Monday, February 11, 2008

CHICKENS RETURN to ROOST...


Well, that was the shortest work-week in recorded history... I went in late Wednesday, and was finished by 1 pm on Friday. Then I whisked up a blueberry-banana smoothie, made a cup of coffee, grabbed some goat cheese, and hopped into the car to head out to the Big Woods to start all over again.

I'm beginning to figure it out: When the Goat is feeling sociable, i.e., when there is a party in the offing, or if there is a chance to see some of his family, everything else [like Guess Who] fades into the background; when the Goat is fried and just wants to get away, then it's all about us. [Well, OK, it's really all about him, but I have a Really Good Time.] So, the moral of the story may be: keep him fried. Well, that may be out of my hands; in a few weeks he has an interview with the Headmaster [can you believe they still call people that? I can't] to discuss the renewal of his contract. I wonder what life with an unemployed Goat would be like... Well, he has pointed out that I am the most under-employed person he knows, which is his way of saying I could do a lot better, but I do believe that the bird[s] in the hand are worth a whole bushful, no matter how you slice them. Call me old-fashioned...

It was the best of weekends, it was the worst of weekends. Great pleasure, great food, great food for thought. Spending five hours a week driving to and from my lover's house is beginning to wear me down, but the prospect of actually sorting through the five million things I just dragged away from my former home to get them out, and figuring out what can actually fit into two rooms where I think I am going, what will have to be stored, and what can be safely given away or thrown out... seems completely overwhelming most of the time. So I put it off. And spend my time concentrating on other, more immediate questions... like how beautiful the Goat is to me. How much I love him. And how easily he drives me crazy in every sense of the word, including the less fortunate ones...

But that isn't all I have on my mind.

Here is the conundrum on which I am currently chewing:

I will admit that my married sex life probably always existed under the cloud of my conscious decision to avoid becoming a leather-man. Fair enough. But it was also fabulous, even towards the end, perhaps especially towards the end, what there was of it. As I am currently rediscovering, sex with someone you love is the most amazing thing, and it becomes a kind of self-reinforcing cycle. The downside of that is that as you stop reconnecting through sex and other things begin to tear you apart, that too becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. The last dozen years of my marriage were marked by one or the other of us suffering from neglect, and it cut both ways, to nobody's benefit. I guess it's a little ridiculous to announce "sex is here to stay" as some sort of epiphany, but there we are.

No, what really occupies me is that I am focused on love as the matrix of sex, and the Goat focuses on sex as the matrix of love. Nobody's wrong here; I suppose it is even once again a fairly standard guy/gal thing. But it still blows my mind that the two very distinct things get so completely entangled that there is no disentangling the knots, and every "event" creates another knot --in what is becoming a major snarl of emotion and sensation.

On another note, I have to watch it with the weed. I have discovered [again] how cheap a date I am, and that I have to tread very carefully if the entire evening [not to say weekend] is not to fracture into a series of disconnected moments: Saturday night I felt some kind of control, but Sunday night I was completely over the edge, and the Goat said something complimentary about it on the phone today, and I must have gone silent, because he then asked, with an audibly arched eyebrow, whether I remembered anything about the event at all. I do, of course, remember more than just "anything," but sometimes I can no longer put the event back together into a cohesive picture, and that makes me Completely Crazy. The Goat, however, finds it all wildly amusing.

There was a night last October, when we were holed up by the ocean, when I had vivid memories on waking, but had no idea when they came from -- and no locatable memories of the night before, past a certain point I couldn't quite put my finger on. As my more long-suffering readers may remember, they were all in fact memories of the night before, but they had come unmoored from the context of the day, and I would have been just as easy to convince that they were memories of last week, or last month, as of the night before...

Time to concentrate on legal drugs. God knows I have had plenty of them recently. My current recommendations:

Cavit Pinot Grigio.
White wine, in my opinion, should come as close as possible to paint stripper. This lovely Italian bulk [not to say "bulk-tank"] wine comes in magnums and is the best bang for the buck.

Doña Paula "Dos Cardos" Malbec.
This delightful Argentinian red tiptoes across the pallet and occasionally turns up on sale for as little as the CPG above. The skinflint's choice for red...

Hahn Estates Cabernet Sauvignon.
This is an "expensive" wine: $10 a bottle on sale, which is when I buy. But, boyohboy, is it worth it. This is the Goat's favorite Cab of the moment, and Cab is all he drinks. I have to say he is on to something. This is definitely in the Daffy Duck/"woo-woo" category. Another wine that it is simply very difficult to stop drinking. But then, what good wine ever makes you want to stop?

Damned if I know.

I am now trying to figure out how I can get away on Friday night this week, when in theory I have a function to attend in do-good drag. I do dislike having to represent anything less complicated and messy than myself. And especially having to leave a good impression: no food, no wine, makes Jack a dull boy. Me, too. Do you think I could suddenly get sick, now that my boss knows I have a reason to be somewhere else? I think not.

Oh, well.

Hang in there, all.
C

2 comments:

  1. Functions for the salt mine are my worst. I do avoid them like the plague. Perhaps a Cabernet or some weed would make then tolerable. I fear it would be "career limiting" though if not "career terminating" I am after all so skilled at holding my tongue when I imbibe ;)

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  2. Isn't it amazing how parallel certain parts of our life are? Except I'm trying to lay off the legal ones as much as possible...

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