When I Needed A Villain, He Donned A Black Hat

He wasn't equipped to handle love, and I wasn't able to stop giving it, no matter the cost. He knew I needed to hate him before I could stop loving him, so he stepped out of his true self and into a suit of pure, selfish evil to help me get the rest of the way over him.

In doing so, Shawn helped to expedite what might have taken weeks if not months to finally wither and die. So, even though his actions over the last 72 hours have prompted a fierce and tenacious hatred to flare up in me, I have to credit him for the act of kindness hidden in so much cruelty. He hurt me like no one has ever done before, and I am damaged as a result. More damaged even than when I arrived on his doorstep in Yakima some 7 months ago in what would be our first face-to-face meeting after a year and a half of flirting and chatting on Scruff.

Had I known then his capacity for love was so limited, I would have turned my heart off and just enjoyed the hard fuck he was always so good at delivering. I would never have let myself attach so much importance to his opinion of me, nor would I have allowed myself to feel so nurturing and caring for him. I let him use me, and he let me use him. He gained from our relationship in material things, and I gained the illusion of love and intimacy he was willing to supply in such small, intentionally limited amounts.

That should have been enough, and had I let it be, we wouldn't find ourselves locked in an ever spiraling circle of mutual destruction the way we have these last few days. I will always love some part of Shawn, if for no other reason than that he knew when I needed to hate him and bore the weight of that need to its bitter end.

Thank you for being such a heartless fuck, you fucking amazing man. I hate you so much only because I loved you so hard. That is behind me, and I never want to see your face or hear your voice again. I really do wish you both the best in life and the worst that you deserve at once. May our paths remain mercifully uncrossed for the rest of our lives, so that the hate you bequeathed to me so easily can continue protecting me from loving you ever again.

Goodbye, Shawn. Go be selfish, loveless, and alone amid so many meaningless encounters, just the way you always wanted. And may you always regret what you threw away in me, because I could have been very good for you. Now you'll never know just how good. And that's for the best.

That's My Best Friend

Goodbye, Best Friend. It was real while it was real. Please remember that.

Inequitable Heartache

At some point, even the most self-loathing masochist reaches a point where he must acknowledge that the one-sided love he's been feeling is damaging his already crippled sense of self-worth. When the person he loves cares so little about seeing or spending time with him, what is a love sick fool to do? Berate himself for having been so blinded by feelings that he ignored every single sign and signal that the relationship was one of convenience for the other person? Or wallow in self-pity, worsening the contempt he already feels for himself by painting another layer of pathetic across his reflection in the mirror?

If you hadn't guessed, I'm the love sick masochist (and you're clearly an idiot). For months I've tried my damnedest to stop the growing fondness that developed between me and my friend, S. I knew from early on that he didn't share my fondness of  him; that my feelings were not reciprocated at all. And yet intensify they did. That's what happens, I suppose, to someone who subconsciously hates himself so much that he actually enjoys being treated poorly and disrespected at every turn. When his texts go unanswered and his intended goes around sticking his cock in any and every hole that'll take it - except his, of course - there seems to be some internal mechanism that turns that pain into sustenance and feeds on it as he sinks deeper and deeper in to depression.

Two weeks ago, I nearly killed myself. There wasn't any grab for attention. I didn't write a note or leave any hints for some friend or acquaintance to find. I simply drank what I knew to be a lethal amount of GHB, left my apartment so the cats wouldn't eat my corpse, and walked a few blocks to a semi-private place where I intended to die. I had taken a look at myself, at my prospects or lack thereof, and at how many years lay ahead of me during which I could look forward to worsening expectations of happiness as I aged and grew more sullen and somber. That wasn't a very attractive future for me, so I opted out of it.

Or at least I started the process of opting. What actually happened was that I chickened out at the last minute and puked my guts up all over the Spanish Steps just when that beautiful, thick honey feeling began to envelop me and make everything feel beautifully slow and sexy. The thought of my friends gathered to bid me farewell flashed before me, and I heard how they spoke of the waste of life I'd chosen. I was confronted by the fact that lying there slowly approaching death in perhaps the most chickenshit way possible, I was giving all of the power to S and reserving absolutely no agency in the matter for myself. I had surrendered my will and thrust all my worth and wellbeing upon his disinterested shoulders.

Fuck that noise. The thought of being so thought of was enough to start the nausea, and a quick diddling of my esophagus with my middle finger sufficiently finished the deed, causing the contents of my stomach to erupt in a sickening spray that decorated the historic steps with my sadness and disappointment. And also with corn.

And even after having narrowly dodged my own stupidity in that moment, even after the rage flooded in to replace the feeling of pity and sadness, still I went crawling back for more! What a piece of work is man indeed? This piece of work nearly offed himself because a self-centered man who took him for granted and made him often feel unwanted acted like a self-centered man. How unexpected!

I need some time, I guess, to feel the full brunt of hurt and withdrawal that has to happen before I can tolerate time spent without him in my life. I'm hopeful that I can come out the other side and be mature enough to still be his friend in some capacity, but I wouldn't lay odds on it with any hope of winning that bet. In all likelihood I'm going to have to hate him in order to stop loving him so hard. And in order to do that, I have to somehow find this hateful internal switch that transforms his disinterest into fuel for my self-hatred and thrives on the hurt that our fucked up relationship keeps causing me.

I regret having let my feelings for him drive me so close to the end. I never wanted to hang my toes over the precipice of suicide again, and yet there I was, guzzling death and welcoming it to the party all over again. Maybe it would have been the easier route around the hell that is to come. Perhaps the deep, dark nothingness that awaits would have been a kind of reward compared to all the fuckery that's about to unfold in my heart. I don't want to think about that. I just need to start feeling that hurt to its fullest measure and letting it corrode my feelings of love until they burn themselves into a bubbling tar of hate. Then I can survive it. That's when I'll be okay. I just have to kill the love for him, not myself.

So, I guess I'm off to commit a murder this weekend. Rest in peace, sweet love of mine. I wish you'd had a chance to flourish and thrive. But now I have to end you.

His Growth, Their Gain, My Loss

On the subject of HIV stigma and the impact it has on those it touches, I am not naïve. It's safe to say I've encountered it firsthand a time or two. And I've had 26 years during which to observe how many different ways HIV stigma feeds into other facets of my life. I've seen how stigma based on ignorance feeds fear and results in rejection, discrimination, and even violence. The moving parts of that basic machine may vary from facet to facet, but the function they carry out when in motion is the same. Ignorance is the root of the problem, and one that, much like the retrovirus in question, wreaks havoc on those things that might otherwise be its undoing.

Ignorance can inflate the fears of a person or group of people beyond what most would consider rational limits. It supercharges a person's fear by highlighting all the unknowns and filling them up with terrible possibilities.

I'll give you an example.  A person is never taught by a trusted, credible source like the CDC, that people living with HIV who maintain an undetectable viral load are essentially unable to transmit the virus to a partner. As far as this person understands, based upon whatever sources of information he's had up until now, an HIV-positive person is leaking virus all over the place if they bleed or ejaculate on or inside an uninfected partner, thereby transmitting the virus to any person they share a needle with, have unprotected sex with, or give birth to. In this world he inhabits, people living with HIV are forever one mistake away from infecting those HIV-negative people with whom they interact.

That's a frightening prospect! It discounts the fact that adherence to a regimen of antiretroviral medication therapies can lower the virus' presence in one's body to such a level as to be undetectable by the tests designed to detect it. It ignores evidence that PrEP and TasP have been proven to be 99% effective at preventing new HIV infections between  serodiscordant partners who adhere to their daily medication routines.

These missing facts remove an aspect of comfort and reassurance from the overall picture of HIV in his view of it, and it leaves gaps in his understanding of HIV that are then easily filled with musings, ponderings, misinformation, and the unknown, each of which can ignite fear.

My very close friend, who you might guess from the fact that my entire blog has been dedicated to him, now comes into this story. Since we first me, he has shown that there some gaps in his understanding of HIV and about the risk involved in various sex acts with an HIV+ partner. There would be a statement here about how the virus did this when the body did that and then something else arrives and does this other wrong thing, and he knows, because it came from someone's story retold about their uncle's former lover's old maid, or some such convoluted string of citations and sources.

It was clear that he experienced a certain amount of nervousness or anxiety during sex with me, but I didn't have the heart to ask him about it, thinking he was already trying so hard to hide it so that I wouldn't feel judged or feared, even if somewhere deep down inside he was judging or fearing being with me just a bit.

He was very polite and always respectful whenever we discussed my HIV. He was curious to hear firsthand details about how the virus operates, how it can and cannot actually be passed between partners, and about how effective PrEP and TasP are at preventing HIV from infecting him. I shared my experience and knowledge, addressed some of the ways that stigma had negatively impacted me, and corrected those parts of his knowledge that were ill informed and misleading. He accepted those facts and experiences into his world view and has begun to build a new understanding for himself that now has less room in it for ignorance to breed and nurture fear.

My good friend is now taking Truvada as PrEP, and he now has less anxiety about having sex with men who have HIV if he feels he can trust their claims of being undetectable. I am proud to have been a part of his new expanded view of the facts surrounding HIV, and I am happy that he now carries less anxiety about having sex without using condoms. I want him to feel safe when he is safe and to enjoy the experience without being concerned about becoming infected. 

That being said, I would be lying if I said I wasn't also grievously hurt by his lessened worry and concern. Given the state of our relationship, following what was a transformative and  devastating weekend, it is quite clear that sex between us is no longer a good idea for either of us. It hasn't been completely ruled out as a future possibility, but even then there are likely to be complications for both of us if we continue having 1-on-1, intimate, meaningful sex with one another.

He would be pushed closer and closer toward feelings of romantic love and obligation toward me, which he steadfastly declares he does not want for himself at this point in time. Having spent the last two decades in one relationship or another, he wants to give himself the space to feel what being beholden to no one but himself is like. He says that he doesn't want any relationship with any person right now that is close enough for them to be hurt by his actions, deeds, or words. He wants to have only those friendships that he knows can be maintained with minimal effort and could be ended without hurt feelings or dramatic separation. 

For me, having sex with him would weaken my resolve to turn off the feelings that were causing me so much pain and him so much anxiety. It would be too easy for me to regard it as love making, which would make me susceptible to a resurgence in romantic feelings and a desire to win his love and commitment. Those things are simply not available to me at the moment whether I like it or not. So I can't let myself consider them as factors in the relationship I manage to salvage between us. I have to lock those away in order to move forward without constant pain and emotional trauma.

Dealing with all of that is already pretty complicated. Now consider this:

The man with whom I was falling in love, who harbored a number of fears and reservations about how to have sex with me when we were still having sex, is now more comfortable having sex without condoms with HIV positive people -  except for me. It seems that my being such a temptation for him to begin to view me as his boyfriend has won me the great honor of NEVER getting to be his boyfriend, and the added bonus gift of getting a front row seat to watch him evolve beyond the fears that plagued him during sex with me into being able and indeed a bit more than willing to engage in more and more bareback sex with a now widening range of possible partners free of such fears or concerns.

What a fucking fucked up mind-fuck I have created here. Fuck my life. Fuck all of these fears. Fuck his worries and fuck my broken heart and fuck all the fucking suspicions and jealousies and betrayals and fights and separations. And fuck me for fucking myself thusly. FUCK. How am I going to pull this off?

Surely, one day in the not-too-distant future, I will be able to look back on this absurd collection of painful experiences and laugh. I will have figured out how to move forward and I'll be less impacted by the memories I'll then have of the time I am chronicling right here, right now, and the comedic element inherent in these ever increasing misadventures in adult friendship will be made delightfully apparent and nostalgic in my melancholic recollection of it. 

These things have to be true if for no other reason than that I am paying so richly for some kind of relief with a currency made of tears and anguish and emotional earthquakes that keep shaking the foundation upon which my sanity rests. The hurt I am depositing into eternity's' First National Bank of Karma is surely going to secure for me that small future luxury or else it has all just been a waste of time and a regrettably unnecessary injury upon my future happiness.

A Homo With FOMO

There's a man I know and love as my very close friend. Things have been a bit tense with us lately, mostly from my perspective as an over-apologizing, self-loathing pleaser. You see, I admitted to my friend that I cared for him very deeply, in defiance of a previous warning he had issued about the grim future he sees for us should he and I become romantically and sexually entwined.

My admission was followed by several episodes of my friend simply ceasing to communicate with me, usually while a conversation is underway via SMS messaging, for entire days and nights at a time. That terrified me the first time and has infuriated me all the subsequent times.

Anyway, as I was saying, my friend tries his best to go with the flow when it comes to me, which is challenging due to the amount of emotionally charged baggage I carry with me. He absolutely slips up now and then, and he hurls razor-tipped arrows directly at my heart, but he usually realizes it soon after doing so and tries to fix it. I let him slide a LOT.

Now, for someone that patient and accommodating, you wouldn't automatically think, "This handsome fellow looks as if he has a subconscious fear of missing out on anything, anytime." But you know what? He does! His FOMO manifests itself in so many ways, too!

Chief among the examples of this fear showing up and fucking shit up is when he is almost off work and starts to think about what he wants to do when he clocks out. Will he hang with a fuck buddy somewhere up in North Seattle for a while and then go to the bath house, or should he be going home and maybe inviting me over, doing some laundry, and perhaps eating a bit of dinner or smoking a little weed?

Still, there are more options for him to consider, because his phone is perpetually filled with notifications on Scruff and Grindr - dudes who dig him and want him to put that junk in their trunk. Good for Friend! Really! He's been well received since moving back to the area in February. Being new and one of the dwindling local supply of bonafide, honest to god, butt-fucking tops, he's been received by more bottoms than he can even shake his stick at.

Say his better angel prevails and nudges him toward the homeward decision. He messages me, or responds to one of a dozen of my text messages piled up and waiting for his response. We make a quick plan to meet up, hang out, and maybe have me sleep over. It actually happens pretty often, so don't let my cynicism infect your perception of my friend. He's a good guy. Well, he tries to be. Okay, he'd like to be! (I kid!)

Imagine happy me dashing hither and thither packing up laundry, grabbing essentials to bring with, all while wearing a real, honest to god smile on my face. Fast forward an hour or two later, when he resurfaces in text message format and admits that he's been double, triple, even quadruple booking his social activities, mostly, I'd wager, due to how much of his time I've lately begun consuming like a damned drug.

He's been on the phone trying not to let anything slip between his fingers. The thought of a hot and sexy experience with one of his other friends does to my friend what catnip will do to even the most refined, laid back feline when sprinkled around on the floor. He does everything the cat would do except perhaps for rolling on his back and trying to wriggle some of the thought into his skin somehow.

He overextends himself so often and to such an untenable degree, though, that what ends up happening is someone, often multiple someones, are going to be disappointed, inconvenienced, made angry, or jealous. As you might have read in this blog before, it's frequently been my lot to enjoy the jealousy toward his other friends.

His relationship with the whole truth is like my relationship with clean work clothes. I always want to have and use them, and I do my best to make sure that I always have some on deck, but if push comes to shove one obnoxious morning, you can believe I'm going into the office wearing whatever is the least wrinkled in the hamper. So you might say his excuses can be categorized sometimes as temporally asynchronous stories of obligations that he actually might have had - FOMO is going to be the death of me, or of our relationship if I have to keep finding myself juggled between 5 other obligations he's made for himself at once, or thrown into uncomfortable, sometimes hurtful situations where he imagines I'd be alright with shedding my clothes and jumping right into some group sex with him. (I strongly suspect that somewhere in his mind, he is counting that as two or more birds with one stone. He gets his rocks off, fucks some strange, and fulfills his quota for spending time with me as well.)

Except, remember the part where I admitted feelings for him? And may I refer back to the section where I labeled myself a self-loathing pleaser? Those things haven't gone away since you set out on the journey of reading of this post, leaving me A-OK and painlessly fallen out of love with him. No! It fucking hurts ten times WORSE now because he is aware of my feelings and still lets his dick make decisions about how to incorporate me into some of his extemporaneous hook ups and orgies. (Sorry - but even remembering that made me queasy with heartache.)

So, my friend isn't able to give to me all of the parts of our friendship that actually exist. I'm forbidden or at least heavily throttled from being regularly sexual with him, because he fears that our fucking too often will cause him to begin feeling too attached in a way he doesn't want to be attached. He gets to determine which touches are okay, and which ones aren't. There are significant pieces to our friendship that I feel have been stripped and locked away as if to protect them from me.

When I have to watch or listen to him fucking someone else, I feel physically ill. I literally get nauseated, because that other piece of shit twink or bear or daddy is getting access to some of those coveted, stripped away friendship perks, and my only reward is being invited to be included and adjacent while it happens to someone else. WTF?

It's cruel! I wouldn't put anyone into such a situation if they had spoken to me at length about their feelings for me. Doing so would seem intentionally hurtful, and I would feel terrible afterward. His dick doesn't suffer the same moral dilemmas. It just points him where it wants to go and leaves him to clean up the aftermath once it pukes all over some guy.

"Hey, man. I bet we can get another 3 guys!"

Friend, I beg you - slow down a little. Take things on one at a time. I understand you feel you can juggle half a dozen things sufficiently well to get them all done, but you actually don't. You drop people and chip or break them a little every time you propose meeting up but end up breaking that date in favor of some other task or obligation or a more persistent piece of ass. The same is true of your non-people obligations. You try so hard to do everything at the same time and end up getting none of it done as quickly or to the same standard you wanted to have done. You aren't going to miss out, I promise. Those people will still be there, and they'll appreciate their time with you more because it will have been devoted exclusively to the two of you. (Three if your dick is involved.)

No more throwing me into your sex parties with other men, especially bottoms that you fuck on the regular. I am not a second bird for you to hit with that one stone, and our taste in men are usually at completely opposite ends of the spectrum, except for some universal overlap in the middle. You're hurting me deeply when you suggest it, and sometimes I feel obligated to agree to it because you've had to leave one or turn down one before thanks to my fragility. There are now three such cases for you to think back on as examples. I was hurting in each and every one of those. Hurting badly. I know you wouldn't want to do that if you knew, so now you know.

And still, I love the shit out of you. Let's fix this shit.

The Unfuckable Hulk

The Unfuckable Hulk

Fat, middle-aged, balding, somewhat effeminate gay Bear with AIDS, bad skin, an average length dick that he hardly ever uses, a strong preference for bottoming, and intense emotional sensitivity seeks authentic, honest comrade and confidante with whom to share intimacy, closeness, support, and a legitimate mutual attraction culminating in frequent, enthusiastic sex, either 1-on-1 or with others.

Candidates must be well educated about and sensitive to the underlying traumas caused by HIV, long term exposure to stigma and rejection, body dysmorphic disorder, child abuse, major depressive disorder, social and performance anxiety, chronic substance abuse, as well as domestic violence and infidelity.

Please have steady, gainful employment, enough pride in yourself to strive for growth and self-improvement, integrity, empathy, and an innate sense of compassion. No liars, thieves, hustlers, users, junkies, or opportunists need apply.
    

Tall, Lean, heavily tattooed, dominant tops and alphas get priority admittance to this roller coaster, plus a free gift certificate worth 100,000 fucks, sucks, cuddles, and hugs. Must be over 21 with state issued identification to apply.

Ouch As FUCK!

As prophecized in the scriptures of the Lordt, I really got what I was asking for if being humiliated and cut through the heart were the top two items on my wishlist. He didn't say much. More like, he let my conclusions resonate in the awkward silence until they were deafening. Uggh!

I don't want this heart anymore. I think it's defective, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that it's broken to pieces right now. 

Fuck.

Careful What U Wish 4

My incessant need to always confess shit has brought me to the precipice where I currently find myself perched. I don't know what I expect to get out of the conversation that I all but insisted Shawn have with me tonight. I guess the main objective would be to get it all out from both sides, which is to say that I would really like to walk away with an admission from him that I was right -- which is going to hurt like hell -- or something concrete and believable I can hold onto without always and forever finding myself wondering what he really feels behind the polite lies he feeds me regularly.

An end to the guesswork. That pretty well sums it up, I suppose. It's exhausting trying to excavate a truth I can live with from the depths of Shawn's evasive nature. When he sees me coming at him with my truth shovel, the man is a marvel at throwing up smoke screens, putting up detours, and camouflaging himself instantly in a Gilly suit made of disaster, all aimed at keeping the status quo in place without having to deal with any repercussions his true feelings might inspire.

I understand why he doesn't want this to come to a head. As he's learned, there is a steady stream of support and generosity that flows one way toward him day and night from me to him, and that might continue unabated for quite a while, as long as nothing upsets the flow. Allowing me to wrest a hurty truth from his chamber of secrets would jeopardize that equilibrium, so he tries his best to mitigate the risk by omitting truths, bending them, or just flat out lying to me in a way he thinks is for the greater good. Bullshit.

Now that I've put all my cards on the table regarding the frustration and heartache I've felt pretty much consistently since he moved here from Yakima, I can't settle for any of those tactics or let him skirt the issue with one kind of distraction or another. I'm half tempted to tie him to a chair and get my answers forcibly, but that could prove counterproductive to say the least. No, what I need is to assure him that nothing he says is going to hurt me so badly that we can't recover from it. I'm 90% sure that's true. 

I fully expect to be disappointed and hurt and embarrassed beyond belief when he finally coughs it up, so there's that 10% chance I could run for the hills and hide my head in the sand for a while. But if that's what it takes, it's what has to happen. I can't keep this act up any longer. There needs to be a meeting of the minds, at least, even if our hearts might be on completely different paths.

All Cards On The Table

Here is the text message I sent tonight. <sigh>

"One subtle point that I think maybe you haven't considered is how, when you and I met in Yakima, I was mostly clueless about the real behind the scenes drama at play with you and Corey. I won't say completely clueless, because you had alluded to there being an in house separation and tension along with it. But from my perspective, there wasn't any "off limits" area into which whatever might happen to grow between us couldn't grow. You get what I mean?"

"I was operating under the simple assumption that I'd met a guy that shared chemistry with me, who I found incredibly attractive, and whom I began to really look forward to seeing more and more of as time and distance allowed. So when you moved here and added me into the shuffle of so many other guys, I was a bit stung. Then, when you admitted that you were purposefully pushing back on my advances out of fear that we might become too much like a romantic pairing, I was devastated."

"Until then, I hadn't realized that line was there, or that you weren't as open to our growing into whatever we wanted as I had been all along. You may remember how I struggled with that information, trying hard to reconcile the feelings I'd already developed with this new limited role I was left with if I wanted to keep any role at all in your life. I doubted everything you'd said, about how you found me attractive, how you hadn't had to force yourself to have sex with me on the few occasions we did, and lots more."

"I couldn't figure out how any of those things could be true if you were so easily putting a stop to further advancement toward dating, because I felt those things about you, and it was all I could do not to throw myself at you and kiss you every time I saw you. That you clearly didn't have those same strong urges was proof to me that you never had, and so I had to withdraw and simplify us to the point where further humiliation was no longer a risk."

"Then my birthday happened, and the agonizing back and forth and stop and start all culminating in that super hot frottage session made me wonder for a moment if maybe you'd reached that tipping point and had gone ahead and let yourself feel that way for me. Maybe by making you hump me through our underwear, I'd found the magic recipe that finally made you want me."

"Nope. I got immediate indications and testimony that that was absolutely not what had happened, and that it had been something akin to a birthday present to me. A one-time annual charity that wasn't to be construed as an open door for more of the same."

"I saw and heard how eager you were to get back out of your seven-day post-gonorrhea quarantine and back in circulation, and it crushed me. As I saw it, you had a living, willing partner right there at your disposal -- one who wanted nothing more than to give you pleasure and to be the happy recipient of all that pent up sexual energy -- and you didn't even consider it. It didn't even cross your mind. When I finally put those observations together and saw the picture they painted, I was devastated."

"I hid as much as I could of the explosion that was happening in my heart that morning, while you drove me back to my place. It was not my best performance by a long shot. That's when I determined that I needed pharmaceutical help to get past that much pain. So I self-medicated as soon as I got home and doubled my daily dose of crazy pills to help shut it down completely."

"And it worked! For the most part. I can still identify the hurt, like, feel where it resides within my body, you know? But I don't have to access it with my heart, and that is a huge win, because I don't want to access it that way. Not yet."

"Obviously it's a temporary fix to a problem we need to find a way to adult our way through. And I'd like to try doing that sooner rather than later. But today, probably tomorrow and the next day, I'm able to cope with the realization that I came home from Yakima all those months ago feeling a certain way about you.  But you didn't walk away from that room feeling the same way. It's embarrassing. It's disappointing. And I feel like I didn't get a fair chance at having whatever it was we might have had. But I'll get over it."

"We'll talk. And Shawn, I need for us to really talk, all cards on the table, no trying to protect me from the truth, no trying to say something by not saying another - just the facts, so that I can eventually look you in the eye without feeling a cramp of sickening loss quake in my heart. I think that's a reasonable thing to ask."

"So, if it's cool with you, I'd appreciate it if we could have a sit down very soon."

Okay - it took 3 messages to send all of it. But it's sent. Lordt! It's sent.