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.

“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.

More Than a Kewpie Doll at Stake

She wore a short denim skirt and white panties.  The skirt I noticed when she walked through the library security gates, the panties when she knelt to find her hold on the shelf–a bright triangle between shiny tanned knees.  She stood empty-handed.  I followed her legs to her face, reaching it as she turned to me at the circ desk.  I locked onto her eyes, smiled, and silently invited her to come talk to me.  Her smile accepted.  Her hold was not where she had looked for it because it was waiting at the window for her to driveup for it.  I recognized her name when I scanned her card and knew that she picked up all her holds there, though I’d never actually seen her at the window.  I got it for her.  The title was something like When Food Is Love.  As our engagement was mutual, at parting I gave her the test:  How long would she maintain eye contact as she left?  She dropped her eyes to her book and slid it off the counter to her other hand, and as she turned to the entrance her near eye swivelled to me and smiled.  If the same light hit my eyes, I suppose I returned the same.  I’m sure I felt the same.  I watched her out the security gates then turned back to her name, still on the monitor before me, and clicked on it.  Fifty-four years old!  You’re kidding me!  I was pegging her for five years my junior not three years my senior.  She suddenly became even more attractive.

Such an encounter as that is now my goal for my hour on the circ desk.  Accepting that that won’t always happen doesn’t tempt me to lower my standards but to practice as intensely as possible.  And that I don’t practice on every woman but the ones I find most attractive shaves my opportunities to the bone.  (I’m a picky guy.)  But I’ve stumbled onto something–speed dating at its quickest and least embarrassing.  Simply, it’s first-eye-contact.  In that moment is the most significant moment of the relationship–in fact, the moment that decides the possibility of that relationship even happening.  And if that moment tells me it’s not happening, where’s the rejection?  Brilliant!  It starts with self-accepting the initial attraction and then conveying it.  I saw this woman (whose name I will withhold for compromising her vanity) before she knelt in front of the holds shelf, but she did not look my way until she didn’t find her book.  I was already attracted to her; now I had to let her know by looking in her eyes.  That she returned my smile with her own did not necessarily mean she was attracted to me–I could have just been a friendly face willing to help her–but it did mean she was willing to accept my friendliness.  That’s all I can ask, isn’t it?  It’s easy to discreetly test the waters from that point, as we are now open to each other, relative to being strangers.  After the initial positive connection I do not fear tripping over my tongue or saying something inane or innappropriate and have little trouble maintaining eye contact; plus, I will do anything she asks and offer to do yet more.  But how can I be sure I’ll see her again?  I can’t be sure I’ll be on the desk the next time she comes in, or on the window when she picks up there.  That’s why I have to intensify my practice.

Matt invited me over for lunch Memorial Day.  Being a bachelor (or just being me), I accepted the free meal.  “Oh,” he added, “Chris invited us over for a cookout later.  Do you think you’d wanna come?”  “Yes!  To tell you the truth, I would hope to see Jackie there.”  I told him about seeing her at the yoga studio.  (He doesn’t read my blog.)  “I really could use the classes,” I told him, “but I haven’t done anything about it because it still feels like a pretense to see Jackie.”  Well, guess what?  It must have been.  My hopes were already in the way when we got to the cookout, so my tongue was tightly knotted.  When someone asked, “Jackie?  Where’s Brian?  Is he working?”  i knew my game was over, but I was as relieved as I was disappointed–and I no longer felt the nine-mile trip to the yoga studio was worth my Wednesday morning.  At least I hadn’t committed myself to the hope and inflated it beyond proportion.  I could easily have done that in the months since I’d seen her, but unlike the months it took me to ask Julie out, I wasn’t reminded of my hopes by seeing her every workday.  If I’d been paying attention when we first saw each other at the cookout, I’d have already seen in Jackie’s eyes that our interests were not correlative.  My day wasn’t ruined; it’s knee wasn’t so much as skinned; it didn’t so much as cut itself shaving.  There was no lament or woeful wail, but a shrug and “Oh, well.”

I play on.  I keep looking, keep looking into eyes, looking for…what?  A connection, then a deeper connection.  It’s there, somewhere, in someone’s eyes.  It’s not a game–I shouldn’t call it that–and it isn’t play or sport.  I might know what I’m after, but getting it doesn’t get me the broken tape and the top step on the tri-level dais.  No medal will be hung around my neck, but a millstone might be lifted from it.  This is serious work and might amount to a life’s-work in the end, but…but the thought is too complex for me to express adequately, and, despite my normal analytical bent, I get the feeling that I should accept it being so, that even an understanding, much less an explanation of what I’m doing is not only unnecessary but detrimental:  Codifying what I do is what makes this a sport, a game for its own sake.  I want to see beautiful women; I wnat to meet them and talk to them.  I want to fall in love; I want to love myself.  That I feel good doing what I’m doing only means I believe I’m doing the right thing.  Whatever comes of that must be what I deserve, and the only way to accept what I deserve is to know I’m doing right:  There’s my circle.  I have to trust it not to be a snake eating itself.

What Is This Position Called? and Can I Ever Hope to Get Out of It Again?

After all, maybe there’s Jackie.

The weekend after Christmas, Matt invited me over for dinner.  He also invited Chris, who I hadn’t seen since his party Memorial Day, when I’d hoped to see Jackie.  In the second grade, when I was still an outgoing kid, Jackie was my “girlfriend.”  On the side of my house one day after school, Jackie asked, “May I hold your hand?”  “Okay,” no big deal.  I didn’t see her over the summer.  When the school posted the new rolls on the classroom windows in August, I couldn’t find her name.  Until I moved into the city five years later, I didn’t know where she’d gone.  Once again, we shared a neighborhood, but in the ten years I lived there, I never saw her, never went to the same school.

Chris had a Super Bowl part in 2006 (2007?–the last year Jerome Bettis was with them).  When Jackie walked in we were introduced.  She said, “Didn’t you used to be Kevyn’s brother?”  “I still am,” I answered, not a little peeved at the second-hand recognition, but amused by its wording.

At dinner, Chris said to me, “Jackie was asking about you.  She was real sorry to miss my party, because she’d hoped to see you.”  “I had hoped to see her, too,” I said.  Wow.  Interest.  Mutual interest!

Chris dropped me off home that evening.  I told him as I left the car, “Would you tell Jackie I asked after her.”  “Sure.  I’ll see her Saturday.”  So it’s been how long?  Four weeks?

Back in the summer, I overheard Julie tell Tammy she’d brought her a brochure from a yoga studio.  “Yeah,” she said.  “I sometimes ride my bike in Bryan Park, and then I go to this coffee shop I like on MacArthur….”  Stir Crazy.  She was talking about Stir Crazy, the scene of that humiliating non-date of ours.  How could she go back there, much less claim it as a favorite of her own?

Monday was a holiday, for Martin Luther King.  Though Stir Crazy is nine miles away, I was determined to get there, despite Caffespresso being within walking distance.  I’d already had my coffee and it was already three when I was ready to go, but I’d finished my errands–dishes, clothes, groceries–and had the rest of the day free and clear.  This yoga studio is at the opposite end of the short retail strip from Stir Crazy.  Jackie, a massage therapist, works there.  I hadn’t really come for the coffee.

I wasn’t sure I’d recognize Jackie–I couldn’t form her face from memory–but I knew who I was looking at when two women stopped in front of the coffee shop between my bike and me inside:  The long chestnut hair curling lazily at the ends, the sharp nose, the spark shooting from the eyes nearly buried in the wrinkles of an open-mouthed smile.  They didn’t come in but continued on.  I leisurely finished the americano I hadn’t needed and followed.

The two women were at the counter.  I acknowledged the one I didn’t know, bashful at the possibility of recognition.  (Much as I wanted it, I was afraid of giving away the game.)  I asked for information, and Jackie moved away, down the hall.  Helen gave me a brochure and explained the various classes.  The only one that fit my schedule was Jackie’s.  Helen asked me what brought me in, and, stumbling in my mind over the urge to confide my pretense, I finally mumbled, “I can’t say.”  Whether Helen sensed an ulterior motive or just chalked up my havering to a muddy mind, she did not press me but immediately offered me a tour.  In each room of the converted post office I looked first for Jackie.  When we found her and were introduced, Jackie’s eyes flashed.  “Burns?”  I didn’t correct her.  “Um-hmm.”  I made no pretense at the “surprise” of finding her here.  We hugged.  Helen left the rest of the tour to Jackie.  I reminded Jackie of the Super Bowl remark and she laughed at herself.  She gave me her card and we hugged at parting.

I know this sounds dangerously like pursuit, and I won’t deny that it is, but I actually have been seeking yoga instruction for quite awhile.  Of course, I might still be seeking if I hadn’t found Jackie at it, but she’s as good a reason as any to end that particular pursuit.  Don’t think that I’m going to push the love agenda, either.  I’m not in love with Jackie and will not pretend to be so.  I don’t know Jackie yet.  Maybe I can’t fall in love with her, but maybe I can enjoy a friendship.  The hope is there, of course, but I’ll give awareness precedence over expectation and appreciate what’s given me.  Maybe.  I hedge my bets on the future against the lessons of the past and the realities of the immediate.

It Doesn’t Matter How Many Times You Click Your Heels Together–You Never Left Kansas in the First Place

Stacey is letting Eric go.  (Most magic is an illusion.)  Not only does she not want to be involved with a married man, but he can’t see her “past the physical.”  She believed him when he told her she was beautiful, and she was flattered.  When he had to get home Saturday night from her place, he had a tear in his eye.  He said he was very happy.  Stacey did not feel the same way, having already decided she wasn’t all that attracted to him after all and feeling that his attraction to her wasn’t deeper than her skin, but she didn’t denigrate his tears.

Now she’s going to break it off, and she’s asking my advice.  I’ve missed that.  When she sided with Chris when he blew open A Bright Ironic Hell, I had difficulty forgiving her, and for a while she was just a twice-a-week ride to work.  Now she’s asking my advice on how to let Eric go, and I see an opportunity to redeem Julie’s pat blow-off of me and to ensure not only that this guy is treated respectfully and without condescension, but that any subsequent guy in her life who needs to be let go gets the same consideration.  I told her to be honest, don’t apologize for anything, don’t try to buck him up.  Tell him it won’t work out because he’s married.

Sounds easy.  Men have been let down with a lot less honesty, and they’ve accepted it.  It’s just been the way of those men.  That is, some men have too much pride to see resolution in being let down softly.  But an emotional and passionate life beyond rooting for a favorite sports team.  Last year I displayed my passion and was told both implicity and explicitly to cover it up again.  I think the reason that most men will accept the pat let-down is that they know what I had to be told, that emotion and passion are weaknesses in men.  Eric might cry again when Stacey lets him down.  I hope he does.  Stacey should be allowed to know how he feels, and he shouldn’t pretend he feels other than how he does.  It’s the best thing for both of them–and for me and you.