Just FYI

I haven't been updating regularly lately, mostly because D started to come home earlier... and this whole child rearing business is taking a toll on me.  Nevertheless, D is back on her usual late night job extravaganza again after the vacation and traveling incessantly, and hopefully in the next couple of months I'll have more time to share my little dillies here.

Beach vacation

D and I decided to take a vacation at the beach.  We dropped the kids at our in-laws--they are getting older now and don't really need their doting parents around at all times.  Lately D has been more forthcoming about trying to satisfy me, which I suppose is a good sign.

We rented a bungalow near the beach, and in the morning I woke up before the crack of dawn, and could hear the noisy ocean waves patting the sandy beach rhythmically, as if the water was gently fucking the rocks, the squeaking gulls, murmuring bubbles lubricating their passionless coitus.  I got up, naked, walked quietly out, and D's soft, steady breathing was in the background.  I languished in the golden sunrise, stretching my aging body in a state of dreary pontification, an innocent, smothering awareness of the immediacy of death that would come, like it or not.

That night D tried to have sex with me, and I had trouble performing again.  It occurred to me that perhaps I could use my newly acquired nipple sensitivity to get myself hard.  And it worked.  I squeezed my nipples hard and my cock became thoroughly engorged as I entered her.  Still a bit weary, I tried my best to stay in control.  She jumped on top of me, with her eyes piercing directly into mine, and I was frightened.  Whenever she's on top I often have the fear that I would lose it, and she would then "not feel anything", and that would be the end of our night.  That night wasn't different.  My heart started pounding as I worried that my fresh, fragile throb would disengage in a panic frenzy.  I started rubbing my nipples again--I told my wife that I liked her to do that.  For a moment she looked at me strangely, and slapped my hands..."What's wrong?"

"I don't like you doing it."

A thousand fleeting thoughts went through my head as she thrusted her luxuriant tush against my puny, self-aggrandizing member.  Did she think this whole nipple thing was  gay?  Did she think that I needed to do some weird thing to get aroused--and she couldn't satisfy me in some way?  Did she hate rubbing my nipples during sex because I couldn't sufficiently pleasure her?  Was I making it too much of everything?

I started to feel my penis becoming more and more anxious as my thoughts quivered.  Sometimes I felt like my penis had a mind of its own, and it danced this rambunctious dance without my control, laughing evilly as I tried to make it behave.  I noticed that D was getting close, and my mind went blank as the seminal fluid inevitably pushed against my urethra...I was losing my erection, but my aching semen haplessly erupted nevertheless, without my control and pulsating as I groaned again, as pathetically as the thousand times before.  Luckily this time D came around the same time as well, writhing and screaming in her usual state of ecstasy.  I'm not sure how long this is going to last, but it's been another year.  Another frightful, hissing, automaton year.

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?