The true test of being over someone-- not using the edit menu's search tool to check for your name in it every time you visit their online journal for whatever little reason.

A supplementary bit of knowledge: They were probably over you about two weeks after the last time you were mentioned. (This is void when it's clear that they're using a pronoun, a group of people, or a non-entity in place of your name. Trust me. I know these things.)


True sign of not being over someone: falling in love with, and obsessing over, literally anyone in order to distract yourself from them, including:
A- Some stranger you see on a weekly-ish basis, who's name you don't know, and therefore you refer to as some funky nickname like "Mr. Muttenchops" or "The Tuesday Guy." These names might also involve Dairy products, for those of you who get my meaning.
B- Straight, underaged girls that you have on-and-off friendships with.
C- The guy who works in the fish department at your pet store. No, I'm talking in universal terms here. Really.

People not in this group:
A- Your husband.


So...today was the first day I actually found "The Fish Guy" to be very physically attractive. I've probably talked about this phenomena I call "work crushes" before-- they are the epitomy of attraction based on convenience. Nothing has to be right with these people, really, it's just got to be not terribly wrong. There are a few things in common with the work crushes I've had in the past:
A- They're all within five years of my age.
B- They're all of a gender that I find attractive. (either male or female.)
C- None of them are so horribly bad looking that I'd rather defecate into my own toaster than look at them for too long. Assuming I was going to use the toaster again.

The Fish Guy, who replaced "The Cheeseman" in Linda's timeline of distracting male figures, is tallish (+), strongish(+), not darkish or handsomeish(-,-), but I have come to discover that underneath his glasses (+) he has blue eyes (+), and he looks (as of today) really good when he has the half-amused, half-dismissive smile on his face that only I seem to evoke in him (+).

Were I to not spend roughly 28 of my 40 working week hours in the same general area as The Fish Guy, I would not give him a second glance. But work is boring. And boredom, I have found, breeds wantoninity. (copyright)

I feel constantly compelled to point out that Zack is fully aware and accepting of my two man system (One to be my all, my everything, the person who completes me; the other to let me do all that fun unrequoited infatuation bullshit that I was such the honor student at during my school days.) and he is as aware of The Fish Guy as he was of The Cheeseman and of the brief but mentionable mini-crush on The Underaged Girl, all of whom replaced someone I shall now award the moniker of "The Wifebeater", which is a private joke between me and The Wifebeater himself. "The Wifebeater" is the one who I am not over, but I am notably more over him than I was, let's say, three or four months ago, with the help of a barrage of aptly named sidekicks. I no longer have to refer to him as "him" or as "someone", "everyone", or "no one!!!". I dub him THE WIFEBEATER!!! And, thusly, can stop it with the previous nonsense.

That's gotta be something, right? Someone mark this spot.


Anyways, "The Fish Guy" is a new challenge. I must get him to fall desperately, incredibly in love with me despite the fact that he knows that I am married, and therefore:
A- He can not have me.
B- If he could have me, I would be a horrible person. And why would he then want me?

This challenge is new, and did not pertain to The Cheeseman or The Underaged Girl because:
A- The Cheeseman did not know my name, just as I did not know his, and he certainly had no idea I was married. (Incidentally, the flame died, I think, when we found out each other's name. He is Brad. I even know his last name, sadly. It begins with an S.)
B- The underaged girl, I didn't want to manipulate into loving me. Much. She was so...underaged. And straight. And, really, too good to be toyed with the way I toy with, well, let's just say it, men.

I made a breakthrough in this case today, as I leaned over the trash can he was filling through a syphon with dirty fishtank water, when he made a joking reference to a crush he thought I had on another co-worker. Clearly, he understands the nature of the flirtatious crush situation I so covet-- it's not malicious. It's entertainment. Now, I merely have to make him realize that he is the recipitor of my, uh, "affections", and then I have to dangle that fact in front of him like season tickets to the Bills (he's a sports fan...there, I said it.) until he wants much, much more than I do, and, ultimately, converts to some weird religion where they devote themselves to some girl they could never have, and live a life of silent agony. But not before he slams be against the goldfish wall, takes my head between his hands and half-mumbles, half-screams "I must have you" as he kisses me passionately, and I push him away. "I'm a married woman." I would say. Then he'd have to realize how completely and utterly devoted I am to...Zack. Yes. Zack.


On with it.

No other way to say it: we need more Americans like Andrew Veal.


Also, I can't help but be amazed by the irony of his last name-- Veal. Young, destroyed by a senseless slaughter more or less carried out by the Texan himself. Goddamn.


On with it.

Best and Worst Commercials currently on Television:

Best: Starbucks Frappucino featuring Stacey Rumplestein and the four black men singing a capella. If you haven't seen it, you can catch it regularly during Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network.

The premise is this, for those of you who do not have cable or do have better things to do: In an office, you see Stacey walk from her cubicle to the office refridgerator, out of which she takes her Starbucks Frappucino. When she takes a sip, she's surrounded by a group of black men dresed like a Barber Shop Quartet. They ever-so-politely stop the people who were about to bother her with their insignificant needs in the following song:

"This is Stacey Rumplestein.
It's Stacey's time to clear her mind.
So, step off Bob. Expense reports can wait.
Larry, she's not interested in a second date. (No, no, no no noooo)
This is Stacey's tiiiiiime."

The promise of a group of charming singing bodyguards stopping people from annoying me in the course of my work day almost makes me want to brave my life-long hatred of coffee.


Worst: McDonald's commercial featuring an unusually cruel, and seemingly delusional, black woman denying her Chicken Selects to a group of imaginary children. I don't know this one by heart, but one line that really stands out at me is when she says "Momma loves you, but you need to back away from my chicken." speaking, of course, to the Kitchen sink. It's a sad world we live in.

I haven't seen it too much, but it annoys me. It's part of a series of commercials in which this same Lady is constantly eating her Chicken Selects and denying anybody else a piece-- another in the series features s a geeky white guy in an office yelling at people in the lunch room who aren't really there. A mother who's imagining her children and a boy who sees dead people...these are less wholesome commercials and more the bastardized plots of some recent horror flicks.

This is really a disappointment, because McDonald's, I think, had really hit a home run with those "da-da da da-daaaa, I'm lovin' it"commericals. Everytime I heard any group of notes that sounded even vaguely like those, I went out and bought a ten piece nugget and fries. Indeed, my pants size is in direct correlation with McDonald's Dow Jones rating. Use this information wisely.


On with it.

I saw Andrew -- Rich Kid-- the other day, drove out to Lisbon and we went for a walk down by the river and talked. The nice thing about people you don't see very often is that you get a chance to revisit in conversation all the greivances you've long since exahausted with your everyday friends. I chose to treat him like the kind of friend I am selfish with-- there are those I am selfish with, and those who are selfish with me. Rather than going through the almost impossible torment of maintaining a give and take relationships, I've decided perhaps it's best to have give relationships with certain people, and balance it out with take relationships with others, assuming happily that they've got a giver on their other end to complain to about how I'm always taking, thusly continuing the cycle. If I'm wrong, well, hell. It's not my fault they broke the chain.

I have -the- most beautiful give and take relationship going on right now involving what, perhaps, is the only remaining venue for truly give-and-take relationships-- e-mail. The starry-eyed Meg Ryan to my cynical Tom Hanks, Nissa gives me something to look forward to at the end of my day-- sometimes a long tale full of excitement or incite, sometimes just a great line or two to play over and over in my head throughout the following workday. And always an excuse to hunker down on this here reclined, get all cozied into my laptop, and be the writer that, god help me, I truly am. Some of my best work is e-mail.

I should point out, for the sake of accuracy in reporting, that I think Nissa is beautiful. I love her voice and the things that she says and the way she looks when she says them. I can be brazen in the admission of this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that a month-and-a-half long hiatus from this little watering hole of mine has all but gas-chambered my readership, but a better reason is that I'm married. Marriage gives me a more defining idea of which things are just doe-eyed admiration and which are true and pertinent. Or at least, that's what I've got them all believing. In reality, Nissa could drive through me like a wrecking ball if not for some pitiful focus I have on a wedding band and a man who I still find truly beautiful. Oh, and she's straight. There's that.

Still, there's nothing impertinent about her.



I was driving along 196 on the way home from dropping Andrew off the other day, and stopped at the intersection with what becomes Maine Street at an impossibly long light. Looking over, I see a car pulled to the side of the road in the opposite direction with two police cruisers behind it, seemingly from two different towns, or perhaps one was county. The car is an only somewhat beat-up 60's mustang, or one of those cars reminiscent of a 60's mustang, primer-grey in color. The driver is a young girl, her hair back in a ponytail, her head hanging and hard to see. Two cops were leaning on the back of her car, ostensibly discussing what to do with her. I couldn't help but be reminded of dreams I always have where I do something bad and it just keeps snowballing until it seems as though my whole life has gone wrong, then the feeling of relief when I wake up is incredible-- one such dream of mine, the first, was when took my parents car for a drive, back when I was, oh, I don't know. Way too young to drive a car, anyway. In the dream, it was all a terrible feeling of panic, as taking it out around the block somehow became me getting lost in it, trying hard to find my way home, all the time having no idea what I was doing and always fearing a glance from anyone around me who might turn out to be authoritative. When that happened, when they would approach, I think it would be the fear and anticipation that finally jarred me awake. There, safe in reality, my conscious self would reassure me that it was all a dream, and within fifteen minutes or so, I would be asleep again.

Looking over at this girl, all I could think was that she wasn't going to wake up from this. I looked at her, couldn't look away, trying to determine her age. I was trying to make myself believe she was something like 17 and the car was her's or a friend's, but I knew it couldn't have been true. The way her head was hung-- something like shame or confusion, but neither, something deeper and stranger. And from what I saw, all that time I couldn't look away, what I saw of her face and the way the police were talking, she couldn't have been more than fourteen. Staring harder and harder, I realized finally what it was I'd been trying to put my finger on: She looked just exactly the age that I feel, most of the time.

And the light turned green.



My latest incarnation of that dream is that I'm driving from the back seat, leaning uncomfortably through the two front seats to hold the wheel. Sometimes with my feet. I pull it off okay, but the whole time I'm totally panic-stricken, and it occurs to me somewhere in the middle that I have no idea why I tried to pull it off at all. Without much effort, an analyst might say that this is a dream about transition: feeling like I should still be youthful, and sitting in the back of the car, but forced to take the wheel and be the adult, however unprepared for it. It is about the anxiety I feel in every day life, now that I'm a pseudo-adult. I'm at an age few of my friends will ever have to really experience-- their version is an age where they've got this perfect transitional phase: being out on their own but still financially and collegiately backed by their parents. Still having a life centered around the safety and order of school life, but each year they've got a few more options, a few more variables. The traditionally educational part of college, I've found, is secondary-- this is to adulthood what pre-school was to childhood. They're learning the ABC's of balancing their checkbooks and buying their own underwear. They've still got people collecting their crayons and making them put up their chairs at the end of the day. They're not learning secondary education or accounting or bio-chemical engineering. They're learning to use the fucking potty.

Me? I'm working a shit job, bouncing checks, and straining over the center console to grab at the wheel with my big toe. But I wipe my own ass.

On with it.

I will write again, maybe, one day. When I can write a sentence without fearing that one person will see through my clever disguise of generalizations. When one person will be able to read the sentence "I do not love these people anymore..." and not translate, too fluently, "I do (not!) love you anymore. (really.)" When one person will be able to read what I put before me and think of it as something I believe fundamentally to be true, and not just some poetic representation of the lies I haved lived and the love I have lied for the one, the two, the many (the one) that got away. I will write again, perhaps, when I no longer live in the paranoia that that one person will think I truly am writing about everyone who I ever loved, everyone who I ever touched, everyone who I ever called "everyone", and not just one person. I will write when one person takes what I have to say at face value.

That one person turns out to be me.

Or at least, one of the "one person"s. I have to write in such riddles now that I can't fucking translate myself, and when I can, it's too clearly. You see what you were missing? Exactly.

Yet, one too many people have asked me recently if I am writing, and I have replied one too many times, "No, I am not." "Time" has been my excuse one too many times.


This whole fucking thing is more of a poem than a coherent thought. One of Kevin McPhee's shitty poems.




The stupid thing about women is that we truly believe in truth. We think that the solution to harboring countless hours' worth of heartaches is to go to our assailant and confess. We think that if loving someone makes us act like enough of an asshole that they don't love us back anymore, the grand and perfect way to remedy this is to tell them that the reason you're acting like an asshole is because of how much you love them!

This is such incredible genius SHIT! And I will now write a poem for it.


---

You loving me made me love you.
Me loving you made me do
What I wouldn't normally do.
And I acted irrationally
Like there was a rash on me.
And now you do not love me anymore.
And now my heart is sore.
And now my heart will pour:
I love you! That is why
I have sat and cried!
I love you! That is why
I have hurt on the inside!
I love you! That is why
I've stared up at the sky

And had the same appeal to you
As a Lifetime Movie Double Feature
You've made my skies blue
And I've become a leech-er.
I am a student of boo-hoo,
And you, you are my teacher.

So, please, love me like you did back then,
So we can do this all again.

---


See? Now, when someone asks if I've been writing, I can say "yes."

On with it.

I read Casey's Livejournal, and more and more, am enviously impressed with his writing abilities. Truth be told, when we first met him, I thought he had little talent as compaired to potential, and I guess that's what kept things in check for me. I guess I never expected that he'd cash in that potential and become the writer I never could be, but that's what happens when people go to college, and when other people go to trailer parks.

"One brother wore blue, one brother wore gray..."

It's funny how I see people from my high school class and the classes surrounding me and look down on them when I can tell they're in crap jobs and going nowhere. Me, I tell myself, I have a plan. Zack will find a job just high-paying enough to manage our bills for a while, and I will re-educate myself on massage, pass the certification test, then fly out to Cali to re-take the two-week course. When I come back, I'll do it part time until I can build up my practice enough to leave Petland, and Zack can start training as a bartender, and pretty soon we'll be well on our way. We'll keep the trailer for a good long time just to save up, and I'll take some college classes, and still have enough free time to work on that book, whatever book that is. And he, maybe, could take some classes, too, and he can be successful, but not so much to threaten me. He'll be happy in my shadow and when I make my speech after being the first person to win a Tony, an Oscar, and a Pullitzer all in one year, I'll give him all the credit, I'll say it was him all along. No one will believe it, but it'll be enough for him. And we'll be happy.

I tell myself.

There's a phenomena I've been thinking about and think I have explained: the trashier certain women are, the more youthful they dress, regardless of age. Think of the 20-something check-out girl in your neighborhood grocery store, wearing that neon-green scrunchy. The fat, toothless forty-year-old mother of five in her stained Garfield T-Shirt. That thirty-something diner waitress in the spandex that were popular back when she'd hang out at that same diner after gym class let out. Why is this? To my mind, it's because they haven't grown into the lives they were expecting to-- they never went to college, never married a prince, never acted on broadway or recorded a pop album or wrote their memoirs-- so they deny that they've grown up at all. The youthful attire, while obvious to the rest of us as being a poor excuse to burn a hole in that Goodwill discount card, to them is a disguise, a clever costume that makes their life a masquerade ball of denial. The next time you see one of these ladies in their work place, stop and think for a moment if you think what they're wearing might be a desperate grasp at a youth that's passed them buy.

Me, I go to work dressed as Safari Stan, so I'm clearly above this. I tell myself.


On with it.

 

It's a new beginning for me, Zack and I to be specific, but at this exact moment I'm so sick of being a "we" that I can hardly stand it.  He and I are moving into a trailer in a park Brunswick, and so I check off another on my list of "things I'll never ever do in my whole life" list, a version I'll estimate was modified at around twelve years of age.

 
Get married-- check.
Move into trailer park... -- check.
...in Maine. -- check.
Have redneck children-- pending...

 
I'm sure the list is longer, but I'm tired.  It's been a long day's worth of being something I never expected or hoped to be, and that can wear on a girl's ability to really concentrate.  I complain that Zack falls asleep so much easier than I do, but if it weren't for that I'd never write anything.  These late-night manifestos are the only thing that keep me in distant contact with the self I'm slowly abandoning:  people like Jeff and Mark complain that I never have time for them anymore, and my comeback is always that there are other people I'm struggling to keep ties with, too, and I have to budget what time I have left at the end of the day between all of them.  What I don't let on to is that those other people are all versions of myself.

 
People comment on how young Zack and I got married, and I tell them all different lies and exaggerations on why that it is;  I've lost track, so here's the low-down, the truth's truth, or what I've pieced together of it.  For what it's worth.  We got engaged early, that's true, but we agreed on the stipulation that very night that if we were going to make that kind of commitment, we'd wait years before actually going through with it-- it'd give us time to grow into it, to be the right age and the right people.  And it seemed like a smart plan-- we were in love, and we'd have plenty of time to practice being in love forever before making it forever forever.  It was a smart plan, actually.  Sure, anyone we'd announce the engagement to would write it off as one of those High School Sweetheart things, but when the day finally came, they'd have to hand it to us.  It wasn't until well after the engagement that Zack decided, with my naive permission, to join the Marines.  He signed on at the end of his senior year and was due to go to Boot Camp in November.  Knowing this, we decided it was best to speed the wedding up, and this wasn't the mistake, either:  It only made since, I couldn't live on base with him without being married, and I'd been living without health insurance for a long time, which prevented me from seeking treatment for the Vaginisimus.  We'd marry before he left for bootcamp, I could start treatment while he was gone, and we'd be a blissful millitary couple upon his arrival, complete with base housing and a naval paycheck.  How perfect it would be.  (sic)

So we announced the engagement to both sets of parents, and the planning for the wedding began.  The date was set for October 18th, arrangements commenced, invitations went out. 

And then the Marines started fucking with us.

They wanted to send Zack to bootcamp the day after we were to be married, then Zack protested, and they claimed he'd never told them about having a fiancé.  Now I had to be checked out and approved, and he took a tongue lashing from some higher-ups for trying to run his own life.  The war wasn't getting any better, and I was scared.   About this time we started talking about ways to get him out of his commitment.  Zack announced to his parents that he didn't want to be in the Marines on his birthday, October 2nd.  We did some research, found blessed, blessed Objector.org, and with the help of the GI Rights hotline, we had him more or less officially out just before the wedding.

And so, the urgency to be wed was dissolved.  But everything was done, the dress, the food, the people, the place.  And we'd made such a stink about how we weren't getting married just for insurance, we were just speeding up the inevitable.   There was no getting out of it now, and why bother?  It seemed that slamming on the brakes for something as trivial as having no reason to get married was some kind of insult to what he and I were.  An affront of logic in the midst of our perfectly nonsense love affair.  We were a fairy tale, and why should it matter if the fairy tale ending came on a little early?  We still had our happily-ever-after to look forward to.

So that's why we're married so young.  And, to be precise, I don't think that was our big mistake, either.

 
Our big mistake might have been agreeing to the Marines in the first place.  It seemed nice.  Money.  Security.  He'd be providing the housing and a decent paycheck, so I could get some part-time gig and focus most of my attentions on being the writer I'd always dreamed of being, despite having gotten married.  And it was a way of giving him a future, as I felt so guilty about the future I'd already denied him...

 

Because he wasn't sure, that's why!  He didn't fucking know what he wanted to be and he didn't care about school.  He didn't want to go to college.  We had layed in bed once, when we had just started dating, and I complained to him about the bitter cycle of life. 

"It's not fair."  I told him.  "You break your back in high school so you can get into the best college, where you work your ass of just so you can get a good job.  You bust your hump at your job so you can put away a savings, and by the time you get a chance to enjoy everything you've worked for, you're too old.  You get a few years of RVing, then you die.  I don't want anything to fucking do with that system."

"That's how always felt."  He said, and it wasn't what I expect him to say.

"Really?"  I asked, turning on my side, to watch how he looked as he answered.

"Yeah.  I don't care about high school, and I don't care about college.  I just do well to avoid having people lecture me about not doing well.  But I don't want it.  I don't want to live like that."

Hearing him say that, that's what started the wheels turning.  Until then, I'd thought for sure that when I went off to massage school, that'd be the sad, but inevitable, end between us.  I'd go be a masseuse somewhere and a older and wiser Zack Smith would go off to UMO like every other zombie Lisbonite, and maybe sometimes we'd write e-mails.  But when he said what he said, I realized that he was a kindred spirit.  Here was someone who wanted what I wanted, could live the way I could live.   Neither of us cared about school or academics or the workaday world.  We both wanted excitement, we both wanted freedom, and best yet, we both wanted each other.   This really started to make things come to life for me.

But it was just laying-in-bed talk.  As usual, I was listening too hard.

About a month after that, just after one of our joking conversations that we should run away from it all and get married and live in a van at the side of the road just to be together, I told him something I hadn't planned on telling everyone.  "Listen...we keep saying things like this, we keep talking about some imaginary future.  Why don't we talk about a real future?"  So we did.  I told him, if he wanted, we could try for a lasting relationship of some kind.  I'd be willing to come back from California for him.  To wait around until he finished High School.  And while I wanted to get out of Maine for good more than anything, I could endure Lisbon until he was done school, and then we'd get out and start adventuring together.  He said he wanted that, too.

And, lo and behold, I'd just done something incredible.  I'd made real sacrifices for someone else.  I'd put myself on the line and committed to someone I loved, and who I trusted loved me.  That was big for me.  It was nothing like I'd ever expected.

And then came the engagement.   Blah blah blah, we've been over that.

Zack hadn't expected to go to college, so he applied to a few uMaine schools to make his parents happy.  It was when the acceptances came rolling in that trouble started.

He'd made a few references to college, and that confused the hell out of me, so I finally asked him, trying to seem ever-so-casual, "So...what's happening next year?"

"Well...my parents are really on my case.  I guess I'm going to college."

This shattered my world.  This was out of left field.  I had no idea what was going on.  Was the engagement nothing to him?  Didn't he realize that I was waiting for him?  Didn't he realize that this was our life now?   Where was the discussion, when was the decision?  What the fuck did his parents have to do with this?
 
It was a few days before I finally let it burst.  I told him that it messed up all of our plans, that it forced me to stay in Maine, to linger around while he was in classes all day.  It added up debt for us and it put off my dreams four more years, and for what?  Because his goddamned parents wanted something he didn't?

In my defense, I said this, I was never unclear about this.  "Just tell me it's something you want, tell me that you really want to go, and I'll be more than happy to wait for you.  But I can't wait four years and wrack up four years worth of debt just to make your parents happy.  So please, please...tell me it will make you happy, and we'll do it.  I need you to tell me that it's what you want."

And he couldn't tell me that.  So he agreed not to go.

 
I guess this was the big mistake.

 
I wasn't wrong.  I couldn't have waited.  When the Marines thing came around, it seemed like a perfect solution, a perfect future.  I should have known what people told me: (and this was the only time I consent that they were right and we weren't.)   There's never anything perfect with the Millitary.

 
I guess I'll never forgive myself for Zack not going to college.   I try to tell myself, over and over again, that all I really asked was for him to make the decision on his own behalf, not his family's.  But I'm a year away from that now, and the exact conversation is a year hazier in my mind.  I'll never be entirely convinced that I didn't just say "No."

And here's what really scares me:  How much better off would he be today if I had just backed off?  When I met Zack, he was a self-mutilatory head case on the track to suicide, or at least that's what he lead me to believe.   Whatever happened between me and him, I knew I'd leave him better off than I found him-- I had that assurance to lie back on.  I could get him a little off track, dizzy him up a bit, even break his heart, but he'd be in one piece.  For better or for worse, everyone would have to be grateful that I saved a kid's life with my gratuitous romance.

Now all I can do is think where he'd be now if I'd let him go off to college:  happily asleep in some busty coed's dorm, getting an education and a sex life that I can't give him.  I think this image has become to foremost insecurity of my life.  There seems no greater discomfort than the belief that someone you love and need would be truly, truly better off without you.

God, I hate that coed.  Now, because of her, everything is wrong.  She is in the back of my mind, always, and I can't be happy.  Zack can't make me happy.  And because he cannot make me happy any longer, he's become unhappy, and drastically less the man I fell so in love with, back when things were looking over some beautiful precipice from which we would fall so gracelessly.

So my fairytale marriage and my nonsense love affair have become just your everyday tradgedy, with none of the Shakesperean glamour and none of the Tarentino charm.  Just tradgedy, day after day, year after year, line after line.

 
I want so much to run away from the way the mistakes I've made have turned me into this whining, pitiable thing that even I would turn away from, given the chance.  I want my friends back, my dreams back, my beautiful beautiful Zachary back.  I want to stop paying for the one mistake I keep on making:  refusing to forgive myself for any of them.

 
"This kids they lost their graces...
She broke down the other day,
You know, some things in life may change
And some things, they stay the same,
Like time."
~Damien Rice, Older Chests

 
On with it.

The length of the good day has weathered it down, and after so much productivity and good fortune, we're driving home in the car, not speaking to each other. I would easily have the willpower to hold out the longest, but I've known him long enough to know that if I don't say something, we'll spend the rest of the night in silence.

"What are you thinking about?" I whisper, staring forward and the winding summer road.

"I don't know." He says.

Exactly what I was afraid he'd say. And I know exactly what I'll say when he asks me "What are you thinking about?"

"How much it would have meant to me if you hadn't said 'I don't know.'"

It's the perfect reply, but it's not true: I'm actually thinking about saying that it's what I'm thinking, until I realize that I am, and them I'm thinking about the realization. Then I begin to flesh out this whole paragraph in my mind, working into a full update. How much detail to give, where to start, where to end. I'm narrating each and every word that you're reading right now, and I narrate myself into what a strange phenomena I've discovered, how it's sort of like I'm in the future, how oddly reciprocal it all becomes. And in my mind, I'm typing about how this is how I know I'm a writer, the way I sit in the middle of a real-life situation and I'm already working it out in past-tense in my own little world.

"What are you thinking about?" He asks. NOW he asks. Now that I've thought myself a mile away from my perfect, polished gem of passive agression.

Just say it. Just say 'How much it would have meant to me...' I tell myself. But it's not true now, now you're thinking about writing. No, actually, that was a few minutes ago, -now- you're thinking about what you should tell him you're thinking about...you confusing bitch.

I tried to tell myself that it was still the perfect thing to say, and that it was never really true, so it didn't matter whether or not it was true now. I tried to will my mouth around the words, the words that would leave me so victorius...

"I don't know." I say finally, and I immediately set to work on how to reword the whole damn thing.



On with it.

It's some day last week when the kid walks into our door. He's 19ish and waiting at the register for a while, behind someone I'm ringing up. I guess I noticed him, but I can't remember what my train of thought was up until the point where I saw the stack of green cards in his hand and he asked if I was registered to vote. I interrupted his spiel, letting him know he needn't waste the breath on someone who reads Casey's livejournal as regiously as I do-- except in different words, as saying that would have confused him terribly.

"You with the MPA?" I asked, eyeing the door to see if maybe Casey was walking around the strip.

"No, I'm with Bike the Vote. We're riding around Maine trying to get people to--"

"Yeah, yeah. What, no petition?"

"Nope."

"You guys must be unaligned, then." He nods. This strikes me as somewhat noble, this encouragement of American's to express their opinions, free of strategy or agenda. Stupid, but noble.

Noble and stupid so rarely walk alone.

"My friend works for the MPA, I already registered with him." I lie, in case Casey might need the convenience of having an unregistered, but not (completely) politcally jaded liberal voter just a phone call away. Come to think of it, I'll probably just tell him all the relevant information and just tell him to fake my signature. "I'm sure I can find someone around here that's not already, though. Hold up a minute."

Just then, Tabby walks up to the register. Tabby's short, thin, hot in that emaciated way. She's one of those girls who's too frail to pick up the lab puppies at work, and just good-looking enough to rival my sales. In other words, I hated her.

Or hated her until I realized she's a huge source of entertainment-- for one, she's got epilepsy, which provided a refreshing breeze of entertainment on one slow monday-- eight hours is a long damn time no matter how you look at it, I've decided, and sometimes someone need something like an unexpected seizure to make it go along a little faster. In Tabby's case, actually, she tends to pass out before she has one. She'd been complaining all day of various medical discomforts-- her head hurt, her stomach hurt, she was suddenly very cold. I was furious with her, convinced she was faking it to get out of work early (as I had a week before, making such real-to-life puking sounds into the toilet that it made me actually puke.) Nevertheless, when she leaned next to me at the register, while I was on the phone with eighties hold music, I took pity on her, perhaps sarcastically, and started dancing around her to "What's love got to do with it?" in order to perk her up a bit. It was all to no avail, she just stood there staring forward, and I thought it was quite rude of her not to acknowledge me. On and on I danced, and it wasn't till I tried to take her hand to join me that I realized something was wrong-- I couldn't pry her hand away from her body, so I tapped her arm lightly to get her attention. She fell over like a harvested redwood.

No, that last part didn't really happen, I just thought if I was going to take that long a tangent I might as well add in the sheer fun of an epilectic chick falling on a hard tile floor. What really happened is that I danced my idiot head off until Alicea, the frustrated manager, came up to tell Tabby to get back to work, only to find her unresponsive. In a panic, Alicea and Amber carried Tabby over to a puppy socialization room, and Trish cleared people out of the store and guarded the door. I ran to call t]Tabby's mother.

"Hello?"
"Hello, is this Tabatha's mom?"
"Yes, it is."
"Your daughter...we don't know exactly what's happening to her. She's...passed out. I guess. She fell asleep standing up, and we can't wake her."

Okay, concerned Mom! Here's your cue to tell us what to do! Your daughter is about to have the first seizure she's had in years, and she's in the hands of a bunch of teenaged puppy salespeople! Tell us, what do you have to say in this frightening, dramatic situation?

"...And?"

Uhm. "And...uh...let me get the manager for you."

I run back onto the sales floor. "Alicea, Tabby's mom is on the phone." I tell her. "You found the number? Good work!"

Yeah, go me.

So yeah, anyway, Tabby has her seizure and her mother eventually comes to pick her up, arriving with an incredibly matriarchal mix of compassion and condescention. "Oh, sweetie, did you have a seizure? Come on, let's go home and have a nappy-nap, you silly little jumping bean." That, and the fact that I had to cover the last two hours of Tabby's shift, were enough to make me sick, but I knew at least I'd have a cool story to tell. If only she'd really fallen on the floor.


It's not this incident, but another involving a shooting at her apartment (fired off either her former boyfriend or one of the four people beating him to a bloody pulp, no one knows who.) that leads me to believe that, in all the time she's been stuck testifying in court and narrowly avoiding bullets and teenaged pregnancies, she might have forgotten to register to vote. I call her over.

"Tabby, are you registered to vote?"

"Registered?"

"Yeah, to, uh, vote."

"I don't think so. I got that card thing, I just keep forgetting to send it in. I'll have to do that tomorrow."

"No, don't. This guy can register you."

"It'll save you a trip to town hall!" He says, a line I recognize from Casey's escapades. I guess it must be a seasoned closer, what with two seperate orginizations using it. It's not that people aren't seriously passionate about the issues, it's that, you know, town hall's all the way down town, Oprah's got Kirsten Dunst on in a few minutes, and gas prices...who needs it, really? Why, if only someone would bring political activism to them, via a biking youthful activist with convenient little cards! Oh, then how the world would change!

Tabby agrees to register, and I can literally feel the winds of progress mussing my hair.

"What political party am I?" She asks. "I don't think I'm any of these."

"Just put indepedent." He tells her. "That way, you can be anything you feel like."

"And the only drawback is that you can't vote in...what is it?" I ask him. "Where they pick out the nominee for their party? It's on the tip of my tongue." I'm sure to add that, as I'm trying to look all involved and impressive-- actually, more to distance myself from Tabby. Meaningfully enough, I've actually by now moved to his side of the register, putting the counter between me and the unaligned blond who's definition of a political caucus is Bill Clinton's schlong.

"Party primary." He tells me, and smiles a little. I smile back, trying to let him know I'm one of his people, despite the Safari Stan (copyright) attire.

"Yeah, the party primaries. You don't want to vote in them, anyway, Tabby." They're all the way downtown.

"I don't even know who's running this year." She giggles.

"It's George W. Bush and John Kerry." I tell her. "Vote for Kerry."

I figure this sentiment is pretty universal. Blond or no blond, you've gotta know that George Bush has seriously fucked this country up. Like all the semi-political cynics of my generation, I'll be voting democrat in my first presidential election. We're not informed enough to be pro-Kerry, we're just very anti-Bush.


"No!" She practically shrieks at me. "I'm voting for Bush." Bike-the-Vote Guy and I shoot each other a "This has gone in a bad direction" glance, as if we were the final two survivors in Agatha's Christie's "And then there were None", having just discovered the latest corpse. We're battling, in silence, between taking the moral high road and respecting her ill-informed opinion and ripping her up registration card right then and there when he finally has the balls to say what any decent American would:

"but WHY?" He bursts in a totally unprofessional state of disbelief. Thank god he said it.

"Because, Kerry is totally against anything millitary."

"But, but he..." My astonishment has totally winded me verbally.

"He served in the millitary!" Bike the Vote guy starts, "His millitary involvement is a major campaigning point." He's outraged, but verbally inclined, and I start to think of how much sexier it is to do this whole registration thing biking around than the MPA's methods. Whole groups of beautiful, atheletic, idealistic people biking from town to town, wetting their thirsts with the satisfaction of social responsibility. I felt like dropping to my knees right there.

"Kerry's a liar!" Tabby bites back, and for a second, I don't even know where I fucking am. Working at Burger King had made me realize how seriously screwed up it was for someone like me to be working side-by-side with people who's mental capacity barely allowed them to multi-task a Whopper and a King Supreme, people who were viciously enthused when a white supremecist group came to Lewiston to "take care of those fucking towel-headed Somalis!!!" The environment in Petland is different-- in sales, your job depends on having some at least moderately developed social skills, and you've got to have enough wits about you to pull puppy-happy propaganda out of your ass at a moment's notice. But in that moment, as I found myself wearing the same uniforme as this bubbly-blond-Bush-supporter, it was all I could do to look around for the hidden Camera.

Bike the Vote guy realized at this point, as I so often do, that arguinging with an idiot just isn't worth the air-- words like "Weapons of Mass Destruction" would have as much meaning to Tabby as, you know, basic math, and he could be there for precious registration-gathering minutes only to have her argument top off at "Kerry Smells!", so he held his hands behind his back and politely waited for her to finish the card-- actually, it wasn't so much polite as devestatingly condescending, but silly little jumping beans don't have a real tight grasp on concepts like condescension.

She gave him the card and he walked toward the door, I followed him, realizing how much closer I was to BK than I'd realized. He was about to get on his ten-speed stead and ride across a beautiful state on a beautiful day, the winds of progress billowing against his T-Shirt. I was about to hock a pee-happy cocker spaniel to an unsuspecting couple with an unsuspecting carpet. He smiled and said thanks. I asked if he wanted fries with that.

I swear to god, if I hadn't just gotten health insurance a few days previous, I would have walked out the door with him.

I told him, "Don't worry, I'll work on her."
Loosely translated: "Take me with you, my helmetted Adonis! I don't belong here, you must know that! I am yours for the taking!"

"You do that." He says.
Loosely translated: "I'm getting the fuck out of here."


Goodbye, dear knight. I will try to prevail.


As I watch him walk away, Alicea, the one co-worker I've gained a tangible respect for, comes over to me. "Tell me this," I say. "Are you a Kerry or a Bush woman?"

"Bush." She says. "Kerry's a liar."


And then there were none.

On with it.

Before all my friends went to college, I thought Marijuana was the real enemy. It ate people up, I thought, consumed them entirely. Little by little, they'd become less themselves, less witty, sarcastic and fun, and more...rastafarian. At first all they'd lose would be the subtleties of them, the things I'd spent so long memorizing in their faces and manner. And that would be the worst of it, the hardest part, but from there on they'd just continue to atrophy until they become a walking symbol of what they'd succumbed to: they'd become a pothead.

And there's nothing worse in life than a fucking pothead.


Now I see, though, that marijuana is a afflicition that can only affect a certain kind of person. There are people that are susceptible, and the rest of us are relatively safe. I didn't have too many friends that were the pot kind of person. I had smart, smooth, college-bound kids. They'd fall to something else altogether.


Serena and I commiserate sometimes about how they all drink, all of them. The people we went through high school with, we'd sit at tables with them and scoff at the jocks that were obviously going to spend the night getting drunk. These were the people we'd make snide remarks to about the intelligence and appeal of our fellow students social lives; these were the people who'd always laugh and bitterly agree. And what was alcohol to us? Surely, nothing that could be beaten by a movie in Katie's spare room or a carpool up to Applebee's. Surely, to us it was nothing at all.


I guess there's something about college though that makes you different. Something in classes you can skip without being noticed that makes you thirsty, something about parents being hours away that impairs you.

I guess what bothers me about it so much is that it's such a fucking cliché. This John Hughes teen movie bullshit isn't what it's supposed to be like. My friends didn't write all those essays to get accepted into Animal House. They didn't take the SATs so they could casually assume the roles of Jason Biggs or Molly Ringwald. They're supposed to be real people, and have real interests. Something as one-dimensional as drinking isn't supposed to be real to them.


I'm not the diehard about it Serena is, I have to admit-- I'd even tried it a few times before, the summer of senior year, but it didn't, couldn't, click with me. I always said it was the taste, but I think all I'm really tasting is my own disapproval. I've never had more than a few sips, never been drunk, and I don't think I ever will. And if I do, here's a shocker-- it won't be till I'm 21! GASP!

Because I think the law was probably made for a reason, okay? That's why. I'm not being a hypocrite, I'm not naive, I'm just chose to believe it's not a totally arbitrary number. I believe someone probably decided it for a reason, and that it was probably a better reason than I've heard from any of the drunken 16-year-olds who've tried to change my mind. Aside from which, I just don't have the energy to go around breaking laws on principle.


"She says she's tired of life, she must be tired of something."


I guess I'm starting not to care about the appeal my entries might hold for people, because I don't think there was an ounce of wit traceable in that whole thing. But certain people have been bugging me to write again, and maybe I'm just trying to make a point to them: there's just nothing worth saying anymore.

On with it.