[sotto voce] this is the voice i would like to use

The perpetual cheer and ruddy moral unimpeachability of my Bananarchist voice is pissing me off, because when it comes time to write about unfunny things or things that cast me in anything less than a messianic light, I am afraid that the blog personality cannot withstand the cognitive dissonance. What I would really like to write about today is the headache that is my "open" relationship with Stephanie, but having lobbed accusations of imprudence myself, I'm not in a position now to disclose via permanent public journal the nightmares I have about trying to slap her prospective other lovers but missing and then resorting to beating them both in the arms with a baseball bat, which induces teeth-grinding and sleeping and waking crying at 10:15 a.m. on the last Friday I have to work this summer. Note irony and pathos in preceding sentence...all part of the armament in my war against candor.

Having emerged after a decade of what I'll evasively call my overlapping serial monogamy, this brand new bag is just something we carry so that we say we can carry it. Eleven months of the year "polyamory" is a multisyllabic way of saying that we are monogamous but think the politics of unorthodox intimacies are to be admired or coveted by way of secret repeated viewings of Shortbus. In fact, what we practice is not polyamory but a discrete and doctrinal coupling that involves brushing our teeth together, taking turns making the tofu and kale dish we scrape into our faces at least three nights a week, watching lackluster Netflixed movies on a little television together, and crawling onto preordained sides of a 42 sq. ft. pillowtop surface every night. This makes us perfectly happy, save for the screaming matches we get into about congestion pricing, and we do it over and over again while waiting to get bored of it.

One month of the year, though, I board a plane with my dog and jet off to California and leave my lover and her preparatory piles of Japanese stationary covered in neat .03mm pen markings in our noisy shitbox of an apartment. I say that it is because six consecutive summers in New York has driven me out to the temperate chaparral and/or I want to be able to watch Ratatouille with my grandmother; she says that I leave because I'm trying to run away from our relationship. Our separation allows us the space to break each others' eggshell hearts, with flexes of our polyamorous muscles, and then try, with webcams and phone calls, to piece our humpty dumpties back together again. We argue until the very witching time of night, then wring our hands in our sleep. Is a prohibition on sleepovers a burdensome condition or just something we need to have in order not to self-destruct? May our extrarelationship relationships flout our shared politics? Are we allowed to lie and say that we are "out shopping for backpacks with friends" or "celebrating John's birthday" when there are a few unexplained hours of absence? (Answers: the latter, no, and yes.) These requisites each need to be discussed for hours. The conclusions dissatisfy both of us.

I am discovering than my amazing powers of mind control cannot control my jealousy nor my desire to beat a person named Ed in the arms with a baseball bat. Is it wrong not to want that hairless twat tupping in my bed? I should think not, but apparently it is. With our teenage hearts throbbing we have made this mess and now we have to figure out some way to make it bearable. I'm ten years too old for this! Oh god, peace on earth.