wonderful sex dream!

Often I wake too quickly during sex dreams, but this one went on for a good while.  I got to explore every part of his body, we got to talk while doing it, and he had such an interesting body to explore.  He was an ex porn-star who I've seen in videos, but many years had passed since and he was no longer in that perfect shape, instead he had a lot of scars and body modifications, some of which required some future tech that doesn't exist yet, like he had a patch of small plants growing out of his left shoulder.  He had a rash on his chest, lots of stuff to explore.  I remember probing his butt hole with my fingers.  I got to feel myself dry humping him as we made out -- I was very interested in topping him, and in this dream I wasn't caged, my cock was fully erect and ready to go.  We had condoms in the bedside drawer, and lube of course.

To make things weird, as dreams do, I was also younger and somehow in the same house as my mother, so the door to my bedroom was closed and we had to be quiet, but that didn't stop us from having the overhead light on and talking with each other.  When I lived with my parents I did have secret gay sex in the house with "friends" while my family was sleeping.  Later, after I was out to my family, I openly had boyfriends sleep over.

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Soon, Bug, you'll be vaccinated and grumping about how flaky guys are again ;-)  But even chasing after flaky fellas filled my life in a way that committing to Quarantine will never do.

I wondered whether I'll have anything "to show" for this year+ in Quarantine.  Well, I felt successful at NaNoWriMo for the first time.  I'm exercising pretty well and pleased with the results: the basement gym will remain, the dance and yoga videos will remain.  I still got to see K regularly until October, so I wasn't as isolated as some people.  In certain ways T and I get along better than before.  I still have the condo as my escape hatch.  I wish I were advancing consistently along the music skills track.  I'm surprised I didn't spend more time playing board games solitaire.

To the extent I don't have more "to show" for Quarantine, I think it is because sharing a house 24*7 with T and three pets while doing a paid job and most of the chores wears me out.  I never did have that feeling so many Quarantined people felt of having extra time on my hands.  Instead everything blended together, and I'd just want time off from it all at the condo, where I can feel I'm on little mini vacations each weekend.

Much of Quarantine also overlapped with the stressful presidential election "season" and it's unprecedented aftermath, especially the riot at the Capitol, which caused me and a lot of my coworkers to pretty much check out for the following two weeks until Biden was safely installed.  We also had the BLM protests and associated lawlessness on certain nights in DC -- it seems liberals want to think of BLM as "peaceful" while conservatives want to think of BLM as "violent" when it was certainly both at the same time -- there were peaceful protests and also looting & shooting.

I remember as the lockdowns began, a big stressor was the almost daily ratcheting of new restrictions and not knowing where the Governor or Mayor would stop.  I think I was breaking the law for a while in traveling between house and condo.  Then we had to deal with a President who was plainly incompetent at managing the situation, making it more stressful for all of us.  And not knowing -- still not knowing -- when or how this will end.  Although we're now getting much closer to the finish line and 60 million have received at least one shot, but some worry the COVID variants will keep us in lockdown even after the vaccine.

It was never a vacation for me.  Work felt more stressful, at the house I never felt alone, the entire country was feeling stress.  T and B were still estranged.  Going to the grocery or liquor store felt like risking my life.  I was wary of touching mail or packages -- had to wash hands afterward.  Walking outside was fraught because not everybody else was wearing masks or wearing them correctly.  K moved away.  Christmas was completely broken as T and I had to physically distance and wear masks within our own house, and I'd hurt my back putting up the tree.  Oh, right, how deeply guilty I felt having to say "no" to attending family events like birthdays, graduations, and holidays, until finally the relatives stopped inviting me.  And the rift between my deputy and my boss that led my deputy to transfer to another division -- how awkward I felt in the middle of that mess.  And then getting downvoted by my boss, after spending much of the year feeling my job was impossible.

Yeah ... so I would get mad when I read about people having time on their hands.  Though the parents with kids at home had it much worse than I did.  My sister and her husband are both teachers, and with two small girls at home, they had a lot to juggle as schools closed, then partly reopened, then closed again, etc.

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Well, I'm a little lonely around the edges, but I'm still employed, still alive, and in good physical shape.  If only I could have sexy dreams like this one on demand! ;-)

a bit more on Couples Privilege

The way the term "privilege" is thrown around these days, I could understand if somebody is skeptical about whether Couples Privilege is real, or if so whether it is a bad thing.  Shouldn't non-monogamous couples be able to have rules and set boundaries about their particular instance of non-monogamy?

The problem with Couples Privilege isn't the establishment of rules and boundaries, most every non-monogamous relationship has rules and boundaries.  The problem with Couples Privilege is when the couple designs rules that are intended to treat everybody outside of the couple as second-class.

The worst examples of Couples Privilege are veto rules.  If one primary partner has veto power over the other primary partner's choices of who to date or whether to go on a date, then these relationships with secondary partners exist, or not, at the whim of somebody the secondary partners don't know and may have never met.  "Sorry, I can't date you, my partner decided you're not my type."  Or, "Sorry, I have to cancel tonight's date, my partner wants me home tonight."  The needs and expectations of the secondary partners don't count, it's as though they aren't real people.

Also ranking on the list of worst examples are requirements that the couple can only date or play together.  If you like one of the two, you've got to pretend to like the other one, or "consent" to playing with somebody you'd otherwise not consent to.  Often one of the couple has standard good looks while the other does not, so they use the good looking partner to snare hookups for the less-desirable partner -- it's the only way the desirable partner gets to fuck around.

There's also what's called the One Penis Policy in heterosexual couples -- they only play with women so the primary male never feels his masculinity threatened.  The primary male is always in charge, calls all the shots.

There are less drastic examples, but they all spring from the idea that the primary relationship "should come first" and so there need to be rules to enforce an explicit hierarchy.  Instead of having fair and open negotiations with all concerned, the primary partners rig the game so they always win.

Couples Privilege doesn't have to be formal or mapped out in advance.  It can arise spontaneously from a failure to set rules and boundaries ahead of time.  The example I see most often is Primary A had a bad day at the office, but Primary B has already made plans with Secondary C to go out that night.  Primary A demands that Primary B cancel the date with Secondary C, because Primary A had a bad day and needs comfort.  Primary A believes that her needs should come first, because she's the primary.  Or, after "opening up" the relationship for a while, Primary A decides unilaterally to "close" the relationship now because it "isn't working" for her.

But it isn't fair to Secondary C that her dates with Primary B can be canceled whenever Primary A is in a bad mood.  And Primary B should not be able to blame his flakiness on Primary A being in a bad mood.  Bad moods are not emergencies.  Primary A should be able to exist in a bad mood without wrecking Primary B's relationship with Secondary C.

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A lot of the conflicts I see on the Poly subreddit flow from a belief that having a bad day means your partner(s) should drop everything to cater to you, or even break up with their other partners to cater to you.  I've seen Secondary C complain bitterly that Primary B won't cancel a movie night with Primary A's kids to come over and comfort her after a bad day.  Secondary C then complains, "Why am I even in this secondary relationship!"  Secondary C hasn't been honest with herself about what she really wants in a relationship, she's settled for sharing Primary B with another family.

In the monogamy world, some couples can get away with this shit, insisting that you cancel all your plans when he's having a bad day.  But in the poly world, this doesn't work anymore.  Your relationships cannot be all about you, because your partners have other partners, and everybody has to juggle.  Maybe, given a bad enough day, Secondary C would graciously offer to reschedule her date with Primary B, but you should not expect that, instead you should be able to endure a bad day on your own.  Perhaps by reaching out to a friend or relative, or taking the kids to grandpa's for the evening and drawing a bubble bath, or going out into the back yard and chopping wood until you feel exhausted enough to sleep.  Something other than demanding your partner cancel his other relationships to cater to you.

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This may feel far away from the example I wrote about yesterday: a BDSM Dom refuses to cuddle with his subs because he reserves cuddling for his husband.  But it's the same thing -- treating a secondary partner as less than human in order to make the primary partner feel secure in the hierarchy.  Human beings have emotional needs.  If you are presently with a human being, participating in a BDSM scene, and this human has a meltdown, is it ethical to refuse cuddles and aftercare to this human because it would upset your non-present primary partner's sense of hierarchy?

Many non-monogamous couples do have rules that explicitly treat their other partners as objects rather than humans.  No kissing, never fuck the same person twice, no feelings.  These other partners are supposed to be sets of differently shaped holes, for some variety in the hole fucking, or to have more frequent hole fucking.  If the other partner acts like a human for a second, you walk out or ghost them.  "No way, man, you caught feelings, I'm not into that.  This was supposed to be fun."

Many single people treat their hookups this way also, as holes for fucking.  It's something I try to screen for when I'm looking for hookups, because I don't want to be treated as a simple sex object, I want to be treated as another human being.  Somebody who deserves the basic respect of showing up and communicating and negotiating and being polite.  I'm not into dehumanization.

For me, my philosophy of hookups was always, "If we had a fun time together, why not do it again?"  But that philosophy risks treating each other as persistent human beings who exist beyond a single encounter.  Which is who we are, in reality.  Complex sentient beings who persist.

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I can't ban Couples Privilege, and I can't ban people from treating hookups as objects.  But I can categorize and label these behaviors and pose alternatives and find these alternatives for myself.  I'm not into monogamy, but I'm not into being a second class human or a sex object.  There is a middle ground, that is sometimes called polyamory, sometimes called ethical non-monogamy, sometimes called relationship anarchism.  This middle ground is what I advocate.  This path between idealizing one human being as your one and only, and treating everybody else as objects.  We're all people, all deserving of love, sex, snuggles, friendship, and time to ourselves, via consensual and open relationships.

The reality of this middle path is usually messy, but it feels more authentic to me than either of the two extremes.  I'm not your everything, but I'm also more than just a fuckhole.

It's inevitable now

If I'm ever famous enough, for any reason, we can all count on somebody going on a social media rampage against "offensive" things I've written in my past.  And then if I bother to apologize, they'll further claim that my apology is a "slap in the face" to those I've offended.  Because I've been writing provocative shit for decades now.  I don't even remember most of what I wrote in high school and college anymore, but that's fair game even if it happened in the 1980s.

When will we get tired of these social media offense campaigns?  It seems there's more of them every day.  Somebody wore an offensive costume several years ago, so now he must be fired.  Somebody made an offensive tweet while she was in college 10 years ago, so now she must be fired.  If you've ever done anything offensive to anybody, then you should become permanently unemployed and your family should die of starvation and exposure to the elements.

If this is the end result of multiculturalism, I'd rather live in a uniracial country where I understand my place in the hierarchy.

It used to be a principle of free speech that even offensive speech should be protected, because that's better than allowing censorship.  Liberals fought to extend free speech to cover other kinds of expression, such as music, film, sculpture, protest, even strip clubs.  Now it feels our culture is in widespread retreat from anything that offends anybody.

We suck.

I'm reminded that trying to change minds is a form of aggression

Although most people in the US are still not allowed to sign up for a COVID vaccine shot yet, we're already flooded with think pieces trying to explain why some folks don't want to get the vaccine.

A lot of these think pieces are trying to explain why one particular subculture is supposedly more resistant to uptake than the rest of us.  I've seen think pieces saying that LGBTs are more resistant, that Blacks are more resistant, that Hispanics are more resistant, that White Evangelicals are more resistant, that young people are more resistant, that old people are more resistant.  I'm not sure there's anybody left who isn't more resistant!

Bottom line is that perhaps a third of adults don't want the vaccine, for a large variety of reasons, no matter their racial, sexual, religious, etc., identities.  But nowadays we're so stuck on viewing people through their subculture identities that we can't see the forest for the trees.  A third of adults don't want the vaccine!

And I'm going to ask -- so what?

One proffered reason for caring is that to achieve "herd immunity" so we can all go back to normal, we need some high percentage of the population to be immune to the virus.  Nobody knows the exact high percentage, because no country has achieved herd immunity from COVID yet.  This assumes herd immunity is possible for COVID!  It might not be.  If immunity wears off quickly after a few months, if the virus keeps mutating to escape our immunity, if the virus continues to spread & mutate in poor countries unabated -- COVID could be like influenza, with no such thing as herd immunity.  Not every disease can be wiped out via vaccination.

There's also the idea that for purposes of equity and non-discrimination we should reach out to various subcultures to make sure they are protected by the vaccine; we're supposed to help them overcome their resistance to the shots so we can save their lives for them (against their will).  Not by forcing them to get the shots, but by changing their minds against their will.  Via Public Education Campaigns, Outreach, Role Models, etc.  OK ... but these campaigns don't actually change many minds.  People can sniff when the government is trying to convince them to do something they don't want to do.

Also, businesses want to offer safe spaces for customers to spend money, so they'll want to ensure their staff and customers have been vaccinated.  I'm sure there are plenty of stores and resorts that can't wait to advertise that their staffs are fully vaccinated.  So businesses will want to force people to get their shots, and they'll lobby governments to back them up on this.

But we don't require adults to get any sort of shots in the US!  Medical care for adults is voluntary, if you can afford it at all.  And these shots have only been around for months, or weeks, and were approved on an emergency basis.  There is no such thing as a fully-approved COVID vaccine in the US, and won't be, for years.  People are right to be skeptical of new technologies that haven't been used in humans before.

I've been studying these vaccines so I can make an informed decision of my own, but that doesn't mean everybody should have to get a shot.

And most people do not really want to wait until we reach "herd immunity" before we return to normal.  A lot of us want to return to normal as soon as we get our own shots.  A lot of us want to return to normal NOW, shots be damned.  There will be a solid supermajority of people wanting to return to normal as soon as all of the adults who want their shots have received their shots, which Biden said would happen by the end of May.

So, I counsel tolerance and patience with regard to the people who don't want their shots.  Let them make up their own minds.  Let them see whether the shots work on us guinea pigs.  Let them sign up at their own pace.  Let's not turn getting shots or not into another goddess damned culture war, we have enough of those in the US already.

the point on multiculturalism

Multiculturalism was supposed to open doors so every subculture could flourish without fear of oppression, in a world of mutual respect.  Instead it is creating a new multilayered oppression field that goes back in time to turn stuff you did years or decades ago into fireable offenses today.  To survive in 21st Century Multiculturalism you need to be able to predict years or decades into the future whether anything you say or wear today will get you fired in the future, because it might offend identity groups then that don't even exist yet today.

And this is a liberal talking to you -- you know conservatives are even more irate about this than I am.  And on this issue, I'm starting to have a lot of sympathy for conservatives.

If you want to hold people to a new standard of conduct, you need to clearly communicate that standard of conduct ahead of time, and give people time to learn about it, and give them "first warnings" when they screw up, so they can learn from their mistakes.  Changing the rules and then applying them backward in time to punish people for stuff they did while they were in college, or before offense was widely taken under these new rules, is absolutely unfair.  This is fostering widespread resentment and is not the way to move us all forward into a world of mutual respect.  It helps people like Trump to get elected.

The growing intolerance on the Left is a major problem for achieving our goals.

this book is ridiculous; page 197 of 253

I've read other YA novels that have far better plots. This one is ridiculous. So I'm not going to name it here. But, I'm reading it. I want to create a new habit of actually finishing some of the books I've started. After I finish this one, I'll pick another one to finish that I've already started.

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FMJ arrived! It looks cool. I haven't put it on yet, I want to take a shower first. I think a before-bedtime shower, then I'll put it on.

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Ran 4 miles today in the warm afternoon air. I miss the days when I could take Dax with me, but he can't run anymore. Even the longer walks and hikes are starting to wear him out now. He sleeps almost all day now. Old pup.

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We've resolved Dax's hunger strike. I'm burying his medicines inside piles of his favorite soft food. It's a bribe, but we'd stockpiled the soft food to feed him after his surgery anyway. Instead of recovering from surgery he's got to swallow all these pills. So, soft food for now. We think the antibiotics are bothering his tummy.

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Work was disorienting today. I received so many emails I couldn't even open them all -- it caused my brain to overload. Usually I can at least read each email to decide whether to deal with it now or later. Today ... it may have been the most emails in one day ever? WTF. So I quit an hour early and had a cocktail. I'll try to sort through them in the morning before everybody else wakes up.

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I'm gonna stay at the house Friday night to help B celebrate his 40th birthday with T. I need to pick a birthday present. T is gonna bake a cake and make dinner. He wants me to hit the liquor store tomorrow -- I haven't been since sometime last year.

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Maryland's governor is following the Republican trend, he's going to lift a big chunk of the state's COVID restrictions on Friday at 5pm. I don't know why we can't wait until more people are vaccinated first. It's starting to look like the entire country is just gonna speed back toward normal ASAP no matter how many more people might die along the way. Tired of hiding from a virus, willing to play Russian Roulette with it instead. I'm gonna hide until I get my vaccine no matter what restrictions are lifted. I'm not going to a restaurant or concert or movie theater, nope.

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K asked me whether somebody on the Internet is trying to cancel me. No, I'm pissed off at what I'm seeing happening to other people. I'm so tired of Twitter Leftists trying to be more woke than everybody else and then harshly condemning the less woke.

People aren't born with college degrees in diversity studies. Not everybody on the planet can be as woke as you are -- even you weren't always as woke as you are now. Should you be fired from your job because your tweets from 10 years ago were less woke than you are today?

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OK, let's shower and get ready for bed and then put on the FMJ. Assuming it fits well, later this week I'll trim pubes and freeze the keys, will try to stay inside the FMJ until another fella chooses to unlock me.