planning to fail is obviously not failing to plan

I wish it wasn't cold because the field across the street looks very inviting in the late morning sunshine.

I used to walk to this part of town from the northern side of midtown all the time. I did it bymyself. I would nearly always offer an invitation to melissa to join me and also try very hard to make it convenient for her but I believe there were really only a few times I made the really beautiful walk with my partner. I wish I had had a dog during those times to walk with me and I know that sounds much worse than I mean it but much like my adoring cat, Jenny Any Dots, a dog loves her kind friend without reservation and with foolish abandon. There is a journal drawn by Nikki McClure called "Things to Make and Do." It has divisions based on different verbs such as dream, create, hope, and the like. On the first page of the plan section she wrote "Make a mistake." I pondered that for an exceedingly long time before I began to understand the nature of regret and failure in light of that phrase. Especially being under the heading of "plan." To be sure I never, ever planned for my life to end up how it is now. The most intriguing aspect of the last five years of my life is that for the first time when something catastrophic (or nearly so in some cases) has happened to me I can't trace events back to one or several dimwitted decisions I made. I am out of control and I washed up on what appears to be a God-forsaken bank that is more stone than sand and there is no place to lay my head and rest.


Certainly no one is an island but I feel as though I have been stranded on one wishing rather to actually be one than on one. For what can an island be but and island and therefore has supreme ability to be content. But what of the lonely inhabitant who has no claims and has no identity? What of him? What of me?

That's why

Sometimes I have tiny fantasies that people are sending each other links to my blog saying, "hey, you should check this site out. It's just a dude whose wife recently ditched him and he just talks about pain and shit and it's really depressing but in like a Woody Allen Manhattan sort of way. You know tragic but hilarious." I also fantasize that my parents read my blog and know that I use foul language: the unacknowledged moral crime in my family. Every one of us has a dirty mouth(except my father who is thoroughly pure) but since my mother is mostly blissfully and willfully ignorant of this we never mention it and we all tame our tongues around her. She inquired one time about something my brother wrote on the internet where he said fuck several times or something equally shameful. "Do you use language like that?" My youngest brother had recently visited me in Omaha so our colorful conversations were fresh in my mind. "Well, I'll put it like this, when I get together with my brothers we all tend to get rather salty." This brother I get salty with is now engaged to be married to a lovely girl with her masters. He is 21. Mazel Tov.

Anyway, I need to find new contexts for my pain. Or at least for the painer. I, the painee, need to submit her to a series of experimental reconceptualizations wherein she will take on the form of just any one of the people I know who does not cause me pain. She is living her life and her new context for me is one of bemused disinterest with a tinge of sentiment that I can only assume causes her guilt and is therefore rejected outright and quickly. Of course now I am just speculating and it is not fair to paint her in such a light. But even if I do move on to someone who will actually love me and appreciate me and see me as not an obstacle but a conduit to more fuller living I will never be able to remove the deep, deep grooves of scars that did not have to exist at all and were once freckles of joy.

This makes me feel better.