Paper Slaps

I’m pleased with the postcards–a couple more Quint Buchholzs with books, one with a cat on a stack, the other with a boy asleep under one.  Who knows when I’ll send them.  I have nothing to send them in but Impossible (Nancy Werlin), but I got that for my girls, and one of my rules for the game state that it has to be a book I’ve read.  I’m waiting on Scottish Poems.  A part of me really wants to believe I’m just doing this for fun–I am, but fun, for me, is in the challenge, and I don’t mind making my own challenges.  I have some theories, and the challenge is in testing them.  I want to see how much trouble I can almost get into for the sake of self-expression.  This paragraph is a test of those theories.

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.

Isn’t That Why I Grew the Beard?

Winter is the longest season.  This the longest winter.  I wish I could do what my body would like and hibernate.  The summer was too long, too active to be satisfied with staying home Friday nights and days off, but I have yet to transition fully to the weather.  It’s too easy to stay home, even before the sun goes down, because it’s  just a bit chill outside for my liking.  There’s no element of desperation, but social inactivity always teeters me closer to She Who Must Not Be Named.  A bad movie (The Girl Who Played With Fire) slowed down my moviegoing (as did living slightly beyond my means).  I have not been inclined to actively seek my mate, but I still crave society.  Society is the healthy diversion I’ve needed.  Reading, writing, puzzles, music–none of it holds me from considering my addiction for long.  The only thing that stops me altogether is better sense, but connectiong with someone else is all that sufficiently pulls me away from myself to meet someone halfway and beyond and leave Julie (sorry–couldn’t be helped) behind.  It’s not often enough, though, that I can do that, and I begin to squirm thinking about her.  That’s why I wish I could hibernate:  to stop the effort and the awareness and just shut down until spring and shorts weather.  The best I can do toward that end is stay away from Thomas, his teasing and his “news.”  I do not need to know what he felt in his latest squeeze, how soft and pliable she was.  I do not need to know that she exists, and Thomas is the only reminderer of that.  Reminders undo my progress away from her–and, yes I am aware that my writing about it is itself a reminder.

There are still two months of winter to go, still more snow to come and layers to put on before getting on the bike.  Usually, my winter reading is about baseball, a verbal substitute for the real thing, to get me to the next season.  Last week I checked out Why We Love–not Why We Love Baseball.  I’m afraid to read it.  I don’t want to go down that reading path again.  Marriage was at the end of the path last time I took it, and it wasn’t a good one.  I can’t trust that I’m any better fortified against it than I was then.  Love is easy to believe in, and these love  preachers can really sell it, sending millions out after it armed only with hope and good intentions.  Perhaps all I’ve gained(?) is cynicism.  Sure, we all deserve love, but if getting it were as easy as reading a book, 152.41 Fisher would be the love bible instead the tip of an ever-expanding section, racing the diet books to the last space in the stacks.

Social idleness has been the breeding ground of my worst “transgressions” toward Julie.  It’s why I thought it was okay to give her the magnets and why I wrote that angry email to her when she didn’t accept them.  It’s why I went to Carytown a month ago just to buy two Quint Buchholz postcards and why I sent one of them to Glen Allen in The Crow Road inscribed “You still fascinate me.”  I had sense enough, anyway, not to sign it or address it–anyone there could have come across it and simply been puzzled by it–and though it’s easy enough to track the borrower of the book, what had I done? and to whom?  Ah, but that logic has more than a touch of arrogance in it, and arrogance is an emotion that can grow to engulf even the best sense.  “What was I thinking?” is usually what I hear myself say when that happens.  I have another postcard and another Glen Allen book.  Save me spring! distant, distant spring!

And Good Fucking Luck

Fuck it. I’ve lain in bed long enough to know I’m not getting to sleep until I pull off the goddamn gloves and say what I feel. I just can’t understand it. I can’t sympathize with whatever made her accuse me of harassment. What the hell did she expect that to do to our work environment? Did she think it would make everything better, that I’d stay on this fucking leash and like it? I’m not losing my job over this, believe me, but I’m not taking this vindictive shit lying down. Yeah, I fucked up. This is what I get for apologizing? What did I do that can be called harassment? I gave her a couple fucking magnets, for godsake! Let it go! Christ, it’s been a year since you killed A Bright, Ironic Hell–and nearly two since I’d given you anything–a box of altoids! What the hell am I paying for? I don’t need to tell you how to spell grudge!

I went through absolute HELL today trying not to ask you what–if anything–you were thinking to make your accusation–or call you a vindictive bitch. I’ve had enough of trying to understand you–sic your goddamned demons on yourself! Whatever caused you to be this way, I no longer give a flying fuck–and is irrelevant, anyway. I’ve exhausted all attempts at sympathy. Yeah, that’s rich–I’ve been an asshole. But I know what I’ve done, I’m ashamed of it (though not as much now as before you did this), and have apologized for it, but I AM NOT A THREAT. Call this a rant–call this whatever, I don’t care. I’m angry beyond measure, but I’m not a threat of any kind to anyone.

Goddammit! This is better? This is less stressful? What the fucking hell were you thinking? You weren’t! Any more than I was when I sent you that email. At least I realized the damage I’d done. Do you really believe your damage is proportional? Do you have any idea what it’s like now at work since you laid the minefield? Justice would have you sharing my hell, but justice is for the one who runs to the boss and tells her story (and I do mean story) first.

I don’t care how irrational this seems. I don’t care how much of this could be shouted right back at me, but–Fucking magnets? Jesus Christ!–What the hell did you think I meant by them? And are you gonna tell me you’d have accepted them if I’d handed them to you? BULL. SHIT.

I love my job, but you’ve been marking time since you got here–and here you are threatening to take it from me. That’s so fucking rich–you, who abandoned circ at our busiest times for your Adult Services vacations because you’re bored–and now sloughing off workload onto Slackles, as if he needs an excuse to sit on his fat ass and pretend to work. (You know, there are simple appliances to do what you do at your desk without your attendance. If you’re bored, do something we need done.)

This was not a work issue and never was. I can confide in who I like about anything I like. If I recall–and I do, correctly–it was you who let everyone know about the blog, so don’t play that hand. Was it any of your goddamned business who I told I had a crush on you? How did that hurt you? Your embarrassment is your own–you created it, you carry it. How the hell did I “[keep] reminding” you with my “words and actions how” I was in love with you? Huh? HUH? What the hell has that paranoid brain of yours concocted to justify that statement?

Get over my writing “about” you. How many times did I tell you I was writing about me and how I felt. Let your vanity believe what it wants but these were my feelings to express as I needed to. I haven’t told anyone about this blog, but I know coworkers are reading it. Is it an invasion of your privacy? Run tell Greta. She’ll make sure everybody in the system finds out, as you did before.

So, did you tell Greta about the card that came with the flowers and what the flowers were for? (Didn’t think so.) What did you tell Bethany and Becky and anyone else who would listen to your sob story of relentless victimization at the hands of a–but I won’t say it–you would be to ready to ignore the irony. I’ll say this, though: You’re sick. Yeah, yeah, so am I–whatever–but at least I have some self-awareness. I try to break down my walls, not build them up. Accuse me of whatever the hell you like. Did I speak your name? If it’s not true, it’s not you, right? (Whatever you need to tell yourself.) Good-fucking-night.

The Fifty-One-Year Locust

Sunset is before eight o’clock now.  The  cicadas are thrumming themselves to death.  If it really were possible to gauge the temperature by the cicada’s mating call, tires would be melting to the street and trees desiccating to dust.  But it’s getting cooler, too, and wetter.  I didn’t get into town over the weekend.  I feel like latching onto a tree and thrumming to beat the band.  I see darkness coming; cold wet excuses keeping me off my bike on weekends; and a long, dark winter without a warm companion. 

I’m missing  valuable practice time.  I’m nowhere near the point where socializing comes naturally.  A couple months of painstaking diligence is no match for a lifetime of easy ignorance.  If I don’t get out on the weekend not only do I risk losing what little touch I have, but I am not diverted enough from the negativity of my work environment to make positive progress.  Backsliding is vey easy when going uphill.  Even baby steps make progress, but as steep as the way is, even stopping is dangerous.  And by this Monday, I won’t have gotten out again.  When I work both Friday and Saturday, as I did last week, my only opportunity to get the weekend’s groceries is Friday night, because Saturday night I have the kids. I am losing touch with my progress.  Habits are hard to recognize–old ones because they’ve been taken for granted; new ones because they haven’t fully established their identies and embedded themselves in the unconscious through diligent application.  A week of opportunities at the library can’t replace–in quality or quantity–what I can rack up in a day in the city.  I need to be practically inundated with opportunitiy to practice the new habits if I’m to get them to take hold, to push the old ones out.  But the conscious wearies, slacks in its diligence, and the unconscious flows into the gap.  I forget my strategy, lose my confidence.  When I don’t get out on the weekend, I want to spend every working hour on the desk and hoping that the flow of patrons to it doesn’t stop.  I’ve given myself a second chance, made myself a new life, but will I soon need a third chance and newer life?  (See what I said about the confidence?)

It’s fair enough that I should feel desperate, but it doesn’t make anything easier.  Yeah, the days are getting shorter, and cicadas are dropping from the trees, but I’m not dying, not even going into hibernation.  I’ll find my way to human contact despite the less than optimum conditions, find my way back into my new life, regain patience and confidence, maybe even remember what the hell I’m trying to do.   Maybe the winter won’t be that cold, either.

Better the Julie I Don’t Know

The library at which I work is open till nine the first four days of the week.  Each of us works two of the evenings, our day starting at twelve-thirty.  Friday and Saturday the library closes at six.  Half of us work alternating weekends.  Before Julie was on my radar, we worked the same schedule–Wednesday and Thursday nights, same weekend.  Before I asked her out, she switched her Wednesday evening to Tuesday.  A couple weeks ago, she switched weekends with Becky.  I now have two whole days and two half days with Julie.  This is Friday.  Julie was at a training class yesterday.  Monday is a full day together.  I may need more time to write this.  Without Julie I have much more room.  She fills the library when she’s there, like smoke.  I take small breaths so I don’t choke.  Emotional survival is my only goal.  Her absence does not stop me thinking of her but stretches and thins the emotional wall to an  opaque veil, until I can almost think of her irrelative to my desire for her.  I need to be in that state from now till I finish this.

What is Julie to me now?  Julie is not May.  May would, of course, would not exist but for Julie, but Julie is just the framework for the character.  The rest I make up from what I know, filling the gap of my ignorance with imagination, extrapolating the girl I want from the girl I know.  But May would not exist if I knew Julie.  I would not be projecting my hopes onto May, because they would have been realized in Julie.  What Julie is to me is a fascination, a toy I can’t put down, a puzzle half of which I don’t have–the half in the box with the picture on it.  She is a regret:  I chose ego preservation over compassion.  I had the chance to get to know all about her.  I attacked her, instead, already digging out my pound of flesh for the perceived wrong of rejecting me, never considering how hard it was for her.  What I heard as patronizing–”If I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know”–was a nervous attempt at appeasement, appeasement I was too proud to accept.  She had considered my feelings, something I hadn’t done for either of us.  At last, I’m grateful for that.

My fascination with Julie I’ve never been able to quite trace to its source.  Perhaps I simply wanted to be fascinated by her.  Perhaps I really had no choice.  It has continued unabated and grows with each offhanded, overheard snippet of information she proffers to coworkers who aren’t me.  Those snippets plus what she told me of herself while she still trusted me add up to the Julie I know:  The fourth of four, the others boys; the third died in his early twenties after a very long illnes; the oldest predated her by sixteen years.  She “grew up in” northern Virginia, though her parents lived in a few different places before settling there.  She worked for Borders for thirteen years and is bitter about being let go.  She has a horticulture degree but would rather have (in hindsight) studied voice and/or “design.”  Her father died six years ago, her mother a month ago.  Add a few like/dislikes and personal observations and it’s only just enough to madden my curiosity.

The Julie I extrapolate from what I know and have observed was not born in northern Virginia but likely moved there before school age.  Her father I’ve narrowed to two professions–college teacher or military, leaning toward military, based on something else I know:  Julie was not on the academic track in high school but distributive education.  That is, she was preparing herself, it seems, for a commercial career, not a liberal arts education, which I can’t imagine would sit well with a teacher-parent.  Northern Virginia tells me “government job”  for retired/decommed dad.  It also tells me “very white upringing in a vast surburbia,” evidenced also by the fact that she had to ask who did “Ball of Confusion.”  Julie isn’t two years younger than I am.  If she didn’t hear that song on the radio, then she was a in a demographic that wouldn’t have been exposed to it that way.  Her brothers, I surmise, were not so much her protectors as whom she needed protection from (oldest brother excepted).  This I make out from her being so tough (outwardly), self-protective, and emotionally guarded.  As the youngest and a girl, she was likely daddy’s little girl and not real close to her mother.  I doubt she’s ever had many true, lasting friendships–plenty of acquaintances but no confidants.  She aches to be more outgoing.

Julie’s darkness attracts me perhaps more even than her beauty.  I want to know that darkness (though maybe I do already; my own might not be dissimilar), be with her in it, walk out of it with her–but I am not a knight, or a prince;  and if that isn’t what she needs, it’s at least what she wants, I would bet.  A bigger man than I would be happy to see her happy with the right man.  I want her to be happy, but I want the right man to be me.  When that man comes along–and I really do want him to–I don’t want to see it.  I don’t want to experience it in any way.  I would be happy for her, but I woud be devastated for me.  There is heartbreak in her darkness, and shame and regret.  I recognize it.

I accept all the attractants that tie me to Julie–her beauty, her darkness, all the common interests, her sexuality.  The pedestal on which I’d placed Julie has never been more than a shabby simulacrum of rotten wood and mis-hit nails.  She’s always been a whole woman to me:  It hasn’t been just her lips and neck I’ve wanted to press my lips against, not just the contours of her face I’ve wanted to trace, not just the hair I could see that I’ve wanted to comb my fingers through.  Why am I only now able to admit this?  (The more I consider the answer, the more rhetorical seems the question.)

This is Monday now, long after work, close to bedtime.  Julie has made no effort toward reconciliation; I have not made another.  I suppose for Julie it is just not worth the effort, or she just can’t make it; or she doesn’t trust me–or herself.  I want to get along, and I can’t believe she doesn’t at least want that, too.  This isn’t going to get better for either of us until she wants it to.  I may be asking her to be assertive beyond her usual capacity, but isn’t that what growth is?  We’re both stunted, rooted firmly in a barren clay of stubbornness, but I’m not content to wither in this rotten excuse for soil.  There’s better to be had.  Doesn’t knowing that obligate one to pursue it?

I Didn’t Land on Razor Blades, But the Fall Was Farther Than Expected

Melissa wrote me back.  No, no exclamation point, either of despair or elation.  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I know for sure that Sandra is only interested in friendship right now.”  I wrote back, “That’s not such bad news.  Thanks for getting back to me.”  That was the best I could do–mask my disappointment with blandness.  Melissa went on to suggest that I “friend” Sandra on Facebook.  I doubt I’ll do that.  I may not have gotten my hopes up high enough to make the news a crushing blow, , but to readjust my hope is tantamount to accepting the second choice, and I just don’t do second choices.

James, upon finding that Kristen, the most recent woman he’s fallen in love with, is gay, has seemed to have accepted both the impossibility of a romance with her and the possibility of a friendship with her, and has struck a rapport with her.  Whatever it takes to be able to do that I don’t have.  The best I can do is know that and not inflict it upon anyone else.  Perhaps in time I can grow that special ability of James’, but in the meantime I can at least hope to find someone whose flaws are complementary to my own, mutually neutralizing and sympathetic.  I s that really what this about? a balance of flaws?  A balance of flaws must also be a balance of strengths, and that is a completeness.  Haven’t I always known that?  I know a lot of things.  I have accepted very few of them, stubbonly clutching contrived principles to my chest as if I could press them into my heart.  The heart knows, but I don’t know my heart.

Maybe it’s backwards; maybe it’s about what will work for me; but I want to find friendship with a woman through love.  Is that the first acceptance I have to make?  The first principle to let go of, then, would be the one that states it works the other way round.  I don’t know how my heart feels about this, but I can’t let my head simply invert the principle.  I’m already thinking too much about it. 

I have not fallen in love with Sandra, and I may never attempt to make her my friend, but it is not a connection I’ll sever.  It wasn’t such bad news, after all.

Nowhere Near “Postal,” Anyway

Work without Julie is a relief.  That, like many another thing I’ve said, is not true.  There was a time when it was true.  There was also a time when I was unhappy without her there.  This is neither of those times, though it strongly resembles both.  Her not being at work relieves me of watching out for her in order to avoid her or openly show my disdain for her.  It deprives me of that, too.  It relieves me of very little stress.  See, if she’s not where I am she’s relieved of me, free to live without me.  Free to be happy.  Free of my dramatic disdain.  I could say I don’t want that for her, because I feel that way, but I don’t believe it,  and I don’t want to hate myself yet more by talking myself into believing it.  I’m just lonely, jealous, and brittlely insecure, and Julie is a target for my projections.  What I can’t take responsibility for I blame her for.  There’s my awareness.  Where’s my corrective action?

The solution is beyond my intellect–not smarter than it, but transcendent of it, impossible to consider.  What’s to do when thinking won’t do?  We come back to faith, a frightening place, a place without control.  A humble place.  A place without Me.  A lifetime of looking for myself, and this is what it comes to.  I thought I was through with irony.  This soul’s not big enough for both faith and pride, and it’s easier to keep what I’ve always had than to replace it with what seems an ambiguous entity that will claim control of my ego.  Pride has not altogether blinded me, or I would not be questioning its worth, but sight is the price I would have to pay for faith.  With what, then, would I look in the mirror?  How would I avoid Julie?

I still have my little game of flirtation with the patrons, but the big game I play at the library is with Julie, and I lost it at the tip-off–even playing by my own rules–simply by getting her to play with me.  Winning now means losing my ego.  I tell myself this is all an experiment, a test of limits and reactions, but it’s really no more than poking with a stick.  I don’t honestly want her to hate me.  I’m even beginning to doubt that I’ve fallen out of love with her.  Was saying I was no longer in love with her just another of those hopeful deferences I made to Julie? or was the lie the declaration of love?  (Wow, Irony, you don’t mess around!)  If Julie changed her mind about me, do you really think I’d say, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel it anymore”?  The supposition says enough.

I’ll play my game.  I’ll avoid Julie as I avoid doing so many “right” things:  with awareness of the actions and their consequences, the guilt of knowing and not-doing, and the pride of doing the wrong things well.  Awareness doesn’t change anything but my level of self-loathing.  Do I have a limit I must reach before I change?  For how long can I work with Julie before I reach that limit?  Will awareness keep up?

Am I a Man Dreaming He’s a Butterfly? or a Butterfly Dreaming It’s in Hell?

Among my rich, myriad delusions, a recent favorite is that all I need to straighten my life out, make me a perfect person, and fill in my bald spot is a girlfriend.  I’ll no longer be an asshole–I’ll talk to Julie again as to someone I never had the least inclination to fall in love with.  I will like myself and be popular.  But let’s say that that original catalytic miracle happens, that some woman actually falls in love with me as I am now.  Here’s what would happen:  I’d have her come to the library for lunch with me on every Monday, Thursday and weekend–that is, every full workday with Julie–and flaunt her shamelessly.  I would brag on her loudly in the workroom to anyone but Julie (but with her always in earshot).  In other words, I’d be a loud-mouthed jerk (as opposed to the tight-lipped jerk I am now), and my girlfriend, flattered though she might be at my apparent pride in her, would get very little attention otherwise. I wouldn’t change a bit.

Perhaps I’m being hard on myself.  (Perhaps that’s another delusion.)  Does awareness of a self-delusion make it less of a delusion?  Awareness of my depression doesn’t seem to lessen the depression, but are my delusions as organic?  (Hm.  Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that.)  It’s one thing to be aware of the delusion; it’s another to take action against it.  I’m not likely to do that.  My pride generated the girlfriend delusion as a rationale against its own dissolution.  But even knowing that doesn’t hasten pride’s demise.  No, pride has the upper hand here, engineering my demise.  I could stop being a jerk to Julie–at least say “hi”–but not without making a point of it in order to satisfy my ego.  But I’d vowed not to write her any more “notes”–or “Notes!,” as Julie practically spit in my face the last time we had it out–or, rather, she had it out on me.  The best I can do right now is nothing, since anything else would be provocation.  If awareness of my delusion is not enough to dispel them, then it is my punishment for doing nothing about them.

A girlfriend doesn’t need to be in the middle of this.  How could I lover her?  And though nothing I feel for Julie is but a projection of my pride, it’s a slick enough barrier to love trying to get a foothold.  I’m not deluded there.

I Think That Tree Has Already Been Cut Down

I pedal through flurries of leaves on my commute, and never does one touch me–glance off my helmet or wind-glue to my chest for a moment.  On the evenings I work attractive women my age criss-cross my vision.  Rarely do they come to my half of the circ desk.  What would I do, anyway?  I’ve forgotten, or lost my drive, on which I had only a tenuous hold at best.  Flirting is fun, but, ultimately, it seems simply another manifestation of vanity.  I’m not flirting so much to attract women as to make myself feel good, to assure myself I still have it.  Whatever “it” may be worth intrinsically, I can’t right now discern it value to me.  It has all but evaporated in the distillation of necessity.  Why this process doesn’t also rid me of pride and self-hatred, I don’t know.  It seems all I’m left with–the two of them dancing maypole around me, keeping the women away.  But they are not just a barrier; they are a force, as strong a repellent of others as an attractant to me.  Awareness is often deterrent enough of creeping evil, but I have not yet convinced myself of pride’s malevolence.  Yes, the words.  Talk, talk.  No one can convince me of anything with just words.  I can’t even convince myself, even if I make the most sense.  This eradication requires more than awareness.  It requires a sacrifice of pride  itself, surely, but what does pride walk on?  What do I pull out from under it to upset it? and then how do I keep it from getting back up?  I’ve tried to imagine a life without pride and no picture forms, only a vague emptiness in my gut.  Pride is my only connection to Julie–my only reason to keep it and the best reason to get rid of it.  I can’t let her forget me, even it she only remembers me as odious.  Shouldn’t pride demand a better impression upon others?  It does, upon others. I want Julie to hate me as much as I hate myself.  I’ll take any emotion she’ll give me as long as it’s strong. 

Why should a leaf cling to me, even for a moment?  I work with good people–people who greet one another, talk to each other, help each other out.  That alienates me.  The other person is never the first person I think of, though I manage somettimes to do the right thing.  It’s the people who always do the right thing that I allow to make me feel small and less than human.  Yet Mike, James, and Julie are all lonely people, too.  If anyone is more deserving of love than anyone else, they are more deserving than I.  I see them give every day.  I’ll bet they don’t even have to think about it.  Why is no one clinging to them?  Love is not fair.  Why isn’t it ours to just pluck from the tree?  Why must we have to try to catch it when it falls from the sky?  Is it getting swept to the curb, washed down the gutter, when it eludes our tense grasp?  Does it dry up to be crushed underfoot?  Was there a harvest that we missed?

What would I do with that leaf pressed against my chest, held only by the force of my forward movement?  Pedal harder to prevent it peeling away?  Snatch it off and cram it into my pocket?  I doubt I could simply welcome it for as long as it stayed and say goobye with a smile.  It would not be easy-come-easy-go.  It would not have come easily, its trip having been so long as to have at least been ponderous, if not also circuitous and arduous.  I would not let it leave.  In my pocket it would go.  Occasionally, I could remove it briefly, to admire it but not to appreeciate it.  I hope I get the chance to do otherwise.  Fall is not over yet.  There are plenty of leaves yet to pedal through.

Lead Me Not Into Distraction

To eschew distraction I need a damned good reason, and that in the form of the one thing to replace all distractions.  How can I be sure I have correctly chosen the One Thing?  That’s likely another decision /pursuit that cannot be actively made.  So having chosen not to be distracted from the One Thing, it must be the ease of distraction that choses the OT.  How does my innate capacity for distraction factor in?  How distracted from the thing am I allowed to be? or does any distraction disqualify it for OT?  I’m fishing for a formula, aren’t I?

Then there’s work, the distraction I get paid for, the distraction that’s anything but–not because it allows me to concentrate on the One Thing, but because, with Julie’s presence, it forces me to.  So maybe it’s not ease of distraction that rules out a candidate but the relative lack thereof that identifies it.

All this from the ink-mouth of someone who expects love to just come to him!  You know why?  Because I don’t believe it.  I want to believe it–it’s a great idea, and maybe it’s actually true–but it might as well be god for all my ability to give my soul to it.  But neither do I believe in trying to find love, and not simply because I’m tired of the pursuit (and I am profoundly tired of it).  The One Thing is probably not love–yet–but finding or becoming, myself.  But I already talked about that when I said love would come to me when I was ready.  I could call that irony, but I’d rather call it coming full-circle:  I’ll believe it when I make it believable.

Eschewing distraction–I don’t even believe in that.  It’s taken me a week to write this much, between watching movies and solving sudokus (and work).  I’m barely reading or watching tv, and the computer’s just taking up space, but I find my distractions, nonetheless.  Actually, I have to admit that I need distraction.  The One Thing, misidentified, can become an obsession, a victim of the all-work-no-play syndrome.  Distraction can be as much a means of expression as these ordered words insomuch as it is a search for a connection, something meaningful.  It’s when the distraction threatens to become the One Thing that it is detrimental.  That’s what I fear and why I thought it best to avoid distraction. altogether.  But it’s not distraction I need to avoid so much as mindlessness.  Habitual distraction, at best, sinks the mind into stupefaction.  At worst, it aggrandizes itself into the One Thing–in actuality, its doppelganger, Obsession.  I am safe from the former eventuality because I have little capacity for mindlessness.  Awareness born of very recent first-hand experience keeps the latter eventuality from blossoming.

So I think I’ll acknowledge and keep aware of my distraction, instead of trying to rationalize them away.  They have context, a value to my personal growth.  I won’t pursue distraction, but I will allow it.  If the One Thing is to come to me (and I”m to believe it works that way)  I must have my distractions from the pursuit.  I’ll take the scenic route and let it place itself in my way to stumble over.  It’s not a formula, but it’s a plan.