Behold, The Photo that Shook Shelton.

I thought about not posting it here, but whatever, the damage is done. Jennifer, who is prone to defend me just because she likes me and cares about me and therefore has a pro-Matthew bias (that will reveal itself to be kind of funny in a minute), insisted more than once it wasn't my fault -- but really, it kind of was.

Just about anyone observing this situation objectively would rightly wonder what the fuck I was thinking, posting a photo of myself with Jennifer and the guy she essentially left Eric for. I do have a defense prepared for myself, though! And it was partly Jennifer's defense as well: "[Eric] knows you post stuff!"

I mean, this is the thing. Jennifer never asked me to keep this a secret, perhaps understanding that this would put me in a very uncomfortable position. Posting pictures of the people I'm hanging out with is just something I do, something anyone who knows me at all knows to expect. I really would not much have liked being asked to pretend that other guy was there, and thankfully, I was never asked to.

That said, when I posted to social media about the Strawberry Shortcake Martinis Jennifer made for us, I included both the shot of Jennifer blending all the ingredients, and this shot of all of us holding up our drinks. I do this every year for my Birth Week overnight with Jennifer, after all; if she has a friend over and they are drinking with us, I tend to include them in the photos. Why would Matthew be any different? After all, nether of them objected when I asked to take a photo of all of us, and even though Jennifer later said she hoped I would "wait until later" to post it, I thought it was pretty obvious when I asked about whether the drinks would be considered martinis and I was fiddling with my phone -- surely it must have been obvious I was about to post it? Neither of them asked me not to post it, and many people over the years have learned to ask me directly not to, if they did not want a photo posted.

Oh right, I kind of just buried the reveal there, didn't I? This guy Jennifer is seeing is named Matthew. When Jennifer first told me over Facebook Messenger she said, "You'll never guess what his name is." I truly had no idea what to guess. Funnily enough, when I started to repeat the converstion later to Shobhit over text, without missing a beat he said, "Matthew."

This other Matthew is very young. Twent-six. ("And three-quarters," he apparently recently added.) I already learned back when I stayed the night last month that Jennifer does not like being called a "cougar" -- something I did just once, and apparently even Matthew did once before then.

Anyway, I haven't even gotten to the juicy part! And this gets to the other part that's kind of a defense of my boneheaded decision to post the photo to Facebook: referring to Eric, Jennifer said, "Sooner or later he's going to have to get used to it!"

For now, though, any time Matthew comes up or in Eric's mind gets in the way, Eric flies off the handle in weird, borderline pyschotic ways. When I posted the photo, the first thing he did was post a comment, tagging Matthew: I always left them alone to drink. Matthew should honor tradition and go home.

Okay, let's unpack that for a minute. Yes, it's true, Eric always stayed out of Jennifer's and my hair any time I visited, usually just hanging out by himself in another room. And I won't lie, I always appreciated that. But you know what? I literally never once asked him to do that; nor did Jennifer; and had he wanted to hang out and drink with us, I really would not have minded.

But then, unable to stop herself, Jennifer responded, Do you ever mind your own fucking business? He responded something about her rubbing Matthew in his face (it took a while for him to even vaguely understand that I was the one who posted it, not Jennifer), and the thread snowballed from there -- really inappropriately angry, melodramatic soap-opera stuff.

Matthew asked about how he could un-tag himself, which it appeared he could not do in a comment. I didn't particularly want that thread there anyway, and so I deleted Eric's initial comment, which cleared out the entire thread. He then posted another comment, Really, deleting comments? (Uh . . . yes!) He seemed still to think it was Jennifer doing that, probably because I was very deliberated not engaging in any direct way.

After a little while I finally decided to remove the photo from the Facebook post. It did not delete the whole post, as I still left the shot of the martinis being blended. As I said, the damage had already been done, but I figured it best, still, not to have that photo visible where new associates, Facebook friends from work and such, could find it in their news feeds because I had Jennifer tagged in it.

From Eric's end, it was too little too late: he had saved the photo to his own phone's hard drive. And then he did something that really lit a fire under the whole situation, prompting Jennifer to call him and get in a screaming match. Eric cropped me out of the photo (how considerate), and posted a shot of just Jennifer and Matthew to his own Facebook page, with a caption telling people that if they see this guy delivering their mail they shoul say "Shame on you!" because he's sleeing with his wife.

Jesus Christ. Jennifer has signed the divorce papers, incidentally. She's only still Eric's wife because he hasn't.

Well, I just checked Eric's page and the post does not appear to still be there -- I never saw it. I did find something Sherri posted to his page, though, saying that family and friends of Jennifer have been asked to delete one of them, and because they have refused to take sides from the beginning they have deleted both of them. That was posted just this morning, and I have mixed feelings about that ("both sides-ism" is often a transparent logical fallacy; in this case, while neither of them have been perfect in their behavior, one of them is quite clearly nutso). Curiously, even though Jennifer told me she was thinking about asking people to do that, she still hasn't directly asked me to. I don't see any post to that effect on her Facebook page, so I don't know if she called or texted people direct or what.

Well, whatever. I just unfriended him. His behavior is just too much. I haven't communicated directly with him over Facebook since all this started, and when I was with Jennifer on Saturday night she finally figured out that she had only unfriended him and did not block him -- and she finally actually blocked him. He probably still would have seen the photo since I was the one who posted it, even if she had blocked him earlier.

Anyway, my feelings about Matthew? He's fine. I don't feel strongly one way or another about him. Jennifer is an adult and can make her own decisions, and she certainly doesn't ask me for advice about them, probably because she knows if she did I'd be apt to tell her something she didn't like. Still, I'm not on Matthew's side, and I'm not not on his side. I am, however, willing to take Jennifer's side, even if I don't necessarily agree with everything she does.

At one point I was walking through the kitchen and Matthew rounded the corner, just walking through in the other direction rather casually, and he scared the shit out of me. "Jesus Christ!" I said. And he said, "Nope. Not him." That did kind of crack me up. Jennifer really laughed about it when I told her later.

I do kind of wonder if Eric even has the wherewithal to see if I have written anything about all this here. I figure chances are, he hasn't. Either way, I think I've made it clear where I stand.

On a much lighter note, check out this incredibly gay birthday cake Jennifer got for me!

I think I left Des Moines at around 3:15 and it was a roughly ninety-minute drive to Shelton. Soon after I arrived, Matthew actually left just long enough for Jennifer and me to go out to dinner at a new Thai place they have -- I guess he wasn't comfortable enough to join us for that. That worked for me too. And although this was very much Eric's M.O. when he was around, I really did not expect Jennifer to pay for us both -- but she did.

We went back to the house, and Matthew was back, actually waiting in his car across the street from the house. I have no idea how long he had been there. And I was seriously so tired pretty much mid-afternoon through the evening that day, you would not believe it. I was not drunk, and didn't even feel a buzz from the incredibly sweet Strawberry Shortcake Martini -- but it must have still put me over the edge, because I really zonked out, and was have to put forth a herculean effort to stay awake. And we're talking, like, barely past 9:00.

Around that time, Gabriel FaceTimed me. Lea's playlist had flipped on Madonna's "Like a Prayer," and it turned into a dance party with the two of them in her living room. Gabriel called to show me. It was amusing enough, but I could not keep my eyes open. I had gone up to Hope's bedroom, where I would sleep (the kids were all visiting Eric), and I made the probably stupid move of laying on my back to look up at my phone.

Gabriel now has this running thing where I am disappointingly "chill" whenever I am around Lea, giving Lea an apparently inaccurate idea of what I am really like. I mean . . . define "chill," right? How am I supposed to counter that, anyway? I am always usually reserved; I've never been flamboyant. What does he want from me?

Well, maybe that I don't fall asleep. He was talking to me and I closed my eyes. He laughed, but still he said, "You're falling asleep! Fuck you!" and then he hung up in the middle of my telling him I was listening.

Jennifer thought that was pretty funny when I told her about it. I returned to the living room where she was playing the 1993 film Dazed and Confused -- which clearly has no prayer of having the kind of cultural impact now that it did back then. Somewhat ironically, the movie was a hit with people who were teenagers in 1993 and thus born around the time the year it was set (coincidentally, 1976 -- the year I was actually born), but young people now are just too many generations removed. Matthew really never locked in, and would miss key punch lines because he would ask Jennifer something. To be fair, the Eric Drama was also doing on in the middle of it.

Anyway. I had also soaked my foot in salt water using an emoty litter box Jennifer gave me, the soaking being at the suggestion of Heather on her boat earlier in the day. Even though Heather runs a brokerage company now, I learned she also has a nursing license, and when she found out I had an infected ingrown toenail, she asked to see it, and she gave me suggestions. At her direction, I even dipped the toe in the Puget Sound sea water over the edge of the boat for a few minutes. It was fucking cold.

Soaking it in the warm salt water at Jennifer's really seemed to help, though, and it seemed perceptiply improved on Sunday morning. Before that, though, when he was not yet even 10 pm, I had mentioned how hard it was for me to stay awake. Jennifer said, "You can go to bed, I won't be offended." And so I did.

I slept like the dead that night; had no hangover in the mornnig; an was awake and alert the whole day yesterday. I got into the shower just a bit after 7 a.m., and was hanging out with Jennifer as she did her makeup yesterday morning. After that we had about an hour to hang out before it was time for me to leave for Port Townsend. I think it was during that hour that she finally managed to block Eric on Facebook, actually.

Anyway, if you really want to see the full photo set dedicated just to staying the night with Jennifer, you can see that one here. That one's only got 14 shots in it -- the best ones already visible in this very post.

[posted 9:49 pm]