All I know of love is how to live without it…
All the years of useless search have finally reached an end.
Loneliness and empty days will be my only friend.
From this day love is forgotten I’ll go on as best I can.
John Bettis & Richard Carpenter, 1972
When you see through love’s illusions, there lies the danger,
and your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool.
So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger,
and your loneliness seems to spring from your life,
like a fountain from a pool.
Jackson Browne, 1974
“Because I feel like a big mistake that you managed to not quite make.”
“You took something that felt so good and crushed it because you could.”
No life’s without uncertainty
We both know how hard this love can be
It’s just this hurting inside of me that threw it down.
(2010)
My reward is in the knowing that I held it in my hands for a little while.
(2016)
Em Cee Squared
Dedicated, with enduring affection, to:
Ffikus Pydaxel, Diva Dearest, and Early Riser
14 February 2004 — “Other Sweetie,
I’m afraid things are going to be tough for us for a while, but I think we can hold on to each other if we try really hard. I love you. Now and always, your Sugar“
1 October 2022
Oh, it WAS tough. Much tougher than necessary. Tough for the sake of the injury itself, just because the bitterness and resentment of some were insufficiently celebrated. And I tried. I tried really really hard. I tried so hard to be false and pleasant and superficial and pointless, but it was never enough. The depths of my sincere objections apparently were just too much to tolerate. I nearly broke me in the attempt, and in the end, finally, it was just another case of sprinting to miss the bus.
12 July 2023
I’m beginning to have my doubts about “always.”
It’s not like they can throw me out much farther, and yet I still “act like this.” It’s possible I was NOT deliberating manipulating their emotions. It could be that they just got fed up with my continuing to not be the me they imagined, but remained the me I’d always claimed to be instead.
210114 — Father of the Whom?
It has been suggested that I suffer from a persecution complex, and that the exclusions or ejections from fruitful relationships are imaginary. AND that I have brought them upon myself. Well then, which is it? If there were actually something for me to bring upon myself, wouldn’t it be real?
I’m generally willing to concede the possibility, and sometimes even the likelihood, that I am the author of most of my troubles. I am emotionally retarded and so can be a rather difficult case for people who might otherwise care about me. In fact, I’ve spent much of the past week or so exploring these debilities, in a series of essays that I’ve reproduced from fragmented notes, and augmented, and posted (now under the umbrella title of “Counterpoint Confessional.”) Unfortunately, the posting of these genuine suspicions have been read (again) as assaults on others rather than as an exposure and exploration of my own failures. Just as no good deeds seem to go unpunished, few confessions escape being read as denials.
It is not imaginary (unless I am more delusional than had been suspected) that I have been ejected from two marriages, and recently, from a probable third – well not quite “marriage” – but close enough to hurt as much. The aggrieved are real people and they seem to have had their fill of me. I also recognize that the common factor in all three of these failures is me.
The following is also not imaginary.
Years ago, I attended my son’s wedding. It was a gay festive affair AND a sobering revelation. The world is free to review the photographic evidence. During and before the event there were many portraits staged to commemorate both the day and the raveling relationships. Many of course of the happy couple, the bride and her entourage, the groom and his, the proud and beaming mothers of the pair, the newlywed bride’s dance with her Daddy, and… Well, that’s about it. Oh, there were also plenty of candid shots at the reception, with eyes half closed or mouths half open, or eating or drinking or dancing and the rest of the revelry.
Okeh, THAT’s about it. Other than an apparently unfortunate and unmistakable physical resemblance of a couple of fellas in the crowd, there was no affirmative evidence that the groom’s nativity was other than parthenogenic.
update 210202: It was many things, but in the end,
mainly, it was Wuhan Flu™ and Medicare.
(With a disgraceful lack of properly bleating compliance.)
update 210713 (201103 redux): And voting! Voting was bad. Well, voting in person. Who knows how many times I killed them by standing in that line, with my mouth shut, outside, in that anti-viral sunshine? Voting (and then telling the truth about it) was clearly a mistake.
update 210307, Reflections of the “Discussion”: Once the truth was revealed (again) that I was always telling the truth (again), what I remember most is the look of horror, disgust, and revulsion.
When I hear that, “It doesn’t mean we can’t be friends,” it tells me I have no hope. I had no intention of backing away at all, so SHE may back away as much or as little as she needs to. Standing still may look like retreat, to those retreating, just like falling slower looks like flying upwards to those who are falling faster.
update 210308, I am the Microbial Roach Motel:
My vigorous immune system doesn’t get the respect it deserves. I guess it’s bad enough that I’m not getting sick and infecting other people, but worse yet, I also tend to destroy most of the pathogens that breach my barrier. Out in the daylight, if a virally laden droplet were to land on my shoulder, they would die of dehydration or UV poisoning in a matter of minutes. If it landed on the wet welcoming membrane of my eye, or if I sucked it up my nostril, eager leucocytes and attentive antibodies would destroy them in a matter of seconds.
update 210325 — Rescinded:
“You’re posting that anti-mask stuff again.”
“It isn’t ‘anti-mask;’ you’re misreading into it.”
“I don’t know why you have to… forget it. The invitation is rescinded!“
210403 additional reflections on rescission
On the other hand, maybe it was only Medicare, as the virus itself has now been eliminated from the complaint.
So it isn’t Wuhan Flu™ that’s sickening them. It’s all me.
update 210408 — Detached:
So I saw Kittens at GrubCo™ yesterday and disclosed maybe more than Bud and Sugar may think prudent, but I feel that if I stay fully detached, like a delicate bloom from the green stalk, I will wither and die.
update 210411 — Cicisbeo no mo‘?
It isn’t Italian, nor any secret language. It is actually English, albeit a little archaic (“And eat it, too”). Still, it shows no sign of renewal, so it may as well be from a dead tongue.
April First, Abandon that hope.
It wasn’t the First. Weeks later, it occurred to me that the hammer dropped about the first of the month and maybe I was being April Fooled. Well, this doesn’t mean I’m NOT a fool, but in fact, it was March 25th, not April 1st. So, it’s still no joke. When she says we’re quits, we’re quits!
Enrollment of Distinction, April Nineteenth
This is too too rich, too too apt, too too funny, and too too risky. I would like to give Klint proper credit for inspiring the christening of the latest member of my Rogues’ Gallery of Former Arch-Nemeses. I put a great deal of thought and care into selecting those loving sobriquets, but when presented with perfection, how dast I amend? Henceforward shall The Sweetie Formerly Known as Sugar be known as Ffikus Pydaxel.
Still Rescinded, May Fifteenth
A child who pulls the wings off butterflies is heart-broken to realize that they can no longer fly. Just because he’s the source his own heartbreak doesn’t make it any less painful. I find it both sad and amusing that parties who eagerly seized offense at exaggeration, stereotypes, and parody are now mourning the consequences.
211030 — Rudderless, Hopeless, Pointless, and Friendless?
I don’t actually have a paddle. Or a canoe. Or a map. Or a lake. Or any idea of where I should be going. But I am confident that once I’ve dragged myself out of the water, help and advice will abound. (They’ll be telling what I should have done, but they won’t lend me the keys to their time machines so I can.)
211125 – Conflicting Criteria?
Klint once told me that Ojuxit “can’t take care of everybody,” and I understand that. There is only the one of each of us, and we all have our limits. But I never asked for care, though I offered it plenty. It has been confirmed that the future I saw of tending to the infirm and the frail and the failing into their advanced years, helping them up and down the steps, or into and out of the bath, was not to be. Because of my vigorous good health and high tolerance for discomfort, I guess I’m just a little too low maintenance to qualify. I’m not sure this makes any sense, but I’m not inventing it either.
221003 — On Squandering Our Irreplaceable Time
I often wonder how much richer, sweeter, and more productive our lives together might have been if we had also devoted the time that SHE spent raising issues, WE spent discussing them, and I spent recovering from them. It often seemed interminable as, frequently, she would raise new issues before I’d recovered from the previous episode. Sometimes the issue was my “not getting over it” (because everybody recovers at the same rate, I suppose). Talk about your positive feedback loops! Was there no getting better allowed?
(Who’s “she?” Go ahead, pick a former arch nemesis, any one at all!)
(“IKYR Anyway, even if only metaphorically”)