Dance With Me Through This Rain

These days I call my wife every morning despite our separation. She's been diagnosed with ALS. I've talked about it a little in prior posts. She's dying an excruciatingly horrible death very slowly. She's terrified. This morning she was sobbing about the depth of her tragedy and then all of a sudden stopped. She blurted, "I probably shouldn't tell you this." Oh come on, I said, what?

She told me about the college senior daughter of friends of ours who had been an intern in my office three years ago. College Senior is a very smart, ambitious, lovely young woman who I had just the other week had lunch with and talked with about getting a job in the legal field so she could get practical experience before going to law school.

During her internship College Senior had become BFFs with a former employee of mine. Former Employee, a seemingly cool woman, and I had also become extraordinarily good friends. I told Former Employee almost all my secrets. Suffice it to say, Former Employee knew all about my kink.

Former Employee moved back home last year and College Senior interned with Former Employee's new office and lived with Former Employee last summer. "She was like my big sister", College Senior told me over lunch.

Anyway, enough backstory. Wife says this morning that Former Employee (let's just call her Asshole) apparently told College Senior about my bdsm proclivities. My wife knew this because College Senior was so freaked out that before meeting me for lunch to get my take on the job market, she had confided in an adult friend of ours, one of my wife's BFFs, and mother of one of College Senior's best friends, that College Senior was weirded out to be having lunch with a pervert.

Suffice it to say I was enraged at Asshole Former Employee and sent her a text to that effect. I probably shouldn't have. Asshole Former Employee denied telling College Senior I'm a perv and then blamed College Senior and I for creating drama in her already stressed out life.

Is that just breathtaking or what?

Asshole Former Employee tells 20 year old College Senior a secret and confidence I trusted Asshole Former Employee with, lies point blank about it, and then blames College Senior and I for complicating her life. I suppose I have one less so-called friend to worry about.

I often wonder what I might do if my blog was discovered by my wife. Or discovered by the New York Post. Or I somehow got publicly outted. I like to think I'd just own it and say it's something I love, am proud of and is private. I hope I'd say get a life and move on. But telling a 20 year old kid who didn't ask to be burdened with the private confidence and doesn't have the life experience to process it just seemed the height of deeply flawed judgement.

People who aren't us don't understand us. Liberal, consenting, sophisticated adults don't understand us. Why would you out a friend to a kid? I suppose it's a reminder that so much of the world views our thing as such a dirty little secret that we truly do have to be constantly vigilant about who we confide in.

"Cause we all have a darker side
A place we keep where no one else will find"

Gonna Take A While For This Egg To Hatch

Somehow Thanksgiving just doesn't inspire my perv side like the week between Christmas and New Year does. But despite all life's current challenges and difficulties I am very thankful. I have lots of new kinky friends. I get to go have Thanksgiving dinner with the same folks I've done the holiday with for twenty two odd years and my wife and I will eat together and be happy to see each other.

I have a kinky dance partner and though I know the studio and instructors are just hustling us, they all say we're hot.

And then there's the new crush girl who is cooking dinner for 20 and called me the other night from the grocery line just to say hi. And even though my condo deal in Miami went south and I won't be going to Art Basal with Ms. Mah Wah Kiss; I have my license to practice in the sun.

I'm to bring soda, near beer, and cigars today and on the way back, my playlist produced this goodie which made me think of my kinky new crush girl. Sometimes I'm just a teenage girl.

Underneath It All

I suppose I just should have been flattered that the lunkhead, twenties-ish, rental apartment broker chose a fifth floor walk-up as the first apartment in the West Village he'd show me to be my new single-guy home. Nothing like a dark, dirty, postage stamp sized, fifth floor walk-up in the Village for $3500 a month to make you want to move to Miami. I figured he was doing a bullshit broker bachata - letting me see dreck to soften me up for a kill shot in the fancy full service building at four stacks a month.

At the urging of friends and shrink I've expanded the search for my aging kink-boy bachelor pad to include neighborhoods other than the FiDi. While I'd love to walk to work and I've found a great building, the Wall Street area does button up early and, save for the tourists, is pretty dead on the weekend. So I'm having to put up with broker shennanigans. Spare me.

To boot, I've decided not to go see She. I may not have shared that She lives on the same balmy beautiful island where twenty years ago this fall, my wife and I ran away and were married at sunset, on the beach, with our bare feet planted firmly in the sand. I figure at this stage, the downside risk of being caught is just too great. If I can manage to get one of these snake oil selling brokers to get me a decent apartment, in a few months I can go visit She with a clearer conscience and less chance that I'll turn an amicable separation into the battle for Bastogne

But I'm really sad I'm not going. These days I'm either sad that I'm separating or sad that I haven't seen She in going on five months. Plus, other than her unexpected and totally sweet invite, She is in the throes of what I've come to think of as seasonal disconnective disorder. Sunday will be a month since we've spoken. It's hard to do anything but email her as she's always shooing me away from g-chat or a quick phone conversation while she's working. One would think she is the executive assistant to POTUS. Mr. She's car is permanently kaput so they're car pooling in the morning and She can't call me. She doesn't do email or text much and has said it makes her uncomfortable if I call when Mr. She is around.

I guess the thing is I've been here before with her need to disengage. It seems if I just suck it up and focus on other things, She cycles back. Try as I might though, underneath it all, my little insecurities begin to croak and bleet like a chorus of spring tree frogs until they reach this unbearable cacophonous, crescendo of doubt and need.

But I abruptly shake myself and say, "Snap out of it, fool." Life is good. Just around the corner the loutish purveyor of rooms for rent will show me the coolest one bedroom loft with a little terrace on the Lower East Side. I'll pick my way through early morning tenement streets lined with hip restaurants and hot bars for a run along that other river. I'll find a little local coffee joint where they make my extra large red eye to mainline caffeine with my endorphins. And one day soon She will whisper something incredibly hot and dirty in my ear and all this festering puzzlement will be worth it.

Or maybe one night there will be a certain someone across the bar in that new little local joint I eat dinner in twice a week ... I know some real bad tricks and I'm in need of a little discipline.

Fix My Ignition

I've been home sick today. I never take sick days. Since I'm my own boss I suppose I'm not going to get written up, am I? Lousy cold, I hate it. Anyway, my wife asks me to clean out a little section of the shelf around the computer. Dutifully, I tossed out very old computer games, cheat books so when I played I could actually get off level one and various other junk. After I'm finished she comes out to the kitchen brandishing my little silver Rocstor hard drive and inquires, "What's this?" Oh, that's where I keep all my porn. Nothing like honesty, right? Well, maybe.

This revelation precipitated a discussion about how porn and my perverted sexuality has caused me to be disconnected from her, to fear intimacy, and to not be capable of having a successful sexual relationship with a woman. She hurled some familiar, inflammatory insults and was typically revving herself up to unleash her very powerful anger. Maybe it was how nice the 60 degree February day felt or how doped up I was on over-the-counter cold meds but I just didn't take the bait. We ended up having a very connected, intimate and successful chit chat about separating. Sometimes I don't know what's worse - the horrible screaming or the mature recognition that our marriage maybe corroded beyond compromise.

It seems sadly ironic to me that the price of feeling so much better about my kinkiness and myself will be my marriage. I told another woman friend about my marital troubles and she confided in me that she was the kinky one in her marriage. I've known her for sometime and for many years had a wicked crush on her. In fact, it was really with her that I first began to peek out of my closet and joke about kink. I mean, when she tells ya that for Halloween she dressed up as a nun but underneath wore stockings, a corset and skyscraper pumps and wanted her then boyfriend to put a diaper on underneath his priest costume - you know you're talking to a kindred spirit. But she married a wonderful, traditional guy with, as she characterizes it, a Madonna/Whore complex.

So why do we do this? I know we don't all do this, but a bunch of us do. Why do we think we can remake our kink into some acceptable flavor of vanilla? Maybe the urgent desire will go away. Maybe it won't be so important. Maybe I'll get him/her to do just a couple of things. Things will be okay. But they just aren't. At least not in my backyard.

It was good today talking to her. Made me think we'll separate and figure out how to be friends. I really do love her very much, but I'm coming around to seeing that I can't make this compromise solution work.

I need a shot
I need a shot of ambition
I need a hit
I need a hit of nutrition
I need a fix
I need to fix my ignition
If you want to whip me into shape
I need a plan or a mission

-"Fa Fa Fa" by DataRock