Ex Girl Friends Ex Boy Friends

Yes. All that hair. I recall it came into vogue at around the time of the Munich Olympics, which would be 1972. The men's hair salon I went to at that time in Toronto - that now long-chopped long ago era when I still had hair worth reckoning with - immediately put up its prices by 50%-100%, and according to my hair cutter the cash rolled in.

It looks rather, well, unnatural now. But it was THE fashionista look in 1973 when I left Toronto for New Mexico. In Santa Fe I soon got rid of my flared jeans and had my locks shorn to the popular NM short cut. Real men in Santa Fe and Taos didn't go out looking like a male model in the '70s.

These days many of us would be happy to half half as much hair. And black not out of a dye bottle.
 
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DownUnder said:
Yes. All that hair. I recall it came into vogue at around the time of the Munich Olympics, which would be 1972. The men's hair salon I went to at that time in Toronto - that now long-chopped long ago era when I still had hair worth reckoning with - immediately put up its prices by 50%-100%, and according to my hair cutter the cash rolled in.

It looks rather, well, unnatural now. But it was THE fashionista look in 1973 when I left Toronto for New Mexico. In Santa Fe I soon got rid of my flared jeans and had my locks shorn to the popular NM short cut. Real men in Santa Fe and Taos didn't go out looking like a male model in the '70s.

These days many of us would be happy to half half as much hair. And black not out of a dye bottle.
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Hairspray. Men used it as much or more than women back then. But it wasn't much use in the New Mexico wind. Hairspray was nasty stuff. And hair gel. That stuff would harden and you became a helmet head. "Unnatural" is putting it mildly. But we did it for vanity.


.....................
 
ZM - Two dogs and a shadow by Archiver, on Flickr

Zeiss Ikon ZM | Zeiss Biogon 28mm f2.8 | Kodak Portra 400 VC | Melbourne

During the good times, we would walk her dogs to a nearby park. As dogs often are, they were rambunctious and active, needing a fair bit of play each day.

I had an unexpectedly enlightening experience with the one on the right: up until then, I never really liked dogs on the whole. But one day in the back yard, I was sitting on a step while she was in the bathroom, and I looked at her dog - spontaneously I felt a profound sense of connection, and I saw this dog for the living, breathing creature that he was. As he looked back at me, it was as if his demeanour softened; he moved towards me, and gently put his head against my knee as we looked at each other. I've never seen dogs the same way since. This experience paved the way for me to have a love and appreciation of animals in general, coming a lot later in life than for many. It's one of the things I would probably not have experienced had it not been for her.

When he passed away, I gave her dozens of photos I had taken of him over the years. She had some of them printed and framed, and the frame hung on the wall above the urn of his ashes.
 
An old photo (and when I say old I mean 25+ years) I stumbled upon recently. I do not know how it survived. Apart from that, I probably never did anything with this image earlier not because of the subject, but instead, due to its technical shortcomings. But in retrospect looking at it with new eyes, it has a certain "je ne sais quoi" that conveys a private moment of her awakening from bed to a new day. A delicious moment that bespeaks of quiet intimacy once shared. Odd in retrospect that moments and feelings so strong back in the day are now nothing much more than an interesting photo op - albeit of someone who was once so very special. But that's life! Modern physicists sometimes argue that time is an illusion............................but not from where I am sitting.

Photo0015_Nero_AI_Image_Sharpener_Sharp_Face (1).jpeg
 
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boojum said:
Kafka: "Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."
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"Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; in this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself."
Kafka Briefe an Milena.

Kafka’s letters to Milena are seriously disquieting; he wrote to her in German and she responded in Czech. If you read the original texts there are places where they clearly misunderstand each other. The perfect written metaphor of life with someone else, each only ever really in their own head.
 
Freakscene said:
"Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; in this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself."
Kafka Briefe an Milena.

Kafka’s letters to Milena are seriously disquieting; he wrote to her in German and she responded in Czech. If you read the original texts there are places where they clearly misunderstand each other. The perfect written metaphor of life with someone else, each only ever really in their own head.
Click to expand...


The man who married my-ex wife to me was a Jesuit. In the final pre-Cana conference he shared, "It is difficult enough for two people of the same sex to live together. For people of the opposite sex to live together is a miracle." Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars explored this. Nevertheless were are drawn to it. It works so long as love can conquer difficulty. It is difficult but when it works it is wonderful. In a good relationship you are making love to your best friend. That's as good as it gets in this life.
 
boojum said:
The man who married my-ex wife to me was a Jesuit. In the final pre-Cana conference he shared, "It is difficult enough for two people of the same sex to live together. For people of the opposite sex to live together is a miracle." Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars explored this. Nevertheless were are drawn to it. It works so long as love can conquer difficulty. It is difficult but when it works it is wonderful. In a good relationship you are making love to your best friend. That's as good as it gets in this life.
Click to expand...
I heard a statistic just today by chance. (I do not know of its origin or truth - but it sounds at least "truthy" to me.)
It said that the worst success rate for marital relationships are those involving two lesbians.
The second worst involve male - female marital relationships.
And the most enduring relationships are the male - male ones.
Now I cannot say myself as I am hetero and have only ever been in male - female relationships. But I say it sounds "truthy" to me based on my own experience and observations.

As a dear friend of mine Greg, (now sadly passed far too young) was wont to say: "They breathe different air." He was a lawyer and had a way with words! 🙂 ( I miss Greg he always the source of some pithy sayings that had more than a hint of wisdom to them.) 😢

He said this not to denigrate women - he was in constant search for a stable relationship with one and his words were words of exasperation, not denigration. And the problems are not those of women alone - we are part of the difficulty, no doubt. Yes, we and they do breathe different air.
 
I found these slide images and scanned them a few years ago when passing those long COVID lock-in hours. (What a complete balls-up that whole man-made disaster was from beginning to end and still no one held accountable. But that's an aside.)
Taken on a trip to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea one photo shows my then wife diving on a sunken U.S. B25 bomber off the coast of Madang (north coast of New Guinea) and the other her diving on a Japanese freighter, the Toa Maru in Ghizo (Solomon Islands Western Province). For some reason I preferred this monochrome version in the B25 image. Whatever the reasons for our relationship not lasting may have been, we certainly did have some things in common which bonded us, such as a love of adventure, diving, sailing and travel and those things still live with me. In fact, it is fair to say they helped make me. So we take from all of our relationships the good things if we are wise. This has allowed us to stay on friendly terms in subsequent years.


DSC07690.jpg
DSC07644-Editaa.jpg
 
peterm1 said:
I heard a statistic just today by chance. (I do not know of its origin or truth - but it sounds at least "truthy" to me.)
It said that the worst success rate for marital relationships are those involving two lesbians.
The second worst involve male - female marital relationships.
And the most enduring relationships are the male - male ones.
Now I cannot say myself as I am hetero and have only ever been in male - female relationships. But I say it sounds "truthy" to me based on my own experience and observations.

As a dear friend of mine Greg, (now sadly passed far too young) was wont to say: "They breathe different air." He was a lawyer and had a way with words! 🙂 ( I miss Greg he always the source of some pithy sayings that had more than a hint of wisdom to them.) 😢

He said this not to denigrate women - he was in constant search for a stable relationship with one and his words were words of exasperation, not denigration. And the problems are not those of women alone - we are part of the difficulty, no doubt. Yes, we and they do breathe different air.
Click to expand...

From these observations the obvious problem is women. LOL To quote Henry Higgins, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" OTOH, for me, they can be so damned attractive, endearing and desirable. There was a young woman I loved so long ago, attractive, smart as hell (Ph D + MD, Yale and Harvard), spoke five languages and was at the time my very best friend. If there is a God, and if there is a Heaven, and if I get to go, she will be there with a large glass of tea with strawberry jam stirred into it and a slice of seedless rye with unsalted butter. We have to talk.


Masha-04.jpg


As for sailing, Ratty put it best,

"Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing... about in boats — or with boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."
 
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boojum said:
From these observations the obvious problem is women. LOL To quote Henry Higgins, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" OTOH, for me, they can be so damned attractive, endearing and desirable. There was a young woman I loved so long ago, attractive, smart as hell (Ph D + MD, Yale and Harvard), spoke five languages and was at the time my very best friend. If there is a God, and if there is a Heaven, and if I get to go, she will be there with a large glass of tea with strawberry jam stirred into it and a slice of seedless rye with unsalted butter. We have to talk.

As for sailing, Ratty put it best,

"Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing... about in boats — or with boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."
Click to expand...
All true!
Which is the enigmatic and infuriating thing about relationships and this itself keeps drawing us in. (Thinks: It will be different next time!) 😆
 
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