So I was holding the little turtle, she is blonde and has her mother’s blue eyes, she screams “Daddy!” every time she sees me after I have been away for an hour or so, and she wakes me up by saying “Morning daddy!” with a kiss and hug to go with it. She has always been so direct and clear with everything and though she is not two yet she speaks enough to explain anything that she wants to express. I had asked her mom to put on some music and I was spinning the little turtle around dancing with her.
The first song that came on sounded like some country and western love song, kinda whiny and drawn out, and I said so; half to the little turtle and half to the wife, something like “Sounds a bit whiny…” but whatever, my little daughter, like all of them, just likes to dance and if I swing her round a bit with the music she smiles or laughs.
The wife didn’t even betray a smirk or anything, just looked up then carried on ironing a patch on one of my perennially ripped jeans. Then, as she knows I would, because I always do, I started hearing the actual words.
And all I managed to say was…
“Oh, it’s about… I thought…”
And then, without any warning or even understanding of why really, a whole bunch of crying burst out of me. Tears and that coughing thing a man may do when trying to stop, except I couldn’t. All the things I passed through with Scorpio Girl, who is twelve now, and who I didn’t have any time with for 5 of her first 9 years, who is here for the third year with us now, came flooding back, even while I was holding the little turtle and her total innocent love and honesty, that I would murder thousands to protect, and the other two girls too, of course, but these two, the first and the latest, they hit me at the same time like a one-two from Mike Tyson in his prime.
I still haven’t really processed it in a way I can put into words. I don’t know if I ever will, I have always been like this. Stuff of this sort probably just adds up. Scar on scar. Builds an armour I don’t know about. And all the women and broken things before just buried it I don’t know where.
And Lucie comes along and finds that gap, and shines a beam of sunlight in there. Among all the broken things and what it maybe used to be shines through as she begins to dust and clean and repair something I forgot I even had in there.
The little turtle was worried looking at me crying, tears on my face she had never seen. And Lucie came to hug us both. I told the little turtle I am fine, I am happy, I love her. And she seemed to accept it, if maybe not fully convinced.
I went to lie down upstairs on my own a minute to try and understand what happened. And the best I can do is what I write here now, so far.
One other thought came to me that is irrelevant to the specifics of this but I still think is relevant in a wider world context, and it is again a difference between what one might at first imagine is the difference between Latino men, spics and dagos like me and Northerners like the Anglos, Swedes, Germans and so on.
But on reflection, I think stems more from —once again— the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. The reflection of the reality of God, as it expresses in man versus the caricature of it.
The difference is perhaps best expressed in a way that my father pointed it out once when I was a young teenager. I don’t recall what the context was. And my father has never been a very soft man, anyway, but he was describing this difference between the Anglos and us:
“They think if you show your emotions you are weak. They are stupid that way. They think if you cry because your dog died you’re a pussy, and maybe even say so to you. Then when you kick them in the balls and break their nose for disturbing your private moment of mourning, they think you’re a crazy person. The truth is that they are weak. Just because a man cries when something hurts him doesn’t mean he can’t cut you open from belly to throat without blinking when you piss him off.”
It wasn’t a life lesson I really ever needed to be taught, as I was this way instinctively, always have been, but the verbalising of it had crystallised it for me nicely.
I don’t have that crystallisation as to why exactly I burst out crying so suddenly, and I don’t especially need it for myself, but it is probably important conceptually for others. A contextualisation of spiritual truth matters in the wider context. It is, after all, how the truth of God has spread and expanded in its details thanks to the Catholic Church’s dogmatic truths, expounded and detailed over the centuries from the basic principles of the gospels and Catholic tradition harking back to the three centuries before the Bible was even compiled.
Anyway, I am not sure what you may gain from this story, other than some generic concepts which will no doubt get twisted into mutant versions of what I wrote, be it “Latins are more manly and i touch with their feminine side!” All the way to: “The kurgan is a pussy and no one should take any advice from a man that cries because if a song!”
Without forgetting the “He’s obsessed! He makes it all about Catholicism and how it’s the best religion ever!” For the record, I am no more “obsessed” with Catholicism than I am with 2+2 being 4. It just is true and that matters.
And if I cared what people said about me, well… I think by now anyone that knows me realises there is no danger of that being a threat to my psyche.
Oh, and of course, the final lesson to take away from all this is that women are devious creatures even in their most loving and caring aspects.
The song:
The Sexual Difference
Between the kinkiest, dirtiest, most pleasurably debauched sex you can imagine, and the totally connected, deep intimacy of being with a woman you want to reproduce with and who wants to do so with you, is really not comparable.
The problem is that we have an endless supply of examples of the first kind of sex to “aid” the stunted imaginations of both men and women, predominantly in pornography, but also in pretty much every single “cultural” and “normalised” aspect of modern society, especially in the West.
While the second type of intimacy is only known about by those who have experienced it. And there really is almost no one left even capable of imagining it. I did —imagine it, that is— before I experienced it, and it was, in my imagination, kind of the mythical Holy Grail I was after, as I worked my way through dozens of female bodies in a short period of time, I certainly partook of the first type of sex enough to know, that there is a definite allure to it.
In fact, I believe the most common response of a reader that has experienced that, on reading the very first paragraph would be to say that if you can find a woman just debauched enough to click with your own kinks, you can achieve a level of sexual chemistry that is in and of itself, as deep a connection as you can have with another human being as possible. And no doubt such people believe it. I partly thought it might be the best you can get on this Earth too, although, like a foolish and mystic knight, I never gave up on my imagination of what it might be like to experience the second type of connection. And even when I lay with women who did want to have children with me, and even with one who did, there was still, always, something not quite there.
And being as how I am built, I have always had, since a very young age, the sense of following the ideal instead of the possible. I’m not just saying that. My memory was always excellent, being able to recall at least some events from age two. And one I recall from age four or five or so, was my grandfather telling me an old Italian proverb, which was:
“Better to be a living deckhand than a dead hero.”
I didn’t say anything, but I recall my thought clear as if it happened a minute ago. And it was this:
“But as a living deckhand you’re only a deckhand. A dead hero at least was a hero.”
That way of being has always been in me. I don’t know where it comes from or why, but the perception of what might be, of the impossible glory, not for me specifically, but for a concept, an ideal, a truth above all, has always mattered to me more than what the world around me, material reality, the thoughts of others on the matter, or what passed for the possible supposedly was.
And in my 55 years on this Earth, I have only increasingly satisfied myself that this way of being is far superior in quality than one that is limited and hamstrung by what the vast unwashed masses of humanity assume is “possible”. Not that I ever had any doubt of it. I never have, even when I was briefly atheist.
Therefore, even when my first two marriages crashed and burned, when the sex with the most kinky and exotic of women ended, I still imagined that somewhere in the Universe if not on Earth, that intimate connection I imagined, must exist; even if I never found it, I felt certain this Universe must be one in which that kind of connection can exist.
But I don’t think even 1 in 10,000 men can imagine it as vividly as I did. And it’s not arrogance saying that. Are you aware that almost every Chinese person has no internal dialogue? That most Africans can’t have conceptualised thoughts of three dimensional objects in their mind and rotate them?
And it’s not about race, it’s just humanity in general is so very poor at using its imagination. Of course, it has also been intentionally trained out of us certainly for at least over one hundred years. Today, it is almost entirely the purpose of formal modern education to do so.
So, how can one even discuss, or make a man that has NOT experienced that level of depth of connection believe how much better it is than any level of debauched sex you might engage in?
Especially since you are far more likely to have experienced the lustful and kinky side of sex than the deeply lovingly intimate one.
Any man who has not lived it is likely to think that anyone extolling its superiority is merely an exaggerated fable-teller. A puritanical Bible-thumper who couldn’t know what kinky sex was if he was parachuted into a Roman orgy, whose only aim is to get you to fall in line with his stunted and puritanical religious ideas so you can be just as miserable as he is.
It’s probably right up there with teaching a guy from Sentinel Island what an aeroplane is and how it works. Except they can see the aeroplanes, but modern men and women cannot even imagine the connection I am trying to make you aware exists.
And yet… it does exist.
And I wish there was a way to make you all see it and know it. Because if only you could, if only you knew, the world would change in an instant.
The Satanic pedophiles would be hung from the rafters in their own high-ceilinged homes in a matter of hours. Current politicians would be tarred and feathered if not buried in mass graves, and people would instantly have a proclivity to be far more honest and direct than any other period in the entirety of the history of the human race.
But we are the lucky, if eternal, few.
And yes, we are eternal, because our imagined dream of intimacy, is really but a mere shadow of the real thing. The real thing, for those few of us that live it, overshadows our best imaginations in ways none of us could have contemplated.
That reality, that absolute truth, all the more so because of how broken, fallen and corrupt we all are on this Earth is itself an ever-present miracle.
On this Earth we are all dominated by Greed, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Envy, Avarice, Wrath, Pride and all matter of Sins, and despite how weak and cowardly we are, this truth, this union of souls in a sexual intimacy you can’t even imagine, that creates new life too, remains true. Exists. Is real.
And it will always remain true because it is one of the foundations of this very Universe. It is why every sunset and every dawn is beautiful in and of itself. It is why a flower or a little insect crawling over it, a bee, gathering the nectar, if only you could see it, if only you could really watch it and understand it, reveals to you an endless Ocean of love, that you are immersed in even when the darkest things happen to you and you have no hope, no God, and no chance.
And as hard as your heart cries out for Justice, so too, know, that that very sentiment, the ever-unappeased rage of an injustice never righted in this life, that too, can only exist in a Universe where Love, total, ultimate Love, must exist.
I hope you will know it.
I hope you will live it.
But first, you must at least believe in it, if you are ever to see it or find it.
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By G | 26 August 2024 | Posted in Increasing Happiness, Relationships, Social Commentary