Category: Diary

There’s a grade school game called ‘Telephone’ or something like that in which one person whispers into the ear of the next person, and that person into the next and on down the line of 20 or so people, until the last person is reached, and the original message which was something like, “Joe likes pizza” ends up being morphed into something more like “Joe licks panties.” Lately I feel that some people in my life have been playing that sort of game with some of the details of my life. They start with a small detail that comes up in a passing conversation, and it ends up being blown all out of proportion until I am having sex with the Queen of England or something like that. It seems as if it is a little way for fans of “General Hospital” to bring a little of that drama into their own lives. People, stop it! I want you as my friends, and I value as just that, but supposing you know what in the hell is going on in my life when you haven’t been privy to the information is just wrong. I have been really down as you all know lately, and the last thing I need to feel as if some people I hold dear to my heart are spinning yarns behind my back. I need your support and will gladly give mine if/when you need it. I try to be here for all of my friends. Please try to do the same for me. Don’t kick me while I am down. I have never met Queen Elizabeth, much less do I know her intimately, but I do like pizza… and I try not to lick panties… at least not too often.

Talking to S tonight, she finally got the final sign off. She got the “thanks for the 5 years but it is over for good now.” I guess I know how that feels, and I conveyed that to her. She said that she understood there were lessons lying beneath but that she really couldn’t think about that right now, that the hurt was too much. I told her the lessons would come, and that she need not understand them now, nor could she really even begin.

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I awoke this morning with eggs
after a dream of eggs last night
and I wonder today what
my therapist will say
about such things –
these eggs, or those,
in that dream,
or the pigeon eggs,
broken,
just shells that fell
from the rafters
beneath the train tracks
as I was on my way
to the stairs and
to this chair
to write about eggs.

One of the biggest things that holidays are for me is a time to measure out change; to see where you have come, how much your life has changed since the last time that holiday rolled around. Thanksgiving also gives us the chance to take a look at what we are thankful for, perhaps through the lens of that time measurement.
I decided not to go to Durham for Thanksgiving this year. It was not easy to just take the offer of that safety, security and support, but I felt like I needed to stay in Atlanta to prove something to myself. New friends had invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, and I felt that being able to decide to stay here for the holiday showed a substantial amount of progress in my recovery from the break up, and the formulation of a new life that I have been attempting lately.

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Okay,
here’s how it goes,
we are sitting at this pizza joint,
and at most it is 3 to 4 months into it all.
We are just sitting there and
talking about love and
our love for one another, and
how great the other one is, and
how we should get married
before we hate each other, and
she is saying she has never
felt this way before,
and I am saying I have never
felt this way before, and
there is a way she eats the salad,
discarding the pepperoncini,
that I could see a demise,
that she didn’t like blue cheese,
and that orange salad dressings
were distasteful, I could feel death coming.
I am sitting here trying
to convince myself that it was all over
from the start, that these pathologies
were already eating us up,
that we fulfilled some fucked up
psychological void that we each had…
but no it was love, it really was,
as sure as pepperroncinis don’t matter, nor
a distaste for blue cheese, it was love.
At least there was that, and
there’s nothing wrong with it, and
it was good.

I will awake
in the morning
with a yawn and smile
and the dream will be over.

I always hate when I get
to the final chapter of the novel
especially the last few pages
when I have to start considering
what I will read next and
I start to wonder about how
it will end even though I already know.
I know the writer puts emphasis
on this ending, it will be the last
thing he leaves you with, and
there are novels with such beautiful
endings, even or especially the sad ones.
I am up late again and out tonight
the late autumn crickets are singing
just as they did in the beginning,
and the cars are coming up
and down the road, people are
moving, falling in love, and out,
making love, kissing, arguing,
drinking, and fighting loneliness
and their own demons.
I have been up with too much
on my mind, trying to remember
the first words of the book
so I might write the last ones.
I forgot to save the pages, or
they were washed away in the flood.
I will have to recreate them, but
for now I am attempting an ending.
John Irving doesn’t write
the first line of a book
until he has written the last.
If this one ends this way,
then that end is also a beginning.
Maybe there was death at the beginning,
or the thought of, or the fear of,
or was it love, a smile, comfort after
many long days, was a corpulent arm
throwing change to the beggars below,
or did it begin or end with him coming
home after a long day, and her waking
in a monologue, ‘yes I said yes I will Yes.’
Some things end that way, or others
with a ‘no nope never’ and some don’t tidy
up so easily.
I remember something sloppy
at the beginning of this book.
Perhaps a metaphor misplaced
or carried on too long. Something
was not right and it carried
its discomfort through all of the pages.
I hate this feeling at the end,
when you start reading so much faster,
and inevitably the phone rings
right as you are reaching the rapturous finale.
This one will end right where it began, I suppose.
The pages will loop back on themselves
and I will not have to worry
about what to read next,
and all of the unkempt ends
will smooth and fray and smooth and fray,
and we will lose sight of
the beginning or ending,
and it will just go on,
fall in love and out,
and in and out until it all ends,
or at least one of us.
Where did it end? Or begin? Or does it?
It was love,
it was love,
it was love,
no matter what the critics will say.

I must warn you all that this one will be boring. Today has been pretty awful on a lot of fronts. This will not be a piece where I will wax poetic very much. It will simply be me purging myself of the demons of this day.
I awoke this morning with JT on the sofa. We had approximately an hour and a half left together after seeing each other regularly in two different cities for the last week. We would board the MARTA train and travel to 5 Points Station together, where I would get off and he would transfer to the southbound train, and eventually to a plane back home to Chicago. It was hard not to be sad. This past week has been a pretty good respite from the things that have been perplexing me lately. I was really scared of what coming home alone from work would bring today.

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Despite what you may think, it is Bibb County that this place is in, not Macon County, so the romance ends there. We are departing back to Atlanta now with car in tow behind pickup and I am $165 poorer, not to mention what it will cost to get the damn thing running again this week. Keep you fingers crossed for us, we have been known to screw things up many times before.

Okay, this may have nothing to do with medication or my depression or recovery, or with the breakup, or anything like that, but life does go on in other directions as well.
Earlier this week a sportswriter at my paper, a man of about 55 years old, named Jack, came by my desk and asked me did I own a blue VW Passat station wagon. I had never met Jack even though we both work on the 8th floor. I thought he was about to tell me that my headlights were on in the parking lot, or that he had just seen a band of hooligans run off with my rims, even though they are not so fancy. The story is much more interesting than that, though.

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