my careless contagion

After times of great tumult, what we're left with is the often difficult task of making sense of what happened. How many tomes have been written about the world wars or the Great Depression or other significant upheavals? Well, I may not have been through a war or the Great Depression, but I feel like I've had my own skirmishes and have endured a significant amount of depression the past few years.  Starting about a year ago, I've been chronicling my emotional landscape. The major themes are: the end of a 20-plus-year relationship, falling in love with a different woman, and subsequent heartache as that relationship failed also. I've spent a considerable amount of time on the latter two, mostly because I have already dealt with the former for the last five years. We expect our progression to be linear and oftentimes we are surprised when we go backward or laterally in relation to where we'd like to go. What we may see as a setback, however, is probably just emo...

For my first 20 years, I thought I'd never be in a relationship and certainly never thought I'd have sex ... mainly because I thought I'd never be in a relationship. And I wasn't the kind of guy who could have casual sex.  Then I enjoyed sex (with all its ups and downs) in spite of myself and the many marital troubles I had for many years. I thought things would continue that way. Naturally, after my separation, the sex ceased. This seemed like new territory for me, but it was just a return to my pre-relationship life. I fought the idea that I've come to accept now: that I will never have sex again. Here's why. I can't, or won't, have sex with a woman I'm not in love with. There's only one woman I love enough to have sex with. She's not in my life. It's a simple equation. No girl = no sex.  Then there's the fact that I'm pretty sure everything stopped working down there. That's a new thing, too. Of course, I have ...