Riches and Real People

I don't want to be rich.

There. I said it. Even thinking that thought feels somehow blasphemous in this society where lotteries are commonplace and people's characters are often judged by their bank accounts: "to get a loan, you must first prove you don't need one".  But all I have ever wanted -- at least since I grew up -- is enough. I define "enough" as "sufficient to keep me connected, to let me hold up my end of multiple friendships, with something left over to fund occasional breaks from the world".

I don't play the lottery. To me it's a tax on the innumerate. If I did play, and won, I would give a great deal of my winnings away to people less fortunate than I am. But in all honesty I would dread the exercise. How do you decide at what proximity of relationship the money should be cut off? And how much goes to each person without making everyone else feel as if you shortchanged him or her? How many friends will stick by you after you "only" give them $$$$$ when they were hoping for $$$$$$$? The answer is always surprising, and heartbreaking.

I don't trust charities (with a very few exceptions): most of them seem to be in business to perpetuate themselves. You can't tell me, for example, that if we really put our minds to it we couldn't cure cancer. How many billions of dollars have been swallowed up by cancer? How much of it has had any effect? Likewise the disadvantaged both at home and abroad. If we could solve poverty by throwing money at it, Africa would be the richest continent on the planet and Canada's indigenous population would be living in the lap of luxury.

Canadian author Spider Robinson has, to my mind, the best, most positive idea for getting rid of a great deal of extraneous money quickly, legally and karmically. Go to a law school. Find someone who has just missed out on a scholarship. Offer to pay her way through school, plus living expenses, if she will, in return, promise you and your friends and family free legal representation as and if needed. Go to a trade school and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Amass yourself a group of dedicated professionals in any field you and your loved ones might conceivably have need of for the foreseeable future.

That's something I would do. I would leave myself enough money so that Eva and I would never have to work again unless we chose to: but at our age that's not nearly as much money as you'd think, not when our tastes are as simple and inexpensive as they are.

The truth is I don't easily trust expensive tastes. It's hard enough to accept that the level of quality in products has declined such that you must pay out the nose for simple durability now. Let me give you an example.

My current bike.

It's (to my mind) quite expensive, but in reality it's firmly in the lower end of retail prices on bikes. It was one of the cheapest models available, if not THE cheapest,  at Ziggy's Bicycles in downtown Kitchener: a place I had heard good things about.

The bike came with leaky tubes. Both tires. I had three flats in less than three weeks. These flats, Eva and I were told in no uncertain terms, were my fault: I was supposed to check the air pressure every time I got on the bike.

C'mon. Seriously? I used to go three seasons a year never needing more than (maybe) a single top-up in my bicycle tires. I did that for about a quarter century. Now you're telling me that the merchandise you sold me wasn't in fact defective, that the tires on it are so persnickety that I have to baby the fucking things?

We took the bike where I should have gone in the first place: MacPhail's Cycle and Sports. Got the tires replaced, at considerable expense. They've needed air twice in a full year's riding.

The funny thing is, I detailed this story in a Reddit thread asking for a decent bike store in town. The condescension I got in response was incredible. "Ziggy's is for professionals, people who would never go to them to fix something so mundane as a leaky tube. MacPhail's is for amateurs, they're happy to sell you a BSO." (I had to look that up: Bike Shaped Object.)

It's not often I want to slap strangers, even on the internet. I wanted to dislocate this one's nose so he might be able to look way down here and see me.



The biggest reason I don't want to be rich is that I absolutely can't stand what comes, in so many cases, with excess money: pretension.

I abhor pretension more than anything else in this world, I think.
I despise people who believe they are better than me or anyone else simply because of an accident of birth. The very concept of 'royalty' in this day and age makes me ill. I'm willing to concede there are rich people who have worked hard for their money...but not many. Certainly not as many as say they did, which is pretty much all of them. The average minimum wage worker with a work ethic puts in something called "an honest day's labour." That adjective, "honest", is there for a reason. Can you honestly tell me that the CEO of the company, the man (it's usually a man) who makes Mrs. Peon's annual salary by noon on January 2--really works that much harder?

Even the people who have earned every cent and more of their wealth by my admittedly narrow standards--doctors, for instance--receive as their "just" reward admittance into something called "high society"...which is nothing more than an elaborate and ornate excuse to look down your nose at PSOs (people-shaped objects).. i.e., the rest of us.

Here, let's contrast snootery with pootery. Among my circle of friends, if someone lets forth with a gut-ripping fart that proceeds to put everyone in sharp mind of dead cattle, she'll like as not be met with horrified cheers. Transplant that fart into some elegant gathering and...well, Queen Elizabeth I's courtier, the Earl of Oxford, once freed a mud-duck mid-bow to his Sovereign and put himself in exile for seven years. (Upon returning, he was greeted with "my lord, I had forgot the Fart.")

Everybody farts, you know. Rich people, poor people...even the President farts. He farts oval farts. Because of his orifice.... How can something everybody does be shameful? I'll tell you how. If you pretend you don't fart, you're better than those second-class nobodies who do.

Does anybody really like caviar? Be honest, now. How much of the joy of eating caviar derives from the knowledge that most people can't afford to?
That's one pithy example in what, to me, appears to be an entire ecosystem heavily polluted by pretension. I wouldn't last fifteen minutes in it without choking. Give me comfort food in comfortable surroundings with comfortable people, people who are themselves around me and who allow me to be myself around them. People who don't feel the need to list off the credentials of every acquaintance they mention, every time they mention them. "My friend Robert, the director"..."my pal Sharon, who runs a small country in her spare time"...hell, I actually know somebody who will name-drop to the second degree, as if I'm supposed to be impressed he knows somebody rich and famous who knows somebody even richer and famouser. What is that about, anyway? What kind of fundamental insecurity does that speak to? Are you really so much improved by knowing rich people who know richer people? Am *I* improved by learning you know them?

I'm interested in people as people. I'm only interested in what they've done if it sheds a positive light on who they are. Amassing money, in and of itself, doesn't.  I don't give a tinker's damn what you do to pay your bills, much less what your husband or childhood friend or cousin does to pay the employee who pays their bills. This tends to restrict my choice of friends to people roughly at or below my station in life.

Real people, in other words. Not pretend ones.

Easter musings

There's a post going around Facebook -- again -- which looks like this:

I see it every year, shared enthusiastically by rational people who also share an antipathy towards religion.

It's wrong. Wrong several ways, from trifling to fundamental.

The trifling: Ishtar  is pronounced ishtar. MAYBE "eeshtar". Not "Easter".

Ishtar was indeed an Assyrian and Babylonian goddess, a very important one. Her domains were love, sex and war. She and her roles went by different names in different societies in the region over millennia: Inanna, Astarte, and Isis. She makes an appearance in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving great literary work (from which the story of Noah and several other Biblical narratives ultimately derive). Like more than a few gods and goddesses throughout history, she comes off as a real bitch.

Her symbols were the lion, the gate, and a star with eight points. Not rabbits, not eggs. Though both of those things ARE symbols of sex and fertility, celebrated since time out of mind in the spring when the land "resurrects" itself.

The word EASTER, as any dictionary will tell you, comes from Eostre, a Germanic pagan dawn goddess, also known as Ostara. (If you do a survey of different languages' words for Easter, you'll notice that English and German (Ostern) are two anomalies: practically every other European language takes its Easter word from the Hebrew Pesach (Passover) through the Latin Pascha.  This is one of many instances where I feel compelled to remind Christians that Jesus was a Jew. At its roots, Easter was about celebrating Passover.

Constantine didn't have any contact with Germanic pagans and the word Easter would have meant less than nothing to him, since English wouldn't even exist in its absolute earliest form for another two centuries.   So "Easter" wasn't "changed to represent Jesus".

Anyway. It drives me buggy when things are shared on Facebook that look authoritative and are so riddled with errors. That said, the overarching idea behind it should be worth considering, even if it's wrong in almost every particular. Religions beg, borrow, steal and subsume other religions all the time.
______________

Can an atheist be a minister?

This one is. Though maybe not for much longer. The United Church is reviewing her position. According to this, she doesn't have much of a leg to stand on.

Which is really too bad, in a way. Vosper reminds me of Tom Harpur, one of my favourite theologians, who writes in his book, The Pagan Christ:

“Can we say with any authority that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed as a historical person? I have very grave doubts that we can.”... [Jesus is] “in fact a mythical copy of many preceding saviors.”

Another person that springs forcefully to mind considering the case of Gretta Vospar is the Rev. Roger McCombe, or "Uncle Rog", as generations of Ingersoll high schoolers knew him. Now regrettably passed on whatever awaits us all, he and his inclusive, lovingly critical approach to life and learning had a huge impact on me and many, many others.
Rev. McCombe didn't believe in God so much as he believed in gods. And goddesses, and the power of myth. "Myth", he said, echoing Joseph Campbell, is something "that never was, yet always is".  That's my view in a nutshell on religion in general and Christianity in particular, and I think it's more than possible to be an atheist with a healthy respect for the power and uses of myth.  I wonder if Vosper feels the same.

Hmm. I see here a book I should read.

----------

I'm toying once again with joining a church, specifically this one. Whether I will or not is up to several things: work, mostly. Church services don't exactly accommodate night shift workers, and the place is halfway across town. And I'd probably be going alone, which doesn't scare me near as much as it would have as little as a year ago, but does still give me pause.

Why would I do this?  The same reason Vosper values her ministry. Community. I've lived in largely self-imposed exile for quite a while, not considering myself fit for human interaction. That's past, but I'm still searching for connection by any and all means. The only way I'm going to have new experiences is to open myself up to them. At this time of resurrection and rebirth, that's a potent thought to hold.

Happy (hoppy) Easter, everyone.

The Last (Poly) Post

There is a widespread belief among straight people -- older males, especially -- that being gay is all well and good as long as they don't have to look at it. "You don't see straight parades", is the common refrain.
You do, of course, see straight parades. Every day. You don't notice them because they go on beneath the radar. We don't feel the need to support straight people, so the crowds that form around these parades are utterly unaware of them: indeed, they become part of them. Any time a boy hugs a girl or a woman kisses a man in public, that's a float in the Straight Pride parade.

But why is there so much nudity in gay pride parades? You don't see butt-naked straight people walking down the street!

First, let's remember that (contrary to widespread straight opinion) you can't tell who's gay just by looking...unless of course they're doing something gay at the time.  (I'm speaking of course of gay men--we all know that women can grope and smooch their best female friends without anyone thinking twice about their sexuality.)

(And spotting the gay guy isn't near as easy as you'd think...)

Given that, there are two schools of thought on the nudity at Pride parades. One school holds that, since you can't tell who's gay and who isn't, the gay people should make it easy by being as flamboyantly shocking as possible:

"Lois, I'm just warning you, if this movie turns me gay, I'm gonna start bringin' gay guys home. And I don't mean the classy "maybe they are, maybe they're not" gay guys, I mean those big "Oh my God, here they come, floatin' around, makin' noise" gay guys, not the fix up your house gay guys."
--Peter Griffin, Family Guy S5E7

Being gay matters a great deal to proponents of this school of thought. They view themselves as part of a Cause, a Cause that people have died for and continue to die for, and they're going to announce it to the  world, as loudly and proudly as possible. Stark naked? Why not? It's not as if there's anything wrong with being naked.

You think there is, don't you? You think that children should be shielded from nudity. What you don't understand is that you can't shield children from nudity: all they have to do is look down to see it. Maybe you think that nudity is shameful. I find many Christians feel this way. These same Christians will tell you that they were made in the image and likeness of God. If they're ashamed of that likeness, I should think that would be a rather grievous sin.

Hey, as I always say, if God had intended for us to walk around naked, we would have been born that way...

No matter, there's nothing wrong with being naked. Or gay. Or naked AND gay. Or gay AND European (sorry, that song's stuck in my head now).

I have a gay friend who is the headmaster of the other school of thought.  He wouldn't be caught dead at a Pride parade. Not because he's in the closet; not because he's ashamed of being gay; not because he can't acknowledge all the pain and anguish that has gone into making any such thing as a Pride parade necessary in the first place.

No, he won't attend a Pride parade because for him, being gay is inconsequential. It no more merits celebration and pride (or censure and shame) than having red hair or green eyes. He sees no need to shock anyone into dealing with his gayness: he takes it as read that it will be dealt with, and reacts as appropriate to those who can't, or won't accept him.

Some gay people from the other school view his behaviour as ignorant, even treasonous. That doesn't faze him, either. Accept me as I am, he says, whether you are gay or straight. He doesn't draw attention to his sexuality any more than straight people draw attention to theirs, and less than most. His contribution to the Cause is to live his life normally.

It's a huge contribution. I admire him for it.

______________

Being poly is at least a little like being gay.

I don't mean to equate the two: I can't be that crass. As I said above, people are still routinely disinherited, beaten, killed for being gay in many parts of the world. Being poly doesn't compare. I know of evictions and firings and many, many Family and Children's Services investigations (only a few of which have found anything amiss: once you explain the "it takes a village" attitude towards parenting and demonstrate your village is stable, they tend to go away and leave you alone).

But there are several similarities, nonetheless.  I was told it was a phase I was going through. (Hell of a long phase.) There is some debate as to whether polyamory is a choice or not (unlike homosexuality: any people who actually believe being gay is a choice should prove it: just go ahead and choose being gay, say for about a year). The general consensus on poly is that there's a spectrum: some people are hardwired polyamorous, some people are hardwired monogamous, and quite a few people are somewhere in between. Sort of like the Kinsey Scale...except...call it...the Parrot Scale. After Polly the Parrot.
Me, I'm hardwired poly: I've been this way as long as I can remember.

Polyamory is still misunderstood, seen as morally wrong (whose morals?), seen as a threat (to what?).  It's dirty (because people can't seem to get past the sex, and sex is APPLIED nudity: REALLY bad!) And because of all this, many poly folks are in the closet about it with some people, most people, all people outside their polycule. Many others are out and very vocal about it.

You actually see poly people marching in pride parades now. This is from Atlanta, 2013:

(link to relevant article)

and this one is from Antwerp, last year:

(love that slogan: "Love multiplies, not divides")

You're probably wondering what school of thought I fall into when it comes to poly pride. Or, given my advocacy here and on Facebook, you probably think you know.

You WON'T find me marching in a Poly parade any time soon. In fact, I don't plan on any more Breadbin posts on the subject. Some of you may be relieved at that, others disappointed. It doesn't matter.

When I came out, it was all I could do not to turn into a poly blowtorch. I got the tattoo. Everything and anything was actually about polyamory. I wanted to explain every last crook and nanny of it even before I'd explored its near horizons. It's always felt both emotionally and logically right to me, "right" in the sense that a poet would use the word, or an engineer. I wanted everyone to think about polyamory vs. monogamy: by all means choose monogamy, if that is your choice, but make it a CONSCIOUS choice. Don't do it by default, as if it's the only option available.

 My positions in the standard poly debates have never wavered:

• I'm staunchly, VEHEMENTLY, against the one penis policy for the reasons given here: it's sexist as hell and blatantly unfair to boot. 
• I favour non-hierarchical polyamory (and here's where you can see me generating a nice discussion which clarified my thoughts).
• I won't interfere in a committed monogamous relationship. Many poly people have no qualms about doing so, on the very shaky grounds that cheating with somebody isn't the same as cheating on somebody. I feel differently. If I drive the getaway car in a bank robbery, well, sure, I didn't rob the bank myself, but...) Holding this moral high ground can be tough, I won't lie. It's yet another gay parallel: how come all the good ones are straight/monogamous? There are times I wish I didn't have these damned ethics. But if I was to go ahead and break my cardinal rule, I couldn't live with myself afterwards. 

None of this has changed. I still feel just as strongly about all of this as I did two years ago, or twenty years ago. That tat? I'm glad it's there.

But I've said about all I can say over the past nearly two years. At some point, like, oh, about now, it's time to stop talking and start walking. To show all the doubters (I know you're still out there) that this can work...and the best way to do that is to...make it work. 

So I'm shifting gears. I won't deny I'm polyamorous, ever. It'll remain as part of my description both here and on Facebook, and the links to More Than Two and Poly In The News will stay right where they are. Aside from that, though, this should be the last post concerning the topic. From this point on, I'm just me. I'm normal.

Well...I wouldn't quite go THAT far.

Nice Guys And Misplaced Assumptions

You choose your words
Careful voice
In the end I'm not the first choice 
You say you want someone just like me 
So then why am I your plan 
Why am I your plan 
Why am I your plan B?
--Marianas Trench, "The B Team"

So this caught my eye the other day.

I just love it when people share something that's utterly devoid of context and make up their own context so they can judge it, harshly. 

A man named Matt Collins posted the following on Twitter:

OK ladies, I get it.
You don't want a pleasant evening chat.
You don't want a gentleman to walk you to your car.
You don't want a friendly dude to help carry your groceries...or hold open the door...or crush the life out of other men who would do you harm.

Fine -- fear the good guys. I guess we'll just have to suffer watching you get trampled over and over by the SCUM you think you love. 

But I want you to know it's not easy, and it hurts to see you fall. 

Give the good guys a chance to help you be less afraid of the world.

I read that and I cheered. I could have written that myself. I did write something like that myself, many many moons ago.

Then I read the rejoinder and became very, very confused.


Dear Sir, 

If you’re watching some girl you like getting hurt by another guy STOP WHINING ABOUT IT AND DO SOMETHING. Don’t leave some anonymous note on a dorm wall. If you know someone is being hurt DO. SOME. THING. 
 If you want to play the “good guy” you need to rethink your intentions. If you’re only doing it for gratification, then you aren’t being the good guy. Did Batman give up on Gotham because people weren’t thanking him for saving the city? 
 You know what I really want? I want respect. I want people to respect that I’d rather not walk with a stranger in the middle of the night. I want people to respect that I can defend myself. I want people to respect that WOMEN CAN DO THINGS WITHOUT A GENTLEMAN TO HELP. 
 You want to be a gentlemen and a good guy? Start with changing the way you and other men see women. We aren’t fragile things you need to defend. We’re people. Keep holding doors open, keep being friendly, just don’t expect things in return; you aren’t owed anything by this world. 
 If you want us to be less afraid of the world, then change the world, don’t change us.

It's funny, you know. In one sense I agree, emphatically, with every single thing in this response. How could I not? It's all true.

Just (probably) not in the context of this letter.

What's more, the woman writing this takes the SCUM behaviour Collins referred to and projects it on Collins himself. Try a little irony, Alanis, it's good for your blood.

Let's break it down, shall we?

"STOP WHINING ABOUT IT AND DO SOMETHING".

I have two responses to that.

1) Who's to say he hasn't?
2) What would she have him do?

I am a good guy. I'm almost afraid to admit it, now, because apparently "good guy" is code for "self-entitled creepy asshole". This, needless to say, is a revelation to me. I never even suspected it. I thought a good guy was a good guy. Little did I know. Women have shared this all over the web, and with follow-up replies indicating savage agreement: THIS THIS THIS WHY DOESN'T THE 'NICE GUY' JUST FUCK OFF ALREADY.

I can't speak for what Collins has actually done to support his "good guy" credentials. I suspect he has done most, if not all of the things he mentions, with the likely exception of "crush[ing] the life out of men who would do you harm". Good guys don't tend to do that. Usually it's the scum doing that TO the good guys.

Before we go any further, let's differentiate some more between scum and good guy.

Scum: I'm going to rape you until you like it. Then I'm going to dispose of you like the Kleenex you are.
Good guy: I'm the guy you come to after you've been through that. You cry on my shoulder, your feelings of disgust are thoroughly validated, and you walk away seemingly convinced you deserve better...except then you act as if you don't, and here we go round the mulberry bush again.

Scum: treats you like an object.
Good guy: treats you like a person.

Scum: cares about himself and his needs, and will only satisfy yours if it means his will be satisfied in return. Those needs, of course, are primarily sexual. Distressingly common: so common, in fact, that good guys are assumed to be scum who just hide it well.
Good guy: cares about you and your needs to the total exclusion of his own, if necessary (while privately lamenting that it always seems to be necessary). Those needs do have a sexual component--hey, contrary to popular belief, we are in fact human males with functional libidos--but they are primarily emotional. More common than we're led to believe, mostly because women (and other men) insist on assigning to us all the characteristics of scum.

What do "good guys" do when a woman they care about is being hurt? Usually we don't see it. We only get the aftermath. We comfort, we restore, we offer to intercede on your behalf with the scum and we're invariably told not to. So we don't: we just sit back and wait for the next episode.

"If you want to play the "good guy" you need to rethink your intentions."

What intentions are those, and how do you know what they are?
I'll tell you want they AREN'T: we're not looking for a notch on our bedposts. We want the same things you (say you) do: to cherish and be cherished,  to respect and be respected, to admire and be admired, and to love and be loved. We want to share your uppest ups AND your downest downs. And yes, we want to feel like the kind words you say to us -- "why can't other men be more like you?" actually have some substance behind them.

"You know what I really want? I want respect."

With all due, um, respect, many of you have a funny way of showing it. Guys who so plainly DON'T respect women never seem to lack for women...unless the ugly guys also happen to be ugly. I've never understood that. CONVICTED RAPISTS always seem to have women chasing them.  It makes no sense.

I want people to respect that I can defend myself.

We do. We're not offering to walk you home so that we can beat off the muggers (though we will if it comes to that and we do care enough about you to want to see you safely home). We're offering to walk you home for the company. EVEN IF THE COMPANY ENDS AT YOUR FRONT DOOR.

"WOMEN CAN DO THINGS WITHOUT A GENTLEMAN TO HELP"

Where did this even come from, let alone the savagery behind it? Of course you can do things without gentlemen to help. We can do things without women to help, too. Being alone is fine: being not alone is much better. Wouldn't you agree? If you don't, why are you so often seeking out the wrong type of guy?

Start with changing the way you and other men see women.

I wasn't aware there was a problem with the way I see women. Please elaborate. As for other men: I'm open to suggestions. Although, to be frank, I'm not sure what I can do to change their behaviour. I'm sorta kinda of the opinion that scum behaviour is the fault of the scum, not the nice guy, and that it's up to the scum to change...not the nice guy.

But what do I know? I thought being a good guy was a good thing. Naive of me.

Snapshot: Us

Administrivia: I am sorry for the paucity of posts. This has been a crazy month and there's no letup in sight. The details are boring unless you're me -- a guy with a sudden herniated disc and a need for bifocals (with friends and family considerably worse off), making strides at work while dealing with the traditional pre-Easter craziness, and on the good side, lots of visits to and from loved ones to liven up life.

One detail, though, may be of interest to you, and it can be summed up thusly: DON'T GO ON DISABILITY. And if you do have to go on disability, DON'T GO OFF DISABILITY. In fact, it's probably best to just avoid the entire thing.

What's best is not always what's possible. A thing many people don't know about disability benefits is that mental or physical ailments are not sufficient grounds to access them. No, you must be financially disabled as well. They make certain of it. And then going off disability: well, you need to cultivate the attitude of feeling lucky you have a job to go back to, because Eva makes less money working full time than she did not working at all.

Eva is almost through her graduated return-to-work program, and by all accounts is doing just fine. Her days are hard, but she is persevering through them.  Our finances, though, have taken a hit, and they were none too good to begin with.

So we're taking in a tenant.

A friend, really, and it's a win-win situation for all concerned. We're slowly decluttering in preparation (there's a fast way to declutter, but it provokes anxiety even those not prone to anxiety as it is).

Living with other humans is one of those exceedingly rare things of which I can truthfully say I have much more experience than my wife. I've had great housemates (one of my best friends, twice) and terrible housemates and all manner of in-betweeners.
It's an adjustment, to be sure. A robe has been procured, and the cleaning regimen is slowly stepping up in time with the decluttering. I'm pretty laid-back as housemates go: basically, so long as I have my 'morning' time in peace, I'm golden.

That's life in the house with the Breadbin in it. Actual, albeit sporadic, posting to resume shortly.

Core beliefs

"You have no core beliefs?" she asked.

"Sure. A short list, as vague as I can make it, not written down anywhere. Let's see. Kind is better than cruel--I'm sure of that. Loose is better than rigid. Love is better than indifference. So is hate. Laughing is the best. Not laughing will kill you. Alone is okay. Not alone is way better. That's about it...and in my life so far there's not been a single one of them that's always been true."

--Spider Robinson, "Very Bad Deaths"

---------

I used to be strange.

I mean, I still am, but I used to be, too. My strangeness has...evolved somewhat over time, is all. 

Very little of me survives from my teenage years. A few things have come back after disappearing for a while--I was tight-assed with money back then, went through my twenties bleeding money from every pore, and have regained fiscal sanity, for instance--but much of what made me me is irretrievably gone, and good riddance.

Let's see. I used to be a homophobe. I used to be prissy to the point of immediately and greatly distancing myself from people who did drugs, even if they never did drugs around me. Tattoos were for criminals. My politics were conservative, if not always Conservative. And anyone who thought different from me wasn't just suspect, he was obviously and patently guilty. Changing my mind was improbable, nearly impossible.

Now? I'm as committed a straight ally as you'll find. I know and love many people who do drugs, and don't hold it against them any more than they hold my near-total temperance against me. Nothing so much against the drugs themselves, either: it's just that both intoxicants I have tried had the effect of removing my sense of self control. I did not find that sensation pleasurable. Many do, and that's okay.

I have two tattoos and haven't ruled out getting more. My politics are liberal and getting liberaller and liberaller the older I get. And everybody thinks different from me or they'd be me and not them. I'm a husband: I'm therefore habitually wrong and MUST change my mind, frequently.

My stepdad used to level more than a few criticisms at me, most of them entirely justified. The two most common were contradictory, but both true to seven decimal places. I was a rigid black-and-white thinker; I didn't stand for anything.

Confusing? Only until you understand that the one thing I did stand for, absolutely and unequivocally, was non-confrontation. And that, friends and neighbours, hasn't changed.

There are people who seem to relish confrontation. One of them is running for President of the United States as I write this. I distrust such people, even as I understand their façade: for most people, 

bellowing and bullying is simply an attempt to mask insecurity. For a select few--around one percent of the population--this is not the case. Such people are called sociopaths, and they scare the ever-loving shit out of me. 

I hate confrontation. Hate is actually far too gentle a word for how I feel about it. Most anger is so...pointless. It's an ego defence for people who have too much invested in their ego. And it hurts. It hurts a lot. Scream at me and I'll want to clap my hands over my ears, not to block out the noise but to try to block out the pain. 

It took me a long time before I came to realize that my perception of negative emotions is somewhat unique. Most people, I am given to understand, don't feel other people's negative emotions quite the way I do. 

How to explain it? I float my boat on an ocean of emotion. If that ocean becomes turbulent, I get seasick. The seasickness takes different forms depending on the nature of the storm. Being around intense mental pain makes me want to vomit, while anger and fear (which are closely related) cause diarrhea.  My own emotions contribute--they're akin to my rocking my boat. Which is why I expend a great deal of effort trying to remain calm, and avoiding confrontation if it can be at all avoided. In an argument, I will try my damnedest to simply state my views as calmly as I can, and concede (publicly) to others if that tactic fails (it usually does). 

Now, there is an odd effect to all this. If you absolutely force me into a confrontation I will hate you for it, and that compounded hatred (of you and of the situation) is a more potent force than you'd ever expect to come out of the likes of me. It causes people to back off, fast. It causes me to become violently ill shortly thereafter, but people don't usually see that.

I'm not sure I could ever strike, much less kill, another human being. Only in defence of someone I love would I do such a thing, and yes, the hatred of being put into such a position would compound and explode in predictably unpredictable ways. But I imagine I'm far more likely to die than kill, defending someone I love. I have had many dreams in which that happens: the person I'm dying for is often different. Usually I'm shot; occasionally I'm knifed.

Now you know why I strive so mightily for inner calm. It's entirely selfish: there's enough turbulence around me without my adding to it.

Because of all this, I believe that cruelty begets cruelty, that "war never determines who's right, only who's left".

I believe that it is normal to love many people at once; that loving one person does not diminish love for another. To me this is self-evident, not just from my own experience but from reality I have observed over decades. Most people believe otherwise. I'll never understand why--it's like saying that 2 plus 2 is only 2.2--but so long as they are happy, it's not my place to question them. 

I believe that everyone is the heroine of her own story, and further, that her story is unknowable to most of the world. Nobody sets out to be evil: all the evil in the world can be chalked up to selfishness and shortsightedness and narrow perspectives. Even those sociopaths simply do what pleases them, without a care in the world for anyone else. We've all been guilty of that on occasion; they just do it by inclination.

I believe there's something that persists after death. I have no idea what it might be and I don't believe you do either. 

As far as core beliefs go, that's about it..and in my life so far there's never been a single one of them that's always been true.

Confrontation, as awful as I find it, is sometimes inevitable and even desirable, right on up into war, which should only be engaged in to stop a greater horror. (What is a greater horror? Ah, therein lies the rub.)  Some people really don't understand consequence, not out of malice, but because they haven't been adequately taught about it. Some people certainly act as if their love is limited, and that's okay. There may well be nothing after we die but dust: I can't know that either and (well, sorry) neither can you...at least for now.

There is one thing I don't just believe, I am certain of: my way is not a better way; my way is merely another way. 

Living Around Anxiety

I am not qualified to speak on living with anxiety. Although I am something of a worry wort, worrying about things isn't the same as generalized anxiety disorder any more than being down in the dumps is like clinical depression. But I'm well versed at this point in living around anxiety, and I'd like to share with you what I've learned.

I've learned that this is hard. Not near as hard as living WITH the disorder, of course, but hard, nonetheless. It's especially difficult when generalized becomes specific: when YOU'RE stressed, yourself. Just imagine: if you feel like this, HE's feeling ten times worse most of the time, and there's no on/off switch you can toggle.

I've learned some tips. I'll start with the nevers.

Never tell someone having a panic attack to calm down. If she could do that, she would, believe me. Likewise, never ask why he's crying. Odds are pretty good that he doesn't know, and if he does, his answer won't be anything helpful.

Generalized anxiety is just that: generalized. In its mildest form, you're uneasy about, well, everything, or close to everything. Further on up the spectrum, you can be reduced to a quivering ball of rage and fear for no apparent reason. If you are the sort of person who relishes control, especially self-control, the mere fact you seem to have lost that control feeds your anxiety exponentially. If, further, you are the sort of person who was raised to believe weakness is some kind of filthy sin, that's another way for anxiety to feed on itself. 

Never minimize the anxiety. All that does is call attention to how "wrong" she is for feeling panicky. That said, it's not productive to join in the "oh, dear" games, either. Allow anxiety to be felt, but don't feed it yourself, if you can help it. This is a tricky, tricky balancing act that you're bound to get wrong the first few dozen times you try.

Don't withdraw, even if you feel useless (and if you're a man, you will). Your mere presence is a calming agent: take that away, and she'll just be anxious and alone and anxious about being alone.

Don't walk on eggshells. That tells the anxiety sufferer that there is indeed something to be terrified of. Also that you think he's made of rice paper, which is just one more thing to batter at his self-esteem.

_______


DO encourage healthy living, ideally together. Don't nag about it, but do encourage it. Exercise, dietary improvements, cutting out caffeine (that's a big one: it provokes panic attacks)--all those tips for a good life that you know in your head but refuse to take to heart because exercise is painful and there's no such thing as good-for-you food that tastes good...doesn't matter. Do it anyway.

Really work on your own mindfulness. You're going for a Zen state: failing that, at least aim for stoicism for yourself. When the shit hits the fan, try to remember above all else that shit washes off, and get scrubbing. If you still feel anxious, by all means express that--but make it crystal clear you're directing it at the situation, not the sufferer.

Do gentle reminders: it's time to take your medication, it's time to eat, it's time for something else that's part of your daily routine. The anxiety sufferer very easily becomes completely dissociated from time. Five minutes can seem like five hours in the grip of a panic attack, and five hours can seem like five minutes of low-grade toxicity.

Love unconditionally. I'd say just "love", but most people don't understand that conditional love isn't actually love at all.

This won't save you from seeing tears (or maybe even shedding them)...but that's okay. The funny thing is this is all good advice for life without anxiety in it.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Man: I want happiness.
Buddha: First remove 'I'...that is ego. Then remove 'want'...that is desire. All that remains is happiness.


You get up, you go to work, you come home, you eat dinner, and you go to bed. There has to be more to life than paying bills until you die, right?

Of course there is. There hasn't exactly been a shortage of people telling us as much, over the millennia. Not just the heavy hitters, Buddha and Jesus and Muhammed and such, but the myriad people who have also embraced their true selves and brightened the world in so doing.

I've been blessed to come across many such people in my short time of limited awareness...people who make a difference, lights unto the world ("enlightened" would be a fair description), souls that have touched and enriched mine and many others besides. I know...I don't believe, I know...that I will discover many more. I strive and struggle to be one of them myself.

I've read a fair number of 'spiritual' books since I was a young adult. Some have stuck with me to the point that I quote them in my mind and on the page with some frequency: Neale Donald Walsch's ...With God series is probably the most prominent of those. Others merely brushed my awareness and didn't leave a lasting impression. Regardless, many of the truths in them are merely different expressions of the same Truth, just as most religions, at heart, are the same.
It's blasphemous in nearly every one to suggest as much, of course. God forbid (ha-ha) that someone else might have a valid path to enlightenment.

My metamour Mark lent me a book he said had a profound effect on his spirituality: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach. I'd heard of the book, but only barely. For some reason I thought it was a five hundred page doorstopper. It isn't. It's actually only 37 pages long, with large print and wide top and bottom margins. The edition I read was fleshed out to 112 pages with many pictures of gulls flying. I read it in about half an hour.

That was a profitable half an hour.

You may know the story: Jonathan Livingston Seagull yearns to fly. To fly free of his Flock, free of their endless preoccupation with scavenging for food, to fly just because flight, for him, is his highest expression. He's ridiculed by his peers for endlessly refining his flight technique, seeking greater speed, agility and control. Upon breaking the seagull speed record, he's banished from his Flock for 'reckless irresponsibility, violating the dignity and tradition of the Gull Family'. Cast out to the Far Cliffs, his spiritual awakening and subsequent journey truly begins, and eventually leads him full circle and Beyond.

The book spent 38 weeks at #1 and broke all hardcover sales records. It spawned a feature-length movie (critically panned, albeit with a Grammy-winning soundtrack voiced by Neil Diamond). It's also generated, like most things spiritual, its fair share of vitriolic misreadings. (This linked review perverts nearly every core message of the book, and indeed stands as a perfect example of the kind of contempt the desire to elevate yourself and those around you is held in.)

Seagull's messages resonated with me. I have long believed in 'power with, not power over', and that true enlightenment is revealed in enlightening others. And as an outsider to many of the world's games, for good or ill, I've certainly the "price of misunderstanding" that Jonathan alludes to: "they call you devil or they call you god".

They liked the practice, because...it fed a hunger for learning that grew with every lesson. But not a one of them...had come to believe that the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as the flight of wind and feather. 
--Jonathan Livingston Seagull, p. 76

That's why spirituality doesn't seem to catch hold: because many of us, even its devoted students, often find ourselves questioning, wondering if there's any real value in such esoteric, impractical teachings. After all, our world places a premium on practicality. Love thy neighbour is all well and good, but it doesn't pay the bills, does it?

No, it doesn't. But that's not what it's for, and the practical-minded people need to understand this.

We as humans are cursed with binary thinking: 'either/or' rather than 'both/and'. That binary thinking has infected our world to an alarming degree. If you're not religious, you must be an atheist; if you're not with us, you're against us; if you're not this, you must be that.

There's a passage in Conversations with God (pdf) in which the author is asking "God" if various kinds of sex are okay in God's eyes. (It's important to note that this series repeatedly tells the reader NOT to blindly believe in it, but to simply accept OR reject what it has to say on a sentence by sentence basis. "Either way, you'll have arrived at your Truth".) Also note that the 'God' in this series often mixmasters up pronouns and descriptions of Itself in order to break you free of imagining God in one (male) role.

Here's the response:

First, let’s be once again clear that nothing is disapproved of by God. I do not sit here in judgment, calling one action Good and another Evil...
Now—within the context of what serves you, or disserves you, on your Path of Evolution, only you can decide that.
There is a broad-based guideline, however, upon which most evolved souls have agreed. No action which causes hurt to another leads to rapid evolution. 
There is a second guideline as well. No action involving another may be taken without the other’s agreement and permission. 
Now let us consider the questions you’ve just asked within the context of these guidelines.
 “Kinky” sex? Well, if it hurts no one, and is done with everyone’s permission, what reason would anyone have to call it “wrong”?  Loveless sex? ... Let me just say this: Loveless anything is not the fastest way to the Goddess. Whether it’s loveless sex or loveless spaghetti and meat balls, if you’ve prepared the feast and are consuming it without love, you’re missing the most extraordinary part of the experience.
Is it wrong to miss that? Here again, “wrong” may not be the operative word. “Disadvantageous” would be closer, given that you desire to evolve into a higher spiritual being as rapidly as you can.
--Neale Donald Walsch, CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD, BOOK 1

It's not about EITHER being spiritual OR practical. It's about infusing your practicality (and everything else in your life) WITH spirituality. It's about approaching everything from, and with, love. What form that love takes is up to you. It could be, as it was for Jonathan Seagull and a few exceptional souls in my experience, teaching. It could be massage. It could indeed be sex. It could be almost anything, so long as it comes from your highest expression of Who You are.

I'm still seeking that highest expression. I may never find it, but at least I'll never stop searching.

"There's only us
there's only this
Forget regret
or life is yours to miss...
No other path
No other way
No day but today"
Jonathan (Larson, not Livingston) -- RENT, the musical

Love: A Biography In Verse

I’ve always loved too easily, too many, more than two

And I refuse to say it’s her I love, not you, or you.

I love you all, no matter what. An ‘us’ there’ll always be—

I love you ‘cause you’re loveable. Is that so hard to see? 

Remember back in days of yore— high school, eleventh grade,

That girl I’d blithely kill for, if she asked me, if she made

just one small step towards me? I was mincemeat in her pie

She never did. Almost, not quite. She knew it, so did I.

I played along, I had no choice. She had me in her thrall.

I’d take a scrap of love from her, or anything at all.

She cornered me and took my hand and spoke. “Here’s where it’s at:

“There’ll never be an ‘us’,” she said. “I don’t love you like that.”

Fast forward several years to university and lust

I’d lay anything with half a chance. I’d even lay the dust.

But laying close brings love for me, that’s always been the case…

Love wasn’t in the cards for us, she said. She needed space.

I gave her space, I gave her time. I loved her from afar.

And then one day I went to her, and asked her how things are.

She held me oh so tenderly, and then she said it straight:

“There’ll never be an ‘us’,” she said. “But wow, the sex was great.”

And then I met the woman I would marry and I learned

just how it felt to reap reward of love that I had earned.

I’d never felt the like before. Not sure I ever will. 

It’s been seventeen years now and it feels so early still. 

Like anyone, we’ve had our ups. We’ve had our downs as well.

But through it all we’ve had each other: still do, you can tell. 

We know we’ll be together up until and through the end:

“There’ll always be an ‘us’”, she says. “On that you can depend.”

So this is where a rhyme like this should end, or so it’s said.

But love, it doesn’t work that way, in either heart or head.

We always knew that one day someone else would come along

And maybe someone else again. Or maybe a whole throng.

It took a lot of years for me to finally make her see

She was so lovely that others would love her, not just me.

But once she grasped that fact of life, she eagerly took part:

There’ll always be a ‘them’, I see. And that gladdens my heart.

And me? I fell as quickly. I went right head over heels.

Nothing is quite like knowing that you’re free to feel your feels.

She had a man already, but her love was much like mine

We seemed like kindred spirits. It could only be a sign. 

They say that hindsight’s perfect. I wish foresight could be, too.

I shouldn’t have been blinded, should have known before she knew.

I didn’t. I was shocked and deeply hurt to hear her say:

“There’ll never be an ‘us’, you know. I got carried away.”

My heart had not been broken in so very many years.

It used to be a normal state, the heartbreak and the tears.

But after far too long I found my feet and walked away

And set upon a different path, embraced it, come what may.

What came had been there for some time, and growing more and more.

So strange to realize love exists where like had been before.

What’s more, I think she felt it too, at least to a degree

But what is, is, what’s not is not, and this could never be.

I know this. I accept it. Well, the most I feel is wist.

I’ve never hugged her properly, for sure we’ve never kissed.

But I felt a sort of COMFORT when I heard her say this line:

“There’ll never be an ‘us’”, she said. “We didn’t meet in time.”

There are so many others I could mention, but will not.

So many people that I love, so much love that I've got.

What can I say? You're lovely, every one of you. It's true.

And that is why I love you--also you and you, and you.

So here I am beside my darling wife and metamour, 

Sensing a new beginning, but not knowing what’s in store.

“There’ll ALWAYS be an ‘us’, I say. “And I stand here, indicted

of loving all of you although my love is not requited.”

“It’s what I have, it’s what I do, it’s what I am, you see—

I love you ‘cause you’re loveable. You mean the world to me.

There are so many of you, more than half the stars above:

There’ll always be an ‘us’, you know. Because that’s how I love.”

To my readers:

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." --Ernest Hemingway

Dear Readers,

The Breadbin turns 12 this year. Twelve years, coming up on  1600 posts, well over a million words. Definitely a few clunkers in there, as well as some ancient entries of which I am not proud. (I advocated for STEPHEN HARPER. More than once. Dear God.)  A fair bit of repetitious repetition: whenever I've repeated a theme, I've tried to write in wider and wider spirals, covering at least a little new ground each time.

There's a lot of good writing in here, if I do say so myself. I've bared my soul to the world, warts and all; covered a wide variety of topics, some requiring (ugh) entirely too much research; tried to make you laugh, cry, and think.

My end goal is to make a living off my writing. That is wildly optimistic of me. I'm not putting myself down in saying so: A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the people who consider themselves writers earn enough money to write full time. But writing is place-proof and age-proof: so long as I have the mental acuity and a means to put words to screen or paper, I can write. Past retirement. I picture myself writing a quick post on the day I die. I hope that can happen. I really do.

I believe I have the talent to supplement my income, at the very least. That well over a million words I've written over the past twelve years? I've done it for free.

Maybe free is what they're worth. Maybe not. I've never had the opportunity to find out.

Enter Patreon. Patreon is sort of like Kickstarter or GoFundMe, except instead of a single (hopefully large) crowdsourced donation, it allows for a small recurring one. It's entirely voluntary: you'll still be able to read my blog for free. But if you choose to, you can donate an amount you set per post, to a maximum of an amount you set per month...as little as a dollar a month to as much as you want.

I want to make it clear that none of you are under any obligation. I'd also like to make it clear (if it wasn't already) that I'm willing to write on just about any topic: you can PM me on Facebook or leave suggestions as comments here.  This blog is my blog, but it's also your blog.

Thank you for reading. I'll be going live with Patreon in the next few weeks.

--Ken

It Bothers Me.

This is going to be a challenge to write, on several levels.

One, I find the subject matter repulsive in the extreme. As I hope I made clear in my last post, BDSM is so far out of my comfort zone that I actually recoil whenever it comes up. I can intellectually grasp the appeal of bondage, sort of, but anything involving pain or humiliation mystifies and horrifies me. In any other context, deliberately causing pain to another human being is inhuman and monstrous, and deliberately courting it is proof of extremely low self-esteem at the very least. But in the most intimate of contexts, it's "just another way to love".  I'm not sure I can express just how much this bothers me.

Two, and related, I have no idea what I'm talking about. There must be a lure to BDSM, and a powerful one: otherwise  Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn't be the top-selling book written for adults in all of history.  (Gag...literally.) What that appeal is, I can't even fathom, and I freely admit I don't want to fathom...but I simply have to accept that for every man who fantasizes about  hurting a woman, there seems to be a woman out there fantasizing about being hurt.

Three, it's controversial, and therefore no matter what I say, I'm going to unwittingly offend someone. It seems I can barely open my mouth or flex my fingers without pissing somebody off. I know I'm not supposed to care about that...but I do. Since the world has lost its sense of nuance at some point when my back was turned, and it took mine with it, writing about topics like this is like walking through a minefield on stilts while juggling swords and flamethrowers. I just did it up there myself: I'm sure women don't want to be hurt, exactly...nuance, nuance...pain in the service of sex seems to exist in some alternate universe where "hurt" ceases to have meaning.

Until it doesn't: that's when charges and courts ensue.

__________

Jian Ghomeshi. Guilty or not guilty?

We won't know until March 24...which hasn't stopped people from declaring either way.

I've watched this trial with a kind of creeping horror, not just because of the subject matter, but because the legal process has been so...cringeworthy in this case.  Three women, each utterly shredded by Ghomeshi's lawyer, in a viciously public way that had to be at least as traumatizing as any alleged assault. Marie Heinein, "the most sought-after trial lawyer in the city" according to Toronto Life, once had this to say about her profession:

"As criminal lawyers we represent people who have committed heinous acts. Acts of violence. Acts of depravity. Acts of cruelty. Or as Jian Ghomeshi likes to call it, foreplay."

--which just goes to show that lawyers believe what they're paid to believe.

Heinein has, as I said, completely destroyed both the reliability and the credibility of each of the three complainants--which doesn't mean Ghomeshi is innocent, but it sure does raise reasonable doubt in the eyes of many legal professionals.  And that makes me ill. Yes, you're supposed to judge these cases strictly on the evidence that's presented, but...

I mean, come on, it's a matter of public record that he cracked a woman's rib. He actually admitted as much by SHOWING A VIDEO OF THE INJURY to his bosses at the CBC, which led to his termination. There have been TWENTY THREE women who have come forward with allegations of assault. Twenty of them are irrelevant as far as this trial is concerned: again, strictly legally speaking, this is understandable, but  emotionally it makes me want to scream. Or weep.

(I was accused of making that cracked rib up. I didn't. People have crappy memories, it seems.)

A woman named Karen Logan (or what I can't help but think might have been a man using her account) posted this in response to my skepticism about Ghomeshi's innocence:

"Injuries are common and death is not unheard of in BDSM sex. That doesnt make him a criminal. I leave that up to the judge to decide. Also....out of all the women accusers...these ones were the best the prosecution could come up with. It was unfortunate they didnt tell the police and crown everything. It would have never made it to court. Not my opinion but expert opinion"

The fact each woman had repeated contact with Ghomeshi shortly after the alleged assaults is not in and of itself damning to their cases. Case law recognizes that this is irrelevant. The fact none of them chose to mention that contact to investigators, each claiming amnesia about it until it came up in court (how convenient)...that's quite likely fatal.

All the same: I can understand why you wouldn't choose to publicize the fact you wrote a letter extolling the virtues of the hands that just choked you, or saying this:

"You kicked my ass last night and that makes me want to fuck your brains out. Tonight.”

Flowers. Loving emails. All three women (and probably many more) exhibited this behaviour, to varying degrees, after saying they were assaulted. In DeCoutere's case, above,  the "love-bombing" went on for months.

 It looks bad. It looks very bad. I've been told by a woman that it isn't bad, it's common for victims of abuse to act this way. I can see it in the case of wives married to monsters: you're manipulated, over years, into believing you deserve nothing but abuse, in a sick way actually craving it: but these relationships weren't marriages. They barely qualified as dalliances.

Nevertheless, it happens. Apparently quite often.

Were his victims coerced into acting this way? Jesse Brown thinks so. An anonymous source provides him with a chilling account of Ghomeshi's M.O. before, during, and after dates, a scheme geared around manufacturing the illusion of consent. (Lost in this is that you cannot consent to physical injury in Canadian law).

None of this came up in court. If any of it is true, that fact puzzles me mightily. One thing the Crown got right in this case: it's about Ghomeshi, not the women he allegedly assaulted. But Heinein made the trial ALL about those women. I would fully expect at least one of them to blurt out "he made me do this". None of them did. What does that mean? That it's not legally true. Which may have little or nothing to do with its factual truthfulness.

Damnit, this is hard.

Let's for just a moment discard our preconceptions and assume Ghomeshi is exactly, and only, what he says he is: a man who likes to engage in rough sex with willing women.  Even if that's the case, he was doing it all wrong. Even I, as totally ignorant as I am, know there's an intricate dance of consent involved...and not consent by duress, either. A safe word needs to be established, or a safe gesture if a gag of any kind is involved. Aftercare is critical. There is no one so contrite as a top who has just upset a bottom in a dominance/submission scene: the sub actually has all the power. (That alone took me years to fully grasp.) Ghomeshi, according to those who knew him, faked some of this and ignored the rest. Add in decades of anecdotes about creepy-stalkery behaviour (none of which is admissible in court), and it's hard to understand why he could very well walk away from all this. If that happens, he might even sue. Imagine that.

If nothing else, I can certainly understand now why victims of sexual assault do not report. It's the one crime in which the victim is put on trial.

"If you're raped, don't charge the bastard with rape. Charge him with indecent exposure. It is much easier to get a conviction for that charge than for rape. The defence is not allowed to ask anything about your sexual history or how you were dressed at the time. Forensic evidence is unnecessary. The total public embarrassment to you is cut more than in half. What's the guy going to do, leap up in court and say, 'It's a filthy lie, Your Honour, I raped that bitch'? In many states, a man convicted of indecent exposure will actually draw more prison time than a rapist. And weenie-waggers do harder time than anybody but a short-eyes -- in fact, the scheme sort of incorporates the Law of Talion. An eye for an eye..." 
--Spider Robinson, "Lady Slings The Booze"

But there's yet another side to this. Ought we simply to, as the hashtag had it, #BelieveHer, no matter what she says about what happened? That would be at least as much a travesty of justice as a guilty man getting off scot-free. It makes consent impossible to obtain for certain. In the absence of physical evidence, how do I prove I never raped someone? I can't prove a negative. A mere allegation of rape or any other kind of sexual assault would ruin my life--which is why I don't hug people near as often as I'd like to. A hug from me is a very strong declaration of trust in you.

I want to be sensitive to victims of assault and rape, at the same time cognizant that sometimes women come up with false allegations. Determining the truth of the matter is much more difficult than it seems. In this case, I've made my mind up: I've heard too many stories about the disconnect between Ghomeshi's charming, liberal, feminism-espousing aura on the radio and his actual behaviour with women. But none of those stories are under consideration here.

It bothers me. It bothers me a LOT.

Love and Marriage (and Sex!)

NSFW post. Adult themes up the ying-yang, graphic language, probably a trigger or two, reader discretion is advised, etc.

"Hardon You"

I know my constant horniness gets hardon you
Sometimes it seems I'm always in the mood
If that is so, I truly beg your pardon, too
It wasn't my intention to be rude
My love is like my horniness, in that it never quits
But I'd love you if you didn't have those tits

Men have only got the one thing on their mind
It gets so repetitious it's a crime
Somebody said a hard man is good to find
As long as you don't find him every goddamn time
You are not only something that I lust for, that I hunt
I would love you if you didn't have a cunt

I'm neurotically erotic, with a taste for the exotic
And your body is hypnotic when it's next to me
I'm dementedly attentive, and in need of no incentive
But you know you represent much more than sex to me. . . 

You know that I was horny for you from the start
And that's the way it's always gonna be
But you ought to know your sexiness is just a part
of the value you will always have for me
It may have been what caught my eye, it ISN'T why I stick
I would love you if I didn't have a dick.

--words and music by Spider Robinson

Want to get a bunch of people you have never met and will never meet really pissed at you? Dare to tell them the obvious: there's more to love and marriage than sex.

To me, this is a statement so self-evident that it shouldn't require a word of explanation or clarification. But I have found over time that it's precisely those unquestioned axiomatic assertions that trip you up. Say online, for instance, that sexual attraction is NOT a prerequisite for love any more than the other way around and holy shit. I mean I had a hundred people downvote me in fifteen minutes and some freakishly nasty comments. Nothing I haven't seen before, nothing that even rattles me, but nasty, nonetheless.

I could just walk away from it. These are nobodies hiding behind screens. Give a hundred monkeys keyboards and in short order they'll be flinging shit around online, right?  But since shit washes off, I figure I may as well try to engage them. A little. If I get through to one monkey and elevate his consciousness a wee bit, I'll have done something productive with my day.

And so. I explained how love and sex work for me. And I hope to Christ there was one silent monkey in the crowd who got it, because the cacophony and renewed shit-flinging fair drowned me out. THAT was when I walked away, head held high...but having taken note of the distinctive flavour of shit.

I'm rambling, and I haven't even started yet. Great.

I have a low libido by male standards. It's by no means nonexistent: there are days when I could cheerfully fuck a beehive. But it is and always has been subject to wild swings. My antidepressant has made the lows even lower and the spikes less frequent (still there, but once a month instead of once a week). This is, I gather, supposed to bother me as a male, because my self-worth is supposed to be all tied up in the sex I'm having *coughbullshitcough*.

It doesn't bother me much. Oh, I'd be a liar if I said I was completely unfazed, but if I have any reservations about sex, they tend to revolve around my perceived inadequacies, the ones hard-wired into my personality.

I think it's because I never had a sibling.

Screaming left turn there. Hang on, folks. *smile*

Seriously, though. I watched my nieces frolic around the house yesterday. They bring such joy wherever they go, but they're typical sisters: even at not-quite four and one, you can see at a glance how much they love each other...and hate each other.

Because that's what siblings do, right? I love you so much, you are my PERSONAL punching bag. Anybody else punches you, I kill them. Punches from me are love taps.

I never got that love-hate thing. Still don't, at all. My twin died when he was two days old and I grew up an only child. Love is love and hate is hate and the two things can't be further apart on the emotional spectrum for me.

This has had profound implications on the kind of lover I am. My love is completely devoid of anything that might require a pinch of hate as an ingredient. I can't do power trips. I can't degrade--even if it's something I've convinced myself is degrading and my partner disagrees. I can't talk dirty, I feel like a fool if I do and nothing kills a boner faster than embarrassed laughter. My top speed is barely out of second gear: as soon as I hit third I leak transmission oil everywhere. Get me on one of those fuck-a-beehive days and I'll leak transmission oil if you pop me out of park. You people who can tear around the track for five hundred miles, redlining all the way...how do you do that? I'm in awe, man. Seriously.

Ven vee are havink ze sex, is to try to pretend vee are someone else, says the sex therapist who lives in my head.
Why would I do that? (I talk back to the voices in my head. Don't you?)
Because zen vee could experience all ze Hollywood sexy things. Vee could do angry passion. Vee could be rough. Vee could zay thinks like "fuck me, bitch". 
But none of zat...excuse me, none of THAT... is sexy, I say. And if I'm pretending to be someone else, I'm not me. If I'm not me, why not just let her go be with someone else who has that soupçon of hate that lets them be not so fucking boring? Or boring fucking, I mean?
No, no, vee can't do that! the therapist says. If vee do, then it means vee are not goot enuf--
Oh, go fuck yourself, Freud, and that's the end of that until the next time I see a movie where Mr. Alpha Sixpack Stamina is dominating the screen/wench beneath him and said wench is deep in Planet Orgasm. ASS always has the same look on his face, like sex is a matter of life and death, a test he must pass, and the woman is just the paper for him to spread his ink on.

These aren't porn movies, by the way. This is standard Hollywood fare. I can barely watch porn because of how utterly degrading it almost always is. Where's the porn where they cuddle and go slow and kiss everything that quivers, even a little? Show me porn where the woman is ravished and worshipped and lovingly sipped instead of jackhammered and whee! libido problem goes bye-bye. Does that porn exist?

I am good at what I do, or so I have been told, occasionally by people who are out of breath at the time. (Stroke that ego and watch it grow, but for god's sakes don't put it in third gear or there'll be a mess.)  It's just that what I do is not the full scope of Things That Are Done.

We happen to live a life that makes allowances for this. People assume that it's why we practice ethical nonmonogamy, because sometimes she just wants to ride shotgun in the Indy 500. Nice fringe benefit, to be sure, but not even close to why.

See, bring up polyamory in the context of sex and you must be a cuckold, a guy who gets off on the idea of his wife being with other men. I'm the furthest thing from that. That stuff is private. I couldn't tell you about it if I wanted to, because I don't know it, any of it, and don't care to know it any more than you do. Am I happy she's happy? Of course. Do I get some kind of sexual thrill out of it? Really, really, really not. The same thing will operate in reverse should I find another partner and become sexual: what happens in the bedroom stays there. Compersion--joy at another's joy that had nothing to do with you--does not have to have a sexual component.

In truth, neither does marriage. Ours does (and that's the sum total of information you're going to get about that)...but "I'd love her if I didn't have a dick". There are lots of married people on the asexual spectrum, as well as men who are "impotent" and women who are "frigid"--would you get a load of the heaping helping of judgment loading down both those words? As if whether or not a man can have sex has something to do with his potency. As if a woman who does not have sex can't possibly be warm and loving. As if.

There are lots of good reasons to get married. Passion is one of them: in a passionless marriage you are housemates and little more. It's not everything. It's not even most of the things.

 Sex may be very important to you, and that's fine. You may regard it as the glue that holds your relationship together, and if you both agree on that, who am I to say otherwise? But consider: even the horniest couple can only spend a tiny fraction of their lives fucking. I would think there's got to be something more, something stronger, that keeps you together other than ugly-bumping. Call it...call it love.

There are people who view sex as a pastime. They don't remember the names and faces of their partners, and don't care to. I accept this...but I find it sad. Sex as sport is all well and good (and I sure don't remember all the people I've played hockey with), but for me there's so much more there. It's about deep connections, for me.  I don't understand how you can connect to someone on such a fundamental level and then...just...move on.

It sometimes feels as if I am alone among men in that sex and love are inextricably linked for me. I've met more than a few women for whom sex need not involve any amount of love, too. It all goes back to that love-hate thing, the power dynamic in which I would much rather yield than wield the power. Sex without love feels much worse than, say, masturbation. (I mean, I love myself...at least a little!) It feels, again to me, as if "any hole will do" and the person attached to the hole is an afterthought, if she's a thought at all. I recognize there are probably nuances to this I don't get, but since I don't get them, I don't know how to overcome them.


I fall in love with people from the inside out: always have, always will. That hole? It happens last.

-------------

Next post is going to be a continuation of this one, on a topic I'm incredibly unqualified to pontificate about. It'll be about a man who does have that pinch (and slap, and choke) of hatred in him.

It'll be about Jian Ghomeshi.

The Need To Explain

A dear friend of Eva's--which makes her a dear friend of mine--sent this to me the other day:



I have to admit, I stared at it for a while, not entirely sure what to make of it. Many of those things are personal bugaboos of mine, little insecurity traps. I feel some pretty intense guilt over one of them, defiance over a couple of others, and I probably spend far too much time thinking about almost all of those things as a group.

Check that, all of them.

This is supposed to be a liberating poster, something to take to heart. I'm supposed to let go of the need to justify each of these things, because they're none of anybody's business.



And yet I still looked at that first poster and thought, she's telling me to shut up about all of this stuff.

Apparently I still care too much about what others think.

I don't have to explain any of this...except sometimes to myself. And in doing so, you, dear reader, get to ride shotgun. Ready?


1) One of the biggest regrets, if not the biggest regret of my entire life is my having taken the wrong degree. Not so much my dropping out--I don't think I would have dropped out at all had I taken something a little more...relevant than Honours English, Language and Literature (abbreviated as you'd expect). I took English because it seemed to be the path of least resistance, and because I loved stories. Or at least that's the story I tell myself.

What I should have done was mapped out a career goal and followed a path straight to it. What career? Given my proclivities and my idealism, three spring to mind: politics, law, or psychology. Those are three places where I'd have made a tangible difference. Probably not electoral politics--I doubt I could get myself elected to anything--but the elected people are just figureheads anyway. Law: I have a very strong interest in the interplay between justice and mercy, and it would be a source of unending joy to fight for both of those things.  Psychology is obvious, when it seems like every person with a crisis homes right in on me (and I love the feeling I get when that crisis is averted or overcome)...but I'm not as sold on it. I care too damned much. If (when) I lost a patient I'd go off the deep end myself.

I'm more than halfway through my working life: it's far too late to start from scratch now. So I make the best of what I do, and save my "making a difference" impulse for things outside my career, and hope like hell I do. Make a difference, I mean.

2) Where I live. Also, truth be told, not where I want to live. I feel very much, even now, like this is a "starter" house, not the kind of place you spend twelve, let alone twenty or thirty, years in. It doesn't help that we specifically picked this place out with children in mind, children who never materialized.
Again, we make the best of it. There are advantages. The house has more than doubled in value since we bought it and the carrying costs are more reasonable than rent. We deliberately bought less house than we could afford, reasoning that interest rates would go up again. Silly decision, in that light alone, but it's never stupid NOT to waste money.

3) My appearance--I couldn't explain this if I wanted to. You get enough people telling you how ugly you are and you believe it, even when one person comes along and says otherwise. I know that I look better in a suit and tie...and I defiantly choose not to wear suits and ties because I am who I am, not what I look like. I cling to that. I have to.

4) My political views. Nobody wants to talk politics--it's right up there with 5) and 7) as hot-button issues. This confuses me to no end. If you hold a political view--no matter what it is--by definition you think the world would be a better place if other people held it too. At the same time, it's always good to hear dissenting views: they may force you to re-evaluate your beliefs (grow, in other words). So respectfully talking politics is something I enjoy, and I wish more people enjoyed with me.

5) Religion is the politics of the afterlife. I do believe in an afterlife:
paraphrasing Jodie Foster in Contact,

I'll tell you one thing about Time, though. Time is a pretty long time. It's longer than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just this... seems like an awful waste of time. Right?

I most emphatically do not believe in God as He is commonly portrayed. Way, way too limiting: why only male (don't answer that, it's too obvious)? Why does He act so...human (the answer to that is just as obvious, as far as I'm concerned)? But again, as with politics, I'm more than willing to listen to dissenting views. Not so as to "convert" me, mind you. Evangelization is the mark of a superiority complex, and nothing turns me off faster than people feeling they're superior to other people. No: I'm just interested in what people believe, and why they believe it. Points if the answer to 'why' is something other than "because it says so in this book, here".  I like exploring the commonalities between religions (strip away dross and ritual and you'll find, as Stephen Gaskin once said,

Religions only look different if you get 'em from a retailer. If you go to a wholesaler, you'll find they all get it from the same distributor.

Atheism and a host of civil religions (such as the blind faith in the Great God Progress) are just as likely to invoke that superiority complex: indeed, there is nothing quite so annoying as a militant atheist who mocks everything he can't see or touch. Anybody using science to disprove a holy text, OR a holy text to disprove science, misunderstands the purpose of both.

You are special, every one of you...but you are no more special than anyone else.

6) My alone time -- I'm never alone. That's something I've learned, finally, in the last year or so, to my incalculable relief. Before that I felt alone in a crowded room: cut off, isolated, often completely invisible.
But what I've learned is that if I close my eyes
and  speak your name, you're right there beside me, ready to catch me when I fall. There are a lot of you out there (in here) and I love you all.

7) Life and relationship choices: actually, I do owe people an explanation for these. Not for myself: I'm far beyond caring what uncharitable thoughts you harbour about polyamory, because I know they're based on incorrect assumptions. I owe people an explanation for my polyamory because I'm not the only poly person out there. Until it has the legitimacy it deserves, I'm going to fight for unlimited love, because I believe it's something worth fighting for. Being as unlimited love is so counter to the way the world works (and hey, it starts with big ol' #5, Who loves you "unconditionally" but still somehow judges, condemns, and damns you)--there's often a lot of explanation that has to be done.

-------

That friend added this:

Feel free to opine, just don't expect agreement and you won't be disappointed...


I don't expect agreement. I don't expect ANYTHING from people if I can at all help it, because people have a habit of not living up to expectations (and I'm a people, too). What I hope for is understanding and acceptance, from myself and from others. You don't have to agree with me -- what a boring world it would be if we all agreed with each other, all the time! -- but I'm learning to accept myself and I hope you can, too.

The End Of Local

Not long after I got here in 1990, our local newspaper, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, ran a story on page A1, above the fold.

Its title was:

A) Councillor Retires After 33 Years Of Service
B) Potbellied Pigs Make Perfect Pets
C) Ethel Bloodthwaite Gets New Screen Door

Bear in mind that this city had a population, at the time, approaching 400,000 people. It wasn't quite a metropolis, but it was quite a long ways from being a one-horse town.

The correct answer is B, and no, I am not making this up: the most important story of the day, that day, was that potbellied pigs make perfect pets.

I very rarely read an edition of the local rag after that. Every once in a while I'd pick up a copy, confirming with one glance at the front page that if it didn't happen within city limits, it didn't happen. Ethel Bloodthwaite and her new screen door would come up every time I talked about the Record, to my wife's unending chagrin. Oh, look, she'd say when I brandished a copy of the Globe and Mail prominently featuring a piece of Toronto-centered fluff. It looks like Ethel done up and moved. 

Yes, but her pigs are still rooting around town, and damnit, they make perfect pets!

-------

Guelph, Ontario, population 175,779, just lost its local paper, the Mercury, in business since 1867. Very nearly a century and a half, vanished, leaving a thriving city without a local newspaper.

I'm sure many of my readers don't care: newspapers. How quaint. Next he'll be lamenting the loss of video stores and blacksmiths. 

Here's where I admit to a lifelong love of newspapers. I still have a weekend subscription to the dead-tree edition of the Globe and Mail, and it's something I look forward to every Saturday morning. There's something about an actual newspaper that bespeaks seriousness of purpose. This is the news, it says, in indelible ink. The pixels on your screen are peripatetic, winking in and out of existence, but the paper? Stored properly, it will outlast me.

I've read the Toronto Sun since fairly early childhood. Now, the Sun has its detractors, and I am often one of them. Let's see: sensationalistic, unabashed right wing trash, riddled with typos; and let's not forget the daily portrait that used to grace (?) the inside cover and now resides somewhere near the back: Sindee, 19, who loves dancing, shopping, and anal sex. Oh, and while the Sunday edition used to push 300 pages at times, 200 of them would consist of full-page ads.

Yes, the Sun was and is heavily flawed, and its reporting of the news is more biased than most papers. But it had two things going for it back in the day. One, it wore its bias proudly and didn't even pretend to be evenhanded. Two, and much more importantly, it allowed and encouraged its writers to express whatever opinions they had, regardless of whether or not they fell in line with editorial orthodoxy.

I can't begin to tell you how exhilarating that is for a reader like me, watching two writers feuding with each other in print. You could learn something. You could learn a lot. It was much better than the Toronto Star, a paper with whose politics I generally AGREE: there was and is no room for dissenting opinion in the Star, and it leans at least as far left as the Sun does right.

Then there's the National Post, also very unapologetically right-wing, but at least it has an excuse: it's marketed to millionaires. Their HOMES section ought to be called ESTATES or MANSIONS or some such, and rare is the car review of something plebeian like a humble Ford or Toyota.  What the Post does have going for it is a dearth of advertisements. In their place there is lots of long-form, meaty journalism.

The Post is on life support and has been for years. Because of so few ads? Possibly. More likely there was never room for a second national newspaper in a country with less population than metro Tokyo.

Finally, the Globe and Mail, which bills itself as Canada's paper of record. I find it strikes a pretty fair balance, and it employs a number of my favourite columnists, among them Tabatha Southey and Elizabeth Renzetti.   Its Arts section on Saturdays is a treasure trove.

Pardon me that digression. I just wanted to say I've been reading papers for a long time, and I don't read them online very much. Somehow they seem...I don't know...cheapened online, like virtually (ha-ha) everything else.

I'm an old curmudgeon that way, I guess. Because everything is migrating online. Information longs to be free and all that, but free doesn't put food on the table for those who gather it, edit it, or opine on it. And so the Canadian media has lost ten thousand jobs in the past decade, and the American media is shrinking at the rate of a thousand jobs a month. Newsrooms are consolidating in major centres: local papers, like the Mercury, are being crumpled up and thrown in the garbage bin of history.

It's not just newspapers. Canada may lose half of its local television stations by 2020. Again, the major reason is that people aren't watching local news any more, preferring to get all their content online.

Except if there' s a reliable source of local news online, I've yet to find it.  It's certainly not in any sort of convenient package.

We haven't had access to local television news for many years. For a long time we had Bell satellite, and it would show my dad's local news, and Eva's mom's local news, but not ours. Now we don't have the satellite any more (and what a trip through bureaucratic hell THAT was: I don't look forward to ditching our landline by the end of next month, let me tell you). We've got Netflix and Shomi and we'll almost certainly get rid of Shomi soon. Primewire and Putlocker have everything those two do and much, much more, and they're free with your unlimited Internet connection. Hard to beat that.

Local is disappearing, at least for now. (I don't believe forever: for one thing, I don't believe the Internet will exist in anything like its present form a century hence). But for now...

Local is boring. Who wants to stay close to home when there's a digital world, a galaxy, a universe, out there just beyond the next click?  Why talk to the person in the same room when you can text somebody halfway around the world (or in the next room?)

Progress isn't always progress, you know. It's the secular equivalent of Satanic to say this out loud: it's apt to brand you a heretic, a Luddite loser who wants to go live in a cave. (As if there's nothing in the whole of human existence between "cavemen"--very, very few of whom actually lived in caves--and the present day!)

But progress isn't always progress. Sometimes, maybe even often, it's regression instead. Compare the respective quality of a 1970s appliance with its modern counterpart. Today's has more bells and whistles, to be sure, but it will also be a brick in five or seven years. Rather than face this truth, we've created a world in which novelty is a virtue. Well, guess what? Novelty is often pointless. Why buy a new something when your old something does what you want it to do?

Pity about the collateral damage as we chase the newest gadget and the cheapest way to get news of the world. We're losing a very valuable sense of locality, a grounding in the here and now. Some of us are losing livelihoods. Adapt or perish. Survival of the fittest.

What's fit, again?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get Ethel to close her screen door before the last pig gets out.