Two Kinds Of Bloggers Who Should Be Taken Out And Shot

I can handle the blogs in other languages, or the "Eleven reasons I want George W Bush to be the father of my child" blogs, or the "God is my best friend" blogs, or the "pictures of people I know with no explanation or narrative" kind of blogs, or the "omg!!!! i A |\/| aN el33T hAx0r" blogs from the too-cool-to-spell-properly age bracket. But there are two kinds of blogs which I can't deal with:



1. The kind of blogger whose blog content is a litany of ads for Viagra, Vioxx, marketing secrets of Don LaPre, or some similar crap.



2. The kind of blogger who sets up their blog so that when you reach it, a little dialog box opens on your screen which cannot be cancelled and which demands that you click "ok". I had one such blog install a trojan on my machine tonight, which thankfully MacAfee caught. The next one, I tried to back out of, and ended up having to ctrl-alt-del out of the process. Jackwads.



Blogger needs to remove these kinds of blogs from their "next blog" rotation--the first is worthless and annoying, and the second is dangerous. That's not censorship--that's quality control.

Oh Happy Day

This morning, before going out to run errands, I stopped to check my bank balance. And for a change, it had TOO MANY numbers.



::happy chair dance:::I got my tax check, I got my tax check...



I'd say that most of the time, I am a bad little American. I do not consume.



I am wearing, for example, the same pair of shoes LJ bought me last Valentines Day. My snow boots--last year's. Coat--same. I've bought one pair of jeans in the last year. I have several pieces of clothing that are over ten years old. My sofa is a ten-dollar garage-sale special from seven years ago--although, to be fair, that's exactly what it looks like and we really could use a new one. The newest TV in our house is the one LJ brought back from the block one day. My main expenses are food and utilities. And that's mostly intentional. I'm no great believer in retail therapy.



But today, my friends--today I went SHOPPING.



I bought myself a router. (Yeah, I'm one of THOSE girls--I like power tools. I make no apologies.) I bought myself half-a-dozen little tools that I didn't realize I'd needed--nail set, screw punch, cross-level--and some clamps, and some shelf cleats, and a doormat, and some jeans, and a hoodie, and some new pajamas.



My hair is full of sawdust from my initial explorations with the router--I have much to learn, but the bentwood chair now has a new plywood seat, so the experiment wasn't a complete failure.



Tomorrow: the upstairs closet gets shelves.



This is fun.

And While I'm Thinking Of It

How is it, I wonder, that it's somehow perfectly all right for certain nameless female bloggers to have to get up at 6 AM and take two trains and a bus allllll the way up the North Shore, in cold and ungodly temperatures, at least three days a week...



...but that a certain nameless female blogger's nameless significant other can't haul his happy ass to the bus stop and catch a bus six miles to the courthouse on the one day he has jury duty??



Just speaking hypothetically, of course. :::mumble mutter mutter:::

Okay, Now, Seriously

The weirdies are back.

My site meter, always a reliable source of entertainment, revealed that in the past few days, I have been linked to by people who searched for the following terms:



"WeatherScope Crack"--meteorologist in baggy pants? no clue...



"bitch trancejen"--hey now, she seems like a nice enough person to me...



"why should not we kill the dogs and cats in Greece"--I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks this is a question that needs an answer...but just in case, perhaps "because their English grammar is probably somewhat better than yours" might be a start.



"my blog is pink"-- Hmmm....it DOES seem a little feverish...Do we have any baby aspirin?



"I fucked my daughter'/"I fucked my daughter's friend"--oh, THIS guy again. Honey, again I have to tell you: nothing to see here. I have neither daughters nor friends, and if I did I wouldn't fuck them. So you're barking up the wrong, wrong tree.



"WHY SPOUSES SPIT IN YOUR FACE"--dunno. Maybe you've got a smudge on your nose??



"albatross boinkers"--good lord.



"biggest male horny doctor medical checkup site"--again, good lord.



"reasons why I enjoy S&M"--see, this would NOT be a good day to get me started on THIS topic again. Just don't. Just please, for the sake of you and everyone around you, just don't.



And of course, eleventy-eight requests for more info about the K@rshner triplets, whom I mentioned exactly ONCE by name, approximately eight or nine months ago. I'm thinking of editing that post to de-K@rshnerize it, but that would rip out half my traffic, and my stats would make me sad. (The only thing that could kill my stats worse would be if I were to piss off Zorn, who mentioned me again in his blog today. That really, really NEVER gets old, that whole seeing-your-name-in-print thing. Unless you're Michael Jackson, maybe, which mercifully I ain't.)

Tornadoes and Other Disasters

Last night was rough. Very, very rough.



I am burned to a deep-fried crisp, actually. I have abso-ever-fucking-lutely had it with my job--I am very nearly at the point of walking out.



Example, just for today:



Last week we had a meeting. (I say that as though we don't have a fucking meeting every fucking week--like, eight of them.) The meeting in question was about our addresses, and the fact that our data validation is for shit. We have no standard abbreviations, data is duplicated all over creation, and we're about to go to the next iteration of the database and none of these issues has been adequately dealt with. Anyway, in this meeting, I was given a task, which I very carefully wrote into my notes. The task involved finding out how many clients we had and how many zip codes would be within 20-mile radii of those clients if we wanted to target mailings to those areas.



Notice the 20-mile radii. That figure was suggested by Beverly, the Big Boss Bitch, and I specifically wrote that figure down because she said it, and I'm trying desperately to unfuck my wrongly-fucked reputation with her. This would be easier if she was not a scapegoating drama queen.



That task was due today. So Tuesday afternoon, I went through this ghastly long process I can't even begin to describe, because it's boring and geeky and database-y, and got the info together and did a kick-ass job, and e-mailed Amy with the results. I told her that if we DID try to pull data for those 20-mile radii, we were going to have our hands full and would probably need a temp to do the work.



This morning she fires back: "Please drop by my office to talk about this--I think you're misunderstanding the task." :::deep sigh::: Okay. Fine. I go to her office.



She explained to me that we didn't really need such a big radius, which sorta made sense when she explained her thinking, and would have made MORE sense had she actually told Beverly that it didn't make sense when she SAID "20 miles" instead of telling ME after I'd already spent a good chunk of time doing it.



At this point, Beverly walks into Amy's office to ask her about something else (another meeting, I believe). Amy says something to Beverly to the effect of "I was just telling Gladys that we probably ought to use something smaller than that 20-mile radius."



Beverly gets this blank expression like "20 mile what-now??" and Amy attempts to clarify. "Gladys said that in the last meeting, you said you wanted to pull all zips in a 20-mile radius."



"Well, I didn't say that," Beverly said. "I don't remember saying that."



"Okay," Amy says, and they pass a couple sentences about their whatever-it-is, and Beverly leaves.



Now, you have to understand something about my job, and it really is an immutable rule: If I say someone said something, and the other person claims they didn't, the other person is automatically believed. There really are no exceptions. I am the least-credible person there, and I have no idea why. I am assumed to be a liar although I have never actually been caught in a lie (I will not say I've never TOLD one, just that I've not been caught the once or twice I've done it)--and it is automatically assumed that anything I say is open to dispute. The only people to act on this assumption are my supervisors; the other staff believe me and listen to my professional judgement. Not the bosses. As you can imagine, this is very tiresome and demoralizing, especially when it happens again and again and when, on the occasions where my judgement has eventually been proven to be sound, no one ever acknowledges it.



But generally, I just suck it up and deal. I don't complain about it to them because I know: that's just how they are. Nothing I say or do will change them. This is a conclusion I've drawn after much conversation with several of my friends and co-workers, most of whom feel demoralized and dismissed in other ways. No one where I work is happy.



Anyway, when Beverly walked out of the room, I let out a big sigh; I'm wrong once again, I thought. Once again I'm being told I didn't hear what I heard. And when I let out this sigh, Amy says to me, in a SUPER-snotty tone, "Let it go, Gladys."



Yeah, THAT's a good way to validate your employee's feelings. I went back to my desk and sent out three more resumes.



Okay. Now, imagine stuff like that happening EVERY DAY. Often several times a day. How would YOU feel?



So yeah, I'm just fried. And in this condition, along with two exacerbating circumstances (1.I just dropped my methadone dose again, and 2. The last time I got laid was the night before Thanksgiving), I decided I needed something to read, and went downstairs where most of my books are. And picked "The Artist's Way".



For those of you who haven't read it, "The Artist's Way" is one of those courses in how to unblock your creativity and get back in touch with your essential self. And 99% of the time, my basic cynicism kicks in about a page or two in, and up goes the wall, and I READ whatever-it-is but it doesn't really have any emotional effect on me.



99% of the time, however, I'm not in quite such a fragile place.



I cried. Like, a LOT. Part of it was The Usual--there's a lot of talk about loss and acceptance, and neither of those things are things with which I am unfamiliar, and both of them are things I've not dealt with very well. I'm very good with building walls; they are many feet thick and surround a core of absolute gelatin. But actually DEALING with my pain--not so much. I am nowhere near as strong as I'd like to believe, and I'm fairly sure that everyone around me knows it.



There was a lot of other stuff that messed me up too, and by about 11:00 I was just sobbing. Which sucked especially because in my saner moments, I realize that a lot of what is in that book is recycled twelve-step-ism, which I have always disagreed with completely. (That's a post for another day.) But last night--lonely, unfucked, tired, burned-out, hating the way my life has changed and dreading the morning, when I would once again drag myself to a place I hate, to have my self-worth shat upon by people who respect only their own power...yeah, I kinda lost it.



One thing is very clear to me, though, and no matter how much twelve-step drivel you coat it with, it's still very true: I HAVE to make a change. And I HAVE to do it as soon as possible. If I try to swallow down my rage any longer, I know it's going to get messier and messier, and pretty soon I'm gonna do something that will jeopardize the parts of my life that actually DON'T suck.



...though at the moment, I couldn't convincingly tell you which parts that might describe.

Untitled

I am not sure, tonight.



I sit here in front of this screen and I look at this blank page and I cannot answer my own question:



...am I as empty as I feel...



...or am I just waiting to be filled?

Scars: An Inventory

Your skin tells your story, JP used to say.



Left temple: small indentation, about the size of a chicken-pock. (Much as I disagree with my mother, I've got to give her credit for this: "Don't pick at that" is very good advice.)



Right forearm: thin line, about an inch long, four inches above my wrist. When I was ten, I had a swimming pool in the back yard. My best friend and I were jumping around and my right arm hit her in the mouth. She had braces.



Right knee: small irregular spot, dead white, about an inch under the kneecap. I was running in the backyard, wearing shorts; I tripped somehow, and just slid.



Right wrist: two short, mostly faded thin lines, one on each side. No, not what you'd imagine. A few days after my eleventh birthday, I broke my arm roller-skating; the next summer, the doctor told my parents that one bone was growing but the other had stopped. The only answer was to stop them both from growing, so the summer I was twelve they did surgery to fix it and I spent my twelfth summer in a cast as well. My right arm is still about half an inch shorter than my left.



...the story of my childhood--pampered, accident-prone, always lovingly mended.



Right elbow, inside surface: one small dark spot, about the size of a pencil eraser, directly over the vein.



Left elbow, inside surface: two small dark spots, likewise.



Back of left hand: two thin parallel lines, running along the veins.



Back of right hand: likewise.



Left thigh: a pair of spider-veins that never healed, about two inches above the knee; from trying to shoot up into what appeared to be the only visible remaining vein I had.



Right forearm: small dead white spot, about eight inches above the wrist. Result of a skin-shot of heroin which was filled with cotton fibers; while the wound was healing, I could pull tiny threads from under my skin.



...the story of my 20's--the drawing on the envelope, clues to what was beneath, had anyone cared to read them.



Right ear: three piercings, one tiny pinhole scar. The pinhole, long-healed, from a piercing that reminded me of someone I'd rather have forgotten. One from when I was a child. One I did to celebrate my freedom, shortly after I left my first husband. And the third--the one JP and I had done together. I've worn that earring since the morning of his funeral, over nine years ago; if there's anyone left to follow through on my wishes, I want to be buried with it when I die. The other, I buried with him.



Left ankle: an initial.



I have never spoken of this scar before. It looks like any other scar. But it is a story all its own.



We each left an indelible mark on the other, JP and I; in the physical realm as well as the emotional. My mark was on his forearm; his mark was on my ankle. Both were made intentionally, both were made with the other's full consent, a gift incomprehensible to anyone but each other, like so many other things about us.



Your skin tells your story, JP used to tell me.



His mark is still on me today.

Confession/Realization

Not: I am too old for these life-changing experiences.



Just: I haven't found any lately.



Not resignation--envy.



I need another spring. I need some huge tide to sweep me up and bear me somewhere far outside my rut.



I need something to happen to me; the things I cause to happen just aren't the same, somehow.

Writing, Food, and Scars

When I was twelve, I started writing my first book. I bought a little paperback-sized journal with a flowered cover at Chicago Ridge Mall, which had opened just that year; it seemed to me that if one was going to write a book, one should write it IN a book.



It sucked, of course. It was the old "write what you know" problem: I was twelve years old and didn't really know too much of anything, other than what I'd read in other people's books. It didn't get very far.



My next real attempt at writing a book was when I was fourteen. I had developed a fascination with nuclear warfare--my dad had worked on one of the atomic-test projects, for one thing. Also, it was 1984, spang in the middle of Ronald Reagan's personal apocalypse, and there were plenty of items to pique a geeky freshman's interest in destruction.



The novel, written on my Commodore 64, wasn't quite so much about nuclear war as it was a love story set -after- a nuclear war. At the same time I was working on that story, I was also hitting puberty like a brick wall. I was finally out of the hell that grammar school had been, and I felt like there might be some hope for me yet; I was at a coed high school where nearly no one knew me and no one knew my reputation as the weird, smart fat girl.



Yes, I was always "the fat girl"--at least, in my own head I was.



It's a funny thing--I look back at pictures of myself through that era, when my mother was buying me diet books and sending me to nutritionists, and I think I looked perfectly normal. I often think to myself that if my mother had just fucking RELAXED and left me alone about the whole weight thing, I might have had some sense of perspective about my own body and the ability to judge FOR MYSELF when I needed to make changes. As it was, food became my rebellion--particularly when I came home after college and discovered that even though I had a job, an apartment, and a man, my mother still thought it was her place to run my life. Even now, to this day, she's always telling me how much weight I need to lose, how much heavier I look. I have managed, thus far, to stifle the urge to say What, you think I don't fucking KNOW that? You think I don't have a fucking MIRROR? I remember when I was a kid, and I'd take an extra helping of noodles or a bigger piece of cake, she'd say "Don't blame me when you're big as a house..." Well guess what?? I do. But not in the way she thinks. I never had an accurate body image. NEVER. When I was five I thought I was fat--because she said so. I had a little tummy all my life--big deal. But to her, that was "fat".



My dad wasn't any better.



I haven't too much mentioned my dad much in this blog; I've realized that. Outside of a couple of anecdotes, it's all mom, mom, mom (and her relatives) when I talk about my family. There's a good reason for that.



Of my parents, I'd have to say I got along better with my dad when I was a kid. I get my brains from him, and my sense of humor, and my interest in computers. But most of all, I think I got along with my dad because he stayed the hell out of my business....for the most part. As you will see.



It was probably very easy for him to stay out of my business, though--he was a very distant, self-contained person. To some extent I get that from him too, but I don't take it to his level. He'd go to work at 10 or so--he was smart enough and necessary enough that his bosses never squawked--and he'd come home around 6 or 7, we'd eat dinner, and he'd disappear into the basement, where he kept his little office. I didn't see much of him during the week.



It hadn't always been like that. When I was a very little child, sometimes after dinner, we'd pull the toys out of the TV room cabinet--the Weebles with all their accoutrements, the little Fisher-Price people, back when they were straight wooden pegs with round heads and painted-on features--and my dad and I would play in the living room while my mom did the dishes. Or we would take empty paper-towel tubes and play light-sabers, like in Star Wars; he would use the tube to enhance his Darth Vader voice.



I don't know what changed, exactly, as I got older. Maybe he didn't know how to deal with a girl past a certain age; maybe he got more worried, as I got older, about how he was going to put me through college or whatever. I know my parents were having problems as I got older, which my mother blamed on him. I used to wake up in the night and hear them arguing in the basement.



Or rather, I'd hear HER arguing. He didn't argue. He just listened, implacable and calm, and agreed with everything she said, no matter how dramatic and unfair.



He didn't listen to her. He didn't do his share of work around the house. What work he did, he didn't do when she wanted it done. If he REALLY loved her he'd clean out this basement so they could have a civilized room down there like everyone else, instead of a rat's nest of useless junk. He didn't keep to the kind of schedule she wanted him to keep. Why couldn't he go to work from nine to five like everyone else?



And he listened, silently, as she harangued him--and then he'd just agree with her. Yes, he needed to do more around the house. Yes, the basement was a mess. Yes, he should get up earlier.



How mad this made her, I can't BEGIN to describe. She didn't want capitulation--especially since she knew it wasn't going to change anything. She wanted a fight, and when she didn't get it, she slammed doors, threatened to leave, went off on long car rides by herself and didn't say when she was coming back. Which was just fine for HER, I guess, but which scared the crap out of me.



You remember "me", don't you? The little kid without the life experience to know what all this was about? The one who was always afraid that someday I might make her that angry too--angry enough that she might go off and leave ME and not come back?



As you might imagine, I always took my dad's side, in my head. It was the simple algebra of peace and quiet: Mom yelled, Dad didn't. Ergo, Dad was right.



Except he wasn't, exactly.



I can't really know the circumstances of their fights; what I do know is that my mother often goes for obvious things in fights without ever bringing up what's REALLY bothering her. It's one of her less-tolerable traits, which I've experienced first hand. (I've listened to her harangue about my lifestyle for an hour at a time and much later found out she was angry because I didn't say "thank you" for something. Which I had, but my mother tends to ignore praise and focus on what she feels she should be entitled to. I'd said thank you--I hadn't said it repeatedly or extravagantly.) So it's possible there was more going on than I knew about.



That's one thing. The other: My father, whatever good traits he had, was pretty much devoid of sensitivity. He would say things matter-of-factly without thinking too much about the consequences, and most of the time he got away with them--because he was smart, because he was necessary, because he was a good provider, because he was intelligent.



But you can be as smart and as necessary as you want, and it will not erase your daughter's memory that when she was nine or ten years old, you used to serenade her in Spanish with a song about how fat she was.



You can be the best provider and the most intelligent human being in the neighborhood, and it will not make up for your verdict when you read your fourteen-year-old's first sustained attempt at writing a novel: "I wouldn't pay $9.95 for it..."



I think that was when I gave up on the notion of having a career as a writer. The message I was given, over and over, was that writing wasn't a career; writing was something to do when the REAL work was over, if you had time, if you still had energy or the heart to do it. And if you were good enough, which I wasn't.



The closest I ever came to believing I could actually be a writer was--of course--when I was with JP. When we were together, writing was something I couldn't NOT do; that first summer, when I was seeing him and wrestling with the question of when and how and whether to leave my husband, I wrote over 100 poems. I still say those were my best work--the only things I've ever written fearlessly. And of course he loved my writing, just as I loved his songs.



I've blogged about what led to the end of my writing--not JP's death, so much, but CR and his betrayal. But people keep telling me "you should write a book".



I want to, really; I'm just lost in my own history, and in the lack of time. Mostly the last, I think, and that's the frustrating part--that I'm nearly ready to break out of my self-imposed cocoon, but when I do, I'll find that even butterflies have to pay the bills.



Well, that, and they also have to come up with an idea. Which I ALSO haven't got. So in the meantime, I guess, I'll just keep blogging about my past, and my parents, and the really kick-ass lasagna I made for dinner last night. Not exactly what I was hoping to accomplish with my life, but it'll have to do for now...

Oh, How I Love The Weekend...

I am sitting here at 2:30 AM, watching something crappy on Court TV, serene in the knowledge that I don't have to get up tomorrow morning.



Not only don't I have to get up, it would be a fairly-pointless endeavor regardless--I won't be able to go anywhere. Because, my friends, it is snowing like a mad bastard here.



I may get up anyway, however, since I've been upstaged by some chick I've never met, apparently.



LJ came home today--what DOES that man have about travelling during snowstorms?--and brought a friend with him from downstate. And the two of them, for the hour or so that we all were in the same room before they left, talked about nearly NOTHING but how well they'd been fed over the past few days--apparently, the friend's woman cooks like nobody's business. I wasn't even there and I was getting a little drooly just HEARING about all the shit this woman cooks.



I gotta step up my game.



It's funny--I'm a vicious feminist, yet I get all Stepford-Wife-y about things like this. But it wouldn't matter if I didn't actually LIKE to cook, or if it wasn't something I take pride in. I mean, if one of the guys were to criticize my housekeeping, I'd give him the squirrel-eye and offer him a mop--let's see if YOU can do it better, muthafucka. But say anything about my cooking, and you've got a fight on your hands.



Tomorrow: lasagna. Take THAT, friend's unnamed girlfriend!

Vacation Day

I took today off, though it meant staying at work til nearly 7:30 last night to finish up all the crap that needed to be done.



A note to all you managerial folk out there: Here's how NOT to motivate your "valued" employees to new heights of achievement and morale.



1. When they ask for a vacation day, tell them "oooookaaaaaay, IFFFF you get everything done." This, despite the fact that there's absolutely no way everything will EVER be done, on Friday or any other day--and despite the fact that you, the managerial-type person, have actually admitted that you do not know everything that the employee does even though you're supposedly her direct supervisor.



2. During the intervening four days before your employee's scheduled vacation day, ignore the employee entirely. Leave at 3 each day--in fact, hell, enjoy one of your OWN scheduled days off!



3. The day before the employee's scheduled vacation day, get there early. Spend the half-hour before your employee gets there going through four weeks of e-mail and sending an e-mail for EACH question you have. (Ten or more is optimal.) Make sure you include questions about projects that haven't been mentioned in weeks, and make sure your employee is properly ashamed of herself for not answering them long ago. (Injudicious snarkiness is always a good way to do this.) Enlist the help of one of your favorite employees to throw in a previously-unmentioned deadline on another, complicated project due that same day.



4. Schedule a two-hour meeting after lunch--just in case anyone needed to get something done before the end of the day.



I'm supposed to leave at 5. I was nearly done at 5:30; then my e-mail program went to hell. Which normally wouldn't have been a problem, except the project in question was sending mass e-mails. (Why is the tech sending mass e-mails? Because I'm the only one who has the time. Oh, wait--that's right--I don't. So...I don't know why. "Tech" in this position seems to be defined as "anything that involves using a computer in any way more challenging than typing a recipe".) I spent 40 minutes on the phone with the main IT center trying to get the mess straightened out, with no results. I ended up having to install the e-mail software on my other computer (yes, I am truly a geek--I have two computers on my desk) and re-doing about 60% of what I'd already done.



I got home about mid-way through "The Apprentice". (Which, by the way, might conceivably NOT suck as much as last season, though it's awfully early to tell. And I'm not sure whether I love or hate that Danny guy, though I'm totally rooting for the high-school grads to kick MUCH ass.)



Also--Is it wrong for a 34-year-old woman to spend her day off watching PBS Kids cartoon shows? Consciously? By choice?



Oh well.



Chicago is supposed to get WALLOPED with snow this weekend. Blogging should be frequent.

Diagnosis: Lack of Car

LJ is out of town again.



(Aside: I find it oddly entertaining that I'll gleefully blog all sorts of wrathful babblings about work that, if found, would easily get me Dooced--yet I'll be extra-circumspect in speaking about LJ's doings. Then again, my job won't get me locked up.)



He rented a car--which promptly broke down somewhere along the south end of I-55, much to his annoyance. This left me with the Be-Damned Truck, which has :::finding wood to knock::: been behaving much less damnably lately. And it was today, on the way home from work, that I discovered what's been bringing me down lately: the lack of freedom.



When he's in town, even on the days I have the car, I feel honor-bound to come straight home as fast as possible, making the bare minimum number of stops, because I know he's here waiting for the truck so he can go make some money. I don't mind, but it takes all the fun out of driving, knowing that I'm going straight home and the next time I leave will be to go back to work.



Today? I puttered. I stopped like, six different places. If I hadn't been so damn hungry, I would have stayed out longer.



It felt GREAT. It was so much fun. I didn't realize how much I missed that feeling of freedom, til I was driving down Western with "I Do Not Want This" blasting from the speakers. I felt about eight years younger.



I've begin to understand something about the nature of my new life. I love LJ, a lot, but I also accept that he will never know as much about me as I wish he did. He will always have a very limited concept of who I am, which is kinda sad. He misses some of the things I like best about myself, and it makes me sad that there's never a real context for him to see those things--that all he sees are the bits that fit into the "Den Mother To The Thugs" persona that's developed since we moved in here together.



But then I think about a conversation I overheard between him and Damian one night--the night Damian's girl was here for the first time.



"There's some shit I just don't bring her around," he said, meaning me--"because I know if she saw that side of me, she wouldn't wanna be with me anymore."



I don't think he was right, nor do I think he'd leave me if he saw my "other side"--I do wonder, though, what happened to him that made him so very cautious. I don't know if I'll ever find out.



I miss having my own car, true enough....but when he's not around, I miss LJ even more.

C.E.A.N.N Redux

Oh well, whatever; nevermind.



(I'm trying to be patient. I'm trying to bite my tongue instead of someone else's head off. I'm not necessarily succeeding.)



The comfort of thinking that someone Gets It is often outweighed by the disappointment when one is proven wrong.



You don't know what I'm talking about?



Exactly my point.

Got An E-Mail Today

When CR and I broke up, I kept in touch with his brother James and James' girlfriend Anna. I didn't know Anna for very long but she seemed like a really cool person, as well as being one of the few females I'd actually be willing to ...:experiment: with, should the chance ever come up. (It hasn't. Simmer down, boys.)



I suppose, as always, a bit of history is in order.



CR and I met in rehab. I realized even then that this was DEFINITELY not the ideal circumstance in which to meet a potential partner, but there were mitigating factors. (I was the hardcore one; he was just there because he'd mentioned to his parole officer that he smoked a lot of weed. To parole officers, that counts as a drug problem.)



The ex-con status and the weed smoking I could handle. The fact that he was a compulsive liar and a sex addict (as long as the sex wasn't with his significant other and involved some element of degradation) didn't come up til much later. Nor did the fact that the "roommate" he claimed to have, who had a teenaged son and was twice CR's age, was actually his girlfriend. Nor that she was a psychotically jealous trailer park bitch.



This was the woman who broke into a hotel room where CR and I were hanging out and beat me as I cowered naked on the bed.



CR was the man who let her, and then blamed me for not defending myself.



This was the woman who snatched me out of my own car, grabbed me by the collar and yelled "Are you gonna kill THIS boyfriend TOO???"



CR was the man who had given her the ammunition to use--who had told this crazy bitch the story of my grief.



This was the woman who shredded my poems and let them fly all over the trailer-park snow; the woman who found an explicit letter I'd written to CR, back when I could still write about such things, and mailed it, without explanation, to my mother.



CR was the man who let her get her hands on those items.





But this was also the woman whose man I took, no matter how worthless he was.



And CR was the man who lied to me to get me to take him back, who told me he never loved her--while telling her I was "just a place to stick his dick"--that's a direct QUOTE, boys and girls, repeated to me verbatim on the longest Thanksgiving night of my life, when I walked down the stairs of the motel and said to him as he begged me to stay: "You can't get me back. You can't talk me back, and you can't fuck me back. You know how you said you were afraid of being a 'Lou' or a 'David' instead of a 'JP'? You know what? You're right. You're none of those. You're lower than any of them. And I'm done."



I should have listened to myself.



He came back, telling me how sorry he was, how he was done with her, how he slept on the couch (hmmm....foreshadowing? You betcha) and he just needed to stay there a little longer til I could get a place, and then we'd move in together and be happily-ever-after.



And then she'd show up again, or try to beat me, or do some other evil shit. And he'd go back with her. And then, a few weeks later, the whole cycle would start again.



I don't know why I believed him.



Except I do, a little bit. I was alone, and I was scared, and I felt like JP's death had been my fault. I felt like all the things I'd done had left me damaged, so that no "good" man would want me. I felt like I had to prove something--not to CR, of course, at least not at first--but to God, maybe, or the universe, or the world I couldn't even bear to look in the eyes any longer. I believed in second chances, but I'd already had mine. It was my turn to give someone else a second chance. Or a third. Or a nineteenth.



Finally I just called a halt. I'd gotten an apartment and a job and had gotten my shit together and kicked the heroin for the fourth or seventh time, and CR had moved in but still worked far away, out by where She lived, and then he started calling after work and telling me he was "gonna spend the night at his grandmother's".



Maybe that's what the kids are calling it these days. (Well, she WAS twice his age....)



He dumped me on Valentine's Day. Called me from wherever and said "I'm not coming back. I'm done." I said "You picked a great day for it, didn't you." And went out and got some more heroin--I'd gone back on shortly after he'd stopped coming home entirely.



I was bored, and I was lonely, and I wanted my old life with JP. Not this New, "Improved" version which was supposedly supposed to make me happy--apartment, check. Job, check. Bills paid, check.



Only man in the world I ever would have willingly died in place of?

Nope...not there.



That June he called me again. "Hey, listen, I'm driving out to get Tim from Arizona and we're gonna drive back and then...I wanna come back. I'm so sorry." And he cried. "Can we all...get a place together, or something? When me and Tim come back? We can be like a family again."



"Again," he said. "Family", he said, and that's what HE was calling it, maybe, when he'd sat me in some little diner booth one night a few months after we'd met, and broached The Subject, the Subject that was never to go away completely: a threesome. In this case, with Tim.



"It will make us a family," he said. "My woman and my best friend. It's like a bond between us."



So we all got really drunk and really high, and Tim was so fucked-up as to be useless in that regard, pretty much. Which was fortunate. And it's a testament to Tim that neither of us ever mentions it--that we can still be friends, or what passes for friends, even after being in that situation together.



But I had been alone for too long when the call came that June, and so I said "Yeah--we'll talk when you guys get here."



He called me again, on my birthday, and asked me to wire them some money. Which I borrowed from my mother, claiming some emergency.



I didn't hear from either of them til a week after they were supposed to have come back. And then, it was only Tim, landing on my doorstep with his surviving cat--the other had perished after being left in a hot car on the trip.



"I just wanna tell you," Tim said, "I had nothing to do with it. I mean, I need a place to stay and everything, but I had nothing to do with his decision."



And I was just that obtuse that I didn't know what he meant, til he told me: "CR went back to Her."



So much for family.



Tim was going to crash on my couch for the remaining month of my lease. Then I was going to get a studio apartment, and it was gonna be sink or swim to the lot of you.



Then he was just gonna crash on the couch at the studio for one night. And how could I say no? He'd helped me move.



One night became two, became four, became thirty. Finally the landlord put it very plainly: either he goes on the lease, or out you both go.



And by then everything was good again--I'd gotten a new job, quit heroin for what's still the last time, and started getting my shit back together again. Tim's presence didn't seem to hurt, if it wasn't really helping. So I put Tim on the lease, and told him if CR ever, EVER, so help me God EVER, got a hold of our phone number, I was holding him PERSONALLY liable.



No worries, Tim told me.



A few months later he "just mentioned" that CR was about to be homeless--that She was moving and didn't want to take him with. "He wants to talk to you," Tim told me. "He said he used to call the old number just to hear your voice on the machine."



And I was alone, and I was lonely, and I was tired of hearing Tim on the phone with his girlfriend, calling her "Babygirl", which had been one of JP's names for me so long before. The loneliness was like a long sharp fork to the gut, and I wanted someone to love me again. I told Tim to give CR the number.



Before long, there were three of us living in the one room. And I had bought CR a set of turntables, because he wanted to be a DJ. There was barely room to walk. We got a three-bedroom apartment shortly after, on the third floor of a building across the street. And CR and I were happy, for a couple of months.



Later I found out: he was still sneaking off to see Her after work.



Later I found out: once he quit that job, once he was sitting at home while I worked, he was talking to women on the Internet. He frequented the chat rooms for "BBW's"--Big Beautiful Women. Fat chicks, in other words. Women who were perfectly happy being fat and wanted to date men who were attracted to fat chicks.



Even if they were involved. Even if they were living with someone else. And whatever scruples they had, could be broken down:



My girlfriend doesn't mind.

My girlfriend doesn't give me sex.

My girlfriend is too closed-minded to do the things I want to do.

Don't worry--my girlfriend will join in.



One day, not long after he got a new job, he sat me down and told me he'd met this fabulous woman "at work". "And her thing is, she comes into relationships where things have kinda gone 'pfft'. And she spices it up a little."



I hadn't known til then that things had gone 'pfft'.



It was all arranged, he said. She was going to come and spend a week or two with us.



Of COURSE he cared how I felt, he said. If I didn't want it, then he'd just call Bertha. And disappoint her. And he'd never get this freaky-sex-thing out of his system. But that was okay. If my narrow-mindedness was more important to me than his happiness...



The first night, over Chinese food, she said something about "the chat room". I fixed CR with my Glare Of Impending Nuclear Death and dragged him, bodily, out to the kitchen.



Of COURSE he'd send her home, he said. If I was that upset about a little white lie, which he'd told only to protect me, that it would actually move me to be RUDE, and to kick a guest out of my home....



She stayed a week and a half. By the last day, the two of them had made plans for her to move all her things from her mother's home in Iowa into the middle bedroom of our apartment.



She was to arrive on my birthday.



Later I found out: he'd told her I didn't mind. In fact, that I was thrilled.



Later I found out: she was leaving her four kids, all under the age of ten, in Iowa with her mother.



Later I found out: she never even called those kids ONCE.



She lived with us for a month and a half before he tired of her. Or of me. Or of the drama. Whatever he tired of, the lease had MY name on it--not hers.



At CR's request she left, saying she was going home. She went to some other Net person's house and slagged our names all over the chatrooms. Mine, too.



Her mother called us a half-a-dozen times, looking for her. We didn't know what to tell her.



CR said he was sorry. A hundred thousand times, he said, he was sorry. He'd learned his lesson. He was over it. He would be faithful from now on. We'd get our own apartment--our relationship with Tim had deteriorated drastically almost from the moment we moved into the three-bedroom, ending with CR putting Tim through the wall one night in a drunken brawl. The Bertha thing had been just the icing on the shit cake.



I let him stay. We got a nice little one-bedroom apartment, in the same building the studio had been in. And we were happy, for a couple of months.



Then he got back in touch with Bertha. He started sending her money for her bills.



She brought her two little daughters to our house the day after Christmas. He asked me to let the kids sleep in the room with me, to give him one last chance to get it out of his system for good, before we got married. He promised this was it. That he'd be done.



I refused. But the kids ended up sleeping on my floor anyway. They liked me, and besides, CR and Bertha wanted to listen to some music in the living room.



In the middle of the night, long after I estimated any festivities would be over, I got up to pee. The room was dark, lit only by the streetlight outside.



It was enough to see by.



I told Bertha the next morning not to believe everything he told her--particularly about me. "What do you mean?" she said.



"I mean, I did NOT tell him it was okay for him to fuck around. In fact, I told him exactly the opposite."



He came into the room and caught her packing her things and the girls' things, and tore into ME. "You realize this means we're through, right? I'm leaving. You're a bitch. You had no right."



And then chased her around the apartment, into the bathroom, to plead with her to stay. And then chased me around, to tell me that if I wanted to kick these poor little girls out, if I wanted them to see how rude adults could be...



She stayed a few more days.



"Sometimes," the three-year-old told me as I stood one morning making everyone breakfast, "we're hungry 'cuz we don't gots no food." On their way out, I gave them half our groceries.



He finally decided--after I'd had to tell him once too often that no, we couldn't go buy records this week, because we'd sent all the spare money to Bertha for her bills--that he was done with Bertha. He was always done with people who inconvenienced him.



And after ten million more promises, after telling me that I was the only one he really cared about, the only one who would ever be able to help him be the person he knew he could be--after all of it, we got married on Valentine's Day, in the basement of City Hall.



His brother James and James' girlfriend, Anna, were the only ones there. My family didn't even know about it--not even my mother. One of my co-workers had a husband who worked in the McCormick Place Hilton, and she got us a room for the night, cheap, even though the Auto Show was that weekend.



We went out to dinner and got snubbed by the waitstaff--two black males, two white females was apparently more than they could deal with--so we went to a Walgreens and bought a shitload of liquor and went back to the room to hang out.



James and Anna got too drunk to go home, so CR said they could stay. Then he pulled me out into the hallway and tried to arrange a foursome, videotaped with James' camera.



I put my foot down. I spent my wedding night in the bathroom, crying my eyes out, listening to CR try to talk me into it.



The next morning, CR and James got into an argument about Michael Jordan--some irrelevant little-boy shit--and later, when James tried to hug me goodbye, CR snapped at him "Get your hands off my wife!"



That was the last time we saw them. Anna still called me, though. And a couple of months later, CR left me for another woman he'd met on the Internet.



Later I found out: he'd told her our marriage was just a sham.



Later I found out: He'd told her he'd married me as a favor. That it was a sexless marriage, that I was actually a lesbian who was involved with a co-worker, but who didn't want my family to know. That he'd married me just to hide my shame, and that I was okay with him having other relationships. Because I wanted him to be happy.



He moved off to Indianapolis, to "find himself"--but he promised me he'd come back. And as long as we didn't have to be married--as long as he didn't have to feel owned--we could be together.



I got the divorce a month or two later. (I paid for it.)



In the meantime, I cried, and wrote long begging letters, and pleaded with him over the phone to come back. And he agreed that he was wrong. That he didn't mean to do this. That he needed some help. But he was staying with her. And if I did anything stupid--like an anonymous letter telling her the REAL truth--I'd never see him again.



I wouldn't have told her, anyway. I kept remembering the lack of dignity with which his LAST jilted girlfriend had comported HERself. I wasn't going to be like THAT. I was going to salvage my little scraps of pride.



He said he'd come back in September. By September I didn't want him any more. Even the realization that the two-night stand with the really hot guy had just been a pity-fuck wasn't enough to undo THAT resolve. (But my god, was that guy fine. On my deathbed I will be able to say with all honesty that in my life, I have been well-fucked by at least ONE classically-fine guy. That's all most women can ask for, no?)



By October I had another man--Bob, my Seattle man. Who, in the end, I treated very shabbily--it was a non-breakup breakup. After four months of round-trip weekends, I just stopped calling...Except it wasn't like that, not really, not at this end. It was more like, I just stopped not-fucking someone else. Who turned out to be LJ.



That was in February. By the end of summer I had my credit cleaned up and one eye on this house.



And that was when CR called.



So how've you been? he asked. Have you heard the new Audioslave? 50 Cent sucks. He's a joke. You sound like you're doin' good. Oh, you have a cell phone now? That's great. Buying a house, eh?... Listen...our lights are about to get cut off, and I was wondering....



I lied to everyone, even Stella, even Firefly, even LJ, about this story. I told them I'd laughed in his face and told him to go fuck himself, and then hung up.



Really, though, I sent him $80.



I lied to everyone because I knew what they would think, and why they'd think I did it. But they would have been wrong about my motive, about why I'd sent him the money.



Not because I felt anything for him. Not because I ever entertained the slightest wish to have him anywhere in my life, even on the fringes, or the fringes of the fringes. Not because we were "family" or because we'd been lovers once, or because he needed me--or for any other stupid altruistic deluded reason.



I sent him the money because I COULD, and he knew I could, and he hated that I could, and I KNEW that he hated that I could. I sent him the money to tell him I thought that when you left I wouldn't be able to support myself. Now that you're gone, I have enough. In fact, more than enough. I have enough to spare, which I didn't have when we were together. So--here. Enjoy your electricity.



I have never claimed NOT to be, in my heart of hearts, a vengeful, castrating bitch.



He e-mailed me a couple of times, trying an apology, but I wasn't receptive. Finally I told him he hadn't changed a bit, and if he wanted something he needed to spit it out and quit with the grovelling because it was making me a little sick. He sent me one last message, telling me how wrong I was about him, and that was that.



I hadn't talked to James and Anna in a while, though James sends me bulk-mails about his comedy shows and karaoke gigs. A couple of days ago he sent me an announcement about his new Internet radio show.



Relevant background: CR's hugest dream was to be on the radio. He wanted to be the next Jay Marvin or Roe Conn or Garry Meier--or M@nc0w. He really, REALLY wanted to be the next M@nc0w.



So I sent James a reply: "You know, don't you, that the mere EXISTENCE of this radio show would be enough to send your brother into screaming HISSYFITS, if he knew?"



Today, I got this back.



"My brother is pretty much dead to me. He molested my wife over the Christmas holiday. He's a degenerate scumbag whom I have no further use for."



My reply:



":::donning my best lace-curtain Irish, Little-Miss-Snippybritches voice::: I was not aware that that ....individual...was even back in town. (Pass me the bleach, please; I have an entire STATE to sanitize.) (/Snippybritches)...Jeez. Nice to know that good ol' CR is still bringing the clusterfuck wherever he goes."



Is it wrong of me to hope that CR ends up at my doorstep one day, all 5'5" of him? And runs straight into LJ's navel?



No--really--is that wrong???



Sometimes I look back at my life and cry for what I've lost.



Then there are days like today, when I look back at my life and count all the shell-casings from the bullets I've dodged.



That's a lot of expended ammo, boys and girls. A LOT of ammo. And I'm still standing tall.



Sometimes it kinda rocks to be me, you know?

ARGH

Blogger did it again!



Blogger needs to stop eating my posts.



Or I will kick some bloggy ass.



That is all.

Rib Tip Haiku

#1

Entrees that exude

That much bright-orange grease are

Likely not healthy.



#2

Gravity is a

Cranky dining companion...

Damn! Laundry again.



#3

Tomatoes, garlic,

Peppers, smoke, spice and sugar--

One enormous belch.

Cryptic Entry, Apropos of Nearly Nothing

I have concluded:



One thing I can't STAND anymore is a drama queen.



Or maybe that's just...some other emotion talking.



Fuck, I hated seventh grade. Even when I was twelve.

Man Detox

Okay. So not to bitch or anything--I've just spent FOUR HOURS reading TranceJen and I feel like if I bitch about anything, ever again, dogs will eat my innards--but...



I'm COLD.

I mean, REALLY fucking cold.

I plastic-ed the front window, but cold is seeping in through the window frame. I shit you not. This house SERIOUSLY needs some work.



And while I'm not-bitching:



I'm depressed, I hate my job, and I'm going through Man Detox.



No, I haven't broken up with LJ; I just haven't seen him much. Business has apparently taken him (and the truck, may it be damned to an everlasting pit of fire because it won't start if it's cold) to Wisconsin, to hang with Damian. And hopefully, with Damian's girl, who will once again refresh LJ's memory about how much exactly he ought to appreciate me. Because I'm not a crack 'ho.



He left Friday night, after taking the Be-Damned Truck for some mechanical therapy--I dunno what they did to it, but I hope it was painful. And so all weekend I've been here by myself.



I apparently have to be left by myself for a bit to realize how useless having a man around makes me.



It was the same with CR. When he was around I lived in this state of suspended animation, not doing anything much because I was never sure when he would need something from me, or when he might come home and expect something. Anything. Anything that would make him not leave. Anything that might make him see that I was worth something.



I learned this at home. I learned this by the constant criticism that came with just playing quietly, by myself, or just sitting in my room reading a book. (Yes. I read books when I was a kid. I think about it now and I think to myself, If I had a kid and he/she read books instead of 99% of what kids do these days, I'd be so fucking grateful that I'd probably fall to the ground weeping. But not my mom. It wasn't USEFUL.)



When CR left, I went through a long period where I just didn't get out of bed on the weekends. There didn't seem to be any reason to get up. It was hard enough making it through five days a week; seven just seemed excessive. So I took two days off from life.



I think I have a slightly better reason now, when I don't get out of bed til noon on weekends--I'm TIRED. My brain is fried by the fucking idiots in charge at my job. I need to heal my brain from the assaults on common sense that are perpetrated Mondays through Fridays.



But that doesn't explain it entirely. I think on some level I'm doing the same thing with LJ that I did with CR--the same thing that explains why all his friends seem to think he's got the best girlfriend around. I'm waiting. I'm always there. Just in case he needs anything--which, to his credit and my constant bewilderment--he almost never does.



Since I was very small, I've always felt like I had to be earning something. Money, or love, or approval (which equates with love somehow). I remember, as a kid, constantly asking my mother "Are you mad at me?" Even when she had no reason in the world to possibly be mad at me, I was always asking that question. And always fearing the answer.



And now, at thirty-four, I'm still trying to earn love and approval from anyone who crosses my path. If I don't have anyone to earn approval from, I just...sit. And wait.



How much bullshit is that?



Today's Project While Sitting And Waiting: staying warm. And watching Camp, which has the distinction of being the only movie that makes me cry which I'll watch despite that fact.

Confirming the Obvious

You Are 23 Years Old

23 Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

Untitled

This pretty much sums it up, right here...



I was on the phone with my mom tonight, talking about my job. Specifically, that I'd just put in my application for transfer, because if I stay where I am much longer, I will do something really stupid--I know this already: that one day they will push me too far and I will just stand up and quit. I am so close to that right now.



So I was telling my mom about the position I'm trying for, and how unhappy I am with the situation where I am and how little respect I get.



"Well," she said, "think of it as a learning experience."



"Yeah," I said, thinking Yeah, that's a pretty positive way to look at it, thinking of all the stuff I've actually...you know, learned.



But she continued.



"Next time, just don't tell anyone your business. Just keep to yourself and do your job, that's all. Just don't tell them anything about your life."



WTF?? I think. "I don't think that was the problem here," I said.



"Well, I don't know. You never know how people are going to judge you. I mean, that's the world."



Let's dissect this for a moment:



Apparently, there is something so shameful about JUST BEING WHO I AM that it would be absolutely IMPOSSIBLE for people to treat me with respect, even in a professional environment and even if I did my very best, if they knew about whatever-this-shameful-thing was. And whatever it is, it's SO shameful that I must be very, very, VERY careful not to reveal ANYTHING about myself, so that this shameful shameful thing could never POSSIBLY come to light.



Good to know, ain't it?

All Is Well...

Except me. I'm just fuckin' FRIED.



Our regularly scheduled blog will return shortly--I just gotta get through this week first.

I Need A Vacation

I was off for nearly two weeks over the holidays.

I have now been back to work for five days--four-and-a-half, really, since I went in late one day because of the snow.

I need a vacation.



I have been on the Monday bus since early this morning (which always happens when I have to go to Mom's on Sunday; it eats up a whole day of my weekend and always messes up my weekend routine.) I would seriously give almost anything to not have to go to work on Monday--or at all, anymore. Not because I hate work; because I hate that place and at least half of the people in it. Because I have quite a lot of other things I'd ever-so-much rather be doing. Because I am tired of devoting most of my waking hours to work--because I realize this isn't where my future lies, and because spending time where my future ISN'T, just diminishes the amount of time I can spend getting to where my future IS.



It's 3 in the morning and I've been working on my website. (No, not this one--this one is gonna get an overhaul too, though. I'm getting tired of the orange background and Arial Sans (or whatever font this is--Ka knew what it was but I don't recall and I'm too lazy to go look up her comment) and now that I know how to upload images, I can have some real fun with this.)



I feel like I am compressing all my living into forty-eight hours between Friday night and bedtime on Sunday. There just aren't enough hours to cram in everything that matters to me--even if what matters to me is just to sit in front of the TV for a while and relax. I hate that I have to waste some of this valuable time sleeping--and generally I love sleeping!

High Praise

It was an interesting week, but not in the way I thought it was going to be.



Damian left last night, but not before I paused and took a mental count of the number of females he's involved with. There's his girl he lives with, a girl he brought over on Thursday night, the 42-year-old he told me about the other night, some chick from a rich family, and another female he was talking to on the phone last night. (Yeah, just for health reasons, I think I'll proactively count myself OUT of that list.) At one point, I told him I was gonna start calling him "Spot", because he was such a dog.



After Damian left, LJ went up to watch the game in bed. When I got there, he turned off the TV and I said to him "Man, I KNOW this wasn't how you planned to start the new year."



I don't know why, exactly, but he was very talkative last night. We ended up talking for about three hours, with him doing most of the talking, telling me about all his plans and how he expects to carry them out. We also talked a lot about Damian and his situation....which was actually a good thing.



Let's just say I think LJ might have picked up the clue-phone somewhere along the line; I think after listening to Damian all week and getting the stories of all the frantic, emotionally-manipulative calls from his girl, LJ maybe appreciates his current situation a lot more.



Apparently Damian had a few things to say about me as well. LJ told me "All week I'm hearin' 'I can't stand my girl, I wish I had a girl like yours. She don't nag you, she works, she cooks...I ain't never heard you say shit bad about her.'" Which--despite Damian's hound-like tendencies--was still a pretty cool thing to hear.



And then--and I'm not sure I will ever get over this--LJ said something totally out of character for him. We were talking, very obliquely, about E-MailGate, about whether or not he was messing around or what--and he was telling me about how he sees his friends doing that and doesn't understand why, if they're so unhappy, they just don't LEAVE instead of cheating. "I mean, yeah, I see females--when they wanna buy some weed, or if somebody else brings them with. And yeah, I mean, they try to holla at me and shit. But I'm not gonna risk what I've got on no shit like that." He got quiet for a minute, and then Mr. Detached, Unemotional, Cool-as-Ice LJ said. "I guess what I'm tryin' to say is....I'm happy here. And I will ALWAYS come home."



We finally fell asleep around 4 AM. And I think I was probably still smiling in my sleep.



Yeah--it was a good week.

Definition of "Sheltered"

Found on another blog I read...

What's up with Kwanzaa all of a sudden? I go through 30 years of life without ever hearing about it and this year I get wished a happy one by several people and people are blogging it everywhere I look. Holiday meme?

To the guy who wrote this comment on another blog, I apologize in advance if you're reading this one, but...Dude. I mean, goddamn. Where in America can you possibly be living where for 30 years you don't even HEAR of Kwanzaa? At least I'm not attributing it, to either your name or the blog on which I found it.



Seriously, though--you might wanna get out more.

They Can Make Me Stay Late, But They Can't Make Me Work

Pending Argument is now Dead Horse To Be Beaten At A Later Date. LJ will not be budged from his position that it was NOT him who wrote that e-mail; he says he'll try to find out who DID do it, but somehow I don't see that happening...not so much because he's guilty, but because shit blew up big time in his little circle a couple of days ago, and everyone he knows is feeling the repercussions....including me, oddly enough, since it's not something to do with me directly.



What happened was this: apparently one of his business contacts got a bit too greedy, started messing with more-felonious products, got his comeuppance, and is currently (to the best of our knowledge) residing in a lovely federal suite on Dearborn Avenue. And they got this guy's cell phone as well...containing, as cell phones do, all kinds of interesting data on who he called and who called him, and when and how long and for what, and so on. So now everyone whose numbers were likely to be in the guy's phone is in an advanced state of paranoia.



The end result of this, however, was kinda fun, all things considered.



Last night when I got home, the house was dark, to match my mood rather closely. Damian was snoozing on the sofa in front of "Malcolm In The Middle", and LJ was knocked out upstairs. Neither of them had come home the night before; apparently they crashed at LJ's parents' house, and neither of them slept much.



Damian woke up first and came into the kitchen, where I was fixing myself a can of soup. My first words to him: "So what'd you DO, anyway?" Which--of course--elicited a long, melancholy tale of the injustices done to him by Lisa, calculated to inspire the maximum of sympathy...and it might have worked, if I wasn't still dwelling on LJ's theoretical betrayals.



"...and I mean, she didn't have NOTHIN' to bitch about. I mean, NO REASON," he said.



"That she knew of," I added. "According to what you told me the other night, she had PLENTY of reason to bitch--she just didn't know about it!"



He looked VERY slightly ashamed of himself...in the same way a cat will look ashamed of itself after it's just demolished a whole off-limits roasted chicken. Not so much sorry, but sorry you brought it up. "Well yeah, but....man, sometimes people just DRIVE you to do things, you know??"



"Oh, please," I said. "I've heard THAT once too often." (He knows the CR story, or at least its skeleton.) I told him I just did not want to hear excuses about how it was always the other person's fault--especially since I could prove that it WASN'T always the cheat-ee's actions that caused their partner to cheat. Or as I said to him: "Man, you see how I am around here--and yet I have a feeling I'm up against the same shit!"



I could have continued that debate for quite a while, but then: in the distance, the rumblings of a great big cranky bear coming out of his den, followed by the sounds of feet on the steps. Damian and I, at opposite sides of the kitchen hallway, peeked down the hall like something out of the Patty Duke Show intro, watching LJ getting himself together to go forth into the snow. Damian said something to him--I didn't hear what--and got his head snapped off. "Man, I ain't playin' with you. I just ain't in the mood for this shit today." He unlocked the front door to leave; being LJ, he said nothing about where he planned to go--just "I'm gonna go clear off the car--I'll be back." :::SLAM:::.



Damian and I looked at each other. "OOOOkay," I said. "I ain't sayin' SHIT to him tonight. I have never seen him that pissed before, I've gotta say."



A short conversation ensued, in which I was given the basic details of what happened within their circle of supply and demand; other than the brief outline above, no one is still sure about the exact details, LJ included. Damian went out to see what LJ was doing and if he was supposed to go along, and popped his head back in a moment later to tell me "C'mon--we're leaving!"



That's right, boys and girls: in the midst of the worst snowstorm in two years, we were going for a ride.



I knew where we were going, once they told me I was coming along; I have one of LJ's friends, Jayson, on my cell-phone contract, and everyone was getting their numbers changed, just in case. And I'm a cautious soul myself; I could see their point--I just wished for more cooperative weather!



What would have been a 45-minute errand took three hours. But I didn't mind. There's a certain cachet, if you will, about walking into a public place flanked by three large, dangerous-looking men--and then spending thirty minutes waiting for a clerk, talking and laughing, flitting among those same three guys like a strange little miscegenating moth. The poor clerk who ended up with us didn't know what to make of the situation--here I am getting one guy a new phone number, and he's buying me a new phone, yet the other guy across the room hands me a $50 when I ask him for money, and I spend most of the wait time talking to the third guy... The clerk was actually stumbling over his words, at one point, not sure whether to call Jayson my "boyfriend", my "friend", or what. I love inducing that sort of confusion; it's one of the great rewards of my ambiguous life. I love the dirty looks the other customers gave me. It used to make me self-conscious, long ago, and I know for a fact that LJ hates it--for example, there are certain friends of his I can't meet because their girlfriends don't like that he's dating a white girl. I'm not sure if he's trying to protect me or himself, though I suspect the latter.



We got home at 9:30 and I made a big pot of spaghetti sauce, and Damian and I stayed up long after LJ had gone upstairs, watching cartoons and talking. I'm beginning to think I fall into the "one of the guys" camp--or possibly "older sister"-- but I don't mind that so much either. I just enjoy the company.

I Think I Need A Chaperone.

Interesting things that happened today:



1. I received an e-mail from a former online flirtation, with whom I haven't spoken in years. Since 2002, in fact--or so he says.



2. In trying to find out when I'd last written to him, I went back into my Yahoo sent-mail box, and found the following. (Keep in mind: this was sent from my account, on 12/30, at 2:40 in the morning. At this point in time, I had left my e-mail up--LJ was in and out of the house (allegedly "working"), and I wasn't expecting him home. I don't recall whether or not he brought home any of his friends (you know, the ones who supposedly use his paid personals account to chat up females)that night...but I doubt it.)



Here's what I found:

Subject: See you soon! 'PIC' *PIC*

To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx





hi miss lady. can we be friends? can i get to know u alittle better sweety? my name is {insert name here--close but not exactly his}. let me know if u is intersted sweety. see u at the dance boo. take care, see u soon

This is--like the last one I found, an IM a few months ago--almost word-for-word what he sent me when he responded to my personal ad.



3. When I called him--very calmly this time--I asked him "Who was at our house Thursday night?" Conveniently, he claimed not to remember. I told him why I was asking, and he claimed he still didn't remember who was here, but he claimed he hadn't written to anyone and hadn't been to any parties or such in at least 8 months. (He was out all night New Years' Eve--again, supposedly "working".) I said "okay," and told him I'd talk to him later.



Apparently he heard something in my tone--perhaps it was the dripping disdain and the distant sound of locks about to be changed--but five minutes later he called back and told me he was going to cancel that paid account, because he wasn't going to let anyone else use his shit anymore and he wasn't going to deal with it anymore. As he put it, "I mean, you the expert--you WORK with computers. I KNOW you can find out everyplace I went online, where I was, who I talked to--if I was gonna fuck around, I sure as hell wouldn't use the computer!"



I don't know if I buy this--as you might well imagine--and as far as I'm concerned, this is a Pending Argument...but I somehow don't think it's gonna be resolved tonight.



See, there's a little complication.



Remember a post or two back, my post about Damian and his little info-seeking tactics? Remember his "Yeah, I think Lisa's days are numbered" quote?



Well, it looks like the "number" in question was "two".



In the middle of my "why are you talking to females on MY e-mail account?" line of questioning, LJ told me "Yeah, Damian got into it with his girl, so he gon' be stayin' with us for three days or so, maybe til Friday."



Prediction from the 0-for-4 Psychic: It's gonna be an interesting week.



I'm not a vengeful person. But I am--in typical Gemini fashion--both a self-protective and a self-destructive person. I have been driven in the past, by that duality, to do some ugly, evil shit--and generally it's turned out splendidly. I'm lucky that way--or maybe I've just been able to ignore the less-than-splendid outcomes. I am a fan of the grand, majestic gesture, and though I am slow to act on it--often inexcusably slow--my anger is something that I carry around with me constantly. In some ways it's my main motivator; I only hold it in check because I generally see no good and acceptable reason to let it out.



When given a good or acceptable reason, however...a reason, maybe, like finding out that for two years I've been being played?



If that's the case--or even if it just can't be empirically disproved that that's the case--well, to say the least, look out.

All Right, You Sick Little Googlefucks...

Things you will not find here:



"mom's tits my dick first time mom's bedroom" (Dude!!! To paraphrase Damian--what, can't you get off the regular way?)



"PVC coupler for masturbation" (oh, sweetie, that CAN'T be safe. And even if it is, a hint from me to you--don't use purple primer for lube, 'kay?)



"story of mother fuck's her young son" (Okay, first of all--no apostrophe in "fucks". If you're not old enough to observe basic grammar rules, you're not old enough to be reading about shit like that.)



"I fucked my daughter's friend story" (Since you have a clear grasp of the apostrophe, I'm assuming you're old enough to read these things. But in that case, you're old enough to know what happens to people who read child porn. Back to the state pen, Chester.)



And that's to say nothing of what all you Googleverts have been looking for in regard to those nice K@rshner boys. The assorted permutations of genitals and orifices that have been searched for regarding THOSE poor children would trouble the Marquis de Sade.



Why don't you guys just take up model trains, or something??? Please?

Obvious Headline of the Day

From Yahoo News headline section:



House Republicans may weaken ethics rules



Gee, ya think???

Goddammit, Damian

So yesterday afternoon LJ calls me to tell me that Damian will be spending the night at the house again. (Damian lives in Wisconsin and "commutes" down here for business purposes.) Okay, I say, and go on about my business.



LJ and Damian show up around 9:00 and immediately Damian goes into full entertainer mode. Mind you, he was drunk off his ass--in fact, he took the time to enumerate exactly what-all he'd had to drink in the past 24 hours, and the list was extensive. But he was perfectly coherent all the same--just unusually expansive, even for him.



So we were sitting in the living room, LJ had gone upstairs to take a shower, and Damian and I were talking, to the exclusion of even worrying about what's on TV. I think it was CSI or something, and there came a lull in the conversation, which coincided with a point at which the TV was showing a scene of some S&M dungeon-type thing.



He looked at the screen and said "See, that's just a little TOO weird for me."



"Also, totally fake," I said. (I have very deeply-held beliefs about the legitimacy of organized/ritualized roleplaying and S&M--I've too often seen it used as currency to purchase the sexual version of street credibility. That's a whole 'nother blog post, for which I will have to be in a certain, very specific mindset.)



"Yeah?" he said.



"I've known lots of people who were into that," I told him. "They were all...artificial, at least in that way. It's like they had to stage everything in order to feel something." (Which is not exactly my objection, but I wasn't feeling verbose enough to get started for real.)



"You know what that is?" he said. "That's people who just can't get off any other way, so they have to do some big scene just to get off." (Thinking of Nelson Algren's take on such things, I had to agree with him--you just don't see much staged sexuality outside the middle and upper classes.) He continued: "I mean, I'm a freak--I'll admit it--but that shit..."



Judiciously, I did not say anything leading. Then again, I didn't need to--though if I had, things might have gone down a very strange road indeed.



I should back up, since no one here ('cept Nob, because he read one of my poems) knows what the hell I'm talking about. I have never gone into my sexual history here--not the bits of it that are in any way defining of how I see myself, anyway. As always, the pieces I've concealed trace a straight line directly back to JP...JP, who taught me about anger, about rage, about scratching and clawing and snarling and biting, about bruises and scars--and taught me without a drop of malice and without the slightest wish to harm or scare me. We had very, very basic rules--a safeword, actually--but there was never anything planned or staged or ritualized about it. It just was; it just happened, if and when it did; we accepted it as we accepted everything we had, as a wonderful piece of luck that we had found each other.



I have never recaptured that. What I thought I saw in CR was an echo of it, but it was laced with CR's real, unreconstructed hatred of all women--myself included. There's a difference when they do it to hurt you, when it becomes something you don't want and don't consent to and they care not at all. And LJ...well, he lacks the imagination.



I have my suspicions of Damian, however, in that regard--but damned if I'd be the one to bring it up, was my point of view last night. My style of flirtation--and let's be perfectly honest here, that's what it was--is quite restrained; listen, laugh, toss in a couple of quips here and there, and don't ask questions. This last is based on the premise that people will tell you what they want you to know, and you can learn a lot by what it is they choose to tell you.



And Damian fell right into the very center of that particular web. Without saying anything that would even hint at flirtation, I was handed the following bits of information:



1. He is, as aforementioned, not averse to freaky behavior.



2. He is apparently also not averse to fucking around with older women (some 42-year-old he screwed the other night was mentioned...with details included. Either this is You're One Of The Guys, So I Can Tell You, or....well, just "or".)



3. He is NOT married.

(I'll admit, I had to break my no-questions rule to get this one--he said something about Lisa, and I said "I didn't know you two were married."

"Huh?" was his response. "We're not married..."

"LJ said you were married!" I told him.

"Man, you gon' listen to what that n***a tells you? He don't know what he's talkin' about." Either this is the truth (which I suspect from the next item) or it's a Why Would He Tell Me That Unless.)



4. To quote him: "Yeah, I think Lisa's days are numbered." He then went on in detail about how they argue all the time, she doesn't keep up her end of things, she nags him to get a "real" job; she doesn't cook, doesn't clean, and she won't fuck him. And apparently only that last is unforgiveable; as he said, "I could handle all the rest of it if I was just gettin' some of that ass once in a while..." Again--this could be You're One Of The Guys, or it could be one of those thinly-veiled hints.)



I was SUCH a good girl, too. I could have jumped right into the fray--he left me an opening I could have driven a bus through--but I didn't take the bait. He made some remark about how lazy he was--and followed it up with this: "Yeah, I'm so lazy, when I wanna fuck, I just lay on my back and make her climb up on top of me!" Then a couple of seconds later: "I'm just playin'--you're standin' over there thinkin 'Yeah, I can see why his girl don't wanna fuck him!'"



What I COULD have said--maybe SHOULD have said--was: no, I'm standing over here laughing my ass off and thinking that you've just very accurately described MY situation, though you don't know it. I COULD have said that, but I didn't. (Karma BETTER have something good for me after THAT, is all I have to say.)



And then LJ came back downstairs, and we turned on Scarface, and the conversation veered back to less-charged territory. Which was also strange, and sorta supports my hypothesis.



Leaving aside the question of how much of what Damian says is true and how much is bullshit and/or drunken braggadocio, I still find it intriguing that he would even choose to bring these things up unprovoked. I'm no expert on guys...god, what an understatement THAT is...but my experience is, when, in a conversation with someone else's girl, they pick their sexual habits and their discontent with their current girlfriend as the topic of conversation, there generally are other intentions behind it. (Guys, feel free to correct me. But do it gently, will you? Because my ego was kinda enjoying the attention.)

Filed Under "Why Literacy Is Not A Bad Thing"

From the Chicago Tribune:

36 children injured in sledding accident



Items compiled from Tribune news services

Published January 2, 2005



MINOT, NORTH DAKOTA -- Thirty-six children were injured in a sledding accident during an all-night New Year's Eve party held by a religious organization.



Three of the children were hospitalized, but all were in stable condition, officials said.



Police Sgt. Winston Black said more than 100 children ages 12 to 19 attending a Youth for Christ event gathered at a high school around 4 a.m. to slide down a hill using sleds built out of cardboard boxes. A sign posted on the hill prohibited sledding.



The children and Youth for Christ staffers piled eight to 12 passengers on the sleds, then went down the hill in quick succession, Black said. "The sleds struck rocks, a light pole and each other," he said.

Ummmmkay, everyone. Now explain-to-me-this:



The guy who booked the transvestite fashion show into the New City YMCA in a time slot that just baaaaarely overlapped with a swim meet the next morning--THAT guy lost his job. Nobody was HURT, mind you--just some parents who should know better (my god, people, New City is NOT exactly the least-gay-friendly 'hood in Chicago!!!) got their precious little Midwestern sensibilities offended--but the guy who did it is out of a job because of it.



Any bets on how much nothing will happen to the asshelmet who decided "Yeah! Let's take the kids sledding on the no-sledding hill?" (If they do fire him, he can go off and found a splinter group--Dumbasses for Christ. He's not just the president--he's also a member.)

New Years

Okay, so maybe last night was the cosmically couldn't-have-picked-a-worse-night night to do what I did. But it started out as a perfectly legitimate Project For A Lonely New Years' Eve--working on my quilt and watching a bunch of whatever cable cared to throw at me.



Well...See, I've got a horrible sentimental streak. I'll admit that. In my foyer closet, mixed in with the many boxes of closet-stuff with almost no sentimental value, there is one box filled with things that belonged in my life with JP. His two Nirvana shirts are there; his drumsticks, which he always said were the one object that defined where "home" was for him. Pictures, of course--pictures of him, pictures of his son. The strap from his guitar; pages and pages of scraps of lyrics. His obituary and the program from his funeral.



I went into that box last night--there was a good reason, which I'll get to--and went through everything piece by piece. I found a love note I thought I'd lost; letters I'd written to him while I couldn't see him, while I was living at my mom's. I found a letter he'd written to Margot, who he'd lost touch with, telling her how much he wanted her to be in the band, how important the band was to him. It all brought back a lot of memories, to say the very least--especially the letter to Margot.



Margot then was a lot like I was about four years ago--making all sorts of bad choices in relationships, staying with men who treated her badly and openly abused her. JP knew about this; he was scared for her, and--at least a little bit--scared for the place where she fit into his plan. That band was everything to him; Margot was the girl he'd taken to see Nirvana, despite the fact that his girlfriend at the time was in the hospital after giving birth to their son, the son they put up for adoption a few days later. They were barely-together, JP and his girl; they had broken up a few months earlier and she had gone home to her people, only to resurface a couple months later with the news that she was pregnant. They broke up for good a few months later, very shortly before I came on the scene. He told me she was trying to get him to come back to her, asked me to call him every day to strengthen his resolve to stay away. A few months later, when we were living together, we lay in bed one night and she told me all the things she'd done, all the things he'd done in retribution--and he cried about it. "She hurt me so bad," he said.



Margot, on the other hand, had been his friend since college; she understood him, he said, in a way that his family didn't. In the letter he talked about that--how his family saw the band as "some ridiculous rock-star pipe dream", how they didn't care that it was the only thing that mattered to him, how they kept telling him to get a "real" job, to go to work every day for the rest of his life--which was his worst nightmare, he said. It was the band or nothing--and he had given himself a deadline. If he hadn't made it by the time he was 30, that was it. He didn't want to live the life he saw his mother and his father and his older cousins living; it wasn't something that was open to compromise.



We had talked about all this, of course. It was a plan I wholeheartedly supported; I didn't want that life for myself any more than he wanted it for himself. Between ourselves we knew the deadline was always open to extension--and besides, once we straightened out a bit and quit the drugs, we wanted kids. (We'd even picked out names.) And neither of us would be so selfish as to kill ourselves if we had kids. We both knew that; it, too, was part of the plan. We had a high sense of our own drama and were more than happy to indulge each other that way.



It was always going to be something we did together, though--like everything else, if we got tired of living, we would make our exit together. Never discussed--never on the docket--was the possibility that one of us would die and leave the other one behind. Neither of us ever expected that ten years later, all that would be left of what we had would be memories and a box of treasures--letters and photos, drumsticks and lyrics, scraps of a grand plan that never came to fruit.



Also in that box was a torn flannel shirt, purple and red and blue and black, with a rip down the middle of the back. It was one of the things I'd collected from his mother's house after he died; I'd never washed it, and for years afterward I could still smell him on that shirt. Then one day a couple of years ago I picked it up, looking for something underneath it, and--nothing, just the smell of dust and flannel. And that was like losing him all over again, in a small way.



I thought of the shirt again when I started making this quilt--different plaid flannel squares alternating with white--and last night, I decided to pull the shirt out and work pieces of it into the quilt; to put it to good use instead of letting it just sit in a box. A practical impulse, seized for less-than-practical reasons. So I sat on the sofa, watching _Valley of the Dolls_ on cable, cutting this flannel shirt along the seams.



The thing about quilts--about sewing in general, actually--is that it involves a lot of ironing. Everything has to be pressed if you want to get straight cuts out of it--long-packed-away flannel shirts especially. So I set up the ironing board, on New Years Eve, and ironed the scraps, sitting in front of the TV.



The heat of the iron touched the fabric, and on the steam, a faint familiar scent rose up--a ghost I thought I'd long forgotten, the way you sometimes forget a long-unseen face, or the sound of a voice you don't hear anymore.



I laid my head down on the ironing board and cried, one more time, for all I've lost.