Lets get married ; so what?

Lets get married ; so what?

We can’t really live apart; we tried three times.  We love each other – it’s pathetic.  You and me, we met through a transvestite friend  and we laughed at the fact that we were drawn to each.

And now its another matter.  We miss each other when we’re apart.  We both light up just having a drink together.   We’re having no luck dating other people – and we’re  are both really trying to do that.  I’m unhappy without you and you’re not having a lot of fun either.    Its pathetic, but we’re drawn to each other.

We’re drawn to each other, but that is what’s hard to understand.  I’m a senior Jewish guy who bikes a lot but is kinda dumpy and beat up looking.  You’re  a pretty much younger thing who teaches Yoga and rides bikes with me.   Ok, how’s that anything much in common?

It’s not.  Our shared swimming and biking and dope smoking isn’t really enough.  What works is that we are attracted to each other.  It’s a Boy-girl thing that does transcend other considerations like money or you looking like you’re having dinner with your father whenever we go to Langer’s for corned beef.

   

All of which is what brings me to my marriage proposal.  I want us to have a marriage on the QT ( or on the 'down low' as they might say).  We tell no one and we elope quietly – Vegas kinda thing (although, why go to the expense?)  We keep our separate residence as long as we can afford to.  If we can’t afford anything else, then we might have to move in together, but I don’t recommend that.   We just know we’ll always be there for each other and we'll always be kind, gentle and understanding of each other.  

Its marriage as a voluntary form of human bondage that only stings when lodging together occasionally.  The sex thing we need to figure out.  I'm OK with what we do now, but are you?  You need to tell me what to do when your ready.  Our relationship has a sexual component but you need to define it for us; I'm OK with that.  I need you to control that.

Not sure this is like a 'REAL' romance or just a mirage.  We always assumed this was just something temporary.  Can we get married just in case the ‘REAL’ thing never does come along .   You see,  you kinda are the REAL thing for me.  And that’s why I want to marry you.

Hey Charlie

Hey Charlie:

Not sure how to communicate. Blog, tweet, facetime, e mail, Podcast or Analogue phone.   Kinda like parables, but don't really know any except for maybe the story of Holden Caulfield in the Cather in the Rye; He would have seen things for what they are and called it right.  But he was 17 - I'm 3 times that age.

This is why our whole fucking generation is looking to our kids for answers.  We just don't know anymore but I used to think Holden Caulfield had the answers.  So, its a cluster fuck, we're confronted with tough choices and bad decisions and what do we as boomers do?  We bail,   or start dying off and speeding it along with a virus. 

And now its all your lousy problem.  I mean baby boomers skated.  We never dealt with any real problems.....our parents and the welfare society they created - VA bennies,senior housing, senior bus fare, senior blow jobs.  All a fabrication to allow baby boomers to grease the skids for a soft landing.  Its stuff that is outrageous and can't say, Charlie, that I would understand it if you were angry.  Thank you for letting me slide, cause you never really show that anger to me.  Its like you were the accepting parent all along.  

Which is something I always wondered about you, Charlie.  You always let  me put every decision, every life choice and every plan for myself on you're shoulders.  It was like a reverse father-son deal that was more like a 'relationship' than parental. 

Why are you so kool?  Like too kool for school.  I appreciate it because of course you know I'm not exactly the model of sobriety and yet, I don't ever feel dissed by you. But I don't feel like I can help you in any way.  I think I just amuse you.  Which leads me into my first you tube video - please see: https://youtu.be/IWINtUCshxY     Joe Pesci asking “Do I amuse you?”

So in this sort of rampling parting shot I thought I'd express what things would look like now, now when I'm 69.  Then if I make it to 70,  I'll write some stuff like this all over again and we'll get this like dairy, letter, artificial writing structure thing that like no one's has used since the 1870s to write a book with. One of us will have to published the thing….again, counting on you to do the shit work.

This time, April 1, 2020,  right here,  may be the high point just as Pandemic takes over and we still kinda really remember what everything was like before.  Ya see, my whole world view died in this plague.  I only tell you how LUCKY I feel that my life (up to now) has been great and far better than anyone thought it would be for me.   Of course, you were real luck.

I was the kid who flunked 3rd grade, had discipline issues - hated structure and like little girls.  Always liked little girls.  But I liked guys too.....I like people and have a fun life with lots and lots of people in it.  Its what I wanted for my self towards the end.   Never cared about withdrawing from anything - other than maybe the bank or....as a method of birth control.

I’m very lucky you’re my kid.  My father was a not a very respectable character and my mom was mentally challenges as in nuts.  So the likely hood of me making it to college thru an MBA program were slim (you’re namesake, Charlie Samter, said I wasn’t really college material. ).  Just like the likelyhood of me having a kid graduate from Georgetown Law School and becoming a lawyer were also pretty slim. 

So its been great til now. But now its stuff I don’t know how to navigate.   Now shows America that its sort of open society and freedom is hopelessly out of synch with modernity and all the very tough issues that must be faced now.  Climate Change, Pandemics, Income Inequality, Aging Population - and it all starts hitting now.

No more dodging the bullet.  American’s exceptional -ism is dead.  Now the deal is we have to run to keep up.  Keep up with autocratic societies that can do things we simply cannot do:  like contain a virus.   Open Societies and rugged individualism is no longer allowed for Great World Powers or whatever they call them in Orwell's book 1984.     No, my America is over and maybe it’s my fault, my generations or what the fuck does it matter who's fault.  You gotta get about the job of fixing it Charlie.  And you will,  I have no doubt.

Back from the Dead

BACK FROM THE DEAD: COVID19 RECOVERY STORY

by BERNIE DUBINSKY

I’ve always thought of myself lucky, but not until I caught the COVID-19 virus did I realize how lucky. 

As a 70 year old overweight guy who biked a lot but still had all the other risk factors, I thought if I got this virus, I was a goner. The news of 2020 Pandemic hit me as the start of a collapse of life as I knew it and I’d assumed part of that deal was, if I caught the virus, I’d be dead. Made sense.  The virus targeted my generation and was gunning from me, kinda like the Arnold nut job character in the Terminator.  Every time I looked over my shoulder, there it was, always about to catch up and when it did; I felt for sure that would be, ‘all she wrote’. 

Didn’t work out quite that simply.   Right after 2021 started I took sick – not all the symptoms, but enough that my heart sank.   Testing took forever but a positive result came back Jan 6^th – just in time to watch the Capital get over-run.  I felt like I was being over-run by an invader as well. Couldn’t sleep……started drifting in and out of consciousness…no appetite, constipation, non-stop nausea.  Now this was weird, like LSD, Peyote and Mary Jane all wrapped up into one bad trip. Trouble is, I wanted to hold off taking this trip, I wanted off this airplane. 

Like it or not, it was on.  Nights filled with bad radio voices, endless channel flipping on unwatchable cable TV and bad movie ideas from Netflix as I sat in my place zoned out.  Until I noticed something.   I could hear shouts and cries, e mails from over my cell phone. All messages from folks in the cooperative I live in. Like vague chants, me neighbors kept nudging me.  

They were rooting for me to stay alive.  The Terminator caught me, but these guys in my housing cooperative  figured I could beat it.  Imagine that?    These much younger voices drowned out all the other bad news and self-doubt and old movies.  Maybe I was just being a drama queen and this is not the “Sickness onto Death”?  

Turns out, those voices were right. I started by me getting hungry again.  That’s what happened first.  In the middle of the night, I grabbed a week old rotisserie chicken in the fridge that was given me by a neighbor, threw it in dirty baking dish and warmed it up.  In the dark, at 3 am, I wolfed that chicken down, like a caveman, and ate half of it – not even putting salt on it, just slicing it with a Swiss Army penknife.  .

First real food I had eaten in 10 days.  Protein craving was my body’s screaming out for energy for the fight.  My body kept telling me; “you’re gonna fucking die, you moron, if you don’t help me with this virus – forget your imagined death, I’m struggling here to stay alive.”  And that’s what I did. I forget my doom and gloom stuff and started listening to this my beat-up old body. 

Been symptom free now for 6 days and as the 45^th prez just left my old hometown, DC: other clouds have started to lift.  I’m sleeping again, eating and yes, even going to the bathroom like normal.  No more split consciousness; clarity of thinking has returned. I’m recovering nicely, according to my HMO.  One more negative test result and I'm good to go.  Imagine that?    I’m still alive. 

Looks to be pretty clear for now.  Feels great! New movie playing in the mental VCR, its Charles Dickens Christmas Carol and I’m Scrooge, back from the dead on Christmas morning.  But that could all change with yet another health reversal.  Just hope it’s not like Arnold always says: “ I’ll be back.”

                                                                                                                        

My Closeted Affair with a Trumpster

I never knew I was sleeping with someone that voted for Donald Trump until a couple of weeks after the 2016 election. Dee and I had been an ‘item’ more or less for 5 years and we never did figure politics as part of the attraction. We just knew we both loved to bike and swim and head to the beach at random times. Both had irregular schedules that let us meet during week days and both needed the affection and intimacy that drew us together.

It turned out that politics was what pulled us apart.

Being 25 years older than her seemed the least of our problems. She was drop dead gorgeous when really young and age enhanced her looks for me. What had been very small breasts on a tallish, athletic, small boned young woman become kinda voluptuous boobies when they began to drop as she aged. Her flaxen hair cascaded over shoulders built up from hours of Yoga and swimming; her larger thighs bespoke more of biking muscles than flab and her pale blue eyes distracted you from noticing her mounting wrinkles. Even her grey hair streaks were camouflage by her sun bleached coif.

For a pot bellied aging lefty like me, Dee was heaven sent. True we had to be very careful about sex ’cause Dee could still get pregnant, but that wasn’t much of an issue. Half the time my borderline diabetes gave me hit or miss performance and Dee never did find ecstasy with the dirt bag losers that were drawn like flies to her beauty. She wasn’t exactly frigid but the joys of sex had always eluded her. So in terms of sex it was a pretty good match — she didn’t want it in and I couldn’t get it up.

We shared lots more interesting intimacy than the old ‘in and out’. She is an exhibitionist who loved getting naked in front of an audience and I was always willing to watch — and that extended to showers together, sleeping in the buff together ( especially at wake up time) and even bathroom stuff (which did weird me out a little, at first). I even bought this little cot mattress that fit along her bed so we could fondle each other side by side in a harmless fashion. Not getting overly excited, but feeling kinda nasty and dreamy all the same.

It was the sort of magical LA street romance of convenience made possible by biking back and forth across LA from downtown (where I live) to West LA (where Dee lives). I became her cut-rate sugar daddy and she became my younger paramour by default. We did all kinds of low-cost outings together like the Hollywood Bowl, or a trip to Hansen Dam or late night Karaoke and drinks. But our real love was getting high on pot. And that happened as soon as her eyes met mine. I paid for most everything but not in an overt way — it was always Dee’s intention to even the financial score but I knew she never could.

Dee was trapped in the gig economy ever since the world renowned Yoga studio she had worked for went bust. Dee had been a teacher/admin supervisor for a wacky Yoga franchise operation for a number of years that was a convenient bike ride away from her over priced West LA apt.

When the company closed its doors, she never was able to pay her bills and was forced to rely on her parents for help. I buying her dinner or taking her to a movie was a thrill she appreciated as something outside of her budget. I did not expect anything back for my largesse. Dee was extremely independent and willful and hated to take anything from anyone. It’s all part of that Republican thing about being a ‘rugged individual’ and never taking a hand out. I accepted her party affiliation as just another eccentricity.

As 2016 advanced towards the election, I noticed Dee was watching some strange stuff on You Tube. Alex Jones, “Lies from the Mainstream Media” , and lots of hate stuff about Hillary and the “Deep State” were on the I-pad I lent her and I wondered what it was all about. Truth is I never much cared about her politics. I was more into our physical activities but it was interesting that she was such a strong Trump devote. She loved his grand plans to disrupt the establishments. I only later realized how much all of that fed into her resentments about being left-behind by a tricky economy that was very unforgiving.

I had all the ‘baby boomer’ advantages in terms of career opportunities, investments and benefits of marriage. This meant that I led a comfortable middle-class existence afforded by good health and fortune. Dee was not nearly as lucky and it gave her a radically different perspective on the economy and everyday life. The Bogard/Becall movie “To Have and Have Not” summed up our relationship and how politics came to interfere with our bliss. (For Bogart it was the French Resistance in that 1944 movie.)

My whole world is made up of progressive friends working to cure the World’s ills like climate change and abuse of women or LBGT discrimination. My friends bike as much to make an environmental statement as to get cross town. We were all shocked out of complacency by Trump’s win.

The big question was ‘Who the hell voted for Trump?’ Only folks in the ‘fly over’ States my liberal friends and I concluded. Wrong. Dee told me she did. It caused me to shutter and deny it was true. I couldn’t tell my friends. I avoided them and started living this weird ‘closeted’ life style where we stopped socializing with others.

Her revelation cast a whole new light on everything. I hadn’t thought of myself as a ‘pussy grabber’ in the Trump mode. I had noticed that nasty old white guys gave me a big wink when Dee and I loaded our bikes on the bus and scrambled aboard, but I missed the Trump effect until Dee started advertising for Q-Anon on her bike basket. Then, those old white guys started up conversations with us and called us ‘fellow patriots’. It threw our whole relationship into a weird narrative that gave me motion sickness.

If she’s a Trumpster, I must be a wannabe ‘pussy grabber’ -’cause that’s the sort of women who hang with those sort of guys. I just couldn’t face my friends, the world or even my reflection in the mirror knowing that about myself. Finally came that day when I had to send that ‘Dear Dee’ e-mail. I sent her the lyrics from Cole Porter — Just One of Those Things song and lamented about us having to part. It was a bittersweet parting.

I guess even love is polarized in the era of Donald Trump.