They’d Probably Stab the Bag of Sugar, Too

The plant came home with me.  It was a rescue mission. I noticed that the aloe had been watered.  It should have been dry.  I taped a three-by-five notecard to the pot that read, “This plant is being overwatered.  Please leave it be.  If you want to live, leave it to me.”  The next morning, the card was gone and the plant was sopping.  I immediately removed the plant from the silll to my locker.  At the end of the day I carried it home on my back, wrapped in bubble wrap.

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.

My Plastic One Can Do the Same Job, Just More Slowly and Painfully

(To the tune of “Foot Shooter” by Frightened Rabbit.)

Thomas said he had news.  I said, “Oh, yeah?”  My mind was already out the starting gate, chasing the possibilities; my gut already girding for the blow.

“But I can’t tell you.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“Yeah, but see, I didn’t know you were gonna take it so hard.”

I was surprised that he found that more important than the amusement it afforded him,  but maybe I’ve been selling him short in the compassion department.  Of course, I wanted to hear this “news,” and, of course, I didn’t, but my imagination had probably already topped the reality:  The immediate thought was that she had a boyfriend.  Not that I could believe it, but my imagination took off after the worst news I could have heard.  I didn’t push Thomas.  I knew that despite my own worse-case scenarios, ignorance was the path to bliss in this matter:  Don’t give me the knife, and I can’t fall on it.  Naturally, I’d be jealous of any man whose romantic attentions she accepted, but after that. . . ?  Well, I’d feel plenty of pity for my lonely ol’ self, sure, but I don’t think the dreaded inpiration-loss would happen.  See, I’ve been learning to channel the bitterness of the irresoluble reality that was Julie and me into a resolute fiction–Twickory. I am creating the resolution, putting two characters in motion against each other and trying to interpret the consequences and steer the course to an actual destination.  Thomas can go ahead and tell me Julie has hooked up with the man of her dreams, and I’ll feel all the things I usually feel towards her and myself, but if it comes down to asking the same unanswerable questions with which I’ve burdened myself in Satellite Dance and A Bright, Ironic Hell, then I will put them to Twickory and see how those people deal with it.

Very recently I discovered the answer to one very old question, and have found in that answer yet more motivation to fictionalize my account of the affair.  It might have been one of the first questions I asked after Julie was told about BIH:  How was my writing about how I felt about her an “invasion of [her] privacy”?  The simple answer is, it wasn’t, and in my defensive, naive idealism that was the end of the matter.  What I’ve finally come to realize is that though it was not an invasion of privacy, it was lack of discretion:  Had I had more respect for how my writing might affect Julie, perhaps I wouldn’t have written what I wrote in the way I wrote it.  Not that I regret doing so, because at the time and in that forum it was the only way to express myself; but I do regret the pain that it caused, though I will yet not take the blame for the readers’ inference and its effect upon them.  That said, however, there is an entire page of this entry slashed with a red X that, though a true account, would serve only to hurt Julie.  There was a time when that would have been a weak argument for exclusion–on the contrary, might have been the best reason for inclusion–but the argument has strengthened mightily under a regimen of maturity and humility.  At the time, especially since The Tribunal, the motivation for discretion has been mostly self-preservation.  I’m not concerned with Julie taking further action against me–she won’t and can’t–but I am concerned with bruising the ego of a more “important” person than Julie.  I cannot trust someone who says, “I remember every word I say,” so I can’t feel safe in telling you what he said to me when I reopened Satellite Dance and after Julie had left his library, what he gave me explicit (though unsolicited) permission to do at Glen Allen; only that I would never do it and that I took silent umbrage to his use of  the word “harass.”

I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (though that hasn’t always been the case) but I do want to tell the truth as I know it as candidly as needs be, and sometimes discretion gets in the way of candor and is shunted by emotion.  Thomas is the more valorous of us two, but he didn’t have pride to contend with.  He had better keep his news.  I’d be a fool to solicit it (the same fool that’s dying to hear it), and who knows how valorous I could be with the information.  I would be a fool to want to find out.

“What a waste….”

It snows, and I wonder how Julie is getting along at the house she just bought three months ago.  Is she digging herself out okay?  Has a neighbor offered help?  Would she take it?  She’s been gone from Twin Hickory for two months now.  It feels like much longer.  How long does it have to feel like before I’m actually over her?  Forever? or as if she’d never been there?  And how long will it take to get there?  I don’t ever want to see her at the library, but I miss her.  When I no longer think of her relative to myself, I am over her.  Saying that makes me think that the blogs have been about neither her nor me, but about us.  When it truly is just about me, I’ll be over her.  I have to reclaim the blog from her as I do some of the music I love.  When the thought of doing something I know–or even suspect–we both like doesn’t conjure daydreams of us doing or partaking of them together, then that thing is mine again and I’m over her.  Or is all it takes is to want to be over her? because I’m not even there yet.

I played all my XTC one week on the pretense of introduction to my kids.  The pretense helped shift my usual perspective of, and self-investment in the music, so I can’t confidently attribute my relative emotional semi-detachment wholly to personal growth.  The association of the songs to Us or her was delayed from instant to eventual to not at all, depending on the song.  No small feat, given the difficulty in finding a song in their canon that isn’t about love.  Still, I haven’t been fooled into trying Prefab Sprout.  I was reluctant to give up james (Hey Ma), because after a particular listening I became enraged, entirely stripped of the fool’s new clothes–the belief that I could get over Julie.  That was several months ago, and now I want another listen.  I loved that album, but I had convinced myself that Julie did, too, and couldn’t sever the association.  Now Belle and Sebastian is taking up that mantle.  It doesn’t make me angry, though, to believe that Julie likes them.  It taps hope’s knee, but the reaction no longer kicks my ass.  Though in nearly every song I can apply a lyric to Us, the gut-wrench is no longer the requisite reaction to the association.  Belle and Sebastian are mine, but I’m willing to share.

Of course, work is a reclamation project, as well.  Two months, and the thought of her when I’m at the library still knots my shoulder and stifles my expression.  I quickly got use to the absence of her car, but in the library two or three times I thought I heard her voice and was attended by equal parts hope and dread.  And paranoia can still make me believe that the next time Ahmed or Greta speak to me it’s going to be, “May I see you in my office?” though I know I’ve done nothing to be reprimanded for.  My sister calls it a post-traumatic stress disorder, and I won’t argue; I just about exhausted the war analogies in describing the ordeal.  But the war’s over.  I’ve long since forgiven Chris for telling Julie about A Bright, Ironic Hell (“The Fool, Winner by Knockout”); and though it still hurts a bit, I’ve forgiven Stacey for siding with him when it happened.  We don’t really talk, anymore, but we were never really friends; we just kept each other’s misery company before the procession of her boyfriends began.  It hasn’t been a conscious effort, but it would be nice if management noticed what my peers have noticed: “You’re so much more yourself” and “You laugh a lot more”; and I’m much less intent on lying low and doing my job than on doing what it takes to help us all out.  Mary Lou and I work very well together; my blowups with her were always about Julie and blew over without hard feeling.  Everyone knows what I did to force the last office meeting, and if there is anyone left who hasn’t forgiven me they are hiding it pretty well.  Thomas the courier, endlessly amused with this particular tribulation of mine, never fails to bring news from Julie’s new library home, Glen Allen.  When he finds me alone, he betrays confidences the likes of which I was soundly condemned for exposing.  (I wonder if he’d be punished for his indiscretions if she found out.)  He knows he shouldn’t, but can’t help himself, knowing the laughs he’ll get out of it at the expense of my agitation.  No one at Twin Hickory has been so indiscreet, though I daresay there’s a lot of material to work from; but I’ve heard enough to not just temper my insecurities about this whole mess, but to make me feel good about how people feel about me:  It was definitely not just me.

Two months gone, and I’m still tangled up in Julie.  I will be for a long time yet.  What is she to me? and what must she become?  She is a fascination and an inspiration still, but she may also be a woman I’m still in love with.  How many more months before the love and the woman fade and leave the fascination and inspiration with which to write?  When will the fascination allow me to plumb the depths of her character without falling in love again with the woman?  When does the woman become the complex character that allows me to know her?  I don’t want to be over Julie, because I’m afraid of the inspiration drying up; that I’ll no longer feel the need to write it out–not even fiction–if  I no longer feel for her.  True?

Time will tell, right? A time dependent upon Julie’s continued absence to do any good.  It may be a long winter, though.  It will snow again, and I will worry again.  Maybe I would show up at her door with a shovel and a smile.  (Don’t worry; I don’t know where she lives.*)  I wish I wanted to see her again.

* I fell asleep, pen in hand, book on lap, and dreamt, after writing that last word:  It seemed a nice day.  I was pedalling along enjoying it, but found myself nearing Julie’s house.  As I drew opposite her front door it opened, and I dreaded/hoped she would see me, but she closed the door and stepped down three concrete steps with her head down.  At the bottom she turned right and dwalked to the shrubs under the picture window.  She wore a dress of burnished yellow whose few movement-made folds shimmered in the sunlight.  The back was cut in a deep V, and when Julie reached with her left arm toward the top of a shrub, I watched myriad muscles tense in a powerfully attractive pattern.  Then I was struck with sadness that she was going out, had a life of her own, without me.

Echo in a Packed House

I’m close to not writing, or farther from writing.  Satellite Dance has been a much lonelier endeavor than A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I thought I was writing a forum, but I’ve just been shouting down a manhole. I thought I’d connect with people who felt what I was feeling, but those people won’t come out, even incognito–I know they’re out there.  I get calls from well-meaning family worried about my emotional health and called into Ahmed’s office to be told I misrepresented him, but I am not after advice or trouble.  Spare me the pity, too; I’m not after that, either.  I express how I feel and hope to be understood, but, like Kerouac, all I’ve had to express is my own confusion; so if I’ve done a good job of that who can possibly understand?  Goddamned irony.

I talked to my dad last week.  He asked, as he always does, “Are you writing.” but added, “Not journal writing–real writing.”  I bristled but only said yes and changed the subject to my guitar-playing, which he could better relate to.  He is embarrassed for me and my writing.  This, coming from a former professional actor who once said, “You have to bare your ass for your art.”  Well, my ass has been hanging out there for a long time, but it’s winter and it’s damned cold.  Anyway, the people who’ve seen it are either embarrassed or offended by it.  Maybe it’s their own ass I’ve been showing them.  I haven’t connected.  I’ve exposed my self–my flaws, my fears, my hopes, my joys–but I have no clue that anyone actually knows me any better.

I’m sure many people don’t want to know me quite that well.  I began announcing new blog posts on Facebook (and Twitter), and, at first, readership rose; but now a new post is met mostly with indifference.  I’ve equated readership with friendship, because writing has been the easiest way to reach out, so if no one is reading . . . well, you do the math.  Writing has become a lonely job with little return on my efforts.  Lately, I have felt better not doing it, but that doesn’t end the need to be understood and to understand and connect with others or make it easier to do so in some other way than writing.  That bared ass has taken many a bite because of the blogs, and I suppose if I’d considered those possible consequences I’d never have started them.  But then I’d never have written, never have asked Julie out, and all those other bite-precluding nevers that would have followed.  I’d have been miserable.  Instead, I was confused and frustrated, but I was alive.  I moved forward, took action, suffered the consequences, and grew.  There may yet be more:  Jackie has friended me on Facebook, so she might find out about the blog(s) and maybe read enough to find herself mentioned.  This writing just keeps on giving.

But it doesn’t give enough.  I don’t want to write so much as the writing yearns to be written, and I try to oblige it with a few hours a week.  It demands more, but some things are more necessary to do, and some things more rewarding.  The reward of having written a post often is having gotten it out of the way, marked it off the list:  It’s a burden lifted, if not exactly a chore.  I’m never satisfied that I’ve said what I intended, and all of it, only that I’ve made some sense, and that doesn’t seem enough relative to the effort.  Neither does the audience seem worthy of the effort.

I am not leading up to saying this is my last post, though at the start I thought I was.  I’m trying to navigate a transition, yet I’m not sure where I’ve come from, and I certainly don’t know where I’m going.  Julie’s gone, and the cold and snow and the refusal of deference to desperation keep me from the social rounds I’d established over the summer; so, busy as my head is, I wonder if any of the chatter is worth relaying or if it is within the scope of the blog.  I’ve said I don’t like to write about writing, but writing is lonely and writing about it is as much about loneliness as writing about Julie is/was about me.  I still believe that I write simply to get a word in where my meager confidence in conversation won’t let me.  In writing is a place where I can’t be interrupted, where I can be confident, even in my confusion, that I’ll finish saying something.  In that way it’s a friend, but it’s a crutch when I ask too much of it, and that’s when I consider abandoning it as a weakness.  Then I consider other lonely, socially awkward people who may not even have a compensatory creative outlet, and I feel grateful that I can at least write.  Until I wonder if anyone’s reading.

To Take Desperation Down There and Drop It In a Bum’s Cup

It was more than two weeks before I finally played the CD I’d bought at Plan-9 when I was last in Carytown.  I didn’t want to be reminded of the failure and disappointment and the limbo of transition I was lost in.  It’s called Write About Love, by Belle and Sebastian.  It only took me a day, though, to respond to the sticker on the wrapper:  “Write 300 words about love in any form.”  It was a contest solicitation, but the thought of a “song and a visit from Stuart Murdoch” was not my inspiration.  Being asked to write about love was enough. It was the kind of inspiration that got me started on A Bright, Ironic Hell after at least two years of not writing about anything.  This what I wrote:

Love is all I write about, because I don’t know what it is, and I want it so badly.  I think I have been in love.  I’m not sure.  It was a new feeling, and it was a good feeling, and it was torture.  It might as well have been love.  She didn’t love me, though she liked me once–just not enough.  Now, she doesn’t like me and won’t even let me talk to her.  So I write about her.  She doesn’t like that, either.  It doesn’t matter what I write–whether I’m angry that she rejected me or worshipping her qualities–she doesn’t like it, and has asked me to stop–a few times–and I have stopped, because I would do anything for her.  But I have always started again, because, I guess, there was always that one thing I couldn’t do for her as long as she inspired me.  And, though, if she told the truth and said she hated me, I would find inspiration still in the fascination for her that won’t die.

Was I in love with her?  Am I still?  Is it even love if it is rejected?  Is it just a seed without soil?  Her name is Julie, and she’s beautiful except when she looks at me, when her eyes darken and her face hardens, and I could cry because she feels that way about me.  I only wanted to love her.  That was my crime, and that face is my punishment, though hell is not being able to stop seeing it before me–and having to write about it.

Still, it was two weeks later, just after I’d published the previous post that I listened to the album, and now it cozily inhabits my head.  Friday had arrived and all the chatter I’d felt so excluded from had left with the half of the crew that didn’t work that weekend.  I am always more comfortable with the smaller crew, and the size of the group has much to do with that–the smaller the better for me–but the people in that group are individuals I’m comfortable with, people I can talk to and listen to.  That they’re all women plays no small part, either.  I feel the rooster in the hen house in some ways, but the brother among sisters, mostly.  Mike and Maddox have in turn shared this weekend with me, and I felt them to be interlopers.  Jennifer traded a weeekend with Bethany recently, and it simply seemed there was a hole in Bethany’s place.

This crew–Megan, Becky, Bethany, Angie, Sujatha, and Judy–gets a much more relaxed Dion than they’ve probably ever known.  Though I harbor bitterness still over the not-so-distant past, I feel no reason to air it at work; without its source and target, it has no (or little) context there:  She’s gone, I’m out of the box.  I can breathe deeply and not dread an emotional menace around every corner.  On my best days–and they are coming more consecutively all the time–I feel like a dancer–loose-limbed, swivelling from the hips and shoulders; turning on a toe; reaching from the waist standing on one leg, back and other leg parallel to the floor, eyes straight ahead–nearly every move a “step.”  I feel closer to real.  Amongst this group, I feel much more accepted; and individual but still connected to the group.  I’d like to think that I ask for less and give a little more now that the person I used to ask so much from with such futility is gone.  Before she left what I wanted out of this crew (and everyone else) was some acknowledgement that they understood me, that I wasn’t alone.  My paranoia needed to know that not everyone was on her side.  Then the peace lily came, and she left.

The desperation stayed, of course; it’s mine, a part of me for the time being.  I can diminish its role as motivator, but it has to tag along to work with me.  It wants me out on the circ desk, to see and talk to people (by which I mean women).  I’m anxious to get out there, too, but when I do, I leave desperation in the workroom.  On most days, with a full crew in force, any of us is lucky to get more than an hour out there in a day.  Monday and Tuesday, day shifts for me, are busts:  Any women I see on those days are most likely to be either young mothers or retirees.  Give me my hours in the evening on Wednesday and Thursday, when the working women come in.  Fridays and Saturdays, with the half-crew, I might get on the desk three times, and as busy as those days are, my opportunities for contact can reach tantalizing proportions.  I have no “line,” just a smile, a greeting, and lots of eye contact.  If her eyebrows go up, the pitch of my voice goes down and its edges melt away.  That’s my invitation to a flirt, but sometimes the invite comes from the other side of the counter.  I never turn those down, though not leading the dance can momentarily tangle my feet before the flattery rights me.  With Megan as witness at the terminal next to me, one woman virtually turned a fine payment into a come-on, leaning across the counter to within inches of my face to joke huskily about being “bad” just before casually dropping the husband bomb.  I felt teased but didn’t let on, didn’t even pull awayto regain my personal space from what could’ve been a kiss if we’d both puckered up, we were so close.  If this had been a game, I’d have conceded her the victory but not without letting her know with a one-sided smile of a wink that I was merely extending her a gentlemanly courtesy and that next time I’d be a bit more competitive now that I had her measured.  I asked Megan what she though of this woman dropping the husband bomb in the middle of a flirt.  What was the point?  Megan theorized that the woman wanted to prove to herself that she still “had it.”  If that were true, then she went away satisfied.  I felt the same way:  It had been nearly as good as good sex–a mutual challenge willingly met to pleasure in each other’s pleasure.

I’m not sure what I’ve been getting at here, except, maybe, that I don’t have to just write about love, that I can talk about it, too, at work, where there is no longer someone with whom I’m in love and who resented and feared it.  What I have now (for the most part, and the rest doesn’t matter) is a peace lily and people who understand that I am a passionate man and am not ashamed of it; can confide with it and joke about; and is who he is not because of one person, but despite her.  Every day is less of her and more of me, and much more fun–and I’m getting paid for it.  What’s the rush to Carytown?

The Price

I gave Julie both magnets, placed them on the door of her overhead storage compartment in plain sight on a day she didn’t work.  She saw them the next day, when I didn’t work.  She said nothing to me the next day but approached me the day after as I sat alone at lunch.  I was spooning yogurt when she asked, standing across the table from me in the breakroom, “What do you know about the magnets on my over head?”

“I put them there.”

“Why did you put them there?”

“I don’t know.  I just did.  I didn’t expect anything from it, if that’s what you’re worrried about.”

“Well, you know I can’t accept them.”

“I don’t know why not.”

“I just can’t.  It doesn’t feel right.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want you to give me things.”

“I saw them and thought of you, thought you’d like them.”

“Well, I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t accept them.”

“Okay.”

She walked away.

I seethed the rest of the day and emailed her the next morning.

I’m angry and disappointed. I’d had those magnets for some time before I gave them to you. When I bought them I thought of you, but thought you would misunderstand my giving them to you. Then I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt, that you might accept them in the simple spirit in which they were given. I expected no reaction, wanted nothing from it. You thought otherwise, and that was disappointing. You didn’t, as you said, “appreciate the gesture,” or you would have accepted it without confrontation, as you would have from any other coworker. It was not a diamond ring.

I’m angry because there now seems nothing at all I can do that you won’t construe as a come-on. Which one of us is not over this? I’ve had to get over making the biggest mistake of my life–falling in love with you. What have you had to get over? If you can’t accept a peace offering, a housewarming gift, can you accept anything at all? Do you like things this way? Do you like being afraid of me? Do you like thinking I’m still carrying a torch for you? Do you like worrying about encountering me at work? Do you like that stress? It’s time to read another magnet of yours: What attitude does our conversation follow? The workplace is toxic with our attitudes toward each other. And please don’t pretend to believe that you’re only doing it because you thought I wanted it this way. Who would want it this way? I’m not dying to get away from Twin Hickory, but from you, because things won’t change as long as you believe I still hold affection for you, and whatever proof you need to believe otherwise is beyond my reckoning. I’m tired of being the one who cares that we get along. I’ve stepped up, I’ve tried, however awkwardly, to mend things, but it is not, as you once said, “all up to” me. How often is that your answer to conflict? How often do you just wait for bad things to just go away? Or, how often do you walk up to them with that facade of smug bravado you’ve been perfecting all weekend and accuse them of having feelings for you? Don’t you want things to be better than this? Is there nothing within you power to change it? Your power over me is not sufficient–and waning. If you want to get along, try. If I don’t at first seem to appreciate the effort, it will only be because I don’t recognize it for what it is, having lost hope of ever seeing it. Believe it or not, I want things to get better between us. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve just gotten weary of trying. If you care, please come halfway.

Immediately, I regretted sending it.  Not a word seemed true, only mean and accusatory.

I found the reply in my basket.  I put off reading it for several hours, afraid for my heart.  I made sure I was ready to get on my bike to leave work before I removed the staple and unfolded the single sheet of copier paper.

First let me say how upsetting I found you email.  I can’t understand why you would send me what I felt to be a bitter, mean-spirited email at work.  It seems I upset you by refusing your magnets.  You accuse me, among other things, of not being able to accept them in the “simple spirit in which they were given.”  How was I to know what you intentions were as you did not approach me personally.  Maybe, if you had handed them to me and explained youself, I might have accepted them.  Instead you chose to leave them anonymously on my overhead bin with no note, no anything.  And I was supposed to know your intentions, how?  You equate your gesture to that of any other co-worker but it wasn’t.  Would you have done the same thing for any other of our co-workers?

For the past two years I have had to live with a work situation that I have found uncomfortable at best.  After I initially told you I did not return your feelings, you proceeded to make your feelings a work issue: Telling people about your blog, informing others that you had a crush on me, taping my photo to your bicycle.  You wrote about me in your blog with no regard for me or my feelings.  You kept reminding me by your words and actions how you were ”in love with me.”  I did try to not let it interfere with our work environment and to maintain a cordial relationship with you but you didn’t seem to accept that, you seemed to only want what I couldn’t give you.  If I remember correctly I made it clear I didn’t want it to affect our working situation.  And the most distressing part was that you continued to write about me in your blog when you knew I did not appreciate it.  Now, all of a sudden, it’s my fault we don’t get along, that I’m the one who isn’t trying and I’m afraid of you or like thinking you still carry a torch for me.  If that’s what you think of me, then you know nothing about me at all and I wonder how you can even imagine you were ever in love with me if you believe that’s the way I think and act.  I have no desire to have power over you or anyone else.  Your past actions have made me uncomfortable with you and I do not and have not for many months felt comfortable conversing casually with you.  Now you expect me all at once to forget that and be friends.  Yes, maybe it’s a failing on my part that I can’t do that on demand, but how would you react if you were in my situation?  I certainly don’t claim to be perfect.  You betrayed my trust and that is something that has to be earned, not given for the asking.  And the tone of your email to me certainly hasn’t improved the situation.  Quite frankly, I don’t know now if things will ever, as you say, be better between us if this is the approach you continue to take.  And to answer your question about what did I have to get over?  Well, that would be the death of my mother.

It has been a very long night since then.  I have forced myself to read the letter a few times, forced myself to not react in angry denial of this perception of me.  I try not to react at all, but the weight of shame is crushing.  I sent Julie flowers last night.  She should get them at work before I come in in the afternoon.  The note with them will read, “Everything you said is right.  I’m sorry.  Please accept these flowers and my apology in the spirit of peace and goodwill.”  I realize, now, that she will be embarrassed and have some uncomfortable explaining to do to coworkers.  That was not my intention.  It’s simply what I thought to do.  I didn’t consider how it would make me feel, either, but that doesn’t seem important.

The magnets, which Julie tossed in my basket after reading my email, are on my overhead now.  I should probably remove them, remove them from any chance of seeing them again, which could make me bitter again, but that seems inevitable, anyway. I only hope that whatever I was meant to learn from this takes hold first. I only hope that Julie can forgive me and that I can forgive myself.

Dr. Weekend and Mr. Work

Monday through Thursday, there is almost as little to say here as to Julie, though in both cases it’s a matter of allowance:  Pride doesn’t let me speak to Julie; better judgement prevents me talking about the turmoil that that puts me through.  The problem is not going away.  Not-talking is not the same as not-feeling.  I almost feel a hypocrite or a liar for not expressing these feelings, but I ignore them only on paper.  So I’m stuck just thinking about them, fighting them away.  It’s been about a year since Julie and I had a conversation, so it’s been nearly that long since I ended (I won’t say “finished”) A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I still have many questions, and they fuel the bitterness of my pride, but only in my mind do I allow myself to ask them; and I ask them bitterly, knowing the answers hide within Julie.  We have settled, Julie and I, into an “understanding,” in which not even a word is spoken.  That is not an exaggeration.  Not one word.  When our eyes happen to meet, I can no longer read what they say or know what mine are trying to say to her.  I don’t even know what I’m feeling then.  If I had a more benign humor about this, I’d say this was all ridiculous, but there’s nothing funny here.  It’s not like two people mirror-dancing to get by one another.  The weekend’s advantage got me through Monday, but Tuesday through Thursday threatens to bleed into the weekend, though here, on a Thursday, it’s easy to underestimate the freedom that absence of Julie affords me; and if I still have that in mind when I leave work then the advantage will be mine, and I will have a headstart on a good attitude for the weekend.

“If.”  Where’s the font big enough for that word?  Especially when here it is Thursday night and I’ve been a bad boy, opening one of those doors I’ve told myself not to open and stealing glances at Julie.  And god am I paying for it.  I know I moaned out loud once.  She’s just more beautiful each time I look.  God help me if she doesn’t gleam when she smiles.  And in telling you this I’m going through another forbidden doorway, but it’s this or–I don’t know what.  I nearly kissed her neck tonight.  There it was, the back of it exposed as she stood over a cart looking down, her back to me, and I was drawn, pulled–yanked–toward her, leaning–oh, if I could just get a whiff of her hair….  How good sense turned me away, a foot from her, I don’t know, and I don’t know yet if I’m grateful;  though surely it would have cost me my job, I still see that smooth, pale neck with its brown mole, and I’m drawn still, but the fantasy can’t suffice.  The mind can only pretend to take what the body can’t have.

But it’s Thursday night, and I don’t want to try to sleep with that issue, yet how much of what I don’t allow myself to say is going to fester and spew pus on my weekend if I don’t lance it know?  So let me tell you about the flirt party Thomas and Julie threw Wednesday.  Thomas was in rare form because he had a rare opportunity with both me and Julie in the same room.  At first I’d left, not wanting to see the too affectionate squeezes or to hear Thomas drop his voice to the Barry White register to coo at Julie, but then I dedided I’d let him put on his show and see just how far I could take it.  Of course it wasn’t his cooing as much as her flirting along with him that tested the boundaries of my tolerance.  Thomas flirts with all the women, but Julie’s the only one who doesn’t roll her eyes and avoid him.  It gets harder all the time to believe she’s not enjoying the twist of the knife in my gut as much as the attention she gets from no other male, but we won’t go there, will we?  I gave it about ten minutes before I said to him, “Get out.”  He said, “What?”  “I’ve had enough,” and I turned my back him at my desk.  He said, “Did you hear that, Julie?”  He told me to get out.  What do you think of that?”  I didn’t hear a reply, though the full room had gone silent.  Thomas said, “Can you believe that?  He hurt my feelings.  Do you want me to go, Julie?”  “Oh, I would never ask you to leave, Thomas.”  But he left, and Angie told me later that she was practically dancing with joy when he did.

So, I’ve broken my rules already.  What the hell–it’s Thursday night with three days of no-Julie ahead of me, and a Friday of whatever I want right around the bend.  I feel good, and maybe by Monday I’ll feel great, but I can’t lie my way to that feeling.  Working with Julie will not get better by pretending nothing’s wrong, but nothing’s wrong about enjoying my weekend, and taking work there with me won’t help me do that.  However, taking the weekend into work with me can considerably improve my attitude there.  Call me a prideful coward at work if you like, but you can’t call Julie much less, and at least I’m using three days out of the week to effect some positive change in the rest of the week.  I think “if” is only about eight points high right now.

GMAT, GRE, CLEP…?

I asked Greta again if she knew anything about the transfers, and this time she said that “they” were waiting for the end of the fiscal year before moving on the transfers.  Not much information, but more than I’d had.  I suspect she knows more, but between the bunker mentality borne of her retail experience and the executive privilege of witholding information in the name of professional discretion, what I got was the best I could have expected to get from her.  It’s a straw I will snatch.  No timetable, no process–that hasn’t stopped my hopes from packing my bags.  I even started a farewell letter to Julie, though I’ve already trashed it.  Forget advising myself against high hopes, because at this point they are a substantial boost of oxygen into the hermetic box called the Twin Hickory library.  I’m not blind to the chance of a negative outcome, I just don’t want to entertain it.  I’m even aware that raising hopes for the positive can give the negative devastating power, but I’ve chosen to take that as it comes and not modulate my reaction pre-emptively.  When I look ahead I can’t see Julie, so if I can maintain that focus my attitude will keep me in a job.  Job evaluations were conducted, despite no raises in sight (and Henrico County can see at least a couple more years ahead), and we were required to assess ourselves in writing, demonstrating how well we’ve performed over the last year, how well we reached the goals we had set, and what goals we intended to meet this year.  I was blunt:

I realize that a narrative will not make this part of your job easier for you, but I have to be honest, for whatever it costs me or is worth to you: My heart’s not in it. I do not know what goals I set last year, but I probably did not meet them all. I took no classes and am not interested in taking any. I would rather just do my job, which I like and feel I do well at. I have no further professional ambition as regards the library, except to not be here while a certain someone is, and, of course, I’d rather be closer to home, anyway. Given the impossibility of reaching that goal, I can only concentrate on my job and on strengthening relationships with the coworkers who aren’t afraid of me and will talk with me. I believe in our family despite the strain within it, and I really do want to get along with everyone. Emotionally, some days are better than others. You can probably tell which are which, and I hope I’m not affecting my “siblings” on the not-so-good ones.

I still try to challenge myself daily to make what we do more efficient. I’m glad to see some of my ideas, such as the re-orienting of the holds rubber bands and the sorting hour, were well received and doing the good I thought they would. I’ve weathered the attrition storm with, I hope, a level demeanor; and Java and STEP and whatever other new technological marvel they throw at us will only take some getting used to and is nothing I think will be difficult to master, as has nothing else I’ve had to get used to for my job.

Patrons are always my first concern as I work. Everything I do is with a consideration of their convenience and needs. I still consider myself a patron before an employee and feel it helps me empathize with them better and understand their needs in their words, which aren’t usually from the same vocabulary as ours as employees of the library.

I’m sure there’s much I didn’t cover, many competencies I missed, and I’m sorry. If you need me to do this more conventionally, let me know.

Perhaps that “impossibility” in April is not so much of one now, but my attitude has not much changed, and with summer, our busiest time, upon us, my diplomatic abilities will be strained, at least with coworkers, some of whom seem to be affronted by their duties.  One person in particular, whom Julie calls “Chuckles” but whom I refer to as “Slackles,” does little that lifts him off his ass.  Slackles, a few months ago, was a Head of Circulation at another branch in the Henrico system.  When he tried to take sexual liberties with someone in his office, he was demoted and shipped to us.  Nearly everything he says is full-stopped with a laugh, hence Julie’s nickname for him.  After he took a cell call in the stacks, I told him, “That was not cool.”  He answered, with a grin, “Thank you.”  A designated shelving hour to him means shelving the holds he’s just trapped, and the holds shelves are closer to the workroom than any other.  I could go on.  I have little enough patience with lazy coworkers, and I’ll have none at all at the end of the summer if they don’t step it up.  Even Julie has slackened, and I once admired her ethic.  She was designated to sort one hour, but took a look at the carts and said, “There’s nothing to sort” (a blind-wrong assessment), then proceeded to help the backup discharge books–that is, make work for the sorter.  Yet she wasn’t making the work for herself; she spent the entire hour discharging.  Halfway through the hour, when I realized she had no intention of sorting, I stepped into her job.

Readers of A Bright Ironic Hell readers might recall that it was just three weeks short of a year ago that I made similar disparaging statements about Julie (Steps Forward: Steps Back–especially the comments).  Back then, Julie lashed out, essentially forcing the closure of that blog.  That won’t happen this year, and its not my intention to provoke it.  It’s my intention to leave before I provoke anything, and I fear the summer stress–increased workload, the proportional slack to take up from some coworkers, and Julie–will have increasing influence over the better part of valor, and that as the summer wears on my self-control will wear out.  Of course, I hope I’m gone by then, and my hopes remain high, because it’s what I want–desperately.  But hope can’t be justified.  If all hope needed in order to be rewarded was a good reason, I’d have Julie and you wouldn’t be reading this.

It’s been a long weekend, in a good way, especially for the Monday off giving me an extra day without Julie and shortening the coming week with her to three days, but there’s not another holiday till Labor Day and the heat is picking up, too.  Hope, patience, heat, Julie–what other tests do I have to pass to get to Tuckahoe?  I have to know.

Think the Kid Could Do with a Little More Rope?

As I clutch at the thinnest straws for a differences between this blog and the last, I’m tempted to conclude that I have not moved forward in my emotional development.  That may be an exaggeration, but progress at glacial speed is only progress for a glacier.  It seems all I have learned is how to jerk Julie around without getting into trouble.  Yet it’s trouble I want.  I am as desperate as ever for her attention and as certain that I’ll get none of it.  I talk to her here, hoping she reads it, hoping I don’t fawn or go the other extreme and caustically derogate, as if it I could actually do any more damage or hurt her any further.  I want to address her now, but I resist the conceit; though I write closest to my heart when I address her, I am ashamed of what my heart still feels for her, and it crumbles into yet smaller pieces.  I cannot win her.  I am tired of saying that and tired of believing otherwise.  Does it ever end, this awful ride?  How can knowledge and belief be so far apart in one person?  How can certainty mean so little?  Is there any value in what I know? or am I at the mercy of my emotions?  Can I really have no say at all when it comes to what I feel?  Do I really want to feel this?  Do I really want to be this goddamned jerk?  No!  Do you really think I enjoy this game?  No! It hurts it hurts it hurts!  Julie absolutely wins.  I don’t know how much this hurts Julie, but she would be happy to know I’m cooking in my own stew, and would be more than willing to throw a few logs on the fire under the pot.  I scoff now at the l.s. and the petty arrogance that tries to justify it, and I come very close to labelling the act “pathetic,” but I try very hard not to judge my actions but to understand them.  Yet understanding this one is what makes me despair of my emotional growth.  I am, by my own doing, entirely unable to talk to Julie to the extent that I have to provoke her to talk to me.  Beyond the magnet, there is not plan, but I know that for all the non-planning I do I have already set off on a mission, because it’s the same mission as ever, and I recognize the signposts–the token and note, so far–despite being draped in the camouflage of rational justification.  No, I see this path before me quiet clearly:  The tokens will be rare, but the notes will continue, though only on repair slips, and not on every one.  I don’t know what the notes will say, but they will be carefully tuned to a pitch only Julie can hear.  Sounds a bit sociopathic, as if I were trying to settle a score, but my caution is less about not “getting caught” (whatever that would mean) than about not crossing the line into meanness.  That I’ve thought it out this far is both disturbing and comforting in complementary measure.  Maintaining their positive balance is the key , and the thumb on the comforting scale dish is sympathy for Julie.  If my aim is uncertain, I at least know I have no intention of hurting her, and I will do nothing that I think might.  This is not a vendetta.  It’s neither her anger or her tears that I want to invoke.  That I can’t honeslty state what I do want is the thumb on the other side of the scale.  Can one exert more pressure than the other?

It is likely to sanity’s advantage to consider this whole thing an experiment.  It is not without precedent in my life.  In 1988, when response to personal ads was still carried out through postal correspondence, I launched a sociological/literary project in a popular (and still popular) local free paper, The Style Weekly.  Each week I would ask a simple question, like, “What are you reading?” or, “What are you eating?”  Each ad in the personals was given a box number to respond to.  My first ad was given Box 049.  I asked for and was granted permission to keep that box for the duration of the project, which lasted twenty-six weeks–thirteen brief questions, then thirteen brief answers.  The overarching conceit was that I never so much as hinted upon my sex.  It was apparently an overpowering allure to men and women equally.  I had great but happy difficulty keeping up with the correspondence.  If they asked the burning question, I told them.  Of course, the women weren’t surprised and the men (most of them) were disappointed.  One man refused to believe me even after meeting me, convinced I was just a messenger sent in place of the “real” “Box 049.”  I overheard women in the grocery store talking about me.  The whole thing was simply an experiment, and one with no stated objective.  I’m still not sure what it accomplished.

So, here’s Satellite Dance, yet another experiment in public writing but with Julie as the guinea pig and not an objective in sight.  Having cut off direct communication with Julie reduces me to an observer, little more tha a clinician collecting data:  I plant a token or a note then sit back out of sight with my clipboard to record the subject’s reactions.  If only I could believe I were thus emotionally detached.  If I have grown emotionally over the course of Satellite Dance, it is most clearly manifested in a softening of moral judgement–imperfect, incomplete, and slow, of course, but alive and growing.  I understand that the dichotomous combatants, The Wise Man and The Fool, of A Bright, Ironic Hell are actually Father and Son.  The boy may listen attentively to the man and appreciate what the father is attempting to impart to him, but if he understands it at all, it is not in an applicable way.  The father has to be patient, not critical.  He has to allow his son to make mistakes, to sometimes act counter to wisdom.  After all, that’s how the father came to be so wise.  If I have this emotional child in me, it’s because I didn’t receive that wisdom as the physical child to grow into.  I am my own father now, as most of us, I suspect, are our own parents, and this “awful ride” is the frustration of a difficult interaction between the parent and child, with the child trying to claim its autonomy from the parent stressing responsibility.  I don’t judge the man as severely as I do the child.  I strive to judge neither at all and just let them talk, but the child will rebel with rash action, and the parent will react with harsh judgement.  The child of BIH has grown up a bit.  He understands much more of what he’s been told, though he’s also grown more cunningly aware of the limits of the father’s admonitions.  The father is aware of that, but begins to recognize himself in his son and knows his son will make the important mistakes.  Julie is the catalyst for this relationship, like it or not.  One day, the son will be grown and full of the wisdom his father imparted.  He will no longer need the father, and neither will either need the woman they fought over.  That’s what the father thinks, anyway.

Out of Orbit

I’m not sure I ever truly believed I could pull this off. “This” needed faith, hard work and honesty, but faith failed me at the start, conspiring with unwarranted optimism to burden my pen to solve my problems. Inspiration was what I needed, and it was all but entirely absent. “Definitely not really about Julie”: Did I really think that was something I could laugh about? Of course, I was not done with A Bright, Ironic Hell, because it was not so much a choice to end it as a final deferment to Juilie. I regret ending that blog–and I suppose I didn’t really; Satellite Dance is poorly disguised, not that I let myself believe at the time it didn’t stand on its own. I thought by not dwelling on the minutiae of working with Julie, not chronicling the details of contact with her, I could be rid of the obsession; but I had dug myself into too deep an emotional hole, and an infinity of words might not be able to build a tall enough ladder. The chronicling might stop, but not the obsession. I have been able (mostly) to refrain from reporting the contact made or attempted with Julie, but not from stockpiling them to ruminate upon later. I could even refrain from calling myself pathetic or feeling guilty about my behavior, but only rationally: Knowing that feeling that way doesn’t help me out doesn’t prevent me from feeling that way and has barely kept me from letting those emotions control me. I came into this “project” ill-equipped if I really thought I would find love. It’s a fool’s game, and I’m not yet fool enough to understand the rules–and too smart to stop trying to figure them out and just be blissful.

The reason I didn’t want to write this blog the same way as the last was, essentially, to withhold “clues” from Julie.  If she was going to insist on reading Satellite Dance, as her vanity made her read BIH, I was not going to telegraph my intentions. Treating BIH as some kind of operator’s manual, Julie practically gaslighted me with my own words, trying to be what she thought I wanted her to be, according to my previous posting. I was on the brink of paranoia before she admitted reading the blog. And, even now, every time I restrain myself from announcing my intentions toward her I resent her for it.  I want to say–scream!–”Here’s what I’m going to do, Julie, when I’m going to do it, and why.  Move over and let me drive.”

I miss the old way of writing.  I say I want to reclaim my life, but first I want my blog back.  I want to say what I want to say, turn this paranoia on its head.  What do I know about love, anyway?  All I know about is this thing I have for Julie that won’t go away.  On a repair slip for a dvd that I dropped in her basket, I wrote, “Heard Frightened Rabbit?”  That was at least two weeks ago.  She won’t repond, I know, and yet I hope.  Those soft-core fantasies I wrote a while back were a taunt to Julie, but I felt every word, and I feel even more.  I don’t have to see her flesh to know every soft, pliable inch and sensitive crevice.  Yes, I will say what I want.  Let the paranoia be hers.  For some time, I have not been pleased with the quality of my writing.  It’s been herky-jerky and scattered.  I’ve been diligent, but the head has been straining against what I’ve really felt–it’s doing it right now.  But what started as a death knell for Satellite Dance is now a clarion call to reload and charge.  The fire Julie lit that burned so brightly in that ironic hell of mine just isn’t here, and the path I’ve tried to take with SD is too indistinct to follow.  Sure, I can pull this off, but I need a more realistic idea of what “this” is.  I’ve been working hard but blindly and with little faith that I’m succeeding, because I hardly know what the goal is.  I  still don’t, but I can at least say that honestly now.  That’s a start.  “Definitely not really about Julie.”  Well, yeah.  Inspiration?  What is it?  Do I need it? or need to know?  Confusion needs expression, too, so I guess I will be its champion until I figure out where I’m going with this, ploughing through the overgrowth until I get somewhere.

Here–Hold My Breath

Pascal is over me, I guess.  I haven’t heard from him in a long while, not even a response to my last email.  Did I hurt him, or did his passion burn out?  Did he suddenly see I was not the man for him? not the man he’d thought or hoped I was?  I am not angry or sad that I’ve lost Pascal.  Neither am I happy or relieved.  It was warming to know that someone felt so strongly for me.  But was it just my picture?  Did he read the words I didn’t write just for him? the words you read here?  Our correspondence might have been the difference.  These questions Pascal would consider unnecessary and anoying but the neurosis they come from “cute.”  Cute is a far cry from the fiery sexual fantasy of the early messages.  Cute doesn’t sustain passion, but passion is a fire, and fire dies out.

What does being “over” someone mean?  Is it just the scales of hope falling from one’s eyes? the stark new light revealing flaws one just can’t accept and love?  I think it is that plus the diminishment of embarrassment and shame for having felt so strongly toward someone:  Suddenly, this person is just another person, and you can’t imagine any longer what made you feel the way you did about them.  In fact, you can’t imagine the feelings themselves.  This is all theory–fantasy, even–because I do not know.  I know too well what I have always felt for Julie, and I was reminded of that on a day that began with me confidently believing that the feelings had diminished by such a significant degree as to be simply put aside like clothes that no longer fit.  By the end of the work day I was shoe-horning myself back into them, sadly acknowledging the delusion and its control over me.

It didn’t help that Julie came in with a new hairstyle exposing her neck and sweeping her bangs across her forehead.  Dammit! i thought.  I don’t need this.  Nor did I need her to wear blue, which turned her eyes to glistening cerulean marbles.  God, did I want to tell her I liked her hair! but I doubted my ability to handle even a thank you in response.  In other words:  I was a goner.  But, otherwise, I bravely, stubbornly pushed through, performing little favors for her, such as helping her offload the discharge cart onto the sorting carts, and other little things that we do for everyone else but each other.  I was soliciting thanks, which I received with emotional neutrality, but was also heading off the guilt I knew I’d feel if I didn’t perform these simple acts of professional kindness.  Later, I even alerted her to some new donations,  Nancy Drews from the forties.

If I had studied the schedule more closeley I might have chosen to suffer the guilt, instead:  A couple hours before closing we were to share a desk hour, such a rare occurrence anymore that I’d begun to take it for granted as a thing of the past.  Still, I was able to convince myself that it was no big deal and did a pretty good job of not working myself up about it or planning what to say.

“Did you find anything interesting in the donations?”  That’s what I asked her.  The rest of the conversation doesn’t warrant transcribing.  It was virtually the same one we ever had on the desk, where I’d ask a question, she’d answer, then…nothing.  I’d wait for her to say something anything, without prompting, and, so, the rest of the hour would be spent in a congealing silence.  No, the details, though vital to the drama, would only invite obsession and inflate hopes–as it did the rest of that workday with her.  The old jealousies and hopeless hopes floated up from the bottom of my emotional cesspool.  Allowing those feelings to pull me in would have been to drown me.  I can acknowledge that I’m not over Julie, but I cannot afford to celebrate.  Don’t I want to be over her?  (As I wrote that, the question expanded to monstrous, insatiable proportions.  I will render it rhetorical, for now, by simply not answering it.)

Getting over Julie might be a simpler matter if I could believe she never felt anything for me (which would require her to tell it to me herself).  I remember how giddy and jocular we both were the rest of the day after I asked her out, but then I remember, too, the wall shooting up through the pavement between us ouside athe end of the day when I expressed my frustration with not being able to get together that weekend.  A switch had been flipped, and I find it impossible, still, to understand what changed and why, and how she turned so quickly from excited to scared.  If I can’t stop wondering, though, I must not speculate.  Speculation without clues is just obsession.  Nothing a mind fabricates from the whole cloth of neurosis is to be trusted to be worn in the light of day. 

So, Julie, you are stuck with me.  For nearly an entire workday I thought we could work this out your way–you know, pretending it was already worked out–but you are still afraid of me, and that’s hardly back to “normal.”  (My fear of you has never changed.)  Yeah, I almost thought reparation, such as might need done, was all up to me, but I’ve done what I can do.  I waver between appreciating your inabilities and being frustrated with your acceptance of and submission to them.  Perhaps things are already as good between us as you care to have them be.  Keep thinking it and you might believe it some day.  Do you really not mind things this way?  I’m not dancing alone here.  This is a tango, baby, and you know it.  Maybe it has lasted so long because it didn’t flare as hotly as Pascal’s for me.  Maybe you can be grateful for that, anyway.  Or not.  Were I Pascal to you, would you still be embarrassed now?  At least I would be over you.  Would you have been flattered at all to have been a masturbation fantasy?  By the way, how’s the sofa thing working for you?

Ah, but nothing will change, Julie.  In fact, you know what?  Nothing has changed for so long that we’ve reached a new normal.  Maybe I should stop whining about you not talking to me, since I can’t change that, but I don’t expect that to change, either.  I know you’re in control,  so whenever you feel things need to be different you can let me know.  Don’t be too subtle, though; you know I can’t take a hint.  Maybe I’ll let you know when I’m over you.  Probably not.  By the time I’m over you, what will it matter?

I suppose I still love you.  I lust after you, anyway.  Is that an improvement or a downgrade?  It’s easier, in any case, being so far outside the realm of possibility as to be unencumbered by hope.  Can you believe that I can desire your body? a body you don’t like all that much yourself?  Or is lust another of those things you take for granted from men, as if it were less a personal, individual desire than  universal biological imperative indiscriminately applied?  (Do you lust?)  Lust is maybe all I have left for you.  If I can’t access your mind or heart, I can at least imagine the feel of your skin, the contours of your flesh, the smell of your hair, the taste of you lips.  Clothes can’t hide your shape; they are no defense against my imagination.  You are naked.

I did not intend to talk to you like this, Julie.  I did not intend to talk to you at all, but you are a more tangible audience than (most of) my other readers and it’s been you I’ve been talking to all along, anyway, right?  I’ll feel the need to keep talking, but you can’t stop me as easily as you did with A Bright, Ironic Hell, with an indirect attack through one of my readers.  My obeisance will not be granted so easily; that I am doing you harm will need proof this time, because my hope is no longer on your side.  You can rid yourself of me as easily as I (inadvertantly) rid myself of Pascal–with honesty.  Ah, what scales would fall then!  Is that what you want? for me to see you as ordinary, unexceptional?  How would we get along then?  I bet you really couldn’t go back to that.  Could I?  Does it matter?  Think about it and get back to me.  You’ll be surprised by what you feel.

What Lies on the Surface

The Picture, the one of Julie I can’t show you, was taken nearly two years ago.  The picture is much different now, but with which eyes am I seeing the difference?  I’d worked with Julie  for about a year by then, and my hopes for most of that time were no less modest than they ever were relative to any attractive and eligible woman my age:  Don’t embarrass myself in front of her and try not to show her my attraction.  It’s amazing I didn’t blow that the first time we met.  Or did I?

Julie was the last to join our crew before the library opened a month later.  On that day, we gathered in the meeting room and were given a personality survey and the results of our Meyers-Briggs tests.  On the survey, we were to list so-many regrets and so-many dreams, then tell one of each to the room.  Only my regret and her dream do I remember.  “I regret buying my first car.”  My last one had given me up just a month before.  The HR rah-rah who facilitated the gathering said to the room, “Wow, that must have been one bad car!”  (The meaning was lost on her, but James got it, at least.)  Julie’s dream:  “I would most like to take a bike tour of Scotland.”  We had not been introduced.  Upon first seeing her, upon her entry into the meeting room, I had sized her up only as attractive and maybe my age, though the extent of graying in her hair made me wonder if she weren’t actually older.  I don’t remember which came first, my assumption that she was married or my hope that she wasn’t.  At lunch the assumption was dispelled.

At the break I sought her inside but spotted her outside from Children’s walking toward a small  semi-circle of benches.  I beelined for it.  It’s only now that I think of how bold that was of me.  If it had been a simple case of attraction–if I’d thought she was girlfriend material–I’d never have sped down there and asked if I could join her, but I was excited to find someone who longed to do what I’d done twice and longed to do again.  I was after a friend.  Perhaps I hadn’t even found her attractive then.  Coming on strong (read “needy”) is, in my history, the dominant characteristic of the pursuit of friendship, and this was no exception.  Within a few minutes, Julie knew my parents were from Pittsburgh, I was half-Scottish on my dad’s side and Campbell on his mom’s side.  I look back on the encounter and think, “What a dweeb I was!”  I’m sure she marked me off right then and there as boyfriend material.  Soemhow, amidst all my chatter, I found that she had been to Scotland twice already–with her mom as a graduation present, and to see Trashcan Sinatras, her “favorite Scottish band.”

The next day, she gave me a sticky note with the titles of their four albums.  Her handwriting mesmerized me–he “a” approximated the typographic one, and the “e” was a “c” with a slash through it.  Soon after, she lent me two of the titles, I’ve Seen Everything and Happy Pocket.  I played them quite a bit, and on the way home from a Vegetarian Society picnic Stacey took us to on July Fourth, four days before the library’s grand opening, I told her that one song, “Earlies” from I’ve Seen Everything, was “impossibly beautiful.”  I had not talked to her all day, unable to muster conversation, because, by then, I was already hopeful of more than friendship and could not relax around her; and, so, desperate as I was to be with her, I could feel her discomfort with my presence and didn’t push myself on her.  She didn’t remember “Earlies” in particular and I was disappointed, having hoped to connect with her that way.  A month or so later, she asked after her cd’s, and I replied that I was “wearing them out.”  She wasn’t amused, and I was annoyed and a little hurt.  I put them in her basket the next day.  She never mentioned it.  (That annoyed me, too.)

What happened between that summer and the following spring, when I finally had to write, I’m not sure, though I can guess without too much strain on my imagination that I became more and more nervous around her, less and less able to talk to her, less and less able to be myself, and more and more the awkward dweeb dying for her attention.  A Bright, Ironic Hell, of course, takes it from there.

I really wish you could see the picture.  The proverbial “thousand words” allotted it wouldn’t, being mine, come close to doing it justice.  The most interesting–and annoying–aspect of the picture is the perspective:  Julie is not looking at the camera, but just to the left of it, as if she were attending a reporter while the cameraman filmed.  Gay Lynn, who took the picture, told me that Julie, in dramatic jest, had thrown her head forward to cover her face with her hair then thrown it back to expose her face again, at which moment Gay Lynn snapped the shot.  The annoyance is in not being able to look directly into her eyes:  She’s not looking at me.  Perhaps her eyes would have been a different if she had.  I usually describe her eyes as dark blue, but in the picture they are gray.  I actually had a disagreement with Thomas about it, and he said he asked her the next day, and she stepped right up to him and stared the foot upward into his eyes and confirmed his conviction.  I said, “That’s not what I see when she looks at me.”  The storm rolls in when our eyes meet.  Her tossed hair thinkly veils her near eye.  The flash glistens lightly on her chin, nose and high, round, taut cheekbone.  Her smile gleams with an upper row of perfect teeth, nearly all of which are visible.  Her thin, mostly gray hair lies flat and styleless but shiny clean to the sides of an off-center part.  Her eyebrows are light brown, and I can only assume her hair was also once that color, but I have difficulty visualizing it.

What do I see now?  Almost nothing is the same but for the hair.  The smile I never see.  The Julie I see now seems to sag under various weights–her mother’s death obviously the heaviest.  Her skin has lost it smooth luster, and her hands betray a Julie older than her years.  There is the weight of what might have been and what’s left sandwiching the meager filling of what is:  a barely adequate salary, a life barely lived, hardly loved.  Julie will be fifty in Semptember, a fact no one would be wise to remind her of, as she’s been calling herself old for at least a couple years now.  In the background of her picture is a book, a tour guide to Scotland gleaned from the donations.  It’s still there.  I wonder how that dream has fared.

Me?  I had a picture taken, too, minutes after Julie’s.  I’ll show it to you when I find it.  That was me at the moment I began to transcribe the journal I’d started two months before into A Bright, Ironic Hell.  If you’ve read that, you know how my picture has changed.  I have my own catalog of misspent moments and maps of wrong turns, but falling in love is not among either.  What is falling in love but a hope of being fallen in love with?  How rarely that hope is realized doesn’t diminish it.  Sometimes hope is all there is–is, in fact, the last thing one can give up.  Through all the bitterness, cynicism and despair, hope prevails–transcends.  I may never get back to Scotland to walk the drove roads or visit the homes of my favorite writers–that all hinges on practicality–but I expect love to find me, despite there being nothing I can do about it, because I believe it, and there’s always hope.  The real picture I can’t show you–yet–is of that hope realized.

Pedalling to Distraction and Back

There was a moment Friday, alone in the workroom on a third straight Julie-less day, that I thought, Maybe her way is the only way to do this.  It seemed, all of a sudden, that my asking for resolution from her is like asking for justice for blowing the cover off A Bright, Ironic Hell:  No one wants it but me.  Even my believing that it would be the right and best thing for everyone doesn’t make it so.  Who has any stake in resolution or justice but me? and are they victories worth winning?  What damage have I done, not letting go?  But I’m getting myself down.  Pretty soon I’ll have to be asking justice of myself.

On a rare Sunday without the kids, I thought I’d try to think as little of Julie as I could , not work myself up into the usual frenzied dread of the next day.  I headed to Carytown after lunch with a Zone Perfect bar and a navel orange.  Of all the places I wanted to go, only Plan 9 was open.  I bought six cd’s–Stranglers, Simple Minds, Sparks(2), Spoon, and Elvis Costello.  Three hours in Carytown, still bustling despite most of the shops closed, and I hadn’t spoken to anyone besides a guy asking for spare change.  Lonely and disappointed, I headed further east, to a headshop, Katra Gala, that Judy told me her son had some glass pieces in.  I thought I’d get Colin something as I hadn’t for her birthday just passed.  We were alone, the clerk and I, and finally I had someone to talk to, if not of anything consequential–the proliferation of such shops in Richmond, the legal euphemization of “reefer” into “tobacco,” “bong” into “water pipe,” etc.  I wasn’t attracted to her, though she was cute in a way and very friendly.  I probably had twenty years on her, what I consider to be an unbridgeable cultural gap for the purposes of romance.  It was enough for me, though, to have made her laugh.  I love to make a woman laugh.  (I got one genuine laugh out of Julie, long ago, pre-blogs, when someone mentioned the coming time change, and I said, “Finally, my clocks will be right!”  But I’m supposed to be forgetting about Julie.)  After about twenty minutes, and not having bought anything, I got a fillup of my water bottle from her and left for points yet further from home.  I ate my orange in my alma mater’s Shaeffer Court.  VCU has changed in seventeen years, but I probably blend in better now than then, with the long hair and bike.  I made no connections with my fellow students back then, being too old but not too old enough, I guess, and looking every bit the married man part.  In the time I ate my orange I made no connections, either.  Then, a few more miles east, maybe twelve miles from home, to James’ doorstep on Tobacco Row.  He lives in a secured building so I had to call his cell.  I had to leave a message:  “Hey, I’m outside your door.  I guess I’ll hang around a bit doing…I don’t know what.  Hope to talk to you soon.”

In Shockoe, nine blocks closer to home, at the end of 13th Street, I sat at the foot of a former monument, its plaque pried off, its statue cut from the steel beam that now protruded, jagged and rusted, from a crudely cemented pyramid of large, smooth stones, and ate my nutrition bar.  My phone rang as I finished.  James was on the canal on one of his writing walks.  He didn’t know his phone had rung until he opened his backpack to stuff in his notebook and it alerted him to my message.  I invited him up.  He was only a block away.

James had been writing poetry, a new medium for him, he confessed, but one he felt to be the best to express his latest Kristen inspiration.  Kristen is a waitress at Bottom’s Up, a pizza restaurant and watering hole, and James is in love with her.  He told her so, too, drunkenly, at a Super Bowl gathering at the eatery.  Guess what?  She didn’t run screaming to management to have him shut up!  (What? me bitter?)  He’s had that luck twice since he left the library, and though neither girl felt the same way toward him, they were (and are, in Kristen’s case) still friendly with him.  Kristen actually appreciates his company.  Simply the extrovert’s advantage, methinks, though James is quite bashful around women to whom he’s attracted.  However, his bashful is probably equivalent to my brashful.  (His cute would be my creepy.)  But Kristen is a lesbian, something James knew long before his declaration.  Hope for romance is suppressed by rationale and his concentration at making a friend of her, which he seems to have pretty well in hand.

James and I sat under the budding oak at the base of this monument to political correctness for a couple hours.  Of course, Julie came up but I diverted the conversation to the state of the libary–our attrition, the continued militaristic culling of our not-even three-year-old collection, and the bookstorification of the public library due to its unfounded fear of competition–until both the sun and my blood sugar fell to warning levels, and I had to go.  Knowing I couldn’t get home for The Simpsons, I got Chinese takeout in Carytown and ate on the sidewalk.

I’m never in a hurry to get home from the city, where on my bike I’m an actual vehicle and people are not only allowed to walk but are given places to walk on and to.  Would you be eager to come back to a place where you are considered an obstruction–even by police–if you aren’t driving? where cars honk at you every day (yes, every day) and people yell at you, “Get the fuck off the road!” and “Pedal on, you faggotty ass sonofabitch!”?  It was nine-fifteen when I got home.  I didn’t read or write or watch tv, or even listen to any of my new music, but soaked in a warm bath and went to bed.

The Sunday outing worked to a small but significant degree, though I could not, in my deepest dread have imagined a worse Monday than the last.  It was a Monday better than most.  Our first encounter was sudden and gave neither of us time to throw up but the most meager guard.  I even almost said, “Good morning,” but it just wouldn’t come out.  Instead, we settled for brief, honest eye contact and shy, tight-lipped smiles.  Thomas made her blush later that day–I could see it sixty feet away–and I was jealous and sad, wishing I could do that again, but the next hour, when I was on the desk and Julie was again shelving dvd’s in front of me, I again stared at her as she worked, but, this time, could not work up a passion:   She was there, and little more, though, still, I could not stop staring.

At the store that evening I seemed to be attracting looks and smiles, and at checkout was transfixed for a moment in the clerk’s hazel eyes as she handed me my bags.  If only I knew how this state was induced, I’d climb into that bottle and close it up behind me.  Is it a glimpse of who I really am? of what I could be for someone else? a preview of my reclaimed life?  Sometimes I can almost visualize–literally see–the distance between Julie and my own life.  I can almost take a deep, calming breath and say, “I can do this,” and choose to have my life back, to let Julie go.  Spring is well and truly here, and I don’t want to miss it as I did the last two.

All of those ideas and strategems and conclusions my brain wrought in A Bright, Ironic Hell have turned out to be true, according, now, to my heart.  Before Julie even knew about that blog, before I even admitted I was in love with her, I screamed for separation from her.  It’s been nearly two years since I started writing about this (though it seems like ten).  What would I have to say without her? What would I need to say?  Feeling her departure imminent, I have my last words to her ready.  I will not speak them to her or even write them here (now).  A card will go ’round, and I will write them there, for her and everyone else after me to read–one last embarrassment, one last public announcement that, this time, she can’t drag me out to a coffee shop to avoid.  Her leaving would be a good riddance for me, though, of course, I would miss her; but the void would be filled, I suspect, and hope, by deep calming breaths, a life of my own, a heart that beats more like a man’s instead of a hummingbird’s, and a heart I can give to someone who wants it.  I can do this.

Stuck in the Middle with Me

Pascal has cooled since our spat, and I miss it.  I suppose that beyond feeling flattered was the knowledge of being appreciated without judgment or stipulation, even being a source of inspiration.  But did I step off a pedestal when I protested his passion?  My insecurity couldn’t believe someone could feel such a way for me.  Did Julie feel any of this when I told her she “fascinated” me? or when she found out about being the object of a blog?

Pascal and I have been talking about Julie.  I sent him some pictures of myself, and he asked for a picture of Julie, so I sent him The Picture that nudged the little snowball on its way down the mountain to where we are today, The Picture I am terrified to have but will never relinquish.  Upon seeing it, he said, “Besides being pretty, she is warm, generous, and open.  Her smile shows [it].”  I replied, bitterness clouding the truth, “She has not been that to me in over a year.” 

Pascal called me a “neurotic romantic,” and how could I disagree?  He understands me.  That’s what I want.  Not advice.  No one’s given me any of that I haven’t given myself, and even from me it’s just rationale.  Pascal listens without pitying me, without scrambling for words to make me “feel better.”  Even my family can’t listen the way Pascal does.  A Bright, Ironic Hell elicited embarrassment from my father, self-guilt from my mother, threats of intervention from older sister Kevyn, and advisement to seek therapy from psychologist, younger sister Shawn.  I don’t know if youngest sister Colin read it.  I’ve let none of them know about Satellite Dance, and I would refuse to talk to them about it if they brought it up.  The writing is my therapy and the intervention.  What might I have done with these emotions had I not had this outlet?  What kind of fool would I have made, and still be making, of myself if I had not picked up a pen, instead?  My father would say I’d made fool enough of myself this way, and the rest of the family would just think it, but I’m no more fool than anyone else and probably less of one than anyone who cannot or will not take a good hard look at heir pain and try to accept it and love it, listen to it and hold it.  I cry as I write this, and I’m not ashamed or afraid of it or pity myself for it.  It’s how I feel, and if you cry as you read this then I guess you understand.

I told Pascal I missed his passion.  He was amused and not at all surprised.  He said it is my “seduction assets”–”all of you from head to toe and inside.
Knowing how to please and be desired…hair on your chest. Your
fore arms, your eyes, lips, fair, cock behind sexy trousers…” –that I am insecure of.  Though my imagination is no less vivid, I would describe Julie’s seduction assets a bit more subtlely, but they are no less powerful.  I want to enumerate them now, as I stare at The Picture, but my pen falls.  I can see only the woman I miss.

When I Get Writer’s Block, It Will Be “Antagonistic”

When the first two lines of my novel came to me, I was suddenly more conciliatory toward myself.  (But it was also my birthday, and I still feel good about birthdays as long as I can share them with someone, and I was treating Matt and Hinckley at Joe’s Inn as I did last year.)  Conciliatory in what way, I’m not sure.  I may be using the wrong word.  For what should I apologize to myself?  I have been very hard on myself lately, but as a drill sergeant to his “maggots”–to force change, if not conformity.  I don’t know if I’ve graduated the basic training, whether I’ve made myself a better person, but I know I deserve better treatment.  So does Julie, of course, and I thought that would follow.  For a start, I thought I could ask how her mom was doing (I’d heard she’d taken a bad turn) but not show any interest toward Julie herself–not to continue my disdain but to keep the feelings between us as much out of the way as possible.  I thought I could ask about her family holiday.  I couldn’t do anything.   An hour on the circulation desk together would have been the perfect opportunity, had I taken it, but before I’d even stepped onto that road I could see the end of it–the hope that Julie would love me; that I’d laugh at all my silly machinations, accept her as simply a coworker, and get on with life, only to have her then see me as the sensitive, well-meaning man who found her fascinating….  You (and Hollywood) know the end of that fantasy.  Absurd.  So, the hour was silent between us.  I didn’t even dare glance at her for fear of betraying my interest.  I have trouble now recalling her face.  I see her only from behind now, and when I look at her I stare.  It’s the best view my pride will let me take.  I try not to argue over whether or not I have feelings for Julie, for what I insisted while I was in love with her–that this was not an affection of convenience–now seems untrue:  There she is, here I am, there we are–why not?  Pure practicality, easily put off.  No love, so why bother?  I look at my verbal sparring on these pages about my receptivity to love and its chances of finding me and I know that there’s nothing to do, either, about my feelings toward Julie.  The think is, I’m still bitter about allowing her to put a stop to A Bright, Ironic Hell and angry at myself for not questioning her on just how this blog was hurting her.  I considered it, then, an act of compassion to end BIH–and it was–but, increasingly, I think that what I was hurting was her vanity, because she didn’t even have to read the blog, and I see myself as weak to have bowed to such a shallow god.  It’s only unanswered questions that keep my hurt alive.  “Conciliatory” is definitely not the word I should have used.