MÖBIUS STRIPS MAN...DETAILS AT 11

Flip, this response to your latest post just got too long to leave as a comment...

Möbius Man:

I haven't checked your blog in a while, so I was unprepared for the stakes you just raised. WOW. Let me say this about that, allowing as always that you take what I say as being no more than my POV and the result of a confluence of similar, but not identical issues. First of all, who would have thought I needed any proof beyond the Piggo Event that I tend to project my own experience onto the little that other people post, just so it makes sense to me? But there I was, assuming that your post Smokin' was a moral fable composed to show your commentators how far off their comments were; there I was, assuming that the event had only taken place in the realm of possibility. Oh. Now I get it. OK, OK, I get the Gold Medal in the Naive Olympics, so what else is new?

When I was in grad school and trying to be celibate in all directions -- and frankly couldn't conceive having the TIME to do anything else -- one of my classmates, a beautiful young woman who had pretty much the opposite problem said to me, "Troll, you would be better off if you just got laid more often." My rejoinder was, "Well, Nancy, maybe we would all be better off if you just got laid a little less." Not very nice, but I happened to know how she was treating her current boyfriend... Full of how well I knew what was going on, it took me years to recognize how right she had in fact been about me. Because part of what I was doing by refusing to act at all was denying truths about which acts I really wanted to perform.

I can't quite believe that you can proceed from the wild and crazy event of Smokin' to the declaration at the top of Stakes that there is Heavy AA Stuff to follow. Well, to that I say: that is not all that follows. I think that part of what follows is that you are dangerously full of some substance, and liquor is not it. You are the one who kept telling me I was playing with fire; well, OK. I will admit that while I am not playing with fire, at this stage in my messy life, I AM fire. Fair enough. But isn't there an equal and opposite danger to just battening down the hatches and hoping the powder doesn't catch? I believe that Hamlet once described a sapper "hoist by his own petard" -- blown up by his own gunpowder...

What I am not saying is that refusing to set up meetings in hotel rooms is better than setting them up. That is a secondary bridge for you to cross after you became honest enough with yourself to admit openly what you are up to. It ain't easy; I'm not even DOING anything, and the whole pursuit of truth has become so painful it is practically paralyzing. But here’s the problem. You talk about how you can’t ask your wife to live in an open relationship, but you are ALREADY making her live in one, you just don’t want to pay the price of telling her. How is that “rigorously honest”? I would say that it looked rather different from the outside: maybe even "rigorously different”. If “deep in your heart”, you don’t want an open relationship, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU UP TO?
I can’t believe you said that little too-timid-to-act ME was playing with fire. You are juggling it, swallowing it, farting it... you are up to your alligator level in fires, Flip.

Yes, we all need to forgive ourselves. But that is based on loving our neighbor “as ourselves” – and that means that you can’t bless someone and wish them warm and well-fed without at the same time making your deeds help to achieve that promise. If I feel the San Andreas fault shifting within me, I am terrified that you have allowed the Grand Canyon to open up within yourself and the Colorado to flow at flood stage with fire. STOP and THINK. [Pray if you can, but for God’s sake, stop acting without knowing what you’re doing.]

I will tell you a story, if I can remember it correctly; it was told to me only ONCE a long time ago. I have a dear friend who is Navajo, whose mother was a woman of great wisdom. She did her best to see that all her many children were equipped to live in the wider “Anglo” world as well as the world she had inherited from her mothers before her. She had five sons, if I remember the story right, of whom my friend, is the last. His three oldest brothers all committed suicide, and when his last brother went to their mother to tell her that he couldn’t face his life, and that he too was thinking of taking the same step, all she said was: “Do what you have to do. But know what you are doing.”

I don’t think for a moment that I would have the strength to say that, but I think her utterance deserves respect. In spite of coming from no particular “faith”, it is profoundly religious, and profoundly wise. Flip, your life is truly and completely in your hands alone; noone can make those decisions for you, nor can anyone’s fear of, or certainty as to, what they mean really be a factor in YOUR decision.

“Do what you have to do. But KNOW what you are doing.” KNOW what you are doing.