It's 4:13 and I have just finished a post menstrual-cycle-induced mental breakdown regarding my inability to drive, and I am wishing, as the 10 McDonald's chicken nuggets settle heavily into my system, I am wishing very strongly to be back in last night, to be back, naked and handcuffed in Zack's bed again. It's in the moments just before he has to leave and I know I won't see him for the rest of the day, until tomorrow morning or- god forbid- tomorrow afternoon that I know why I'm marrying him, because I do love him so much more profoundly than I've ever loved anyway...I know that when I look at him and I'm suddenly shocked by the beauty of the way he's standing, the way he's looking at me, how good his hair looks short, how nice it was to pull on long, and all of the sudden he is my one-and-only all over again. If I had my wish, in those moments, he'd never be gone, but then I'd never get my little reminder of how incredible it is that I- Linda H.- am in love, and that every single day that changes me a little more, and lately it all seems to be good.

"You can doubt anything if you think about it long enough
What happens always adjusts to fit
What happened after that."

Reckoning, by Ani diFranco, is playing, and I love her slow stuff her hurt stuff her sad stuff as much as her fast her angry her vengeful stuff, more than her powerful her political her pro-active stuff, more than any of my stuff, my amateur my alien my unpublishable stuff- but at least you're reading right now- Hi. I put reckoning in an e-mail to Elorza once, a quote from it, and how I do love the way I write e-mails to people that I really love- I put so much damn attention into them, try to make them so meaningful and so often they fall on deaf, unresponsive ears, but as much as I'd like to think I'm doing it for them, I'm doing it at least equally for me.

"I don't care how fast you run
Just tell me, baby, when you're done
With your little marathon
You still got cab fare home.
'Cause the finish line's a shifty thing
And what is life but reckoning?
You are still the song I sing
To myself when I'm alone."

That part was Elorza the day I wrote him the e-mail, and the next day it was Jeremey- who had cab fare home, who I can talk to now, who I love so goddamned much, and who I am not just "accomplishing"- he is not someone I just can't stand to be rejected by, maybe that's part of it, but you'd all know differently if you saw how happy he makes me, when he does.

Fucking McDonald's. My doctor's visit the other day- for a physical- was hazardous to my mental health, what with making me stand on that auction block of a scale. Bleeding now, I can assure myself that I am just bloated, that must be where the ten merry-little-surprise pounds came from, but the fact remains- I hate my body, most of the time, when I'm not looking at myself in the mirror the way I was last night, with Zack next to me- do you know how GOOD we look together? Fucking AY we're perfect, fuck what traditional mental health institutions might have to say about that. I feel like going for a bike ride- ooo! A transportation-oriented machine I can actually operate!- and it was warm earlier, but I don't know if it will still be by the time I get out everything that's in me, all sticky and the like. My mother lost my straw and I am drinking my calorie-filled coke through a long, thin, orange straw that actually lead me somehow to the thought process, earlier, that if one always drank through a straw like that, the extra suckage required would burn off enough calories to offset the unhealthiness of the beverage. Linda H.: Fitness guru.

And Jesus, why doesn't everybody read this crap? I'm at least as interesting as the blaséd characters in "Four Blondes" and about fifty (thousand) times more than all the characters in "About Schmidt" put together- don't go see it. Under any circumstances. Zack, the miniature devil on my shoulder, keeps telling me to tell everyone to go see it so they have to suffer the way we did, and while my cynical side loves him for it, I just couldn't do that to another human being....I should suggest it to Tony. Nobody's away messages are interesting right now, and Mark is coming over in probably an hour in a half. I really should try to get some riding in.

I wonder if I can find the CD player. That would be nice. Especially if I hadn't left "More Than You Think You Are" in California- I bike rode in January in California. I do miss the weather....

"I learned how to laugh and I learned how to cry
Well, I learned how to love and learned how to lie
So you'd think I could learn how to tell you goodbye-
You don't say you need me
You don't sing me lovesongs
You don't bring me flowers
Anymore."

All hail Neil and Barbara for performing the single most depressing lost love song that I currently know. It's too good, too bad, too true to be true.

And on and on and on with it.

Since some of my posts were deleted, I've been paying decidedly less- and decidedly not enough- attention to this place. It seems now somehow foreign that I would sit in front of this screen and write till the post was pages long, and maybe I'll build up the strength and courage to do that again, maybe I won't. Way gives onto way...or something like that- anyhow, I'm making a reference to the fact that Casey and I have decided to start a site vaguely akin to Something Awful and The Onion, except that it should be, by our own protest, nothing at all like them and just our writing. I however, don't have as much faith in that protest as he seems to. We're also planning on dragging Ben into this by his toenails- When we started planning, we decided against telling Ben at all until we had it all set up, and then just let him know he should send us some stuff. Ben is impossible to work with in even the simplest endeavors- he's agreeable enough, he would just never actually do anything, and therein lies the problem. He is currently aware of the project and has no objections for it, but for the first month or so, Casey and I expect just to copy and paste some of the posts from his many failed blogs to use as content. As for mine and his, I will be posting something almost identical to the Newsletter, except that it's, well, worldliness and marketability should be vastly improved (IE, hopefully it won't be just me bitching about acting female anymore). Casey...well, Casey's rather un-established in what kind of work he'll be contributing to our little efforts, but I have enough faith (albeit blind) in his abilities to grant him, unabashed, all the room he needs to work in- free-range Casey. Mmmm-mmmm good.

Now all we have to do is do the writing and design the site before we can launch our little ship of dreams. Oh, and name it. Anybody got any ideas for a name? Left up to Casey and I (and, *ahem* Ben), this thing will haphazardly be named something like "the haphazardly named site...ah, fuck, we can do better than that!" Your input is vital.

I was inspired to post today by an e-mail I received from a fellow Ahernite (which is, for the record, what we called ourselves out west), Rachel. While we all boasted of our mutual love out there, Rachel is one of few that I might have actually liked in a different setting. I wonder now, directly after having written that, if it is a fair assertion (and moreso if any of the others will ever see this post)- suffice to say that Rachel was one of the four I found myself really bonding with, and of those four, she... well, she glowed. I make no secret, anymore, of the way I felt about her over there- a vulnerable time for me, an environment where everyone was taking off their clothes and touching each other, and the single most breathtaking creature in California, who's first words to me were raspy and whispered into my unsuspecting ear "Wanna be Reiki'd?"- I was fucked.

Casey, Jeff, and Zack have all heard equal amounts about the Angel of Ahern's, (So nicknamed for the Angel wing tatoos on her shoulders which continue to haunt my subconscious like faint memory of what it was to have faith in God himself) or perhaps not equal, exactly- Understandably, there were details I kept from Zack. I felt every need not to be dishonest, though, and told him quite frankly that if I ever got the oppurtunity to go anywhere with this girl, I had no idea what I would do. Even now that she's safely out of my peripheal vision by 3,000 miles, I find myself openly questioning it, and letting him know that I still have no idea what would have happened. Fending off the stupid come-ons by idiot co-workers or the occasional tension with a used-to-be-love is one thing, but there's only so much a person can do when under the spell of the Apple of Discord's rightful owner. The situation never arose that I would have had the ability to deviate from my makeshift devotion to the one I was coming home to, as I knew it wouldn't, but the implications of my potential willingness to hurt him puzzled me, and from time to time, they still puzzle me. I have to remind myself, though, that nothing happened, that all is well on Olympus and on Earth, and there's no use questioning it- I am still in love with Zack, and my correspondence with Rachel has been reduced to the occasional phone call or e-mail- not that I take these for granted in any way, her latest e-mail leaves me smiling and sighing all at once:

"thomas sent us wind chimes. i hung mine out on the little balcony i have at the apartment i am subletting in oakland overlooking a major street in the vietnamese auto-shop ghetto south of the lake. during the day when a breeze pushes through i can hear the chimes barely audible over the prostitutes arguing about their territory of our corner. good fung shui."

So, for now, I shall write her back, and maintain the friendship that I have a right to and the distant admiration that I don't- inspite of the fact that I'll probably never see her again, and not because I have a chance, and not because that matters: simply because every angel deserves a prayer, every goddess deserves a temple, and every girl deserves someone to tell her how beautiful she is, over and over again. Granted, I'm sure Rachel has more than her share, but still, let it be known- every insecurity she's ever had is irrational, every rejection she's ever gotten was blind, and every different way her face rests is a masterpiece. And she's beautiful, she's beautiful, she's beautiful.

On with it.