There was a pretty big step-up last night by H when I once again held to my boundaries. I left the house shortly after he showed up to take S5 to dinner, declining to go with them as I already had plans.
So, when I came home, he took out the big guns (I'm pretty sure he asked S5 where we went Sunday & he told him the yacht club. Quite a change from the usual Father's Day celebration he enjoyed when we were together).
Just as he was leaving, he said he had "The Offer" that I asked for (???)in the car, & if I wanted it, he would go get it. I said I would go out to the car with him & get it, no need to come back in the house. I commented that he said he wasn't going to give it to me yesterday. He said he was referring to child custody (?/?), not "The Offer."
We get to the car & he opens a notebook & hands me a soccer application for S5.
Stalls some more, says we need to finally just go for it & stop tripping each other up.
I took my friend CVA's counsel & said nothing more than a calm "OK" when he handed me the envelope. We stood there starring at each other with that "I'm not backing down" look for a couple of minutes.
That's when he asked me if I'd ever seen the movie Dr. Strangelove, where events reach a certain point of no return. Where you try to stop from blowing each other apart, but it's too late to stop the destruction.
I asked if he was saying we're NYC & Moscow. Yes, & once I take this envelope, failsafe is put into action.
I handed back the envelope & said I was going back inside, if he decides he wants me to have it, leave it on the porch table for me.
He snaps it back into the folder & asks me if I'd like to go dinner on Weds., D24 is in town...think about it.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (aka Dr. Strangelove) (1964) is a black comedy film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott. Loosely based by screenwriter Terry Southern on Peter George's Cold War thriller novel Red Alert (aka Two Hours to Doom), Dr. Strangelove satirizes the Cold War and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.
The story concerns a mentally unstable US Air Force general who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and follows the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer as they try to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
After the Soviet bomb went off, that would not work, since the U.S. was then just as vulnerable. Mutually Assured Destruction (with the appropriate acronym MAD) became the doctrine of choice, with deterrence as its linchpin.
If models of nuclear wars were unemotional, the arms race and space race were its opposites. The launching of Sputnik gave the U.S. a sort of inferiority complex about the state of its technology. Followed by the Russians sending the Yuri Gagarin up as the first man in space, a fret to catch-up was understandable. It was even viewed as a military necessity; if the Russians could send a dog into orbit, why not a nuclear bomb into orbit? why not a nuclear bomb into Washington? The specter of destruction from a distance spurned a space race. At first the U.S. saw its efforts fail -- "Flopnik" the press dubbed the American attempt. Eventually however, Americans began closing the imaginary missile gap, allowing a very great crisis to emerge.
.... perhaps a thaw was needed in relations, perhaps all the manic scurrying would cause humanity to end and to scurry no more.
It was into this mood that Dr. Strangelove was tossed into, with replies of worry, censure, confusion, and tempered laughter at the foolishness of the world's greatest nations.
-- Obviously, Kubrick pondered deeply the astonishing reality that idea that man was smart enough to blow up the earth, but not smart enough to stop that from happening.
