The reading room

In between everything else one is a prolific reader. You could almost say an omnivorous reader 'cos one has even been known to read tech manuals at a push. At the moment though, most of the reading is done on the bus... along with writing and makeup. Hey it's an hour long trip each way; it may as well be spent creatively.

Now because of the nature of the reading room one favours a Kindle and detective novels. Both can be put down at a moments notice. He of course has slightly different ideas about content. See He likes to discuss what he reads, and it helps if the victim target audience has read the same book.

So one small slave gets things loaded up on the Kindle that are not necessarily a personal choice. Some are just hard going... others are just unsettling. One such example of the later was "The Average American Male", a novel by Chad Kultgen. It is a deeply disturbing, darkly misogynistic tale of how one man secretly regards dating and sex. A tale made all the more perturbing by the depressing ending where he settles.

What makes it depressing is not the death of his sex life, nor the fact that it is heavily implied to be a result of an inability to pull due to his advancing years (he is almost 30), but the inevitability of it and his subsequent acceptance of that fact.   

Why such a visceral response you may be wondering?

Well...

That is because on some level one has settled. Not for a lack of sex... well for any length of time. Unfortunately even we have the odd time when there simply aren't enough hours in a day, like the last week, to squeeze in quality sex. Even so we still manage to at least try and threaten each other for the simple reason that no sex doesn't make us better people at all, in fact it makes us horrible... but one digresses. Back to settling...

See when we got together there was never any plan to stop looking. In fact monogamy or the lack thereof was one of those many things we discussed until we were raw. We wanted to be open to new experiences... actually we wanted to make sure we didn't miss out on a single opportunity. So it was something of a shock to come to and find that one had stopped looking altogether. And somewhere along the line He has too.

See the difference is that for the character in the book settling was the death of his internal dialogue, the end of his youth... Peter Pan got little wooden clogs. For us it was the beginning of something else entirely.

We have settled... not for each other more on each other. Rather than feeling the sense of loss that a little part of us thinks we should feel, all we do is feel profoundly grateful.  And we wonder how we got so lucky as to find each other.

Sighs what kind of fucked up is that?