VirtualExile

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! ;-)

OCD Bug is forever entranced by questions like: how many countries are there?  Why are there even countries?  Because there is no definitive answer to these kinds of abstract questions.  What is a country?  There are 194 universally "recognized" countries -- countries that all agree they are all countries, under international diplomatic agreements.  But then there are other candidates for countryhood -- countries that not all the other countries recognize as countries.

Is this 194 number going to be a relatively stable thing over time?  500 years from now there will be around 200 countries, but probably different countries from those we see today, with different territorial lines.

Occasionally I've seen on Twitter animated graphics that show the changes in country names and borders over time, across a continental scale.  How we humans organize ourselves into overlapping and hierarchical groups is always fascinating to OCD Bug.  Oh, Australia is the only country that occupies an entire continent!  And I've written before about how Europe isn't really a continent -- that anybody treats it as a continent is racist, because geographically it simply isn't -- it is part of Eurasia.  White people need their own imaginary continent, though, to feel special.  You yellow people over there live in a separate continent (Asia), because we (European) white people say so!

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite books in the house was an atlas.  I loved poring over that, looking at the borders and railroad lines (this was the early 1970s, heh) and resource symbols.  It had some historical maps showing before and after various wars.  So fascinating to an OCD kid.  While the other kids were outside playing basketball or something, I was exploring maps.

Here I sit wishing we had a more functional and comprehensive world government, looking out for the survival of our individuals, our species, our planet and the species we share it with, the universe, etc.  But we're divided into roughly 200 countries, and many of them are not democracies, so ... creating a world government would be viewed as tyrannical excess, one "country" conquering all the others.  Nationalisms ... hey, we're all humans, the same species, why can't we forget about this country bullshit and just all work together?

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Oh, weird, I went to the Wikipedia article about Africa and it has a button to show the map either with or without national borders.  If I could so easily delete national borders!  Click a virtual button with my trackpad!  Poof!  All borders are gone!

It was not newsworthy at all in the US, I learned about it from a British newspaper --

One week ago, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force. This treaty has been ratified by 52 countries, which means in these countries it now has the force of law. These countries have agreed to ban nuclear weapons within their territories, not to develop nuclear weapons, and not to help anybody else develop or deploy nuclear weapons.

Of course, the US is not a party to this treaty -- and I hadn't even heard of it before yesterday. At last count, the US held more than 6,000 nuclear warheads, most of which are ready to launch at the order of the President in his role as Commander in Chief. This is a big reduction from the US peak in the 1960s, when we held more than 30,000 nukes. During the intervening decades we've negotiated reductions in our nuclear arsenal with the Soviet Union/Russia.

Two parties to the treaty that used to hold nukes have given them up: South Africa and Kazakhstan. So it is possible to give up nukes and then continue existing as an independent country. Unfortunately the world does not have a perfect record on this point -- Ukraine also gave up its nukes, but now finds itself being slowly chewed up by nuclear-armed Russia.

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I've had mixed feelings about the existence and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It seems to me the existence of nuclear weapons has so far avoided the eruption of another "world war", via a "balance of terror" between the major world powers. But there have been incidents over the decades that arguably could have resulted in nuclear war between nuclear-armed countries. Have we been lucky, or do nuclear weapons provide a real deterrent to violence? And as nuclear weapons proliferate to additional countries, will the chance of nuclear war increase until it becomes inevitable?

The nuclear standoff has not ended war entirely of course, we continue to have armed conflicts within & between many countries; often these conflicts are "proxy wars" funded by the nuclear powers as a way to push against each others' spheres of influence without provoking a direct war between them. Of course, you don't have to be a nuclear power to fund proxy wars -- Saudi Arabia and Iran are skirmishing by proxy in a dozen countries.

Syria has brought US and Russian armed forces into what I'd call Proxy Plus -- both countries have based troops in Syria, requiring a set of negotiated rules between them to avoid direct confrontation. The Russians are there to assist the Syrian government, the Americans are there to assist the independent Kurds and to fight ISIS.

WASHINGTON — A small number of U.S. troops were injured this week during a skirmish with Russian forces in northeastern Syria, American officials said on Wednesday, underscoring the risk of simmering tensions between the two rival powers in a hotly contested part of the country.  (August 26, 2020 -- NYT).

If the US and Russia didn't both have nukes, would we be fighting each other directly in Syria and other locations?

But I do think it is hypocritical and immoral for the US to deny other countries the ability to build their own nukes.  If we think Iran shouldn't have nukes, for example, then we should first get rid of our own.

It's a tough issue.  Like global warming, nuclear proliferation is not something that one country can solve all by itself.  I'd like to see a steady ratcheting down of nuclear weapons by the countries that have them, until one day no nuclear warheads exist.  But we cannot delete the knowledge of how to build them.  Could this knowledge serve as a deterrent without having to stockpile actual nuclear weapons?  Don't get into a war with Russia because then they could build nukes and blow us up?

I wonder to what extent this "knowledge-based deterrence" already exists in the world.  I think both Iran and Saudi Arabia have the capability to build nukes, is this what keeps them fighting at the proxy level instead of directly?  Japan and South Korea definitely have the capacity to build nukes, so China & Russia pretty much leave them alone.

Yeah, I'd try to create an international regime in which there's a steadily declining cap on how many nukes a particular country may have, along with trade incentives for remaining free of nukes -- perhaps a 25% international tariff on the goods of any country that does hold nukes, with the proceeds divided among the nuke-free countries as a peace dividend.  Heh, dream on, Bug.

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The existence of nukes hasn't helped the countries that do not have them.  These countries have continued to fall prey to major-power imperialism, civil war, and violent neighbors.  But that doesn't mean I would hand over nukes to every country on the planet.  How do we build a world without imperialism, without civil war, without violent aggression?

I'd create a World Parliament, elected by global proportional representation, as a replacement or reform of the United Nations.  I'm not sure exactly what powers to give this World Parliament.  But the original idea of the post-WW1 League of Nations was to create a global force for peace that would intervene to prevent wars from spiraling out of control.  Ironically, nuclear weapons have done a better job at keeping international peace than either the League of Nations of the United Nations ever did.

Maybe we need a nuclear Balance of Terror to keep us from having massive armies of tens of millions of soldiers battling back and forth across the major land masses, throwing millions of civilians into concentration camps as they advance.  I don't know.  I wish we could instead find a way to share resources peacefully across what we now consider national borders -- these imaginary and arbitrary lines that we use to divide humans into nationalisms.  A World Parliament of the Human Race, that erases national borders, taxes global capital, regulates global natural resources, limits global pollution, and provides a basic income to everybody while administering education, health care, infrastructure, criminal justice.

Dream on, Bug, somebody's got to ;-)

I had a lot of dreams involving touch overnight -- my favorite was a dream where I went to see a therapist and K was there with me snuggling with me from behind while I spoke with her about my feelings.  She told me that what I'm feeling is normal, especially during these times.  K just listened.

Also, I showed up to the therapy session without a mask -- she handed me one and I mumbled something about forgetting to bring one, except in my dream I hadn't forgotten, I was going without a mask on purpose, and I said I was suffering from pandemic fatigue.

When I woke, I realized the snuggling was real -- Astrid had been snuggling against my back :-)

I remember agreeing a few months ago that I'd see a therapist but then it sorta piled on top of the general To Do List that has always been too long during Quarantine.  And on Sunday when I got home, T piled more things on the To Do List.  Although I'm catching up with stuff at work, there's ever more to do at home.  And then I add personal goals to the list, like NaNoWriMo, which I feel I completed successfully although I haven't done the word count yet.  Or getting back into music.  Or exercising more.  Or working out an annual budget with T -- which we did, though it was emotionally costly for both of us.

My main complaint to my dream therapist was that I feel unmotivated.  Which is weird because I do have a lot going on.  And in the past I've had friends tell me that I'm one of the most motivated people they know.  But part of me feels like I could be / should be / doing more.

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My chats with Mark from Reddit yesterday went in a pleasant direction, continuing to get to know him better, establishing some mutual trust.  Whereas with Matt I'd responded to a personal ad, I don't know where Mark came from.  He messaged me directly, so I don't know how he found me.  Reminds me of Missa that way, although I "met" Missa on Grindr.  Missa had contacted me directly, I'd never seen his profile before, he was a "lurker".

I'm often more comfortable, and more successful, with younger guys when they contact or approach me first.  I know a lot of younger gay guys feel harassed by older gay guys and do their best to ignore them.  It's often an unwelcome shock to younger gay guys to learn when they come out that most gay men are older than they are, so most of the people contacting them will be older than they are.  Most of them want to date or hookup with someone their own age, like they would've done in high school, like society teaches them is appropriate.  But some younger guys seek out older guys on purpose, either because their first sexual relationships were with older guys, or because they crave the maturity that most of their peers lack.  And some of them are frankly looking for sugar daddies or "finsubs".

There's a younger guy MG from Twitter who I've given small gifts to, and he's friendly with me -- friendlier than Jeremy was when I agreed to be his finsub.  Jeremy was good at everything about the findom role except for providing a human connection, it was obvious it was just a job to him (though a job well done), and I never heard from him again after I told him I wanted to focus more on having in-person connections -- not even a thank you or good bye.

Heh, I still want to focus more on having in-person connections, but I can't have them right now.  The risk for my current harem of online boys is that After the Vaccine I'll lose interest in them if they don't actually want to visit.  I'd be willing to travel to Canada or Massachusetts or elsewhere to meet these fellas, or to have them stay with me at the condo for a long weekend visit to DC.  As I was willing to visit and host my dozens of gay LJ friends back when LJ was still a busy place, before Facebook sucked all of them away into our horrible social media future.

The online gay guys who I dumped back in 2005 were the ones who didn't want to meet in person.  I had no time for that in my life anymore.

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Anyway, I'm glad Astrid's nighttime snuggles provided the stimulus for my snuggle dreams, I really needed some snuggles, and I really needed to talk with a therapist while snuggling with K.

[Follow the "self interrogation" tag to find my previous answers to questions #1-4.]

Here's #5, finally:

If I could do this, why am I not doing it right now? If not now, when? What's my excuse for waiting?

By "this", question #5 refers to question #4, regarding limiting my own personal consumption to my own personal sustainable share of global production.

In answering question #4, I consulted an actuarial table to find my expected lifespan, and decided I would reduce my own personal consumption over the course of my natural life by 3-4% per year until I reached Green Communism by the end of my life.

So what's my excuse for dragging this out over the course of 29.0 years?

It's really about the other commitments I've made in my life.  I can cut my own spending by 3% next year, and another 3% the next, without cutting into the commitments I've made to my career, to the two most important people in my life, and to the three pets I've adopted.  Over the next seven years, as I approach retirement, these commitments will begin to fall away.  Instead of sharing two homes (house with T, condo with K), I expect to reduce to one home at some point between age 55 and 60.  These three pets are all entering the second decade of their lives, and will eventually pass away.  And then I will retire from my career, at which point my consumption will drop anyway to fit into my post-retirement income.

It clearly would not be possible for me to continue any of these commitments if I were to immediately cut my consumption by over 90%.  I could not afford to live in the DC area, so I'd have to quit my job, sell the house, stop sharing the condo.  T would probably keep the pets if I dove below the poverty line.  I'd have to move to a cheaper part of the world and find a new job.

I can aim to move toward Green Communism, but I'd have to break my life to do it immediately.  And, Green Communism isn't something I can accomplish by myself anyway.  I'd be setting an example for the rest of you, at best, but global warming and mass extinctions would continue.  Living sustainably is something we all have to do together.  And it would take time for all of us to do this, even if we wanted to.  It would probably take as long as a human lifetime to reorganize all of our systems of government, production, and distribution to live within a rational ecological footprint.  My own back-of-the-envelope plan for getting rid of fossil fuels would take 30 years to fully implement.

So, I'm not expecting any more of myself than I'd expect of humanity.  Over the next 10 years I'll stop getting any of my energy from coal, and I'll cut my overall consumption of stuff by >30%.  Over the following 10 years I'll stop getting any of my energy from oil, and I'll continue to cut my overall consumption by >60%.  Over the final 10 years I'll stop getting any of my energy from natural gas, and I'll finish cutting my overall consumption by >90%.  There will be time to adjust these goals if it turns out my share of sustainable global consumption is more or less than it would be today.

I'm embarking upon my own personal journey toward living Green Communism.  It would be great if the rest of the human race joined me, but I'm not waiting for y'all.  Yet, I'm also treating myself and those I care about with compassion, instead of unilaterally breaking my life and disappearing into a different world all at once.

After we all decide to begin this journey together, if we ever do, it will take the rest of our lives to get there.  We can't just click on "OK" to load the next page.  This loading screen is gonna take a billion seconds to complete.

The human race does not seem to have ever embraced Green Communism on a global scale in the past, why do I think this can possibly happen now?

It's a gamble, probably a losing gamble, however many chips I put on this French Roulette wheel, I'm probably going to lose them.  But I'm putting all my chips on the green number 0!  (Odds are 1/36.)

As I read more about the ecological history of the human race, my pessimism deepens.  Many on the Left tell themselves myths about prehistoric or indigenous peoples, believing these peoples lived in harmony with nature.  The archeological record shows they did not.  The fossil record shows they did not.  The climatological record shows they did not -- the anthropogenic global warming trend actually started thousands of years ago.  As we move into the period of written history, the historic record shows they did not.  As we look at ourselves today, the global human race -- we are not living in harmony with nature.  Why should we start now, homo sapiens has never lived in harmony with nature!

Betting on humans to change their ways is usually a losing bet.  I've always been skeptical that humans can surmount the climate crisis.  It would require too much sacrifice.  It would require more sacrifice than the South giving up their slaves in the 1860s.  I'm not the first to make this comparison.  Others have said that trying to enforce abandonment of fossil fuels would require a World War -- and not simply between nations, but within each nation, across all nations, a Global Civil War between the Green Militias and the White Mercenaries.

There's $100 trillion in fossil fuel wealth at stake.  You think those people are going to leave their $100 trillion in the ground without a fight?  People have fought wars over far less.

This is a war I will not join.  I'm not going to kill people over this.  If persuasion, consent, and democratic governance are not the solution, then I'm not going to solve this.

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We've got the potential for technologies changing human behaviors.  If renewable energy sources become so cheap that fossil fuels become uneconomic, and if inexpensive birth control becomes widely available everywhere, then enough countries may voluntarily give up fossil fuels and reduce births below replacement.  So, maybe a Green science fiction fantasy will come true.  But I think the more likely outcome is what we're already seeing as a result of new technologies -- we just continue to use more of everything -- technology makes fossil fuels less expensive also! and finds more of them!  It doesn't even matter whether we stabilize human population during this 21st Century, because those 10 billion humans will continue increasing their consumption of everything at exponential rates via new technologies.

The problem with new technologies is that we still have to ban fossil fuels.  Just like we still had to ban slavery to get rid of it.  This is a political problem.  We need a global ban on fossil fuels.  I think the chance of this happening is, yeah, French Roulette: 1/36.  I'm placing our entire planet on the green number 0.  Let's spin that wheel ...