Okay, so, I wish those widgets weren't stacked on top of each other like that, but my desire for justice and equality is very slightly stronger than my desire for neat and tidy presentation. So, those are the links to sign the petitions for the mentioned LGBT issues, but on each of them, I would also strongly suggest you send an e-mail of your own to your representatives. With DOMA, which I think may be the most important issue on the list, I would suggest visiting RepealDomaNow.org to do so, they have a lovely convio-powered form that will allow you to automatically send your message to the relevant parties. This is a little trickier with the fight to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell-- the only site I found with a convio-powered form to do that is that of the Log Cabin Republicans. Don't be scared off by the name, my liberal friends-- the log cabin republicans are a group of republicans that lobby just on behalf of LGBT issues, and filling out the form will not send a letter with any secret conservative agenda-- it's just a very simple way to get in contact with the correct people about Don't Ask, Don't tell. The HRC has apparently also started PassENDANow.org, which I have just now discovered-- again, convenient, convio-powered for telling your representatives that you'd like to see legislation pass which would prevent people across the USA from being fired because they're gay.

Not a lot of time to write, and not feeling particularly motivated to, but I have to say that I was very moved by the president's speech to the HRC tonight. I know a lot of people out there in the gay community think that it was all just beautiful speech with no action-- I gotta tell you, I think they're underestimating the importance and power of beautiful speech. I'm proud to have a president who is willing to get up and say unequivocally how he thinks the LGBT community is equal and should be treated as such, and this kind of verbal leadership rallies the masses-- those of you out there complaining about his lack of action, take a note from another beautiful speaker and ask what you can do for your country. Many of you have already taken action, but can you do more?

On top of which, the president made some very valid points about how the issues he is working on every day are issues that pertain to all Americans, including the LGBT community. Okay, yes, I know that this probably seemed to the wary listening like he was just putting off the needs of the community, but he wasn't vague or indecisive about his intent to undo Don't Ask, Don't Tell, his support of efforts to repeal DOMA, his desire to see ENDA signed into law. Let's keep in mind, most of these are things that the president, himself, cannot actually do-- these are things that he can work with congress on, that he can voice his support of, that he can make priorities. But we have three branches of this government for a reason, and that makes it impossible for him to right all the wrongs with one swift movement. Congress has to be involved, and that means we have to get involved.

Send the letters. Sign the petitions. Tell your friends and families to do the same-- if you're like me (and married), you just sign all these things twice-- once with your own name, once with your spouse's. (No, I'm not trying to disenfranchise my husband. They're plenty of things we disagree on politically, but he's given me a blanket permission slip to act as him in LGBT issues.)

Anyway. Maybe take a moment to let the man's beautiful words sink in, to be motivated, and to do what this very small series of things, potentially to make a very big difference. Maybe take a moment to breath, remember that thi isn't the Bush administration anymore, count your blessings, and give the man with the silver tongue some trust, at least until he's given you a real reason not to. If he's working a little too slowly for some of your tastes, well, I'd rather see him blossom slowly than completely fuck it up, and then be defeated by a Republican in the next election. This upcoming decade is way too important for that.

Okay, maybe I was *a little* inclined to write. On with it.

or, Create a Petition

Change.org

or, Create a Petition

Change.org

For posterity, and for those of you who don't know, I will preface this post by saying that I have now officially started attending classes full-time at Southern Maine Community College, working towards an associate degree in liberal arts, with a concentration in arts. This decision regarding my field of study was motivated by my strong desire to one day illustrate my own children's books , as well as by my lifelong interest in art and all things creative. So far, I am enjoying the experience-- I love the campus, and I like the challenge. The very, very real challenge.

Tonight, my assignment-- should I say, one of my many, many assignments-- is to do four cut-paper compositons focusing on line; diagonal, horizontal/vertical, curved/organic, and mixed. Black on white. And maybe that's the root of my problem.

Black and white are not colors I'm used to-- that stark contrast of one idea against another, of, let's face it, wrong against right. Maybe it's in my nature to strive for the familiar ambiguouty of grayscale; maybe it is through a psychological compulsion towards things that are hopelessly complicated that I find myself accidentally fraying the edges of the black paper against the white, creating the illusion of gray. I rub the dry rubber cement peaking out from under the sides of what should be neat-and-tidy edges, balling it up for easy removal and creating ugly little messes that I hate, but can never seem to clear away completely, no matter how furtively I try. Maybe I don't believe the art I create deserves to be free of them. Maybe I don't consider myself above this moral haze.

For those of you paying strict attention, yes, I am making a metaphor about my life out of my art homework. This is why I'm not an english major-- I don't need any more help with that bullshit.


Have you ever found yourself in a situation where no one involved is really right, no one is the good guy? Everyone could be considered a villain in some capacity, but there's no hero to be found? The situation I've found myself in, there are no truly sympathetic characters, just a lot of people who are in constant flux, gaining and losing sympathy for each other in their oddly parallel weaknesses. I've aligned myself with the character who is, perhaps, the least sympathetic of all involved, and find myself almost violently defensive of his basic and inalienable goodness, despite the story building around him, determined to cast him as the weakest link in a paper chain. Defensive of him to the extent that it's put strain on relationships that should be absolutely uninvolved, maybe ended one. Depending on the point of view, I could easily be getting the silver medal insofar as blame and immorality, despite my efforts to hold onto the ever-vindicating (ha!) virtue of honesty, or at least, honesty in amounts directly proportionate to the sum of my affection and respect for the recipient. Coming in third-- again, depending on viewpoint-- is a woman I don't want to expound on, really. A woman who I doubt I could speak about with any modicum of impartialness, a woman I did not know at all outside the influence of this sphere of insanity which we've, all three, been sucked into.

I mean, some with a little bit more emphasis on insanity than others, but I digress.


What is, of course, compelling about this situation, wrought with vice, is that it does not exist but for the one perfect virtue. Love, the greatest motivator of our strengths, so often the backdrop to our most hurtful mistakes. Love, in it's brightest, burning red can't help but reduce the blacks and whites of this world to nearly indiscernible shades of gray. I don't go to or remain loyally and defensively at his side without it, nor is he compelled to mine, nor is she pushed or pulled by either of us. Nor are the bounds of our own quiet consciences violently tested without it, nor are any of us kept awake at night, nor are any of us compelled to wake in the morning. Nor are families built without it, tested without it, wrecked without it; rebuilt, retried, continued on without it.

Nor, it seems, are words written without it-- and not just by me, right now. Love, the great muse. Reading the words of my mirror, I am challenged to keep this ode to love so reverent, challenged once more to strive towards grace, challenged, as ever, to wipe desperately away at the mess to see what lies, and is beautiful, beneath.


On with it.

With very little else I feel like sharing with the world at large (or, plenty that I'd be willing to share with a group of total strangers, but that simply is not the group I'm offered, lately), let's do this meme again. Here are the rules:

Put your music player (iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, etc.) on Shuffle or Random mode, press Play, and list your favorite line or verse from the first 10 songs that it plays. Then get your friends to guess the artist and song title of each lyric. Fun! (You can skip instrumental-only songs, but no skipping of the embarrassing songs!)

Did this one last, on this site, on February 7th, 2008, then again on livejournal for Emily, who did not get enough of the answers the first time around. (I'm reading through some of the livejournal entries, which are all these quiz thingies, and thinking that my most eager vistor as of late is going to have a ball with them. Over and over again, I talk about how my biggest weakness is falling in love with people. One random question/Answer: "17. When do you know it's love? Too often. That's when.")

Anyway. On with the music quiz thingy (I keep wanting to call it a meme, but I've come to believe that's not actually what these things are. I guess that's one of those new-fangled words I just don't understand), since my collection has expanded greatly in the past year (to be something I'm really, really proud of. I really enjoy my diverse taste in music.) If I come up against a song that I honestly can't pick a good line out of, I'll skip it, but I'll tell y'all what it is I'm skipping. Also, I feel no reason to keep it to one line, if it turns out that the part I like best is really a few. It's my quiz thingy.

1. "Now that money comes and goes a bit faster than my confidence grows. Everybody knows there ain't nothing new about money woes."

I have to skip this song, "Theme From Pinata", by Bright Eyes. It's from one of the Bright Eyes CDs I kinda forgot I owned, and so I never added it to my iPod until recently. Thusly, I think this is probably only the third or so time I've heard it. It's a shame, though, it seems to have a lot of great lines.

2. "And why'd ya sing Hallelujah if it means nothing to ya? Why'd you sing with me at all?"
(I have to try to remember that this is the one of the songs that references 'Hallelujah' that I definitely want to include on the future Mix CD I've promised for Sam. That is, once I've written the song I've promised, to close it with.

Skipping "Time Won't Let Me" by The Smithereens. Great band, not their best song, no lyrical gems.

3. "Wears high heels when she exercises. Ain't that beautiful?"
(Grew to love that line when I was on my original "dance hour" kick, and I, too, would exercise in high heels. I also like "Her confidence is tragic, but her intuition, magic.")

4. "It's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all."
(I feel a little cheap; that's obviously the most quoted line from that song. But it's definitely the best. Maybe I could have gone with "Tears and fears and feeling proud, to say 'I love you' right out loud." Man, this is just a great song.)

Skipping "These Things" by She Wants Revenge. This song just freaks me out, as do a lot of the songs by She Wants Revenge. I've tried to make peace with that weird part of myself that they alarm, but it's just not worth it anymore. I'll keep "Tear You Apart" and take the rest of the iPod. I need the space, anyway.

5. "I catch the bad guys, well, most of the time. So it's a good life, a perfectly good life. Not exactly sublime."

6. "So take it off, like you home alone, you know, dance in front your mirror while your on the phone. Checking your reflection and tellin' your best friend, like 'Girl, I think my butt gettin' big.'"

7. "Now I do as I please, and lie through my teeth. Someone might get hurt, but it won't be me. I should probably feel cheap, but I just feel free, and a little bit empty."

8. "Your face like a vision straight out of Holly Hobbie. Late light drizzling through your hair. Your eyes, twin volcanoes."

Skipping "Stayin' Alive" by the BeeGees, because I can't come up with a line that I've ever actually bothered listening to other than the first, which would be a dead giveaway.

9."I do anything for you. Beat someone black and blue. Black and blue, and I'd do it for you."
(Never actually took the time to listen to the lyrics of the verses of that song before. Enlightening.)

Skipping "November 22, 1963" from the Assassins soundtrack, because, as moving as it is (I would have shot JFK with that kind of peer pressure going on.), it's not actually a song. And an instrumental version of "All The Pretty Little Horses".

Skipping "Simply Kind of Life" by No Doubt because I want to link to this entry that I wrote which featured it, but that'll ruin your chance to guess. Skipping Lit's "My Own Worst Enemy", because the song went all the way through while I was looking for the link to that last post, and then this next song came up, and I really love this next one, so it's more appropriate to end with.

10. "So I will find my fears and face them, or I will cower like a dog. I will kick and scream or kneel and plead. I fight like hell to hide that I've given up."


If you don't feel like guessing on that last one, and you happen to love my archives as much as I, sadly, do, read this post, the first in 2007. It's very musical.


I'm opening comments, if you'd like to take your guesses. On with it.

"And check out my hair. It's so unstyled, it's like a pile of stand."
~Casey J.

Looking through my archives, I find a link to Casey's old livejournal site and go. His last post to that site was in 2007, which would have been a year that I had very little to do with him.

I was about to write this whole post about how clear to me it was, while I was reading that, why I was crazy about him-- how smart he is, how funny, what a great writer. And there's something so sexy about his cockiness, and his dismissal. You know that cliché that women go crazy over the bad boys who act like they don't even like them? Casey is, like, the geeky journalist version of that.

But as I'm about to start writing this thing about how great his post was, about how his post made me feel, I realized that I didn't even read the whole fucking thing. That I couldn't bring myself to read it. There's a possibility that this somehow indicates that he's not as interesting as I'm giving him credit for-- more likely, it means that I'm still smarting from the way our friendship (essentially) ended, by the way it left me feeling utterly inferior to him.

I gotta get my shit together and learn things. Start reading Newsweek, listen to more NPR than I already do. Get some strong backing for my opinion on universal health care, and all of the other political issues. And other shit that would make me interesting to him again. Spend more time playing video games. Spend more time climbing fences. Start a fight club. Go seduce some more women. Write about fucking anything other than myself (and him. And other people in my life who I have all these bullshit "feelings" about.)


Maybe the coolest I've ever been in my life was when Casey Labrack still thought I was cool. Probably the least cool I've ever been was as I was typing that sentence.


This is not the way back to win back his respect, his attention, or his "ineffable fondness." Writing about vague ambitions to be better, do better, know more, but never really do anything about them. Just the fact that these ambitions are more about getting him back than they are about being a intellectually curious person, well, that sort of poisons anything I could accomplish. But he doesn't have to know that-- that is, if I could shut up about it for even a second.

I tell myself, don't be so hard on myself. One week from today (technically yesterday, since it's after midnight), I am going back to school, and this time, I'm going to go learn things that I want to know. I'm not being so career-minded, I'm not clawing and scratching my way out of a crappy job and a going-nowhere life...I mean, I am, but not quite as desperately, and with enough patience to make it more about the journey than the destination. This first semester, I registered for four art-related classes and, with a great deal of anxiety, music chorale. I just decided it was time to be brave-- time to ignore the people over the years (my sister) who have repeatedly told me that I can't sing at all, and just learn what I can, and be the best I can be at it, whatever level of skill that may be, because, frankly, I love singing. I always have. So it's time to just do it, incredibly scary as it might be.

That's kind of cool, right?


Maybe, one day, soon, I'll be publishing the children's books I've written and illustrated. Maybe I'll dedicate one to him-- or, better yet, I'll dedicate one to me, a little parable for the kids in the audience about being yourself, about not trying too hard to impress someone else. About having self-respect, about loving whatever it is about yourself that makes you special. And it'll sell a million copies, be an instant classic, and I'll be beloved, and successful, and I'll make millions of dollars.

Then I'll buy him a vintage El Camino, so he'll have to be my friend.


On with it.

I haven't wanted to write in this for a few days, due to various circumstances that need not be discussed in a public forum. But a few things are backing up, just some little bits and pieces that probably don't make up a full post anyway, so let's let them out:

-Tomorrow, I get to go see Mr. L and have a head-on conversation about his advice that I sleep with another man-- which I didn't take. Which I'm not going to take. I'm going to ask him exactly what the fuck he was thinking, I'm going to write it down, if I can remember, that early in the morning, to take a pen and notepad. I'm going to explain to him all the various consequences of his just giving the advice, let alone what would have happened if I had taken it. And I'm going to find out, once and for all, what the old hippy thinks of marriage, and decide whether or not he's the appropriate man to be seeing in an attempt to rescue mine.

If he doesn't piss me off too damn much, and he might, then I'll schedule an appointment for Zack and I to attend together. Won't this be fun?


-My ideal form of celebrity: to be one of these hot, B-listy celebrities that gets to be on the cover of playboy without having to actually show anything on the inside. Last month, Olivia Munn was rocking the cover, but the one picture of her on the inside featured her in panties that she was sort of vaguely pulling down (but she hadn't revealed anything), with her nipples safely under her hair. This month, Heidi Montag from the hills looks so fucking hot on the cover, it makes me want to go out and shoot that douche Spencer (with the creepy, flesh-colored beard, if you follow the soup) more than I usually do, but her photoshoot on the inside is completely tame, there's only one photo showing crack, every other major hotspot is totally covered. These are the the kind of photoshoots you expect in Maxim, not playboy.

If I got the choice of which magazine to be in, and I mean, I never will, but if I did, I'd pick playboy over Maxim, but just barely. The bunny is what puts it over the top. Gotta love an iconic rodent.


-And now for a few public letters:


Dear Rachel Maddow:

I know you're supposedly very happy with your life partner, but if that ever changes, I'd like to go ahead and put my name on the list, or whatever. Somehow, I definitely think you're the sexiest woman in the public eye-- you've knocked Angelina Jolie, Eva Mendes, and Scarlett Johanson right down the list.

If the people's veto goes through, I'll move to Massachussetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, wherever. Say the word and I'll leave Zack, Rachel. Anything for you.

With Love,
Linda H.



-And, to Cosmo.

Dear Cosmopolitan Magazine:
What the fuck? On the cover of the August Issue (with the Katy Perry Cover), you tooted to have an article inside about "The Orgasm Whisperer", and how "every woman needs one." I spent a long month wondering precisely what that article could be about, fascinated by all the different possibilities--- could it be a hypnotherapist who rents out their craft to orgasm-lacking women everywhere? Instructions for chanting yourself into a tantric state of bliss? Some kind of bizarre audio device? What, what what?

I finally checked out the article today. It was about lube. Personal Lubricant. It claimed I could make my man into an "orgasm whisperer" by just using lube.

WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM, COSMO? GO TO HELL!

Bullshit false advertising. Fuck you.

Sincerely,
Linda H.


I've always hated all the assumptions that Cosmo magazine makes about it's readers. If you've picked up a copy, you must be a 110-pound career-oriented CEO who pulls in 250k a year, with fucking spectacular sex life and great fashion sense. How many women out there like that actually read Cosmo? I'm guessing two. And I hate them both. I hope they and there slimy orgasm whispering boyfriends fuck themseves off a cliff.



Hmmm. I may be bitter tonight. Towards everyone but my Rachel.


Kinda a wasted post, but it's a matter of staying in practice. See you soon, maybe even with something relevant to say. On with it!

"Picture this, we were both buck naked, banging on the bathroom floor."

Man, I haven't heard this song in a long time. Totally had it stuck in my head the other day for...uh, no apparent reason. Right.

In attempts to get the information from my old computer onto the new computer, I'm finding a lot of old files that had somehow gotten lost. Lot of songs I haven't heard for a while. Maybe songs that it didn't occur to me I'd actually miss...actually, the evidence suggests that they were songs that I didn't, in fact, miss.

Talking to James, who I've previously spoken of as the benefactor who bought SuedeCaramel.com for me. As truly grateful as I am to him or that, it didn't occur to me that his generosity isn't without some, uh, provisos? See, while he has always made it so SuedeCaramel.com and, for the matter, LindaHild----.com come directly here, he never actually gave me control of the two addresses.

James: Well, I could do anything. For example i could point your name to midget goat porn.


Oh....oh yeah. I guess he could.

I oddly thought James was a fan of the site, from the way he will occasionally harass me when I don't update. Turns out, about two or three times a year, he'll come, read every post on the page, and leave.

Well, I'll take it.

James: have you thought about the next step after blogging?
Linda: is there a step you have in mind?
James: lifecasting
Linda: hahahahaa
Linda: what the fuck is lifecasting?
James: you setup a webcam, it runs 24/7
James: It's put somewhere like a livingr oom or central area where people are clothed
James: and you spend time with the lovely people of the internet when your online.
Linda: I don't think it's quite the obvious progression that you make it out to be. I'm a writer.
James: Right, but it allows interactivity with the world i guess?
Linda: well, no. Interacting with the world allows interactivity with the world.
James: Not nessisarially.

I know he doesn't come off as the smartest guy in the world in that conversation, but don't judge too harshly-- if you look closely, you'll see that spelling of necessarily works, phonetically.


So, thinking about LindaHil-----.com, I was compelled to type my nameinto google to see what comes up. Surprisingly, it's pretty hard to find this site by doing that, which is odd-- it wasn't hard, say, two or three months ago. What did come up were a couple of posts from the weekend of my wedding-- not on this site, but Emily's old diaryland page. This one was written the day of, this one, which talks about the wedding decidedly more, was written the day after.

Emily was possibly not as charming talking about my wedding as I tried to be when I wrote about hers-- oh? Jenn looked gorgeous? Great. Thanks. The bride is only mentioned as being "awkward" and "mildly obnoxious", but Jenn looks gorgeous-- but I'll try not to be bitter. The blushing bride that was me was not in the same league as the blushing bride that was Emily.

I guess, with things the way they are now, I'm a little sensitive to the fact that Emily kept describing the whole thing as being not real to her-- oddly, it kind of reminds me of those idiotic Birthers who think Obama is not the real president because "he was secretly born in Kenya." Wanting the story from a different source, I went to see what it was I thought to write about my wedding day.

Hmmm. Nothing.

The last post before my wedding was a lovely, Edna St. Vincent Millay-style sonnet that I wrote presumably because I did something horrible. The next was written in January, and it covers the wedding a little bit tersely. So, I guess Emily, in all her incredulousness, covered the day better than I bothered to. It's a real shame. I could really benefit from crawling back inside the mind of that girl, that girl who wanted him so badly, that girl who wore that dress, who walked that aisle.

Jenn wants me plan a do-over, which is what I've wanted since day one. I wish I'd gone ahead and planned it for our fifth anniversary-- it's a good, round number, and it fell on a Saturday. Seems weird to do it on the sixth or the seventh, weirder still to do it on a day that's not an anniversary at all, though mid-October isn't necessarily ideal for the location I, at long last, decided on: Salem Willows, the beautiful park on the water in Salem, Massachusetts. I look forward to going there every year with Zack during the summer, to feed the squirrels and pigeons. There's a place where we buy popcorn (delicious popcorn) and bags of roasted nuts for them. There's an amphitheater we could have the ceremony in, covered picnic structures for the reception, a carousel we could possibly rent. If the weather in October wasn't just slightly too cold, well, maybe I'd start planning something, maybe for the tenth.

Except, at this point, who knows for sure whether my marriage will make it to be six. Nobody whose been paying attention, that's for sure.

The shame of it is, if I ever got divorced, well, okay, I might one day get the benefit of a second wedding one day, maybe, but I couldn't do it there. I'd have to come up with a whole new perfect location. Salem Willows is our place.

Those are our squirrels, our pigeons. Our bags of peanuts twisted close at the top, our delicious popcorn. Our sun-covered days by the sea; everyone else there, they're just props. It's our tradition, our bliss, something I'd never do again, without him beside my side.

I can't think about it.

On with it. I hope.

Harry: What does this song mean? For my whole life I don't know what this song means. I mean, 'Should old acquaintance be forgot". Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them!?

Sally: Well may be it just means that we should remember that we forgot them, or something.

~Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, When Harry Met Sally

No, Meg Ryan. That's a bad idea. It's a horrible feeling. Remembering that you forgot.

"There's only one moment I need to write....I shouldn't write it at all. I should delete this e-mail once it's sent. I should forget, so I won't have the burden of remembering and knowing I said nothing. But what if I do forget?"

That one's me. The beginning and ending of an e-mail I sent to Emily on July 19th, 2009. I took at least part of my own advice, that night-- I had to search the trash folder of my gmail account to get that quote. And honestly, tonight, I'm glad that I wrote it all out. I'm glad I have the e-mail that I wrote with the sweat of that moment still fresh on my brow. I'm glad I have this black-and-white reminder that I am not black-and-white, that there are things and me that are blazing red. Right now, I am colorblind.

I won't say the old man was right, but he sounds distinctly less crazy when I get to that point where I'm just angry at the idea that I don't get to have what other people have. Angry when I think of the fact that sex is life-affirming, and angry when I get to that point where I can't even imagine how it could be. Angry when I see that episode of Scrubs where sex makes everything better in the end. Angry when people make suggestive jokes about what Zack and I must be doing tonight. Angry when I think of the entanglements that have built up, angry when I think of that one, thin gold necklace I owned that got into so many little knots that it was rendered useless, and I had to throw it out-- it was gold for christ's sake.

Angry when I think about how much I still love my husband, how attracted to him I still am on so many levels. Angry when I think that, maybe, they aren't the levels that matter.

Angry when I hear Mr. L's voice in my head, telling me that I "come alive" when I talk about my sexually charged encounters with other men. Angry when I think that he is the man that I feel has a chance to save my relationship, maybe the only person who can untangle the kinks in the chain, and he doesn't seem to respect marriage. I don't know that I ever realized before, but he's got to be...almost sixty if not, and he's single, and he's dating women much younger than him, always has been by the reports I've been getting. I know I mentioned this briefly in the last post, but I'll expound upon it here. I know he has kids, so he's probably divorced-- I have no idea why I've never just asked him this, I guess my fear is that, with the "daddy issues" he's eminantly aware of, he'd be concerned that I had those feelings for him. At any rate, I've been trying to justify the fact that he told me to sleep with someone else by the fact that he must want what's best for me. He says I'm co-dependent (I don't think he's wrong, but I've always been too scared to look up what that really means), and he thinks my relationship is doomed (we have been struggling since day one), and he wants to stop me before I go down with the ship, I guess. Surely, it's not that he doesn't respect marriage, it's just my marriage that he feels has run it's course.

Except the guy he told me to sleep with? He's married too.


I keep telling Zack just slightly too much truth about the things Mr. L says, making Zack incredibly angry at him. He has violent fantasies, and I can't, frankly, blame him. Problem, though: my only real shot at making this work, one thinks, is couples therapy, which is a service I frankly don't trust. But I know from one pseudo-session that Mr. L can get Zack to talk, and he already has -so much- of my backstory; this could work. Except I, being an idiot, (That would be a great new title for the blog, if I were looking to change it again. "I, being an idiot...") had to go and give Zack all the reason in the world to distrust and feel betrayed by this man. Super.

Linda: He asked which one of you I think would perform better cunnilingus.
Zack: What? Why??? What the hell kind of a question is that???

Yeah...what the hell kind of a question is that?


But, like I said, it's hard to blame him when I feel like I do today-- frigid, broken, useless. Someone who'd better find some satisfying cause in life, because she's never going to find any satisfaction anywhere else. Someone who, like so many retirees, might as well close up shop down south and come north for the summer--that comparison, howevever, would have worked so much better if retirees came north in the winter as opposed to be the summer, because my life is shaping up to be one long winter, as it were. What's that crocus poem by Jean Little in "Hey World, Here I Am?"

Surprise

I feel like the ground in winter,
Hard, cold, dark, dead, unyielding.

Then hope pokes through me
Like a crocus.

The crocus, that's what I remember that I forgot. The crocus that poked through me on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday. I know that it was there, I can visualize the-- jesus christ, I use metaphors too much-- beautiful petals, imagine the sweet scent. But I can't remember how it felt to have that crocus pierce through my frozen soil, a harbinger of new life to come, of the hopeful days of spring, of the sweltering heat of summer. A theoretical harbinger, at any rate, since the summer never came. Just more winter.

"In winter time, the roses died.
Her blood ran cold, and then she said
'I want to love, but it comes out wrong.'"
~The Smithereens, Blood and Roses

Also, I have no idea what a crocus even looks like, in real life. Time for a google image search.

Oooo, pretty.



On with it.

A minute ago, I had few scattered moments of believing that I had done the right thing, as evidenced by the tweets that I will leave up, for the time being. That confidence, it wanes.

At four o'clock today, I got a message from you on my phone with one simple request-- one that I was, apparently, destined to ignore. At four o'clock for you, I shed the first tears that were exclusively for you. They weren't the last. I haven't yet seen the last.

At twenty minutes after midnight or so, my entire right leg fell through the hole in porch, twisting my left foot as I fell. I screamed aloud in the night, letting it seem that it was for the pain of the fall. It might have been a little, but as I lapsed into sobs, even Zack knew that it was for you. He'd be a fool not to; I've been acting pretty crazy all night; I told him what I did. I told him why I did it.


At maybe 7:45 this morning, I was fuming mad at Mr. L. I was calling him anything insulting that vaguely fit. I was calling him a hippy (there's a tweet on that one), a new-aged joke. I was railing at the idea of a sixty-ish, unmarried man who sleeps with women right about half his age and undermines the important of marriage-- sure, he wants me to get mine now that I'm twenty-something, but by the time I'm his age, I'll be worthless, having avoided marriage my whole life at his suggestion, and found myself unmarketable to a world of men who want only younger women. That's what happen to girls like me when we listen to men like him. Sure, he wants me and my superior genes to join his free love movement now (not for himself, mind you. Even angry at him as I was, I can't allege that. It's just not true.) But once I grow up, I'll get put out to pasture.

Not everyone has your particular set of problems, Mr. L. I could leave Zack now and spend the rest of my life bedding anyone who I find mildly interesting and still never have the problems you talked about in session today (edited for content on August 20th.) I'm gonna have some owning up to if he actually reads this, but whatever, fuck him.) So maybe we shouldn't be as concerned with the pursuit of Linda's perfect orgasm-- this bullshit idea that, in reality, may never, probably will never happen-- and focus on Linda's semi-charmed life.

I love my husband, goddamn it. Even if, as you (Mr. L, not you-you.) pointed out, I'm currently in love with someone else. I'm not gonna blow every blip on the radar. Was this whole thing some sort of bizarre, sick reverse psychology thing? Because, if not, remind me to bring a paper and pencil and make note of your justification of this advice next time. Because everyone, everyone thinks you're fucking crazy.

For those of you who aren't able to keep up, Mr. L said that I should sleep with another guy. The other guy. The one I've just gone through a pseudo-breakup with, mostly out of fear that, with the infallible one's blessing, I would give in.

So yeah, Mr. L. Fuck you. And yeah, I'll see you on the 18th. Trust me. I'll be there.



Maybe you won't read this ever again. Maybe I won't be able to make you understand how hard this is for me-- the way I typed out that last text message and stared at it for maybe twenty minutes, floating my thumb above the "send" button. When I finally hit it, I instantly had no idea if I had done it on accident or not. I waited and waited, hoping for some further protest. You probably have more pride than that. And then, there's the possibility that I got you into some serious shit on your end. If that's the case, then, christ, I'm sorry. I wish I could have waited. In that moment, I didn't feel like I could.

It that seems selfish, you'll have to understand that I was somehow paralyzed by the earlier conversation which ended so suddenly. I could do nothing but wait for the situation to resolve itself. I couldn't write my damn essay, I couldn't watch TV. I didn't eat. I did masturbate briefly, and to no happy end-- Mr. L would be satisfied by my dissatisfaction, as proof of his point. (Didn't I say fuck you? Fuck you.) I had things to do, and I had no interest, no will to do them, till I found some sort of closure. I was hoping it would just be closure to the conversation...I guess it wasn't. I guess by the time I finished typing it out, I guess by the time I maybe-accidentally hit "send", it was more definitive than that. One way or another...I don't know. There's part of me that keeps saying it "had to happen."

But I shouldn't have risked getting you in trouble. I'm sorry. And it should have been in person. I'm sorry. And it should have been a thousand years from now. God, I'm sorry.


I want to see you again. I want to discuss it in person. I want us to find whatever comfortable place we're going to get to, to be sure that you'll make good on that promise that you'll care about me even when I'm not half naked and halfway done. Or, if we're never going to find someplace "comfortable", then fine. I want to search for it and miss. I want to know definitively that we're always going to be holding back some deeper connection, some seed that longs to take root, some ever-streaming tail of a firework, always maybe about to burst. (That must have been the description you were talking about the other day...the firework one.)

Without my noticing, U2's "With or Without You" has come on in background. Again, one of those moments where I suddenly love a song. Maybe more profound if I'd realized it was happening earlier.

"Sleight of hand and twist of fate,
On a bed of nails, she makes me wait.
And I wait without you."

I hope you come here again. I hope you read this. I want to see you...I know it won't be soon. If I could have accepted that, if I weren't so fitful at the thought of it, maybe none of this would have happened.


On with it.

It has to end. It has to end. It has to end.

I was blunt, I was cruel, and I was right. I was straightforward, I was consistent, and I was right. I was hurtful, I was hurt, and I was right.

It can't go on like this. This loneliness that can only be tempered by one person, that stings ever more harshly when surrounded by a sea of people that are not the right one. This torture that is a problem without resolution, this sick melancholy which is addiction to melancholy.

It has to end.

I don't like who I am in his absence, what I do to those who represent a lack of him. And anyway, it's not safe anymore-- that was part of the appeal initially, was it not? I am scared by intimacy, but so drawn to it despite that I go and press up against it, caged, like an animal in a zoo. Some fierce predator that I long so long to touch that I stretch my fingers through the chain link fence, but would dare not approach in the open savannah.

Poetic bullshit. Where's Casey to slap me silly?

It's not safe anymore, with the building of the desperation. With Mr. L's approval. Having explored every other option except those with are entirely taboo. It's not safe anymore, and, because of that, it will become safer-- I will lack response to it. I will pull back, into myself, fingers intact.

Or will I?

It has to end. It has to end. It has to end, before I can find out.

I will pull back into myself and be safe, be intact, be worthless. I will pull back into myself and waste the rest of my life being safe. I will pull back into myself until the ennui makes me crazy again, until I fall back into the same patterns and find some other cage, some other large, powerful beast who will ignite my imagination from a distance, who will make my fingers ache, and the pattern of the Zoo, it goes wildly in circles like the rides they have there: merry-go-round, ferris wheel, roller coaster.

Round and round. Up and down. Over and over, ad nauseum, quite literally.

"Something here will eventually have to explode."

Am I talking myself into or out of something? It's hard to tell anymore.

If I can manage a paradigm shift by the next time I see him, I might get out with my awful little life in tact. Maybe I will have gotten out without breaking anyone's heart. Maybe I won't have.


I don't know what I want. I don't know how to get it. I know I can't follow Mr. L's advice. I know I can't keep trading hours of misery for a few scattered minutes of...a different kind of misery, the kind that would be like joy if it could sit still for a minute, if it could relax. A relief tempered by the knowledge that the pain comes on again, and soon.

I can't trade all of these hours for those minutes, and I can't trade the rest of my life to turn those minutes into hours. It has to end. It has to end.



Tell me what I want. Be here, to change my mind. Tell me that getting rid of you doesn't actually make my life easier or better, it just lets me fall into these same patterns again. Tell me that even if Mr. L wasn't right, maybe he was pointing me in the right direction. Tell me to spend just a little bit longer with you. Take a lesson from me, and don't let me leave.

Except that you can't do that from where you are.


On with it.

As of late, there has been a lot of comparison between me, in a sexually aroused state, and a cat. A kitten, more acutely, but for the purposes of this post (this eventual metaphor), we're gonna stick with cat. Those of you who know me well can imagine how turned on I would have to be before I found the kitten comparison anything but completely repugnant.

And that's what it is, or what the word "kitten", in this context has come to mean: me, in a state so worked up and in the moment that I suspend my cynicism for that kind of drivel, and really, my criticism of really anything at all. Me, getting beyond that state of endless thought, fast-moving analysis, the sarcasm, the defensiveness, the stress.

I'm sure, for most of you, such a state isn't terribly hard to imagine. Myself, I have one definite account of it in recent memory, and I'm dubious that there'd be more than that if I looked farther back in the records. But then, I have a tendency to forget, quickly, how something felt, and only remember the facts and figures, some of the conversations and the visuals (though almost always in a third-person, movie-camera angle.)

I really think my sex life would benefit incredibly from learning how to meditate, how to shut off the go-go-go of my head. I bought a Psychology Today magazine a few weeks ago, an issue on sex and attraction. It sits, crumpled, on the floor of my bathroom, open to a page that has one of the oversized quotations from the surrounding article: "When a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent." I feel like the further information that must be in the article would be illuminating, if not entirely surprising, and I feel like I should read it, but by the time I get around to actually picking it up, I'm generally done with whatever I was in there for in the first place.

I do think it's interesting how often science seems to be running to catch up with things that seem completely obvious to the new-age set, though.


So, I've found another comparison between my sexual self and a cat tonight, because heaven forbid I should witness some natural phenomenon and not find a way to make it about me. Riding my bike tonight, I come across a cat toying with some small, helpless prey. Hypocritically, I ride up to stop it. Unlike the two or three other cats I've done this to on my late-night excursions in the past few weeks, this one didn't seem at all perturbed by me. I rode the bike up until I was a foot and half away from it, then had to get off to deal with it at closer range. The mouse it was toying with must have been injured by the time I got there, it would have been easy enough for me to scoop it up and bring it somewhere safe, but not wanting to get bit, I put my hand between the cat's head and the rodent. I expected, finally, for this to spook the cat, but I found the cat's head pushing resistantly against my hand. At first I thought it was stubborn, then I realized that it just wanted my affection. I pet it at length to distract it and give the mouse a chance to escape, and I remembered I that I know this cat-- not just metaphorically, either. This is the same cat that's often on this stretch of road, often comes up to me and demands my attention. Every time I pass it, it comes to greet me, it's colleague.

So there it is. I didn't find a delicate way to put it, but it's obvious, non? Both of us cats, catching and toying with prey, injuring or killing it, and for no good reason. We're both well fed, well taken care-of. But it's in our nature, to chase and destroy. It's in our nature to make a life into a plaything.


"I've been a bad, bad girl.
I've been careless with a delicate man.
And it's a sad, sad world.
When a girl will break a boy, just because she can."


There's probably more on my mind-- more about how much today sucked, how many little conversations have backed up in my system and will die before they have a chance to get out, like so many seedling maples, growing in a gutter. About missing my muse, the man who, if nothing else, has given me the will to write again (Talk to me in person, world, if you want know where to send that giant thank-you note.) About things he's got me thinking and talking about-- what I really want out of life, why I won't let myself have them.

But I have to finish my English homework, and get this damn mix CD done, once and for all. For him, of course. I do this as a token and a labor of love, finding just the right combination of songs, just the right order so that it builds and falls appropriately. I bet the cat never did that for the mouse.

In the end, I guess, that's what separates us from the animals.


On with it.

On my walk tonight, I was thinking about too many people to even remember who they were now. Largely, people I've kissed. And one person I long to kiss again, with this sort of Mitch Albom-style pining. (IE, cross the plot "For One More Day"-- where the lead character gets to see his dead Mother again-- with a lesbian erotica. It made more sense in my head.)

I stepped into a smell that reminded me of her, but maybe only because I was already thinking of her. I found myself wanting so badly to think of a song that reminds me only of her, and of nobody else. When I couldn't think of one, I looked through my iPod. Nothing there was quite right, nothing there was quite worthy of her. But the ensuing melancholy, and the temperature of the air around me, and odd sadness that's permeated my alone time lately, that all begged for Arcade Fire's "Crown of Love." It's a song that does not remind me of her, or of myself, or maybe of anybody. It's a parting gift from Casey, one of the last songs I ever downloaded on his recommendation, but it doesn't remind me of him. I think, perhaps, it reminds me of a reality that lives in my fears.

"I carved your name
Across my eyelids
You pray for rain,
I pray for blindness."

As the full meaning of these lines crushes into my head for the first time, I want to fall to my knees and scream at the sky.

"If you still want me,
Please forgive me.
The crown of love
Is falling from me."


And now, I am relistening to the song to recapture the feeling, to get these words down. And now, I am paralyzed by it. By the sad, driving progression of the piano. By the inevitable, pained strains of the strings. By the desperation in the singer's voice.


There is something I want to say here, about how, even as I grow to love someone new more and more, I grow to believe in love less and less. The affection that grows between us now is just a testament to the fleeting and frail powers of affection in general. I'm certain reading that will be, at best, annoying to him: more likely, it will make him acutely remorseful of the consequences of his decisions, both the painfully obvious and the bizarrely ironic.


For some reason, I'm listening to "Danny Boy" now. Great song, came into loving it pretty late. Not a big fan of this particular singer. (Daniel O'Donnell)


He said if he was ever going to give in and kiss me, it would be while we were standing. He's great at that, and he knows he is-- paying attention to things people have said, and using them again, at another time, to their absolute delight. I told him that almost all of my first kisses with people have happened while laying down (he says it's because there's some arcane aspect of my beauty that comes out while I'm lounging-- that's not an exact quote, mind you, but I have to fit his sentiment to my own sense of rhetoric. Something about the slope of my side...I don't know quite what he's talking about, but then, neither does he.) The rare ones that haven't been laying down have been sitting-- at this point, I have to make a written list of everyone I've ever kissed just to make sure I know what I'm talking about. Twelve on the list that undeniably belong there, in that I didn't just kiss them, I had a whole, like, session of kissing them. Jill, Jeremey and Bobby also on the list, as people I only kissed once or twice (Jill) or whom I kissed during a game of Truth or Dare or Spin the Bottle (Jeremey and Bobby)-- I guess Serena and, to a lesser extent, Peter, would be added to that list, if you count those.

And Kris and I used to have a policy that I was allowed to kiss him as a friend-- IE, no tongue, brief and simple and completely platonic. When I say, "we had a policy", what I mean is that I realized that Kris had a tendency to kiss me like that, so I asked Zack if that was fine in such a way that implied he had no choice.

Only one person on that list who's name I can't write at all. One person who I've chosen not to mention in too much detail on here so far. One person whose name everyone knows should be on the list, but with whom my last kiss was a secret.

When I first wrote it down, I had the sneaking suspicion I was missing someone-- I was. Greg Goulding. Breadloaf, Vermont, maybe in 2000. The dew-covered hills that we were rolling all over as we skipped out one of the readings that wasn't optional, the library with the bust of Robert Frost and the fireplace, and reading poetry to each other on that couch.

Any good man can tell you, I'm a sucker for literature.

I was coming around to something-- oh yes, why I'm sad that I've never been kissed standing up. It's not just a positional thing, it's important to point out. It's about the build up to the moment. The will-they-or-won't-they. A terribly important aspect of my fantasy kiss is that I be the person who gets kissed, rather than the one doing the kissing. It's equally important that it happen at a moment where a significant amount of movement has to happen before landing-- IE, that I not already be in that position, that it's not just a matter of parting one's lips. There has to be that moment of anticipation. Whether the movement of someone's head towards mine would happen quickly and passionately-- think someone who's eyes are fixed on you crossing the room at a New York pace, then grabbing you up, and kissing you hard-- or would happen slowly-- think of someone looking deep in your eyes as they go to hold you, then they are looking from your eyes to your lips, then touching your face with their hand before tilting their head and leaning in as they pull you in gently with their hand on the back of your neck-- well, whatever. In theory, I'd take either, so long as there was that question in the air for just a moment beforehand, like the tiny, almost indiscernible trail of a firework that disappears altogether for just a moment before it explodes.

In practice, I'll take neither. I'm married. I mean, chicks of the world, you have your instructions. But this is, by no means, an invitation for the men in the audience. Unfortunately.

I am trying to count how many of my first kisses were started by me. Six, I know for sure. Emily, Mark and Jeff, I don't honestly remember anymore. (I'll leave comments open if any of the three of you are reading this, and would like to edify the audience. Anyone who's kissed me, actually, feel free to contribute. Remember, to access comments, you have to view this post by itself.) Greg, Ben, Sam and Katie, I'm pretty sure they kissed me first.

I feel like somewhere in that list, there's more I could write about. But I probably shouldn't. I'm re-reading some old posts, I may include some links in a tweet-- I really love this damn blog, I really want people-- other than me-- to read the archives. Wanting that wouldn't be the most shameful thing I've wanted, as of late.

On with it.

There's a post I want to write, that I've been saving up for too long now. Too many pieces, and how will they all fit together?

A post about a word that is my weakness. A word that makes and breaks things-- that I am dependent on. I once-- twice? A hundred times?-- told Sam that the reason he and I could never be together is that I didn't believe he'd ever be able to look into my eyes and use that word for me, and whenever, in the past, I've started to wonder how it might feel to be with someone like him, someone who intrigues and seduces me the way that he does, I remember that he'd never be able to say it. I also know that it's for the best, that he not have what it takes to use my weakness against me. As if, at the time, in that moment, he was not my weakness. But I guess I have more than one.

And no, it's not "love". Believe it or not, there's a word that makes me even crazier than "love".

A post about the way Emily's cousin came up to me yesterday, begging my forgiveness that she did not recognize me at first, and used that word, all three perfect syllables of it, twice, with modifiers like "absolutely", and, I don't know, something else. In return, I told her I recognized her, because she was the same as she'd ever been-- stunning. I didn't go into the fact that it wasn't just the physical that made it true-- her manner, her personality. The easy generosity with which she lavished complements upon me-- the complement, it turns out, that is maybe the only one I would ever need to hear. It's easy to see why she's Emily's favorite cousin, why our mutual friend never got over her. It makes me feel somehow more important as a person to have made any kind of impression on her in the two or three times we met previously, as well as through the things that Emily may have told her over the years.

But this isn't a post about Maggie, not really.


It's a post about something I said the other night, having one of those moments where suddenly, I realize, I feel far less self-worth than I'm even aware of. And I wanted to link to a post about one of the last times that happened, and if I find it, eventually, I will put that link here. (Well...I found one post that briefly made mention of it here. In that same search-- I searched for the word "possibility"-- I found this post which I find particularly interesting, too. I'm wondering if the post I was actually looking for-- which had the words I said to Sam, the lack of his appropriate reaction to them, and then Zack's reaction to them, later, and how perfect it was, despite everything we were going through-- was actually an e-mail to someone? If it was, I may post it, later.) I wanted to express how, it turns out, I still feel broken, defective. Even with all the progress it could be argued I have made. Because of all the progress it could be argued that I never will make.


It's a post about belief, as much as anything else. The belief I held, when I was young, that the first thing that happened when you got to heaven was they sat you down in a room with a big TV and a group of angels, and reviewed a full, decades-spanning video of your life. When I was young, this was the largest source of my Catholic shame-- this belief that I would be trapped in that room, seeing, with perfect remorse, all the times I ever touched myself, all the times I ever swore without immediately adding "I'm sorry, God."-- do you know how long I did that?

"Catholic girls start much too late."

That same belief of the afterlife, while it had been such a source of anxiety, was maybe the hardest thing to lose, when I lost my faith. Suddenly, I inherited the belief that everything that had ever happened to me was, all at once, gone. That, along with the shameful moments, I had lost my turn to see it all again, the friendships, the happiness. The moments of extreme perfection which are like shining islands in the sea of misery that they cause, acting as poor and precious justification to ruin everything you've come to depend on. Suddenly, all that was left of these things were my fleeting memories-- and anything I'd already lost a memory of, well, maybe someone else had one. But if not, if it was something that was just my own, well, was it even real anymore?

This was probably the seed of a rather unpopular idea I expressed in lit class a few weeks ago, that truth may be subjective. I know I'm not the first person to think that, but it's not something that I've really known anyone to agree with.


Belief in other things, too-- or the lack of belief in other things. Seeing my reflection, sometimes, I'm given ample evidence to believe that I am that thing I wish to believe I am. Other times, I see myself and think that it couldn't be farther from the truth. This informs my skepticism-- do beautiful women exist? Or are their simply women who know better than others how to pose, how to dress, how to apply makeup and hide their flaws. Myself? Well, I'm pretty enough from a certain angle, but I don't know quite how to strike it, and even in the company of people who give me ten times more confidence, in the moment, than I usually have-- when I leave, I can't help but wonder how much of the evening I spent with my neck craned in just that certain way that makes me, somehow, more appealing, more worthwhile.

Conversely, it's important to point out that I do believe in ugly women-- they are as real and as tangible as the earth beneath my feet. This isn't some hippy-dippy tribute to equality and the subjective nature of beauty. I believe that some women are truly ugly, but I question the possibility that any women are truly beautiful.


If there was anything to challenge that skepticism, it was the vision that was Emily, yesterday, on her wedding day. In her gown, with her hair just so-- seeing that, and holding my breath, and needing to stare: that must be what a real belief in beauty feels like. She was more beautiful than I'd ever seen her, but, beyond that, somehow more beautiful than anyone had ever been. How ridiculous that she should lack confidence that she would be.

There was a post I was going to write, the day before, about how, despite my changing tastes over the years, despite my changing moods, my changing lifestyles...despite the approval that I give for the hollywood standard of beauty, and the way that makes certain people think I am shallow, despite everything, the first person I ever kissed has never stopped being beautiful to me. Having seen her yesterday, the whole ode I had planned seems to be something of an understatement.

And Emily, with that same generous grace that seems to be a quality of a "Davis Girl" (as Floyd puts it), Emily always tells me I'm beautiful, too.

What would the world be without Davis Girls, huh?


There were other things to write-- about this CD I've listened to easily five times in the past forty hours or so. About whether or not I am converted, about individual lines that stand out. But, in reality, this wasn't a post about the one person who's been driving me to write so often, lately. And it wasn't a post that was asking to be pandered to by him or anybody else. This was a post about Emily being beautiful, Maggie being stunning, and me being weak. This was a post about the subjectiveness of truth, and the impossibility of perfection, and the things I believed when I was young. This was a post about the things that I don't believe now.

On with it.

I'm just gonna stick this post on top for a while...it was originally posted on the 7/25/09, at 10:04pm

Eventually, I plan to redesign this site so that a twitter badge is worked seemlessly into the sidebar, allowing my readers to follow me both on to-the-moment thoughts, and long, rambling...ramblings. But for now, I'm gonna stick a twitter badge into this post, and then tweet a little.

Twitter Updates

follow me on Twitter





On with it.

Text messages again.

Me: I was wrong.
Sam: About?
Me: Him being better for me than you, as if I'm an addict and you are a more damaging drug. Better metaphor: I am a self-mutilator and you are two glass bottles.
Me: IE, you'd both be completely harmless if I weren't such a fucking mess.

I'm not as faithful to the shuffle gods tonight. I put it on shuffle, but I skip past any song that isn't hard enough to drive my anger-- anger, I should point out, that is purely at myself, no matter how much I associate it with somebody else. I let it play a song by Sage Francis (thinking that this feeling I had that let me enjoy it, it must be how Elorza and Zack feel all the time), and then one by Buck 65 (the Buck song was not quite angry enough for my tastes, but I was also feeling incredibly, incredibly uncool, and hating myself for it, so I wanted something to make me feel cooler than I was. What's cooler than underground hip hop? If you said canadian underground hip hop, well, then, you must think I'm pretty cool right now.) I let it stop on "Unkind" by Tabitha's Secret: "Bring it on, baby, whatcha gettin' into?// Is living on pain the thing that's getting to you?// Write my name, pin it up with my picture,// say it's the only thing, 'cause I'm not around to be around." There's a song by Regina Spektor that I've never paid much attention to before, that strikes a chord with me, called "Hero": "And we're going to these meetings but we're not doing any meetin'.// And we're trying to be faithful, but we're cheatin', cheatin', cheatin'."

I listen, for a while, to the tinny overhead music that completes the awful scene as I sit in the red, lawn-style reclining chair in the annex where they sell barbecues and mulch.

Even as I've come to hate myself, I've come to love that chair. That chair is dangerous enabler. I'm breaking up with that chair.


In a conversation with Emily I have in my car after I drive home (she responded to one of the five "I'm too pathetic to exist" text messages I sent out to random friends while I sat in my chair.), I tell her "I'm going to have write on my blog, or tell him to his face: 'you have my cell number. You can have my home number. There's absolutely no reason you can't call me, and, really, I mean any time. So, if you're headed to wal-mart and you hope there's a possibility I can meet you there, if you want to take a walk sometime, if you want to come over and watch a movie, whatever. Call me. And if you find that it makes you uncomfortable or that you'd be afraid I'd already be busy, well, then clearly you're not paying attention, and anyway, that's just not as big of a problem as me spending all my goddamn free time at wal-mart for no good reason.' And god help me if I don't have the strength or the self-esteem to find some way to communicate that. I mean, really, if I don't, shoot me now, because I'm fucking worthless."

I mean, the telling it to his face thing, well, that would have suggested slightly more strength and self-esteem than this does, but one way or another, it's gotta get done.


I need to reiterate-- I am mad at, annoyed with, and disgusted by no one but myself, here. And I wish to god I was oblivious enough that I didn't have to be, but I'm not. It's clear as day that I'm assigning other people's faces to my inner demons. I'm at this weird place of balance. I'm too smart to not see the idiocy in the things I do, and too sane to not see how fucking crazy the things I want to do are (IE, punch the large bags of dog food on display...and maybe the brick walls, a little...and all the other customers.) And I have too much pride to confess to all that, but honestly, I also have too much pride not to confess to all of that. And if you can't figure out how that works out, don't worry, you're not alone, because I really don't know what I meant, either. Maybe that I'm afraid if I'm not honest about how truly idiotic I've been acting, I'll be free to continue acting that way. Maybe.


This is not his fault; this is not your fault. I am not angry, and the things that are destined to change soon, well, they haven't changed quite yet. But god help me if I find myself at that hellish symbol of misery again without having a legitimate need for low, low prices.


Also from "Hero":

"I'm the hero of this story,
Don't need to be saved."



On with it.

Elorza and I are currently discussing my apparent lack of respect for the institution of marriage, and I can't help but think of that Edna St. Vincent Millay poem. I definitely remember reading it over and over again when I was in love with Chad, but I can't quite remember if it was one of the ones I memorized with the ambition of getting him in a quiet moment and then coyly whispering it into his ear.

OH, THINK not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now:
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you–think not but I would!–
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.

I guess I never thought of that poem as hopelessly depressing before today. I guess I never really had any reason to.


After seeing "I Love You, Beth Cooper" (the movie was fairly faithful to the book, and I recommend both, but definitely read the book), I went to Wal-Mart tonight for my all-to-usual walk around the store-- how many days has it been since I haven't been there, or at least driven around the parking lot for twenty minutes?-- I put on my headphones and set the iPod to shuffle. I almost skip past the first song, but leave it on, appreciating the irony. Carole King's "You Got a Friend."

By the end of it, I hate myself. I mean, really. I hate the things I do, and the way I make my way through my days. I hate how weak they leave me feeling, how tenuous my hold on the things that give me momentary happiness are. I hate how used up they leave me. I hate how they build expectations that no one can fulfill, and then I blame my own imagined deficiencies when they don't go right. (You cannot imagine the willpower it's taking right now not to go back and delete the word "imagined", in the midst of Jiminy Critic's protests)

I hate the idea that the people I love might be-- probably are?-- just placeholders. Props to be used at the whim of my weaknesses. I hate the idea that if I wriggle free of someone who might not be good for me that I am drawn to because of some psychological need, I will just seek out someone else to fill that void. I hate that idea, and yet, I can't afford to discount it, lest I get sucked into some depraved, psychological cycle. And I hate that I'm smart enough to be cognizant of that possibility in the first place.

The people I love are better than this, they deserve more than this. They deserved to be loved, and deeply, for individual aspects of their personalities. Here, I want to list them, but believe it or not, dear audience, I really am talking about more than one person, and heaven forbid they should have no idea who they are when they read this.


It takes me a while, until just now, actually, to figure out what my problem has been, as of late: I am losing faith in love.


If love is the only thing keeping my little mistakes from turning into big mistakes, if love is the only thing that holds up the roof of my house, that feeds my bank account, that warms my bed at night, if love is the only power by which my life moves forward and my heart keeps beating and I keep working towards something, anything, better...then what do I have if I come to the inevitable conclusion that love is some physiological trick?

It wasn't long ago now that I went through a crisis of faith-- by which I mean a crisis of un-faith. It was maybe two years ago, maybe more, that I started realizing how deep the hole was that was left by my lack of religion. Things were bad for me, I guess I don't remember the specifics as to why, but I remember the longing I had, all of a sudden, to believe. To belong to a group of people who were brought together, week after week, by a moral code, by the understanding that there is a right and a wrong, and that human decency is right, and that human suffering is wrong. To fit in among people who have a unifying source of strength, and, from there, have the power to be kind to one another. (If this doesn't sound like organized religion to you, keep in mind I was thinking of one of the more progressive, modern religions, like Universal Unitarianism.) To believe in heaven, to having some reason to stop being so ultimately terrified of death. To believe in my soul.

"And I have no faith,
But it's all I want.
To be loved
And believe
In my soul, in my soul."
~Bright Eyes, Waste of Paint

I came to the conclusion, ultimately, that it was no longer possible for me. I stopped believing in god because it stopped making sense to me, and at the time, it was freeing, it was exciting; I was so young. It was all about the logical arguments with frustrated adults. I was cocky, and I-- legitimately-- understood the nature of the divine. But what I didn't know is why so many adults believe in god-- they understand the nature of life.

The problem was, once I gained that understanding of life-- what about life demands faith, what about life begs for a source of strength from the beyond (whether or not it is a placebo effect)-- well, my attitude was different, but I still couldn't make it make sense. In fact, so many years removed from my original fall from grace, it made less sense than it ever did. I couldn't have it back, no matter how I wanted it. Because I was never wrong. I'm not wrong.

So I reduced the mysteries and wonder of heaven and earth into science in my mind-- and I'm not even really that big on science-- and I couldn't get it back. Now, I seem to be doing the same to love-- dissecting it with a critical eye and a junior chemistry set I picked up from the wal-mart toy department (Because, ah hell, I'm there anyway.) Oh. Goody.


At least Casey's "ineffable fondness" will be subject to that same level of scrutiny.


The next song on the shuffle list was Flo, a Smash Mouth song about a woman who's with a man when she's spending all her time thinking about someone else (from his perspective.) Next was "Problems and Bigger Ones" by Harvey Danger. Talk about your fucking heart-wrenching songs, about an impossible relationship, made up one part real love-- no matter what you believe that is-- and two parts real circumstances, real bullshit, real life. Whatever you believe that is.

"Here is a fact you cannot rise above:
We'll have problems, yeah, then we'll have bigger ones."


Are we noticing a pattern here? I'm walking through Wal-Mart, and the hate is getting bigger, and the hurt is getting bitter, and the iPod is getting crueler. Next, Matchbox Twenty's "You & I & I." This is a great song to switch you from depression to anger. Still relevant, though."

"Well, it's a shame, you pander to me.
C'mon, stroke on my ego like it's never broke before, held by anyone else.
And what doesn't kill you, it makes you linger,
And it makes you wonder.

Well, goodness sake, do you ever get sleep?
If there's one thing I believe:
What doesn't kill you doesn't stay."

From there, I got to a weird place where the Muppets and John Denver singing "Where the River Meets the Sea" made some odd, cosmic sense, then Rogue Wave's "Kicking the Heart Out" which I barely know but has a haunting resonance ("But, oh, you're 25 for an hour."). It picked me up briefly with "Mad Season" ("I feel ugly, but I know I still turn you on."), and as I was leaving Wal-mart, at last, it ended very appropriately with "Idiot Wind" by Dylan. ("We're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.")

In the parking lot, it plays, quite rightly, "Untouchable Face." The first Ani song I ever heard, and still the best.

"So fuck you,
And your untouchable face.
And fuck you
For existing in the first place.
And who am I
That I should be vying for your touch?
And who am I?
I bet you can't even tell me that much."


Well, if I believe in nothing else, I guess there's always the power of the demon spirit that randomizes my iPod. Put on your headphones, some protective eye gear, and grab a cheap plastic beaker full of baking soda with some flimsy tongs. It's time for an existential crisis, boys and girls.


On the upside, Wal-Mart had the giraffe pattern underwear I'd been looking for, against all odds. (Haha, yes, even I know that last picture is a little ridiculous. What the hell, though.)


On with it.