Occupational Hazard

First, a gripe about my smartphone:

Dear Swype, I hate you. I just lost a composition because your predictive text capabilities and my fat fingers have erased five paragraphs of text. Digression over.

 As I Swype, I'm looking at my cousin's friend, a young lovely with a perpetual smile and seemingly no conception of a life past college (that could be my ageist, elitist aspect talking. I don't know her beyond her smile and her preoccupation with whatever ladies her age concern themselves with today). I find myself wondering what it would be like to sweep her of her feet and shower her with kisses. I find myself imagining what it would be like to enjoy her attentions, her care. I find myself angry that I am subject to these thoughts here, now, when my uncle is at death's door.

The hospital is not a place for thoughts of cupid. Too, any friend speaking to me over the last three years will know of my new-pledged disdain for thoughts of cupid. It's well-known among my friends that I believe cupid owes me for years of unnecessary grief.

It's her innocence that I miss and envy. More than the diminishing possibility of my ever having mutually enjoyable sexual activity with someone my age or younger, someone full of sensual promise; more than experiencing love in that furtive, explosive, singular, new, manner of teenagers and people a little above twenty years of age:  In the face of the grief I feel, and the pity and the outrage, I feel the desire to flirt, to make meaningful social and sexual connections-- much, much to my shame.

I've always felt that it isn't necessarily wrong to feel this way for someone. I've loved women younger than myself-- often leading someone out of innocence is in itself one of the highlights of such a love. The problem is that it's all too easy to be attached to the perks of any new love, especially new love with someone newly come into sensual potency.

For convenience's sake these thoughts and stirrings are shoved aside as they bubble up, whenever humanly possible. In the long term, attaining any of my goals is not helped by the prospects of romantic entanglements, and I would be wise to remind myself and interested parties of this always.  

This is one of the larger occupational hazards for men who want to make something of  the little time they have left on the planet before they become too infirm to do so.