The rain seems to have let up a little. I hope it doesn’t stop. I don’t want to be tempted outdoors. It would not then, either, be a perfect day for whisky. The traffic is still noisy out. How could there not be a lull at ten in the morning? Is anyone going anwhere? The downspout’s output is down to a trickle, and the puddles are undisturbed. Wipers swish only to dispel the spindrift of the car in front. A tension grows in my shoulder.

I won’t come full-circle. That would put me back where I started. I didn’t book a round trip. I’d like to think–and I have to believe–that I’ve gotten somewhere, and I don’t need to know where I’ve been to know where I am. This satellite dance was not about me going ’round and ’round, but about all us satellites circling one another, hoping for and dreading collision. Satellites don’t get anywhere unless they’re knocked off course. I won’t belabor the metaphor; you already know what I mean.

The site will remain up, but I will do my writing elsewhere. It’s sunny now, and I’m compelled to lay down the pen and get out. That’s just the way it will be.

It’s evaluation time at work again, when we have to put in writing what we accomplished last year and what we hope to accomplish this year.  This year, as last year, my stated goal is to “move to the Tuckahoe library and work in my own community.”  Writing–my spoon–might never dig me out of this prison, but maybe I can spend the rest of my days in a more relaxed facility.  My legs and body are overweary of the commute, and I want back those eight hours lost to it each week.  Well-meaning people who are the second incomes in their households or earn six figures wonder why I don’t get a car, while I only wonder why Richmond and Henrico can’t get together on a fucking bus system.  My employer doesn’t owe me a transfer or any kind of accommodation to my well-being, but neither do I owe them my health and sanity.  Loyalty is not a commodity–no salary can buy it.  It’s to the community that I owe my work, and my employer can’t say that I shirk that responsibility.  Neither can they say I wouldn’t do an even better job in a community of my neighbors.

Another hour later, and the bird is silent, or just can’t be heard.  Another Richmond spring, another day of work.  Rush through an unnoticed landscape to seal yourself off from it.  Appreciate it on your own time.  When you get it.

I write every chance I get, but the chances are still too few, and I don’t know how to make more. I can’t write in the shower or on my bike. Eating is a begrudged distraction. Reading can’t find a place in my priorities, and as goes my reading, so goes my writing: I can’t seem to engage in a book, and so the writing is choppy and scattered. I’ve become desperate enough for time that I’m willing to pay for it, soliciting someone to transcribe my handwritten Twickory pages. Henrico County employees have an e-mailing list to buy and sell stuff, and I advertised there. A library worker was among the many who answered. He appeared to have the skills, but he works under Julie at Glen Allen, so though I initially felt bitterly mischievous to think of virtually writing under her nose, I didn’t want someone else innocently delivering my acid. I’d also like to keep the library system’s stinking nose out of my business. I won’t say there’s not enough time, only that too much of it is already allocated to something other than writing. Nights get later, but then so do mornings, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed at work. It would seem only fair for writing to compromise my work at the library, considering how badly work has compromised my time to write, but which am I getting paid for?

This dream I’ve deferred I have no intention of denying. The love I seek now is the love I have always sought. It’s the approval I needed to continue confidently in the direction of my passion. And though I can’t make up the love I didn’t receive as a child, I can give myself the approval to do what I need to do to reclaim the passion in my life. The love I seek now is not also the approval to seek it.

And where is the time to do that? The only time left to carve more from is that for which I’ve already carved it–writing. Ah, irony. Am I sealing myself in a vacuum and suffocating the writing I forsake everything else to get done? I have to beat its last breath to the finish line. Spring is not yet the breath of fresh air I need–forty-three degrees for a high today, and work besides–but it needn’t be an airless cage, either. Writing, life–too much, too little.

Despite its artificiality, I keep in mind the formula from Why We Love and have set an arbitrary deadline of the end of the year for finishing Twickory. I don’t know when I’ll finish the letter–maybe never–and then there’s Book Monkey. I’m burning out on the stress of finding the time to get it all done. I’m resenting work more every day, and that’s poisoning my writing. It’s a soul-sucking vortex of diminishing importance and increasing annoyance–a loud brat demanding ever more of what it ever-less needs. Or maybe it just feels that way when I’m sitting on the floor of the storage closet, lunch beside me, writing in my lap, and waving at the automatic light three times a minute to turn it back on as I try to get some peace from the inane nattering in the breakroom. Or maybe it’s when I’ve just pedaled forty-five minutes through the wet dark just to sit down in my rocking chair and scribble till the pen droops. Or when my mind is so clogged with what I don’t have time to write that I can’t say anything–and waste a thousand words saying it. I hate writing about writing. It’s dissipating. The end of the year. God, look at this mess.

What has this chase cost me?  What future cost will my children bear because of it? because I brought home anger and frustration that I couldn’t put aside to interact with them kindly?  What, ultimately, will it have been worth to have fallen in love?  Probably nothing until I fall in love again.  Or until my kids do, when I might have something to teach them, if I’ve not become too bitter by then to accept the wisdom offered by the experience.  I want them to be prepared for love younger and better than I was.  I guess there’s time.  I want them to know what I’ve been through, what a hard-headed ass I was most of that time, how little control I had over love, and how much I hurt someone in the name of it.  I want them to know what at least one man is like in love.  Maybe I’m not a good role model for that, but by the time I understand it myself they’ll be too old to tell anything to.  What does a daughter need to know? and when?  What does a dad need to know?

In love, I’ve been single-minded, neglectful of nearly everything else.  What did my daughters not get from me?  Being in love again would be tempered by more than a little guilt, as if it were a betrayal.  Emma probably still harbors resentment toward her mother for both the divorce and eventual remarriage, and I know she adores me.  Would I be betraying her?  Would I seem (to her) to be cutting her out?  I need her adoration.  I would probably feel abandoned, too, if she or her sisters fell in love.  I might retreat from them to give their love space, though I would hope that they would still seek my approval and advice.  These two loves–the one I have from my daughters and the one I seek–how do they coexist?  Who is the father and who is the lover?

All of these questions are probably the kind I should not try too hard to answer, as having asked them is awareness enough, a bridge I’ve yet reached:  Knowing there is a bridge is all I need to know, even as I cross it.  How much more prepared can I or need I be?  I hope my daughters fall in love, as I hope I do again; and I hope they recognize it and accept it without the struggle I put up against it.  Perhaps in one kind of love is bound the other, and each makes the other stronger.  It can be like that, can’t it?

So, help me out with this one:  By my reckoning, this is the work of a sociopath.  What, besides killing the plant, was the intent of this action?  Who was this person attacking?  I didn’t sign the card–there was no point–and I don’t know who knows my handwriting.  Actually, I’d rather believe it wasn’t about me at all, because I don’t want paranoia to get too secure a foothold.  This is a person who revels in misery, their own and company’s.  Whose misery they wanted to join theirs, I don’t know.  All I know is that I don’t want to work with that person in the building.  Their presence is disturbing, especially since I can’t imagine who it is.  I haven’t noticed any other such acts.  Have I just missed them?  As scary as that person being here, is their perfect assimillation into the library’s culture.

Now someone does come to mind:  Chris, who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me why he felt he had to expose A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I can see Chris watering the aloe and convincing himself that it was a joke, but I won’t accuse him and will try  not to suspect him further.  It doesn’t matter who it was, does it?  Whoever it is is just one more reason to get the hell out of Twin Hickory.  This place has become so infested with backbiting and petty snitching that it’s becoming a junior high prison.  Morale is long gone, in a tank of formaldehyde in the Mutter Museum.  Everyone is resenting someone else for not pulling their weight in one way or another–using a cell phone in the stacks or making personal calls from a service point, shopping online at their desk or not shelving as scheduled.  Someone even felt they had to tattle on me for being late one day.  That place is toxic, and I’m going to at least get a plant out of the crossfire if I can’t save myself.

When I was hired, I pegged this as my last job.  I quit trying to be a writer and resigned myself to being a father and an employee, and I was able to fool myself for longer than ever before.  I’ve had this job a year longer than any other, but now I’m much more a writer than an employee (though, I hope, not more than I am a father), but what am I getting paid for?  To fit in with a group of malcontents.  The irony is that the more discontented I become the more accepted I feel here:  The waning cynic meets the waxing cynics.  But I don’t want to stop at their level, much as I crave acceptance.  I could easily join in the backbiting and tattletaling, and probably will to an extent, but it won’t make me feel good for long or help heal the damage to morale.  Neither do I want to be fired.  Knowing how high-handed and imperious management can be with none-of-their-business is knowing how much moreso they could be once given a leg to stand on.  No, I’ll leave on my own terms, even if I don’t know yet what they are.  This just might by my last job, not because I[‘m resigned to die at it but because whatever I do next, I plan to do for me and my soul, and that is not a job but a willing duty.  Ultimately, only one’s soul’s rules are worth following.  All other rules try to rule the soul.

The aloe won’t get as much sun in my window as it did at work, but it will get the care it needs and no malice.  I didn’t want to possess it, but the rules it follows were not respected at the library, either by those ignorant of the damage of their well-meaning care or by the malicious intent of a hateful individual.  Some people believe they’re doing the right thing in reporting their coworkers’ missteps; others want to demonstrate their superiority or just plain inflict pain:  Righteousness or sociopathy.  Would that I could be carried away to a caring, meaningful place where I would be allowed to follow the rules I know to be most beneficial to me, where I would be allowed to be me, but I will have to be my own white knight.

So the weekend was done, and you’d think three-out-of-four was adequate, but quantity far outstripped quality.  Like The King’s Speech, it was good but not engaging.  Missing James was not a good start.  We would have spent most of the day together, walking the canal, talking, listening to music.  James and I connect as well emotionally as we do intellectually.  Idea and feeling are conjoined passions.  James has fallen in love at least twice since I’ve known him (three-plus years) and he’s passionate about many things.  He quit Twin Hickory to pursue writing two years ago.  He’s yet to make a cent, but he’s yet to give up, and I daresay he won’t soon.  James doesn’t drive or pedal, and I don’t own a car.  It’s nearly an hour on the bike east to Tobacco Row.  Even for James, I’m not willing to do that but on a Friday of a long weekend, which comes up every fourth week, so it will be another four weeks, at least, before I see him again.  I haven’t seen him since my birthday more than two months ago.

Diane and I had a little fun, I guess, watching old tv shows, but who really engages that way but loving couples? for whom it’s not about what you’re watching but who’s keeping you warm on the sofa, whose hair you stick your nose in, whose ribs you tickle with the hand around the waist.  Diane and I were never that cozy, even as a couple.  Susan was supposed to meet me at the box office of the Westhampton.  I got there just before showtime aned waited outside, cussing a little more vigorously the longer I waited, for fifteen minutes, finally going in and plopping into the nearest seat.  I didn’t know how much I’d missed until Susan found me during the end credits.  I was ready to pick a fight.

“Where were you?” i said, probably already a little shrill.

“Oh, I got here about five minutes early and just bought my ticket and came inside to wait in the lobby.  I peeked out every once in a while to see if your there.”

“I though we’d agreed to meet at the box office.”

She said, “Oh, silly boy.”

I bristled a bit but shook it off, though I was still disappointed we hadn’t seen the movie together.  She hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but a more respectful acknowledgement of our agreement would have been nice.  I didn’t tell her that.

Every weekend that weather and time permit us, Matt and I take our Xootrs and a soccer ball to Pinchbeck Elementary, my first alma mater, and push ourselves around the blacktop (the venue of most of my dodgeball glory) while trying to keep the ball on the court, sometimes passing the ball, sometimes attacking each other with it.  We’ve been doing it for more than eight years.  Usually apres scooter we have a coffee and sit and chat.  This time he had to get home to Mary and dinner by six-thirty.  By the time we’d done on the blacktop that’s all he had time to do.

Minus James, and without Matt to talk to at length, the weekend was a bit of a disappointment.  I realized, afterwards, that what I’d wanted was someone to really care about me.  Diane asked about the kids, which is what everyone asks who doesn’t really know me; it’s what they know.  Susan and I know very little about each other, but we have a good rapport and can make each other laugh.  We haven’t shared much backstory.  Usually, our conversations take place with the circ desk between us.  She once asked me something to the effect of what did I do with my spare time, and I answered, “Oh, I’m just always looking for love.”  I didn’t mean hers, and she had to have known that, but she blushed and turned slightly away.  There is not that kind of attraction between us, and she got about a fifteen-year headstart on life.

I can’t say Diane and I really connect; there’s just that dense four-year history we share from way back when that counts as a bond, and we don’t talk about that.  I find it difficult to relate otherwise.  She makes so much money that she paid in taxes last year what I grossed in income.  At the same time, she doesn’t seem to relate to my comparatively meager lifestyle, often suggesting I do something that is outrageously implausible for me to even consider, like buy a townhouse.

If I ‘d wanted more from Diane and Susan, I could have given more myself. I didn’t make an effort, not so much as asking “How have you been?”  I’m out of practice with the lesson “Giving Is Receiving.”  (Another victim of the winter layoff?)  But I’ve also expected–taken for granted–to connect better on an emotional level with women than with men.  I’m finally having to notice that it’s not necessarily true.  Women  seem to more readily relate to emotions, but are as wary of a man’s as they are accepting of a woman’s.  I don’t know if that’s true, and I hate to believe in such distinctions.  It could be that I’m simply more demanding of women, regardless of romantic intent, than I am of men.  Hm.

So it wasn’t the weekend I’d hoped for.  How can I complain?  I kept busy with people I know.  I was amused and entertained.  I was hopeful of more engagement, but not desperate for it.  (People give what they can give.)  Spring’s not even here yet, after all.  This weeekend was a pleasant run-up to that, a chance to hone the social skills with people with whom I could relax.  So far so good, lessons learned.  Expectations and hopes are for ideals.  If I can’t stop myself from having them (and it wouldn’t be wise to try), I can learn to accept falling short as just a smaller step forward than I’d wanted to take.  Forward is what matters (sounds like a mantra for the coming warm seasons) and I at least went that way.  Being so philosophical about it might be easy at this stage, but a running start can only help.

The last time I said I could “play it canny” was just before I crossed a big, fat line.  How sure can I ever be that I won’t do it again?  I don’t know how I can escalate from unaddressed, unsigned postcards, but I’m afraid I’ll figure it out.  Apparently, I’m neither content with the unrequited aspect of this love nor mindful of the pathetic quality of dialogue with her I usually provoke.  Spring can’t come too soon to give me something better, more positive to do.  Eh, but it’s still a few more weeks away, and it will get cold again before it warms for real, and I have time, postcards and love on my hands.  As I can no longer (thanks to Blaise Pascal) trust reason to keep me out of trouble, I can only hope for more rewarding distractions from trouble, because it’s trouble I want, and I can only talk myself into it, not out of it.  The less talking to myself the better.

God, how could I be missing Julie?  I feel almost ashamed of it.  How could I want her back?  How much of that hell could I go through again?  I don’t want her back at Twin Hickory.  I couldn’t go through any of that again, but hope always thinks things could work better the second time around.  It seems unfair that I am not rewarded for falling in love for the first time after fifty years, for not giving up on the possibility.  But nothing’s done right the first time, is it?  I understand what I’ve been going through, but it doesn’t seem to mean much at the end of the day, when I still have to write like this, with my smile cracked and my humor beaten flat, left with this wistful pain.  I write better feeling this way and feel better for having written.  It’s martyresque.

Anonymous postcards sent unaddressed.  What am I doing?  Does it matter?  Just let me do it.  It’s what I have to get me to spring.  Let me believe she reads them, and that when she does she thinks about them, doesn’t dismiss them as an annoying reminder.  If not my words, maybe the pictures on the front will be appreciated.  “Maybe” is all I have, because the postcards are a weak provocation unlikely to elicit a response–in fact, the game was all but designed to render all provocation inferential.  If what I really want is to stir something up, I won’t likely be satisfied–and so I’m back to worrying about escalation.

I would plead for spring’s hasty arrival, but what will that really change?  Julie and spring are just different brands of the same desperation.  Which has the more attractive package?  I don’t need it or want it, but I can’t help buying it.  Spring will probably just find me buying more postcards and having more books sent to Twin Hickory from Glen Allen.  I write, and spring isn’t likely to deter that activity.  Like anything else I write, the postcard game is a project, and though it’s destination is as yet undefined, I’ll see that it gets there.  That, also, is like everything else I write.  Everything I write is a provocation, too, a boot in the ass, a wake-up call, a rent in the drone of life:  Listen to me!  Listen to yourself!  If you think you have nothing to say, nothing better to do, then why would you read this?  You have given up and would as soon do what you do every day without deviation, without challenge.  Take it, keep it, go away.  To proclaim myself a provocateur is to say I’m no mere troublemaker.  I feel, and I want you to feel.  Spring and all its promises provokes a renewal of hope and its potential unrealized from last year.  I plead for a provocative new season to kick my ass, to expand my possibilities, to smother my excuses–not to distract me.

Whatever I’m doing with the blogs and the postcards I have to do, to whatever ends they take me–Oblivion, Nirvana, or Trouble. I don’t see an alternative.  It has been, and will continue to be a hellish sort of fun, a continual challenge, a wired-in, nervy awareness that might never be satisfied or restful.  That’s me, that’s the journey.  Wish you were here.

I started up Patterson, climbing to Parham.  Sometimes that stretch seems like an electric brae.  Its ease of ascent has surprised me in each of my hundreds of ascents.  The downhill on the other side is no illusion.  I topped out my gears not halfway down.  Cars were only dawdling past me, so I had to have topped thirty.  I nearly topped the next rise on momentum alone.

I finished Why We Love last week, returned it this week.  Before I had it, a staff member at another branch had had it.  Quite a handsome woman, too.  And even more attractive for having read the book.  I wonder what she got out of it and if it was what she was looking for.  I got what I needed.  I hadn’t known what I was looking for.  I got confirmation:  I had been physically, mentally, and emotionally in love.  It’s good to know that.  It’s nice to know that there were good reasons–not excuses–for my behavior over Julie.  The book didn’t tell me if I’m still in love, but I’m not rushing to the stacks to find the book that will.  It wouldn’t be there, anyway.

Besides more postcards, all I wanted out of Carytown was to be among strangers in a place I liked.  Desperation stayed home.  Despite the weather, it’s not spring yet.  The rutting season is a few weeks away, and if I can be so blunt as to call it that, I’ll probably retain an understanding of what I really need and what, if anything, I can do about the signals my body is sending me.  Before I returned the book, I had to remove a half-dozen or so sticky arrows.  One of them pointed to a quote from Blaise Pascal:  “All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.”  I’ve known that all along, but have resisted surrender or decried it when I had to succumb.  But now this is something I can believe:  The fight between the Fool and Wise Man is actually a process.  The effort of reasoning is to arrive at the Fool, not annihilate him, and with luck, to better understand and empathize with him.  Perhaps that’s the key to loving myself, or just to loving. 

I made little contact in Carytown, but didn’t leave there reluctantly (or eagerly).  I enjoyed my time there, though the coffee, despite a larger helping than usual, was drunk too late to head off the headache.  My legs could have used the rest, but the rest of me was restless.  I’ll take a spring day whenever I can get one, and I’ve needed one for quite a long time.  The winter in Richmond has not been bitter, and February has been more like March the past couple of weeks.  I suppose hibernating creatures all over the area are rolling a little in their sleep.  I’m eager to stretch my legs in a fresh, green season in society.  I wonder how last year’s growth will serve me this year.  If this year ends as another without a love to call my own, I hope at least to have been given the understanding as to why.  It’s the only way I could accept it.  I hope the new season finds me more open and patient, less desperate but quietly hopeful.  I don’t want to treat hope as an enemy, cruel pusher of unreality, but I don’t know what will change that attitude but the preclusion of desperation, and how that is effected I don’t know.  Maybe that will be the season’s lesson.

Lieneke’s Law, Relationship Rule #1:  Getting over the separation lasts half the time the relationship did.  (The Vanishing, 1988, The Netherlands)

From the time I declared (to myself, in writing) my crush  on Julie to the days she left Twin Hickory was twenty-six months.  I’ve gotten more than three of the thirteen months allotted me out of the way, so it seems I can anticipate my Christmas (or birthday) present.  If the formula is true and my calculations correct…well, I’m not sure.  I’m ambivalent.  It seems soon, but isn’t it what I want?  It’ll be the biggest non-event of my life, but it will still be a non-event.  Seeing her set me back a month, maybe, but I did nothing about it but write, so I might very nearly be on track.  If I shut up altogether it might happen sooner.  No–later:  I can’t fool myself into not thinking about her; that’s just an explosion down the road.  I don’t do distraction well; I want to face my problems–resolve them, not ignore them away.  If that prolongs the battle, then it will have been well and truly won in the end.  To resolve it I have to live with it, give it a place in my life where it will do the most good, and that’s right here, and in Twickory, in Book Monkey Says, in “the novel.”  I write, I tell stories.  I have a story to tell, and, somehow–I don’t know how yet–I’ll tell it.  I am afraid of getting over Julie, afraid of losing her.  I want to capture her on paper, at least.  Can I do that when I’m over her?  Will she still mean enough to me to finish the story?  Will she remain an inspiration?  The writing will decide that, will create the Us without Julie (and without me at times), imperfectly recreate the woman I couldn’t get to know otherwise and let me know her surrogate, instead.  Resolution is finishing telling the story as I know it; and though I know barely half of it, I can eventually fill out the rest with my fascination for the other half.  I’m most afraid of losing the fascination.  I expect none of these fears to be realized, though, now that I’m that I’m aware of them.  The aggregate fear is that I might stop feeling love for her, but I’m now almost sure that I can be over Julie and still love her.  And why not?  It’s a good feeling to love without obligating someone else to return it (and I come closer everyday to actually believing that).

The Vanishing is only a movie, and Lienecke’s only a character in it.  There is no rule.  I’d be as well off making my own rules, arbitrary as such rules are.  Why We Love offers no formula, says only “weeks, months, or years.”  Whenever.  Whenever–it’s as good a time as any, considering my fascination with the journey.  Where am I now?  I still think of Julie for a large portion of my day, but every day less of the frustration and bitterness accompanies the thoughts.  Fading, too, but at a slower rate is the regret of missing so many opportunities to step up and get out of my pride.  But how could anything have been different between the two of us, given how we were each equipped to handle any of it?  We both did what we could do, in our own inadequate way.  For my part, hormones were doing the driving.  I dubbed them “The Fool.”  I don’t think they’ve gotten behind the wheel quite as often since Julie left, but they’re still not in the back seat, either.  Minus Julie’s agitation, The Fool can almost relax, detach a little more every day from the past, now that it’s not the present every, single work day.  Sometimes, I can take step back from that bright, ironic hell and see the satellite dance, and that excites me, because that’s what this writing was supposed to have been  all along:  A look back–not over my shoulder, but through time.  When that shoulder no longer knots up at the thought of her or at the sight of her handwriting, maybe that’s when I’ll have reached Whenever.  Or will it be when I no longer look for her wherever I go? or when she finishes becoming Phoebe?

I have honed a certain necessary ability to categorize my feelings for Julie by venue of expression:  The worst bitterness and frustration–e.g., when I saw her at the training center–goes into Twickory; there’s no longer room for that here; I’m trying to heal.  I still often feel the feelings that aren’t good for me, and, still needing to be expressed, they’ve been given a place of their own in Twickory.  It’s an important outlet, a place to answer the nagging questions and understand the Julie that wouldn’t let me know her.  Of course, it’s all still speculation, but in fiction everything is true, nothing can be disputed.  If you understand it, it’s true.  Without Julie’s help I’ll help myself.  That’s an important step away from her, as important as not needing her love to validate mine for her.

But I suppose that it will yet be a long while before I’m over her.  I still write this for her, to her, still hope to hear from her, to see her, to sit down and talk with her–not to air grievances, not to talk at her, begging for answers, but…to get to know her.  Having those hopes makes my recovery seem a lot farther away.  Perhaps Twickory is the place for hoping, too.  Hope–at least this hope–might as well be fiction, and Julie might as well be Phoebe, because the reality just isn’t good enough.  Whatever the reality is at Whenever, it may still pale to my hopes, and Twickory may in the end be little more than a story.  What will I be?  A little more complete, a little closer to loving myself, a little closer to falling in love again–a lot less Julie and a lot more me.

I’ve been told how Julie seethed and stomped about when the flowers were delivered to her.  Had I been there, I think she would have confronted me again, and I would have, again, refused to defend myself and apologized for a blameless act.  Trying to spark a dialogue, I had, yet again, provoked a territorial defense.  Those flowers, of course, are long dead, but the peace lily is thriving and blooming.  I repotted it, giving most of the plant to others and returning the remainder to the same pot and cachepot.  This plant, a reminder of emotional support, gets no less precious treatment than the aloe.  Though Julie is gone from Twin Hickory, not all of my paranoia went with her.  I am not comfortable there feeling as I do that I yet must be on my best behavior, that even a slip five years down the road will validate management’s label of me as an emotional loose cannon with an “ongoing” attitude problem.  That plant must outlive my stay at Twin Hickory, which will be much longer yet, unless I can find my way out of the Henrico library system altogether.

I took the day off to write, because I need more time to do it than work and the commute allow me, and it’s more rewarding.  Don’t tell me a job is it’s own reward–that’s bullshit.  If a job is your life, it’s not a job.  My life is much larger than my job, for which Henrico County has not rewarded me or my coworkers with raises for going-on four years while they chase the technological Jones’ with “upgrades” that don’t make our work lives any easier.  No plant gives me solace from that frustration.

Writing is not my life, either, though.  Just as my job is a means to feeding myself, writing is the means to discovering my self.  Were I paid to make this quest I would feel much more rewarded, much more complete, much nearer my goals.  Love is one of my goals, and I’m still desperate for it; but it’s still winter, too, so I am little up to the pursuit.  Instead, I think and write about love, little though I know about it.  I’m still reading Why We Love.  There is no chapter on unrequited love.  Breakup is as close to the subject as the author gets.  Julie and I did break up, in a sense.  The emotional attachment might have been all mine, but it was nonetheless painful for both of us.  In my goofy, awkward, painful way, I try to make it up to both of us by taking care of an aloe in a chipped pot.  It’s the way I’ve done anything involving Julie.  How could I possibly change now? and in what possible way could this offend her?