COWARDICE AND BREAKING UP BY DISAPPEARING....

Writing comes from inspiration and I am coming to believe that inspiration comes only from pain, possibly also suffering, anguish, fear and occasionally loathing.  Until recently, I have not had any of those feelings and, thus, have not been moved to write.  There has been no inspiration. Ah, but that all changed not so long ago.

Several months ago, I met a younger woman through, of all places, the Internet (who'da thunk?).  I will not go into the details of the site or anything.  Suffice it to say, I was seeking a woman that had holes in her head that fit the bumps in mine.  In this case, at least initially, they absolutely did, but as time passed, things began to change, and not for the better.

I noticed that we would get together and she would ask questions about why I chose this restaurant or this hotel or whatever.  What became clear is that she was asking because my choices were not up to her expectations and/or standards.  In plain English, they were not expensive enough for her tastes.  The cynic in me now recognizes that she wanted only the best possible "stuff" whenever someone else was paying for it.  Quite frankly, near the end, and I did not see the end coming, I was going broke paying for her Champagne tastes.  I suspect she recognized this and decided that since I was not Daddy Warbucks that I was no longer suitable.

In my defense, I am not a cheapskate, but a relationship has to be more than expensive dinners, all the time and meetings in expensive hotels, all the time.  We spent one hour at her condo, once, and no time at my house ever, over a period of about 5 months.  This is just not normal.  Spending several hours in a hotel, screwing like bunny rabbits was fine, but coming to my house was "out of her comfort zone."  I bought cute little gifts, not expensive, but, in my opinion cute and romantic as reminders of the time we spent together.  Not that I would ever expect their return, but she made sure she got a much anticipated gift that I had told her I had bought her before she disappeared.  In fact she got it the last time we were together.  In my world, we have a name for women that do this...LOL

When she decided to jettison me, and I use the term jettison deliberately, she did so by simply and totally cutting off contact with me.  There was no conversation, no explanation, not a word.  Suddenly, I was cut-off.  My calls went unanswered, my texts went unanswered and after that there was not another word spoken or written between us.  Well, I lie, there was one text message exchanged.  I was becoming worried at the fact that I had not heard from her after about three days, which, up to that point, was unusual.  In a text message I made her aware of my concern and it was pretty clear I was going to show up on her doorstep just to make sure she was alive, not hospitalized, etc.  She responded with a text that she was having "major issues" with her daughter and this is the reason she went silent.  Of course I now know this to have been a lie just to make sure that I would not show up and she would not have to speak with me.   I can be a little thick sometimes, but I got this message loud and clear.  I have not heard from her, nor attempted to contact her again.

While it sounds like I am not "over" her that is really not the case.  I can take rejection pretty well.  Like most people, I have been doing it all my life.  What I do not understand, and what really bugs me, is how a person can treat another person in such an abominable fashion.  Just disappearing is just, well, for lack of a better word, rude.  It is also, in my-not-so-humble opinion, cruel, heartless and mean-spirited.  I can deal with the breakup of a relationship and have in the past.  While I appreciate an explanation, accurate, inaccurate, even a lie, it is not necessary, but some sort of goodbye, even a dismissal as simple as "it's not working out for me," is fine. 

Just falling off the face of the Earth is, well, cowardly, and I find cowardice one of the most vile character traits in a person.  Fear is a reaction, and an understandable one in many cases, but cowardice is a conscious decision to act as a, well, coward.  This, in my world view is completely unacceptable.  This is probably the best reason why I am really over her, because I could never be with a coward.  I do look back on my life and think about bad things I have done and wonder if this might be some kind of Karmic payback.  I am not perfect and although it is probably not huge, I am sure I have a Karma Debt (as I call it) to pay back.

The breakup of any relationship is difficult.   I have been divorced, I know.  It can be painful and it is emotional, but as human beings, we owe it to our partners, even our temporary partners, at absolute minimum, a notice that "it is over."  I am not talking about a full-on explanation, nor a discussion, nor, in particular, an argument.  Do it on the phone even, then if the unwanted argument occurs, you can hang up.  At least your ex-partner knows it's over.  If you fear you are going to be the subject of stalking, I am not sure it is going to make any difference whether you give notice or not.  I would have to say that if your partner is physically or emotionally abusive, then the notice requirement is waived, and even then, the notice likely comes in the form of the police knocking on the door with the Restraining Order.  In an older time it was Daddy or big brother with a shotgun, sometimes far more effective, actually, and it did not require multiple Court appearances.

It can be beneficial to tell someone why you are dumping them, but it is not required.  If anything, consider that the person might engage in self-improvement and the next person they meet will be better off for your experience.  You are paying it forward to the next person, and there will be a next person, but if you just disappear, there can be no improvement, self-assessment, nor will there be closure.  If your goal is to deny your former partner any or all of these, it just makes you an asshole or a bitch…oh well….

I'M BAAAACK !!!

My Dear Followers...All 6 or 7 of you?

I have reappeared onto the blogosphere!  I am back on the radar, which begs the question, why was I gone, absent and otherwise not here?  Well, in no order of importance, I was a bit depressed by the lack of readership.  It is hard to keep shouting, or in this case, speaking softly, and not be heard.  Eventually you quit.  I plead guilty, I quit, but I hope to turn it into a hiatus, a temporary absence.

Another reason is that I was in a relationship and put forth my efforts to make that relationship work.  I can now tell you that I was apparently not successful in making it work because it ended.  There was some bitterness on both sides and, since she will not be making a guest appearance here, you are probably going to get only my side of things.  Oh well, she can write her own blog....LOL

Another reason is that I started another blog.  It is a tumblr blog and is, to be honest, pornographic pictures.  These are "unique" interests I have, and are of a sensual, erotic sexual nature.  I shall not post the URL here, but if you ask, I will happily share it.  Allow me to state that this blog is almost exclusively pornographic pictures and some of the pictures push the edges of the envelope of taste, assuming that there is such a thing as tasteful porn (more comments on that later).  Allow me to disclaim.... There are things I find very interesting, almost in an academic fashion, but I would never consider doing them, ever.  By way of an example, when I was young, in the military and in Texas, I went on the mandatory trip to Tijuana, where I got liquored up and, with my buddies, went to one of the rights of passage one goes through in that setting, going to the show in which a girl has sex with a donkey on stage.

In the context of my youth, it was cool, icky, but cool.  In the bright light of age and maturity, it was disgusting, cruel and awful.  I would not have then, nor now, been involved with something like this, but I did watch and at the time it was "interesting."  How many of us did things in our youth that we look back upon and say to ourselves, "What was I thinking?"  This is one of my moments.

I have "interests" mostly as regards Dominance and submission, that I have explored and continue to explore, in the context of a relationship.  When appropriate, I may share aspects of the adventure and exploration of that interest.

In the coming months, I plan to share with you my version of the realities of being middle-aged and single, once again.  I am actually on the downhill side to being 60 and finding myself "dating" is, to say the least, and unexpected situation.  I am pretty sure it is going to be interesting....LOL

So, I am back to being the frustrated writer I am and seeing if I can get my writing "fix" once again, here.  Sit down, read carefully, and hang on...I suspect you may be in for a helluva ride....

Good Life Guilt

People I know, and on occasion myself, seem to feel guilt at having lived good lives.  By this I mean a relatively easy life.  I have never known hunger in my life.  I have always had a roof over my head, and a nice roof too.  I have never not gotten anything I needed.  Please note I did not get a lot of things I wanted, but I was never denied anything I ever really needed.  I got a good education from the time I was a young child.  My parents, although somewhat distant, were involved in my life.  This involvement sometimes, and sometimes often, involved punishment of the physical kind, but I managed to come out of it relatively unscathed.  I was able to continue my education past college and into graduate school thanks to my parents and the U.S. Army.

I have friends who tell stories of their parents working their entire lives in steel mills in towns that where almost subsidiaries of the steel company.  My friend worked in the steel mill every Summer while he went to college at an Ivy League College and then went on to law school.  He had a different life than mine, but was probably even more successful for it.  He earned everything he ever got, nothing was given to him, whether it was something he want or needed.  I think he probably has a greater respect for material things than I do, in all honesty.

Good life guilt has lead me to spend the greater part of my life dedicated to being worthy of my good life.  I have been a public servant and public employee my entire adult life.  I have used the education, training and experience that has been given to me to make the world a better place for others.  My friend earned his good life having lived a hard one.  I, on the other hand, am working to be deserving of the good life I have had and have now.  I am not sure if there is a measure of who got the better deal, so to speak, but, in the end, I think that we are pretty well even.

One day I will retire, I hope, and I will be able to look back on my life and identify, with some particularity, persons that are better off for the fact that I am alive.  I will use this to justify my good life when the time comes for me to be judged.

CHANGE IS ALWAYS BAD !!

There are those, and they walk among us, that truly believe change is always bad. The terms new, different and exciting cause them severe gastrointestinal distress for some reason. Change sometimes involves a bit of risk. You have to put yourself out there and take a chance on being wrong. So what you have to do is make a determination of the risk/reward ratio. Those of us that have been administrators often call this cost-benefit analysis. You weigh the risks against the rewards and you figure out if it is worth it, but more on that later.

Change can cause discomfort. New, different and exciting can sometimes be the cause of fear; fear of the unknown. You do the best you can to figure out the benefits of a change, but you cannot always be right on in your determination, and often there are the dreaded "unintended consequences." You had no idea that unintended consequences would occur, but once the change is implemented, you discover, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, that there are results that you did not anticipate. If you listen to the conservative politicians and believers, the reason the economy took a dump was the fact that the liberals in Congress decided to change the rules regulating mortgages. Liberals have long believed that everyone should be able to own a home and dictated, by legislative fiat, that mortgages had to be given to certain minority groups, in a certain percentage. Ultimately, this resulted in persons that could not afford mortgages getting financed for mortgages on which they could not possibly make the payments. Time passes and poof, they default. This happens all at once, the residential real estate market takes a huge crap on the economy and we get "The Great Recession."

An excellent example of this is a girlfriend I used to have. She refinanced her home at 120% of the market value at the height of the market; the assumption being that the homes would continue to appreciate at the over-heated rate they had for the previous several years. In order to be able to make the payments, she amortized the payments over 50 years (she was in her mid-40's at the time...you do the math). This was the only way she could afford the payments, and she used the money to pay off her car and her credit cards, etc. This succeeded in financing her debt over 50 years instead of the usual 5 for a car (again, you do the math, 4% for 50 years vs. a higher interest for only 5 years). Oh, did I mention that this was an adjustable rate mortgage? Well, the rate adjusted up and she had to do everything she could to make the payment, including getting a second job. She teeters on the brink of losing her home...oh well. I am a little distraught only because I, being the nice guy I am, and being able to at the time, loaned her the money to make a down payment. This is money on which I have not seen payments in a couple of years, but she was able to buy a new Harley...oh well. In many cases, this same thing happened and people lost their homes to foreclosure. The real estate market crashed and burned and still lies in a heap of rubble as I type, but again, I digress.

I will not argue the point as to whether the conservatives among us are correct or not, but, if true, I will say it is an excellent example of unintended consequences. We decide to make sure all minorities can share in the "American Dream," regardless of whether they can afford to make the payments on their new homes and, as a result, we get an economic downturn the likes we have not seen in 80 years. This does not consider the fact that the mortgage foreclosure has devastated these people's credit even further into the future than it might have been before.

Many years ago, as part of a military project, I was doing what we called "hearts and minds" work in a far-off foreign land. One of the things we were doing was to train the farmers how to use things like fertilizer, rotate crops and till hillsides to avoid erosion. It was what we called Peace Corps work too. Each time we tried to get the villagers to do anything different, their reply was always the same, "But we have always done it this way." There was no rational reason for not doing things differently. There were no unintended consequences, just an irrational desire to not change because "we have always done it this way."

In spite of the rather ominous example of unintended consequences, change is not always bad. Change can lead to a more efficient and effective way of doing things. Change can bring about the ability to get more done, do things faster or with less effort. Change can bring about a change of image from old fashioned and stodgy to progressive and enlightened; you know, modern, but in a world in which change is feared and to be avoided at all possible costs; where change is bad, change will never occur. Things will stay the same and they will not get any better, until change is forced upon "them" by an outside entity, or progress marches on and over those that stand in the way.

Cowards are persons that fear change, any change, but should know better. However, they are not tribes of under-educated, third-world fiefs or serfs in a feudal system. The cowards are those that tremble at the mere thought of doing things differently; they think that if things stay the same, they have nothing to fear. They hide from progress and they wallow in the behavior of the past, governed by their fears, their insecurities and their false perceptions. Cowards do not realize that change is not only necessary; it is inevitable, just as progress is inevitable. They do not understand that they will suffer the fate of the Dodo if they do not change and accept change, for progressive thinkers will take charge and replace them in the blink of an eye. The cowards will be left trembling in the wake of change, having no idea what has happened to them, decrying their fate, a fate they truly deserve.

Most things can be done better as technology improves, as new methods of accomplishing a task or process are developed, so change is not always bad. However, just because we can change it, does not mean we necessarily should; to paraphrase Dr. Ian Macolm in Jurrasic Park, "You were so busy patting yourself on the back that you could, you never bothered to ask whether you should." We have spent so much time in our society changing things for the sake of change; we have screwed up a lot of things that never needed fixing. My personal belief is that the education system in this country that focused on reading, writing and arithmetic, did not need to be changed. We changed it because we could, not because we should. We had to justify the employment of all sorts of bureaucrats that justify their existence by changing things for the sake of changing things. Sometimes you have to look at things from the position of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are changes that need to be implemented, where things aren't working, but the cowards won't and that is a damn shame.

The Puppet by Johnny Welch

This poem was originally mistaken to be written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a farewell message to all his friends at a time when his health was failing him. It was actually written by a Mexican ventriloquist, Johnny Welch, and dedicated to his puppet. Which actually makes more sense, but I suppose makes it less poignant.

Either way, I think it has some lovely imagery.

The Puppet

If for a moment God would forget that I am a rag doll and give me a scrap of life, possibly I would not say everything that I think, but I would definitely think everything that I say.

I would value things not for how much they are worth but rather for what they mean.

I would sleep little, dream more. I know that for each minute that we close our eyes we lose sixty seconds of light.

I would walk when the others loiter; I would awaken when the others sleep.

I would listen when the others speak, and how I would enjoy a good chocolate ice cream.

If God would bestow on me a scrap of life, I would dress simply, I would throw myself flat under the sun, exposing not only my body but also my soul.

My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hatred on ice and wait for the sun to come out. With a dream of Van Gogh I would paint on the stars a poem by Benedetti, and a song by Serrat would be my serenade to the moon.

With my tears I would water the roses, to feel the pain of their thorns and the incarnated kiss of their petals...My God, if I only had a scrap of life...

I wouldn't let a single day go by without saying to people I love, that I love them.

I would convince each woman or man that they are my favourites and I would live in love with love.

I would prove to the men how mistaken they are in thinking that they no longer fall in love when they grow old--not knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love. To a child I would give wings, but I would let him learn how to fly by himself. To the old I would teach that death comes not with old age but with forgetting. I have learned so much from you men....

I have learned that everybody wants to live at the top of the mountain without realizing that true happiness lies in the way we climb the slope.

I have learned that when a newborn first squeezes his father's finger in his tiny fist, he has caught him forever.

I have learned that a man only has the right to look down on another man when it is to help him to stand up. I have learned so many things from you, but in the end most of it will be no use because when they put me inside that suitcase, unfortunately I will be dying.

Sometimes You Just Need A Hug...or "I want my mommy"

Contrary to the popular belief and conventional wisdom that men must be courageous, strong and brave all the time, sometimes us men can just get overwhelmed and need a great big hug by a set of enveloping arms and maybe even be able to, dare I say it, shed a tear from time to time.  Today was one of those overwhelming days for me.  Not because anything in particular happened; the stars aligned, the tides were right, the barometric pressure was just so, the phone rang once too often and the pot just kinda boiled over, creating one of those I need a hug days.

I wish I knew how to prevent these events, but most of them are totally and completely beyond my control.  Life changes with the ring of the phone and, unfortunately, I have no choice but to answer the damn thing.

I have reached the point of losing it completely three or four times in my life.  A couple involved women and, I admit it, I cried like a baby.  In one case I have a witness.  Life, as I knew it, was over.  I was crushed, my heart broken and left a pile of spineless flesh.  The truth be told, I brought these instances on myself and I probably, no make that almost certainly, deserved it.  On one occasion a man actually tried to kill me and my brain was not able to wrap itself around this event.  It resulted in my beating a man into hospitalization.  The shrink called it a "psychotic break" apparently a part of something called Acute Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I am not a big man because I was able to beat a man senseless and under different circumstances, would have been criminally charged.  I actually feel it was an act of cowardice on my part, but I shall save that for another time.  The final time I was just overloaded, having investigated every dead child that had occurred in a rather large county for five years straight.  I knew something was terribly wrong when I was able to point to every photo of every child on the bulletin board on my wall and tell you their names and birthdays.  Do it long enough and you will snap, trust me.  If you don't snap, you will eventually become so dull emotionally you will become the moral equivalent of a zombie.

Today was just one of those days I would have liked to have been able to come home to a kind, strong, loving and understanding woman with a set of outstretched arms and a few kind words who would have done nothing more than listen to me complain, bitch, piss and moan.  Having such a person in our lives is not an option, it is a requirement, a necessity and as needed as food and water at times.  It is something that keeps us sane and, yes, it is nothing more than a carrying on of a man's need for his mommy.  I am not ashamed to say that I have been in situations of absolute, abject, life-threatening terror that I have screamed for my mommy.  I have screamed a few other words during the initial shock, but once the bone-chilling fear took hold and the reality of the fact that I might just die in a moment or two set in, I called out for my mommy.  Although, not quite the same, what more comforting feeling can a man have than when hi smother hugs him.  It is the ultimate protection, followed closely by pulling the covers up over our head.

I find that the next best thing is to just write it down here and share it with the greater world.  This is my version of the Doogie Hauser diary of the T.V. series of the same name.  I think that struck a chord and I am living that portion of wisdom in my own life.  I feel better now.  I still could use the hug, but now I can go on better without it.

Who I Want to Be

I want to be so many things, really.  I have been fortunate to have been so many things, but I am not a poet, nor songwriter, nor singer.  It is not for lack of inspration it is lack of ability and in the immortal words of Harry Callaghan, "A man's got to know his limitations."  So, I let the people that have the skills to do these things speak for me sometimes, for they do it and say it so much better than I ever could.

Once in my life, for one special woman, I want to inspire her to feel the things in this song.  She may not be able to write them or express them the way Carrie Underwood can, but she will be able to feel them for certain, and I want to be the man that makes her feel this way...

Mama you taught me to do the right things

So now you have to let your baby fly
You've given me everything that I will need
To make it through this crazy thing called life
And I know you watch me grow up and always want whats best for me
And I think I found the answer to your prayers

And he is good, so good
He treats your little girl like a real man should
He is good, so good, he makes promises he keeps
No he's never gonna leave
So dont you worry about me
Dont you worry about me

Mama theres no way you'll ever lose me
And giving me away is not goodbye
As you watch me walk down to my future, I hope tears of joy are in your eyes

Cuz he is good, so good
He treats your little girl like a real man should
He is good, so good, he makes promises he keeps
No he's never gonna leave
So dont you worry about me
Dont you worry about me

And when I watch my little baby grow I'll only want what's best for her
And I hope she'll find the answer to my prayers
And that she'll say

He is good, so good
He treats your little girl like a real man should
He is good, so good, he makes promises he keeps
No he's never gonna leave
So dont you worry about me
Dont you worry about me

Mama dont you worry about me

Dont you worry about me