h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I just thought I'd apologize for not having solved all the world's problems. They're all on my list of 'things to do' but I just don't seem to have come up with satisfactory solutions that please everyone involved. I'll keep trying but I'm not making any promises.

It seems that part of my problem, at least, is that I keep failing to post my subjective 'take' on things as if I were presenting the absolute truth without any editorializing or any bias in my own direction. I just can't seem to find a way to forget that other people tend to see things the way they choose to see them rather than to question whether any particular problem might have more than one viewpoint or that the people involved in it might be causing some of their own suffering by refusing to consider that they might have misunderstood what was actually said or, more often, what was intended by what was actually said.

After all, if I use the word 'love', why should anyone care if I'm talking tennis scores, emotional committment, slang for 'money', or deliberatly misusing it as Chef Emeril consistently does when confusing sybaretic potential in menu modification for something that has more permanent effect than can be cured by a roll of Tums. There is certainly no chance of confusion with 'lust' any more than with desire or affinity. After all, everyone knows what 'love' is, don't they? Everyone knows that everyone knows what 'love' is, don't they? No one has to worry about having misunderstood, do they?

In the case of my wife, there's no confusion when she accuses me of abusing her as a means of getting me to react because she knows I love her and can be abused that way. Is there? This is particularly non-confusing when she then demands that I tell her what to do.

Of course, my wife, whom I dearly love (there's that word), after telling me how she has noticed how far and rapidly I have sunk in recent times in the vast, roilling seas of mental wholeness and personal capability to the point that I am begging the world to permit me the use of a hollow reed that is not blocked and does not leak, still comes home exhausted from work and anxiety over the seeming pointlessness of her efforts to help us both at least float with our noses above the flood and appears to blame me for not having saved us all as I had done, admitedly poorly, over all our years together.

Note the word, 'appears'. At this point, I have to recognize that my net bouyancy is determedly negative and I may be seeing everything through a lens of the rippling liquid that neither of us wants to fill either of our lungs.

I have to recognize that we are both damaged, she undeniably more easily seen so than I. I have to recognize that we both approach the unapproachable in vastly different ways. I have to recognize that our terror produces very different behavior in each of us.

But, why must *I* be doing this alone or, at least, more than she?

Why must I be trapped by her inviting friends over to help me, whom she refuses to allow to help her, and then blames me for having been helped at her expense?

Why must she post her screams of pain and terror, after having insured that I would not have charged her in the same way, and then be accused by our mutual friends for having done her such terrible harm without them ever, first, asking me for my side of the story?

Why can't I just sit here and type out my outraged and moderately cathartic outpourings of rath and semi-fiction without admitting that I might be equally to blame for the failures that led to the conflicts, percieved or actual? Why can't I just forget that my ways aren't the 'right' ways but merely 'my' ways? Why would I be ashamed of being so selfish if I had done as she had? Why is she not?

All these questions have the same singular answer, "Because." And, if it were not so, none of it would have happened, none of it would have mattered, and neither of us would have cared.

As it is, it did happen, it does matter, and we do care.

My thanks to my friends and hers who have been understanding and caring, though not necessarily both at the same time, for both of us. The care, the understanding, the help, the prayers, the good thoughts, the suggestions, the offers, and efforts to postpone what seems inevitable are all appreciated and gratefully acknowledged.

I don't think there was any need for me to have said any more than this, but in this, as in many other things, I may be wrong.

Thank you all. You have my gratitude and you have my love. For the first you may rest easy, for the last, who can say?

Barton

Ok, sweetlings,
Give me a call when we are both up. BTW, How is the roomer search going?
Maize