March 11, 2001

Today I woke up early to go take a friend down to the Saturn dealer so he could look for a car. The first place we went to was closed on Sunday. I thought that was odd since it seems like more people are likely to purchase a car on a weekend than any other time of the week. We went down south to another Saturn dealer and they were open. He found a L100 car for about $16k that he wound up purchasing. He probably wound up purchasing a Saturn becuase he got used to riding in my car.

I spent about 4 hours at the dealership with him and his wife while they went through all of the paperwork and such. Afterwards he and his wife invited me over to their place for dinner. I got home at around 6pm, just in time for everything to close. I hate how everything closes on Sunday. I found a note on my computer from my brother asking me if I could run his dress shirts over to the dry cleaners, but I guess he assumed I'd be home earlier.

I'm pretty happy today. Sara sent me an email last night which made me feel pretty good. She is spending the weekend with her mom and having a good time. I feel good knowing that she is having fun, but I really feel a sense of emptyness when we're not hanging out together. I don't really know how she feels about me exactly, but when I last wrote to her I wrote at the end that I hoped I wasn't being a pest, and part of her reply said "dont even entertain that thought". She seems to like me in a special way, but doesn't want to be tied down. This has to be an odd relationship. Isn't it usually the guy who wants freedom and the girl who wants committment and togetherness? Oh well, we'll see how it goes... I'm happy for now :)

For now, I guess I'm going to go out and buy an iron.

My numbing little fog wore off sometime around five today.

I really took a step back and wondered "Just what the hell do you think you're doing?"

I'm too candid, too emotional....I broadcast all the fear, anger, shock and fortunately happiness that I feel constantly. NO wonder I wear people out. Thankfully, I can't stand to be around the same people for any amount of time either. Some people attribute that to my more Gemini side. I tell them they're wrong..."no, thanks for the reassurance, but really. I'm just fucking crazy."

This broadcasting, this sinking of all of my feelings into my environment has cost me dearly. Cost me things I wasn't even sure I wanted to begin with. Do I have regrets? DO I have a chance to take back the last two years? NO? Then give me back what I had in the first place.

I've done a lot of reckless things...especially lately...and I can no more squelch the feeling that it's not over than I can stop breathing.

Why do I relate this, these weaknesses on an electronic compendium of information that wants very little to do with subjective little 'old me? I closed a diary of my two years in Baltimore months ago, and haven't felt compelled to open another. Sounds like a good enough explanation to me. That and I know maybe half a dozen of the people who make up this chaos by their faces.

I've done a lot wrong in areas of my life. No really, I have done wrong. But I've also been wronged and I guess what I'm trying to figure out is where my wrongs ended and their's began.

Have you ever woke from a dream frantic feeling like you've done something horrible, but for the life of you, you can't remember what you did or who you did it to, but you know you're going to pay dearly in the end?

I get the feeling...ah hell, I know I'm about to get a swift kick in the karmic ASS. All because I love to take chances. I love the smell of risk in the morning!

All this anxiety because I didn't LISTEN to ANYBODY. I'm just to the point where I don't give a shit who lied, who did wrong, the past is the past is the past......I've just got my fingers crossed that this period of being in limbo will be over shortly.

I feel so guilty for what I want and what I miss. Especially when there doesn't seem to be any room for what WAS important before.

This makes a whole lot of sense, you just THINK it doesn't. First, a tone poem:

yikka-yikka ssnnaaaaaaaaaark! snaaaaaaaaaarrrrk! wiki wiki iki iki fow, fow, woohaw, woohaw!

Got on the water today, out on the bay. Finally; first time in a long time. I woke up and node-tended for a while, cleaning up some of the sawdust and ashes from last night's urgent noding. Elsewhere, otherwho has said: If I Could Remember What I Realise When I'm Drunk I Would Be Very Wise By Now, and I gotta agree. In vino, veritas. I do think that the nodenapse is a shadow of an Everything noding session! I just haven't expressed it so that it resonates with sobriety as well as it resonates with Glorious Excess.

I also think that Carl Jung is the originator of SYTML; now how to make that grokkable?

In this sober moment of sober sobriety, I think that my rockband (as in "X would be an excellent name for a rock band") should be called F.O.G. for "Fear Of Genius".

The joy of knots. A trucker's hitch is truly the most useful knot you can learn; with that and a half hitch, there's nothing you can't do.

That woman: Aggressively cute. It was like her beauty was yelling its head off while she stood there. I wonder whose sister she is? I wonder what her handwriting is like?
Thinking about getting over it, how you have to ~, etcetera. About smarts, and who's got 'em, and who doesn't use them. About the return to music after all these years of NPR. About the need to be a good typist, how it would smooth the thoughtflow and the nodeflow to be able to type square brackets at will, so that I could link without it seeming so goddamned ARTIFICIAL. Grrr. Thinking about how being mad is like being in love. Consuming. Convincing. Fills your sensorium. Gives you a reason to go forward.
Thinking about how disapponted (disapponted: thrown off a bridge?) er, disappointing it is that Jesus (or the messiah) has not shown up after all this time, after all the earnest prayers of some very nice people. Could it all be based on a misapprehension? Sure seemed real to me all those times I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar.

Went to the bottle shop to get a bottle of...Kahlua? Khalua? Kaluah?...to make a White Russian with. In honor of The Dude, and the terrific acting in the movie The Big Lebowski. I ended up asking one patron of the shop where he was from: his accent sounded...NZish? Not New Zealand, he said. There was an awkward pause, where he should have volunteered his country's name. His pal said, "Only five possibilities", which puzzled me. Pal explained, "Only five places that speak English with an accent like that."
My next guess was right: South Africa. It wasn't a guess. I knew. Something in his awkwardness. An Australian would have guffawed and offered a disparaging remark about New Zealand. And there was something about his reticence that reminded me of other South African friends.

Lyrical exhaustion. What. What's the story with that kind of song? Thinking of the Bruce Cockburn album "Humans", and the song about being on a train in Japan: "...while across the strait a volcano flew a white smoke flag of surrender." The perfect thing to say at that point in the song, so perfect that it... um, I don't know. Every time I hear it I want to close my eyes and disappear. That moment and the pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are bits of unfailing proof that human beings are cool, and should stick around for another few thousand years to see how things turn out.

So, more thinking about beauty. At the party I was talking to this woman and arguing what feels right: that it's possible to be in love for a moment at a time. That I've never slept with someone that I didn't, in some moments while we were entangled, feel love for. And that yes, that's real love. And that I have a policy of standing by the embarassing things I say when drunk: I didn't say it because I was drunk, I said it because I was momentarily brave. In wine, there is truth, even if you are too chickenshit to swear by it when you're sober again.
So it's all about how you let those aberrant moments affect you. The good moments, if you feel bad. The drunk moments, if you're usually sober. The awake moments, if you're usually asleep. The big moments, if you're usually petty. The agile moments, if you are normally stiff and in pain.

Rereading bits of Walden. The introduction, just now, to check up on a cool gem, a nut in the brownie, that I remembered: "The head, I find, is primarily an organ for digging". So apt! I have no idea of how I could like a book any more than I like Walden. I had the quotation a little wrong; see writeup.

One of those days, after spending some time on dmoz, I thought of checking out what's new on E2. Found these ...

• Message Inbox - pretty cool for the loads of message that I didn't read. ;-}
• Contents Editor - one , gamaliel, nicely /msg me to mercy kill one of my branches.

Hmmm ... Perhaps I should check in more often? :-)

Well, I'm off to Montreal for 3 days in their local office. It's going to be quiet an experience, as my French language skills are, um, "ne bien pas". Thankfully, since I work for a pretty good team, they'll probably be very accommodating to me.

The toughest part will be leaving my fiancee behind. She's really upset about me leaving for 3 days, as we have never slept in separate cities (or beds, for that matter) since we moved in together in July 2000. Hopefully she won't try to call me when I'm at work, but even if she does I'll still like to hear her voice.

Another problem is that I'm going to be disconnected from my computer for 3 whole days. Oy! It's my primary source of entertainment, information and communication with my far-flung friends. My God, all those E2 votes are going to go to waste!

Hopefully I'll learn something really interesting when I'm in Montreal and I'll be able to add a writeup or two when I return.

Au revoir!

Jennifer,

Look first of all Im sorry I wrote that email. I was being rash and its alot easier to tell someone off that way than to their face, so I took the easy way out. It was spiteful and Im never going to do something like that again.

I know you told me to never associate with you in any way and I respect that. I wont try to talk to either of you if you wish, I just have something to say. I was trying to talk to you the other night and I thought we were getting along, I thought we could put everything past us and forget. But I guess you don't want to. I want nothing more than to live in the present. Jesse was a wonderful part of my past that I have to forget now. It hurts me very much that you would accuse me of all those things, like going on his screen name and etc, because I didnt. I wouldnt do that to him, I still wouldnt. He has said some very cold-hearted things to me and I'm not going to retaliate because its not worth it to me.

I hope that you and Jesse work things out, I really do. I admit that there was a point at which I didnt want you to be with him because I wanted him still, but there was also a point at which I realized he wanted to be with you. He wanted me sexually but he wanted you emotionally. We both got a raw deal there, hmm. Maybe things wont work out with you and him, maybe so. You're right, its no longer my concern, so it doesnt really matter to me whether you do or not I suppose.

I have never lied or "bullshitted" you. Everything I told you was true, I guess you have no reason to believe me but you have no reason not too, either. I dont know why you chose to write that email to me now, but you know that me and Jesse had done something since those five times. This is not news to you, or to anyone, so its not like I am telling you to keep you apart or to spite him.

I did want to be friends with him still because me and him had a special kind of connection that I thought we could maintain, even though he had you. We only messed around because our relationship has been like that ever since we became close in May, and its hard to break a habit I guess. But there wont be any of that, so if you decide to forget everything and get back with him that is no longer a worry.

About the topic of sex, I heard that you and him had sex, which he wont tell me but whatever. I never said that you had an STD, I just told him that since you had messed around and had sex with other guys before Jesse, I had to be concerned about my safety since I was going down on Jesse and I could get something if you didnt know that those guys were clean, and you had gotten something without knowing. Im sure Jesse told you that so you would take it the wrong way, but I am telling the truth about that.

I am not being nice here because I want something from you. I do not expect you to trust me or like me, in fact what you wrote is probably how you always will feel about me. I just want to say no hard feelings from me. Im not taking the moral higher ground and trying to make you look like a bitch. But this is how I choose to deal with everyone now. The thing with Jesse taught me that its not worth it to hurt others, because I know what its like to be hurt. So Im hoping that by minimizing others pain I can minimize my own. So do what you want, but if you guys want to hurt me anymore just please save yourselves the time and my the pain and leave me alone.

It saddens me that we couldnt have been friends. Or at least have not gotten so out of hand. I know that I didnt make any effort to make things better at any point and messing around with your b/f jesse didnt help, but at those points I didnt really care. I figured that if anyone should have cared it would have been him. He did, but he just doesnt think about things at the time. Well now I do care. I know that being cheated on sucks and no one should do that to anyone. I hope that you have never cheated on Jesse, but that is your business.

Well anyway I must be going, its almost midnight and I have a term paper to write. I hope that writing that horrible email didnt make you feel better about anything, but I know that writing this one makes me feel better. I can finally move on with my life which Im sure youre more than happy about.

Sincerely

Ashley

On Thursday, March 8th I suffered another lapse of common sense and drove down through the mountains to the city where beautiful girl was house-sitting and not doing well with isolation. Ended up spending the whole weekend there, although I had planned to leave a day and a half earlier than I actually did.

Today we woke late after a night of raiding the liquor cabinet and getting inebriated and naked on the floor, committing sins too numerous to mention. The night also saw me curled into a ball and bawling my eyes out while she held me. Today I see I've burst many of the capillaries under my eyes.

I don't suffer hangovers, and woke more or less okay. Beautiful girl was not so lucky, but she was well enough to treat me to a late breakfast/lunch at IHOP. I left far to late in relation to my plans.

Most of the journey home was made below the posted speed limit due to snow and lack of snow-plows in the mountains. I drove thirty most of the way home, hurling my schedule back to stone-age.

Had a lovely weekend, yet when I return home the uncomfortable feeling sets right back in again. I'm really tired for no reason, and I want nothing more than to forget obligations etc. etc..

Bumper sticker seen on the way home: "Get your Nutrition in the Morning: Read the Bible"
I still don't know what that means

Today I woke up at 9:00 AM after sleeping only 4 hours, then went straight to work, got off around 6, came home, slept, read some of the new Kinky Friedman novel ("The Mile High Club").
God bless Jackass for being the only decent thing to happen to me on this worthless Sunday.

What is limbo?

10/3/00 excerpt from my journal

It's a vague conditon, a place of oblivion. It's neither here nor there, but a shady place somewhere in between. To me, limbo is a place 22' X 8' on a little patch of borrowed stone driveway for an indeterminate amount of time. One can live only in the now because the future is immersed in a dense fog. The days all run together. They feel the same. There is no Monday nor Saturday, just one day after the next after the next after the next. One day at a time. I know eventually it will come to an end, I just don't know the when. It's a hard way to live, struggling to keep food on the table and this little patch of gravel under our camper and not losing our house back in Connecticut before it sells. We live in limbo. Never knowing how long it will be before we are told to leave this patch. There are no guarantees. We are told constantly that we will be thrown out if our dog gets loose, if our kids disturb the neighbors or if we make friends with the wrong people. It's a constant reminder of the impermanance of our life.

Limbo and frustration walk hand in hand these days. I catch moments of contentment when I least expect it. These moments are fleeting. I grasp them to me when I can. My days are filled with battling the hundreds of ants that constantly forage our camper, keeping them out of our food stores.

Accentuating the positive.... the large black ants we picked up back east are gone now. Woo-Hoo! (Bug Behaviour 101)

3/11/01 (five months later)

Yes, we are still in limbo. However, limbo is not as bad a place as I thought back in October. I must have acclimated. True, we still live day to day without knowing the future. But it has brought me a new sense of the now. I was one who dwelt in the past and worried for the future. This life style has forced me to live in the present. It has forced me to reevaluate how I spend money, how I spend time, how I spend life. I have been living with less than 10% of my possessions. It's different, but not so bad. I hear the idle threats from disgruntled employees here, but I no longer listen to them. My ears grow deaf to their grumbles. They are venting their frustrations at living here by being generally disagreeable. I don't take it personally anymore.

I've learned to let things go. e2 has helped with that. Accept the things you can not change... There are five of us living in this space. We have come to appreciate each other more. We have come to appreciate each day. My moments of contentment have grown to large blocks of time. Soaking in the hot tub watching the sun set is one that I seek out on a regular basis. I don't wait for moments to happen. I MAKE moments happen. There is only now and I have no intention of wasting it! Limbo gave me now.

Today is a gift, that is why they call it the present

still trying to write about adultery, i am reading all the badly-fated-relationship nodes i can lay pointer to...i am not looking forward to work tomorrow. i'm on *break* dammit! doesn't that mean i'm supposed to relax?! eh...i suppose i need the extra hours anyway. i think i'm teaching an html class this week...or is that next week...? bah. it's a free lunch, and that's what matters. i look around myself here in my little apartment, and realise that i'm still a kid (note the pokemon poster!) and somehow i live the life of a lazy god. and before you think it, i'm supporting myself,thank you. stream of consciousness persists, flowing no closer to mediaeval adultery and Beroul's Tristan... sigh. maybe when frater shinma gets home he'll have some ideas about the last 300 words of this thing... but i'll tell you, before i wrote this, i had no idea that C.S. Lewis had written a book about Love (The Allegory of Love). and the man makes some good points, too. i'd go on about it, but i'll leave the perspectives on love for another writeup...sometime, perhaps when i feel less like a rucksack full of onions. i should go beat my brain on this paper some more...

On writing

I always thought writing was a little like art, which really blows my noggin in a happy way

Art is beautiful because it involves creating something from the ground up; lines, symbols are somehow placed upon the page breathing meaning into their form. I willingly consent to the lovely stuff that materializes out of some artists mad scribblings; I am in awe of dots and lines.

This is one of the worst days I ever had. Some good things happened last night as a birthday celebration for one of my friends dragged on and turned into today. But then when I awoke, inspired by some events from last night, my day was punctuated with an incredibly depressing demand from this incredible girl I'm stuck on.

I realized that I do have some cool friends. Like, Eric's a really cool guy to hang out with. And he and his wife have all of these other cool friends who all seem to have everything together. They looked so genuinely happy as they drank their liquor and sat in the irish pub telling jokes, flashing their breasts at one another in celebration of the total lack of inhibition brought upon them from the alcohol. And as they were all so concerned about one another, each other's lives, and how they were all doing. And they listened to each other's every word, and laughed so much. And I sat on the end of the table wondering why I never fit into crowds like this. They try to help me fit in. They try to share the joy and merriment with me. But I still feel like an outsider. They're not directly my friends. They all just seem like friends of friends.

All my friends seem like that. I can't shake the feeling. My friend Becky followed me like a puppy, noticing that I was feeling a bit distanced from everyone, and kept ignoring the calls from her boyfriend for her to go back home to be with him. She must have noticed that I felt out of place, and she wasn't going to let me give up and just excuse myself from the group to go drive her home. Each time I asked, she gave me more excuses. She's really just a very good friend, and knew that I need to be around people like that. And she was putting her life on hold for a while as a show of friendship.

And the friend whose birthday it was wouldn't let me slide out of the pictures. He cared that I was there to wish him a happy birthday, and to go to the nice spanish restaurant with him, and have a good night out on the town with all our friends. And he even called me just to chat a little when he finally managed to wake up today after the long night of partying.

But the only person I can think about, the only person my mind keeps caring about, still won't even try to be a friend. And I just don't understand why not. My whole life I searched for her. A young woman of extraordinary beauty both inside and out. One who I thought had seen a glimpse of the way I want to be. Someone who I thought had seen similar qualities in me once, and who could really love me the way my heart is telling me I love her. If only she didn't think I was some insecure loser for not automatically fitting in with people like my friend's friend Eric and all of his huge group of friends who know how to just be secure and cheerful and relax and party. I know I don't just blend in with those people, but I always felt that maybe I could if I just had a little encouragement. And I thought that girl I used to date was beautiful enough inside to not be stuck on such things, and could actually have some patience with me. Once when I told her I never felt like I was cool, she said that was okay because cool people are usually dumb. And I know I'm smart and sincere, and I try to be sweet. Maybe lately I don't seem so sweet to her because I'm so frustrated and don't know how to deal with emotions very well. I'm frustrated that she once told me in a little pool hall where we used to hang out together, while we were outside smoking, she said that she and I seemed to be heading towards the same place but through different routes. And I thought that meant that she saw past my sensitivity and cautiousness and realized that my heart was pure and that I desired the same sort of relationships with other people that she wanted. I thought she was disgusted by facades and attitudes, and that she believed as I believe that if a person cares about you and is nice, and doesn't quit on you when you need help, and who you can always rely on, that that was more important than whether they had a cool car and cool clothes. And if the person doesn't always know how to say the right things, that you shouldn't discount the fact that they're still there for you trying. Before, I thought she said she liked me. And I thought she agreed that with just a little work I'd be exactly what she wanted in a guy. I thought she was aware that just her being with me helped me. Just talking to her about things helped me figure it all out. I thought she was aware of how much peace she brought to my world and how much of that insecurity got washed away when she was with me and was building me up and giving me some hope.

But somehow I've managed to disgust that girl. That girl who used to so sweetly sit across from me on my patio and ask me to hush and kiss her. That girl who sat under the stars on a cold, foggy night on my favorite beach with me all night long just being with me. She's abandoned me now because I was so in shock that I found her that I didn't know what to do. And I don't know how to gain her favor ever again. So I just sit on my patio alone now, smoking, numb to the friends who aren't abandoning me and who are trying to be there with me. All the while I just stare out at the street and the few cars passing by at this late hour wondering how I'm ever supposed to learn how not to lose a girl like Brenda. And pondering whether the world even contains any other women like her that I might someday meet. What did I do that was so wrong in her eyes? I can't figure that out. I can't figure out how to get another chance to try and work whatever it was that was so wrong out with her. And she may be the only woman like her in the entire world.

Yesterday I got up at 7:30, went to work for a couple of hours. I have a tape back up issue that I can't resolve and still couldn't get it to work.

I went home and did laundry, crap like that, and took my son to get his septum pierced. He never admits that anything hurts, and this time - it did. I bought a new 14 gauge belly ring, a half circle with some cool beads on it.

After a shower, still naked, tried to put it in, with no luck. In fact, my piercing closed up so much I couldn't even put a 18 gauge ring in! And it was a 16. I got nauseated from trying to push a metal hoop into my body and felt like I was going to pass out. White noise suffused my ears. I had to lay down and cover up in a blanket and just think calming thoughts.

I went over to M.'s house for dinner and had a wonderful time. Umm Ummm yum! He's so yummy in bed. It was awesome, as always, when I'm with M. He is so amazing in bed, and no one knows it. You just wouldn't guess by looking at him.