I'm not a bad writer I'm just a bad writer (Yes I know that I just contradicted myself, that wasn’t a mistake). I get so frustrated with this voice recognition but at the same time I love it because it allows me to record my thoughts and save them until later when I have time to edit and/or post to my blog. One of the things I don’t understand about my editing abilities is it seems that no matter how many times I read, read, read, and reread there are still all these typos or statements that just don’t make sense. You would think that because I am dictating everything lately my posts should be accurate and without typos except for my grammar issues or perhaps my accent because where I am from we tend to run our words together (sort of in the Northeast of the United States). The one thing that really drives me crazy is when the phone app sometimes stops recording and I don’t notice it. Its seems like every time it is is recording beautifully and I am walking along deep in thought, no matter how long I talk as long as I keep checking its recording with no issues, but let me be distracted and stop thinking about the possibility of it stopping and I’ll be damned it if doesn’t stop at some point and I would have been talking for god (there is no god) knows how long and then notice that at some point it had stopped and I have to repeat myself. Sometimes I lose some very good thoughts, things I know I said I really liked but of course once I see that the phone stopped recording or translating my voice two or three minutes before I certainly I can't remember those thoughts or specific words and try as I might to recreate them they don’t come out the same. It’s probably all moot anyway because it’s not like I think people are actually reading my posts, or following them with any regularity. I notice that those that do seem to read or comment are going through the same experiences, like losing a pet or drinking too much etc, so I guess the old saying that misery loves company is true.
Since I’ve been using voice recognition I have been posting nearly every day since and I like the consistency. Unfortunately (and remember I’m typing/editing this about 5 to 35 days after I recorded it) the only person (at this point) that I believe is reading my blog and taking it with any seriousness is my husband and this is because he has just started treating me like he always does when he is in one of his “Woe is me, I’m so sad and it’s your fault” and the “let me mentally attack you for your thoughts and posts” mode. In other words he is being a REAL DICK the last few days. But I digress...
Sometime because of my accent my phone simply makes up words and I don’t always catch it and I try to edit (and I’m a terrible editor because I am forever missing stuff) and of course if the phone doesn’t understand what I’m saying then that causes problems too. I am so bad at this even when I do proof my documents (and edit like I’m doing now) the words sound right to me, they read right to me and the later, after I post the blog and re-read them (say on my smartphone while sitting on the toilet) there are ALWAYS and I say ALWAYS mistakes. Even after I catch this erroneous errors and correct them and later reread the post I still find more, It’s maddening!! it looks perfect to me and I will be damned if when I look at it later once again I find yet even more mistakes. So what I’m saying is that these documents are kind of like what they call “living documents”. The first time someone reads my posts they might be like “Who is this illiterate idiot? I’m not reading his crap.” (like I have a huge following that even cares) and I don't really believe anyone is really interested in reading about the details of my life (other than my husband) anyway, so this blog is mostly about therapy for myself.
There are other times during the recognition process when for some reason the software just seems to go back to the beginning of my translation and just starts repeating the entire post (it’s weird, it just randomly restarts from the beginning and I have to wait for it to catch up while it retypes every I had already recorded as if it’s a new statement) so later when I go back to edit not only are there portions missing and words that are misunderstood but sometimes the document text is repeated three or four times. I mean it literally restarts at the beginning and when I’m editing I suddenly find that I’m looking at what I just corrected in the next paragraph is raw form so this process of recording live does have its drawback. The frustrating part is that usually I am recording when I am walking around the outside of my house with my dogs so when it repeats of course it stops recording during the process because it’s busy duplicating what I had just said and I have to wait for the phone to reprocess everything before I can proceed and sometimes I will just be like “Fuck it” and not bother.
But I am telling you, anyone that blogs about their day to day existence, this is the way to go! I am recording my thoughts, experience in my life, memories of things passed and thoughts of my future all in live time. When I die I will be long forgotten but as they say everything that goes on the Internet remains somewhere forever (some Russian spy is probably at this very moment reading my blog… actually some Trump inspired spy.. Juicy stuff hey Mr. Spy?). A good analogy (not that I would ever consider doing this) would be like masturbating in public. Would anyone simply watch you and if they are watching are they enjoying it, becoming aroused? Or are they about to call the police and say “Hey this crazy pervert is dangerous and jerking off where everyone can see it happening”. Or maybe they are recording you on their Smartphone while you are doing it so they can post it later saying “Look what I saw on the subway today”. (And yes I saw this on a posting which is why I’m thinking about it as being the perfect comparison to my blog posts, kind of an erotic analogy but I like it).
I have always liked the idea of journaling and even as a child I used to have one of those handwritten diary books, you know like the one with the golden key and heart shaped lock that mean brothers are always trying to find hidden so they can pick on you later. (Like the Brady Bunch when Marcia’s privacy was betrayed...I think that was the character, been a while since I’ve seen that sit-com). Sadly all of my diaries or journals have long since disappeared or were thrown away my mother who always thought the notion of a diary was nonsense, but of course I found out that in one point in my life my mother would read what I wrote like, she being like the nasty little brother I just described and always at some point would use my own words against me at a later. I’m sure like most mothers, especially those like mine they feel like as long as the child is living in my house they (the child) is my property and I can do and say anything I like, in other words, no privacy rights in my parent’s house. She love to snoop and see what she could find hidden in my room, for some reason it gave her a kick to spy on me and my younger brother (me more than him as I was always the black sheep of the family) it was just something she did and something enjoyed, she was a snoop, looking under my mattress and finding magazines that I would use during my masturbation sessions, a magazine that I usually swiped from my brother's bedroom or my father's bedroom (yes I did my own snooping….I’m the kettle calling the pot black here). My older brothers preferred Hustler magazine while my father enjoyed his Penthouse and the occasional Playboy. (I always wondered if my mother found these magazine in their rooms too.) The problem with Playboy was there was generally nothing but women in those fuzzy edged artistic poses (boring) but Penthouse and Hustler often had male and female couple in seductive softcore poses where they would sometimes actually show the man’s cock. So while my mother would confront me with her findings, (one time presenting a cum stained pair of underwear to me to embarrass me) in reality my mother was finding my brothers or my father's magazines under my mattress, but as I just questioned I’m sure she must have snooped into their private areas as well so I’m sure she knew where the magazines came from, after all I was too young to be buying them myself (except for Playgirl).
You see, at some point if she would have looked hard enough (and she may have) she would have found the occasional Playgirl magazine. This magazine (probably out of business now) geared towards women (or so they thought but I think it was more of a way to reach gay men as well, without making one appear gay). I was lucky enough to find by accident in a store on day. You might ask “Well how did a minor get an adult magazine?” Well I had this silly little note process that I would use to purchase Playgirl (so desperate was I to actually see a naked man) and I was probably 12-14 years old at the time. They would never allow this now today but I would go to the nearby drugstore or 7-11 convenience store with this silly note that would read: “Please allow my son to purchase one (I would actually specify “one”) issue of Playgirl magazine and it was signed by me with my mother's name (a fake names obviously, I certainly didn’t want my mother to be contacted)
I stood before the clerk acting all innocent as in my lie as the would ring up the purchase, today this technique wouldn't work because this transaction would be illegally selling pornography to minor (even though they can get it for free on the internet today) so no child really needs to be as creative as I was at that time, they can just go to www.dot.anything. Anyway in today’s world they probably wouldn't even know that magazines like Penthouse and Playboy ever even existed. I don’t know now, as an adult, whether they publish these anymore. I think Playgirl is definitely long gone.
But these would be the types of things my mother would often hope to find as she searched for anything that would incriminate her child of anything she could use at the right moment, her own motherly waterboarding technique so none of my personal and private thoughts or moments were off limits to her. She generally would know everything about what was going in my life at that time, believe me, more often than not there were gay thoughts being revealed, something of which she never spoke but I’m sure appalled her, which is probably why I was the focus of her searches. Even without her nosiness my mother knew I was gay, they say mothers always know so I’m sure even before reading about my crushes on the boy in school or the odd and random television star she knew her little boy was gay.
I'm probably being more crude than people are comfortable with in this blog posting speaking of topics like masturbation and I’m sure in my youthful journals and diaries I avoided that topic as a youth because I always felt that adolescent guilt after performing the act so I felt shame that it was something I was doing, thinking (just like when I first started realizing I was gay) that I was the only one that was didling. At least my mother was spared the details of my orgasms while thoughts of men swam through my head.
I'm sure there were many descriptions of people that I liked in a sexually and even if I die mention them I would sometimes changed their sex and name to something female just in case some (like I knew my mother was doing) would be reading my private thoughts and dreams (at least in the beginning of my journaling because over time I started mentioning men, what I liked about them and what I would do with them). But when I start putting my thoughts on paper if I was thinking “I love him” as I am sure scribbled as some point somewhere, I more probably referred to “him” as “her”, as if that would fool my sneaky little mom who later told me that she always knew I was “GAY” she would say with such disdain, as I said, mothers always know.
In my case tt should have been obvious to anyone entering my bedroom because while Farrah Fawcett’s famous bathing suit poster hung in plain view as you walked in, behind my door, where generally unless you closed the door in my room was my there for my own private viewing was a poster of Dirk Benedict shirtless with a towel around his neck and shoulders, gripping the ends in a very masculine pose, MAN I LOVED HIM! For those who don’t know Farrah Fawcett was a female sex symbol of the 70’s that played a detective on a television series called “Charlie’s Angels” and Dirk Benedict (while probably not a sex symbol (at least to most people but he definitely was to me)) played in the first iteration of “Battlestar Galactica” as the character Starbuck and I fantasized about him more than any other male star (well next to Lee Majors and Robert Conrad and Michael Landon and well...any other handsome male actor). But I followed everything I could regarding Dirk Benedict, I remember knowing that he was from Walla Walla Washington and that he first started smoking cigars as a kid. Of course I’ve long since forgotten all the other facts I knew about him, but he was my teenage crush. I adored him but somehow by the time he became “Face” on the “A-Team” (another television series) I had lost interest. I think that is because by that point I was no longer fantasizing about gay sex but performing it with at minimum some of the neighborhood boys (all married, so even grandfathers today).
In a way it’s kind of odd that I’m talking about my adolescent crushes because when I got older in the 1980’s I had a thing for the lead singer from “Wham” and I’m talking about George Michael. Man he looked good in the video for his his song “I Want Your Sex” and boy did I want his sex. I just thought he was adorable and I just stopped and listened intently anytime the radio played his music. I even bought his “single” cassette so I could play this song over and over in my car. I mentioned in another blog that my husband and I would spend a lot of time at his sister’s home during the 1980’s in her home bar that was decorated to look like a real bar and I can’t tell you how many times (once we were all good and buzzed) that we danced to “I Want Your Sex”. After that “hit song” you really didn’t hear about him too much until the 1990’s when he came out with that “Faith” CD (compact disc - we didn’t have MP3 players at that time). Then at some point he got caught for lewd activities in a public bathroom doing gay stuff so it came out that he was gay and I was like “YAY!” but when I saw him interviewed after his arrest he had changed so much, he was no longer sexy, he actually looked weird with this really short cropped hair with bangs and odd wrap around sunglasses. He just looked so totally freaky and was no longer attractive to me but the cool thing was that he was gay. I loved it when someone famous would come out as gay, there were so few of us out in public even with all the progress gays were making when you were along, at work, in public, at church (like I ever attended) or school, you still had to hide in shame for being a pervert because some ancient book said “and this is so”.. Anyway I’m kind of going on about George Michael because I just heard that he died today (at my age, 53) from some sort of heart complication. Sad. Even though I no longer found him attractive I still like his music.
But his dying at my age from a heart attack or whatever makes me feel less stupid about my fears of a heart attack. I mean he was the exact same age as me and he's dead from something that has caused me panic since my 20’s in the 1980’s, suddenly and out of nowhere which is precisely my fear, my phobia. He was a reminder of the reality fear of heart failure and the infinite number of panic attack I suffered could one day be the real thing. All those imaginary heart issues (and now I live with a person who has real heart issues) so lately it has been back on my mind again on a nearly daily basis. I'm reminded of heart issues no matter where I am, what I am doing, at every turn and just can’t seem to avoid the topic. In addition there is a lack of happiness in this house right now having lost my one dogs and my other dogs seem to be mourning the loss as much as I am because they just don't seem happy anymore, they seem lost. Maybe it’s my imagination because how can I possibly know what a dog is thinking or how they feel but they seem to look at me all the time like they are saying “Where is he?” (as if asking where did my deceased dog go).
I am not in happy place myself right now either, for me everywhere I turn in my house I feel like I am seeing and hearing about death and now George Michael's death just reminds me how close I am to my own mortality.