Becky, Bonnie, and Brittney Oh My

Becky, Bonnie, and Brittney Oh my!
(names have been changed to protect the guilty)

It was my 25th high school reunion. I think. I can’t even remember. And it’s too much trouble to find out. The point is: It was a long time after my senior year.

My senior year was good.

I had been an abused and tortured nerd throughout my entire public school experience. Had the term geek been created I could only have aspired to it. This merely worsened with age. Grade school paled in comparison to Junior High. Junior High could only aspire to the gaping black maw of high school. I was ridiculed, mocked, beat up, hounded, and humiliated beyond comprehension. I am, in fact, lucky to be alive.

And then came my Senior Year.

I was one of the finest singers in school. I was in the premiere choral group that traveled all over the world. Members of Concert Choir envied me. I was active in theater as well. In fact, I won the Best Actor Award that year. I was the star. People worshiped me. Even the teachers. I dated the Head Varsity Cheerleader who later became the Prom Queen. Football players scratched their heads in wonder. And undoubtedly said disparaging things.

Senior year was good. I was in no hurry whatsoever to leave that womb of success and adoration. But I had straight A’s. What else could I do?

After we graduated, Becky (the cheerleader/prom queen) and I went to separate colleges, though we lived together for a while. But our love was far too young to bare the heavy weight of separation. Plus she was just a horney slut who couldn’t keep her hands off the college boys.
In addition, she was a better than average actress and had visions of thespian grandeur. As a result she slept with everything that moved in order to fulfill her potential. So despite my noble and best efforts, having sucked the life right out of me, and not in a good way, she threw me aside like a spoiled vegetable on the garbage heap of love.

She dumped me.

Of course it is the grief stricken male who most often carries a torch down through the years. When a woman is finished, she’s finished. It’s a switch. It’s ON or it’s OFF and when it’s OFF there is nothing, NOTHING you can every do to turn it on again.

Break a man’s heart, on the other hand, and, if you’re cute, he’ll still fuck you.

But I digress.

^V^V^V^V^V^

Twenty five years later, or thereabouts (see the opening paragraph), I was financially sound and happily married to my second wife who knew all about Becky. I had regaled her with stories of my awkward years, culminating in that one splendid burst of senior glory. And, in all modesty, I had gone on to be at least moderately successful. I had a good job making music. I was respected in the community. Existence was not bad.

And so with the appropriate amount of pride my adorable wife and I walked across the street to the up-scale country club where my high school reunion was to be held. I drank. I ate. I drank. I schmoozed. I laughed. I drank. I’m quite certain people admired me from afar.

And then I saw her across the room.

We had not communicated for years. I had not even thought she would be there. Why would someone so talented and so successful bother with a high school reunion? Last I heard she was working her way up the Hollywood ladder. By way, I could only assume, of the Hollywood mattress. She told me about a couple of big names herself.

But I digress.

But there she was.
I said, “Oh my god,” before I could even stop myself.

She was almost perfectly round. Virtually the same dimensions vertically and horizontally.
In fairness, she was less than five feet tall, so it didn’t take much to achieve equality.

“Oh my God.”
“What?” my tiny, cute, well dressed wife asked.
“That’s Becky,” I nodded in the direction.
Pause…
“Becky the girlfriend?” (Skeptically. Staring.)
“Yes.”
Pause……
“The cheerleader - prom queen?”
“Yes.”
Pause…..
And then, bless her heart, she laughed right out loud.

So did I.
And it got even better, depending on your definition of “better.”

I walked over to Becky. We hugged. We talked. We acted like long lost (platonic) friends. What I did not say was….“You changed my life. As I look back over the years, you are one of the most significant people I have known. You changed me. Or rather, I changed because of you and I want to thank you. I loved you. In some way, I probably still do. I think I always will.”

I did not say that.
It’s probably just as well.

I introduced my wife. She introduced her husband, a paint salesman ten years her senior. She called him……to this day I can barely fathom it…..she called him “Father.”

“Father, I’d like you to meet my old friend Bruce.”
And so on.
Her husband!
“Father!”

My wife, who would have slapped me silly if I ever called her “Mother,” and I laughed all the way home. We still laugh.

V^V^V^V^V^V^V^

But that night, after the lights were out, and I was alone with my own mortality, I felt it.
It wasn’t so much an existential crisis. It was more of a tickle. That gnawing fear……
Have I changed like that? Am I to my old self as she is to hers?
No, I decided. I can see in the mirror that I haven’t changed that much.

But what about inside? Have I changed? Have I sold out? Am I just a comic book version of all the things I ever wanted to be? It wasn’t just the weight. One could be forgiven that. It was who you have to be to allow that kind of change, and then to forgive yourself for it. And to call your husband….”father.”

And even IF I had not changed - (And how could I, on the inside looking out, ever be sure of that?) - how could SHE change that way? How could she be someone so different than I thought she was? How could I have been so wrong? It felt like someone had died. Someone I loved. I wanted her back in my memory the way she was. I wanted the memory of myself, when I was with her, back the way it was.

Just a tickle, really.
A little existential tickle.

I shrugged it off.
Then came Bonnie.

^V^VV^V^V^V^V

Chronologically, Bonnie predates Becky. Bonnie was my starter girlfriend. She allowed me to experiment on her and refine what would become some killer-ass technique when it comes to women.

But I digress.

Bonnie and I went to rival high schools. We met at church.

Now that right there is a warning sign, believe you me. NO relationship with its seeds planted initially in the weed-choked garden of the church, ANY church, will EVER amount to good. Trust me. I am an expert on this. I met my first wife at church, roughly the same time I met Bonnie who turned out to be a minor inconvenience with enough pay-off to make it worth the grief. The first wife, on the other hand, was a long term, unmitigated, financial, emotional, and spiritual train wreck from which there was recovery only after years of putting my therapists’ kids through school. So I know what I’m talkin’ about here.

Bonnie and I experimented, and it was fun. It was exciting. First hand-holding. First kiss. First etc. My heart pounded and I thought “Oh my god, no one has ever felt like this before and we are so meant for each other and I can’t believe the world doesn’t feel the way we do.”

The thing about puppy love……is that it’s real for the puppy.

She introduced me to marijuana. My first high was with Bonnie. We got in lots of trouble together and I don’t regret one solitary minute of it. But………

We eventually went our separate ways. Bonnie had issues with men. She loved them. Lots of them. And she liked the way they loved her. One man, at least the one man I was at the time, was not enough for her. Eventually she moved away and the other girl from church and I jumped on the marriage train bound for hell.

V^V^V^V^V^

Many years later, around the time of my 25th-ish high school reunion, Bonnie came back into my life ever so briefly.

She called and said she was going to be in town. She lived in Florida and was coming to California for a visit. My afore-mentioned second wife had no problem with this whatsoever and said, “Invite her to dinner.” I did, and arranged to pick her up and bring her over to the house.

It was great to see her. As we drove back I pulled off the road into a parking lot and stopped the car. I got out, went around to her door and opened it. I reached down for her hand and helped her out of the car.

“What are you doing?“ She asked.
“I just wanted to kiss you,” I said, “and I knew this would be the only chance to do it.”
So we kissed.

On the way home she told me why she was in California visiting family. Her husband had found pictures of her with another man. Recent pictures. She had kept them in a shoe box under their bed.

“That was dumb,” I said. “……..keeping the pictures under the bed.”
“Yeah,” she said.

It was reassuring, actually. She hadn’t changed a bit.

She returned to Florida. She and her husband worked things out I guess. It was before email and more difficult to keep in touch, though I’m not sure we would have anyway.

And then, several years later, my now former wife called and said she had seen Miriam’s name in some Baptist newspaper. She had gone to be pastor of a church in Texas and could be contacted at…...etc.”

So…..I called her.

We talked for almost an hour. Mostly about her. After our visit so many years ago, upon her return to Florida, she had become a counselor. She landed a job working in a clinic and been content to live out her days in God’s Waiting Room. But then her husband wanted to move to Texas to be closer to his parents and off they went. She got a job at a large, non-denominational church as a counselor. And now she has worked her way up to being the Pastor. Not to do-ing the Pastor but to actually being the Pastor. She loves it. 5,000 people in the congregation. She ministers to her flock. They want her. They need her. They love her. And she has the power…….to cast out demons.

That’s what she said.
“I call up demons and cast them out. I heal people.”

OMg…………………………………………………………………………..

V^V^V^V^V^V^

In fairness, Bonnie was never intelligent. She was smart. But she was never intelligent. And she was certainly never talented. So it’s hard to take her vision of the world seriously. She was always a ditz. I knew it even back then. But she was a sweet ditz, in a conniving, underhanded, deceitful sort of way. And I loved her for that. At least for a while.

And after all, how seriously can you take ANY church with a female Pastor? The Catholics are the wealthiest medieval cult on the planet because they got one thing right. Religion is a male dominated sport now. The Goddess had the good sense to make a clean getaway. She could see the whole thing was going south and decided to get out while the getting was good. Before her reputation tanked, like her Successor’s has!

And one more thing……….
When we talked, Bonnie said this:

“I want to apologize for the way I treated you. I know I hurt you sometimes. I was so young and so immature. Sometimes I made up things I did with other boys and told you just to make you jealous. That was mean and I hope you’ll forgive me.”

It never occurred to me how good it would feel to hear that…………………..

“You know,” I finally said, “that is an incredibly kind thing to say. I suppose you’re right, it did hurt. But I’m betting I was fairly immature as well.”

What I wanted to say was, “You bet it hurt. It hurt a lot. But THANK YOU for saying you are sorry. Because it hurt so much then, the “sorry” means so much now!”

But what would have been the point?

I did, however, say, “I want you to know that of all the relationships I have had in my life you are one of the most significant. I’m happy that you remember enough of it to say you are sorry. I remember it too, fondly, and I’m grateful for the time we spent together.”

And that was that……………..

V^V^V^V^V^V^V^

On the one hand, she’s just as ditsy as she ever was and this is just one more wacko manifestation of her endearingly distorted view of reality.

On the other, she has gone off the deep end and traded what brain she had for a turnip. It is now the turnip, surgically implanted in her head that is making decisions and running her life. The only logical conclusion is that ONE of us is bat-shit crazy and I honestly don’t think it’s me. But, of course, I can’t be sure……………..
Once again I badly miss-judged the long-term character of an intimate relationship.

But either way……….one of the kindest, most generous, most truly loving things ever spoken to me were Bonnie’s words “I’m sorry” and I will always, always remember her for that.

Which in some odd way helps with the existential tour de force that was Brittney.

V^V^V^V^V^V^V^

(Close up of a man dreaming. There is a faint, almost dashing smile.)

I don’t even remember it. But I woke up and instantly realized it had been about Brittney. That in turn prompted me to wonder what had happened to her. I wondered about her all day. I should have left it at that.

V^V^V^V^V^V^V

My first job out of graduate school was teaching music in a four year Baptist school that was essentially a glorified Bible college. That said, there were smart people on the faculty, enlightened thinkers who saw through the dogma which this cult, masking as education, espoused. That made the prison we had chosen for ourselves more bearable. We hung out. We traded stories. Some of us played poker and drank beer. Activities, had they been widely known, which would have resulted in immediate firing. We made the best of our time. In fact, some of those friends never left until their dying day. I saw to it such was not the case with me. When I joked about what a miserable, life-sucking, excuse for a school that wasteland was, I wasn’t kidding.

I was the choral director. I also taught other classes, but it was as choral director that I established my identity. It was a high profile job that required: travel; the ability to play a conservative-good-old-religious-folk room; and a bevy of adoring students who would do exactly what I told them. It was a rush. And I made the most of it.

I was filled with that libido driven energy of a twenty-five year old that boils over into every aspect of life. I worked 60 hours or more a week. I made great music. I lectured. I conducted. I created performance experiences to rival a Second Coming with the original cast.

In juxtaposition, my home life was for shit. My first marriage to the train wreck was coming apart faster than the US economy under a liberal government. So all the focus, energy, and determination that the average person might have expended at home to alter the course of a looming disaster, I invested at school. And the pay-off there was big. I was invincible.

Brittney was my accompanist. I don’t recall if I inherited her or hired her. I also don’t recall how she became my secretary. But she did. And from that moment on we rode that gospel train bound for glory.

Brittney was tall and thin, with thick, dark hair. She wore tight jeans and even tighter tops that accentuated her larger than average breasts. She was articulate, confident, and talented. She was flirtatious without being demure. She radiated sensuality. When she walked into a room, people noticed, especially male people.

Once…. at the beginning……..she opened my desk drawer and said,
“Where’s all your stuff?”
“What stuff,” I said.
“You know pencils, paper clips, scissors, stuff you need to work.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll take care of it,” she said.

She was sitting on my desk when she said it, wearing a very short skirt, legs crossed, and leaning in my direction.

I also don’t remember who kicked it up a notch. Who touched first. Who kissed first. I don’t remember. I wish I did. But soon we were “together,” and as evidence of my besotted immaturity, I didn’t care who knew it. In fact, I wanted people to know it. I was proud of her and I was proud of us. She was everything I had always wanted in a woman and had abandoned. I could not have designed a better partner. Five years younger, hot, especially for me, talented, smart, confident, and experienced.

One night we were out driving around and eventually parked on the top of a hill overlooking the city. We did all the things you would expect, at least as best we could in a car, until eventually I stopped, sat back, and said something to the effect of “I wish we could make love.”
“Why don’t we?” she said, incredulous and amused.
“Now?”
“Sure.”
“Where?”
“Outside on the ground.”
“Really?”
“Why not?”

I could not think of a single reason.

And then, a few weeks later, came Peak Sex.

Once again, with regret, I don’t remember who broached the subject. But at some point the topic was oral sex. I would bet she mentioned it first. In any case, I do absolutely remember that at some point in the conversation, she said, “Sure, I do it for my boyfriend all the time.”

I remember those words.
I will always remember them.

This was before she dumped the boyfriend. Clearly the fact that I was married put a damper on our relationship. But there was no alternative there. If I were to divorce I would lose my job, my house, and a substantial portion of my income. I was not fiscally or psychologically prepared for a divorce. She, on the other hand, had only a boyfriend. I was jealous and wanted her all to myself so eventually the boyfriend went away.
And so it was arranged. We would use the swanky apartment of another student. He was attending GBC (Glorified Bible College) on a tennis scholarship and had the morals of a rabid dog. He used to get stoned before giving me lessons. Frankly when I got stoned, I couldn’t even find the tennis court. But he was a world class player and I’m sure drugs made the lesson more entertaining. In any case, he had absolutely no problem loaning us his apartment for the day. It didn’t hurt that Brittney was the one who asked.

The details are not important. What is important is that it was my FIRST time. And it was the most influential sexual event of my life.

Of course I was nervous and this didn’t help. It also did not help that I am a profoundly cerebral person. I live in my head, often to the exclusion of my body. There are voices. Constantly narrating, commenting, evaluating voices that are directing my every move in order to avoid death and avert failure. So when something I have fantasized about for hundreds of years actually happens, it is cause for a great deal of commentary. The voice yelling, “But what if I can’t do it?!” being one of the loudest.

But we did do it, and she was kind, patient and, as far as I could tell, enjoyed every minute of it.

When it was over we lay there. We lay there for a long time. Probably an hour. We talked, though the predominant part of my conversation was merely a periodic repetition of the single syllable, “Wow.”

Eventually I took a shower. The tennis player used Irish Spring. To this day I can’t smell that soap and not be lost in mental revelry for hours. We went to lunch, or dinner, or something. And then I think we may have come back and made love again. I don’t know. But I do know that several days later I was still high as a fuckin’ kite. If I thought I had energy before, now I was on some kind of sexual cocaine. I said something to Brittney about it.

She said, “Yeah, peak sex.”
“What?” I asked.
“Peak sex. My parents told me about it.”

Her parents were both psychologists or therapists or academicians of some kind. Probably why they raised such a liberal, open minded, intelligent daughter who belonged somewhere far better than GBC. It’s also probably why they did not kill me when they found out what I did to their daughter, or, as I’m sure they were enlightened enough to realize, what we did together.

“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a sexual experience that changes your life.”
“You mean the best you’ve ever had?”
“Maybe. More like a spiritual experience.”
“There’s no such thing,” I said with the same tone I might have applied to an argument against space aliens.
She shrugged.

The next day she brought me a magazine article. It was a medical fact. It had been studied. People with advanced degrees had verified it. Peak Sex!

I Google-ed it a few moments ago. You can imagine what I got. Needless to say it had nothing to do with essays on psycho-sexual nirvana. But it was real and I kept the article until it was too painful. As best I can remember: A Peak Sexual experience has the potential to change the way you see the world. It can affect and alter the underlying paradigms which govern your belief system and resulting behavior. Following a Peak Sexual experience reality will never look the same and everything you thought you knew and believed will appear as so much flotsam and jetsam on the shores of your soul.

That was the gist of it, but in more medical terms.

That was my experience and the years since have born it out. There was to this experience some aspect beyond the physical. Something that shattered an already fragile wall between me and what I suspected was a more genuine, realistic view of the world. The wall had been weakened over the years by the usual lectures, conversations, books, and movies. I don’t know whether this final rending of the veil was the result of Peak Sex, or whether the destruction of the barrier is what catapulted it to Peak. Either way, they were simultaneous events from which I have never, thank the gods, recovered.

And that means the story will ALWAYS have a happy ending, no matter what happens.

Brittney set the standard for all the affaires to come. She taught me much of what I know that matters. She introduced me to a much larger and more entertaining world than the one in which I was living. She inspired me. She motivated me. She made me do great work in order to impress her. She loved me unconditionally. She accepted who I was. She helped create who I was.

Or, I did it all and projected it onto her as the muse. Either way, it was damn real to this puppy.

V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^

Eventually, of course, too many of the wrong people found out. Brittney had to leave. She went to live with her parents and attended school in northern California. Missing her almost destroyed me. There was no will to live being created at home. And outside of home I was constantly on the hunt. But the passion was no longer in it.

I missed her so much in fact that I decided to tell the Starter-Wife the truth. That may seem counterintuitive. And in retrospect…….. But I was miserable. I was incapacitated with regret and depression. I had gone from being excited about my life to dreading every day of it. And I simply could not think of any other way out. I couldn’t get a divorce, and spend my life with someone who adored me and made life passionate and exciting. I couldn’t afford it. I certainly didn’t love the Train Wreck. Quite the contrary, I loathed her. But if staying was the only option, and it seemed to be, then the only way of ever being happy again was to make the relationship work.

After a huge fight the harridan flew off to Texas to seek counsel from an ex-boyfriend. In her absence I talked myself into the need to repent and apologize. I could love her and wanted it to work. Needed it to work. We were a team. We belonged together. We had to try.

So when she got off the airplane I greeted her with a single red rose.

“Tell, me the truth, “she said as we walked to the car. “Whatever it is I can live with it. But I have to know what happened. I just don’t want to keep making up stories. If you tell me the truth, whatever it is I will still love you. Did you have an affair with Bittney?”

The pause that followed was ample time for an entire flash-by of a life. And in that eternal instant I was clear that the time left to weigh the pros and cons had come……..and gone. There had been months of that. There was only the cave dwelling instinct to survive. Only a genuine and naïve desire to see life get better, for myself and for those I loved. So I took a chance.

“Yes, I did.”

“I want a divorce, “she said.
Never missed a beat.
Never broke stride.

V^V^V^V^V^V^V^

So life changed anyway, despite my lack of fiscal and psychological preparation. Or, as seems more likely in retrospect, I was quite prepared. Either way, Brittney is the girl most associated with that transition. And the tentacles of that relationship weave their melancholy way through every aspect of my life.

She taught me to keep an apple by the side of the bed so that first thing in the morning you can take a bite and have instant fresh breath…..for kissing. She taught me to tuck my shirt into my underwear to keep it tight and form fitting. She taught me it was possible to be myself with someone and still come out alive and loved. She taught me how incredibly fun it was to really be in love! She showed me you can have sex almost anywhere. She also showed me that sex is better, no matter where you have it, when you genuinely care for your partner. She made everyday an adventure. She loved to please me. I loved to please her.

Of course, all this begs the question:
Why then, when I saw her a couple of years later, and she offered to spend her life with me, did I turn her down?

By this time I was divorced, broke, and unemployed. Just the way I had planned it. So I grasped at a straw. I called her.

She was married. She would meet me as soon as I wanted. I took what little money I had and flew to northern California. We met. We went to a motel. We made love. We walked on the beach. We made love. She told me she would leave her husband and come live with me. And god damn it, I so wanted to do that.

But I was terrified.
I was wrestling with…….issues.

What was I going to do with the rest of my life? How was I going to earn a living? Who was I going to be? What is the meaning of all this? Is there anything that Truly makes it worth prolonging life one more day?

Given the plethora of voices, how could I think rationally enough to I make this kind of decision?

And if I decided “yes,” what if it didn’t work? Not only would I have destroyed her life but what would it do to me to go through that with someone I actually wanted and, more frighteningly, needed? None of my current pain had anything to do with the fact I never saw my ex-wife. That was the one positive thing in my life. But I loved Brittney. What if we destroyed each other? What if the relationship could not take the pressure of what we both had given up?

V^V^V^V^V^V^V

And so I came home.
And slowly, but surely, I pretended to forget.

Then, 30 years later, came the dream.

V^V^V^V^V^V^V^V^

As I said, I don’t actually remember it. But the essence of Brittney remained, like incense on the brain. A palpable presence. And, of course, I simply could not leave bad enough alone.

I looked her up on the internet.

You can find almost anyone these days. Even nobodies. So I took a chance. And there she was. I recognized her picture. She had aged, but there was no mistake. I knew the shape of her eyes, the curve of her mouth. She was on Facebook, and I could read about her interests.

Those interests were, among others, K-LOVE radio, a Christian radio station. Bible Gateway, an online searchable Bible. And the California Family Council which serves as the statewide council for Focus on the Family, which in turn provides “relevant Christian advice on marriage, parenting and other topics.”

Now I don’t want to leap to any unwarranted conclusions, but what the fucking hell happened here? Did I enter some twisted, fucked up, mind blowing, one major toke-over-the-line parallel universe? Is this Candid Camera? Am I the unwitting test tube in some government-psychological-torture experiment to see how people will react when something completely mind fucks them?

Or……… is this just my punishment for remembering something good in life? I mean, I try not to dwell exclusively on the painful, wretched, soul crushing parts of it. I cultivate and feed on a few joyful experiences. But is this just Life’s way of saying, “Look what I can do. I can completely alter the past. I can fuck you up anytime I want and when you least expect it. You can’t prepare. You can never be ready. You can never be good and accurate and smart enough. I can always get you. Always.”

Yeah…..I think that’s it.

And so for a few days I was pretty depressed. Depressed enough to start remembering similar incidents with Becky and Bonnie. You remember them from above. And I just figured, well fuck this. I can’t judge character for shit. All those people I thought were wonderful and fun and full of life turned out to be fat, trashy, deluded, religious, freaks of nature. What the hell? And what if the people I love right now turn into that? If I could have been this wrong in the past, who’s to say I’m not wrong about everyone I know right now?! Maybe nothing I believe is True. Maybe it’s all a crapshoot. Life and everything that happens in it is just one big fucking existential, random, no-holds-barred, it-don’t-mean-shit, que sera sera, god-dammed crapshoot!

I fucked myself over this way for several days.
I wrote this article.

And then I realized:
No, it’s worse than that.
It’s True, life does fuck-you-up now and then.
And it’s True, I may still be a bad judge of character when it comes to the people I know.
But all that, and much more, is navigable if you’ve got The Passion. The passion for ANYTHING. But Passion for something in life has to be there to drive you forward through the occasional fuck-ups life throws at you. And I my friends, yay verily I, had come to create a great deal of Passion by carefully sculpting a finely honed version of my past.

It is such a refuge in times of trouble. A memory in which to hide when the present is just too painful. The memory of all the stuff that worked. The complete absence of all the stuff that didn’t. It was Perfect. It was Beautiful. It was Camelot.

And as if that respite were not enough. When I finally emerged from my memory opiates, I thought, “I can do better than what I have now.” And so memories provided inspiration. To create. To strive. To achieve. To do better than now. I did it for the Love Lost. I did it for it for the unobtainable Other. I was passionate again.

V^V^V^V^V^V

Beethoven had a life-long habit of falling in love with women who were not available to him. They were either too young, or too rich, or too married. This was a constant pattern. And even though Beethoven professed a belief in that singular Other, in that Soul Mate, he never created one for himself.

Smart man.

He used that unobtainable Love to drive his creativity. Just listen to the music. Where do you think that kind of pain comes from? Beethoven rips your heart out and leaves it throbbing on the floor as he wanders off completely unaware of the devastation in his wake. What drives that?

Unobtainable Love!

No, I am not comparing myself to Beethoven……..too much. But I understand. I do. I see how that sort of thing can work. I see how it can make day-to-day life more exciting. I can see how the delicious loss of that One True Love can make life worth living.

And I see how that sort of thing can implode right in your passion-driven-obsessive-compulsive-validation-seeking creative face.

I was still in love with who those wonderful, exciting, young, passionate women were. And they ruined it. They didn’t just reject me. They rejected themselves. They morphed into completely undesirable, uninspiring, pedestrian, run-of-the-mill ex-girl friends. Who needs that? Where’s the inspiration? Where’s the Passion? Where’s my will to live?

I needed the memory of them to get me through the day. I needed them to inspire me to create today what I imagined I had yesterday. I needed that image of us running in slow motion through the park. And they destroyed it all by turning into something so far beneath who they were.

They destroyed my past. They destroyed the warm summer nights by the lake under the stars listening to the radio, safe, with an incredible amount of TIME spread out in front of us. So many possibilities, so much TIME to succeed, so much TIME to be together, everything was possible, TIME made it possible!

I knew nothing of politics, nothing of life, nothing of success and failure, nothing of real pain, nothing of family and job, nothing of responsibility, nothing of cause and effect. It was the last time I was remotely naïve and happy.

And now they have destroyed Time and Happiness.

They destroyed it all by changing.
And changing badly.

I am so disappointed in them.
I am so disappointed in myself.

V^V^V^V^V^V^

Coincidentally, the 39th anniversary of the first time I had sex occurred not too long ago. The fact that I both know and even, in some matter-of-fact way commemorate that, undoubtedly says more about me than is prudent.

But I digress.

It occurred to me to try and see what happened to the object of that first lustful affection. You know, just out of curiosity. Face Book. Maybe Google. You know, just out of curiosity.

And then I thought Oh Blessed-Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph, what possible good could come of that?!? She’s living in a trailer park if she’s living at all. You know she is. So just hang on to the finely honed image of that experience you have cultivated over the eons and leave well enough alone.

And as proof that you can teach an old dog new tricks, that is exactly what I have done.

One of my X-es, about whom I know very little now (and that’s fine!) made the unforgivable mistake of knowing me too well when she said, “You’re not in love with me. You’re just in love with love.”

Right you were, Calamity Jane.

And as it turns out I’m fairly happy now.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s no Camelot. But it’s good. And measured from every angle, except the I-Can-Make-Up-Something-Better angle, my life is the envy of millions. On my worst day it’s still a joy and a privilege to be on the planet. For the most part, I’m having the time of my life.

Of course I can make up things that would be better. And yes, there are days I dream of killing people who are VERY close to me. But you can’t let that fuck you up. If I weren’t the type of person who constantly imagines something better, I wouldn’t be where I am today: Happy, and terrified of leaving it all behind.

But I do miss The Passion.
That memories-engine that drove me to learn just a little bit more and to dream just a little bit further.

That must be the price tag for contentment and security.

High price………



The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly
Into our hearts
And our brains.

Paul Simon