I take a gamble that this bottle is a twist-off as I sit down to assess my life. Twenty-five years ago at this moment, my mom was probably already in labor. This wouldn't have hurt as much as that, even if I was wrong.

So why'd she go through the trouble? What am I today?

Age is a number. I used to admire people who said that bullshit. And, yeah, I know it's terribly infantile and self-centered to be having a midlife crisis at the age of twenty-five. If you've ever read a single post on this blog before, I hope to god you aren't surprised.

It took me a while to figure out exactly what the two things that have been bothering me lately are, and a little while beyond that to see how they fit together. I text messaged Sam earlier, and the conversation brings both themes into the mix nicely. Let's go ahead and put the whole damn thing up, while I can pretend I'm already drunk enough to think that's not a bad idea.

Linda: Six hours of relative youth left. What should my final act of rebellion be?
Sam: Hmmmm, infidelity?? (I'm not going to post his mispelling of the word. I found it terribly unattractive, and come to think of it, terribly ironic, that he of all people could not spell that word.)

This is actually all of the conversation we need to establish the two things that have been bothering me lately. Number one: That I feel like twenty-five is the age where I really need to stop giving myself slack for making mistakes, the age where I need to buckle down, finish what I'm going to finish, and stop writing things off because I'm young. I'm not saying everyone, at this age, starts to turn their life around. I'm saying that if I don't, I will be much, much older when I realize that I forgot to.

And number two is the line from "No Children" that's been making me want to cry-- if you read that in the last post, because you're a loyal (or a new) reader. Not because that post was at all interesting. But I owe it to you to wrap it into this post somehow, so you feel rewarded for wasting your time on that one.

"I hope I lie,
And tell everyone you were a good wife."

It took me a while to figure out why that song fucked me up. Oh yeah, my secret shame. I am a bad wife.


Lest all you loyal friends of mine come immediately to my defense, let's examine the facts, here. First, the "domestic goddess" clichés. I am a slob. I cannot cook. Not because it's difficult, I hate people who offer to "teach me." My problem with cooking is organizational, and to do with the fact that I am a picky eater. I do not have children-- until recently, could not have children, but at twenty-five, even I would only fault myself for that intermintently. So let's move on, beyond that. Let's move on to "sex goddess." I am bad at sex. I don't take much pleasure in pleasuring my husband, or being pleasured by him. I need therapy for this, which I have been very slow in getting. Despite all this, however, I am ready and raring to go when it comes to other people. Which doesn't mean I have been exactly unfaithful, but let's face it, I was, once. A long time ago, when things were very bad between Zack and I-- and yes, you can trade blame back and forth all you want, but really, things wouldn't have been bad at all if not for the lack of "sex goddess" status. So, I spend more time than I should lounging in the arms of people who are not my husband. And, maybe sometimes, they are someone else's. I am completely, completely honest with Zack about this, and I ue that as my defense. But then I harbor this secret shame about it.

What else? Well, I can offer abject compliments to these other men, but rarely to Zack. I find it hard not to criticize little things about his physique that would kill me if he said the same thing to me-- tommorrow, he is getting a spray tan for my birthday, because I'm curious what he would look like if he were tan. I forget to be respectful of his job, how important it is-- I tell everybody he gets paid for doing nothing most of the time, and this seems to be true, but the books will tell you (the christian relationship advice books, don't ask me why I've read them) that you need to offer respect towards a man's job, or else he will be belittled.

He is home now, petting the dog behind me, and when I walked to get my second bottle of Smirnoff Ice, I definitely felt dizzy. I'll get heartburn soon-- ahh, there it goes. The dog. I defend the dog a lot when Zack gets mad at him, even when the dog is misbehaving. This undermine's Zack's authority, another thing the Christian Relationship books would not have me do. And I accuse Zack of being a budding alcoholic. I don't think I'm wrong. But I should wait for more evidence, so as to be less hurtful. Especially when I am currently the one drowning my heartache in heartburn. (Not that I'm accusing him right now...except where I just typed it, there. I think I type faster when I drink.)

So. I'm a bad wife. And in keeping with that, let's have the rest of the conversation with Sam! (The fact that I still talk to Sam at all, citing the fact that I asked Zack, time and time again, if he'd prefer me to stop, and he said no, as my justification.)

Sam: Hmmm, infidelity?
Linda: Possibly, but I think you'd be second in line right now. someone else has been putting much more time into trying to seduce me, and he's local.
Sam: Well, I am in town...
Linda: I figured that was my luck.
Linda: He's no good for me, but he's much better for me than you are. No jittery side effects.
Linda: (After twenty minutes of no response) I didn't mean for that to be quite as insulting as it sounded, gorgeous.
Sam: Oh, I got it, don't worry...I guess I'm just no good for you.

There, I should have left it, because he's not exactly wrong. But it was heartbreaking. And I'm self-destructive. So I had to go and say this.

Linda: I'd been thinking for a momth I wish I could see you sometime near my birthday, that that would make me happy, and very little else would be worthwhile.

To which he never responded.

But you see in there how I do the right thing? How I don't see him? It's out of loyalty to the other guy. Not to Zack. And I must say, I find this fascinating. I guess the thing is, I know I'm not going to do any more with Sam than I already have, and so, it's enough to be troublesome to Zack, but it's not exactly infidelity. It is, however, the same exact amount of contact and affection I would be sharing with the other guy, under different circumstances. And so it feels unfaithful to him.

Of couse, let's not give myself too much credit. Probably, if I had taken Sam up on what seems like an offer to hang out there, he would have told me he was unavailable. Let's find out.

Linda (right now): For journalistic purposes, if I had told you I wanted to see you tonight, when you hinted you were in town, I would have found out you already had plans, right?


While we're waiting. There's this whole post I wanted to write the other day. When I was listening to Modest Mouse's Bukowski and thinking about Casey, and thinking about the word "Love." Loyal readers (as opposed to new readers) know that Casey has ruined the word for me, or been blamed for it, at any rate. Then again, thinking about the last time it tickled my lips as often as it does lately, without coming out, I am reminded of when I was first befriending Zack. This was well before Casey's influence. (A bit of trivia-- I actually met Casey before I met Zack, on the same day I met Jeff, my sophomore year of high school. It was an inter-school young writer's gifted and talented program, the first day of it, and the three of us-- Casey, Jeff and I-- all got put into a group together to discuss the essays we had just read aloud-- mine was about Jeff, who I had never met, which made it awkward. That's sort of a seperate story. Anyway, that day was the day that officially started mine and Jeff's relationship, but I didn't speak to Casey again for a number of years. On a side note, I can still tell Jeff I love him. He still says it back.)

It wasn't I didn't want to tell Zack I was in love with him-- I wasn't, yet. I didn't want to tell him that I loved him, as a friend. Or rather, I wanted to, but I was afraid he couldn't handle it. Creepy, obsessive self-mutilator. I mean, I loved him, I did, but I wasn't going to make the mistake of thinking he was stable.

And I guess I was still pretty fresh coming off of what I did to Andrew (Lunt.) Or what I thought I did to him-- I carried around the shame of "breaking him" for quite a while after we split. I guess I had already thought to think of "love" as a four-letter word with five-alarm consequences. (How cool that I can string together a sentence like that halfway through my second bottle of smirnoff. Though I'm drinking slower, now, and I really have no reason to be actually drunk yet.)

Sam: (right now) I always have plans, hun, it's more about whether what your (sic) offering is more interesting than my previous plans.

Thank god he responded right then. I thought I wasn't going to be able to tap dance around the topic anymore without undoing all the hard work I've done in not saying what I've wanted to say. First, do no harm.

"People say friends don't destroy one another.
What do they know about friends?"
~Mountain Goats, Game Shows Touched Our Lives


On with it.

Okay, so let's go for a post that contains all the partial posts that I've wanted to start recently, but haven't, because I had no way to make them into an entire post. Be prepared for some frustrating, unsatisfying reading, but please don't take this opportunity to wonder why you come here at all:


Song that make me want to cry almost every time I hear them:

-The Cure's "Just Like Heaven", slightly preferrably as covered by Gatsby's American Dream.
-The Mountain Goat's "No Children."
-Oops. Maybe that's all I can think of right now.


Jeremey's first day of his new job was today. Emily got legally married today. Jeff has his old job back, and I've yet to remember to e-mail him back about this. Blah blah blah, insert something here about how my life, in comparsion, is starting to feel small and insignificant.


I've been thinking lately that I really need therapy. I've been wondering if my negative experiences with Mr. Ladd-- when he left-- have informed my distrust of therapy in general. The reality of this is probably bigger, though. I started distrusting therapy based on the fact that it's just a person on the other end, every bit as flawed as you. Over time, I think what I feel about has changed: it's no longer really a distrust, it's more of a...I don't know, it's more of a need to find the perfect conditions for it to work under. For it to work, I guess I just think you really need to find the right person. And who has the time and the money to go from threapist to therapist, waiting for one to click?

How strange that, as I'm writing this, Mr. Ladd has come online. I really don't speak to him that often, at all.

I guess the other thing is that the trained massage therapist in me tends to be more interested in...I don't know, holistic modalities-- hypnotism, Emotional Freedom Technique. Things that allow you to cut through the blah blah blah and access the parts of your brain that are really in charge. I guess I'm a pretty firm believer in the power of the subconcious...and maybe I think everything else is irrelevant. My trouble is that I don't really succumb to hypnotism. Like at all. Maybe after a few years of yoga or meditation training. Something that could slow down my constant stream of thoughts, many of which react very sarcastically to hypnotic suggestion.

Mr. Ladd and I are going to make an appointment. Here we go again.


I find it annoying that the time when you're in the best position to be absolutely honest with a person is right before they start to mean too much to you. Because that honesty-- or, at least, that opportunity for honesty-- nessecarily leads the relationship forward, if you're me. Nothing does it for me like that moment in a relationship where you can tell a person everything because they're interested, but still largely unaffected. Keep that up for too long, however, and you're going to get to a point where your words have consequences.


I just fucking -know- there was another song I wanted for that list. I mean, there are others that have been on there in the long term-- "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", and Mariah Carey's "Without You." (The latter because it was played in the car on the way to my grandmother's funeral.) But there's one I've been listening to recently....speaking of music...


Rob Thomas has a new album out. Reminded me that I needed to replace my copy of his last one-- also, I downloaded both "Yourself or Someone Like You" and "Mad Season", which were missing from my MP3 collection, given that I've owned each of them at least three times. I have this thing with losing those CD's. A few promising tracks on this new one-- you have to give Rob Thomas, by himself, the benefit of the doubt. He's obviously better with Matchbox Twenty, and without, he has a tendency to be too poppy, and to favor (ugh) chorale background singers. But he's still Rob Thomas. Anyway, did you buy "Exile on the Mainstream"? Did you even know about it? No? Then don't blame him for releasing "Cradlesong" as a solo album.

Give me the Meltdown" and "Mockingbird" are each pretty good tracks, with some excellent lines. He always was a fantastic lyricist. However, even I am a little offended by the track called "Real World '09." Come on, man. Some things are sacred.



Blah. Maybe staying in the habit isn't quite worth the effort. I'll have something profound-- or at least vaguely relevant-- so say next time. Promise.

On with it.

Dan is talking to me about a poem he just wrote, saying he normally doesn't bother committing the lines that pass through his head to paper, but today he felt compelled. I wrote an entire poem in my head earlier, but let it pass instantly. It seems lately, I can't write anything I'm feeling without risking something.

I had made the deal with myself, finally, to write in this more often. To hell with the caution, to hell with the shame. Let's just get back to who I used to be, when I was an open book, when I put it all out there, good and bad. Zack doesn't fucking read this, anyway.

I alternate between being annoyed by that and realizing, with shocking clarity, exactly why he doesn't, why he can't. It bothers me that, when I look too hard, I can never *really* blame him for anything. Sure, he lies, but I create an environment where he can't be truthful. Sure, he's distant and sad and won't talk to me, but I create an environment where he can't be happy. Sure, sometimes it feels like we have a bad marriage, but doesn't that just make me a bad wife?

You'd think with those kinds of feelings, I'd find it hard to justify the things I sometimes do, the things I'm all too eager to write about, if somewhat vaguely, in these less-than-hallowed pages. In reality, I feel like I've missed something when I don't do them, feel like I've lost someone when I don't write them. If a genius is someone who can hold two contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time, does that make someone who can have two (or eight) contradictory feelings at the same time an emotional Einstein?

My guess is no.

---

I told him "I flit"; or rather, he told me he noticed it: my tendency to switch between intense passions almost weekly: passions for people, passions for ambitions, and, not uncommonly, for people as ambitions, as things I want to accomplish. ("He" is not Zack. "He" will go, for the moment, unnamed.) After he mentioned this tendency of mine without assigning the cute little word to describe it, I coined it much later, expressing my concern for our relationship to him. I sighed. "I do flit.", I said, and he agreed. I turned to him, accusing "Do you have any idea what I mean by that? 'Flit?'" He did-- how delicious is that? He described what I meant perfectly back to me, using a butterfly in the metaphor: I remind myself not to be too enamoured by the comparison, after all, how can one use the word "flit" and not think butterfly?

I know this about my emotional ADD, about the way I get so very deeply involved with something so quickly, and then allow it to pass me by. It's him, right now, it has no one to be with him. (I'm sure that sounds rather insulting, if you're out there. I don't mean it that way.) It gets so intense, so quickly. Good, ol' fashioned suburban infatuation, where you want to be in any public place (Wal-Mart, lately) because there's a better chance he'll be there than at your house. Where you can't help but notice, for the first time, exactly how many of that make and model of cars are on the road, or, equally as frustrating, how many cars sort of look, from a distance, just like that make and model? (Does anyone remember, from high school, how I hated Ford Taurus'? "Grrr, Taurus"? And motherfucking Mercury Sables, the little clone bastard car. It was all because of Jonathan Lawless's car, remember? I guess some things never change.)

It will end soon enough, it has nothing to do but end. (If you're out there, I'm not sure whether or not you find that insulting, but I suppose, unfortunately, that you can't find fault with it's verity. Can't say I didn't warn you. Can't say I haven't tried.) I told him, the other day, that I do; I go from passion to passion, from person to person, and I can't seem to help it: the feelings are real, in the moment, and I never mean to hurt anyone. Maybe it's even been a while since I have hurt anyone, with one, big red-headed exception...or, come to think of it, two exceptions that share a bed at night. But I flit, I'm a flitter by nature, and I told him this: I feel like I betray everything I touch.

Maybe, upon closer inspection, I'm less like the butterfly, and more like one of those destructive tent moths. The ones that land on something beautiful and leave it ugly, gray, and destroyed, through their solicitous, consuming attentions.


I hope I'm being harder on myself than I deserve. I hope I'm not the parasite I fear I am. I might go back to some public place tonight, compelled by instinct, ready to move my wings in their dainty fashion, and be what I am, whatever it is. Or I might have the comparative grace and poise to sit at home and watch some crappy romantic comedy I've seen a dozen times, or listen to some songs that remind me of my current, transient obsession.


The last line of Dan's poem is "OH how I wish you were here."

On with it.

There's a post I want to write that deserves more attention than I have the energy to give it. Things about myself that I am only beginning to know, things that deeply inform who I am, the mistakes I make, the people I hurt, the people I love. All these tangents to weave in and have it still somehow be relevant. I'm going to give it a try. I hope it comes out alright-- I want to sleep, but I'm afraid of what will happen to this if I don't get it out now.

Elorza was in town for the fiesta. The Monday after, we celebrated my birthday early-- five people in attendance, it seemed like the largest grouping of my friends that seemed likely for me to be able to amass, at the very least, without conflict. But this much is hardly relevant.

Outside with another friend as he is getting ready to leave, he says of Elorza, "He's a little full of himself, isn't he?"

"He comes off that way. It's really just to hide the immense self-loathing he feels."


Elorza being in town brought a lot of negative feelings for me, too. I took a walk with the other gentleman, explaining to him how I normally don't "keep guys around" who aren't at all attracted to me. I expressed my worry for mine and Elorza's friendship in the wake of getting all this non-sexual tension out in the open a few months ago. It's not that I want things to happen between he and I-- I don't. But I really don't know how to interact with someone-- someone male, anyway-- who has no attraction for me whatsoever.

I guess I've been chalking that up to being insecure on a certain level. What it is, though, is being insecure on a very different level than I was aware. There's this manager at work I really respect-- I mean, on a level that it makes me a little crazy. Little by little, I'm beginning to find faults with him-- thank god-- but for the longest time, I thought of him as just about perfect. He balanced intelligence and kindness in a way I had previously thought to be impossible, and added diligence and professionalism, to boot. I had sort of a complex about him; an inferiority complex, I guess. Every now and then, I'd get in these awful moods around him, just thinking of how much better he was than I. All of this, not too disturbing by itself.

I didn't really notice at first, but I wouldn't hang my coat next to his on the coat rack at work-- every day, it was this very detailed process I did, almost unconsciously, keeping it as far away from his as I could manage. I didn't stop to think about it, but if I did, I knew why: I am gross. I am dirty. I fear that I radiate some disgusting aura, that my belongings smell or are diseased, perhaps. Still, it wasn't a problem until one day I came in and he had hung his coat next to mine. I had a small panic attack. I had to move it right away. I was shaky for a half-hour afterward.

That was a little bit of a wake-up call.

Once I accidentally used his earpiece instead of mine when we both went for a break at the same time. When I realized my mistake after he began looking at his, I apologized profusely and used alcohol swab after alcohol swab to clean it for him before I returned it-- he looked at me like I was crazy, and I must have looked crazy in that moment.


I don't know how I went so long without realizing I had a complex about this. I wonder if I always have. It's obvious where it came from, I guess: years and years of kids accusing me of being unwashed in elementary school. I can't imagine that I actually was, but my hair tended to knot up, and my mom, god bless her, could not remove the knots without putting me in extreme pain.

Maybe that's not all of it. I remember, too, when it was explained to me what confession was for, in Sunday school-- to clean away your sins. I pictured sins as being little black spots on a two-dimensional white outline of you that represented your soul. After too long, the little black spots, they would build up, cover you. I liked the idea of purging them all at once, but being in the confessional was just too much for me. Whatever happened to me when I was young, (with regards to whether or not I was molested and have blocked the memory) it resulted in me masturbating at a very young age, earlier that kindergarden, to the types of humiliating fantasies that I can just barely come to terms with today. You try explaining that to a priest when you're six.

So I couldn't go back. And the little black spots, they built up on me, because that's really what I believed sins were.

I wish I could go back there and tell that girl what sins really are-- that they do color you in, they give you shading and form. You are just a white silhouette without them, or maybe one of those eerie sculptures with a blank space where the face should be. The sins, the mistakes, they shape and form you, they make you what you are. If only I could have told her back then that what I was, was beautiful. If only I could have told her there'd never be anything on me that I couldn't wash off.

On a related note, I've been wondering lately if what draws people together might necessarily be their weaknesses, not their strengths. I've been thinking of this seemingly random cycle I have with my friends, where I get to be very intense with one of them at a time: I don't think, anymore, that it's random at all. I think I gravitate to the one who can fulfill whatever psychological need I'm feeling at the time. There's more to be said about that...maybe another day I'll say it.

And if what draws you to a person is your weaknesses, what happens if you then grow as a person, beyond that weakness? With regards to my marriage, this particular thought worries me often. I love Zack, I do, and it's because he's a decent person, an intelligent person, a person with a particular sense of humor, and a gentle spirit. But when I think of what I was first drawn to about him, what made our relationship work at the time, I remember how well he fit with my shortcomings, not my strengths. I was needy, he was obsessive. I was insecure, he was devoted and without a past. I wanted to feel needed and strong, and he was damaged goods. I couldn't have sex, and he swore he was willing to wait. And I remember how happy I was when I found out he had next to no sense of smell.

And let's face it, I'm still all those things, I'm still that same set of weaknesses with only a few interspersed strengths. Anything that's changed, it's been by inches, not miles. But what happens to our relationship if one day, I'm none of those things? What happens if I self-actualize? Will my marriage last on pure and untainted love alone if one day I'm independent, secure, sexually capable, and psychologically deodorized?

Well, there's one disaster that FEMA can breathe easy about, at any rate.


I gotta wrap this around to where I was going. All this time, I've been under the impression that this need to feel like people are attracted to me was all about conquest. I thought this deal with Elorza was about the rejection of the past, when I was in love with him and he was not in love with me. I thought I was really shallow. I thought this all played into the question I can't stop asking, about whether or not I am objectively attractive (A big question). And I don't think all of that is completely invalid. But....

The whole time Elorza was here, all I wanted was too touch him. It wasn't about lust and it wasn't about conquest. It was about closeness. It was about the fact that I love-- really, really love-- this person that I almost never see, and the fact that I am a physically affectionate person. The fact that I am someone who needs to touch skin, feel heartbeats, hear breath. It was about the way I think of death: that the only hope of an afterlife I feel I have is that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and that's what a person's soul really is (not a white outline with black spots). And if that's true, then if you want to spend eternity with someone, you have to spend as much time as possible breathing them in, absorbing their physical energy, making tiny, tangible parts of them into tiny, tangible parts of you.

I wanted to touch him. Hold his hand, lean on him. Sit closer to him than I would to a stranger. Hug him, hold him, put my head on his knee. But somehow, because of some stupid conversation I had with him a few months ago where he stated, unequivocally, that there's no way he could ever find me attractive, I couldn't. I stared at him from afar, I crossed my arms and stayed my distance. He hugged me when he came, and when he left, and a few times in there-- when we'd been drinking-- I dared to get just a little closer. But I didn't touch him, not the way I did the last time he was here. All because of that stupid conversation. And the whole time he was here, the whole time I was looking at the alluring, perfect smoothness of his dark tan skin-- I just kept feeling worse about myself.

I thought it was just rejection, but it didn't feel quite right. It took till tonight for me to figure it out: I don't believe there's a halfway.

I don't believe there's a halfway. He's not attracted to me, he could never be attracted to me. So he must know that I'm disgusting. He must have figured out my guarded secret. He could smell me from a mile a way, he did me a favor just being in the same room. I am reprehensible, vile, I have an aura. And he knows it.


That's why I need people to be attracted to me-- maybe there's a whole slew of other reasons why I want it, but that's why I need it. That's why I'm afraid of our relationship ending over some bullshit.


This whole thing, it's not a conversation I could have with him. There's something I would need him to say, and he doesn't get it-- he doesn't get that the lack of saying what I need to hear is the cementing of what I fear most. He doesn't cater, and that doesn't matter. Wouldn't risk it now, even if he did. Most of the time, I have an absurdly open relationship with him. I guess that's how I know this is a big one.


I wish I had a good way to wrap this up. I wish I had something in my stomach right now. I wish I didn't have to work tomorrow. I wish I believed a lot of you would read this and understand how core it is for me, how bizarrely urgent it was that I write it. I wish I knew how to talk to the little girl with the knotted hair and the spotted soul. I wish I knew that the love I have for people is based on love, not unconscious needs; more than that, I wish I knew that there was more to love in general than chemical misfirings and Freudian levels of consciousness. I wish I believed in souls in a more traditional way, so I wouldn't have to fear that my physical distance from Elorza is discounting our importance to each other in eternity's eye. I wish I could have written this whole thing with that gentle, flowing turn of phrase that is the one thing I adore about myself, the one thing that reminds me that I have worth, that more comes out of me than pestilence.

I have a lot of wishes.


On with it.

Every now and then, I get entangled with him again, and he steals every song, wrestles away the meanings from anyone else they could possibly apply to. He shows up in every cloud formation, there's something relevant to say to him about every thing I observe. When I look upon other beautiful things, I do not feel the beauty-- I feel guilt. I look upon them sadly, wondering how something so magnificent could mean so little to me in his absence. I look upon my life and I am dissatisfied, I look upon my decisions and question them.

I want to tell him all of this, and I do, but eventually I fill up my quota of e-mails I can write without getting an answer-- without losing whatever vestige of pride I still pretend to have. So I turn here. When fully-formed lyrics for a song I'm supposed to write for him-- because it's not enough that every song should be about him, it has to be every song plus one-- I find little pieces of scrap paper to jot them down on, carry them home in my pocket, add them to a growing document in notepad. I have all these perfect lines, these perfect stanzas, little blips of melody in my mind. It doesn't seem that I'm writing him a song. It seems that I'm writing him an album.


And tonight, I have spent a small fortune on more songs, for inspiration, for commiseration. Downloaded, from iTunes, an album called Punk Goes 80's because it had a cover of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" by a band called Gatsby's American Dream. Ordered the Cure CD the Original was on-- Kiss me, Kiss me, Kiss me-- off the Amazon Marketplace. Downloaded the Dullard album by the Will Gattis Trio-- no idea why I didn't have it already, and if you don't, go get it, I won't burn it for you because I support local musicians. (As a side note, it's almost dangerous to have contact with someone so clearly brilliant. I've asked Will to help me with the accompaniment when I have this foolish song written, and I will insist on paying him for his efforts, if I ever get it done. After listening to some of his music for the first time in a long time, I'm afraid I'll have to give him more for his help than I was planning too. He's really too good a musician for my chicken scratch obsessions.) Ordered a used copy of Elton John's Greatest Hits. And I'm probably missing a few.

I press play on a random title on the Punk Goes 80's listing once it's downloaded, just to test my theory. Yes, as always, there's at least one line in here I want to use as a subject line for an e-mail that I just barely have enough restraint not to write. Maybe, if I'm lucky, the next six times this happens, I can satiate myself by quoting the line as a status update on facebook, and I'll imagine him reading it, imagine him wondering if it's for him-- maybe he'll doubt it is, have just a glimmer of hope that it might be.

He won't, mind you. He has a life. (So why do I keep offering up mine?)


During a recent reorganization of the "Recovery" section at work, I saw several books on Love Addiction. Seemed like such a farce at the time. Now...well, not so much. Let's be clear here, I don't know thing one about actual love addiction, but when you break it down, all attraction really comes down to is an interaction with a person creating some sort of chemical reaction in your brain. What happens if, with one person in particular, your reaction is less seratonin and more...heroin?

(Right now, if I were Starlee Kine, and this were This American Life, I'd be calling some neurophysicist to have them explain exactly how right or how wrong I am about that chemical addiction to a person hypothesis. And it would be Phil Collins helping me write a song about my heartbreak, not Will Gattis. If you have no idea what I'm talking about-- and, let's face it, you don't-- you really should subscribe to the This American Life Podcast. Or at least download the episode I'm talking about from the archives here.)

I've let a few tracks from Dullard distract me from him for a few stray minutes, and I'll have to thank Mr. Gattis for that. I'm quickly reminded, however, of how much the object of my thoughts likes this CD, how he bought a copy at the benefit where I met Will. I'm reminded of his being there when so few people were, and soon, that will bring me into another spiral of thoughts.

It won't be too long before I start to detox, to force him from my mind. In the wake of my last seeing him, I could tell instantly that I had been more guarded this time. In the days since then, it's been a struggle to picture his face, to remember the effect of any stray contact of skin, and I should be thankful for that. For my sake, for the sake of the people I love-- the people I'm not simply addicted to. It's easy enough to write songs about obsession, harder to build relationships out of scraps of paper and cloud formations. It's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all.

The detox has already started, in fact. I was trying to think of him earlier, shaking and shuddering when I realized how far from those few precious moments I am. I was panic-stricken, looking at the closet full of my clothes, in the house that holds the life I've built with somebody else. Looking at the soda cans strewn about, at the TV I own jointly, laying on the bed I share every night with someone I am not addicted to.

And now I think of something Elorza said to me once, that there are two kinds of substance abusers: Addicted and Dependent. This thought, for the moment, leaves me cold.

I'm so confused for the moment that I've lost the direction this post was going. The neat-and-tidy full-circle reference that was going to make my errant ramblings seem somehow so precise-- he always liked it, when I used one of those in an e-mail. Probably, I am only compelled to write this because the other day he told me I am a good writer-- or, rather, he told me that I was not a bad writer, but with a voice full of irresistible conviction. Between that and all the extra chemical activity bumping around up there, I am writing, writing, writing. Songs at first, then entire albums. E-mails at first, then lengthy blog posts. Musings at first, then confessions. Then revelations.

Addicted or dependent. Could it be that all this time it wasn't that I couldn't narrow it down to one man, I simply couldn't decide which kind of self-destruction was a better fit for me?


At least I finally got around to downloading Dullard.

Why does everything bust at the seems?
Why can't anything stay between two extremes?
Nothing's as it seems.
So I dream
Lavender Dreams.
~Will Gattis Trio, Lavender

On with it.

So, for no other reason than because I don't have to be work until three tomorrow and Zack is already asleep, I find myself poking through my old hard drive and reading old AIM conversations. The folder I was in seems to house conversations from early to mid 2002; that is, the second half of my senior year, and a little bit of post-graduation stuff.

So, what was going on in my life?

Well, I wasn't reading them in any chronological order, just clicking the ones that had interesting titles, but here are some snapshots:

-I had just started at Burger King, and the job was not yet killing my soul.
-My key group of friends were the Auburn boys, minus Jeremey who was NOT speaking to me...
-I know this because one of the conversations I read was on a screenname I created to talk to him as someone named "May". He was nice to her, but extremely aware of the possibility that it was me.
-I was dating Jeff but falling in love with Chad. Or, in a later conversation, I was dating Jeff but getting my heart broken by Chad. Or, in a later conversation, I was no longer dating Jeff.
-Zack's only appearance in these conversations was at the end of one where I told Elorza I had a "date" with "the psycho who walks past my house every night."
-Mitch and I were in the midst of our extremely short-lived friendship, in which I e-mailed him everything in these incredibly long letters, and he would tell me how brilliant and fascinating they were. He was all kinds of charming and attractive, and even then, I had a penchant for guys who were younger than I.

A few things are striking about these conversations I've read. For one, so many of the people I had the conversations with are about are people who were incredibly important to me back then, but whom I probably haven't spoken at all (or, in certain cases, more than nominally) for years on end. Mitch, Nick, Jacquie, Aaron. Others are people that I like to credit myself with keeping in my life, but with whom I definitely can no longer claim to be as close: Chad, Jeff. I would say only two of the relationships mentioned have remained or strengthened (Elorza and Jeremey.)

I found it really saddening to read how freely and easily me and some of these people were trading "I Love You"'s-- I don't remember when those words got harder for me, and maybe they didn't overall, maybe just little by little, with each individual. When I look back on the history of my willingness to use those words, I have a sneaking suspicion that it was disproportionately influenced by one gentlemen whose presence in this folder of conversations was notably absent, probably because the crest of the wave that was our relationship came six months to a year after all of these. He is the one person that I tend to credit for changing the way I interact with the majority of people, the one person who made me more self-conscious than anyone else. I haven't lost complete contact with him, but I find myself waiting to have something worthwhile under my belt, so I can go back to him, as an equal. Back to him and show him I still am what I marketed myself to be in the first place.

When I think about the relationships that were strengthened over these intervening years, it occurs to me that they are the ones that have the least in common with that one. These are the relationships to which I bring no hint of pretension, no posturing, no real holding back. My relationships with Jeremey and Elorza have so much seniority over my relationship with this other person-- Yeah, it's Casey, okay, let's stop being vague-- that his effect on me couldn't change them. Elorza, in particular, I think about as being someone I can go to and say anything, be as pathetic as I need to be in that moment, and it's okay, in the long run. When I exercise this right, it quite frequently isn't pretty, and he is not, not, not the type to cater to my insecurities, to pander to me in anyway. Quite often, that leads to me being hurt my him, to me being incensed that he wouldn't just make a compromise, just once, (who am I kidding?), for me. When this happens, I'll generally stomp away for a while. But when I come back, it's never with a sense of shame...or, at least, it's never with a sense of shame that he, in any way, contributed to. And things are back to being pretty square.

With Jeremey, well, more often than not, he's the one with no pride. My relationship with him is more giving than my relationship with other people, and I like the way that makes me feel about myself. I want to be there for him, always, no matter what kind of bullshit either of us puts the other through, and the nearly fifteen-year-track record shows that that's really not all that unlikely. But the same thing goes-- dealing with all the insecurities he's had over the years-- all the "Does this make me a horrible person?"s, and the "Tell me what you really think"s, these have earned me the right to say what I need to, should there come a time when I have to be selfish. If I need to call someone and I'm balling my eyes out to the extent that they have no hope of understanding my words, well, it's probably going to be him.

I love these two men-- and how strange to call them that word just as we are on the cusp of it really, really being true-- as deeply as I can imagine loving anyone; yet, I still have a great deal of love for nearly every name mentioned in this post. The part of me that has been affected-- adversely or otherwise-- by Casey is reeling with discomfort that that word should appear so many times in one run-on sentence in my own writing. The part of me that's unaffected by him looks on to try and gather what's different about the way I express it with these two people than the way I do with those with whom my relationship has faded in it's luster. Do I tell these two I love them? Yes, maybe not as often as I would have been compelled to a few short years ago, but yes. Do they tell me? Well, they each have, but it's not an easy word for either of them. But when I think about them, well, as much as it has been sometimes, that's really not the point now.

The difference between these two and the rest is that, words or none, I believe they love me. I don't spend a lot of time questioning it. Wondering if it's out there, in the universe, unspoken.


On with it.

Let's go for a listy post. Don't worry, it will still be ridiculously self-interested.

What I used to like about myself better before than I do now:
-I used to be a better, more passionate writer.
-I used to have a better command of vocabulary.
-I used to be less ashamed and private. I tell my friends far less about my life than I used to.
-I used to be less afraid of failure, or, at least, I used to have no concept of the fact that I was afraid of failure.

What I like more about myself now than I used to:
-I'm slowly learning the value of learning-- to be patient for progress, to put time into what I want to achieve.
-I'm getting braver about going after what I want to learn and know and be.
-I'm getting better with money and financial decisions.
-My balance, posture, and flexibility are getting better. Flexibility is the important one on there.
-Not very long ago, it would have been like pulling fucking teeth to try and write this next list.

What I do like about myself, right now:
-I'm not afraid to sing karaoke.
-I'm one of the most non-judgmental people I know, and when I catch myself passing judgment, I work on it.
-I have really good, really varied taste in music.
-I'm ambitious about learning.
-I'm fairly self-aware. Even when I'm making idiot decisions based on low self-esteem or tiny chemicals firing off in my brain, I know that's why I'm making them.
-I really prefer giving to receiving, at least as far as gifts are concerned. Giving thoughtful gifts is one of my favorite things to do.
-I don't kill bugs. I tend to make an attempt to usher them outside if I think they're in danger of being killed by someone else.
-I like to dance, and I do it in my living room quite often, and, most of the time, I'm not too embarrassed to do it in front of other people.
-I see the good in people. The people I love, I love with a great deal of sincerity.

There are downfalls to that last list. I'm maybe, too ambitious about learning, and I have to pair that up with having a relatively poor attention span-- thusly, I invest time and money in all kinds of things I want to learn, and then drop them, most of the time, before making real progress. And I'm starting to rethink the killing bugs thing when it comes to mosquitoes. And the seeing the good in people thing, well, that ends up meaning that I'm attracted to a lot of people. Pair that up with poor self-esteem, something to prove, and a wedding ring, and you've got a really dangerous combination. And being self-aware, even when I'm making idiot decisions, leads to me calling myself an idiot a lot. A lot a lot.

And the gift thing doesn't always reconcile with the good financial decisions thing, but I'm getting closer. And the thing where I never could have written that last list, well, leave it up to me to have to write two paragraphs of qualifiers after a list of my strengths.

This whole post seemed like it had a whole lot more potential, seemed like it would be more satisfying to write when I conceived it about an hour ago. At the time, I was abuzz with exercise-induced endorphins, feeling uncharacteristically confident, uncharacteristically capable of living up to my ambitions, focusing on what I want and working through the slow progress. It doesn't feel as true anymore, but, then, one of the things I want is to start writing on this again, reconnect with my passion, get beyond the shame-- and hey, here's a post. That must mean something.

Unless it doesn't. I guess we'll see.

On with it.

I imagine the secret to writing a bestselling self-help book is just to keep notes of all the great advice you give yourself that you totally ignore. Let's go over some of these gems of wisdom-- free of charge, from me to you, because god knows I'm doing fucking nothing with them.

-When your feeling like you're not worth someone's attention, do something that gets you closer to being that totally kick-ass person that everyone wants to know. Learn an language. Exercise. Singing lessons. Dance.

Me? I have spent money on the Rosetta Stone software for French, Yoga Booty Ballet, Tae Bo, Richard Simmon's Sweatin' to the Oldies, Singing for Dummies, and a brand new pair of tap shoes. But, hell, wallowing is free, so why not?

-Text messaging is the devil. It really one of the all-time lowest forms of communication. "Hey, I don't feel comfortable enough with you, close friend of mine, to risk you answering the phone. But I wanted you to know I was thinking about you!" Over and over again. The dangers of text messaging are numerous: you never know what you're interrupting, and when somebody doesn't answer, you just know it's because they're in fucking Bali doing body shots off of the svelte natives, and my, what an exciting life they must have. And my, how pathetic you are. Furthermore, you never know when the conversation has ended, and if you're engaged in it-- and you are, namely because you aren't in Bali, you're home, and home sucks-- you're going to check your phone every five minutes for the rest of the day. Because they *could* get back to you any second.

I mean, they aren't going to, but they could.

Found yourself doing this? Take my advice right away-- delete that person's contact information. You'll still be able to respond to any texts sent directly to you, but you won't be able to initiate again and again and again. You'll hear from them eventually, when they realize how much the miss hearing from you twenty-six times a day. Really. Really.

Me? I edited the contact information so it reads "Don't." instead of the person's name. That's close, right?


-Keep in mind that however fantastic you are, there is nothing whatsoever compelling about someone who sits around waiting for someone else to make them feel fantastic. It's not sexy to prostrate yourself to the idea of someone else. The only thing that's going to stop you from being worth their time is sitting around, wondering whether or not you are.

...unless I'm not.

On with it.

In an all-too-rare burst of ambition tonight, I put on Aerosmith's Big Ones before resolving to put a load of dishes in the washer and clean up a bit before exercising. The idea is that by the time the third track, Rag Doll, comes on, I'll be just about done with cleaning and energized by the music, ready to conquer some cardio. It doesn't work out this way.

The state of my house-- and by house, I mean cheap-ass, soul suckingly unwelcoming trailor that I had hoped and prayed to be out of by now-- is such that I find myself exasperated and overwhelmed just trying to put it into words. The mess is no one's fault but my own, and, possibly, to a lesser extent, Zack's, but all the same, I feel victimized by it. And feeling victimized by and responsible for something awful is a very bad feeling. I'm not sure if you know.

Peter Walsh, the author of It's All Too Much, says that one of the major warning signs of a clutter problem is if you have trouble with "flat surfaces"-- that is, if every table, counter, desktop and shelf is constantly, and forever covered. Picturing this state will give you a very accurate foundation upon which to build the mental image of my household, if you so masochistically dare. In the kitchen, there is a kitchen table which we've literally never eaten a meal of any kind at, and an air hockey table, displaced from a spare room during a short stint when a friend inhabited it a very, very long time ago. Both are piled high with...jesus christ, what a hateful list it is. Coats, hats, scarfs, a banjo, unpaid bills, unused envelopes that have been sealed shut by the humidity in the air, and then boxes-- four or five different kinds of boxes, holding useless things that we have not had occasion to so much as glance at since they've been put into those boxes. Zack has...a great deal of boxes like these, containing knick-knacks that he is pathologically protective of. This fondess for odd little things, I think, would have the makings to be charming, if not for the fact that, as I said, these things are all in little plastic boxes that are never opened, but seem to have some sacred right to their places, scattered throughout the house: three on our kitchen table, one in the pantry, some buried in the closet in one corner of the spare room, others catalogued on a colorful rack in the other.

These boxes, let it be said, are not a topic of conversation, lest that conversation should become evidence of my attempt to finally and completely assimilate him, having, evidently, no respect whatsoever for his earlier way of life. As if, were I some mastermind manipulating everything to get my way, this is the way I would choose to live.

As it happens, though, the boxes that are entirely his are not the only ones around. It occurs to me, only now, that what I once respected as Zack's great ability to be focused and productive when cleaning and organizing is merely his tendency to put things into boxes, and then leave them somewhere out of the way. Another box which is just as much a permanent feature of our house as anything is the one that stores items we got for christmas several years ago-- things we never wanted, needed, or asked for, but they show up in stockings and in brightly-colored paper anyway. This is my fault, too-- isn't everything?-- because, at christmas, I've made such a big deal out of pacing myself as I open my gifts, so as not to run out of presents while everyone else has something left to open, that I must be sending the message very clearly that I value quantity just as much as quality. I imagine, though, that it would be impossible to avoid either way, to some extent-- everyone has some aunt who has no idea what they like but makes a losing effort every year. The one that gets Zack sports paraphinilia. The many that get me candles or talking clocks or something of equally broad unappeal. This christmas box appears every year-- a new one, I mean. I wonder where Zack has put them all. Found one under the sink the other day.


There's a lot to say. Closets filled with ripped sheets and boxes of notebooks and cans of paint. The bookcase with just as many books piled on top as there are on the four shelves. The fact that we've never had a permanent place to keep clean socks or underwear. The joke of a filing cabinet. And all the stuff-- so much stuff-- that should have been taken out of here years ago. But let's skip to "the trouble with the situation." The trouble with the situation is this: the place is not only incredibly disorganized, it's also incredibly dirty. And this puts me at an almost philosophical standoff-- which to conquer first? It's very difficult to just clean up if there isn't anywhere to put anything-- if almost everything that is on the stained counter, on the dirty stovetop, has no place else to be. But you have to put it somewhere first, before you decide where it finally goes. And that place is likely to be a box. And then we are likely to run out of energy, and leave it there, into perpetuity. At the very least, you need some space in which to gather all the homeless objects before finding homes for them, and that space just isn't something we have.

I feel like this has become more of a rant than anything else, and I'd probably be suspicious of anyone who showed interest in reading it. Still, there was a point, a moment of inspiration that caused me to start writing this, and wouldn't it be a shame if that got lost in the clutter, too? Oh, did I mention that? The losing things? How something you just fucking saw is all at once gone, absorbed by the doom around you, and there's this feeling that you get...sometimes it's rage, sometimes it's nausea, sometimes it's despair. That was one part of my point.

What you really need to understand is that while it may seem that I live in a very dirty, cluttered house, what I really live in is a metaphor. A perfect microcosm of the larger life which it contains, the larger life which the house is only one part of. What better representation of the hopeless-feeling confusion of my finances, the sisyphusian pursuit of my sex life, the infinite rubik's cube that is my health and happiness. Though, honestly, if I could ever conquer those first three-- the house, the finances, the sex-- health and happiness might just fall into place on their own.

It goes without saying that by the time Big Ones played through, I hadn't begun exercising, and, drained by the disorder around me and my fruitless attempts to make some iota of progress with it, no longer had any intention to. (On a related note, Peter Walsh's second book is called Does this Clutter Make my Butt Look Fat?) I was, at this point, on the couch, writing checks for some unpaid bills simply because I had no where to put them, as the final track, Livin' on the Edge, was playing. I never thought very much of this song before. I assumed, without listening very hard to the lyrics, that living on the edge referred to living a dangerous way, a throw-caution-to-the-wind, devil-may-care, rockstar way, the way a Steven Tyler might.

In that moment-- and I don't know if it was when I was shaking and sucking the end of my dying pen so that I could finish writing my return adrress, lest I have to somehow find another one, or when I was putting two thirty-nine cent stamps on the envelope because all my stamps are old, and even if they weren't, I have no idea what the price of a stamp is nowadays, and it's worth mentioning that it was a miracle I could find the stamps after all-- I don't know which of those moments it was, but I heard these lyrics:

"Tell me what you think about your situation.
Complication, aggravation is getting to you."

And I knew. That song isn't about his way of life, it's about mine.

I notice the bill says I should detach a stub and include it with my payment, but it's not perforated. I turn for the pair of scissors that, characteristically out of place, was sitting on table in front of me moments ago. They aren't there now, and I feel nausea well up inside of me.

"You can't help yourself from falling.
You can't help yourself at all."


On with it.

You tell me: did this one slip through the cracks, or have you heard about it? Because I've yet to hear anyone gossip, horrified, around the watercooler about it, and it's that kind of news.

In a small town in Belgium on Friday, a man in black and white face paint breaks into a daycare center and, unprovoked, starts stabbing babies with an 8-inch knife. Kills a nine-month old, a six-month old, and one caregiving employee, and wounds (I hate how vague that word can be-- stabs) ten more children and two more adults. When they found him later, he had the addresses of two other day care centers in his backpack.

This is doing with news what movies like Saw and Hostel did with entertainment (and I use that term loosely)-- ripping a jaded generation harshly out of its comfort level of "shit happens". I don't consider myself a particularly sensitive or maternal person, but, walking into a daycare center and stabbing babies? What the fuck?

Obviously, an outpouring of support and condolences have manifested themselves in every form, and apparently there is a facebook group you can join if you'd like to take a stand-- that is to say, if you'd like to boldly make that controversial political statement, "I don't support baby stabbing." I have to wonder if these kinds of measures really bring any solace to the victim's families, or if it is simply the kind of reaction that happens an overstimulated, internet-bound generation finds itself, for the first time, shocked.

Perhaps I'd be more inclined to offer my cyber-regret if not for how quickly my sorrow turned to annoyance: the end of the first article I read about this truly heinous crime ended with this sentiment from a local bakeshop owner: "It's something you here about in America, not here."

As a jaded, young, American national, we have now seen how it takes baby stabbings to shock me, and, evidently, the accusation of a free-wheeling, baby-stabbing morale climate to offend my ailing sense of patriotism. You expect this to happen in America, Belgium? Really? I guess our ignorant, benevolent attitude towards you isn't a two-way street: all we every expected out of you were waffles. I tried to put this quote behind me, reminding myself that this was the attitude of but one, traumatized baker; then I realized that a similar quote I read in a seperate article wasn't a second translation of the words of the original man, but a second expressing the exact same idea. "We thought that things like this only happened in the United States and now we see that in Belgium, in a small village like this ... that such a thing could happen, it is very, very bad,"


There's a lot to mourn for here. The loss of two young children, the injury of ten more, the hurt and killed caregivers, the traumatized community. The loss, perhaps, of the entire Belgian nation's innocence. And, not insignificantly, the realization that this is how bad things have gotten: we all knew that America's standing in the eyes of the world took a beating during the Bush Administration. I guess we just didn't know it was such a bloody, wailing massacre.


Good luck turning it around for us, Obama. If the rest of the world is to be believed, you better hope you don't let us down.

On with it.