Monthly Archives: August 2010

Today’s the Day My Wife Met My Girlfriend

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I am not Yale Marrat.

In that novel, Robert H. Rimmer turned the story of one man’s unconventional marriage to two women into a national controversy. Although my daughter has always said my life is a country song and while my controversy has not played out on the national stage, it does affect people in many states.

My name is Dick Harper and I haven’t cheated on my wife.

But I do love — and am in love with — two women and I’m shouting it from the rooftops!

[This is the final piece in our ongoing polylocution puzzle about boundless love. You really really want to read gekko’s companion piece, Going All the Way (Poly, Part 4).]

If you have hung in through eight or ten blogs and more than a hundred comments, you may have guessed there is something special between Nancy Ahern and me. She gives me great joy.

For the record, Anne not only knows about Nancy, she knows Nancy and she gave us her blessing. They have partied together. Anne stayed in the house of Murphy and Teegan when the girls attended a NASCAR race together without me. With all of that, she does not approve of this lifetime friendship and love.

For more than 30 years, Anne and I have shared the deaths of our parents and the lives of our children and grandchildren and coming great-grandchild, job gains and job losses, old house hassles, used dog stores, baking cookies and fixing furnaces, … and laughter. We have two important things in common: we like elephants and peanut butter. April 1 is our anniversary. No Foolin’.

Dr. Phil calls what we’re doing “right.”

For more than 7 years, Nancy and I have shared the travails of our parents and our children, job gains and job losses, real estate conundrums, used dog stores, hermitting and hanging mirrors, … and laughter. We have two important things in common: we like Mets baseball and we’re both paper-trained. Today is our anniversary.

Dr. Phil calls what we’re doing “wrong.”

Sculpture by Ania Modzelewski

The Victorian standard of serial polygamy holds that “one must fall out of love with someone old when he or she falls in love with someone new…”

I disagree. The point is not to lose your love for someone “old” but rather to expand it. Love may give us energy but it acts exactly like entropy.

Entropy measures the disorder or chaos of a system. Energy is finite but the entropy — the carrier of energy — of the Universe is always increasing.

Love can assuredly be chaotic but only those selling unhappiness would want to limit how much love we can have in our lives.


Only those selling unhappiness
would limit how much love
we can have in our lives.


By now, you may think that the people I love or the people Anne loves have somehow lessened my love for her. Nope. She and I have been friends and lovers for a big part of our “grownup” lives. That hasn’t changed.

By now, you may also think you know what is going on between Nancy and me. I won’t tell you if we are sexually intimate, because that is not your business. I will tell you we have been lovers and best friends for seven years today, because that is.

I fell for the beautiful gekko smile; I stay for the conversation.

And that, dear reader, is making love for the rest of our lives.

[Editor’s Note: Nancy and I are concluding this public conversation about life and love. Please read Going All the Way for her own announcement.] Next week, we return to regularly scheduled political ranting; I’ll report later on some of the difficulties we have faced.

I’m not proud of everything I’ve done.
I’m pretty sure I’d do it all again.
–Jack Nicholson in The Bucket List


Joy

Got M-m-m-m-management?

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A lifetime ago in political terms I ran for state representative. I visited every dairy farm, rich and poor, in our then-two-Town district (Puffin East and North Puffin).

I spoke at some length with Etienne Chasseur, a North Puffin farmer milking about 75 head on 180 acres over on the Sweep Road.

“You need to sign on to the Canadian supply management system,” he told me. “I’m going broke here on an $11 milk check but my brother-in-law up north gets $18 U.S. for milking the same size herd.”

What, is he nuts? Etienne left out some of the story. I didn’t sign on then and would not now.

Vermont is a major dairy state with minor farms. The state defines a “large farm” as more than 600 cows; the median farm here now milks 120 head. Wisconsin, California, and even Nebraska dairy farms often milk 1,500, 2,000, or more. Many more. In 1991, a Vermont cow on one of our 2,381 farms produced about 15,000 pounds of milk per year. By 2000, average annual production per cow had risen to almost 17,500 pounds per year. (There were 11,019 farms here at the middle of the 20th Century.) Farmers measure milk production in “hundredweight” rather than gallons. About 12 gallons of milk weighs one hundred pounds.

Dairy farming here is unique because dairy farmers cannot set the price of milk and cannot pass along increases in operating costs. Neither Etienne Chasseur nor Wisconsin dairy farmer Paul Rozwadowski knows how much his milk sold for until the “milk check” comes in the mail. A month later.

Canada and the EU have a two-tiered system that offer farmers a (fixed) high price for “quota” milk, but a very low price for milk that is more than the quota for each farm. I’ve talked to some dairy farmers in Quebec. One compared his 150 cows to a 1,500 head herd in Wisconsin. Over the last dozen years, he made more total profit on 150 cows than the Wisconsin farm did on 1,500 for nine of those years.

The latest debate over dairy supply management began in 2007 and has picked up again.

The current milk pricing system is “inadequate, unfair and devastating family farms across the country,” Mr. Rozwadowski told the St. Albans Messenger. His last milk check brought in $13.80 per hundredweight for milk that he said cost $18/cwt to produce.

That price is based on dairy commodity sales. The USDA Federal Milk Marketing Order Office monitor the price of butter, dry milk powder, whey powder, and cheddar cheese sold on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The feds jinker with the numbers to come up with the mailbox price, or the price that the farmer actually receives.

So. What have we learned?

  • The government sets the price farmers sell for
  • Some farmers want to “level the playing field” by having the government also limit how much they can sell.

Where else could this plan this work? (1) Since the Obamanation owns General Motors, can we expect to see car sales limited to, say, 4 million units annually for all sellers and no more than 50,000 Chevy Volts sold prix fixe $65,000? If GM wants to sell more, the remainder must sell for $3,000 each. (2) Perhaps the feds should limit the oil companies to 15,680,000 barrels/day (about 5 million per day below current consumption) and fix the price at $180/barrel. Any production over the 15 million must be sold for $10/barrel. (3) Next, all manufacturers of men’s knit shirts will be held to 686 million units next year and the price set at $21 each wholesale. Anything over 686 million units must be wholesaled out for $6.

Did any of that really make sense to you?

Things that should be simple seldom are:
Try reading the Federal Tax Code

Got milk? Maybe, just maybe, farmers should look for a better way to price their milk instead of beseeching the feds for yet another set of regulations to hamper them.

It’s All About the Sex

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Or is it?

Polly Wolly Diddle All Day, gekko said.

[If you haven’t been following this ongoing polylocution about boundless love, please read the first two pieces in the series along with gekko’s companion piece, On Betrayal, On Joy (Poly, Part 3) , for her take on spit-shining.]

I like sex. I like love better. And I guarantee the sex is better with a lover than with a sexer, something I did not know at 21. A question remains to resolve this week: one can have sex without love but can one have love without sex?

Polyamory, the Movement, talks about love and open communication and responsible non-monogamy. Polyamorists the people talk about the sex.

Important Note: Condoms break. Those involved in a polyanything relationships should plan regular bloodletting for the obligatory STD tests.

“Humans are the most sexual of all the primates, willing and able to do it just about anywhere, anytime, with anyone (and even with other species if the Kinsey report is to be believed in its findings about farmhands and their animal charges),” Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American .

Old joke: Billy Bob and Luther were talking one afternoon when Billy Bob tells Luther, “Ya know, I reckon I’m ’bout ready for a vacation. Only this year I’m gonna do it a little different.

“The last few years, I took your advice about where to go. Three years ago you said to go to Hawaii. I went to Hawaii and Earline got pregnant. Then two years ago, you told me to go to the Bahamas, and Earline got pregnant again. Last year you suggested Tahiti and darned if Earline didn’t get pregnant again.”

Luther asks Billy Bob, “So, what you gonna do this year that’s different?”

Billy Bob says, “This year I’m taking Earline with me.”

Ba da boom.

Sculpture by Ania Modzelewski

Hugh (Call me Viagra™) Hefner, going strong at 84, opened the doors to the sex party in December, 1953, with a $1,000 loan from his mother and a 50¢ cover price. Since then, sex in person, on television, in the movies, and on the Internet gets more hits than God and Mephistopheles combined (Sex: About 656,000,000 results; God: About 476,000,000 results; Mephistopheles: About 1,060,000 results. Source Google™)

This week, while no-longer-androgynous gekko talks about lifestyle, I shall search for spit and spunk to prove that “it’s not just the sex.” Positive results under an alternative light source don’t prove love and the lack of bodily fluids doesn’t prove fidelity.

Over on the other pages, Nancy “came out.” Eleven years ago, she had sex with a man who wasn’t her now-ex-husband. She made the decision to cheat as well as to hide it from him. Sex.

The long-married Fred and Gwen Strong have Friday night date nights and have for a couple of decades. Sex. Fred and his girlfriend Carol spend every other Thursday evening at the Comfort Inn. Sex. Fred spends Saturday mornings sitting side-by-side with Bonnie in the comfortable chairs in the library visiting room; sometimes they simply read but often they talk. They usually hold hands. No sex.

Does there have to be sex to be lovers?

Intercourse always starts before coitus commences. When thousands of miles separate potential lovers, they could have months or years or millions of words before they have even one kiss.

Talking too close is far more dangerous than dancing too close.

Emily and Barny Feeler have had a kind of no worries online fling for years: proximity, immediacy, and blood tests not required. It’s fun and they could probably sustain it indefinitely — after all, they live thousands of miles apart. They get to play with words, play with ideas, and even play at sex. The new age way of touching someone without ever touching. No sex.

They have also learned enough about each other to become friends.

It’s all about the sex?

Were Nancy and her turning-point fling lovers? Were Fred and Bonnie? Fred and Carol? How about Emily and Barny as lovers?

The consensus view holds that having sex with a non-spouse is cheating but not having sex with a non-spouse is not, I wrote last week. The consensus view is frequently very wrong. If the poly relationship has no groping and panting, is it still what many call infidelity? I suggest that it is and not because Jimmy Carter ran into that attack rabbit or was unfaithful when lusting in his heart.

Relationships don’t fail because of sex present or sex missing. Relationships fail because the people in them stop liking each other.

Relationships succeed because the people in them do like each other.

Nancy and her brief crush probably weren’t lovers. They had a sexual attraction but she didn’t report on the bond she now understands she wants to feel.

Library Fred and Bonnie could be lovers. They have a long-term, intimate relationship, know each other’s children’s birthdays, and would go out on a rainy night to fix a broken down car.

Motel Fred and Carol meet the test. Carol has an intimate relationship with Fred that is similar to Bonnie’s. And, of course, they have sex every other Thursday.

Online Emily and Long Distance Barny are assuredly lovers. There is no sex but they know each other’s most intimate secrets from office gossip to menstrual cycle. They share everything and would do anything for each other including fly across the country to move a … bureau.

And that, dear reader, is making love.

[Editor’s Note: The rest of this series on Polyamory may be found here . Please also read gekko’s companion pieces, Poly Blogging , and the newly minted part 3, On Betrayal, On Joy , for her take and lots more commentary.]

“When there’s someone that should know
then just let your feelings show
and make it all for one and all for love.”