Tiny, Yellow Frog

The landscape of my dreams has changed. It seems sudden, but I can trace a subtler transformation back a couple years, when it was a maze of artificially and dimly lit corridors, flat and anglular, to a rugged, pathless wilderness wending through woods, across meadows, down steep, jagged slopes to cool, sighing streams, and back up another craggy climb to the next meadow and distant wood. Along the way corridors turned to paths and the paths disappeared; and getting somewhere became just going. There’s no anxiety to get somewhere or get something done, because no one is there to ask it of me. Instead, animals feature prominently–most lately, frogs, and in great numbers at once. Wednesday night, following the giving of the flowers, the frogs appeared to me as I slept, and, as many as there were, I yet became fixated on a frog that could not have been more than an eighth-inch long, but was colored a yellow so bright as to be nearly luminous. I tried to catch it, but I could not close my fist over it before it sprang from my palm, though I caught it again several times before it could finally touch the ground and get away for good. I don’t know what they mean, the landscape and the frogs, but after the anxiety of that workday the dream was an oasis from my troubles instead of a reminder.

I am off work this week, and I intend to put last week far behind as I get back to more positive work over which I have some control. In Greta’s basket, for her to read Tuesday afternoon when she arrives, is a copy of “The Price” (minus the title), submitted, as I wrote in the enclosed note, “in the interest of truth and fairness.” I also made it clear that I would not discuss it any further with her or anyone else not of my choosing. I have slept much better since, but I have not been able to recall my dreams in the morning.

The farther I move forward the smaller last week becomes–not that I’ll be looking at it in the rearview. Not getting out the two weeks leading up to the Magnet Mangle precipitated it: As I was unable to turn my attention from Julie with my outside endeavors, I allowed myself to apply my efforts to that problem. It was a vacuum I couldn’t leave to fill itself, and now it’s a black hole. My dream settings are always dark, a murky gray. I’m hoping this week to bring some light to them by doing all I can to sweep out the basement corners, throw open the curtains on the vampires of my soul and send them scurrying with impotent hisses into the black hole. The landscape of my life henceforth is as undulant and varied as the roads and neighborhoods I pedal through to experience it. In my recent dreams, upon scaling the craggy bank, I have looked back across the stream and the meadow to the woods from which I’d emerged, and I see no path, no line of flattened grass, no tumbled rocks, no footprint in the stream bed. I turn back to the way ahead and find I am between mirror images. But I know where I’ve been, and I know that the stream, meadow and woods behind me are not the same ones I will face when I turn forward again. I notice, too, that I’m walking eastward, the same direction I pedal toward the city. Perhaps I’m walking out of the night toward dawn, where the vampires can’t follow me.

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.

Cacophony on All Fronts

The war rages on two fronts–work and elsewhere–against separate enemies–Julie and my shyness–but my arms and armor against either in either venue are meager.  My heart certainly has little place at work, and it would be more beneficial outside of it if it had any degree of subtlety short of desperation.  At work Julie is, indeed, the enemy, but it’s a cold war we fight.  There is no aggression but a passive hostility.  Love is irrelevant there, as there is no hope of gaining anything I’d once naively hope for.  What’s left is only a tolerance of the current conditions, and only the mind can effect that, if only by reasoning an ever-thickening wall against the heart’s blind insistence.  It’s brainwashing, plain and simple.  When I tried to give the fight over to my emotions it was because I thought my mind was unequipped to do the job of the heart, when it might more accurately have been the heart’s intrusion into the head’s business that kept the job from being done properly:  My mind offered reality; my heart offered hope to the contrary.  My mind knows the truth, but it would rather believe the lies.  I have been trotting out the old evidence and arguments against Julie’s domination of my heart and recognize my heart’s defense as pride grasping at straws for dignity.  But what dignity is there in groping for love where there is none?  These things I tell myself, and must keep telling myself, to get through even a short day with Julie.

I’m aware that this strategy is analogous to the self-help books that I eschew in that it is, essentially, a trick, a treatment of symptoms, but at least it’s one of my own devising–a better-fitting suit that off the rack.  I’m finally allowing Julie to help, too, not fighting her indifference (and, sometimes, obvious hostility) but allowing its brick to go on my side of the wall.  Why push against the wall she never stops building?  What fight is there against the eyes that stare straight ahead as we pass in the narrow hallway though I am looking right into them?

I will remove the l.s., the cute magnet, at my earliest convenience.  My guess is that it’s still there.  I hope that she hasn’t found it, because she would likely assume it came from me and, so, couldn’t possibly appreciate the sentiment.  I’d hate to have wasted that on her.  I also hate to waste concern for her presence in a room, and I fight hard to not look for her and just go about my business.  I can’t afford to care about her more than she does about me.  Forget the morality of this strategy; forget its cowardice.  It’s all I can do.  I am not spiteful and cruel.  I am doing the best I can with what little I have to do it with.  I can’t look at Julie without hope, and I can’t hope without feeling angry and bitter.  So why look?

I take my heart out to movies, dinner, etc., and come home with it no more content than to be able to say, “At least I got out.”  Though I don’t know what I’m doing, I have to try.  I’ll go to a gallery show tomorrow in town.  I’ll be hopeful, of course, but I’ll hope first that I can enjoy the exhibit and not just be glad to be getting out.  Once I’ve gotten out for a day or an evening I don’t want to return home, where I’m left with just the reflection of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, but that is always stark and pale like the living apparition of terminal hunger.  What is the trick to this endeavor that would pull away the curtain of hope I can’t see through to the life on the other side?  I wake up alone in a double bed and think even my bed is a lie for being so big, with its depression in the center instead of on each side.  What a waste.  I had just dreamt of waking up with another’s hand in mine and feeling it was everything I needed.  I hate that I awoke to the same loneliness as ever, that imagining a soft body beside me to hold and protect is not real enough and seems to become less real each morning, that I cry as I try to finish this and, therefore, can’t to my satisfaction.  I take this all with me, and it all shows, and I hate that, too.  This war–why is it?

My Child Can Beat Up Her Child

The last post haunts me.  Will this child ever grow up? or will it just grow more powerful, until its tyranny is complete?  I say there will be tokens and notes, then think that because I say that I have the control to not let it happen.  Then I start planning what I’ll write on the repair slips.  I think of removing the l.s., but I don’t want to find it still there, after more than a week.  (It’s become partially visible since I had to replace another DVD case the day after I installed it.)  Every day with Julie more is difficult than the one before.  You should see our accidental approaches:  We scramble for somewhere else to go, something else to do, someone to speak to.  I’ve tried to steel myself against the cowardly avoidance and look her in the eye, but she will not oblige me, and I find myself staring at her, waiting for her to turn to me, but then I feel like a creep.  If I thought I had any real hope of a transfer, I wouldn’t try but cut my losses and get out of there, but Thomas says some people in the system are already trasnferring, so it seems that if mine were to be granted I’d know by now; and if I have to stay at Twin Hickory things between Julie and me have to change drastically, because I’m suffocating day by day, sealed in a shrinking box. 

If not for Thomas I might have suffocated already.  He’s the only person in the library I can talk to about Julie.  Yet I might see him only a few times a week.  On my day shifts I might be on the desk or in the stacks when he brings the branch mail; on the evening shift he’s been and gone before I show up for work.  Thomas has never known about the blogs, and I’d never tell him.  He wouldn’t get it.  He’d shake his head in disappointment and disbelief, but at least he wouldn’t judge me.  I can’t seem to get through to him, either, that I no longer want Julie, but maybe he just knows better.  He thinks I came on too strong at the trainwreck (I don’t call it that with him), that I should have been smoother and slower and gotten to know her, but he has no idea of the months of trial leading up to that.  Love must be a difficult concept for him, too, at least in the context of another guy’s pursuit:  He points to one eligible female coworker after another and says, “What about Soandso?”  My answer is always, “I don’t want that.”  He thinks available is good enough, that sex is the object, but though I often think that it would be a much simpler equation without love, the solution would not be acceptable.  Sex has never been and never could be a casual one-off.  No love, no sex–that simple.  Thomas likes to suggest what it would be like “gettin’ it on” with Julie (“Do you want her to scream your name or mine?”)  and still goads me with reports of the pliability of her flesh under his latest grope in the guise of a hug, but I’ve already done all that in my own mind, and though titillating, it’s only that.  Still, I’m not reluctant to join in, and I especially enjoy it in a crowd of coworkers, whose dirty minds I can challenge with their own inferences.  If he doesn’t see Julie when he comes in with the first hand-truck load of bins he says to me, “Where’s our baby?”  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” I’ve replied.  Across the workroom, I’ve called “Don’t you know her schedule yet?  Want me to write it down for you?”  On a recent Monday when she was off, I answered Thomas, “She’s not here.  She had a rough night.”  Thomas was quick on my implication, bursting into laughter.  “You ain’t right, Dion!”  No, I ain’t.  I’m just trying to grab the deep breaths before Thomas leaves and puts the lid back on the box.

With hope of transfer waning, I try to prepare for the long haul, but the struggle is day-to-day, and I’m already exhausted.  I arrived at work with a headache from muscle tension that ran from my neck to my middle back.  I told myself to give it till five-thirty–a half-hour after Julie was gone–before taking anything for it.  It nearly reached nausea pitch before then, but with her gone my jaw unclenched and the headache dissipated.  And that had just been a half-day with her.  This could be a very long haul; Julie will do nothing about it on her own, and will not accommodate my efforts.  She’s just not equipped.  She believes I want it this way; that’s how she justifies her inaction to herself.  That’s not speculation–no more speculation–but declaration.  If it’s not true, fucking let me know!

I’m stopping–all literary sensibilities aside, loose ends flapping in the breeze, metaphors mixed–fuck it.

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.

Give a Million Monkeys a Million Wrenches….

Did I say, “Paranoia be damned”?  I know I said, “God save me from this love and the fool it might unleash again.”  And so the battle commences.  I’m headed back down that road to hell, and there ain’t one good intention under my feet.  I’ve planted that “little something” on Julie’s desk, and since I have no intention of pretending I don’t want a reaction, I’ll not pretend, either, that I can wait till she finds it and not just tell her where it is.  The moment I bought it I knew where I would put it and how the opportunity would present itself to me, and I was prepared to bide my time for it.  After all, it’s not often I have to replace a DVD case, but there it was–a Wiggles case that would no longer close and had a flap broken from the spine.  Having anticipated a long wait for this chance, I’d slid the “l.s.” face down over my ID badge in its sleeve.  As the badge is necessary to pass from the public area to the workrooms, it would not be off my body all day, so the l.s. would always be at my finger tips.  The first time I had ever been grateful to have a Wiggles video in my hands was while Julie was at lunch.  I lifted open the cabinet over her desk, slid the l.s. from the sleeve, and as I pulled out a new DVD case, I dropped the l.s. in behind the stack, where it adhered to the back wall.  (So there it is, Julie.  I know you’d love it if it weren’t from me, but I know, too, that you won’t give it back, because  that would be acknowledging me.)  Now I wish I’d taken a picture of it.

So, yeah, there’s the “token” I said would never be forthcoming, a few weeks removed from the Frightened Rabbit note.  I made it nearly a year–a new record.  Julie could make it nearly to the end of time without talking to me again–her resolve is about as stubborn as mine in that respect, and in most others is even moreso–so I’ve had to sharpen up the ol’ stick and give her a poke.  It’s a shame, though, that she can’t accept it as affectionate fun instead of as a threat.  It’s a challenge, no denying, but not a threat.  If I were the right guy, I’m sure my efforts would be charming and cute, but I’m not that guy, am I?  Then what satisfaction could I possibly get out of this?   I have to push limits; it’s what I do.  I don’t usually have much more of an objective than to see what happens after I toss the monkey wrench into the machinery.  “Well-enough”, the “status quo”–those are vacuums fit only for automatons.  I can’t live there, and I can’t live with the machines that do.  Most people can remain machines, for all I care, but some people get the monkey wrench–because I care for them or am fascinated by them:  I want to hear their hearts beating.  I know that the boundaries I’m pushing with Julie I should not be trying to cross, because the heartbeat I hear will be an angry one.  If I hadn’t already forced that from her once, I’d say that was good enough, but I want more:  I’ve been given the proverbial inch already; now I want to go the mile.  What I really want to see is her tender side, the side she hides deepest in her trunk of emotions.  That seems a cruel thing to ask of her and a crueller thing to force from her, but the mystery of it attracts me no end.  Maybe I even covet it, seek it like the Holy Grail.

Surprisingly, given that it seems she even refuses eye contact now, I can still imagine us together, sharing.  I can see the brilliant smile and sparkling eyes more open for me than for anyone else before.  How could I?  How could I imagine soothing her fears, since I have been one of them?  How does a little magnet hiding behind a stack of DVD cases show Julie I am worthy of what she gives no one else?  I’d be a fool to try to answer those questions.  I am a fool, but not that kind.  I’m the kind or fool that tosses pebbles against a soundproofed window and copper lassoes on electric fences.  There is no god to save that fool, because the fool is god’s monkey wrench.  Where the fool lands is out of his hands.