Vol. 1, Post #31

I got nothing.

Dear Readers,

A two-week complete respite from work is a wild ride, and as the end of it coincided with some very very very terrible news, instead of coming back full of vim and vigor, I find I have nothing to say.

Vigor is a word that most of us know and sometimes use. Lesser known is vim, which is from the Latin vis, meaning strength. Similar to the word koach, which is Hebrew for strength, might, power. Koach is a word near and dear to me. I have it tattoo’d (in Hebrew, large font, as in, pay attention) on my upper inner left thigh. I think of myself as strong, sometimes too strong for my own good — too headstrong, too sure of my own “knowledge,” too committed in my own narrative. I’ve been working on being less so for years.

In Provincetown, I have a tiny bit of a ritual that I like to perform when I’ve been sitting and staring at the sea for days. Across the bay from our home on the beach is Long Point lighthouse. While it’s always beautiful to gaze upon Long Point, and I’ve even kayaked out to Long Point from our beach — another wild ride indeed — I find that watching sailboats pass by the lighthouse gives me a kind of “that was then” and “this is now” feeling. On more than one occasion, I’ve said to myself, “I’m going to allow myself to think about XXX for a bit longer, until the boat crosses the lighthouse, and then I’m putting XXX to bed, and saying good-bye to it.” It’s cleansing to me. As Isak Dinesen wrote in Seven Gothic Tales, “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”

On the tail end of our vacation in Provincetown this year came the news that six of the Israeli hostages were murdered, most of whom are close in age to my son.

While sex and gender are deeply politicized topics that I have welcomed into my Substack again and again, the politics of war and crimes against humanity don’t need any more editorializing by me in this space. I am deeply, deeply sad right now and the thought of publishing this week’s original post — which was about new technologies in sex toys, masturbation, and orgasm after age 50 — seems preposterous. It will wait. So until next week, Dear Readers, I send you all wishes for peace, love, and strength. And a sailboat.