"But the local particulars of content matter less to me than the underlying investigation in all these essays: the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone."

-Jonathan Franzen

Saturday night I met two boring unattractive guys who had recently cheated on their boring unattractive wives with boring unattractive other woman and I woke up Sunday morning next to my decent-looking rich communist not-boyfriend and asked, "What makes these people tick?" I try to imagine them feeling anything close to passion for one another and can only deduce that they cheat out of an urge to make their lives seem more interesting, for the thrill rather than for the person, or perhaps just to get away from the wife and kids for a while. I vaguely recall having read a theory somewhere that when people are married they begin to feel like they have no life or identity outside of the marriage and that having an affair is a way for them to feel like they have something that is all their own and unknown to their spouse. I throw this idea out there too, passing it off as my own. He calls me an elitist, which is funny because usually it's me calling him an elitist. I ask him why they would bother marrying if they are just going to cheat and he rolls over to go back to sleep.

Whenever I think too much about anything I lose my sense of place. What is more natural, the urge to pair off or the urge to screw around? And then: is natural right or is natural what you need to fight against? My communist always asks why relationships are more important to people than most other things and I haven't been able to give him a satisfactory answer. I know that we are not special, that everyone has these questions and that trying to come off as profound on a subject such as this is like trying to write an effective analogy--you can try but you'll probably end up looking like a horse's ass. Still I persist.

I found myself recently in the unenviable position of explaining to my boyfriend of two and a half years that I wanted to be able to date other people and subsequently in the arguably enviable position of dating both him and the communist at the same time. The most pertinent information that I have gained from the experience is not how difficult it is to manage that sort of situation but relates instead to people's reactions when I explained my circumstances. Almost everyone that I told who was not in a relationship or had only recently entered into a relationship reacted with words of caution and advice to put an end to the mess as soon as possible. The most common reaction from people who were married or in long-term relationships was, "Good for you!"

"Good for you!" they would congratulate me as if I had just told them I'd quit smoking or gotten a big raise. And every time I would just look at them and not know what to say. Some of them were more excited about it than I was and I felt like perhaps they were trying to live vicariously through me. Is everyone at heart a cheater?

Really this is all about the big questions. Nature vs. nurture. Are we made up of more than neurons firing? And of course, is there a God, Goddess, Goddessi? OK no Goddessi. The communist always asks me what the meaning of life is, as if he were asking me for a cup of tea or something and then I always give him this look like "What are you, 17 years old?" I thought people stopped asking that question. Once upon a time I decided that there was no such thing as concrete reality, so I should be able to create my own, but I quickly discovered that folly when my entire life came crashing down around my head and no exertion of will power could stop it. Since then I've come to the conclusion that even if we are just brains in vats, those scientist are doing such a good job of poking us in the right places, that anyway it feels real so I'd better act as if it's real. I try to be more cautious in my actions, but deep down I still have this feeling like maybe it's all a cosmic joke. When I'm at my best everything is funny, but that is also when I am at my worst because that is when I am fooled into thinking things don't matter as much as they do. But I am aware of this.

I am cautious in that I pause a moment before doing something completely idiotic to ask myself if this is really what I want to do. The problem is that too many times during that pause I listen to the idiotic urge, shrug, and go for it. Somehow I think if I continue to live in the moment, then the past and the future will never catch up to me. No one needs to tell me how false this is. I live it and think it and feel it every moment. That doesn't mean I act on any sort of understanding of its falseness. Instead I laugh at the cosmic joke and keep laughing, hopefully into the grave. It seems to me that all the great philosophers were all about the shifting ground we stand on.

Since I started this essay I had the "just friends" talk with the boyfriend, which went badly at first but then much better, except that we're still having sex. But that's fine with me as long as there's not the level of commitment that the open relationship entailed. What is the difference, you ask, between an open relationship and a friendship with sex? I can't tell you, except that there is one, and perhaps you should ask the scientists that are wholeheartedly poking at my brain right now.

The other day I told the communist that I could see him and his girlfriend getting married. I think I said it half to see what his response would be and half because I meant it. His response was unremarkable and noncommittal. Maybe I thought he would deny it, but he didn't. I do in a way believe that I am just a distraction for him, but I can't mind really because I don't want to be anything more than a distraction. We both make a strong effort not to get jealous, which mostly works sometimes I guess.

He lives with a girl who he's been with for 9 years but who a couple years ago stopped kissing or having sex or even cuddling with him, and who a few months before I met him asked for an open relationship but never acted on it. I don't try to understand why they sleep in the same bed still or why when I go to their apartment she has a cross above the door. As far as I can see, he has his bullsh'it and I have mine, and I'd like to keep it that way.

There is a point here. Don't rush me--I'm getting to it. I've been here before and I know what I'm doing.

Don't act so concerned. As good ol' Ginsberg would say, "I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." I'm always writing poems to America. America is a good subject. It fills us with patriotism and loathing at the same time. America is a perfect repository for all of our emotions, the Platonic asshole for us to release our loads. And what a sweet/bittersweet/foul load I have to spout into the fountain of American culture. America, are you ready for me?

Well if you could embrace Ginsberg with his queer prick you can probably embrace me with my round breasts and round little belly and round moist little mound.

So what else is this about? There has to be more. I'm quite certain this is about everything really. Stop and think about what most concerns you and then fill in the blank:

Sometimes when I stop and think I am reflecting on nothing really, a sort of emptiness. That is why I left the blank for you. Both to let you know that what you think is important and also because when I stopped to think, that blank space is all that I came up with.

I hope this means I'm closer to Zen. I took a meditation class and at the end when I had to write about my experience I wrote about being always on the go, the inability to empty my mind and stop for a moment. I think I am improving. While I was in college I wrote the following poem:

From 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.--
a solid wall of beer.
With all that follows:
drunken spinning,
recognition perhaps of time-space continuum,
I'm sorry man about your girl well listen.

At 2 I realize that of course Godot will come as soon as I go to bed,
so I go.

And now,
here I am,
6:30, 7:30, 8
a.m.
awake, looking for signs of his having come.
I empty ashtrays,
stare numbly at recycling pile overflowing beer cans red, white, and blue.

At the time I thought it was very existential and angsty. I still haven't decided if it was that, or just pretentious. But I think we have to stop worrying about the authenticity and clever-ness value of what we write and believe in it even if it is full of sh'it.

Later in college I wrote this poem:

Da-sein Gets Entangled in Itself*

1

My mind is filled with a roaring cacophony:
the voices of a thousand days.
Everything crowds together in my brain,
bouncing off the walls and into each other,
bruised and mangled versions of themselves.
I cannot grow quiet.

Riotous life
held in the go
always already beyond stopping.
I fornicate and read the paper.
Keep abuzz until I can
descend into deep seamless oblivion
to forget the everlasting void.

2
Boys
scatter my attention
like marbles splayed
against a marble wall.
His demon-drawing touch.

I submit to beauty wherever I find it
in contemplating holyJesusMary,
and in his glow when he knows I will
give myself to him.


*Heidegger, Being and Time, pg.178 (German pagination)

I think it is the best poem I ever wrote, although I also think the only thing that makes it good is that it references Heidegger, and what Heidegger wrote is what is truly good. I feel that it is only my knowledge of philosophy that gives me my veneer of authenticity. And I pretend that I know a lot more than I actually do. Draw your own conclusions.

A week ago the communist's girlfriend left to go to Poland for two months, and he's been really miserable because of it. In a way this is a relief for me because I was afraid he would become too attached to me in her absence--he kept on talking about how convenient it would be for me to spend the night all the time since his apartment is just a few blocks from where I work. Instead he won't stop talking about how he misses her. The first night we got together after she was gone he launched into this big speech about how they had been getting along so much better right before she left and how sometimes she is the only person he wants to be with and how he realized his feelings for her were deeper than he had previously thought. He was worried I would be upset by this but I told him honestly that I had already figured out everything he had said by the way he had been acting recently and that it didn't upset me at all.

I've been reading Carl Jung. He believed religion is psychologically important and that modern man's belief in science has stripped us of something necessary--that without faith in the mystical we are unbalanced. Maybe that is why love has become so important.

The communist told me Sunday that he has decided to leave New York, to go look after the store that his family has been taking care of because he is worried they aren't doing a good job and his business will fail. He wants to leave in a few days. In a way I am relieved because I feel like a lot of things about him have been annoying me lately. But I am not totally relieved. What's interesting is that Saturday I decided to stop having sex with my ex-boyfriend because I think it is just making things worse between us, so once the communist leaves I will be truly single for the first time in over 2 ½ years. I am looking forward to it with joy and trepidation.

The communist told me this afternoon that the reason he hoped to make things work with his girlfriend was because he was too old to be fooling around like we had been and that it was time to settle down.

I don't feel like I have lost, because I wasn't trying to win anything, but I do in a way feel that this was a score for the other side. The other side being conventionality. Then again I don't know if I can call it the other side, since I am a responsible ops manager in a bureaucratic office. But that's just my job and this is his life we are talking about. I wonder if I will be saying the same thing 10 years from now. Also I don't even know if that's his real reason because it seems like every time he gives an explanation of something, the explanation is actually something else, and I'm tired of that.

I guess I should stop calling him the communist because he really wasn't one. It was all a lie, and if I wasn't so sharp, I would have fallen for it.

Perhaps I place too high of a value on authenticity. My dictionary of etymology says that authentic comes from self + doer, or "acting on one's own authority." Have I made a religion out of intellectualism? I am just beginning to understand what it means to be alone.