Give or Take a Second Opinion

(To the tune of “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan)

Anyway, I’m not crazy.  I started reading Why We Love (Helen Fisher)*.  I am not a weirdo or a psycho.  I was in love with Julie.  I don’t know yet if I still am.  I saw her.  The book has told me, so far, that what I have felt toward her is normal.  I hadn’t seen her since she left Twin Hickory three months ago.  I suppose it was normal, too, for all the blood to rush to my face.  The book will probably tell me that in the chapter on unrequited love.  It was more than simply the sight of her that pulled my blood against gravity; I was trapped in a classroom at the county’s training center.  For fifteen minutes I didn’t learn a thing (the class was “Emotional Intelligence”) as I stared, through a window, down a floor, and fifty feet beyond the building, at that black-pea-coat-draped back.  Though her hair was mostly hidden under the coat and her back was to me, I knew it was her, even before I recognized Jennifer beside her, probably because I expected her to be there.  She and Jennifer work out together at the gym there, and I saw Jennifer going in when I got there.  I didn’t hear a word the instructor said, either while the two of them chatted on the sidewalk before parting for their cars, or a few minutes after seeing Julie’s car cruise past that spot a couple minutes later.  I was enraged by my impotence, the missed opportunity, though what I’d have done with it I don’t know.  I prayed for a break in class, and when it finally came scorched off a couple pages of Twickory.  At that point, I hadn’t begun reading the book.  The writing helped–I returned some of my attention back to the class–but I was antsy to get out of there and write some more.  I didn’t know I’d feel that way when I saw her again, and I didn’t even see her face.  But that’s okay, right?  “When one’s love is spurned…the brain links this motivation with negative feelings, such as despair or rage.” (page 76).  The inability to express myself to her, the frustration of trying to engage her, drove my rage.  When it came to a head (how many times was that? four?) it exploded in an impulsive act that would finally get her attention.  It was not (once she clued in to my affection toward her) good attention.  I finished My Brilliant Career and sent it back to Glen Allen with a postcard on which I’d written “I hope love finds you unafraid.”  I should be so arrogant.  Could I handle what I’ve asked for?

I am also not wrong to consider this love an addiction, according to the book.  At this stage, it might be the most accurate designation of how I feel about her.  I’ve been just hanging in there without her, pretending and distracting myself away from the idea of her; but the sight of her was a mainline into my heart.  I’ve relapsed only slightly, though, I think.  It helps to know that this is normal.  Is it normal to have lasted this long?  Is it normal to feel the need to buy more postcards and check out more Glen Allen books?  (Maybe there’s a chapter on “Delusional Self-Permission.”)  I’m not crazy, anyway.

* Thanks, LL, for the book suggestion from your site (Unrequited Love).

Mad Scientist’s Lament

There’s a monster I created two years ago that I’m now refusing to feed, yet I’m the one that’s starving.  My obsession with Julie fueled a passionate torture machine.  There is still torture, but passion?  Or is the passion there, too, and it’s inspiration that’s lacking?  The pilot light’s on, but there’s no reason to turn on the burner.  What I put myself through over Julie sprang me a quantum leap to a new level of self-expression, but it was a level of maddening futility that reflected the worth of the object of my obsession relative to my soul’s needs.  As I try to rise to a new level of not just self-expression but maturity I have to leave behind this Marley’s-chain I call Julie.  Whatever purpose it served it has served it.  Whatever it is I feel for Julie, it is not love. That’s the first link unforged, the first meal denied the beast.  How could it ever have been love?  Sometimes I think that falling in love is no more than getting carried away on a wave of hope, swept up in a fantasy that overwhelms all rational faculties, blinds and deafens us to reality.  Yet it’s what we want.  It’s still what I want.  Even pride is subdued.  Until she says, “You’re a nice guy, but…,” then it unfolds from it’s depths and wreaks a terrible vengeance.  But I shouldn’t apply a universality.  Who do I know but me (if him)?  That’s another battle among my many.  Maybe it’s the whole war.  Can I handle another rejection?  Do I dare even risk it?  That’s wy it’s easier to believe that love will just find me:  I can’t trust myself to find it.

I’ve lost my way, in this narrative, in this mission.  What am I trying to say?  What am I trying to do?  These are daily questions.  The efforts toward survival offer little room even for thought, and attempts at it yield confusion.  I’ve thought all the thoughts and am still on the brink.  Thoughts no longer have the power to keep me from taking that last step, that step into…? See?  I know so much, I’m oh so smart, and I’m powerless to help myself.  I know what goes on at work, how staunchly Julie and I avoid interaction, how we do it, and how I feel about it; but I feel that to write it out would be to justify it, and to justify it would make it too real, would give it a life that would once again claim mine.  I don’t want to own that madness again.  That’s not the inspiration I seek, and if that’s all that fuels my writing then perhaps I need to be inspired to not write.  Emotions will have their way, but they can’t write themselves.  Do they have their way with me? or can I choose which ones to express on paper?  I try to choose, but the omisisons often seem to make lies of what I’ve chosen.  They say I’ve made the wrong choice, and they are probably right.  After all, this writing is an exorcism, very likely of itself.  The monster Frankenstein created can’t live, doesn’t want to live with all of the torture and none of the passion of humanity, but the doctor drags it to work with him.  But at the library the choke-chain is around the other neck.  Nothing is funny and music is angry, and breathing is intermittent and emitted in sighs.  To offer more detail would be to feed the beast.  I can think what I wan’t–the beast can’t read my mind–but to write it would be to place the dish in front of it.  But pride is sustenance enough and there’s no short supply of that at work.

I tire of these metaphors, as I tire of the incessant quarrel in my head that comprises my work day and consists of flare-ups of bitterness at the sound of her voice, followed by talking them down with reasoning, which is then slapped down for having already been heard–to obvious ineffect–a million times.  All.  Day.  Long.  Is it any wonder I’m practically a zombie at work?–that and being awaken two hours before the alarm by the argument’s resumption.  There’s your monster–a three-headed goon that won’t shut up.

If Julie ever talks to me again or if my pride allows me to talk to her first (again), I’ll let you know; otherwise, details of our days together, footholds for obsession, are best withheld.  With nothing to hold onto, maybe I can let go, but there’s been nothing for a long time, yet I cling to the Julie that inspired, unable yet to replace her.  Which comes first? the letting-go or the replacement?  The question is all the more unanswerable for the seeming umpossibility of either resolution.  The monster, the machine, the chain:  The metaphors are all much more real than resolution.

Think the Kid Could Do with a Little More Rope?

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

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

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

Out of Orbit

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

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

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

Ouila Fortune

Another reposting.  (What the hell’s going on, WordPress?)  This one rightly goes between “Homecoming” and “Naydream.”

If this writing is, as I claim, my therapy, what good has it done me besides  prevent a catastrophic public outburst of emotion?  Just made it less public and more slowly and lastingly catastrophic?  I may very well be healing myself emotionally, but I am far from over Julie.  I will have to settle, eventually, for an ugly scar.  Julie appeared in a dream last night, an infrequent occurrence and a rare tender one.  I am frustrated, of course, by not being able to talk to Julie, and I am more so every day; and the white elephant looms so large now in the library that I want to attack it, plunge the longest, sharpest  sword into its dense hide over and over again,  slice it through until I can step straight through its carcass and command Julie to talk to me.  And then Julie passed me on Nuckols road Thursday night after work, and I wanted to flip her the bird.  That’s when I began wondering (yet again) how to get through to her, and I wondered all the way home.  My head and my legs went their different ways, but my legs knew the way home, where I arrived with an uncomfortable solution:  The written word is out of the question–too easy to ignore .  Confrontation is all there is for it–hit-and-run, have my say and walk away confrontation.  Subtlety is not the watchword.

Then the dream, or what I remember of it:  Julie and me together, looking over a note I’d just given her.  The paper tried to curl, so I held it down.  She made a gesture toward the paper that brought her hand under my spidered fingers and in light contact with the outside edge of my hand.  I glanced sidelong at her, but she seemed to place no significance to the gesture.  Neither did she remove her hand.  “What are these lyrics here?” she said.  I was flattered she would call my words lyrics but noticed a gap at the very end.  “The last word is missing,” I said.  She asked what that was, and I said,  “Wee-la–o-u-i-l-a.”*  I won’t pretend to decipher meaning from this fragment, meaning from this fragment, but allow me to puzzle over its friendly tone, considering that only hours before I’d stifled the urge to show her my middle finger.  I’d sure like to know what I’d written.  It seems to have been the right thing.

Working from my hope-made theory that getting over Julie is contingent upon finding someone to (realistically) replace her, how will I do either as long as I write publicly?  This is the slow and (ever-?) lasting catastrophy:  Google would not be my friend.  Everyone googles everyone.  I’ve dragged Julie right to the top of the search results my name conjures.  Is that something I want that special someone to find?  (It never was before.)  And suppose that that someone does?  Instant red flag?  For the majority, no doubt.  But someone, surely, eventually, will not only not see an obsessed creepy,  desperate exhibitionist of emotion but will find a man with nothing but his heart on his sleeve, his head on a stick.  Whatever that’s worth, it’s me, and if these blogs have made that, well then, I guess I’m a self-made man.  Is getting over Julie waiting for someone to find me in my words?  Do your worst, Google–I’ll keep up the good work on my end.

*“ouila,” a web search tells me, is, indeed, a lyric–in a song called “Raba Raba” by Khaled.  It is also in the title of a song by the same artist, “Ouila Ouelet.”  Neither song is in English.  A little help?

Grownups, Better and Worse

Pascal and I had our first spat and have gotten past it.  I tried to quell his expression of sexual passion for me by telling him I could never feel the same way about him.  However true (he said, “You don’t know that”), I didn’t need to say it, and I’m not sure why I did, except that I couldn’t join in his pleasure.  From a woman, yes.  But I didn’t mean to hurt him.  We come from such different cultures, lifestyles, and upbringings that there have to be misunderstandings along the road to knowing each other.  But we’re over it, like grownups.

My fantasies with Julie I will never send to her, of course, and I could never call our misunderstandings a spat, something we could simply set aside in order to move on.  What moving on could there be when one of us pretends it will just have to go away and the other pretends that it will be resolved amicably?  It won’t just go away, because, for Julie, it likely means me going away; and, for me, an amicable resolution is her falling in love with me.  Neither is a realistic solution to the problem, and either neither of us knows what that solution is, or we don’t have the strength to effect it.  I am in love with Julie.  What solution is there to that?  I recognize my fantasies as hope disguised, so they cannot be fantastic enough for me to hide in from the reality.  How far I go with Julie on her sofa does not get me any closer to penetrating her sadness, which seems deeper every day.  What can I do?  Last week I broke through and asked her, “How are you?”  We had not spoken to each other in quite some time.  She responded brightly, maybe a bit surprised, “I’m fine!  How are you?”  I didn’t really want her to ask me back, sincere as she may have been.  I turned from her smile and eyes and said to the computer, “Okay.”  That was all we said that hour on the circ desk, a week ago today, and have said nothing since.  We are acting like grownups, but shy, non-assertive grownups.  We are not a couple, so this cannot be a spat.  We cannot agree to disagree, apologize  and move on, still wanting to be friends.

What are we?  What can we be?  Fantasy can’t entertain these questions, much less answer them.  But neither can Julie, it seems, and I seem to be pursuing the answers through an ever-denser thicket of emotional and psychological brambles until I just have to stop and imagine the stings gone and the wounds healed in the arms of a small, soft, lyart-haired woman.

Lead Me Not Into Distraction

To eschew distraction I need a damned good reason, and that in the form of the one thing to replace all distractions.  How can I be sure I have correctly chosen the One Thing?  That’s likely another decision /pursuit that cannot be actively made.  So having chosen not to be distracted from the One Thing, it must be the ease of distraction that choses the OT.  How does my innate capacity for distraction factor in?  How distracted from the thing am I allowed to be? or does any distraction disqualify it for OT?  I’m fishing for a formula, aren’t I?

Then there’s work, the distraction I get paid for, the distraction that’s anything but–not because it allows me to concentrate on the One Thing, but because, with Julie’s presence, it forces me to.  So maybe it’s not ease of distraction that rules out a candidate but the relative lack thereof that identifies it.

All this from the ink-mouth of someone who expects love to just come to him!  You know why?  Because I don’t believe it.  I want to believe it–it’s a great idea, and maybe it’s actually true–but it might as well be god for all my ability to give my soul to it.  But neither do I believe in trying to find love, and not simply because I’m tired of the pursuit (and I am profoundly tired of it).  The One Thing is probably not love–yet–but finding or becoming, myself.  But I already talked about that when I said love would come to me when I was ready.  I could call that irony, but I’d rather call it coming full-circle:  I’ll believe it when I make it believable.

Eschewing distraction–I don’t even believe in that.  It’s taken me a week to write this much, between watching movies and solving sudokus (and work).  I’m barely reading or watching tv, and the computer’s just taking up space, but I find my distractions, nonetheless.  Actually, I have to admit that I need distraction.  The One Thing, misidentified, can become an obsession, a victim of the all-work-no-play syndrome.  Distraction can be as much a means of expression as these ordered words insomuch as it is a search for a connection, something meaningful.  It’s when the distraction threatens to become the One Thing that it is detrimental.  That’s what I fear and why I thought it best to avoid distraction. altogether.  But it’s not distraction I need to avoid so much as mindlessness.  Habitual distraction, at best, sinks the mind into stupefaction.  At worst, it aggrandizes itself into the One Thing–in actuality, its doppelganger, Obsession.  I am safe from the former eventuality because I have little capacity for mindlessness.  Awareness born of very recent first-hand experience keeps the latter eventuality from blossoming.

So I think I’ll acknowledge and keep aware of my distraction, instead of trying to rationalize them away.  They have context, a value to my personal growth.  I won’t pursue distraction, but I will allow it.  If the One Thing is to come to me (and I”m to believe it works that way)  I must have my distractions from the pursuit.  I’ll take the scenic route and let it place itself in my way to stumble over.  It’s not a formula, but it’s a plan.

Food, Shelter, Love

At work I see plenty of physically attractive women, but I’m not ready to fall in love with any of them.  Physical attraction in only that.  Love is more.  To be physically attracted is to have sized up a potential sex partner, a biological imperative justifying a recreational pursuit.  Where is love?  Of course I want sex, but it isn’t the first thing I want.  It might not even be the second or third, depending on the scope of love.  Is it realistic to want love above all else? to eschew the baser needs in favor of a need that has never been satisfied?  Why not?  Let the baser needs take care of themselves.  What, then, has happened to letting love come to me?  Well, I’d leave well-enough alone if it were well enough left.  But regardless of my inability to bring love to me, my overwhelming need for it crowds out the faith that it is on its way.  So I distract myself with the shapes of women, and I don’t kid myself that it’s anything else.  I know better than to look for love in a vulgar aesthetic.  Though sex, for me, has never been a simple vulgarity or casual one-off, I have never fallen in love with an object of sex, and when I have fallen in love (if I actually ever have), physical attraction was not the reason.  If I have ever fallen in love, it was with Julie, and in all of the time I mooned over her I never considered sex with her (though, eventually, that would have been nice).  If I had not otherwise been attracted to her, there might have been no attraction at all.

So, here we have new expressions for both the inutility of vanity towards the “acquisition” of love and the futility of seeking or even preparing oneself for love.  If physical attraction cannot recognize love–and as a biological (animal) mechanism it must be singularly ignorant of any spiritual imperative–then what role of the least significance can vanity have in the attraction of anything but sex?  If that is all vanity can do, then its role is to distract one from seeking love.  But I don’t want to be distracted–from anytything.  These shapes are all nice to look at and to imagine having fun with, but as much fun as they might be, they aren’t enough.  Feeling that way, I can’t enjoy the game.  Yet there is nothing else but distraction when there’s nothing else I can do.  Nothing else is more important to me than this thing I can’t do anything about.  But as I have neither the patience to not-wait for love or the faith in not-waiting that would facilitate the patience, what’s left but to play the game? to appreciate the shapes?  Perhaps that’s all that keeps obsession at bay.