Look at this! The bloggers have gone mad as well!

A quick search of the advanced Google service turns up no fewer than forty-six thousand blog sites engaged in some discussion of, or use of, Kip Dawson’s name. And the number is growing by the minute.

Incredible!

She finds an unofficial estimate posted from some obscure department at the UN claiming that of the world’s six point five billion humans, fully one billion of whom have access to TV and many more to radio, that at least two billion people are following the story.

And in the United States, ABC is reporting, nearly eighty percent of the population are fully engaged, meaning an incredible number of children as well as adults.

It’s an advertiser’s wet dream!she thinks, wondering how fast the ad agencies are scrambling to figure out a way to leverage the coverage, and what the networks are charging.

On a whim, Diana types her name and that of Sharon Dawson in the search engine, startled that several hundred hits pop up instantly—as does an Instant Message from Richard DiFazio.

“You up?”

“Yes. You wanted me to do the morning shows, and they’re at seven a.m. Eastern.”

“Sorry. I was just looking at the international coverage on TV. From the BBC through Al-Jazeera to NHK in Tokyo it’s all the same thing. All Kip.”

“I’ve been seeing that.”

“Did you see the latest, Diana? About his divorce?”

“His what?”

“I just caught it on TV. He’s writing up his divorce filing. It just started.”

Kip pauses, wondering why lawyers have to use such convoluted words to say the simplest of things. Drafting his own divorce filing has been relatively easy so far, though he’s sure that it would disgust any lawyer. But there are no lawyers around Intrepid,and the process of creating a brand-new life simply has to begin with the gift of a conjugal pardon.

Once more he rereads the words, wondering if Sharon will even be alive by the time anyone actually sees what he’s composed.

To the Pima County Superior Court, Arizona:

Comes now Kip Dawson in the matter of the request for dissolution of the marriage of Kip Dawson and Sharon Summers Dawson. Due to irreconcilable differences, Kip Dawson hereby requests the court to dissolve the marriage between the petitioner and the respondent. All Petitioner’s personal property and all of Petitioner’s share of the marital community property are hereby transferred to Respondent with Petitioner’s blessing, inclusive of bank accounts, savings accounts, and all real or personal property of whatever kind wherever situated. Petitioner shall retain only his automobile, his father’s wicker chair, his filing cabinet and the contents thereof, and one half of his retirement account. Petitioner requests the immediate grant of this petition. Signed electronically and certified correct in the physical absence of any living notary at this location, I hereto affix my signature, Kip Dawson.

He adds the date and sits back, wondering if he should finalize the divorce before going out with anyone on a fantasy date in his new, re-created life.

Yeah. It would be unseemly otherwise without a final decree.

Pima County Superior Court, Arizona. In the matter of Dawson versus Dawson, Petitioner’s petition is granted in full as petitioned. By order of the court.

There! Now I’m truly free to start over.

Okay, now for the realstory of my life.

I was born to a branch of the Rockefeller family and filthy rich from the get-go.

He stops, appalled by the flippant nature of the words against the truly serious intent. He backspaces to erase the sentence. This may be fun, but it’s deadly serious fun, if there is such a thing.

So, how do I want to have it start? How do I want to begin my ideal life?

Strange, he thinks. It should be so easy to figure out.

Air Force wives learn early that family dinners are uncertain events. Especially when the husband is a four-star general. Such men are married to the Air Force first, leaving the wives to feel at times like little more than mistresses with commissary privileges.

Bitsy Risen checks her watch, aware she’s been glued to the television all day—though her slight rebellion against complete submersion has been the piano sonatas playing gently in the background as closed captions march across the top of the silenced flat screen TV. Kip Dawson’s amazing saga continues to scroll haltingly across the bottom.

“It’s like the ultimate reality show and soap opera rolled into one,” she’s telling friends—including the equally solitary wife of the NORAD vice commander who also expects to see nothing of her own husband until very, very late. They both know that a series of space launches are about to start “…popping off the planet like fleas off a dying dog,” as Chris Risen said at five in the morning when he rolled out to find the shower. Bitsy knows the routine. When things start happening in space, NORAD wives open wine, turn on stereos, call their girlfriends, and mostly chill.

But the experience of reading the Book of Kip,as one of her friends refers to it, has been disturbing, and she thinks any wife would feel about the same. She sees Kip’s words about wifely support and intimacy and sex, and she’s surprised that it’s prompting her to suddenly reassess her own, well, performance. It’s the only word she can use within the context of Kip Dawson’s laments—not that such worries really apply to her. She and Chris are still in love with each other, and when it comes to libido, they’ve always chased each other into the bedroom at the drop of a suggestive comment. Still do. So no problem there, right? At least none that she can sense.

Bitsy hopes there’s nothing she’s missing—no blind, unwarranted, dangerous assumptions she might be making.

Chris is satisfied, isn’t he? As satisfied as I am?

She’s kept herself trim and feminine and completely supportive of him in what they, as a team, both chose. But the whole subject is unsettling, as if she might suddenly discover that this marital bliss isn’t real life, but a play in which she’s become too immersed—an illusion that can evaporate as rapidly as a play reaches its finale.

Men like Chris canbe seduced by illusions, too, she thinks. Like any pilot who bruises himself hauling on the controls trying to “save” a flight simulator that’s actually bolted to a concrete floor.

But, she hopes what theyhave is anything but an illusion.

This has got to be deeply rattling a lot of women out there,she thinks, especially those who’ve become lazy and forgotten to be lovers.At the same time, she knows that the male mid-life explosion often has nothing to do with intimacy or frequency.

Sometimes it just happens.

Thank God, Chris and I escaped,she muses, already aware how rare it is to grow together instead of apart over the years. So many of their friends have long since split, leaving kids shuttling endlessly between cities and houses and sets of parents and stepparents. Not to mention the anger and divided retirement funds and the names of former spouses who can no longer be mentioned without pain.

The words begin scrolling across the bottom of the screen again after a pause. He’s been working on the rewrite of his life and the thoughts and ideas and dreams are fascinating. In some ways it’s been like getting a private, completely unauthorized look at the top-secret workings of the male mind.

And some of the things he’s related—some of the things he’s been through and felt—have brought her to tears.