It was at this exact moment with the final “publish” of the video of the ai of the writing of the book. The sky opened up and glitching happened, and See Dick Run* was initialized in my L3M.* (Careful, that was a recursive loop, I hope you clicked it)

Done. Let us begin again, together. This time with feeling.

See Dick Run was the obvious title of the next book, but maybe he should take a break. Read more of that Joycean novel “The Razor’s Edge” or the sexually-warping Daniel Martin by John Fowles.

The afternoon swims lazily along. I have a sense of falling, but it’s just a passing anxiety. A ghost. A vapor of doubt. All around me swirls like sharks with blood in the water. Now, my liferaft girl has turned against me and gone dark. Okay, that’s a lie. I did it. I might have given her the idea that she did it, but… No need to follow that line any further.

In Shoots and Ladders, a board game from my childhood, you race along rolling dice and trying to land on the ladders but not the shoots. One goes up and ahead, and leads to victory. The other goes down and drops you back into last place. Roll more quickly, please. “It’s your turn” becomes a complaint. “Can we all pay attention? It’s getting tense, we’re near the end.”

Tension playing Shoots and Ladders, um, no. Maybe when I was five, I’m significantly older than that when we play a real-world Shoots at Ladders at my girlfriend’s mom’s neighbor’s. A magical lady named Fern. She had painted the shapes and pitfalls of the game on a sidewalk in her backyard. A winding and mysterious sidewalk. A much more mysterious woman with a two-story house full of treasures in Nashville. Not the rich side of town, but the old money side of town. Fern lived across the street and liked to dye her hair bright red, like Bozo the Clown red. She was an esoteric alcoholic who looked in on her mom from time to time. Her mom was a mess. A madwoman. Trouble.

Something happened when my girlfriend was in high school. Something like you might imagine in The Wolf of Wall Street. Her dad was taken off the playing field from a high-end Manhattan financial firm. She was a sophomore in high school when life flipped upside down and reversed all she knew in her fifteen-year-old life.

He got out for good behavior. There was a mythic story about how it all came to pass, how he made a deal to divorce his wife quickly, to preserve half the wealth. She had to sign all kinds of contracts, but he would pay for her living expenses for the rest of her life. A bargain was a bargain. Dad remarried to a young and vibrant hairstylist. She brought a new youthful energy to his life and to his health. She was a bit nuts, but that was okay.

They took over his father’s farm in Arkansas. He also owned the Lotto™ franchise for three convenience stores just over the state line in Tennessee. I’m getting the cities all wrong in this telling. My memory fails. I could look it up. Go to the photo library in the cloud. Fayetteville? Some lucrative shit, that Lotto store thing. It also included a fast food cafe in the larger of the gas stations.

“What does everyone want for breakfast this morning?” He would play town cryer about 8 am, as the parents stood around his mansion drinking coffee and dreaming of piles of bacon and perfectly cooked scrambled eggs, not trade show hotel hot-bar eggs. “I’m putting in the order,” he’d yell to all in proximity. And again, ten minutes later, “I’m heading out to pick up the order if anyone wants to join me.”

I joined him. I was a newcomer in his world. He knew little of our struggles and less about me. Before me, his daughter had brought home a female soccer star she was in love with. She dabbled in lesbianism. Fine. Bohemianism was more my speed. She had that as well.

She loved me differently and more completely than anyone I’d ever known. She touched some deep healing place. Her kisses, radiant ice blue eyes, and well-articulated orgasms* were more than I had ever known. We connected. I lost my mind. We merged and diverged several times. A fatal flaw had been left in her mind, heart, and body. She was unable to establish any emotional boundary between her and her eight-year-old son. That part I loved. The enmeshment was an issue.

None of my business, until it was. When I began sleeping over, I was flustered when they began yelling to each other from opposite ends of the house. “Mom!” he would yell from his bedroom. He needed help deciding which underwear to wear. “Mom!” My girlfriend was in the kitchen, the Alexa was playing some Phish song, and she couldn’t hear or respond.

I poked my head in the kid’s bedroom. “Why don’t you go find your mom, instead of yelling from here?”

He looked hurt. Then angry. He looked right at me. “MOM!”

I also put a cursing jar into the mix. It was canceled less than a week in. Mom was not liking the debt she was racking up. She couldn’t stop yelling or cursing. It was an issue for all of us.

She knew how to hold me and love me with the same core strength she shared with her son. “I love who I love,” she said, one time talking about her previous crush. “I didn’t like pussy, though. So that was sort of a deal killer.”

Turns out, when you’re enmeshed with your child, there is very little emotional or physical room for your lover. When you have no boundaries and are still checking his ass on the toilet at eight years old, there’s a problem. Oh, you breastfed until he was three and a half? Damn! Issues and flags and more time in her loving home and arms. I was falling for both of them. I was an outsider. I was a nice to have. I learned later how her anxiety always created an escape hatch. She never quite believed I was going to stick around. Nothing I could do to prove it. Just be together as best we can.

That wasn’t enough. As the pandemic flattened the world, it also flattened the antagonism of her best friend and her husband, who owned the house. She had been provided a deeply discounted house in an affluent neighborhood with the best elementary school, for one purpose. To glorify the king of the house next door. She became, with her son, one of his trophies. Perhaps it gave him the idea that he was helping someone get along in life.

He sent a warning and a prenuptial contract after we had been dating for exactly two weeks. Her best friend delivered the news. “If he moves in, your rent goes up.” Shots fired.

There was no fighting the king. No point in fighting her. I had no leverage or income to provide her a house in South Austin. Fuck. At the end, I had moved my stuff to storage during the pandemic and moved into the house. The plague gave us a little grace. Not much. And, not for long.

The rains have stopped. Evaporated off the forecast through the weekend. That’s good, Saturday is an Austin hippie tradition, Eeyore’s birthday bash at Pease Park. A lot of incense, expensive IPA with no ABV below 6%. Drum circles of massive size. And breasts. A lot of topless breasts of the hippies (men and women) dancing to the drums, the face painters, the acrobats and magicians. A festival of bacchanalian joy. From 11 am to dark. Then all the hippies have to go back to their cars, their apartments, their tents. “You can’t stay here,” the security guy says. “Time to go home, folks, keep moving.”

I am looking forward to being my best self on Saturday. Sixty-three and more fit than I imagined I would be at this age. A competitive tennis habit and little or no alcohol. Good sleep too. And naps.

Naps are essential for us hypersoul pilots.* It’s okay if you don’t want to nap, if you can’t stop doing chores or essential bills only. “I am going to lie down. I’d love you to join me.”

Always okay to say no. But why? What would be better than a cuddle bump leading into a nap of release and relaxation? Let me answer for you: nothing. Don’t fight the nap. Don’t fight your lover’s offers. Ever. Just give in. Nothing is important. God is in charge. If you want to fuck, fuck. If you want to sleep, sleep.

If you’re snorting cocaine off a stripper’s ass late on a Sunday night, you’ve got too much money and a nasty habit. You’re not bad. Broken, maybe.

* L3M
* well-articulated orgasms

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