For those who don’t remember, he’s my room mate and landlord, and a good friend of the family. He is actually family, just not by blood that we know of. I wonder what he’ll think of the changes in me. Like Shai, he’ll probably like them and say things like, “Good morning! Welcome to Israel.”
Hannibal has started SMS’ing again. Those have been rough conversations. The last one ended with me saying, “You opened this can of worms, princess. You’ve never shown any concern for my wellbeing. You’ve never been a man for me. As long as you keep behaving like a discarded bitch instead of a man, I will keep reminding you.”
I had to calibrate that carefully. In the past, I’d have been either giving in because there was no American equalist reason not to, or obeying my instincts and not giving in, I’d have gotten a little hysterical and said something actually rude rather than steady and calculated to point out his unmanliness. If a man is going to conform to societal norms at all, then he should honor the implied discreet affairs social contract. If not, then he does not recognize the differences between men and women and is therefore unfit to mate with. Or he simply doesn’t recognize my womanhood, and is therefore not someone who is safe for me to mate with, much less grow attached to. It is most likely the latter since in the past I have seen him treating other ladies like ladies even though they were extremely unladylike.
So our time has passed years ago. His cousin and my mentor Hypatia did not understand his behavior towards me. I explained to her that somewhere along the way, I must have convinced him I was stupid.
Diva explains that men suffering from NMS are much like African Americans caught in the slave mentality. Deep down, they know they are incapable of handling freedom the freedom to determine their own destiny the freedom to have sex outside of marriage. You can’t tell them that though. It would be politically incorrect.
Were they capable of handling freedom, they would be doing something good, or at least something interesting with it. They would rise above their previous constraints and be marvelous instead of failing even to meet the past’s mediocre bar. So the slaves play little king, spend their little money on trifles they can’t afford, and make a mockery of being bad-assed. The broken men play house and pursue women they can’t afford, and make a mockery of being stallions.
But Nature is what she is. Just as a man should not keep me in his life if I am not improving it in any way, I should not keep a man in my life who is not improving it in any way. At the very least, he should be loving, and a consistent supply of attention and sex so that I don’t have to waste time in the streets, and my head is clear for work. That’s the least. Ideally, if he’s not broke, he should not want me to have any worries that he doesn’t, and I should look like a reflection of his status if we choose to live and work within society anyway. I don’t need to wear my gold to shovel compost but then many women in Africa do exactly that.
At my age, I don’t have much hope of meeting someone who wants to take care of me, but that being the case, they shouldn’t expect me to consider them more than temporary amusement. A boy-toy is just that: a toy. Their interest in me will pass as what is left of my beauty does, so my interest in them passes when they become boring. The sexual market is flooded with stupid men who somehow think they invented the idea of being aroused by big tits and a pretty face attached to a perhaps socially inconvenient, spirited woman.
In their fantasies, they imagine that they have what it takes to contain someone like me. So they tell me lies of a particular sort because in the dream world, it is true. In the real world though, it is not.
So in Hannibal’s dreams, he would be my king the tyrant in my bed. He acted out a part of this fantasy when he saw me, but life doesn’t have a subplot that can happen off screen. If it doesn’t occur, it doesn’t, and he never earned anything from me. I owe him nothing. There is no heroic action for me to admire. There is no consistency that I can lean on to build trust. There is just nothing but an occasional amusement that lost its fun factor back when he broke my bed from falling on it too hard when he was drunk, and not getting me a new one.
He has cost me enough, and not benefited me in any way that a thousand others more handsome, more masculine, and at least more honest could not.
