*a colossal waste of time (maybe)
*training completed and two days of comparably successful days without the hedge of a monitor praising my correctly executed duties and admonishing and explaining my shortcomings (although I did not have a formal invigilator those two days the rest of the kitchen staff were keen on stepping in and correcting my steps when I would misstep or would find myself out of my depth in any of the numerous ways available to me to do so)
*the waste of time seemed like it couldn't be helped
*I have told people I do not have the requisite credentials to have been offered this job at the restaurant
*I couldn't sleep perhaps because of the nap I took or because I was so caught up in the engrossing narrative of Breaking Bad that there seemed no compelling reason to halt
*I believe I have told people there is no surface reason I should have been offered this position in order to persuade them that I am employed in a more creative and enticing occupation than I actually am
*it didn't hit me that I had spent far more time watching 48 min. episodes of a TV show back-to-back-to-back than was reasonable when the black sky became a deep, morning blue-green
*in proffering up this exaggeration I have disguised myself as a modest vegan cook while my conscience belies my actual state - an insecure sycophant who is given much yet ungratefully desires more, on principle
*my ears kept popping as though I were changing altitudes and I did not know that I was watching the show at a volume grossly inappropriate for 3 a.m. until a neighbor rang the doorbell
*the position I hold in the kitchen is a challenging one, to be sure, but it is not as glamorous as the one I have wittingly expanded it into with slight manipulations of descriptions of my duties I give to people who want success for me and whom I do not want to disappoint
*at first I did not know it was my doorbell because I have only lived here for a little less than two months and I have not heard the bell before but I did turn down the stereo to be able to her the buzz of the bell better so I could figure out what it was exactly and as I did this the intermittent bell ceased buzzing and I understood what happened
*in very flimsy defense of myself, the job I do actually hold is quite difficult to describe because the structure of this kitchen is very different than nearly any other comparable restaurant and my position does not exist in those other kitchens, yet I took this more as an opportunity to cloud my friends' and family's perception of what I did so as to appear more prosperous than an accurate explication might not convey and in doing this I, effectively, rob myself and my loved ones the true joy of celebrating something that actually is and actually is good in myriad ways on its own merits but now seems tarnished in the yellow, caustic light of my fabrication
*it was over ninety degrees in my apartment most of the night last night as I watched Breaking Bad and lounged on the sofa in my underwear and after throwing on a couple pieces of clothing so I could go to the door and apologize and give a face to the explosions and screaming my neighbors must have heard through the walls; no one was at the door and when I stripped back down to stay cool I put in earbuds and began a new episode, the tenth of the night, and I felt ashamed

*watched Sherman's March with John
*there is a shot of a statue of Sherman on a horse trailing after a figure referred to as "winged victory" and the director, Ross Elwee, does a voice over quoting Sherman as saying, "I suppose we know what it means to be war famous now. It means you die on a battlefield and have your name spelled wrong in the paper."
*John made vegan brownies (thanks John)

Today

* finished a long art project that probably will amount to little more than an exercise in patience and inking

* tried to download Samsung printer driver but failed

* couldn't print off resume

* walked to MET grocery store and paid way too much for cooking spray, tortilla chips and salsa

* made a couple people happy on twitter

* watched an episode of GIRLS with John

* made some curry fries

* ate them with a sandwich

* found an interesting thing in a notebook and posted it on my blog - my real blog

This very day.

*the AC window unit works and Marissa turned it off this morning when she saw that I was bundling tighter than it seems I should. Thank you Marissa

*had oatmeal with golden raisins, walnuts and maple syrup. Marissa had the same

*I read more Are You My Mother, the Alison Bechdel memoir that I feel an inexplicable compulsion to finish before moving on to another activity (too much)

*we walked to some baby clothing stores in search of a present for a newborn belonging to a friend Marissa hasn't spoken to in five months, apparently.

*we went to three of these stores - actually, come to think of it there were only two baby stores and two dress boutiques. Marissa was looking for a dress to wear to an outdoor wedding and some very specific sandals

*we went to Brooklyn Industries and I am going to be applying for a part time position at their Green Pointe location

*apparently they like former Urban Outfitters employees, of which I am

*we went to a shoe store, found the correct sandals but not a proper fitting pair in the desired color

*we left that store with nothing

*we went to the Park Slope Food Coop and I wore a visitor's sticker. So I walked around and silently pointed at things as Marissa walked several steps behind me and put the selected items into a cart

*we called a car to come pick us and our groceries up

*the car was nine dollars plus a three dollar tip. So the car was twelve dollars

*I peeled some beets and kept dropping them in the garbage due to their slippery exterior. Well, they started out dry but as they are peeled their juices are allowed to run and the whole process is complicated by this. Also, everything turns purple - which is great

*we roasted the suckers. actually they're roasting right now

May 29, 2012 addendum

Earlier I forgot to mention that Jasper waited at the window of his mother's apartment for half an hour for me.

Upon entering their apartment Nina told me she loves me glasses. "Those glasses are your trademark. You'll get rich with those glasses!"

What a disastrous blog. Here's redemption: a mere listing of things, external - as I am given to explore the internal to a solipsistic fault - so mundane and dully circadian some augmented pattern will surface and I will have what I need. What I need being a script of these things proving their reality and perhaps, later on, their validity. More and more I am certain that the latter is always, at least initially, engendered by the former. Nothing has pertinence unless it actually is. A thing without substance is not a thing at all. So establishing veracity to beget value is the goal here.

May 29th, 2012

 I believe my Spotify account renewed itself today. I don't need this music service for another month but since I have already paid the ten dollars I will keep it for one more month. Even though I suspect this will be the poorest month of time in Brooklyn and therefore ten dollars is much more important to me I like having the possibility of listening to basically anything I wish on my iPhone. I bought Alison Bechdel's second memoir, Are You My Mother, at Barnes & Noble a few days ago - Friday, I believe it was because that is the day Marissa and John returned from the island off the coast of Puerto Rico. This volume of Bechdel's life concerns her mother as the first installment was preoccupied with her father. I had never been so engrossed in a graphic (or traditional) memoir mostly regarding adults before reading Fun Home and I am once again equally enthralled. I want Alison to be my sister. Or at least my Miss Havisham. I'm not sure she'd appreciate anyone regarding her as such but perhaps the literary reference would quell her misgivings. (too much editorializing - nip this in the bud. Use bullet points or * if necessary)

*Lost lucrative job with Ian
*gained possible job with unnamed mother with three-year-old son
*got in touch with Lynn
*Lynn imparted secret about Valerie, Ian's mother
*Cut strawberries that I assumed wouldn't last long but now I worry they will spoil for sure because there are too many to eat
*John installed AC unit, dropped a nut four stories down, recovered the nut and we all laughed about it (droppin' nuts all over town sorts of jokes)
*Finished reading a short play last night John recommended. Circle Mirror Transformation sounds like something I could relate to. And it was. (again too much opining, don't use proper sentence structure to ensure list format is unbroken)
*hope coming out here was a good idea (DAMN IT!)

news, news. on and on

I needed some good news today so I opened up a fortune cookie that was sitting amongst my coffee stuff. It was probably about 3 months old and tasted pretty awful which was really disappointing. I opened up the paper slip and read "The stock market may be your ticket to success." Perfect.

I had spent most of the day trying to sketch ideas for the first few pages of the first issue of my first comic and I was not gaining much ground so I needed a tiny little pick-me-up from a magical cookie. I had been reading this blog I found called 3eanuts. They take the typical four panel comic by Charles Schultz and remove the final panel leaving the characters in their existential misery. "Despair pervades all" as they put it. I read all twelve pages that were posted because in this format I surprisingly identified even more closely with these poor souls. And that is quite a feat because Peanuts has been a driving force in my life for many, many years and to somehow give it a seemingly new life, well, the accomplishment cannot be understated. But anyway, I believe it put me in somewhat of a dour mood. The cookie's supposedly hopeful message merely joined the party.

Spring. Come. I have places to walk to and I want to be able to enjoy the journey a little more than I do right now.

brandon

memories an' shit

I love memorabilia as bookmarks. Right now my place in my copy of Sarah Vowell's essay collection "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" is being saved by my ticket to "An Evening With Garrison Keillor." In W.E.B. Du Bois' "The Souls of Black Folk" is a "World Famous Cable Car" ticket from my trip to San Francisco last summer. I always keep these little bits of ephemera but until very recently I have never figured out what to do with them beyond keeping them in small, decorative boxes. Of course my little boxes are full of things that won't fit in a book quite so snuggly, such as gift shop shot glasses, old t-shirts from parks I have camped in with my parents that are far too big (or too small), and a small chunk of the Blues Brother's vehicle, the Bluesmobile, that I accidentally broke off when my family was visiting Universal Studios many, many years ago.

Speaking of traveling, I have thought about writing a travel essay entitled something like "places I have pooped" because having IBS I have pooped more places than not. Any sort of environmental change engages my illness so needless to say when I travel I defecate. Well, it's an idea anyway. I have found it is always good to get all ideas out so they don't disappear. But perhaps it is best to not write down these ideas on a public blog. Oh well, I am not into editing these posts so it is going to remain. And I will be the one laughing all the way to the bank when the Travel Channel picks up my travel column that spun off of my essay and turns it into a hit T.V. series. So take that, sayers of nay.

a joke

I just heard this joke as the Ice Breaker on the podcast "Dinner Party Download" from NPR. This joke made me laugh louder than I have in quite some time. I frightened JennyAnyDots who sunk her claws into the bed and puffed her tail up. So here's the joke.

"So Jesus is walking around Heaven checking everybody out. Everyone is all blissed out with their harps and halos and such but there is this one fellow who is sitting all alone with his head in his hands and he is bawling his eyes out.

'Hey, hey there.' Jesus said to the guy. 'This is Heaven, you know. It's the place of perpetual joy and, well, you made it so we can't have you crying. Kills the vibe and such.'

'Oh, I didn't mean to cause any trouble. It's just that back on the earth I was a lowly carpenter and I had a son who was in the profession with me but when he was around 30-years-old he left telling me he had a mission to accomplish. So he went off into the wilderness and I never saw him again. I was really hoping I would be able to see my boy once I got here but I have looked everywhere and I haven't found him.'

Then Jesus exclaims, 'Father!'

And the man stands up and yells, 'PINOCCHIO!'"

Gets me every time.

wretching

I helped a friend move about a week ago and when we were finished her new roommate was in the living room sitting with her laptop. We came around to her side and she unpaused the episode of "Californication" she had been watching.

I thought about this today because I just spent two lovely days in Lincoln and the moment I began walking up my front steps I began to cry. I tingled all over and my heart began beating powerfully against whatever bone and cartilage is between it and the rest of the universe (and honestly that space seems so profoundly expansive most days but filled with nothing but air and grief). I walked all the way up to my apartment and I sobbingly fed my cat and put my coat on the rack and used the restroom and then I sat on what was once our bed and I wept bitterly for almost twenty minutes. I got up and paced up and down the hallway - into the kitchen, through the hallway, into the office, back through the hallway so on so forth for about half an hour. The whole time I cried so hard I was squealing and snorting. I screamed at God. "What the fuck am I supposed to do now? I can't be alone." So I texted a few friends I knew were there when I needed them but no one answered or they couldn't hang out just then. "Why the fuck should I be alone?
I've been alone before. I've been miserable before."

And then I remembered the show my friend's roommate was watching and I remembered how what happened in the couple minutes I stayed to watch struck me so deeply I could barely function the rest of the night. I drove from the house to an empty cathedral parking lot that was nearby and I wrote down every word from the scene I just saw because the whole thing was coursing through my mind very, very loudly. It is somewhat cheesy just reading it but I was in such a tender place it sliced through me with ease.

Here's the scene:
David Duchovney and his ex-wife were discussing "what went wrong" for them. He has a pretty quick answer. Seemed like a rehearsed answer.

"I would say we loved each other too much. And I think we made the mistake of getting it right the first time, and that put an insane amount of pressure on us to keep it going. And…we buckled. You know what I miss most about – well, aside from our daughter, of course. I miss your smell."

"That’s it?"

"When you left, I couldn’t wash the sheets because I didn’t want to lose that completely — you. And it fucked me up for a long time because I would wake up and I’d smell you and I’d think you were there. And that would — my heart would break all over again. I think that’s why I go in for the kiss all the time and then cry myself back to sleep."

I fled immediately after he said that. As I walked down the back few steps I cried uncontrollably conceding the horrible truth that David Duchovney had gotten it indisputably correct. I still haven't washed the sheets and I still haven't taken down the water color paintings from the kitchen. Or the pheasant feather she picked up and carried as we walked through Boyer Chute - the last thing we did as a real couple, together. I am so stuck. I am so bound. I feel no freedom and no peace.

on deaf ears

I discovered this amazing curriculum for teaching comic book writing. Drawing Words and Writing Pictures was conceptualized and written by the two series editors for Best American Comics, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. I really want to some day teach this at the downtown library possibly or at the amazing Kent Bellows Studio here in Omaha. I also stumbled across this amazing comic book store in Los Angeles called Meltdown where these four dudes, who work in "the industry" and have a successful movie discussion podcast called Down In Front, are doing this live DVD commentary on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Holy shit. No kidding, this is one of the best ideas I have ever heard.

I am trying to rack my brains on how to make something like this work in Omaha. We have the film community (speaking of which the Omaha Film Festival is happening as we speak), we have witty and gregarious folk who could easily do a credible and entertaining commentary, and we have people who would attend such a thing. Oh wait. That last one. There's the rub. Getting people to break their bar routine or attend something that isn't heralded as the chicest event since last year's fashion week is like pulling all their teeth out and then punching them in the face repeatedly while pressing both knees into their chest while they writhe on the ground, bloodied and without companions. Where are your accusers? Right here. This city has got a serious problem supporting the talent within its own blocks.

You can read my wrap up of the Encyclopedia Show for Omahype.com here and see that even something as brilliant as that is not worth most Omahans' time. Tragic. Simply another reason why Omaha sometimes makes one ponder the usefulness of one's efforts. It seems there has to be great amounts of spectacle and pomp to gather a crowd. I feel as though grassroots doesn't work quite as well here anymore. I want to be proven wrong. This year, or maybe this year and next year, will be the years of accomplishment and movement. ONWARD!

I can't reconcile these things

I needed some juice last night so naturally I stopped quickly at the grocery store while driving home. I have been mostly vegan-ish for nearly three-ish years now and during that time every grocery store I enter I immediately gravitate toward the organic/healthy/nutty aisle or aisles depending on how progressive said grocer is. This allows me to bypass all of the synthetic, all of the treated and all of the lesser (read: affordable) fare and feel good about myself or at least about the things that will soon be absorbed into the make up of my biology.

I stood before the cage-free eggs and tofurky deli slices contemplating if three dollars for juice is still worth it. In this section you get your full range of nutrients and you pay dearly for each and every one.

I had been craving some R.N. Knudsen apple or pomegranate cocktail but I was halted at the Odwalla/Naked case. There was among those usual brands a juice I knew from a previous time. Bolthouse Farms juice. I remembered when I had first come upon these Bolthouse Farms drinks. My college roommate "turned me on" to them because he was insanely, possibly artificially fit. (I never found real evidence to corroborate my hunches about how he attained such an inhumanly perfect set of abs). On one trip to the grocery store together around 2 possibly 3 a.m. he picked up this small, green plastic bottle that had an unappetizing mixture of baby poop and Missouri River in it. I asked him why he was examining something so indisputably putrid. He spun the bottle around and showed me the Nutrition Facts label and I had never seen so many items listed beneath the second bold line, you know, where the vitamins and other actually healthy components are listed. I also had never seen so many three-hundred percents and four-hundred percents concerning food contents.

So I waxed nostalgic to the point of exhaustion and while still in this state of mind I glanced upon something that swelled my heart three-hundred percent. And it broke me utterly. Granola. Bear Naked brand granola cereal. I had bought some the last time Melissa and I went to Ohio and my parents' lake house in Indiana. I ate it as a snack the eleven hour trip home. For months after Melissa and I talked and laughed and felt good about how that was one of, if not the most pleasant trip we had ever taken together. This granola symbolized for me everything good and perfect about Melissa’s gift-likeness to me and our marriage to each other. I nearly fell on the floor.

This was an involuntary association and it should have been a rapturous one but even this random granola treat grabbed me by my unusually stretchy cheeks and shook me vigorously as it recounted details of what had been lost, what has left me and what will probably never be again.

I didn't ask to be reminded of all this. I am no glutton for punishment. I have felt more than my fair share of pain. Like I said, this glimpse at the minute losses I am suffering was strictly involuntary and quite unwelcome as it interrupted an otherwise pleasant evening.

These are the things that tell me I have not attained resolution and I have not "gotten over" her. Even at my most focused times of resolute "I'm moving on" mindfulness some lightening always strikes my brain and reminds me I cannot forget. Or perhaps that I can't not remember. This is the madness that breaks my heart because if this continues for the rest of my life I will never have a healthy relationship again. I fear I will wake up in the middle of the night craving Melissa and I will see my new lover next to me and I will feel even more despair than I do now. I fear this is a possibility because these unsought recollections have not remotely lessened. I know it has only been four months but how fucking long does it take? I hate being a slave to Melissa or the memory of our happiness. I hate it so, so much. Am I so weak that I cannot achieve peace and freedom? Is that even correct to say? Is it achievable or is it granted? If it is granted then how should I ask for it? I want peace. I want freedom. I want peace.

absence and fondness

This has astounding purpose. There is a reason for this as opposed to other ways to communicate as opposed to other ways to process as opposed to other ways to fulfill a need as opposed to other ways to survive something heinously unrecognizable as surmountable. This is necessary.

Onward, certainly. Because this is about me but in being so it most assuredly is about infinitely more or at least contains that inexhaustible nature and its characters and narrative in an infinitesimal corner of the internet. All that to say, there is a lot going on here and pretty much no one notices which is almost beside the point.

As much as I wanted this to exist less as a working out of things and more of a way to showcase projects I am working on it has evolved into a public display of my eagerness to know myself and be known and the journey.

This is the dynamic human spirit, no?

onward

In order to start channeling this blog in a more positive direction and to be more consistent with my proclamations of being more concerned about others than myself I want to make everyone aware of this cause Change.org is pushing:

With the phenomenal support of 107,053 people from 163 countries -- the most popular campaign ever launched on Change.org -- a tiny group of lesbian activists in South Africa just scored a major victory, taking "corrective rape" from an unspoken epidemic to a national discussion. Now we need your signature to reach 150,000 and crank up the heat on the South African government.

Reblogged from Supergrrrl

This petition is incredibly close to meeting the aforementioned goal of 150,000 signatures. This is grievous and I hadn't heard a thing about it until today. Pass this new knowledge along to anyone you can.

on loving love (love love love love love love love)

I was deadly serious when I had previously mentioned with great conviction I was no longer going to write about Melissa, our division or anything pertaining to those things. That declaration seemed like a fine idea and a terrific way to move on. It wasn't a bad idea but it certainly wasn't a good way to move on in any respect. Despair set in even more vehemently after deciding to "be over her." Voluntary repression hardly ever engenders relief. Any therapist worth their salt will tell you that.

My apartment, which I often still refer to as "our" apartment, is full to bursting with relics of our truest love. There is scarcely an item in this place that does not have Melissa's literal and phantasmic fingerprints layered upon them. I put on a bandanna yesterday and it smelled just like her. It smelled the way she smelled when we crawled in the grass next to the pond at my school when we had known each other only a matter of hours. And it smelled the way she smelled when she came over after Thanksgiving to gather her belongings from our bedroom. Needless to say, I donned the bandanna and cried into the linguini I made to eat alone. JennyAnyDots, our cat, ran under the table to hide because I began to stumble from sobbing so vigorously.

If I deny these things I am doing myself a grave injustice and I am lying to Melissa. In truth, I do not want her to think I am doing well. I am not. I do not want her to think that everything is copacetic and I will endure. Because most of the time I am not sure I will. I want to fully know what has been lost here and I want Melissa to know the same and be able to grieve it. By pretending I am healing, stable and sane I rob her of the chance to feel sad about what is taking place. That seems dangerous to me because it could shrink her heart. I believe in her heart and the immense possibilities of it. I love her dearly and to deprive her this opportunity to grow as a human with the mighty capacity to feel deep loss and love and fully understand these things no matter how much of it comes out in pain is not a loving thing for me to do. And I desperately love love. Nothing gives me more anguish than when I see love being put aside or disrespected. By myself especially because then I have to deal with the fact of my hypocrisy which is always bound to appear but is always so terrifying to face.

"Don't beat yourself up"

I have heard this from a great number of my friends in the past few months. Usually it is followed by some form of an encouragement telling me I should focus on myself or get to know who I truly am.

I have always been introspective to a fault. I have always been well aware of my blunders and even more aware of my achievements. I know my limits, my destructive tendencies and the extent of my abilities and traits at least in relation to the people I measure these things against. I am brutally self aware and have been so as long as I can remember.

I know what part my actions have played in my misery. And I am dreadfully remorseful for these things. I am not beating myself up. I am taking responsibility and attempting to amend what my foolishness has broken. For my part I apologize.

As far as what is left now that my marriage is dissolving I am attempting to sit in the middle of the floor of my bedroom and pull all the pieces toward me and then chase other things. The way I saw it I didn't need any of the other shit because I had someone to live for. Perhaps the Christian perspective (which is the one I wholeheartedly attempt to ascribe to) would tell me I should have lived for Christ and all these things would be added unto me. Perhaps but it was my solemn act of worship to God for what was given to me in a loving, beautiful, intelligent woman. And I truly thought that nothing but death would separate us. I was content. I was alive. But it's going to be a smooth death and my heart has a million miles to go.

"We are the sun, we are the sun, we are the sun, we are the sun" goddammit

because of my friend's phone call

What the hell is happening to our humanity? I am and always will be entirely convinced a crucial aspect of what makes us alive is our living in communion with others like us and unlike us and the ability to act in a manner that is more supportive and useful to the group than to the individual even if that community consists of only two people (even especially if the community is two people). That differential is what sets us apart from a stone that has no relationship to the craggy hillside it finds itself on other than the fact that they both exist in the same general space. But they can do nothing for one another. The stone cannot decide to humble itself and not roll down into the grassy knoll where it will surely be more cushioned and possibly more safe from corrosive elements but instead remain with the craggy, windy, practically barren hilltop because this stone adds a beauty and uniqueness to something otherwise incomplete without its presence. This will not happen. Perhaps an earthquake (or as I heard on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me this morning: a dreaded hurriquake) could shift the stone to a new location but this sadness would not be so severe because this is the way of things. Anyway, none of that would be sad at all. Stones and hills don't feel. And that is it exactly.

We do feel and we have a choice to live to create unity and share and cooperate and refuse to participate in anything or with anyone desiring division and selfishness and exclusion and destruction. Remain angry so you do not inadvertently allow evil but stay in love so you may intentionally create life and bring what is separate together.

unavoidable obviousness

I finally saw 127 Hours tonight. Good God that movie was relentlessly enthralling. My wonderful friend, Rachel, joined me. Immediately, once the movie ended, I turned to her and told her I have not felt such a affinity for other movie viewers I have been in a theater with in a very, very long time.

Terrific feeling. Terrific to feel at all. I must admit my time in Ohio was not the most sensational as far as being emotional tactile. My family and friends did a mighty job attempting to draw me out and provide me with a great deal of experiences to help me cope, grieve and progress. But, and this is no fault of theirs, all this effort was sadly not a suitable rival for the unparalleled numbness the unavoidable obviousness of the void my lover's absence created. I certainly collected memories I will cherish for eternity on end but my hopeful intent of relaxing away my anxieties and coming to grips with some internal demons was not realized. I did return with an incredibly valuable revelation, however. I understand more fully and unmistakably that Omaha is my home. I came out here to build one and now I see that I accomplished just that. At this point it looks and feels a far cry from what I thought I set out to establish but it is here and it is sound.

In an almost identical manner to the way Aron Ralston gingerly/greedily sucked water from his nalgene while he was lodged in the crevice with his boulder I am lapping up the times I am sharing with my friends. They are affording me such life giving moments that feel so perpetually sustaining. When I leave their presence I no longer feel so parched or chapped. When I depart I know I can last until the next time I get a chance to take in great gulps or even shallow slurps of this incredible cloud of friends I have been granted. Luckily I have more than a 150 ml supply of friendship beverage unlike Mr. Franco/Ralston.

re:

"I never went back... The longer I was away, the less I wanted to return and see how small the place must have grown, how sparse the stars, how perfectly ordinary the tract houses, how trim that mysterious house, the jungle of a yard. And even if I managed to come at just the right time of year, and the neighbor's pear tree still stood, and I managed to find a late-season pear in an early snow - would the voices of my friends come wandering down the dark road, calling my name as I bent down to claim it?" - Elizabeth Gonzales (from Half Beat from The Greensboro Review)

I certainly reconnected but I cannot say for sure it made much difference. I think what I know now is that I do not care to waste time re-ing anything. Reconnecting, remembering, rehashing, redoing. Except for reconciling. If it is broken then there is true necessity for healing, redemption, reconstitution. But otherwise forward motion is all that counts. Recognizing the state of these relationships with my family and oldest friends (and newest friends that feel old) and taking them into new realms and to new heights of honesty and integrity and intensity and fruitfulness.

I have felt what I feared I would feel returning to Cincinnati. Every time I have pulled into the neighborhood of my adolescence I have felt the same thing I felt in high school. There is a pull and a voice telling me to leave. "You should not be here. There is nothing ultimately good for you here and you cannot grow. Leave not as an escape but as actual movement. To stay is to stagnate and you must go on." I believe that voice because the longer I am here the more I feel as though my passions are evaporating and my heart is regressing.

Not that it is bad for me to be here for short stints nor that my parents have not attempted to build a home that would foster an environment of great and mighty achievement for us four boys. For this moment, however, when I am most confused, lonely and in need of solidarity encompassing me the unsettled commotion this place offers is unmooring in ways I don't need right now. But steps had to be taken over these last few days and difficult things needed to be said and heard. This winter has been my time to live uncomfortably because for the time being there is no consistent comfort for me.

I am very unsure of what is reliable right now and what will not crumble under my weight when I try to use it to support myself. It seems most everything is slipping away extraordinarily quickly, especially my trust in constants and anything or anyone who claims to be thus. I am more skeptical than ever and therefore even more alone because I don't trust myself to any greater extent than anything or anyone else. Perhaps I am about to embark on a stage of life involving imminent commitment issues. This has never been the case for me since everyone I have tried to commit to has abandoned me when I asked something of them that seemed reasonable to me at the time and as I consider each circumstance now, still rings very justified and menial in certain respects. I was never the one who had to be convinced commitment and persistence were possible and positive. There have only been three people I have sustained what in my young life could be considered long term relationships and none of them stuck around when I had wishes of my own that would cost them something that I always assumed was slight compared to what I thought they should be willing to offer in a relationship such as ours. Anyway, I am having a hard time seeing myself as lovely or lovable and this trip has not done much to quell these feelings. I hoped it would. On some level. I just feel more motivated to "go out and get mine" but this is mostly spurred on by anger and self inflicted indignity. I want to conquer my corner of the world but only to make noise and be noticed and that is never satisfying. If I am truly honest with myself I actually just want it all to come to me. I was talking with my youngest brother, Jarrod, and I realized I have never been pursued by anyone. No one has ever taken such an interest in me without my initiation that they began doing things to secure my affection. I have done that for multiple people abundant amounts of times to no avail. I am alone and I am partnerless. I am learning to wait without expectation or bated breath. I am learning to breathe and exhale prayers. I will be heard and I will be found.

At the end of nothing

It has come to my attention that I was never loved. There was scarcely a mite of care to muster during the last days of a one-sided, fruitless and aside from just getting two people on to another portion of their life, utterly pointless relationship.

At this moment I am not devastated by that thought. It is more freeing than it previously was. For my part, I did everything I could to care for the crippled horse of our relationship while it was simultaneously being shot in the head and kicked in the throat.

I have hope that I am not unlovable. I still sense a great deal of love within me that is more than pleased to be bestowed upon another. The fact of this spark not being snuffed out and merely flickering even when being huffed and puffed upon mercilessly gives me great hope that I will be able to find myself at some point loved in return as well. I will fully believe it when I see it but I have faith in its existence.

So without further ado I am altering the direction I have been recently taking this blog. I don't give a rat's ass about discussing Melissa any longer. Writing about her has run its course for me and I am extremely weary of it. I have more vital concerns to attend to and I refuse to chase a friendship that would clearly end up no different than the marriage only to a lesser and more stupid extent. I have joy and dreams to strive for. I have traveling and writing and living and loving and praying to get on with. I devote myself and my public writings to this end. This weekend in Lincoln was a beautiful foundation for a life much more well lived.