A few of you have emailed me wondering just what's happening, and why I've been so quiet of late.

Personal things have contributed.

I recall reading somewhere, don't even know if the author was a novelist or a philosopher, an interesting analogy. He likened life to be like padding down a river. At times, the river will broaden out into a slow-moving lake or bay, perhaps one with several exits. You have several options, with time to reflect upon them. Later, you may find yourself flying through rapids in a steep-walled canyon, with little choice but to hang on and survive the experiences consequent to your earlier choices, with little resembling "free will."

The last few months have seen the ending of a major section of my life, and toss me into one of those placid bays where the options are more diverse.

After around eight years, CG and I have decided that we will no longer live together.

We'll always be friends and lovers. But she'll be moving out to go live with some friends of hers, and I'll be deciding in the next few days whether I want to stay here in this place, find something else, toss all my shit in storage and roam the world, or what.

As to the whys and wherefores, I'm not really comfortable with detailing them, as I don't think it's fair to let you folks hear just my side of the story, so further deponeth sayeth not. I will say it was nothing horrible or dramatic, more just an continuing erosion of affection brought on by all the silly little crapola of everyday life.

Until now, our sex life has been the mortar that held us together despite some fairly striking incompatabilities. Seems though, we both woke up one day to learn that we needn't preserve all of the relationship, just the sweet and sticky parts. :-)

It's feeling weird for me. I've almost always had a full-time, live-in lover in my life. From my early 20's to the present, save for about 6-8 months after my divorce (twelve years ago, for you newbies) I've had a lover. Being on my own again seems at once liberating, but flavored with what tastes like another failure.

I know I shouldn't feel that way, we still love each other, the parting is amicable, etc., but even a hard-headed guy like me can't escape some of the social conditioning that whispers to us that when a relationship ends, that we've done something wrong.

After Kate Hepburn died a bit back, I read many of the obligatory remembrances of her. In one, they quoted her her opinion that there was nothing wrong with getting married, but she thought that married couples should simply get houses next door to one another, to preserve their individuality and personal space.

Methinks pr'aps she was on to something. :-)

Update: As of today, 8/11, she's still not found a place to stay. Then again, she hasn't been trying all that hard. A part of me is Ok with that, while another, perhaps larger part, wants to get this separation over with.

Update 8/16/2003: She's moving out Tuesday to live with a friend for a while. But it will take until the end of the month before she gets all her stuff out. The woman has some stuff.

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Over at BeerMary's blog, I started to comment on a post of hers. However, her software limits comments to 2500 characters, and I'm barely warmed up by then. :-) So I had to bring it over here.

Her original post, and the comments which led to this, are here. Go read them and come back.

OK, I knew you wouldn't, so here's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version:

She has watched the movie "Bridges of Madison County" for the eleventeenth time. Mary talks about the woman played by Meryl Streep, and how nobody really sees who she is until the Clint Eastwood dude stares into her soul with his Magic X-Ray Luuurve Goggles (my words here, not hers - she's a lot less cynical than I am. Further disclaimer, I've never seen the movie. Can you spell "chick flick"? I knew you could. But hey, you wanna talk Judge Dredd, I'm all over that.)

She then mentions how for a few fleeting moments in her life, she had somebody that truly "saw" her, but no longer, and wishes that she, and everybody else, had somebody like that.

I replied that this soul revelation was like a tango, it takes two.

She replied to my reply saying that I had a good point.

Never willing to leave well enough alone, I blathered on, which led to this....

I didn't (and don't) mean anything I say as criticism, and I certainly don't know anyone likely to read this well enough to be their shrink, or even offer them good advice.

Like I'd let that stop me...

In my opinion, (and though I'm sometimes wrong, though never uncertain :-) if you don't have someone in your life that loves and cares about you, the primary responsibility for that state lies with you.

That may sound harsh, and unforgiving. Sorry 'bout that. But until such time as you accept responsibility for your aloneness (solocity? I love to make up words :-) you have no control over it. You remain subjugated to Fate, waiting for that magic person to come riding in on a Hollywood white horse to rescue you from your solitude. Maybe Mr. X-Ray Eyes will come charging in, maybe not. I'm guessing in most cases he will not.

If you've had loving relationships, and none of them have lasted, then the safest thing to admit to yourself is that all those loved ones could not have been wrong. If you insist that they all were, then the question becomes what is it about you that causes you to pick out such an uninterrupted string of losers?

Short answer - your subconscious will never fail you. It will unerringly lead you to just as much happiness in life as you truly believe you deserve. If you've ever wondered why people stay in desperately unhappy, or even abusive relationships, (or stay relationshipless) that is ultimately the reason - because they feel that they are worthy of nothing better.

How can people come to such a self-destructive self-evaluation? Because poor self-esteem is pandemic in our cullture, for many reasons.

The media carries much responsibilty. We are bombarded by images of people that are always smarter, richer, prettier, more eloquent, more noble, athletic, funny, whatever, than we could ever hope to be. We compare ourselves and our lives to the fantasies created by the scriptwriters, and then wonder why our lives seem wanting, pale ghosts of these set-piece fictions, fictions so impossibly unreal even the highly paid folks that act them out for us are not able to recreate them in their personal lives. We watch movies like Sleepless in Seattle, or Bridges of Madison County, and think, like some fool buying lottery tickets, that someday lightning will strike us, too. If only...

Our culture also leads us to have unrealistic expectations about our romantic relationships. AKA The Happily Ever After Syndrome. It leads us to think that there is something "wrong" with the relationship, or our partner, or ourselves, at the first signs of strife, boredom or worse, attraction to another human being.

Our religious indoctrination plays an even greater role. We are told from our infancy that we are corrupt sinners, steeped in Original Sin, unworthy, doomed, and helpless through any act of our own of achieving salvation. We are taught that it is only by a gift of grace from an all-powerful deity that we can be be saved from an eternal punishment a gift that is, unlike the unconditional love a true loving parent feels for a child, only bestowed upon us if we follow the rules, rules that few humans can follow without fail. Guilt, shame, and feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy assault us very nearly from the day we learn to understand our language.

It's a freakin' dogdam miracle that any of us find a modicum of happiness in this world.

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Zaftig is a Yiddish word, variously translated as juicy, luscious, or ripe. It derives from the Old German, saf, or juice. As applied to a woman, it means buxom, voluptuous, bosomy, or my favorite word in the whole wide world, rubenesque. Mae West was zaftig. CG is zaftig. Delta Burke, Sally Struthers, Anna Nicole, Bette Midler, Marilyn - all zaftig.

While I've had relationships with all sorts of women, for some reason it seems the great loves of my life have all been women of generous proportions. I think to be as skinny as modern fashion requires mandates a degree of asceticism that doesn't work well with my hedonistic tastes. I love women with large appetites.

There's an artist in Goteborg, Sweden. His name is Heinz Guth. His website is here. I stumbled across his website a few years back, and saved this painting, along with a few others, on my HDD.

He also painted this one, which I think is one of the best combos of humor and eroticism I've seen in a long time. I think maybe you might have to live in the south to fully enjoy it. :-) Look at her feet - she's a real pig :-)

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