Like the Spring… Attraction Begins Anew

Entry 03/31/2025 05:58:31 PM: Mentat 2551

It is said that each time someone falls in love, it always different.   Each person you encounter and get to know has a different effect on your approach to love and loving that person.  For me it always starts the same way: strong attraction.   However after that initial reaction, I can say it’s always different.

So the question is — how do I describe that difference this time?

Intense.  Once the hesitancy disappeared, the amount of emotional energy the man generates can be felt hundreds of miles away.

There’s definitely a strong feeling of magnetism here.  More so than I have experienced.  The want and desire to meet, match and perhaps even exceed the sort of intensity I often felt when attracted to someone else.   It doesn’t have words, currently it is pure emotion.  I want to find the words to make it solidify and crystallize, yet at the same time it’s like both of us are trying to find exactly what words best describe the feeling to the other.  Like it’s waiting for the right moment, or the right amount of trust before it makes itself known.

Do I feel safe?  Yes, currently.  Better than I felt 6 months ago when I ran into him again after the issues that he had to work through and ended up being slammed with a new set of issues he was still trying to prepare himself to face.

Do I feel the same thing from him as I feel for him?  Yes I do.   It’s as clear as a morning when the fog has been  lifted.

Do I wanted to explore more?  Oh  god yes.  I can imagine that there’s a lot more going on in the unspoken than the spoken.  It’s just…   Waiting for it to all come pouring come out.  It’s as though those words are at the door, holding the knob and waiting to turn it, before stepping out and being known.

…And I’m willing to wait.

I actually look forward to how this year and a day is going to go.  It’s a partial feeling of anxiousness, excitement, expectation and exploration as we get to learn more about each other and how we can work together.

There will be more on this as the days unfold from Spring to Summer.

All I will say is this…  It can all be summed up with one word:

Nick.

Until the next time.

The Year-end Contemplation

Entry 12/30/2013 09:04:07 AM – Mentat 688

“Learn as much by writing as by reading.” – Lord Acton

It’s coming up on the end of the year, and looking at my journal for 2013, I realize all too painfully, I haven’t written nearly as much as I wished. Or as often as I should have. I know that sitting here and thinking about it — I have had a million reasons and excuses why this had come to pass for this year. I thought about some of the reasons why I had picked up writing a diary/journal in the last 32 years… At first it was because I was an introvert and needed to learn how to be more open and extroverted. Then my journal entry changed a bit and started including bits of philosophy, metaphysics and the observations I made during these studies into books by Alice A. Bailey, Helena Blavatsky, Aristotle and Socrates… I even included bits pieces (and even whole entries) about dreams and the dreams that I’ve had over the years, delving into understanding the unconscious and the subconscious…

After that, there was much about my private life. Mostly because I had been accused by many that I had dated (and even had long-term relationships with) that I was too secretive. That I kept too much of what was going on inside me close to my chest. When I broke up with my last SO just over a decade ago, I changed it to dealing with the healing that came from living 4 years in an abusive (and extremely toxic) relationship. During the next 5 years, it was a struggle dealing with the pain and the hurt and the healing that comes from finding myself in a dark place and trying to make it back to the light. I did pretty well, in spite of the work-related drama that cropped up for a couple of years. Was even lucky to find myself head over heels in love with a man that understood everything that came out of my mouth no matter how confusing or obfuscated it sounded.

Things trucked along as they should and I was as active as I was when I first started coming out of my introverted shell, in spite of the fact that I was at home with all the baggage that it incurred. In spite of the often strange, eccentric and gruff attitudes that Yankees have here in the Tundras of New England. In fact, I had reached a point in my life a couple of years ago that mirrored the times when I finally worked out who I was and what I should-be doing with myself and my life.

Then comes two years ago. I have the illusion that regardless of the circumstances that lead me to having to move I was in that comfortable place of dealing with whatever was going to be thrown my way. I found myself dealing with a thief and a user, and another that was not only incompetent but also a user… And that’s when I only just realized I was dealing with karma not only from the last relationship I had, but also dealing with issues going all the way back to my first boyfriend (the asshole ex, as I refer to more often times than naught). Admittedly my anger and rage was through the roof with both. The thief I was just wanted to pulverize because humans like him don’t deserve to live and use others in the way that he had used me (and before any new readers think I dated him, I can assure you he is most assuredly not my type). And the incompetent one, I just want to smack the shit out of him in the hopes that sense will be beaten into his skull. The thing is that sitting here and writing this entry, I realize I let these two fuckwits imbeciles get the best of me, so much so that I had become quite a tight ball of hate, anger, rate and vitriol. The more that I attempted to confront that hate and anger in the form of writing a journal entry, the more verklempt I became. It reached a point where instead of continuing in trying to work through the issue, I avoided it — like a plague it felt it was — ran away from it diverting myself with anything I could pay attention to. Sometimes these diversion were creative (like my fractal a day work), sometimes not so much (like my MMO gaming and television show binging). In the end though, I ended up lethargic, unmoving, and almost incapable of doing anything but distractions.

Sometime last month; after I had to get family to intervene for me while I tried to epically control my anger with dealing with one of the fuckwits imbeciles in my life, something happened. With my family witnessing the insanity of one of these imbeciles and then commenting on it — I came to the slow realization, “well gee… It’s not just me (being a perfectionist)… He really is an idiot…” It was then that I started to repurpose my approach to the problems I was avoiding.

This approach has been met with some conflicting feelings from family. My mother believes that if someone/something gives you that much problem that the best (read to me as safest) solution to handling that problem is to leave… Move out… Go somewhere else… Basically let someone else handle the problem, or let the problem just break itself. The only problem with that is that I’ve gotten tired of running away whenever I have a problem. Leaving it to karma or to other people — while momentarily satisfying — took too long for the likes of me to get resolved… And let’s face it based on the two years I’ve been here in Providence, RI — these two fuckwits imbeciles have been doing this sort of crap for far too long longer than my personal experience has witnessed.

Sure, I would wait for karma to catch up and deal with them… The only problem with this is that while each of them have gotten (at least one) the wake-up call to the road they’ve been walking will not end well for — and yet both of them do just enough to stop the train wreck from happening. And I’m tired of waiting…

I might talk about them in the next couple of days… I might not… Not sure whether I can or can’t… But in either case, I’m gunning for both of them and this time I’m going to pimp slap the both of them where it counts: in the wallet. And I will do this efficiently and legally instead of taking matters in my own hands.

Let’s see what else…

For about 7 months during this year I had been dating (albeit really long distance) the man that I had mentioned way back when in April (Entry 683)… C was inspirational, energetic and most of all inquisitive. The problems that cropped up were the facts that he was way too impulsive, flighty/un-grounded, and lacked the integrity of his own word — breaking promises because such promises were inconvenient to his desires for impulsiveness. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the time after waking up from a particularly troubling nap, I encountered a private message from him on Facebook that I couldn’t tell whether it was him or one of his friends taking the piss out of the two of us by using his account. Couple this with him breaking the promise of one day a week of getting together (more than twice), I had my fill of that inconsistency. Writing a quick “Dear John” I explained precisely why I had broke all contact with him and moved on with the feeling that “it had to be done…”

Friends and family tried to excuse his actions to youth and inexperience, yet I can’t accept the excuses of “coming of age”. I’m of the firm belief that by 18 people should have a good damned concept of what integrity means. Hell, even know the value of one’s word to commitment. If by adulthood one doesn’t understand this, then one needs to learn the consequences of ill-action. This lack of commitment and integrity must come with ramifications. Because no matter how intelligent we humans think we are, we learn best when there are (negative) consequences to our actions.

While the dreams that came from being around him had stopped, there have been a couple of times since our breakup that I get the impression he’s been thinking about me and once or twice I’ve been struck with the impression that he’s thought about reaching out to me in some way… But the one thing I’ve learned about humanity is hurt is the greatest motivator to integrity and commitment and given the break up — I’m sure that his promise of never speaking to me again if I were to disappear the way that I did… Still though, I’m sure like me — there’s been more than one time we’ve thought of each other and wondered whether the direction taken was the only one left at the time.

I’m going to stop here for the time being. I have some things to think about in what I want to say for today or New Year’s which means it’s time to wander off to contemplate. Until the next time.

Men *eye roll*

Entry 04/21/2012 10:58:08 AM – Mentat 642

“The surprising thing about young fools is how many survive to become old fools.” – Doug Larson

Spring has finally sprung and I’m pretty damned happy about it. Sure the nights are still more than a bit chilly, but it’s not something that can’t be remedied by either closing the window for a little bit, or in my case tossing another throw on the bed — particularly given that I’m once again making the bed for spring and summer and not autumn and winter. Of course now that I’m middle aged, I can see one of the hereditary problems on my mother’s side of the family has finally come to full fruition… Eczema… Most of the men on my mother’s side of the family get eczema on their legs during the winter months and it seems that I didn’t escape that fate. It’ll clear up by about the time my birthday blows in (sooner if the weather continues to be as comfortable as it currently is). It flares up all because of dry heat in the house along with cold and gray weather. And here I was hoping that I would take after my biological father’s side of the family when it came to not having to deal with it. Oh well… Not this life anyway.

Then the other night I had a wonderful scare that reminds me of a certain prediction a gastroenterologist gave me a couple of years ago. Now I’ve been doing pretty well with my diet. I have avoided the massive amounts of heavy carbs and fatty foods my aunt used to cook for me and my uncle for years (he’s a 50s meat & potatoes sort of man) that had caused my gallbladder to flare up 3 years ago and had me rushing to the emergency room because I passed a gallstone. About a month later, I’m sitting in a Gastroenterologist’s office with him doing a routine checkup/follow-up consultation to ensure everything was all right. He commented that he was surprised I didn’t get admitted immediately and surgery performed given results. He also indicated there was indeed a problem and that my gallbladder should be removed at some time. Said to me during the checkup that it was probable that I would have to have my gallbladder removed in about 5 years (if I have another flare-up like the one I had the month before.

Fast forward 3 years and because it’s warm, I’m indulging in one of my passions of the summer: ice cream. I didn’t have a problem with the small bowl that I had in the afternoon after I came back from my walk. Then I had half a bowl again after dinner that night and things seemed to have been going well. I went to bed early because my day started early and at about 11:30 that night, I got hit with almost the same amount of pain I did the last time I had an attack. While it wasn’t enough for rush to the ER to handle, it was enough to keep me up for about 4 more hours while I waited to see whether the pain would get worse or subside. It did after a couple of Gas-X tablets and a couple of dry toast. So for the last couple of days, I’ve avoided dairy products (ugh!), had couple of meals involving a modest bowl of rice and dry toast. For my caffeine, it’s been mild green tea (ugh!), dry cereal without milk (not too bad given it’s Sugar Smacks, but still it would be better with milk)… I was finally able to do have my morning coffee this morning without any gastric scares. Still though, I’m going to need to watch it for a while and exercise more to see if this is going to become more common, or just a flare-up because of my being sedentary through the winter months. Needless to say, this is not something I’m looking forward to, given that once again, gallbladder removal is common on my mother’s side of the family — particularly with the first born kids.

Pity too… I still have the ice cream in the freezer. It looks like it’s going to be sitting in there for a while to come. And here I was just getting to enjoy the Maple Walnut goodness too. Heh, at least it wasn’t anything chocolate and cherry — then it would really be torture.

Heh, other than the scare from the other day, it’s a relatively quiet Saturday morning where I’m waiting patiently for the impending rain that’s supposed to happen (given the satellite pictures I was looking at earlier). It seems that in competition to the car wash, the fire department on the other side of the house has some sort of renovation going on with the roof of their building. The first day the construction company was there, it sounded like they had some massive vacuum running from about 9 in the morning until about 6 in the afternoon. Today it sounds like they’re running rocks and gravel through some sort of pipe which started just a shade earlier than I liked: 8 in the morning. Since then it’s been pretty intermittent, but it’s enough for me want to keep the door shut to the kitchen for extended periods of time so that it’s not blasting through one side to get to the other… Instead it’s more listening to bounce off the concrete of the pawn shop next door. And unfortunately I can’t drown out the noise by putting on a pair of earbuds because the pair that I had finally died. It’s the same old problem involving the way the wiring runs from a center post and the right being able to wrap around the neck (one that I prefer given I don’t like it hanging down the front while I’m riding), where the wire got pulled enough that the right earbud no longer has any sound.

I could fix it, but given they were a really cheap set, I don’t think it’s worth it. So I’m going to use the gift certificate money that I got from the surveys that I’ve been doing over the years, I’ll just use that to purchase a new set. It was originally for a new backpack, but given this one’s still lasting better than I thought it would over the years, it’s a good diversion of the funds for the moment. Heh, particularly given the amount of noise pollution that comes from across the street, not to mention the occasional bouts of insomnia that hit me in the middle of the night.

As for me, I had a rather interesting realization while I was struggling through an issue I was thinking about rehashing in my journal about Tom (aka Mr. I-Feel-Nothing-For). The realization involved something both annoying and disheartening when dealing with men my age. Sure, they demonstrate a veneer of respect, honesty and perhaps even a little bit of politeness… but that veneer doesn’t seem to last all that long and once you scratch under the surface you find some pretty ugly things involving selfishness, emotional damage (to the point of complete and utter dysfunction), and a definitive disrespectful attitude.

Take this for example from Tom… He had changed out his profile because his previous profile was attracting way too much unwanted attention for sexual liaisons that he wasn’t actually wanting and asked me what I thought of the “improvements”. But what really took the cake wasn’t the frivolous note that he had written, it was the post script that cause me to react (and sort of go on the offensive). He had inquired on how much closer we were to a phone conversation. Let me recap this as quickly as possible without going completely off on a tangent.

Keep in mind, we had chatted casually for about 3 weeks, and in those 3 weeks.

1. The notes that we shared were frivolously uninformative, to the point of being bland.  (I blame the character limits below).
i. He made a couple of references that I didn’t get, looked it up and was rewarded for getting them right.
ii. I do the same and instead of him looking it up, get from him saying consistently, “I don’t get the reference”, expecting me to explain the references to him.

2. We had chatted in real time twice.
i. The first time was interrupted because he had an important phone call.  This is also the chat that he establishes that he respects my wishes to chat online first.
ii. The second time he was an emotional wreck and couldn’t track/parse half of what I was saying, even after I adjusted my dialog for him to understand.
iii. The third time we were supposed to chat, he stood me up and didn’t write a note telling me he wouldn’t make it until over 2 hours after the fact telling me he had more drama with family and had to leave quickly.

3. I make several attempts at suggesting to move the conversation out of the chat environment because there is a less than 2,000 character limit to notes.  There is positively no acknowledgement to this suggestion and certainly no e-mails from him in the process.     And believe me…  1,500 characters isn’t enough to express anything as a writer — if it were the case, this journal entry would be done halfway through my gastric-panic.

4. After he had stood me up, he had requested whether I chatted on Yahoo Messenger of which I post my UserID from Yahoo and tell him he can note me whenever.  (After all, I have 3 yahoo accounts, 3 MSN accounts, 1 for ICQ, 1 for Google Talk, 1 for AIM, and even an account on the old Jabber network.  Thanks to Pidgin can run them all simultaneously).   Again, zip..  Nada…  Nothing when it came to acknowledgement of this note and certainly no chatting on Yahoo since I responded to his note.

And then he has the audacity to ask me if we’re closer to chatting on the phone!? This is respecting my wishes?! Seems extremely selfish to me given that he knows nothing about me, and the things I learned from his frivolousness is that he likes Post-Victorian books and that he doesn’t deal well with family drama as if leaves him emotionally drained and incapable of parsing things from other people (not coincidentally he seemed to always write me after this drama).

*takes a deep breath* Seriously, with this and the others that I’ve dated since I’ve come back to the Tundras of New England — there does in fact seem to be a trend of men in their 40s here that I’m having a difficult time dealing with (let alone accept in any degree). A trend that involves selfishness, frothing ego-mania, disrespect, and an insipid want to compare successes based on either material security or a quality much like a cookie-cutter, bland and even emotionless approach to living life (e.g., laid back, down to earth, hanging with friends, chilling at home… the list goes on). Oh and the damage… Christ on a drunken rampage, the damage I’ve seen in people around my age. From the laundry lists I’ve gotten from men about the hurts and damage that happened on the first date to emotional distance and using sex as a handshake to establish a relationship… it’s a minefield of drama and hot mess from people that are supposed to be “laid back” and “chilling with friends”.

For the longest time I thought it was just my experience, but after following another WordPress user’s blog called Sex and the Pity, I’ve come to learn that it’s not just gay men that are this way — it’s both straight and gay men. And don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m going to have to go through a whole lot of damage and rejecting/rejection in order to find someone that’s worth it, but seriously where am I going to have to go to find someone at least modestly worth it?

At the same time it certainly puts into perspective the differences in men that I’ve dated that were younger and those that were closer to my age and it makes me wonder — just where precisely is the dividing line that happens between the ages that can cause someone young, hopeful, sharing and caring into selfish pigs out for sex and whatever agenda they have for a date, a man and a relationship? Whether it is truly a transformation, or whether it’s just a string of luck that has caused me to go from finding the kind that I find attractive to finding the kind that put my knickers into such a bunch. One of those questions I’ll be sure to continue to ponder in the weeks to come. And given the last one, might have me (seriously) reconsider one of the requirements that I’ve been trying to stick to since I’ve decided it was high time to try all over again.

That and I still have my own problems that I need to work through. Though I’ll take a look at them tomorrow. Along with another problem that I’m having with someone.

And on that note, I think I’m going to wander off for a bit. Have a nap or something and then perhaps watch a little of my queue that has suddenly become unruly and long. Until the next time.

Entry 02/19/2011 09:23:31 AM – Mentat 601

As I’m sitting here at the moment with the coffee brewing behind me, softer music playing, the whining needy Hellbeast happily sitting on the bed cleaning herself from a thorough gorging of this morning’s food, and wondering why I’m sitting here in my T-shirt and sweats; I’m feeling rather accomplished at the moment after almost 9+ hours of fixing a relative’s PC woes. I am also feeling a bit daunted as to why one of the problems is still going on, small as it is. I received a call from my uncle earlier this week with the usual, “what are you doing?” which is often the pre-amble of the New England-polite for “you’re expertise in computer’s is needed”. Turns out my Aunt Norma’s nephew’s home PC was acting incredibly slow and he was at a loss as to what the problem could be. So with the usual interchange of “any day good for you is okay with me”; I set the daunting task for the end of the week so that it would give me the usual false sense of accomplishment I get for the weekend.

What kind of environment the PC is in and who uses it the biggest telling of the probable cause for the current computer woes. Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 3, ~2.6 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, 512 MB RAM… Family of four(-ish). Two adults and teenagers… Teenagers have limited accounts. As the dad tells me a bit about some of the work that he had done prior my arrival, I peruse the system to see what I’m looking at for damage. The son’s account is password protected and it’s pretty apparent to me why it would be password protected: he’s 18 and the computer in the basement and out of the way of most traffic. The daughter’s a big-time music fan and social group addict. Two Adult Accounts and a Main Admin Account with Full Access and no password protection. Wireless router in place, with default SSID and passwords in place with no WEP/WPA passwords/keys in place.

Smiling a bit to myself, I get a strong feeling of what I’m in for, for repairs.

Asked the father while looking about the layout, if he had run Spybot Search & Destroy as I found the icon and a full load up of an older version of the program in its appropriate directory.

Father doesn’t know what it is, and only ran the standard Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam program provided by Cox: McAfee.

I thought to myself that one of the kids knew that either the system was slowing down or tried to clean up the potential for downloading something that they shouldn’t. The logs indicated it had been run a couple of times, but hadn’t been in some months.

I pulled out my thumb drive with the tools of the trade and installed the newest version of Spybot, and hankered down for the long wait as it ran a complete system check.

Forty-Five minutes later and enough warnings on the values of putting passwords on the admin accounts making comparisons that children (and especially young teenagers when the computer had originally be bought) are like the worst employees when it comes to a piece of IT-like hardware; Spybot reported about 22 different forms of malware, from XPAntiVirus to various flavors of Virtumonde and all sorts of variants of CoolWebSearch types; Spybot happily cleaned them all up after a couple of restarts and running in Safe-Modes. Still though the system was running a bit slower than I’d expect for an XP machine with less than adequate memory for Service Pack 3.

So the next order of business was to load up two of my favorite tools from Sysinternals and get them running to see what I could see: Auto Runs and Process Explorer. The run registry entries in HKLM and HKCU were a mess of unnecessary programs and call procedures to bloat and malware of which I happily hacked away the unnecessary, while cleaning out the DLLs and executables that were attached to the malware. Watching the processes in Process Explorer, I could see some pretty interesting pieces of innocuous software completely misbehaving in ways I’ve never seen before. The older version of MSN Toolbar loaded up three different executables to run, one of this ended up slogging the system down to a crawl for reasons that left me stymied. So off it went along with the three other toolbars that I didn’t recognize loading up in Internet Explorer… Heh, while it wasn’t as bad as this Toolbar Fail, given that I don’t run toolbars on any of my browser, three are entirely too much for my liking. Off went a lot of other things that seemed to be load

With the system still running a bit slow for my liking, I ended loading up Hijack This! to see what BHOs and unknown programs were causing IE to slog down. Not to mention for some unknown reason, during boot up, IE has a habit of starting up and running resident when it shouldn’t be. It’s easy enough to kill out from Processes Tab in Task Manager, but the thing it IE is supposed to be an on-demand only program. On the whole my aunt’s nephew was more than happy with the end results (in spite of the rogue IE and the current work around), and I made a promise I would look further into this problem while I had suggested that he purchase more memory to bring the system up to at least 1 GB RAM.

Getting home last night (and again this morning after my morning coffee), I honestly couldn’t find what could be causing IE to silently launch in the background and suspect there’s either a BHO I’m not aware of being a problem, or a piece of malware that none of the programs that I used to clean up the system recognized it as a problem. I’m still promised to head there to work on the laptop that my aunt’s nephew’s son bought, along with cleaning up that minor annoyance and even perhaps put some more memory into the desktop (to bring it up to at least 1 GB of RAM).

From this happy trip, I feel like reminding folk of what I know from such trips to family houses and family computers:

1. When you have teenagers, always password protect your admin accounts. Make sure the password is a word or phrase that only the adults will remember (I usually suggest something from their past that they haven’t told their children about).
2. Strong passwords should always be used. No dictionary words, at least 1 capital letter and 1 numeric in place of a letter.
3. Always password protect the SSID. The last thing you need are neighborhood kids mooching their connection for P2P piracy. I can’t tell you how many take-downs of business-classed accounts I’ve dealt with over the years from the next door neighbor’s kids were caught by the MPAA sharing movies through various torrent software.
4. Even if your children are 18, monitor their activities for installing programs until you’re sure they’re reading and thinking wisely. This will ensure that they’re not clicking through install screens and adding unnecessary and even potentially dangerous malware. The rule of thumb is, “if you can’t read what the screen said, they didn’t either when they clicked NEXT.” (Something I have to watch my aunt as she has a habit of clicking next, next, next without realizing she’s changed her homepage and added yet another toolbar).
5. An ounce of prevention is always worth more than a pound of cure. When in doubt about a piece of software being requested to be installed, say no first and do research. It’s always easy to say okay afterward when something is cleared than cleaning up a mess when it’s a bad piece of work.

After that, it’s just a matter of common sense.

As for the rest… On an impulse buy, I decided to finally upgrade my Logitech webcam from a Communicate STX to a C910 and definitely not for the suggested retail price on the Logitech site either. While the quality of the video is significantly better than the older one that did it’s job marvelously, I am not too keen on the fact that the software has changed drastically between the two. Seems that the controls for the camera itself and the capturing software are now two separate components instead of integrated in a single ribbon. Then again, I admit that I’m not really good with radical change in software; but I’ll adapt like I always do.

Admittedly the impulse buy wasn’t exclusively my own idea. I was influenced when a person that I’ve been talking with paged me to want to talk about getting some advice about purchasing a new webcam. Given the man’s penchant for privacy, I had suggested the C510 as it’s small and compact and gives the necessary privacy by folding up and away. Part of the reason was that while he aid that he knew about computers, in less than a ½ hour of speaking to him about the pros and cons of using a webcam, he wasn’t exactly as “expert” as he boasted he was and I suspect that he could easily fall prey to trojan software that can be used to hijack a webcam. Of course, he completely disregarded my advice (as I knew he would), the instant he found out I was going with near top-of-the-line with mine. But this isn’t why I’m bringing him up.

I’m bringing him up because I find myself in conflict with wanting to continue to interact with him. While he’s extremely smart on many subjects, and I really do like talking with him about the myriad of subjects that come and go over the course of hours, I find myself put-off by the fact that the 4 times we’ve talked on the phone and the one time I was admiring the fine picture of the webcam I would be expecting in my mailbox within a day — he has always had a cocktail in his hand. In a couple of instances, he’s been more than drunk during the course of the night… Add on to the fact that he’s admitted to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and couple this with his admission of having a heart-attack in his earlier 40s, and well… This seems like self-destructive behavior I personally have no need for in my life.

Glenn has in his almost-sagely sort of way asked me whether it was something I would be willing to face to help this man face and without any doubt in my mind, answered to the negative. Of course it didn’t help matters that in my pondering his question I was having images of Rick and his drinking ’til he got drunk and smoking like a California Summer Brushfire and all the control issues he had toward the end of our relationship. Still though, while it makes me cringe when I say things that contain the words, “…at my age”, I still can’t help but point out, “these aren’t the sort of issues I want to be facing at my age.” It is of my firmest believe that when one gets to middle-age, one should have some modicum of sensibility and common sense to know better.

So at the moment, I’m doing what I feel is necessary to do until I can make up my mind as to how I want to approach/encroach the subject: avoiding it for some “me” time that I can think about whether it’s something I want to deal with in my life even in a casual manner. Really, I need a day, especially given that every time it’s been my turn to contact him, he’s been beating me to the punch and contacting me first. That also doesn’t help my conflicted state as I feel like I’m dealing with a bit of “clinging Kudzu” while I try to sort things out. More on this in the near future no doubt.

Finally as I wrap things up… The world had a scary moment about midweek when my old Coffeemaker decided on breaking the feed tube to the grounds bucket from the heater. Ugh! Yes, I once again was faced with the Water tank volcano as I had described in a previous entry and no matter what I did wouldn’t stay fixed. Fortunately for me, I only had go pull out the 12-cup maker for my happy addiction and when out during my normal shopping run to pick up a new one. So the Coffeemaker is dead! Long live the Coffeemaker! Life as we know it is safe from my pre-caffeine rampaging.

Well that’s about it for the time being. Uncle’s out of the house for most of the day which mean my aunt and I are fending for ourselves. As it’s been a while since I’ve had a grinder, I think as I’m buying that’s what we’re going to do. Until the next time.

Entry 01/08/2011 12:56:44 PM – Mentat 594

Well, I certainly had an interesting start to this morning. My cat apparently was having a nostalgic moment while we were laying in bed and seeing as she was hungry and wanted food, she decided on putting a very wet and cold nose into my exposed ear, purring loudly to get my attention. To make matters worse is that now that she’s over a decade old, she also drools so as she’s getting up to my ear to do this, she’s also drooling all over my face and cheek. Heh, certainly not the sort of way I want to wake up in the morning (apart from my own occasional drooling which can be quite the eye-rolling experience as well). Then as I had her happily fed, and checking e-mail, see I got a note from someone I had bestowed a Jester Award for an outstandingly humorous profile; asking familiar questions I’ve been getting since I’ve been part of this particular dating site —

• Have you had any success with this site?
• Is anyone using this site real?

Then after shaving, dressing and getting my business while chatting with Glenn about bric-a-brac, I start my morning coffee and then get distracted talking with my aunt about someone she was seeing on television (Henry Fonda in Fort Apache), I come back into the apartment to first hear my coffee maker making entirely too much noise, and then seeing that it’s bubbling from the water the rear of it and spilling all over the counter it’s resting on.

For only a split second I was thinking, oh god, there’s going to be no coffee this morning.

Though I got over that pretty quickly when I remembered that in the pantry closet, I have a 12-cup coffee maker in there as back up (and in case I have guests over, which is rare but I’m prepared for it nonetheless). Turns out the feed tube from the water-heater (at the bottom of the unit) to the coffee basket had become dislodged so all heated water was ending up back in the water tank and bubbling up like a volcano. With a little handiwork and a little manly pressure, the coffee maker was back brewing right as rain without a problem.

Crisis averted! Life as we know it can breathe a sigh of relief!

Good thing too, as I didn’t want to have to clean out the bigger coffee maker and prep a new basket of grounds for only 4 cups in a 12-cup pot. That would’ve been more than a little annoying.

Now that I’ve had my morning coffee, the cat’s fallen asleep at my feet and is quietly snoring, the house has a quiet about it at the moment as my aunt’s finished doing her housecleaning and my uncle’s probably passed out while watching John Wayne on AMC, I have a hodgepodge of thoughts and what not about the whole of dating, attraction, love (and unrequited love), and a slew of other half-thoughts and feelings going on the last couple of weeks. Not sure how I’m going to tie it all together, and chances are I’m going to find myself skipping all over the place while writing this. So — those of you that like to voyeur my journals — consider this your warning.

On the lighter side of this, I’m rather surprised to be receiving another note from someone on this dating site asking me whether I’ve had any success using it, and asking me whether the people there using it were real in any sense of the word. Some months ago when I started using it, I recall chatting with someone about it, as I found myself rather amazed at the veracity he had shown in changing pictures and profile information in order to get attention. I had marked him for follow and chatted with him a bit about this, and he told me that he had no luck at all with the site whatsoever. Seems that out of the 5 people he had chatted with, 2 ended up being dates from hell and the other three simply stopped chatting with him prior to setting up a date. After about a month and a half of my following him and watching his pictures change, he stopped. A week after that he deleted his profile — apparently completely giving up on it.

Another man I had casually chatted with told me the same thing, although with this man he had only one date and it went so badly he couldn’t get out of the restaurant fast enough.

Then there was my two attempts. The first never wrote me back. The second was going really well, but when I admitted to my not driving (as he lived in the middle of Connecticut that would definitely pose a problem only 9 hours of riding a Greyhound Bus to that city could remedy), he simply stopped writing me. Never heard from that one again. Chances are once he fully obtained my name, he did a little research and probably ended up finding my Deviant Art account, WordPress and maybe even my Flickr account of which can drive off gay men because of the fear of a blog outing them in a world they have no control over (really, it’s the 21st century. If people haven’t figured out by now you’re gay — you’re either lying pathologically, or self-deluded to think you’re that chameleon-like).

Though as I said to this gentleman that lives in a difficult place to get to without public transportation, I admitted to him that I haven’t really tried as hard as I could. And in a way, it’s true; I’ve been extremely casual about who I’ve written and who I’ve found attractive enough to want to drop a note to. Part of the reason why has been because honestly, like the man that dropped me the note this morning had said — “…I personally know some of the people on here and their profile does not match them in real life…”

In a way it’s had me thinking about it, though after him saying this it has helped me form a better way of putting to words what I’ve been thinking. Sure, I understand that people try to put their best foot forward when it comes to getting a date (be it face-to-face or on a dating site) and too often that best foot forward can be more than a simple embellishment in order to impress a potential date/suitor. Hell, I understand this — I’ve done it in the past. Though, what I’ve seen on many of these profiles are bald-faced and often egregious lies. For example, saying one is making $100K+ in an area of the United States who’s average annual income is $35K – $60K… Well, that’s basically going to start the downward spiral of doubt and mistrust of any other information provided within the profile. Really, we can’t all be making $100,000+, have 8″ penises, travel a every month, be “laid back” and “drama free”… And yet why must more and more men looking for a date (online and off) propagate such a deceptive vision of one-self? You’re going to get caught, and when that happens, you really can’t cry about the failure of a dating site when you failed to be honest to begin with. Admittedly as I said to Glenn (and a bit indirectly to the man that I responded to), it becomes extremely off-putting when you can spot multiple lies in a profile.

To make matters worse, with the exclusion of a precious few people that I’ve chatted with around here (the area) — New Englanders are just plain crass, rude and extremely impatient. I know I have my moments when it comes to being exactly like every Yankee I’ve ever encountered, but at the same time when I’m calm and when I’m emotionally balanced I generally attempt to practice manners and etiquette. Some of the things that I’ve seen come out of New Englanders mouths, and off of the tips of their fingers in a note/e-mail are generally the sort of thing that would get you shunned if you said that in the south and ignored in the west. I should know, I learned this when I lived in Atlanta and Seattle (and probably why I learned manners the hard way).

[Last Edited: 01/08/2011 07:15:06 PM]

The other thought that I had is a sort of rehash of an issue that I’ve visited time and again the last year that felt the need to be reiterated one more time. The fact of the matter is when a man reaches middle age, there comes with it some pretty heavy baggage. Let’s face it, it’s not any easier being a gay man reaching middle age given the various horrors life visits upon us for being different and the various horrors we visit upon ourselves because of the abuses collected in our lives. Given what’s happened in my life the last two decades — I have collected a hell of a lot of emotional and mental baggage along the way that routinely has a way of haunting me in various ways when dealing with others. From trust issues, to outright cynicism, to the occasional delusion that my simple presence can make a difference in someone’s life, to even the thought that love is enough to change a person.

And those trust issues are frequently visited whenever I begin dealing with a middle-aged man that continues to demonstrate the sex-only mentality of 30 years ago with penis pictures for profile avatars, fake pictures that have been recycled and reused so much that you can see the compression distortion in the bigger version of the picture, and hitting on me as though being sexual is being sexy in spite of the fact my profile doesn’t read anything for people looking for casual encounters/sex.

Honestly, there’s something to be said about those younger than me. While there are some that picked up the sex first approach to relationships, the stifling power of political correctness makes sure that in a public/semi-public setting — such attitudes are kept to a minimum. Either that or I’ve simply been lucky in that those that are younger than me simply don’t find me sexually appealing/attractive enough to want to flirt with me. Either or, it’s a nice way of getting to knowing another human being without the implied undertones of sex being involved as routinely as they are when talking to someone closer to my age.

Though this sort of segues into my next issue that has sort of developed over the last couple of weeks — an issue of unrequited love for a friend. Though even printing that out, it’s even more complex than what I’m trying to say. Sure, there are elements of attraction in there, though there’s also the altruistic love of a best friend as well. It’s this strange sort of balance between wishing to be intimate with this friend, as well as enjoying the fact that I cannot be intimate with this friend because of his own obligations and attractions, and even the occasional frustration of wanting to smack him upside the head and tell him he needs to stop holding everything in the way that he does.

It most probably because I’m feeling lonely at the moment now that I’ve gotten through the holidays relatively unscathed and he’s been nice to me and I’m misinterpreting it like I usually do. Post holiday blues tend to do that to me, particularly given the people I know are usually off with their boyfriends/girlfriends/partners/husbands/wives and I’m usually wishing for those sort of quiet moments that I used to have back in the 90s with Darin.

Well, I think I’ve pretty much covered what it was that I wanted to for the time being. Tomorrow while I’m doing laundry I think that I’ll work a bit on getting some of my profiles updated a bit. Went looking at one and didn’t realize just how dated it was. So I have something to do.

Until the next time then.

Entry 10/17/2010 01:40:42 PM – Mentat 585

I went to bed entirely too early last night and ended waking up sometime in the middle of the night after realizing that I had been snoring loudly (enough to wake the dead), drooling into my pillow like an invalid and having a cat prodding at me because she was hungry and too slack-assed to head to the food bowl on her own. Not too bad a thing really — I only stayed up a couple of hours before I passed out for the remainder of the night and getting an almost full night’s sleep in two really long naps. Waking up in the morning, I realized that the mood that I woke up into was a sort of rampage of various good old-fashioned rants. One of them a sort of left-over from what I was doing to pass the time and calm my mind enough to fall back to sleep. The other is a sort has been the one that I’ve been mulling over and completely avoiding for the last several or so journal entries that I always think I’m going to sit down and address the issues, and end up completely leaving alone because most attempts come off sounding more like a whinge, and less of valid issues.

So be prepared, this is probably going to be a mixture of rant and whinge. I had woken up this morning in a sort of rampage; and thought it high time that I approach everything with a “I couldn’t care less” attitude because I realize it needs to get the hell out if I’m going to deal with moving on from it.

First off, I’m really not liking WordPress all that much at the moment. Last night while I was biding my time until my over-active mind finally calmed down enough to lay back down and pass out, I remember heading over there to see if I couldn’t find a journal entry or two to read. Nothing too heavy reading, just the sort of thing of someone else putting together the puzzle pieces of their lives and either finding success — or failure — in the attempt. What I ended up seeing from the front page were nothing more than journalist and journalist wannabes talking about today’s or yesterday’s news, reviews of restaurants and what sort of eating out someone should do to maintain their girlish (or manly) figures, tech reviews and assorted spyware reports up the ass and generally the short of shit that I could get from reading Slashdot,  Boing Boing or Engadget.

One of the first articles that I clicked on, while being poignant about bullying and harassment of queerfolk that’s hit the media was actually tagged left, right and center from CNN. CNN?? Really? Like CNN’s monstrosity of a news site isn’t enough, it has to have its journalism choking up another site as well? The next was a fellow Spaces User that had made their way to WordPress because of the site shutting that portion down. What was his article about? Windows 1.0 which had YouTube embedded video that Slashdot had talked about and linked back in September. Blah, old news is old for a reason and the fact that I remember the embedded video only brought up more ire toward anyone trying to be wannabe journalist in a blog setting.

I tried out (a little bit but not until later in the morning) the cloud (which is a listing of words based on personal tags) and while this lead me to where I wanted to be — looking at personal blogs — you have to be careful about which tag you choose to get to them. Some of them end up going to just another regurgitation of the front page of featured articles which are journalistic or journalistic-wannabes. Personal is one such word that brought up my ire in the middle of the night finding myself not wanting to read “featured” articles which to me are entirely too impersonal for my taste.

I think that LiveJournal has the right idea when it comes to a personal blog-site/blogsphere, though one of the biggest problems that I had with that site was the overwhelming angst of young teenagers crying about the tyranny of their parents or worse — the social stigmas that have been around for centuries. I don’t think I’ll see the same on WordPress from adults, although I do have a better understanding of why people like using WordPress’ software for their own personal websites — to escape the glut of a site stifled with what feels like informational advertising, and journalistic whoring.

I’ll try to putter around the site some more, and see if I can’t find some journals/blogs from people instead of people trying to be journalists. Particularly given my extremely strong opinion that amateur journalists and journalist wannabes don’t do any sort of fact-checking and really should — for the sake of journalism if anything. If not, then it’ll serve just as MSN Spaces did — the site for being the oldest online journal site that I have out there…

==================================================================

As for the other tirade… God this one’s been the ongoing and long-time coming one. One that I’m not sure whether it’s just me sick and tired of the games of dating, or whether it’s honest to god legitimate. Either or, here it comes… Ready or not…

I don’t know what to make of the profiles that I read of single gay men online. For every piece that comes off truthful, there are times when the lies or blatantly egregious self-promotion turns an otherwise interest to drop that person a note to finding myself completely put off. Sometimes I think I’m simply being too picky… Other times, I feel as though I’m justified in my disgust and cynicism. I mean — here are some good examples of what I face in this attempt to finding someone interesting enough to date…

The tagline on one site that I use is “Yes, I shall go down in history as the man who opened a door!”- Ever After

I got a response from someone telling me it’s his favorite movie and that he saw it the other night… His nickname: ricocksucker4u. It’s a picture of an erect penis (I can only assume it’s his, but it’s what I call a headless horseman picture) that he’s holding. His profile is all about various sexual actions that he’d like to do with someone.

Yeah, *thumbs up* that sort of profile just makes me want to strike up a conversation with a man holding his penis about romance or critiquing a romantic story.

On another site I have the following as the first thing you read when you get to the profile: Be *IN* the USA only. All others will be marked spam. I go on to explain that I’m looking for someone that’s not separated by oceans to call a boyfriend.

I get responses from folk in the Philippines, Ghana and China asking to be my boyfriend.

Really? I know that English might not be one’s primary language, but even those that respond in broken English seem to have a basic understanding of what they’re saying in responses to me. For giggles I did respond to a few of them asking if they had problems reading that line and all of them apologized for not reading it. Which means, of course, they were looking at the pictures and not reading anything at all.

Then again, this shouldn’t be surprising really given that on yet another chat site, I’ve been positively flooded and inundated with friend requests and “you’re hot” tags from folk from the Orient. I guess the great firewall of China’s come down on some sections of these sort of sites.

[Last Edited: 10/17/2010 06:44:44 PM]

Okay, I walked away for a bit… had supper, got the cat fed and generally got all sort of ire going for different reasons. Wanted to borrow Avatar from my aunt so that I could get some good old fashioned vitriol going in tomorrow when I’m sitting there getting caught up with reading and it turns out that the woman completely decimated the box for it. Then looking through the DVD box, the DVD is completely missing.

Then my aunt insists to check my uncle’s portable DVD player, which he’s been using to watch the movies he’s asked to borrow to check out. I tell her it most certainly won’t be in there given how deeply into the cabinet that Avatar was and how recent my uncle’s movie watching has been. She insisted only to see that my movie My Neighbor Totoro queued up.

And then my aunt wonders why I cringe hardcore whenever they want to borrow any of my movies.

But I digress…

So the on-going rant that I have is the whole online dating scene, which I walked away from because frankly I find myself just plain cynical about it. Oh, I know! Here’s another beauty…

On one several of the sites they have the ability to see who came to visit your profile. I was watching this 50-something that had checked my profile out several times over the course of a couple of weeks that has in his username the city I’m currently living in. Not too bad, I thought. I wouldn’t turn in down outright. Checked out the rest of his profile and it was completely blank. Not very inspiring for me to find something in common to check out, so I pretty much left it to his discretion whether or not he would stare at me some more before I approached him about that routine checking.

Next day he asks whether I’m from the same city he’s in and would I like to go out for coffee.

I responded politely asking for a day and time of his convenience.

Nothing… A month later and he’s not responded.

Well all righty. Check-check with the manners there. Moving along from that now.

*sighs* I think as I’m sitting here thinking about it — I’m just tired of the game some men play to snag a boyfriend. The lies, the half-truths, the insincerity behind the things that they say about themselves: either because they don’t want to appear well; average. Or the outright fabrications to build themselves up to more than they actually are. That and the fact that a majority of the profiles I’ve read through are so… cookie cutter. Their likes and dislikes are so mainstream as to feel they were chosen because they don’t want to come off as too oddball to be un-datable.

Take for example the man that said that one of his fears was for cats. I had asked him about it as I’m naturally curious of anyone that would have a fear of felines. It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen it, but opportunity being the mother of invention, I decided to enact upon it to find out what the cause of that fear was. He explained succinctly enough that I could comprehend and empathize with his fear (as it does touch upon the primal fears of our racial history). It was the way that he had described it though that I found myself facepalming through the re-reading of his note.

It came off as though he were hyper-concerned that it would his wording would be interpreted as being effeminate.

I can say this much though — I didn’t once think him the least bit effeminate. What I did consider after re-reading his note a third time was that he was incredibly high-maintenance; given he had at least five different phobias and stressed at least eight times how much of a man’s-man he was.

It leaves me wondering… At middle-age do we men become so self-conscious of our image, we over-exaggerate our actions to prevent that image from being misinterpreted? Do we become that egotistically frail that we no longer see ourselves the way we did when we were in our 20s that it’s a constant effort to maintain some bloated or otherwise virile self-image when we reach our 40s?

It makes me wonder how I missed out on that insanity.. Heh, at least it makes me thankful I missed out on it.

Well that’s about it for the time being. I could go on, but I have other things to think about and do. I might revisit this a bit more. I might not. Until the next time.