CONTINUATION OF LAST THREAD AND ATTEMPT TO WEAVE IN SOME NEW THREADS AND PREVIOUS THREADS WITH HOPE THAT SOME KIND OF INTEGRATED PATTERN MIGHT BE REVEALED—OR AT LEAST BE SOMETHING TO GO Hmmm ABOUT.


Dividing the Drifters into Founders and Spouses is interesting to me from a historical perspective.

What other perspective could it be?

The fact that the Founders all knew each other for many years before meeting the Spouses may not have much significance in terms of our present situation, but by training a long lens on something that looks back that far does provide me with a way to think about the present in a light that I’ve only recently begun to think about now that my empty nest has freed up some space for it.

Back to the empty nest again? That horse got beaten to death already.


When Ellen and I first got together I not only spent a fair amount of time with her family (mine having been scattered to the winds—which blew mostly to California) but also her friends. Woody and Renee were two of them. Woody had just started dating Karen (correct me if I’m wrong) and Renee and Marty were, if I’m not mistaken, recent newlyweds. (If I’m mistaken about these facts, I’ll hear no end of it from Ellen, and Renee, and maybe Woody, possibly Karen…but definitely not Marty)

I ain’t gonna play no favorites, cause we are all sensitive souls at heart, but me and Marty are cut from similar cloth in that we are both too damaged already to even pretend to take offense at anything so petty--especially considering that the sky is falling and the world as we know it is coming to an end—for which we are both secretly grateful.


And Ellen was also still friends with half a dozen or so others she had grown up with—and dated, lived with, slept with…whoa whoa….

I can’t elaborate on this any further cause I know a few things about the law as it relates to slander and libel, and all my money is tied up in this house at present, and I doubt there’s a lawyer alive who could save me once I got started.

At the time I felt like the guy who was traded for toward the end of the season for a run at the playoffs. I was on the team and was in the starting line-up, but in the clubhouse and on the team bus I was odd man out when it came to sharing in all the camaraderie that only comes with long-term experience together.

See very early post regarding character traits….I believe I used the term melancholic in reference to myself. This may have something to do with this choice of metaphor.

And if this bothered me at the time, it was probably because I didn’t have any family or long term old friends around of my own at the time, and I was probably jealous of all these people and jealous of the bonds they shared. But I was also bored by much of the conversation since it was frequently nostalgic in nature and I’m not even particularly fond of indulging in my own nostalgia. In fact, at the time, I was probably more inclined to want to avoid revisiting any of the people and events in my past.

If I were to explore this thread any further, I might be wise to begin a separate blog which I could then tell Oprah about and get her to recommend to the millions of her “Woe is me” and “ I grew up in Dysfunction Junction and survived” fans.

What’s my point?

I don’t have a point, and if you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity you should know that by now.

So my point is, Henry Ford was wrong. History matters.

Those early years of the Founders and The Spouses is part of how we happened to arrive at our current state of joint affairs. But only a part. Naturally, the subsequent years in which we all spent time together and got to know each other, and were part of and witness to each other’s ups and downs with careers, children, etc. now outnumber the years in which the founders were friends pre-spouses. And those years are now married to the early ones and...blah blah blah...

Yes, The Spouses years have outrun the founders years and we keep gaining on them with every passing day.

Just occurred to me that anyone reading this might conclude that all these thoughts are part of an attempt on my part to adjust to and make peace with the fact that we Drifters are soon going to have to live together and work together and spend time together like some kind of communal farm family dedicated and committed to a long term future filled with intimate co-existence and co-dependence.

Such a conclusion would be erroneous.

We're just six people who either can't or don't want to lay out the dough to get our own places and thus have agreed to share the financial obligation required to secure our own little piece of paradise where we all expect to be left alone to get old and cranky with a maximum amount of privacy and minimum amount of social obligation.

The only thing that even remotely makes it seem romantic or laudable is that we trust each other.

So far.



BTW: Speaking of woe is me. Theo Dreiser is dropping the ball. After all my songs of praise, he’s swinging for the fences and missing by a mile as The Genius winds down. I got so frustrated and upset that I went online to find out more about his own life for a clue as to why he ran off the rails in this book. What I learned may explain some of it. For all his virtues and depth of insight, it seems he may have been something of a creepy lecher with more than a touch of repressed child molestation impulses in his DNA. Damn. I wish I didn’t know that. Reminds me of the story of a film producer who wanted to meet her hero Marvin Gaye, and when she did, he spent the entire time lying in his bed masturbating under the sheets.
She probably never listened to Sexual Healing again.