pretty dumb things

the hammer is not my penis

The way I’m feeling these days is mostly like I’d like to find a musical with a song about how it’s ok to feel like crap and then play it on infinite repeat. Something along the lines of “It’s ok to feel like crap/ it’s ok to sit on your couch/ and watch Veronica Mars/ and eat ice cream sandwiches for hours/it’s ok to feel like crap” would be great, only, you know, with a lot more rhyming.

In an ideal world, and this is a revelation that any regular readers will readily file under “D” for “Duh,” the song would come from a musical penned by Joss Whedon. Forgive me, but I’m feeling a bit like I should change the name of this blog from “pretty dumb things” to “pretty dull things.” My emo echo is driving even me to ennui, so I completely pardon you if now you jump ship and go someplace where people are having uncomplicated sweaty naughty sex (or even complicated sweaty naughty thoughts). I am solidly back in the doldrums. (It’s a fictional landscape I envision as a series of rolling grey hills, like if you carefully arranged a movement of moles, made them stand still in an infinite undulating sinuous series of curves, and shaved them.)

Ok, so here’s life in my Working Girl office. The office space itself is kind of like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as decorated by Franz Kafka, only without the girlish charm of the former or the childhood whimsy of the latter. It’s a great big room painted optic white, lit by fluorescent lights, and with desks all out in the open and arranged in foursomes like a quad square of chocolate, but without the melting yumminess. Which is to say that everyone who walks by can see my monitor. Everyone. All the time. There is no hiding in that bleak white landscape and, trust me, it hurts.

To be watched, however fleetingly, while I write is a painful business. No one needs to watch me write. It’s not pretty. I talk to myself, my face goes all tic-tic-tic as my inner Leonard Bernstein conducts reluctant words into strange new melodies. In the best of all possible worlds, I jump away from my writing constantly, with the alacrity of touching something hot or faintly gross. I surf the web non-stop. Sometimes, I take three-minute dance breaks that often as not are comprised of my doing the pogo to the consternation of my long-suffering downstairs neighbors.

All of these things, things that are complemented by my sudden and inexplicable needs for some obscure food item that I must have that moment, things that are punctuated by  strange and indescribably changes in posture or the need to make my fingers do push-ups on the desk or any other item from my large bag of writing quirks, don’t work well with others. There’s a reason why writing is largely a solitary occupation and that is this: writers are fucking freaks. No one needs to watch, and yet everyone in my office can watch me. I feel like a circus geek.

On the other hand, I do like my work. I’m writing some interesting stuff and I get to solve interesting issues and it’s all pretty neat. So there’s that. I just would very much like to do it in the privacy of my own home, AC/DC or TLC or ELO or NAS playing loud on my speakers, surrounded by my pets and the free rein to let my writing tics fly. But alas. Plus there’s the fact that this job has so consumed my writing mo-jo that when I finally, finally get home to my quiet and solo abode, I am too depleted to type. Without time and energy to write, I mean my own writing, I pretty much lose my will to live, and that is not hyperbole.

And there’s this: I had sex with my X. A couple of weeks ago. It was a hot, sweaty, dirty night and we had hot, sweaty, dirty, faintly irritating sex following a meal of West Coast oysters and a bottle of Sancerre.  I’m not going to narrate it, not yet anyway. I’m not ready and this isn’t the time and it’s still raw and red as road-rash. It was a natural course of events that began when Donny sent me that letter back…whenever it was. We started talking, and talking led to eating, and eating led to eating and drinking, and eating and drinking led to fucking, and it’s an old story. (I do miss that sexy-low writing, those words that swirl and spin in some dark fleshy ecstasy. Soon, I hope to let loose the critical synapse and let the gutter utterances sway slow as junior high-school couples.)

At first I thought everything was fine. At first I thought I was fine. But then I realized I wasn’t and that I hurt and that this whatever it was wasn’t working. So I called Donny and told him that unless he’s calling to tell me he wants to work it out with me, or unless he’s calling because something is really, really important and he really, really needs me, that he can’t call me. I feel like I’ve been running the break-up ultra-marathon and my joints are failing me. Everything hurts and I just can’t put another foot forward.

Finally, there’s the fact that I’m still putting off my need to get a roommate. I just can’t cope with the concept that I’m going to have to give up even this, this last bastion of my independence. I have crunched the numbers and crunched them again. The stark mathematical fact is that without finding steady additional freelance work, I can’t live here by myself. It’s a thought so depressing that I stand stock still in the face of it.

So there it is. My life in a bitter nutshell, and a low from which not even Dr. Horrible Sing-Along Blog and all the joy contained therein can lift me. I turn, as always, to Buffy. This song from "Once More with Feeling" comes closest to my apocryphal ditty, “It’s Ok to Feel Like Crap.”

the profound suckage of my life in 241 words

Forgive me. I’m not feeling particularly jaunty at the moment. I’m solidly back in the doldrums, staring a 40k office job in the face, a dearth of time to write, and a roommate, because even at 40 grand, I can’t afford my apartment by myself.

I took a big risk this past year in committing myself to writing, and it’s not paying off. I don’t know what to do, and my back is uncomfortably flat against the wall. I know it sounds terribly precious to be sad about a perfectly fine job, but I loathe office jobs with an extra-flamey white-hot burning passion. And I don’t really have a choice but to suck it up and take this one that’s been tenuously offered to me. I might add that this job very well could go poof, much like pretty much everything else that has been waved in front of me this year.

To be honest, I feel the kind of white-eyed rolling terror best illustrated by horses in stable fires. I need someone to put a blindfold over my eyes and lead me out of the conflagration. I spent last night in bed wondering how awful it would be to throw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge. After all, Spalding Gray did it, and he was a successful writer (if a depressed human). I’m a failure and depressed. The endless unfurling of the oily East River is looking mighty tempting right now.

break ups and other viscera

I never thought I’d agree with anything that Neil Sedaka ever voiced in song, but in this one respect he is correct: breaking up is hard, so hard, to do.

Having made that stony blanket statement, now let me backtrack a bit. Breaking up, if you’ve fallen out of love, is not hard to do. Then, actually, it is remarkably easy. It’s like ripping a Band-Aid off a cut that’s healed and on a patch of skin without hair. Breaking up with someone with whom you’re now longer in love is, and forgive the extreme visceral metaphor here—and I warn you, it bears a kind of X-Games intestinal intensity—is like taking the perfect shit. When you no longer love someone, dumping that person has a kind of gliding excretory grace. It’s nearly pleasurable. And when it’s over, you clean yourself up a bit and all you feel is relief.

Not so when you break up with someone whom you still love. Then it’s kind of more like those medieval torture devices where they dragged your intestines out and wound them like yarn upon a spit. It’s a long, slow death, from what I’ve read, and you’re likely to pass out from the pain. As rococo as this image is, it’s also the most apt metaphor for what I’ve been enduring with Donny, my X, since last September when he messily told me that in fact, no, he wasn’t ready to marry me.

The upshot of all of this red, gooey gore is that I’m out here on the beach and I did not invite Donny. Rather, I invited a few other friends and a couple of them are joining me. We three girls will undoubtedly pillow fight vigorously while wearing pastel panties and twee tank tops, until we melt into a heap of tanned limbs and Sapphic intent. Actually, we won’t. But you’re free to let that sugarplum image dance in your collective heads if it pleases you.

And yet, even here on this little island with its sand and its chirruping birds and its crashing of the surf and its sun beaming in a charming, non-fatal way, I am enveloped in the emotional aspic that is the lingering break up. Donny, apparitional, haunts my thoughts, and as much as I want to exorcise him, I like him lingering, kind of like the rank, pink smell of flowers so past their prime that they approach the loam readiness of mulch.

I probably need a lover. I vacillate. I masturbate. Mostly, I masticate. Though I’m currently on a bender of beach waddling/wogging, an endeavor that seems to put a gentle kibosh on my cookie eating. I try to think of myself as incorporeal, which is difficult at the beach. There’s just so much skin-ness here. I’m brown as the proverbial beetle. My feet are so tan they look transplanted. I recognize that part of the process of this compulsive sun exposure (with sunscreen) and beach exercise has buried within it the attempt to reunite me with my own flesh. The break up took a physical toll, you see, and for many months I wanted to pretend I simply had no body, now that I had nobody.

It’s probably a good sign that I want to turn Donny into a ghost, that I want him to thaw, melt and resolve into a dew, because for many months I desperately wanted to be the ghost. This break up has been so very painful that I’ve had fantasies of simply vanishing. I’ve wanted to walk the streets invisible. I’ve pondered the glorious obscurity of the burka. I’ve wished that I could be as alone as a ghost, a solo shade flitting about the Hades of Manhattan. I’ve wanted, frankly, to cease to exist, but not, you know, in a permanent kind of way.

Last night I had a dream that I had succeeded, nearly. I dreamt that I’d taken some obscene overdose of Technicolor pills and that said dose had deposited me on death’s door. I felt this intense desire to just, finally, let go. But I didn’t. In my dream, I was revived, and then in a shocking turn of events that really happens most often only dreams, I was with Dustin Hoffman. I was interviewing him. He was looking at me peculiarly, and I explained what had happened with me the previous night: pills, color, desire, drifting, snapping back to life. He was solicitous.

And then he asked, “So I don’t suppose you would consider something casual, like a fling?” I considered it. I demurred. We continued talking, and Dustin morphed into a forty-ish Robert Redford. A while later I woke up.

What I make of all of this is that I’m fumbling through this break up. It’s not been easy because I loved Donny; I loved him enough to choose him as my husband. I remain hurt that he didn’t choose me, and I remain doubly hurt that it’s taken ten months for me to begin to realize that he isn’t the man I thought he was, that we are not in love any longer, and that I am ready to move on.

But something in my gut is telling me to accept all of that all of that gristly truth. Incredibly I’m almost listening.

wish/fear

And then as if to torture me, my unconscious serves up a piping hott sex dream dwelling on Donny’s dexterous fingers. It’s not enough that I spend my waking days repeating an elliptical list of highly rational, extremely persuasive and extraordinarily lucid reasons why I need to move on, post-hastey, but now my unconscious feels the need to prod and poke at the most delicate parts of me as if to remind me as to why I ought not.

It’s less fun, really, and I’m beginning to see the wisdom of the phenomenon of the rebound boy. Regretfully, I also know I’m no longer the kind of woman who can surf the relationship wave, hanging ten and shooting the green hook-up tunnel. I am simply not that flexible. Maybe I need to take up tantric yoga and learn some new relationship asanas. Downward-face double-dating dog, or some such.

Last night’s sex dream, as my sex dreams tend to do, held out the sweet pink promise of orgasm, attenuated it, and then snatched it away. My unconscious is a cruel, perverse mistress, and not in a good way. My sex dreams tend to incorporate people I know, so Donny’s presence, and more to the point the presence of his long and agile fingers, was unsurprising. Nor was the unusual setting—my back up against a wall of unknown origin, my skirts wadded up around my midsection, Donny close as a conspirator, his fingers buried inside me as if he was trying to snitch a lost object from an inconvenient locale. My sex dreams like to present to me a full spectrum of sexual behaviors that in my waking state I’d be hard pressed to find particularly pleasurable. They like to remind me of my conscious limitations.

I can’t help feeling that this dream is part and parcel of my current stage in the Donny-processing process, which is one wedged somewhere between the hard wish and the rocky fear. What precisely those wishes and those fear are, however, remain murky.

Like, for example, when we talk, I become a ventriloquist’s dummy as this horrible voice makes me go all puppet-like as it insists on asking/intimating/insinuating that Donny is dating someone else. I hate this voice, and yet even as I feel its words burble in my mouth, I’m incapable of stopping them. I am momentarily the unwilling acolyte to this horrid Svengali. And after I utter them, these phrases that require Donny’s swift and pointed denial, I feel dissatisfied. Yet I’m not sure what exactly I’m dissatisfied with—Donny’s denial because it wasn’t ardent enough, Donny’s denial because I’d actually like him not to deny, myself for asking in the first place, or something else I’ve not yet ascertained.

I find myself caught between the wish that he’s seeing someone and the fear that he is, or perhaps the wish that he is and the fear that he isn’t, or the wish that he isn’t and the fear that he is, or…bugger it. I can’t help but feel that were Donny to move on, and were I to know it, painful as it was, it would give me the tacit permission to move on my own darn self, and frankly that would be an immense relief. I feel like such a schnook that I can’t extend that permission to myself, but as of yet I can’t.

And here’s the kicker of last night’s erotogenic near-apogee: historically, I have a far harder time moving on from relationships with extra-good sex. Pretty much what keeps me yearning is high-quality fornication. It took me, for example, seven years to fully process my loss of C, the man I loved most and best prior to Donny. I shudder to think how long it will take me to see Donny fully recede in the relationship rearview mirror. On the other hand, lovers less stellar like Eff and Ernie vanished quickly and, like arsenic, left only a bitter trace.

My Xs have a tendency toward coupling unto nesting. All of my serious Xs—C, Eff,  Ernie, even the Goat-Gatherer—hooked up like doilies with someone new within weeks/months of our relationship’s demise. C and Ernie were married (to other people, not to one another, though that image amuses) within a year and a half. I suppose this history too is another complicating factor to my wish/fear surrounding Donny. I more than half expect him to take up with someone else, and quickly. And no small part of me just wearily wishes that he would.

an imprudent proposal

See, here’s the internal conundrum waging noisily as roofers inside my head: do I make an imprudent proposal, or do I not? It’s a question one could almost sing to a Clash song, were one to simplify the syntax.

The essentials of the issue are stark. Next week I am at a vacation house rather surprisingly alone. It’s a lovely little house with all the comforts of home and then some—I, for example, have neither cable nor a washing machine. It’s near the beach. It has a deck and a grill and it’s quiet and quaint and there are roses that bloom assertively. I wasn’t expecting to be spending about five days at this here house by myself, and yet here I am, staring a five-day, beachy solitude in the sandy, sunny face. I’ve asked a bunch of my friends to join me, and for a variety of reasons (mothers visiting, trips to Europe, busted exhaust systems in their vintage automobiles) no one can make it. So faced with spending a solid expanse of time on my onesy, I have been mulling over inviting, yeah, Donny.

My X and I remain in chatty contact. We are both of us tiptoeing precariously on that tightrope between parting forevermore and cleaving together. We chat, and the talk, seemingly light and fluffy as meringue, is thickly pregnant with possibility. It’s not just the sexual innuendoes that come and go like so many erotic birds winging about; it’s the subtext of keening loss and wailing need and the slow, inexorable thrum of love. Neither of us seems set on what we want, and it’s horrible and delightful in equal measure.

I’ve been turning over this idea of Donny spending this free-floating beach-bound time with me for weeks. It’s a concept I’ve considered from all its polyhedal angles. I’ve imagined the best and the worst, but mostly I’ve imagined us fucking. I really, really miss fucking my boyfriend, and I’m having a hard time teasing apart the threads of my emotional desire from those of my purely rank red pussy, to steal a line from Joyce and in doing so paraphrase it poorly.

To be fair to the totality of the situation, I’ve also considered inviting a stranger. There must be some man somewhere on this wet blue planet to whom I’d be attracted and who would want to visit me on this slender wisp of sand with the express purpose of unrestrained and possibly prelapsarian fucking. I’ve flipped the concept of some strange over and over like a pancake, so much so in fact that it has grown a bit tough. If it’s this hard for me to get roused over the abstract concept, I probably would have a really hard time with the reality.

And so it goes back to Donny, a known and beloved entity with fully known and beloved body parts. I imagine our playing house as a break from our break up and from our lives, as if this house that is not mine nor not his, this place that squats on this space that is neither land nor ocean, and this time that is not quotidian however much every day elements linger and in lingering grow a halo of specialness. In my mind, Donny’s coming would be utopian—attached to nothing, it would hang in space, unchained to expectation.

But I know the cold steel reality of the situation is that none of that is really possible. It is, after all, an imprudent proposal, an idea made unworkable by its churning emotional wake, and the naked fact that Donny, still unable to commit to me, is not the man I want in my life, much less in my pussy. Or possibly the other way around. To give him unfettered access to both, even for just a few days, is tantamount to giving up, bowing down, turning my belly to him and showing submission—and not in the good way.

So alone I’ll probably go it, those handful of days with sun and sand and grilled flesh and fresh corn. It’s not the worst thing that could happen to a girl, especially one like me who has had the metaphoric rug pulled out from under her optimistic legs as often as I have this past year. Still, it seems a shame to waste these days with no one but myself to play with.

color me the murrey/perse of okay

Like a funked-up wombat, I am slowly acclimating to life outside of my hideyhole. It has been a emotionally roughshod six days, but I’m doing pretty much ok.

I talked to my Major Agent on Tuesday, and with clipped, brisk efficiency, he reassured me that while I do have work to do, it’s not an insurmountable mound of work. I have to reshape my proposal, but I don’t have to write two new, fresh chapters, and that was what I was fearing. It’s funny, but in the six days after I got the big thumbs down from the Very Large Publishing House, I realized that I’d glossed over/neatly avoided/totally skirted/otherwise sidestepped a bunch of things that while difficult for me to tell in the highly distilled, seemingly impersonal and completely commercially driven format of a proposal would have actually helped sell the story. In reshaping the proposal, there will be a place for these bits of soiled laundry.

It’s tough writing a memoir, at least it is if you want to be both honest and not histrionic. It’s weird to find yourself packaging your interior like so much ground chuck and hoping that the shiny wrapper will entice people to buy you and, in an ideal world, at a tremendously inflated price. I have put myself on the auction block often—my career as a stripper felt like nothing as much as parading my blonde pony self to the highest bidder again and again unto near infinity—but this time has a special piquancy. I find myself appraising my prose with a coolly commercial eye as often as I feel like when I write, I’m pulling out my viscera—pain, blood and fascia included.

That said, I’ve been slowly stuttering back to writing. This post being the third thing I’ve written since I got the big thumbs down—the first being my melodramatic Warner Brothers post, and the second being something for one of my clients. I haven’t had the will to write, which is for me pretty much tied up with the will to live, but both are returning, and I suppose that’s a good thing. It’s hard for me to exit the kingdom of ambivalence—the skort keeps on wadding up between my thighs and it’s so hard to walk.

I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of people showing their unqualified support in the past few days. Those of you who have taken the time out of your day to leave me a comment or write me an email know who you are, and I thank each and every one of you. It has meant an inordinate amount to me that strangers tell me they care about me. I’m not at all accustomed to a cheering section, and as odd as it feels, I think I like it.

It’s always weird to me who’s there when I’m low and who’s not. It’s often not the people I expect. My family hasn’t called, not once. Two of my very good friends have given me what could only be construed as very odd responses to my pain. But then others, like my friends Daisy and The Virgin have been rock solid, as have a couple of other writer pals. They have helped tremendously.

So, shockingly, has Donny, who took me out for a burger and a beer last Friday when I got the bad news. As strange as it is to see him, it is also not. We love each other, still. In many ways, he knows me best, and it’s hard for both of us to let go when the love won’t diminish. It’s all very odd, but I’m glad that he was there to literally hold my hand. Once more, we kissed and nothing more. Once more, I missed his kiss and let his smell linger on my fingers. It is what it is and is not what it isn’t.

I’ve gotten a lot of encouragement, and it has helped ease the burn. Rachel Kramer Bussel submitted my story “Stuck at Work and Late for a Date” from her erotica collection Yes, Sir! to Tristan Taormino for her collection Best Lesbian Erotica 2008, and it is one of the finalists for the collection. So that’s kind of cool. Another one of my friends has offered to employ me if I need it, and that’s awesome because I hate looking for work when what I really want is to write. A few of you have donated to my tip jar, and I thank you. It’s nice to feel your collective wind beneath my wings.

This post is kind of ambling like a drunk, and I apologize it hasn’t my usual attention to narrative form. I’ve not my writing legs back. Soon, though, I’m certain I’ll gather my gait and stride forth as a colossus. I can feel my strength returning.

a dream dejected

I imagine the most Warner Brothers of endings: safes falling, pianos crashing, rickety bridges snapping, large explosions in primary colors. To say that I’m not taking the recent rejection of my book proposal well would be an epic understatement. To be completely honest, I would very much just like right now to cease to exist. I’m having a hard time going from minute to minute and not collapsing in a heap.

Had the Very Large Publishing House actually bought the book that made the two editors perk up like spaniels when I told them about it that afternoon in February, I would be right now in a diametrically opposite position. I’d be so happy that sunshine would be beaming out my ass. I’d be so happy that I’d be floating. I’d be doing little dances of joy punctuated with pinching of my flesh just to make sure that I was awake and not dreaming something too improbably good to be true.

I don’t remember a whole lot of the specifics of that meeting last February. Much of it went by in electric quivers of anxiety, though a few odd details remain: the greige of the mushroom bisque that I spilled on my sweater, the way my hands felt strangely chill, the appraising gaze of the female editor. And I remember this: I remember saying, much to my emo chagrin, that I really, really hoped that this book actually came to fruition, because I wasn’t sure how much more I could take of my hopes being raised all lofty only to be dashed on the jagged rocks of disappointment. Or something along those lines.

I knew then that I couldn’t take another pony in the mist, another time when a person extended to me the possibility of a dream becoming corporeal, only to have that person pull it away, like Lucy and the football, at the last moment. I had just had that happen with Donny and my engagement. I bore the pain of that loss like a burn victim. I didn’t feel my skin had healed enough to have it happen again.

So I worked really diligently and slowly on the proposal. I solicited advice from people in the writing biz. I sent out portions of the proposal to friends, colleagues and strangers, and I sifted what they said with my own thoughts, and I incrementally built a proposal that I felt really good about.

I got an agent. A serious agent with a list of seriously impressive clients. I kept in touch with the editor from the VLPH. I gradually began to believe in the actuality of this dream becoming real. I steadily, and shockingly, began to trust all the people who told me that this book deal was going to happen, that my book was going to sell, that I was going to be paid real money to be a paid, validated, signed, sealed and genuine author. That, like Pinocchio, I was going to fulfill my dream of becoming real. Even more, I'd be able to pay my rent, afford my student loans and get health insurance for the first time in seven years.

The email from my agent informing me that the VLPH had passed on my book came as a complete shock. Even now, nearly 72 hours later, I can barely believe it. I had done the work. I had created a proposal for exactly the book that the editors had enthusiastically said they had desired. I had worked really, really hard on it. I had made informed choices after canvassing many people in the know. Against my own nature, I had come to be invested in my success. And I had been shot down.

Today, I really, truly don’t know what I’m going to do. Everyone has been quite kind, and yet I feel completely alone. I don’t have job. I don’t have much money coming in. I don’t have very much work lined up because I’d trusted in my proposal, in the words of others, and in the beneficence of the universe that this time I’d get what I wanted. I didn’t, and I don’t know if I have it in me to suffer more rejection. I know I don’t have it in my bank account.

As many of you know, I have webstalkers. These two people—and I know who they are—have waged a campaign of hate against me for the past two years. Often, their voices have served as a digital chorus to my own worst, most self-defeating interior monologues. As I’d gotten closer to this book deal, I’d found the collective voice of these people to be increasingly funny. They were grasping at straws. It was clear: I was a good writer; I was having success. Their voices began to take on a darkly ludic quality. I found I could laugh at them.

Now, though, I keep returning to an email they sent me on 25 February. “Please stop postponing the inevitable and kill yourself now,” they wrote. Perhaps, I think, wrapped as I am in my own dejection, I should, but thinking of all of the people that my suicide would bum out, I can't. So I'll just curl up, cry, visualize Acme anvils dropping, and secretly dream of some small, life-saving success.

(Image courtesy of The Acme Catalog, From Warner Brothers, text by Charles Carney, published by Chronicle Books.)

on clowns and fear, itself

Like clowns, fear is a funny thing. Like clowns, fear is something that isn’t necessarily what it seems to be. Like clowns, fear sometimes sneaks in and bops you over the head with a rubber haddock, while other times it comes up flapping up on squeaky shoes. Even as fear approaches, you can’t always believe what you’re seeing. Fear and clowns have many similarities.

And then there’s this: in the end, fear, like clowns, often turns out to be not nearly as bad as you'd imagined. Such is the case of my college students finding out about my pretty dumb things, this blog that confesses everything from my predilection for spanking to my experiences of multiple abortions to my unabashed love of my previous dog, Spencer.

I started writing my pretty dumb things three years and a couple of months ago. At first, I wrote because I was motivated by spite; I felt the need to show this man who had a blog, who had publicly devoted himself to me on his blog, and then had quietly dumped me on it, that I could do what he did, but better. I wanted to spite him, and I guess I did.

Then I wrote because I had to. It felt as if there was this huge backlog of stuff I had to say, all these stories I had to tell, all these moments, thoughts and feelings I had to share, and share them I did. Catharsis is write, I’ve said before and will say again until I grow tired of the phrase. Without writing, I’d still be the monumentally fragmented and profoundly unhappy individual I used to be and not the relatively sane and oddly content individual I am now. Without writing, I’d still be stuck I a rut. I’ve given my gratitude to my readers more than once, for without you, I’d be not nothing, but a lot less.

My one fear in writing this blog was that my students would discover it. I didn’t worry about the administration of the school finding out, for I’d told my Department Chairs about it. I don’t keep my own secrets, though I do keep those of others, and so it wasn’t a big secret that I had a blog, that much of what I wrote was dirty, and that people were free to read it or not. It just didn’t matter to me because I knew that my need to write loomed larger than my fear of being discovered.

I could write about why much of the content of this blog has been explicitly sexual, especially at the beginning, and perhaps some day I shall, but today is not that day, that post is not this post, for this post is about the day that I realized that my students had discovered my blog. It was, actually, on Super Tuesday, the same day that I met with two editors from a large publishing house who were—and are still—interested in publishing my book. I went home from the lunch I’d had with these two editors and my friend who’d set the whole thing up, I signed into my stat-counter, and I discovered  a thick handful of people with IP numbers from my college were avidly reading my blog. They were downing pages like M&Ms, that is to say, endlessly, quickly, and without much evident digestion. Though I couldn't know exactly the identity of each blip on the screen, I knew that only my students would be that interested in this blog.

My initial reaction was to completely effing freak the fuck out. I’d always maintained that I could deal with anyone discovering my blog—except my students. I imagined them hating me. I imagined them disrespecting me. I imagined them hijacking the classroom. I imagined my authority yanked out from underneath me like a tablecloth. I imagined me tumbling down to the floor, my sprawling limbs messy as broken plates, awash and red with shame. I imagined the worst.

So, apparently, did my stalkers, for it was their attempts to out me that led my students to my blog. On New Year’s Eve of 2006, my stalkers bombarded sites that college students use. I discovered my stalkers’ attempts very early after these stalkers had begun their attack.Despite my attempts to control the situation, eventually, these stalkers were successful. An ex-boyfriend found me this way. So did my biological father. And so, finally, a year after my stalkers first tried to out me, did my students.

On that Tuesday in February, after reading my stat-counter compulsively and discovering more and more of my college’s IP appearing, I freaked and did all that I could do. I spoke to friends, who reassured me. I took deep breaths and several shots of whiskey. I went to bed. The next day I was on campus, I went to my Department Chair and I told her the story. Then, bracing myself for the worst, I went to class. I taught. I taught again. And nothing happened.

No one said anything. Not word one. Nothing changed. Not a bit. Not an iota. No one said anything about anal. No one said anything about my love of being dirty-talked to. No one said anything about my history of depression. No one said anything. After a couple of classes, I exhaled, relaxed, and moved on. I did have one conversation with a former student who admitted he read my blog, but as bad as that was, it wasn’t that bad. At the end of our conversation, I realized that my fear had been a hundred gajillion times worse than the reality, for the reality was…nothing.

I must admit that knowing that my students were reading my blog absolutely colored my content for the past few months. Every time I felt like singing paeans to my raw pink pussy, I checked myself. Every time I felt like bemoaning my dearth of anal and my ambivalence about it, I stopped. Every time I felt I was saying something that I would not want brought up in class, I paused. Sometimes I wrote it anyway; other times I did not. I am profoundly glad that I’m no longer teaching and that I have the freedom to write freely. I’m the sort of person who believes that things happen when you’re ready for them to happen, and all of this—the meeting with the publishers, the students reading, my decision to bid adieu to academia—happened as I needed it to. (As ever, click to embiggen the pictures—if you dare.)

It’s all a lot like the Buffy episode of season 5 called “Fear, Itself.” It’s Halloween, Buffy and company get trapped in a frat party haunted house, and systematically, all their fears come true: Xander feels abandoned; Willow’s magic overcomes her; Oz turns into a werewolf; and Buffy finds herself alone. They each get funneled into the top room of the house, and there they discover that Gachnar, the Fear Demon, had been summoned. As they stare at the gaping floor boards pulsating with light, their fear grows.

Rising slowly up from the eldritch light, Gachnar appears, all helmeted, swathed in black leather and wrapped in wires. He is also about six inches tall. Buffy squashes him with her sneaker, and the metaphor is complete.

Fear is a lot bigger in our heads than it is in real life. In real life, it’s almost always not that bad. And here’s the other thing: those people who wanted to instill fear in me by attempting to out my blog identity to my students, they just wanted power over me. They succeeded; I was afraid. But then I saw the fear for what it was: puny, insignificant and meaningless. And the fear, like clowns, became something to laugh at.

I’m no longer afraid. I’m fearless, I’m powerful, and I’m strong. What’s even better? Soon, I’m going to be published.

greetings from lake lachrymose!

The thing about the cruise ship that is my interior life is that I never know ahead of time which event I’ll be attending. One day, I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go but my own emotional gala. Another day and I find I’m at some suburban coffee klatch, chatting amongst my selves while we all talk over one another’s sentences and refuse the pound cake (only to eventually succumb to its buttery vixen wiles). Still another, and I’m at a frat party, downing body shots with abandon. On any given Monday, I’m at an inner wake, dressed in fetching black and mourning…something. On any Wednesday afternoon, I’m at a tea, all sedate and crumpet-eating. Outside, it might be raining, but inside I might be entertaining. There’s no rhyme or reason or invitation in my emo life.

Lately, and for a long and completely understandable time, I’ve been attending a drawn out pity party. It’s been necessary, this Mad-hatter’s tea of patheticism. I’ve moved my way down the seats of the seemingly endless table, surrounded by the scraps and orts of my lingering feelings for my X and metaphorical china cups ringed by the vestiges of something that was once comforting and warm and now is cold, congealing and faintly repulsive. There’s been a lot of self-pity and frankly, I have laved myself in it. I lost a lot, and loss requires mourning and yadda yadda yadda cookies.

Then, suddenly, there was a break in the party. I thought I saw the last of my pity guests as they sloped sullenly out the door. The tail of Eeyore. The grey skirt of Emma Bovary. The metal clunking of Marvin the Robot. I thought I’d courteously shoved them out the door, goodie bags in hand (a package of Kleenex, a sample-pack of Xanax, a copy of Eat, Pray, Love) and bid them a not unsentimental adieu. I thought that with the tender pop and bang of my 2,500 mile booty call my pity party had ended.

Not so much. In the past few days I’ve found myself once more surrounded by the disco dirge of lament. I have found myself once more on my couch in the classic “woman weeping on fainting couch” pose: body flung like laundry, legs curled in an S, arms folded origami-like under face. I have been that woman on the couch weeping inconsolably and I have heard the slow inexorable crank of the pity party, like the worst sort of French accordion music, start up once more.

I have tried to resist the pull of the increasingly morose Julia, my emotional Cruise Director. I have tried to beg off, and like Amy Winehouse cry, “No! No! No!” as Julia has tugged at my sleeve and led me pity-party-ward. I have tried, and I have failed. Ultimately, I just succumbed to the chthonic beat. I went limp and I wept. A lot, and with Buffy in the background because if I am a geek, I am at least consistent. Nothing has quite the cathartic impact of Buffy’s words to her sister Dawn right before she flings herself into the glowy-red rift between demon dimensions thereby fulfilling her prophecy that death is her gift. “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it,” Buffy tells Dawn. Currently, I’m resisting getting that tattooed on my body.

I’ve been resisting a lot lately. Most recently, I’ve been resisting emailing Donny and telling him something so drippy in bathos I can’t even write it here. I’ve resisted calling him. I’ve resisted emailing him. I’ve resisted and I’ve resisted from one moment to the next. I’ve felt like I can’t live another moment without smelling his scent, and I’ve resisted telling him that. I’ve resisted calling him and telling him that my heart simply will not stop breaking. I’ve resisted every impulse to tell him the truth: that I miss him palpably.

So instead I called him with the news that Snoop Dogg had made a cameo on One Life to Live. Never mind that neither one of us has ever watched a soap opera. Never mind that neither one of us has more than a passing interest in the oeuvre of Mr. Dogg. Never mind that telling Donny this piece of news was tantamount to telling him that I am having a hard time living without him because this piece of news was so pointless as to travel around the bend and become pointed.

No, on second thought, do mind that last bit. Nothing says something like nothing, really, and there’s not a lot less of something than Snoop Dogg on a soap. It’s the kind of bubble that screams when popped.

So greetings from Lake Lachrymose. I’ll be leaving here soon. I think I’ll take up a residence at Chagrin Chateau, where I’ll be staying in disguise. Look for the woman on the couch with the dark glasses, wadded hankie in her hand, and cookie crumbs besprinkling her bodice.

and my black t-shirt

I’ve had a lot of relationships. I’ve lived with five men. I’ve had many more intense boyfriends and a couple of intense girlfriends. I’m pretty practiced with the break-up, and yet I marvel at how it doesn’t get any easier. Age and practice make easier many other difficult things—losing a job, getting a job, first dates, moving, financial woes, all of these stresses have eased with the passage of time and my reluctant acceptance of maturity. Not so much with the breaking up. Breaking up, if it’s something I don’t want, remains as raw as eggs, as abrasive as tarmac, as hard as eternity.

If you’re the leavee, rather than the leaver, there’s this moment in every break-up when you take stock of your stuff and decide whether it’s worth the emotional turmoil to get it back. (If you’re the leaver, you can decide before you take action what to do with the stuff; it’s one of the fat advantages of being the leaver.) You ask yourself if the pain of the loss of the stuff is more or less than the pain of getting it back. You consider the visceral thrill of that horrorslothian moment when you open the signed, sealed and delivered box—or even more evocative, the door. You do this, anyway, if you are me.

Donny has a bunch of my stuff. Mostly, it’s sundry clothes and sex toys. A few pairs of panties, a bustier, a bra, a pair of pajama bottoms, a couple of t-shirts. A butt plug, an njoy toy. Not much, but a fair bag of things that when I considered them in their tawdry heaped glory, I knew I wanted them back. Donny has nothing at my apartment. He would always carefully amass his belongings at the end of every trip, fold them, and place them pointedly in his backpack. He made sure that fine lines were drawn and kept between us. He kept me at bay with his devotion to the discreet.

A couple of weeks ago, the day that I ran into Donny’s cousin at the place where I freelance, I called him. It was a moment of weakness and I knew I’d regret it, and I did. He mentioned something about my stuff. We had a brief stuff discussion. It got the stuff ball rolling. Stuff was in the air. It hung like an astronaut’s laundry, still and strange, in the space between us.

I told him that we needed to have a conversation about how I would get the stuff back—whether he’d mail it to me blank as a bill, or whether we’d chance the face-to-face meeting. I told him I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do beyond getting the stuff, so he could think about it and get back to me.

Weeks passed. And so in my head the stuff grew. It became a monolith of stuff. I could see my box of stuff tucked in a corner of Donny’s apartment. I could see it gather dust, mote by mote. I could feel its tiny heart beating like Poe’s tell-tale heart, even 170 blocks south of it. I could hear my stuff calling, and even I knew that I had to get it back because it was no longer stuff; it was tender debris.

Tender debris is the phrase I use to name all the physical detritus of a defunct relationship. When a relationship dies, some objects become imbued with this aureole of loss. Sitting somewhere in between a Victorian memento mori like those eerie flowers made from the hair of the dead and a fetish doll, these objects grow uncanny. Saturated with free-form feelings, these objects get bigger than themselves, somehow. They take up a lot of room. These things are the tender debris.

I’ve had a few drama-filled moments of tender debris. There was the time that I had to break into the house where I once lived with my boyfriend—the first boy I ever lived with—and found him in our bed fucking another woman. Later, having moved out, I went in under the cover of darkness when he and his band were out playing. I gathered my Bert Stern Marilyn Monroe book, my collection of vintage handbags, and my clothes. I forgot the cowboy plates I inherited from my grandmother, and I mourn them still. I’ve had some civil Great Stuff Exchanges too, where we acted like grown-ups and sipped tea, and at the end we hugged meaningfully.

Dramatic or decorous, the stuff is nearly systolic with emotion. I know I can live without the stuff that Donny has. It’s just…stuff. Panties and a sex toy. Who cares? But it’s the metaphor that holds meaning. If I don’t get my stuff back, it languishes there until he tosses it in the trash like a dead goldfish. I resist being relegated to the trash heap. I could have him mail it to me, but that feels so imperious and impersonal. I don’t want to open the box, really. I’m busy accepting the stark naked reality of our break-up, but I can’t accept the postal system.

So tomorrow, I’m seeing Donny. I’m getting my stuff, and I am sure it will be awkward in the special way that only people who have been once been close as vines and are now dead as leaves can be. There will be unfinished phrases. It will be studded with ellipses. It will fumble and fail. And then, like all things, it will end.

Which, really, I remind myself, is the point.

the trouble with dreams

The part where I dream of him every night has commenced. Every night, or nearly every night, often enough that it feels like a nightly event, as if my unconscious has a regularly scheduled date for pernoctation, I dream of Donny.

Mostly, in my dreams Donny is moving out, despite the fact that we never lived together. In my dreams, he’s packing boxes, or he’s surrounded by boxes already stacked and packed, and I am struck by both the visual of a nearly vacated room and the feel of a room made new by its echo. In my dreams, I wonder where I’m going to put things, how I’m going to fill the space, now that he has moved out. (Before we broke up, I had all these dreams that I had two apartments, one I lived in and one I didn’t. In my dream, I got eviction notices for both; I felt stress about how I’d pay for both of my homes, especially the empty one.)

I’ve had other dreams where we’re just together, doing stuff; stuff is done by us, and we are there. There’s nothing special about the dream. No penguins or uncanny architecture. No bones or flying or bullets or bodies. No dwarfs or she-males. Just us, talking, doing stuff, and the pervading sense that the end is unquestionably nigh. I’ve had dreams where we fought, and in them we fought with a kind of spitting primal anger we never had in waking life. I’ve had dreams of Donny, lots of them, of late; my mind works overtime to process this loss.

(I also had a dream that in this highly posh, art deco L.A. hotel, Naomi Watts seduced me. She pulled me down onto a velvet divan the color of an arterial spray. She was wearing silk of a color somewhere between ecru and lemon. She kissed me and held my face in her cool, narrow-fingered hands, and the room swirled and morphed and somehow I was in her bed, all crisp, white linen and bolstered headboard swathed in yet more arterial velvet.

She and I were kissing and touching, undressing one another with our hands, and suddenly her husband Liev Schrieber was there also, undressed but for his boxers. I looked at Naomi, who nodded her ascent and then reclined on her side to watch me slide Liev's boxers off over his cock, already swollen and hard as a dehiscent fruit. I got this vivid view of his abdomen carpeted with bristly hairs, my hands shorts sliding his boxers down, the shiny-taut toasty-pink skin of his glans, and his moon-shaped face watching. My mouth nearly watered with the prospect. But then, as dreams do, it got mussed by the appearance of two more people, one a male-male, one a she-male, and in my dream I made my regrets. A threesome with Naomi and Liev was one thing; a five-some was something entirely something bigger than my unconscious mind could wrap itself around. They were very polite, if disappointed.)

This oneiric processing of the emotional break-up is nothing new for me. After I broke up with C, I spent seven long, heart-wrenching years dreaming about him. My C-related dreams were unequivocally painful, involving as they did my dreamed obsession with him: us meeting unbeknownst to his wife and sharing some brief fucking passion in a strange apartment; my breaking into his house and poring through his things, touching his photos like totems; my stumbling across him and his wife in flagrante delicto, and feeling a blaze of delicious horror. These were always painful dreams. I often woke up weeping.

At some point near the end of those seven years, I dreamt of C and I told him how often I dreamed of him and how I would wake up in tears. I knew as I was telling him that the dreams would soon end. They did. I can now see C, and I feel affection for him. I feel gratitude. The ghost of our years together and our love beyond reason colors the room, hovering in the milky distance, but I don’t feel pain. His life is not mine, and I feel thankful for that. In those seven years after we broke up, I never thought I’d get to this point, and yet here I am, able to stand on a peninsula and see C-land, off in the distance, wave a cheerful hello and then walk away with neither insouciance nor sadness.

Someday, I’ll get to that point with Donny, but it’ll be a while. I’m feeling better than I was. I’m now nearly funk-free; I’m able to do the things I need to do without feeling like they’re bigger than I am. I am no longer so distracted that I feel immersed in the Donny-fug, like it’s swirling about me all emo-miasma and clouding my vision. I’m able, from time to time, to see clearly. And then there are my dreams working overtime. (Over time, they will fall away like leaves. Over time, I’ll grow a new pearl where Donny once was.)

I don’t have sex dreams about Donny. But I can still smell his scent, evanescent as water, sweet like beech trees. I can still feel his fingers, and I can still remember the way he kissed. Someday, those details will fall away too. Fall like fluff and stick somewhere, anywhere, but not here in my consciousness.

crankypants/sex dream

So essentially how I’m feeling is that in the kingdom of the annoyed, I’m wearing the Royal Crankypants. Everything—everything—is noisome. This feeling isn’t new. It’s been building like a tsunami in the open ocean of my unconscious.

That last sentence, that really irritates me. I’d cross it out and start again, but I’m going to let it sit as a silent, purple testament to exactly how prickly I feel. I’m tetchy, goddammit, tetchy as fuck. The world conspires to make me ill tempered.

I’m annoyed by my skin. It’s itching everywhere, particularly places I can’t reach.  Yesterday, I ran into Donny’s cousin at one of the places I freelance. She’s looking to be there full-time. That was deeply irritating. Not to mention awkward. This whole thing about Jezebel being sold to Condé Nast is galling me, first because I thought they’d been sold, and then later because I realized it was an April Fool’s joke. My obtuseness rankles me.

I’m really maddened by the fact that Ernie, my X, has apparently gotten a job at a college here in Gotham. I was really looking forward to his being forced to move to a very different Congressional district. I’m angry at how long it’s taken GQ to send me a check for the freelance work I did—maybe all of my annoyance is really Condé Nast’s fault. Darn that Sy Newhouse, darn him all to heck. Also—my iTunes is really bothering me. 7,000+ songs and all it can play are the ones that suck. How many times do I need to hear “Everybody’s Kung Fu Fighting”? That is not a rhetorical question.

My stupid book proposal is really annoying me. It’s annoying me to infinity; it’s annoying me to the nth degree. Which is pretty much the same thing, and my repetition really irks me. It’s also annoying me that beyond “irritating” and “annoying” there are not that many good words with which to express the feeling of being irritated and/or annoyed. My thesaurus really abrades, affronts, aggravates, angers, bothers, bugs, burns, chafes, confuses, distempers, disturbs, enrages, exasperates, frets, galls, gets, grates, harasses, incenses, inflames, infuriates, irks, maddens, needles, nettles, offends, pains, peeves, pesters, piques, provokes, rankles, rasps, rattles, riles, roils, ruffles, sours, tries, vexes me.

My sleep has been choppy of late. It’s infuriating. My sleep comes late, after much coaxing, many countings of breath, and too well into the inky blackness of night. When I do finally sleep, I toss fitfully. My sheets wad up like swaddling around my thighs. I sleep aware of my sleep, not plunged like a baptized infant in Lethean waters. And can I say, wow, this writing sucks like a pangolin. The sleeplessness and the sucking weary me. So does my pretentiousness. I should just fart in a wineglass, sniff it, and call it a day.

See, my sleep becomes all the more precious when, as I was early this morning, my unconscious gifts me with a sex dream, even one as David-Lynch weird as the one I had last night. (I might add that my cat chose the exact moments of my sex dream to walk over my head, press his wet nose into my eye sockets and purr loudly. I really, really hate my cat.) And it was weird, it was a strange dream, even as dreams go, but in it I got to kiss a woman who looked an awful lot like Madeline Zima. And that, unlike an echidna, does not suck.

In the dream, I was back visiting FlashDancers. They had remodled extensively since my last visit there in 2002, or at least they had in my unconscious. For one thing, it was a lot larger than it used to be. It sprawled all subterranean for blocks, like a parking garage stacked full of ecdysiasts. Plus, they’d installed these weird bidet-toilets that were separated from one another with iridescent blue shower curtains, apropos nothing. Really, the whole dressing room was the height of minimalist chic, as if Jacques Herzog, the architect for Prada, had redesigned it. It was pretty disconcerting, but I was accompanied by my Madeline-Zima look-alike stripper, so all was fine with the world when I had to squat over the weird bidet-toilet and my Frye boots kept skidding out from under me, threatening to deposit me in the toilet drink.

Of all the strippers in all the world, the one who glommed to me in my dream was this Madeline Zima creature. All big eyes and thin shoulders and white skin and black hair. All improbably young. Even in my dream, I was pinching myself that a woman like this would be interested in me for longer than it would take her to apply lip gloss. Yet here she improbably was, talking about hair cuts with a kind of improportionate fervor and dropping lines like “I think everyone needs both a boyfriend and a girlfriend, don’t you?” casually as used matches. I was—and am—inclined to agree.

In my dream, it was just a matter of time before we kissed, and soon—after wending through the new FlashDancer dining room (It looks like a Ponderosa, I said; she laughed), after downing monolithic dark drinks poured by my unconscious bartender with a very heavy hand, after my Madeline-Zima clone had instantaneously and inexplicably changed out of her long-gown stripper garb and into a pair of denim short-shorts and a tank top, and after she pulled me into a dark alcove, we kissed. It was, might I say, not at all annoying. It was, might I say, a really lush and lovely kiss. It was, might I say, too bad it wasn’t real. I'd like to pry her apart and eat her with my fingers.

Dream-drunk, I tried to write my phone number for my freshly bussed  Madeline-Zima girl, but I couldn’t. I tried and I tried, but every number came out wrong, wrong as pork soda, wrong as culottes, wrong as creationism. No matter how many times I tried to crib my digits on a card, the numbers were all wrong. Not-Madeline-Zima sat looking expectant and only a little bit exasperated.

Which brings me back to my own irritation. The cat walking on my head and nose-butting my eyelids woke me. I hate my cat. And here I am, typing crappity-crap-crap in crankypants.

I’m going to meditate on pictures of the real Madeline Zima in hopes that they will soothe the snappish beast within. It could happen.

exit wounds

I’m still in the midst of book-proposal writing hell, which is really less hell and more a wan flavor of purgatory, truth be told. I find myself alternately dropped into the cold dreck of self-doubt and  then lifted into the sunny aeries of self-confidence. It’s an unpleasant interior see-saw, and what I want, what I really, really want, is to just finish the fictional document and sign a happy contract. Zig-a-zig hah, indeed.

And yet the telling of other stories won’t wait. They intrude and demand airing, like bed linen left too long. So I must break with the proposing in order to tell you other stuff, for I must tell someone and tell it again, and tell it anew, and each time discovering something fresh.

A week ago I received a letter from Donny. It was a pretty long letter, hand-written, studded with inside jokes like nuts in a pastry. The length of the letter was improportionate to its message. There was, to be precise, no clear rhetorical end. There was nothing about wanting to be with me, or committing to me. There was nothing about what he’s learned in the past couple of months or how he’s come to terms with the way he treated me. Mostly, the letter went something like this: he loves me; he misses me; I’m really so great,  especially my figurative insides.

Which dearth of rhetorical message meant either that a) the letter was all text and no sub or b) it was all sub and not so much text. In reading it a couple of times, both to myself and to one girlfriend, I came to the realization that the letter was more the latter. I don’t doubt that Donny truly loves me, seriously misses me, and unquestionably appreciates my greatness, especially those of my figurative insides. I think all of that is true. However, I also think that he was motivated to write said letter far less because of his love or my insides and far more because of his loss—and his difficulty in dealing with it.

I wasn’t going to respond to the letter. I really wasn’t. I had made up my mind that there was nothing for me to say to it that would help either one of us. There was no conversation to be had, and I resolved not to start one. And then, last Thursday, after the reading at In The Flesh, and after a dinner at a molecular gastronomic restaurant that was accompanied by wine and bourbon, I wove my way back home, and snuggled deep in my soft and yielding bed, I drunk-texted Donny.

What the fuck? I ask succinctly. That’s what I texted him. (It probably surprises none of you that when I text, I do so in fully sentences, complete with punctuation and the best spelling I can muster.) And then with the bed rocking gently, I tried to sleep to mitigated success.

Friday, Good Friday, a day that Donny being Catholic takes off from work, was punctuated by snippets of texts and fragmented conversation. It all culminated in a conversation with Donny late on Friday afternoon, after he’d returned from his “medieval service,” his words, and I from my therapy.

And you know what? It was good to hear his voice. I really missed his voice, his slight Jersey twang and his laugh. I missed his vocal syncopation, the way he pauses before certain words, the way he always calls me by my full hexasyllabic name. I missed the sensory confirmation that Donny lives on in this world, thinks about the things I imagined he was thinking about, laughs at the jokes I thought he’d laugh at, and feels the general emotions I envisioned him feeling. I missed him, and for a brief respite from the pain of our break-up, it was good to just hear him.

But then he brought up the letter, whereupon I had to respond to it and to him. I told him that it was fine to write letters until the cows came home, but it was not ok for him to send them. I told him that in sending this letter, he effectually ripped the scab off the wound that had been healing for the past couple of months. I told him that he had broken my heart, not to put too fine a point on it, and that his decision to write to me was selfish, for I could find no reason for him to write to me beyond his wanting me to help him feel better.

I told him, too, that that was not my job. I told him I was not his friend. I couldn’t be his friend. And while I love him and miss him and wish him the best, I don’t want him. I told him that I realized that I couldn’t change him—that no matter what I did or how much time I gave him, he wasn’t going to joyfully commit to me until he was able to on his own time, and that seemed to be no time soon. I told him to that because I wanted someone who would joyfully commit to me, and he was incapable of it, that the simple math brought me to the painful recognition that I don’t want him.

He was pretty silent throughout, and really, what other response could there be. He knew he’d done wrong in writing me the letter—he apologized for it both in the letter and on the phone—so his silence felt like a tacit acknowledgement of all that I was saying, which all of it I said calmly, precisely and not unkindly. The way I felt was simply that I could not go through what he’d put me through last fall again, that I was angry at him for feeling that I would be there when he reached for me, and that I’d been doing ok with the whole heart-healy thing, until last Friday.

Last Friday, and for the remainder of the weekend, I found myself plunged into an industrial sized vat of what-the-funk, and it did not please me. I lost days at the gym. I got a monster cold. I couldn’t write. I ate a lot. I retreated to the couch and Buffy.

The weird thing is that now, now that the emotional rubble is once more starting to settle, my mind is self-selecting the good bits, the tasty morsels, the parts where we enjoyed one another and held each other and fucked with our foreheads close as greeting Maoris. I have to remind my mind of the pain and the confusion and the unfulfilled promises and how he has so consistently acted so selfishly, like I’m little more than a gem of a hologram with interesting thoughts and a profound penchant for deeply creative sex.

Today, I find myself missing Donny and not liking it at all. I was happier when I felt good with being alone, and not keen as a whetted knife with syrupy, confusing loss.

two months, not that anyone's counting

It has now been two months since I last saw Donny, my erstwhile fiancé, boyfriend of three-plus years, and muse for much of the smut written here. I’m finding it odd to think that two months have passed since we last kissed. It’s odd because as much as the finality of our love feels wrong, it also feels right. It’s also odd both because it’s not odd and also because it is. Habituated in the strange half-life between odd and not-odd, I feel like I’ve been dwelling in a place of shifting absolutes for the past two months; it has taken me some time to get my see-legs in this land of kaleidoscopic perspectives.

In the past couple of months I’ve grieved quite a bit. Most often, my grief has taken the form of sitting on my couch, watching Buffy and eating too many packages of Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Milano cookies. Sometimes, my grief has manifested itself in shopping on EBay for purses that, as it turns out, I neither want nor like. Other times, I’ve compulsively shopped for books, music and DVDs. I now own about twenty new books and ten new movies I’ve not yet read/watched. Every once in a while, my grief intruded itself in my weeping copiously at something bathetic and mundane: a commercial, an article, a touching clip of Celebrity Rehab.

There has been a fat slice of grief, especially that one sudden moment of unwieldy loss that broadsided me, and there has been some confusion, some hushed perplexity over who I am without Donny and how I’ll manage my life beyond him. There’s been a little bit of that. There’s been a lot of time spent by myself, and a lot more time than usual spent with my friends. In the past two months, I like to drink more wine than I used to. Anyway, I’m drinking more.

And yet, despite the grief and the ambient loss and the occasional confusion and the red wine, I’m actually now feeling pretty much okey-dokey. Hunky dory, even. Pretty good, in short. Yesterday, I joined a big, expensive gym. It’s a huge gym with infinite towels. I think I am its most unlikely member, and I find that my form of rebellion against the gym’s palpable pretense has been to be slightly more goofy and nicer than normal. It’s like everyone there has this sheen of cool—everyone but the grannies, that is, who don’t give a wet rat what anyone thinks as they work out in their high-waisted jeans or pad through the lobby all blobby in their wet bathing suits from 1983, bless the grannies—I feel compelled to be extra special cheerful in the face of all that Manhattan black.

So I’ve been working out. I’ve been writing. I’ve rearranged my apartment. I have, for the first time in my consenting adult life, let go of the notion that I need a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a lover of either or both genders, and quite frankly, it feels spectacular. I’ve averred that I may never date again, a sentiment my friends are quick to point out as spurious at best and melodramatic at worst, but the truth is that I’ve put dating on a shelf. Every once in a while, I run a Swiffer over it to remove the dust, but mostly I’m thinking that dating is not something I want to do, and I’m groovy with that. More time for me, really.

Things I’ve not been doing to deal with my pain: having anonymous sex (not that there’s anything wrong with that), obsessing over Donny and what/who he’s doing, giving into the fleeting desire to search for Donny’s profile on Internet sleaze corners, self-flagellating (either metaphorically or literally), compulsively masturbating or even masturbating much at all, contemplating suicide, feeling depressed, considering joining the French Foreign Legion, or going extemporaneously fetal. I feel pretty good about not having any desire to engage in any of those enumerated behaviors.

I do miss sex. I miss writing about sex. I miss the whole sweaty, naughty, frisky she-bang. I’m not in any hurry to have it, though. It’ll happen soon enough. I’ll write about it then. Until that time, I’m giving myself the big, blank check to write about whatever crosses my mind, dirty, sublime, mundane, extraordinary, or something somewhere in between. In  the past two months, I’ve realized that I’m living my life, and it’s really, actually pretty cool.

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For those of you who wait patiently for the results of the My Buddy contest, just sit tight. I've passed the entrants on to the My Buddy PTB, and as soon as I know, you'll know too.

the dead boyfriend, a reconsideration

Buying a coffee at Starbucks, I noticed this stand of books sitting in a location primed for impulse buy. Like most of the books sold at Starbucks, this book fell neatly into the genre of emo-laden feel-goodery—the kind of book that should be read to a John Williams’s score, the kind of book that will go down like a cliché, the kind of book that will blend like the fruit in a Jamba Juice,  be slurped up just as easy as a  smoothie and be almost as memorable. The kind of book that, by the time you’re finished with it, swirls and morphs into Listening to Tuesdays with the Kite Runner.

The book that caught my eye is called Beautiful Boy, and it is, according to its front jacket, “the story of a father’s journey through his son’s addiction.” The cardboard stand further informed me that “While drug addiction nearly killed his son, but David Sheff refused to give up.” I first pondered the sentence’s grammatical flaw, but then my attention turned to a thought far more grave than the syntax’s coordination issue: my dead ex-boyfriend, Will. Unlike the father and his son, I most definitely gave up on Will when he picked up his addiction to heroin and cocaine like it was luggage he’d left in a bus station locker, that is to say quickly, easily, unthinkingly and wordlessly.

imitation of art

1979 had some pretty fucking great films. Apocalypse Now. Norma Rae. The China Syndrome. Being There. Breaking Away. Kramer vs. Kramer. La Cage Aux Folles. It’s tough to argue with that kind of cinematographic breadth. That year’s Oscar awards, Sally Fields observed that we liked her, we really, really liked her. Dustin Hoffman received his first Oscar, as did Meryl Streep. No one remembers what Cher wore, if she even went.

I turned seventeen in 1979. It was a profoundly bleak year, one I remember primarily for its complete absence of colors. It was the year I turned suicidal, the year I first entered therapy. It was a year that remains a frozen tundra in my memory; I was in an emotional gulag that year; I read a tremendous amount of Solzynitsin. In retrospect, it probably didn’t help matters.

I’ve long found solace in other people’s narratives. I grew up reading books like my classmates breathed air: without remarking upon it because it was just that necessary. But in 1979, I realized that books weren’t alone in offering me the kind comfort of stories, for in 1979, I discovered movies. Or given how important they became to me, and to honor that importance in language, I should say that I discovered film.

missing him like ellipses

What I feel most is the grey space of missing him. It’s almost a comfort, this emotion of wistful longing; I’d been feeling so much nothing for so long that I was afraid my heart had been anaesthetized. But now, over a month since the last time I spoke to Donny, my once-almost-fiancé/now-X, I miss him.

I had missed feeling when what I felt was nothing. I had felt a slight shiver of panic, a tremor, sort of, that kind of almost-absent vibrating that presages an earthquake, and had flickeringly feared that perhaps I was broken. Perhaps, like a doll, I’d been crushed and could feel nothing at all. I didn’t cry much when I realized that Donny and I had broken up for good, a phrase I employ without irony and in both senses of meaning. I had been afraid when at first, and for a while thereafter, I felt nothing. I felt like a blackboard erased blank, just the palest palimpsest of words looping illegible under the arid watermark of chalk. Awash, I was, in nothing.

I know the exact moment when the missing part made itself manifest. I was sitting in traffic in a bright yellow cab. The driver was listening to a Haitian radio station, which meant that I could discern in the tide of French sporadic words and even occasional whole phrases but not ever a sentence entire. I know that it was a long news report about vitamins and malaria, but whether the vitamins helped or hurt lay just a bit beyond my slender grasp of French. So I’m sitting in traffic, listening and straining the words I could recognize from the words I could not, idly noting the spiraling meter upward tick, tick, tick, and out the window I see a construction site, a large white and red crane set in a pit, a big blue wall, and a sign emblazoned with the name of Donny’s company. It was Donny’s most recent project that I saw out the taxi window, where inside patois dropped like rain and meter rose like smoke, and it was in taxi and in that moment when I felt myself suddenly miss him.

The thing about missing him now—missing him so brightly after living through that dusk of etherized heart-silence—is how my missing comes in fragments. I miss his fingers. Or I miss the sound of his voice. I miss the way his hair grew over his wrists. Or I miss the extravagant wave of his upper lip, the way it curved like an inverted parenthesis. I miss Donny in pieces, in shards, in remnants, the way that the end of a bolt of fabric is sold. I miss him, apparently, to bits.

If I had to guess why I miss him in these tiny, bite-sized, mini-muffin morsels, I would guess I do because missing the bits is all I can take. To miss him whole is simply, right now, too much for me to take. It’s too large an endeavor, and so my mind parcels him out into these proper, mannered bites, these scraps just large enough to fit in my mouth. When I do stop and contemplate the complete and utter loss of all of Donny, I feel my heart droop like a wounded bird. It’s melodramatic, I know, but that’s the image I get—my heart folded over itself, head on its breast, not in rest, but in pain.

I imagine that one day, I’ll find myself able to miss larger Donny pieces. Perhaps soon I’ll miss his whole left arm, or perhaps his entire back from the nape of his neck to the small indentation at the base of his spine. Perhaps soon, I’ll be able to miss whole great swaths of conversation with him, and not just the disembodied timber of his voice, his slight Jersey twang. And then one day, maybe a day when I’ll be immersed in some other activity, I’ll find myself able to miss all of him in one, great fell swoop.

Then, perhaps, at some unforeseen day sometime in the misty, distant future, I won’t miss him much, or hardly at all, or I’ll find my missing waned to the glossy sheen of nostalgia. But right now, when I’m quiet, when I sit, exhale, feel the space between my breaths and search my heart, I find myself missing him to pieces.

robert browning knows more about love than hallmark

Not Shakespeare’s earthy sonnets, complex as humus. Nor those of Neruda, strong and deep and full of wonder. Not the hurrying pastorals of Marvell, nor the fleshy conceits of Donne, or the stark and stalwart modernism of Auden. Not even the exultant song of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. No, my favorite love poem is one by Robert Browning, a man not known for his love poetry, unless you consider his torturous, sometimes tortuous, dramatic monologues of killers to be love poetry, and I suppose they are, of a sort.

My very favorite love poem, the one that reliably brings me to tears whenever I read it is Browning’s “Two in the Campagna,” published in his 1855 volume Men and Women. It’s not a poem much read or studied. Other poems get the notoriety. Poems like the eldritch “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and the very fine, morally questionable “Fra Lippo Lippi” get the notice. This one, my favorite, only gets read by those of us who have fallen in love with Browning’s poetic compassion for tweaked, the twisted, the casually murderous, and just keep on reading his other stuff for fun.

Browning was not an autobiographical poet. No Sexton or Plath, no Rossetti (neither the florid Dante nor his more reserved sister Christina), no Swinburne, no Baudelaire, Browning didn’t spend his poetic energies on translating his quotidian experience into transcendent lines. He didn’t mine his own experience for his art, not much, not often, not palpably. And yet, there’s something about this poem, my poem, that seems to sit pretty in pain and autobiographic in nature.

“I wonder how you feel to-day,” the poem begins, and I see the two of them, Robert and Elizabeth side by side in the wild fields that in the mid-nineteenth century surrounded Rome. “We sat down on the grass, to stray…This morn of Rome and May” it continues. I imagine them, the smell of old earth growing new things, the slender green of the grass, and I hope that Flounce, Elizabeth’s spaniel, ran happily about them, barking. Browning’s relationship with his wife is one of profound poetic whimsy—A.S. Byatt’s Possession is only the most recent of novels based on their love, but there have been others. Browning and Barrett Browning had a kind of love story that can only inspire more love stories.

In 1854, when Browning penned this poem, Barrett Browning would have had just over five years to live. They had gone to Italy in no small part because Barrett Browning was ill, possibly with tuberculosis, and Italy was where British folk went to heal.

In the sixth line, the poem turns. “For me, I touched a thought, I know,” says the speaker, who may be Browning and may not (I like to think it is he), and likens the thought to “the turns of thread the spiders throw.” And this is why the poem slays me, because it is as much about love as it is about writing and it is as much about the impossibility of both as it is about the intense necessity of each.

“Help me to hold it!” the speaker exclaims. His thought, he finds has eluded his grasp. It was there; it is now gone. There is only the haunt of the thought, and who better to turn to in order to find it but to her, his lover. Seeming to trail the thought, he watches it scamper over weeds and walls, through insects and up slopes, across the wilding landscape that surrounds Rome. (I imagine Rome rising like a leviathan out of the greenery. I see its white domes off in the distance. The space between is dotted with rotting ruins and hunched peasants scratching their lives from the land. The sun pours liquid and hot.)

All this mass of nature waxes heavy and erotic and there is the lull of bees: “Such life here, through such lengths of hours/ Such miracles performed in play/ Such primal naked forms of flowers,” the speaker says, getting derailed by the sheer effusive lushness of the country. “O my dove,” he says, “Let us be unashamed of soul/ As earth lies bare to heaven above!” And then they seem bare inches from some prelapsarian fucking. Birds do it; bees do it; let’s do it; let’s have sex outdoors.

And then another turn. “How is it under our control/ To love or not to love?” he asks. Our expectation—my expectation, anyway—is that here the speaker will launch into something ecstatic, something wide and free and liquid and calm, something as accepting as Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” It doesn’t. Browning, the husband, or his speaker, it’s hard to tell who speaks in this poem—there is no discernable character here—rejects such a premise.

He says, “I would that you were all to me,/ You that are just so much, no more.” It’s heartbreaking, and it’s true. And yet the poem is a love poem, it is, in fact, the only love poem I’ve read that accepts the naked and pained fact of love: we will always be separate from our lover. Try as we might to smash our bodies back together, try as we will to express how we feel, try as we can to share our lives, to unite and not untie, we never, ever will succeed. We are apart, even as we are together.

Our love, however great it is, will, except for brief and splendid moments, remain as elusive as that thought. This poem bravely recognizes this; the speaker says:

I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul's warmth,— I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak—
Then the good minute goes.

It’s a terrible moment, and a beautiful one, that reduces the poet to dashes. The lines break and break again. The poem, like the moment, cannot hold. The rhythm of the poem too, the uneven rhyme of four tetrameter lines followed by a single trimeter, suggests that the best you can hope for is one perfect moment in a mass of instability. (And this is why I’ll never be a poet. Poetry’s necessity of rhythm and meter and inherent mathiness are inimical to my brain.)

At the end of the poem, after “the good minute goes,” the speaker returns to his far-flung thought: “Just when I seemed about to learn!/Where is the thread now? Off again!” On the cusp of rediscovering that thought, it’s gone, evanescent in the light. It whisks off, leaving the speaker, the poet with the “Infinite passion, and the pain/ Of finite hearts that yearn.”

That’s the couplet that slays me, that nearly inevitably reduces me to tears for Browning and his wife and the crumbling ruins that surround Rome and all the love I’ve had and expressed in these tiny driplets because the moment passes before I can hold it, and when it’s over, it’s just too late. And these are the lines too that argue too why love and writing and writing about love matter: because we feel more than we can bear, we think more than we know, and the beauty as well as the burden comes when we try our lowly best to write those mercurial moments into being.

You can read the poem in its entirety after the gap.

here i go again on my own, with fewer cheeseburgers

Forgive me. It looks pretty unlikely that I’m going to have sex any time soon. Unlike the somatic-frenetic summer of 2004, the time when I presented myself with a Publisher’s Clearing House-sized check to indulge the full-spectrum rainbow of my sexual proclivities, I just don’t feel the burning urge to go out and frug with hordes of strange. I also have zero interest in tying on my shoes for the full-length ballet that is dating. I don’t want to tell anyone my life’s story. I don’t want to wait for the phone call. I don’t want to preen and primp in vain hopes. I don’t want to wonder when, or if, he’ll kiss me and when, or if, I’ll like it. The way I feel is that I pretty much can’t be bothered.

Which is all a shorthand way of saying that this break-up has felt very different from every other break-up I’ve ever had. Break-ups are like cheeseburgers: every one may be different, and yet they are all essentially exactly the same. They’re ubiquitous—nearly every restaurant serves a cheeseburger, and nearly every person has suffered a break-up. Some go down easy, and others leave you with a burn in your solar plexus for far too long. Sometimes you look forward to one—you feel an indefinable need for it, cheeseburger or break-up—and once you have it, you feel both guilty and satisfied. But as much as most of my break-ups, and cheeseburgers, seem to have melded and solidified into a single meaty mass, this one stands out.

It has been three weeks since I last spoke to Donny and nearly a month since I’ve seen him. As much as our relationship had endured an epilepsy-inducing on-off-on-off strobe-light freneticism, this off position feels distinctly permanent. I’ve missed Donny. This past week, as I felt buffeted about like a small bird in the maelstrom of emotions surrounding my possible first book, I wished I could call him and share all of it. I’ve certainly missed the sex with him, his pointy pervert’s tongue and his fat-bellied cock. Certain images or smells have projected full-blown and Ilfachrome-bright pictures of his body in my mind. And yet while I miss him, I don’t want him.

I don’t want anyone but my friends, really. Which is what is weird. I’ve had extended periods when I was single; I’m not like some friends of mine who surf the boyfriend wave, bobbing only for a few weeks between men. But every other time that I’ve been single, either I actively pined for a boyfriend or I fucked freely and meaninglessly as a Bonobo. I never felt particularly ok without either the search for meaning in a man or in sex. Now, however, I do.

Sure, I bat about the imaginary man mobile in my mind. I do idle supine in bed or while I’m engaged  in some other task that requires only a model’s portion of my cognition and I entertain romantic fantasies. I do, occasionally, look at a man looking at me, as one is wont to do on a city street, and wonder if I could see myself in and with and perhaps under him. I’m not without desire. I’m just not propelled by it. Desire currently doesn’t fire me, at least not desire for either a mate or a fuck. Strange, that.

Similarly odd, I find myself relatively free of angst about this break-up. I have not gnashed my teeth nor have I rent my clothes. I have not beat my breast and cried Mea Culpa, fists thrust predictably heavenward. I’ve thus far not selected the hair shirt. I have not beat myself up over this break-up and I feel surprisingly little pain. I have felt grief, I have felt sad, but I have not felt like curling up and dying. It’s a peculiar fucking sensation. I’m so accustomed to twisting the knife in my heart that when I’ve put my hand to my breast and found no hilt to grasp, I have laughed.

So here, again, I may go on my own, but the road I go down feels oddly new, however déjà vu familiar. No matter where I go there will be cheeseburgers, but that doesn’t mean I have to eat them.

star catharsis: heath ledger, naked and dead

To be naked fluo