With my wife away last evening at 8 p.m., I was to bed later than usual because my younger brother had bused away in the early afternoon to commence his daily drinking, so I was not expecting him home until after 9 p.m. In fact, I never even finished and published yesterday's post here until 9:30 p.m.
However, I did not sit up too much later. I am confident that I was to bed by 9:50 p.m. at latest, and my brother had still not shown up.
Of course, I was not to bed for the night. I was merely logging what restorative latter evening napping I could manage in order to fortify me for my regular earliest a.m. hours working here at my computer when I have the best assurance of privacy and peace.
As for my wife, I had figured that she had gone off to party with friends ─ in particular, her employer at the Thai restaurant where my wife works part-time. Often, another female restaurant-owner from Vancouver joins them, and that evidently was so last evening.
It was 2:17 a.m. when I heard my wife unlocking the front door. And she was definitely comically intoxicated and rather loud, but at least she did not waste too much time in getting herself to bed.
She had asked me to get her a glass of hot water, so I had gone downstairs to boil water for that; and when I brought it up to her where she lay in bed, she was talking on her cellphone ─ which she generally has on 'speaker' mode ─ and I heard a male non-Thai-accented voice saying something that included the words "your husband". This was when my wife hurriedly made an acknowledgement and terminated the call.
I feigned to not have overheard anything and gave her the water, and then left, shutting her into the bedroom for the night.
As I always say concerning my wife's whole weekend absences, "Such is our sorry marriage."
Nonetheless, it did hurt me, as I keenly felt when I returned here to work at adding content into a new post at one of my two hosted websites. And I was pointedly wroth with God that He does absolutely nothing ─ despite years of my pleading ─ to help this 71-year-old who is too hopelessly buried in debt directly attributable to his hapless marriage to ever be free of that state, and able to do anything but sit here in his debtor's prison with his ruin all about his ears.
I have no other recourse ─ lacking that financial miracle of liberation ─ than to sit beneath this roof and bide the slow trickling away of my life, for I can change nothing on my own. I cannot even meet the monthly mortgage without contributions from my wife's two adult sons ─ I am a hostage to all.
How can I stand as if I am somehow a strong and able man? Hell, I am every bit as much to blame for the failure of my marriage as my wife ─ maybe even more so. I am the member of the union who has failed to meet the conjugal duty owed by one partner to the other.
How am I a true man when I am so unspeakably impotent in so many ways? Why would I expect anything else from a wife over 23 years younger than I? Why should she sacrifice her 'needs' just because her husband is useless in bed?
The truth is that as of sometime next month (March), it will have been a full eight years since we were physically intimate together. I of course can not speak for her, but I have been with no one else; and that is a long, long time to be starved for even the intimacy of being able to lie within the arms of someone else quite apart from any sexual activity.
Humans have a biological / psychological need for human touch and especially for extended physical contact.
This seems where God want me. Sitting here faced with my profound, glaring ineffectuality in absolutely everything related to being a man and a provider. I sit here retired, while my wife must keep working. Yet my pension is too inadequate for the situation that I retired into, and I knew it then. I just hoped that God would understand and be kindly towards me.
Even if just to save my marriage.
But no. He is grand at mandating the sanctity of the union, but it is not for Him to ever directly reach out His hand to someone like myself and work a genuine miracle that would yield me the means ─ and thus the tools ─ to save my marriage, and what is left of my life.
But this is not why I am blogging today. I have neither the time nor the inclination to continue on this theme.
I was back to bed this morning far nearer 5 a.m. than I like, for even then it takes me a long while to fall asleep.
And no later than 9 a.m. I was awake and checking the time, but too underslept to be able to rise for several minutes. My brother was downstairs watching T.V. and drinking coffee.
I remained upstairs here at my computer until nearly 10 a.m. before I went downstairs to boil water for an instant black coffee, and then I joined him.
When he issued the invitation to put our Android TV Box to use, I led things off with three videos that I had previously downloaded into a USB flash drive, but the only one I will mention is The Sequel: The Fall of the Cabal part 3.
We have been slowly working or way through the full documentary series. We find it extremely interesting, but do so as 'outside' viewers ─ neither of us is a convert to Janet Ossebaard's contentions. We just happen to be thoroughly impressed by the depth and breadth of her research.
After the three downloaded videos, I then tuned in an episode each of Supergirl and then Deadbeat. By the time they were done, my brother took his leave to seek some bed rest ere heading away for the afternoon to ultimately resume his drinking somewhere. However, he did not seem to remain in his bedroom long enough to have actually gotten a nap.
My wife never rose until after he had gone. While she was in the bathroom freshening up for her day, I had some quick exercises out in the backyard toolshed, and then came into the house to make a meal of some of the leftovers of her cooking from yesterday.
Then by around mid-afternoon, she took her leave, merely softly saying as she left that she would be back.
Years ago when my youngest stepson (who is now 23) was still in late elementary school, he would say as he was leaving the house, "I'll be back!"
His older brother and even his mother eventually began using that famous Arnold Schwarzenegger phrase as if it actually meant that they were going to be out for a while, whether short or somewhat long ─ as if absolutely everybody was commonly privy to the expression as simply meaning that.
I find it to be rather cute the way they have invented their own use of that phrase and do not even seem aware that this is so.
You or I would just say, "I'm going out for a while." I am sure that this is what my wife and her two sons believe their use of the movie phrase intends.
At present it is nearly 6:30 p.m., and she is still away. Right after she left, I took the opportunity to catch a nap, and then I was soon at work on this post. No one was home, but my youngest stepson has shown up around 6 p.m. or immediately thereafter.
I think that I would like to have a beer or maybe even two and catch an episode of one of the T.V. series I follow exclusive to any I watch in common with my brother. And since I have some exercising I would still like to tackle, I am going to call it quits on the blogging for today.
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