Balance balances out

Fall is now unquestionably here. Sure, admit it... you can't usually remember if Fall starts on the 20th, the 21st, the 22nd, and you probably don't give a shit. But this is now the 24th, so it's gotta be, right?

It rained this morning in New Jersey, which is where I am. I got here last night, Suzanne and I got something to eat down in Hightstown at a place we've liked before. There were lots of who-cares baseball games on, so we spent the evening talking, mostly about people from the past and near-present. I was thinking hard about a discussion I had with a friend of mine in IM the other night, and we threw those ideas around a little.

Balance.

Balance is important.

Doesn't much matter what the issue is, but if things are out of balance for long, eventually some part of the structure fails and someone gets hurt.

Suzanne agreed.

What amazed me, once I thought about it -- and I did, as we drove home and later after we'd fucked each other's brains out -- was that I can't find anything in which Suzanne and I aren't ultimately in balance. We just... balance. We ask things of each other sometimes... like right now, where she's asleep and I'm sitting here writing this to all you people instead of being next to her in the other room... but we always seem to find ways in which whatever we asked, we give back.

We'll see if that carries through longer term, but the fact it's gone on since May without any real conflict or snag actually counts for something. Reading back, by this time in my relationship with Melody, I should have been three months gone.

Yeah. I think I mentioned that, how there's a certain value in reading back through my own life here over the last nine and a half years... mostly, things confirm my own first impressions.

Here, they've been good.

I've got this attractive, fit, well-dressed lady with diverse tastes in music and thought, sleeping in a chair two feet away from me. There are pleasant rabbits sleeping under the dining room table, there's diesel in the Passat, and two hundred miles away there's a house we'll both live in in a few months that's equipped with pleasant stupid cats and a view of the world.

I'm pleased. I can't say that I expected life to turn out any better than this. I can't say that I can picture anything any better for me. All I know is a past loaded with a lot of things that were worse. And a future that says it might be incrementally better still.

I have done a remarkable job of not screwing this up so far. This is an anomaly for me. I think.

Then again, dumb luck -- even if it's bad - counts.