Progress Stumbles On

For each of us, there must be someone we can’t–and shouldn’t–live without.  Who of us has met this most significant other?  Who of us has settled for less? Who’s kept what they settled for?  I settled once.  I was tired of being alone.  I met a woman who was tired of being alone.  But we were still alone, alone together, for thirteen years.  I never felt more alone as when I was married.  Failure engenders a desperation for success.  After my divorce and before my pursuit of Julie, I was desperate enough for an end to my loneliness to pursue it through personals and a few online dating services.  And, so, here I am, having finished another failure, desperate still for a success.  But I didn’t get down to Carytown on my first Friday off since Julie’s departure.  I spent most of the day and much of the night with James.  By then, the eighth day of Julie’s absence, I still had not celebrated.  Watching Julie paraded to her car by well-wishers that last night as I climbed onto my bike, I was sad, hoping right to the end that she would have something to say to me.  The next day I was angry.  It wasn’t until I’d spent a week without Julie that I began to appreciate the new environment at work.  That’s when I celebrated.  I could have wandered Carytown and thereabouts.  I was feeling loose enough to engage strangers in talk and confident that something wonderful could happen, but I was feeling hopeful, too, and hope is the first ingredient of desperation stew, which was not on the menu for any meal that day.  I would like to have made a fourth attempt at finding the Carytown Psychic’s door unlocked (do you think they know I’m coming?) or hung out in a coffee shop for a while, but I hadn’t seen James in a month or so, and who better to celebrate Julie’s departure with than the guy who kicked me out of my shell, slapped the doubt out of me, and convinced me to ask Julie out?  If you think I should be whacking him upside the head with the bottle of Jura I brought with me instead of sharing it with him, consider the months I spent agonizingly not-asking Julie out before confiding in James about my feelings for her.  It was the right thing to ask her out.  How could it not have been?  There is no more room in my life for what-ifs and if-onlys.  That’s why bypassing Carytown was an easy decision:  Maybe I missed meeting the woman of my dreams and idle fantasies, maybe not.  I didn’t meet her at the diner at lunch or at James’ over beer and scotch.  I may have met her on the way home.  She may have even gotten me there, for all I know, because all I remember of that trip is pulling over about halfway home to throw up.  I don’t know how I’d pedalled that far or how I covered the rest of the eleven miles.

Who is this woman that I can’t live without?  She’s a comfort, a smile, a warmth.  Someone to touch, to hold, to kiss, to breathe deeply of, to wake up to.  But you know that.  If I can trust my fantasies and dreams, she has long, dark brown hair, thick and with a slight wave.  Her little pooch of a belly is nearly as satisfying to cup as her small, round breasts, with a downy treasure trail into a curly jungle–Oh, but I don’t really know her that well, do I?

But I will, won’t I?  Do I have to be desperate to hope?  I am hopeful, and that means I haven’t given up, that I care and am confident.  The confidence totters between desperate to inevitable on the fulcrum of hope.  Desperation carries the weight of failure, a burden that will be difficult to shed, though less so now that its focus has left Twin Hickory.  My pursuit of Julie was a failure only because I didn’t catch her, but I can more accurately say that I succeeded in not-catching her.  In fact, I succeeded in many areas during that time, most importantly in finding voice in my emotions, in opening to myself.  My journey has been a continual stumble, but always a stumble forward, trying to keep pace with my emotions.  Eventually, I will find my feet and the woman I know so well but haven’t met.  Maybe in Carytown this Friday.

The Fifty-One-Year Locust

Sunset is before eight o’clock now.  The  cicadas are thrumming themselves to death.  If it really were possible to gauge the temperature by the cicada’s mating call, tires would be melting to the street and trees desiccating to dust.  But it’s getting cooler, too, and wetter.  I didn’t get into town over the weekend.  I feel like latching onto a tree and thrumming to beat the band.  I see darkness coming; cold wet excuses keeping me off my bike on weekends; and a long, dark winter without a warm companion. 

I’m missing  valuable practice time.  I’m nowhere near the point where socializing comes naturally.  A couple months of painstaking diligence is no match for a lifetime of easy ignorance.  If I don’t get out on the weekend not only do I risk losing what little touch I have, but I am not diverted enough from the negativity of my work environment to make positive progress.  Backsliding is vey easy when going uphill.  Even baby steps make progress, but as steep as the way is, even stopping is dangerous.  And by this Monday, I won’t have gotten out again.  When I work both Friday and Saturday, as I did last week, my only opportunity to get the weekend’s groceries is Friday night, because Saturday night I have the kids. I am losing touch with my progress.  Habits are hard to recognize–old ones because they’ve been taken for granted; new ones because they haven’t fully established their identies and embedded themselves in the unconscious through diligent application.  A week of opportunities at the library can’t replace–in quality or quantity–what I can rack up in a day in the city.  I need to be practically inundated with opportunitiy to practice the new habits if I’m to get them to take hold, to push the old ones out.  But the conscious wearies, slacks in its diligence, and the unconscious flows into the gap.  I forget my strategy, lose my confidence.  When I don’t get out on the weekend, I want to spend every working hour on the desk and hoping that the flow of patrons to it doesn’t stop.  I’ve given myself a second chance, made myself a new life, but will I soon need a third chance and newer life?  (See what I said about the confidence?)

It’s fair enough that I should feel desperate, but it doesn’t make anything easier.  Yeah, the days are getting shorter, and cicadas are dropping from the trees, but I’m not dying, not even going into hibernation.  I’ll find my way to human contact despite the less than optimum conditions, find my way back into my new life, regain patience and confidence, maybe even remember what the hell I’m trying to do.   Maybe the winter won’t be that cold, either.

Victories Everywhere

This is very hard.  I have to take my victories very small, or I could not remain motivated.  Friday an abundance of confidence allowed me to believe that my search for love could end that day.  Yet at the end of the day, the light retreating, I sat outside The Eatery in Carytown wondering what I had accomplished.  “Nothing” was my initial assessment, but as I wouldn’t go home feeling that way, and I could think of no other reason to hang around other than the hope of the love of my life falling into my lap within the next few minutes, I decided to make a closer inspection of my interactions during the day:  There was Stuffy”s (pass), Richmond Book Shop (fail), main branch of the Richmond library (pass), Library of Virginia (mmm…pass), Carytown shops (fail).  I guess I did alright on the pass/fail scale, but that still wasn’t good enough to get me on my bike headed west.  I tried a third assessment that started with throwing out the fails and moving to a deeper measure of the passes.  How good was the eye contact?  How often did I stop myself from speaking? and how many times did I not? With how many strangers did I initiate conversation?  This is where I began to feel better.  At Stuffy’s the eye contact was good and the banter loose and easy, but at the book shop I began to turn inward as I assessed the likelihood of meeting anyone there as unlikely the moment I walked in and the woman behind the counter didn’t look up; and I felt a pang of failure for not speaking to her.  The disappointment of not finding myself in the treasure cave I’d anticipated depressed me a bit further.  I was relieved to be out of there, to escape my darkening mood and the leaden stuffiness nowhere near relieved by the meager phalanx of fans.  Before I unlocked the bike I nearly called James but felt I might miss out on meeting someone if I spent the rest of the day with him–taking friends for granted for the sake of friends I haven’t yet made.  Hm.

It wasn’t the last time that day that I stood on a busy street pondering my next move–in fact, it could have been the theme of the day.  I spent a lot of time looking in all directions for the right direction.  The last time, frozen in place on Cary Street, I looked down between my feet.  From a crack in the sidewalk protruded a silver cut-out heart.  I stared at it for several moments before stooping to pick it up.  I had a heart already, a pocket charm I’d bought a few weeks before, just before I’d found a heart-shaped rubber band in a book on a shelf at work that I now wear there around my name tag every day.  Then there’s the one on the claddagh, too.  Direction was home, with my new heart.

At the library I take my victories even smaller because they are harder won.  The nag of hypocrisy sours much of my action and digs me into a cynical hole from which I have to climb back into my game by the time I have to face the public, because the positive opportunities there can help me heal the negative ones in the back room.  However, the gains I make out front, in public and on the floor seem yet to have made an impact on the back room, but I try to ignore that situation altogether anymore, as there seems nothing else to do about it without a cooperation that will not be forthcoming.  No victory there, but an unsatisfactory truce.  No ground to be gained, I’ll go where I’m not trespassing.  There is no enticement or motivation to cross a minefield–what reward could overcome the setback?  I won’t get hope started in that direction.  The ultimate little victory I can go home with at the end of a day is, sometimes, simply not to have gone that way.  That can be quite an accomplishment, really.

The Norse God of Escape

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

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

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

More Than a Kewpie Doll at Stake

She wore a short denim skirt and white panties.  The skirt I noticed when she walked through the library security gates, the panties when she knelt to find her hold on the shelf–a bright triangle between shiny tanned knees.  She stood empty-handed.  I followed her legs to her face, reaching it as she turned to me at the circ desk.  I locked onto her eyes, smiled, and silently invited her to come talk to me.  Her smile accepted.  Her hold was not where she had looked for it because it was waiting at the window for her to driveup for it.  I recognized her name when I scanned her card and knew that she picked up all her holds there, though I’d never actually seen her at the window.  I got it for her.  The title was something like When Food Is Love.  As our engagement was mutual, at parting I gave her the test:  How long would she maintain eye contact as she left?  She dropped her eyes to her book and slid it off the counter to her other hand, and as she turned to the entrance her near eye swivelled to me and smiled.  If the same light hit my eyes, I suppose I returned the same.  I’m sure I felt the same.  I watched her out the security gates then turned back to her name, still on the monitor before me, and clicked on it.  Fifty-four years old!  You’re kidding me!  I was pegging her for five years my junior not three years my senior.  She suddenly became even more attractive.

Such an encounter as that is now my goal for my hour on the circ desk.  Accepting that that won’t always happen doesn’t tempt me to lower my standards but to practice as intensely as possible.  And that I don’t practice on every woman but the ones I find most attractive shaves my opportunities to the bone.  (I’m a picky guy.)  But I’ve stumbled onto something–speed dating at its quickest and least embarrassing.  Simply, it’s first-eye-contact.  In that moment is the most significant moment of the relationship–in fact, the moment that decides the possibility of that relationship even happening.  And if that moment tells me it’s not happening, where’s the rejection?  Brilliant!  It starts with self-accepting the initial attraction and then conveying it.  I saw this woman (whose name I will withhold for compromising her vanity) before she knelt in front of the holds shelf, but she did not look my way until she didn’t find her book.  I was already attracted to her; now I had to let her know by looking in her eyes.  That she returned my smile with her own did not necessarily mean she was attracted to me–I could have just been a friendly face willing to help her–but it did mean she was willing to accept my friendliness.  That’s all I can ask, isn’t it?  It’s easy to discreetly test the waters from that point, as we are now open to each other, relative to being strangers.  After the initial positive connection I do not fear tripping over my tongue or saying something inane or innappropriate and have little trouble maintaining eye contact; plus, I will do anything she asks and offer to do yet more.  But how can I be sure I’ll see her again?  I can’t be sure I’ll be on the desk the next time she comes in, or on the window when she picks up there.  That’s why I have to intensify my practice.

Matt invited me over for lunch Memorial Day.  Being a bachelor (or just being me), I accepted the free meal.  “Oh,” he added, “Chris invited us over for a cookout later.  Do you think you’d wanna come?”  “Yes!  To tell you the truth, I would hope to see Jackie there.”  I told him about seeing her at the yoga studio.  (He doesn’t read my blog.)  “I really could use the classes,” I told him, “but I haven’t done anything about it because it still feels like a pretense to see Jackie.”  Well, guess what?  It must have been.  My hopes were already in the way when we got to the cookout, so my tongue was tightly knotted.  When someone asked, “Jackie?  Where’s Brian?  Is he working?”  i knew my game was over, but I was as relieved as I was disappointed–and I no longer felt the nine-mile trip to the yoga studio was worth my Wednesday morning.  At least I hadn’t committed myself to the hope and inflated it beyond proportion.  I could easily have done that in the months since I’d seen her, but unlike the months it took me to ask Julie out, I wasn’t reminded of my hopes by seeing her every workday.  If I’d been paying attention when we first saw each other at the cookout, I’d have already seen in Jackie’s eyes that our interests were not correlative.  My day wasn’t ruined; it’s knee wasn’t so much as skinned; it didn’t so much as cut itself shaving.  There was no lament or woeful wail, but a shrug and “Oh, well.”

I play on.  I keep looking, keep looking into eyes, looking for…what?  A connection, then a deeper connection.  It’s there, somewhere, in someone’s eyes.  It’s not a game–I shouldn’t call it that–and it isn’t play or sport.  I might know what I’m after, but getting it doesn’t get me the broken tape and the top step on the tri-level dais.  No medal will be hung around my neck, but a millstone might be lifted from it.  This is serious work and might amount to a life’s-work in the end, but…but the thought is too complex for me to express adequately, and, despite my normal analytical bent, I get the feeling that I should accept it being so, that even an understanding, much less an explanation of what I’m doing is not only unnecessary but detrimental:  Codifying what I do is what makes this a sport, a game for its own sake.  I want to see beautiful women; I wnat to meet them and talk to them.  I want to fall in love; I want to love myself.  That I feel good doing what I’m doing only means I believe I’m doing the right thing.  Whatever comes of that must be what I deserve, and the only way to accept what I deserve is to know I’m doing right:  There’s my circle.  I have to trust it not to be a snake eating itself.

Running Toward Dear Life

It’s been a few days since I listened to Frightened Rabbit, but “Things” still pulses in my brain, the music and the singer both running, frantic, until desperation is quenched in the baptism of another, knowing, soul.  That I connect deeply to this song still does not seem to be the complete reason it resonates.  What keeps the tape looping is the absolute surety that Julie would love this album.  It speaks to me, not for me.  It can’t tell Julie how I feel about her, but it can show me the necessity and ability to move away from her.  I wouldn’t expect it to tell Julie this; I just expect her to like it.

Don’t expect me to try to make conversation with her over this.  I still hope for too much from her to not be disappointed with the usual outcome, the outcome that history gives me every reason to presume–and presuming the outcome will not change, I will avoid that disappointment until I’m sure I would no longer feel it.

I feel myself turning bitter again when I think of that disappointment.  I wanted to say that telling her about Frightened Rabbit was a step toward just being civil to each other, but the usual hopes stoke an infernal anger.  This thinking I’m over her never lasts long and seems always to end by exploding all over my ego.  I’m filling paper bags with water, delusions with reality.  Was that previous post a delusion?  I can’t believe I even sustained that attitude for a thousand words.  Now it all seems false.  I haven’t listened to the album since I wrote that post, and I get an almost sickening feeling thinking that my emotional life is so shallow as to be dependent upon music to–

I can’t finish that sentence.  Instead, I put on Frightened Rabbit.  I wish I could pour this music onto the page–words seem just impossible for me sometimes, given the choice of repeating myself, proving how little I’ve progressed; and an ineffable state of virtual stasis of mind.  The entire album is about rebirth, self-baptism.  I hear despair, the certainty of what must be done, the determination to do it, the crushing pain in doing it, and the validation in living through it–redemption.

What I’m going through can’t be so clearly defined or so dramatically undertaken, but it can’t escape being characterized as a quest for redemption.  My sometimes strident righteousness is the wall I hide my guilt behind.  Of what I feel guilty I’m not sure, and so it is not a motivator of my actions.  Neither is the guilt strident, so it will not push its agenda–even if it had one.  So from what do I seek redemption?  This behaviour toward Julie that I have so glibly rationalized?  That she has implicitly accepted it has suckered me more than a few times into believing I’m doing the right thing, but my conscience knows better.  I do nothing about it because the rewards I seek, the assuagement of my guilt and (yes, dammit!) the love of Julie, are spurious and ridiculous, respectively.  Redemption will just have to wait, I suppose, until it’s got better reasons for my attention.

So, that last post was not a lie.  It’s what I need to do.  Last Thursday night, I cast around almost maniacally for activities to fill that Friday off, to distract me from Julie and get me a little closer to my real life, but I awoke Friday with too much sense and decided I should rest my cycling legs.  So I did little, and the idleness of body turned to the playground of mind, and there romped Julie and my bitter hopes, laughing at my stratagems, dancing aound me, strapping me to the maypole.  I can’t let this weekend, or any weekend, turn to that.  With a three-day weekend at the end of this week and kids out of town, I have to strike out in earnest toward a real social life.  Come the workweek, I will lose two steps to Julie, so I have to take some giant steps over the weekend.  If this seems urgent, well, it is, but if I concentrate on the effort I can remove the stress from it and focus on the long run, and that right simply means getting from one weekend to the next without a step backward.

If Julie loves Frightened Rabbit, I had better not know it.  I don’t want that taken from me like she took XTC and Prefab Sprout.  Luckily, I’ll have no way of knowing; she wouldn’t tell me.  Anyway, it’s Morphine in my head right now, even if it is “All Your Way.”  I won’t even pretend Julie would like that band.  Step away, Julie–a giant step away.  Clear the way for a weekend without you.  You be the frightened rabbit and scurry off at the thud of my foot or stand still in the camouflage of my disdain.  Baptism?  Redemption?  How about reclamation?

I Can Almost Believe Myself This Time

Though I try to believe that love will just find me, I think it needs some help.  It won’t come  bursting through my door, so I have to go out and meet it.  Not find it, just…run into it.  Maybe it won’t be in the movie theater, but I might find its wallet on the sidewalk out front.  Maybe I’ll bump shopping carts with it or laugh at an embarrassing event it had hoped no one saw.  However it comes, I expect it to come unexpectedly.  This attitude relieves the desperation of the endeavour, if not the urgency, because it’s a role that suits me.  I believe in serendipity, but like luck, it needs a catalyst sometimes.  So, I’m getting out of my bubble to do things I like.  I may no longer be getting my money’s worth out of Netlflix (I kept Stranger Than Paradise two weeks), but spending two-thirds of my monthly fee on one movie in public is more cost-effective for my purposes–eventually.  I think. 

But of course I spend half my waking life at work, so I have to seriously consider the library as a site of prime opportunity, and for direct, captive contact the circulation desk is the place to be, where the patron will first encounter library staff.  Each week there’s a chance of not getting an hour out there one day.  On that day I feel caged and wonder what opportunities I’m missing and hope that I can at least get out into the stacks with a cart of books to shelve, maybe get a chance to help an attractive woman find something.

On the circ desk, the patron has to come to me, but I can attract them.  Two people are assigned to the desk, and if I’m really intent on getting on my game, I’ll try to get the terminal nearest the entrance in order to make the first contact with the patron and try to steer them my way with a smile and greeting.  If it’s a woman I find myself attracted to, I consider her mine and will be disappointed if I don’t get at least a smile in return.  If she steers to the desk I lock onto her eyes.  This is especially important when she approaches head-on from the stacks (as opposed to the entrance, whose path is parallel to the desk) and is deciding which clerk to visit; first eye contact almost always wins.  Having won her my way, I look for the glint, the bright band of connection, the bridge from soul to soul.  Quite often it’s there, and when it is I am that much closer to being at ease and myself.  I can throw away the professional scripts and be Dion instead of Mr. Library.  Discreetly, I look for the ring and try not to let finding it close me off.  After all, contact is the thing, and I’ll take all the practice I can get.  (The last time I was on the desk with Julie, after the failed conversation, I enjoyed a banter with a woman my age as I checked out her books.  We had a very easy time making each other laugh.  There was never a thought of romance in my head–I knew she was married–the conversation just flowed, and afterwards I realized how important that kind of rapport is and how Julie and I never had any of that, how strained, even in the best of times, our converse had been, and how our humors had rarely met.  If only I’d recognized then the signs of incompatibility….)  I maintain the eye contact as best I can (that doesn’t come naturally to me, either) especially at the parting, as significant a moment as the greeting.  The duration of eye contact at that moment is very telling:  The longer it lasts, the brighter and stronger that band of connection becomes.  But as strong as the connection might be made, it may never get a chance to be made stronger.  With maybe one hour on the desk a day, and rarely the same hour, reconnection is, at best haphazard.  In fact, I can’t think of a good connection made twice with the same woman.

Still, I psych my self up for the opportunities.  My vanity, formerly attended to strictly for Julie’s audience, had, until recently, fallen somewhat lax, but on most days now I bother to shave and wash my hair.  I’ve discovered my physical persona as a rugged, outdoorsy guy, and I like him, with his perpetual tan, his sleeves rolled up and his hair in a ponytail.  If my physique falls a little short of my ideal–Michaelangelo’s David–I can at least say that I’m comfortable with it–in fact, a bit smug about having chiseled it from my chosen lifestyle without that narcissistic artificiality of “working out.”  I like wearing what shows it off and showing what the clothes are supposed to be covering–a boy’s ringer tee tight around the biceps, a tad short at the waist above the low-riding jeans, flashing skin between the belt and shirt reaching to the high shelves, squatting to show off a rim of colorful underwear.  I embrace the exhibitionist in me as I try to embrace all those other mes I used to deny as flaws to be expunged from my character.  “Me first” is not, in my case, selfishness in the derogatory sense; it’s the place to start.  It should be easier to complete myself that way than to seek someone to do the job for me. 

Is what I’m completing the vessel to hold love?  Instead of bumping into love or finding its wallet, will it just flow into me?  Or am I sewing a cap and begging for love to be dropped into it like loose change?  I suppose my attitude will decide, and right now my attitude says “vessel.”  If it ever points to “cap,” I hope it does so with an impish grin and a wink and doesn’t thrust out the supplicating headgear before finishing a goofy soft-shoe.

Tunnel?

(There are actually four paragraphs in this post, but WordPress seems to have lost the ability to separate them.  I hope it’s temporary.)

 

For a moment, I saw an infinite meaning.  The redbud bent away from me in the wind of a lowering sky.  Somehow, I could hear a robin through closed windows and over traffic; and there was the life beyond the words and the world beyond the life.  And then it blew away.  I took a half-day off Wednesday, the first half of the evening shift, so I had an entire day to myself before going in at five.  Monday was when I asked for it.  It has become impossible to write in the evenings, and by the time I get a morning to myself, there’s too much to write before I have to be at work in the afternoon.  This life is becoming increasingly more important than the library.  Even now, I sit, shirtless, wet hair dangling just above the page, scribbling, half an hour before I have to be out the door, lunch not eaten, dinner not made, clothes not chosen and packed.  I too easily now accept being late for work.[Paragraph]

I had work to do Wednesday, work more important than the work I’m paid for, work that more nearly defines me.  Writing looms large, but be it a wraith or just a shadow, it has no power to lift me out of this concrete world of responsibility and plant me in what is yet an abstraction of the life I should be living.  Those things I’ve collectively called a distraction–movies, music, books–have resumed the role they’ve always had, of the dig site of my soul.  What evidence do I have that I’m digging in the right place?  Would I know the evidence when I saw it?  Those questions show me my futility and stop me reading, watching movies, and listening to music.  They don’t stop me writing, digging…a well or a grave?  And the way it presses on me, I don’t know if I’m digging my way in  or out.  I only know that by the time I’d stepped into work at five Wednesday the load was off–I’d finished and published the previous post and missed a day of working with Julie.[Paragraph]

This isn’t a sustainable life.  I can’t take that half-day off every week, and I have to work with Julie.  I write for a way out, but the way out doesn’t seem to be in the direction in which I’m writing.  (The incessant soundtrack to this post is “Things” by Frightened Rabbit, an anthem to a desperate rebirth.)  But it’s not so much the way out of the library I’m trying to find as a a way away from Julie, and I already know writing won’t do that.  Writing won’t find that life I saw swish through the redbud; another metaphor won’t bring it back into my view.  How can I hope to find it in someone else’s creative output?[paragraph]

In a place transcendent of all those things is my life.  Yours, too?  We are the satellites dancing round our orbits, never meeting, never changging course to make it happen, always looking for each other, always missing each other around a just-turned corner.  I’ve been thinking I’d find you at the Westhampton some Friday night.  I’ve been to two movies the past three weeks, twice as often as the past two years combined.  I thought that was you behind me in City Island, the only person laughing with me in several places in the movie, but you left before the credits finished, so it couldn’t have been you.  I knew at a glance you weren’t with me at The Story of Kells–only four couples and me in the whole theater.  Too bad.  I thought of you.  I thought of Julie, too, but I’m sure youd have appreciated it more.  Maybe next week–there’s always something new there.  In the meantime, I have this life of words, words, and more words; the library; and Julie.  Please come to the library.  Don’t be afraid of Julie; she doesn’t care.  It gets lonely there–especially when she’s there.  Help me find that meaning again, that meaning beyond the distractions, outside of Julie, and within you and me.  Because here I am, late for work again, and I’m caring just a little bit less than yesterday.

What Lies on the Surface

The Picture, the one of Julie I can’t show you, was taken nearly two years ago.  The picture is much different now, but with which eyes am I seeing the difference?  I’d worked with Julie  for about a year by then, and my hopes for most of that time were no less modest than they ever were relative to any attractive and eligible woman my age:  Don’t embarrass myself in front of her and try not to show her my attraction.  It’s amazing I didn’t blow that the first time we met.  Or did I?

Julie was the last to join our crew before the library opened a month later.  On that day, we gathered in the meeting room and were given a personality survey and the results of our Meyers-Briggs tests.  On the survey, we were to list so-many regrets and so-many dreams, then tell one of each to the room.  Only my regret and her dream do I remember.  “I regret buying my first car.”  My last one had given me up just a month before.  The HR rah-rah who facilitated the gathering said to the room, “Wow, that must have been one bad car!”  (The meaning was lost on her, but James got it, at least.)  Julie’s dream:  “I would most like to take a bike tour of Scotland.”  We had not been introduced.  Upon first seeing her, upon her entry into the meeting room, I had sized her up only as attractive and maybe my age, though the extent of graying in her hair made me wonder if she weren’t actually older.  I don’t remember which came first, my assumption that she was married or my hope that she wasn’t.  At lunch the assumption was dispelled.

At the break I sought her inside but spotted her outside from Children’s walking toward a small  semi-circle of benches.  I beelined for it.  It’s only now that I think of how bold that was of me.  If it had been a simple case of attraction–if I’d thought she was girlfriend material–I’d never have sped down there and asked if I could join her, but I was excited to find someone who longed to do what I’d done twice and longed to do again.  I was after a friend.  Perhaps I hadn’t even found her attractive then.  Coming on strong (read “needy”) is, in my history, the dominant characteristic of the pursuit of friendship, and this was no exception.  Within a few minutes, Julie knew my parents were from Pittsburgh, I was half-Scottish on my dad’s side and Campbell on his mom’s side.  I look back on the encounter and think, “What a dweeb I was!”  I’m sure she marked me off right then and there as boyfriend material.  Soemhow, amidst all my chatter, I found that she had been to Scotland twice already–with her mom as a graduation present, and to see Trashcan Sinatras, her “favorite Scottish band.”

The next day, she gave me a sticky note with the titles of their four albums.  Her handwriting mesmerized me–he “a” approximated the typographic one, and the “e” was a “c” with a slash through it.  Soon after, she lent me two of the titles, I’ve Seen Everything and Happy Pocket.  I played them quite a bit, and on the way home from a Vegetarian Society picnic Stacey took us to on July Fourth, four days before the library’s grand opening, I told her that one song, “Earlies” from I’ve Seen Everything, was “impossibly beautiful.”  I had not talked to her all day, unable to muster conversation, because, by then, I was already hopeful of more than friendship and could not relax around her; and, so, desperate as I was to be with her, I could feel her discomfort with my presence and didn’t push myself on her.  She didn’t remember “Earlies” in particular and I was disappointed, having hoped to connect with her that way.  A month or so later, she asked after her cd’s, and I replied that I was “wearing them out.”  She wasn’t amused, and I was annoyed and a little hurt.  I put them in her basket the next day.  She never mentioned it.  (That annoyed me, too.)

What happened between that summer and the following spring, when I finally had to write, I’m not sure, though I can guess without too much strain on my imagination that I became more and more nervous around her, less and less able to talk to her, less and less able to be myself, and more and more the awkward dweeb dying for her attention.  A Bright, Ironic Hell, of course, takes it from there.

I really wish you could see the picture.  The proverbial “thousand words” allotted it wouldn’t, being mine, come close to doing it justice.  The most interesting–and annoying–aspect of the picture is the perspective:  Julie is not looking at the camera, but just to the left of it, as if she were attending a reporter while the cameraman filmed.  Gay Lynn, who took the picture, told me that Julie, in dramatic jest, had thrown her head forward to cover her face with her hair then thrown it back to expose her face again, at which moment Gay Lynn snapped the shot.  The annoyance is in not being able to look directly into her eyes:  She’s not looking at me.  Perhaps her eyes would have been a different if she had.  I usually describe her eyes as dark blue, but in the picture they are gray.  I actually had a disagreement with Thomas about it, and he said he asked her the next day, and she stepped right up to him and stared the foot upward into his eyes and confirmed his conviction.  I said, “That’s not what I see when she looks at me.”  The storm rolls in when our eyes meet.  Her tossed hair thinkly veils her near eye.  The flash glistens lightly on her chin, nose and high, round, taut cheekbone.  Her smile gleams with an upper row of perfect teeth, nearly all of which are visible.  Her thin, mostly gray hair lies flat and styleless but shiny clean to the sides of an off-center part.  Her eyebrows are light brown, and I can only assume her hair was also once that color, but I have difficulty visualizing it.

What do I see now?  Almost nothing is the same but for the hair.  The smile I never see.  The Julie I see now seems to sag under various weights–her mother’s death obviously the heaviest.  Her skin has lost it smooth luster, and her hands betray a Julie older than her years.  There is the weight of what might have been and what’s left sandwiching the meager filling of what is:  a barely adequate salary, a life barely lived, hardly loved.  Julie will be fifty in Semptember, a fact no one would be wise to remind her of, as she’s been calling herself old for at least a couple years now.  In the background of her picture is a book, a tour guide to Scotland gleaned from the donations.  It’s still there.  I wonder how that dream has fared.

Me?  I had a picture taken, too, minutes after Julie’s.  I’ll show it to you when I find it.  That was me at the moment I began to transcribe the journal I’d started two months before into A Bright, Ironic Hell.  If you’ve read that, you know how my picture has changed.  I have my own catalog of misspent moments and maps of wrong turns, but falling in love is not among either.  What is falling in love but a hope of being fallen in love with?  How rarely that hope is realized doesn’t diminish it.  Sometimes hope is all there is–is, in fact, the last thing one can give up.  Through all the bitterness, cynicism and despair, hope prevails–transcends.  I may never get back to Scotland to walk the drove roads or visit the homes of my favorite writers–that all hinges on practicality–but I expect love to find me, despite there being nothing I can do about it, because I believe it, and there’s always hope.  The real picture I can’t show you–yet–is of that hope realized.

Future Life

My future wife was in the library, but she got away before I could find her.  Or, that’s what I told everyone there.  Tyger dragged me out to the bike rack out front to show me the coolest bike–a girl’s model from the fifties or sixties with a front drum brake, built-in generator for front and rear lights, full wraparound chainguard, and fenders, topped off with the bicycle equivalent of a hood ornament, all of it original–and I said, “I have to find her.”  I scoured the library for a bicycle helmet, in vain.  I must have bordered on indiscretion, maybe even mania, judging by the looks of some patrons at computers and carrels.  I went back to my shelving, distracted, leaving it every five minutes to make sure the bike was still there.  Another hour till lunch:  If the bike was still there then, I was going to camp there beside it.  But a half-hour later the bike was gone.  I didn’t think to leave a note.

Had Julie been at work I might not have made the fuss, or at least not have broadcast it.  In fact, with her gone, I was practically human again, joking and chatting with nearly everyone, going out of my way to find a bond in every encounter.  When I arrived at work I had been already beaten down by an angry morning and was not looking forward to even a minute in Julie’s company.  But even upon realizing Julie had taken the day off, I was angry.  It quickly wore off in the presence of people who carried no grudge against me, who would talk to me and listen to me.  I have found Angie to be particularly comforting.  Of course, she’s no stranger to the Julie saga or its chronicles, but to her I was never the sad, creepy, obsessed guy that so many of our co-workers considered me.

With Julie gone, I can flirt and joke about my failures and foibles in romance.  I can fall in love with a patron I’ve never seen or one that’s just strolled by the circ desk.  I can laugh and have opinions without giving a damn who hears them.  I can be attractive, so I am attractive.  I can feel like I’m showing off my arms in my ringer tee, because I can feel that someone will appreciate them, and I can appreciate the appreciative glances.  Julie’s off today, too, so it will be a nice, long weekend without her.  I’d like to believe the time will give me an insurmountable headstart away from her, but Monday will come soon enough–too soon.  What I’m actually counting on now for that distance is Julie’s leaving.  It seems realistic, though I’m not sure what gives me that feeling.  Maybe it’s just wishful:  Seeing as I have no realistic means of leaving this workplace, it’s not me that has to go from this place that isn’t big enough for the both of us plus a white elephant–and the elephant’s not leaving on its own.  In every workplace there are people who, from the moment they arrive, seem to be looking for a way out.  Julie’s been trying to escape for longer than I’ve been a thorn in her side.  I’m not content at my job (Julie aside), but I like it.  I last gave librarian school serious thought before I finished my English degree.  By then I knew I was not a librarian, was not going to pursue a career that didn’t define me.  I’m a writer, and though I harbor only the most desperate hopes of writing my way out of this day job, it’s what I am, regardless of how many publishers would disagree (if I gave them the chance to).  I won’t make a cent in this forum, but I’m saying what I need to say the way I need to say it.  I don’t know what Julie is, and maybe she doesn’t, either, but she’ll possibly try to find out the way many people do, by getting another job or another degree.  Anyway, I don’t expect her to be here through the year, and I’m almost counting on that to keep me patient for the end of my torment.  Don’t ask me if I want to see her go, because I can’t answer honestly.  I want my life back.  I want to not love her.  That’s not true, but the only alternative is to want her to love me, though no more likely to happen.

With Julie gone, I’ll be free to love someone else, or free to pretend that I want to, anyway.  I don’t want to see my future wife.  I don’t want to be married again.  Do I even want to fall in love again?  If Julie leaves without making peace–and, yes, it is up to her–I will still be in love with her, but making peace would allow us both to move on.  Does Julie have any less at stake than I do?  Monday gets closer and closer.

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.

A Bright New Purgatory

This new world is so featureless as to have me floating in a white space. Or is the light just too bright? It would be ironic of me to try to describe it further, but who’s afraid of a little irony?

The irony is that I might have to write about writing in order to see anything here. I’m struggling against the pull to the style of A Bright, Ironic Hell—a chronicle—as Julie begins to dominate Satellite Dance. I’ve talked of no one else for what seems a long time. I don’t talk of pursuing love. I hope I’m not pursuing Julie, because, in this place, I might be powerless to stop it. Right now—god—I just want things better between us. Hope would make a lot more of it than that, but it doesn’t have the sway it once had. Hope of Julie loving me is a fantasy, and I know what’s real: I reached out today. I said “good morning” to Julie. Her identical reply practically ended with a question mark. I didn’t try to make eye contact. It was the best I could do. Nothing more all day. Julie made no effort till the end of the day when she said, nearly out the door, “Goodnight,” without turning back. Mike and I were talking as I was finishing donning my rain gear, so she was addressing both of us. My only hope—and this is not a fantasy—is that she will greet me one morning soon. I just want to know that she thinks it’s worth it. I want her to come out and play again.

The king of this new emotional world (let’s call it NEW from now on) is not the despot the old one was. It does not shout for retribution or justice. It lets the old king do everything it used to do but with a detached benevolence that could almost be inferred, by pride, as a patronizing indulgence. The lion is now a mouse, its roar a squeak. The new king is a new kind of despot. He leads with a silence pregnant with hopefully expectant instruction, but he doesn’t so much as give examples to follow. He’s the government that governs least, but I don’t know what to do with the responsibility he’s left me.

I trust him, but I don’t feel encouraged by him.  He’s like my father that way.  I talked to my father the other day.  He’s glad I’m writing but wishes I weren’t so publicly emotional.  Not that he put it like that.  He didn’t even mention the blogs (he never would), and I’m surprised to think that he’d even have read any of them, but he cares me for me, in his way, and always has, I know, though his way has not been enough for me.  That is how he and the new king are not alike.

Over the course of writing this post–it seems like a week but has only been a few days–the NEW landscape has still not taken on a topography.  I’m disappointed to still be floating without orientation.  I’m in a transiti0n to a place that doesn’t yet exist, or I’m there and can’t see it.  I want to get there but don’t know if I’m moving toward it or away from it, or if I’m moving at all.  Despite the frustration, I trust.  At least it’s a bright place.

Father to the Man/Child

My girls are now closer to fourteen than thirteen, and boys are showing interest in them.  A boy asked Emma out.  She was surprised.  All she could say, after recovering from the shock, was, “I don’t think so?”  The boy said, “I failed, ” turned, and walked away.  A friend of hers thought he did it on a bet.  I told her I thought  it might have been more of a dare (if that), a push from his friend to do what he was afraid to do.  I was washing dishes when Emma told me this, and I looked down in the sink at my yellow-rubbered hands and saw an important opportunity to move this generation of young women in the right direction.

I said, ” I hope you can appreciate how hard it must have been for him to ask you out.”

“I’m sure it was hard,” she said.

“I asked a girl out when I was thirteen.  It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.  She said yes, but the date was the second hardest thing to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t know what to do.  I didn’t know what to say.  I was so boring.  It was excruciating”:  Two hours watching The Paper Chase in a dark theatre, all the time wanting to just touch her, then standing outside waiting an eternity for my dad to come pick us up.  I’ve blocked out the agonizing details from my memory.

Emma doesn’t have feelings one way or another for this boy, Taylor.  She was neither flattered nor repulsed by his advance.  It’s just what boys at this age do, and what girls at this age prepare themselves for.  It’s not love or romance, and it’s certainly not sex–ironically, considering the whole ritual is put into motion by hormones.

A boy told Keely she was the prettiest of the Burn triplets.  She didn’t know what to say.  Her sisters weren’t envious.  Claire, as far as I know, has not been attended upon by boys, but Claire might not tell me if she had.

Every day with them–and I get fewer than two a week–I feel less a man than a father.  My problems mean nothing while I try not to lose touch with teenagers growing away from me.  Soon enough I won’t be “Daddy” anymore.  Next year they’ll be in high school.  Will it be then that I become an embarassment on Wednesday mornings waiting with them and their peers for the school bus?  They are all I have, but I am not all they have, and they will have ever more as they move deeper into adulthood, and I, it seems from this gloomy end of the tunnel, will have that much less.  I can’t see a woman taking their place (it wouldn’t be her place, anyway), though I can see my desperation for companionship increasing in proportion to the growing distance from my daughters.  Or will my desperation manifest in a pathetic clinging to my daughters?

It’s doubtful that I’ll allow any boy–or man–to be good enough for my daughters, but that could stretch the gulf between us to an unnavigable distance.  How can I be both a man and a father when I feel so inadequate as either?

Unless Maybe a Bed of Razor Blades Cushions My Fall

Matt and Hinckley both have exhorted me to not let my attraction to Sandra lapse in inaction.  Coming from two men with no more romantic experience than myself, the advice was surprising–until I thought about it.  Matt and Hinckley (James from now on) were speaking from experience, but from an experience of regret of having n0t done what they now urge me to do.  As I have been reticent to attach importance to my attraction to Sandra, so was I reserved in telling my friends about my New Year’s Eve encounter.  But I told them, so my coolness did not fool them, because they know I don’t speak to fill a silence or hear my own voice (or to read my own words, in James’ case).  Matt and James support me as friends do–with the greatest, most honest empathy.  Their hopes for me are my own.  Matt has been married more than twenty years.  James, twenty years our junior, has not been married, but has been passionately but unrequitedly in love twice in the nearly fours years I’ve known him.  Matt doesn’t want me to play it so cool that it grows cold.  “If she is attracted to you,” he said, “the longer you wait to try to find that out, the more she’ll believe you aren’t interested in her.”  James told me, “If this is to happen, you will have to take at least one other step in the direction of making it happen.”  Faith isn’t going to do it.  Zen isn’t going to bring Sandra into my orbit.  I found Sandra on Melissa’s Facebook page, and I looked at her photo self-portrait on her page.  I lingered on it.  It was all I could see; her page was private.  I didn’t solicit her online “friendship.”  This was before my friends’ double-barrelled exhortation to action.  I’m still not prepared to contact Sandra.  What I am prepared to do is contact Melissa and ask her if Sandra has expressed any interest in me.  Not daring, but  a step forward and no chance of rejection–for the fear of rejection has been at the heart of my reticence:  I wasn’t sure I could handle it.  I’m not sure still, but the longer I wait to do anything, the higher hopes climb and the greater the difficulty in reaching them.  If I jump now, the fall can’t hurt me.

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.

Comfort Zones

Since I’m not “looking” for love, I’ll entertain myself seeking interest. I helped a woman with the copier yesterday that attracted me strongly. Her sharply drawn face was softened by large brown eyes in which I could sound no depth. After I’d helped her I retreated to the desk and just stared at her. It was the hair, I think–salt-and-pepper, falling from an asymetrical part in two long, thick waves to just above her shoulders. I’ve been a sucker for lyart hair since falling for Julie. As I was staring she glanced at me. Unabashed, I smiled faintly. There was no interest on her part-I could tell that immediately–but she had no guard up, as some women do when confronted with someone they are not attraced to that appears attracted to them. The woman at the copier was not extending an invitation any more than she was extending the ten-foot pole between us. She was confident she was safe–probably married or otherwise committed (I couldn’t get sight of her ring finger), or just very comfortable with herself.

At work is where I’m most comfortable seeking and pursuing attraction. It is my job to be seen and helpful. I know my professional role. I know the likely situations and how to deal with them. Patrons respect the assistance I provide. I’m appreciated. Outside of work, what is my role? Where is my respect? Who will ask me for help? Would I be able to help them? Even the most likely situations out there are too numerous to be prepared for. My comfort level dips precipitously: Show’s over–nothin’ to see here folks!

Leaving Well-Enough Annoyed

If there’s nothing I can do, what can I do?  Well, there’s me all over:  Well-Enough will always have my company.  For most of the time that I pursued Julie I knew, explicitly, that she was not interested in me.  For once, I’d come out of myself to pursue what I thought was a chapter of my destiny and could not have been more wrong.  Why not leave it to chance this time?  I could certainly use the breather.  Not that I don’t live on the edge of hope.  I encounter quite a few people at the library, and the odds throw several attractive women my way every day.  I look for the widening gaze upon first contact, the naked left ring finger as they pull their card from their from their wallet, and the birthdate on their account if the first two criteria are met.  If I can’t build up a flirt, I try to make meaningful eye contact or look for the head-dip/side-glance combination, or either of those along with the hair-tuck over the ear.  Let’s not say I’m looking for love so much as interest.  As long as I’m not looking for love I’m unburdened of the groundwork.  All I have to do is answer the phone when it rings and the door when it’s knocked–as long as I don’t each time expect or hope that love is the caller or visitor.  Ah, but I won’t hold that breath.