While these words are placed here, the one who is writing the words in sequence is part of the words so should “I” step out from behind them and write a personal blog entry or a third-person story?

I step out today as I slowly awaken from a months-long slumber, stirred awake by my dear friend Jenn a month or so ago.

When I stood over the kitchen sink looking into the backyard a little while ago, I wondered how I could thank Jenn for getting my attention.

Should I sing her praises?  After all, she is a person worth writing lyrics and melodies instead of short stories and poems.

Or should I celebrate our friendship by writing what I used to write before I fell asleep, knowing as I do that my six months of snoozing directly correlated to the moment when I stood outside a Hammersmith community center in London, waiting on my wife to finish a Ceroc dance when a white male in his 30s/40s approached me (he had eyed me a few times during the evening and I had simply nodded at him in what I thought was the typical heterosexual male recognition manner) and offered to perform a sex act with my in the loo?

I had maybe 5 or 10 seconds to consider telling my wife that I had to go to the bathroom and she wouldn’t have questioned anything.

Running through my thoughts was the tube schedule and how much time we had to get to the nearest subway station to catch a ride back back to South Kensington.

Plus my natural reticence, the slight paranoia that the guy’s offer could be a setup.  Or maybe he had an STD that he would fail to mention and I would get infected.

The look of anticipation on his face told me he feared my saying no so I chose to believe that his offer was truly genuine.

In the last second when I was deciding whether to commit to “what goes on during London holiday, stays in London,” my wife stepped up beside me and interrupted the nervous gaze I was sharing with the guy.

Therefore, I thanked him for the offer and told him I wasn’t interested, upon which he literally ran off.

If I hadn’t told my wife, she wouldn’t have known what just transpired.

But I’ve told myself all this in a blog already.

What I failed to mention was the connection of this event to my failure to move out into a house rental on my own when I thought my wife might be dying of heart failure just before our London trip.

Failure, failure, failure.

Most importantly, I lumped all of this together with my love for Jenn.  And not just Jenn, but the part of me that is unashamedly polyamorous, and how many times I’ve failed to show, as opposed to tell, Jenn how much I love her.

By admitting I love Jenn, I admit I love many more, such as the only woman whose body has no personal space between her and me — Michele.

Michele and I are happy dogs in heat when we’re together, including when my wife is there.  Being bisexual, too, Michele loves my wife.  Michele is the only woman I’ve ever loved with whom we can be in full embrace and talk about our spouses at the same time. Zero jealousy in either one of us.

So, when I didn’t take the free opportunity to demonstrate to myself and myself alone that I was truly bisexual with a stranger in London, I thought my life was over and if my life was over, there was no more Jenn, Michele or others in my life and all I was left with was the monastic life that I could have led had I chosen to give up sexual relations with another person at any point before I got married 30 years ago.

I returned home and focused on the life of an asexual aesthete, telling everyone about the moments in my London trip where I had felt the greatest epiphanies, in Newgrange and Westminster Abbey.

I also started masturbating a lot more and quit writing.

I won’t say that I hated myself but simply that I felt it was no longer necessary to care about the future, every moment felt the same as the previous moment which would be the same as the next moment, ad infinitum.

Not a bad thing, really.

In fact, for most of us that’s the daily truth, the FEELING that everything is the same when it truly isn’t.

It was in the tiny realisation that no two moments are exactly the same that I lived the last six months.

My hearing loss increased and the sense of smell decreased, worrisome signs of either depression, dementia, or both.

I wasn’t dead yet.

Meanwhile, the winds of society shifted ever so slightly, something I smelled when we were on our Rhine River cruise in December 2015 and reinforced during our Ireland/England trip in August 2016 (nothing like going out-of-country to get a clearer view of your national subculture, especially as globally loud as an American one).

When I stood face-to-face with the guy in Hammersmith I was ever so slightly aware that our encounter could be recorded and used against me in an overbearing ultraconservative government intent on making examples of citizens it deemed unworthy or who would not buckle under blackmail to get in line.

For you see, as a writer I think I am my own god and as my own god I believe I have an influence on others that outweighs evidence to the contrary.

The little pebbles I throw into the pond of life are not causing typhoons in the South China Sea.

Or are they?

What if I believed that words I had written months or years ago were part of the zeitgeist which understood our species was only going to establish permanent offworld colonies by depriving the peasant class of essential raw materials needed to build laboratories where the next great living things were going to be created from scratch, beings specifically created to live in space and on other celestial spheres?

And that despite my reservations about his sanity, the current U.S. President and his administration understood the same thing?

Would I be willing to sacrifice my personal desires to declare a permanent presence on Mars of Earth-based lifeforms fully successful by 6th May 2050?

Can I have both?

Jenn gives me the hope that I can.

I don’t know how. I’ve already tried and failed once.

“If at first you don’t succeed…”

My smartwatch reminds me I’ve been sitting for an hour and not exercising.

My future is alive again and I feel fine. Time to stop writing/talking and dance!