The vaccination problem

One of the things that really bums me out about people who are against vaccination is that the arguments they believe in are so often nonsensical, if not based on outright fraud.

They're afraid of "toxins", but they don't really know what that means. 

They're afraid of "overloading their child's immune system", but they don't understand what happens in an immune system when it's exposed to a vaccine, or when it's exposed to an actual virus. 

They want to "build their children's natural immune system", but they don't understand that the only way to form a natural immunity to a disease is to contract that disease. 

They worry about side effects from vaccines, without understanding that the side effects from vaccines, in the rare cases when they occur, are typically milder forms of the effects of the disease itself. 

They are not bad people, and they are not necessarily stupid people, but they are people who have been given bad information and are operating under a belief structure in which they have invested their children's health. They are socially invested in communities that reinforce their beliefs.

These are people who are not likely to change their minds, regardless of the evidence, even if their children get sick, and even if vulnerable people die because of them. 

This makes changing the problem very difficult, and doing so involves a very sticky territory around regulating the alternative healthcare industry, and also around free speech, specifically the scare websites making unsupported claims about vaccination.

So what do we do? 

After all the folderol and hauling over coal stops, what did I learn?

I often say that I don’t see any point in defining myself by what I am not, but thinking about it, I do exactly that all the time, when I compare myself now to myself in the past. I’m less emotionally reactive now, I think to myself, I’m not as attractive, I’m certainly not so promiscuous or as prone to falling in love. I’m less exuberant. I’m less argumentative, and not so damn certain I’m right.

I don’t think I want to define myself that way. I don’t want to define myself by what is absent, but by what is present.

So here is a list of a few of the things that I am more of.

1. I am sadder. This might not sound like a good thing, but in a profound way it informs almost everything else about me; instead of shoving my sadness into a corner, to break out and overwhelm me when I can no longer contain it, I let it be. I acknowledge it, and it coexists with my other feelings.

2. I am more moderate. I have gotten better at seeing multiple perspectives, and to appreciate that there often is more than one truth, as well as more than one way to look at things. While there is value in going hard, there is also value in going steady, and for now, I am finding more pleasure in going steady.

3. I am more vulnerable. With my sadness right out in the open, what do I have to lose by letting people see it? If there are multiple perspectives, what do I have to lose by trying on someone else’s? If error is an important part of how we learn, what do I have to lose by finding out I’m wrong? I have nothing to lose, but I stand to gain a lot.

4. I am more strong. I know that every heartbreak, little or big, is another bump in the road, and that I can grieve and feel lost when I need to feel those things, but ultimately I will persist, I will survive, and I will feel happiness again.

5. I am more present. It’s not that I don’t have hopes and dreams and plans for the future, but the future will have unexpected changes, some wanted and some unwanted. The path will diverge and it will almost certainly not be the path I imagined. I can’t predict other people’s actions or feelings or thoughts; I can barely predict my own, and I have a lifetime of experience at being me. So, I can feel certain that things will happen, good and bad, and they might be things I can influence but they will almost certainly not be things I can control. I can do my best to take care of the things that need to be taken care of in my life right now, including myself, my children, and my friends, but that is all I can do. And that is OK.

Ultimately, I am still me, and that is not going to change. My temperament is what it is; probably not set in stone, but probably to a pretty large degree determined before I was born by the fabulously complex assortment of alleles given to me by my mother and father. I can see both of them in me, and some elements I cherish while others I’m not so keen on. That isn’t to say that I am without choice; just to accept that the foundation is what it is, and how I change as I get older is more likely to be small shifts in the expression of the essence of me-ness, not the formation of a whole new me. So I am still exuberant, enthusiastic, passionate, opinionated, assertive, intemperate, and stubborn; just maybe, hopefully, a mellower version of all those things, a better version of me.

Snapshot in a shoebox

Where to start

This is not a sobstory

20 ish years ago I met this teenage boy, and somehow sitting mostly silently in a room with this boy I fell in love with him. It is important to note that I was not much older than a teenager myself.

One night he confessed to me that he did not like girls his own age very much. I said, perhaps you should try dating older women? I was all of 22. I meant me. Stupidly, so stupidly, I meant me and hoped that my hint would somehow take, or that I would somehow get brave enough to tell him. I was kinda dating someone else, but it was a rebound and I was ready to move on, I thought. Two days later, the teenage boy was dating my best friend. And a year or so later I married my rebound. End of story.

No, that isn’t the end of the story. Of course it’s not, why would I even write it if it was the end? That would be pointless.

Several years later, I divorced my rebound. I had two children. I was a 30-year-old mom. And the boy… the boy was single again too, living with another good friend and one day, I realized that I was still in love with him. Of course, it makes sense that I should have told him so. Of course, I didn’t. I was a single mom. What would he want with me? And while I was agonizing over whether to tell him, of course he met a girl. And then he moved away, back to where he came from, to go to college.

I have never made good decisions when it comes to men. I had no good model. I don’t know what I am doing with them, and I never really have. I can be forward in low-stakes situations. In high-stakes situations… I don’t have many of those, because I can’t breathe and my heart stumbles and I run away.

A couple of years later I met someone, and I remarried. And when the boy got married, on the other side of the country, I cried myself to sleep. It made no sense, really, none at all.

I don’t want to be one of those old women who has a picture of a young man in a shoebox, a picture they drag out from time to time to cry over, because it represents a risk never taken. A might have been. I have a photograph of him with my daughter on his knee.

Fast. Fast. Forward.

I divorced again. And then he divorced, and three thousand miles away a little piece of  my not-entirely-competent heart quietly, secretly rejoiced. I started talking to my friends, saying I should tell him. I should tell him. Shouldn’t I tell him? I should tell him, right?

Because telling someone and being rejected is way better than getting old and dying with What If hanging over you, the shoebox of elderly tears. I figure. It has to be.

Oh, no, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. Are you kidding me? Why would I tell a man on the other side of the country “hey dude, BTW I have always kind of been in love with you, just FYI”? How would I? Fuck no. Even if it made sense, even if it were perfectly reasonable, I don’t know how to do that  kind of risk, to make myself vulnerable that way, I never learned how to. So I didn't.

But still, it lived with me, and it kept creeping into my mind. What could I lose by telling him, really? It would be better than never telling him. If it didn’t go over well, if it was completely unreciprocated, he lives on the other side of the country. We could just pretend I never said anything, and forget about it.

I wanted to tell him. I was terrified, I felt like a friable winter leaf, strong strong bold me just gut-clenchingly frightened, fragile enough to be blown down the street in a strong breeze. My friends were lukewarm about the idea, at best. Probably not a good idea, I guess. Shelf that. Another year went by.

And then he said he was coming to visit for our friends’ anniversary party, and I made my resolve. I could make it light,  make it non-threatening and non-vulnerable. I could keep myself protected

Ohhh the reality was so different. I am forty-two years old, and I have never learned to be smooth, and I almost chickened out. I bet you’ve been there, but you were probably seventeen. It was a party, and all our friends were there. I was way past my tired point and I knew I should have gone to bed, but… if you have ever been a dumb kid who kept drinking because the boy/girl/whatever you liked wasn’t done with the night yet, you know.

I had myself convinced. Not gonna say shit. But I walked into the kitchen and this neckbeard I don’t really know, a friend of a friend, was in there. “You really like that guy, don‘t you?” he said.

My drunk-girl, at-the-end-of-the-party, should-have-gone-home-hours-ago self said something like “Yeah, but nothing will ever happen.”

Neckbeard said “Does he know?”

I said “how could he not know? If I’m that obvious?”

Neckbeard says “Listen. He’s a nerd. He won’t know unless you clobber him on the head and drag  him back to your cave. I know about this, I’m a nerd too.”

So, I went back outside with the blood and liquor roaring in my ears and I told him. That part’s kind of a blur, but I remember that I said “I’ve always had a thing for you” and he said “you’re fucking with me, right?”

I had to convince him. I had to unravel the weak-ass explanations about this twenty-year goddamn infatuation I’ve been packing around. I’m pretty sure I convinced him I was serious by kissing him, and the kiss was amazing. And then our host shooed us off to sleep and we laid down together and made out and my MIND WAS GODDAMN BLOWN because what do  you do when something you’ve wanted for that long is actually happening? I felt like a seven-year-old at Disneyland, man, I felt amazing. Even with too much alcohol in my bloodstream I was tuned in, making slurred confessions of affection with an addled brain and tongue but with the connection to every nerve-ending in my body completely, brilliantly lucid.

We didn’t have sex. There were times when we were half-undressed  and god knows we weren’t shy about touching each other, but we didn’t.

And then it was morning, and he walked me to my car and gave me a hug and I stole a kiss and I drove off and that was that.

I saw him again before he left. I thought (hoped) we would be alone, but it was him and his brother and then other friends joined us. There was no kiss, just an awkwardly unintimate hug at the end and a promise that he would return soon for a longer stay. And my heart stumbling like a drunken sailor, my heart wanting him, my heart confused about whether to sing or sob, my heart at least not destined to be the old lady heart that breaks over a picture of a young man with a toddler on his knee, tumbling endlessly over the question of what if, what if, what if.

This is the story I haven't told. I've told parts of it, but not the most important part, which was the moment I leaned my head against the window of the car and let trust slip out of my loosened fist.

I was thirty one, and my baby was two months old. We, my new husband and I, had been in Sacramento visiting his family, and we had the most wonderful, happy, beautiful time together. He was the one; I was madly in love, and couldn't believe that after all the struggle and all the disappointment and bad choices, I could finally be so lucky. We had made love the night before, and it had been amazing. I was, for the first time in my life that I can remember being, happy. Not just situationally happy, experiencing joy in the moment, but truly, deeply content.

We were driving home, just starting the long drive North, and he said it. "You know, I've been thinking. I'd really like to open our marriage".

I don't think about it much. I'd rather not. But that was the moment I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would never trust anyone again. Not as a partner. My stomach turned cold and I leaned my head against the glass and let the tears drip silently off the end of my nose, as the road, like my happiness, unraveled underneath the car.

That's the story of why you never stood a chance.

My dad

My dad comes over every Saturday and... well, I kind of just wish that there was someone here besides the kids to listen to this shit. It's a recap of the same things he's told me every week for the last 5 years, intermixed with horrifyingly personal reminiscence and personal information. This is a very different dad from the one I remember from just a few years ago... no less long-winded, but more scattered and less filtered. I have been getting (and trying to hide from) the feeling that this is the last wind of a man who is on the decline into dementia. He corners me in a room while I clean furiously, and tells me deeply personal stories, stories that often make me uncomfortable, but I can sense that he feels like they are important, and that I am one of the few people... or maybe the only person... he can tell them to. I am, he likes to remind me, his baby girl. His littlest daughter.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than what we used to do on Saturdays, which is argue about politics. He said that I was the spitting image of his mother, Ida Bea, in personality as well as looks, and so Ida Bea is the name he calls me when I'm being obstinate or argumentative or opinionated. My dad used to love to get me riled up, because he said that everyone else is scared of him and I'm the only one who will get in his face and argue. God fucking damn, that man could piss me off. He would come over and almost before he was in the door he would posit some ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY BULLSHIT premise, and I would tear it apart while he defended it and I became increasingly enraged and frustrated, pulling myself as tall as I could and glaring up at this big smug motherfucker in his fucking green beret and yelling "THAT IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!".

Eventually I would defeat him and he would ruffle my hair and say "OK, Ida Bea, you win." After years of this, when he revealed to me that he was just messing with me because he liked that I would argue, I was a combination of angry, proud, and relieved... because it always dismayed me that this man I knew was brilliant (Well, he's also a medic and a chaplain, commander of a ranger base, and has a Master's degree in education) would come to me with arguments that it seemed to me only the mentally defective (such as Tea Partiers) could support. My dad is--or was--a troll. Most of the time I thought he was full of shit until he started taking me to his council meetings and dinners and events, but I realized one night when he left me alone at a table with two generals who laughed at the fact that I bossed my dad and he meekly said "yes, dear" and went to do my bidding... oh. Oh... my dad, Daddy, he is the real deal, even though he's just a sergeant. They said "In all these years I've never seen him take orders from anyone... little girl, you don't know your power!" and they laughed and laughed, making large of it. Years later, another dinner at a table with other generals, and one of them said "You don't really know who your father is, yet". It was a statement, not a question. So I know that in addition to the pages of documents of things that I know, some of which were declassified the year I turned 30 (That's when I found out why he was gone during my infancy, for which my mother never forgave him) there is a great deal more to come. Probably among them things that I don't want to know.

In addition, of course, to the things he tells me that I already don't want to know. I won't go into details but my father's romantic history has more shocking, more tawdry, and more tragic than anything I've ever seen in a movie or read in Henry Miller. Fucking hell, dad.

A year or so ago my dad was convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud. What the shit, dad? For voting under my dead brother's name and the name of my missing-presumed-dead uncle (allegedly a mercenary; also allegedly a crossdressing burlesque performer who, in his youth, went by the stage name of "April"). Local news and a random "debunking" website latched onto the story and attempted to debunk my father's military record, accusing him of fraud based on the inconsistency of his stories with public military records. During the trial I learned two things; one, that my father has been diagnosed with Alzheimers, and two, which the judge said while looking me straight in the eye, that my father's military record is exactly what he has claimed, and more. The judge said in court, on record, that my father is a bona-fide hero. So, while I know he has also been a wily old bastard, and fuck-all knows what kinds of schemes he's planned up and what I have yet to learn, I also know that all the crazy tales he has told me are true. That he has taken part in incredible, historical POW rescues. That he is a remarkable, and honorable, man.

He talks a lot, recently, about how everyone will come out of the woodwork when he dies, looking for a slice of the pie. They don't know that there is no pie, that he has put all of his properties into other people's names, that there is no inheritance to be had there. That his inheritance is the act of having put up with him over the years, his trolling and stories and bigness and loudness and sharp, sharp eyes. That his inheritance is him putting his big brown hand on my head and saying, "OK, Ida Bea".

Quality of loneliness

The quality of the loneliness is different now,

because I had a kind of understanding with him.

It's like speaking a language nobody else speaks,

that has words for different ideas; even though

you learn the language of people around you,

you always feel a little foreign. You get used to it,

so that it doesn't seem bad or even, usually,

all that alone. But then you meet someone

who speaks your native language, and you feel

like you can fully communicate for the first time.

It's not until they go away that you discover

what it really feels like to be lonely.

He still loves her

but he doesn't love me.

"That's not nice".

Someone I am acquainted with was trying to explain why they don't like someone. They said "He's a really nice guy and everything..."

But here's the thing.

"Nice" is usually, on some level, a euphemism with "OK with the world as it is".

In other words, they may be "nice" but they aren't GOOD.

Because NO FUCKING DECENT HUMAN BEING could look around at this shit and what we're doing to ourselves and everyone else without wanting to cleanse it with fire. That doesn't mean lacking sympathy or kindness or human decency. It means understanding that nice people have the wrong priorities. Nice people support genocide and war and poverty and cruelty by default, and that's the worst part, because they don't even have the decency to be malicious. They're banal, and that is perhaps a worse evil than malice.

Rather than being nice, try being good. It's a lot harder, and damn if you might not find that it's almost impossible to do in a world where our shoes are made by child slaves overseas, but it's worth a shot.

A story for the soul eater

A very long time ago, in a forested area that is just to the southeast of what was once the continent’s largest city, a young woman lived in the outskirts of a village. It was an unimportant village, and people there mostly avoided the war and politicking that went on in more populated areas, living their lives as they had for many generations, hunting, farming, loving, worshipping, weaving, and having the same petty intrigues and gossip and fallings-out that people have always had; raising their children, tending their elders, and growing close to friends, spending hours in the evenings talking with each other. This is when people still knew how to talk and how to listen, and how to not mind the silences that fell when everyone was beginning to get tired and reflect on what had been said.

The woman was brown and strong and healthy, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair and a strong high nose like the eyes and hair and noses of the other women in the village, and she lived on the outskirts because she was a priestess. She had large white teeth and smiled often. Her primary job was to perform the duties associated with the transfer of souls from death to underworld and from underworld to birth. Her altar was no more than a pale stone slab that lay on the ground, and her temple was a simple arch. Her position as priestess was hereditary, and her father, also a priest, taught her the rites of death and birth. The village was healthy, and she was happy. She became pregnant, and this was a blessing which made her even happier.

Her son was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen, with her same wavy thick black hair and curly eyelashes, and his eyes were like obsidian mirrors. She loved him fiercely, with every part of her being, and as he grew, and his eyes lightened to a deep brown, they spent many hours playing together in the forest near the altar, where she taught him to be as observant and fluent of the language of the plants and small wildlife as she had been taught by her own father and mother. She taught him about the frogs and the insects, the pronghorns and the wrens. Life was right and good for the young woman with her village and beloved villagers, her parents, and her beautiful son.

I don’t know how she died; possibly of infection from a wound, possibly of complications from another pregnancy. It seemed important at the time, but it really isn’t. Her grieving father performed the rites of death, showing her son for the first time how to prepare the dark-green leaves from a certain small tree into a drink that would help him to channel the god who carries souls from the dead to the underworld in his belly, to wait to be assigned by the wife of Death to a newborn body.

The young priest had few friends; he had needed none, because he was still at an age where his best friend was his mother. He was small and slight and had not yet developed an interest in girls. Despite the attention of his grandparents, he was now alone, and profoundly lonely.

Some months after his mother’s death, among the other births, a baby girl was born in the village, and not long after she was born, he looked past her curly lashes into her obsidian mirror eyes.

After that, they were inseparable. They had an arrangement. How fortunate that their Goddess was the Goddess of assigning souls! Usually they would be husband and wife. Sometimes she would precede him into death and he would be her grandfather for a while, laughing at her toddler antics as she played around his feet. Sometimes he would be the teacher and she the student, sometimes they would be siblings, but they were always together. It wasn’t always a kind life; there was pain and strife and suffering. But in the village, it was mostly a clean and straightforward life. They were together this way for over three hundred years.

Until the last time. I don’t know what happened; perhaps he was bound or killed or taken away. Perhaps the magic that allowed them to find each other was broken. Perhaps he was protecting her from something, because often the most painful mistakes men make are the ones that are meant to be for the good of the ones they love. But whatever happened, the last time, he did not call the soul-eater god to carry her into the underworld in his belly. He was not waiting for her, and he did not come back. She waited for him, and waited until the waiting became despair and the despair became bitterness. Lost in confusion and sorrow, she didn’t notice at first that around her the happy village that she loved faded and died away. The old rites were no longer practiced, and her altar and arch became forgotten and overgrown. The gold and blue paint that once represented the wings of the goddess of rebirth was long gone. When the time came that no more babies were born in the village, she couldn’t wait any longer.

After a while, no one would know there had ever been a village there, not even the builders when they came to put up row after row of blank red houses for the new civilization that had no priestesses at all.

The once-young-woman lived now in a world where true partnership between sexes was mostly forgotten, if not forbidden, and she knew that this world was poisonous. It had eaten her old world. She made herself forget her village and her mate, her abandonment and anger. She even, mostly, forgot that she had been a priestess. Far away from the happy days of playing among the trees, she found other loves, had children, and at times she was even content. Sometimes, though, the pain of loss and loneliness would bubble up from a place deeper than memory, strong enough to pin her to the ground.

There is a story that Death’s wife, her pride wounded over her husband’s infidelity, killed him and took his mantle, hiding her feathered wings beneath it and assuming his duties alongside her own, and that this is why men, afraid, stopped working together with women and forgot that the goddess had once been their mother.

Facebook symbolism

Today I blocked my Eater-of-Souls on Facebook. Again. Then I went for a two-mile run, trying to tire out the sorrow.

Blocking him seems childish in a way, but it is more than anything an admission that I'm not over him, not getting over him, and that there is no hope for us, now or ever, because the conditions of my exile require getting over him for there to be hope.

It's a double bind, a catch-22. There is nowhere to go with it. So I give up, and I give in to being hopelessly in love with him, and I give in to the permanence of being separated from him. I give in completely to his absence from my life. I admit my helplessness over the yawning void where it still feels his body and words should be.

Maybe someday my hands will stop shaking. And maybe someday, after hopelessness has worn its way through the soles of my running shoes, I'll be ready to move on and love someone else, someone completely different, completely unique, and completely wonderful in ways that could not possibly be any more unlike Eater-of-Souls.

I love the smell of the rain

And I love the feeling of finally being free.

We Were Magic

When we first went out, you were in your jacket with suede elbow patches. Tall, gawky, awkward, all tweed and elbows, a balding professor of a Lothario. I asked you why you were doing what you were, and the conversation lasted well into the night. I didn't know if I was attracted to you, but I thought I'd like to see you again, anyway. It was a month later that you gave me the letter that changed everything and shaped the relationship we were to have together, and I still have the letter in a box, along with books, a poster of us, the perfume I used to wear, and the earrings you bought me in Arizona.

We were more than lovers; you were the Father-King and I was your Dark Empress. We were legendary, we were beautiful, we bested the curse of the Thunderbird and emerged clean from the Valley of Death, we drove all night under shooting stars to arrive delirious in the morning in Her Chosen City. We drove through the desert in monsoon, we were struck by lightning, Oh Eater of Souls, the things we saw together! We saw places through our four eyes that no one else has ever seen, not the way we saw them. We saw machine cities, bears and glowing centipedes, caves and herds of elk.

You were the golden plains and I was the road. The railroad track was our story. I made a legend for you, my Spore of the Desert. The legend is alive and growing, even though you are lost to your Queen. It's been taken up and propagated by your people, who are my people. You don't know how it grows, because you're not here for me to share it with. I yearn to show you my beautiful, terrible gift, but the world you are in is not my world. Not anymore.

Oh my King, love of my life. Every time I turn around in the kitchen and you are not there, I feel the gap in my synapses where you used to connect. Can you still feel my feelings, my love? Because I can no longer think your thoughts.

I'll meet you at the railroad tracks when the rains begin again.

Make a wish,

-Snowcap

On exes and their new loves

I have a boyfriend; a wonderful boyfriend. A wonderful person. A kind, gentle, compassionate, strong, willful, accomplished man.

He has an ex, his most recent ex, who is from all accounts an interesting, intelligent, strong, willful, accomplished woman. They broke up around the same time I broke up with my most recent ex, although our relationships were very different.

For me, when I have lost someone loved, it has always been a sort of comfort to establish a friendship with them that included knowing their new loves, even if it hasn't always been easy... even though it's often painful to see someone I loved and hoped for a long life with having that life with someone else. There is also something valuable, I think, in seeing that loved one live happily with another person who is not only my equal but an even better match for them; someone who I can honestly like and feel not upstaged by, but simply recognize them as a better match. It's harder when I perceive an inequity, for instance if I don't think my ex treats the other person as well as they deserve or vice-versa... but usually it is a good thing, remaining friends with my ex and establishing some rapport with their new love.

In this case, my boyfriend's ex wants to remain friends with him, and for many months had a hard time recognizing the boundaries he set, in a fairly intrusive way. To give her some credit, for the first months of our relationship he didn't know what boundaries he wanted to set, didn't know what he wanted from our relationship, and so she perhaps couldn't clearly perceive the lines most of us know by heart; the lines between lost love and new friendship. So it was difficult.

After a time, though, after about six months of our dating, the lines became clearer; he had definitively chosen a new relationship with me and discarded the potential for rekindling the relationship with her, at this point long-distance by some thousand and a half miles. He said in no uncertain terms, this is where I'm at; this is my new life. Still, she persisted in communicating with him as her lover, not her ex-lover. She would not let go of the old intimacy, and rejected news of me as too painful for her to hear or acknowledge.

He, wanting to honor their former closeness, told her that he wanted to stay in communication, but asked that she acknowledge his new relationship, and acknowledge me; and asked that if she wished to stay in close contact with him that she make some effort to befriend me. She refused.

This is where it gets muddy.

It had been most of a year since they had been together, and in the meantime he had allowed a fairly intimate level of communication. By then, she reasonably felt like they had a reasonable relationship for exes. She is quite young, and this was, and is, her first breakup of a very significant love relationship. So, she was angry that he would ask her to accept us as a package deal should they remain friends... and she refused contact with me. And until then, I had accepted his relationship with her as a package deal, thinking, deliberately,  only of furthering our relationship together, and not of how she might still, after six, eight, ten months still be thinking of me as the "other woman".

So it got messy. I got angry. We got angry. I felt heartbroken.

We, he and I, together, got over it.

But she didn't. And she continued to talk to him, via email, obeying limitations we had set, but still not understanding or acknowledging, or perhaps understanding and refusing to acknowledge, how things had shifted; how we had become a package deal.

So, ignoring what he had asked for (that she communicate with me if she wanted a relationship with him) and obeying the technical restrictions he had asked for (that she keep things very surface-level if she would not) she continued to email him, at first infrequently, and then with greater intimacy and frequency. She had been in a car accident  but not been hurt. Then, she wondered why she was so attracted to Pisces men (such as him). Then, why had he not answered her question about attraction? Also, by the way, she was coming to Portland.

He ignored her question a second time, and said that it was too bad they couldn't meet but he wouldn't feel comfortable with it unless she was comfortable meeting me as well... to which she responded angrily that she hadn't asked to meet and never wanted to meet me, and he could never suggest it again.

I don't know what I can say about that. To me, it crosses a line; one that has been crossed time and time before. I have left out many, many details, including the one about how I emailed her at his request, and was replied to with "I am his former lover of two years".

I understand that she is younger. But I was young once myself, and this still feels wrong. Her behavior, from a very early time in our relationship, feels wrong. It feels possessive, jealous, and intrusive. She is an ex, and seems to have no concept of how to behave as an ex who wants to develop a friendship. I have left out many of his attempts at setting boundaries, partly because it's all too much to type out and partly because they weren't strong attempts. It's not because I don't think he meant them, but perhaps in part because I don't think he knew what he meant.

And partly because I, like him, don't quite know what to do with people who can't understand and respect changing relationships and changing boundaries.

Even though I myself have been such a person in the past.

Almost four years ago I embarked on a relationship with a man who was separated from his wife. They had had an open relationship and she left him for a man she had been seeing. From his account, she was an abusive partner and a fairly inattentive mother; from my perspective as his lover, both were true, though it's obvious how such a perspective can be skewed. He cared for his children most of the time, as far as I could tell, and his stories of their breakup tended, as such stories will, to depict her as the villain. I was convinced but now I don't know; was she? I will never have the detachment to know.

Two years after they separated, they got back together. Although the sexual component of our relationship had ended months before at his decision, we had become very close friends and I was very much in love with him. When they got back together it was clear to me that I could not continue seeing him even as my friend, because of my intense feelings for him.

A year later I was in love with someone else, and we started hanging out again.

I called him my love

I don't even know what it means. For months we have danced around this word, "love". He asks what it means, and I have no answer; and tonight, as I go to sleep, I project him into it. My love.

I am not sure I will ever know what it means.

There is so much more to this story.

All other issues aside, I think she is a well-meaning girl. But she has this DOG. The dog is a good dog but totally untrained; she took him to obedience school briefly but she didn't agree with the methods (typical dominance/reward training, very effective with dogs as it fits with their natural pack behavior) so she quit. He has extreme separation anxiety issues, and will bark all day if left alone.

This girl is a postgrad student and is not home very much. The dog DID have range of the back yard, but he really needs to be walked, and preferably taken somewhere to run, twice a day. I don't have time to do it and am not interested in taking over her responsibilities if I did. Her dog is a hunting breed, large and rangy, and dumb as a sack of hair trimmings, but I think he would be trainable if she would put in the effort. He's a barker, very noisy and difficult to control. I am home all day, so for the last two years I have been the person who has put most of the effort into letting him in and out of the back yard and trying to curb his barking.

Now we get to the good part. Because he's not getting enough exercise or attention, he started slipping out of the house and running away, and he does not come when called. He never does it when I open the door, and rarely when the kids do, because we're all pretty good at blocking him, but if ANYONE else comes over he takes advantage of their unwariness to push past them. He has absolutely no wariness of roads or cars and we live near a busy street. It got to the point where, if someone knocked on the door, I would put him in the basement before opening it.

He has also killed several of my trees and shrubs by urinating on them, including a 7-year-old paw-paw that SHOULD have fruited this year. This dog is a huge PITA, and a lot of it could be resolved simply with attention and training... but my housemate wants to spend time with her boyfriend instead of coming home and taking care of her dog.

So, then he figured out he can tear apart the side fence and get out. He did it twice, and the second time, what I had feared finally happened: he got hit by a car. Luckily, only his paw was hurt, but here's where it gets really weird; she handled this by locking him in her room ALL DAY while she's gone. It's ridiculous. A sixty-pound dog should not be locked in a 10x12 room for ten hours at a time. She comes home, takes him for a walk, and then puts him back in her room and goes off to do her own thing. I can understand doing this while his paw is healing, to make sure he rests and doesn't re-injure it, but then

And, OK, I realize I should probably step back instead of letting myself get upset with this, BUT

She is moving out at the end of the month (I am so grateful she decided this on her own, as I was dreading asking her to move) and is talking about how hard it is to find apartments with a big dog, and is trying to get him declared a service animal for her anxiety, so she can more easily find a place. I said "I hate to say it, but to be gently frank, I am not sure an apartment is going to be a good fit with your dog, because of his barking"

And she says, holy shit I could not believe it but she says, "My plan is to (a) move in where they already have dogs that bark and (b) use the spray bark collar and if he can't stop, then I can keep him in my boyfriend's adjacent basement."

The fucking basement. All day. Alone. In a basement. That is so absolutely not OK I can't stand it. I told her that locked in a basement is no life for a dog. She takes him nowhere. Not to the beach or hiking or anything. Ever. She goes to Sauvie's Island all the time with her boyfriend and never takes the dog. He just needs to get out and run, and be trained, and his behavior issues would be resolved. He just needs time and attention. I can't give it to him; I have three kids and two dogs of my own, neither of which have her dog's particular needs. I have neither time nor energy for this dog, which is why I don't have a large hunting breed.

The insanity of a full-time grad student getting a large hunting breed boggles my mind; it's like she has no regard at all for anything other than her own immediate desires. I am upset and frustrated and at the end of my rope; the girl won't even read dog-training books because she "disagrees" with them, meaning essentially that she is willfully ignorant of anything that might contradict what she WANTS to do.

Sigh. I am trying to just ride out the month. After that, what she does is her own problem and at least I don't have to witness it.

On contentment and questionable food.

I am among the nation's great unwashed masses of discontent.

Sunday mornings always do it for me. This is the morning when the fathers come to pick up my children, leaving me in my vast empty house all alone and usually bruised and/or mildly hung-over from whatever Saturday night shenanigans I got up to (hardly anyone was hurt and only one window got broken). I shower and oil my hair and my skin until I'm soft and glowing as an Egyptian whore and, depending on whether they've been assholes lately, put on something that will remind my exes that they will never, ever tap this again, hand off my kids with the requisite polite small talk, and bam. Door closes. Silence falls.

At first I clean. This is my big chance, you know? Three days of not having a sink constantly full of dishes, and towels that have been used to wipe up something questionable, dragged through a pile of dog hair, and then hung back up on the hook for the unwary showerer to anoint their face with.

And then, with a reasonable amount of vacuuming and laundry out of the way, I sit in my office with the sunlight pouring through the window, and I am discontent. An hour ago I was annoyed because my pubescent daughter would not stop rattling on about some anime she's really into, and now I don't know what to do with the absence of her noise. I look out at the cedar fence that separates my yard from the neighbor's and contemplate selling the house. I had a view of Mt. Hood, now I have a view of recently-built, overpriced townhouses. But I've got six, almost seven years worth of growing time on those fruit trees, and my garden is finally, for the first time since I bought the house, perfect.

I am discontent about my view.
I am discontent about my floor plan. This is a really shitty floor plan... who thought that would be a good idea?
I am discontent because nobody has called me back about hiking today and I don't really feel like going alone.
I have the problems of the lucky.

I am an ingrate.

Yesterday, in the grocery store buying birthday presents for my son's friends, I stopped in the frozen dinner aisle for what may have been the first time in my entire life, and I saw these little microwave entrees for a dollar each. A dollar. What the hell, that looks pretty fucking questionable. I selected a dozen of the more revolting-looking ones and trundled them along with my sixer of High Life tallboys (for the demolition, for fuck's sake. You can't do proper demolition without Miller High Life in cans) to round up my son and make my purchase.

Now, for fun, for shits and giggles, I'm sitting in my office eating a goddamn Salisbury Steak I got for a dollar. It is 100% as disgusting as you probably imagine it to be, and I'm enjoying the fuck out of it.

Later, I'm going grocery shopping at the Dollar Store. For thrills. For food that not only I, but pretty much no one, wants to eat.

This is America, guys.

Don't be here now

I don't want to fall in love again. Not anymore. Too much heartbreak, all at once. Abandonment, rejection, loss, in rapid succession like machine-gun fire because I fell for someone I shouldn't have. I just can't do it anymore. I feel numb. Even seeing last summer's lover was no great hurt... after all that, after the beautiful summer and the ending and the anguish... he walked up to me and gave me a hug and told me he was sorry, and instead of my friend buffering me from my former lover, it was my former lover trying to shelter me from the loss of my friend.

My other friends, they're angry and sad. I don't know what to say to them. I don't want them to be angry. They think I should be angry, too, and maybe I will be but I'm not ready for that yet, I'm still shell-shocked.

You would think I was writing about a death, reading this. It's not a literal death. It is a pushing-away, a walking-out. I don't know how to adjust from having someone go from being a constant presence to the gaping absence of them. Just being gone. It is like a death; in a way it's almost worse, not quite but almost, because he could call me, he could see me... but he doesn't want to. It's hard to wrap my head and my heart around the rejection.

And I miss him. I don't know how to lose my friend, not-quite-lover. It reminds me of my divorce, except by the time we got to divorce my marriage was already dead, I just had to make the decision to cut the rope and let it fall. There was nothing dead or over between my friend and I; no fights or anger or anything but laughter and comfort and love and support. As much as the divorce was a lingering cancer, this is a freak accident. He has seen me at my best and at my worst, and now I'm at my worst again and I can't call him... or, I can call him, but he'll never call me back. He made himself my home base, I let him, and now he is gone and I am anchorless.  


I saw a plastic bag driven by gusts, tumbling in the air above the trees, and I thought, there I am.  


I'm jumping the gun.


I have this problem of existing too much in the present moment. People say "live in the moment" as if it's a virtue to strive toward, but it's not a blessing, it's a curse. When the moment is all there is, it becomes all-encompassing, whether in happiness or sorrow. If you truly live in the moment, you have no perspective with which to temper your emotions.


I hoped a lot for a long time, and now I'm afraid of hope because that's what gets you, really. Despair is tiresome, but it's almost a relief, once you accept it. If I believe, or hope, that this silence is temporary and he'll be my friend again, be allowed to be my friend again, I'll be waiting for him every day and I'll go to bed sad every night. If I believe, accept, that it's over, my heart will break and be broken for a while, but it won't break anew daily.

We used to get sandwiches and two bottles of beer and go hiking together, and eat lunch out in the woods. We'd each get a different kind of sandwich and a different beer, and swap halfway through. We never hiked long; just an hour or so, long enough to get some air and get a little winded, and go back to work feeling good. It was one of my favorite things, a high point of my week. Even before I went off on his wife, she would fight with him over that, because she thought he was "wasting time" hiking instead of working or looking for work. Just two hours, once a week. I miss those two hours. He'd call me and see if I could take an hour off work to pick up chicken feed, and it was  fun. Everything we did together was fun. We tore the rotted old arbor off the back of his garage year before last, and even that was fun.

You know, when I met him they were split up and I used to wish his wife would come back to him, because he was so, so sad. I've never seen anyone as heartbroken as he was. I wished it until I actually saw her manipulating, controlling, and putting him down, giving him hope and then yanking the carpet out from under his feet a few days later. And then, finally, she was engaged to another man, she was living with her fiance, and he was ready to be done. He was ready to file divorce papers, and suddenly, she broke up with her fiance, she had nowhere to stay, she came back. Now he is more miserable than he ever was when she was gone.

I know it's not the same thing, but I don't want to be waiting for him like he waited for her, and I don't want to hope for him anymore. I do want him to split up with her so we can be every bit the friends we were before, and I do want more than friendship if the universe would happen to go that way, but I don't want to do what I know I will do if I don't assume it is over, which is wait here with my little bloody heart wide open, hoping, trying to sew it back into my body every night so I can sleep with the disappointment of not having heard from him, again.


Your fingertips across my skin
The palm trees swaying in the wind
Images

You sang me Spanish lullabies
The sweetest sadness in your eyes
Clever trick

I never want to see you unhappy
I thought you'd want the same for me

Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
Should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do

We walked along a crowded street
You took my hand and danced with me
Images

And when you left you kissed my lips
You told me you would never forget these images, no

I never want to see you unhappy
I thought you'd want the same for me

Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
Should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do

I cannot go to the ocean
I cannot drive the streets at night
I cannot wake up in the morning
Without you on my mind
So you're gone and I'm haunted
And I bet you are just fine
Did I make it that easy
To walk right in and out of my life?

Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
Should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do


(Almost Lover - A Fine Frenzy)

The End of the World

The end of the world. It’s a different place for everyone, but everyone knows where theirs is, although sometimes they don’t know how to find it until the moment they need it.

That highway calls to us, the highway to the end of the world. If you feel inside yourself, you’ll find you know instinctively where the beginning is. Sometimes, driving, you might have the sudden urge to make that turn, take that freeway entrance, and just go.

It’s not like the lure of the bridges; the bridges are something outside of you, coercive, malicious. The siren song of the bridges is to distract you, to trick you. The bridges, beautiful, old; they have no love for you, other than their love of your sorrow. Just walk across one, you’ll see what I mean, the water glinting grey and deep between the slats under your feet. I have the fear sometimes that a bridge will get me and then that last moment will be eternity, the fear and loss and the cold and the choking, the taste of mud and corpses and sewage, the bones breaking as I hit the water, regret and heartbreak and agony all rolling into one permanent instant as I wish I could change my mind about the bridge, about everything, walk back up the street for a pack of cigarettes, a shot of bourbon, cry it out, shake it out, scream it out, sleep it out drugged and curled on the couch, anything but experiencing that one last moment more than forever, because when time stops there can be no end of the world.

No, the end of the world is something inside of you, which is why all the bridges stay the same for everyone, but everyone’s end of the world is different. It may be only a few minutes from home, but usually it’s a long drive away. The end of the world is not danger, it is solace. It’s where you go in your mind when everything is crumbling, the place you long for when the steel band circling your heart is two notches too tight. You close your eyes and feel it calling for you, yearning for you, loving you. It wants you there as much as you want to go.

Down the street, a left turn, a slight right, up the freeway north, north through the city and past the volcano, past where the cooling towers used to be, through the small towns and the capital, past the religious nut with the billboard and past the 47-year-old Columbus Day Storm snags of trees jutting like broken teeth along the wind tunnel of the I-5 corridor, north into the riparian jungle, the wetlands and marshes, off the freeway and onto the highway, past the casino, off the highway and onto the winding rural roads that take you through the reservations and the small, small towns, north until you get to the place where you can’t go north anymore, and you get out of the car and walk through the trees to the spot where the water crashes against the rocks 60 feet below, and maybe you take a small object out of your pocket and throw it, or maybe you sit on the edge looking down, or maybe you don’t, and you know that in all this solitude, in all this quiet, your dirt and loss and all your pain will be washed away, washed clean and smooth like an eggshell, like the blank slate you imagine you used to be, and out here at the end of the world no one will ever, ever find you.


I don't think anyone wants much more of an afterlife than they want from this one; a warm spot in the sun, a garden, that moment of bliss when you wake up in the morning and sense that the warm body next to you is someone you love. It's when all that goes awry that we have to run, have to lock the car doors and piss in a bottle driving ninety up the rain-slick freeway at one am to get away, to get the hell away from the city and the bridges and the wreckage of hope. Or you run by pouring it out onto paper or into song or by pouring whiskey down your throat, or you run by fucking someone new but the new never quite stops reminding you that those brown eyes and that smile are not the brown eyes and the smile that you're running from, and pretty soon, no matter how far you run, you can't quite remember if you were running away from something, or trying to chase it down. 


That's why we need the end of the world, and that's why we need the wastelands and the bridges. The wastelands and bridges, their siren song scares us and makes us run, and the end of the world is the place where we get to stop. It's not the afterlife but it's close enough, close enough to let you sit down and catch your breath and try to remember whether you were chasing something or fleeing from it, and remember that the cigars and the bourbon and the tranquilizers and the sex and the running never did get you any closer or any farther away from whatever it is. And maybe you just take a minute, and that's all you need, but maybe sometimes you go to the end of the world and you never come back, and if there's anyone to talk to, you never, ever talk about why you're there.


Your heart’s on the loose
You rolled them sevens with nothing lose
And this ain’t no place for the weary kind

You called all your shots
Shooting 8 ball at the corner truck stop
Somehow this don’t feel like home anymore

And this ain’t no place for the weary kind
And this ain’t no place to lose your mind
And this ain’t no place to fall behind
Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try

Your body aches…
Playing your guitar and sweating out the hate
The days and the nights all feel the same

Whiskey has been a thorn in your side
and it doesn’t forget
the highway that calls for your heart inside

And this ain’t no place for the weary kind
And this ain’t no place to lose your mind
And this ain’t no place to fall behind
Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try

Your lovers warm kiss…
It’s too damn far from your fingertips
You are the man that ruined her world

Your heart’s on the loose
You rolled them sevens with nothing to lose
And this ain’t no place for the weary kind

(Ryan Bingham)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zelvaxvTaUk

The true story of Mr. Earfinger

Names have been changed to protect the innocent.




I walk to the upscale-ish restaurant/bar in my neighborhood, arrive exactly on time, belly up to the bar and order a well bourbon with a beer back. I'm wearing something cute but not risque; jeans, T-shirt, cowboy boots, leather jacket. It's a lovely evening, for winter. The door opens a few times and I keep turning to check. The third time, it's unmistakably the guy from the ad... 40 pounds heavier and a lot less attractive. I am tempted to bolt, but instead I smile and greet him politely with the requisite Portland half-hug (I greatly prefer a handshake, but everyone here seems to think hugging is the way to greet strangers).

He orders, pays for my drink, we go to the back and sit near a window. I am internally steeled for a polite hour of being pleasant and interesting. We chat.

He is actually not so bad to talk to. Quite nice, actually, fairly interesting. Kind of funny. He pre-emptively orders me another drink (a good reason to insist on going dutch on the first date) and I figure, oh, what the hell, I'm having a decent time. Shortly thereafter, though, the conversation starts to become decidedly less interesting and funny as he begins bloviating about the hospital he works in and how being in a hospital gown is the great equalizer of men blah blah blah. Then I register what it is he actually does, and where; he's an MRI tech in the same hospital my friend Surfer Boy works at. "Oh hey," I say, I don't suppose you know my friend Liam, do you? He's a film librarian there."

There's a pause, and he looks deliberately thoughtful in the way people only look thoughtful when they know immediately who you are referring to, but want you to think they don't.

"Liam? Hmmm. I don't know, there are a lot of people in my department... Liam... what's his last name?"

"Sandusky", I say, "Liam Sandusky".

More pretending not to remember. Then, a snap of the fingers; "Liam! Of course! He works my front desk sometimes when one of the ladies is out. Cocky little guy... really full of himself. He thinks he's the cock of the walk, doesn't he?"

Is this fucker really saying this about someone I just told him is my friend?

"Um. No, actually he's quite shy and self-effacing. He's a creative guy, writes poetry. He's really smart."

"Well he sure comes off like he thinks a lot of himself, the way he struts around flirting with the ladies."

I can see very clearly what the problem is. This bloated old fuck sees Liam's youth, his gentle quietness, his good looks, and the fact that women like him, and he's envious and threatened. Then he asks the obvious next question:

"So, how do you know Liam?"

"I met him online and dated him for a while, about a year ago."

"Oh... so, it just didn't go anywhere?"

"No, it went somewhere... he just realized he liked me too much to keep it casual, but isn't into kids, so we decided to just be friends."

Faux-sympathy. "Awww. That's too bad!"

"Not really."

Pause. Then he starts in on a story.

"You know the funniest thing? You know how Liam has those sideburns? Well, I used to have big mutton-chop sideburns, and it wasn't until I grew mine..."

"Oh, actually," I say sweetly, knowing exactly where this was going, "It's funny but I hounded him for MONTHS to grow those. He didn't want to but I was relentless."

Pause.

"I'll be right back," he says, "I need to use the restroom."

I sit in kind of mild disbelief at his rudeness for a couple of minutes, and then he returns... and oh FUCK, he's bought me another drink. FUCK FUCK FUCK. OK. I can live through one more. He sits down, sliding onto the bench next to me instead of the seat opposite.

"One more," he says, "I hope that's OK."

"Oh, sure... but this has to be my last one."

"You know, when I walked in I couldn't believe how cute you were. You're so... tiny. You're just really, really tiny and lovely. A tiny, tiny lovely creature."

WTF? What is this "tiny" shit? Is this supposed to be seductive?

"Um, thank you?"

"I really just couldn't believe it. It's like, you could fit in the cup of my hand. Is that perfume I smell?"

He leans in and sniffs, and then, suddenly, he is KISSING me. I fell for the oldest fucking trick in the book. We are in a restaurant, with people, and he is kissing me in public, in front of people, and I am contemplating how I am going to get away, and his hand is on the back of my neck, and then...

He puts his finger in my left ear.

Not like, a caressing fingertip. He sticks his dry index finger into my ear canal. I freeze, stunned like a deer in the headlights. Is this weird? I think. And then, the other finger inserts into my right ear. Fuck YES this is weird! Break contact! Break contact!

I don't really know if I jerk away, turn my head, slump into my seat, but blessedly, both lip and ear contact are broken.

"Ohhh, that was so lovely" he says with a little smug smile. "You know what? Those hipsters over there keep staring at us."

I turn to look, and sure enough, three young hipsters are looking right at us with combined expressions of amusement and disbelief.

"Wow, I really ought to head home! It was nice meeting you." I say, getting hastily to my feet and putting on my jacket.

"Hold on, I'll walk you to your car!"

"Oh, I didn't bring my car, I walked." OSHIT why did I say that? WHY?

"Well, you can't walk home alone in the dark! I'll drive you home!"

"NO um I actually really want to walk and it's my neighborhood and really very safe also I was um, planning on going to buy cigarettes first."

"I'll walk with you, then. I insist."

SHITFUCKDAMN.

I'm thinking, rolling over plans in my head. Can I go to the bathroom and call someone to rescue me? Or wait... maybe I'll just go to the mini-mart in the exact opposite direction of my house, so that he'll be tired out when we finally get back here, and he'll ditch. OK. Try that.

He settles up and we set off, me walking a bit faster than normal, him huffing and puffing to keep up. He tries to make small talk, but I don't really reply. At one point, though, he thinks we will hold hands, and his palm and fingers are eerily dry and scaly feeling, and warm like a lizard that's been basking in the sun. Repulsed, I pull away. Not one to take a hint, he tries again a couple of times, and I start walking faster. He's struggling to keep up, his great bulky body sweating and wheezing in what would otherwise be a lovely crisp night.

Three goddamn stores. The first two are closed, and I renew my suggestion that we go back to his car and I walk home alone but, inexplicably, he refuses to take a clue and follows me doggedly around my neighborhood until I finally score a pack of cigarettes at the Chevron five blocks from my house. Thankfully, by now his efforts at impressing me by talking have ended, because he doesn't have the stamina to walk and talk at the same time.

We get to my house. "Well, here I am" I say, extending my hand. "It was nice to meet you, have a good night!"

"Oh, it's been wonderful! Do you mind if I sit and catch my breath for a while?"

By now I'm past any pretense at being polite. "Uhhh fine" I say, and lead the way to the front porch, choosing to settle into the fortress-like rattan chair in the corner. This leaves him the bench, from which I am untouchable. I light a cigarette and offer him one. I know he doesn't smoke, but I was hoping that he would take it out of peer pressure and it would give him emphysema. He's shivering from the cold; he didn't bring a jacket.

"Would you mind terribly if I use your bathroom?"

Oho. He thinks he can get me inside. Think again, Earfinger.

"Sure, it's straight through the kitchen, to the right. Don't mind the dogs, they're harmless. Try not to scare my housemate."

It's an awkward moment, and I don't care. He goes inside, into dark and unfamiliar territory and barking dogs, and emerges a couple of minutes later. Unfortunately, he sits down again. I have to pee, but I am not going into my house until this behemoth potato on toothpicks departs.

I smoke. And smoke. I sit in my impenetrable rattan fortress for three or four cigarettes, and at last, after what feels like an hour, it finally seems to filter through his dense mass of cluelessness that he is absolutely not going to get anywhere with me, and that I will gladly keep him out on the porch until dawn.

"Well, I'd better go I guess. I had such a great time, it was so wonderful to meet you."

He stands up and I extend my hand from my fortress. "'Night" I say, and he pauses in one pathetic confused moment, then accepts my hand, says good night, and like a portly, oppressive cloud, blunders off into the night.

I still love him

like I loved him yesterday.