There’s a grade school game called ‘Telephone’ or something like that in which one person whispers into the ear of the next person, and that person into the next and on down the line of 20 or so people, until the last person is reached, and the original message which was something like, “Joe likes pizza” ends up being morphed into something more like “Joe licks panties.” Lately I feel that some people in my life have been playing that sort of game with some of the details of my life. They start with a small detail that comes up in a passing conversation, and it ends up being blown all out of proportion until I am having sex with the Queen of England or something like that. It seems as if it is a little way for fans of “General Hospital” to bring a little of that drama into their own lives. People, stop it! I want you as my friends, and I value as just that, but supposing you know what in the hell is going on in my life when you haven’t been privy to the information is just wrong. I have been really down as you all know lately, and the last thing I need to feel as if some people I hold dear to my heart are spinning yarns behind my back. I need your support and will gladly give mine if/when you need it. I try to be here for all of my friends. Please try to do the same for me. Don’t kick me while I am down. I have never met...
Talking to S tonight, she finally got the final sign off. She got the “thanks for the 5 years but it is over for good now.” I guess I know how that feels, and I conveyed that to her. She said that she understood there were lessons lying beneath but that she really couldn’t think about that right now, that the hurt was too much. I told her the lessons would come, and that she need not understand them now, nor could she really even begin. She talked about a hit to the self esteem, about how she felt so low right now – about how five years had passed and all she could do was think of the professor. I also understood that. I told her that that would improve also. She probably didn’t want to hear that either, or could not take any comfort in it. My demeanor and self esteem is improving, folks. I still wonder if there will ever be someone who comes in and takes me totally and completely like G did. I sure hope so. I sure hope that is possible, and I believe it is. I will live my days thinking it is possible. It is all I can do. If it doesn’t, I will rest knowing that it happened once at least, and all the stories I hear seem to say that many don’t even have that. I need to leave this house before I have more nights here without her here than I had with her. Let this place ultimately be ours, because it could never really be mine. Concrete...
I awoke this morning with eggs after a dream of eggs last night and I wonder today what my therapist will say about such things – these eggs, or those, in that dream, or the pigeon eggs, broken, just shells that fell from the rafters beneath the train tracks as I was on my way to the stairs and to this chair to write about...
One of the biggest things that holidays are for me is a time to measure out change; to see where you have come, how much your life has changed since the last time that holiday rolled around. Thanksgiving also gives us the chance to take a look at what we are thankful for, perhaps through the lens of that time measurement. I decided not to go to Durham for Thanksgiving this year. It was not easy to just take the offer of that safety, security and support, but I felt like I needed to stay in Atlanta to prove something to myself. New friends had invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, and I felt that being able to decide to stay here for the holiday showed a substantial amount of progress in my recovery from the break up, and the formulation of a new life that I have been attempting lately. Obviously my life has changed quite a bit since last Thanksgiving. I am still in the same house, but probably not for much longer. I still have mostly the same friends, and a few new ones, but some of my friends I am not allowed to see or communicate with in the same way that I used to. Things have become much more complicated in some ways, while at the same time more simple in other ways. Much hardship and pain has occurred. Much thought, revelation and clarity has resulted as well. Last year I spent the one day I had off for Thanksgiving in Spartanburg with G, having dinner, playing music, and eventually deciding to stay the night...
Okay, here’s how it goes, we are sitting at this pizza joint, and at most it is 3 to 4 months into it all. We are just sitting there and talking about love and our love for one another, and how great the other one is, and how we should get married before we hate each other, and she is saying she has never felt this way before, and I am saying I have never felt this way before, and there is a way she eats the salad, discarding the pepperoncini, that I could see a demise, that she didn’t like blue cheese, and that orange salad dressings were distasteful, I could feel death coming. I am sitting here trying to convince myself that it was all over from the start, that these pathologies were already eating us up, that we fulfilled some fucked up psychological void that we each had… but no it was love, it really was, as sure as pepperroncinis don’t matter, nor a distaste for blue cheese, it was love. At least there was that, and there’s nothing wrong with it, and it was...
I will awake in the morning with a yawn and smile and the dream will be over.
I always hate when I get to the final chapter of the novel especially the last few pages when I have to start considering what I will read next and I start to wonder about how it will end even though I already know. I know the writer puts emphasis on this ending, it will be the last thing he leaves you with, and there are novels with such beautiful endings, even or especially the sad ones. I am up late again and out tonight the late autumn crickets are singing just as they did in the beginning, and the cars are coming up and down the road, people are moving, falling in love, and out, making love, kissing, arguing, drinking, and fighting loneliness and their own demons. I have been up with too much on my mind, trying to remember the first words of the book so I might write the last ones. I forgot to save the pages, or they were washed away in the flood. I will have to recreate them, but for now I am attempting an ending. John Irving doesn’t write the first line of a book until he has written the last. If this one ends this way, then that end is also a beginning. Maybe there was death at the beginning, or the thought of, or the fear of, or was it love, a smile, comfort after many long days, was a corpulent arm throwing change to the beggars below, or did it begin or end with him coming home after a long day, and her waking in a monologue, ‘yes I...
I must warn you all that this one will be boring. Today has been pretty awful on a lot of fronts. This will not be a piece where I will wax poetic very much. It will simply be me purging myself of the demons of this day. I awoke this morning with JT on the sofa. We had approximately an hour and a half left together after seeing each other regularly in two different cities for the last week. We would board the MARTA train and travel to 5 Points Station together, where I would get off and he would transfer to the southbound train, and eventually to a plane back home to Chicago. It was hard not to be sad. This past week has been a pretty good respite from the things that have been perplexing me lately. I was really scared of what coming home alone from work would bring today. I didn’t have to wait until work was over for things to get tough. I walked in this morning to all hell breaking loose on a couple of projects that I am closely tied to. One was a project that I spent the better part of my Saturday working on. It was like running up a slippery slope all day. By 5 o’clock I started tearing up at my desk and I still had another hour to work. Five o’clock seems like the hour that, if I am going to shed tears, I usually do. Usually it is after I am at home though. Today it was at work. R thinks that it is just habit....
Despite what you may think, it is Bibb County that this place is in, not Macon County, so the romance ends there. We are departing back to Atlanta now with car in tow behind pickup and I am $165 poorer, not to mention what it will cost to get the damn thing running again this week. Keep you fingers crossed for us, we have been known to screw things up many times...
Okay, this may have nothing to do with medication or my depression or recovery, or with the breakup, or anything like that, but life does go on in other directions as well. Earlier this week a sportswriter at my paper, a man of about 55 years old, named Jack, came by my desk and asked me did I own a blue VW Passat station wagon. I had never met Jack even though we both work on the 8th floor. I thought he was about to tell me that my headlights were on in the parking lot, or that he had just seen a band of hooligans run off with my rims, even though they are not so fancy. The story is much more interesting than that, though. Jack said, “I know this is a little odd, but I have a friend whose birthday is on Thursday and she has always wanted a blue Passat wagon, and, ahem, you can say no to this and it will be fine with me, but, ahem, I was wondering if, since I am taking her to lunch for her birthday on Thursday, if I might drive your car to pick her up, as a lark of some sort. It would just be for a couple of hours and I will be careful and all of that, used to own a ’76 Superbeetle, am familiar with cars…” I have always wished that I would obey original instincts in these situations, i.e. to say “fuck no, dude, I don’t even know you” but of course I do not obey these instincts ( a fact which...
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