Dream Land

Well, the great core router fiasco of 2005 is now over, the good guys finally won. The weekend was quiet, mostly because all of us were too tired and shell shocked to do much of anything. My youngest spent the weekend with Fiance and I. We mostly did things close to home, I think that youngest daughter had a hell of a week in her own way, and she desperately needed down time as well. We watched the first two Star Wars movies, still just as much fun as they were when they came out. She is off school this week, back to Ex, then back to me in a patchwork shuffle that spreads the vacation time between us.

We are now at 20 days and counting to the wedding, two more weekends to prep and then the big day. I am down to buying a suit for my son, today we bought shoes and a shirt for me to go with the new black suit and back up shoes for the fiance. We are ready, time for wedding bells once again.

Dreams seem to be the theme of the week. Fiance is having all kinds of wedding stress dreams, you know the ones where she shows up to the wedding and no one is there, the one where she starts down the isle and realizes she is naked, (now that would be a hell of a show). Its normal, she is excited and a little worried that this well planned event will have a hitch. Reality is, there will probably be one or two and it just does not matter, it will still be a great day.

My dreams continue to be either uneventful or all too memorable bizarre episodes with the Ex. That she continues to haunt my dreams even after three years is suprising and a little disturbing. My heart has been broken seriously only thrice, once by my first great love, a high school senior named Karen that was my hometown honey my junior year at college. The second was the wild brunette that shared my first affair, and the third, of course, is the ex. Karen left me depressed for most of my senior year. The brunette haunted my dreams for a couple of years. In a memorable one, she and I were swimming in a tropical ocean, and all of a sudden there were around us a chorus of old women singing a song by Baisa: "once upon a time it was for real, nothing mattered more than we were together, you were nearest to my heart, only now I understand, we never felt the same..." I had a lot of dreams about her till finally I stopped thinking of her.

The ex haunts me like that. Two nights ago she was in my dreams.. we were still divorced, but for some reason sleeping together and attending a swingers orgy as a couple. It was a nasty and erotic dream, doing things to each other that left me, upon awaking, with a major case of morning wood and a memory of sex almost immediate enough to be real. I have had a lot of those dreams, too many. She dropped off my daughter on Saturday, showed up in five inch heals, Gucci skirt, and a skimpy top that displays her last major purchase quite nicely. She wanted to talk, and as always she leaves me feeling a bit, well, bummed.

The fiance and I have a very healthy relationship, one borne of trust, shared values, mutual respect and love and affection. Our sex life is very good, our connection strong. My daughters love her and my son truly likes her. It is very clear that she loves me and will continue to love me, and does so authentically. I have no worries here.

My relationship with the ex was, from the beginning, about sex. I was younger and had about ten X the libido and she was all about being fucked, all the time. She completely defines herself around being sexy and desirable, overly so, to the point of desperation. Clearly that is what drives her relationship with this new boyfriend, he is all about fashion and looking good.

I suppose she continues to press those buttons in me, and my dream life suffers as a result.

I know myself well enough to know that this is going on. I am attracted most often to the desperately beautiful, desperately damaged ones. It has made for some great sex with some beau--ti--full women. The fiance is a digression from that pattern..she is beautiful and attractive, but she is not the bombshell nympho (nutcase?) that has so often populated my intimate life. Since the ex there have been three like that, one was a two month long revenge fuck with the wife of the guy that was fucking my ex wife in rehab, the other was kicked to the curb after a second date that ended in with her drunk and twitching, mumbling threats to her old roomate.

The third was the last gal before I met the fiance. She was a runner, a single mom, and a recovering alcoholic. We connected immediately and it was very hot and heavy for a few weeks, only to end abruptly one Tuesday afternoon when she called me up to tell me it was over, something about her daughter and her sponsor and it was too soon, etc, etc. Turns out that the father of the girl, who had been jerking both of them around for years, all of a sudden showed up with an engagement ring when he heard about me. After her, I had given up completely, convinced that cigars and whisky are the only true path for a man.

Fast forward eighteen months and I am 20 days from my third marriage. This one will stick, I am sure. I am happy with her and look forward to less drama and more real goodness in my life.

But the old nuttiness seems to lurk. Part of me will always be driven to the slutty, the pornographic, that intense beyond belief high that comes from nasty sexual conquest, cock shoved deep into a willing throat. Desperate, tragic, dramatic sex that owns every pore and breaks all bounds. I have had it, bathed in it, been possessed by it.

Been destroyed by it.

What is also clear, is that I need a new focus for all that intensity. My brother, when he became born again and a preacher, after a few years became a rock climber and mountaineer. He needed the danger, the intensity that he had found before in drugs and sex. I think I need the same, and more. In many ways I can be even more driven than my brother, and I need a focus for that drive if I am ever to find balance.

I have considered remaining alone, but that path seems not to work. Perhaps, if I had never married, never had children, and knew what I knew now, that I could have crafted a different kind of life, living as a single man, pursuing my passions and sharing my bed with women that would use and be used to meet the needs of animal desire. But I am a family man, a role I take seriously, and in that role, I seem to do poorly single and much better as part of a couple. That I can even look at this is testament to the stabilizing and healing power of my relationship with Fiancee.

My dreams will continue, the ex will continue to pluck the strings in my heart that are attached to my pudenda, and my feelings will continue to remain confused, until, after much more time, all will fade into dim memory and forgetfullness, as we will all fade into forgetfullness and return to the unconscious void from where we came. They do not exist, except as shadows in my mind, and perhaps I have spent too much time on them even tonight.

Life moves on, beautiful and terrible and powerfully random, and if not random, then obscure enough to seem so to mortals. There is no meaning here, perhaps, and only the patterns that grow from simple processes working back on themselves long enough to create complexity, and in that complexity our eyes are deceived into seeing meaning or purpose, where there are only events, one after another.

All we have is what exists in this moment, and all we can do is to love those in front of us for as long as they remain.

Fried Grey Man-Brains

The guy version of my favorite chick movie.

Now on day 10 of the Cisco core router hostage crisis.

Since last week my team and I have been battling a subtle, intermittent and very serious problem in our data center that has been driving us and our customers batty, and has led to none too few sharp exchanges. It is the kind of problem that is most challenging, intermittent system wide glitches on a network that spans two data centers and the networks of three separate companies where the logs and standard troubleshooting tools tell you either nothing or very little that is specific. Tracking down the problem is hard enough from an engineering perspective, but you have to add to that the interpersonal dynamic when you get three separate IT groups to work on the same problem.

IT types are, as a rule, arrogant, proud, argumentative, tribal, territorial, self righteous and wicked smart. In this world, looks, money, abs, dick size, black book size, car count for NOTHING. It is all about who knows the most and being RIGHT..and never, never saying you are WRONG.

And who is the master at accessing the best porn sites secretly from the office.

Me, I am a facilitator by nature, what I am doing in this line of work confuses even me. Riding herd on this one is kind of like refereeing on the beach at D-Day. You spend the first couple of days convincing every one that it MAY be their stuff and that the prudent action is to get off your ass and CHECK and TEST instead of arguing. Eventually you get the manufacturer to send you the obscure bulletin that no one else has seen that describes your problem exactly (the one you wish you had eight days ago).

Anyway, we think that after a week of not sleeping we have tracked the problem down and one guy is off to Vegas to swap out the switch. I hope this is it. I need to spend a night with the Fiancee without my ear in a phone.

In other news, the wedding plans are proceeding, 23 days left in this round of singledom. I have been a husband to some one for 20 years, just never the same person.

I got to thinking about what I miss about my exes. Suprising, but something you think about. Strangely, there is nothing about them as a person that I miss..The Fiance is a much better partner than either of them, we are very well suited as friends and as lovers and as a couple.

So all I am left with are a few specifics.

First ex. I miss her corn bread. She also, every once and a while could be a nasty cum slut..she loved to get it all over herself, would let it drool out on her lips. She also loved 69, she would lay on top of me and stick her pussy in my face and grind as I would lick her to shuddering orgasms, and she seemed to be able to time hers with my exploding in her mouth...now that was a talent.

Second Ex. Hard to miss anything about her. She was and is a looker, probably the most dramatically beautiful woman I have ever been with. She is also the most difficult, times infinity, and the nuttiest. She could take it hard , though, the kind of girl that you could bend over and shove it in her ass and pile drive till she screamed and gushed a river. I could say I miss that, but there have been a few others like her and I pounded and passed, I am now careful not to make that mistake again.

**********

It is now twelve hours since I started this post. I have been up for 24 hours plus and have not really left the office. We replaced the core router overnight, a major evolution that went well, only a few hicups. Now the waiting game, see if we really nailed the problem.

This is now my third 24 hour day this week, and I have not been spending enough time with fiancee. She is very understanding, but clearly I need to get off this treadmill and spend some quality time with her. Care and feeding is key to successful relationships, this one has been on a diet this week.

When I get tired enough, my brain goes in strange places. Tonight the lack of sleep and this weeks lack of sex has my mind racing down the paths of my own sexual past. The images are immediate and graphic, a pornographic counterpoint to 24 hours spent with my all male computer geek team pouring over switches and software. These two things should not go together in any rational brain, trust me. We used to have this gal in the office, Indian but raised in SF, beautiful and a touch slutty. On Fridays, clad in hip huggers and sporting a purple thong and skimpy top, she could raise the dead tree to a live woody. But no more, there is nothing in this office that can arouse, ney, nada, neyt.

Maybe tomorrow, when I have a moment I will tell a story..for some reason Valerie is coming to mind..and hers is an instructive one.

After I sleep...

Need to Vent

I keep thinking I will have time to write, fun things about sex, nutty things about my day, thoughtfull things about the course of empires. Naturally, life has a way of getting busy. For example, here was yesterday:

6:00 am wake up, make coffee
6:30 to 8:30 Tai Jian practice ( that is chinese straight sword for the civilians, though I mix up Dadao (two handed, big ass broadsword) work into it)
8:30 to 9:30 Morning emails, morning status call with my ops center, intermixed with "21 days to Java" and "21 days to C++"
9:30 to 10:15 Shower, head to work ( get large coffee on the way, now up to four cups)
10:15 till 6:00 normal work day
6:00 leave work to meet fiance at gym
6:30 till 8:00 Lift, work out
8:00 to 9:00 make and eat dinner with fiance
9:00 till 10:30 pm Staff meeting and final conference call with India. Struggle with Java
10:30 to 11:00 finish Saullist "The Jurgenthine War and Catiline Conspiracy"
11:00 PM to bed with Fiance for an hour of talking, relating, fumblididdles.

That is pretty typical. As you can see, not a lot of time for BLOG. Today is pretty much the same, except add dance lessons and a release at 1:00 am. Tomorrow is more of the same and fencing at 8:00PM.

I pack a lot into a day. Always have.

But today, I come here once again for the group thearpy sesson.

Interfacing with the ex, always a lot of fun.

I suppose that the bottom line issue here is that I really do not like the woman very much AND I am connected to her through my daughter AND I still have a lot of residual personal connections, like astral bonds that flicker between us. On the one hand she is a chaotic, difficult, selfish piece of work that whirls like a drunken tornado, carelessly damaging whatever comes into her path. Not malicious, just immature and petulant, a 13 year old adolecent in a 47 year old body. She creates, no, craves instability, swinging from overly mushy pronouncements and demonstrations of love to fits of loud annoyance at the people in her household, to tear filled bouts of guild and self blame.

From another angle, she is the mother of my younger daughter, a girl that she clearly loves and clings to as perhaps the only legimitely good thing she has ever created and not destroyed. She is clearly doing the best she possibly can, and clearly has the girl's best interests at heart, no mattter how imperfect she is in execution.

And of course, finally, this is the woman I shared a bed with for over ten years. Being next to her is to live in the tension point between kissing and killing, desire and disgust. All of that is happening on the subconcious level... for me it is a viceral high frequency osciliation between wanting to pull her pants down and fuck her right there and now and wanting to break her in two with my bare hands. Neither will happen, and none of this is happening at the thinking level. But it is there.

It makes for a horribly conflated set of emotions every time we interact, and an interaction level that is way higher than I would ever want. Unfortunately, both of these things seem to suit her just fine, she likes having the comm line in the "always open" mode, and conflated mushy relations seem to fit perfectly into the chaos and drama that forms her life.

Nothing in life is totaly clean, we all have relationships that do not fit into clean models and that press buttons better left un-pressed. Case in point, the fiance has a friend, very cute redhead. We hang out with her occasionally. The city crowd has this hug and kiss on the cheeks thing going, while red likes to hug and give me a kiss on the lips when we meet. She also gushes a bit about how great I am...and I think she is neat. Clearly there is some "crush" stuff going on there, and just as clearly it will never be acted on.

But it is there, and we have to deal with it.

But there is a reason we get distance from ex's, and I am not getting enough distance, and given that we have a daughter, it is pretty clear I won't.