AMAZING GRACE...

I spent most of yesterday actually saying to the Goat various things I had written in my last post: I'm so happy, I'm so happy, etc. I suppose I am lucky that he didn't suffocate me with a pillow last night just to shut me up.

Having canceled our trip to the B&B, I did not think through the fact that I had arranged to stop off on what might have been our route back to the Big Woods to see my daughter, who is working on a farm and generally wondering what to do with her life. So, instead of stopping on the way, which would have made sense, or taking my car, which would have made sense, we wound up driving in the Goat's truck way out of our way, an hour in and an hour back out, and I wound up spending way too much money on a fancy-pants lunch close to the Favorite Daughter's fancy-pants farm.

How could she not be my favorite? she's the only daughter I have...

It's true that the great improvement of moving next door to the Goat will be the precipitous drop in my gas spending and consumption. On the other hand, my mother has let it be known that leaving my job in the relative metropolis of Nowheresville and moving further away from her was "burning my bridges." How can I complain about my life? my mother and my lover both believe that I am destined for great things. I take a somewhat more jaundiced view: I don't really expect to achieve much of anything in the next ten years of my life that I had not somehow managed to pull off in the first fifty, but then, who knows?

Oh, back to the subject of tossing money out the window: As soon as I had posted my complaining note about the doctor and the gold-plated nasal spray, I realized that compared to my expenses so far this year [eating my son's debt and buying my plane ticket to travel with the Goat in March], things like $55 for a doctor's visit and drugs simply dwindle into insignificance. Or should at least be assumed as the price of doing business. The big picture is about questions like: how will I support myself when I move out to the Big Woods? and will I have to pay rent in two places, or will I be able to find someone to carry the last piece of my lease? That's Real Money.

I have tried to put a deposit down on the rooms I have started counting on having in the Goat's friend's house, but there is the fate of the Weird Little House for me to sort out also. After badmouthing it for so long, I now know that I am going to miss it, and the real friendliness of my landlord, a lot. I do still figure things like this out occasionally, though on the whole I am dealing with a constantly diminishing supply of functioning brain cells. I sometimes think my boss hired me under the slogan "Hire the handicapped; they're fun to watch." Oh, well.

And another correction: if any of the five of you out there actually reading this have assumed from what I posted about pushes and being allowed plateaus in-between that I now have some sort of black belt in gay sex, you can forget about it. What I meant was less that I have become some sort of sophisticate than that I have started doing what I defined myself as not doing for some thirty years -- practically any form of gay sex is new territory for me, and we are spiraling in from the outside edge. And we are moving very carefully and slowly, which is to say that he is.

Which brings me to another point: the Goat as good as admitted this weekend that he is leading me from one thing to another with what the unkind might consider "malice aforethought" and the more positively inclined might consider a "decent concern" for my previous semi-virginal state and set of inhibitions.

It still creeps me out a little not to know where we are going, but so far it's been a pretty good ride. He did drop a couple of hints that made me sit up and take notice, metaphorically at least. On the whole: I am very happy to be here, and even look forward to wherever it is that we wind up going. If I don't like any of the way stations, we can negotiate the frequency of our return to them when the time comes. It's probably a stupid and dangerous thing to say, but I will in fact try anything once. And have gotten completely accustomed to things I used to think I was too squeamish and clumsy to do at all.

Well, never underestimate the ability of the human mind to accommodate the impossible.

I was talking to someone recently about traffic on the blog, which I have not been obsessively checking for a change, so I have no amusing list of new addresses to share. But I went back and looked at the totals for last year, and it still looks like 30 unique people a day, with 5 a day returning... or at least, those are the averages; the real numbers are 12,000-odd [very odd] people, 7,200 unique [truly "unique"] visitors, and 1,800-odd [really odd] return visitors. The bulk of the hits are now people looking for Gengoroh Tagame, who is more talked about than featured here [he's featured plenty at "Roids and Rants," by the by], with the occasional guy carrying a torch for Greasetank; M. Sagat seems to have dropped off the edge of the world... maybe now that he has his own website, nobody needs a signpost to find him...

The web is just a very weird place.

Hang in there, all.
C