spell for a while. The Ex one day started pushing me in a strange way, telling me that she felt sorry for the neighbor and that I should go over there and take care of her. It was one of many "Huh" moments I had with her. Never happened).

Disclaimer, I am not currently in the market for a swinging relationship. Quite happy with what I have found, have plenty to keep me busy for a long time. Not exactly sure if this mid 40's guy can keep up with mid 30's, so far so good, but lets not queer the deal, shall we.

But it does strike me, that for all our sideways looks at this lifestyle, the people involved have seemed to hit on a very practical solution to the 7, 10, and 20 year itch, the one that feels like " I love my spouse/family/life but if I do not power fuck someone random this instant I will just go CRAZY!" Kayten in a blog stated that she worried that she might never find someone who loves her and satisfies her kinky wild side. Now I think she will, seems like just too great a catch for some 30 something guy looking for life, kink and family.

But you have to ask the question, why does she have to choose?

Maybe we would all be better served if our ethics around swinging and sharing were a bit looser, if more of us found it ok to have our friends and eat them too. It means having a lighter touch and a bit more tolerance for different people, a willingness to be open to experiences. It also seems to me that it requires a great deal more real intimacy in the couple, serious honesty and compassion and a sense of shared fun. There are risks, but it seems to me to have a lot of advantages over affairs.

For one, it is honest. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Second it is fair, you get, she gets. No one feels gyped. Third, it is participative, no one feels left out or unwanted. (This from my conversations with people who do this sort of thing, like I said, I have yet to partake). Seems a lot better than sneaking around, stressed out, having your wife get the text message you sent to your lover. ( Just happened to a friend of mine, OUCH! ).

Seems better to me than being the one who gets that text message.

Now, we are not going to solve all marital problems with a healthy dose of group sex. For example, the ex and I could have done the entire Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad in concert with the offensive front line and still would have been doomed. But for all those people out there who feel that family love and connection with the home front, but feel the need for something else for the midsection..well it might just work.

I have one fantasy that has yet to be realized. True confessions, I really want to do a woman from behind that is straddling another woman's face, her licking both of us as I pound away to screeching exploding orgasms. So what did I do? Well, told the fiancee about this one. Not something that has to happen now, or even ever. If I have to choose between her and fantasy, she wins hands down.

Her response was, " well, some day, I would be open to that."

There is power in honesty and asking for what you want. You feel clear, you feel whole.

And some times you just might get what you ask for.

In the meantime, we have a lot of dancing to do.






The Pass and Fell of Incised Points

So how do you spend your free time?

My life can get pretty full just on work and workout and friends and Fiancee and kids. Add in a few parties and trips here and there and you have most people's lives. I however am cursed with too much friggen energy and an insatiable curiosity on a library worth of subjects. That, and I love to experience things, reading is great, watching on TV or a movie is fine, but doing is where it is at.

Tonight, my friend Dick and I will be two hours in sword play on his front driveway.

I have (as many of you can guess from some of my posts) a life long passion for military history, theory and strategy. Pick any period, I can bore you to tears with the grand scope or mundane details of how people removed their neighbors from this best of all possible worlds. (thank you Dr. Pangloss).

For example, in the 16th and 17th century, Reuiters Calvary and Curassiers were armed exactly the same ( full plate armor to the shin, two or three wheel lock pistols and a longsword), but had very different tactics. Reuiters (Dutch word, the Spanish called them Genitors) would ride up in dense columns to the front of an infantry formation. The first rank would unload pistols, then wheel to the back to reload while the second would shoot and wheel, then the third and so on, pouring fire into the ranks of the enemy. Curassiers would just charge home, shooting their pistols then driving into the disrupted front with drawn swords, overthrowing their opponents with a mix of fire and shock.

Asleep yet? Hey, I have a million of them.

I love swords. I own six, two rapiers, a practice rapier, a main gauche, an English sword rapier and a Tai Chi sword with a Damascus blade. I buy them from an outfit in Atlanta run by an academic expert, who has them designed to original specs and made by a plant in India. No stainless steel knockoffs, these are the real deal. I work out with them a couple of times a week on my own and fence once a week with the group.

About two years ago a friend and I formed a renaissance fencing group. Not RenFair, and not the Society for anachronistic Living (Nice people, but they take things waay too far. ) We were both sometime Japanese Martial Arts students that wanted to try something European. Most Wednesdays, done up in masks, padding and gloves we go at it like musketeers. We use the practice swords, they are designed to be real, but the tips are hammered flat and the blades bend on the thrust. Sometimes it is single blade, sometimes it is sword and dagger (my favorite). Always a workout for body and mind.

There are a couple of things you learn when you go from watching Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom to actually thrusting away. First thing is just how quickly your arm can get tired. Real swords are much lighter than you might think for that very reason, but regardless it only takes a few minutes of active sword work for the burn to set into your shoulders and forearms. The second is just how quick things happen. Victory comes not to the strong, but the quick and agile. Watch the movie Rob Roy, the skinny assed pasty faced Tim Roth ran Liam Nielson in to the ground. (of course, if you stand there and gloat the big old Scotsman might just grab the point of your little rapier, at which point you become a sitting duck for a claymore, which gets me back to the need to be quick).

Another thing you learn is that all that spinning and leaping nonsense is just that, a lot of nonsense. The whole battle takes place in line, face to face in a matter of minutes. The fool who shows his back or steps off line only provides an easy target that is soon serviced.

It is real simple. Parry riposte, parry riposte, parry, thrust, thrust home, and in the real world someone has a half foot of steel in his vitals. In our case, you can wind up with a bruise under the padding.

Now I could have read about that, but you know, you never really get it until you feel it.

Kind of like life. We can read all about it, but until we live it, well, we really do not know anything. It is part of the reason why we get into so many situations, some good and some bad. Until you do it, you don't know, and all of us deserve to know, need to know for ourselves.

And I guess that explains some of my views on life. Given the choice to watch it, read it or do it, doing it wins every time.

Hey, sometimes you get whacked on the back of the leg with a steel sword, and let me tell you, it hurts!

But it is fun.


Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Never Judge a Book.....

By it's cover, especially if the cover is understated, or plain old boring.

The most dangerous man I ever knew was a friend of my first wife. He was short, smiled all the time and talked to his wife in baby voices and constantly kissed her and mushed over her. He was in shape, but looked too "done" to be truly straight. He was blonde, and for all the world looked and acted like a gay aerobics instructor. You know the type. Most guys who did not know him would look at him and think, "pussy".

He was also a Navy Seal. Not just any Seal, but Seal Team Six and some other group that was so secret that we could only guess at what it did. His times away tracked the major combat events of the 80's. His life was parachuting into crazy situations and killing people. He made a career out of it.

I am glad I was always polite to him.

It is hard to know a person, any person, no matter how hard you try. And we wonder about the game we call love.

Tonight is mostly a series of random thoughts and observations. The Fiancee and I hit the gym, always a good thing. After dinner I helped honorable number one son to navigate the arcane labyrinth that is the California DMV. Generally all is right with the world. Today, I spent the work day in geek space, a rare place as I don't usually get the time to do engineering any more. Sometime this week I am going to figure out how to post links to favorite blogs on a "blogs I read" section as well as in the text. Earlier today I scooted over to The Hot Librarian and read a few of her old posts...she had me in stiches.

So far my adventure in blog space has led me to the sex/relationship zone and the political zone. The relationship zone seems to have a lot of people that are in the middle of some interesting stuff, real page turners on the nature of affairs, divorce, the implications of long term marriages and internet dating. Of course, there is enough erotic content to fill Hefner's library with words that would infect a Masonic lodge with erections, a rare experience for them indeed. I have to believe that, at the least, paperback sales are down over these past years, Why pay for fake when you get real for free.

I know from first hand that there is a therapeutic value to this, my own recent set of posts are a case in point. I had a story to tell, one that needed telling and needed reading. This turned out to be the perfect venue. Having readers, if only a few, and their comments, made the experience ten times more valuable than just putting it in a journal. Therapists need to take note, blog is a great tool.

The political guys are fascinating, but a bit more suspect. I trust reading about people's life experiences more than I trust posters facts. Journalism is a discipline that seeks the truth. Opinions follow the old anal analogy, for the most part. Still, all life is politics and all politics are viewpoints, and all viewpoints are, in the end, opinions.

Is this why all politicians are assholes?

Then again, I have to allow for the possiblility that I am just as full of shit as the rest. It is usually good to have a healthy appreciation for your own error factor. As they say in the Venture Capital world, it is ok to brew the Kool Aid, just don't start drinking it yourself.

In all human discourse, we judge a lot by first impressions. We all know that, know the dangers, and yet still do it. Our first impression of a person is the one that stays with us, informs all other observations that we have about that person. As time goes on, we adjust that opinion based on our experience of them and in the context of the experiences we share with them. My opinion of my Ex is part first impression, part learning about that person.

But it is also a large part the shared experiences that we have. I will forever judge her by the way she treated me. Would my judgment be different if she had treated, say, my co-worker that way, and I were just an observer?

Maybe in the end we never really know a person, any person, very well at all. No matter how well we think we know them, there are things that they keep hidden and filters that we create around them based on what they did with or to us. Both conspire to guarantee that our view is at best a projection, a two dimentional shadow of a three dimentional person.

We even have filters that are the remains of previous experiences with completely different people, yet we insist on applying today. These are the most insidious, old tapes, like zombies, no longer with the quick, but refusing to join the dead. They bang around, brainless monsters creating havoc and mayhem, existing only to eat the living, without sense or reason.

So even if people bared all to us, showed us their inner selves with candor and courage, would we even see it through the filters?

Very hard, when the filters are so often wrapped up in our own self defense mechanisms.

Thus the central problem of finding love, love that lasts and fills us.

We are like people in the dark, holding lamps covered with shades, each of us wearing sunglasses.

Wondering why we cannot find the light.

To find the fiancee, I had to leave the shades and glasses at the door.




Three Years Later

I have spent enough of my life and energy processing this, it is time to be done and move on.


A part of me would like to be able to say that I went from sad and pathetic to Desert Storm Demon, righteous assault on the bastard and bastardess that screwed with my life and my family. I am after all a Scorpio, son of a Scorpio, vengeance is in my stars and blood. Her "boyfriend" and savior ( you should have read the emails) was a chicken shit, as soon as his wife confronted him with proof he dumped Marilyn like a hot potato. Not that it did him any good. When my part in their story ended, he had been arrested for trying to run his wife over with a car. I hope she found someone solid to cherish her the way she deserved and a life that makes sense.

My attorney was ever the voice of reason, knowing that a battle was fraught with peril. Her attorney was not smart, but she could see a child endangerment case building, and that scared Marilyn into leaving the guy alone. I also think that as the details came out she lost some credibility with her family. They were still behind her, but I think realized that, recovery or not, truth was still a rare visitor in her life. They also were starting to look a bit stupid. We sparred for a while, got a bit nasty, but the assault never developed, more another pointless third world border skirmish.

In the end, while I remained furious with her and was tempted to do harm, it became obvious that in harming her I would only be harming my daughter and ultimately myself. Nothing was to be gained, no amount of scorched earth was ever going to make the pain go away. I took the years we had together, all of them, put them in a bottle and put them on the shelf. Until now, I never took them down. I set a clear role. I was supportive where it supported my daughter. I strove to be kind and cooperative. And I erected an emotional wall between us, an uncrossible boundary between me and any other part of her life. I did not want to know, did not need to know. We did not need to talk about anything that was not about finishing out the divorce or my daughter.

We hammered out an agreement. I bought her off so that I would not have alimony, we worked out child support so it was equitable. It cost me more than it cost her, but it left me free of her, as free as I can be. Mostly it ensured that I would never be responsible for her again.

I could have done considerable damage. Her lawyer, in a mis guided attempt to put pressure on me handed me a death star weapon that could have screwed dearly with her house plans. My lawyer was all about using it as a weapon. Marilyn called me. I called him off. Her lawyer did a lot of that kind of stuff, ran up a huge bill, much bigger than mine. Sad to say, a lot of the money I gave her went to the lawyer. A lot of what had been saved and built over eight years went down a rat hole.

I hid out for a year, going to work, going to church. Dated a nice lady that filled the space and taught me a lot. The house was sold in the early spring, the last insult, and my son, my dog and I moved into a townhouse down the road.

I gained a ton of weight. I spent a lot of time with spiritual people, processing, learning, healing.

I started going to India for work.

I knew Thanksgiving that year was going to be hard. I didn't have any of the kids, I would be alone. I wound up spending it in the home of one of the most famous Hollywood actors of our day, a story for another time. Suffice it to say, it was distracting.

I spent Christmas with my kids, did the whole thing soup to nuts by myself. Christmas morning that year felt normal and fun, with my son filling in as the second adult for the girls. Christmas Eve was, however, a bit sad. It was the first time I ever sat there after playing Santa alone.

December 31st, New Years Eve, the divorce was final.

January 1, 2002. I was bending over to tie my shoes and I could barely breath. I looked into the mirror, and I was plumpy. Yuck. I was a drifty, balding, plumpy old man. Fuck that.

I mean, once a week I was fencing with a group I had formed, but it was clearly huffing and puffing with plumpy.

That was the turning point. I started hitting the gym, dropped 25 pounds and then some. Dialed up and old friend, spun up a posse in the city. Lost fat, gained 20 lbs of new muscle, did the Black and White, did San Francisco every way from Wednesday. Sailed, hiked the slot in Zion, trekked the Sierra, tried internet dating, the list goes on. I engaged life at full speed again.

There were ups and downs. The dating scene was, as I described in a previous blog, looney. I had fun, but it was not the same. There were plenty of ladies to date, and a few hot times, but it seemed, well, off. I learned to smoke cigars, and I relearned to love a good whisky. I have to say, there were times when given the choice of a date or a cigar, I took an evening on the deck with a cigar.

One thing I learned, if you are horny and tired of your hand, hookers provide a great service. Not the street gals, but the escorts. Hey, you can get by.

That October I went to India for a month, partially to get a project done, but more to clear my head. I took a guy friend along and hooked up with another old buddy. Swam in the Straits of Malacca, trekked the jungles of Malaysia, hiked the Ghats in Western India, partied with Bali girls in Goa. One night, on the back of a motorcycle, weaving for dear life thru the chaos that is a Pune street, it happened.

I found myself again. I figured out who I was, and what I was about.

I came home, started planning for a life alone. Then, at a party before Christmas, I met my Fiancee. She spend Christmas with me. By New Years we were an item, and we are off to our new life, never once looking back.

Until now.

It is three years later, and for the first time I can take that jar off the shelf and open it up. It needed to be opened. In doing so whatever was in there that frightened me so has been set free, released into the winds of time that will blow us all away one day, like smoke from the remains of an old campfire.

Marilyn has been in recovery these past three years. She lives in a house her family bought her, next to her sister that "saved" her and now cannot stand her. Last Christmas she took a bunch of money from a house refinance and had plastic surgery done, new face, new tits. I could care less, but her family was pissed and judgmental. This is not suprising, it fits a pattern that has been going on long before I arrived and will continue long after today. The sister she lives next to, her most consistant rescuer, is once again the bad guy, and they rarely speak. I know, because Marilyn called me up to complain about her, just as I am sure she complained about me to her sister on those nights in December years ago.

She has steadily tried to re-create our relationship into a "friendship", wants hugs at Christmas, wants to lean on my shoulder when her family is being harsh. She wants to talk and joke and act like we are old friends. For my part, it is a bit crazy, coming from a woman who told me she did not want to be around me, just wanted us to be over.

I think that deep down, she wants desperately not to be the bad person, she does not want responsibility. She never wanted responsibility. She has rewriten the entire story in her mind somehow, I am sure that if you asked her now she would tell people that she cared for me deeply and that it just did not work out. Her capacity for slective forgetfullness is astounding.

She is still beautiful, but when I drop off my daughter in the morning, when she is without makeup, she looks old. She paints and works out constantly, the two things that seem to keep her on an even keel. Paint and be sexy, Marilyn to a tee.

She has a boyfriend, he is moving in this month. He is very well off and artistic. I have no idea what kind of couple they are, nor is it my business.

We are all moving on.

So what happened?

I have thought of that often in the last three years. Was I blind? Was is something I did?

You can drive yourself nuts on the might have beens.

I once told her that it was clear that she never loved me, and that she was only using me all those years to get what she wanted. She was pissed at me for that. She is very invested in the fiction that her last decent into drinking and drug use was due to me, regardless of the facts.

What I believe now is probably closer to the truth. She had been an alcoholic since she was a teenager, dealing with emotional abandonment from her mother and a father who was physically there but off in his own little world. Her emotional development was arrested at a young age, and even though she was 34 when we met, she was in many ways, still 13 or 14 years old, impulsive, irresponsible, living in a magical world. The pattern of behavior is all too transparent to me now: addicted to spending, addicted to drugs, addicted at times to sex. Impulsively charging off after the idea of the minute, reacting like a petulant child whenever she perceived that her actions were being challenged by "parents" (read anyone who didn't let her do what she wanted). Running to mommy(daddy, big sister) when things finally collapsed, begging them to clean up the mess.

I think that she loved me when we met, the way a teenager has a crush, falls in love. I think so long as it was about fun, it was great. I think that so long as we were either heading towards or planning the fairytale wedding/ happy ending, she was enthralled.

I think, though, that once we settled down, the patterns took hold, and I entered into the extended version of her family drama. I think I was doomed from the beginning to eventually be the "evil parent". Caught in and reliving her family drama again and again, she did what she always did.

She blew it up.

I could blame the other guy, but he was just another stock character in her drama. I could blame her family, but they were just doing what they always do, acting out their roles in their central family drama, The Perils of Marilyn. I could blame her psychologist at the rehab, a bitter, nasty piece of work, playing her own issues and dramas out on the live's of her paitents. I have studied a lot about recovery, talked to a lot of recovering addicts and alcoholics. When I relate that part of the story, they just shake their head in disbelief.

I could blame myself, and I have.

But this has happened so many times before, and it is still going on today, although at least with less kilotonnage.

She has done this time and again. There is nothing new here.

It is just that this time, she took me with her.

And I think that I was too steeped in the "Knight in Shining Armor" archtype and the "fix the alcoholic" pattern to ever have any kind of real perspective.

Every close relationship pushes buttons in us. We survive or fall based not on avoiding the buttons, but on understanding them and ourselves, and on how much control we have over our reactions.

But we are only half of the equasion, and we have no control over any other person. All any of us can do is be honest with ourselves and live our truth.

Finis. Now our story is done.

Postscript, dramatic license and all:

The man writing this is not the man who lived it. That man died somewhere back in December of 2001, killed by an experience that was too much, a level of consistent failure and stress that he had been conditioned to fear beyond all fears by a father and mother who know only fear. His ghost traveled some of these pages, a shade of what he was, confused and murmuring, like the pale shades of Pluto's realm before their Lethean draught.

What you have here is his reincarnation, started with a hard breath and full formed on the smoking back of a South Asian two wheeler. He is wiser, happier, less committed to being in control and more committed to living his life each and every day.

The man who lived this was frantic, running to and fro, spinning balls in the air to prevent the disaster he knew in his soul was coming. He thought he could, should manage all problems to ultimate success, lest the world see him for the failure he knew he was. Do anything to escape the demon whirlwind, and in the process, never know the joy and peace available on the way.

The new one has the benefit of memories and learning. Drinking this Lethe on the way back to the living brought not forgetfulness, but understanding.

Now, I do not concern myself with the whirlwind, I cannot stop it, it will come when it wills, calling my name in challenge and warning, bringing death or despair.

Or both.

Till then I will live, and love, breath deep and look long and laugh hard.

We have no control over the people and events that make up our lives. We can only control our own actions and reactions and attitudes. We do have influence, we can suggest and create, but we must never forget that in an instant, everything, everyone can be, will be all taken away from us. What we have, the only thing we can count on, is having ourselves. And in that there is great comfort.

For in the moment that we truly know who we are, and know that we have ourself, we can stop running. We create a lot of pain, for others and ourselves, this running from who we are, what we feel, what we fear. I caused it for me, my ex casued it for her, and me, and practically everyone else around her. The only way out is to stop, turn around, and face that whirlwind.

We cannot find joy from things or others. They may give us joy, pleasure, happy moments.
But joy truly comes from the attitudes you form, the choices you make, the courage and integerity with which you face life.

You can read this same advise in novels and fiction and self help books and movies till it seems to be the cliche-ist of cliches. Thats how I used to feel, rolling my eyes at one more psudo-guru spouting "know thy self" etc, etc, oh my god, etc.

I suppose I know better now.

We all have our central metaphors, the vision we have of ourselves. I am, among other things, a swordsman, not a great one, but handy enought with rapier and main gauche. My buddy Dick and I spend Wednesdays, swathed in protective gear working up a sweat and living out our D'Artangian fantasies. I have come, at times, to see myself that way.

I am in a great place today. It may last. Tomorrow it may end, and the whirlwind will come again, with me in its path.

I think that this time I will stop, turn and smile....

And in a moment, draw, shout and leap into its maw.

If you think about it, there really is no other way.

Monday, January 24, 2005

Madness

At what point do we push over the edge of sanity, into the abyss of madness?

Is it a single moment, or a process? Does it take a second, or a lifetime of single hammer blows, chipping away at the edifice of our psyche, till one day it crumbles into wrack and ruin?

I was shattered, at most a ghost moving sluggishly through the haunts of a former life, at worst a mass of sobs and pain too indescribable for mere words. My days started with my son dragging me out of bed, aching, forcing me to get him to school and me to work. They were spend on the phone, reaching out to everyone and anyone who could, through the gift of conversation, or simply a sympathetic ear, ease for a moment the hurt where my heart should be. I the evening I would rush off to an al-anon meeting, or a therapy session, a place where I could speak my sorrow and find it ease. Then, home I would go, and to bed, wishing for sleep to end it all for a while.

I tried to call, connect, to discuss, to get answers, to find a way back. I begged, I pleaded. It was to no avail. She made it clear, she did not want to discuss this, she only wanted to discuss the kids and how we would get the divorce done, nothing else was of interest to her. She was brutal, she was cold. I stopped trying, it was pointless.

There are drugs they can give you to take the edge off the pain. I used them. My boss sent me home for two weeks, both a measure of the level of dysfunction I was feeling and the nature of his character and compassion. I will always be in debt to him for that gift, and for the way he stood by a person in distress who he barely knew.

My lawyer tried to get me to start some actions, her lawyer was the pushy, aggressive type, but I think he knew that I was broken, and so he kept it simple. He was also smarter than her lawyer, a bitch both greedy and none too bright.

I spent Christmas with my brother. He made his home a place of shelter that year and buttressed me and gave me good advise. We had never before been close, but now we are, one of the silver linings in this perfect storm cloud. Still, Christmas and New Year sucked that year.

She tried to connect with my son, claiming that she loved him and that he needed her, and became angry when he repulsed her advances. He had given her a chance, she had in his mind blown it, just like he expected she would.

She sent letters to my first wife and older daughter, telling them that I was the reason she drank and that she had to leave and that I was all kinds of awful. The first wife called me one day to tell me about it and to ask my lawyer to tell her lawyer to tell her to knock it off. They saw through her as well.

She sent me a letter too, full of justifications and "go with god" ( this from a life long atheist). I ignored it.

I was all over the map those first months. This was a shock, there was nothing in my memory or my experience to lead me to believe that she could do this, would do this, would want to do this. The speed, the dramatic cutting off of our life, so quickly was just incomprehensible. I wanted answers, none were coming.

In late January, I began to slowly come out of it, began to breathe again, though there were still many painful moments. I went to St. Louis on a business trip. One evening, I checked my home voice mail . Along with the usual, there was this message.

" Hi Maurice, you don't know me, but my name is Tara Silverman. My husband and your wife were in rehab together, and I wondered if you knew about their relationship. I would appreciate it if you give me a call. My number is......"

In a moment of sharp clarity, some things started making sense.

I met Tara that next week for dinner, after we had exchanged phone calls. She had phone records, e mails. She even had hacked his phone and had voice messages. Things were very clear. She had thought that Marilyn had also come back home, was surprised to hear that she was out. I was able to confirm her suspicions from what I knew. It turned out that her husband was her second, an alcoholic and an abusive piece of work that had convictions for spousal and child battery and a history of being in and out of rehab.

She was furious and hurt. I was furious and hurt.

Tara went home and confronted him. She asked him to leave. He lied, then he pleaded, then he hung around and wanted to talk about it.

Sometime that week, she came over to the house and I fucked her stupid, and she me. It was payback, it was "fuck you honey" and it was good. We kept at it for a while, it never was going to last, but we were bound on a mission together.. to pay those bastards back any way we could.

I called my lawyer and told him the story. "I am done with her, get that abusive asshole out of my daughter's life and get his slut out of mine!"

Like I said, I fight like Panzer Division. In that moment, all I wanted, all I could smell, was blood.

Cry havoc!

And loose the dogs of war!


Sunday, January 23, 2005

"I alone have escaped to tell thee..."

As a teenager, I studied the Book of Job as part of an Advanced English class. The combination of Hebrew story and King James translation has made it one of the great books of all time, and ranks with The Epic of Gilgamesh as among the earliest investigations into the meaning of life, death and suffering. That same semester I was part of a High School acting troop that put on "J.B.", Archibald McLeash's 1950's update to that same biblical story. I loved studying the book and acting in the play.

I did not know at the time I was foreshadowing my own tragedy.

August 2001. I remember one last perfect day. We had taked the family down to SLO town for a beach weekend, rented a house with friends. I could only stay for a weekend, I already had taken too much time off from work. That Sunday I spent kayaking with a friend off of Avila beach while Marilyn and the girls played on the beach with the rest of our group. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. The water was calm and warm for Avila. We rode the surf, navigated the rocks, played with the seals. As we came in for the last time we both misjugded the breakers and wiped out beautifully. I tumbled in end over end, hanging on for dear life to the paddle, which was tied with a long line to the boat. I came up for air and started pulling the boat into shore, short my hat and sunglasses.

As I made it too the beach, Marilyn came walking up with the girls. She was as I love to remember her, smiling, hair golden in the sunlight. She was older, but still as beautiful to me as the day we met.

"What a wipe out, you really ate it." She said. We laughed. We all walked back to the house and as the sun slowly westerd, I felt that all was right with the world.

It was the last good day for a very, very long time.

That Monday morning, very early, I left to drive back to the Bay, leaving the kids and her on vacation while I went to work. As I had said, I was working at a startup, a very well funded and extensive operation, a joint venture by some of the major players in the financial services space. It had been a rocky ride the past months, and we had some concerns. I was expecting that we were going to have to do some restructuring and make some changes as it was clear the joint venture partners were not exactly happy with all the results.

So I was expecting change, maybe another round of layoffs, some hard things for me to do. That I was ready to handle.

What I got was a bit more. That Wednesday two members of the board of directors walked into our offices, sat down with the CEO and fired him on the spot. He was gone within an hour of their arrival. They then sat down with the Executive management team, appointed the head of marketing to the CEO job and told him that they had six weeks to find a buyer or be shut down.

I will not recount the story of my failed startup adventure here and now, it is an epic in it's own right and needs a proper telling if it is to be told at all. We were out of money, apparently, and the partners were out of patience, and we were going down right into the dot com collapse without a lifeboat or paddle. People all around me were out of work and it was looking like they would be for a long time. I was about to join them.

When major companies have layoffs, it sucks, but you do have some advantages. Typically you get severance, sometimes months of it. And you get to buy health insurance through the company for up to a year.

When a company closes its doors, all that goes away.

I had never been laid off before. I was sole breadwinner for the family. We had bills. We had some savings, but not a ton. More to the point, we had significant medical expenses for Marilyn and three of us with defined pre existing conditions. But more than anything else, I knew that I was alone.

Some of that was all about who Marilyn was. She dealt with economic difficulties by ignoring them or convincing herself that it would all work out somehow, never by changing behavior or reducing expectations or expenditures. Who was to blame her, all her life her family had bailed her out, till I came along. She had induced crisis before, many of them financial, and I had always pulled us out. So while she knew to mouth the right words, she just expected that I would somehow find a job quickly and rescue us. Till then, my concerns were just an inconvenience.

Some were my own issues. I was the oldest child in a classic alcoholic family, my self esteem trampled by an abusive drunk and my self worth defined by my success. I was about to fail, and in the world of alcoholics, you get "one chance" and then you "screw it up". It is a very private hell, and I was in it.

Two things happened for me. One, during up time I went into hyperdrive. I worked with the management team on a series of hopeful but ultimately doomed attempts to rescue the firm and our jobs and dreams. Heartbreaking does not even come close to describing what happened. As I learned much later, our efforts were always going to be to no avail. For their own reasons, the partners wanted the firm dead, our six weeks were an exercise in avoiding lawsuits.

I fired up my network and job search, spinning every opportunity I could, trying to manufacture something. I also positioned myself to extract as much out of the failing business as I could, arranging to stay on the shutdown team. I navigated the arcane world of health insurance.

The second thing, in my down time, was to become depressed and edgy. I spent so much time holding it together during the up periods I had nothing in the down, and black moods ruled much of that time.

One thing I did not do was pay close attention to home. Marilyn tried to reassure me, tried sex, tried food. She was in her mind, trying, and in her mind too, I was overreacting. She did not even want to consider looking for a job as well (" it would kill me" she said) and she wasn't too keen on other practical steps, except to comply where I insisted. What she was most concerned about was having a new furnace installed in the house with a complete reducting job. Winter was coming, and after we put in the hardwood floors, it was a colder place. She wanted it warmer.

Much later, it was my brother that pointed out that so long as she was creating disasters (and she created a few, the DUI type fiasco was an example of the kind of crisis that showed up in our lives every year or so) and I was the fixer, every thing was ok. She was the designated patient. What she could not stand was a reversal of those roles.

By mid October it was game, set, match with the startup, and I was out on the street with my last paycheck and health insurance paid up till the 31st. To say I was stressed and a bit manic is an understatement. But even in the worst of it, I am still good, and I was lucky. Before the month was out I had been offered a job. It was a pay cut, a step down, and a substantial one. It was enough, and it was benefits for the family. It was a life boat. Strangely, Marilyn did not want me to take it, she thought it was below me. But I knew that it was a gift, and I sucked it up and did what I had to for the family.

So I lost a job, and I found a job, in the nick of time. Felt a bit like Indiana Jones. I had been falling for weeks, now I was on stable ground, but still raw and battered.

The weekend before I started the new job, we took our daughter to a show. After, on the way home she said. "Now can I get the furnace installed?" She had been pushing for that damn furnace every week for six, each time with a different excuse. ( do it while we have the money, do it now, he said we can defer payment, it isn't that much anyway, do it now you have a job).

"I have not even started at the new job, can't we just give it a rest for a month till we stabilize?"

"Fine" Silence.

That night, after we went to bed, she got up and went to the family room and bombed herself stupid on red wine.

The next day I started my new job. I was a bit relieved, but not exactly thrilled, and I could not shake the feelings of failure. I was a bit sorry for myself, and still grieving the loss of the dream that was my dream job. She called me that day to tell me that she was feeling awful.

Halloween was that Wednesday, a beautiful, warm moonlit night. I was beginning to calm down some. Still raw, but getting a bit better.

Thursday, November 1, 2001. Five in the afternoon. I call home, telling her I am heading home. She tells me then.

"I am leaving tomorrow to go to a rehab facility" I am stunned, shocked, overwhelmed. Too much was happening, too fast. When I get home, she is there. Her brother and sister are there, the family once again gathering to rescue the girl. Turns out she had been working up to two bottles of wine and five pills a day over the past three months, her way of coping with life.

My son was totally impressed. He was completely behind her doing this. Arrangements had been made for my daughter. It was all set, her brother was to take her to the place. I was to keep plugging away a the new job.

"It will be a new life for us. I will do this and come back and it will be so much better for all of us." We talked. I was exhausted, but supportive, if a bit skeptical. We made love that night.

The next morning she left for rehab, kids for school, and me for work.

Two days later I got a letter from her. It was full of hope and love and promises, sealed with a big lipstick kiss. I would not be talking to her much, only one visitation day a week, on Sunday. There were Sessions for the family to learn about what the patients were going through.

The first week seemed to go well. Had a call on my Birthday. I checked out al-anon meetings. We visited that Sunday, she was subdued and detoxing, but things were going well.

The next week was strange, she seemed distant. I was to come up that Sunday, but oddly, she asked that I not come up that day. She wanted to hang out with her family and that we would have that Monday, since there was to be a group session with patient and spouse/support team. I insisted on coming up and she relented.

It was a good day, but she seemed distant.

That Monday I went up, brought her a sandwitch (the hospital was vegetarian) and flowers. She lighted up when she saw both and gave me a kiss. I had a separate meeting, then the group session was to be an hour later.

When she walked into that room and hour later, she was as cold and as distant as I had ever known. At the end of the session, we went outside.

"I may not be coming home".

I sat in silence. ( I alone escaped to tell thee...)

" what do you mean?"

"I cannot get healthy at home."

We talked, it made no sense. I went home that day and was a mess.

The third week was only getting worse. She asked me to talk to her therapist. I call her and was worked over by a very smart, bitter and confrontational woman. I left the conversation feeling like shit.

Thanksgiving was the third week. We had talked, we had been back and forth. She asked me to bring the kids up, I made reservations at a restaurant. It was tense, but we were a family, so it seemed. I had hope.

That Sunday I brought them up. We talked. We walked.

"I am leaving you. I do not love you, I have not loved you for a long time. Don't come up next week when I get out, I do not want you around."

( I, alone, escaped to tell thee...)

Disbelief.

I tried to hold it together on the long ride home, but I couldn't. I cried, so much I had to pull over twice to pull my self back together.

I called her that last week. She ducked me. I talked to her sister, she was supportive, and also telling me that what I had to do was to move out and get an apartment. We agreed that the daughter should spend more time at her house, it was more stable.

Marilyn called me that week and asked me to move out. I told her she could come home, but that I was not going to leave my home and my son under any circumstances.

My son told me to tell her to go to hell. She tried once after that to talk to him, he told her to fuck off. They have not spoken since.

That following Monday, she left rehab and moved in with her sister.

That Tuesday I went to see a lawyer to prepare.

That Friday she went to a lawyer and filed for divorce.

( I, alone, escaped to tell thee...)

Somewhere that week , I collapsed.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Life

By what yardstick do you measure eight years? How do we assess almost a decade in our life?

Is it by our conquests, our earnings,our trips, our friendships? Is it the series of unforgettable moments we have? Is it by our success? Our failures?

When they are done, do those years really exist?

Two thoughts come to mind, one a cliche', the other a quote.

The cliche: "They settled down and built a life together."

But is anything ever really built, when all you have is this moment to hold.

The quote: " Flying is long periods of extreme boredom puntcuated by brief moments of sheer terror."

Some how both seem to fit.

If I tried to write the story of our married life together, this blog would become a novel, one that was too long and too common in its events to enthrall or too specific to interest the reader. The details of my life are of great interest to me, only the lessons are of use to anyone else.

I can give you the flavor and tenor of that time. After the wedding and short honeymoon we returned to do what all new couples do. We bought a house in the Oakland Hills, I changed jobs and careers, starting a long process of rapid career advancement. My son was settled into a new school. We made friends, had parties, attended PTA meetings, renovated the house.

We went to the Caribbean with my family, a delayed honeymoon that was one of the best vacations of my life. Soon after, we got pregnant, and ten months after that, we had a little girl. Marilyn started working part time, we had nannies. Then after that, she quit working to stay home with the kids. My son and I joined the boy scouts, she volunteered at our daughter's pre-school. Summers were spent with my daughter from the first marriage and our daughter, my son was summering in Texas.

Family dinners, Christmas, holidays, book clubs, parties, outings, the wend and weft of hip east bay life.

Sound good?

Well, that was the surface.

Under it, well, as you expect, there was more going on.

For a long time money was tight, very tight even with both of us working. I learned that she was bad, very bad with money, loving to spend it and very adverse to saving it. We did a lot of budgets, she just would never live to any of them. Before we got together, she managed by getting very deep into debt. We got her out of that, but it was a constant battle to keep us from going back there.

She hated working, and she hated her job. In point of fact, she hated every job she ever had. When we were dating she had gotten fired from her job. I learned later that she had gotten fired from just about every other job she had ever had. When I said before that she quit her job, what she did was to get fired from it, at a time when we were doing better but still needed her income to make the monthly bills.

I remember that day. She called me crying, devastated. I called her boss, called the corporate lawyers, I blusterd and threatened, not to much avail. Her boss was an idiot, that was true, but it became clear that Marilyn had been burning bridges there for some time. (I had met the guy, a fellow former Naval Officer. He was not so much an idiot as an insecure child in a manager suit. Two years later, with a wife and two kids at home, down in Texas, he pulled over to the side of the road one day and blew his brains out.)

The next day I walked into work and bluffed my way to a major raise. That was and remained a pattern throughout our time together. She would over spend, I would bash down doors to get promotions, raises. We would be ok for a bit, and then the spending went up, and we would be back close to being in the hole.

That was a source of a lot of fights. Usually she was contrite right after a particularly bad bonehead money move, but within days she was right back to arrogantly insisting that she deserved what she wanted, and that I was just overreacting.

Much of our time was spent handling the twin demons of depression and alcoholism, with a little bit of pill addiction thrown in. The depression was diagnosed as clinical, and she started taking anti-depressants. They helped a lot, but the side effects were bizarre. Prozac killed her sex drive and shut down all of her feelings. Another one sent her loopy. Finally celexa seemed to work, but she would go on and off it, and when she went off you could see her face turn suicidal.

Alcohol and pills were different. The month before we moved into the new house, she was arrested for DUI, a costly and inconvenient warning flag that she chose to ignore. Over eight years we swung from "I am an alcoholic" to "I am not one of those people"and back. And back again. Twice we worked with doctors to get her off the codeine. I went on the wagon with her a couple of times. It would get better, then worse, then better. But it never went away.

My son drove her nuts, and she him. It was a constant struggle, she could neither connect with him, nor find a way to adapt to him. He pressed too many buttons around her own upbringing and sense of failure. She tried several times to get me to ship him off to his mother, to no avail and no few fights. She loved him, wanted to be loved, but she could never just relax and let it take it's own course. She always cared about him, and was pissed off daily by him.

In the end, it was like we were two families in one house: she and daughter and I were one, and he and I were another.

She dealt with issues by alternating withdrawal from the family and diving in headfirst and going overboard. It was heart breaking.

We fought, like before.

We went to counseling. For years.

Our sex life suffered. There were a few periods where we were on the once a month plan, and it was an issue for me. She developed some real shame issues around sex, which surprised me. We stopped doing some things at her request, and she was none too interested in trying new things. She also felt bad about that, and some of the issues were tied to the drinking and pills. But she also tried to fix it, as if it was not a decision, but something out of her control. Strangely, once she got going she always enjoyed the hell out of herself. One time, after I had coaxed her into it and after we both had explosive orgasms, she said "God I love this so much, what is my problem?"

I got a bit looney myself. I began to expect and fear the next disaster, nervous and watchful in the good times and exasperated in the bad. I started to monitor everything, treating her like a beloved ten year old. She hated and resented it, until the next blowup, when contrition ruled the day. Somewhere, in this process, I became my mother, I am sure of it, reactive and irrationally concerned.

We did not neglect each other. We both took care of relationship business. Example, for my 40th birthday we went to Cabo and had the time of our lives. For her's, I planned an entire birthday surprise day, topped off with a catered dinner with friends.

She was episodic. Life was an erratic sine wave.

It was not just an unending series of problems and disasters. We also had a lot of good times, hours filled with laughter and fun. We accomplished a lot together. We comforted each other. We learned to communicate better and to understand ourselves better, or so I thought. Sex was on the very good once a week plan in the last years. Some things we stopped doing, but in all it was fine, and although I would have liked more, I was ok.

I asked her once, "are you happy?" She told me then that in her old life she had been so lonely, and that now, for all the struggles, she felt loved and full and safe. In her quiet moments she knew full well what she was doing to me, and was ashamed. In my quiet moments I became aware of my own growing neurosis, and tried to change.

Eight years. I remember the bad, I remember the good. I will not tell you it was all roses (though it was way too much wine), but I never entertained thoughts of leaving, and I thought, neither did she. We loved each other, we were family, we were committed.

For better or worse.

In the last years we seemed to be in a good place. I had a dream job at a startup that paid a lot of money and promised more. We had the house we wanted, in the hills we loved, with friends and a life. The sex was good enough, the kids were healthy, the drinking was down. The drama was not so dramatic. We had land under our feet and finally (after a lot of struggle on my part) money in the bank. She had the daughter she wanted, the garden she loved, no job, and time for piano lessons and art classes and book clubs.

I remember that summer we finally took that long driving vacation we had always talked about, loaded the girls and a ton of gear in the van and headed off for Zion National Park and points east. We drove all over Utah, doing crossword puzzles while the girls watched movies and stopping to swim in rivers, climb up mountains, and cook marshmallows over the fire. The girls still talk about that trip. It was amazing. We were friends, we were family.

I never saw the thundercloud on the horizon. Maybe I just didn't want to.


Friday, January 21, 2005

It Was A Glorious Day

In a moment, for a season, everything changed.

It was as if the Marilyn I knew of old had re-awakened from a long and dark sleep. One kiss from her Prince, and Sleeping Beauty was alive, reborn into happily ever after. For the next six months, and for some time after she was content and bright in a normal and consistent way. The headaches remained, but the depression seemed to be gone. The drinking faded into the background, now nothing more than the standard level of social consumption that one expects for a Northern California couple. Fighting ceased, at least the nasty kind.

Marilyn has a big family, a brother and several sisters and a tribe of nieces and nephews.
Led by her somewhat formidable mother, the clan engaged to create what was to be the final blowout family wedding, The Social Event of the Central Coast. Dresses were bought, churches and country clubs rented. The bridal party included the entire family on both sides, and I still had to enlist a posse of my guy friends just to have enough groomsmen to balance the bridesmaids and matrons. The event planning rivaled a Westminster wedding, or maybe even D-Day. Marilyn threw herself into it with a gusto. The black sheep, the forever single bad girl was finally making good.

Sex stayed amazing. Her newest trick, was to flip over and reach back to her ass cheeks and pull them apart for me. There were a few others, you get the idea.

I was happy for her and us, and loved every minute of that time. I was beginning to think that the problems of the past year were my doing, if I had just been more open to getting married she would have been fine. She just needed me to take a stand for her.

Lets talk about that for a minute, because I want to clear up some lingering doubts that the reader may have formed. First, this is my story, so obviously it is my point of view. Let me be clear, I am no saint. I have a number of faults and quirks, some known to me back then, others I was not conscious of till much later. My father was a raging alcoholic and my mother, a lifelong co-dependent. They modeled a home life that was chaotic, confrontational and often irrational. I have never hit a woman or a child, and I am not one to start fights, but when challenged, like I said, I fight like a Panzer Division, all shock and awe. I tear deep into weak spots and overwhelm and overrun. Back then I had huge abandonment issues, so while I was not one to hover and control, I was hyper sensitive to certain "clues" that looked like abandonment, either emotional or physical, and could over react accordingly.

Marilyn had huge issues, and I had a few of my own, and it took me a long time to come around. But what she had never had before was a guy who would take a stand, commit to her, stay with her through all the yukey stuff. I thought that her behavior of the second year was a lot of the pushing away behavior that had driven off the good ones before, and now that I was standing up for her, she was in a safe place. We had wounds, but together we would heal them for each other.

It is hard to get an untainted recollection of my true thoughts at that time, too much has happened in the ensuing decade plus. But I had a model of her and of us in my head that looked like this:

She was damaged
I was flawed
She needed someone to stand by her
I loved her
She loved me
Regardless of the problems, we were in this together
We both felt that way

So we would be ok, no matter what. We loved each other, and that is all that mattered.

That, and I have never lost that image of us that first year we were together, dating. I always felt that it was the true "us".

Well, to make a long story short, the planning was perfect. On a fine October weekend, we all mustered from the four corners of the compass to the Central Coast of California. October in San Luis Obispo is without a doubt, one of the great moments, up there with Spring in Paris, or Christmas in New York. In the church she grew up in, eight attendants, three ushers, four flower girls, one ring bearer and a cast of family and friends bore witness as we pledged to have and to hold, till death do us part, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

She was radiant, breathtaking, like a queen of High Elves out of an Ancient Legend.

When we walked down that isle as husband and wife, I never before or since saw her happier.

The reception was a grand party, with toasts, and food and dancing. Her parents were happy, the family was happy. The kids were having a blast. We danced together, we danced with every body. Everyone we knew was there and all had a stellar time. We had so much fun we did not want it to stop, and when it was over a bunch of us went into SLO town, took over a bar and kept things going deep into the night.

It was a Glorious Day.




Thursday, January 20, 2005

Moving On In

It took a month to complete the move. By the New Year she had a new place and I had a new living arrangement.

I would like to say that things went well for a while, but that is not quite the truth. The drama, heretofore non existent, started almost immediately. But it would also be untrue to say that things went bad. I think that it would be best to say that things started oscillating between very good interspersed with moments that were not so fun. We all have the same experience: drop us into a bad situation and we recognize it immediately, but if you feed it to us in dribs and drabs over a long enough period of time, we humans adapt. We adjust until the same bad situation feels normal.

The bad at first, seemed manageable.

Some of the new things were understandable. My son was ok with her, but he was also doing his level six year old best to push every adult button on her he could. The three of us were living in the suburbs, not a place that works well for a dramatic bombshell artist. She often felt like a fish out of water. That, and she now had a commute.

Some of it was unavoidable. She suffered from migranes, she also suffered from depression. Things could be cooking along just fine, and then I would come home and find her hiding up in our room, afraid to come out, sunk in a black hole that seemed to have no end.

Some of it was untenable, though I did not know it at the time. She drank, a lot more it turns out then I ever knew. She drank alone, and she drank when she felt bad. Now as a dating couple we partied a fair bit, and I am no teetotaler. But Marilyn would get depressed and bomb herself to the point where many times she could not remember what happened the next day. It seemed that this new life was depressing her more often than either of us had expected, though for no particular reason.

I learned a lot more that next year. She had been emotionally damaged as a child. She had been bulimeic. By nature she was easily irritated and annoyed. She was easily bored. She was acrophobic, sometimes hiding away from people for days. She was often depressed. Her sense of self was incredibly fragile. She could be vicious, cold and judgmental, starting fights, but then collapsing into tears in the face of resistance.

I learned that her family had rescued her not once, but multiple times from self destructive personal blowups. Each instance was different, but the patterns were similar. I learned that her family saw her as the black sheep, the troubled one, and that all of her siblings in some way saw her as still a teenager. Her family loved me and seemed to be happy that Marilyn and I were together. Maybe they were just relieved.

I repeat, don't want anyone to think that it was all bad. It was mostly good and we had a lot of fun. We went on a great rafting trip, did a lot of dates and a lot of family activities. She tried really hard with the boy, though the struggle was more with her own reactions. We spent time with her very large family, and they made room for the boy and I. We carved out a life that seemed to work. We talked about the future. What was right about us, to me, felt much greater than the challenges. Looking back, the signs were there, subtle forshadowing, as if I was in a story and the author was trying to warn me, or at least cluing in everyone else that something was not right.

But like I said in the beginning, if something happens to us slowly enough, we adapt. We rationalize.

One thing that stayed explosive was the sex. Use your imagination, it was all there. She loved to be worked over on her hands and knees, licked from behind, fucked from behind. I would pull my cock out, move over and stick it in her mouth while I continued to play with her. She loved it.

The mission never went away. She was patient for about three months, then started pressing. One time she tried moving out, thinking that it would force my hand. A week later she moved herself back in. She was twisting arms, hard, but I have to say, she never tried to cut me off physically. Just a lot of drama.

With the drama came fights, and we had some doosies. She was driven by hormones, more than anyone else I have ever known. PMS was a time of depression, frustration, and all around edginess. When she was close to ovulating, she was a hyper sex machine, happy and horny.

So mix one part PMS with one part biological clock, a dash of impatience and shake well. Serve it up anyway you choose, because it will get hot quickly. She fought nasty, and I fight like a panzer division, cannon and armor, shock and encircle. It was never physical, (though there was a time later when we were married when she cold cocked me), but it was intense.

Ugly.

We always made up, usually horizontal.

High Drama.

Yet in it all, and I believed this with all my heart, she loved me. And what she wanted was not unreasonable, it is what we all want, in the end, to love and be loved completely.

One day I realized that, warts and all, I loved her, I was bound to her, and I was determined to stand by her.

Yet I was still scared, still wary of walking that road again. Starting to be a bit concerned, it was hard to make that last commitment.

Then, one night, in a moment of mild depression she was bemoning the wait, telling me that she was coming to the end of her rope.

And at that moment I decided it was time.

I proposed.




Wednesday, January 19, 2005

A Year of Living Wonderfully

I learned a lot about her in the first year. She loved red wine. Champagne and white wine had a bad effect on her. Her hearing and smell were very acute. She was a very good artist. She had been a bad girl growing up. She was 34 and had never lived with a man, or even had a relationship over a year. She was addicted to working out. She had been rescued from a bad experience in Los Angeles by her family, but had really gotten her shit back together up in the bay over the past few years. She had started the cuisine club to try to find a husband. She liked having a hand down her pants playing with her. She laughed a lot. She loved lipstick. She would always keep my cock in her mouth until I had done pulsing. She liked brutal men, but knew they were verboten. She has a talent for languages and speaks German like a native. She suffered from migranes. She had a big, close family.

I remember driving to Yosemite to spend a week with her family. It was night, she was dressed in an orange summer dress, no bra, no underwear, all blonde and juicy, feet up on the dash, windows open as the light from a thousand street lights lit her face just so, and I could feel my knees go weak.

Whenever we drove anywhere, she would put my hand between her legs, it comforted her.

She liked being spanked.

And she was on a mission. It became pretty clear that her biological clock was ticking like Big Ben. I thought I knew what that meant, but you know, in retrospect it is clear I really did not understand what that meant. She was not pushy at first, but by the time my first divorce was finalized and my son and I were moving back into the town house as my ex and daughter were off to Texas, the "where are we going" question was pretty well on the front burner.

Now that left me in a pretty pickle. I had been pretty clear with her on my feelings. I was just out of a divorce and very leery of marriage and love was a pretty difficult concept for me. On the other hand, I was hooked. What we had was fun and hot and a daily dose of amazing, like nothing I had ever had before. It was tough, and as we passed that ever crucial one year anniversary, things started to get dicey as she tried to twist my arm and I tried to resist, and both of us trying to avoid the blow up that could end us.

One other thing, from every action, every discussion, oozing from every pore in her body came this one simple fact.

She was crazy mad nuts in love with me.

We floated around a bit that November, not apart, but not exactly together. I had plans for Thanksgiving that did not include her.

Those plans fell through, and she invited my son and I to come down to her parents for the holiday. We went together, and had a great time. I remember sitting with her at the kitchen table at her folks place, and there we hatched the plan for her to move in with the boy and me. She could cut expenses and pay off her debt, we could figure this whole thing out.

The die was cast.


Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Losing Your Brain

That was an easy question to answer.

It was not, however all that explosive an evening after all. We both had drank too much good wine and unique beer. I remember following her on a wild ride through the east bay hills down to her rooftop apartment off Piedmont Ave. We stumbled up to her place. I got naked and fell into her bed while she lit candles and headed to the bathroom. When she came out she was naked too, stunning with toned arms and back, a beautiful waist that ended in a scrumptious ass and small but tasty looking breasts. We spend our selves and fall asleep, both happy enough with the outcome.

The next morning we wake up, hung over. Sometimes when people sober up from a one night stand there is an awkwardness, a "what the fuck did I just do" pall over the newly happy couple. None of that here, we were both comfortable with what we had done and with each other. I take her to breakfast at Lin and Lu's on grand. We eat omelets and drink coffee and talk about how hung over we are.

That night I call her and we make plans to go out on Tuesday. I pick her up at 7 pm at her place and we head out to the Miramar Beach Inn. She is wearing a short skirt, tights, top and short leather jacket. Same stunning looks. Over the drive and dinner we talk art and philosophy and history and family and a million other things. I learn she has degrees in History and Art, that she is an artist, that she works as a secretary to make ends meet. She is a native Californian, she has traveled to Europe but never to the east coast. Our conversation that night was one of the best first date conversations I have ever had, interesting, funny and easy. We seemed to fit like a hand and soft glove.

When I took her home that night, I hesitated, did not want to assume that I was coming up. She noticed, and I think it surprised her. She asked me to come in. When we got to her bedroom, she lighted candles and we started to undress each other. By the time we were done I was standing there with her softly holding my tight hard on.

"I want to get on my knees in front of you". She said as she got down. She put my cock into her mouth as she rested her hands on the outside of my thighs. I moaned.

I was looking down at her, working me, feeling those lips and tongue, hearing her coo, feeling her breath.

I swear I have a memory of being outside my body, watching us from the side. Maybe just my imagination, but it was that good. At some point we moved to the bed, I went down on the sweetest pussy I had ever tasted while she writhed and purred and finally came in an earthquake and gusher.

"Come here" she breathed, as I moved to straddle her face. She grabbed my cock and deep throated it, sucked and pumped it till I was at the point of cuming, and then as I started to squirt she pulled it out and rubbed it over her mouth and face as I exploded, pumping every last drop onto her lips and into her mouth. When I was done, she lay there with her mouth open in a mask of ecstasy.

The rest of the week we saw each other a couple of times, talked on the phone a lot. Every time talking was fun and easy and, well, natural. We laughed all the time.

Needless to say, the nights were explosive.

And she was direct.

"I want to suck it" Giggle.

She came down to my place the following Saturday. As she walked in I pulled her over to the counter, pulled her jeans down to her knees (she rarely wore underwear) bent her over.

She was already wet. I pushed my cock into her, in the mirror I could see her face and hair, all made up for our outing. I loved the look she got on her face as she came, crying out as I blew up in her.

The next week, another dinner date, went to the movies, went back to her place.

"I was talking to my friend" she said " she tells me that I just have to try it in the ass." She smiles. We get down to it, and I flip her over. She has a great back, taut, yet smooth, curving all the way down to a round, tight ass, the kind of ass and waist that can make me cum just from looking at it. I am face down in that thing, laping as she is loving it, till everything is sopping wet and she is writhing. I move up, part her cheeks, and slowly start, pressing the head of my cock into her. I am trying very hard to be gentle, take it slow.

Just as the head passes into her ass, she says, "you devil, you just slipped it in there."

Then she reaches aroung with both hands, grabs my ass and with a clean jerk, pulls me into her and lets out a moan. Now I am pounding her, and as I do I reach around and slip my fingers into her pussy. I can feel my cock pressing on the walls of her pussy as I play with her.

She starts to cry out " Oh God, Oh God"

With a shudder, she comes, and comes and comes, and somewhere in there I come in a ball draining flood.

For the rest of that first year together, that is how it was. We never fought, we never got frustrated. We went places, and did fun things and fascinated each other with our insights and cracked each other up with our jokes.

And we fucked our brains out until every brain cell was gone. And it was all good.

It was the best time we ever knew together.



"Wouldn't you rather take me home...."

The names are changed. The events are as I remember them.
*********************************************************

Long drive, longer than I had planned, going up 880 from the south bay to Oakland. Never had been in Oakland before, really. My first two years in the bay were spent all in Pleasanton and the Peninsula, with the obligatory expeditions to San Francisco. I was newly separated, the kids and their mother were still in the townhouse off 680 and I was in Mountain View, closer to work. Invited to a house party hosted by my friend Linda and concocted by someone named Marilyn. It was a cuisine night, a Cajun party, and eveyone had to bring a dish. I brought shark in Creole, I was never a great chef, but I was passable in the kitchen.

There was a concert at the Oakland Collesium, some teeny bopper group, and I was running late. It was a madhouse, car after car load of teenage girls jamming the freeway, hanging out the sun roof, screaming at each other. Pandemonium and pressed ham. No way I was going to be on time. Well, no worries, Linda told me these things never started on time anyway. It was a warm September Saturday night, I had the windows down, feeling the air. Summers in San Francisco can be down right frigid, strangely enough. The intense heat of the Central Valley and the cold ocean current off the coast conspire to suck cold, wet, foggy air thru the golden gate all summer and refrigerate every thing in its path. But in September, the "air conditioner" stops running and things in the bay and the coast get downright consistently warm.

It was a younger me, long hair, the body of a casual but committed gym rat. I was just out of a miserable marriage, a screwey affair and a disaster of an ending. That night, I was feeling better about life than I had in a very long time.

After winding my way through the East Bay hills, I found myself at Linda's house. I could hear the sounds of a party up on her deck. Armed with a bowl of Shark Creole and a fitting excuse for being late, I proceeded up the stairs to her front door. The house is interesting, one of those custom redwood cliffhangers that dangle from the sides of the Oakland hills.

The party seems to be getting underway. The crowd seems older, my impression was late 30's and 40's, probably single agains and obviously an east bay crowd. There seemed to be a even mix of ages and genders, and I remember thinking, college faculty singles mixer.

I can hear Linda's voice on the deck. Linda is a bit larger than life. Short, curvey, muscled, brassy, attractive in a earthy crunchy sort of way. She came to San Francisco in the summer of love and spent a year living on apples and borrowed pot. When she got sick of apples, she met a man, had a son and started businesses. Eventually she and her husband owned one of the largest auto repair shops in Northern California and along the way she had picked up a masters degree and a position as a manager at a large California company. When I met her the husband had been gone some years, the son was living with her in the house they had bought together and she was a fellow manager at the same factory I was working. We considered dating, but wound up friends, and she had been a source of support and a good friend through my recent series of incomprehensible events.

"Linda" I boom as I walk onto the deck. " would that you had TOLD me that there was a teeny bopper concert between you and me tonight!" She laughs and tells me to get a beer. "its over there, a keg of Tied house Ginger beer". She knows I love unique beer.

I turn towards the keg.

Standing there is a tall blonde woman, pair of tight fitting jeans, too small blue tanktop showing off an athlete's belly. Her socks and her shirt match. She looks up.

Two things strike me.

The first is that she is beautiful. Blue eyes, full red lips, face like Kim Basinger, smile like a spring day.

The second is how she is looking at me. It was obvious, so obvious that I was surprised. She looked at me and I could see her face just light up, like she had just seen Adonis. I had never until then had someone look that enraptured to see me.

"Hi, I'm Maurice."

"Hi, I'm Marilyn, you want a beer?"

We step in side the house, beers in hand.

We talk. She is the organizer of these events, lives in the east bay. I tell her a bit about me. We talk about how we know Linda. Turns out she sidelines as a color consultant. I make a off hand remark that maybe she could do my colors sometime, improve my image.

Her face changes, goes all cold. " Well, you would have to pay me money for that."

Well, that went south fast. The conversation dies, and we move off to talk to other people. I figure it's a no starter. Too bad. Oh well, pretty woman, but I guess I plucked the wrong string.

I move off to get some food and chat with others. The inside crowd is ok, fun enough, if a bit muted and reserved. I head back out to the deck to find Linda and her sister sitting together. Now Linda's sister is about my age, brunette, thin, very pretty. She is an odd mix of librarian and dominatrix, with a hint of Angelica Houston as Morticia. She is also wicked funny in a wicked way. So am now in this conversation group of Linda, the sister, her boyfriend and a couple of random people. Linda is sitting beside me. She gets up to go somewhere, I am laughing my tail off at the sister's last comment, something deliciously disgusting about her boss and a co worker.
I turn around and there is Marilyn, sitting in Linda's vacated chair, with a plate of pecan pie and a piece on a fork, pointed in my direction.

" You have to try this.", she says. So I do, and we sit there as she feeds me pie, one piece at a time.

Later, much later I learned that at first she thought I was coming on too strong, and she felt she had to push me away, put me in my place. As the evening wore on, though, she realized that she didn't want me to go away.

We go back to talking, someone calls for a toast to Marilyn as the instigator, and then someone else puts on dancing music. We all get to dancing, and at somepoint I am looking at Marilyn up close, and her eyes pose a question, and I answer her with a kiss.

She is a kisser, soft, big lips. I must be doing ok too, from the sound of things and her response. We end up making out and whispering to each other on a far corner of the deck, with the lights of the bay below us.

Now I learned a long time ago that there is nothing wrong with being forward with a woman, but best policy, when first meeting, is to end the night heading home alone with a phone number in hand, especially if you really are interested in a gal.

"Give me your number, I'll call you. We can go out to dinner some time this week."

She looks at me, smiles and says..

"Wouldn't you rather just take me home and fuck my brains out?"

And thus it began.

Monday, January 17, 2005

Guys Rule 5:00 AM

When I was younger I was a late riser. No more. One of the first things that a man in marriage with kids learns is that there are few times he can call his own, his days are prescribed by work, wife, soccer matches and homework assistance duty. But in all generations, at all times, the first hours of the morning belong to man.

5:00 AM is truly Yang in its composition.

This is a quick post, just a check in, as I do not have time today for weighty writing. The weekend was spent with Fiancee and youngest daughter up in Inverness at the home of a friend and sometimes boss and business partner. My daughter learned how to make pizza in an Italian wood pizza oven and my fiancee met a man who, for better or worse, provided the backdrop for much of what happened to me back at the end of the last century and beginning of the 21st.

Sunday was a walk on the beach, the water was flat and beautiful. Note to self, time to find time to launch the kayak.

Anyone see the pictures of Titan? Incredible. Imagine a place with a sea of methane, rivers of ethane. The universe is an amazing place. Hats off to the European Space Agency and the people of NASA and JPL.

A strange feeling is coming over me, one of familiarity, and not in a bad way. The Fiancee' and I have been living together now for almost 7 months. My youngest ( who is with us sometimes) and my oldest (who is technically with us always, though an 18 year old boy with a Camero is a mobile creature) have settled into having her around quite nicely. All the kids like her a lot, she is more normal that either of their mothers (one is a lovely, but very born again Baptist, the other is a recovering long term alcoholic/pill addict). I find myself back to a place that feels normal, and it is as if the last three years were more a dream than real. Strange, seeing that there used to be a crazy skinny blonde and now there is a smart, younger brunette with curves where curves were not. Still, I should not wonder, I have been married or engaged with kids since I was 26, just not with the same woman. Singlehood, apperantly, is not something I do often or well.

Fiancee and I are off to visit my parents in a month. My mother is a saint, my father is very sick, both with heart and kidney problems and with recently diagnosed Parkinson's disease. He was a life long alcoholic, a depressive and rage-aholic, an all around piece of work. In some kind of karmac justice, the sins of his life have writ large on his body. The last five years have been for him a very Dantean experience of hell on earth. Now, he is just a very frail, scared old man. It is time to see him while I can. Mom is beside herself to meet the Fiancee.

Ok, well this week is going to be a bit of a wild ride, mostly on the work and wedding planning side, not a lot of time to post.

I had thought to spend a bit more time on political musings. That will now change. Dreams have been haunting me, the ex has been rattling around in my sleep time, and I think it is time to write some things that have been waiting for the right time to write. I promised in my second post to not focus so much on the sexual. Given the topic matter, I must beg forgiveness from my readers, her's is a steamy, torrid and sometimes lurid story all around. It may take me a few days of this to do it right.

By the way, for those who were wondering, a Cataphract is a Roman Knight, heavy horse soldier, trained to lance, sword and bow. A combination of horse archer and lancer, they were the Roman's response to the Gothic and Hunnish horse armies and the backbone of the Byzantine military system. They also provide an interesting metaphor for life.

Sometimes you have to stand off at safe distance and pepper them with arrows..

Sometimes you have to charge home.




Friday, January 14, 2005

Republicans, Procopius, and Titan

Today's post is going to be a bit rambling, as I am having a hard time focusing on one particular subject. First I have to thank all my readers for their nice comments on the last post, I hope it was helpful, even if in a small way. The posts I read are instructive, and have helped me to put a few of my own life experiences into better perspective. The insights provided can only make me a better person.

First up today, the election. I live in a liberal part of a liberal state surrounded by liberals. Point in fact, the liberals are the conservatives in San Francisco and the Bay, given the host of radicals that live, work and breed here. I am a moderate, fiscally conservative, but socially tolerant and environmentally aware. (Not, however, vegan, veggian, or a member of the green party). I have a lot of conservative friends (my brother is an evangelical preacher, no less) and a ton of liberal friends, and ex girlfriends of all shades.

Most were dismayed by the recent election, convinced that either A. The American people are stupid or B. that Karl Rove stole the election AGAIN. Now anyone who read my previous posts know that I'm very critical of the entire Iraq debacle, and am none too happy with the current National Security/ Defense Department leadership. I also find John Ashcroft a tad bit scary. But, no, I do not think that the republic is about to fall to some neo fascist cabal, nor do I see the dark hidden hand of a Skull and Bones shadow government slowly taking the reins of the government away from the people.

Sorry folks, that stuff makes for great Grisham novels, but rarely happens in real life. I was in the Navy for years, with a clearance. Trust me, no one is that good at keeping secrets. The government is frankly, a sieve. Twenty years ago, you wanted to know Classified US Navy ship movements in the Pacific fleet, you did not need to break a code or compromise a sailor, just ask the Olongapo hookers. They always knew, their livelihood depended on knowing the movements of their regulars.

Part of what drives this kind of thinking is the notion that a large number of Americans seem, from the liberal perspective, to be voting with corporations against their own economic interests. Pundit after Pundit states this "truth", that Ohioians are voting for the guys that are moving their jobs to India and against the labor backed people that promise to keep jobs, a car for every garage and a chicken in every pot for the beleaguered American Worker. The reasons for this range from disbelief (these people are just stupid) to dastardly (these people are really voting for us and the election is being stolen) to denominational (these people have been duped into thinking that voting republican is voting for God).

Now, I can see how the cultural issues do impact this election, and it is a factor. But lets be clear, nothing, not one thing in nature, acts against its perceived self interest. If you even hypothesized such an organism had ever existed, it would have died off eons ago. I have yet to meet the rational man, woman or dog that would take consistent, deliberate action to deny its own food bowl, and I am not ready to grant that over half this country is suffering from mass psychosis (though the popularity of reality TV can cause me sometimes to re-evaluate that statement.)

What my liberal friends in all their ranting on the evils of corporations, Republicans and the like, forget is the real distaste and despair engenderd in the average American by the government.

What are the three greatest lies?

The check is in the mail.

I won't cum in your mouth

I am from the government, I am here to help.


Some add the fourth as the response to the third: Oh really, I am glad you are here.

You have to look not at the theoretical, but at the day to day, where people live. We all share the same experience. First, taxes. Remember your first paycheck, how great it was to get it, and how small it looked after taxes. Remember your first raise, an entire whopping 6%, that evaporated in the increased deductions? Remember your first bonus, and how it seemed like it should really be written, bone us? You get the picture.

Now close your eyes and try to remember all your interactions with your government servants. What was it like? Was it customer friendly? Were the lines short? Could you find even one nice person? Did anything happen the way it was supposed to, even on the second or third try.

Now take a moment and remember all your interactions with union members. How did that go?

Now let me say for the record, I have had some great experiences with public servants. But in almost all those situations, it was with the small town variety. The principle and teachers at my son's old small town elementary school, the lovely and highly competent people at the Saratoga Springs town hall. The ladies and gentlemen of the Pleasanton, California police department. All of them, professionals to the core.

And I have nothing but respect for firefighters, cops, park rangers and paramedics everywhere.

But there is also the Oakland School district. Yes they have problems, but they have squandered a fortune on unneeded administrators, foolish programs and stupid initiatives. Anyone remember Ebonics. The Bay Area Air Quality District does good work, but have over the years treated Motorists as pariah, when in California saying "motorist" is like saying "citizen" or even "anyone over the age of 16 and breathing". This, the richest state in the country, richer that the entire country of France and with some of the highest tax rates in the nation, is deeply in the red, spent mostly on a legion of state workers and retirees with benefits well in execs of anything that the average citizen can command.

Hey, I am all for special retirement deals for front line cops, but meter maids? Give me a break!

The bottom line is, my liberal friends see a world where government is the solution. But government, their employees and the unions that represent them have not acted exactly like solution providers. Instead, following their own self interest, have carved out a nice life for themselves at the expense of the rest of the populace, and have created Byzantine bureaucratic systems that seem more intent on thwarting than promoting the common good.

Now yes, corporations do the exact same thing, and sometimes with catastrophic effects. However, a corporation cannot put you in jail or bankrupt you with a prosecution.

And you cannot just quit, you are stuck.

Now I have drawn some broad strokes, and broad brushstrokes are by nature unfair. But you see the picture. Over half of the country voted republican, in part, because over half the country has seen the evil that is corporations, and the evil that is government, and chose the lesser of the two.

They did not vote to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, they voted to be able to drill a well without having to navigate an increasingly expensive regulatory labyrinth.

And thats the truth.

I am reading Procopius now, and it helps me get the argument. Procopius is the great historian of the sixth century, the chronicles of Justinian the Law Giver and Belesarius the Great Captain. His histories are instructive, but one small volume, "The Secret History" is his backroom revelations of the venality and greed and corruption of Justinian and his consort, Theodora. Reading its pages, you realize that no swindler on earth can dispossessed you faster than one in the seat of government, for Caveat Emptor does not help you with the tax man.

We all read about the Fall of Rome, but few ever get to read the parts where the populace was praying for the barbarbians to come and relieve them from the burden of the Roman Tax Collector.

Read Gibbon, and Procopius, it will change your perspectives, or at least illuminate the problem.

You also will get an idea as to the words and idioms that a classical author uses to describes a blow job, anal sex and group sex. Turns out Theodora was a bit of a vixen.

Ok, so that is the dissertation for today. In later blogs I promise to offer up some solutions, only pointing out problems is tiresome and ultimately unproductive.

Oh yes, Titan. The Huygans probe landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, last night, and the images and data are just coming through. Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a substantial atmosphere, thicker that Earth's. This is history and science in the making, I highly recommend following its progress. Look here athttp://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

Tomorrow, more dissertation, then time for a sex blog again. Something from my history, I promise that it will be juicy.