Magnum Hopus

Thursday I couldn’t be pulled from my writing to shave and shower for work, but I didn’t get on my bike ungroomed for my day off Friday.  I believe my priorities are straight:  Compared to my social life, work is little more than a paycheck, and as long as both Julie and I are there the paycheck is way too small.  I have work to do outside of the library that’s worth much more.

I got back down to Carytown, but my first stop was well past it–Quirk–an art gallery on Broad past VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University). 

Quirk

The exhibit of handcrafted painted bikes and bike accessories was quite a bit less impressive than I’d hoped, but it had at least brought me back to a part of town I hadn’t hung about since I was selling blood to supplement my paper route money.  (If Id’ known where to sell spunk, I’d be living off the interest of that fortune today.  Hmm….)  It is no longer the seedy neighborhood I knew, but chock-a-block  with art galleries, cafes, and eclectic shops.  I popped into a couple other galleries and ate alone in the

Harlem Cafe

Harlem Cafe.  I could have eaten across the street at Comfort, which just got a big writeup in a Richmond glossy, but that’s the kind of thing that brings in the outsiders and squeezes out the locals, and I didn’t want to be one of those or be among them.  My Caribbean jerk chicken sandwich was excellent and cheap.  I asked the waitress about the place, prefacing with, “I always worry about a place when I’m the only person in it,” but she said they’d been open several years, but that most of their business was at night, with parties, music, and open-mic events.

I was disappointed to find the Richmond Book Shop closed.  Even in my college days a textbook’s toss away and in my woozy, blood-deprived meanderings I never managed to stumble in there despite the decadent allure of the faded posters and hand-written signs leaving only slits to peer through into a murky treasure trove stacked to the high ceilings.  At least that’s what I imagine is inside:  The sun and dirt on the storefront fill in the cracks between the postings, the latest of which, taped under “Closed,” read “Sorry.  It’s just too hot.”  In one of my rare silver-lining discoveries, I just sighed and thought, “Well, there’s incentive to get back down here.”  It’s at least another  mile past Carytown that I wouldn’t otherwise justify if I weren’t already headed to see James on Tobacco Row.

In a triangle park behind Shafer Court, on my way back west, toward Carytown, I stopped to call James.  He didn’t answer, and I moved on.  It would have been nice to see him, but I would have spent the rest of the day and probably quite a bit of the evening with him, stimulated enough with conversation but diverted from my agenda–simply, to talk to people I don’t know. See, in light of my desperation I have to parse my hopes, bring the future closer to the present, live not for love but for what becomes love.  I can’t pull love from another’s eyes, though I might see it there; it isn’t mine.  It might be some day, that love, but not from the eyes I hope or expect to see it in.  I’ll never know it until I’ve met it, smiled to it, said hello to it.  And that’s what I do now.  It might not yet be love I’m meeting on the sidewalks and in the shops, but aren’t the chances a lot better out there than in here?

It was yet another very hot day in Richmond, so that was motivation enough to duck into this shop and that.  Plan 9‘s CD collection has shrunken yet smaller in reaction to the new inventory tax.  I thought I’d augment my Belle and Sebastian collection, but their bin had been wiped out in the two weeks since I’d bought Dear Catastrophe Waitress.  I left with only a card announcing their appearance in D.C. in October, to which I probably can’t go.  (When I got home I slipped the card into a book, All Quiet on the Western Front, to flatten it back out, but forgot to remove it when I returned the book.)  I’ll give the missing CD’s a few weeks to show up in the used bin.

I crossed the street to the toy store, World of Mirth, where I’d gotten the l.s., to buy it’s companion magnet.  I’d retrieved the l.s. from Julie’s cabinet the day before.  It was more than half-exposed.  She had to have seen it. 

"Little something," retrieved.

Good:  Now she’ll know I’ve taken it back.  I decided to give it to Kevyn with its companion; she would appreciate it.  Thunder heralded the rain just before I stepped out into it.  I stood on the sidewalk and sighed, relieved, the soaking cooling my baked skin as the sidewalks cleared of shoppers scurrying for the shelter of recessed storefronts.  The light in the western sky told me it would be over soon.  I walked the away.  I didn’t get a block before it stopped.

Carytown has a psychic now, just past the 7-Eleven.  I don’t often walk up that far.  A sign hanging from the shingle announced half-off palm readings, now $10.  Without hesitation, I started to the door, but it said Closed, without apology, for the heat or otherewise.  I was more disappointed than at the bookstore.  I am a skeptic, but a hopeful one, and at the prospect of finding out (or being told, anyway) something positive about myself and being given some direction, I was willing to leave the skeptic outside and enter with hope.  (This from someone who can’t accept a god.)  This disappointment, as with the bookstore’s, will bring me back ever more hopeful of finding treasure.

I felt like buying myself a ring, so I went up another block to Alter Natives, because they’re local, non-profit and have interesting and inexpensive handcrafts.  The first thing the shopgirl said to me was, “Are you from Richmond?”  “Yep,” I answered, “born and–well, raised,” and I fessed up to my birth and six-month residencey in Hopewell.  I didn’t need to ask the same of her–not that I could tell through my particular atptitude for accent recognition or that her vitals were tattooed on her forehead–she told me:  She was from Chesterfield, came to the city to study world religions at VCU, and still lived down there in the Fan.  She appreciated the irony of my living carless in bike-anathemic Henrico County and having to pedal into town for all my fun.  It was just the two of us in there for half an hour before I left, but by the time I did we knew a lot about each other.  She even knows I’m open to love, because I had to ask her about the traditional way to wear the claddagh I’d just bought, and she looked it up on Wikipedia.  It’s on my right hand with the crown facing away from my heart. 

This wasn’t love, or even attraction–I didn’t give her The Eye–but a friendly, open conversation–all I can ask for right now, according to my adjusted standard.  Applicable, also, to this standard is the perceived need to always be doing what I can to be seen or make contact.  There’s still the reluctance to go home unsatisfied, but the satisfaction gets easier to find each week.

Leaving Alter Natives and heading back toward my bike, I wondered if I was heading home.  I stopped at the T where Belmont Street stopped at Cary to ponder the question.  Live music, unadulterated, undegraded, undiluted by the trip from studio to stereo, blasted crisp and clear.  My ears directed my eyes south down Belmont where they caught figures moving in a square of dark.  Without the warning thunder, it began to rain again.  I followed the sound to the sight.  The guitar and drum seemed slightly out of sync, but the closer I came to the music, the closer came the instruments to each other, as if I were uniting them with my approach.  They were a drummer and a guitarist in a one-car garage on the corner of an alley.  I sat down across the alley on a low wall that kept a tiny, sloping front yard from spilling on to the sidewalk and into the alley, but I hardly just sat.  The drum shoved me this way and that and pounded my foot into the grit, and the guitar, issuing with improbable volume and clarity from a ten-inch box that looked like a fifties radio, smoothed and rounded the rhythm in a wash of reverb.  All this and rain, too.

 ”Hey, man.  Mind if I join you?”

I turned.  “No, not at all.”

He introduced himself as Tyler.  I had a hell of a time getting my name through to him over the music and was tempted to let it go at Leon.  He’d just gotten off work at Weezy’s, a diner on Cary, and had been drawn as I had.  I was surprised there weren’t more behind him, in an unbroken line back to Cary.  Tyler’s glasses were held together at the temples with black electrical tape and tipped from the top toward his cheeks, as if looking down at his feet.  Sandy hair peeked from a dirty baseball cap.

“Man!” he said, “this is just the kind of music I’ve been looking to play!  The Band is my all-time favorite band, and these guys sound so much like them.”  I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so.

Tyler’s been in Richmond, via Harrisonburg, for five years.  He was in a bluegrass band up there, but hasn’t found a scene here to play in. 

The jam came to a consensual close after about twenty minutes.  I didn’t want to disturb the guys, but Tyler yelled, “Great stuff, man!”

“Thanks,” said the guitarist.

So I asked, “You guys gig anywhere?” hoping the verb didn’t betray my ignorance of the culture.

“No, but if you know of anyplace, let us know.”

I nodded.  Me?  Know of anyplace?  Do I look like I ‘d have connections?  I guess I must have at least sounded like it.

Tyler strolled across the alley to them.  I followed, reluctantly, feeling creepy not to.  Chris and Robert, guitarist and drummer, shared this cube with a washer and dryer lined on the wall near the opening, and a tv on top of them facing the wall.  Thin sheets of blue foam rubber suspended from the ceiling flapped lightly against the cinderblock walls in the breeze of a small box fan on the floor.

The rest of the band was in Georgia.  “They don’t get up here too often,” said Chris.  “What’s you band’s name?” said Tyler.

Chris looked at Robert, who shrugged but finally said, “Uh, the Chris Wickham Experience?”

Chris chuckled, said, “Yeah.”

Tyler offered his musicianship, and Chris took his email address.  Tyler’s effusing over The Band seemed to back Chris off a bit.

I watched Tyler shuffle up the alley, then asked Chris, “You think you’ll contact him?”

“I don’t know.  We need somebody, but….”

“Seems a bit sketchy,” said Robert, lifting his forehead from a cymbal he’d been tapping.

“Yeah,” said Chris, ” a little.”

“Well, you never know,” I said.

The rain had stopped.  I left them to their thing, hoping they weren’t rueing the intrusion.  Instead of going back to Cary, though, I trod up the alley the way Tyler’d gone. He’d disappeared pretty quickly, so I figured he lived along here somewhere.  Four doors up I was hailed from the bottom back porch of a duplex.  Tyler sat in a plastic chair at a plastic table.  I followed a buckled sidewalk under the shade of an elm, through a dusty yard the rain hadn’t reached through the tree.  Two concrete steps nearly met the wood porch that canted toward them.  On the table in a plastic glass painted with hibiscus floated sharp ice cubes in tea.  A glass ashtray behind it betrayed a roach.  Tyler’s eye’s betrayed he’d been smoking it.

“Want some?”

I did, but I knew I’d feel paranoid in public.  I told him that.

“That’s cool.”

The guys started up again.  It didn’t carry so well in this direction.

“They’re not going to get back to me,” Tyler said.

In the time it took me to get back to my bike I’d decided to see Winter’s Bone at the Westhampton.  All day I was sure I wasn’t going, that it would be a downer, but then, deciding that it wasn’t about the mood but the movie, and that the movie would probably be good, I headed that way, a couple miles closer to home.

I caught the seven o’clock show.  Of course, it was dark when I got out, and I knew the batteries in my headlight were as good as dead.  A man and a woman stood in front of my bike, talking.  I heard, from him, “structure” and “Catholic Church.”  He was talking about himself.  I crossed the street to take a picture of the theater, but the light was too low.  I continued to the 7-Eleven around the corner on Libbie and bought batteries.

They were–he was–still talking in front of my bike when I got back to it, and they were close enough to it that I had to step to the curb side of it to access the light.

“We were thinking of stealing your bike,”  the woman said to me.  Her hair was cleanly blond–no “dirty” to it–and thick and short.  Black-rimmed glasses hovered over sharp cheekbones aligned with a strong square jaw.

I looked into her brown eyes and said, “Couldn’t figure out the combination, huh?” 

“Nope.”  I’d expected something a bit more clever.

I opened the lock but didn’t leave.  My dinner, half a sub, was already spent, so I sat nearby and ate a nutrition bar from my satchel.  Still he talked about religion and himself.  She was listening, asking cogent questions, making intelligent comments, but she seemed engaged more on a professional level than a personal one.  I hadn’t seen them in the theater.  Perhaps they’d been in Phillip’s next door.  He began to seem much younger than she.  I began to think this was a first date, after an online correspondence.

As I approached my bike she said to me, “Really, we were going to steal your bike.”

“Well, I gave you a shot at it.  It’s been unlocked for five minutes.”

 ”Ah, but you were too close.”

I didn’t want to, but I glanced at the now-young man.  He was looking at her with a creeping dread of losing her attention, and maybe a little guilt for talking so much and precipating the loss.

“Better luck next time,” I said, and winked.  This was satisfaction.  I pedalled home behind a bright headlight.

There’s a long way to go yet.  The transfer isn’t happening.  I got sick of waiting to hear something, so I called the woman who’d sent out the solicitation.  She explained, apologetically, that this was just a flyer for interest, and that they do it every year (though not last year or the year before, believe me!) and put the responses on file in case of emergency openings.  So now Fridays can’t come soon enough and are more deserved each week as I pass through the yet-tighter gauntlet of Monday-through-Thursday of Julie.  Staving off the desperate aspect of my pursuit is contingent upon stockpiling these little satisfactions, making progress as much toward what I want as away from what I don’t.  This also means entirely ignoring Julie–not even looking at her from behind.  So I’m a creep or a jerk–or both–to her, but not caring what she thinks of me is as important as getting into town on the weekend.  I can’t afford to waste guilt on it.  How or if it will ever get better at work, I don’t know, but my efforts at making my true life better are what matter first.  I can’t even afford to care what you think of me.  Where I’m going I’ll get to following my own path.  I have a paycheck coming to me that’s much larger than Henrico County will ever give me.

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.

Or If It Can Even Pull the Weight

Maddox leaned over my desk and whispered, “Have you read your email?  There’s an email from headquarters about transfers, saying anybody could put in for one, and there’s a form to fill out.”  How cute of him to be so discreet, as if it was any secret that I’ve wanted to get the hell out of this branch for more than half the time I’ve been at Twin Hickory.  My application was in the interoffice mail bin five minutes after I opened the email.  It was a very simple form–name, position, branch,  three choices of transfer.  Tuckahoe was my first choice.  I left the others blank.  The email was not detailed.  I’m not sure why the library system is offering transfers or when the transfers will be made.  I’m already daydreaming about a new start, eight miles closer to home, a million miles from Julie.  I have been careful about what I’ve wished for.  I know what I’d be gaining and what I’d be giving up, and I know the gain would be the easier to accept and would grow more gainful with time.  The losses I hope would diminish proportionally, though their initial store is no doubt double the prospected gains.  I have worked a long time with many of the people I’d be leaving, and I’ve only recently begun to appreciate their camaraderie.

But the balance of gain would hang on Julie:  Which would leaving her be?  I can’t know until I leave.  My clamorous cries to be away from her are merely a desperate admission of a reluctant resignation:  What I can’t change I must get away from.  But at the end of a day of not looking at Julie, as I tug on my bike shoes, I sigh and wish I’d taken that last glance I’d told myself not to take before I snatched the water bottle from my desk and marched away down the hall to change.  This had been no victory, no heroic endeavor, but a cowardly shirking of conscience.  I miss Julie; I’ll miss her then.  I would miss her more than I would the coworkers that have cared to get to know me, and for longer.  If leaving is a good thing, I might not realize it for quite some time afterward.

Yet I stand in the cart and look back upon the road hope has pulled me along, and through the settling dust I can’t see the horse catching up.  The transfer is not guaranteed.  I don’t know how it will be decided to whom the request is granted or when it will be dedided, but the cart somehow still inches forward.  I want to shorten my commute from eight hours a week to thirty minutes.  I want to work in the community in which I live.  That’s all I know of what I really want–or, rather, of what I can actually reasonably ask for.  I wonder if the horse will ever catch up.

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.

When a Ten-Foot Pole Just Won’t Do

There is a lot to be said for the separation theory for getting over Julie.  By Monday, I will have worked with her for only four hours out of eight work days.  During that time without her, I became a silly, confident chatterbox at work.  The library has very nearly become the home I’d always hoped it would–a vast meeting house full of diverse ideas and open minds and hearts, and things that need to be said that are actually heard.

I talked with Valerie as I leisurely registered her for a card.  I have no doubt that everyone is Valerie’s friend.  She is intensely curious and entirely without social fear.  Valerie told me how years of military service on an island off the West Coast created her unusual accent, how she has had ten operations and has a terminal disease (she’s only forty-five), but she told me with neither self-pity nor a desperate grasp for mine.  She has died, she said, and she is not afraid of death.  “You know how love feels?  Well, what I felt was a billion times that.  But I came back.  My brother saw the sheet over my face going up and down.”  I tried to imagine that billion-fold love and could only stare with wet eyes into Valerie’s under the potato-chip brim of her cowboy hat.  She smiled, said, “Yeah,” and we both laughed, me with a tear running down a cheek.  “Don’t sweat the small stuff, Dion.  Those little details”–she pressed her thumb and finger together between us–”don’t mean a thing.”

Michelle is as mellow as Valerie is intense.  Michelle is Future Wife–only not.  The bike came back and I spent my lunch hour beside it with no return of the owner.  But I left a note this time, and while I was one the desk a woman stepped up and told me so.  I was disappointed at first sight–she was stout–but she was pretty and natural and in her low/mid-forties, near the low end of my age range.  Her son Michael, about ten or eleven, was with her (explaining the smaller bike near hers).  He was very patient (as was Brian, upon whom I’d sloughed my duties) as we talked for much of the hour.  She couldn’t tell me much about the bike (she got it at Goodwill), but she told me a bit about herself:  She’s from Santa Cruz, been in this area a few years, renting one of the few farms left in the area, keeps a community garden on land.  She cried for a three-hundred year-old oak that was taken down because it, supposedly, was in the way of a water line coming through.  When she found out I’d lived in Richmond my whole life she was surprised, by both my Mid-Atlantic (non-Southern Southern) accent and my liberal consciousness.  By the end of the conversation she’d become quite attractive, indeed, and she left me with an open invitation to drop by.  “We’ll throw something on the grill.  My husband’s laid-back–well, I’m laid-back and Michael’s laid-back.  My husband’s not laid-back.  But he’s cool.”  Ah, well. …

A younger woman (early thirties) flirted lightly with me as I helped her with the copier, but I was caught off-guard and put off my game.  I probably blushed.  I’m always shocked (and flattered) by younger women flirting with me.  Are they bolder than women my age or just enough less subtle about it that I’m actually able to recognize it?  I know it’s spring, and the human is no exception to the rutting instinct of the season, but if Julie were around how much chance would I give myself to find a mate?  I go to more trouble now to look my best on the days without Julie, and the weekend’s casual dress code gives me more leeway to be myself–out of the khakis and into the jeans and t-shirt.  I’m eager to get on the desk, where I can see (and be seen by) people and meet and talk to them.  The library is where I have to do that, because it’s where I like to be (most days), where I live much of my life, and where I’m most likely to meet minds and personalities meeting my needs and standards.  I’m saddened to think that I can have this only by closing myself off to Julie, but what else can I do?  I hate this game, where the rules tie my hands and stuff a sock in my mouth.  I’m leaving Julie those rules and playing by my own.

I had no intention of being bitter.  This was to be a celebration of a new direction, of territory reclaimed, but though I am off in a new direction, and I have reclaimed a little of what’s mine, the cost gives me pause, and Monday I will give back much that I gained over those eight work days, including a calm consience.  Or maybe I will talk to another Valerie or Michelle, or I’ll see the blushing woman again and get to say more than “Hi” to her.  Maybe I can actually do that with Julie in the library.  Have I gained that much distance?

Am I the Prince or Cinderella?

Someone is in love with me.  He is a reader.  His passion is startling and unabashed.  He is thousands of miles away across an ocean.  To say I’m flattered would be to marginalize his ardor.  No, “flattered” is rebuffing a friendly advance from a member of my own sex.  I’m kind, letting them know I’m both flattered and heterosexual. I don’t think I’ve ever hurt anyone’s feelings that way.  Angie,  describing a gay friend’s troubles, said, “Well, he chose to be that way.  I guess he doesn’t mind.”  A choice?  Imagine, getting all the attention I could handle–only, I don’t want a man.  Though being the idol of a man’s masturbatory fantasies is a little uncomfortable, I’m still flattered.  Hey,  someone  thinks I’m “hot and sexy”!

But am I in Julie’s shoes now?  I try to convince myself of the absurdity of that question, but I’m not laughing.  Pascal’s passion is flattering but frightening, like something I might have to defend myself against yet not trusting my battlements to withhold the onslaught.  Is that Julie?  Is Pascal’s passion also mine for Julie?  This is a mirror I really don’t want to look into, knowing and fearing the naked image staring back, saying, “Look at me!  Stop pretending I don’t exist!”–my other half, my compassion, my connection to humanity, my understanding of Julie, my total immersion in New Emotional World.  Yes, I’m in that world, but the umbilical to the old is long and tough.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t look.

Yet I’m feeling more vulnerable than perhaps I ever have.  I was a quivering wreck at work yesterday from the moment of our first non-encounter in the hall:  I stared, she glanced till recognition, then pretended not to see me as we passed one another.  I stared at her every chance–goddammit! why can’t I not look at her?–and was not discreet about it.  God, I must seem such a creep!  She came within inches of me, politely asking permission to squeeze in a book on a cart in front of which I knelt.  I mumbled assent and stumbled frantically out of the way, though I would rather have fallen the other way, into her.  Oh, what I wouldn’t pay for just a touch!  And another half day with her today before I’m away from her for a long weekend.  There is a chance, I know, for today to be better than yesterday, but I know, too, that it would take a leap beyond quantum proportions to affect it.  I would have to be the man I wish I were–assertive, confident, extroverted. My resolve to greet her when we first meet dissolves instantly when I see her eyes hardened against it.  Is it a challenge?  What if I stood up to it, actually smiled and said, “Hello, Julie”?  That would be more than a baby step.  Then I think of all I’m not allowed to say to her, and I want to resolve to say nothing till she speaks to me.  I know she’s trying, though, and it can’t be easy breaking through to me, either.  Besides the awkward encounters, Julie has tried to be nice to me, but my inability to respond in kind has not encouraged her.  I have to be the man and step up.  I can’t live this quivering, anxious life.  I imagine that man and know I could be him for Julie, given the chance.  Is it a chance I have to make, or is it a chance Julie has to give me?  I can’t see–or just can’t look.

What the Hell’s on the Other End of This See-Saw?

This emotional life isn’t easy to live.  How could it be, for someone not bred to it?  I used to refer to myself in this state of sensitivity as a “raw nerve” or an “open wound,” but it’s simply the opposite horizon from cold, rational arrogance.  It’s the words–they don’t know what to do.  The problem is not that I don’t trust the words, but that they don’t seem to belong.  They are humbled by a world they once dominated.  I’m not concerned with bringing the words back to dominance, but with how to express my heightened emotional sensitivity with the humbled words–and without irony.  The man behind the curtain has been exposed.  It’s time he fessed up to not being all-wise and all-powerful and to use his true skills to lift one from the knees he had cowed them unto.  Words have a lot to learn here.

Ten seconds of Julie Friday, and I was just about ready to hand the reins back over to Words.  Julie came in to shelve to make up some snow time.  When I first saw her, I thought, “Dammit!” and said, “Why does she have to be here?”–quietly, I hope.  She stayed in Children’s the entire two hours, I think.  Anyway, I didn’t see her again until I emerged from the mailroom into the adjoining corridor, where coats are hung.  She had just shrugged on her coat and was bending to pick up her plastic grocery tote.  Dammit, again, but I said nothing.  Her back remained to me even as I turned the corner around her, it turning with me.  I stared at her the whole time, but could not get through the shield.  I thought if I made eye contact I might be able to at least wish her a goodbye.  But I knew I wouldn’t, because I’d decided the moment I saw her there that I wouldn’t speak to her, and my conscience was taking the beating of its life.  For the next two hours I worked myself up close to tears.  When I wasn’t angry and self-hating, throwing books and smacking the computer screen, I was practically catatonic, heaving great sighs while staring at nothing.

I wanted someone to talk to.  On my weekend shift there are only three sympathetic choices–Angie, Megan, and Mike.  My intention, once I’d narrowed the field, was to bribe someone with at least a drink to listen to me whine for a while after work.  But Angie and Megan, I knew already, were going to second jobs after work, and Mike, who doesn’t drink, is, well…a guy, and, nice as he is, he is not experienced with women.  Anyway, I really wanted to talk with one of the women.  Faced with that impossibility, I suddenly felt better, relieved.  There was nothing I could do about it, so I let it go.  It was not even a decision but a a matter of course.  If my conscience was still beleaguered, at least the flogging had stopped.

That was also the moment I realized I had to speak to Julie–not have a talk with her, but say “Hello” or “Good morning.”  I can do that, though not much, if anything, else.  No small talk–I don’t want to hear “How are you?” because I can’t yet pretend to be on that casual a basis with a woman I’m in love with.  How could I possibly answer “Fine” when my temperature has just spiked two degrees, and I have to roll up my sleeves and open another buttonhole on the front.  By the time I left Friday, I was not exactly happy, except to be out of the depths I’d dug myself down into.

This emotional life, I know, is not just the opposite horizon but the other extreme on the spectrum.  Of course, I’m ultimately after a balance of the emotional and the rational but often overcompensation is the only way to tip the scale back to center.  I don’t know how much compensation is overcompensation, but surely I’ve made a difference.  If not, I have very long way to go yet.

Holding My Breath Waiting for Satan to Slip on His Ice Skates

Julie’s mother died last week, about a year after her stroke.  Still, I managed not to talk to Julie.  At best, I’m horrible at offering comfort in such a situation.  It was not a lack of compassion.  It hurt and hurts still to think of Julie alone in her mother’s house, her brothers eventually leaving town again to get back to their homes and families; Julie surrounded by her mother in the shape of what she left behind, sifting through the memories of intrinsically valueless things in a practical, necessary effort to distill sentiment into a portable burden, the burden anyone with such a loss carries.  And I’m jealous.  Her mother’s funeral was Saturday.  I was working.  So were others, but some still took the time to go.  Mike went, and I couldn’t have been greener, though I’ve always known he’s not attracted to Julie.  I was jealous of the attention Julie got without me, but if I’d been there, I’d have wanted her attention.  I told myself she wouldn’t want me there, as if my presence could possibly have dampened the surprise I’m told she felt upon seeing coworkers there.  Only for my sake was it best I wasn’t there.  Even now, when I consider how it would have been at least a nice gesture to be there, I wonder what kind of points it would have scored me.  How could I ever have thought I was worthy of her love or capable 0f giving her mine?

Julie took off today, the first workday after the funeral, and I spent the entire time thinking about her.  I will tomorrow, too, no doubt, as I avoid her, stare at her furtively, and try now and then to make eye contact.  I wish I knew what love was.  I want to know if that’s what I’m feeling for her.  I think I love her yet am not in love with her.  I think that’s possible.  I think it would help if it were.  But if I loved Julie I would be kinder to her, not expect and hope for so much from her.  I’m not going to say I’m a horrible person.  I’m not.  It hurts to be the way I am toward her, but I don’t know how to stop.

I thought about her on the way in to work, too, and by the time I got there I was angry, having yet again revisited her betrayal of A Bright, Ironic Hell to all the managers in the building and how a week later I get an “apology” passed through one coworker and another admitting she “overreacted.”  And I just can’t let it go.  When will I ever?  How far am I from love when I feel that way?

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.

John Gray Is From Uranus

Stacey didn’t take my advice.  Eric called her, she didn’t call him back.  She’d met Alex at church soon after she’d met Eric.  Alex was better.  When she told me about him, she didn’t call him The One–not for not wanting to but for knowing the scepticism of her audience.  I took news of Magic Alex with a mine of salt.  A couple of guys over the past year have been The One.  Now Alex is over.  He broke it off–too many red flags he couldn’t get past.  Before Eric, another guy had broken up with her–same thing.  The guy before that she just started to ignore.

See the trend?  When the guys break it off, they’re straightforward, honest.  Stacey breaks it off–sort of–by hoping it will go away if she ignores it.  The guys were not cruel–they didn’t want to hurt Stacey’s feelings–but they knew that it was best to be honest.  Stacey knew all that, too, so why couldn’t she be honest?  Now she’s embarassed to go back to that church or that store and the places the other guys worked.  There’s little sympathy coming from me.  I didn’t know any of those guys.  Stacey is a friend.  I don’t like to see her in pain, but the embarassment is the bed she made.  The one time I compared my difficulty with Julie to her difficulty in frequenting the places where she met these guys, she said, “But you didn’t sleep with her.”  “No,” I didn’t say, “but I was humiliated by her.  You didn’t have to sleep with those guys.”  Stacey knows I can’t side with her, that I feel she did Eric wrong, and that she’s got to lie in that bed.  I don’t speak Julie’s name to Stacey, and Stacey does her best not to whine about the places she can no longer go, and no one’s the better off.  Julie is not redeemed.

Nowhere Near “Postal,” Anyway

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

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

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

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

Cancel My Engagements

If I were to say that my life was hollow and lonely I’d be only half right–that is, in a proportion of each adding up to about half. I get home from work, and here I am, on the sofa. I could watch tv or read, listen to music, get on the computer, write–the same things I could do every day. I don’t want to do any of them. I run through the list like channels on the clicker. Nothing engages. I don’t even want to sit here writing this, but it’s the only thing that expresses how I feel. The other things just cover it up. Nothing much means much with no one to share it with. There’s only so much I can share with the kids that they would understand, and why would I tell them I’m lonely? Thirteen is an awkward enough age without feeling that your love isn’t enough to keep your father happy. The girls are nearly the entire portion of my life that is not hollow and lonely–that’s all they need to know. (Funny, by the time they are old enough to understand, perhaps they won’t care.) So I write and pretend I’m talking to someone who’s listening and is neither judging nor pitying me. I won’t talk to myself. I’ve heard it all before, and I’m not sympathetic or forthcoming with good advice. I don’t want a therapist, a professional listener and sympathizer with advice from books that’s been doled out to countless others before me. I want someone to be with.

Since Julie came back to work it seems my opportunities to connect with female patrons has shrivelled up, but the stress of working with Julie has simply hardened my mood and put me off my little game. Tap me with a hammer and listen to the echo. Shake me and you might hear the faint rattling of my marble of a conscience. Or is that Jiminy Cricket’s dessicated carcass? I’ve been judged and pitied at work for falling in love with Julie, so I come home to seek understanding, and all I have is pen and paper. I’d better stop writing or they’ll start pitying me, too. Now, do I watch a movie or have a drink?