Thanks for the mail and the interest. It’s very kind of you, but to answer your general points:
No, David Wolfe is not an idiot. I have come across this attitude before, where gentlemen are apparently supposed to do the decent thing and get it up to order, and I don’t buy it. It is neither pleasant nor adult behaviour to bonk everything that moves. Besides which, he appears to have a preferred list of attributes which I am not on. I was likewise until I met him – I use the term loosely, since it was really a brief moment of cynical irritation on youtube that initially sparked things off some months prior to our fortieth. The haiku was good, apart from that.
I do have the message I sent to my friend somewhere on one of the computers – I think it was 2008 or so. One of Harley’s psycho fanbois was involved as far as I remember, and I said something along the lines of “Shit, I appear to be in love with the horrible man, how the hell did that happen?” In any case, it appears he was married by then, although there was no trace of it at the time, so it has all been a self-delusion of mammoth proportions which happened to get me through at least one period of extreme stress – my mother would have been dead years ago after being thrown into a care home by her disgusting offspring if it hadn’t been for the aspirant Mrs Wolfe delusion.
Anyway, from casual observation – I stopped looking at anything to do with him in 2011 or so as I was afraid that I was going mad – he prefers compliance and a considerable amount of forbearance, and I am definitely not of that ilk. Been there, done that, don’t need the anxious wrinkles or the insecurity. I am probably in the best situation I could be in – I get to make indignant objections without pissing him off, which strategically is the most advantageous situation for both of us. I also get to obsessively work and ignore him, which is kind of why I don’t generally do monogamy in the first place.
I was asking myself for some time whether the overall situation was a question of safety. I gave up a lot of old relationships that were not really going anywhere because of it, and I don’t regret it at all. It is also very safe emotionally speaking to avoid actual relationships, so I wondered about that, too. Having had several tiresome years to ponder it, however, and considering the number of times I was told I was mad for admitting to it, I do not think it was a cowardly decision to just accept it and work through the inevitable questions that followed. Cats or Wolfe? Mother or Wolfe? Do I hate America more than I love Wolfe? Shit happens, and sometimes you just have to make like a fish and deal with it.
The frightening bit was the lobster tank part – if you put lobsters in a tank, one will almost make it over the top before the others pull it back down, and I got a lot of that. I had no idea that people who criticise others for achieving, do so on the basis that they feel safer being a nothing, so anything you do is going to be hated. They will pretend to be interested and then sabotage what you are doing because it makes them feel safe. That has wasted years even after making the decision to roll with it, never mind the years of misery before I met Wolfe.
I think the first thing I wrote for him was an astonishingly pompous looking academic philosophy of love entwined with some rhetoric material. Even I looked at it and said WTF, so I had some vague ideas about disseminating information to a wider public at that point. A really good specialist publication can sometimes only sell about 8 copies, to people that need to know who you are before they will buy it, so academia was never going to work for the over-arching project. I do not now regret the huge confidence crisis that has meant the delay in the work, although measures could have been taken earlier to prevent agronomic war, which I suspect is now inevitable in about fifty years. We can blame the Avocadess for that one, so she is welcome to a good hard stare in the mirror when America finally gets bombed flat by 194 irate and probably starving countries using its own crappy missiles. I was more of a sarcastic pal prior to that bit of pointless nastiness, and I was certainly very out of touch with my emotions generally.
I don’t really do convention, and I don’t regard squabbling over ‘ownership’ as being something that is relevant to me at all, since I do not play that way. Either you want to be with me or you don’t, and if you don’t you are welcome to bugger off for ten years until you figure it out. I’m not usually in love with them when I make that deal, however, so I guess this is a bit of a departure from my norm in that respect.
The only really bad part is the timing. I could theoretically go and have a child before it is too late, but I don’t really want to be sucking anybody into anything I don’t mean. Tough tittie, you make your decisions in life for whatever spurious reasons I guess.
Suck it up.