Spring Me

So many Richmond springs behind me, and I’ve probably yet to appreciate one.  They haven’t been the springs I wanted–a full three months of moderate weather–but a week or two of neither heat nor chill before the heat takes over. My  anticipation of an ideal spring causes me to miss the one we get, and the one we get seems to be in a great hurry to be done with this year. The succession of blooms is so compressed as to  give the impression of all the flowers blooming at once. Nature knows, and what it seems to have figured out is that we’re in for a very dry summer. For other reasons besides anticipation of an ideal, I have missed the last few springs.  The distraction is not wholly removed, but I see with less cloudy eyes now, though enjoyment of what I see is still a challenge.  I am still preoccupied with making a better life for myself, finding a place, building a space that is mine. I woke early this morning (the clock said 3:51) to a bird singing in the echo chamber between the two long apartment buildings.  The song had no rhythm and little repetition.  It seemed more like speech than song.  I then began to think of giving up writing altogether simply to find more time to myself, as I can’t  work shorter days or shorten my commute.  But that would be to surrender to all I’m trying to escape.  The wall is thick, and I have only a spoon.  Five hours later I could still, just, hear that bird over the traffic. 

It’s evaluation time at work again, when we have to put in writing what we accomplished last year and what we hope to accomplish this year.  This year, as last year, my stated goal is to “move to the Tuckahoe library and work in my own community.”  Writing–my spoon–might never dig me out of this prison, but maybe I can spend the rest of my days in a more relaxed facility.  My legs and body are overweary of the commute, and I want back those eight hours lost to it each week.  Well-meaning people who are the second incomes in their households or earn six figures wonder why I don’t get a car, while I only wonder why Richmond and Henrico can’t get together on a fucking bus system.  My employer doesn’t owe me a transfer or any kind of accommodation to my well-being, but neither do I owe them my health and sanity.  Loyalty is not a commodity–no salary can buy it.  It’s to the community that I owe my work, and my employer can’t say that I shirk that responsibility.  Neither can they say I wouldn’t do an even better job in a community of my neighbors.

Another hour later, and the bird is silent, or just can’t be heard.  Another Richmond spring, another day of work.  Rush through an unnoticed landscape to seal yourself off from it.  Appreciate it on your own time.  When you get it.

To Bridge a Gap or Leap Into an Abyss?

It was to be a four-friend weekend, and I was excited to have had so much on my social calendar.  I felt almost normal, to be in the society of acquaintances instead of strangers, to whom I’d have to reach out and from whom I would have to expect and accept rejection.  The people I would be with would, to varying extents, at least know me.  I aimed for a full weekend of healthy preoccupation without desperation.  It didn’t work out quite the way I’d hoped.  James was sick.  Though that saved my legs twenty-two miles and my wallet at least that many bucks for lunch, it also made me restless.  I stayed home and tried to write, but did everything but–washed clothes and dishes, cleaned the apartment, played the guitar.  The words wouldn’t come, so I let them be.  Dinner with Diane happened–subs and on-demand Netflix on her giant screen.  I couldn’t get Matt out for scooterball the next morning, but I did catch the matinee of  The King’s Speech with Susan (sort of), with cookies and talk in Carytown afterward.  Matt and I got around to scooterball the next evening.

So the weekend was done, and you’d think three-out-of-four was adequate, but quantity far outstripped quality.  Like The King’s Speech, it was good but not engaging.  Missing James was not a good start.  We would have spent most of the day together, walking the canal, talking, listening to music.  James and I connect as well emotionally as we do intellectually.  Idea and feeling are conjoined passions.  James has fallen in love at least twice since I’ve known him (three-plus years) and he’s passionate about many things.  He quit Twin Hickory to pursue writing two years ago.  He’s yet to make a cent, but he’s yet to give up, and I daresay he won’t soon.  James doesn’t drive or pedal, and I don’t own a car.  It’s nearly an hour on the bike east to Tobacco Row.  Even for James, I’m not willing to do that but on a Friday of a long weekend, which comes up every fourth week, so it will be another four weeks, at least, before I see him again.  I haven’t seen him since my birthday more than two months ago.

Diane and I had a little fun, I guess, watching old tv shows, but who really engages that way but loving couples? for whom it’s not about what you’re watching but who’s keeping you warm on the sofa, whose hair you stick your nose in, whose ribs you tickle with the hand around the waist.  Diane and I were never that cozy, even as a couple.  Susan was supposed to meet me at the box office of the Westhampton.  I got there just before showtime aned waited outside, cussing a little more vigorously the longer I waited, for fifteen minutes, finally going in and plopping into the nearest seat.  I didn’t know how much I’d missed until Susan found me during the end credits.  I was ready to pick a fight.

“Where were you?” i said, probably already a little shrill.

“Oh, I got here about five minutes early and just bought my ticket and came inside to wait in the lobby.  I peeked out every once in a while to see if your there.”

“I though we’d agreed to meet at the box office.”

She said, “Oh, silly boy.”

I bristled a bit but shook it off, though I was still disappointed we hadn’t seen the movie together.  She hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but a more respectful acknowledgement of our agreement would have been nice.  I didn’t tell her that.

Every weekend that weather and time permit us, Matt and I take our Xootrs and a soccer ball to Pinchbeck Elementary, my first alma mater, and push ourselves around the blacktop (the venue of most of my dodgeball glory) while trying to keep the ball on the court, sometimes passing the ball, sometimes attacking each other with it.  We’ve been doing it for more than eight years.  Usually apres scooter we have a coffee and sit and chat.  This time he had to get home to Mary and dinner by six-thirty.  By the time we’d done on the blacktop that’s all he had time to do.

Minus James, and without Matt to talk to at length, the weekend was a bit of a disappointment.  I realized, afterwards, that what I’d wanted was someone to really care about me.  Diane asked about the kids, which is what everyone asks who doesn’t really know me; it’s what they know.  Susan and I know very little about each other, but we have a good rapport and can make each other laugh.  We haven’t shared much backstory.  Usually, our conversations take place with the circ desk between us.  She once asked me something to the effect of what did I do with my spare time, and I answered, “Oh, I’m just always looking for love.”  I didn’t mean hers, and she had to have known that, but she blushed and turned slightly away.  There is not that kind of attraction between us, and she got about a fifteen-year headstart on life.

I can’t say Diane and I really connect; there’s just that dense four-year history we share from way back when that counts as a bond, and we don’t talk about that.  I find it difficult to relate otherwise.  She makes so much money that she paid in taxes last year what I grossed in income.  At the same time, she doesn’t seem to relate to my comparatively meager lifestyle, often suggesting I do something that is outrageously implausible for me to even consider, like buy a townhouse.

If I ‘d wanted more from Diane and Susan, I could have given more myself. I didn’t make an effort, not so much as asking “How have you been?”  I’m out of practice with the lesson “Giving Is Receiving.”  (Another victim of the winter layoff?)  But I’ve also expected–taken for granted–to connect better on an emotional level with women than with men.  I’m finally having to notice that it’s not necessarily true.  Women  seem to more readily relate to emotions, but are as wary of a man’s as they are accepting of a woman’s.  I don’t know if that’s true, and I hate to believe in such distinctions.  It could be that I’m simply more demanding of women, regardless of romantic intent, than I am of men.  Hm.

So it wasn’t the weekend I’d hoped for.  How can I complain?  I kept busy with people I know.  I was amused and entertained.  I was hopeful of more engagement, but not desperate for it.  (People give what they can give.)  Spring’s not even here yet, after all.  This weeekend was a pleasant run-up to that, a chance to hone the social skills with people with whom I could relax.  So far so good, lessons learned.  Expectations and hopes are for ideals.  If I can’t stop myself from having them (and it wouldn’t be wise to try), I can learn to accept falling short as just a smaller step forward than I’d wanted to take.  Forward is what matters (sounds like a mantra for the coming warm seasons) and I at least went that way.  Being so philosophical about it might be easy at this stage, but a running start can only help.

Paper Slaps

I’m pleased with the postcards–a couple more Quint Buchholzs with books, one with a cat on a stack, the other with a boy asleep under one.  Who knows when I’ll send them.  I have nothing to send them in but Impossible (Nancy Werlin), but I got that for my girls, and one of my rules for the game state that it has to be a book I’ve read.  I’m waiting on Scottish Poems.  A part of me really wants to believe I’m just doing this for fun–I am, but fun, for me, is in the challenge, and I don’t mind making my own challenges.  I have some theories, and the challenge is in testing them.  I want to see how much trouble I can almost get into for the sake of self-expression.  This paragraph is a test of those theories.

The last time I said I could “play it canny” was just before I crossed a big, fat line.  How sure can I ever be that I won’t do it again?  I don’t know how I can escalate from unaddressed, unsigned postcards, but I’m afraid I’ll figure it out.  Apparently, I’m neither content with the unrequited aspect of this love nor mindful of the pathetic quality of dialogue with her I usually provoke.  Spring can’t come too soon to give me something better, more positive to do.  Eh, but it’s still a few more weeks away, and it will get cold again before it warms for real, and I have time, postcards and love on my hands.  As I can no longer (thanks to Blaise Pascal) trust reason to keep me out of trouble, I can only hope for more rewarding distractions from trouble, because it’s trouble I want, and I can only talk myself into it, not out of it.  The less talking to myself the better.

God, how could I be missing Julie?  I feel almost ashamed of it.  How could I want her back?  How much of that hell could I go through again?  I don’t want her back at Twin Hickory.  I couldn’t go through any of that again, but hope always thinks things could work better the second time around.  It seems unfair that I am not rewarded for falling in love for the first time after fifty years, for not giving up on the possibility.  But nothing’s done right the first time, is it?  I understand what I’ve been going through, but it doesn’t seem to mean much at the end of the day, when I still have to write like this, with my smile cracked and my humor beaten flat, left with this wistful pain.  I write better feeling this way and feel better for having written.  It’s martyresque.

Anonymous postcards sent unaddressed.  What am I doing?  Does it matter?  Just let me do it.  It’s what I have to get me to spring.  Let me believe she reads them, and that when she does she thinks about them, doesn’t dismiss them as an annoying reminder.  If not my words, maybe the pictures on the front will be appreciated.  “Maybe” is all I have, because the postcards are a weak provocation unlikely to elicit a response–in fact, the game was all but designed to render all provocation inferential.  If what I really want is to stir something up, I won’t likely be satisfied–and so I’m back to worrying about escalation.

I would plead for spring’s hasty arrival, but what will that really change?  Julie and spring are just different brands of the same desperation.  Which has the more attractive package?  I don’t need it or want it, but I can’t help buying it.  Spring will probably just find me buying more postcards and having more books sent to Twin Hickory from Glen Allen.  I write, and spring isn’t likely to deter that activity.  Like anything else I write, the postcard game is a project, and though it’s destination is as yet undefined, I’ll see that it gets there.  That, also, is like everything else I write.  Everything I write is a provocation, too, a boot in the ass, a wake-up call, a rent in the drone of life:  Listen to me!  Listen to yourself!  If you think you have nothing to say, nothing better to do, then why would you read this?  You have given up and would as soon do what you do every day without deviation, without challenge.  Take it, keep it, go away.  To proclaim myself a provocateur is to say I’m no mere troublemaker.  I feel, and I want you to feel.  Spring and all its promises provokes a renewal of hope and its potential unrealized from last year.  I plead for a provocative new season to kick my ass, to expand my possibilities, to smother my excuses–not to distract me.

Whatever I’m doing with the blogs and the postcards I have to do, to whatever ends they take me–Oblivion, Nirvana, or Trouble. I don’t see an alternative.  It has been, and will continue to be a hellish sort of fun, a continual challenge, a wired-in, nervy awareness that might never be satisfied or restful.  That’s me, that’s the journey.  Wish you were here.

Tiny, Yellow Frog

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

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

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

Cement Shoes or Helium Hat?

Another weekend verges, and I feel desperation crowding into my potential fun.  It can’t be helped, and the inevitability tempts resignation to keep me home.  Of course, that won’t do.  I’m feeling softly toward Julie again; that’s the problem:  My ulterior weekend objective is to hide from those futile feelings, because I can’t see what good facing them would do.  Loving Julie can have no happy ending without her, and admitting that I love her only offers hope that somehow I can turn her my way.  Can you believe I still harbor that hope?  Yet it’s so strong now it’s almost a belief, and I shake my head to rattle out the nuts and bolts of that irrational construct.  God save me from this love and the fool it might unleash yet again.  The possibility, however vague at this moment, of leaving Julie and Twin Hickory for Tuckahoe, begs me to make one last, grand overture for her love–or the final, epic embarrassment for us both.  It’s incredible–even to me–that I can still believe that somewhere in her heart, if only deep below the pain and fear, Julie holds some little affection towards me that I have only to tease out.  Here’s yet another chance I tell myself, if only…if only–if only a lot of things, a mountain of things.  Why isn’t love enough?

Another weekend is just another weekend without Julie.  She is my crushing desperation.  I want to have fun with her.  Otherwise, everything–every minute out and about, no matter what I’m doing or where I am or who I talk to–is distraction, though distraction is still more realistic than finding Julie’s love, if no less disappointing in the end.  I won’t be going out till tomorrow night, but I’m already dreading coming home from it.

Probably a Yorkstiff with No Tags

So, here I am, with the answers and the attitude, doing nothing about anything.  The mission is no less urgent, but the imagination is no more forthcoming.  Do what I like, I tell myself, but there are no movies in town I want to see, and I can’t convince myself that it’s less about the movie than getting out and finding love’s lost dog.

The last time out was unsatisfying.  I tried this newish cafe/wine bar, Cafe Caturra on Grove Avenue, just for an espresso.  The coffee was the only good taste I left with–snooty staff and a clientele dominated by wife-picked polo shirts tucked into belted madras shorts did not spell my kind of action.  What better could I have expected, though, of a place situated in a neighborhood anchored by two Catholic schools with a private university (of Richmond) between them?  That was three weeks ago, and I’ve since discouraged myself from going out the subsequent Friday nights.  What”s a guy to do in a town in which coffee shops are on the sun’s schedule? because that’s something else I like to do–hang out in a coffee shop and watch the people-traffic and listen and write.  Bars don’t work:  The noise is more loud music than conversation, which all too soon slips from barely interesting to moronic–and it gets expensive.  But I didn’t feel good about staying in; it wasn’t doing me any good; it wasn’t getting me anywhere near love.  I nearly spent another Friday at home, but though I couldn’t get myself to go see Sweetgrass, I could neither forget the weeks’ disappointments nor consider reading blogs an acceptable substitute for human contact.  I went back to Grove but around the corner to the sub shop.  I live in the suburbs–no sidewalks, no traffic not encased in steel and glass (except for the occasional fifty-one-year-old writer/idiot on a bicycle),  and no nightlife.  One has to head east into Richmond to do that.  I was that one.  Grove is the nearest Richmond (about four miles) with an approximation of after-dark activity.  After eating I walked back around the corner, but to Starbuck’s across the street from Cafe Caturra.  For once, Starbuck’s was a choice instead of a last resort.  Still, it closed at nine, and I closed it.  Only two other people came in, and they didn’t stay.  Then I began to think of Julie–all the questions that will never answered, all the regrets I can’t fix–and I knew I couldn’t go home.  Deeper into the city to Carytown.

There’s life on Cary Street–restaurants, bars, and the Byrd Theater with second-run blockbusters for two dollars–and none of it touched me, despite having set myself down smack on the busiest corner for nearly two hours.

Carytown night

 A few looks, a few nods, and one three-beered guy hailing me with “Top of the evening to you!”  I nodded and replied, “And to you.”  Thinking of Julie or not (what do you think?), I pedalled home.

A good portion of my disappointment has come from the same lack of contact at work.  Nothing is happening–no attractive women, no repeats.  Ms. P (for “panties,” if you like, but also her last name) picked up a hold at the window fifteen minutes before I would have replaced Megan there.  I caught her eye incidentally–nothing sparked.  And on Thursday, Greta* puts me on the desk with Julie twice.  Minutes before the second time, I look at the schedule and notice it, and I mutter, “Very funny, Greta.  Very funny.”  Julie was passing behind me as I said it and looked at the schedule herself.  I felt like a jerk.  Maybe I am; I knew Julie was there.  A very, very long hour of leaden silence folowed.

I’m back to feeling there’s nothing else I can do to attract love, make love happen, or get whatever it is I think I want, but to feel that way is to give up to the prophecy.  Besides, I just don’t believe it.  Give me the patience to wait for that movie I really want to see, and, Julie, get the hell out of my head or talk to me.  I still love you, you know (damn me), but I want my life back, so I can give it to someone that wants it.

*Head of Circulation and, therefore, schedule-maker

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.

Pedalling to Distraction and Back

There was a moment Friday, alone in the workroom on a third straight Julie-less day, that I thought, Maybe her way is the only way to do this.  It seemed, all of a sudden, that my asking for resolution from her is like asking for justice for blowing the cover off A Bright, Ironic Hell:  No one wants it but me.  Even my believing that it would be the right and best thing for everyone doesn’t make it so.  Who has any stake in resolution or justice but me? and are they victories worth winning?  What damage have I done, not letting go?  But I’m getting myself down.  Pretty soon I’ll have to be asking justice of myself.

On a rare Sunday without the kids, I thought I’d try to think as little of Julie as I could , not work myself up into the usual frenzied dread of the next day.  I headed to Carytown after lunch with a Zone Perfect bar and a navel orange.  Of all the places I wanted to go, only Plan 9 was open.  I bought six cd’s–Stranglers, Simple Minds, Sparks(2), Spoon, and Elvis Costello.  Three hours in Carytown, still bustling despite most of the shops closed, and I hadn’t spoken to anyone besides a guy asking for spare change.  Lonely and disappointed, I headed further east, to a headshop, Katra Gala, that Judy told me her son had some glass pieces in.  I thought I’d get Colin something as I hadn’t for her birthday just passed.  We were alone, the clerk and I, and finally I had someone to talk to, if not of anything consequential–the proliferation of such shops in Richmond, the legal euphemization of “reefer” into “tobacco,” “bong” into “water pipe,” etc.  I wasn’t attracted to her, though she was cute in a way and very friendly.  I probably had twenty years on her, what I consider to be an unbridgeable cultural gap for the purposes of romance.  It was enough for me, though, to have made her laugh.  I love to make a woman laugh.  (I got one genuine laugh out of Julie, long ago, pre-blogs, when someone mentioned the coming time change, and I said, “Finally, my clocks will be right!”  But I’m supposed to be forgetting about Julie.)  After about twenty minutes, and not having bought anything, I got a fillup of my water bottle from her and left for points yet further from home.  I ate my orange in my alma mater’s Shaeffer Court.  VCU has changed in seventeen years, but I probably blend in better now than then, with the long hair and bike.  I made no connections with my fellow students back then, being too old but not too old enough, I guess, and looking every bit the married man part.  In the time I ate my orange I made no connections, either.  Then, a few more miles east, maybe twelve miles from home, to James’ doorstep on Tobacco Row.  He lives in a secured building so I had to call his cell.  I had to leave a message:  “Hey, I’m outside your door.  I guess I’ll hang around a bit doing…I don’t know what.  Hope to talk to you soon.”

In Shockoe, nine blocks closer to home, at the end of 13th Street, I sat at the foot of a former monument, its plaque pried off, its statue cut from the steel beam that now protruded, jagged and rusted, from a crudely cemented pyramid of large, smooth stones, and ate my nutrition bar.  My phone rang as I finished.  James was on the canal on one of his writing walks.  He didn’t know his phone had rung until he opened his backpack to stuff in his notebook and it alerted him to my message.  I invited him up.  He was only a block away.

James had been writing poetry, a new medium for him, he confessed, but one he felt to be the best to express his latest Kristen inspiration.  Kristen is a waitress at Bottom’s Up, a pizza restaurant and watering hole, and James is in love with her.  He told her so, too, drunkenly, at a Super Bowl gathering at the eatery.  Guess what?  She didn’t run screaming to management to have him shut up!  (What? me bitter?)  He’s had that luck twice since he left the library, and though neither girl felt the same way toward him, they were (and are, in Kristen’s case) still friendly with him.  Kristen actually appreciates his company.  Simply the extrovert’s advantage, methinks, though James is quite bashful around women to whom he’s attracted.  However, his bashful is probably equivalent to my brashful.  (His cute would be my creepy.)  But Kristen is a lesbian, something James knew long before his declaration.  Hope for romance is suppressed by rationale and his concentration at making a friend of her, which he seems to have pretty well in hand.

James and I sat under the budding oak at the base of this monument to political correctness for a couple hours.  Of course, Julie came up but I diverted the conversation to the state of the libary–our attrition, the continued militaristic culling of our not-even three-year-old collection, and the bookstorification of the public library due to its unfounded fear of competition–until both the sun and my blood sugar fell to warning levels, and I had to go.  Knowing I couldn’t get home for The Simpsons, I got Chinese takeout in Carytown and ate on the sidewalk.

I’m never in a hurry to get home from the city, where on my bike I’m an actual vehicle and people are not only allowed to walk but are given places to walk on and to.  Would you be eager to come back to a place where you are considered an obstruction–even by police–if you aren’t driving? where cars honk at you every day (yes, every day) and people yell at you, “Get the fuck off the road!” and “Pedal on, you faggotty ass sonofabitch!”?  It was nine-fifteen when I got home.  I didn’t read or write or watch tv, or even listen to any of my new music, but soaked in a warm bath and went to bed.

The Sunday outing worked to a small but significant degree, though I could not, in my deepest dread have imagined a worse Monday than the last.  It was a Monday better than most.  Our first encounter was sudden and gave neither of us time to throw up but the most meager guard.  I even almost said, “Good morning,” but it just wouldn’t come out.  Instead, we settled for brief, honest eye contact and shy, tight-lipped smiles.  Thomas made her blush later that day–I could see it sixty feet away–and I was jealous and sad, wishing I could do that again, but the next hour, when I was on the desk and Julie was again shelving dvd’s in front of me, I again stared at her as she worked, but, this time, could not work up a passion:   She was there, and little more, though, still, I could not stop staring.

At the store that evening I seemed to be attracting looks and smiles, and at checkout was transfixed for a moment in the clerk’s hazel eyes as she handed me my bags.  If only I knew how this state was induced, I’d climb into that bottle and close it up behind me.  Is it a glimpse of who I really am? of what I could be for someone else? a preview of my reclaimed life?  Sometimes I can almost visualize–literally see–the distance between Julie and my own life.  I can almost take a deep, calming breath and say, “I can do this,” and choose to have my life back, to let Julie go.  Spring is well and truly here, and I don’t want to miss it as I did the last two.

All of those ideas and strategems and conclusions my brain wrought in A Bright, Ironic Hell have turned out to be true, according, now, to my heart.  Before Julie even knew about that blog, before I even admitted I was in love with her, I screamed for separation from her.  It’s been nearly two years since I started writing about this (though it seems like ten).  What would I have to say without her? What would I need to say?  Feeling her departure imminent, I have my last words to her ready.  I will not speak them to her or even write them here (now).  A card will go ’round, and I will write them there, for her and everyone else after me to read–one last embarrassment, one last public announcement that, this time, she can’t drag me out to a coffee shop to avoid.  Her leaving would be a good riddance for me, though, of course, I would miss her; but the void would be filled, I suspect, and hope, by deep calming breaths, a life of my own, a heart that beats more like a man’s instead of a hummingbird’s, and a heart I can give to someone who wants it.  I can do this.

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.

Lead Me Not Into Distraction

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

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

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

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

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

Food, Shelter, Love

At work I see plenty of physically attractive women, but I’m not ready to fall in love with any of them.  Physical attraction is 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 anything.  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.

Cancel My Engagements

If I were to say that my life was hollow and lonely I’d be only half right–that is, in a proportion of each adding up to about half. I get home from work, and here I am, on the sofa. I could watch tv or read, listen to music, get on the computer, write–the same things I could do every day. I don’t want to do any of them. I run through the list like channels on the clicker. Nothing engages. I don’t even want to sit here writing this, but it’s the only thing that expresses how I feel. The other things just cover it up. Nothing much means much with no one to share it with. There’s only so much I can share with the kids that they would understand, and why would I tell them I’m lonely? Thirteen is an awkward enough age without feeling that your love isn’t enough to keep your father happy. The girls are nearly the entire portion of my life that is not hollow and lonely–that’s all they need to know. (Funny, by the time they are old enough to understand, perhaps they won’t care.) So I write and pretend I’m talking to someone who’s listening and is neither judging nor pitying me. I won’t talk to myself. I’ve heard it all before, and I’m not sympathetic or forthcoming with good advice. I don’t want a therapist, a professional listener and sympathizer with advice from books that’s been doled out to countless others before me. I want someone to be with.

Since Julie came back to work it seems my opportunities to connect with female patrons has shrivelled up, but the stress of working with Julie has simply hardened my mood and put me off my little game. Tap me with a hammer and listen to the echo. Shake me and you might hear the faint rattling of my marble of a conscience. Or is that Jiminy Cricket’s dessicated carcass? I’ve been judged and pitied at work for falling in love with Julie, so I come home to seek understanding, and all I have is pen and paper. I’d better stop writing or they’ll start pitying me, too. Now, do I watch a movie or have a drink?