"Trouble comes in lots of different ways in this life, but usually people are the ones who bring it." ~jd, Wave Man

Trainwreck -- (a nickname a mutual friend gave him after this most recent stunt – “He is a trainwreck, and it would be better for him if he also seemed like an asshole instead of a nice guy, because then maybe he wouldn’t get so much leeway to make such an unredeemable mess of himself”) -- Trainwreck, intentionally and with malice of forethought, made me feel like a bad partner for feeling lonely and rejected when he was rejecting me, made me believe I was paranoid/crazy/hormonal when he was actually sneaking around, made love to me just enough to keep me buying both those lines of bullshit, and then he let me pack his lunch.  He deliberately undid me, made me ever more exhausted by the sleeplessness that his disappearances (“emergency medicine”) and associated lies caused, clouding my mind and making me feel rather than ever tell me what the truth was finally: that I was as dispensable, as valueless as shit to wipe off his shoe.  He snuck it to me like poison, saying I love you when what he meant was You are worthless, and I can prove it.  And he sure did.  

I should be happy about what I know happens next to him, given all that.  I keep trying to talk myself into feeling that way.  But I'm not. Not vindictive.  Not even distraught, either, really. I just feel empty.  As Lorrie Moore puts it, "full of emptinesses". 

"People think there’s a type of logic to life. I’m not so sure. Some days when business is slow and clients are scarce, I sit at the window and gaze out at the water of Port Robertson. Gulls wheel around the tourists at the fry shack on the town pier. Working boats and yachts drift across the offing. The town’s tiny ferry works its slow way across to Shelter Island. It’s a continuing surprise to me that I’ve ended up where I am, doing what I do. You could argue that my past has led me here, but I’m skeptical. When I look back at my life, I don’t see a logical and predictable progression. It’s a track marred by footsteps, sure, but it hasn’t been a parade. It’s more the scuffmarks of someone staggering through life, step by blind step.....we create our personal disasters one step at a time, with the optimism of the ignorant." jd, Wave Man

I remember. When he left his first wife, and he needed to go there to retrieve things, she left used condoms around dripping and recently spent to get under his skin, he told me.

I remember. He was half crazy to have been with her, always always always beset with doubt and anxiety. That she was not who she said she was, that in fact she was carrying on with other lovers or would-be lovers all the time, always needing to be wanted wherever however.  She was, as he put it, malleable – she would be whatever you wanted, what whoever wanted. “Easy.”

I remember.  When we were new, he watched me like a hawk at first, and I laughed at that.  I am unrelentingly exactly what you see. And not easy.  Watch me all you like, ha.

Finally his mind calmed, when he had blown me to pieces and still, well, I was just what I said I was, true to my word.  Then for a little while, he lived as one thing, an integrated person who was also what he said he was.

But then, at some point, I guess, he realized he was more at home with duplicity. Entropy.  

For several months, increasingly every day I would feel certain he was again lying to me somehow.  To honor him, to honor my word to honor him, I put these feelings aside as my problem.  He would act so hurt to be suspected, and I didn’t want to hurt him.  I had sworn never to hurt him intentionally.  So, I imagined he was betraying me then I put that imagining aside as an evil fantasy.  Until I was having to put my own mind aside almost constantly for his sake.  And when I would look around me and see clear evidence that he was “elsewhere” really, though he was still here, his utter disinterest in things he claimed to love, his brewery, his dog, the kids, me – then I chafed finally, but he looked me right in the eye, dead in the eye, held my gaze, and told me no, that we were fine, that he was just tired.  And I blamed myself for doubting him.  And I cried.  And he watched me cry.  And I tried to be better.

Now, I think about those condoms.  Places like that, not homes, people like that, who would do that, who are just one of however many, and mean nothing truly to anyone, just points to leverage. 

home

the smell of fresh paint is better than napalm in the morning

sisters, thank God for them

Me: I’m choosing my own take-away. I am a woman who can inspire a tattoo, a deep one.

Her: I forgot about that tattoo (giggle)..... .....

Here Django, you read it. 

"Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understating that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved." 

“Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough

VIRGO Long ago someone dear to you didn't treat you with the care you needed or the respect you deserved. You can be sure that this person has regrets — not that it brings you any satisfaction.

“And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“She wanted to feel safe. Untouchable in her home. The ultimate female fantasy.” ― Kathy Reichs, Déjà Dead (yup)

the golden rule is lame

“Diamond Rule”: “Do that which others need and no one else can do in your place”.

"I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most."~The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen

If you lose your fear of God la la

I wouldn't have watched except it came on during Jeopardy and I was sitting there...and I swear, WTF IS TALKING ABOUT??, he just makes no sense, it's like listening to one of the old guys at the nursing home who you can tell used to be an asshole but now is just nuts....and then, Did he just say he was at a 711 when it was attacked by terrorists??? Not quite lol

Scary stupid

A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing.~When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

You left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had he the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
 Capacious as the sea,
 Between eternity and time,
 Your consciousness and me.

—Emily Dickinson

"I can't go on, I'll go on." Samuel Beckett

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” ― Bertolt Brecht

"...his absence had gone on so long that I was falling into a trance with it and the tension was going out of it. I no longer had to hold it in my mind or sustain it; it had grown so large that it surrounded me and sustained me now, and I rested in it."

There is an exhausted hornet where my mind used to be.

I'll take all you sons of bitches when I go

Unless you're Neko, who switches it up
Bonus (Word.)
 

Bonus bonus track

Every minute of the show cracks me up, so I'm rewatching clips (why? because I don't know how to work the tv), noticing that the advertisement is always for pampers which also cracks me up

“Statistically speaking, there is a 65 percent chance that the love of your life is having an affair. Be very suspicious.” ― Sctt Dikkers, You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day

bonus track
 #1 reason couples break

Outcomes assessment is my new specialty. Whatever is the chore needs doing as per usual. This one is both huge, what with our accrediatation in the balance and all, and it also seems particularly ironic. Assessing outcomes, what the hell do I know of that except to be flabberghasted? My outcomes. Ha. Whatever they've been were not exactly my intention in almost every instance, I can tell you that much. Maybe they were better or worse. I am probably not reliable to both intend and assess. That's got to be a conflict of interest.

Example of my new job: I stop having due dates for assignments at all. (I can just do whatever in the name of assessing it.) Some students turn things in on time. Some students say they will turn things in later and they don't. Some students turn things in when they get around to it. It has always been that way, those three basic categories. So, I take the due dates off, I try that. Nothing changes. Students entirely new to me turn things in every week or not at all or whenever they please. Just like they always did. All those years I wrote down due dates because I was required to do so. Outcomes assessment: I wasted my time on that for two decades. I tell everyone, You might be wasting your time entirely on any number of things. They stare at me, 100+ people with ash Wednesdays on their foreheads. The nun is leaving, they're very nervous already, they recoil from anxious to devout (I understand). Now this. Now even order itself might be nothing within our control to impose much. Students, being humans, might be free to learn or not and fail or not at their discretion more than ours.

Aaron is not here and Jasper sleeps on Aaron's side of the bed....I did intend that but 

Mark is still dead. I don't think about it for days and days. I'm busy. Then I remember and I think, STILL dead? Patti Smith, she says to Fred after almost 20 years, You've been gone long enough. But he can't come back. Aaron isn't dead but I think of his absence like that. All the time, to me he is gone, and I think of it as I am doing now. Absence drives us to lament, to want to wail ENOUGH, for even death feels like a choice. But our minds must walk off from it after awhile as if from a show after the credits. 

Then, after he left me, the beginning was not only the first, happy occasion, opening into an infinite number of happy occasions, it also contained the end, as though the very air of that room where we sat together, in that public place, where he leaned over, barely knowing me, and whispered to me, were already permeated with the end of it, as though the walls of that room were already made of the end of it. ~Lydia Davis, The End of the Story: A Novel