Jonathan

One of the characters I have written about since the 1990s is Jonathan. He is(my alter ego) so to speak. My primary purpose for writing is not for money but as a way to stay whole and balanced in my life. Some people do Art, or write symphonies, or play guitar or dance or whatever. I write and play and write music and sing. That is what I do along with hiking, swimming, biking, and traveling to stay balanced in my life. It keeps me healthy mentally,emotionally and physically. It is a very good thing!


Jonathan started thinking about all the women he had known in his life.
Women, historically, like to blame men for everything. It seems to be their favorite pastime. However, thinking like this only makes women children in the eyes of most real men. Men know that they didn't make the world the way it is. They just have to be more pragmatic than most women ever choose to be. For a real man, death is always looking over his shoulder. Death is always near. So women and girls tend to blame men for everything like scapegoats so they don't have to think of dying and death so much. But for real men, death is always breathing on our necks. We know how unsafe life really is. Living in a scapegoat fantasy is not an option for us. We have always died in the wars since time immemorial. Women have the option of whether to go to war. Most of the time men didn't have this option. This one difference changes men in a sad way and many don't survive well with death always breathing over their shoulders and die young in various ways.

So we understand when women choose to live in a fantasy. Their fantasy worlds keep some men alive like me. I have always loved women. They are probably the only reason why I have stayed alive so long. As long as I have had a good woman to stay alive for, I have. Some women's fantasies are silly but some are actually mature enough to sustain a relationship for a year or more or even a lifetime. So, we help each other through life any way we can.

When Jonathan was young he believed in getting married one time to a high school or college sweetheart and settling down and having some kids. But the Viet Nam War and the 1960s and 1970s came along and destroyed all these archaic notions or at least severely modified how Jonathan saw all these things. They say experience is the best teacher. I say experience turns everything you were taught growing up to bullshit!

Survive that! I did. So three wives later and one biological child with each wife and two step kids and 2 god daughters that my third wife and I helped into and through college and my oldest biological son who is now in medical school.

The most meaningful thing I can say about my life is that I survived it. For me, that is the single most surprising thing, that I am still alive at 60.

Because of my father and having had whooping cough, sunstroke and then childhood epilepsy I didn't have to get drafted and go to the Viet Nam War like many of my friends did. However, more young men died my age in Viet Nam than any other. My best high school friend who went to Viet Nam now has dementia and it lost to me. Those who went to Viet Nam came back in pieces either physically and mentally, all of them. No one I know came back a whole person from Viet Nam. It murdered their youth, their soul and their reality. It twisted them into strangers I didn't usually want to know anymore, except for my best high school buddy. But we didn't reconnect until about 5 years before he stopped knowing who he was.

Now, of my three best friends from Junior High through age 30, one is dead, one doesn't know who he is or who I am and one just broke his arm and was knocked unconscious chasing a 25 year old women down the slopes on skis. So he can't sleep more than 5 hours at a time now because his rotator cusp hurts too much ongoing now one year later. Sometimes I feel like the last man standing of all my friends. But I'm married and still have a 12 year old at home so I need to be strong for them. Life goes on.