Au Cochonnet Marin

Mistress… Curiously this word rhymes with stress, underlining the fact that a liaison can indeed be very stressful.

I recently read in AARP magazine an article by Joe Queenan called “Men who don’t cheat”.

Here is an excerpt:

“Men like to plop down on the couch and watch sports and drink beer. Romance, by contrast, is labor-intensive; you have to shower, shave, put on something other than sweatpants, buy flowers, go to the movies, read a book every once in a while, engage in a conversation.
Cheating on your wife involves travel, dinner reservations, booking hotel rooms. Once a man has been married a few decades, the energy he would need to expend on an extramarital affair would be a life-threatening shock to his nervous system. That’s why so many older men wouldn’t even think of cheating on their wives. It is too exhausting.”

This is true. For some men (just like some dogs) the chase is way more exciting than the catch. Once they have caught their prey, they quickly lose interest in it.

“Next to the pleasure of finding a new mistress is that of being rid of an old one.”  William Wycherley

The pursuit is often a way to reassure an aging person that he is still a “player”; that he still can please and seduce.

But for a married man, keeping a mistress is a luxury that few can afford. It is time-consuming and costly. And with the advent of the tell-all smartphone, it has become increasingly difficult to keep an affair under wraps.

An older man falling prey to middle-aged lust is better off using the services of an “escort” (love those euphemisms) than making a Faustian pact.

Having a mistress is definitely a young man’s game. He has the energy and the naivety to propel him forward. The possibility of getting caught never crosses his mind. But caught he will be, because leading a double life is an exhausting enterprise, requiring superior fibbing capabilities and above average stamina.

When engaging in amorous pursuit, it is much wiser to stick with unattached people rather than diddling with tethered femmes fatales.

Alain

What is a Mistress? Something between a mister and a mattress. Jim Backus

We are currently witnessing a war of words between two spoiled brats: our volatile commander in chief and North Korea’s grandstanding autocrat. It would be a laughable interlude except for the fact that this could easily degenerate into a nuclear war.

Any sensible head of state has to show restraint before unleashing the dogs of war. None of these two airheads display any hint of that.

There is no doubt that in a war between North Korea and the United States, the US would prevail; but at what cost? While the two halfwits at the top might survive, thousands of people would surely perish.

And who knows what might follow? World War One was ignited by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Armageddon unexpectedly followed.

“The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was more than 41 million. There were over 18 million deaths and 23 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes about 11 million military personnel and about 7 million civilians.”

“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was once Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy precept. Any well-read individual knows and probably agrees with that; but is our present leader well-read? Or does he read at all? Besides authoring a book (written by somebody else) and sponsoring beauty contests, this remains very much in doubt.

Bombast and blustering never accomplished anything constructive. Let diplomats deal with each other quietly and cut out the juvenile cyberbullying.

Where are the great diplomats of yesteryear for crying out loud? Where are the Talleyrand, Benjamin Franklin, Henri Kissinger, Dag Hammarskjöld, Golda Meir, Abba Eban… the very people who valued peace and thought that diplomacy was preferable to whistling bullets?

An ignominious exit usually follows a populist leader who gets ensnared in his web of deceit. Let us hope that this happens way before the unthinkable occurs.

Alain

PS: Due to a request from Marc’s family, the previous posting (In Memoriam) was removed.

Effective communication between a man and his spouse is often difficult challenging.

Geography and the topology of the battlefield seem to be the main obstacles to this elementary process;  women clearly prefer speaking from a separate room when engaging in a conversation, They seem to imply that a face-to-face dialogue is not as helpful as a room-to-room exchange. I am in the bathroom doing my nails… let’s talk.

A woman often prides herself to be multitasking. She can be ironing, watching General Hospital and have a meaningful conversation at the same time. A man is different. Genetically, he is programmed to be single-minded; one thing at a time. Arguing and chewing gum simultaneously can prove difficult.
For a woman, it is child play. The trick is her uncanny ability to tune out what she hears to focus on what she wants to say.

Later on, she will be surprised (and irritated) if you didn’t catch everything she mentioned earlier. You never listen, she will declare.
I beg your pardon Liebchen, but I was in the bathroom emptying my bladder.
Did you really have to do that? Or was it a lame excuse to ignore me?

In the early days, proximity was never a problem. She would always listen adoringly to your golden sayings. But familiarity breeds nonchalance. After many years of cohabitation, aural faculty on both sides seems to falter and make conversations more challenging.
Hints of hearing aids and Alzheimer allusions are also perfidiously dropped.

This problem though is elementary!
To have a conversation, both parties need to be in the same room, ideally at the same time. Then, speaking clearly (preferably in the same dialect), and waiting for an answer can also help.
A conversation kroshka, is akin to a Morse code exchange. I send, you listen. Then you send and I listen. Capisci?

And lastly,

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. Peter Drucker

Alain

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