YOUR ROD AND YOUR STAFF (AND YOUR GLASS), THEY COMFORT ME

I used to love my wife unconditionally, then she became an invalid.

Now I don't love her so much anymore which is sad because I used to consider her my Hero.

Betty was always the stronger, the wiser the more measured of the two of us. She was the practical one, the one you could rely on to distribute the life jackets on a sinking ship.

Betty's choices were almost always unassailable and the few times where she erred it was never for lack of judgment or even the result of impulsiveness but rather a minor miscalculation regarding a decision of such complexity that just having the courage to assert a conviction was an act of remarkable self-confidence.

I am equal parts proud and ashamed that I relied on her all these years.

But then she became an invalid and has sadly become a shell of her former self. 

If this all sound heartless and cruel, please, let me explain
.

I don't think I'm betraying any confidences when I remind my readers that women have a more intimate relationship to their hormones than men. I will go further and assert that at a "certain age" said hormones begin to realign with predictable as well as unforeseen consequences.

I am not fully comfortable waxing on a subject so particular to the fairer sex but suffice it to say that the shifts in a women's temperament are rarely adjudicated by anything even remotely resembling fairness.

The youth of Betty's old age was seized by reveries of self-destruction. When someone jots down the number of a few suicide hotlines and affixes them to her key ring you know that something isn't right.   

We tried therapy, medication, yoga, buying a dog, buying a car, buying a boat ... nothing seemed to relieve my poor Betty of her demons.

Until she joined The Book Club.

"A book club" I hear you say, "how wonderful, how indeed perfect," but I'm afraid my dear readers, the cure turned out to be far worse than the disease.

You see, in this book club the ladies - did I mention it was a group specifically catering to the fairer gender of readers - did not gather to debate the merits of Woolf over Faulkner or even to parse through the wise choices of Oprah, no, this club read only the bible.

Betty no longer wanted to kill herself - I honestly believe she was never that committed to the idea - and almost immediately began on the long-term project of slowly killing me. Almost overnight I went from being Clement the overweight electrician to Digby, the dancing partner of the devil himself!

Don't get me wrong, I completely see Betty's point of view, if in her eyes I was destined to suffer my sins in the flames of hell than what else could a loving wife do but to set out to save him.

A noun a verb and 'Lord Jesus Christ' is not merely a syntactical limitation it is evidence of a cognitive debility that far exceeds the chronic.

My wife lives but she lives as an intellectual cripple. She blissfully dwells in a vacuum governed by the inscrutable sovereignty of the Word of the Lord.  She's now a full time warrior in the army of God and all infidels should be put on notice.

My wife has regressed into childhood and my new hero, unfortunately, is a brash fellow who goes by the deceptively solid name of Jim Beam.

TIED UP IN THE PAST

I'm not sure which is the crueler fate: To live a life of so little agency so as to allow some powerful force to determine one's thoughts and behaviors or to live with such a person who allows these powerful forces to dominate their will and animate their actions.

I strongly suspect it's the latter. 

Dennis "Bucky" Digby, age 6

My son Bucky - we call him Bucky though his real name is Dennis - is thirty-four years old and has been married to his wife Sherry for nearly five years. They have a four year-old daughter, Dania, who in all objectivity, is the single most beautiful thing in the entire universe. Even at this tender age I can see she'll be the image of her dad.

Hopefully.

It's not that her mother is unattractive, quite the contrary, I find Sherry to be rather fetching. It's just that she's one of those people whose character is of such flimsy foundation that she's constantly involving herself in one type of cultish fad after another.

Just in the past several years she's flirted with the paranoid bridge tables of Lyndon LaRouche, the sandaled Theosophicals of Ojai, the double-jointed Dahn yoga nerds of Scotsdale and most recently those clean cut weirdos with the bright yellow name tags from GroundSign Technologies who cordially invite you to their twelve-hour lectures but once you're there, don't let you use the bathroom.

 Imagine going out for sushi and hearing why 9/11 was an inside job or how the great "Ancient Wisdom" was corrupted by Christianity or that murdered meat will mess with your chakras or that "the past has no meaning outside the meaning given to it by the past."

That's Sherry in a nutshell - a passionate, fair-weather enthusiast of all things ridiculous. 

And you know what ... she should live and be well if this stuff makes her happy.

My problem is that her nonsense is not just running her life but it's running  Bucky's and the baby's as well. One month he's hiding the New York Times under a seat cushion to avoid an argument about "the alleged independent press," the next he's sneaking Dania out of the house for an Easter egg hunt so as not to listen to a screed on the commodification of normative religion.  

Sherry's "new bold self" is so sensitive and fragile that just about anything that comes out of Bucky's mouth is likely to set her off.

When she was taking the six-month Leadership course at GroundSign she needed to recruit at least fifteen new enrollees or else they would revoke her designation as a senior Seminar Room Captain and take away her "Guidance Binder". When Bucky refused to sign up for the three day course she told him he was stubborn and "uncoachable" and they've been living under a vapor ever since. 

In the good old days all the crackpots lived in California but unfortunately that's no longer the case. In our lawless, disorderly age the cultural hen house has been raided by heretics and hucksters. With the decline of faith our natural rage after meaning finds its meager satisfaction in the fleeting orthodoxies of street prophets and con men. No longer guided by the venerable public intellectuals of the past we ask YouTube to illuminate on life's puzzles and mysteries.


Ever wonder how to tie the perfect Windsor?

My Meeting With Rodríguez or The Arithmetic Of Betrayal

I make it point to shave each and every morning just in case my wife decides to kiss me.

I'm retired and I haven't had to button down with a tie in over six wonderful years.

My wife hasn't kissed me in about twelve.

 I never lose hope, though. She tells me she loves me several times a day, sometimes she even says it with a smile. Betty isn't inclined toward physical contact which unfortunately includes kissing.

The kids are grown and live out of town so I guess she's also a little bit out of practice. 

Years and about 45 pounds ago I had the "opportunity" to cheat on my wife with a really nice gal from the office. (Don't worry about this indiscreet confession, Betty never reads my stuff anyway). I remember the struggle I went through at the time and how the hemispheres of my body were in a constant state of war.

Betty, of course, knew nothing of my conflicts. To her our lack of intimacy was simply a matter of course. Betty was a veteran of the Women's Movement and saw sex as a form of submission.

I too see sex as submission - an elevated and reciprocal choreography of consent -  which is precisely why I was so terribly divided at the time. A man simply can't live on "I love you's" and I was painfully torn between my loyalty and my loins.

 I let the opportunity pass, which was just as well because I most likely would have gotten caught. The whole episode was instructive because it gave me the ability to see myself not only as a deeply flawed middle-aged guy with a gut but as someone interesting, vital and even masculine.

It's funny how love contains such a strong element of revulsion though I don't think it really has to be that way. I still adore my Betty with the same ardor and the same devotion that I did on our wedding day and the fact that she's indifferent to me is simply her loss.

To live is to crave and denial is simply a form of existential defilement. "To live without passion is to live a life in half" is how Micah Carpentier described it in his memoir Mi Lucha con Cordura and I think that's doubly true for me.

 

 Betty, my cheeks are still as smooth as glass.

AN OPEN LETTER TO BILL O'REILLY

I was watching TV the other night, dozing off and half paying attention when I momentarily perked up as I heard a snide oily voice mumble something about masturbation. Not your typical fare, even on basic cable, so I roused myself to attention trying to figure out what it was all about.

I guess I had fallen asleep because I was sure I had been watching American Ninja Warrior. Instead what was on the screen was a panel of slick middle-aged professor types and what appeared to be either extremely precocious middle school girls or a pair dazzling anorectics. 

Now I don't know about you but every time I hear someone start a sentence with the words "As the Viennese feuilletonist Karl Kraus famously quipped..." I reach for the remote before I start gagging on my sour cream and onion lightly ribbed potato chips. This time however, there was something different in the air.

"A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation," remarked one professor, and I suppose you're allowed to say that on cable so long as you cite a Viennese feuilletonist.

The other pointy-headed academics nodded impassively but not surprisingly, the anorectics took issue.

I must be a dimwit because the ensuing debate flew over my head like a zeppelin.  It seems that the professors saw the whole thing through the lens of social satire, calling Kraus the Steve Colbert of the time and likening the informality of the feuilleton to a blog or a Twitter feed.

The two gals insisted it was sexist.

There was no moderator but if I were there I would have split the difference. Yes it was sexist but it was also funny and not altogether untrue.


It reminded me of another line from the great Austrian essayist.

"An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time."

CLEMENT DIGBY: MAN OF INCONSEQUENCE

I have a trove of photographs from when the kids were small. I keep them in an old Hush Puppies box in the den underneath the cramped shelf where our old unused turntable sits.

It's a sad corner of the house and as such, no one cares to tamper with it. I should have taken the turntable and all the old Peter Paul and Mary LPs to the Goodwill a long time ago. Instead they lay there ignored or more precisely, baring witness to the sad fact that we take this god forsaken trivial life of ours for granted.

I once read - don't ask me where - that the writer Henry James (and don't ask me what he wrote either) described the artist as "someone upon whom nothing is lost."

Damn!

To think of all that I've lost simply because I wasn't paying enough attention. And in retrospect, how could I have done it any differently? You work, you raise kids, you eat, you shit, you sleep and from time to time you take a little vacation.

The other day I found one of those little photo albums you used to be able to get for a quarter at the dry goods store. Stuck within its pages were pictures of my sons, Will and Clem Jr, and my daughter Irene when they were still in grade school. Will, like his name, is stubborn and determined and was a hard kid to raise. Clem was my splitting image which then was cute and which is now rather unfortunate. Irene, well, what can I say ... Irene was and still is annoyingly perfect.

Anyway, I'm leafing through this thing, which for some reason carried a faint but unmistakably vomitous smell, and I start balling like a child. I mean, I'm weeping and shaking and gasping for air and it was some time before I was able to regain something even remotely resembling composure.

It dawned on me with a brutal, unambiguous clarity that forty years ago when the kids were growing up, I barely found the time to even kiss them goodnight. 

Was I too busy?

Sure!

But I made myself busy and I can see now that my preoccupations were nothing short of an evasion of the intimacies required to form a bonding and lasting relationship with my family. Sure my job had its demands but who told me to become a deacon at St Eusebius?

It took me four years to get through all 11 steps and by the time I was done Bobby Kennedy was killed and I stopped believing in god overnight.

And the bowling league ... what was that all about!? I'm a lousy bowler, beer gives me gas and half the guys I played with were from work. Didn't I see enough of them during the day?

And the volunteer Fire Department crap!

Wasn't I paying taxes so that the town's fires could be attended by paid professionals?

Poor Betty. 

My wife is a veritable saint and to this day I have no idea how she put up with me. The kids all turned out fine and if they lived closer to Elmira I would make up for my idiotic evasions and spend gobs of time with my seven grandkids.

Maybe there's a reason why all my kids moved so far away.

Will, Clem, Irene ... I know it's too late but for what it's worth ...

I'm sorry ...

GOOD LORD!

My wife Betty and I have been married for forty-two years. We have a lot in common and I guess that explains our relative harmony. I love her the way one loves an old dog, which isn't to say that my affections are in any way diminished. People are very attached to their dogs.

If only Betty would treat me more like a poodle. At least I'd get stroked every once and a while.

There are, however, a few fundamental things that divide us. 

I'm more the autonomous type. Show me a system and I'll find a way to beat it. Betty, on the other hand, loves to have rules. She works for Guillame Capital, an all-purpose investment consulting firm that has weathered the storms of the recession and has actually managed to grow.

This is in no small measure due to the meticulous and conscientious hard work of my wife. Every day, with knuckles to the ground, she sits in her cubicle and for eight unbroken hours stares into the vacuum of her company issued Dell. What she actually does I couldn't tell you but every time her boss pats her on the head she comes home beaming like a schoolgirl.

Last October she was voted regional employee of the month, something I'm reminded of each time I reach into the refrigerator for a beer because the faded red ribbon and plastic gold medallion have been fastened above the handle ever since.

About ten years ago Betty joined the Grace Church of God Almighty, an over-sized congregation that meets twice a week at the Shrine Auditorium downtown. The place seats four-thousand and unless you get there at least forty-five minutes early, you'd be hard pressed to get a seat. Officiated by the legendary Most Reverend Eddie Tauschen, the weekly services fall somewhere between an auction, a rock concert and an Amway infomercial.

Leni Riefenstahl would have had a field day! 

Smooth-tongued Eddie let's everyone know in no uncertain terms that they are all big bad sinners but heck, Jesus loves 'em anyway.

Betty is butter in his already greasy paws. She loves to have someone do her thinking for her, especially when the thoughts in question are so ennobling.

"You are perfect," Reverend Eddie reminds the flock each week, "because the God of Abraham and his only son Jesus have a special place in their hearts just for you!!"

Of course, Betty is far from perfect and that's why I fell in love with her forty-plus years ago. But I guess as her cheeks sag and her bones begin to ache it must be nice to know that in the eyes of the big guy upstairs "you are like a gentle, celestial mist hovering sweetly over a blessed field of the great and good Lord's daisies."

THE UNLIVED LIFE IS NOT WORTH EXAMINING

I had a dream last night where I found myself in a very embarrassing situation.

We all have variations of the mortifying dream - sometimes it's a little bit terrifying.

Not this one.

I was in a small bathroom where a very attractive  middle aged woman was getting dressed. I inadvertently brushed up against her as she was coaxing her ample breasts into a bright pink brassiere.

My embarrassment quickly gave way to exhilaration and then I suddenly woke up.

For most of us, sleep is so much more exciting than real life. 

Come to think of it, I can't remember summoning my imagination in any significant way other than while dreaming.

I worked in an office my whole life and when management controls the vast majority of your time you find yourself thinking just like everyone else. There's a sense of powerlessness at work because you are so divorced from your personal life. You find that you lose agency and initiative because someone has done the thinking for you. This sense of numbing obedience is exacerbated by the carrot and stick approach to promotions, raises and performance reviews. After a few years at the office I realized that my old behaviors - the curious, funny, slightly awkward wiseguy - were no longer available to me. I felt strangely comforted by this suppression so I never really thought it was an issue. Work was a closed system with its own logic and its own rules so the life of my true mind could only be stimulated by sleep. 

I'm retired now but I'm afraid it's too late. Try as I might I can't shake the basic conventions of linear thinking. I even attended an adult education course on creative writing but my prose never much elevated beyond the efficient polish of a status report.

I find that on a typical day I anticipate going to bed with such impatience that when I actually do get under the covers I toss and turn for what seems like hours until I finally succeed in quieting my mind and am able to drift off.

But I'm rarely disappointed.

All I can say is that if sleep is this good, then death must be simply amazing!