I want to be the man she sees when she looks at me.
That’s a country song, ain’t it? It’s the first line of the hook. That’s fun for me, and everything like that is fun for me, but it’s more fun because it’s so painfully real.
In love more than anything, and in my marriage to Cathleen more than once, I have seen myself at my worst, much to my shame. Those are good words — I have seen my self at my worst — the kind of words that, the more you worry them over, the more you find yourself thinking the way I think.
But: Being eloquent about bad behavior is ever the poet’s absolution, and I absolve myself nothing. I know I have done badly by Cathleen, because I have seen myself doing it. And because, having done it, by impetus of memory I can never stop seeing myself doing it.
And yet, when she looks at me, she almost never sees anyone but the man I could and should always have been.
I want to be that man.
I want to be good, I want to be good, I want to be good — I’ve always wanted to be good, and I’ve always known what the good was to me — my own ego. And I’ve done a pretty good job of developing and defending my ego, I think, not so much in spite of the resistance I’ve run up against but because if it.
But I’ve won much of my freedom, I know, by scaring would-be bosses-of-me away. I’ve never hit anyone, not since I was a boy. I’ve never needed to: I can lay a lash on you that will sting forever in ten words or fewer.
But here’s a fact of nature I managed to learn in just fifty short years of careful study: Not everyone is trying to be the boss-of-me.
Many people are, of course, and one of the things I’ve loved about living my life so publicly, at BloodhoundBlog, is that I get to see dominance games I’ve been watching my whole life, but I get to see them Read more
