Dis-orientation

For the Christmas play in 6th grade, I was one of the Magi. The three of us sang, "We Three Kings of Orient Are." Not feeling so oriented of late.

Am re-constituting my resurrected laptop. Time-consuming. At least I have an online data storage service that saved everything. Aside from the cost of fixing it because "something" in the software or malware family screwed it up despite my anti-virus program, the computer shop could not find, or read, the license number for my Windows 7 operating system. Radio Shack, which sold me the computer, does not keep records on that. They told me to contact Microsoft! So I have a temporary license. God knows what that will mean. But it will doubtless cost money.

When economic times are tough, and they are for me, an unexpected outlay of several hundred dollars is unsettling.

I am a virtual cyborg: if my laptop and cellphone and cable TV were to go down the tubes at once, I would feel like Robinson Crusoe without Friday. Highly dependent on technology. Highly.

Speaking of disorienting and unsettling, while dealing with an old email address I no longer use, I found a cache of early emails twixt me and B, back from November 2007, when we were first connecting. Very enthusiastically, from the texts. So much simpler then, but I think we were already starting to get in over our heads. Maybe even before that.

It was a dynamite combo. Both of us really liked each other enormously. If we had not stoked each other's eros so much, we would still have become great friends. But stoke we did. And for me, that combo had not shown up in my life for a long long time. I was hooked pretty quick. Unhooking, re-arranging, etc. has been --not too put too whine a point on it-- very very difficult.

I do not easily let go of attachments like these, even when I try to. After all, I still have dinner every week with my ex, Thom. I remained friends with my first lover till he died. I hope somehow B and I can eventually, to use his words, "cobble together" a friendship that works for both of us. The issues that made me withdraw are still there, so how that's gonna pan out, I don't know. But despite what we have put each other through, --especially what he has put me thru!--I know that there is a very strong affection between us, on both our parts.

Watching the antics of Washington and the rest of the planet has not helped me feel oriented toward anything except the occident...the "setting" of our civilization, in its Latin root.

Speaking of orientation in the sexual sphere, another reason to reject the LGBT construct, especially the T part. It's one thing to imagine yourself part of a group of some kind based on what you share among yourselves, in this case, a powerful sexual attraction to one's own gender. It's another thing to do that based on your shared alienating difference from the norm, that is, gender deviance. That shared outsider/victim status, which creates the LGBT construct, being "queer" vis a vis the norm, leaves no reason at all why transvestites, who are mostly heterosexually-oriented males who get a sexual thrill from dressing like females, should not be included. And reveals the underlying commonality in the construct as non-clinical but pervasive gender dysphoria.

Try to imagine contemporary gayness or gay culture without huge doses of effeminacy. It practically disappears.

I am well aware of my deficiencies as a man. They are matters of character and accomplishment and attitude, by the way, and not particularly of sexual practice. They sometimes make me think I should just stop talking about the issue. I want the definition of manhood to include someone like me but I don't imagine that I am any kind of paragon. Were I to give a speech about manhood, it would start out something like this:

"There are far better men than I am. Better than me, precisely as men. More gifted or more accomplished in the masculine qualities: stronger, braver, more skilled, more honorable. I recognize them as my superiors. And there are far worse men than I am. Less gifted and less accomplished in the masculine qualities: weaker, more fearful, more inept or dishonorable. I deem then my inferiors. If you find these two statements scandalous, immoral or unacceptable, then you have not a clue to the meaning of manhood. If judgment, rank, winning and losing, or hierarchy offend you, then you cannot know or love what it really means to be a man."

For better or worse, Ex Cathedra returns!