Wanted: DD marriage

I don't have a DD relationship, but I want one.

Pros:
   1) Most couples who try it find that it revitalises their marriage and puts it on an entirely different footing.
   2) I would like to improve our standard of living.  By that I don't mean spend more money on gadgets or try to keep up with the Joneses; I mean have a cleaner, tidier, prettier house; be more considerate of each other; enjoy each other's company more.
   3) I really enjoy reading the blogs of many women and men in DD relationships and feel inspired by them.
   4) I have never been afraid to spank a woman.
   5) My wife is showing signs of being willing to follow the housework schedule I drew up for her recently, as she really had no idea how to keep the house clean.
   6) We have managed to stay married to each other for 22 years (she is my third wife.)  Sometimes the outlook has been bleak though.

Problems to overcome:
   1)  I am not a very dominant man, in fact I dislike controlling people and telling them what to do and what not to do.  In addition I am diffident and inconsistent.
   2)  My wife is not a very submissive person and she can tell me nothing about her that she wishes to change or improve.
   3)  I am not a socially savvy person and have little idea of how or when to be tactful, when to be assertive etc.  No doubt all those whose blogs I leave comments on will confirm this!
   4)  My wife and I have very different backgrounds and come from very different cultures.  Her parents' house, as she herself remarked to me, was dirty.  It was also of poor quality, built largely of second-hand materials, shabby and leaky, dark and cramped with insufficient lighting and inadequate drainage, no glass in the windows. The house I grew up in was attractive, fairly spacious though old-fashioned, with a large garden that was my father's main interest in retirement and a great place for me to play.
   5)  I have always had a good appetite for sex, although now that I am well into my eighties, that appetite is fading somewhat; but my wife is quite happy to do without it altogether (she was a virgin when I married her at age 32.)  However she has always been willing, if sometimes not very cooperative, and occasionally she has even been enthusiastic.

So, the big question is, How do I go about this?  I must say that looking at what I have written, it doesn't appear promising.

Anyone with helpful ideas is more than welcome to comment.

Indecision

Occasionally a fragment of poetry comes unbidden into my mind.  Sometimes it happens in the middle of the night, when I have to get out of bed and go to a book or the internet to find the whole poem so that I can rest easy and go back to sleep.  Whereas formerly I had to rely on my collection of books, now the internet is available to satisfy my curiosity.

 It happened just now when I was playing a quick game of  Freecell on my laptop:  "...since there's no help ..."  was the tiny fragment.

What prompted this I have no idea.  After a few moments came the rest of a line - " come, let us kiss and part ..."

Here's the rest of it:

    SINCE there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
    Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
    And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
    That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
    Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
    And when we meet at any time again,
    Be it not seen in either of our brows
    That we one jot of former love retain.
    Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
    When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
    When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
    And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
        Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
        From death to life thou mightst him yet recover. 

So, after all, there might be help?  And, is it Love or Passion beside whose bed of death Faith is kneeling?  I don't think Michael Drayton can have been equating the two.

One of these memes again. I wonder who originates them?

I feel it obligatory to attempt these when they come round.




1. Do you sleep with your closet doors open or closed?

  No closet .  But why should anyone want closet doors open at night I wonder?

    

2. Do you take the shampoos and conditioner bottles from hotel?

You mean there are hotels that give you that kind of stuff?

3. Do you cut out coupons but then never use them?

  what coupons?

4. Would you rather be attacked by a big bear or a swarm of a bees?

bear.  I might be able to talk him out of it

5. Do you always smile for pictures?

  I don't know.  Probably depends who holds the camera

         

6. What is your biggest pet peeve?

Most music in cafes

7. What size is your bed?

   Queen .We just got a new one and I had to make fitted sheets for it; but actually I prefer the old, smaller one which was just a mattress on the floor.  The new one is too soft.

8. What's your least favorite movie?

  All movies with guns

9. What do you dip a chicken nugget in?

  don't eat them.

10. What is your favorite food?

Chinese, Indian.  Especially Indian

       

11. What movies could you watch over and over and still love?

     Not One Less!;  The Road Home; (both Chinese); Tokyo Story (Dir. Yasujiro Ozu) - I love understated art, and this is one of the finest examples I know.  Rose and I spent at least the last half of this movie in tears.

12. Were you ever a boy/girl scout?

     No

     
13. Would you ever strip or pose nude in a magazine?

      Lol! For enough money, of course I would.  Can't you imagine me in Playgirl?

14. When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone on paper?

      Last month to my bank

15. Favorite kind of sandwich?

      Ham.  With mustard mixed fresh without the admixture of vinegar

16. Best thing to eat for breakfast?

      Whole wheat toast, butter, marmalade; coffee.

   

17. What is your usual bedtime?

10:30.

18. Are you lazy?

  Yes, nowadays; But not when younger.  

    

19. Do you have any magazine subscriptions?

     Time - partly for the free gifts offered

         

20. Do you sing in the car?

      No car

           

21. Wal-Mart, Target or Kmart?

None of those hereabouts.  USA is not the whole world, you know, though some seem to think so.

          

22. What's your favorite color?

I like them all

23. Do you sleep with your sheets tucked in or out        

In at the foot, otherwise out

24. Have you ever stolen a street sign before?

     There's more than enough clutter in my house already

25. Do you like to use post-it notes?

No.  But I think I might if I had any

Belief and faith contrasted

A month ago I lost my credit card. I only have one, so I have been without a credit card for a month, but today my new one arrived by post so I was able to visit Amazon and buy Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity" and put it on my Kindle.


This book was mentioned and quoted from by Brian Hines, who has a blog called "The Church of the Churchless" that I follow.  It's exactly what I need to read right now. It was first published in 1951.  Here are some quotes I have picked out, after having only read Chapter I.  The italics are mine:

•     We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

•      You will not see the sky if you have covered the [window] glass with blue paint. But “religious” people who resist the scraping of the paint from the glass, who regard the scientific attitude with fear and mistrust, and confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas, are curiously ignorant of laws of the spiritual life which they might find in their own traditional records. A careful study of comparative religion and spiritual philosophy reveals that abandonment of belief, of any clinging to a future life for one’s own, and of any attempt to escape from finitude and mortality, is a regular and normal stage in the way of the spirit. Indeed, this is actually such a “first principle” of the spiritual life that it should have been obvious from the beginning, and it seems, after all, surprising that learned theologians should adopt anything but a cooperative attitude towards the critical philosophy of science.

•     ... the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

Alan Watts had a Master's degree in theology and a doctorate in divinity.

More about seeing things as they are

My last post was about whether there is any meaning or significance to life, and in editing that post this morning to correct some carelessness, I mentioned the book "A Course in Miracles."  If you look up the Workbook for Students in this course, you will see how it is relevant to what follows here.

A while ago I came across a cartoon drawing, showing two young girls of about twelve or thirteen, standing close together; one is whispering into the listening ear of the other, who is looking down at the ground, "We've been wrong all this time, you don't blow at all!"

Aside from agreeing with her that it is confusing to call it a "blow job", it really prompted me to think once more about the possibility that in my ideas about life I might have been, and might be now, "wrong all this time."  And Oliver Cromwell famously said, to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."  Cromwell was an eminently practical man.

Not only do I think that I might have been wrong all this time, and probably still am, but I think - pardon me for this insult- most other people are in the same boat.

Does life matter?

The big question for me nowadays is: Does it matter what happens in life?

Almost all of us think that it matters a lot, that this is an absurd question.  I must say that I feel more comfortable when I try on the idea that it really doesn't matter.

How significant is life, really?  If you have read my blog regularly, and not just read the posts with interesting titles, you will know that I have been wondering whether we really have a choice in what we do - whether there really is such a thing as free will.  If we have no choice, then whether what happens is important, whether it "matters" or not, is a question without any meaning.  And I seem to feel more comfortable with the present moment when I am not considering how important life is.

To recap a moment, it is difficult or even impossible to show you have free will.   Many clever philosophers have tried in vain, apparently.  There is no way you can show you might have done something differently from the way you actually did it.  You can assert your freedom of choice, but that is not enough of course.  And if you are one of those people who think the brain runs the whole show, then of course there definitely can be no free will for you, because who would do the choosing?  Same applies to those non-duality-ers who have discovered there is no actual person anywhere, only a body and a mind.

I could single out some of the blogs I read - Vesta, for example, and Elisa, to mention only two of many, for whom a great part of their blog is devoted to questions about the significance or importance of what they are doing or thinking.  If they weren't like that I probably would not find them so interesting. Mine is like that, too, very often, in fact it seems to be like that right now!  Our whole world would be different if people no longer concerned themselves with what they think important, as far as choices go..  At least this whole spanking blogging community would collapse, to say nothing of the rest of the world's doings.

But would it be a better world?  I think we can still make judgments, even if we have no choices, can't we?  It's interesting to speculate on what our world would be like if we all realised we had no choice over what we do.  Could a science fiction story be written on this basis?

I'll have to try and work out just how things would be if we all assumed we had no choices.  But for the moment I am just going to sit back for a while and enjoy not thinking about the importance or significance of my life, then go and see if the washing is dry and ready to take off the line.  It's a good drying day, sunny and some wind. No moral judgment needed there, for sure.

Edit  I have been careless over the use of the word "significant."  Obviously what happens, whether we have chosen it or whether it simply happens without anyone's choice, may be significant, in that it can point to something, show or clarify something for our information;  be interesting in a cerebral way.  If however you start reading "A Course in Miracles: Workbook for Students" you will soon come across the exercise prompting you to look around you and consider that what you are looking at "has no meaning."  In other words, it has no significance apart from its existence and connection with other objects.  I'll say more about this book soon.

Better not read this if you are a devout Roman Catholic. You have been warned

Resigning Pope No Longer Has Strength To Lead Church Backward

couldn't resist drawing folks' attention to this scurrilous piece from The Onion

 

 

Seeing things as they are

Seeing things as they are has been a goal of mine for some years.  I read a post by Vesta yesterday in which she mentioned the beneficial effects that a friend experienced from taking a ten day course in Vipassana meditation.  The friend said "You never suffer ever again."

I thought that a big claim; but remembering the saying "pain is inevitable; suffering is optional" I investigated and found that there is just such a course starting next month in Manila, an hour's flight from our town.  I applied immediately to take part.

About forty five years ago I read a book by the British sailor, Admiral Shattock, in which he described attending Vipassana meditation in a monastery in, if I remember rightly, Burma.  Or it might have been Thailand.  It's taken me forty five years, then, to react positively to that hint!

I read that "Vipassana" means "seeing things as they are."  For me, that is a very enticing prospect,  I realise that I, like the great majority of the human race, do not see things as they are, but rather as I imagine them.  Seeing things as they are would make a big difference in my life.