Like Jimi Hendrix said, reach out and touch the sky. It’s right there on your fingertips, you know. Anywhere and everywhere that the earth isn’t, the sky is. So, you don’t need a spaceship; the sky comes home to you. Now, if you don’t mind sharing, and if you’ll put up with another of my musical quotes, this one from Bob Dylan, how does it feel?

Silky? Soft? Light as…air? Do you like to feel the sky when it’s filled with rain, snow or a gentle nudge from a breeze? My sky feels like freedom. When they say “the sky is the limit,” that sounds like freedom to me, and that’s how I feel sashaying through life every day. I like to stand on the border of elemental realms – earth, air, water (fire, not so much) – and imagine that I am the connection or the crucible in which each of their energies touch. Imagination and energy – I get to add those two secret ingredients! Not so secret, really. But we all have different intensities of imagination and energy, and through communication or time shared together we get to sample each other’s brand.

July had me sampling lots of inspiration from both communication and time shared, but the highlight was the irreplaceable time spent with my amazing daughter Colleen and grandlad Famous Seamus. It could have happened anywhere, but we chose the (S)Wis(s)consin Dells for the general setting. Prior to that, I thought the Dells were three waterslide resorts you whizzed past on I-94 at Mach 2 on the way to civilization. Contraire! The Dells are sort of Wisconsin’s answer to DisneyWorld with cheese instead of mice. So that’s what I did on my summer vacation, said Tommy Sullivan.

And good golly golly, I surrender to the flood of email that’s come in since the last Q&A I did in April! Seems most of you are fascinated to read about the relationship dilemmas in other people’s lives or to pose your own. So, you want it, you got it. Well, at least to the extent of a couple questions (and my pale responses) as part of this Sullygram. Those heartfelt emails you send really are an education for this here writer and they often hit home with rending poignancy. 

[…to the woman who summed up the classic dilemma in marriage for most females when she wrote:“A woman should never depend on a man for security. Men are too superficial and sexual attraction doesn’t last.”]  Couldn’t agree more about a woman’s independence. I would add only that hormones are first out of the gate in a relationship, followed immediately by a temporary stage of accommodation. But if you measure others by your agenda, of course someone else’s priorities will seem superficial next to yours. Society tells us which agendas are politically correct and which aren’t, but that won’t protect you from being fooled in a relationship. So watch out that the accommodation stage doesn’t mislead you. What is it they say about expectations – a woman marries thinking he’ll change after they are married, but he doesn’t; a man marries thinking she won’t change after they are married, but she does? If you don’t relate comprehensively and in a way that doesn’t stifle your growth, a committed relationship is all but doomed from the start.

[…and this one was so bizarre, I thought he might be putting me on. The email was from a man in a long-term relationship with a female sex therapist (sex surrogate actually – I don’t think she could be licensed as a therapist) whose job includes having instructive sex with other men. No, I’m not talking about pimps with working girls. Turns out there actually are such legitimate practitioners (sex surrogacy). His lengthy email touched on many threads related to how he changed from someone who once joked that his partner cheated on him for a living into someone tortured by the contradiction and the fact that she admitted to feelings for her “clients.”  This wasn’t an open relationship; it was a one-sided one, and I finally composed a response to him that overlaps similar issues others have shared. Here’s part of my reply…] Nothing healthy about your situation. Almost impossible for a man in love to perform in such circumstances. You’re asking too much of yourself if you think you can feel intimate with a woman who’s going to share the same intimacies with another man she has feelings for right out the door. Love is a zero-sum game. No other bottom line is possible. Not if we’re talking love. Not sex without love nor love without sex, not the oxymoron of plural fidelity, not self-bolstering flirtations, not practice passion – I mean real gender based love: sex with bondable emotions, no double standards, a zero-sum balance. I’ve never seen it come out any other way, and it is self-serving to rationalize any other calculation. That is what makes love so perfect as a romantic ideal and so imperfect in practice. I can’t imagine how she herself deals with it if she truly cares about you. Doesn’t matter how honest she is about it; honesty doesn’t make ongoing infidelity not matter. The capital in your emotional investment is reduced. Might be worth it if loving multiple lovers is what you want. But that’s either physically or emotionally masturbatory. Somebody who does that is loving themselves. If this is that once-in-a-lifetime love for you, then by all means keep your heart where it is, but play by her rules. If she has devalued intimacy with you, you must accept that. But you have to survive emotionally; else you’ll end up hating yourself, if you don’t already. Maybe you need a sex surrogate.

Early Summer photos below are all from Wisconsin Dells where my grandlad Famous Seamus and my amazing daughter Colleen and moi pursued some superb high-energy time together. A camera never captures the nuances of words, wit, warmth and wisdom, but it does preserve things and events like this sampling: #1 “A little higher and to the left, please” – Seamus getting a massage from a dragon; #2 Coll and Seamus coming out of one of the wave pools at Noah’s Ark; #3 Seamus and Sully straddling the yellow line as usual…but in the hotel parking lot; #4 Seamus exploring Knucklehead’s emporium; #5-6 Sully and Seamus at Buffalo Phil’s where the food is delivered by train (no greasy spoons, the Dells have every level of dining); #7 just off the beaten path there are the unbeaten paths; #8 Wizard Quest; #9 Pirates Cove; #10 “…water, water everywhere”; #11 biking on a high-wire at the Science Center; #12 father & daughter.