Digging for change

Who the hell has been reading this site all of a sudden? I bumble along getting 20 or 30 views a day, and then yesterday, it spikes to over three hundred!

Where have all you people been? I've been saying the same shit for almost eight years now, and you've shown up late!

Ranting about increased exposure aside, the recent silence from Sarah has been both puzzling and a little relieving. I've been emailing a couple of new people casually, nothing really serious yet. One of the more interesting is an attorney in the public sector who writes easily and says she has cute calves and prefers skirts and heels to jeans and boots. Not that that's vital, mind you, but as you have figured out, it catches my attention.

I noticed something the other day: it's been ages since I talked about hard-core sex. I miss that. It's not that I've been without sex, it's just that I promised Melody I wouldn't go into details about it (though apparently for her, even the mention of it was too much detail) and with Sarah, I guess I just never got around to mentioning it, though I assure you, it was quite enjoyable and fun.

I do find it a little surprising how little I miss hearing from Sarah. I think I miss seeing her, but I don't seem to miss hearing from her. Part of that probably comes from the fact that communicating with her in email or on the phone was always a little frustrating and lately has been very frustrating. We talk perfectly well in person, a skill that I've refined over the years, dealing with my ex-wife, then with Melody, but in email and on the phone I find myself very frustrated, and so, I avoid doing either of these things.

Let me ask you: if someone asks you a question in email, are you obligated to answer it? More to the point, if someone asks you a loaded question, one that either has an obvious bias toward one outcome, or seems rhetorical, or seems like it will create more problems than an answer would solve, are you still obligated to answer it? In her last email, Sarah asked a pile of loaded questions, and I sensed that trying to leap in and respond to them would only legitimize them in a way that would make things worse later on, so I deferred answering them. She seized on that and apparently jumped to conclusions about both the answers and my reasons for "avoiding" the questions.

My own take is, no, you are not obligated to answer every single thing someone else asks you in an email. Shit, I'm still waiting for answers to questions I asked my ex-wife during the divorce, and I don't figure I'll ever get those answers, so I live with it. Apparently Sarah cannot do that.

I guess that's what I don't miss.

She has set an arbitrary date at the end of July when we'll get back together again. What I haven't told her, but that I have assumed she understands, is that I am firmly of the mind that if I've met someone else by then, which I am now only half-assedly trying to do, I won't be back. Just as Melody seemed to do sometimes, Sarah seems to be raising the price of admission at a time when I'm even less willing to dig in my emotional pockets for change.

Avery still has at least one dog in my barn, though a remarkable amount of his stuff has vanished, presumably moved back over to Brunswick or wherever he's moving on to. I guess that means another weekend I can't work on the tractors in my own barnyard without being barked at. The new starter for the 1949 Ford showed up the other day, and I should install it so that I can mow the fields with the thing. They're getting rather tall. Either that, or I need to borrow someone's goats for a few weeks.

Last night's adventure was a fairly disappointing boxing match -- one of the lamest I've been to in years -- wherein the feature fight ended way early when for some unexplained reason the officials disqualified the less-favored boxer. There was much hooting and throwing-of-beer from the crowd. Not me, of course... beer makes a terrible projectile. I threw myself in the Saab and came home instead.

A new podcast will be out this weekend, probably a longer one that deals with a topic I've been interested in talking about for quite a while: "perfect singles." Tune into http://www.theturtle.biz for details... the new podcast should be up Saturday night at the latest, crickets and everything.