To Take Desperation Down There and Drop It In a Bum’s Cup

It was more than two weeks before I finally played the CD I’d bought at Plan-9 when I was last in Carytown.  I didn’t want to be reminded of the failure and disappointment and the limbo of transition I was lost in.  It’s called Write About Love, by Belle and Sebastian.  It only took me a day, though, to respond to the sticker on the wrapper:  “Write 300 words about love in any form.”  It was a contest solicitation, but the thought of a “song and a visit from Stuart Murdoch” was not my inspiration.  Being asked to write about love was enough. It was the kind of inspiration that got me started on A Bright, Ironic Hell after at least two years of not writing about anything.  This what I wrote:

Love is all I write about, because I don’t know what it is, and I want it so badly.  I think I have been in love.  I’m not sure.  It was a new feeling, and it was a good feeling, and it was torture.  It might as well have been love.  She didn’t love me, though she liked me once–just not enough.  Now, she doesn’t like me and won’t even let me talk to her.  So I write about her.  She doesn’t like that, either.  It doesn’t matter what I write–whether I’m angry that she rejected me or worshipping her qualities–she doesn’t like it, and has asked me to stop–a few times–and I have stopped, because I would do anything for her.  But I have always started again, because, I guess, there was always that one thing I couldn’t do for her as long as she inspired me.  And, though, if she told the truth and said she hated me, I would find inspiration still in the fascination for her that won’t die.

Was I in love with her?  Am I still?  Is it even love if it is rejected?  Is it just a seed without soil?  Her name is Julie, and she’s beautiful except when she looks at me, when her eyes darken and her face hardens, and I could cry because she feels that way about me.  I only wanted to love her.  That was my crime, and that face is my punishment, though hell is not being able to stop seeing it before me–and having to write about it.

Still, it was two weeks later, just after I’d published the previous post that I listened to the album, and now it cozily inhabits my head.  Friday had arrived and all the chatter I’d felt so excluded from had left with the half of the crew that didn’t work that weekend.  I am always more comfortable with the smaller crew, and the size of the group has much to do with that–the smaller the better for me–but the people in that group are individuals I’m comfortable with, people I can talk to and listen to.  That they’re all women plays no small part, either.  I feel the rooster in the hen house in some ways, but the brother among sisters, mostly.  Mike and Maddox have in turn shared this weekend with me, and I felt them to be interlopers.  Jennifer traded a weeekend with Bethany recently, and it simply seemed there was a hole in Bethany’s place.

This crew–Megan, Becky, Bethany, Angie, Sujatha, and Judy–gets a much more relaxed Dion than they’ve probably ever known.  Though I harbor bitterness still over the not-so-distant past, I feel no reason to air it at work; without its source and target, it has no (or little) context there:  She’s gone, I’m out of the box.  I can breathe deeply and not dread an emotional menace around every corner.  On my best days–and they are coming more consecutively all the time–I feel like a dancer–loose-limbed, swivelling from the hips and shoulders; turning on a toe; reaching from the waist standing on one leg, back and other leg parallel to the floor, eyes straight ahead–nearly every move a “step.”  I feel closer to real.  Amongst this group, I feel much more accepted; and individual but still connected to the group.  I’d like to think that I ask for less and give a little more now that the person I used to ask so much from with such futility is gone.  Before she left what I wanted out of this crew (and everyone else) was some acknowledgement that they understood me, that I wasn’t alone.  My paranoia needed to know that not everyone was on her side.  Then the peace lily came, and she left.

The desperation stayed, of course; it’s mine, a part of me for the time being.  I can diminish its role as motivator, but it has to tag along to work with me.  It wants me out on the circ desk, to see and talk to people (by which I mean women).  I’m anxious to get out there, too, but when I do, I leave desperation in the workroom.  On most days, with a full crew in force, any of us is lucky to get more than an hour out there in a day.  Monday and Tuesday, day shifts for me, are busts:  Any women I see on those days are most likely to be either young mothers or retirees.  Give me my hours in the evening on Wednesday and Thursday, when the working women come in.  Fridays and Saturdays, with the half-crew, I might get on the desk three times, and as busy as those days are, my opportunities for contact can reach tantalizing proportions.  I have no “line,” just a smile, a greeting, and lots of eye contact.  If her eyebrows go up, the pitch of my voice goes down and its edges melt away.  That’s my invitation to a flirt, but sometimes the invite comes from the other side of the counter.  I never turn those down, though not leading the dance can momentarily tangle my feet before the flattery rights me.  With Megan as witness at the terminal next to me, one woman virtually turned a fine payment into a come-on, leaning across the counter to within inches of my face to joke huskily about being “bad” just before casually dropping the husband bomb.  I felt teased but didn’t let on, didn’t even pull awayto regain my personal space from what could’ve been a kiss if we’d both puckered up, we were so close.  If this had been a game, I’d have conceded her the victory but not without letting her know with a one-sided smile of a wink that I was merely extending her a gentlemanly courtesy and that next time I’d be a bit more competitive now that I had her measured.  I asked Megan what she though of this woman dropping the husband bomb in the middle of a flirt.  What was the point?  Megan theorized that the woman wanted to prove to herself that she still “had it.”  If that were true, then she went away satisfied.  I felt the same way:  It had been nearly as good as good sex–a mutual challenge willingly met to pleasure in each other’s pleasure.

I’m not sure what I’ve been getting at here, except, maybe, that I don’t have to just write about love, that I can talk about it, too, at work, where there is no longer someone with whom I’m in love and who resented and feared it.  What I have now (for the most part, and the rest doesn’t matter) is a peace lily and people who understand that I am a passionate man and am not ashamed of it; can confide with it and joke about; and is who he is not because of one person, but despite her.  Every day is less of her and more of me, and much more fun–and I’m getting paid for it.  What’s the rush to Carytown?

Not Crash-Test, Anyway

Shelving, I caught myself looking in Dating for Dummies.  I say caught myself for I felt so stupid reading it that I even embarrassed myself.  I might say, also, that it was a near thing to getting sucked into it, but what I randomly opened the book up to was a section on exchanging phone numbers, and even that seems a stage far advanced from my position.  Dating–I have very little experience in it and none since the eighties, when I got married, even since the divorce eight years ago.  But books only offer tricks–pharm-rep samples pawned off by the doctor to a patient with an undiagnosed disease:  They don’t know me or my problems.  It’s not as if I even believe in dating as a means to my end, believing as I do that what I need will somehow find me in the natural course of my living my life, but who am I to say that that’s not an avenue to take on that course?

I may have renounced online dating, but I picked up a Style Weekly this week to look at the personals.  They didn’t have any.  I’m guessing they’re online now.  Before my Box 049 project, I’d answered a few ads.  I targeted the quirky ones, and because I’m a persuasive writer I often attracted response–even got a few dates–though no second ones.  “Girl with glasses,” had to see my place and paw through the magazines fanned on my coffee table–stopping at the Playboy and saying, “I guess that’s alright”–before we went out.  We saw a movie (at the Westhampton) that I’d already seen.  It seemed to bore her.  On the way back, she told me that her ex-boyfriend had had sex with a prostitute and that she had since had sex with him.  I suppose that was her way of precluding my sexual advances, but she needn’t have flattered herself that I’d ever been attracted to her.

I met a Christian girl for a drink at a hotel bar, where she like to go on Friday nights to meet friends and dance.  She agreed to the date even after a phone chat in which, responding to “What do you thnk of the Bible?” i said I thought it was “good science fiction.”  In the bar outside the dance floor we had a pleasant conversation–even made each other laugh–but decided as pleasantly that it just wasn’t happening between us.  She was eager to get to the dance floor and friends, and I let her go, only a little regretful, but pleased at least that we’d understood each other.

Then there was the woman, who after dinner and a long walk and talk around my neighborhood (then the Museum District), I never saw again, her therapist having advised her against it.  The next date I took to Joe’s.  She wouldn’t order any food, but picked at my plate.  When she returned from a bathroom visit and slid into the booth across the table, she fluffed her skirt, and I smelled pussy.  We looked at each other, her at me with a hint, me at her with a confused query.  What was I supposed to do? slip off a shoe and slide a foot in her crotch?  Maybe so; that I didn’t do anything but eat and try to have a conversation was my failure of a test, I suppose, but of a test I wasn’t interested in taking, anyway.

I know nothing about dating, or a little less than I know about any other social convention.  I righteously declare that I don’t play those games, but it’s a defiant ignorance of the rules that keeps me off the playing fields.  In staking my claim to individuality, I have virtually renounced my humanity.  Forget about connecting to women–I hardly connect to anyone but you, a faceless mute.  It’s not what I want, but that’s where “my own terms” have gotten me.  I spent all day in the apartment before finally getting out to spend two hours in front of a movie screen (Mic-Macs).  I didn’t go down to Carytown from there, but sat on a bench near the theater and considered my relative humanity, fading nearly into a quiessence I felt I didn’t deserve.  (Don’t ask me why.  I can’t tell you yet.)  In my consideration I didn’t include the positive eye contact and frank, friendly greetings I gave to two very attractive, albeit attached, women at the theater.  That I’d forgotten instead of congratulated myself is a sign that it’s becoming more natural.  I didn’t know either woman was attached until the first one, in line before me, bought two tickets and entered the theater with a gentleman.  The second, a compact, sinewy blonde a few years my junior, practically snatched the eyes from my head as she crossed my path at the intersection of the row and aisle after the movie.  “Hi!” i said, then saw her gentleman friend a step behind and, with no time to register my disappointment, I greeted him, too, but with hardly the same enthusiasm.  He clasped her bicep as they descended the stairs, and I wondered how much each of them appreciated my attraction to her. 

I have to believe that the eye contact and greeting will one day mean more than that to a woman, that we’ll find each other in the simple word and long look.  I have to believe that, because dating is so unnatural to me that it’s a lie to my entire character.  What little I know about it might be enough.  I’m no dummy, anyway.

My Child Can Beat Up Her Child

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

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

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

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

Here–Hold My Breath

Pascal is over me, I guess.  I haven’t heard from him in a long while, not even a response to my last email.  Did I hurt him, or did his passion burn out?  Did he suddenly see I was not the man for him? not the man he’d thought or hoped I was?  I am not angry or sad that I’ve lost Pascal.  Neither am I happy or relieved.  It was warming to know that someone felt so strongly for me.  But was it just my picture?  Did he read the words I didn’t write just for him? the words you read here?  Our correspondence might have been the difference.  These questions Pascal would consider unnecessary and anoying but the neurosis they come from “cute.”  Cute is a far cry from the fiery sexual fantasy of the early messages.  Cute doesn’t sustain passion, but passion is a fire, and fire dies out.

What does being “over” someone mean?  Is it just the scales of hope falling from one’s eyes? the stark new light revealing flaws one just can’t accept and love?  I think it is that plus the diminishment of embarrassment and shame for having felt so strongly toward someone:  Suddenly, this person is just another person, and you can’t imagine any longer what made you feel the way you did about them.  In fact, you can’t imagine the feelings themselves.  This is all theory–fantasy, even–because I do not know.  I know too well what I have always felt for Julie, and I was reminded of that on a day that began with me confidently believing that the feelings had diminished by such a significant degree as to be simply put aside like clothes that no longer fit.  By the end of the work day I was shoe-horning myself back into them, sadly acknowledging the delusion and its control over me.

It didn’t help that Julie came in with a new hairstyle exposing her neck and sweeping her bangs across her forehead.  Dammit! i thought.  I don’t need this.  Nor did I need her to wear blue, which turned her eyes to glistening cerulean marbles.  God, did I want to tell her I liked her hair! but I doubted my ability to handle even a thank you in response.  In other words:  I was a goner.  But, otherwise, I bravely, stubbornly pushed through, performing little favors for her, such as helping her offload the discharge cart onto the sorting carts, and other little things that we do for everyone else but each other.  I was soliciting thanks, which I received with emotional neutrality, but was also heading off the guilt I knew I’d feel if I didn’t perform these simple acts of professional kindness.  Later, I even alerted her to some new donations,  Nancy Drews from the forties.

If I had studied the schedule more closeley I might have chosen to suffer the guilt, instead:  A couple hours before closing we were to share a desk hour, such a rare occurrence anymore that I’d begun to take it for granted as a thing of the past.  Still, I was able to convince myself that it was no big deal and did a pretty good job of not working myself up about it or planning what to say.

“Did you find anything interesting in the donations?”  That’s what I asked her.  The rest of the conversation doesn’t warrant transcribing.  It was virtually the same one we ever had on the desk, where I’d ask a question, she’d answer, then…nothing.  I’d wait for her to say something anything, without prompting, and, so, the rest of the hour would be spent in a congealing silence.  No, the details, though vital to the drama, would only invite obsession and inflate hopes–as it did the rest of that workday with her.  The old jealousies and hopeless hopes floated up from the bottom of my emotional cesspool.  Allowing those feelings to pull me in would have been to drown me.  I can acknowledge that I’m not over Julie, but I cannot afford to celebrate.  Don’t I want to be over her?  (As I wrote that, the question expanded to monstrous, insatiable proportions.  I will render it rhetorical, for now, by simply not answering it.)

Getting over Julie might be a simpler matter if I could believe she never felt anything for me (which would require her to tell it to me herself).  I remember how giddy and jocular we both were the rest of the day after I asked her out, but then I remember, too, the wall shooting up through the pavement between us ouside athe end of the day when I expressed my frustration with not being able to get together that weekend.  A switch had been flipped, and I find it impossible, still, to understand what changed and why, and how she turned so quickly from excited to scared.  If I can’t stop wondering, though, I must not speculate.  Speculation without clues is just obsession.  Nothing a mind fabricates from the whole cloth of neurosis is to be trusted to be worn in the light of day. 

So, Julie, you are stuck with me.  For nearly an entire workday I thought we could work this out your way–you know, pretending it was already worked out–but you are still afraid of me, and that’s hardly back to “normal.”  (My fear of you has never changed.)  Yeah, I almost thought reparation, such as might need done, was all up to me, but I’ve done what I can do.  I waver between appreciating your inabilities and being frustrated with your acceptance of and submission to them.  Perhaps things are already as good between us as you care to have them be.  Keep thinking it and you might believe it some day.  Do you really not mind things this way?  I’m not dancing alone here.  This is a tango, baby, and you know it.  Maybe it has lasted so long because it didn’t flare as hotly as Pascal’s for me.  Maybe you can be grateful for that, anyway.  Or not.  Were I Pascal to you, would you still be embarrassed now?  At least I would be over you.  Would you have been flattered at all to have been a masturbation fantasy?  By the way, how’s the sofa thing working for you?

Ah, but nothing will change, Julie.  In fact, you know what?  Nothing has changed for so long that we’ve reached a new normal.  Maybe I should stop whining about you not talking to me, since I can’t change that, but I don’t expect that to change, either.  I know you’re in control,  so whenever you feel things need to be different you can let me know.  Don’t be too subtle, though; you know I can’t take a hint.  Maybe I’ll let you know when I’m over you.  Probably not.  By the time I’m over you, what will it matter?

I suppose I still love you.  I lust after you, anyway.  Is that an improvement or a downgrade?  It’s easier, in any case, being so far outside the realm of possibility as to be unencumbered by hope.  Can you believe that I can desire your body? a body you don’t like all that much yourself?  Or is lust another of those things you take for granted from men, as if it were less a personal, individual desire than  universal biological imperative indiscriminately applied?  (Do you lust?)  Lust is maybe all I have left for you.  If I can’t access your mind or heart, I can at least imagine the feel of your skin, the contours of your flesh, the smell of your hair, the taste of you lips.  Clothes can’t hide your shape; they are no defense against my imagination.  You are naked.

I did not intend to talk to you like this, Julie.  I did not intend to talk to you at all, but you are a more tangible audience than (most of) my other readers and it’s been you I’ve been talking to all along, anyway, right?  I’ll feel the need to keep talking, but you can’t stop me as easily as you did with A Bright, Ironic Hell, with an indirect attack through one of my readers.  My obeisance will not be granted so easily; that I am doing you harm will need proof this time, because my hope is no longer on your side.  You can rid yourself of me as easily as I (inadvertantly) rid myself of Pascal–with honesty.  Ah, what scales would fall then!  Is that what you want? for me to see you as ordinary, unexceptional?  How would we get along then?  I bet you really couldn’t go back to that.  Could I?  Does it matter?  Think about it and get back to me.  You’ll be surprised by what you feel.

Common Ground

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

Pascal has cooled since our spat, and I miss it.  I suppose that beyond feeling flattered was that of being appreciated without judgment or stipulation, even being a source of inspiration.  But did I step off a pedestal when I protested his passion?  My insecurity couldn’t believe someone could feel such a way for me.  Did Julie feel any of this when I told her she “fascinated” me? or when she found out about being the object of a blog?

Pascal and I have been talking about Julie.  I sent him some snapshots of myself, and he asked for a picture of Julie, so I sent him The Picture that nudged the little snowball on its way down the mountain to where we are today, the picture I am terrified to have but will never relinquish.  Upon seeing it, he said, “Besides being pretty, she is a warm, open and generous person.  Her smile shows [it].”  I replied, with bitterness clouding the truth, “She has not been that to me in over a year.”

Pascal called me a “neurotic romantic,” and how could I disagree?  He understands me.  That’s what I want.  Not advice.  I haven’t gotten much of that that I haven’t given myself, and even from myself it’s just rationale.  Pascal listens without pitying me, without scrambling for words to make me “feel better.”  Even my family can’t listen the way Pascal does.  A Bright, Ironic Hell elicited embarrassment from my father, self-guilt from my mother, threats of intervention from older sister Kevyn, and advisement to seek therapy from psychologist younger sister Shawn.  I don’t know if youngest sister Colin read it.  I’ve let none of them know about Satellite Dance and would be reluctant to talk to them about it if they brought it up.  The writing is my therapy and the intervention.  What might I have done with these emotions had I not had this outlet?  What kind of fool would I have made, and still be making of myself if I had not picked up a pen, instead?  My father would say I’d made fool enough of myself this way, and the rest of the family might simply think it, but I’m no more fool than anyone else and probably less of one than anyone who cannot or will not take a good hard look at their pain and try to accept it and love it, listen to it and hold it.  I cry as I write this, and I’m not ashamed or afraid of it or pity myself for it.  It’s how I feel, and if you cry as you read this I guess you understand (but it’s not requisite).

I told Pascal I missed his passion.  He was amused and not at all surprised.  He said it is my “seduction assets”–”all of you from head to toe and inside.
Knowing how to please and be desired…hair on your chest. your
fore arms, your eyes, lips, fair, cock behind sexy trousers…” (I didn’t send him that kind of pictures)–that I am insecure of.  Though my imagination would describe Julie’s seduction assets with a bit more subtlety, they are no less powerful and maybe even less appreciated by her than I am of mine.  I want to enumerate them, but my pen falls.  I stare at The Picture and can see only the woman I miss.

John Gray Is From Uranus

Stacey didn’t take my advice.  Eric called her, she didn’t call him back.  She’d met Alex at church soon after she’d met Eric.  Alex was better.  When she told me about him, she didn’t call him The One–not for not wanting to but for knowing the scepticism of her audience.  I took news of Magic Alex with a mine of salt.  A couple of guys over the past year have been The One.  Now Alex is over.  He broke it off–too many red flags he couldn’t get past.  Before Eric, another guy had broken up with her–same thing.  The guy before that she just started to ignore.

See the trend?  When the guys break it off, they’re straightforward, honest.  Stacey breaks it off–sort of–by hoping it will go away if she ignores it.  The guys were not cruel–they didn’t want to hurt Stacey’s feelings–but they knew that it was best to be honest.  Stacey knew all that, too, so why couldn’t she be honest?  Now she’s embarassed to go back to that church or that store and the places the other guys worked.  There’s little sympathy coming from me.  I didn’t know any of those guys.  Stacey is a friend.  I don’t like to see her in pain, but the embarassment is the bed she made.  The one time I compared my difficulty with Julie to her difficulty in frequenting the places where she met these guys, she said, “But you didn’t sleep with her.”  “No,” I didn’t say, “but I was humiliated by her.  You didn’t have to sleep with those guys.”  Stacey knows I can’t side with her, that I feel she did Eric wrong, and that she’s got to lie in that bed.  I don’t speak Julie’s name to Stacey, and Stacey does her best not to whine about the places she can no longer go, and no one’s the better off.  Julie is not redeemed.

Food, Shelter, Love

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

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