Beating a Dead Horse

I don't want to be continually apologizing. And knowing what I know now, it may be best to leave well enough alone. I'd hoped that there would be time, prayed for a different ending, gone so far as to try provoke a response because anything was better than this existence without you.

I honestly don't know how I could have messed us up. I did love you; I still do. The bottom line as best as I could determine was that you felt I was taking you for granted, was too hung up on the past. One day you simply decided you wouldn't live with that anymore. From your standpoint, there was no feasible future with me. Everything else stems from that simple fact. Everything snowballed into that big mess that saw me driving you farther away.

I'm sorry. For everything. I can't fix this; I so desperately want to. It's not my call anymore.

Please believe me, I do mean you well. There're so many things I'd wanted to show you. Like in the old days. I wish we could talk.

Someone's found me on Skype

...and I'm not sure if she's even a "she."

It's flattering being asked if I want to "play." Lord knows it's been a long while since someone's called me "Baby." Sadly, as much as the loins may stir at the prospect of a virtual tryst, work still needs doing.

And that this girl is always on-line seconds after I sign in, makes me wonder if she isn't an online software version of a femmebot. One designed to ping the accounts of select Skype users periodically to see if they're online and then send them messages encouraging them to follow a link to her home porn site.

Intriguing, this possibility of being propositioned by a marketing gimmick.

Jogging in Place

I don't like myself today. Every other word I'm saying is either "f_ck" or "bullsh!t." And every other gesture I've been making with my hands is to flip somebody the bird. Not that I would normally point that at anyone but I've been doing that so much someone is bound to see it.

I haven't been truly happy since August. There were moments-- in the middle of editing and contributing to a really fun video or talking about camp icons. Or that time when I became a mime for my friend Maureen. Or that one time when I helped the mideast resto with their electricals and maybe saved 'em from a fire. But since then, nothing. Abso-f_cken-lutely jack-bull-sh!t.

Which is ironic, since in that respect, I'm in the exact same place I was two years ago.

I can handle it better, thank God. And my current workload keeps me preoccupied enough so that thinking about where I am doesn't take up all of my headspace. I still have some major decisions to make that I've been postponing, pending the end of my current work project. Check back with me next month and I'll let you know how those are going.

I am praying that when you see me next I will be smiling, and not because I'm ruminating about the aptness of the image below--

I've logged a thousand miles following the highway, and all this time everyone else was moving while I was actually jogging in place.

Oh god I'm flipping someone the bird again...

Weeks--maybe a month ago-- I dreamt of you. There were scars on your legs, your shins and I kissed them. In the dream I didn't know how they got there. I wanted so much to make the wounds and the scarring go away.

Again, off multiply. June 05 2007

I am getting really tired of serial romances. The kind that begin like a sunrise-- warm, slow and sweet, lending life to last night's washed out colors. I'm even done waiting for the cooler, more muted liaisons, the ones that are built on love and logic. I am, simply put, tired of waiting for sense to make its way into my friends' thick skulls. The self is not God's Gift to Women, but it's the best and only self I've got. I am tired of laying it with my customary roses, marjoram and fruit on a silver platter only to have it unceremoniously sent back to me for consumption with all the parts torn up and put back together wrong. The f_ckups I've had to deal with are nowhere near the legendary levels of last year, but it's very discouraging just the same to be told in so many ways to go hang. I am especially tired of waiting long periods of time for fear, loathing and contempt to fade away when they should not have even been there in the first place. I refuse, however, to give in to indifference (everyone else does) because neither of us has to. (Why am I the only one who sees it?) I will not play the pissing contest of "Who Loses More?" There is nothing stupider than two once close people pointedly ignoring each other and telling their friends what an utter moron the other person is. The situation is unfair and I'm supposed to sit here and take it because everyone else does? Bull cookies. Something has to be done because it can't keep being this way. None of us can afford it. Yes, I'm a gods-damned moron for thinking that there must be a better way to live and go about caring than this. Because if there is none, then we're all screwed, courtesy of our own fickle and benighted natures.

(this is a cross post from my multiply account)

Evil Dex and His Big Bodega

There was a time when I could post stuff about everything that's happened to me. That was before the advent of communities of interconnected interactive blogs. Before I was formally part of a group of people who blogged interactively. I had functional (if relative) anonymity. People who'd stumble on my blogs wouldn't have the luxury of prejudging the content based on how well they knew me. Select instances from my life seen through my eyes would serve to inform and divert and (sigh) entertain to an extent dictated by personal, social and geographical distance and by simple common sense.

Then I started to have an audience: moral supporters, curious and bored readers, at least one critic who put my writing and ideas to the test. The dialogues between blogger and audience was still thankfully somewhat Hegelian, and they were dropped once we left our terminals. The topics we argued about online were important --comics, art, philosophy, love and politics-- but they didn't spill over into our personal lives and social interactions. At least that was how it felt back then.

I was very opinionated, very pompous, very angry, very happy, a little sad, somewhat paranoid, very much in love, and very reflective.

I could almost freely blog about what it felt like, being the houseband living with my then-girlfriend, my issues with mom and pop and God and authority figures. I had a very lengthy blog entry (two parts!) about writing, English and, of all things, my hair as a political statement. I could blog about how much I disliked lawyers and advertisers even if I'm as pedantic as a lawyer and was a college-trained ad man. I could look over my posts and learn and relearn things about myself and the way I think and write and live.

Nagusame's Dex, Shrinemaiden

Somewhere along the line my reflexive activity started to affect other people outside my life online. I think this happened sometime after I lost my wife (the girlfriend). She was my center, or a large part of what kept me together as a person. I lost track of why I was blogging. I stopped talking about politics and comics and America and Hegel and Nietszche and St. Augustine.

And everyone around me knew it, could feel it, was affected by it. Some were inconvenienced and debilitated by it.

I was shouting it on every online mountaintop: I love you. I was arguing, on my blogs, the nature and merits of a life lived for two. Off line I was campaigning earnestly, assiduously for such an alliance.

Reality TV

My online life and my off line life had become one and the same.

What used to be entertainment and diversion that could be shut off as soon as I left the terminal had become ...reality television. I was talking about the dynamics of a romantic affair online and, off line, I was living the equivalent of a romantic affair ending horribly.

And everyone in my social circles (active online and regularly meeting off line) could not help but see it, even if they couldn't bear to watch.

But I couldn't stop-- these were events, variables. These had to be recorded, analyzed, compared with the experiences of friends and colleagues. Future scenarios extrapolated from insufficient data so I could find the one with the happy ending and bring it into existence.

And I felt it then, everyone tired of me talking a topic to death. Everyone tired of me number-crunching scenarios and throwing them away. Everyone with a prepackaged pop psychology solution to something I needed to work out for myself.

How do you stop an Imploding Man?

Perhaps I could have lived these lives separately had I not been part of several groups of people who knew me online and off line. It certainly would have spared my friends the grief of seeing someone destroy himself. It certainly would have spared me the grief of being sorely vexed by people with the best of intentions, by people who loved me. But that's neither here nor there now.

The point is that this is partly why I destroyed my old blog, my old friendster account. Why I stopped going to the club meetings, to the martial arts classes, why I stopped seeing friends. Why I hid. Why I talked about my disintegration and other personal matters in other blogs and venues. And why until August, I didn't post anything about my latest interpersonal stuff.

Bottom Line

Perhaps the lesson is that familiarity breeds contempt, even in the most well-intentioned people. I know for sure though, that I'll be reviewing these musings and referring to them to guide my future interactions with the World Wide Web and the world beyond it.