Hello Again

I haven't written here since about ten years ago.  After so long a hiatus I want there to be a bridge between where things were at the time I disappeared, and now, for those few rare individuals who read here then, and who may encounter this now.  I think perhaps a WTF? reaction could occur.  I hope this helps that.  If you are new to reading us ,then perhaps this might begin a portion of a bio to provide some context to what you read from me.

A period of crisis that evolved over 2010 and into 2011, culminated in my family’s summoning the police the third time in January 2011, not without cause. I began my longest stretch of how we in the U S treat addiction.  Jail.  It’s where one is schooled that they are sub-human scum.  I did learn.  Just a few weeks ago I commemorated the completion of ten years of sobriety.  Tomorrow it will be ten years and one month.  I’m determined never to drink again, and that being the case I hope I may see twenty or thirty years sobriety.  I’m seventy-one.

I certainly have benefited my health, and our finances in the last ten years, not drinking.  I am not at all sure I can imagine what intoxication would be like today, nor do I want to experience it.  I do have endless longings, cravings for various liquors I adored, and good red wine.  I still feel weak, ashamed, and humiliated I was not able to “handle” drinking without wrecking my life over it, and the horrors I subjected my loves Teresa and Sue to.  I feel like wetting myself when I see a cop and have dreams of killing police…….some of them waking.  I appreciate new irony each time I listen to voicemail solicitations from the fraternal Order of Police trying to get a contribution from me.

The courts forced me to actively participate in AA, twice every week, monitored by court spies who keep track of probationer attendance, for two years.  As soon as my probation ended I attended my last AA meeting.  People seem surprised I don’t continue in AA.  I am bolstered in

my resolve to not drink by the fear that were I to drink again, I might have to go back to AA meetings.

I also did “treatment”, twelve-step based treatment, for those of you who are interested.  It was a huge waste but did involve S and T actively in my “recovery” process and gave them hugely important strokes, affirmation for all my disease had caused them to suffer, for the terribly hard steps they took to save me.

Oh yeah, I practice the two step plan.  It’s my own: not developed by some addiction rehab. Guru.  The first is that I drink no alcohol.  The second is I swallow no alcohol.  The redundancy is intentional……..a fail safe.  I do this each day.  Each morning I renew that as the prime directive for that day.  I have found that if I do that over time, it has remarkable impact on alcohol addiction.  It also means I still lead my life in reaction to alcohol.  Leading life in reaction to alcohol, or other substances is my definition of addiction.  Recovery is not succumbing to use.

The three of us are still together in our unique and loving intentional family.  I never returned to work.  My criminal record placed my continued professional career out of reach.  Magically all this happened at an age that retirement and pension etc., benefits were and have been possible for me.  S, six years younger than I, is now two years retired.  T, eight years younger than I,  blessedly has excellent professional employment, here at home with us.  She is wildly successful.  We frequently conjecture about how much longer her career will extend.

About two and a half years ago now we three sold our two side by side condo’s and purchased  a very nice suburban home together, which we have substantially renovated and renewed.  Today we are very happy together there.  S and my retirements means that "discovery” of our polyamorous intentional family-life no longer threatens our professional careers.  T’s employer has no concern for her lifestyle dynamics so long as she performs her work.  Heck we have joked that her employer will permit a gay partner’s being added to an employee’s health and life insurance benefits.  Perhaps they would permit her to add s to her policy along with me, her husband.  Now T and S are not queer, but do love each other and me and we have all been together 19 years.  While her corporation is progressive, perhaps even “WOKE”,  embracing polyamory is well beyond the pale, of their h r policies, even in 2021.

What about my life, in general, in the interim since I last wrote here?  I have done some study, heavily laden with looking at the work of Carl Jung, and his hugely helpful writings for elders, and my continual quandary and internal conflict to resolve my feelings and confusion about religion/spirituality, and the metaphorically similar conflict between Bible history/theology.

I have been in therapy since early 2011.

I continue my life long sensual erotic orientation to kink in the form of spanking.

I obsessively collect professional quality spanking implements and practice using them as often as life affords me the opportunity with consenting adults and certainly my loves.  No doubt I will buy more.

I am obsessed too with knives.  I have hundreds of collector quality knives.  I don’t want to imagine the cost their acquisition has entailed.  I do incorporate them as sensual implements in kink play.

I am currently lusting after a watch on-line.  I have about fifty watches.  I don’t need it.  I spend way too much energy wanting it.  So goes my life.

Hey I’m sober:)

I have things I’d like to write but it didn’t seem right to simply begin back here where I used to write, without some greeting, especially considering my state when I left.

To those of you who, when I was last here in the throws of my crisis, and quite frankly in suicidal agony, who chose to show me your friendship (and even gratitude for opening our home to one of you real time, when you were in crisis) by telling us that I was and, I guess, therefore am, a worthless drunk, FUCK YOU!! I hope to never encounter you again.  

By the way, that approach to someone in crisis is never helpful, unless perhaps it enables you to feel superior to another.

To many others, who I never thanked when I left here ten years ago, who showed support to S and T and to me, despite my miserable condition then, THANK YOU! 

I am sure you have thought that I did not read and hear you in that I just dropped from view.  I did read …….each of you.  Times lying in my jail cell, or in the psychiatric hospital, or when struggling to feel that I had some level of human worth remaining, I reviewed your words in my mind. You can’t know how truly life-saving your kindness was.

Thanks,

Tom

PS I am still a spanking obsessed Dominant with about 40 years experience with SM and related art forms. I still love my two loves and we plan to live the rest of our lives together, here. I have succeeded in maintaining the massive weight loss achieved through my gastric bypass surgery March 23, 2009, and recounted here in our linked sister blog Herons Transforming.