Over the years, I’ve written a fair amount about my relationship to death and dying and deadness. Three different topics, all of which are related. This blog has been with me from my early 40s into my mid-50s. Unquestionably, the span of fourteen years that the blog documents has been the fourteen best years of my life.
The blog begins just as I emerged from my hellhole of compulsivity. Addiction, deception, shame, loneliness, aloneness, and so on. I never have felt as alive as I have in the last fourteen years, even as, in that period, I’ve confronted almost constantly my relationship to deadness and to death. Maybe this is part of what it means for me to feel alive, to be aware of the inevitability of death, of the ubiquity of the feeling of deadness, of the reality that every day I am dying.
In the last couple of years, though, this all has gotten a bit more… real. Partly because of events in my body – injuries, pain, surgeries, loss of function. Nothing catastrophic, but loss that has both scared me and altered my experience of life on a day-to-day basis. I don’t write much about these aspects of my life for a variety of reasons, but suffice it to say, today I walk with a permanent limp and experience chronic pain – both in my lower back and in my neck and shoulder. I try not to complain too much, but all this is relatively new.
Although this all has posed brief interruptions in my physical functioning, for the most part, none of this constrains me. Notwithstanding my limp and my pain, I’m in the best physical shape I’ve ever been in. I go to the gym five to seven days a week, where I do a combination of cardio and strength training. I bike, albeit on an e-bike, to and from work every day that the weather permits. I look better than I’ve ever looked before. My wife and I joke that some men age poorly, some age well.
I am unquestionably just about at peak hotness. I’ve never been this hot before. I’ll never be this hot again.
All of which puts me in touch with sadness, with the loss embedded in, intrinsic to, being at the peak. I’ve written before about how I’m capable of seeing a beautiful woman as an insult, as a reminder of what I can’t have, what’s not available to me. Sometimes this forms in my mind as what I never had, sometimes as what I should have had but lost out on, sometimes other permutations.
The reality though, if I’m able to maintain perspective, is that along just about every axis, I have been extraordinarily fortunate and extraordinarily privileged. I never was quite the slut I fancied myself – I never picked women up and discarded them, I never really had one night stands. Notwithstanding the relatively substantial volume of encounters and relationships depicted in this blog, I’ve always been acutely aware of the promiscuous types who make me look like a stay-at-home wallflower. And if I pause and reflect on that for even half a second, I realize how deluded it is, how perspective-lacking it is.
Even as I write this today, on a day that feels to me so much like one that’s long past my sexual prime, if I’m honest with myself, I have in my life, in addition to my wife, who – let’s be clear – is a spectacular, beautiful, loving, kind, supportive, and hot partner – several burgeoning, incipient relationships (?) with two age-appropriate poly women, another fun and playful relationship with an age-appropriate poly woman, and a couple of swirling relationships with women who are… less age-appropriate.
That’s right. There are six or seven women with whom I might plausibly imagine I might have a sexual encounter at some time in the next four to six weeks. Practically speaking, I’m too busy for all of those to materialize. But a couple surely will.
And honestly, where do I get off thinking I’m in any way deprived?