This is the schtick:

"I'm a creative thwarted artist compromising my freedom for domesticity".

We all need to recognize that living our lives, normal lives that include basic amenities like, say, a comfortable home and the luxury of a partner, all requires sacrifice of something on some level, just as having freedom to pursue our artistic dreams fully would require sacrificing something else, like maybe having a partner and a comfortable home. It is a balancing act, for everyone all the time, and all of life requires compromise.

The stifled artist-angst thing is not something I have great patience for. For one thing, I consider it little more than a lame excuse; a cheap out from actually doing the work. If you're an artist, you can be an artist in a crappy apartment alone or you can be an artist in a comfortable home with a partner. Same artist. If you were alone in a crappy apartment, you would simply find another excuse for feeling like a thwarted artist; that blockage isn't coming from outside. That has always chapped my hide... the people who think they're being held back artistically by the comforts of domestic life. It's crap. All of it. And it's lazy, disingenuous crap at best. It may "feel" romantic to be a thwarted artist when you're in the throes of it, but in the end it's unproductive, creatively hypocritical bullshit that leaves you with no art and no fulfillment. It's the fucking Mentos of angst.

If you are a great person and a creative brain, an artist, and you think you are not fulfilling your creative potential, you need to look inside yourself for what's holding you up, not externalize it and project it on your relationship or your job or your life circumstances. Not on your home, your kids, or your partner. You need to recognize that you are not some fundamentally different creature; that others, too, have sacrificed and compromised and sometimes miss the single, free life of intellectual pursuit and hot 3-am makeout sessions and writing and being a star. Everyone does; every single person. Great artists have, and so have non-artists. But we all grow up and we all change the ways in which we pursue those things, and what sacrifice and compromise we make hopefully leads us to the growth of other things or other ways of expression that we wanted MORE.

How about that story where the girl is in love with the guy, and has been for a long time, and he's basically her best friend except that they sleep together? Also it gets more complicated, but there's no real reason to go into that. It's complicated in the way everyone's lives are complicated, with divorces and kids and friends who don't know and damaged hearts and things that haven't been worked through yet and drinking problems and money problems and communication problems.

But in that story, which you already know because we all already know it, the girl is in love with the boy. The boy loves the girl but he isn't IN LOVE with her, for whatever reason, maybe because it's the wrong time or he's not over his ex or she's not the right girl. It doesn't matter. He's not cruel. He doesn't want anything to change because he likes it the way it is, the closeness and the friendship and even sometimes the sex. She likes it too. The sad part is that she likes it in a way that makes her feel like the only right and natural thing would be if he looked at her the way he used to look at his ex, which is also the way the girl looks at him. He avoids her eyes sometimes. The sad part is that she can feel in her little red fluttery meat heart how right it would be if they ate together, paid the mortgage together, slept together every night, were THAT THING for each other.

The sad part is that she knows she should cut it short, should walk away from the eyes that don't look at her that way and the hands that don't touch her that way, but she won't, because she loves him and she hopes that someday he will love her too, that way.

if I'm with you long enough
to whet our wills as we grow old
could you let me close
to breathe your breath
to touch your soul?
--Deb Talan

So hey

I met this guy. I wasn't sure at first, but he turned out to be totally fucking AWESOME. Smart as hell in a warped way, has kids himself, hits my wavelength. He gets everything, and the sex is fucking amazing. He's the second man I've been able to orgasm with in my life, and it's not for lack of sampling.

At first it was mostly a drunk-booty-call situation but then we started hanging out, and then we started hanging out more, and gradually he grew into a position in life as my best friend, and I realized one day that I was completely, shit-faced, fucked-up, ass-over tits in love with him. The only problem with this is that I'm married, and he's married-but-separated for the last year and a half.

It's been about eleven months since I met him. For most of the time I've been extremely diligent about squashing any ideas that deviate from the obvious option of friends-with-benefits, although deviant ideas have grown more invasive the longer I know him.

A month ago my husband declared, for maybe the 15th to 20th time, that he wants a divorce, and this time I realized that there is no way, no way even though I try and I compromise and I give him what he asks for as well as is within my capacity, that we can stop this cycle of coercion and threats and abandonment, so I decided to give it to him. Now he lives on my couch, and the love I have for my friend no longer has a compelling reason to be stopped pressing at my mind and my heart. There it is, ever present, ever dominating.

I have been in love before. Three times. The second time nearly killed me, and still, in retrospect, I don't know how or why I let myself fall in love a third time. This fourth time baffles me, it defies me. It is the hope that kills, it is the cynical laugh, it is the swerve that carries a carload of kids over the railing of a bridge.

The death of the third love has been a long, slow, lingering cancer. It is the memory of the regret of a long-ago deed. It is as real as the dying great-aunt I never write to. It is the last sorrow before sunrise, or the first one before sunset.

This which I feel for my friend, though; this guy... if I wrote it all down it would seem perfect, on paper. On paper, it is perfect, I suppose, except for this one thing; that he isn't in love with me. Perhaps he is still in love with his estranged wife, or perhaps he's just not recovered enough for love. Either way, he is blameless. I let myself into it. I walked in, open-eyed, open-handed, legs open.

I can't stay here. The multiple rejection is killing me, quickly and slowly at the same time, every day a thousand deaths, as they say. I know he cares about me, and that makes it harder and more tempting to stay, to hang around him, to sleep near him, to bring his body into mine in the hope that somehow, through intimate contact, he will start to feel what I feel. I could become that girl.

I won't become that girl. I won't be pitiful. I will ride my own destiny and not linger hoping for his heart to intersect mine. I will not look into his eyes and see again the absence of what my throat and belly and cunt ache to see.

I will keep putting my body under other men, until the imprint of his is obliterated.

I don't have anything else to say

I forgot how to write poetry a long time ago. Sometimes I eat the remnants, to remind me of the unreasonable heart that beats in my reasonable chest.

In the end it's not about what you lack

I took your invitations as more of an offer of distraction or refuge, so no, not thinking like they were demands or anything. Just giving a heads-up that I might not be out and about much for a while, until we get some sort of mutually-agreed-upon child rotation schedule worked out. The last thing I want is to do anything that would foster resentment at this stage.

I get the impression that he feels that I am holding him back somehow, and maybe that's not accurate but he keeps talking about things he wants to do, and somehow it comes around to chaos and the house being messy, and in the end I am left with the feeling that my whole life, my busy distracted child-filled life, is what is incompatible with his vision of how he wants to live. And, as much as I try to simplify, some things are not going to go away. Life is not going to get simple and quiet and un-busy. I am probably not going to re-structure my priorities to match his priorities. I am not going to make my interests secondary to paying attention to a husband. I'm just not, because that is not who I am. It's not that I think he's wrong for wanting someone who prioritizes the same things he does or whose primary focus is their partner, it's just that I am not that person and I don't think I can change that about myself without becoming miserable in the process. I have already become miserable in the process of trying to change things he doesn't like about me, and the problem with that is that he doesn't like me when I'm miserable. Who would? Who could like a miserable partner?

I have seen partnerships that are like what (I think) he wants, where people are so intertwined with each other that it's almost like they're one organism. To be completely honest, I can't relate, and those people actually kind of freak me out.

I am not, inherently, a wife. I am maybe a perfectly good girlfriend, but I like to be alone too much, I will always put fun above housework in my list of priorities, I can't stand to revolve my life and interests around just one other person, and I believe that personal growth is called "personal" for a reason. It's like personal hygiene... I don't expect him to hold my hand while I shave my cooch, and I don't want to hold his hand while he reads about Zen Buddhism or goes to temple or does whatever it is he wants to do. He is not especially interested in my spiritual life, and I don't blame him. My life, his life, with orbits that intersect for a few hours a day. Maybe only a few hours a week. A fairly decent girlfriend. A shitty wife. And you know, many nights I just want to be left alone, to putter or tinker, or waste time, or whatever. My time. I want him to ask me for my time, not assume that it is there for him unless otherwise allocated. I want him to treat me like my friends do, and not presume that the default is that my time is for him. And even while I type this, I am aware that what I am describing is not a husband/wife relationship.

So, who knows. In the end maybe we can continue having a relationship. I don't think it can be the same kind of relationship we have been trying to have, because that relationship isn't working and trying to make it work is making both of us unhappy. Maybe in the end I could be his girlfriend, and not have to try to be a wife. Maybe he can h ave his own home base and I can have my own home base, and we can come to each other with truly mutual respect for each other's independence, and really love each other for what we bring into the relationship, and not resent each other for what we don't.

And I think that maybe I will make this whole thing a blog because then, you know, it's out there. And I can look at it later to remind myself.

He doesn't love me anymore, and it's breaking my heart.

Phoenix

It was an incredible day here, balmy and gorgeous, and we decided to check out the Columbia Slough (http://www.columbiaslough.org/) because we are thinking about "adopting" a section of it. The awesome thing about adopting the Slough is that you get to go out once a month in a canoe or kayak, provided by the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, and you paddle your section and take notes on the changes you observe since the last time you were there.

The Slough has always been a magical place for me. When I was a kid it was just a 15-minute walk from my home... and I was always warned "Stay away from the Slough, don't touch the water or anything that's been in the water, it's filthy and it will make you sick". And at the time, it was true... it was vile, toxic water, polluted with human waste and other less savory things. I used to make the trek down to the Slough anyway, down the street, through the park, through the old part of the neighborhood, through the undeveloped part of the neighborhood, over the highway, across the train tracks, through the industrial strip, through the big chain-link gate, and finally clambering over the landfill to reach the tangled, murky, trash-filled water. I would sit on the city's discards and eat Chick-O-Sticks while watching sickly carp thrash in the warm, stagnant shallows.

Now, the Slough is vastly different. Through the efforts of a small and determined group of conservationists, my Dad among them, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council has gained members and support, and today the Slough is a far different place, with clean waters I don't have to be afraid to dabble my feet in, and frogs and ducks and healthy fish. The banks are lush with greenery instead of garbage, and in the summer droves of people come to paddle their kayaks, canoes, and inflatable rafts. There are two large lakes connected to the Slough, and although enclosed entirely within the industrial region of Portland, they are still oases of nature, screened from the massive Port activities by oaks and cottonwoods.

I am glad to see a place whose magic was evident to me as a child, even through a haze of pollution, restored to a modicum of its original natural beauty.