cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please come into my life and offer somthing more. Yes, I know that Alex is full of shit. She is full of shit. Alex pretended to have broken up with her abusive girlfriend of 9 years for months on end while having an affair with me. Yes, I know that. Somehow, I allowed myself to be texted into agreeing to accompany her to Richmond nominally to go to the Apple store, but really to go out to dinner and then come fishing with me. We kept our hands off of each other for about 15 minutes and ended up making out behind the kayaks at a sporting goods store while killing time ahead of her appointment at the Apple store. Right now she looks like a slightly hotter version of Winona Rider in Stranger Things. Dinner, etc. I took her fishing at my spot near the foot bridge to Belle Isle. We caught nothing. This was the first time I have been skunked in Richmond all summer. We also got out there too late. Normally I would set up about an hour before dusk and go til an hour past. But I started rubbing her back, which turned into rubbing her clit and bringing her to orgasm, and pretty soon she was bent over against a concrete wall along the shore of the James River by moonlight while I pounded her soft ass from behind. I came inside of her to the sounds of skateboards tooling around on the street above. She has another appointment at the Apple Store on Tuesday and I'm going back with her, because she made an appointment for her phone instead of her laptop, and its all probably bullshit anyway because she doesn't understand how directories are created and assumes that someone has hacked her laptop when something unexpected shows up on her desktop. Not my monkeys, not my zoo. Hopefully on Monday I will sign a lease for this apartment and start decorating and feel like a real person again, moving in long-term into a real home with one kid there and the other a mile away. Alex feels familiar and feels and smells like home. But she didn't leave her shitty girlfriend who controls her income and won't move out. So I'm not falling for it this time. On the way home, we listened to Ladytron and The Velvet Underground and talked about Joy Division using an aerosol can on "She's Lost Control." And about people we knew in high school, and which teachers were gay Our second high school had only around 85 students. It's good, but it is rationed. The hottest, coolest girl from high school is now completely dominated in a non-hot way by a conspiracy theorist, anti-vax, Q-pilled, flat-earth nutbag ex-girlfriend who has taken control of their in-home nursing care business and hands out hours as she sees fit. Everything that is wrong with Lindsay is too obvious to even bother pointing out. She is completely fucking crazy, and probably a danger to her patients. Lindsay controls the booking and scheduling for their enterprise, and can cut Alex's hours to nothing overnight. Alex could probably walk away with about 30% of the business if she had to fight for it. Not enough to pay her mortgage and other bills. So Lindsay stays on in Alex's house, which Alex inherited from her father. Throwing her shit away. Deciding what is hung on the walls. Rearranging the furniture at will in Alex's father's living room. Collecting more chickens that Alex has to feed twice a day. Picking everything on TV. Threatening to tell Alex's children embarrassing things if Alex makes her leave. Refusing to even clear out of the master bedroom. Cooking tasteless slop. Threatening to tell the father's lawyer about me. Overall blackmail. I have no white knight syndrome. It is up to Alex to figure her shit out and decide if she has the strength to file an eviction notice and have sheriff's deputies kick Lindsay out. I cannot do that for her. I can exist in her life and be that thing that she looks at as what life could be like without Lindsay. After how she has acted for the last six months, I cannot guarantee that I will be the rock that she is looking for. Alex has fucked up too badly, failed to show up too many times, for me to have enough confidence in her to really go out on a limb. I'm here, I'm available for a life together, but I'm not waiting anymore and if someone else shows up before she gets her shit together then that ship has sailed. I also have a life to live. My 15 year old son has officially left school and is now homeschooled. When I was only a year older, I got early acceptance to H@mpshire College and wound up spending my senior year and summer before completing college courses that Hampshire wanted from me before arriving. I still have no high school diploma, in spite of four years of college and several books and two feature films and hundreds of articles and a lot of TV appearances and a lot of scientific papers edited and arguably the equivalent of three separate masters degrees in invasive biology, filmmaking, and journalism. Plus a lot of additional work in entomology and at least something in quantum physics. Actually, in spite of my work right now being firming in quantum, my lack of math means that everything I learn in quantum physics will be ultimately less than really academic. Anyway, I'm now helping to figure out his curriculum. For English, I have an idea of how to shape a course with a survey of American literature. The books that I grew up on, the classes on Gilded Age lit that I took in college, and the work I've been doing for the last few years working on my current book. I think it has to start with Ivanhoe, even though that is technically an English novel. No other book so thoroughly shaped the American man's sense of self as Ivanhoe. It is baked into literature and politics for the next century. Why else did most of the accused in the Tweed Ring attempt to rehabilitate themselves in the 1870's and early 1880's? They saw themselves as Ivanhoes, falsely accused and fighting for redemption. Then on to Washington Irving. The first really successful American author. The short stories are obvious. Then on to Louisa May Alcott. "Little Men" was her work that made most of an impression on me as a kid, and that's what I am inclined to assign here. Frederick Douglas' Up from Slavery is absolutely necessary. I remember reading that in a tent by flashlight in my backyard when I was about ten. Him sleeping under a wooden sidewalk had this immediacy when I read it that just stuck with me. I could see the planks above me. And quickly we sort of have to arrive at Mark Twain. What single work do I pick for my son to read? Probably Huckleberry Finn, which I read to him when he was six. A pivot into the 20th century. Jules Verne? Maybe some short stories by Richard Harding Davis. Then one novel by Hemingway. That's a tough decision. What is the one Hemingway novel that I require my son to read? It probably has to be For Whom the Bell Tolls. I'm actually sort of not clear on where to go after Hemingway for the 20th Century. "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" ought to be part of that progression, but I'm not sure what comes before it. I grew up reading literature of the late 19th century. I grew up on Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain and Horatio Alger. I thought that Jules Verne was a woman until I was in my early 30's. I read cheap biographies of John Paul Jones, and the autobiographical natural histories of Ernest Thompson Seton. Organizing all of this into a curriculum is a whole thing to figure out. I hope it will be better than the chaos that became my high school education. Which was actually a lot of studying Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Linear B and was pretty awesome. But it is different. My father hardly noticed my existence until I was 21 years old and went to work for his insurance brokerage. He would hate to read those words, but it is true. Until then, I was at best someone who showed up on his list of things to do about once a month, at most, and that while I was in elementary school. In high school, my father would show up at pivotal gigs at nightclubs to have me waived in as a nominal offspring. I saw They Might Be Giants, Arlo Guthrie, and John Hartford thanks to my father getting me in. But that was about the extent of his involvement. I don't think that the idea of being anything more than that was part of what he had learned. When we worked together for 11 years after that, I learned his honesty and diligence and patience and the many other subtle traits of diligent work in insurance brokerage. Eleven years of working closely together in business. He had had bad instincts before I came on, and tempered them once I was working with him. As many lessons as Thurlow Weed had for every young man who came after him, I had with my father. But my father honestly failed to show up when I was in high school. It was dumb luck that I was close to him after college. I have no template to follow as I am in charge of my son's education at the age of 15. My father never gave a shit until I showed up right after I was married. My son can deal with four hours of prep behind the most demanding of chefs, and then six hours front of house on a Friday night. I taught my son how to make a fire, rig a bass hook, filet a fish since he was three years old. My father waited til I was 24 to start talking about how to negotiate with an insurance company about rates. There is no comparison. My son has learned his craft years before anyone my age or my father's age even learned to boil water. I am just going to go out on expeditions when Alex has a day, and shop for art otherwise, because there is pretty much nobody else who wants to come along with me or exist in my life. Right? Please come into my life and offer something more. 2:07 a.m. - 2022-09-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||