Author and Columnist
Another thing I've noticed about you. You want people around you to think that you are smart. This makes you tedious. I have a similar demeanor--warm fuzziness infuses me when someone calls me clever--but I want people to feel good about themselves when they're around me. I uncover what is interesting about them. I never make them the butt of the joke. So, people should like me better. They do like you better, but we can credit your age for that.
My biggest issue is that you didn't have the knowledge to accept the few steps that would have bridged the gap to get closer to me sooner. The point of his exercise is to forgive you by better understanding the context and factors that put you in situations I regret--and kept you from others I might have rather regretted.
It was an epiphany to realize after a decade of guilt that Melissa tried to sexually assault you, and I repressed it. Seeing more concretely what Emily was doing to you--not my narrative now, but the truth when you are living it--is opening my eyes more than when the relationship ended.
2001.12.20
You do not tune in, if you will excuse the phrase, to read a mundane life. You read me, I would hope, because I am unique.
Buddy, they do not tune in at all. You get more reads when I critique you than when you write this, and I assure you I am not rolling in views.
On the 16th, Melissa, Evan and I decided to explore Pine Bush. For those of you who do not know, Pine Bush was a UFO hot spot several years ago and is supposedly the setting for Whitley Streiber's books chronicling his abduction experiences.
Pine Bush becomes one of the more consequential places in your life. I wrote my best-received novel about the UFO sightings there, bolstered both by going on skywatches and the life of an exploded rocket scientist occultist. I am an annual guest and occasional Pine Bush UFO Fair speaker.
Writing about hunting UFOs is leagues more compelling than mooning over women who don't want you, something you will yet again prove below.
The entire town was essentially shut down, as they said it would be. Very few lights were to be seen in houses and it generally gave an ominous feeling. I, for one, think towns should almost always be somewhat active, being nocturnal and all.
You must have only been on back roads because Pine Bush is no sleepier than any other town.
Granted, when you visit, they have yet to fully embrace the kitsch of being the UFO Capital of the Northeast and the tourist dollars accompanying that. Instead, the residents are usually annoyed that people will skywatch on their land, leaving fires smoldering among the brush.
According to Evan, the Jewish Cemetery had been the spot where seekers used to wait to see UFOs. It was also said to be haunted and he stated that these two facts were probably not unrelated. There were hints at experiments with other dimensions, but nothing solid was stated.
Most of the supposedly hardwon lore with which Melissa and Evan regale you is taken directly from Dr. Ellen Crystall's book Silent Invasion, all about her field research into Pine Bush.
It is, as one might guess, dubious in places. According to Silent Invasion, lasers from the cemetery fire at planes. There is supposedly an underground mining operation whose exhaust occasionally vents in the woods.
After this, we drove around more seeking evidence of... anything.
Most of your adventures in Pine Bush were driving around until you all got bored.
However, you did once spot three white lights rising from the woods far enough away that I could not say there was anything to them. They tipped to the side and vanished. Mundane explanations for that abound. You were sardine packed into Melissa's car with her friends at the time. You told Melissa to stop. She would not. Someone was recording; however, the car's motion and the erratic hand of the camera operator (I do not recall who it was) meant that all that was on the tape was a car full of twenty-somethings screaming.
Melissa records over that tape as some unmentioned point.
They regaled me with a small sightseeing/story-telling session, informing me that a place we just passed was where they saw a very slow moving plane (not so unusual as planes from Stewart Airport can usually be seen) take a sharp ninety degree angle straight up.
I regret to inform you that most of the sightings people report to you boil down to "I saw a plane, but it was weird." When you gently mention this to a man on a skywatch, he informs you that the alien crafts can cloak themselves to look like planes "but they always get the lights wrong."
You find no way to argue this, so you quietly note this and then plug it into your novel.
Or that they had attempted to come to Pine Bush once, but the police stopped them and said menacingly, "I think it would just be best if you turned your vehicle around now and headed home. There is nothing to see that way."
Yes, because a car of joyriding twenty-year-olds driving around in circles seemed suspicious and had nothing to do with aliens.
We saw some odd buildings, like a large barn that was lit up from the inside and had tent-like walls (they equated it with the bee house in The X-Files movie).
A greenhouse. You saw a greenhouse.
And all of the houses were very new and many of them were shuddered closed though obviously inhabited.
It's December and night, Younger Thomm. Do you expect them to have the windows open?
All the places we had visited were practically holy sights for UFO researchers not five years ago.
I try to have few regrets, but I am sorry that I never met Ellen Crystall before her death from cancer. For all the teasing I do of her book, it was an understandable influence on Artificial Gods. She was a figure who loomed in my life, a patron saint of the UFO experience.
You were too young to have rubbed shoulders with the researchers of that time. I have met Bill Wiand often -- though I do not think he ever remembers me. He is the de facto head of the experiencers in Pine Bush and is the leader of the United Friends Observer Society, which even in your era met at the Walker Valley Schoolhouse.
If Melissa were a little more attuned to what was genuinely happening in Pine Bush rather than the mythos you collectively built up based on faulty cameras and empty roads, you could have gone to monthly UFO support group meetings. I shudder to imagine how much that would have delighted you. It would have made a good distraction from all your romantic pap.
As such, it is rather convenient that I am such a freak about the paranormal. Something like growing to the destiny your reality affords you.
I live a bike ride from Bard College, where Neil Gaiman is a professor. We have spoken several times, though he (more than Wiand) would not recall that. He gave minor advice that guided me in getting paid for my first convention.
We do not end up coincidentally near these fulcrums on which our destiny pivots.
I ordered movies and books about the Pine Bush UFO phenomenon through the library (this is what I am doing when I am supposed to be working).
What stands out most about that VHS tape--a format that must have seemed antiquated even then--was Philip Imbrogno stating, "We know [UFOs] are from other dimensions. What we don't know is what they are doing here." It seemed like such a perfect distillation of the phenomena, presupposing something incredible and then hypothesizing from here.
However, it is even better. Imbrogno was widely discredited as a fraud after making himself seem like a pillar of the local UFO community for years. He claimed to have served in multiple secret branches of the military--none of which was backed up by anyone--and went so far as to write a book with Rosemary Ellen Guiley about how the American military uses djinn they found in caves. That he could get this far before someone looked into the credentials of a man who was otherwise just a middle school science teacher is astounding, though one could also imagine that he was running on fumes when he got around to the djinn.
As another small pinion in your destiny, you meet Guiley at the Pine Bush UFO Fair and she suggests you write something for FATE Magazine. You get an article about Pine Bush published in the magazine you spend your teens reading and hoarding, which must be a dream for you.
They do not pay and delete mentions of Artificial Gods, but they include your tribute to Melissa, so we'll call it even. At least I could add that to my published works page.
I said something to the effect that there should be two black holes where the towers were. Emily quickly agreed, though I honestly have no idea what the skyline should look like. I more wanted there to be holes so I could tell what was missing.
For a while, there were two pillars of light like the angels of the fallen towers.
Now, there is the Freedom Tower, which is mirrored and curved in a way that seems improbable and crystalline, as though it is a fractured artifact incompletely glitching into our reality.
We were going to look at the Christmas lights, which I naively imagined to be ubiquitous and overwhelming.
The irony of your era, even months post-9/11, put layers between you and any authentic experience. Perhaps nothing was like Norman Rockwell painted -- how could it be? -- but there was a specialness to something allowed to be unique. Homogeneity is the watchword of America in the 2000s, and our biggest export is culture. We make even the sacred bland.
(I am not suggesting the spirit of Christmas is wholly in the windows of New York City stores.)
I have this thing with bad birthdays. I think a lot of people do. They just end up being disappointments. For example, the fondue in the shoe incident of a few years back, when I had to deal with Virginia hitting on Katie and me and puking. And the fact that when I had a little get-together last Sunday so my friends could have cake and whatnot, absolutely no one came. Not even Emily, because she had become too ill and tired. It was disheartening.
And we wonder why you have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and abandonment issues with friends like those!
Not everyone has friends who would do that repeatedly, but you sure do, and you are too scared of being left alone to call them on it.
Let's say that Emily, indeed, was ill and tired. What's the harm in believing that?
Some friends call on my wedding day to say they don't feel like coming. No other reasons. Just not into being around people right now. And they expect me to care enough about this to argue and convince them, which I do not do since I am rather busy preparing to marry in a few hours.
This way a place to live. No, wrong. This is the home of the most sex shops per square inch.
That sounds like a place to live.
"Square inch," indeed.
On the way home, we, sans Kelly who had a bus to catch, talked about our early relationship. I think I gave voice to a lot of things I had been thinking and not saying.
Not saying, except incessantly online? In this very journal? Just not directly to Emily? Because you are a coward and fear what will happen if you are honest?
Like that I felt rushed into the physical side of being in a relationship before I was fully ready. She assented that I was right, though took mild offense at my assertion that she acted as though my will had little to do with the eventual outcome.
No, you are right here. She pushed things along, and it caused you to feel horrible about yourself for giving in.
You did not feel that your sex life was wholly consensual. You kept trying to put on the brakes. She said she understood, sympathized, and then would push until you gave in, making you feel guilty and miserable for ever saying no to her.
She basically told me that, in the beginning of our relationship, she forced the physical side because she was forced into the physical side in a prior, incredibly abusive relationship. In essence, I suppose, she sublimated these issues onto me.
Hurt people hurt people, as they say often at my job. So, reading this, she felt sexually abused, so she sexually abused you--though it was not as awful as she said he ex was with her.
If she could do this to me, it wasn't so bad that it was done to her,
For all this hurt you, it's hard not to sympathize with this thinking. It doesn't forgive what happened, but it puts it into context.
To Emily's telling, life had wrecked her. She had spent some time in a hospital recovering from an eating disorder or suicide attempt--it wasn't clear, though maybe both. She had faced the sort of sexual trauma that would lead her into her former relationship and probably keep her with you despite your stated wish only to be friends (while you write paeans to women who do not want you). If she were healthier, she would have left. At this point, she made you unhealthier, though you were not exactly the picture of health initially.
I wish someone had read this and interceded. It reads like a cry for help, though you don't know how to ask for this directly. Even if someone had offered, I doubt you could accept or even comprehend it. You would have defended Emily because the other option was admitting you had been stupid and weak and had let yourself be further traumatized. Even now, I don't like saying this because I hate seeing what you are going through, knowing that you don't gain the strength to confront it.
I won't be condescending or joke here. You are in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship. It is not as bad as many. It is not evident to those outside. That doesn't mean that Emily doesn't often lie to you to manipulate you and doesn't ignore when you try to tell her no.
All this time, I've held this pernicious guilt that you weren't a good boyfriend to Emily. Now, it occurs to me that this was not entirely your fault (though it was still your fault in part). You held back because she took advantage of you, and you were desperate for someone to save you, someone who could force you to do what you did not have the strength to do. So you let her keep doing this to you, gaslighting and sexually abusing you, guilting you constantly. In a way you could not confront, you were trying to protect yourself one of the ways you knew how, maladaptive though it is.
She said she would apologize, though. I think she actually meant that she would apologize, but there were no words to express it.
She would apologize, but you do not say she did apologize. If she were sorry, wouldn't she have stopped? She doesn't. She doesn't even slow.
It isn't as though I don't remember these things--though I do need to be reminded of the specifics. You wrote this, so it is facile to say you must have known you were being abused, but you didn't.
Occasionally, I employ an imperfect hypothetical strategy: What if the genders were reversed? In this situation, what if you were a young woman whose boyfriend is faintly apologizing for repeatedly coercing her into sex, not saying he will stop, saying it wasn't his fault because someone did it to him? What would you tell her?
You wouldn't encourage her to persist because the suffering made her more profound, and she deserved it because she couldn't feel for him as he did for her. You would have done all you could to save this hypothetical woman.
In reading all this, I realize that the wandering eye for which I have criticized you so often in these past months may have been a defense mechanism. You were employing a strategy that had worked in the past--finding someone new--to save yourself from Emily's abuse because you don't have the strength to escape her manipulation otherwise. If any of these women took the initiative, you would have leaped into their arms like they had rescued you from drowning. It hardly bears noting how unhealthy this is, but it was the only way you could envision getting away from Emily, even if you couldn't openly phrase the thought. Otherwise, she would have guilted and gaslit you until you relented, and she could coerce you into the ocean again.
I must remember to take a broader, more forgiving view with you. At its core, people's behavior makes sense. One has to find the reason why. I am not claiming what you did was pure or uncomplicated--your attachment to Kate is evidence of this--but that you were not acting maliciously, just unable to figure out how to save yourself.
it was one of those superb late night conversations that I thrive on when absence cannot occur to make the heart fonder.
I am unsure what you mean here, but you need that absence.
Most alcohol is far more reminiscent of doctor's offices and furniture polish than it is of a beverage (or, judging by my peers, lifestyle).
I never did acquire much of a taste for alcohol, and now it is contraindicated by my precious meds. However, you like mimosas and once have the most delicious wine of your life at your cousin's wedding at Boscobel. So, when you get there, would you mind getting the name of it for me?
What chronological milestone do I now have to look forward to? I suppose thirty? Thirty...
You meet your wife when you are thirty, and slowly develop into me--that's where I am putting the demarcation between us, though I imagine it will shift further up by the time I get there. It is possibly the best decade of my life--better than my twenties since you waste much of it and are so stressed and miserable, feeling trapped by circumstance and your untreated mental illness.
So, yes, look forward to thirty. Most people's twenties are spent making mistakes and flailing wildly through their lives.
You know, I was a teenager not too long ago. It is a good gig, though no one realizes that at the time. It is entirely possible that "college student" is equally, though differently, a good gig. It is too close to judge yet.
It could have been a better gig, which is half why I responded to you. You do tend to have a steady stable of unsteady friends. I don't recall your feeling lonely, except in that you do not confide in people for fear they will tell you to stop being feckless when it comes to your life.
I think a lot of my youth passed me by. I had far fewer youthful indiscretions than I think I should have had.
It has barely begun, and you have a broad menu of possible indiscretions you resentfully ignore and judge others for indulging.
I am rather in minor debt right now. (Incidentally, despite working at a job that pays be more money per hour than I have ever gotten before, I am much poorer. Erm).
Why though? To whom or what are you in debt?
Also, the library pays you a pittance, but you don't know that.
It turned out to be, shock of shocks, a Marcel Proust novel. Inside (after I opened it) she wrote that she hoped I loved this novel that touched her so. Or I could hate it.
That is a very Kate thing to write.
I must have this around somewhere. I will look for it. I just read The Vintner's Luck because she lent it to me. Well, she lent it to you, I suppose. You just neglected to read it and return it.
I don't know if you would have liked it.
So I will thank you not to look at me like that. You know what a hypocrite looks like.
At least you recognize what you are.
It is minorly sketchy that Kate imported a high school senior for a brief affair, but she is not shy about the Indiscretion Sampler Platter.
And, yes, you would have done things to Eileen that bordered on the unspeakable. (The worst would have been falling in love with her, an affliction to which Kate is resistant. You gave her more than she could want of monogamous love for a while.)
But the message on the whole speaks of a different person... no, it doesn't. It is the same person; she just doesn't say that she loves me now. This was a bad example, I think.
No, it is a fine example. Reconcile that the Russophilic sex-enjoyer is a continuation of Katie. She does not say she loves you because you actively misinterpret it, but she does love you.
I'm pretty much upset because Kate having this booty call makes me actually have to think that she can be a sexual being without me.
You don't have to think about it, but your mental illnesses make you perseverate over things that upset you until you have catastrophized them impossibly large.
I dare not even speculate on the amount and quality of sex she has had and loved since you dated. She can be and is a sexual being without you.
And that... it's a lot harder for me to conceive of being one.
Because you are sexually traumatized and are actively making it worse by having sex with Emily when you do not want to.
A month of sex with Jen punctuated by her dumping you for Nick was a punch in your sexual gut, as it were. You felt used and cheapened, though it is irrational you thought Jen put that amount of emotional weight on sex. I doubt she had an interest in anything holding emotional weight.
A lot of you didn't really know me when I was with her, but I had zero sex issues.
Are you fucking with me? Sex issues ruled your relationship. Do you think because your clothes would have dissolved if Kate even suggested it, you were not full of sexual neuroses? You were still processing your emotions about losing your virginity to someone else; had made the frankly stupid decision to internalize Kate's trauma that had nothing to do with you; and could not process your hormones, her psychological reservations (made worse by your madonna/whore complex), your abandonment issues, and her guilt.
Sex was the intensely pure, almost magical act.
A sentiment that Kate would likely vociferously contradict.
It wasn't that much of it wasn't good, but this is gilding the lily to a fatal degree.
Kate having her "friend" over for a week, during New Years, no less, bring her sexuality onto my turf (what do you mean her apartment isn't my turf?! Anywhere close to where I live, work, or go to school is my turf according to the Geneva Chocolate Convention).
Kate's sexuality ceased to be your concern months ago (not a year, for reasons covered in previous responses). She has had more and better sex in New Paltz than you ever will there.
She has duly marked her territory; you will always be the outsider.
It's a lot easier to think that the ex-girlfriend who led you on and who you romantically loved for three years (never mind that we only dated two year and three months) isn't a sexual being outside of you.
It is delusional and well out of date.
Kate is exploring her sexuality and, despite what you think, is being healthier than you are.
Yeah, I acknowledge that she was bed hopping between roommates and likely more when she was away over the summer. I have seen the picture of her nude bathing in the hot spring with Virginia and him. But that was very far away, you see.
You are a strange boy. You know penises still function around your ex, even if they are in the Southwest, right? And that many of her sexual issues loosened when you were no longer in her bed to twist her up?
These are fucked up things to say. This, too, I acknowledge.
Then maybe do not say them.
It I could steal back from her what was taken from me during that interim when we were not together and I couldn't be with anyone else, this would be a different song.
From whom would you steal it? Not Kate. She doesn't have it. She wasted some time and led you away from some women who might have appealed to you, but she didn't steal what you think you are missing--if you could even put to words what that would be.
You chose to decline or estrange several women who would have given you indiscretions if not relationships. Always--always--Kate was not making that decision for you. You made them, then looked to see if she cared. And she usually did not, though she was jealous a few times.
Take ownership of what you feel you lost because you were chucking it at Kate's head.
It isn't as though I want to be with her. And it isn't as though I don't want her to be happy, which actually came as a surprise to me.
You want to be with her still. And, for once, you might want her happy, even though you would not be the one doing it.
I cannot tell you the moment you don't want to be with her any longer. When she moves to the city, surely. When she becomes inconvenient--which is why she was not so much of an issue during the summer--you let her pass.
The woman after Emily waits until she is about to graduate before leaving you for good--though she tries before. That is better (though not for her) because you would have called and urged her to see you otherwise. When she is in Ohio, then France, and then not-New York again, it is so much easier to figure out how to be her friend.
It is not beneath my notice that this person is the ex-partner with whom you are emotionally closest. It is not directly causal, but it is a factor.
we got on the topic of people I would honestly want to be with. I think this had to do with the fact that I look at people and try to be attracted to them to see if they are attractive. It's an experiment and mental exercise.
Maybe this is not the conversation one has with the girlfriend with whom one has complicated feelings?
It is not an experiment or exercise, and it is Emily feeling around for threats--of which there are many more than you admit. A not-inconsiderable part of you is scanning for new threats at which to bat your lashes.
I can't imagine anyone [other than Emily] who I would happily and confidently hunt aliens and ghosts with and also kiss.
I have great news for you about your wife.
Eileen, who I think I will love for a very long time, hopefully forever.
I respect her. Though I know little, I want the best for her--and I think she has received it.
Do I love her? I understand the feelings you have for her and believe she deserves them. They are safer than the other torches you juggle.
Heather. [...] She has been gone for quite a while, though she gave me sagacious advice about the Kate situation last December. [...] I am sorry to say I haven't heard from her since she gave me the good advice.
I can't know that the following is true, but you will eventually come to piece this together.
That sound advice about Kate that goes unstated here? You don't follow it. That is what kills your friendship. I forget the details of the conversation you will have on instant messenger years from your writing this, but the core of it was that you drained her with your constant bipolarity when it came to Kate and your inability to hear Heather. She needed you out of her life.
Now, this is how you will eventually come to interpret it. As unworthy as you felt of someone as good as Heather--she is so classically lovely and poised that you felt like a troll beside her--you could not process the hope that she might find you attractive. She may have. You spoke to this wry Audrey Hepburn, who might have burned a little for you despite your flaws and only complained about fooling around with your ex. You frustrated and disappointed her, hurting her repeatedly in the process. She could not suffer to see you be so stupid again, so she preserved herself by cutting off contact.
I can promise the former paragraph only. Even now, I struggle a little with the idea that Heather may have had feelings for you, but I want to kick you if you had the chance to kiss Heather and passed it up to fixate on Kate yet again.
I just searched the internet for Heather. She is a doctoral theater student researching hauntings and the paranormal. Given the picture on the page where I found that, she has retained her elegance.
Revised: I would like to kick you hard enough to break bones.
KC. [...] Confidently attractive in a form some would think awkward. [...] I was shocked to find she was as big a fan of mine as I was of her. We became great friends and talked on the phone occasionally. Katie was quite irritated and became jealous (one of the only times she was jealous). I have not seen KC in years either, through I try to give her a call every Christmas break without success.
I am a social media friend with KC, but I could nearly guarantee this did not come with any conversation.
She is a mother in France. According to an internet search, she was a copy editor at some point and, in college, was once interviewed about avoiding a testosterone-poisoned bar. She was in an orchestra, but I couldn't say what she played--I can't imagine percussion, but her ghost in my head would look good with a woodwind or any stringed instrument that requires a bow. I could not tell you another detail about her life, and she has not updated the profile to which I have access in so long that it is all irrelevant.
The two of you drifted, unlike Heather. I do not think you did anything to annoy her. I do not believe she had any feelings for you other than friendly--in fact, I recall her besotted by her boyfriend then.
The odd thing was the reaction I held toward shirts given to me by Kate. Most of them I had not worn in over a year and frankly couldn't much fathom the situation wherein this would seem reasonable. [...] Two, they are too small to suit my billowy tastes. Three, I have absolutely no interest in being attractive to Kate and no one else ever expressed much interest in the clothing.
Those shirts likely looked better on you than any of your oversized clothing. Why you cannot be convinced to dress for your frame is criminal. You are so penned in by this idea of who your interests should make you.
A thrifting trip would do you a world of good if you brought people who would keep you from trying to look like a seven-foot-tall vampire hit by a shrink ray that did not affect clothing.
She continued that, though I wore the clothing of a (and I hate using these words in reference to myself because I hoped to have left such distinctions in high school. Maybe earlier. I am literally getting irked writing them) "prep," "goth," "freak," "hippy," "normal," etc. I was none of the above and I was all. I was relatively comfortable in any of my clothes, the physical extensions of the facets of my personality
You are branching out. If you just reduced the size of the things you wear by two, you would be good to go.
2001.12.25
I remembered how my younger brother hit me in the face with a hammer on a Christmas Eve over ten years ago and I had to get stitches. I was rather irked when the doctor offered the offending brother a lollypop afterward, while I lay, numb, on an ER cot.
When you were in the bath as a toddler, Dan hit you over the other eye with a rubber tomahawk with an unnecessarily sharp blade. I only remember being bundled in a bloody towel and rushed to the car. Nothing else of that experience remained.
Your brothers did not like your eyebrows intact.
My father attends Christmas Mass, but had done so alone for many years. The last time we went with him, someone tried to break into our house. That sent a pretty clear message to my family.
Yes, Elijah, a member of Dan's crew. That is a detail you should include. Elijah also once drank half a bottle of vodka and suffered from aggravated alcohol poisoning on the floor.
He was not welcome in your home.
The night before, I had stayed up too damned late. Such was not my original intention, [...] I will have to confess the real reason I slept so little.
I am cutting out a lot of your being obsessive and anxious in a clinically significant way.
But you were. You could not sleep because there were things to be done even though you knew the consequences of not sleeping, and none of the things were pressing--you did not need to clean your room in the middle of the night. You were uncomfortable about what you were doing but could not stop it.
You once were on a brief break between substitute teaching and tutoring, so you tried to sync your Palm Pilot. It wouldn't work; you knew you needed to get to the tutoring center, and you almost cried because you couldn't stop trying to get it to sync. It didn't need to. You didn't need the Palm Pilot at the tutoring center. However, you couldn't stop yourself.
It is the same reason that you always had injured fingers. You could not stop picking at them, even when you knew you shouldn't, because they would get bloody. Once I got on meds, that urge vanished all but overnight. Right now, I can't imagine that impulse or why you put up with it.
Yet again, therapy and meds would have vastly improved your life.
Okay, she got me a blank book handmade by Buddhist monks in Tibet. In this book, she wrote numerous poems, none her own that I have found.
I cannot speak to (and doubt) the Tibetan monk claim, but this sounds like an excellent gift and the sort of thing I would keep. It must still exist somewhere among my books.
2001.12.26
It is possible that many girls at this juncture of life are not interested in what a guy like Zack brings into a relationship.
You may overestimate what men your age--and Zack in particular--bring to relationships. He has much to process before he is the relationship type. Otherwise, he leans closer to the "love 'em and leave 'em" archetype. He has a rakish demeanor that allows him to get away with it.
However, judging by the other girls he stated had shown interest in him, it is certain that a goodly number of quality lasses are sensible enough to want a relationship with Zack.
You wrote "a relationship." What you should mean is "to have sex."
One girl, whom I admit to being slightly smitten with when I was in A View from the Bridge, evidently has displayed attraction toward him (flailing neck plumage and whatnot).
You were in A View from the Bridge? That's not how I remember it. You were crew for it. You may have had a required walk-on part, but--and I am not the least bit facetious here--I cannot imagine what it was or when it happened. I recall you were doing well in the audition until they asked you to sing, at which it could not have been plainer that you would not be cast, crow-throated as you are.
Emily insisted that, as I was twenty-one and in a bar, I should purchase my first legal alcoholic beverage. This was not a nice bar, erring on the side of seedy.
It is just a bar. I don't know what you expect them to be.
As such, the girly drinks (daiquiris, mimosas, hard lemonade, etc.) that I might actually want to drink were not available to me.
You do like your alcohol as close to not-alcohol as you can get it.
Only a mimosa sounds at all appealing on your list. My favorite alcohol is sipping my wife's hard cider (of which I drink single-digit milliliters) or kissing it from their lips.
I was very conscious of what I was doing, examining my coordination, speech, and bodily sensations to see what drinking felt like. Clearly I am not the sort that it would be fun to get drunk with, as I had zero interest in losing myself.
Yes, you don't sound fun.
That's not to say I've ever been drunk, though. I'm just less of a prig about it. I think it is fun to be around social drinkers, as it usually suggests that something entertaining is occurring, a concert or party.
I was honestly surprised how good Dave and his band were.
Dave is super cool.
I have no further commentary on this point.
Emily verbally thwapped me for getting entranced by the female singers' song. I told her she could either make them stop singing or overpower them. Failing that, she would have to accept that I liked hearing women sing.
Years from now, Emily will want to have sex with a woman who asked to have her name scrubbed from this site. Emily suggests trying to date her together, which doesn't work for a few reasons. One is that you don't feel sexually or romantically interested in the woman. You agree that this is appealing (see also: your relationship issues with Emily).
Emily takes you to this woman's show, where she sings folk rock while playing a guitar. You might breathe heavily and salivate a bit because the right feminine singing hacks into your brain for reasons beyond me.
Emily is incensed that you, for once, are as keen on this woman as she is. It only lasts until the woman stops singing, but it is enough that Emily is irritated with you for hours.
This woman comes to utterly hate you, the exact reasons for which are nebulous but surely inflamed by Emily's storytelling and seeing a threat (that was never there).