She still thinks that she hasn’t done anything wrong. As far as she was concerned her herpes had “gone away” so there wasn’t really any reason to tell me about it. I know that’s completely wrong, but I can’t convince her of that.

The fact that she seems to think she’s on some higher moral ground continues to fuck with my head like some dark dialectic. A dialectic, if you don’t know, is a range of opposites like white/black, good/evil, or happy/sad. I’ve got an angry/sad dialectic — the emotions I feel are somewhere on that range, from seething anger to debilitating depression.

I’m a pretty strong, independent kind of guy. It takes a lot to knock me out of the saddle, but this… this isn’t good. You see, my “fun distractions” aren’t just fucking someone — I like to think that I’m connecting with someone on a level that’s more than just rutting pleasure. And when I get to know someone intimately, exploring every crook and cranny of not only their body but their soul, I like to think that it’s something that deepens my understanding of myself, as well.

So while I know this wasn’t an intentional betrayal in her mind, it is a betrayal — and it’s a hit to my own soul. What I thought I understood, the depths I thought I had explored, turned out to be… wrong.

This is, indeed, one of those Nietzsche-esque moments — it will either destroy me or make me stronger. But I worry about the strength I may learn from this. Are we talking Paul Simon, “I am a Rock” strength where nothing can hurt me because I won’t let anything touch me? Or brittle strength like steel that’s been tempered at the wrong temperature?

At the same time, it would be easier if I was completely shattered. But there is more to a relationship than where you dick goes. There’s more to living together than sharing a bed. If I never have sex with her again, she’s still my closest friend.

And that’s the problem with dialectics, even dark ones. It’s easier when there are absolutes, yes/no, right/wrong. But life is lived somewhere in between the absolutes, and that makes it worth living. And really complicated.

Oh, it would be nice if it was something like a busty, curvy girl riding on my stiff pole… It would be nice if there was anything remotely sexual about my dreams, but lately it seems my dreams have been telling me, “You, sir, are completely out of control.”

Take the dream my brain was painting this morning… I was in some sort of clinic. I had some sort of incurable disease. The only option was euthanasia. It was supposed to be some sort of big needle at the base of my brain or the top of my spine, whichever makes you squirm more (base of the brain makes my scalp crawl…)

It was all very clinical, nothing really to think about other than timing, and then I realized I hadn’t told Fiona that I was going to be killed at the clinic that day, and that I should really tell her before they stuck that needle into my cerebrospinal fluid. (Yeah, I have pretentious dreams…) I remember going through the discharge process and commenting, “I’ll bet you don’t do this very often,” because, well, usually their patients are dead at discharge.

To me it’s so fucking transparent because, well,it’s my psyche. Although I understand many people can’t figure out what the hell their brains are trying to whisper in their sleep.

Look, I have to get away. I’ve been with this woman for years, and the herpes incident aside, the only way I’m going to get away is if I move. And if I move it’s a form of suicide. I’ll have to abandon my company (to a point), the town I’ve lived in for 18 years, and a lifestyle that not only have I become accustomed to, but that defines me in many ways.

But to stay is a form of suicide, or maybe that’s the incurable disease. Maybe love is the incurable disease… I do love her, and I love the life we have together. But she’s dangerous. Her flaws are often her good points — her hedonistic ways, her distaste for poorly presented people, places or things (poorly presented “nouns” I suppose)… Her narcissism and self loathing almost cancel each other out, but it’s more like a matter/anti-matter collision which can destroy the universe around her.

And I’m part of that universe, constantly buffeted by the release of energies as her diametrically opposed ideals and ideas collide.

So, I know I have to go. I’m drawn to her, and simply “moving out” doesn’t solve the “but you’re radioactive… warm and glowing but carcinogenic” problem. And leaving is like sticking a needle in the base of my brain and departing this plane of existence.

Even in my sleep I can’t get any rest…

“You said you’ll always be honest with me.”

“Yeah…” I hate conversations that start that way.

“There weren’t any women other than the ones you told me about, right?”

“No, why?”

“I have herpes.”

I don’t have herpes, at least there isn’t anywhere I could have gotten it lately. I’ve had STD panels done from time to time and I’ve been negative on the “silent” diseases each time (AIDS, syphilis and herpes). So, the question is how did she get it?

It turned out that she knows I didn’t give it to her — she got it 20 years ago from her husband (the one that died of a stroke). I’ve known her for eight or nine years. We’ve been romantically entangled for seven. We’ve had our off and on times, and while I’ve certainly had sex with other women in that six years, I’ve always been safe about it — she hasn’t even had sex with anyone other than me, so I figured I had the whole STD thing covered.

Apparently she never told me because she tested negative the last two times she was tested for anything and she figured “it went away.” Only she suddenly got a flare up after we had sex the other night. Rough angry sex, so as far as I know it might not even be a flare up and I just ripped something inside her and she’s got an infection, but… what the fuck?

I can almost understand her not telling me until now — it’s natural that she’d like to think that it “went away” and that it would just be weird to tell me about something like that from her past. Only herpes doesn’t go away. It gets into your nervous system and stays there. Forever.

So, while I can understand and even maybe forgive her optimistic ignorance, in my book of liking smart women, it’s a huge black mark in the stupidity column.

But the way she told me just pisses me off and it’s slowly simmering into a huge ball of frustrated anger. She has herpes. She never told me. And she couches it as if it’s somehow my fault when she knows full well that she’s had it the entire time we’ve been sleeping together. For years.

And because I had sex with other women in the interim I’m the bad guy. In her book sex with anyone else is dangerous sex. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t disclose the danger she was carrying — the fact that I might have been exposed to something is more dangerous in her mind than the fact that she was exposing me to something dangerous.

Add the fact that when I mentioned I got a blood test (I’m waiting on the results still) she glared at me as if I was somehow betraying her. I’m sure it’s all mixed up in her puritanical mess, but… really? You’re going to get pissed at me because I want to find out if you gave me an incurable disease?

I deal with the ghost of her dead husband. I deal with her sexual intimacy issues. I deal with her family (everyone’s family is fucked up). I deal with her hot flashes and mood swings. I deal with a lot of shit that makes her “her” and that makes it okay. Complicated, interesting people have shit in their lives, and I like complicated, interesting people

But this was outside what I expect to deal with — relationships are always minefields, but I thought I had this one mapped. Now I just have to wait for the results of the blood test to see if the mine exploded.

Follow up blog: So, I don’t have herpes (but she does)

Always nice to get a casual, “Looks like you have cancer” comment.

So I waited a month to get in to see a dermatologist worrying the whole time about how people let moles go and then find out they have 3 months to live. A nice intern kind of guy got me going, and then asked me to slip into the ever sexy hospital gown. I’m not a vain guy, nor am I particularly shy, but… the absurdity of the gown easily kicks my vanity nerve and, not being shy, my thought is… really?

The whole gown thing turned out to be stupid anyhow. Dr. Perky comes in and I swear the guy is like a character from Saturday Night Live. No, make that Mad TV — completely over the top energetic with chemically perfect skin and what looks like a bad dye job and just way too fucking excited about his work.

“Let’s take a look!!!” Next thing I know I have the gown tossed back, then I lift up the bottom, then I just drop the whole thing so I can drop my underwear.

“Okay, flip ‘em to the left… Great! Now to the right! Perfect!!! Say… did you have some jock itch recently?”

He decides to freeze the mole off my face — it’s not cancer but he just knows for sure that I don’t want it there. So his much mellower assistant gets a canister of liquid nitrogen or whatever the hell it is that they use to freeze bits of skin off patients. Doc Ecstatic grabs it and keeps spraying himself in the face — I thought it was some kind of, “look, nothing to be worried about” demonstration, but then I just decided he was a freak.

I mean, here I am, sitting around in just my underwear at this point, and Dr. Energy Drink is having some kind of rave experience with the medical blower while his latin man servant looks on kind of embarrassedly.

{PfShhht} {pfshttthf}… a bit of a sting, and then he says, “You know what, I don’t really like this one on your chest, either. C’mon, let me hit it. I won’t charge you for it!” So I let him hit it thinking it sounded like getting a freebie from a hooker. An aging, coked out, freaky ass hooker.

Modern science is great. Just great.

Business has been slow, so I’ve been spending a lot of time jacking off. There are more links that I skip as I work my way through the variations of “Busty Riding” or “Big Tits Fucking.” I’ve seen the same photo series over and over, maybe different combinations, but there they are again. The 18 year old getting a fucked during a massage. The MILF in the hotel room in Vegas (yeah, I even know where they are now). Lady Sonia and Jim Slip. Amber at Home…

It’s hard to maintain solid wood when you’re jerking with one hand and hitting Ctrl F4 with the other. “Seen it, seen it, no, not her again. Oh that’s just wrong…” When my porn bores me, I’m definitely getting bored.

Then I had this shift — I’m hard all the time. Just about anything could set me off, like listening to the 70′s station in the car the other day and this Cat Stevens song came on, which for some reason made me think of a girl that I hadn’t seen in years and… trousers were a little too tight for driving.

Part of getting out of the slumped penis slump was a change of mindset — or rather a change of fantasy. I have pretty straight forward fantasies, and I found myself repeating them over and over in my mind. It’s like when you’ve lived with a woman for years and you just can’t see fucking her again… only this was me getting tired of the same stories that came from my own mind.

Interestingly, my sexual fantasies have turned from domesticity (romantic ownership of a woman where she does wonderful things to arouse me) to domination (I don’t care if it hurts, it’s my pleasure we’re dealing with here). Kind of like when you get pissed off at your relationship and have angry sex, I’ve moved into being pissed off at my psyche and I’m having angry sexual fantasies.

Fuck it, as long as that fifth erection is hard and full, I’ll watch midget porn if that’s what gets me off… Unlikely, but I’m open to suggestion.

David Wu is in trouble for being “acting in a sexually aggressive manner towards” an 18 year old daughter of one of his supporters. The age thing aside (he’s 56), he’s a man. A recently divorced man with a lot of stress being a US Congressman. And a man with a lot of power and opportunity.

In my mind, the only thing he really did wrong was pick the wrong girl to hit on. I’m sure it was really smooth like, “Hey baby, you raise my funds, if you know what I mean…”

But let’s talk about that “Sexual Predator” thing… Women like a strong man, and honestly, a lot of women like to be dominated, if only a little, by a sexually aware, aggressive man. Or… a sexual predator.

You see, I don’t think we actually punish men for being sexual predators — we punish them for being lame. Jack Nicholson doesn’t seem to get a lot of shit for being a sexual predator (and he’s an ugly mofo). In a recent Rolling Stone interview he hit a few salient points:

• Jack calls the hours between two and four in the morning his “ass-scratching hours”
• Jack claims never to have bought a condom, but explains, “if I needed a porn picture or something like that, my staff normally does that kind of shopping for me.”
• Jack can’t remember the word “monogamous,” presumably from lack of use in … life
• Jack estimates that, in terms of age of sexual partners, he’s “covered the territory from twenty-one to sixty-one” in the last year

Now you can say, “But Jack Nicholson isn’t a Congressman.” And I say, “No, he’s a very wealthy man with more power than a run-of-the-mill congressman.”

See, Wu had this problem. He got divorced, got depressed, and then tried to deal with his depression while hiding it. Jack gets depressed and tells the press to fuck off. Wu hits on an 18 year old and pisses her off. Jack hits on a 21 year old, beds her, and moves on with no questions or baggage. And if he does fail to bed her, then she laughs it off and tell stories about the time Jack Nicholson chatted her up.

If they would just let the Congressmen act like any other famous, powerful man, we wouldn’t have these damn “sex scandals” while trying to fix the world economy…

I’m not shy, I pretty much blurt out most anything that’s on my mind, and I gotta say, I have a lot of weird shit on my mind. But, I just can’t seem to find an appropriate, even charmingly, off-the-wall, so-inappropriate-it’s-okay appropriate way to say, “Hey, Chrissy, did you know you look just like this girl I wank off to?”

That’s not to say I couldn’t ever say that to a woman, but this woman is bringing me my food and complicated cocktails. She’s forced to interact with me because she’s at work, and it’s just not cool to be that abrupt with your server — your servant, perhaps, but not if she’s on someone else’s payroll.

Hell, if you’ve read my various blogs about fucking employees, you know I don’t go there even when they ARE on my payroll. It’s just not a game of equals — I’ve already won because she’s my subordinate, and fucking with a subordinate takes all the fun out of winning the game.

But, if she and I were out drinking with friends, oh yeah, that would be quite the hand to play. She’d either be flattered or disgusted, but possibly still flattered despite her disgust. It’s a powerful hand to play in the flirty game because it could go so horribly wrong, or so amazingly right.

“He thinks I’m sexy enough to wank off to a picture of a girl who looks like me,” is what I would hope she would be thinking, but I suspect she’s more likely to think, “That is just fucking gross!” as she tries to erase the image of my staring at a picture of her on the computer screen with my dick in one hand and the mouse in another.

But no matter how I drop that kind of a bomb on a girl, you have to remember, it’s a bomb, and if you’re not careful, it might take out one or two of your appendages in the explosion that may follow.

The beautiful summer day probably helped a lot — the way the sunlight played in her hair and the hem of her dress added to my thoughts of rolling in the hay under a peach tree.

A simple picture of feminine beauty.

Until she got closer, that is. Her skin wasn’t really that creamy — it had a roughness you see when a woman smokes too much, aged a bit before its time. Of course the tattoos probably didn’t help with my impression of her skin; mind you, I have no problem with body art, but these were poorly done, fading doodles.

Her grow-out was ragged black with shots of grey and her wavy hair was obviously a bad perm. And while the dress was still cute, it lost a lot of innocence in the years it must have spent in thrift stores.

If she’s a hundred feet away and turns out to be butt-ugly you can always call “100 foot rule!” Sometimes I think I need to make that the 30-foot rule…

Of course Einstein taught us that space and time are one and the same — there are also those women who seem beautiful when you first meet them, then you get to know them and you wonder how you ever thought that ugly bitch could have ever looked like an angel.

While I’m at it, I suppose I could throw in quantum cuteness like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle — she’s cute AND ugly depending on how you look at her. I have a friend who always keeps her hair pulled severely back, until she goes to a wedding or a formal party, then she lets her hair down and… wow. When I see her later with her hair back up I get this weird, flickering sense that she’s cute, but she’s not, but she is, but she’s not…

So cuteness may exist at a distance over a limited period of time depending on the situation…

Cute := [distance/time] ~ situation

Or maybe this isn’t a math problem… it’s probably a fantasy novel all written in my head in 5 seconds seeing what I want to see on the other end of the parking lot…

She gave me the deadbolt key after too times ringing the bell and calling her cell phone in the middle of the night, rousing her out of bed to get her to unbolt the door; it turned out that the only times she wanted to keep me out were times I didn’t want to see her anyhow. I put that key on my ring behind the knob key — my house keys and hers clipped side by side.

We work right next door to each other, so it only makes sense that we carpool… a lot. Even before I found myself sleeping at her house more often than my own, even before I moved my stuff into her house, it seemed I was driving her car as much as my own. So, she gave me her spare car key.

Of course, driving in together often meant that I would help her open her shop. It just made sense to put a spare salon key on the same ring as the car key. And while I didn’t put the bulky car key or shop key on my keyring, it seemed I’d grab that set of keys every day.

Last week we went car shopping — the lease was up on her old car, and I’ve been without a car for most of the last year, so we got something sensible (if you call a $40,000 luxury crossover “sensible”). It’s in her name, but we both picked it out and I’m pitching in on it. So the new car key went on my keyring, along with the spare salon key.

Maybe it’s the hopeless romantic in me, but when I grabbed my keys this morning and realized how many keys are to her stuff I got this warm feeling… You can meet someone, fall in love, run to Vegas and get married, but you still have keys to your stuff and she has keys to her stuff. We’re good at keeping some things locked, but if you’re lucky, one day you find your keyring filled with the keys to your life together.

Let’s see… Fiona came home and needed to unwind, so we went to the pub. I had a pint of stout. Tim showed up (he’s The guy on the other barstool who’s not gay but somehow seems like a threesome partner nonetheless). I had a shot of Jameson, then a glass of wine, Bushmills and Baileys (aka a “Bushwhacker”), then a shot of some whiskey I don’t know, then a glass of port… I’m not going to feel too great tomorrow.

It’s not just the cotton feeling in my head, it’s the fact that my body knows what to do and manages to get me home without too much trouble. Heck, it’s the fact I’m able to type this with a modicum of accuracy (and a lot of backspace/deletion) that adds to the surreality of my drunkenness.

Everything happens before I’m aware of it. Everything takes a moment longer to process than the time it actually occurs. I essentially become a passenger in my own body, and yet, my responses are my own, even if I have to review those responses later.

It’s not like I’ve never been here before (see I’m not that different drunk), it’s that I recognize it almost as an old acquaintance. I’m not going to say “old friend” because my drunken state is not a friend, even if it is familiar. It’s not a nemesis, either, it just is.

But I think part of the problem is that my intellect is able to fight through the haze of alcohol and sugar (I really think the sugar in these things is worse than the alcohol alone). It’s not that I find myself drunk, it’s that I’m intellectually aware of my inebriation even as I lose my ability to control myself.

Sure, the girl at the bar that showed up later was someone I’d fuck. But my intellect talked business with her (probably a good thing). And yet, I feel my tongue slur my words, even as my bran is struggling to say the complex things that need to be said in the context of conversation. I find myself apologizing for my body’s betrayal — only it’s the betrayal of my brain as it allowed these toxins in, sip by sip.

Vitamin B and lots of water… then sleep. And then… soul searching and a lot of, “Did I actually say I’d do a business presentation at 11 and say I’d do a 35 mile bike ride at 2?” It’s not only what I did in the bar in my drunken state, but what I said I’d do tomorrow that is going to hurt.

Disconnected or not, integration is going to suck. Suck hard.