Author: shelly

I knew it has been a while since i posted but two years? Goddamn.

I don’t have any great adventures, raves or crazy rants. I wake up, get some clean on me and go to work. On the weekends, i do yardwork, sleep on my couch while watching English Premiere League matches and try to remember all the things that I need to do on the weekends.

There HAS been one event of significance, however.

Late last summer, i drove home to see an envelope taped to my door. I immedately knew it was something bad. And it was. My landlords had decided they were going to sell the unit i had been living in. They gave me a 60 day notice as they thought the law required. It USED to require 60 days but that law changed on 1 Jan 2021 in that instead of requiring a 60 days notice, it now requires 90 days. I did not learn that until a few weeks later.

I had been wanting a home for some time- years in fact. It was an ache that was always there and i felt that i’d put much of my life on hold until i could afford a home. The problem with that was homes kept rising in price in my area and by a REDONKULOUS amount. As a single guy that makes something slightly north of 60k a year (my take home is MUCH lower), and living in one of the most expensive counties in Washington state, there was no way i could afford a home.

Long story made short, I was able to find a home in Blaine. I wasn’t even the highest bidder on it. Most tied what i was offering but at least one bid was made at $15,000 more than my offer. What made MY bid be accepted where others weren’t was that my real estate agent knew the agent selling this house and that agent knew my banker. In addition, i wrote a personal letter to the seller. Every word of it was sincere. From the moment i saw the thumbnail pic on the listing, i knew this was the house i wanted.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. The night my offer went in, i was sick with anxiety. No news was bad news. But the next day when my agent called, i’d resigned myself to knowing that i didn’t get this home and it was time to start looking again.

Here i am. I’m at the edge of the lower 48 on the west coast. It takes me about 12 minutes to drive to the interstate and once road skirts along the Puget Sound where White Rock, BC is very visible.

Work grinds me to dust on most days. It’s the nature of where i work, what’s asked of me and what resources i don’t have. But i work only 6.5 freedom miles away and when it’s done, i get to come to my very quiet home. There are bun buns that sometimes hang out in my yard. Sometimes i’ll tell one of them about my day. I know he’s listening- i mean, how could you NOT listen with ears like that? Anyhow, i know he’s listening but likes to pretend he’s not.

Early last month i had a fairly good match (percentage wise) with a woman on OK Cupid. We bounced a couple of mails back and forth then i gave her one of my gmail accounts. We had another couple of mails that way then decided to have a video chat.

I’ve been on a lot of blind dates. I’ve probably been on more blind dates than any one person ever should. One of the things that i always tell people when meeting someone they don’t know much about is do not have any expectations. And that’s how i went into the video chat. (Because someone in the future may read this, keep in mind that we’re in the middle of a plague right now).

She was on an iPhone, i was using one of my PCs with a Logitech c920 and my Scarlett 2i2 microphone (mixer and mic = $250). She had trouble hearing me. I expect that’s because with a bass voice, her speakers couldn’t respond appropriately.

As these things go, she was perfectly pleasant if not perfunctory. We had spoken for an hour when she said, “Okay. We’ve been speaking for an hour. It’s time for me to go.” It was a little abrupt but fine. I can’t say there was any degree of chemistry on my part for a couple of reasons but not limited to the fact that i just didn’t find her attractive.

But we still exchanged emails- perhaps i just didn’t have the courage to tell her that i wasn’t really interested in continuing our conversation. Perhaps i was just lonely and wanted someone to write. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

And one day in one of my responses to one of her emails, i detailed to her why i do not like being touched unless it’s by a lover/ girlfriend. Her response was concise and non ambiguous.

One big one of mine is being clear that I must only choose to be in companionship with people who fit me easily and offer reciprocation of specific forms of affection that match my needs well without much difficulty.

I will part from you here with a positive thought for you…

Okay. It didn’t work out. I wasn’t attracted to her, she wasn’t attracted to me. She wasn’t interested in being friends and although i followed up with a note saying otherwise, i honestly wasn’t sure i wanted to be friends with her. That’s just the way it goes. Ego is bruised for a day but then the next day i move on.

Fast forward nearly 4 weeks. I wake up this morning with this single line from her:

I know this is out of the blue… but your voice is invading my thoughts when I masturbate. Try phone sex?

Really?

Is that really what you want to lead with? We never spoke about anything sexual, you tell me you’re not interested in me and yet you want to use The Moisturizer ™ (aka: my voice) so that you can join the six knuckle club? How would you feel if i wrote out of the blue and asked,

“Hey. Remember me? I’ve been really horny lately and was wondering if you’d like to have Skype sex. Maybe you could show me your vulva or something.”

Needless to say, unless she writes again, i will NOT be responding to her. I’ve had my fill of people that want a part of me but do not want me. I’m well aware of how powerful my voice can be. The woman that absolutely broke my heart in 1998- some nights i would keep her rolling in orgasms using just my voice. I’ve had a few other lovers that were responsive to my voice to varying degrees but just like being touched and wanting to touch others, using my voice in a sexual manner is a very, very intimate thing.

She can go buy a Bad Dragon and a Hitachi Magic Wand and turn a subwoofer into a Sybian for all i care.

The next scoop of crazy is a lot more simple. It turns out that i’m a bigot.

It’s true. After a quick introduction and one email exchange, i was asked by a woman from OK Cupid the following:

“They also say that you consider yourself a feminist “to some extent” and that you wouldn’t dat [sic] a transgender person. I’d like to know if those answers have changed as well, and if they haven’t, to exactly what point do you stop considering yourself a feminist, and why wouldn’t you date a transgender person? In your opinion, are transgender woman real women?”

For clarification, the ‘they’ she mentioned was about some questions that i had answered a long time ago. I do not remember why i had put ‘to some extent’ on the question regarding feminism. I explained that was possibly an error. I also explained that no, i am not interested in dating a transgendered woman.

That elicited the following response:

“And transphobia doesn’t line up with my values. Not all transgender women are the same “type”, so trying to say that “transgender women aren’t my type doesn’t fly. Transgender women are not a monolith, and if you’re dismissing all transgender women as “not your type” simply BECAUSE they are transgender, then you’re a transphobe and I don’t want to talk about music and travel (or anything else) with a transphobe. Unless you are homosexual, you can’t say that you “aren’t romantically or sexually drawn to transgender women. Have you met all of them? Transgender women are WOMEN, and represent as diverse an array of “types” as cisgender women do. Saying that you “don’t care” about this is a stance that displays a lot of unchecked privilege. So I’m very glad I asked you to elaborate on your answers. Have a nice day and I wish you the best. I sincerely hope you take a good hard look at your deeply held prejudices. Take care, and goodbye.”

This- this right here embodies why i fucking loathe conservatism. Telling someone what they can think, how they’re supposed to think, who they’re supposed to be attracted to and trying to do it with some sort of pseudo intellectual authoritarianism is an anathema to everything i value. This sort of shit flies in Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia and other conservative regimes but has no place in the US (where i am) nor Canada (where she’s from).

And do NOT try to tell me that being politically correct is anything related to liberalism. This is the same authoritarian rationale that countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc… use to imprison people for blasphemy. It’s used by liberals without any sense of irony to force others to think in their very specific way to discourage people from believing and speaking their mind. It’s a way to punish anyone that doesn’t conform. That is not compatible with an open, liberal democracy; it’s the refuge of conservative authoritarianism.

I have my preferences. Just because i’m not interested in dating Asian women (Japan, Korea, Viet-Nam, Thailand, etc…) doesn’t make me a fucking bigot. I wouldn’t date a woman with excessive tattoos and/or piercings either. It makes me a guy with fucking preferences and no one can tell me that i don’t have the right to my thoughts and desires. Physically i prefer women with big hips, large (natural) breasts, dark hair and if i’m lucky, freckles, glasses and nice eyes. A transgendered woman could fulfill some of those things but isn’t going to fit that entire bill and i will never, NEVER again date someone i am not attracted to. Hips just cannot be grown like a pair of breasts. And then there are the inserty bits. They can be positively sensuous and gorgeous. No amount of surgery is ever going to duplicate that.

Just because i’m not attracted to someone doesn’t make me a sexist, a misogynist or a fucking bigot.

I’m going to expand this for a bit because i’m really, really tired of gender identity politics. If someone wants to identify as a man or woman, great. Do it. I do not care. You’re entitled to every single right and protection that the law affords anyone. But to my liberal brethren that have decided that this is the hill they want to die on; you are stupid and you are useless. This issue alone will ensure that the Nationalists/ Fascists/ Fundamentalists/ Republicans will stay in power. Why? Do you really think that the family that has to sell their house to pay their chemotherapy bills gives a fuck if someone wants to transition to a woman? How has transgender politics helped bring the minimum wage up to $15 or better? How has transgender identity politics helped rebuild unions, rebuild roads and bridges, created affordable housing, modernized tax policies, advanced single payer health care, made affordable education or addressed gun violence? THOSE are the issues that matter to me.

So PA, if you ever read this, know that you are an privileged, pretentious, insecure, whining little shit. At a minimum, you could have given me another perspective and maybe i would have developed a better understanding and empathy for for transgendered problems and challenges. But the way you chose to respond just shows why i hate ivory tower, pseudo intellectual shit stains like you. What a fucking delicate, fantasy world you must live in.

Winter finally passed.

It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it was in the years past. This was a relatively warm one with little snow or ice and the rains seemed to taper off earlier than usual. As I write this, we had our first significant rains in a month or more. The junipers outside my window are half bathed in the orange light of a sun nearly resting on the horizon, a cool breeze is floating into my room and i’m listening to Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians. This piece… i don’t think i’ve listened to it since the last time i wrote in my journal. I cannot express the absolute beauty, the sheer ecstasy of it.

I renewed my Discover Pass a few days ago. I went back to Rockport State Park. It wasn’t nearly as splendid as it was my first time- not because this was my 2nd trip but because with the lack of rain and the time of year, there weren’t nearly as many fungi and mushrooms about.

My next trip is going to be to Mt. Sauk.

I don’t know that i really have a purpose to write tonight. I think i just wanted to say hello and maybe in a moment of quiet reflection, remind myself just how much beauty there is in this world when I take the time to see it.

I’m out of time again. I’ll finish this another evening.

I’m not sure where this post is going to go. I suspect it’s one that i’ll come back to at some point and modify or perhaps eventually forget.

I had a dream two nights ago. It involved perhaps the three most important girlfriends that i’ve had in my life- Betina, Michelle and Heather (now known as Auburn). Actually Auburn is a bit of an outlier but important nonetheless.

I don’t have dreams like this often and when i do, they’re never good. I don’t remember much of this dream but it struck me as odd that these three were in it. It wasn’t a good dream nor was it as bad as they usually are.

I’m rambling.

It’s twenty years later. It’s twenty years since the woman i thought i would spend my life with came home to tell me she no longer loved me. In my profound ignorance and frankly, my arrogance, i thought it was a passing phase. I simply could not conceive of a life without her and for her part, she could not conceive of a life with me.

I was such a different person then and for more reasons than i care to acknowledge. I don’t have to live in shame but i certainly feel ashamed at some of the things i said and did.  Some of it was due to unresolved issues from my childhood, having been deprived of years of normalcy as a teenager (i was sent to boarding school that was run by both religious and behavior modification rules) and i was years into the obstructive sleep apnea.

Talking about OSA is one of the few things that i’m a bit evangelical about. I know i’ve said it so many times but it’s worth repeating. I should be dead. I should have died violently in my sleep many years ago. Snoring is one thing but when someone stops breathing for extended periods of time (my breathing would cease for up to 2 minutes at a time), it stops being ‘just snoring’ and becomes a serious health risk.

It’s twenty years later. The wound never closed but i can talk about it. I can talk about what my failings were. I can talk about what her failings were without being cruel or malicious. For years, she would tell me she loved me and considered us to be married (yes, it scared the hell out of me but i did love her so). Then one night she comes home to tell me she no longer loved me. When i asked her why she never said there were problems, she said she didn’t have any obligation to.

Why does this event have such deep scars in me? That’s easy. She was very culturally literate, she was hurt and innocent at the same time (something we had in common), She was amazingly beautiful and she was the closest i’d ever been to anyone. But those aren’t the reasons why two decades on, part of me still feels that loss.

It’s because Michelle was the only woman i took off all of my armor for.

In the aftermath of that loss, i found it did two things to me. It set an expectation of what i looked for in other women and it set an expectation of what i’d never tolerate again. There are several reasons why i’ve never married (i don’t make enough money to attract a mate, i don’t have any desire to reproduce nor will i become involved with someone with children, etc…) but i’d be lying if i said those two expectations haven’t played a part in it.

There’s also this: what happened to me afterward? Could they have happened had we managed to stay together?

Would i have fallen in love with house music? Would i have gotten over my fear and  learned to dance with absolute fucking abandon ? Would i have had lived, having never learned to appreciate drum and bass, jungle, techno (Detroit, minimalist)? I know that i made some amazing friends in the time i spent in Austin before I left it- Mikey, Chris, Eliza, Jeff, Ernesto and others. I would have never known them had i stayed with her and my life would have been diminished because of it.

Would i have ever moved to Portland and known Dave, Amy, Scott or Alicia? No.

On the other hand, i wouldn’t have lived in Seattle for a year. Oh boy. I really wish i could wind the clock back on that one. I really hated Seattle. Strangely, one day on the bus as i was going home, there was a woman that sat across from me that looked like it might have been Michelle. All i had to do was ask her but i didn’t. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because if it was her, i would have owed her more apologies that i would have time to say- and certainly i did and maybe i still do. Not just the hubris of a misspent youth but being wholly accountable for my failures and explaining what it was like getting less than two hours of REM sleep every night for years on end and what that did to me intellectually and emotionally.

I’ll always live with the spectre (sp?) of the years i lost due to apnea and the swath of destruction it left in me and the wake of others around me in that time.

But would i have eventually found myself here had i stayed with her? I doubt it. I mean, it’s possible but I doubt it.

The sun is rising earlier every morning. A salmon colored horizon behind the shadow of Mt. Baker. Icy winds that bite my skin and smell of brightness and life itself. Countless mosses that hide in the texture of roads, turning them into sheets of burning emerald when the sun is out.

To be continued…

There was a time when i wanted to write nearly all the time. That changed when i began to be treated for my sleep apnea. For those that don’t know, i lost about 20 years of my life in a fugue state and by all rights, should have died in my sleep many times due to obstructive sleep apnea.

Then when going through a breakup a few years ago, all i could do was write- but the further I was from that experience, my desire to write diminished as well. And then I didn’t want to write at all because there is this huge backlog of thoughts, realizations, rage and pain that came out of that breakup here. They’re not just in the posts that i made during that time but also in the scraps and notes that i promised i would eventually get to but every time i thought about it, i came to the realization that i didn’t want to be anywhere around them. I didn’t want to have to acknowledge how i utterly abandoned common sense, integrity and how i’d used coping strategy after coping strategy of trying to maintain a relationship (with plans of marriage) to someone that… that frankly, i loved but was not physically attracted to in the least.  To be sure, she was beautiful and was capable of putting an act on that was so convincing that it even fooled her- but one thing i’ve learned over the last few years is that it’s when times are tough and you’re given a choice between doing what’s easy over what’s right or doing what’s right over what’s easy that the content of your character is revealed.

And therein lies the segue.

I made a promise to myself that i’d get all of this fucking detritus out. Some of that is taking responsibility for, and openly admitting all of the coping strategies i’d used to maintain a belief system, and by extension, a relationship, that was so fucked up and convoluted that when that belief structure collapsed and all of the sutures and stitches i’d used to maintain my beliefs and relationship came apart, it cost me my job, my dignity, my self respect and for a while, i lost my sanity.

I’ve decided that i’m going to clean house, so to speak. That backlog of hurt, rage and honesty that i’ve been avoiding for years because it seems so irrelevant now- i’m going to make an entry and bit by bit, get all of that shit out. I’m not going to do it in one sitting and frankly, it’s not going to make sense. It’ll be disjointed. It’ll be a shattered mirror that i don’t want to touch, let alone look at but that’s exactly what i’m going to do.

I’m glad to say that was years ago. I have my dignity, my self respect and confidence again. I’m living in a part of the world that is beautiful beyond description and am working on some new goals such as another degree (a BS this time of all things) and am about to begin the process of looking for a home. I have a job that is intense and pays decently (terrible benefits though and no paid time off. No vacation, no holiday pay but thankfully WA passed a law forcing employers to provide sick leave) but is sucking the life out of me. It has no future, no chance of advancement but hundreds of people see what I do and know i’m solid. I’m hoping that between those people and the degree i’m pursuing, a better opportunity will come out of it.

On the other hand, it is winter. Winter in the Pacific Northwest. These are the days and nights that it gets tough. Seemingly endless days of drizzle, rain and the winds from the Fraser Valley. Emerald green ferns and mosses set against endless fields of dead and rotting stalks of grass and days when the idea of a horizon seems and the sun on my skin seems like a distant memory from a different land.

There’s more to say and given enough time, it’ll all come out. Unfortunately it’s a Sunday evening and tomorrow is guaranteed to be difficult and draining day for me. Thankfully I now sleep without 120 stoppages of breathing per hour as I did for the better part of 20 years.

Sigh.

All i wanted to do was move the journal to a different directory. It shouldn’t be hard but apparently it is. I ended up breaking the entire thing.

I wanted to spend more time trying to fix it and i had a pretty good idea of where the problem was. Unfortunately it required skills i don’t have [yet] like how to edit SQL tables through the admin tool.

Continue reading “another beginning”