Musing

I biked home from my 40th high school reunion feeling the same alienation I felt in high school — most of my actual friends weren’t there, and the crowd felt like a different world. I had a few genuinely connected conversations and skipped the after-party, choosing to bike in the night air, and my wife, and scotch, instead.

I had an epiphany about the shame I feel when relationships with women end — a deep sense that I am bad, unworthy, and that the loss is proof of it. It connected my pattern of abandonment to my mother, and felt like genuine news even though I’ve written about it many times before.

Death has been a constant presence throughout my life — from losing grandparents as a young child to my mother at nineteen. My own 21-year-old child, though, has been largely sheltered from it, and losses are now drawing closer.

What being sad, being a little depressed, looks like in me.

I’m depressed. Not TERRIBLY depressed. But depressed.

Reviewing French Fries, or, the ridiculous power of AI. Or, I’m totally obsessional.

Meeting women has changed dramatically over the last 15 years — from mass-swiping Tinder to the blog attracting partners organically — and now all avenues have dried up.

I’m marking the 15th anniversary of my blog, a few months late. What began as exhibitionistic and therapeutic has become a memoir of my inner life through my fifties.

I’ve been building a chatbot to give access to my writing — not to imitate my voice, but to preserve it. This project grew from grief over my mother’s lost writings and a resolve not to leave my child without my output.

Every behavior, sexual or otherwise, contains valuable information. Lately my pornographic habits are raising disturbing new questions I’ve been avoiding — ones I plan to explore in a future post.