Hiatus

Just a thought here:

We can all understand why the price of oil is going up. The world situation, increased demand in India and China, the uncertainty of supply. Fine. And we accept the fact that Exxon etc. have to raise their prices to maintain their profit margin. No problem. But does it take a genius or a congressional investigation to see that if an oil company's PROFITS, not revenues, are doubling and tripling during this period, somebody is, um, taking advantage of the situation to anally rape each and every one of us? And isn't asking Bush and Co. to investigate the situation a little like asking Goldfinger to head up the investigation into who messed with the gold in Fort Knox?

WHEN, OH LORD, WHEN WILL WE BE RELEASED FROM SUCH PATHETICALLY TRANSPARENT EVIL? HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK WE ARE?

Okay. I feel better now.

I also want to say that I'm going on hiatus here with the blog for a while. After thinking about a recent comment exchange with [sic], I'm realizing that I need all my concentration and writerly energy for the two projects I'm working on now and looking down the list of things to temporarily excise from the time/energy/concentration budget it seemed that blogging could easily take a break. So--I'll be checking back with all of you as time rolls on and blogging once again when my projects get written, and can always be reached at tomjay5@hotmail.com.

With love to all,


Tom

Dear Abby

I have blogged a lot about my relationship with my wife of almost 25 year, my wife whom I met the summer after my freshman year at college. We are now at a crossroads in the marriage--though she would claim that we are not, that everything is fine if I would only see that. For me the crisis feels less about what I should do about the relationship than what I should think or feel about it. But maybe not. Maybe I do need to do something about it. One way or another, it scares me to think of going on the way we're going without something changing, inside or out. I'm posting this as an open Dear Abby letter to all of you. Read the tale and then tell me: what path, kind readers, should I take?

In the picture you see us on a perfect day in the summer of 1976. I'll call that a starting point, though she had already been my girlfriend for three years. It was a day full of adventure, discovery and romance, and it was only one of many. Within six years of that perfect day we were married, with our first child, our first underpaying jobs, living in an apartment we could barely afford--in short, within six years of this picture being taken, our childhoods were over. With responsibilities, bills, early hours at work, late night breastfeedings and our collective and individual anxieties about our future, things began to change. Gradually, we began to have less sex. But the fact remained that when we did have sex it was as close and romantic as it was the day the picture in this post was taken.

Now, several chapters later, we still have sex. But the fact is, the sex isn't good. It's bad. I never thought there could be such a thing as bad sex, but there is. The heart of what's bad about it for me is that my wife will not take pleasure from me. It's all about getting me off, which may sound good to somebody whose spouse doesn't even do that. But my wife has now openly and calmly declared that she loves me, loves our life together, loves sleeping pressed up against me, but isn't interested in having orgasms anymore. She used to come easily and freely but, interestingly, only from intercourse--at our hottest and most sexual, as I've blogged before, I wasn't allowed to go down on her or any other kind of direct intimate contact--just screwing. And when there was lots and lots of that I certainly wasn't complaining. But I'm complaining now.

Maybe what I'm complaining about most of all is something very small and very simple: she won't kiss me in bed anymore. Ever. Not all the toothbrushing and flossing and shaving in the world makes any difference. We used to make out endlessly in bed. We haven't kissed in bed in years.

I remember the first time, a couple of years ago, when I realized that I wasn't reaching her sexually any more. Of course I went straight to blaming myself. But now it's becoming clearer that this is her choice. Or maybe just where she is in pre-menopause. But either way: I've tried to talk about it, I've tried to get her into therapy, but she's not budging, and I'm not taking the rap anymore. She went for therapy once, very briefly---about five years ago I found msyelf writhing happily around in a bed in a Washington D.C. hotel room with an old girlfriend and then walking around for a week in a blissful erotic haze from the experience and then getting back to L.A. and dragging my wife to counseling--without, by the way, telling her about the old girlfriend and the hotel room--because I wanted that erotic haze to be about her again, about my wife. She bolted from the therapy after a few weeks--when we were actually getting somewhere, I thought-- and now categorically refuses to consider going back, and gets so pissed off when I bring it up that I now know that's over: I'm not bringing it up again.

Both my wife and my therapist say the problem is my mindset---that if I love her I can love her as she is and find joy and pleasure in the setup as it is. And there are days when I think they are right, and days when I can talk myself into that, and days when we have sex that I can enjoy in spite of the one-sidedness of it.

But I finally admitted to myself this week that I don't like having sex with her anymore. Too much inequality, too much trying to make something happen which isn't going to happen, no savoring of the moment, no discovery. I'm actually losing my attraction to her. I'm not getting as turned on. It just isn't feeling good, either physically or emotionally. There was a great time in the shower a few weeks ago, which I wrote about here, but the fact is I was mostly happy that I was actually able to enjoy it so much--because it had been a while since I had.

Every time I actually think about leaving her over this, about telling her that I'm not ready to settle into what we've settled into for the rest of my life, the thought feels ludicrious: are things really bad enough to warrant shredding up my life like that? But every time I think about never having that feeling of her being turned on under my touch, never feeling her come, never kissing her in the dark of our own bed in our own home--that feels equally untenable.

So what do I do?

Created By

If you go to the Internet Movie Data Base you'll find a fair number of listings under my name. I've had "created by" credit on three network series. I've had my name in one way or another on 50 plus hours of television. The range in quality goes from please-don't-watch-it-awful to sort-of-fun-but-cheesy to not-too-bad-with-a-few-nice-moments. And at the end of the day all of it added up isn't worth five minutes of tonight's episode of The Sopranos.

And that's something that, as I sit down at my computer to get a couple of hours work in before bedtime, I know I just have to live with.

More Fearless Moral Inventory

With respect to the last post--while I have yet to do a formal Al-Anon 9th Step amends on that one, it's been six years now, I've apologized many times, and my daughter and I have gotten to the point where we can laugh about my insane behavior. She and I have a great relationship, we talk and email all the time, and at age 23, living 2000 miles away, she has announced that if any family vacation plans are happening she wants to be included indefinitely, which of course she will be. But as long as I'm on the subject of Things I Will Need to Apologize To My Daughter For, there is one more event that needs Fearless Moral Inventory-ing.

This one happens in Cajun country. During the year she took off between high school and college she was headed back east and I said, why don't we take a trip to New Orleans and drive around the bayous and then you can continue on east from there. We were staying in Breaux Bridge and for breakfast I had way more Louisiana chicory coffee than I should have, I know what that stuff does to me, I was driving badly all morning, turning the wrong way down one way streets and missing stop signs, in spite of my daughter's repeated warnings and offers to take the wheel, and sure enough about half way to New Orleans--we were rushing to make it in time for our dinner reservations at Antoine's--I started into an intersection without looking, thinking or really being present at all, and our little rented Hyundai Santa Fe got clipped by, yes, an 18 wheeler going 60 MPH. The front end of the Hyundai was sheered right off, the battery was found in a field a hundred yards away, we did a few high-speed 360's, but by some miracle which I have yet to fathom my then 18 year old daughter and I walked away from the twisted wreck with a couple of scratches, mostly from airbag impact. After an aggravating series of less-than-compassionate Louisiana state cops and surly tow truck drivers we made it to the French Quarter in time to shower, change and get to Antoine's in time for our reservation. I thought the timing was critical; little did I know that the bloom has long been off Antoine's rose and we were sitting in a nearly empty restaurant. Didn't matter to me--I was still completely rattled and basically out-of-body from the accident and I went straight for the Sazeracks, a New Orleans concoction of whiskey and God alone knows what else, Huey Long's favorite, and after the second of these I turned to my daughter and asked "So have you slept with (name of her boyfriend at the time)?" Arrrgggghhhh! She was terribly embarrassed and I realized immediately what I had done and what can I say... I shudder at the memory of it. She handled it great, we went on to have a wonderful few days biking around that great city--a little like remembering Pompeii before Vesuvius now--but-- but-- it was bad, and I found out later how upset she was by it. She did not, by the way, dignify the question with an answer, or feel she had to. She's got way too much self respect for that. So I must have done something right...

The good news is, that really cleans up the 4th step on my baby girl.

The moral of this story is: ALWAYS take the Collision Damage Waiver on your rental car insurance. I dropped off a hunk of crushed smoking metal at the Avis office in New Orleans and walked away without having to pay one single dime.