Exercises in futility

In a few hours, I'll be heading back to Surrey again, for another two weeks and more away. To earn money which isn't going to do anything but enrich the financial institutions and their shareholders.
In my head will be images of what I want in my life, but can never have.
In the next few minutes, I'll be taking another dose of my medication, to help to keep my heart ticking away for another day. Quantity of life, but no quality.
What is the point? To any of it?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Sandel

Evanescence. The first word out of my mouth after finishing the book. A fleeting moment of perfection, and then it's gone. Almost a year on, if I bumped into DBJ tomorrow, it would very probably be gone, even though he's the closest to the ideal that I've ever seen in my life.
I fell in love, of course. Totally predictable, given my penchant for melodramatic emotions, and my propensity for falling for beautiful, but possibly flawed fictional characters. Lucette in Ada, the eponymous boy in Loving Sander, and now Tony. How could I not fall in love with the ravishingly gorgeous, preternaturally intelligent and stunningly talented Tony. It's a very strange, double-edged kind of love, though, a jolie-laide kind of love, dripping with melancholy, pervaded with a sense of loss, albeit maybe the loss of something I've never had and never will have.
Having waited so long to read the book, I'm not sure yet where it fits in my literary 'hit parade'. I'll need to read it again, but first impressions are that it won't be at the very top. I did enjoy it, but in a slightly masochistic kind of way. It didn't bring tears to my eyes, although I was within hailing distance of that kind of emotion once or twice. It would be an exaggeration to call it an anticlimax, but it did kind of end with something of a whimper. Worth devoting my day to, though....I think.

****

A little edit, with a further few hours of thought about the book.
I think it's the ending that I'm struggling with. I don't quite understand it. Superficially, it seems like a cop-out, although I may be thinking anachronistically in saying that, given that the story was written more than 40 years ago. To contrive a last-minute separation, and then to have Tony become something he wasn't before, something that wasn't even prefigured before, seems strange. Maybe I've got a vested interest in having wanted Tony and David to end up together, even though I knew before I'd read the book that they didn't, but the way it was done, the 'suddenly he's straight' kind of plot device seemed very dissonant.

****

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Roast beef and lethargy

That pretty much sums up our Sunday. As a family, we've done next to nothing today. My wife was talking a good fight about going out in the latter part of this morning, but then lost whatever enthusiasm she'd had, while my daughter and I didn't even get that close to doing anything - my daughter has been lounging around in her PJ's all day, while I didn't even get around to having a shower until about 2:00 this afternoon, by which time I was getting offensive, even to myself! The only thing I've achieved today has been in the kitchen, our traditional Sunday morning bacon sarnies, and then a nice beef roast by way of our main meal a couple of hours ago. All part of the 'being at home' experience, I guess, as against what I'm going to be doing for another fortnight from Tuesday afternoon.
The best news of the day was finding, in our mail 'inbox' that lives under the telephone table in the hall, a padded envelope which contained my copy of Sandel - I think my wife was expecting it to turn up in more substantial packaging, and had said that she didn't think it had arrived yet. That's tomorrow's agenda taken care of - I'll read it while I've got the house to myself during my family's office/school hours.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A short-lived improvement

Just when I thought I might be able to have a nice, peaceful, recuperative weekend, my hopes have been shot down in flames. My wife decided I haven't been doing enough to address our financial woes, and started lecturing me about it, and I'm afraid I reacted rather less amenably than she was expecting. So now the communication between us is terse, to say the least. Great. Make me feel even more worthless than I normally do, why don't you? It's times like this when I just feel like saying something along the lines of 'If you think I'm not good enough now, wait until I tell you what I really am.' It wouldn't cure anything, in fact it would probably destroy most of what's left, but there's only so much of this insidious undermining of my already fragile self-esteem that I can put up with before my patience runs out. I know it takes two to make an argument, and I'm not trying to say that I'm some some sort of innocent victim, but I really find it hard to cope with at times.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Better, if only temporarily

Coming to the end of my first day at home of my current long weekend, I'm feeling substantially more at one with the world than has been the case in recent days. It's been a relaxing day, in general terms, nothing more strenuous than a shopping trip involved (although that had its own distractions - a serious, blond distraction, in particular, but I'm not supposed to be talking about that kind of thing), nice weather, twenty minutes of extra evening daylight, given our westerly location, all good stuff. Much more like what I would choose for my lifestyle, even if other issues are still lurking in the background. The only cloud on the horizon is the knowledge that in a few days time, I'll be gone again, back to metropolitan/suburban exile. Oh well, enjoy it while I can, I guess.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A quote

'You think some people are better than others because of the way they make love.'

A quote from the screenplay of Another Country, one of my all-time favourite films. It also pretty much sums up how I feel the world feels about me at the moment. What I want is beyond the pale, unacceptable, unconscionable. I should never be allowed to be me, ever. I should look instead for something 'obtainable'. To paraphrase another quote, from a rather stupid radio advert, it's as though I'd ordered a chicken pie, and the waiter brought a cricket bat, but that I should still be grateful for the cricket bat.
I'm sorry, but I want the 'chicken pie'. Having said that, I've explained in this blog before that I don't want to hurt anyone, I don't want to deceive or, worse, coerce anyone into doing anything they don't want to do, I don't, in short, want to have sex with anyone who doesn't want to have sex with me. That, in itself, means that the chances of my finding myself in bed with a boy are almost nil from the outset. But, make no mistake, I would, if I was convinced that any such hypothetical relationship was consensual. And I would have to be genuinely convinced, after what happened, or almost happened, with 'B' all those years ago. But I can't live without the hope that sometime, somewhere, there is someone for me. If I give up that hope, after the best part of four decades, I might just as well curl up in a corner and die.
I apologise if this isn't what people, especially those who have taken the time and trouble to try and help me over the last year or so, want to hear, but, whatever else, I feel the need to be honest.
I'm going to try, really try, not to harp on this subject anymore. Unless anything substantive changes, I'm going to try and make this the last post about all this for the foreseeable future. There are plenty of other things in life to talk about, at the end of the day.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Unobtainable....

....is a big, scary word. 'What you desire is unobtainable....' If that's really true, if 'never' is immutable, if I can't even hope, if this life of frustration and pretence is all there is, I don't know if I can go on, if I want to go on.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B