Strangely Public, Again! in Whatever Will Be Will Be

I had originally planned this entry out. And then life got in the way. And then it got more in the way. And so the plan turned into a vague idea. And then I got home and wanted to say more than I had intended. So… here we are again. Many things to say and uncertain if I’ll say them all.

First, when I arrived home, I decided to watch Disney Plus while I ate dinner. Tonight’s selection was the new Disney Plus Exclusive Simpson’s Christmas Special Oh C’mon All Ye Faithful. As it is the Simpsons now three decades after they started, I’m not exactly expecting the brilliance of Dickens but always nice to check in on familiar characters and see what story directions are experimented with. If you do not wish to be spoiled regarding this special, I recommend skipping to the next paragraph. Of the various stories going on in the special, one hit me particularly: Ned had a significant crisis of faith. Now, I’ve seen Mr. Flanders go through seasons of doubt or questioning and struggle with “what was God’s purpose” before. But this one forced a literal gasp. Ned Flanders said God does not exist. Ned Flanders encouraged his children to covet toys for Christmas. Ned was truly separated from his faith, renouncing it. As is the common rule for shows like the Simpsons- if you can get away with it, make sure everything ends like it began so I wasn’t terribly worried that suddenly Ned Flanders would become The Face of Woke and another in the pop culture dominoes to force the Religious Right to clutch their pearls and scream “The war on Christianity! The war on Christmas!” But they let Ned have the honest fears, the genuine questioning. If God isn’t real, Satan isn’t real. If they aren’t real, there is no afterlife. If there is no afterlife, what’s the point? I can tell you, especially during my relationship with Hermia, I was starting to feel like that. Embracing a perspective of there are no miracles, there are no spiritual wonders. all that exists is life and nothing.... it.... does stuff to you. And they let Ned experience that and work through that. And then, honestly, his return to Faith was an easy way to get to people like me or my father. While the show “bought it back” as “this wasn’t really a miracle or marvelous” the truth is… faking things that really exist doesn’t negate the wonder of their existence. Professor Frink (a long time favorite side character for me) has some wonderful quotes. “I think that God is revealed in the orderly harmony of nature.” And it is really true. To think “We know everything and can make no room for that which we cannot experience, see, or catalogue?” That isn’t scientific. It is true that we “understand” more about space than we do our own oceans. The things we thought impossible… “nothing can live in that depth, with that little light, and that much pressure!” And yet… there are things living there. “Oh, life as we know it is required to follow the following rules” and then nature comes along and says, “Oh, I’m sorry. Your authority is not recognized in Earth Kick Ass!” And so the very idea that we can get all up our own asses thinking we KNOW for sure and for certain.... “God isn’t real. An afterlife isn’t real. If I haven’t experienced it, it isn’t real.” That’s just… short sighted? Immature? Almost juvenile, in a way. The idea of people loving each other, coming together in altruistic ways… some people don’t see that, don’t experience that… does that mean it isn’t real? That it never happens? Legitimately falling in love… some people don’t get to experience that. They don’t get to see it. Does that mean it isn’t real? You can’t touch it, you can’t taste it, you can’t see it… and if you’ve never experienced it, you can’t feel it… so does that mean it isn’t real? That it cannot be real? It is important to question things, I will always believe that. If some asshole comes along and tells me that “Your faith demands that you pay me $9,000 and agree that selling children into slavery has positive results”… I’m questioning that. But… there is what we KNOW THAT WE KNOW, what we KNOW THAT WE DON’T KNOW, what we DON’T KNOW THAT WE KNOW, and what we DON’T KNOW THAT WE DON’T KNOW. And to paraphrase some wonderful Astro-Physicists… The Law of the Conservation of Energy exists. Energy can never be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form of energy into another. And how arrogant would we have to be (and how unscientific) to believe that we know and have categorized all types of possible energy. Whether it is a druidic “we return to nature” or a spiritual “we return to before” or however you believe and give word to those beliefs… it is as wrong for me to tell someone “You’re 100% wrong, God is real and you’re going to hell if you don’t believe in the exact same God that I do!” as it is for someone to say “You’re 100 wrong, God is not real and cannot possibly be real and you’re a fucking idiot for thinking that there is anything beyond this world that could possibly exist.

NOW FOR THE PART I HAD INTENDED!

So… today is December 17th. MANY years ago now, when I was 15 years old, I asked a girl out and for the first time that girl I asked out said yes. Now, I had asked women out before. Fuck, I was so deeply infatuated with Tammy’s refined beauty and quiet natured soul… but she turned me down. The next year, I though I had asked Kris out. Really. Truly. Honestly. I had lived for decades thinking that I had asked her out and she’d rejected me. But a year or two ago, she reached out (she’s much different now) and in her message essentially said, “One thing I’ve never understood about you is why you don’t see yourself as wonderful as you are. You know if you had asked me out Freshman year, I would have said yes. I was always a little sad that didn’t happen.” SO… clearly there was a problem in our communication!!
But Sophomore Year of High School… with a Winter Formal looming in the future… I had spent Autumn Semester Study Hall with a group of women that I felt remarkably close to. But only ONE of those women had ever been in my dreams before. Literally. In 8th Grade, I had a very clear dream of falling in love with this girl. And a few short years later… this Half-Japanese intelligent, ambitious, beautiful young woman had become an even larger part of my life. I felt… Okay. I know it is scary. But do it. Ask her out. You want to dance with her. You want to spend time with her. You want to experience your first kiss with her. Just do it. So… December 17th, 1999, the day of the Winter Performance Showcase… that morning sometime in the 9 o’clock hour (i think)… I asked her out. And she said yes. And as naively optimistic as I was and as deeply enamored of being a hopeless romantic as I was… I actively solidified all of it into my long term memory. If Tiffany and I lasted… isn’t it romantic to be able to tell the story of first asking her out to kids or grandkids? To be able to say at a potential future wedding, “6 years ago on this very day, I mustered the courage to ask this beautiful woman to be my date and be my girlfriend… and it is still one of the smartest, scariest, most wonderful things that has ever happened to me.” Y’know… that kind of thing!! Of course… the relationship crashed and burned come March starting a history of “3 months or less” relationships with the exceptions of Emily (long distance), Nancy (ex-wife), and now Hermia (ex-girlfriend). But… I still had December 17th in my memory and still try to honor the day each year in some way. To mark the occasion of really beginning my romantic pursuits in earnest… and in a way that got me something other than constant NOs. Though, as I’ve mentioned before… Nancy and Hermia really asked me. ANYWAY… that’s why I wanted to make sure to write this TONIGHT. December 17th. But there’s more.

So… shortly after the divorce… I remember sitting alone, feeling sad but not… just really being mixed up in my emotions and loneliness on July 2nd (our anniversary). And so I developed a ritual that I started doing consistently for many important Relationship Events. I’ve written about it before. Essentially, I decided upon a ritual. It is a drinking ritual. 2 cups. Midori in one. Tequila Rose in the other. And it isn’t a negative ritual. The purpose is a positive one. On important occasions? We wish to remember the past. Honor it. Acknowledge the best parts of it. That’s the Midori. Because like good memories from the past, it is sweet and it is pretty. But also like the past, if we indulge too much… spend too much energy or attention into the past, the sweet turns sickly. Too much and we poison ourselves against the present. We also wish to acknowledge, on important dates, that prior to when the date became important… there was no way to know or predict that THIS DATE would become important. So we take time to honor the future yet to come, the important dates we have yet to experience. That is the Tequila Rose. For as the future is cloudy and unclear, we can enjoy the sweet promise of what is to come… as long as we are responsible with our time in the present. So truly, it is a ritual on important dates that acknowledges the past (the importance of the date), the future (for when the date might no longer be important as other dates take its place), and reminds us that- even as we honor the past and future, we must remember to stay in the present.

Now the ritual dates hadn’t really been updated since Hermia and I first started going out. They were
December 17 (for 1999)- first time I asked out a girl and she said yes
February 23 (for 2021)- the last time I had sex with Essen (and, to the last time this was updated, the last time I’d had sex period)
May 3 (for 1984)- for the first time little baby me existed outside a womb
June 23 (for 2023)- the only recent update as that was the day of Hermia and my first date
July 2 (for 2011)- the anniversary of marrying Nancy
August 26 (for 2020)- the first time I’d had sex with a woman who was not my wife (my first non-Nancy sex and my first time with Victoria)
November 23 (for 2019)- the day Nancy and I officially discussed/made peace with Separating.

Now… that was the old list. That was the list as it existed as a general rule. But the truth is… I did not persist with the ritual while I was dating Hermia. There are many reasons for this, some better/some worse. I always made sure to respect the days that actually deserved it. Which means December 17, May 3, June 23, July 2nd. Those days were celebrated and remarked upon, even while dating Hermia… even if not by ritual. Thing is… with it being December 17th… and me not only once again being alone, but being alone (again) for the entire Holiday experience (much as I was when the ritual began… marking an important day as we transition into a holiday season and doing all of that entirely alone)… I wanted to… reconnect with the ritual. Shake it lose, shrink it down to the REAL actually important dates. I mean… I still have a lot of reason to celebrate that first time with Victoria! And I still have a lot of mixed strong emotions about that last time with Essen. But… I’m also… not who I was. Nancy refused sex for years during the marriage and made the act of love making a once to three times a year MAYBE experience. So, after moving beyond that and finally having sex, and good sex, and adventurous sex? There’s a reason it was originally worth noting! And while Hermia and I weren’t exactly fucking every week… or even every month.... and while we certainly weren’t what I would call adventurous… in our relationship sex wasn’t… a thing. By which I mean.... it wasn’t so rare as to be mythologized and it wasn’t so “three hours of acrobatic athleticism” to be worth chronicling in excruciating detail. All that said, to her credit (and a med change)… it is worth saying that I orgasmed for Hermia when I hadn’t for Essen, Victoria, or even my Wife (many times). And it was one of those things that Hermia was… specific about. Wanting to make sure we both finished and enjoyed which… I understand SHOULD be a part of a mutual, loving relationship involving intimacy but… clearly has been an extreme exception to my lived experience. SO… wipe out all of the sex-related dates from the ritual list!!

Thing is? I haven’t bought the ingredients for the ritual since before Hermia and I started dating. But… Tequila Rose and Midori… those were never exactly… rare finds or anything. But as I searched leading up to today? I could not find Midori anywhere. I even started asking employees “Are you no longer carrying this?” Uh, the computers say we still carry it. “Okay, here’s what the bottle looks like, have you seen this recently?” Oh, wow! I remember those! I haven’t seen those bottles in MONTHS!
And it was like that store after store after store. Which, as I settled in tonight reflecting on “No Midori for the ritual” what that actually translates in the ritual is kind of hilarious.
On this day… which is one of the oldest days in my personal calendar that I observe… the element of the ritual that is gone? Is the part that honors the Past. The part that holds up the past with reverence, with nostalgia, with a bit of longing and an understanding that you can’t focus so much on the past that you lose yourself to it. I don’t have that part for this anymore. Which almost feels… significant. I mean, consider my entries of late. My big focus lately has been “HOLY FUCK, I’M FUCKED IN THE PRESENT” with a strong helping of “I’m focusing on the past because I’ve just gone through a break up so that’s what I’m doing!” All that remains of the ritual, then, is the Tequila Rose: to honor the future yet to come, the important dates we have yet to experience. And I think there’s definitely something interesting about that. Something… important. As 2024 comes to a close and the world dawns on 2025… there are a lot of things in our future to fear. A lot of battles we know we’ll be facing. But we can’t lose hope and we can’t lose faith. The future will hold important dates we have yet to experience. Some wonderful beyond the telling. Some horrible beyond our imagining. New life, new love, new miracles… and the end of life, the end of love, the end of important things we thought we’d never lose. All of it is yet to come. And you can fear it. And you can plan. And you can hold on tight. But whatever is coming is going to come. Let’s hope for excellent things. Put our own work and effort into making things better for ourselves, our loved ones, and the world. And ride out whatever happens. I definitely have some very specific, if far fetched, things I’m hoping for in the future. For myself. For this world. Even for you, reader, right now.

I think it is funny that the song that came to mind as I close this out comes from a Modern Passion Play I did over 20 years ago. When I was thin enough to believably play Jesus without horrifying a crowd upon seeing my shirtless frame on a cross. This particular song played in two specific moments. FIRST: the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus praying in earnest to God to find a different path than the one laid out for him. “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground” Luke 22:44. And as the praying ended, and the soldiers stormed the gates, and the disciples took up arms… Jesus quieted them and even healed the Roman who had been injured in the fray (Luke 22:47-51). As Jesus was marched away, the song ends. SECOND: As Jesus struggles on the Cross. Dying, thrashing in pain, and accepting the sin of the world, to the point where even God could not bare to watch and Jesus cried out “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (which means “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”) (Matthew 27:46) the song swells as Jesus collets himself and prepares for the battle to come. The song fades slowly to allow “It is finished” (John 19:30) and then it becomes a slow almost Celtic dirge as the lifeless body hangs… women and guards slowly coming to remove Jesus from the cross and carry his corpse away.
Obviously.... let us hope our 2025 isn’t that dramatic. Just.... interesting that THIS song should come to mind right now.