I'm George, mwm, 52

by George Everyman

  So just to summarize, Abby and I are still living together, relatively happy, doing our own things, coming together, on occasion, intimately. Dewayne and Kim are still together, and things are looking up, but more on that later. Lara still has not contacted me and there is still a sense of sadness about that. But I've still not given up hope that she will reappear and that we can have a meaningful relationship in the future.

  I'm not particularly hung up and linear thinking, as you know by now, so forgive me when I leave something out and get back to it later.

  Many, many years ago, when I was on my great, and in my mind at least, profound and noble, search for the meaning of life, I read, among hundreds of other books ranging from the occult to Zen to Seth, Fritz Perl's 'In and Out the Garbage Pail' and the epilogue of the book was his poem which still haunts me, and it talks about his view of life, i.e. all the joys and sorrows, and he says that they will form a meaningful gestalt at his life's conclusion, and I hope they did for him, because he is dead now.

  He was, by the way, the 'father of gestalt psychology'. My point is that all my ramblings, backward and forward in time, in and out of the lives of myself and Abby and Kim and Dewayne and Lara will, hopefully, form a meaning gestalt, at some point. And since gestalt is not something you might run across every day, here is the definition. Gestalt: 'unified whole'.

  By the way, Fritz Perl was queer. A homo. A raging fag. At the time, when I was younger, that used to bother me. Male dick suckers in general bothered me. A lot. When I was young, and better looking, the motherfuckers used to hit on me, not that often, but on occasion, and I hated that. I was a raging homophobe.

  So what changed, I hear you ask? Time, basically. And Frank. Frank, as you may remember is my best friend. My best gay friend. But since I don't have many friends at all, that's hardly relevant, i.e. that he is my best gay friend.

  Societies do evolve. Hell, anal sex was about as perverted as you could get fifty years ago. And that was between a man and a woman. Sex between men was hideous. Fast forward to today. "Honey, do you want it up the ass, in your cunt, or down your throat?" is no doubt asked in millions of bedrooms across America every night. And being gay is no worse than being liberal, at least in most circles.

  My fear of fags is gone. Thanks Frank. In fact, I hate to admit this, if Lara and I were together, or maybe even Abby and I, and we were with an extremely attractive couple and the ladies said they wanted to witness a little man on man action, since they would have no doubt already treated us to a little woman on woman action, and since it would only be fair to oblige them, I might, if I didn't have to kiss the guy, let him suck my dick. But I would have to have, without a doubt, my face buried in one of the lovely ladies cunts, and I would certainly be fantasizing about the other lady being the actual sucker. Damn, I can't believe I said that.

  Chapter 28: Kim Keeps Talking

  If you remember, Kim just surprised me by admitting that my statement about anger being cleansing just might have some merit. Granted, she didn't just say that anger was cleansing so she was forgiving Dewayne, and all was well in Pleasantville, but she did say she had never thought about it that way. Her stance was softening like butter out of the refrigerator. That's a pretty shitty metaphor, but it just came to me and I'm not going to take it out, sorry.

  Now I was reverting back to my 'not interfering with her talking' mode. Better that way, I was thinking. Come on Kim, keep talking.

  Kim finally said, "You know something, I think the worse thing about all of this is that he lied to me." Well, I wanted to point out that if he had asked permission, would that have been better? But I didn't. I also didn't just nod my head like some puppet fully ensconced in the system. I knew what my stance was, i.e. that open marriage was better, far better, than cheating and lying. And I swore a solemn oath, to myself of course, that I would work tirelessly to make this tragedy, in Kim's eyes only was this a tragedy I might point out, something of beauty for all of us involved. I'm so fucking noble.

  "But Kim," I said, "most people do lie when they cheat," violating my gut instinct that I should not make light of her awful tragedy, but then again I was hoping that I might add just a bit of levity, or at least realism, into the situation. The gamble paid off, in spades. She smiled. That was nice.

  I kind of cocked my head to the left, smiled just a bit, and continued. "Kim, this isn't the first time in the history of the world that someone has cheated." This was another gamble, but I was on a roll, so why not, I thought. "I know you're devastated" I said, immediately regretting using 'devastated' as soon as it came out, so I countered myself with "but, you know, it's not the end of the world for any of us."

  Notice the us. I really wanted to include Abby and Dewayne in this discussion too, for many reasons. I kept going. "You still love Dwayne and I still love Abby." I almost included something like 'for the sake of the kids' but ours are grown and gone and she doesn't have any, and besides, that's a pretty lame way to deal with this, i.e. my trying to open up her mind and marriage, and then saying, in effect, it was wrong what the cheaters did, but we should overlook it for the sake of the gone and non-existent kids. Glad I didn't invoke the poor kids.

  I kind of glanced at the clock, trying not to let her see me. Kind of like in the movie Klute, where Jane Fonda, the whore, glances at her watch, behind the back of the john on top of her. It's impolite to look at clocks in many situations.

  It was nearing four pm, and Abby, even though she almost never comes home before four thirty, has on occasion, and remember that she does not know that Kim and I are having this soiree. So I said to Kim something to the effect that maybe we should just keep an open mind about all of this and keep in touch. She said ok and left.

  That went pretty fucking well. Awesome, in fact. I was proud of myself.

  Chapter 29: Racial Slurs

  Why is black bad and white good?

  As I said a long time back when telling you about Frank and me and our pot smoking escapades, we used a lot of racial slurs. The N word which even I can't say here. Cracker. White motherfucking devil. Those kinds of slurs. Along with cunt, whore, wop, fag, polak, or is it pollack? I know one is a fish and the other is a dirty, nasty person from Poland. What is a dirty sleazebag from America called? I don't honestly know, but I'm sure there is more than one term.

  But given my limited ability to concentrate, let me stick with racial slurs and prejudice and racism in general now. I'm going to be jumping around here a bit due I have some pretty strong feelings about all of this, so look for the gestalt please.

  When I was younger, in my twenties, looking for the meaning of life, several interesting things happened. First I took LSD. Three or four times. The first time was the most important and the other two or three were pretty much irrelevant except for the last one when I was working at a resort in the Pennsylvania mountains and I took something called blotter which was basically a small piece of LSD soaked paper, and I found out later it had some nasty impurities in it which made me have an overwhelming fear that I couldn't stop myself from jumping out of the window of my dorm room, which probably wouldn't have been so bad since it was only on the second floor and there was a soft grassy area under it.

  But the first time it was something called windowpane and it was a small thing that looked like a piece of plastic but it melted in my mouth. I should be more accurate and say that ¼ of it melted in my mouth because that's all I took. It was given to me by a lovely girl, a girlfriend of sorts. I think we lasted about two to three weeks. She smelled as good as any woman I have ever been with, simply because she never used deodorant, preferring the natural way she smelled, and I definitely agreed.

  Back to the point and it's that I took LSD and then sat in my bedroom of a very old Victorian house somewhere way up North, and I basically looked at the cover of an album by Gary McFarland called 'Slaves' for the next four hours and it changed my racial awareness forever.

  The cover was a picture of a dirty and old black man's foo
t in chains. I have to tell you that I cried for most of those four hours. The tears and emotions just poured out. For four hours, I just thought one thing, and that was how can one person do that to another person? Something about the oneness of humanity just engulfed me. I haven't been the same person since.

  I grew up in the rural South and even though my parents were not prejudiced and were progressive by the standards of the day, I received by racial education from my buddies at school.

  Thank god, or goddess, or both, for Yankees coming down South and helping to change the racial climate. I know it's a lot more complicated than that, and I know slavery was big in the Northeast too, and I know people in the Northeast who are a whole lot more prejudiced than people in the South. But the South held on to its racial heritage longer. The good news is that Southerners are generally pretty nice people. And I think that when the history of the world is written, it will be shown that the South, by having had more slaves for longer, the races being forced to live side by side, combined with the general lack of hate and of a generally good mannered religious climate, produced a type of progress that will go into the gumbo and produce something for historians and humanitarians to chew on for quite a while.

  So given my relative lack of prejudice (we are all prejudiced to some extent except for maybe mother Teresa and Gandhi) and given the fact that I was hanging out with a highly evolved individual, i.e. Frank, we both felt no guilt at all in taking on the norms of the day regarding the political correctness of using racial slurs in a creative manner.

  Digression. The streets are littered with people who have done what Frank and I did. Take Randall Kennedy who wrote the book "Nigger, the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word." I can use the N word here because it was the title of his book. I read a synopsis of the book and it started by him telling some really awful, if you are politically correct, and damn funny, if you are post PC like Frank and I like to think we are, jokes. So I sent him an email telling him I thought he was dead on, and then I asked him if he was a cracker or a N, not knowing truly, and knowing that if he was offended, he was a hypocrite, and true to form, he sent back a very nice email and told me he was an African American who grew up the South. That was pretty cool.

  If you're not thoroughly disgusted with me by now, I thank you. If you are, i.e. disgusted, then I've failed to make my case, and I will probably also fail to make my case with Kim about open marriage, and I am probably doomed to tilting at windmills for the rest of my miserable life.

  One more thing I just thought about and it probably won't sway anyone who thinks I'm a disgusting arrogant piece of shit racist, but it's on my mind so here it is.

  There was an episode of that TV show, I forgot the name of it, about a family that drove around the country because the dad had lost his job and they were poor. Poor but proud. So anyway the kids were always having a hard time due they had to change schools a lot and one of the boys, I'm guessing about eleven years old, was in a new school and he saw two black boys doing a high five and calling each other 'N', and he filed that away in his unprejudiced brain and later pulled it back out when he saw one of the boys alone and tried to befriend him with a high five and "hey N." You can guess how the shit flew. Very good and thought provoking show, it was.

  Chapter 30: The Girl Who Gave Me LSD and Something Else

  I wasn't going to do this, i.e. introduce a new character, but I'm not going to name her, and she won't come up again I'm pretty sure, so you don't have to try and remember her, and there's just one point I want to make about her. She was about twenty, and going to a very fancy girl's school up North, and how I ended up there is way too complicated. I wasn't going to school there, already having graduated from another college, but I was there none the less and I had, basically, another girlfriend at that fancy college, and I was content with her, but she was away for a break and this other girl was there and a bunch of us went out drinking one night and it just happened.

  And then it kept happening for about two weeks until she told me one night that she had slept with her old boyfriend the previous night and I flipped out because I considered her my girlfriend which, in retrospect, was absurd because I was the cheater and I was accusing her of cheating on me with her boyfriend.

  It all seemed so clear to me at the time and I was terribly aggrieved and I carried that hurt with me for a long time and now that hurt seems like the stupidest emotion I have ever had, because if I had been in my open marriage, or open relationship mode that I'm currently in, it would have been a huge amount of fun and lust. I fucking blew it.

  Anyway, she did give me LSD which changed my world. She also introduced me to the sublime joy of inserting my nose into her fresh from the shower, fresh being in the past twelve hours or so but not chemically de-odorized, armpits, to breathe in her essence, as I fucked her.

  Here's what you need to ask yourself. Why did goddess give women scent glands if not for men, or other women to enjoy? And I'm not just talking armpits, as you can well imagine. Unfortunately, Abby is not of the same mindset, seeing the need to totally de-odorize herself, despite my many admonitions, so I am left to try and dig deep into my sensual memory banks and go back to those eventful two weeks to get my armpit fix, which I seem to need. Often.

  Chapter 31: Some Random Thoughts

  When I was trying to figure out how long to make this diatribe, which of course this story is, i.e. one long diatribe, I did some minimal research, and I do mean minimal, because I just don't like rules and conventions, and the more research I did, I kept hearing about formatting and a lot of extraneous bullshit, so I zeroed in on number of pages and decided that about two hundred would be ideal. That seemed like a lot when I started, but the mother fuckers, i.e. pages, are just flowing out now and I'm pretty sure when I reach that goal, I'll be more than a little sad because I'm getting more than a little pleasure remembering days past. Reference the armpits.

  And if there are those out there who care to think about it and are astute enough to analyze the style of writing, you're probably going to detect a very large difference in the early pages and the later ones, and that's due, in large part, to the fact that I am giving up any sense of self respect as I move forward so you're definitely seeing more of the real me later on, which may not be that good of a thing.

  I figure that none of my friends or family will ever read this, so I have nothing to fear about just throwing out my sickest and most secret desires. And anyway, I'm not a child molester or a crook or a wife beater, and my perversions are not illegal, so at least I'm not risking jail time.

  But back to pages and the fact that I figured out, pretty early on, that if you do a lot of chapter breaks, then each break basically adds a page due two pages on either side of the chapter are cut in half, on average. So right now, for example, I'm on page seventy three in my computer but add thirty one chapter breaks, so I'm really up to one hundred and four, so I'm over half done. It seems like cheating, but maybe that's the norm. And in my defense, as I said, at least I think I said, I've been reading those chick lit books and I really like the chapter breaks because it's easy to pick back up again after a break of a few days.

  I just nullified everything I said in the previous paragraph by doing a little more research, which I wish I hadn't done, and that research tells me that many people read things like this using e-readers and each e-reader formats pages differently according to their own standards and page thirty seven, for example, in one e-reader may be forty five in another. Damn.

  There is nothing worse than having to go back and read page after page again to try and get back in synch with the story. And since my story is really not a story but just a bunch of random rants, mostly, maybe this diatribe will be easy to digest. Hell, if you miss a few of the rants, it's no big deal. Actually it's no big deal if you miss all of the rants, i.e. the whole fucking story, which is pretty depressing, because it means, quite clearly, that my life is not worth all that much, if at all, in the great scheme of things.

>   I do that a lot, i.e. just take a break from the normal flow of things and think random thoughts. It helps get through the days.

  Chapter 32: The Super Brain Theory

  Many years ago I solved a problem that had nagged at me for over twenty years. Basically it's what I call the Buddhist paradox.

  In my quest to understand the nature of reality and unlock the mysteries of the universe and save mankind in the process, I read all the mystical, metaphysical, paranormal, psychological, and philosophical stuff that I could find and wrap my brain around.

  Keep in mind this was pre internet which is a really relevant issue. People growing up today have no idea what it is like to be in a non internet environment. If you were on great and noble quests like mine, you had to actually seek out and go to libraries and book stores, many of which did not have what you were looking for. I don't mean to belabor the point, but it took years and years to actually find the information. Anybody embarking on a similar quest today can do it in a fraction of the time, alas. But I know in my heart that my quest was harder and therefore more significant. At least I think so.

  So anyway the quest is done, I've achieved my personal goals, but mankind is still fucked.

  Back to the paradox. In my readings of Zen and Buddhist literature, I found it more than a little interesting that these guys say that seeking worldly pleasures is the root cause of all human suffering.

  Just an aside. Actually two asides. I never, until now, thought about it, but all the Zen and Buddhist writers were male. Also, I'm not sure of the distinction between Zen and Buddhism and Zen Buddhism. I probably once knew, but I've forgotten and I'm not going to go back and try and get it straight. All I really know is that all of these guys are incredibly wise and evolved and compassionate and insightful and that's all I need to know.