George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
even though he has since been unbanned.
Oh? He's still in the banned list, but maybe I don't know how to read that. Good summary, btw.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
I like the Zeugma. Some of the pronouns were a bit confusing:
a mohawk on long walks with amish girls, scrawny white boy at an all-black dance with a borderline little person, suicidal lesbians, a leather jacket with a married chick at an Ani DiFranco concert
Here I am imagining a Mohawk Indian in flagrante delicto with an Amish girl (girls!), and you having gay sex with a thin Caucasian male whose date is a black midget. Also doing it with an article of clothing. This isn't right, I am sure.
The rest, once cleared of ambiguity, is a compelling introduction--though in a way it might better serve as a blurb or an "About the Author" section. Part of the draw of your other similar posts is the What's this guy's story question that isn't immediately or clearly answered. My suggestion would be, if you do write a book, to start in the middle, maybe in "the ruins of what was once Babylon" (a great line) but really anywhere. Don't be bound by a linear structure.
Have you ever read Paul Theroux's My Secret History? It's got its share of critics and most of them are right, but that doesn't mean it isn't an imminently readable book. I don't mean that you should copy it, as such (It could be titled "Me and all the various women I've had sex with"), and it's very different from this, but I feel as if I'm supposed to recommend it here.
As a writer certainly you know to ignore most of the feedback I'm giving you and go your own way anyway. And I am all for that. I encourage you to keep getting it out.
I've had deep intellectual connections with several women over the years. Probably more women than men, if I'm honest. None of them were sexual relationshipa, however. I also don't know if any of them would have been the type to post in a forum like this. Sorry it always seems rather shortsighted to me to make these kind of pronouncements. I will concede that one might not want a romantic partner to also be someone with whom one has constant deep reflective talks.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Right. I would never do any of those drugs that you mention in any dosage, but I suppose you have a sense of what you want and can withstand. I do not know of the infamy of your posts, but that's fine, I don't need to.
Just based on your posts today, I might avoid the trap of thinking any sort of sexual interaction seals the deal in terms of affection--it doesn't. In fact it isn't a measure of much at all, in and of itself. The everything that comes before and after are much more relevant.
I've read you using PUA terms and having a very casual terminology regarding women ("oneitis" etc.) and this gives me considerable pause. Women/a woman is not the answer to all of your problems, nor is doing a bunch of drugs. This may already be clear to you, of course.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
I have found that I can't stand reading anything written by most fanbases of the things I nerd out over, but I am happy to discuss with those I happen to meet in person. People can really be insufferable assholes online.
This may work both ways, because then there's the Motte. Which makes me wonder how recognizable any of us on the Motte would be to one another in real life, or if we would have anything at all to say to each other. Probably not nearly as much as we type.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
For a guy who does not drink or do drugs, you did a hell of a lot of drugs. Let this be my only warning: That kind of high is not long-term. It is a dragon you chase.
The rest of your post weaves a bit much into an account of events that I cannot parse well enough to comment on. Being happy is good, I suppose. But the words "warm glow" and "magical" and the like do not suggest sustainability. How's the business?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
I agree with the other posters here suggesting shorter texts (even one sentence or less) are far better at maintaining a degree of mystery (and thus: interest). While laying all your cards face-up on the baize may seem straightforward, honest, reasonable, and even the Behavior That Was Asked For, that's only ever a strategy when teaching someone a new game--and usually what not to do.
Reworking the above:
Friday Evening
Me: … [local rock] concert. Let's do it.
Her: Ok!
or: .....
Either response is fine. As it is it took you several texts and a lot of hope to get to .....
Shorter sentences. Online dating isn't Motte effortposting. No emojis ever, for any reason. No exclamation marks. Suggest something fun. If she doesn't want to do that thing, be polite and move on. She will never refuse your advances directly, it's hard enough to do that in person--online she can just ghost you. Then if she gets bored or lonely she can reinitiate the interaction (Your self-respect should not allow that to occur.)
But again, always be courteous. Be courteous to a fault. Becoming the angry FuckYou guy just reinforces all popular modern stereotypes re: men. Not that you need to give a shit, but courtesy is a good thing.
People are saying church is lame. Why? It was her idea, though you brought it up. I agree church-as-date seems very unromantic and unexciting. It reminds me of that Life in Hell cartoon of biggest turnoffs before intimacy ("Dear father please forgive us for this vile sin we are about to commit.")
Anyway that's a You thing. We don't all run in the fast lane. I guess. The fact that she was responding with such relative vigor suggests she is either keen or mildly neurotic. Safe money on door #2 (see: I can't eat food around humans.)
Cut your loss, which is minimal. Next adventure begins any day now.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
SkookumTree did not go in February 2024. The last I heard was he was delaying for more training. According to the "SkookumTree +reddit" Google search I just did he still regularly posts there, and on various benign topics. Others may know his future plans.
Morbid question: If a presidential candidate is killed (or dies) prior to the election, who stands in his place?
Edit: or her place? (I write this only for grammatical balance)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Cops at the press conference are saying the guy was spotted (or his gun barrel was spotted) by a secret service officer. Basically praising him.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
True. Also I think genetics has something to do with it as I would never suggest most Japanese people are particularly rigorous in their exercise regimens. Certainly diet and, so far, the lack of a culture embracing fatness has something to do with it as well.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Good news, I wear dress shoes five days a week! I have three pair, depending on the suit and level of wear (brown, black, cordovan). Of course I am not in the US.
I would also suggest re: hotness and rapidly diminishing, to borrow your term, fuckability, it really does depend (and to channel Rodney Dangerfield: "on what I have no idea.") I see women here (in Japan) who keep their looks and figures well into their forties (though even they are not blindingly hot in the same way as younger women) although I believe many of them, certainly if they are still single, seem to have an almost visible cynicism and contempt regarding men, as if the veil of Isis had been pulled back for them long ago, and if they ever did end up coupling with a man it would be with the resignation of a Circe looking at a particularly muscular swine and thinking, ah well....
As for my acquaintances back home any woman my age who still lives there has ballooned into an almost unrecognizable caricature of her younger self. I can think of two exceptions. The men fare little better, perhaps not better at all I'm just viewing them with different criteria.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Sometimes on weekends I go for long walks. We live near a big park with a giant pond, and Americans I've known who have walked this park say it's one of the finest parks they've seen, rivaling Central Park in NYC. I've never been to NYC (which is weird) but I have my doubts. The park is good though. It serves me well. I used to take walks with the boys when they were little; in the summer I'd take them for soft cream and french fries at the little hut that sells these for two months out of the year. In the fall I remember I once made them ham and cheese sandwiches and thermoses of corn soup and they wore big jackets and swished kicking through the bunches of leaves. We played baseball using pine cones for balls and broken limbs for bats. That memory will die with me, I expect, as they were too young to now remember it. They don't now take walks with me. Parents of young children, take note: Every season is different, and the joys you have now you should savor, for they will someday be gone, replaced. I won't belabor the point.
The park has cranes, turtles, great orange and red and dun-colored carp, big rat-like nutria, many many various-sized and -colored cats who make their home in the thickets and bamboo, and, once, I saw a fox. My wife does not believe this story ("What would it eat?") but I know what I saw. All kinds of pigeons and crows. You can see ducks floating out on the pond (more of a small lake). Once my youngest boy took his birthday present fishing rod out and practiced casting from the big rocks at the pond edge.
In certain times of the year there are fireflies, and you go and all the lights are off and you walk in pitch black by the creek that trickles down up the hill into the pond and the fireflies--hotaru in Japanese--bloom suddenly in that amazing bioluminescence and float up and back into the dark of the trees. Again, something we took the kids to a few times, years ago. My wife took my hand, as she sometimes--rarely, but sometimes--does, revealing what often seems a lost romantic streak. Women are magical. They do piss me off, yes.
I go for long walks sometimes but now alone--people have more important things do do--but I don't mind going solo, and probably prefer it sometimes. I do not listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks. You can see retired Japanese on bicycles with a bank of phones set up across the handlebars to play Pokemon Go. I do not know how it works. The local Filipino dudes fishing off the bridge, expressly against the signs which say "No fishing off the bridge," but I guess they can't read Japanese. (橋上での釣り中止).
People run in the park, and walk, and kids ride their bicycles through. In season, people spread out their light blue tarps and do cherry-blossom-viewing parties in the area with the cherry and plum trees. I walk all through the park and sometimes out the other end, where there is a trail along a narrow river, and across and down a hill through rice fields and into a cemetery. There are stone altar koro with candles or incense sticks. The other day I unwrapped one from the plastic bag in the little box and opened the drawer there where there were matches and lighters. I lit a stick and prayed for the dead, then added a prayer for the living for good measure. It is a Buddhist ritual, and my ex-girlfriend, a Catholic, used to say she felt Buddhism and Catholicism had a lot in common. I didn't know what she meant then and I still don't, but I suppose in very superficial ways the trappings are the same.
I could sprawl this out into a winding yarn even longer than it is. This makes my life sound very sedate and somewhat boring, and probably compared to many of yours my days are probably pretty dry. I write this in a way as a counterpart to this post and this other post, both of which made considerable impressions on me. I typically don't imagine I live in some idyllic wonderland--certainly if I wrote about my wife's hometown, which is like the Shire, only Japanese, I could make it seem as if I do. But I don't fear assault, and I am not routinely plagued by crime or filth or discomfort beyond a couple of guys fishing off the bridge.
As I write this my son is complaining about the fish eggs in the maki my wife brought home. She is insisting it's not ikura but he is having none of it. He is eating without his shirt on, something my own mother never let us do. They're all speaking Japanese, and I'm on beer #2. I just made a slip and when my wife said "You can't see your father's clavicle" I said "You used to could." This has caused a realization that I am actually not a standard English speaker. You can take the boy out of Alabama.
I'll try to improve my posting style to have more structure. I expect someday I'll miss these times, too, by which I mean this family table but also this, just posting on the Motte.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Same. You basically summarized my post below but better, clearer, and less wordy(er).
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
The link for me had the relevant passage highlighted. Maybe because I'm on Android?
For years as a younger man I considered myself allied with feminist causes. In undergrad back in the day I marched in a Take Back the Night rally, I took at least two women's studies courses in grad school (one about language and sex differences, which was interesting, though my professor marked me down I believe for a write-up of a conversation I had recorded in which I suggested the female actually seemed to have the power, another I can't even remember the name of the class but what it taught me, what I learned from taking it, was no doubt not at all what I was supposed to have learned. I learned the women in it were mostly self-entitled princesses. Yes I was the only male in the class.)
I am not remotely at the level of misogyny one at times seems displayed in these pages (I use that word to mean essentially "woman hating," not in any esoteric or typically progressive sense) but my views on the fragility and vulnerability of women and the horribleness of men have, let's say, altered.
I'm still pretty moored to how I was raised in my perspective, but how I was raised in a way conflicted with the approach of seeing women as tough-girl badasses that was dinned into me over the years of my younger self. Living in Japan, and perhaps having witnessed the situation of women in places like Thailand, I have to say many of the tropes about paygaps and women not being taken seriously and extremely limited options for women are very true, or at least much, much more true than in, say, the US, which strikes me as a demented zoo when it comes to what seem to me to be mainstream views on men and women (I am not even getting into trans).
None of this is very specific but my bus is arriving so I am ending in typical abrupt fashion.
Edit because this is infuriating word salad: My mistake was buying into the idea that Women Are Wonderful. But even with this mistake in mind I still like women, just not in the same dewy-eyed, trusting way. No. More in a stern-eyed, doubting way.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
I've personally lived in an African village of about 1500 where I was literally the only white for about 200k, and it wasn't a shithole, except by shallow criteria such as relative poverty (many lived in literal mud huts). But these huts were swept clean, the interior stone floors regularly polished to a slippery sheen, the people's clothes, such as they were, were ironed (with a fucking iron heated over a fire) and generally it was a very pleasant place to live.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Wasn't the point the "after 9 months/full term?" I don't recall but that was how I was following it. Very possibly I'm wrong. I agree what you're saying here is relevant and is exactly what he should have been prepared with.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
..."that she said" may have been better than "that she put out."
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
"....a dictator who would eat you for lunch."
I can hear Harris fans high-fiving each other. Who did he just say "quiet please" to? Was that Harris? Or a moderator?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
That "moderator" comment after Trump's abortion comments seemed out-of-place, I agree.
Note: Is it normal for candidates to say "Hell" in their debates? Maybe it always has been.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
I was more specifically talking about caregivers. You're right, though, this wasn't clear.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
That gets rid of quite a few teenagers right there.
On a less flippant note, it takes all kinds. While you may reasonably measure drains on what you're conceptualizing as 'society at large' in terms of money spent, I am not at all sure that families of the developmentally disabled make that kind of judgment. Some probably do, sure. There are people who really thrive when needed, even when needed constantly. Caretaking isn't roses and good times, certainly, and bad decisions get made (your example of disrupted classrooms is a good example). I think there's a line here between concern for society and simple assholery and hatred of the dumbs.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
We lost touch, though he was married and had a son, so maybe he's just raising his family but I don't know doing what. Emails go unreturned but that might be because he's changed it.
This is a good take. I never even thought to look that up and now that I have yeah, it doesn't scan well.
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