New England Bed Death

Portia and I have noticed a "condition" that many folks live with in New England. We have yet to give it a name, but I shall venture one now: New England Bed Death (what do you think, Portia?).

It sounds like some sort of North Eastern analog to SIDS but it isn't. What it describes are all the sexless couples who seem to "thrive" here. Well not only couples but also any chronically single (I know that being alone isn't always being lonely, but many of these nutters need and can't get) whack job who can't find anyone since they have a phd where their genitalia used to be. At first we wrote it off as some sort of weird knee jerk generalization, but for the nearly two years we've lived here the anecdotes, disclosures, and confidences come in steady stream. New England seems to be home to a bunch of upwardly mobile and sexless marriages/couples. Perhaps a third regional lifestyle/admonishment can be added to the well known duo "Live in NYC for awhile and move before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California for a while and move before it makes you soft" making it a trio with the addition of, "Live in New England for a while and move before it makes you epicene"

We don't know how they do it besides affairs on the side. Maybe the whining and frustrated disclosures only go so far as the lament, but what is not further shared are the supplemental or coping mechanisms? The lack of appropriate healthy home satisfaction helps to explain all the desperate, artless, and boundariless flirting and fan collecting that goes on. Sure one sees neat people everyday, though acting available and like one would throw a hand grenade into one's life over any tool who looks twice is way starved, no? Or Maybe the rapid dehumanizing process that many of the ladder climbing and upwardly mobile undergo is neutering? Many of our data points even design their lives so that they and their partners are hardly ever together. Creatures need physical contact, no? And they are going to get it somewhere, no? Maybe. Or maybe not if the creatures in question have undergone some long term intensive denaturing. Or is it the ghost of Puritanism Past? Bloodlessness is next to Godliness perhaps?

What do they tell themselves and each other we wonder to console themselves over such sad sad bloodletting and movement toward non-personhood? "Stay focused! Take pictures of your acquisitions lest you forget what you're here for! Accumulate more! Can never own enough! We may be becoming androgynous undersexed automatons who never say or do anything specific but in 40 years we are going to have the fanciest most well appointed Jazzies and Larks plugged in and charging in the garages of our multiple homes" or something like that maybe? The prospects are chilly whatever the "answer" is.

Not to worry. We're fighting the good fight ;)

Maple just asked me if we can stay in the library a little while longer, and i said, "Sure dude"

and she said, "Seany, Jeffrey Lebowski is The Dude"