I have tried to imagine what a complete history of sexuality would look like. One could look at the history from the point of view of emotions, of biology, of custom and culture, the changes over the centuries, what emerged in various countries, one could even trace the evolutionary roots, imagine pan and look at the bonobos and the chimps, and try to guess what happened when, and how the lines diverged. And there is the question of where we are going.

What is clear is that marriage has been important to all human societies for as long as we have written or verbal information to track, and yet marriage everywhere, at all times, has been shadowed by infidelity, which is just as pervasive as the craving for loyalty.

I am intrigued by this:

Mistresses, it seems, are everywhere. One U.K. reviewer was startled to find the painful story of the end of her own first marriage on page four of my book. Bel Mooney’s husband, British radio present Jonathan Dimbleby, suddenly plunged into a dramatic and obsessive affair with the magnificent soprano, Susan Chilcott, who was terminally ill with cancer. Against her anguished pleas that her very new lover consider his own well-being and not ruin his life for her, Dimbleby vowed to care for her until she died, and moved in with her and her little son. “I still do not adequately understand the intensity of passion and pity that animated my decision,” he said later. “It felt like an unstoppable force.” Yet he also “felt absolutely torn” about being away from Bel and their decades-long, happy marriage.

Less than three months after her last public performance, playing Desdemona and singing sorrowfully, her voice rising to a crescendo, “Ch’io viva ancor, ch’io viva ancor!” (Let me live longer, let me live longer!) Susan died. But a grieving Jonathan did not return to Bel and their tattered marriage unravelled into divorce.

My retelling of their story, Bel wrote, “was a reminder that there are no easy generalisations about this subject.” But she did offer this perspective: “I admit to a suspicion that most men are susceptible to temptation. Show me a loyal husband and I’ll show you one who’s never had a real opportunity to stray.”

Well, not all loyal husbands lack opportunity, but as Bel Mooney’s personal experience suggests, opportunity is all too often irresistible. Remember when President Clinton was under attack for his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky? We discovered later that as Reverend Jesse Jackson piously counseled and prayed for Clinton, he was also cheating on his wife with a mistress who was carrying his child. And Clinton’s self-righteous prosecutor, Newt Gingrich, was secretly pursuing a passionate relationship with Callista Bisek, whom he married after divorcing his wife, Marianne.

Both Jackson and Gingrich mistook the waning years of the 20th century for an earlier era, when mistressdom was the familiar handmaiden of marriage. That was clear when Jackson’s mistress, lawyer Karin Stanford, successfully sued him for child support. After millennia of protecting marriage by bastardizing the offspring of mistresses, indeed even making it difficult for men to recognize and provide for their “outside” children, our new laws essentially “outlaw” the concept of illegitimacy; they also demand parental accountability. Gingrich made another kind of mistake: he gambled on keeping his affair a secret but six years into it, he got caught. The values of the media world were also changing, and the man who had been angling to run for president on a platform of “family values” had to settle for divorcing his wife so he could marry his mistress.

The values of the media world were also changing, and the man who had been angling to run for president on a platform of “family values” had to settle instead for divorcing his wife so he could become his mistress’s new husband.

I’ve been wondering why I got into Berghain. I was dressed as an American, and I was wearing American “office casual” clothing. I was not dressed the way you might think you have to dress if you want to get into Berghain. (I’ve written about Berghain before.) I suppose this explains some of it:

His first job working the door at a club was for his brother Oliver, a D.J. He proved to have talent for picking partygoers who meshed well and didn’t start trouble, and he began working regularly, eventually ending up at the celebrated club Ostgut.

…He does not like the term bouncer; curator would be more appropriate. He chooses an often surprising — those who are rejected say capricious — selection of people, old as well as young, eccentric as often as beautiful, helping to give the club its staying power.

Most reports suggested that New Jersey might lose electricity, once the hurricane hit, and I was worried about my mother, so I decided to go to New Jersey and spend Saturday there. I ended up spending all of Sunday there too, as the buses all got canceled.

Here is my mom, in her kitchen:

We lost electricity at 10:40 PM on Saturday. My nephew called and told me that a tornado had been spotted 8 miles from the house. My mom had gone to bed. I decided to go out on the porch and look for tornadoes. I stayed out there for hours, wary. I thought if a tornado appeared I would run and wake my mom and then we would hide in the basement. Thankfully, no tornado appeared.

At first I was thinking that the hurricane had been less severe than expected. We’d lost power, but that happens during severe storms, in that area. It is frustrating, but it’s also within the usual range of things. The real damage of Irene took some time to become apparent.

The next morning I went out. A large maple tree had been brought down:

Eventually my mom and I got hungry. We did not want to open the refrigerator, as we were hoping to keep the cold air locked in, so as to save the food from going bad. We had no idea how long it would be before the power would be restored. We decided we would go out and find a restaurant. This was not easy. Large areas had no electricity, and even along some main roads, where there was power, most restaurants stayed closed all day. Finally we found a family run Italian place that had opened. It was about 1:30 PM now. We were there only customers:

Funny, the food was good and the place was pleasant, yet we never would have tried the place if there hadn’t been the storm. The staff was very attentive, since we were the only customers. I was so very pleased to get coffee.

The worst damage began to appear after the storm was over. There was only a light rain falling, but all the lakes and rivers were at the breaking point. There were some shocking flash floods. After the restaurant, we drove home, but our route home was cut off by water:

I’ve never seen flooding like this in New Jersey.

I went up to the police officer and asked when this had happened. He said he’d just driven down the road 20 minutes before, and then he was driving back and he was cut off by water.

I should explain, to my right, there is a housing development, and in the middle of that development is a lake. The lake is elevated, maybe 2 meters above where I was standing when I took these shots. The lake is dammed up and controlled, so it can look nice and be safe in the middle of that housing development. But the water had built up and the dam had given way, and when it gave way an avalanche of water raced down the hill and ambushed these cars as they were driving through the low spot. I assume if my mom and I had been 10 minutes sooner, it would have been us out there in the middle of the new lake.

Our lawn was covered with fallen branches, many of them very big. I told my mom I was going to go and clean up. She sprung into action. She wanted to help to. She started grabbing branches and we gathered them into a pile.

We were lucky that the fallen tree had fallen away from the house and the power lines:

I had expected the power to be out for one night. I had not expected it to be out for 2 full nights. The second night was frustrating. I was bored and unsure what to do. My mom lit candles and wrote in her journal by candle light:

In the end, the house was without power for 30 hours. Electricity came back on early Monday morning.

I headed back to work on Monday. My mom drove me to the bus, though we had to take an unusual route as the main road was still deep under water. I was several hours late getting to work, but they were understanding. In fact, I was the only one on tech team to make it in that day. Everyone else worked from home.