Lion’s Journal (Page 5)

Mrs. Lion spanked me Thursday night. I reminded her of the need to do it in my daily email. She kidded me about reminding her. I responded that I knew that I was not getting any sex until the punishment was off the books. She didn’t reply. Mrs. Lion never said that I had to accept any punishments due before sex would be available, but it seems that’s how it works out.  It’s a sensible rule to make. Eat your veggies or no dessert. Right? We’ll see if she formalizes this practice.

I haven’t been sleeping well. I manage to get to sleep about midnight and then wake up again at one. I’ve been watching “Sister Wives” until I get sleepy again at two or three. I find that show very interesting because I was in a triad with two women back before I met Mrs. Lion. It lasted about a year and a half. I’ve long wondered what I could have done to preserve it.

“Sister Wives” is about a plural marriage that began in Utah. The spouses belong to a radical wing of the Mormon religion that still advocated polygamy. The show started with a husband and three wives. A fourth was added a bit into the series. One of the wives said that marriages with just two wives often get into trouble. Apparently the third wife offers a balance that shores up the marriage. Interesting.

My plural relationship broke up because of jealousy. I joined two women who had been in a lesbian relationship for a decade. I was invited to join for a weekend “date.” Both women wanted to experience sex with a man. I met them online and we chatted and talked on the phone for over a month before we finally met. By that point, we knew we liked each other but had no plans to get into anything long-term.

Our first meeting was awkward and a little uncomfortable. I drove to their house on Friday night. After an awkward two hours of chit-chat, we undressed and I made love to one of them. They were both virgins (28 years old), and one still had her hymen. There was a bit of bleeding and she was sore for a week. The next night it was the other woman’s turn. Thatwas easier. Both had orgasms and both wanted more sex with me.

We spent nearly every weekend after that together. Sometimes it was in their house, which was a four-hour drive away. Other times, it was in mine. After a couple of months of these long commutes, the women decided to move near me. Both landed local jobs and they got a house about five miles from mine. This is when things started looking like the “Sister Wives” scenario.

After they moved, we got into a pattern of each of the women alternating spending weekends with me. We still did things together like hiking, eating dinners, and stuff like that. We rarely had sex with all three of us present. This is how the Mormons do it. Each wife has her own home or apartment. The man rotates between them. Our situation was a bit different because the women also had sex with each other. Sister wives don’t do that.

The sister wives on TV talked about jealousy. It was a challenge they discussed at length. My partners never talked about it with me. Apparently, they didn’t talk about it with each other until one of the women couldn’t take it anymore. Before they moved near me, they made a private agreement that if one of them wanted to end things with me, they both would.

One fateful day, one of them said, “We agreed that if one of us wanted to end things, we would. If I want to end things with him, will you end it too?”

Her partner said that she didn’t want to. That was the beginning of the end. It wasn’t long before the unhappy member of our triad won her point, and we were done. I’ve always wondered what I could have done to avoid this very painful ending. Watching “Sister Wives” brought all this back to me. Maybe my mistake was going along with the alternating weekends with one of the women. Maybe we all needed to be in the bedroom every night. At least then, we could have avoided any worry about what was happening behind closed doors.

It’s also very possible that there was nothing I could do to fix things. Creating a relationship like that without the support of a tradition of polygamy is nearly impossible. Of course, it’s a good thing that it didn’t work out. I got to meet Mrs. Lion and she is my soul mate. Still…it’s a hell of an interesting memory.

Life intruded once again. After Mrs. Lion finished work we had to trek to a credit union to get cashier’s checks to finalize our lease for the new house. That took a while. We stopped at KFC and picked up a chicken dinner. By the time we got home, Mrs. Lion didn’t think about spanking me. We both had a hard time sleeping last night. I think it is the anxiety over having to move again.

I’m not sure if Mrs. Lion will be up to anything tonight. She’s had a busy, tiring day with little sleep. I will have to wait and see. This move is a little more difficult than our last one. We are moving over fifty miles from here to a different county. That means we will have to establish new doctors, shopping habits, everything! The new house is nicer than this one, but it is also closer to its neighbors. It seems that each time we move, our location becomes more urban. The tradeoff is that the new place is a modern tract house. The rooms aren’t very big, but the layout is good.

I’m not sure that either of us is very happy to be moving. We have no choice. At least neither of us has to commute. We both work from home. All we need is Internet and someplace for desks. The new house has three bedrooms. We’ll use two of them as offices.

Moving sucks.

We are looking for a house to rent. Mrs. Lion does excellent research scouring the Net for possible homes. We have uncovered an amazing number of scams during our search. Facebook (of course!) and Craig’s List are the two sites that scammers love to use. Listings are free, and no one checks anything.

Here’s how the ones we’ve discovered work. The house is listed with pictures and a full description. The rent is at, or slightly under, market prices. Everything looks good. We responded to a couple on Craig’s List and one on Facebook. The replies we got were giveaways.

The so-called landlords responded with an “application.” The email included a series of questions, including one that asked for a family picture. All three responses had identical questions. All wanted a deposit sent via PayPal. All also explained that they had taken jobs far away, so they couldn’t show the house, but suggested that we look “through the windows” to get an idea of the property.

Obviously, you would have to be crazy to buy into that. Also, when I entered the addresses of the houses on Zillow.com, I got identical ads from legitimate real estate agents. One house was for sale, not rent. It’s easy to scam this way. Just copy real ads and add your own contact info. Craig’s List and Facebook handle replies,so  you don’t see who actually sent  the “application.” I’ll bet a lot of people are fooled.

mysterious package delivery

While we’re on the subject of criminal activity, a porch pirate stole a bunch of packages from our doorstep a couple of years ago. We captured a video of his theft with our video doorbell. One of the items was a picture on glass that I had ordered from  Fractured. All of the items were replaced by the companies who shipped them, so we didn’t lose anything.

Here’s the strange part. Last week, we found an open UPS package on our front lawn. It was addressed to me. Inside was the picture from Fracture that was stolen in 2021. How about that? I doubt the thief had a crisis of conscience. More likely, he ditched the package somewhere–hard to sell a shot of Mrs. Lion and our dog–and a good Samaritan picked it up two years later and delivered it.

The only problem with this story is that the cardboard, label, and contents were in perfect shape. They had obviously been kept indoors. I guess we’ll never know the real story.

Maybe Santa made an early delivery.

Our country is in a mess. I think the cause of this is that issues have been pushed beyond all reason. Take immigration, for example. I think that we have to control our southern border. It’s clear that our definition of asylum is creating a flood of people from Central America beyond our ability to manage. Most Americans, including me, think that we need to refuse entry until the asylum case can be adjudicated.

Sounds reasonable, right? Well, the backlog of cases is almost a decade long. That’s not going to work. Is the solution to let the people in anyway? That isn’t a great idea since those people have no status and can’t legally get jobs. Is the situation so dire in Central America that we should just open the doors? If so, then shouldn’t all of the people we let in get the ability to work?

This is just one of the huge problems that the far right wing of the Republican party has been using to capture traditionally Democratic voters. If given the insane choice of either shipping all illegals back to their countries or letting them all in, a lot of people will vote to ship them out.

Donald Trump may be crazy, but he isn’t stupid. His TV experience taught him that the key to popularity is giving the people what they want. Talk radio hosts figured this out too. It’s very easy to argue the status quo and get a lot of support. Keep America American. Close the borders. Ignore international treaties. Don’t spend money on hippie projects like wind and solar energy. You don’t need to graduate high school to get behind these ideas. And that’s the problem.

If you look at history, you will find that every successful dictator got into power through populist actions. We have avoided this fate because, up until 2016, our mainstream political parties took moderate positions and were able to work in a bipartisan way to solve difficult problems. Yes, there were always differences, but they came from reasoned positions that educated people could use to develop compromise.

The lunatic right has always been there (un-woke), but cooler heads prevailed. The same is true of the left. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris border on socialism. Again, they have always been moderated by more centrist people. Then, along came talk radio. The hosts of these programs quickly lerned that they would garner the highest ratings if they took easy-to-understand, slogan-ridden, extreme right positions. It turned out that there are a lot of Americans who are ready to get behind that sort of thinking. Suddenly, the lunatic right had a voice.

It didn’t take politicians to get the message. The great unwashed were ready for leaders. Slogans, derogatory nicknames, and easy-t0-digest extremist positions became the order of the day.

The problem with all this isn’t so much the extreme positions these people hold; it’s the people themselves. Two kinds of people live on the far right and the far left. One kind are the true believers. They believe in our constitution and think their ideas are best for our country. The other kind are politicians who are willing to do anything to get power. They represent the greatest threat to our democracy.

Donald Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t care about anything but winning. He said that he wanted to suspend the constitution. He is willing to do and say anything that will appeal to his base. He is dangerous. He’s also crazy. He constantly reminds us that he admires Vladimir Putin and other dictators. He’s made it clear that if he’s elected president, he will not leave office, ever.

Meanwhile, the White House is occupied by a political hack. Joe Biden has a long and undistinguished career in American government. Over the decades, he’s been on the wrong side of a lot of issues. The only reason he is president is that the Democratic party needed a candidate who would offend the least number of Americans. Kamala Harris is VP because she could capture the far left. Americans were left with a choice between two bad options.

If the Republican party could get past Trump and DeSantis and find a more moderate, sane candidate, people like me who cross party lines and vote for him. This isn’t the time for extremists. We have big problems that need sensible solutions. In 2024, we’re faced with a truly horrid set of options. We can vote for a populist dictator who will need the army to get him out of the White House or an aged boob with no fire in his belly. I’m voting for the boob. At least if he wins, we will be able to choose somone else in 2028.