This post is completely off topic. It’s about me: the part of me that isn’t sexual. Fair warning! Read it at your own peril.
We recently installed the Amazon echo for cars. I installed it using the Amazon phone app. We were in the car at the time and the app wouldn’t start until I answered a question: “Are you a passenger?” I acknowledged I was. Now, every time I start that app, whether I’m in the car not, it asks me if I am a passenger. I am. I will always be just a passenger.
The chaos we live in is getting to me. Because of my declining vision and loss of balance, I’ve been working from home and I really can’t drive. I feel that I have nowhere to go that’s orderly and comfortable. Here in my home office, my desk is surrounded with boxes and loose belongings. I can barely operate since much of the equipment I need has yet to surface and get set up. It’s worse everywhere else in the house. The kitchen is in complete disarray. It’s impossible to cook. Our bedroom is a bit better, but still far from being very habitable.
I’m not blaming Mrs. Lion. She’s been working as hard as she can on unpacking while holding down a full-time job and taking care of me. I’m absolutely no help and that makes me feel very guilty. We don’t have any family on this side of the country and neither of us is very social so we don’t have a network of friends we can call on. It’s not that friends or relatives could be any help in locating our possessions in the right places. But it would be nice not to feel so alone.
The two of us are generally fine with each other’s company and we don’t really feel we need anyone else. But at times like this, for me at least, I need some escape. I should be going to physical therapy but I don’t. Since I can’t drive and I can’t keep pulling Mrs. Lion away from her work, the only option I have is a County service for disabled people. They run a sort of bus/taxi I can take. I don’t want to. It’s bad enough learning to live as a diminished person without resorting to the “short bus”.
My employer has been great. I have been working from home exclusively. My workload is kept pretty light. Mrs. Lion has taken excellent care of me and has taken on work I normally do. Through all of this, she remains in good spirits, and aside from some grumbling now and then, has been an absolutely wonderful partner.
No one is to blame for the mess. Our former landlord decided to sell the house we had rented for more than 10 years and gave us 60 days to get out. It couldn’t have been a worse time to do this. It’s just a confluence of difficult situations meeting at a single point in time. Aside from these obvious, external issues, I have to deal with some permanent changes that severely restrict what I can do.
Last week, I went to see the neurosurgeon who did the surgery on my neck last spring. He told me that the difficulty I’m having with my right arm will probably diminish over the next few months. That was very good news, but the lack of balance and difficulty walking (I look like I’m drunk) is damage to my spinal cord caused by the sudden increase blood flow opening up my vertebrae created. He’s not optimistic that this will improve. My vision will never come back. At the same time I started having issues that led to diagnosing the spinal stenosis, I developed glaucoma which has taken almost all of my peripheral vision away.
Maybe this is nature’s way of telling me I’m past my “sell by” date and I should resign myself to declining and finally disappearing. Even if I decide that isn’t the case, my world has gotten considerably smaller. Like it or not, I’m now a passenger. I can only go where someone is willing to take me.
I could take the short bus to work or someplace else I might want to go. But when I get there, I have to worry about falling or maybe sitting down and not being able to get up again. About a week ago I just collapsed in our bedroom. I don’t know why but I found myself falling to the ground. It wasn’t a hard fall; we have a nice soft carpet. Nevertheless, I must’ve hit my shoulder and found myself in horrible pain. I couldn’t get up and Mrs. Lion isn’t strong enough to help pick me up, so she had to call 911. Fortunately, I was fully dressed and the paramedics were able to get me to my feet and put a sling on my arm. They helped me to the car and Mrs. Lion drove me to the emergency room of the hospital that had done all the surgery on me.
Fortunately, my shoulder was not dislocated. There were no broken bones. I still can’t really raise that arm and it hurts badly enough to wake me up at night. I’m concerned that I tore the rotator cuff in that arm. I don’t think I could handle rotator cuff surgery again. Now I’m left with one partially, and hopefully temporarily, paralyzed arm and one that won’t work right and hurts to move. You have to agree that things just don’t seem to be going my way right now.
I’m very glad that all through my life I’ve had my adventures in real time, not postponing them for some elusive retirement. I’ve had my Safari, ridden mules to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, rafted through the rapids, and countless other things that give me a rich set of memories. I can sit here in front of my monitor and reminisce about the long climb to the Great Wall of China in Shandong province. I can look at the pictures I took when I visited lions in the Serengeti. I’m happy to be able to do that.
By any measure I’ve had a good life. I guess I am greedy. My life is always been about doing things. Some of those things are pretty exotic. Of course you know about some of those. I’ve been able to locate and marry the love of my life. She stays with me even in dark times like this. She works as hard as she can to make me happy.
I’m an optimistic person by nature. I can almost always find ways to make my dreams come true. I do believe in magic; not that hokey stuff you see on stage, but the real magic you can do if you focus and ask the universe to help you. I may have run out of magic. I can’t make my vision better. It’s unlikely I’m going to ever be able to move about freely.
I’ve considered that maybe it’s time to just accept all this and stop dreaming. Perhaps I have to learn to live in the middle of boxes and belongings without any expectation that things will change. I think the best thing about me up until now at least, is my optimism and my determination to make things happen. I can’t see how I can continue with this optimism. Even if I can somehow partially overcome these physical limitations I face, will I just end up disappointing myself at the small portion of fun I can create? How can I continue to make Mrs. Lion’s life more difficult because I need so much of her help? Should I just spend my days working as much as I can and stay in the house?
I realize that there are lots of people much worse off than me. Some people think that should make me feel grateful that I’ve got as much as I have. I am grateful and I’m also angry. Right now I’m a lot less me than I was only a year ago. A year ago I could walk up and down stairs with no trouble, I could see Mrs. Lion if she was standing next to me on my left, I could type on my keyboard at 30 or 40 words a minute. I can’t do any of that now. I’ve used technology to help overcome as much as this is possible. We have voice to text software that I use to write these posts and other things. We have voice control for our lighting and heat, even to change channels on the TV.
All this makes it easier for me. It makes it possible for me to do things that I might not be able to handle otherwise. But it doesn’t put back the things that I had such a short time ago. It’s hard to sit here alone in the house surrounded by junk and feel optimistic. After all, the me that sat here alone a year ago was so much more.
I’m very sure that somehow we will continue with our enforced male chastity and Female Led Relationship with Discipline. It really doesn’t matter what else is going on, those things will continue. Their part of the fabric of our marriage and like our marriage, they are proving durable and persistent.
If I’m feeling so badly, you may wonder why I would want to continue with these sexual practices. I’m not sure I can give you a good reason. The best way I can explain it is that just because lots of things are going badly for me and I have a seriously bleak view of my life right now, doesn’t mean that there are times when I become the old me. I can do this most easily when Mrs. Lion and I do things together. I don’t need a great sense of balance to be spanked. I don’t need any balance. Similarly, Mrs. Lion continues to own her weenie and my ejaculations. Somehow, no matter how I’m feeling about all these other things, she can make me hard and, if she chooses, make me ejaculate.
No matter how badly I feel about my situation, I can never forget that I’m sharing my life, such as it is, with my soulmate. I never thought I would be as lucky as I am to have her. I just wish I could see her better.
