Author and Columnist
One would imagine that being trapped in ones house would make for a boring journal entry. That is where one is wrong.
I have not even begun the below entry, and I suspect that I am very much correct. Your assurance here only further convinces me of this point.
Given that I wish you would write more of events and reactions (as opposed to navel-gazing), I also feel you write too much because there isn't much substance. This isn't to say that I am encouraging your foolish actions -- though I suppose I am, as it gives me reasons to scold you. I merely wish for you to live as much as you write. Live so what you are chronicling seems more like a complete story and not a diatribe based on mental morsels.
By the way, what is wrong with my car now is nearly the same thing that was wrong with it the last time it died. This proves conclusively that there is a mechanics conspiracy.
I've dealt with mechanics enough who have ripped me off. My last two cars were killed by their ineptitude and my ignorance of what they should have done. Once, they charged me to replace a battery and simply didn't -- though it was easy enough for me to ascertain that the dirty battery in there was not new. All that done, it was the alternator anyway.
So, if a mechanic said that they fixed it and it is broken again, they did not fix it.
Okay, so I was dazed because of sleeping pills pretty much all of yesterday.
There is a prescription pill that you take in your late thirties that does the trick. What you are taking -- I'm guessing Benadryl -- does not. Of course, you can't know this.
Insomnia will plague you for so much of your life that you forget there is a way of living that does not include it. You don't necessarily help yourself, drinking caffeine too late and taking allergy meds that are stimulants.
Be a little more judicious about what you put in your body. For someone who prides himself on being drug-free in the face of easy access, you are not careful about your intake and suffer for it.
That doesn't take one iota away from the quality of my thoughts.
Okay, but it does. You literally can't think properly while sleep-deprived. I have heard the factoid that every hour of missing sleep equals one alcoholic beverage. However, you seldom receive enough sleep (or get it for enough days), so you don't realize that you spend your life in a haze.
If anything, the vague pseudo-hallucinations boosted my thought process to highly abstract. (Kids, don't do drugs. Drugs are bad and so terribly, terribly wrong. And not at all sexy. Even sleeping pills. So, in closing, don't do drugs. Thank you.)
You should take your advice, though I will acknowledge begrudgingly that you can sometimes tap into a flow of words that your conscious editor would have stemmed. I can tap into this with slight focus, which is better. You'll learn, but you have to sleep first.
Well, thought and dreams. The dreams are very important.
Telling people, strangers especially, about your dreams is far from interesting. You fancy yourself a writer -- and I suppose you proffer these entries as proof of volume, if not quality -- but you hardly ever write fiction or an essay that is not assigned. You have only so many words in a day and should not spend them all yammering about a dream.
I have realized that there is a lot of detritus in my life. And I need to clear that out before anyone else can find me amazing. I have ceased to amaze myself.
Okay, buddy, this might constitute the insight I have been trying to pull from you. This borders on a lesson I have had to learn myself, as I have clung to friendships and relationships that have held me back or merely contributed nothing positive to my life.
I went the baby steps route, cleaning my room and deleting files on my computer that have long since outgrown their usefulness (see, I was a teenage boy not too long ago... And I no longer am).
Hey, it is a start.
Granted, it feels at times like I have the worldview of a ten-year-old.
Nurse your inner-moppet so you can develop into a whole person. Ten-year-old you -- half as old as you are now, just as you are half as old as I am -- likely needed more cuddling and less sarcasm.
Yesterday, I petted my cat Kizmet and sang him a ten minute song about how he was the best Kizmet I had ever met. He seemed quite secure in this knowledge.
Most cats are the best cats. This is why they all seem so cocky; they know their virtue.
Something was altered that night in Red Hook and I feel released.
Red Hook does have that magic about it. I became the man I am -- perhaps became a man at all -- because I moved to Red Hook. Bard College gave you a drive and aspiration, though the latter was disappointed on the grounds of student loans.
I found everything about Wal-Mart magical. I ended up giddily walking around aisles, telling Bryan Zen parables from memory.
I suppose you ought to find wisdom and joy where you can, but I'd prefer it not be in box stores.
Now to potentially less constructive news. I have been thinking about the Kate issue a lot.
Potentially? Absolutely less constructive.
How she told me, after the events of January that she wanted nothing more than to be happily in a relationship with me, but that she couldn't be in a relationship right now. How she loved me more than she could ever express and never, ever wanted to hurt me. Such things, which I took for truth as they were truth at the time.
Truth is not a constant. It has been a few months since January and, especially at your age, much can change in that time. Does Kate love you? Yes. If Kate wanted a relationship, would it be with you? Maybe. These truths have stayed consistent, but so has the fact that she does not want a relationship. She will hurt you here because she needs to.
Now she behaves as though dating me was highly painful and not a process she ever wishes to repeat.
To her, this is true right now. Accept it. You are not making the idea of dating you any more appealing.
Pain marks her, pleasure she can ignore.
She is not ignoring pleasure. Your whining does not provide it. Her friends do.
while she initially stated that it was fun to date, period, (based upon her experience of having a very long relationship with me and a NotARelationship with Sky when she was 15) she now clarifies that it is fun when you actually think you can build something with that person.
This may be true, but it doesn't mean that she wants to build anything but a friendship with you.
And you should be having fun dating less seriously.
She was very clear that I am in no way appealing to her and that she wouldn't date me. Wench.
Yes, she has been clear. Calling women "wenches" because they don't want you is a horrible thing to do. "Oh, I love and adore Kate... until she persists in saying something I don't want to hear. Then, I will insult her like a sullen child."
Okay, sorry, that was very clearly Katie bashing. I'm trying to get catharsis, let me purge.
Get your catharsis without putting it on the internet. Get that catharsis without insulting Kate for rejecting you again.
I will get the runaround from Kate.
Yes, you will. She is confused, but she doesn't have any reason not to be confused with you except to push you past arm's length.
And she will eventually realize that new and shiny is meaningless if there is nothing for her underneath.
Maybe, but she won't realize this for years. I would rather have new and shiny than persistently needy, which is how you behave.
Five months after Jen left me, I was four months into a relationship with Kate, she was helping to heal me and we had already professed love to one another.
I will not tell you that you rushed your relationship with Kate. It moved at the speed it did and turned out well for the most part. You were not whole enough to be in a new relationship, but you were seventeen, she was seventeen, and you fell for one another.
But I am okay with being alone when she isn't fawning on other men. Or lying to me about them.
You need to be okay with being alone without her being involved at all. That is what it is to be alone.
You are her friend, supposedly. Kate shouldn't talk to you about other men, knowing it hurts you, but you shouldn't put her in a position where she needs to lie.
Protecting me from the real her, because she thinks it will hurt me.
It will. You've made that clear. She thinks she is protecting both of you by trying her best to leave you out of it and hurt you when you get too close.
Part of me will always think I belong with her. I gave myself more to her than I had ever even thought to do with anyone else. I was hers totally.
You don't. That ended. You do not give yourself totally to a woman until around 2008, give or take a crush to have that epiphany.
You have gone on dates with a few women in the last five months. You return to Kate because she is familiar to you, a known quantity, and you had once loved her. She did not want to be familiar, even if she enjoyed being loved.
There were times when I was furious or disappointed with her. But she never ceased to have total control over my heart, especially when I tried to act as though she didn't.
I don't sympathize with you. You have no right to feel these things, or at least to indulge them. Feel how you feel, but be in control of yourself.
If I was a woman potentially interested in you and I read this, I assure you that I would lose all interest.
Kate does not want to have control of your heart, even if she doesn't want to let you entirely off the hook.
I tell my friends that, if I could only find someone truly remarkable to love, I could let Katie go.
You should get over Kate because you need to. No other person should be involved. Love yourself enough. They will be remarkable on their own.
Can you imagine wanting a woman so attached to her ex? You would hate that.
But it was my soul I was seeing, trying to work from within her. She is a shell to those around her, taking in parts of them as her own until they were outside her proximity.
You have a lot of growing up to do. Jen was a different sort of person, less compatible outside the limited high school context. You are not better than her because you feel things differently.
Also, how are you still licking your wounds over a relationship that ended over three years ago? You are just the worst at moving on at this point in your life.
Please do not get me wrong, though Jen hurt me immensely, I care about her. She was not wrong in her end, merely wrong in her means and I do forgive her.
Don't care about her anymore. She doesn't care about you or wish to know you. She did not ask for your forgiveness, and you never made yourself the sort of person with whom she would have sought that.
Kate insists she is the same way. That I am too romantic (though she calls it cheesy) and altogether too grounded to ever succeed with her. She wants this life of constant travel and adventure, or so she claims. And I do wish to travel, but I like knowing where my home is.
She gets her travel. She goes to New Zealand and Mexico. She married a Puerto Rican man and returned home with him. She lives for a time in New York City. She had the life she wanted before settling in Philly. I am sure there are other trips -- she spent a summer working at a Boy Scout Camp that might have been in the dusty West -- but I was not around to note them.
I think I could be very happy with Kate, still. Would it have been long term? Maybe. Well, two years is rather long term for a twenty-year-old. But please remember, I am secretly much older and hiding in a twenty year old shell.
You are not so-secretly much younger in glaring ways.
You are different from Kate. Not as different as you are from Jen, but not compatible at this point in your life. By the time you might have been compatible again, neither of you was in a place (physically and psychologically) to want to be.
One of her friends with an unfortunately ironic name asked me, after the break-up, if I thought I would marry Kate. I think I would have, in a few years.
You don't get married for over ten years, which was around the right time with absolutely the right woman. Kate is correct to think you are too cheesy. How could your wanderlusty friend want a man who could think about marriage?
If I could find someone to rival if not surpass the connection I share(d) with Kate, I said I could let her go (whatever that means). This person does not exist in my social sphere that I can see and I think I am open to it.
You are not ready for this theoretical woman because you are not letting Kate go. I wish you could see that. When you face a romantic disappointment, you dash back to Kate, who wants you less each time you show up on her metaphorical doorstep.
What I do recall is being in a small cabin on a spring day with my... um... I'm going with friend, though I wronged her (another story, another time), Matrona
No, let's tell this story. Matrona was dating Amanda, one of Kate's childhood friends. (Amanda is, depending on one's definition and how much weight one gives second grade, the first girl you kissed, after which you hid in the bushes because you were sure that she would rat you out.) Amanda detailed to Matrona -- possibly because Matrona mentioned what a mope you were in respect to Kate -- that Kate was having a lot of sex, that Kate boasted about it and named names.
You asked Kate, point-blank, whether this was true. You hated the idea of it, but you also hoped that she would confirm it so that you had reason enough to accept that your relationship could not be revived. Kate said that of course she wouldn't have sex with other men and that Amanda or Matrona had misunderstood or lied. You said this to Matrona in less than kind words, stating that you believed Kate over her and that Matrona was trying to start trouble. That was it for your friendship with Matrona, for which I cannot blame her still. You did not act like a friend when she put herself out to try to stop you from being hurt more by Kate. You insulted her. She had every right to sever your friendship.
I assume you tried to apologize at some point -- I hope you did -- but it couldn't have been enough to heal the rift.
I am not getting hung up on dream girls. Frankly I have quite enough problems with the real ones. But this suggests that Kate can be matched, if only with the power of my mind.
You are almost always, as the last few months prove, hung up on young women. Why not add fictional ones to your obsession?
There are no tactful ways to say this, but you take a long time to see this reflected in reality. None of your three significant partners after Kate resemble your dream woman, but Sirus does exist. Sort of. Not in the real world, of course. At some point in your next relationship, in part because of the longing that this dream implies, you conjure a fake mistress whom you call Chanterelle. Your actual girlfriend refers to her as "Mushroom Nose." Chanterelle resembles the occupant of this dream, meaning that you may have written down the birth of a romantic tulpa without meaning. .