Separate Ways

Following on from the last post, here's another question: do men have Knob Years like dogs have Dog Years? Ageing faster or slower than the rest of the body? I have reached 40 with what I considered to be the knob of a 21 year old - eager and perky. But on Saturday I found myself sympathising with an ageing gangster in a novel (Sacred Games, very good) who decides that the joy of orgasm is no longer worth the effort that precedes it. Have my Knob Years suddenly caught up with me?

Sobering thought - but then again, I was very hungover, I'm tired from working too hard and still sore from the operation which cut my perineum from ballsac to arsehole.

Last night, I went out to a birthday party with my girlfriend and her good humour cheered me up til we got home. With her 18 year old tits and my 21 year old knob, we kept ourselves amused... falling asleep as the first birds began to sing outside.

Do some women have Tit Years like dogs have Dog Years? I mean, tits that age at a different rate - not the standard one-human-year-equals-seven-tit-years, that would be stupid. Maybe a ratio of 2:1 or thereabouts. My ex-wife had a bad ratio. In her mid thirties she had the tits of a fifty year old. Very self conscious, she wanted a boob job. I resisted, not believing it would make her any happier or feel any different about me - and knowing damn well I'd be paying for it out of money we didn't have.

My new girlfriend has a good tit-year ratio. At 36, she has the tits of an 18 year old. At this rate, by the time she's fifty, she'll still have the tits of a 25 year old. Which is fantastic, obviously.

Fantastic and yet not enough. What's going on? She's smart, funny and kind. She's into me. Sex is a damn sight better than it should be for someone recovering from perineal stitches.

I guess it comes down to some combination of these:
- deep down, I think I can do better
- deep down, I haven't given up hope on my ex-lover
- I don't want more kids and I wonder if, deep down, she really does

Tricky. Great tits though. Let's see where it goes.
(this is a slightly pissed entry - I do consider her as more than just a pair of great tits, honest)

Her hands were warm, soft fingers pressed lightly on my skin. Delicate hands, slender light-brown forearms. This close I could smell a perfume on her - a smooth-rounded, purple-background scent. Definitely perfume. Not just medical handwash, with its spikey, chemical citrus flavours.

"And now I'm going to take your temperature," she said.

Lovely junior doctor has been running through basic medical checks with me, post-op and minus the catheter.
"Oh, you look too young to be in here," she says.
"Good technique, flatter the patient."
We're chatting about all sorts of things - her job, mine, how her supervising surgeon's a bit of a twat. I'm making her laugh, flirty but not really flirting.

But.... Oh god, she's going to need to look at my perineum stitches at the end of this. There's two things guaranteed to shrivel a penis to its compactest size - swimming in icy water and medical examination. I'll wriggle down my underpants to reveal something akin to a doormouse asleep on a deflating beanbag. I know it's a hospital, she is a doctor, she does this all the time. But I'd rather have something more like a manly accoutrement than a medical curiousity. I can imagine this situation making it into her doctoral thesis "The Doctor and The Doormouse: Managing Ego and Self-Image in the Small Penised Male."

Uh, nothing for it but to start conjuring up some imagery to get some blood flowing. Hang on, what if I get an erection? She'll think I'm some sort of Singing Detective pervert. Tricky balance - not erect but not recessed either. Here goes.

"Let me put this on, check your blood pressure...."
New girlfriend... in bed... going down on me.... nope, nothing stirring.....
"And put this on your finger, see what your blood oxygen is like."
Ex-lover..... fucking from behind.... oh jesus, nothing happening at all
"Are you allergic to any medicines?"
Ex-lover covered in massage oil..... aargh, it's not working.

"Ok," she says, disconnecting the machine and turning away from me.
"I'm just going to check..."
I hook my thumbs into my waistband and start to hoik my tracky bottoms down, oh this is going to be humiliating.
"....your breathing," turning back to me with a stethoscope, me hastily hoiking trousers back up again.

In the end, she didn't need to see my knackers. Which was good. Male vanity, delicate thing, y'know.

After I'd drunk a whole jug of water and pissed plenty out, they let me go home. I now piss like a racehorse, a yellow cable. Fantastic. Stitches pretty sore, but better by the day - I feel like a new man, with a new knob.

Finally... sick leave as it should be: sat in the garden, sun shining, strategically-placed cushion under my operation scar, newspaper, music on, nowt to do all afternoon but sit on my arse and eat grapes - the Grapes of Sloth.

Been a while to get here though. Went into hospital last Thursday night, operation on Friday, painful recuperation all last week, gradually fading to just bloody uncomfortable.

And on the second night, lying in hospital, I had a dream about oil pipelines. And woke up with an erection (eat your heart out Jung). It was painful (I've got a catheter in, remember), but reassuring - at least something's still working down there.

Sunshine promised tomorrow. I'm going to be as brown as a nut by the time I finally get back to work. Ah well, not as though any of them have sent me a get well card, so fcukem. Hand me a grape.

I took the plunge Monday evening over tea. I'd been umm-ing and ah-ing over how and when to tell my son that I'm dating. He reacted so badly last year when I told him I was starting back on a dating website. Not surprising, when you think of the utter, selfish mess his mother got herself into (and dragged him into) with boyfriends after she left me.

So here goes:
"I've started dating someone", I said. "A woman, in fact."
"Oh right," he says. "Was she here on Saturday night?"
"Er, yes. Why?"
"I thought so."
"How come?"
"I saw you coming downstairs with two cups this morning."

Ahh. Two coffee mugs, two wine glasses - not normal bedroom stuff in our house. He's more observant than I realised. And less bothered than I feared.

"She's really nice," I tell him, "for a ginger...."
"She's ginger? Ha ha, what... more ginger than Ronnie? More ginger than Jake?"

We have a laugh about acceptable levels of gingerism. And it all seems ok.

"And she likes dogs," I tell him.
"Everyone likes our dogs," he says, tapping the lurcher under the chin.

Another little step in the right direction.

We were lying there on Sunday morning, my new girlfriend and me.....

Oh, did I mention I'd got a girlfriend?

Uh-huh, oh yeah (dances badly).

Lovely woman from the date last week, took her out on Friday to watch that sweary tour-de-force In The Loop, kissing in the pub (how annoying is that when you see someone else do it) then home in separate taxis. Rang her up the same night about one in the morning to invite her round on Saturday night.

So, Sunday morning. We're swapping snippets of life story, lying there in t-shirt and pants, a little sleep-deprived. I give her the shorthand version of the last years of my marriage and of the affair that transformed my life.

"Do you still love her?" she asks, meaning my ex-lover, not my ex-wife.
Pause.
I'm not about to lie but I can't think how to describe it. She fills in the silence.
"When you've been in love you can go on loving someone. I did with the last man I was in love with. You don't have to totally forget. But it doesn't mean you can't move on."
I smile at her, thinking she's put it well. "And you can let it go and hold on to the good things, the good memories," I suggest.

I read a review in one of the weekend papers, of "The Field Guide to Melancholy". It described a state of sadness we might actually choose and gain some pleasure from. It is a mood of loss and yearning but without the desperation - so unlike depression (which Susan Sontag calls "melancholy minus its charms"). Gloom, not doom, in other words. The author reckons it's a state which "slows things, allows for percolation, facilitates solitude and solace for the imagination."

I think that's a pretty good description of my state of mind these last few months. Living with gloom, not doom. I was in love, I still feel great tenderness towards that love, the memories of what we had and the sense of loss. I have chosen to dwell on them. But it isn't love anymore - it's melancholy, actually.

"I'm ready to move on," I said on Sunday morning, failing to find a less cliched phrase to sum all this up. "You can't keep loving somebody in a one-sided way. It falls into obsession or stalking, and I'm not going to let myself become that. I wish we were closer friends, but it's not to be."

We carry on talking, Sunday morning stretches out, sunshine fills the room. She's smart, this one. I like her.

Lots happened this last few days - time with my folks, a weekend away with the boys and Scottish Sara, lots of booze, one of the best gigs I've ever seen.

But more important right now, a brilliant, exciting, thrilling date. Four beers, a lot of chat, hands held across a bar table, kissing outside before putting her in a taxi home, and a steady string of flirting texts ever since. I keep doing little reality checks, frown, bite my lip and think "hang on, don't go getting all out of proportion, scare her off and let yourself down." But the overwhelming feeling is being on the leading edge of a big smile...

We'd been chatting for a couple of hours, it was going well.
"I liked what you wrote on your profile about books," she said. I hadn't read my own profile for months, I haven't read hers since the first email I sent her weeks ago, so I stick to a noncommital noise.
"I've not come across anyone else who likes E Annie Proulx before," she goes on. Oh yes, that's ok, I did genuinely finish The Shipping News recently... on DVD. No, I have also read it, honest.
"In fact, that section of 'what I'm reading' is the first bit I look at on a new profile," she says. "What about you? What's the first thing you look at?"

Oh shit! Face.... tits.... arse.... Face obviously in the photo, tits sometimes on show, arse you have to guess from "athletic" or "curvy" descriptions. But I'm not about to admit it.
"Um, well I guess I looking for....." FACE, TITS, ARSE "camping, you know, if you're into outdoors sort of stuff. You have to read right through the profile for that, umm it's not in one place...."

Pathetic. But there's no point telling her just yet that men do read books but are usually happier looking at the pictures.

My appointment with destiny looms closer. Or to be more specific - my appointment with urology. May 1st. It's weighing on my mind more and more. I'm having to make all kinds of arrangements at work, stuff I can't do so have to hand on to others. Each time I have to give a minimal explanation of why I'll be off. I haven't told anyone at work the full story. Normally I would, if nothing else, for a bit of sympathy and humour, but....

It's not very sexy, is it? Cutting up through the perinaeum, cutting out a 2cm section of urethra, stitching it back together, spending two weeks on a catheter and pissing in a bag. I won't be able to walk or sit without pain for weeks, riding my bike's out for ages, god knows when I'll be back to normal.

And then there's the risk of complications. Ten per cent of men suffer impotence after this operation. If the constricted section of pipe was any nearer my bladder, I'd risk incontinence. If it was any nearer my penis, the consultant blithely pointed out, it might involve shortening the penis. SHORTENING THE PENIS! No fucking way! If he'd told me there was a ninety percent chance of death if they didn't go ahead with penis-shortening, I'd have been thinking "yes, but that's a ten per cent chance of not-death...." Let's not even go there.

So if I'm unlucky, I could end up impotent or incontinent - or both. You could say I won't know whether I'm coming or going....

I had a bad case of piles at the end of last week. Not glamorous I appreciate, so I only mention it because it made me think about physical health and moods. Basically, all day Friday I walked round feeling like someone had their thumb stuck up my ass. A large thumb, stuck there despite their efforts to pull it out. My world revolved around my bottom, a very low centre of gravity. Sitting down, grimace. Stand up, grimace. A whole day frowning, unless there was a good reason not to. The opposite of how I like to spend my day - try and smile unless there's a good reason not to.

By the end of the day I was feeling utterly miserable. A friend at work had reminded me about the HALT acronym for avoiding depression - don't let yourself be Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. I'm sure there's an arse-related interpretation of HALT.... it'll come to me. Point is, I'm no richer, poorer, more in love, more single, busier, friendlier than the same time last week, but a pain in my arse is piling on the misery. How many people you meet looking plain unhappy are just victims of some physical gripe, whose unhappiness in turn makes it harder for them to get physically better? Caught by a vicious circle - or angry ring, in my case.

Anyway, I seem to have it sorted now. And I spent today in company, doing practical stuff in the sunshine. And I might have this Summer's camping holiday sorted. So happy again.

There were six of us in the pub last week, blokes in our 40s and early 50s. None of us alcoholics, nutjobs, liars, gamblers or serial adulterers (only me that's even done occasional adultery). All of us Dads - full-on committed to our kids, hands on child-rearers and full time wage earners. And out of the six of us, only one still lives with the mother of his kids. The rest, dumped, pushed out or left by our women - set asunder, as the marriage vows would put it.

Our partners were unhappy, not bullied, degraded or abused. I know that does happen - happened to my sister, who literally ran for her life with her kids when her rapist bully husband walked free from court. But it ain't happening among my mates.

So what's going on? One mate blames a local mafia - or coven, depending on his mood. Women who know each other really well, know the situations and see less and less reason not to copy - a domino effect of divorces rippling through our close neighbourhood.

Maybe. Or maybe there's something else. What have these women got in common? No sense of humour, most of them. I know that sounds trite, but perhaps there's more to it. These women - all in their 40s - grew into their first relationships in the highly politicised 1980s and early 90s. A bloody serious time. Face it, there weren't many laughs in Red Wedge. And there was Cosmo telling them they could have it all - career, relationship, family, boob-job, ongoing youthfulness. And it just ain't so. Unless you're damn lucky or gifted.

You've grown up thinking that the personal is political - not philosophical. So you need a plan of action, rather than a philosophical shrug, an acceptance of disappointment as part of life, and an attempt to smile with it. So when the disappointments seep in to their late 30s, they get moving, take action on us, set us asunder. Start looking for another relationship to make them happy.
(note - only one of us dumpees is going out with another woman, three of the dumpers are already living with another bloke. Although I did get an email on the blog site today offering "a love relationship" with some woman from Russia, maybe I've scored!)

I was walking the dog this morning - past the house of the last one of my mates to still live with his family. Propped up behind the wheelie bin, a cardboard box for a DVD HD Hard Disk recorder. New stuff. I can't even think about buying new stuff without worrying about money. He's got two incomes supporting one home. I'm spreading my one income over two homes. What a bloody waste, what a bloody waste of money, time and effort.

Grrr.