They’d Probably Stab the Bag of Sugar, Too

The plant came home with me.  It was a rescue mission. I noticed that the aloe had been watered.  It should have been dry.  I taped a three-by-five notecard to the pot that read, “This plant is being overwatered.  Please leave it be.  If you want to live, leave it to me.”  The next morning, the card was gone and the plant was sopping.  I immediately removed the plant from the silll to my locker.  At the end of the day I carried it home on my back, wrapped in bubble wrap.

So, help me out with this one:  By my reckoning, this is the work of a sociopath.  What, besides killing the plant, was the intent of this action?  Who was this person attacking?  I didn’t sign the card–there was no point–and I don’t know who knows my handwriting.  Actually, I’d rather believe it wasn’t about me at all, because I don’t want paranoia to get too secure a foothold.  This is a person who revels in misery, their own and company’s.  Whose misery they wanted to join theirs, I don’t know.  All I know is that I don’t want to work with that person in the building.  Their presence is disturbing, especially since I can’t imagine who it is.  I haven’t noticed any other such acts.  Have I just missed them?  As scary as that person being here, is their perfect assimillation into the library’s culture.

Now someone does come to mind:  Chris, who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me why he felt he had to expose A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I can see Chris watering the aloe and convincing himself that it was a joke, but I won’t accuse him and will try  not to suspect him further.  It doesn’t matter who it was, does it?  Whoever it is is just one more reason to get the hell out of Twin Hickory.  This place has become so infested with backbiting and petty snitching that it’s becoming a junior high prison.  Morale is long gone, in a tank of formaldehyde in the Mutter Museum.  Everyone is resenting someone else for not pulling their weight in one way or another–using a cell phone in the stacks or making personal calls from a service point, shopping online at their desk or not shelving as scheduled.  Someone even felt they had to tattle on me for being late one day.  That place is toxic, and I’m going to at least get a plant out of the crossfire if I can’t save myself.

When I was hired, I pegged this as my last job.  I quit trying to be a writer and resigned myself to being a father and an employee, and I was able to fool myself for longer than ever before.  I’ve had this job a year longer than any other, but now I’m much more a writer than an employee (though, I hope, not more than I am a father), but what am I getting paid for?  To fit in with a group of malcontents.  The irony is that the more discontented I become the more accepted I feel here:  The waning cynic meets the waxing cynics.  But I don’t want to stop at their level, much as I crave acceptance.  I could easily join in the backbiting and tattletaling, and probably will to an extent, but it won’t make me feel good for long or help heal the damage to morale.  Neither do I want to be fired.  Knowing how high-handed and imperious management can be with none-of-their-business is knowing how much moreso they could be once given a leg to stand on.  No, I’ll leave on my own terms, even if I don’t know yet what they are.  This just might by my last job, not because I[‘m resigned to die at it but because whatever I do next, I plan to do for me and my soul, and that is not a job but a willing duty.  Ultimately, only one’s soul’s rules are worth following.  All other rules try to rule the soul.

The aloe won’t get as much sun in my window as it did at work, but it will get the care it needs and no malice.  I didn’t want to possess it, but the rules it follows were not respected at the library, either by those ignorant of the damage of their well-meaning care or by the malicious intent of a hateful individual.  Some people believe they’re doing the right thing in reporting their coworkers’ missteps; others want to demonstrate their superiority or just plain inflict pain:  Righteousness or sociopathy.  Would that I could be carried away to a caring, meaningful place where I would be allowed to follow the rules I know to be most beneficial to me, where I would be allowed to be me, but I will have to be my own white knight.

Bag of Sugar to Plant to Human

There is another plant at work that I take care of–protect with my life, really.  Had I not known it had been Julie’s I’d let someone else have their way with it.  As she was preparing to move, Julie donated to us a sun-starved aloe, maybe actually her mother’s.  I took it under wing, trimming the dead and dying and placing it on the sunny breakroom sill.  It’s green again, and I do what I can to keep it that way:  Every day, first thing, I make sure with a finger that someone hasn’t watered it.  I saw Nikki peer into the pot, and I was quick to say, “It’s good.  I watered it last week.  It’s probably good for a couple more weeks.  I’ve been tempted many times to send out a staff email alerting them to leave that plant to me, but I don’t want to get possessive.  I wouldn’t so much as pretend to deny that that little aloe is a surrogate Julie.  I care for and protect it as I’ve wanted to Julie, to demonstrate, if only to myself, that I’m capable, and in so doing ameliorate my guilt and shame.  It helps me, too, to subdue the frustration of that old hopeless hope, which continues to burn and sometimes flairs.  Love, in-love–I don’t know the difference, but the feeling remains.  I have love, and that Julie doesn’t want it is irrelevant to that fact.  It is, again, love regardless.  Is this love she will not take only hers? or does it now await someone else?  Is love love?  For all the unique reasons it exists for Julie, how could it be regifted intact to someone else?  To believe it could be that easy would altogether marginalize Julie, and I don’t want that, though I don’t know why.

I’ve been told how Julie seethed and stomped about when the flowers were delivered to her.  Had I been there, I think she would have confronted me again, and I would have, again, refused to defend myself and apologized for a blameless act.  Trying to spark a dialogue, I had, yet again, provoked a territorial defense.  Those flowers, of course, are long dead, but the peace lily is thriving and blooming.  I repotted it, giving most of the plant to others and returning the remainder to the same pot and cachepot.  This plant, a reminder of emotional support, gets no less precious treatment than the aloe.  Though Julie is gone from Twin Hickory, not all of my paranoia went with her.  I am not comfortable there feeling as I do that I yet must be on my best behavior, that even a slip five years down the road will validate management’s label of me as an emotional loose cannon with an “ongoing” attitude problem.  That plant must outlive my stay at Twin Hickory, which will be much longer yet, unless I can find my way out of the Henrico library system altogether.

I took the day off to write, because I need more time to do it than work and the commute allow me, and it’s more rewarding.  Don’t tell me a job is it’s own reward–that’s bullshit.  If a job is your life, it’s not a job.  My life is much larger than my job, for which Henrico County has not rewarded me or my coworkers with raises for going-on four years while they chase the technological Jones’ with “upgrades” that don’t make our work lives any easier.  No plant gives me solace from that frustration.

Writing is not my life, either, though.  Just as my job is a means to feeding myself, writing is the means to discovering my self.  Were I paid to make this quest I would feel much more rewarded, much more complete, much nearer my goals.  Love is one of my goals, and I’m still desperate for it; but it’s still winter, too, so I am little up to the pursuit.  Instead, I think and write about love, little though I know about it.  I’m still reading Why We Love.  There is no chapter on unrequited love.  Breakup is as close to the subject as the author gets.  Julie and I did break up, in a sense.  The emotional attachment might have been all mine, but it was nonetheless painful for both of us.  In my goofy, awkward, painful way, I try to make it up to both of us by taking care of an aloe in a chipped pot.  It’s the way I’ve done anything involving Julie.  How could I possibly change now? and in what possible way could this offend her?

“What a waste….”

It snows, and I wonder how Julie is getting along at the house she just bought three months ago.  Is she digging herself out okay?  Has a neighbor offered help?  Would she take it?  She’s been gone from Twin Hickory for two months now.  It feels like much longer.  How long does it have to feel like before I’m actually over her?  Forever? or as if she’d never been there?  And how long will it take to get there?  I don’t ever want to see her at the library, but I miss her.  When I no longer think of her relative to myself, I am over her.  Saying that makes me think that the blogs have been about neither her nor me, but about us.  When it truly is just about me, I’ll be over her.  I have to reclaim the blog from her as I do some of the music I love.  When the thought of doing something I know–or even suspect–we both like doesn’t conjure daydreams of us doing or partaking of them together, then that thing is mine again and I’m over her.  Or is all it takes is to want to be over her? because I’m not even there yet.

I played all my XTC one week on the pretense of introduction to my kids.  The pretense helped shift my usual perspective of, and self-investment in the music, so I can’t confidently attribute my relative emotional semi-detachment wholly to personal growth.  The association of the songs to Us or her was delayed from instant to eventual to not at all, depending on the song.  No small feat, given the difficulty in finding a song in their canon that isn’t about love.  Still, I haven’t been fooled into trying Prefab Sprout.  I was reluctant to give up james (Hey Ma), because after a particular listening I became enraged, entirely stripped of the fool’s new clothes–the belief that I could get over Julie.  That was several months ago, and now I want another listen.  I loved that album, but I had convinced myself that Julie did, too, and couldn’t sever the association.  Now Belle and Sebastian is taking up that mantle.  It doesn’t make me angry, though, to believe that Julie likes them.  It taps hope’s knee, but the reaction no longer kicks my ass.  Though in nearly every song I can apply a lyric to Us, the gut-wrench is no longer the requisite reaction to the association.  Belle and Sebastian are mine, but I’m willing to share.

Of course, work is a reclamation project, as well.  Two months, and the thought of her when I’m at the library still knots my shoulder and stifles my expression.  I quickly got use to the absence of her car, but in the library two or three times I thought I heard her voice and was attended by equal parts hope and dread.  And paranoia can still make me believe that the next time Ahmed or Greta speak to me it’s going to be, “May I see you in my office?” though I know I’ve done nothing to be reprimanded for.  My sister calls it a post-traumatic stress disorder, and I won’t argue; I just about exhausted the war analogies in describing the ordeal.  But the war’s over.  I’ve long since forgiven Chris for telling Julie about A Bright, Ironic Hell (“The Fool, Winner by Knockout”); and though it still hurts a bit, I’ve forgiven Stacey for siding with him when it happened.  We don’t really talk, anymore, but we were never really friends; we just kept each other’s misery company before the procession of her boyfriends began.  It hasn’t been a conscious effort, but it would be nice if management noticed what my peers have noticed: “You’re so much more yourself” and “You laugh a lot more”; and I’m much less intent on lying low and doing my job than on doing what it takes to help us all out.  Mary Lou and I work very well together; my blowups with her were always about Julie and blew over without hard feeling.  Everyone knows what I did to force the last office meeting, and if there is anyone left who hasn’t forgiven me they are hiding it pretty well.  Thomas the courier, endlessly amused with this particular tribulation of mine, never fails to bring news from Julie’s new library home, Glen Allen.  When he finds me alone, he betrays confidences the likes of which I was soundly condemned for exposing.  (I wonder if he’d be punished for his indiscretions if she found out.)  He knows he shouldn’t, but can’t help himself, knowing the laughs he’ll get out of it at the expense of my agitation.  No one at Twin Hickory has been so indiscreet, though I daresay there’s a lot of material to work from; but I’ve heard enough to not just temper my insecurities about this whole mess, but to make me feel good about how people feel about me:  It was definitely not just me.

Two months gone, and I’m still tangled up in Julie.  I will be for a long time yet.  What is she to me? and what must she become?  She is a fascination and an inspiration still, but she may also be a woman I’m still in love with.  How many more months before the love and the woman fade and leave the fascination and inspiration with which to write?  When will the fascination allow me to plumb the depths of her character without falling in love again with the woman?  When does the woman become the complex character that allows me to know her?  I don’t want to be over Julie, because I’m afraid of the inspiration drying up; that I’ll no longer feel the need to write it out–not even fiction–if  I no longer feel for her.  True?

Time will tell, right? A time dependent upon Julie’s continued absence to do any good.  It may be a long winter, though.  It will snow again, and I will worry again.  Maybe I would show up at her door with a shovel and a smile.  (Don’t worry; I don’t know where she lives.*)  I wish I wanted to see her again.

* I fell asleep, pen in hand, book on lap, and dreamt, after writing that last word:  It seemed a nice day.  I was pedalling along enjoying it, but found myself nearing Julie’s house.  As I drew opposite her front door it opened, and I dreaded/hoped she would see me, but she closed the door and stepped down three concrete steps with her head down.  At the bottom she turned right and dwalked to the shrubs under the picture window.  She wore a dress of burnished yellow whose few movement-made folds shimmered in the sunlight.  The back was cut in a deep V, and when Julie reached with her left arm toward the top of a shrub, I watched myriad muscles tense in a powerfully attractive pattern.  Then I was struck with sadness that she was going out, had a life of her own, without me.

“We Understand”

Did I tell you about the plant?  It landed on my desk the day after the tribunal, the first of two consecutive days I took off in order to get away from Julie for the week and write what I thought then was the last post of Satellite Dance.  Of course, I didn’t know the plant was there until I made it back to work, but Angie informed me it created quite a stir, and that only through serious conscience-searching did the curious leave the little card envelope sealed for me to open myself.  The plant was a peace lily in a bright orange pot.  The card said, “We understand.  Hang in there.”  It wasn’t signed.  A florist had delivered it.  Only Angie and Bethany ventured a query about it.  I told them only that the card wasn’t signed.  The message was mine.  I smiled impishly to think of the overheating the rumor mill must have suffered in speculation of the sender and message.  I don’t speculate much myself.  No, I don’t know who it was, and, yes, I’d like to know, but they don’t want me to know.  It’s a horse with perfectly good teeth, is all I know–well, that and that it lives at the library and is a hell of an ally.  Just when I was feeling my most isolated and friendless, someone dares to step up and step in and say, “We understand.”  It could be the most timely and necessary gift ever given me.  On my desk, where I could see it and touch it, it got me through that last month of Julie, offering support and peace of mind that came to me from nowhere else in that building.

In this first week without her, it continues to offer support and solace.  It is a friend, as others, I hope, will become.  No longer tiptoeing through a minefield of paranoia–hers as well as mine–I am free to do my job.  The person I was before–that acerbic, angry man–left with Julie; in fact, existed only relative to her.  How long it will take anyone to realize that and adjust their judgement of me is not my concern, though a certain vanity cares a little how I am perceived; but they are not even potential friends.  I know who those people are–I’ve seen the judgement in their eyes, as I could see it in Julie’s, though theirs is much subtler, perhaps becasue of the relative absence of malice.  All the judgements are irrelevant.  I like my work, and I like the people with whom I work most closely.  I talk to them, I ask after their families.  I show interest in them with the hope they’ll show interest in me.  I want to get along, not be alone.

To say the whole Julie thing is behind me would be a lie, though one I try almost incessantly to believe.  “Out-of-sight, out-of-mind” is hardly accurate.  Her nameplate on the whiteboard was removed the first day she was gone and the gap filled by lowering those above; Tupperware cups she’d brought in to hold the transit-hold flags have been replaced with something more useful; and the last of the holds with her handwriting on the slip has either been picked up or deleted.  I had no hand in any of it.  I’m not the only one eager to move on from this mess, which might serve as Julie’s legacy at Twin Hickory.  I can think of nothing else she’s left behind but in a few select hearts.  No, I’m not over it, but I refrain from initiating reference to it, preferring, instead, to looking forward.  I did tell Megan what I thought of Julie in a few terse words, just to get it off my chest, but only Becky has spoken to me directly about it, intimating my relief.  I was grateful that she cared, though I was more expressive of my lingering bitterness over the handling of the affair than of my gratitude to her.  The bitterness will linger for some time, because my questions are not satisfied with silence for an answer.  Things swept under the rug make a lump that’s always there to be tripped over.  It will likely remain difficult for some time to accept Julie’s departure as resolution, but it’s all the resolution I will get.  It’s a pretty damned good one as they go, though, and, without doubt, the best one I could have hoped for:  The one person I couldn’t get along with is gone, and with her the hostility that poisoned the workplace.  My peace lily is thriving, and with good reason.

Don’t Forget to Pack Your Paranoia!

With the entire workroom as audience, I accused Julie of being vindictive in crying harassment.  She said she didn’t accept my apology because I put her note on the blog.  That, she said, “made a lie of” my apology.  It wasn’t long after that that I was pulled into Ahmed’s office for a haranguing, during which I was somehow allowed to tell my side.  Then Julie got to tell hers, and I was hauled back in and told, “Julie told me a completely different story.”  Surprise.  Unlike in a court of law, I was not privvy to what she said, and, therefore, was not allowed a defense.  Please don’t expect me to believe that my story was treated with the same “respect.”  I was convicted before I sat down, so I offered no defense but to two accusations–that I continued to write about Julie after she’d asked me not to (she never asked), and that I told coworkers about Satellite Dance (I told no one at work).  The rest of the accusations were bizarre, to say the least, and I was too puzzled by them to know where to start defending myself against them.  Ahmed told me to delete all references to Julie in my blog and was flabbergasted when I refused, offering instead to make them “private.”  Julie said, “Believe me, that’s the best you’re going to get out of him.”  I hated conceding even that much, but the axe blade was caressing my neck.  When Ahmed asked Julie if she would like to proceed “to HR with this”–quickly adding, “I’m not saying you have to”–she answered, “No, not at this time.”  With Ahmed alone in his office afterward I found out how much of an advantage I’d actually had:  He expressed mortification of harassment proceedings sullying “his library” and, by extension, damaging his reputation.  Besides, it would have been the last thing Julie would have wanted, too, to bring more attention to her this way.  After all, it seems my offense in the first place was embarrassing her. 

Now, a month and a week later, I am rid of her, she and her promotion moving to the Glen Allen branch; and I will continue the writing and my personal social mission of making meaningful contact with my world.  To anyone who would take offense to my alleged reneging on a coerced “agreement”, I would suggest first, “Stop reading it.”  I can write as I please.  Every conversation of which I am a part is mine to report, as are my emotions to express.  Feel free to express your own, but if you have any intention of shutting me down, you’d best lawyer-up.  Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.

And Good Fucking Luck

Fuck it. I’ve lain in bed long enough to know I’m not getting to sleep until I pull off the goddamn gloves and say what I feel. I just can’t understand it. I can’t sympathize with whatever made her accuse me of harassment. What the hell did she expect that to do to our work environment? Did she think it would make everything better, that I’d stay on this fucking leash and like it? I’m not losing my job over this, believe me, but I’m not taking this vindictive shit lying down. Yeah, I fucked up. This is what I get for apologizing? What did I do that can be called harassment? I gave her a couple fucking magnets, for godsake! Let it go! Christ, it’s been a year since you killed A Bright, Ironic Hell–and nearly two since I’d given you anything–a box of altoids! What the hell am I paying for? I don’t need to tell you how to spell grudge!

I went through absolute HELL today trying not to ask you what–if anything–you were thinking to make your accusation–or call you a vindictive bitch. I’ve had enough of trying to understand you–sic your goddamned demons on yourself! Whatever caused you to be this way, I no longer give a flying fuck–and is irrelevant, anyway. I’ve exhausted all attempts at sympathy. Yeah, that’s rich–I’ve been an asshole. But I know what I’ve done, I’m ashamed of it (though not as much now as before you did this), and have apologized for it, but I AM NOT A THREAT. Call this a rant–call this whatever, I don’t care. I’m angry beyond measure, but I’m not a threat of any kind to anyone.

Goddammit! This is better? This is less stressful? What the fucking hell were you thinking? You weren’t! Any more than I was when I sent you that email. At least I realized the damage I’d done. Do you really believe your damage is proportional? Do you have any idea what it’s like now at work since you laid the minefield? Justice would have you sharing my hell, but justice is for the one who runs to the boss and tells her story (and I do mean story) first.

I don’t care how irrational this seems. I don’t care how much of this could be shouted right back at me, but–Fucking magnets? Jesus Christ!–What the hell did you think I meant by them? And are you gonna tell me you’d have accepted them if I’d handed them to you? BULL. SHIT.

I love my job, but you’ve been marking time since you got here–and here you are threatening to take it from me. That’s so fucking rich–you, who abandoned circ at our busiest times for your Adult Services vacations because you’re bored–and now sloughing off workload onto Slackles, as if he needs an excuse to sit on his fat ass and pretend to work. (You know, there are simple appliances to do what you do at your desk without your attendance. If you’re bored, do something we need done.)

This was not a work issue and never was. I can confide in who I like about anything I like. If I recall–and I do, correctly–it was you who let everyone know about the blog, so don’t play that hand. Was it any of your goddamned business who I told I had a crush on you? How did that hurt you? Your embarrassment is your own–you created it, you carry it. How the hell did I “[keep] reminding” you with my “words and actions how” I was in love with you? Huh? HUH? What the hell has that paranoid brain of yours concocted to justify that statement?

Get over my writing “about” you. How many times did I tell you I was writing about me and how I felt. Let your vanity believe what it wants but these were my feelings to express as I needed to. I haven’t told anyone about this blog, but I know coworkers are reading it. Is it an invasion of your privacy? Run tell Greta. She’ll make sure everybody in the system finds out, as you did before.

So, did you tell Greta about the card that came with the flowers and what the flowers were for? (Didn’t think so.) What did you tell Bethany and Becky and anyone else who would listen to your sob story of relentless victimization at the hands of a–but I won’t say it–you would be to ready to ignore the irony. I’ll say this, though: You’re sick. Yeah, yeah, so am I–whatever–but at least I have some self-awareness. I try to break down my walls, not build them up. Accuse me of whatever the hell you like. Did I speak your name? If it’s not true, it’s not you, right? (Whatever you need to tell yourself.) Good-fucking-night.

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.

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.