Category: Friends

Advice, Authenticity, Being True To Yourself, Courtship, Free Spirit, Freedom, Friends, Fun, Human Nature, Ideas, Life, Living, Love, Lovers, Loyalty, Marriage, Oppression, Play, Quality of Life, Relationships, Sex, Values

How an Open Relationship Can be Fun and Exciting for Both You and Your Mail Carrier

Paul Sunstone

“If you love somebody, set them free.  If they return to you, it’s beautiful.” — Anonymous, often falsely attributed to Richard Bach.

SUMMARY:  Open relationships in which the partners are by and large free to do as they please aren’t all roses and sparkles, but they can solve some common enough problems with more conventional relationships.

(About a 7 minute read)

Give me a free spirited woman!  After more than twenty years of being happily celibate, I most certainly wouldn’t know what to do with one, but that does not mean I would not — if the right one came along — seriously consider getting into one of those romantic thingies with her.

You know, one of those friendships where you get to do sexy stuff like…um…I forget now.  Oh yeah!  Like blow up condoms and bounce them around the bedroom together!  At least, that’s what I recall condoms are for.  I’m pretty sure they make lousy garbage can liners, so it’s logically got to be balloons, right?

Continue reading “How an Open Relationship Can be Fun and Exciting for Both You and Your Mail Carrier” →

Bad Ideas, Cultural Change, Cultural Traits, Culture, Friends, God(s), Human Nature, Ideas, Life, Living, Nontheism, Quality of Life, Religion, Wisdom

Late Night Thoughts: Moonless Nights, Theism and Nontheism, Age Segregation, Ancient Reputations, and More (October 1, 2018)

Paul Sunstone

(About a 5 minute read)

I once read that on a moonless night, no more than about 5,000 stars are visible to the naked eye.  Yet, to us that number might as well be a million, given how poor our judgement of numerical quantities is.

Apparently, most of us cannot instantly, without counting, recognize the difference between such a small quantity as eight and nine items — let alone the difference between 5,000 and 1,000,000.

♦♦♦

Can you imagine what a paradise this earth would be for (especially) young men if women did not need to fear getting to know them?  Not only would it be easy to get a first date, but you could take her just about anywhere.

Continue reading “Late Night Thoughts: Moonless Nights, Theism and Nontheism, Age Segregation, Ancient Reputations, and More (October 1, 2018)” →

Adolescence, Adolescent Sexuality, Attachment, Authenticity, Being True To Yourself, Coffee Shop Folks, Coffee Shop Stories, Family, Fatherless Children, Fatherless Daughters, Fatherless Girls, Friends, Human Nature, Jackie, Jerks, Judgementalism, Life, Living, Love, Lovers, Mental and Emotional Health, Obsession, People, Quality of Life, Relationships, Sarah, Self, Self Identity, Self Image, Self-determination, Self-Knowledge, Sex, Sexuality, Society

All the Young Women

Paul Sunstone

SUMMARY: I take a look at the women I met some years ago in Colorado Springs, and then draw a few conclusions about the challenges they faced at that time in their lives.

(About a 8 minute read)

People are often more predictable than life itself.  I can often predict, with surprising accuracy, what a long-term friend will do in almost any situation, but my life has taught me that it can be considerably more difficult to predict where I will be in a year or two.

I certainly did not expect when I came to Colorado that I would soon know — at least casually — about 200 young men and women twenty years younger than me, nor that about two dozen of them would befriend me.

Yet that’s what happened — largely as a direct consequence of my choosing to frequent a coffee shop that both served the cheapest cup in town and was the hang out of hundreds of local high school students.  Since it was also the oldest and most established coffee shop in town, it was also the hang out of everyone else — from the mayor and some city council members to several homeless people.

Continue reading “All the Young Women” →

Abuse, Butch, Ethics, Family, Friends, Goals, Happiness, Human Nature, Judgementalism, Life, Living, Love, Lovers, Mature Love, Meaning, Morality, Morals, Parental Love, People, Purpose, Quality of Life, Rae, Relationships, Romantic Love, Sex, Sexuality, Shannon, Society, Tara Lynn, Tomoko, Values

Butch and Rae: An Unlikely Love Story

Paul Sunstone

(About a 16 minute read)

Butch was such a nondescript man that he surely did not need a crowd to be overlooked by most anyone of us.  He was of average build, and just under average in height.  There was nothing either ugly or handsome about his face.   Blue eyes, a bit narrow.  Sandy hair.  Pale complexion.  Not only was he easily overlooked, he was even more easily underestimated.

Had you seen him during the time we knew each other, you most likely would have thought, “janitor”.  Arms too thin for construction, looks too unpolished to be a professional or even a store clerk.   And you would have been right.  At that time in his life, Butch was a janitor.

He was also one of those curious sort of people you sometimes come across in small towns and rural areas.  An honest genius with no more than a high school education, and no ambitions for himself.

Continue reading “Butch and Rae: An Unlikely Love Story” →

Allies, Attachment, Consciousness, Death, Dying, Enlightenment, Fear, Friends, Human Nature, Impermance, Life, Living, Lovers, Meaning, Meditation, Mysticism, Quality of Life, Relationships, Religion, Satori, Self, Self Identity, Self Image, Self-Integration, Self-Knowledge, Spirituality, Transformative Experience

The Fear of Death and Dying

Paul Sunstone

Disclaimer: The following opinions are my own — I am usually wrong about most things — and so you should examine these issues for yourself. On the other hand, only a boring, bumbling, berkle-snozer would disagree with me about anything.​

(About a 5 minute read)

It is my esteemed and noble opinion that the fear of death is a major factor in how folks experience life, and a major motive behind much of human behavior.

How much of a factor and motive, you might ask? Ernest Becker, the psychiatrist who authored, The Denial of Death, thought it unconsciously drove most of human experience and behavior. And here the word “unconsciously” is key to understanding the fear of death.

I do not agree with all of Becker’s ideas, but I am in complete agreement with him about the fear of death being very largely a hidden, unconscious fear. Ask ten people if they fear death, eight or nine will not be aware of themselves fearing it.

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Community, Cultural Traits, Culture, Family, Friends, Jane Paterson Basil, Life, Outstanding Bloggers, People, Poetry, Quality of Life, Society, Terese

The Currency of Community

Paul Sunstone

(About a 2 minute read)

“Rihanna. I love her music, her style,
Just love her.”

One million or two? How many times today
Have I heard you praise one celeb or another?

Seems curious to me how the down to earth
Billionaires wear T-shirts, jeans, and sandals
To the office; how everyday became causal Friday;
How no one speaks more than two syllables
If they can help it, and none of us any longer
Are pretentious enough to learn the sciences,
But for all our down to earthiness, our hearts
Belong to the celebs, and only the celebs.

In the evening I once again tell you I love you,
But you only turn from your screen
When you want to say Johnny Depp
Has a new movie out that we must see.

Who lives next door to us now that Cheryl died
Do you remember? I never met her myself
More than to be surprised her voice was ice
When once I said “Hello”. I’ve fled from her,
And from you, to the blogs where my heart
Is still a bit malnourished by the distances.

But there I’ve found lives lived in immediacy
To the realities of mine. Terese is as gentle
As I try to be. Kat is as smart as I aspire.
Jane is like me a poet who tackles
Her life as it is. Riali’s kind and supportive,
Mark is brilliant as gold dust,
And most of the others have more than one thing
To recommend them to me.

You speak of Rihanna and Depp,
And others who are cocooned by wealth and staffs,
Who might as well live above us
On a station circling the earth.
Why are you so fascinated with lives
So unlike yours? It seems to me you’re chasing
Some dream of someday living among them,
But you’ve paying for that dream
In the currency of community.

Authenticity, Being True To Yourself, Friends, Relationships

Somewhere in the Vicinity of Your Heart

Paul Sunstone

(About a 3 minute read)

On the warmer nights in the winter
I would sit on the patio composing
Poems for you who had no ears
For them. Poems I once called,
“Lighting colored patio lamps
To guide your way back to the stars”.

I’d sound their words softly
Almost in whispers to hear
If they had begun to flow
Like molten gold to me,
If the heat was on them.

We met when you mailed me
About your husband of 11 years,
A preaching man
Who with his congregation
Wanted you to become the perfect
Wife and subservient helpmate
To all their needs,
But true to none of your own.

You spoke of how you were losing yourself
How you were losing yourself to them.
“What do i do?? What can i do?”
And you didn’t cap your “i”s.

I think I saw beyond your questions.
I think I saw into your spirited heart.

Perhaps being older I knew,
As you did not, consciously did not,
The value of your authenticity to you.

Patio lamps to the stars.
I composed patio lamps to the stars

Like:

Then you said the stick-figure
Drawings of my penis
(That I’d painfully created over the years
By ripping them from the deep reaches of my soul,
And rendering them on museum-quality,
Artist-grade papers)
Had made your raw and honest emotions
Visible to you,
Made them concrete and tangible,
So that you could touch them
Once again.

I didn’t really mind you didn’t get my jokes.
It wasn’t like they were all I did.
It wasn’t like they were all the gifts I had for you.

But they were I think where my love showed,
Was left out on your porch by night
For you to feel it for breakfast in the morning.

It was my love for you that moved me
To introduce you and him who I knew
Would be better for you than me.

I know in this sorrowful world
The sad people offer their
Wholesome condemnations —
Condemnations that substitute
For genuine insight —
Of women who like you dump a friend
For the one reason you gave
(My lack of money)
Then turn on me too
When I stick up for you
Saying I’m a chump and a fool
To be suckered in like that.

But I do not condemn you
And I do not condemn them.
I know judgment never truly sees true,
Never sees the marrow
Beneath the bone.

It’s just that I don’t understand
Why we couldn’t stay friends.

Have you ever dug down beneath
The troubled mud of confusion
About something important to you?

Have you ever looked beneath
The wind-lashed waves, looked
Into the darkness below the surface?

I did that with you.

It felt like being ground to a point
By a sharpener and yearning
Then to glide across your breasts
In order to leave
A fine and gentle mark
Somewhere in the vicinity
Of your heart.