my sordid past

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Man, you don't know the beautiful men I've been through. I used to have a little box full of pictures of them all, because I loved them all and couldn't stop that part even if I stopped the relationship, but at some point the collection was just too depressing as a keepsake. I burned the box. So there is no evidence extant of this marvelous array... except in the memories of those who have known me that long. Men with this kind of history prefer to call themselves "serial monogamists". I have no term for it. It just never stops being what it is.

I was dreaming that Randy, the tall, devastatingly attractive Marlboro Man, circa 1974-79, had moved to Crescent City, that we bumped into each other there and I was trying to convince him to move away to an even more boondocks with me.

This doesn't wake me up a happy camper, love him still as I do, because nothing deeply matters to him except fishing... and drinking... and staying solid with extremely shiftless drinking buddies. He is funny. He is friendly. He scares the pee out of full-grown men because he is so tall and strong, even though he doesn't have a mean bone in the whole vastness of his body. He is the best bed-maker of anyone on earth, can just stand in one spot and handle the whole ordeal with a manly grace. He's as attuned to my "biorhythms" as it is possible to be, but can't live up to it in any way beyond just being that way when it strikes him to take refuge there, can't relate much beyond keeping me a sort of mom who's good in bed... enjoying laughing at his panting friends and my mortification by those same panting friends.

We used to talk to each other in our sleep. His roommate and girlfriend used to pull their pillows and blankets out into the hall to listen to us sleep-talking for their late night entertainment. They sometimes woke us up, laughing so hard.

Incapable of fidelity, he is still a bachelor, and determined about it now. He's held the same job for his entire adult life. Nothing fancy, but good enough pay to support a condo someplace expensive and fishing and hunting and drinking and a new truck every several years. So he should have been able to stick with one or another of the women who would have died for him, but that just always got too sticky for him. He was always bewildered by it too. Clueless.

Why would I want to run away with him?