There was an undertone in my post “commitment, choice, and obligation” that didn’t come through quite the way I wanted it to. In the abandoned paragraphs left crumpled up on a side-street document were concepts and thoughts that might have belonged in that post but I didn’t know how to work them in. At the…
Category: Love
Pheasants May Be Goats
The timing of the online sighting of my ex (the effects of which I chronicled here) got me wondering. Because our brains look for, or at least my brain does, connections and “coincidences” often where none exist, I was curious to see if our profiles matched up on the same day we had matched up…
Wanting More (part 2)
How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into. -Sylvia Plath Yes, I want more…. I suspect I always have – most of us do….
Reflections on April 11
The dog was already in my room when the alarm went off at 4:45. I lazed around for a few minutes before getting up and making breakfast. He spent the next hour and a half next to me pouting. It’s difficult to concentrate when he’s needy like this. Today is an anniversary of sorts. I…
The Day after Valentine’s Day (2023)
Yesterday, I thought about writing a Valentine’s Day post, or an anti-Valentine’s Day post. I also thought about doing a phone dump of screenshots of love poems (which quite often aren’t “love” poems). Apparently, the former poet laureate, Billy Collins, has been doing a video blog or podcast or something like that in which he…
Love and Grief
Love and hate
How much more are we supposed to tolerate?
Can’t you see there’s more to me than my mistakes
Sometimes I get this feeling – makes me hesitate
“Love and Hate” – Michael Kiwanuka
Stubborn Love
She’ll lie and steal and cheat
And beg you from her knees
Make you think she means it this time
She’ll tear a hole in you, the one you can’t repair
But I still love her, I don’t really care.
Speculation and Dithering: An Addendum
As soon as I hit publish on my recent post about dithering, I second-guessed how such a post would be interpreted and/or received. This happens a lot when I have concerns about who might read it or what they might think. It happens when I talk about any subject over which I hold multiple and…
Speculative Questions and Dithering Answers
The other day I wrote a long and rambling mess of a post about indifference as a form of accepting uncertainty (Adjusting the Throttle of Indifference). Or at least that’s what I was trying to write about. I was also trying to touch on what it’s like to try to live without expectations and how…
Adjusting the Throttle of Indifference
Indifference…. we sometimes deploy it as a defense mechanism. We sometimes use it as a cudgel. Because it can be used in these ways, it seems important to be able to distinguish between real indifference and manufactured indifference. As a defense mechanism, feigned indifference – saying one doesn’t care – means they can’t be disappointed,…
Love Lessons from the Gottmans
It’s cuffing season – “that magical time of year during the colder, winter months when people are more compelled to start relationships. It usually runs from late fall, through winter and up until the warmer days of spring and early summer.” Oddly, almost all of my significant relationships started in the frolicking days of summer….
Final Days: A Few Steps Closer to Home
Songs and smells can sometimes yank you back and sometimes subtly glide and guide you through the thin fog of memory to other places and times… distant shores of past lives. For my father, every time he hears “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan, he mentions Fort Devens and his time in the Army. I suspect…