I've Got It Bad, Again (and that Ain't Good)

Hotter than August. In the Libyan desert.

I need to focus my energy on my studies. How can I focus when all I can think of is this man lying on top of me? It's practically impossible.

But for now, I must try.

I saw the man again

we spent two and a half hours just sort of chilling, talking and doing not a whole lot. he is smart, funny, sweet, and hotter than august in tejas.

he took my hand when we had a moment and he kissed me gently on the cheek when we said goodbye.

he is lovely, but we will see.

we will see.

It was almost fine

Last night, I met an absurdly intriguing man. He had the right politics, he was witty, charming, effusive and just delightful. We talked for quite some time, and touched one another unnecessarily, and it was all completely lovely, and I was entirely taken with him.

He had the most beautiful hands I have ever seen; I trust he knows exactly what to do with them.

He was also among the most attractive men I have ever had the pleasure of getting near.

Rare for me, as most of the men I am attracted to are ugly. A very particular kind of ugly, yes, but ugly nonetheless.

This man was unspeakably beautiful.

If he had asked, I would have done him right there, in the cold, on the street; common decency would not have stopped me.

We will see what, if anything, should happen.

It is good, in any case, to focus on a target that is not a) obviously unhinged b) avec femme c) otherwise unavailable or d) apparently alcoholic, troubled, or in need of a prescription for atypical antipsychotics.

Sad, I know, to be excited by such criteria.

If you knew my track record, though, it would make considerably more sense to you. I promise.

Have a baby with your girlfriend, and call it by my name: a letter to my Old Man Friend

Note: I wrote this late in the night, in response to a most recent correspondence from the Old Man Friend (OMF). And thought it best to wait until daylight, when my head cleared, to consider whether to post it. I decided yes. I have not yet decided whether to send it.

OMF –

I have debated back and forth whether to respond to your last brief message. The fact that I choose to is yet more proof that I am unhinged, but, um, I am sort of rolling with that theme. Why fight city hall? And it's late. And your brief letter is stuck in my craw, and I am somewhat angry, if I may be so expressive. So you'll forgive me, I trust, for what follows.

The thought of you weighs on me heavily. It does. It weighs on my mind and it weighs on my body. You know this. I have said this in every way I know how. More times than I can count. I have.

But.

No good can come of it.

I don't mean to moralize, but let's put it plainly.

There you are, OMF. And here I am. And as for you, carissimo, you can't have it both ways. You cannot be in two places at once. Also, um, newsflash: you have much at stake. In light of that, someone–one of us—has to man the fuck up and be reasonable. Given the circumstances it should really fall on you, but I will do it. I will lay it all out.

I refuse to engage you now. I want to, of course, I want to engage you completely, but as things are configured presently, it is not going to happen. I cannot engage you fully, and because I cannot, and this is what I want, I will not engage you at all.

We both know why, but I will remind you. I like reminders myself, because sometimes I forget. This is the reality: you have a girlfriend. In case you've forgotten, which surely you have not. A girlfriend. Who is a whole person. Who exists in all dimensions. She loves you. You love her. She wants you to put a baby in her, as my HEB manfriends would say.

And you say that you can't put me out of your head, but I promise you this: if you dedicate yourself fully to the task at hand, to making things work with your girlfriend, I will leave your head, eventually. I promise.

I will fade. And the sooner we stop contacting one another, the sooner I will fade. Because I am not there. You are there, and your girlfriend is there, and I am here. You need to be there. You need to see if you can make it work, see if you can make a life together, see if you really want to be with her, sans ou avec un kid. You need to be there. And there is no place for me, even the proposition of me. You know this. I know this.

I (singular) am here. You (singular, plural) are there.

It's simple geography. Geometry. Physics. and Linguistics.

Nothing can come of this, like this.

I will be more than happy to engage you, OMF, if and when it becomes appropriate. Right now, it is not. And I must not.

So make everyone happy: please, please make it work with your girlfriend, if this is what you so desire. But I beg you, leave me out of it. Buenos Aires out of it. Because it's ridiculous. It is offensive. It is disrespectful of your girlfriend, disrespectful of your relationship and it is disrespectful of me. You owe me nothing, not even basic decency, but you should demonstrate some care for this woman and what you share. It is emotionally reckless. It's a complete headfuck.

And it is dangerous, which is why it is so attractive, I think. I understand that, I have a lingering desire to put everything in danger. Maybe you do too. But not like this.

I am refusing. It is tempting, you are tempting, but to engage you like this is not the way I want to conduct my business. It is deeply unprincipled. It is also infuriating.

Because as things are configured presently, you hold all of the cards. And the cards are stacked. I am not playing that game. I will not give you that power. I will not give you the power to hurt me. I will not.

I refuse to stay at your periphery. That is not the place for me. And maybe your girlfriend will suffer herself to stay there, but she should not have to.

We have to let it go. At least for now. Please. Let's all just try for a moment to behave like emotionally responsible persons and forget about this. Commit to your girlfriend completely, if that's what you want, and get out, if it's not. Have a baby if feels right. Call it by my name, for all I care. Just, please, please, please leave me out of it.

Because this? This is a losing proposition for me. And I will be damned before I lose. Given the circumstances, there is nothing for me there; nothing for you, here. We can't do it. There is nothing to see here, caro. So let's forget it.

Note to Roommate

To My Beloved Roommate:

Last weekend was a horror show, to put it mildly.

In the future I will not run interference for you between your women, I don't care how much you beg, or how much you plead, or how much wine you ply me with. I am saying no. Categorically. Unequivocally. Now and forever.

Don't get it twisted.

I will lay it all out for you.

Yes you are a fabulous friend. You bought me a birthday cake when my idiot boyfriend failed to procure one. You drove my car back from Philadelphia when we visited my bffl--in the rain, lost, stuck in traffic in New Jersey, while I provided no directional guidance. You visited Tejas, in the middle of the summer, in the middle of a heat wave, for no reason at all, save to see me. In the middle of the summer. Knowing you would see me mere weeks later. It is also worth mentioning that you have cockblocked more times than I can count with respect to the aforementioned ex. You drove with me to his house and you waited for me outside his door/within his line of vision, dutifully, because you are just that awesome. And because you were the only person whose presence would have impacted my decisionmaking process in favor of reasoned and enlightened judgment. And because he was always a tad threatened by you.

But. As for les femmes, you are on your own.

I will break my ass for you in every other respect, but as far as the ladies are concerned, I have served my time. Is it not enough that I have to listen to the loud moans of your girlfriend coming multiples times weekly, when I am in the sexual desert? Is it not enough that you confide in me all manner of not-sought-out details regarding your sex life, your love life, your intentions, etc.? Is it not enough that I was punished for crimes I did not commit this weekend, by being thrust in the twisted admixture of your relationship and nonrelationship problem(s)?

Yes, dear. I think it is enough.

You heard it here first.

Incommunicado

I am not doing a very good job being incommunicado with the OMF (Old Man Friend).

I need to work on that.

No.

I need to just fucking do it.

It's not healthy to have what has quickly escalated from an innocent friendship into an emotional affair. Because as my main man Hemingway once wrote, all things truly wicked start from an innocence.

And because, um, if I'm going to have an affair, someone should, at minimum, be lying atop me.

That was a joke.

But seriously.

I have decided that if I am going to be incommunicado with my old man friend, I must really do it. And I have to do it. I have to forget that we have a disturbing, intense, palpable chemistry, which we have both acknowledged. That we have, as he put it, an emotional involvement, which is, as he put it, there, and quite real. And I have to forget that our interaction is seamless. That he is already in my head and heart and I um, this is inelegant, want him in my bed and body.

I have to maintain strict, unyielding, restraining order level avoidance. No e-mail, no phone calls, no contact of any kind. No thinking about him, even, to the extent that it can be avoided.

No more of this half-assed shit.

No more.

Recipe For a Disastrous Saturday Night

Ingredients:

- my ridiculous self
- my ridiculous roommate
- his best friend, a woman who has been in love with him since they were adolescents, a woman who is uniquely worthy and deserving of him, and about whom I have asked several times, "Why are you not with her? She gets you."
- his girlfriend, the love machine, who decidedly does not get him, or much of anything for that matter, the fact of which the rest of us are well aware.
- a big old bottle of absinthe

Directions: mix; await combustion.

they want you, or they don't (say yes)

One of my friends is deciding whether he wants to say yes to a baby.

For women – some women – the desire to have children is palpable. It is irresistible. For some women – especially women of a certain age – this desire is something that will be pursued at all and any cost.

And they will roam, discontent, only resting once they have received what they are after.

Some women.

For some women, the whole idea of being in a relationship, the entire concept of pairbonding is inextricably linked to breeding. These women are, to my mind, like missionaries; zealous and unyielding, with one goal in mind: a child, or children. It is their conversion.

I think it’s a bad idea. But no one asked my opinion.

There is a separate, but often related, task at hand for many of these women. That task is marriage.

I go back and forth on marriage. I am pretty anti-, actually, for personal reasons, the entire institution is pretty questionable to me. And there are political reasons I am against it, and of course I am cursed to rail and rage against the vestiges of the patriarchy, am I not?

But. I protested Proposition Eight yesterday afternoon, in my little city, far from California. And why? As much as I criticize marriage, it is a civil rights issue. But that's all rhetoric.

There is something very appealing about it, conceptually, and in spite of everything, for its social meaning. There is something strangely beautiful, mystical, even – and I am no believer – in entering into what is admittedly on one level an economic contract – but what is also something else entirely – and standing before one another, and perhaps before some number of other loved ones, and uttering words of commitment, for one another and all who witness to hear. I see the appeal in that. I think that everyone should have the right to choose that, under the Constitution. I do. And frankly I am more irritated by the anti-adoption statutes than the anti-marriage ones, although both are reprehensible, because the very people who argue that every fetus (baby, they would say) has a right to live, then sentence those most precious children to the most miserable of lives? It's the same with marriage, too , I suppose: gay people should live, but they should live in silence, ashamed, without access to the rights other Americans enjoy? What is that?

And I am not convinced that I want it, marriage, not convinced it’s not total bullshit. But I see the beauty in the idea of such a union, the capacity for something real, the promise inherent in the concept, of truth, and growth and commitment, of a true encounter. I see it, and I understand why people might want that. People of all backgrounds and beliefs. People of all sexual orientations.

And I feel similarly about babymaking schemes.

I know plenty of people who have children. People who really wanted kids, who love their children deeply. And I know others -- people don't love one another or their children very much at all, people who did not ever really want children, people who gave it all very little thought, but let their bodies act on their behalves. People who dabbled in self-awareness and decided This shit is not for me.

And that's their choice, I suppose.

But to bring a child into existence lightly? It is too monumental an undertaking, too weighty a prospect, too loaded, too important, too consequential to do with anyone you can’t work with. It matters too much. To do it without a full desire to do it. Or with someone who is ambivalent about the prospect. Or with someone you are ambivalent about. Or with someone you can’t bring a simple project to completion with, because the raising of a baby to functional adulthood is a complex, exhausting, time- and labor-intensive proposition.

And even if you do have the aforementioned desires, capabilities, and wishes, it can still all go to shit. A million things can go wrong. There are no guarantees that any of it will work. So you need the strongest possible framework in place at the outset, because it is entirely possible that everything else will go wrong. You owe it to the propositional child to at least have given the prospect of his existence forethought, and to desire that existence. To really want it, although it will be uncomfortable and exhausting, although it will tire you completely, stretch thin your patience and your bond with your coparent, be expensive, be inordinately messy, full of literal and figurative shit and vomit, to know that yes, it may increase your capacity for love, shift your perspective on life and human relationships, shine a different light on everything, alter your sense of self, but it will also fill you with fear and rage and confusion, at times you will look at your child and want to hire a hitman, you will never sleep again, your sex life will suffer, your precious baby could turn out to be a unmitigated asshole, you may at times want very deeply to kill it. To know all of these things, to have your eyes wide open and do it anyway. Out of desire, not duty.

I think that every parent owes that to their child, if nothing else.

I think that it is the responsible thing to do –to afford the decision as much care and weight and love as possible, and to only move forward if you are sure, in your mind and heart and body that this is what you want.

For many -- but by no means all – women, that desire is already there. It is deep-seated, perhaps inherited, enculturated, biological.

For others, it is not. But either way, you have to know.

For some women the desire to breed is indiscriminate, and takes precedence over everything else. There are women who will have a baby with any man who comes along, and there are women who, understandably, and for a complex admixture of reasons, want the men they love to want a child as much as they do, with them.

And when that desire is reciprocated – even when the hope that that desire is reciprocated exists, the joy such a woman appears to experience – is beyond words.

Myself, I have never wanted that from anyone.

And I would never have a baby with someone unless – at minimum – all of the foundational ducks were in a row. And that would require, for me, that the dude and I were able to work together, in concert, in times of great stress and strife, that we could cope with one another well at our worst, in our ugliest and most heinous moments, that we shared a desire to have and love and nurture a child, with one another, and that doing so felt not merely possible or biologically timely or socially sanctioned, but absolutely, unequivocally, right, in our minds, and hearts, and bodies. Of course, I am not sure that I want a screaming rugrat tethered to me.

And, of course, those are my guidelines, not anyone else’s.

But there are women – men too, I suppose – who want a child like nothing else, no matter the cost, no matter the circumstances, no matter the risks or losses. And I have great sympathy for that desire; it must be exceptionally difficult. And I believe that for these people, the forfeiture of what may be a good relationship sans les enfants in exchange for a potentially crappy one avec les enfants is an easy concession. If you are singleminded enough in your desire for something, you will do whatever you must to get it. And then it is yours. And then you must deal with the consequences. Having opened the can, you must contend with the worms.

How Dare He!

My senior year of college crush, a poet, and I will leave it at that, a talented poet, I will say, a clever and charming and shiteating grinning poet, a writing teacher, has a girlfriend.

I am somewhat disappointed by this discovery, which is totally irrational, because, um, I

a) have never so much as shaken this man’s hand;
b) have not seen him since Grace Paley spoke at UMass in June 2007, and we sat beside one another (and I might add, I was as much moved by him as by her);
c) maintain no contact with this man whatever;
d) have not so much as a platonic friendship with him;
e) think that poets are the third worst kind of men, or fourth, after lawyers, musicians, and artists.

Still. I hate it when men I have no legitimate claim upon, men I barely know, even, men I have never so much as touched, men I merely carry a pseudo-torch for based on a college crush-have girlfriends. He didn’t even ask my opinion. A hell of a nerve, that man has. A hell of a nerve.

And my current crush, if I can call him that, he has a girlfriend too.

So did the table-palming object of my summertime affection, as Woman, my summer roommate and favorite person in all of Tejas, can attest. (Did he ever! Non sequitur: the table palm is the hottest thing anyone can do in public, at least without breaching common decency.)

Sigh.

And I went out last night with a man, a perfectly nice and easygoing and clever man, and I couldn't get it up for him.

Okay, truth be told: it didn't come to that.

But I know: if it came to that, I would never be able to get it up for him. You just know these things: I have more chemistry with my very grandmother than I do with this dude.

And I am supposed to be on a solitary year, I don't know what I am doing. I don't. But I know this: I cannot go out with anyone else. Not for a good long while. It is exhausting, and I just can't suffer myself to do it. He had no nerve.

I need a man to lie on top of me, please, please, please Jesus bring me exactly that, amen.

I want a man, not the aforementioned poet, but another man, one I cannot have.

We don't speak, or see one another. We are, once more, at my insistence, technically incommunicado.

I don't want to be incommunicado.

I want this man in my bed.

But he is an old man, with a girlfriend! I can't go near that.

Still. He has a hell of a nerve. And so do I.

The writing is on the wall.

I am seriously unhinged.

Will I _Never_ Learn?

I believe in agency, not fate.

And yet, and yet, and yet, in spite of this, I seem insistent on repeating the same, singular mistake, over and again.

I worry that I will never learn.

You Just Know

I have often said I have never loved anyone. This is perhaps a lie, I may have loved someone once. A liar and a fraud! I don't like to think on it, is the thing. I understood him. He knew me. And it put everything else in a certain perspective: people either get it or they don't. The ones who get it are the ones for me. We create one another in our own images, to some extent, but this man got it. He knew me, and I knew him.

And he was brilliant and terrible, emotional, difficult, passionate, stubborn; we were too alike, our flaws and tempers too similar, only he was irritable and unreasonable and moody; and we drew the best and the worst out of one another, over and again, until we had both grown entirely exhausted. And it was terribly chaotic, an emotional rollercoaster, and the lows were well worth suffering in exchange for the unspeakable highs.

We fought constantly. At some point, though, I didn't want to fight anymore, didn't want to fight anyone, I have always had to fight, and I was so tired of it, and I least of all wanted to fight him. So I walked away.

I have thought about this since, and wondered if I had tried harder, if I had been more yielding, if I had cultivated a certain tolerance or patience for bullshit, if I stopped calling him out, if I responded to his moods with steadied calm, instead of anger, perhaps I could have suffered myself to make things work. I felt, for an admixture of reasons, that it fell on me to man up and fix it. And I knew on some level that if only I had quieted myself, learned to keep my mouth shut, if I had been more agreeable, less insistent, things could have worked. Had he done the same, things could have worked. But we were no more capable of these things than anyone else is of changing his essence.

Don't misunderstand. I wanted things to work, wanted them to work terribly. I would have contorted my personality into any arthritic shape I could muster to make things feasible. I would have changed myself. I don't think it was possible. And I'm glad. Fighting my essential nature has never worked; trying to change another's is not an option.

Maybe I am cynical, or lazy, or vicodin-high, and but I don't think relationships are supposed to be so laborious. Speaking in broad strokes, I believe relationships work or they don't; they make sense or they don't; they feel right or they don't. When they do, you hold on. When they don't, you let go.

And perhaps it's reductive, maybe it fails to account for exceptions and compelling reasons and extenuating circumstances, but I believe my theory has teeth.

The people may very well be complicated, messy, uncontained and full of contradiction, and that's amazing, that is my kind of life, those are my kind of people, but the relationship itself should not be any of these things. It shouldn't involve too much chowchow, too much confusion or effort, too much questioning or compromise or exertion. I don't think it requires any great insight into the self. You don't decide is this right? so much as you know. When it makes sense, you just know.

The Rules of Love

I was talking to a friend last night, about romantic relationships (hers in particular). This is a fierce and fabulous woman: whip-smart, brilliant, funny, kind. She is someone you want on your side the day of the big trial, and also, incidentally, has the most incredible bone structure. But I digress. I mention her not to sing her praises, which are many, but because she is currently in the process of figuring out what to do with her relationship.

It is hard to say or know what the right thing to do is in the context of a relationship. There are passions that are meant to be resisted, and those that are not. There are compromises that are meant to be made, and those that are not. There are things that will work, with work, and those that will not. There are relationships that are not wrong, and there are those that are right. There is a difference, I think.

And maybe putting your needs aside for the sake of another is a noble thing, a pure thing, a true thing-but putting your needs aside makes for a very long life. A long and miserable life. Putting your needs first might make for a long and lonely life. Is one less valid than the other? Of course not.

And when you’re in the thick of it, when you are in the eye of the storm, it’s hard, if not impossible to see what you should do. Emotions run high and there is so much investment. And what’s easy is not necessarily right. And what’s hard is not necessarily wrong.

And who am I to say?

Still, in the context of this early November morning, the first early November morning of my embargo year, I would like to propose now several ad hoc rules that everyone would be well-served to keep in mind.

The first, which is at once the most elementary and also the most difficult to internalize is that you cannot make someone love you who does not. (Rule one is actually the first rule of life. It is also the root of much emotional diarrhea, most targeted gun violence, and virtually all popular music. But I digress.)

The second rule is that a pairing must make sense internally and there must be great love for a relationship to work; each is necessary, neither alone is sufficient.

The third: the notion that love can conquer all is utterly fatuous, or as my dear sweet grandmother would say, a crock of shit.

And fourth: While love may not conquer anything else, with it, perhaps we can conquer ourselves. And that, I think, is the point.