therapy

Yesterday I went to my therapist and rehearsed the conversation that I needed to have with D.  I guess what I'm unhappy about has to do with no longer talking the way we used to.  It's difficult for me to express myself that way, asking questions, because I always feel that problems need acton, not discussion.  Also, I sense that whenever I want to talk to her, she feels resentful, and distant, and lonely.  We feel like we are two little boats floating farther and farther away from each other on this vast ocean of isolation.  My therapist told me to find a time and a place, and start thinking about how she thinks about the situation.  Mentalize her thoughts.  A skill that I clearly lack.  I can't read minds, and I most certainly cannot read my wife's mind, even though I have felt for a long time that she's the person that I know better than everyone else in the world.  Does she feel lonely?  Does she think that I'm fat and unattractive?  Maybe she's tired of me because she thinks I'm sexually inadequate?  Maybe she's having an affair?  It could be one of the wealthy partners at the firm.  I wonder if it's that guy I've met once...dear god he's as old as my father...although admittedly quite attractive, and I imagine more than loaded enough to care for my children.  The more I think about this the more I feel uncomfortably feminine.  I remember when I was in middle school I had a period when I was scrawny and puny, then pudgy and androgynous, and felt less like a man than ever.  It's incredible how the hormones of 13 turns you from skinny to fat in no time.  My father wasn't very helpful either.  He himself is a bit on the push-over side of things, and not very athletic.  My twin brother felt a bit stronger, but he ended up a musician, so there's definitely nothing to learn from him.  Oh Ricky (Richard's his name, though only I'm allowed to call him Ricky between ourselves, because he associates it with Ricky Martin), I wonder what that piece of shit is up to.  I oughtta call him.  In middle school I decided to change my persona.  Joined the football team for a year, with a pathetic record, but learned a few tricks here and there, and especially useful was the access to the jock's weight room.  And talk like a jock.  That was a "skill" that came to me pretty quickly.  Maybe I'm fat again.  And I'm certainly hairier now than ever.

Always liked writing and math, though, and made some friends that way, and got to know some of Ricky's friends too.  Read a few novels here and there.  I remember zoning out during the football banquet at the end of the year, being benched most of the second year, making ever so little effort during practice.  Still, this popular guy facade made it easier to find a very pretty girl to go to the prom with.  My mother was thrilled.  My father was not happy about how big of an idiot she was...and I judged him for it.

"We really need to talk," I told D, trying to be as solemn as possible.

She stared at me uncomfortably.

"Ok.  Well do you want to talk here?"

I looked around.  It was 9PM.  The kids were in bed.  We were sitting next to each other on this $5000 piece of sectional that we bought from a local designer.

"Look, I'm not sure what's going on but I feel like our marriage is having seriously bad problems.  I feel like you are not talking to me at all, and we haven't been having sex very much for a long time.  I'm not sure what is going on and I need your help to figure it out."

Or something like that per my recollection.

The next hour was really weird.  I think she tried to have a genuine conversation with me.  She said she's sorry and she still loved me and that it was mostly because of work, and she did feel more distant and didn't know why.  Even though I think she tried her best to communicate and we each said "I love you" several times, I get this eerie sensation that we were in the middle of a break-up talk.  I joked around a bit, and started feeling her up and kissing her.  She looked uncomfortable, but I didn't stop.  I put my finger up her panties and started feeling the contour of her labia, first in between her legs then up, with the hairy part prickling on her silky underwear.  She whispered, "we can't do it here."  I didn't stop.  As I started to feel the dampness, something in me clicked.  I wanted to let the consequences rip spectacularly in the middle of our gaudily renovated post-housing bubble den.  I mercilessly suckled her nipples, darkened by more than a few months of lactation.  I pulled down my boxers by my ankles and pushed myself into her from behind--I don't remember the last time I did that, and I didn't last long.  She was wet, very very wet and warm and felt comforting and close, like a womb or some kind of glowing but fading childhood memory, like a perverse, absorbing kind of aggressiveness, enveloping, with no exit except for my muscle tightening, vaguely vacuous, primal contractions.  Ask your man to describe ejaculation to you.  And not just "it felt good."

Afterward, she was silent.  I offered to go down on her, but she said no.  She said we can't continue to communicate by having sex.  It wasn't right.  It felt dirty and cheap and abused.  I said you are my wife and I love you and I wanted to show you that.  She started to get teary and started to whimper but I knew she held back because she didn't want to wake the kids.  I couldn't stand looking at her like that, so I tried to hold her in my arms, but that only pushed her away as she walked swiftly back into our bedroom, stealthily shutting the door on her way.  When I tried to open it later I realized that it wasn't locked, but I assumed that she didn't want me in there.  I walked back downstairs bare footed, feeling the piercing chill of the tiles, and craving deeply of a cigarette.

I slept on the couch last night and I'm a complete mess today.  But I'm at the Starbucks now and the woman with the stroller is back.  I like her body.  I think I'm a dirty and fucked up individual.  I am an ugly brute, no better than any of the frat boys that I had the pleasure of knowing in my life.  I'm a degrading, wife-hating pathetic husband with no redeeming quality.  But looking at her I had a hard-on, and that's how I know that as pathetic as I was, I'm alive.

to tell or not to tell

Having had some time to think things through, I realized that I'm at a point in life where I have to make some difficult decisions.  Relationship with D is as bad as ever, even though neither of us is really making it difficult to live with each other.  She's really doing well at work these days, and really on her way to be floating along the partnership track.  Yesterday she asked me where I would like to take a vacation, Aspen or Bora Bora.  Ridiculous question if there is ever one.  Ever since she turned 30 I've been finding her more and more attractive, especially with her erstwhile slightly pudgy cheeks carved sharper by the imperceptible blades of time.  She washes herself more carefully now, and her privates are more invitingly pink and lasciviously delicious between my lips, with only tender sensitivity that burns me with flames of desire every time I put my head between her smooth, sparkling thighs.

"Wherever I can get a good fuck," I blurted out naughtily, with a mischievous grin.  It was a flashback of our earlier years of incessant tickling flirtations.

She rolled her eyes, of course.  She went on to talk about getting the kids to take skiing lessons.  All I could think about was how I need to bring up this conversation because I could not stand it any longer. Yet words invariably escape me.  

The fact of the matter is, my wife and I have problems that run much deeper than our lack of sex, I think.  I think she wants things that I cannot offer her, and she sees the world differently than I do.  As our twenties rolled by, her talent mitigated her insatiable desire to roll over everybody and everything, including my admittedly fragile ego.  We have less and less to talk about, and the meals are full of silences, dark, enigmatic silences.  Five years ago I was make substantially more money than she did, and that streak didn't continue.  I felt the traditional gender roles collapsing onto me, and yet she sneered and stayed utterly oblivious to my constant insecurity and self-scrutiny.  

When I bring up these topics of conversation, she dismisses them.

I am a shell of a human being, stuck in a cliche that is as old as time itself.  Of course, I can try to escape, but since there's nowhere to break out to, there is no where to go.  I'm an ant trapped on a sphere, or a Mobius strip, and the faster I run the more I determined to leave the sooner I return to where I started.  What I do know is that I love my kids and I can't leave.  At least, not now.  If I can't leave then I can't have the heart to put my words into action, and D would be able defeat me so easily.

Last night D fell asleep next to me, and I had a monumental hard-on.  Drops of pre-cum oozed out of the orifice, and I used my thumb and index finger to make circular, tortuous motions, and it erupted embarrassingly and silently into the blanket as I held my breath.  I need to think about this, I think.  

flickering

It's been a while.  Over Christmas, we went back to my parents for a little bit.  I took a couple of weeks off from work, and D decided to join us after a few days.  My parents are old and finicky, constantly harassing my children about trivialities.  My old room was converted into a guest room and my brother's room was cleared out for a little in-home gym that nobody ever used.  My day consisted of waking up at 9:30AM, eating a bowl of cereal, going to the backyard, and sometimes lighting a covert cigarette.  One night I called up a good friend, Tommy, from high school and he offered me a joint.  His house is literally 2 blocks down the street.  Tommy is married too now, though still in his old pudgy self and never had the physical metamorphoses that one would expect given how much money he made right before the housing crash as a contractor.  We sat by his large, pristine, artificial, Japanese inspired heated pool, watching the snow weighing on the bleak pine trees in the back, barely made out, covered in a fine, pink crepuscular haze.  He got married way before I did, and his daughter is now in middle school, doing well.  He relayed to me how little sex he's having too, that poor bastard.  I suppose it's normal.  I deeply inhaled, and felt the little ripples rising from deep within my scrotum up my spine, emitting a sad, sour moan.

In any case, I spent many of my days with parents beating off on an air mattress in the guest room, being stuffed with semi-processed food that they love, jogging in that patch of suburbia, not unlikely my own in the Southwest, but covered with the distinct, airy flora of the Northeast.  I remember one day I had a flashback of Lester from American Beauty saying "This is my life...and in one year I'll be dead," jogging in his little anomic paradise... Am I not a bit young for my mid-life crisis?

Lately it's been difficult for me sustain an erection with D.  We had sex perhaps once in January and once in February.  She likes to get it over with quickly, and when I went down on her I felt the dread, the heart pounding, the thought of the imminent collapse of our marriage, and our children being abandoned and kicked around like dreary urchins in a Dickens novel.  I don't have the heart to say anything to anyone.  I tried to create an artificial hard-on, but when I was inside of her I couldn't feel anything, which made me even more distressed.  Perhaps the final verdict is in.  Perhaps I am no longer attracted to my wife.  The lack of feeling only sparked another round of fanatic self-stimulation for penetration, only to be met by a quick, unsatisfying orgasm.  I offered to give her an orgasm by oral, but she said she just wanted to go to bed.  The end.  I lied alone next to her, and I cried.  I actually cried.  Of course she wouldn't know or care.  This is me, 6 foot 1, muscular, in shape, working in the financial services, perfect American life.  This little tableau for some reason brought back memories of Greek life in college, all the clueless meatheads, and my pretension of my disinterest in arts and letters, and my phony jocular mien.  Nothing ever happens in three months, right?

Last night I saw Maya

Maya was my third girlfriend, right after I met D.  This new development happened rather unexpectedly earlier this week, when I was "bored" and started googling random people I used to know, especially since I thought she moved to Hong Kong after we both left Chicago.  It turned out that she started working at A Corp., a large, multinational conglomerate based in that little city of ours, and appeared to be quite high up.  Her photo was so brightly adorned with all her shiny resume items collated in the "biographical" paragraph on their website, under "leadership and management", that my eyes didn't hesitate to moisten when I saw it.

I wrote her an E-mail immediately.  I used her company E-mail, and said stoically, Dear Ms. Maya, This is so-and-so from this and that company.  Please give me a call at such-and-such number.

She called that afternoon, on my cell phone.  I saw her name flashing, and realized that her contact must have been carried over when I purged my old flip phone directory to the online synchronization repository.  My heart tightened.

"Hey you."  Her voice was deeply familiar.

"Hey.  How have you been?"

The conversation was easy, like riding a bicycle.  She's moved here not long ago.  She had to run and asked if I would be interested in having dinner on Friday with her.

I said, "sure."

I told D I needed to stay late for a client dinner.  We went to an artisanal pizza place.  I had a pizza with artichoke heart and prawns.  She had a pizza with lobster, lyme and Gouda.  We bought a bottle of wine, though I only had half a glass.  She seemed a bit reckless after downing at least 3 full glasses.

She definitely noticed my ring.  I definitely noticed how she didn't have one.

She's still single, though I suppose in our age bracket these days it's not so rare anymore.  She told me about her "disaster" romances after me, "one guy had a the world's tiniest penis."  I feigned shock, but I knew she was flirting with me.

"So where is your wife?"

I knew it would come up, and I gravitated toward pretending to be a mature, comfortable, content, responsible yet deeply reserved adult--the image of Gregory Peck in "to Kill a Mocking Bird."  I felt slightly wrong, slightly guilty, slightly devious, looking directly at her face while fantasizing about her round, perfectly dimpled breasts underneath her brightly red velvet dress.  Was it velvet or silk, I couldn't tell.  A simple, comfortable dinner dress so hopelessly inviting to my large, fleshy fingers with their brutally unkempt hairy knuckles.  Does Atticus Finch have the same thoughts?  Does he masturbate?  He has no wife.  I can feel my member slowly, campily engorging in my wool trousers, and sweat slowly oozing out of my forehead follicles.  I nervously wiped my face with the napkin.

I drove home rather blankly.  D was in bed, and I wanted to rape her.  Suddenly I felt fat and unattractive, and a thought occurred to me that perhaps this was what half of the world felt like constantly.  That night D obliged to fuck me, and in the instant of my ecstasy, Maya's pink, round, soft nipples flashed in front of my eyes as I sighed, emitting my desperation deeply into someone else.  I stared emptily into the mirror in front of the foamy mattress that bore witness to my hundreds of pathetic orgasms, and D was sleeping next to me, purring quietly like a kitten.

It's been a while

Life has gotten in the way for updates.  For one reason or another, D has been around me constantly lately, and I didn't want her to see this blog.  I couldn't do it at work either, as not that long ago someone from work got hired for browsing some adult site or other.  Suffice it is to say, my only alone time is Friday afternoons when I get off work early and get a nice cup of coffee at the Starbucks at the strip mall.

D and I have some infrequent sex.  Sometimes she asks for it, sometimes I ask for it.  It doesn't matter.  It's always boorish and sometimes a bit lonely.  I even asked her about going to see a couples therapist together, as rare and uncouth as it is in this conservative, irksome city of ours.  The kids are alright, not too demanding, and well taken care of by their elderly nanny.  I find myself often having wandering thoughts, and often getting a massage down the block, at some Asian parlor, and paying for total indulgence, as her finger runs through my body, the warmth of the massage oil and the parlor music envelopes me as the flame in my loin burns a little stronger.  I did that two weeks ago again.  She was a good masseuse, and did her best to take out the knots in my shoulders.  I turned around and like my usual, she offered "the full service".  As she removed my towel I was almost in tears.  Her slender fingers gently grazed the back end of the tip of my erection, yielding a remarkable, electrifying sensation.  It didn't take very long before I felt the full, involuntary flickering inside my pelvis, fluid filled, ready for discharge, and I moaned.  As one of her hand slickly stroked, her other hand cupping my scrotum, I violently ejaculated.  The ruthless jets landed squarely on my heart, uncompromisingly dithering in my poorly groomed chest hair.  The waves of pleasure subsided and I started feeling the pangs of pain in my pelvis--this occasionally happens to me either after I urinate or before, when after orgasm I feel the pain in my prostate, almost as if I was kicked in the nuts, for a few minutes.  I swallowed some air to recover and climbed haltingly off the massage table and put on my shirt and pants, looking respectable again.

Sometimes I think about having an affair, maybe get on a website and looking for a lady in the same disposition as me, and yearn for that violence, that total oblivious, effervescent feeling.  I want someone to tie me up and torture me until I cannot go on and emit the last dying cry of an animal in heat.  

Divorce is not an answer

Some of you may wonder why I am not divorcing my wife.  We have sex at most once or twice a month.  I would like to have sex at least a few times a week.  We have tried a number of things to make this work for us, but I think the essence of it is not going to change.  I would like to divorce her, but it's not as easy as you think it is.  It's not that I can just go to a lawyer, call her up and serve her the papers. Do I really want to live a pathetic, divorcee's life with two young children requiring years of child support?  Do I really want my children to not have a father in their lives?  Do I really want to wade through some custody battle?  The answer is no.  The lack of (enough) sex is not a sufficient reason to let things collapse completely.

Am I happy?  I don't think I am.  But there are many of you out there who are just as unhappy as I am, and you figured out your various ways of coping.  I don't see how getting a handjob is hurting anybody.  Unless you make an argument that there is such a thing as a victimless crime.  That's my way.  You can judge all you want and call it whatever you wish, but while I do feel guilty about it sometimes I despise you and your moral high ground.  You don't know what you are talking about and you are just going to the same hell as I am.

(Acu)pressure

I do apologize as I have not updated my blog as frequently. Situation between me and D are hanging out exactly where it was, with the requisite once a month or so intercourse and pretty much not a lot of anything else.  She doesn't act as if she cares.  I certainly have given up hope, even though I tried numerous times to communicate with her.  I can't divorce her.  I can't get away.  I am stuck.

On Saturday I went to one of those local Asian spas that seemed to have sprouted out a lot lately.  A work colleague recommended it.  It was a small, sort of dampy place, ran by a couple of older Asian women who barely spoke any English.  Each of the massage beds were separated by a thin screen, and you most certainly can hear your neighbors.  One of the ladies pointed to an open bed and said, "take off", and I took off everything except my boxer briefs.

I lied on my stomach, my head in a hole facing the floor, and the masseuse began her work.  As she used her elbows, I started to relax.  The smooth, artificially warm touch created by the sandalwood massage oil, mixed with a faint smell of incense and that barely audible "Eastern" music was dizzying.  Moments later, she pulled off my underwear to my buttocks, and I was startled, but she was only going to massage my back.

The best part was the head and face massage after I flipped over, and after that was done she whispered into my ear, "do you want a special massage?"  "Ok."  I said, and immediately regretted it because I forgot to ask her how much.  She pulled off my underwear and skillfully started massaging my penis, which was already slightly engorged.  A few stray thoughts came into my head: "Is this cheating?  Is someone going to find out?  My wallet is in my bag, what if someone I know comes in and picks me up?  Would I lose my job?  What if I can't get hard?  That's gotta be embarrassing.  I hope they don't try to blackmail me."  But as her smooth fingers started tugging on my tumescent cock, the tide of pleasure started to turn, rising stubbornly from my pelvis up and down, above my belly into my chest and down my feet.  And I realized that nothing mattered.  Pleasure was the end in itself.  Her other hand cupped my scrotum as I started squeezing my own nipples with my free hands and my mind went blank, with all the annoyance and troubles temporally escaping my cranium as the waves upon waves of pleasure tightened my rectum.  I let out a slight moan but was reminded of the indecent and less than private environs.  As the tension in my prostate built up, I relaxed every part of my body and focused my mind deep in my pelvis, and that tingling sensation went into the heels of my feet.  I tightened my PC muscles a few more times as she slowly went up and down my shaft, and finally let that uncontrollable release envelope me.  I watched the jets going straight up my belly, up my chest and shoulders.

She wiped me down with a warm towel.  It was $150.  I am definitely going back.