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.

Ghost of Julie-Not-Quite-Past

No, I didn’t get to Carytown.  I didn’t even leave the apartment Friday until three, and that to do laundry.  I slept in, then read (Watership Down) and wrote (Twickory).  Carytown could not call me out to play.  The air was brisk and the sky cloudy, and I didn’t feel like preparing for a seven-mile ride in anything but optimum conditions.  The motivation was missing.  I couldn’t find meaning in going down there, but I could feel the desperation, the hope without confidence.  And I was feeling poor a week after paying rent and a week before payday.  I guess that all adds up to “I wasn’t feeling it.”  But it’s only going to get colder.  How much more motivated am I going to be three weeks down the road when I get another Friday off?  What else can I do in the meantime that can help me feel more a man worth having, and closer to having a warm, soft body to share a winter’s bed with?

Is this really desperation?  It’s what I want; it’s what I need.  Am I anything but impatient to have it?  I’ve done nothing desperate to reach my goal, don’t even know what I could possibly do to reach it besides what I do now.  It’s my introversion that defines desperation as any difficult necessary action.  Besides the aching desire, what else makes this mission seem so urgent?  Do I need to know?  I don’t think I really want to know, in any case.

Julie is only gone from the library, not from my mind.  Its’s hard to relegate her to the past when there’s still a chance of seeing her at library functions.  I don’t want to see her at those, because (among many other reasons) I still can’t say anything to her; but I still fantasize seeing her in public and telling her frankly how I feel about her.  Not that I’ve come to terms with those feelings; but as I will not likely get a chance to voice them to her, I have plenty of time to formulate them.  My pride holds onto an anger when all I really want to do is talk to her with compassion, not a personal agenda.  The truth is, she still fascinates me, and my curiosity won’t  be sated.  She deemed me unworthy of her trust.  That is her call to make.  I don’t care so much that she doesn’t love me, but I still want to love her. Why am I talking like this?  In my fiction I portray Julie in a much more compassionate light than my pride will let me in reality, perhaps because it’s the only place I can know her, where I can detach from my pride to see through her eyes.  But she has not gone far enough away to leave me alone with my imagination.  She would laugh in my face to hear me declare my compassion towards her, and I couldn’t blame her, but it nevertheless exists.  When I think of her now, I see a lonely woman likely to remain lonely, unable to expose smallest part of her soul to anyone.  Perhaps that sounds arrogant and condescending (and sour-grapes), but I know loneliness, and I feel sad thinking that I can’t help her, that I can’t be allowed to just listen to her pain.  Again, I know how I must sound, and you have every right to not believe me.  Why am I talking about Julie, anyway?  Because I can’t pretend I don’t think about her.  That’s me:  Closure comes only from resolution, and there’s no faking that–or getting it.

The urgency to find someone for myself is to get rid of Julie, and knowing that is what makes the mission desperate and me reluctant to indulge it, though I know also that otherwise I cannot move on:  I have to accept this tack as the best course toward the best resolution I can get and take it.  yes, I’m desperate, but I know what I want, and whether or not I know how to get it I have to make the effort, however clumsy or blind, to find it.  Trust and patience can preclude urgency and desperation, given the chance.  Carytown will wait for me.

To, From, or Nowhere at All?

The week has been passing slowly, but I’ve made little headway back into the outside world, and the purging of the workplace poison seems in no better hurry. The dreams have returned indoors, though I have been able to send them outside with stern lucid commands. Wednesday I finally talked myself outside, down to James’, where across a table over a bottle of merlot before a perfect soundtrack of handpicked music we talked until the wine was exhausted and the daylight nearly so. Despite his diminishing funds, James does not in the least regret his decision to quit the library to pursue a writing career. He feels called to it and wouldn’t trade the lifestyle for any other, except, maybe, that of a “successful” writer. He asked me how I might get out of the library now that it has become toxic, and I confessed to being trapped in a shrinking box, resentful of the attempts by displaced retailers (Greta and Julie) counting out their days to force me from a a job I love. “I’m just…I’m just…I’m just so…”–my voice disappeared in a whisper and a tear trickled over my cheek before I was able to finish–”disappointed. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt of not being that way.” My rubbery legs somehow got me–very slowly home, uphill all the way, but I was sober, if exhausted, when I got there and fell asleep around nine.

Early to bed became early to rise: I was up by seven and took a now-rare morning shower, though I put off shaving for about the eighth straight day. As I towelled off I drifted into revery: A woman was in the shower with me and I was towelling her off when I dropped the towel to the floor and snatched her around the waist and brushed my bristly chin briskly between her shoulder blades. She squealed and laughed as she struggled reflexively to escape the tickling…. I came back to myself, and I was smiling and clutching the towel to my chest. “Ah,” I thought, “such a simple thing to want.” The woman was not Julie, but taller, slimmer, and dark-haired. I never saw her face. Maybe she was the woman I dreamt of so long ago, the woman I was convinced (in the dream) was the one I looking for. If only I had retained that conviction against the pursuit of Julie.

My legs felt okay, and the temperature was the kind I couldn’t break a sweat in and didn’t need to warm up to. Megan had recommended another cafe, Urban Farmhouse. She said she thought it was on Cary around 1st. She was right about Cary, but eleven blocks short, in Shockoe Bottom. I was nearly at James’, but I wouldn’t be dropping in, because today was to be my day. Besides, he wouldn’t be up; his usual day barely begins before noon, and he still had his mother and sister to entertain after I left him. Urban Farmhouse was better than Megan’s previous recommendation, Cafe Caturra–more casual, less snooty, and comfortable enough to keep me an hour with just a coffee (good) and a slice of banana-nut bread (average)–but lunch would have been expensive, so I moved on before I got too hungry to pedal myself to more affordable food.

I barely made it. I detoured to get a card at the Library of Virginia (they told me I had registered in ’92) then stopped at the Harlem Cafe on my way back uptown, but they’d changed their hours and weren’t open yet. I trolled a couple blocks of Broad, passing trendy places with specials like leg-of-lamb and blackened something-or-other, disappointing myself a little along the way by not asking one of several passersby to recommend a cheap place to me, before finding Nick’s deli/market at Henry St. It was just the place–honest and unpretentious. Ahead of me was a line of customers the jolly counter guy knew by name and served swiftly without taking down an order. I stepped up and said, “I have no idea,” and he laughed and yelled to the kitchen, “No idea! That’s lettuce and tomato on nothing!” I settled on corned beef on rye and got the best I’d ever had, though I didn’t find it out till I’d pedalled a half-dozen blocks and plopped down under a tree in VCU-ville, in the triangle park at Grove and Harrison, where a few months before I’d eaten alone. This time I watched a sidewalk parade of young men and women whose attempts to distinguish themselves stylistically came from the same imagination. I did see a tattoo I liked, on a calf–a fully armored knight slumped on his armored horse, three arrows in his back. I told the guy, “Nice art,” and without looking at me, he said quietly, “Thanks, dude.” The women (there seemed to be ten to a guy) were pretty, I suppose, but at that age that’s about all there is for me to see in them.

Of course, I ended up in Carytown, but I didn’t wander or linger, just bought a couple CD’s (Puffy AmiYumi, Proclaimers) in Plan-9 and rolled around the corner to the Belmont library to refill my water bottle and check my email. In a sunny window facing the street I found a small table with two chairs designated for jigsaw puzzle construction. On it was a small puzzle with large pieces, about two-thirds finished, of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Though the sun warmed me uncomfortably, I finished the puzzle, despite, too, being reminded of the lunchtimes Julie and I sat close at the breakroom coffee table working on puzzles. That stopped after The Trainwreck, and the puzzles sit stacked on the refrigerator. I want to throw them away.

It’s easy to tell when it’s time to go home: I begin half-heartedly searching my meager imagination for someplace else I might find stimulation, all the while reviewing my day for positive reinforcement of my efforts. I’ve learned to lower my standards in order to lower the resistance to returning home. At least I got out, I tell myself. I talked to a few people, though I could have talked to more. As much as trying to find the positive, I’m trying to subdue the regret. Precluding it altogether is a bit much to ask of myself yet. It’s the desperation I must keep at bay right now, but even a week away from work I can still taste its acrid atmosphere and see the other shoe dangling over the landmine. I can preach patience to myself from this distance and pretend that I believe my heart will speak clearly to me in its guidance, but I fear that when I step into work Monday morning the pretense will be stripped to raw bitterness and my heart’s voice choked in bile. Whatever personal progress I will have made over this week off is difficult enough now to discern. How can it defend me against a force that has surely not been enlightened in my absence when it could barely dilute the poison injected into me last week?

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.

The Norse God of Escape

I have not been back to Carytown since my street-corner recitation.  I’ve hardly been out at all.  I’ve allowed myself many excuses for it.  Being without a car in the suburbs, I often play myself the distance card:  How far am I willing to go?  Less than three miles east takes me to the western border of Richmond and nine more miles puts me out the other side.  That is the range to which I’m conditioned.  North and south, my conditioning is the eighteen-mile trip to work and back.  By Friday evening, my best chance to find a social life, I’ve put ninety miles on my legs, which need some kind of rest (and a good massage, which I don’t get) before the next work week.  I can’t always motivate myself to get back on the bike, especially if (as has often been the case already this summer) I have just plowed through humid, triple-digit heat to get home.  My imagination, or lack of it, contributes to my inertia by claiming, after looking at the movie listings, that there’s nowhere to go, anyway.  Neither have I been encouraged by my efforts when I have managed to get out and about.  No matter where I go, I seem to be the only person there, or if not, am not welcome.  Sub shop, coffee shop–I can sit in there for an hour and no one else will have come in.  And forget about hanging out in a restaurant alone:  One person in a booth?  Move to the the bar or clear out.  The last movie I took in at the Westhampton (Please Give) was a late-afternoon show, so I ate dinner afterwards next door at Phillip’s.  I’d never been served so quickly, but when the check was slipped onto the table without a proffer of dessert or another beer, I knew that I was not experiencing efficiency but expediency.  I had been prepared to stay awhile with another beer, dessert, coffee, and maybe something harder while I wrote, but while it was all conveyed very politely, the message received was, “Get out so we can serve a bigger party and make more money from that booth.”  Not encouraging, but I can either play the oppressed minority or find my way to where I’m welcome, can have a good time, and meet people.  I don’t know where that is, but haven’t I always said I like a challenge?  But that box I’m in contains my imagination, as well.  The answers are all outside the way I’ve been thinking, but my ideas have all rebounded from the walls all the way back to online dating, which I gave up when I finally admitted to myself, two years ago, that I wanted Julie.  (I swore I wouldn’t mention her!)  It’s not the way to go, but every time I chop it down it sprouts up somewhere else.  I never got anything more than conversation–some of it stimulating–from the online scene–certainly not a date.  I am not going back that.

Desperation is a mighty inhibitor of my imagination, distilling all social considerations down to the possibility of “success” (whatever that is).  Of course, by that standard, no venue is worthy of my effort to visit it or my presence there.  But what do I know of possibilities?  Who do I know is going to be at any of these places?  And desperation shows.  Being “after” more than the movie, meal or shopping, is a pretense that won’t hide, is an emanation that repels even on a psychic level.  Often, I can’t look at a woman on the street without conveying desperation.  At work, knowing this, I have tried to dowse the emanation, with the result of hardly feeling anything, even attraction, toward the women I see there.  I’ve all but forgotten how to play my eye game.

I’ve lain all my hopes and confidence upon the altar of Transfer.  I put all my meager faith in it and have effectively suspended “artificial” efforts at finding peace and love.  It’s as good a god as any, I guess; until I get away from Julie I won’t be over her, and until I’m over her I can’t find what I need, or even pursue it.  That is the ultimate excuse, and having accepted that, I have no excuse at all to not just go out and have a good time–one movie, one beer, one coffee, one art gallery, one impulsive purchase at a time.

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.

Probably a Yorkstiff with No Tags

So, here I am, with the answers and the attitude, doing nothing about anything.  The mission is no less urgent, but the imagination is no more forthcoming.  Do what I like, I tell myself, but there are no movies in town I want to see, and I can’t convince myself that it’s less about the movie than getting out and finding love’s lost dog.

The last time out was unsatisfying.  I tried this newish cafe/wine bar, Cafe Caturra on Grove Avenue, just for an espresso.  The coffee was the only good taste I left with–snooty staff and a clientele dominated by wife-picked polo shirts tucked into belted madras shorts did not spell my kind of action.  What better could I have expected, though, of a place situated in a neighborhood anchored by two Catholic schools with a private university (of Richmond) between them?  That was three weeks ago, and I’ve since discouraged myself from going out the subsequent Friday nights.  What”s a guy to do in a town in which coffee shops are on the sun’s schedule? because that’s something else I like to do–hang out in a coffee shop and watch the people-traffic and listen and write.  Bars don’t work:  The noise is more loud music than conversation, which all too soon slips from barely interesting to moronic–and it gets expensive.  But I didn’t feel good about staying in; it wasn’t doing me any good; it wasn’t getting me anywhere near love.  I nearly spent another Friday at home, but though I couldn’t get myself to go see Sweetgrass, I could neither forget the weeks’ disappointments nor consider reading blogs an acceptable substitute for human contact.  I went back to Grove but around the corner to the sub shop.  I live in the suburbs–no sidewalks, no traffic not encased in steel and glass (except for the occasional fifty-one-year-old writer/idiot on a bicycle),  and no nightlife.  One has to head east into Richmond to do that.  I was that one.  Grove is the nearest Richmond (about four miles) with an approximation of after-dark activity.  After eating I walked back around the corner, but to Starbuck’s across the street from Cafe Caturra.  For once, Starbuck’s was a choice instead of a last resort.  Still, it closed at nine, and I closed it.  Only two other people came in, and they didn’t stay.  Then I began to think of Julie–all the questions that will never answered, all the regrets I can’t fix–and I knew I couldn’t go home.  Deeper into the city to Carytown.

There’s life on Cary Street–restaurants, bars, and the Byrd Theater with second-run blockbusters for two dollars–and none of it touched me, despite having set myself down smack on the busiest corner for nearly two hours.

Carytown night

 A few looks, a few nods, and one three-beered guy hailing me with “Top of the evening to you!”  I nodded and replied, “And to you.”  Thinking of Julie or not (what do you think?), I pedalled home.

A good portion of my disappointment has come from the same lack of contact at work.  Nothing is happening–no attractive women, no repeats.  Ms. P (for “panties,” if you like, but also her last name) picked up a hold at the window fifteen minutes before I would have replaced Megan there.  I caught her eye incidentally–nothing sparked.  And on Thursday, Greta* puts me on the desk with Julie twice.  Minutes before the second time, I look at the schedule and notice it, and I mutter, “Very funny, Greta.  Very funny.”  Julie was passing behind me as I said it and looked at the schedule herself.  I felt like a jerk.  Maybe I am; I knew Julie was there.  A very, very long hour of leaden silence folowed.

I’m back to feeling there’s nothing else I can do to attract love, make love happen, or get whatever it is I think I want, but to feel that way is to give up to the prophecy.  Besides, I just don’t believe it.  Give me the patience to wait for that movie I really want to see, and, Julie, get the hell out of my head or talk to me.  I still love you, you know (damn me), but I want my life back, so I can give it to someone that wants it.

*Head of Circulation and, therefore, schedule-maker

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.

Common Ground

This is a re-posting.  The original disappeared from the site and even my dashboard list of posts sometime over the weekend.  I can only assume it had been flagged.   Only ten people looked at it.  Can ten people censor me?  Is that all it takes, a few prudes, to form a fascist coalition?  If you don’t like it, don’t read it, don’t pass it on–but don’t you dare decide for someone else what they shouldn’t read.  WordPress didn’t say a word, did not alert me in any way.  By the way, Pascal has given me full permission to quote his correspondence.

Pascal has cooled since our spat, and I miss it.  I suppose that beyond feeling flattered was that 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 snapshots 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 a warm, open and generous person.  Her smile shows [it].”  I replied, with 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.  I haven’t gotten much of that that I haven’t given myself, and even from myself 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 would be reluctant 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 might simply 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 their 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 I guess you understand (but it’s not requisite).

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…” (I didn’t send him that kind of pictures)–that I am insecure of.  Though my imagination would describe Julie’s seduction assets with a bit more subtlety, they are no less powerful and maybe even less appreciated by her than I am of mine.  I want to enumerate them, but my pen falls.  I stare at The Picture and can see only the woman I miss.

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.

Sofa, So Good

I have been spending a lot of time on that sofa with Julie.  Nigel treats me with sharp disdain, jealous, though he has no idea how much moreso I am of him.  He, at least, is not imaginary, nor is the lap he often fills.  But there I am, anyway, imaginary, pretending:  We’re watching tv, maybe Fawlty Towers or As Time Goes By, on dvd.  I’m leaning back where she had been.  Julie is between my legs, lying back, head on my chest.  I try but can’t reach her hair with my lips. When I think that I would rather be watching Me and Mrs. Jones with her, I realize how much I would miss her big, open laughter.  Besides, I have no say and don’t want any.  I will enjoy what she enjoys.  I have spent a lot of negative energy trying not to like what Julie likes, but there was never any truth to any of it.  My energy can be better spent, more positively expended, just sitting here and letting her share.

Julie turns off the tv, softly moans with contentment, and sinks further into me.  My deep breath heaves her, my long sigh brings her back to me.  She tells me why she likes British shows, but though I listen, my imagination can’t hear her explanation.  She is too real.  I can’t make her up.  She isn’t a fictional character on whom I can hang traits like ornaments, dress up to my standards, and carry about like a doll.  There is much I want her to be and want her to like, but I don’t know who she is or what she is like outside of work, and my imagination can’t fool me to my satisfaction.

I can imagine sitting on her floor as she pulls out box after box of a massive music collection and talks about her dj days in college, both of which I’m achingly envious of.  But I don’t want to hear about the music I know we both like–Trashcan Sinatras, XTC, Prefab Sprout, Squeeze–because the reality is that I can’t yet listen to them again.  I can easily imagine her liking The Smiths, NewOrder/Joy Division, and The Cure, but I want to hear her rave, too, about OMD, Heaven-17, The Jam, Simple Minds,  and Split Enz.  I want her to tell me she likes The Psychedelic Furs so I can tell her about seeing them in Glasgow in ’81.  I can’t hope that she’d like Elvis Costello before he married Diana Krall, but I imagined too vividly that she liked James until, on that black Tuesday last week, when after listening to Hey Ma at work, I nearly fell to pieces, prompting me to throw it on the donation pile the next day.  (Right now, “Under the Waterfall” runs through my head.)  Until there is an “us” of me and Julie, I don’t want to know she likes Belle and Sebastian; they are mine until she is, too.

There are, though, certain imaginings that reality can’t obviate, and they take us back to the sofa with my arm across Julie’s belly under her pajamas.  It slides up until her breasts rest upon it.  Under her chin my other hand glides down her throat, thumb and middle finger diverging at the bottom to trace her clavicle, my palm slowly flattening against the top of her chest….  That much of Julie I can imagine quite well without the “knowing”, and I’m grateful that she can be at least that real, since the reality of her is not available to me.

A Guy Can Dream–If Nothing Else

What is it like, Julie, for someone to be in love with you and not be in love with them?  What is it like to be beautiful and not believe it?  Who is the man you can believe and love?  So many questions, so many more yet.  My imagination can answer them, but not in your voice, so my heart won’t believe it.  Imagination has taken me far–right up to your moat–but from there I can only shoot peas at the drawbridge.  But though I can’t walk across it, I can at least see through it:  You on the sofa in pale pink brushed-flannel pajamas sparsley printed with small butterflies.  An herbal tea steeps in the same teacup as always on the same corner of the glass coffee table.  Nigel, purring, lies like a laying hen, feet tucked under him, on the afghan across the back of the sofa.  Your feet are curled to your haunches.  You lean on the sofa’s arm.  What is that book in your lap?  What’s on the tv?  Which are you paying more attention to? Or do your own thoughts dominate?  It’s harder to see what you’re thinking.  At work you don’t converse about ideas but things.  But then who at work with whom you talk has ideas?  Who do you trust with what you think?

Do you trust anyone with what you feel?  I think you are very active outwardly at denying your inward activity.  You don’t want to be alone, but you don’t do anything about it.  What’s to do?  Who could possibly understand you?  You struggle with a lifetime of unexpressed emotion and aching needs  you don’t know how to fill.  I wouldn’t believe you if you denied this.  Deny it to yourself–you are much better at it than a I have been since I met you–but I’m not fooled, because in you I see who I once was.  Maybe you have admitted the resemblance.  That could be reason enough to not want to have anything to do with me:  Who wants someone who reminds them of the traits they would like to overcome?  Misery doesn’t want company, but why assume the company will also be miserable?  Misery is always alone.  Company changes misery.

What does it take to be loved by you, Julie?  What do you love?  What do you need?  What fantasy soothes your heart?  Big, hard arms to enfold you within them?  A warm, thudding chest to nestle into?  Calloused hands to arouse the sensitivities of your body?  My fantasy is to match yours–to hold you as you want to be held, to touch you as you want to be touched, to kiss you here, here, here…and right there.  Just let me dream of you, Julie.  It’s so much better than not knowing you, so much more fun than stealing glances of you.  This way I can lay your book aside, turn off your tv, and slide a hand under your pajama top and across your belly.  Let your tea grow cold; you’re warm enough now.  I am not the man you will allow to love you, but I will love you, nevertheless, for there is nowhere my imagination is not allowed, and you are its favorite destination.  Lie back, close your eyes.  I’m right here.