OUT, AND DOWN...AT THE MOUTH, IF NOT AT THE HEELS...

So here we are, not quite three months into my "new life," and I am staring at a wall wondering how I am ever going to survive this. I just got off the phone with one of my far-flung sisters-in-law, who was full of cheerful chat about how I was going to find my feet in no time, and telling me all about how she had come to understand how difficult it all was for me by listening to an NPR commentary on Mark Foley's depression. Great. Now on top of everything else, I am grouped with America's Best-Known Pedophiles.

Actually, this is not an idle topic. "This" being "inappropriate age difference." It has not escaped my notice that most of the pictures of men out there on the web are of young men not too far in age from my sons. The exceptions prove the rule, as with the site "Men Over 30." Now there's a daring concept for you. One of my deepest fears, carrying My Secret around with me, was that I would suddenly find myself attracted to my children [no problem there, though they are both better looking than I am] or their friends.

And sure enough, one of my nastier moments this spring involved someone I had known since he was in kindergarten running by in the blazing sun in nothing but a a pair of gym shorts. Gotcha!

It literally took my breath away. Why him, when I can usually pass runners with the casual appraisal of a connoisseur's eye? Who knows? Someone in the Blog Collective posted a calculator for the age of people you were allowed to date, which basically involved dividing your age in half and adding 7. Luckily for me, both of the gentlemen who got me into trouble this spring were past this benchmark, though one of them squeaked past, I will admit. I suspect that the Young Questioner who wrought havoc on my concept of what I found appealing recently did not even remotely qualify.

At the other end of the spectrum are the people online who are obviously lying about their age. Now, maybe this fools some people; OK, it fooled me once, but I have started taking a closer look at photos than the figures given, and if you think about it, few of us fool many of us. I keep hearing people debating whether or not to come out at work, and the ones who go on at greatest length are often the ones whom I, as a supposedly uninterested observer, would immediately have qualified as "queer." [And homophobes have over-active gaydar, if anything... part of knowing too well?]

I believe I have gone on record as not really thinking I was fooling much of anybody but myself. What is it about us, as humans, that we are so pathetically eager to be other than we are? I do not by any means exclude myself here. I am chiseling away at my illusions, but I find that some of them are pretty intractable.

"We" got a letter from an old friend, a woman who in her youth joined a Benedictine monastery, and found in middle age that she could not in good conscience keep her vow of obedience -- and left, leaving everything to which she had made a "lifetime" commitment behind. Her innocent greetings to the two of us was one of the harder things I have had to face recently; the letter was left in a stack of "my" mail when I showed up to pack books again, and I have been... avoiding... writing a reply. I finally did it tonight. I am finally getting around to a number of things, which I guess is progress, but the progress is so slow and on such a tiny scale, that it hardly registers internally. I can't expect people on the outside to understand what I can barely understand, let alone articulate, myself.

And as the weeks go by, I find the goal I have set myself, of six months to a year of... abstinence, harder and harder to contemplate. (Some of that is the simple experience of finding out that my BlogBrothers are not the only community out there waiting for unsuspecting Trolls; I have to say though, that my brief acquaintance with this newer, larger community bears out every accusation that my wife made of my first, in general more "wholesome," set of friends online.) Not quite three months in, I am subject to the wildest conflicting emotions, which I suppose are in and of themselves the great argument for holding on for at least six months -- how much is anyone going to enjoy an evening where one of the participants spends most of his time trying to sob and only coming down with one coughing fit after another? Well, waiting it out is probably a good idea, but it is not going to be a cakewalk. None of this has been a cakewalk so far, and we are almost six months into my life on-line, and my discovery of a community that has kept me [nearly] sane for most of that time. Here is to you, my BlogBrothers. We rarely agree, and yet we do that one unremarkable, indispensable thing that friends do: we are there for each other. At least, I feel that you have been there for me, and I have tried to respond in kind.

Long may you wave.