David Dalton – författare

A global catastrophe has returned earth to the Iron Age and killed six billion people. Even the billionaires were tricked and eliminated. An Oxford intelligentsia have taken over the planet. Can such smart people rebuild the world in a better way? With help from the galactic federation, perhaps there is hope. But first, earth’s new elite must retrieve from the past some things that were destroyed long ago — ways of thinking and living that can avoid a fatal reawakening of the delusions bequeathed to us by Rome. Jake Janaway — young, modest, handsome, and scared — is selected for a dangerous mission into the pre-Roman past. Jake has no idea why he was chosen. Jake has a lot to learn. But perhaps no one in the galaxy ever had better teachers, or was more loved.

After fifty years of progress and the advent of gay marriage, statistics on the well-being of gay men are as grim as ever. Rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse have not budged. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and poor health are just as widespread. Studies have shown that gay men who live in urban gay communities actually are worse off, not better.

The utopia promised by gay marriage has not materialized. Gay men seem to have run out of ideas for future progress. There is little acknowledgment of the fact that something remains badly wrong. Nor is there a diagnosis of what is wrong.

This book proposes that the diagnosis is obvious if we look at the origins of male sexuality and how it was expressed in other cultures. The anti-sex Puritan system in which we are now immersed is relatively recent in human history. Yet in less than 2,000 years, knowledge of how other cultures lived and loved has been systematically wiped out. The forms of male sexuality were remarkably similar from culture to culture. But starting with the early Europeans in the last years of Rome and continuing around the globe as Europeans colonized the continents, natural male sexualities have been cruelly repressed and then obliviated. We are all Puritans now.

The greatest taboo of all in male sexuality remains unchallenged and is still heavily enforced. That is the taboo of male-male sex, which until 2003 was still a crime. This book argues that the plight of gay men is only a piece of a much larger catastrophe — the Puritanical repression of the sexualities of all men, in an attempt to harness the enormous power of male sexuality for social purposes in the name of moral progress, with promises of  greater glories to be found in heaven. The damage that Puritanism caused to human beings and to stable social systems was never noticed. In fact the damage and misery were regarded as good. It was seen as payback to the devil.

This book is not arguing for something new, untested, unknown, and radical. Rather, the challenge is to return to something very old — the joy of male-male sex — which took similar forms in most of the cultures that we have knowledge of. In such worlds, it was understood that some men are more masculine than others, that some men are gayer than others, and that heterosexuality and homosexuality are complementary and of equal value. And those old worlds were worlds in which every gay man was able to take for granted what to us today is the impossible dream — sex with a straight best friend.

Thoughts shape our reactions, tailor our responses, and contribute wholeness to our psychological well-being, while shaping our spiritual attributes and structuring our relational interactions. In Coffee Thoughts, author Dr. David Dalton offers reflections to help shape and analyze our thoughts.

Throughout this guide to managing your own thought processes, Dalton explores some of the doubts, fears, and perplexities he has experienced in various life situations and illustrates how he found comfort and guidance in his spirituality and in simple pleasures. He presents forty reflections followed by personal coaching questions, covering a host of life experiences:

Intended for daily use and study, Coffee Thoughts offers a gentle and relaxed way of approaching what is often one of our most feared challenges, the remaking of ourselves.