July 2011
1 post
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Alcock's Autobiography 3.4
22 July 2011
During most of the first year, Kumiko was consumed by her love. Fortunately, a good deal of this energy, this desire to please and I daresay possess me, was diverted to the business. With GUIs not yet practical, and PCs just starting to make their debut among experimenters, she mastered the command line interface to our Prime 300 mini-computer and went on to learn enough Fortran to...
May 2011
13 posts
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Alcock's Autobiography 3.3
After our first Japan trip the distinction between work and play blurred. Kumiko spent workdays and evenings and nights with me. The first order from Forestry and Agriculture arrived bringing with it a relentless series of tasks leading up to shipping the container and meeting the deadline. I had to spend as much time at the plant as in my office in Missoula and Kumiko accompanied me on many of...
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Alcock's Autobiography 3.2
14 May 2011
There is always a turning point, a pivotal action that propels the relationship in a certain irreversible direction. Ours occurred two nights later in the Daiichi Hotel in Tokyo. Giddy with the prospect of major export sales to Forestry and Agriculture, we shut down the bar and, as we started to say our drunken Goodnights, Kumiko impulsively invited me into her room for tea....
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Alcock's Autobiography 3.1
Kumiko was the only lover intimately involved in my business. Like any red-blooded profligate of my generation I had had sex with a secretary or two, and at least once I ended up hiring a woman I slept with. But only in Kumiko were my private and business lives inextricably entwined. My first wife positively disliked anything to do with the company, and by the time I married again, both Kumiko and...
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Alcock's Autobiography 2.4
“It was sudden. I don’t know what caused it.” I sat down, put my feet on the coffee table and stared out the window at the snow. The only light in the room was coming from the faux gas lamp outside.
“One day a few months ago, when I started to get a hard-on, I found my penis was bent. Before that I had noticed it was shrinking.” I surveyed her face for signs of...
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Alcock's Autobiography 2.3
I ran into L___ last February on a run to Missoula for a periodontist appointment. I had stopped at the Good Food Store to pick up some groceries, mouth still anesthetized and swollen. It was late February, the weather had been clear, the roads fortuitously bare, but it would be dark soon and snow was predicted. The temperature was in the low 20s, and would drop into the single digits after...
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Alcock's Autobiography 2.2
Although L___’s third point would not germinate for decades, I took her other two points to heart.
It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I don’t think I saw post-pubescent and pre-menopausal woman as fully human until I was in my fifties. Women were like characters in novels then, roles in a film, or simply prey. As hunters I’ve known don’t dwell on the commonality they...
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Alcock's Autobiography 2.1
With L___ things changed. We were still in the infatuation stage, reveling in discovering how our bodies could fit together, in exploring the possibility that this was it— the true love that, like all other common fools, we hoped against hope to find. We were both in the early, optimistic stage, ready, eager to cut each other slack, to forgive sour notes, to see hints at future discord as...
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Alcock's Autobiography 1.4
From what I could tell in the mirror behind the bottles in front of me (I was in the habit of taking off my glasses when eating or drinking), by ignoring this in-my-face challenge, I had merely elicited a sly smile; he seemed to have taken my silence as a challenge, the last thing I wanted.
Over the next couple drinks he launched into a discussion of the Vietnam War. It had been six or seven...
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Alcock's Autobiography 1.3
It was late March, in the single digits, snowy and windy to boot. The motel was cement block. There were fluorescent lights inside and outside. We had the heater on full and still got cold anywhere but directly in front of it.
I can’t remember why I had agreed to go with her to Butte. I think it had to do with something historic, like a century-old bar that was shutting down for good, or...
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Alcock's Autobiography 1.2
What happened with her would happen and had happened with others. But male egotism had blinded me to the pattern. Once I discovered the trick she played on me, and thought about other situations with lovers, I began to see how it had reoccurred again and again, a pattern of being cheated by the very woman with whom I was sharing an intense affair. It was the contradiction between an odd reaction...
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Alcock's Autobiography 1.1
My name is Peter Alcock, the surname’s suffix the bane of my life. I will not repeat a single one of the jokes I had to endure, especially in my childhood and youth, for even now as I await my seventieth birthday, the memory of them elicit only the barest of perfunctory smiles. It would have been bad enough if the referent had been of a size that the conjured image, a male consisting entirely of...
“不怕慢只怕站 Don’t worry about going slow, just worry about stopping.”