Insomnibloggery

It's ten to one in the morning and I've been home for twenty minutes and I'm thinking I should have been in bed fifteen minutes ago. But no, I'm still up, and I have to get up at six and have a full day tomorrow at work, and I can count on not getting to bed early tomorrow, so this is really stupid; but here I am anyway, up. And worse, writing, if you can call it that.

It's just about two hours to here from San Jose, where I loaded up some stuff out of a dorm room whose occupant thinks won't fit in his car later this week when finals are over. I like driving long distances at night, and though two hours isn't very long, it was enough to be enjoyable. My photographic eye saw two scenes on today's drives that I would like to have captured, both on Interstate 680.

The Alamo Ridge is one of many ridges in the folds and hills that separate the Central Valley from the Bay. My eye glanced over to it as I hurtled south, the sun, a few degrees above Las Trampas Peak to the west, illuminating with yellow light a tall dead tree trunk rising out of the hillside. It was framed between two dark green oak trees and underneath everything was a bright yellow blanket of flowering mustard grass. A beautiful image in the eye of memory, seen for but an instant.

Coming back north, where the freeway skirts the hills along the marshes' edge north of Suisun Bay and well after dark, a freight train trundled down the S.P. tracks out in the flats, its triple headlight reflected in the high water, and again I saw dramatic visual possibilities. Alas, I was speeding home, as was the train and everyone else out on that road.

Hours before that, in mid afternoon, I hauled my father's sofa out to a borrowed truck, and rearranged his living room so his new robo-chair faced the TV but didn't bang into the wall when reclining. Dinner was the usual weird and uncomfortable community of the assisted living dining hall. Somewhere in there I found slides of me taken by my grandfather when I was five, including a couple taken off the screen of a black and white TV set when I was on the Mayor Art show in 1963.

My father has a project going of digitizing slides but he's getting slower fast and has prioritized the pictures no one will ever look at, i.e. stuff he did with his girlfriend in the 1980s and 90s. I'm afraid the interesting ones, from the 1950s and 60s, that have me and my brother(s) in them, will never get annotated. Same with regard to my grandfather's. So I'll do all that myself some day, without the benefit of any useful memories.

* * *

I read a blog entry lately by a guy who used to be married and apparently seeks women on the internet. He wrote of one he didn't like particularly, and who didn't particularly like him, but apart from that they fucked anyway. I get a weird sinking feeling at such thoughts. Historically I was never one for casual sex, though I did desire it. For a few decades I was insecure about that, as though I was less of a man for not being in on the rampant fucking. But lately I've had the chance to take a fresh look at myself and at my past, and have concluded that I'm really not there if there isn't a good connection. Worse, some weird instinct has me less than thrilled with people who are. I struggle with this because I have always been fascinated with people who take sex with a casual and healthily honest approach. Perhaps I've misunderstood this fascination as something positive. I don't know. But though I respect and support women's self-determination and sexual adventurism, I also have an atavistic reaction against it, as though when they fuck somebody they don't particularly want to, they become something I cannot understand and am repelled by.

Is this some weird twist on the Madonna-whore complex? I'm a strong candidate for it, according to the simple intro at Wiki. I do remember, late in marriage, being unable to include my wife among my sexual desires. But that was probably something else, "late in marriage" being a clue; and I go the other way also, as it appears I can only enjoy sex with someone I love to some degree. Of course, I haven't been single long enough to prove this. And I guess that's where I was starting this particular rant.

When I read of men casually hooking up with women who casually hook up, I am repelled, and fascinated, and I wonder if I am doing the right thing with my time. I am not, as it happens, using this post-marital time for hooking up. I'm not pursuing any sort of fuck-fest, as men often do. I have two friendships at present that you might say include benefits (though I hate the attitude behind that terminology), and they are lovely women inside and out and we have connections of a lifelong quality. Why is that I feel I am somehow failing myself to be so exclusive at this time? Why do I also feel a revulsion for women who are not as exclusive, even while (to a degree) desiring such women?

The blogger I mentioned has, in my opinion, a raft of unresolved issues with females, and leaves clues everywhere but where he can see them. The same can probably be said of me -- it would only be fair -- but I'm damned if I can figure them out. It's a very complex business, this network of interactions between myself and the essential female. Lots of rope and fish-hooks, and fear and resentment and need; and when I'm alone just about every night, satisfied that a fulfilling time is on the calendar or will be, I sometimes wonder about all those men and women fucking each other even though they don't particularly want to. What has been going on all my life? What truth am I missing?