I have ample time to mull these over as I wait, leaning against a parking meter and scanning the street for Jess's arrival (she did say she would be late). Finn, who has entered and exited Cabaloosa with his cadre, approaches again and, motioning his friends toward to me, says, "This is the safest parking meter on the street."

"Not that safe, it's expired," I retort. In reply, he and his friends walk up and down the street, smoking.

Entering Cabaloosa is a steady stream of people whose every action screams, "Look at me!" something I am immediately disinclined to do. They may technically occupy the same space as I do, but I will be damned if I let them chew my scenery anymore than I have to. I have been them, which makes this all the more grating to me. I have worn elaborate outfits, I have dyed my hair multiple colors (and would likely have dark blue hair if I didn't have to care about employment), I have willfully confused hair length with identity. But it becomes abundantly clear in foregoing these thing that those who need to rely on them secretly worry they are not themselves without accessories. If your personality can be removed with shampoo, scissors, and plain clothes, there is a good chance you don't actually have one of your own. I do not trust people who feel the need to wear all their weird on the outside. To me, it speaks of such a vast fount on insecurity that I wish to give them a wide berth to avoid their trying to draw me in to their justification. This is said with full knowledge that I have close friends with silver teeth or who wear wings to social occasions. But I am further aware that these are not the first things they care to show off to people and that they have more then enough within them to both justify and offset outward eccentricities. (And, of course, people I know and like are given special dispensations by virtue that I know and like them and do not mind my hypocrisy.)

Jess and Rosie walk up the street as I am fishing my phone out of my pocket to inform them that I am too anxious to wait on the street for them any longer, though they didn't ask me to. Jess is dressed in a black and green bodice that summons cleavage up to one's attentions. Her pants are tight and black, decorated with chains. Rosie, on the other hand, is dressed in a peach t-shirt too large for her and demur blue jeans, with a large silver unicorn pendant. Neither outfit seems to be parodying the 1980's, for which I am grateful.

"I couldn't enter without you," I explain to Jess, more than a little embarrassed. "And I pretty much wanted to squish most of the people who passed by. They're all trying so hard. Like this guy in an ankle length pleather jacket. I'm hot and I'm wearing the lightest outfit I can!"

Ryan is judging your profile, Rosie!

"That's Finn's friend. He's actually not trying at all and he's really proud of this coat."

"You can be proud of it and not wear it at the end of June!"

As we wait on line to enter, Rosemary yells to me that she likes to stand in the corner and make fun of the hipsters and, somehow, gathers that I will be useful in this capacity. Have I shown my hand so much, so quickly?

"Are you going to write about this?" Jess asks.

"I have to," I tell her, meaning precisely that. This is an experience, I am having thoughts, why would I bother subjecting myself to potential discomfort if I cannot later regurgitate it into something worthwhile?

We walk in and I put earplugs in. Instantly, I have distance from what I'm doing, as though I am observing and participating rather than existing wholly in the moment. I can hear the music and people talking to me, but I do not feel my insides tightening against the din that would otherwise cause my ears to ring into the next day. I do not cringe at every wave of bass that assaults me, though I can feel the urgency of the vibrations on my skin. Even better for me, the earplugs grant me an inner monologue to compensate for the fact that I know I cannot write until I am free of the club again. I can and do repeat quietly what I will wish to write later.

Jess, Rosemary, and I dance very little after getting drinks - I have nothing but water; even if I were a drinker, this seems like it would be the majority of what would be in my glass anyway - quickly heading to the smoking area on a fenced in concrete platform. I dodge the clouds of clove smoke with due deference; I am the interloper and, while I don't much care, I will give the smokers their space. Jess tries to introduce me around, but I smile and nod until the social cues are given that will release me to wander.

Finally, Jess and Rosemary say they wish to dance again, which is, despite my having no idea if I can dance, my secondary reason for being here (seeing them being my primary, fighting my fears my tertiary). We three dance and quickly a middle aged man in an orange t-shirt begins trying to dance with Jess and Rosie. I glare at him and smile, not that he sees, then direct myself between them and him. I may not be useful for much else on the dance floor, but I am an expert cockblocker. Eventually, but not soon enough, he gets the gist that neither of these women are going to be available for his misdirected woo and cabbage-patches his way to a slock of girls wearing the wristbands given to the under-21s.

Jess wanders back to the smoking area, but Rosie and I don't leave the dance floor. Tentatively, I establish that I want to dance with her, not simply in her proximity. To a degree, I am here as much for her as for Jess, given the thirty seconds of dancing we shared in her apartment over the weekend. Dancing with her was a new flavor to me and I wanted another taste, hopefully a longer one to determine high notes and undertones. We dance through several songs, our contact varying depending on the beat and our collective mood. I know she is safe, that she is not going to misinterpret, so I have no inhibitions in dancing with her.

I ease off of her after this, though I am enjoying my time with her, because dancing with me only insulates her from negative experiences. It does nothing to increase her potential for good experiences with new and possibly rewarding people who are not categorical neuters. My goal of dancing without reservedness may constitute nothing more than bait to her and I would be loathe to interfere more than I need to.

Later, Rosie tells me how nice it was to dance with me, how I was the only one who wasn't thinking about how her dance moves would look in bed. While our dancing was not the type that left space for the Virgin Mary between us and she is certainly sexy on the dance floor, it seems to me like such a waste of a night to try to vertically screw someone who only wants to feel the music from her shoulders to her hips to her ankles.

"Be nice when you write about this," Rosie says as I am making my goodbyes around 2AM. "I'm very narcissistic."

"Oh, I believe I can accommodate this need." I leave the club, take my earplugs out, and hear nothing but the night, all those niggling whispers of insecurity trampled. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090627.php 30 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

The sun is so bright and the air clean after the storm, but the light does not touch Jacki. While she is almost always dressed in a shade of darkness (if that isn't redundant), there is an inner luminescence that she exudes and which is currently absent. She doesn't even seem to be Jacki, just a Russian doll with my friend nestled tight inside. I hug her instinctively, the doll eyes closing and the scent of her doll hair on my face. I remember being like this, so far inside myself to hide from the catastrophe in front of me. I know the basic timeline, but it is impossible to trace the corollaries between what she is experiencing and what the clock says.

We pass our car ride to her therapist in near silence, aside from the intrusions of my GPS informing me where to turn. I felt having the officious voice of a machine telling us where to go was a slightly greater kindness than requiring Jacki to focus on the world outside her skin long enough to direct me. I valued silence in her position, even as I cursed it for giving me the space to think.

She said she needed me to drive her because she would otherwise be a danger on the road. While this in undoubtedly somewhat true, her greater self knows she needs friends now more than ever and, especially given the paucity of my social calendar at the moment, I was more than willing to help her in any way I could.

Here is the story as I know it. I'm keeping it fairly vague and acknowledging my bias. My loyalty is to Jacki, even as my first indication of any of this was a message from Kevin exhorting me to employ journalistic bipartisanship and speak to him before writing about this - something I do not feel inclined to do. The facts speak for themselves and I don't employ hack jobs even when my own heart is the one breaking. For the sake of balance, here is his entry about the affair, which more or less gels with what I have written. So, this is the situation in order as I know it, with respect to the fact that what I know is almost entirely from Jacki and I am piecing things together between sobs and so may have things a bit out of order:

Last semester, Kevin took a class with a woman named Andrea. They apparently hit it off, though I don't have the details here, only that he had a few late nights with her when Jacki was waiting up for him and he told her an easily disproven story (he got in at 1AM and said he'd been at the library, which closed at 9PM). He eventually admitted to having more than friendly feelings for Andrea, who was in his group for some project. What was worse was that, even after confessing this to Jacki, he invited Andrea to social occasions where Jacki was present (including a barbecue and his show at Androgyny). I learned all this when I called Jacki to get advice about my 24-hour crush on Jess, only to be confronted with further guilt by association. However, things seemed to improve between them from what Jacki told me. Around her birthday, they had a talk about how he was coming home less and less, ostensibly because he was caring for his parents (both of whom recently and independently acquired injuries that make navigating the stairs difficult), including one instance where he waited until 11:30PM to call her and let her know that he had a little too much to drink with dinner and would not be coming home at all. He told her that he realized that he was not being the man she needed and he was going to work to change that because he loved and valued her.

If I understand things correctly - I may not - he then lied about going to his parent and drove to be with Andrea to tell her of his feelings for her. She reciprocated and they sealed the deal, as it were, though Jacki was understandably not keen to know precisely what was sealed where and for how long. But, as Kevin tried to defend to Jacki, that was the first time anything physical had ever happened between them and Andrea would only go so far with him while he was still engaged. He said all this to Jacki and told her that he couldn't be with her. As an editorial interjection, I don't think it was wholly Andrea's influence that distracted him from Jacki - it really couldn't be - and he has apparently said as much. I believe that, even as he had been living a life with Jacki for these past years and had prostrated himself to her to be readmitted to her affections after dumping her in a very similar way two year ago, he wasn't ready to give himself over to what a life with Jacki would mean. Just after he first proposed to her and they were relating the story, I saw a glint of fear in his eyes; the gesture of proposing was fine, the concept of marrying her terrified him. I remember this well, as it was how I initially reacted to proposing to Emily, though I acclimated to the commitment and was (unfortunately) ready to marry her for reason best discussed at another time. Much as I wanted Kevin to for Jacki's happiness, I didn't believe he would make it to the altar for her. It feels too easy to say that this was a reaction against the increased responsibility of growing older, finding a way to shape your life around pleasant realities rather than rock star fantasies. That he just finished grad school after a semester of not working might have created the perfect storm for him, one the he was too willing to escape in the Neverland of Andrea's affection. I cannot see how dumping Jacki does anything but exacerbate the underlying issues, though I am distantly grateful he didn't wait until matrimonial plans advanced any further. Returning wedding bands and fighting unsympathetic caterers with a broken heart would much harder for Jacki.

He is trying to rent a room in someone's house - though they won't rent to him until he can prove that he has more than summer employment ahead of him - and then he will be out of the home Jacki and he shared until a week ago. His parents do not want him living with them again. This complicates things for Jacki because, as I can well testify, getting everything that belongs to the person who dumped you out of the house is a crucial first step from healing. The longer it remains there, the longer she has some tenacious flickering of hope that he will come back, even as she hates him for putting her through this twice. And, really, there is no coming back from this and there should not be. The last time he left her - using nearly identical phrasing and reasoning (because they are so different and want such different things out of life) - he returned with repentance and a Sylvia Plath publication that appears in no bibliography. She brought up how ashamed she felt that she took him back. I told her that she really couldn't have done anything differently. She needed to forgive him and try to love him again, she needed to believe he was the man that could give her a forever. The stakes were much higher this time - he proposed - and so walking out is irrevocable. Until all reminders of him are gone - sadly to be replaced by vacancy - she is having the hardest time even sitting in her home. She cannot listen to music, because Kevin so completely made music his alone.

Jacki feels miserable and so unattractive, despite ample evidence to the contrary. I told her that it is something of a curse, because she is so deep and intense that she can't simply shut off what she is feeling to be a little self-destructive as some might. She can't have a one-night stand, she has to work through this all in a healthy way and let things heal naturally, which hurts more and takes a lot longer. Yes, everyone around her knew how it had to end, but I've been exactly there and will not plague her with anything like "I told you so." You don't acknowledge you see it because you don't want to see it. She had to believe that she could be happy.

We arrive at her therapy appointment and she is nearly silent, only offering that I can wait for her in a nearby cafe rather than waiting upstairs in the lobby until the appointment is over. I follow her up anyway, since I know how awkward waiting for a therapist is, though not quite in this dire of a situation. She is still and mute, not really occupying the same space her body does. I want to say something irreverent, so she would smile again and I could see her for my Jacki, but I resist interfering with her somberness. I realize I am only inclined to do this for my benefit, not hers. She enters the office finally.

An hour later, she emerges, clutching a tissue, her eyes wet. I drive her home. She tells me to shut off my GPS, though does not point out that its every informative interjection cut through us. She suggests I take a longer route and, when I do so, further suggests I get food and come back to her apartment so she does not have to be alone. I had assumed the night might turn in this direction and welcome it. I want to know that my friend will make it to dawn in every sense.

Even as we ate and I started to feel more grounded in the situation, I can't remember what we talked about when we weren't talking about him and what he did. Though I wanted sufficient details to better understand any extenuating circumstances, I also respected the need to talk about a life that didn't just abandon her for some near stranger just to have an escape to latch onto. In all of this, as much as I could, I try to treat Jacki how I had wanted to be treated after Emily left, though I couldn't express it then. I don't tear into Kevin as people seem to think is appropriate, as that isn't productive and know who wretched it feels to have to defend someone who has hurt you so badly.

She manages to take only a few bites of her sandwich before consigning to the refrigerator. Since he left, she has managed to keep down only small morsels of food. When Emily left, I remember not eating for days, only drinking as much water and seltzer as I could get my hands on because it made me feel full without being weighed down. I'm grateful she managed these few bites, it is progress.

We end up on the sofa in the dark, staring as a wall of media that would soon be cherry-picked by Kevin and occasionally engaging in bursts of emotional revelation. In the few hours I cradled against her, I think I learn more about Jacki's history and life than I ever knew before. That she has staved off cynicism so well this long is nothing short of miraculous and I consider it my personal duty to prevent Kevin's leaving being the thing that puts her over the edge.

The hour gets later and later and she doesn't want to be left alone. After Emily left, what I wanted more than anything was for someone to spend the night next to me, if just so I wouldn't have to wake up alone. I didn't even want to touch this anonymous person and certainly had no appetite for anything more, just pressure and warmth on the other side of the bed. Jacki listens to this, but nixes it.

"Don't worry, I wouldn't impinge on your tender virtue," I tease, though I don't know why. Perhaps my need to lighten the situation finally leaks out.

"No, I know you wouldn't. But it would be a bad idea for me."

I nod, understanding her reasoning too well to ask for more. Still, I follow her up to her bed and lay next to her until she, still fully clothed from work, falls into a restless sleep from which she wakes in a bit over five hours. I slip out once I am confident she has fallen unconscious, stumbling into furniture in the dark and locking the door behind me. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090623.php 29 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

Hi, Stevehen Warren here. Are you having trouble with coming to terms with the recently dead? Does the idea of Armageddon bring you down? Well, you might want to start practicing the art of catching bullets with the back of your head because we're all going to die. Let's see how it's going to work. See this virus developed by the Germans; they make wicked good killing diseases, attacks the brain stem of the recently dead infusing them with the power of fifteen men. The body leaps to life, devouring all human flesh in the immediate area. Wait, there's more. The disease replicates body trauma and, using a touch of mysticism, leads to a screaming horde of the undead. Billie Mays isn't dead, he's resting.

Hi! Billie Mays here, plotting on how I'm going to scare the crap out of you.

In three days, sometime after dogs and cats start living together but before we shoot Clint Eastwood into the sky to repair Russian nuclear satellites, we can expected a lifeless Billy Mays to mutter catchphrases as he stumbles through our post-apocalyptic world. This is just going to be a crappy day, you might want to avoid Facebook altogether. It's just going to be a bunch of Elliot Smith lyrics tied between your usual calls for a merciful God to end it all. It's going to suck.

Do we honestly think anything could kill Billie Mays? Well, maybe cocaine, a large amount of cocaine equal to Scarface levels. Short of that, I envisioned a world of Twinkies and Billie Mays standing in some post-apocalyptic hell, selling toxic waste doubling at Orange Glo. Throwing this idea out there, but maybe this is all a publicity stunt. Seriously, would any of us be surprised if, at his funeral, a slightly sleep deprived Billie Mays cut through his own coffin with a Dual Saw.

Animal Man flying with a whale has everything to do with Billie Mays.

That thing can cut through safes, you know. I will go out on a limb, if this all turns out to be a cheap attempt to sell overly powerful saws, I will be the first in line to buy two. Seriously, who could deny bursting through a fucking coffin as possibly the greatest publicity stunt ever? "You thought I was dead? Well, thanks to the dual saw, my ass is going to hang around forever. Line up your mothers so that I may reproduce with them stronger children than you will ever be." If this happens, I promised to quit my job and switch to hard liquor.

Billie Mays made you excited to buy things. In a nutshell, that was his skill, his mutant power, if you will. You wanted to please the man, fill his coffer like some medieval king bent on recapturing the Holy Land. What separated him from your usual brand of pitchman was his use of actual standards when it came to products. It had to work. It had to do something so fucking spectacular that your sperm would stop and wonder if it were good enough to create a child for his world. He seemed like a nice guy, I mean who wouldn't want to grab a beer with the guy? Granted, he would likely show off some bottle opener that would make your scrotum retract into your body with joy, but that was part of the elation of the man. On the vast Internet, there is a video of him ordering McDonalds. Head over to your respected search engine and check it out (ED NOTE: No need, I did the legwork for you!). It will make you get some Sausage Burritos and Diet Coke, I swear. It will also fester the desire to strip naked for the man, to have him clean your clothes.

Try Might Putty, people, try it!

Your Musical Moment Provided By Stina Nordenstam Little star, so you had to go. You must have wanted him to know. You must have wanted the world to know, poor little thing. Now they know. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/justify/buycrap.php 29 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

Jess calls as I am on the way to Rosemary's housewarming party and says that we need to have a talk. This is a familiar trope now.

"A good talk?" I ask.

"Not a friendship ending one," she replies, apparently misunderstanding that I would only internalize the "friendship ending one" bit. "But I have some things I need to say to you and... I'm not good with words over the phone." Our prior conversation was fruitful, especially since I carefully researched the topics I wanted to bring up by reading her every bit of writing available on the internet, as well as scanning through her 550 plus pictures on Facebook. To her credit then, she fully understood my need to research and shrugged it off when I called it stalking. We have startling symmetry and, as we stayed at Red Robin half an hour after it closed, still chattering nonstop, I grew to like her even more than I realized possible.

I keep my issues barely in check on the drive to her, though they are tenacious when given such vague fodder.

When I finally arrive, Jess is standing on the stoop, telling the clerk of the spirituality store beneath Rosemary's apartment that she understands the need to repeatedly check that the door was locked. I affirm this as well, wanting the woman to be elsewhere as quickly as possible so Jess and I can have the necessary conversation and put it behind us. I am expecting the worst, thinking I've written something to offend her or hurt her. That's always the case when people need to have conversations with me of this tenor. I can't imagine what else it could be.

"It's not what you are thinking," she begins, though I'm not sure she can do justice to what I am thinking. "I am having a hard time saying this because you are my first friend who is just mine. Everyone else, I met through people and we're part of the same social group and they have to like me. But you don't have to. You're just mine, you like me on your own. And I've been reading what you wrote a while ago, about Katie, and I-" Here, I'm afraid, I have to curtain my exhibitionism and your voyeurism. Suffice it to say that she confessed something personal, something which she worried would be a deal breaker and she wanted to be honest with me. "--and I don't want you to hate me."

I hugged her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "I don't hate you, I couldn't hate you!" Then I hugged her again, so relieved I was that she disappointed my every worry. To me, it feels like I only let go of Jess when Rosemary's car drives by, though I think Jess grants me the indulgence of contact because she is as relieved.

We sit in Rosemary's kitchen as she cooks miniature hamburgers and mixes guacamole. Jess keeps offering ways she can help and being sweetly rebuffed. I am more concerned with judging Rosemary given almost entirely how she decorates her apartment. As I am scanning her bookcase, I outright tell her this.

"I support. That's why you have a bookcase out in the open," Rosemary replies, though it helps that I vast approve of her media and point out a couple - Franny and Zooey (her bible), So I Married an Axe Murderer (the second best Scottish movie ever, she says) - that make me regard her all the better.

I ask the questions you do at someone's apartment warming: how much they are paying, what is included, though one is generally only interested out of politeness and a means of comparison. Her apartment is undeniably the better one, so I don't wish to hear I am being scandalously bilked. Then again, as I am unemployed, I will take my cheaper shoebox for now.

It's over an hour and a half before more guests arrive in the forms of Loren and Finn. I told Jess that I find it strange that the two of them get along as well as they do. When pressed, I pointed out that I just imagine Loren admonishing Finn pretty much constantly about his eccentricities. Yet they absolutely do get along wonderfully, perhaps because Loren does gently dominate his personality, smoothing some edges and providing him focus and attention. They seem to be "romantic friends", a concept beaten out of existence by the twentieth century, one that makes people second guess the sexuality of any historical figure (Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickenson, William Shakespeare) who had a friend they adored but did not wish to shtup. Loren and Finn are physical and affectionate through the night, but it is utterly absent a sexual component. If anything, they seem like fond siblings. Granted, romantic friendships, or Boston marriages or hetero-life mates or what you will, tend to be two members of the same sex (ergo fueling rumors) but I don't see why it can't be extended to two members of the opposite sex who adore but do not need to consummate. I've certainly loved women (Keilaina, Melissa) who I had no interest in bedding. It is, in fact, how I feel toward Jess already and how I am hoping Melanie will feel upon her return (I am endlessly talking to the two women about each other and think I've set the foundations of their friendship sight unseen).

When I felt a rare twinge of awkwardness at the party, I pour a little bit of wine into a great deal of orange juice and wait for the placebo effect to make me feel relaxed again.

"This is lovely," I tell Jess, swirling my drink. "Do you think different alcohols can have different effects on you?"

"I hear that tequila makes people mean drunks, but vodka is pretty much universally okay."

"I can see that. Melanie likes Martini & Rossi - she taught me to fix it just the way she likes it, with ice and a squirt of lemon juice - and she had me help her finish some when I made much too much. I ended up crying on her chest that I felt so awful because alcohol is a chemical depressant. Those words, too. But my fake mimosa just makes me feel a bit looser and warm." As should not need saying, I am not exactly a lush.

Eventually, and irrespective of the alcohol, I dance because there is music and I think I would quite like to dance, only I no longer know how. I swear I used to have rhythm, but the gods stole it from me when I mocked and mimicked bad dancers. Jess has written and spoken of 80s Night at Cabaloosa in New Paltz being an almost cathartic experience, especially after her most recent breakup with a man named Chris. Dancing lets her express herself in a way nothing else can quite manage. It is a sensation I covet, just letting go and allowing the music to take possession. She says, when she gets on the dance floor, she becomes a little different, and just loves everyone.

Later, while they are dancing and I am trying to keep up, Rosemary and I end up close together. There is something about her that telegraphs a degree of reservedness that isn't actually applicable - maybe it is the glasses - but waves of utter sexiness emanate from her as she dances. "If we were at Cabs, I wouldn't even know your name..." she assures me, accomplishing a slight shimmy that makes me swallow hard. "Okay, maybe I would get your number..." The ways she is dancing, if I were single, I would give it. I fear for any boy she sets her sights on, as he is already in her web and simply hasn't figured it out yet.

Even though I have nothing compelling my return home, I make my goodbyes a bit after one when they suggest playing a drinking game called Kings. Jess will stay all night without sleep, spending the whole next day nearly dead on her feet so she can enjoy her friends as long as possible. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090621.php 25 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

Melanie has a theory that I am going to have to struggle a little more in every other aspect in my life to balance out how lucky I am to have found her and fallen into such a nutritive love. It's sweet and I don't disagree. It's a pleasant mantra to keep in mind on days like today.

It's odd being downsized because you are keenly aware that you've done nothing wrong beyond work for a company that never saw you as more than an interchangeable part. At first, they try to blame me, to say my work wasn't up to snuff. But I'd been given an email a week before, telling me how I made a catch no one else did, saving them many thousands of dollars and improving their credibility, and that I was doing well. The example they then trot out wasn't my job. It would be like firing me because I unstopped the toilet in a way they didn't like after they begged me to do janitorial work. Once confronted with the flimsiness of this, they switch their tactics, admitting that they will no longer have proofreaders in the company owing to "corporate restructuring", instead only using temps. Given that part of my duties had been catching and correcting the frequent mistakes the temps introduced into our documents (nothing against the temps, though, they just don't know what the company wants given that they will be working at a different location in a week), I can't say this makes sense from a quality perspective, but I'm sure some number cruncher in Minnesota figured out that this would cost ten cents less per year and so it made financial sense to eliminate me.

This all sounds bitter, but I'm not, which is the part I find so strange. I'm aware that there was nothing I could have done to save my job and resent their making me worry when this had always been the plan, but I am more amused that they are making what is going to be a mistake (their contracts with various states penalize them hundreds of thousands of dollars for lateness and mistakes in final documents). That fact that I was hired just as the school year began and let go just as it ended is not a coincidence, since the work of creating testing materials trickles off in the summer. I was always a temp, simply one they were lying to about my tenure. In fact, during a prior meeting, my direct supervisor asked if I could see myself doing this kind of work more long term and seemed stricken when I said that I felt better doing this than some of the jobs I have had. This is true, as I can be task- and detail-oriented when not threatened with micromanagement. I did an excellent job for them, despite the inherent tedium of the work.

When I go to clean out my desk, the boxes already stacked on top to expedite my egress from the company, I notice that my coworker - who had a better job title owing to considerably more experience in the publishing field, but who was hired weeks before me and did very similar work - has already cleared out, further validating that this is downsizing that they are pretending is something more pejorative to justify some pencil-pusher's edicts. I remember every email I received while I worked here, describing how whole departments opted to quit suddenly to pursue other jobs or take care of children. Even when I comfortably had a job waiting for me the next morning, I knew that these emails were not close to being true. Have they already sent out fiction about why my coworker and I no longer work here? The location where I worked bought out another company a bit before I started and, is seemed, the new location became the favored son; I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this location closed in a year, as the jobs are farmed out to temps or moved to another state. I don't imagine that those who fired me will survive many future cuts, which is honestly a little sad. On some level, as I suspected, they must wonder when the sword will fall on them to save a dollar.

My supervisor pops her head out of her office and says that, though it's a little weird, she will happily write me a letter of recommendation since I "do a lot of things really well." I wish I could say that I saw guilt in her eyes, but I wasn't looking for it, too concerned with rifling through my desk for anything worthwhile I might otherwise leave behind in my haste to return home and deal with this latest challenge.

Of course, I am angry at the greed, at the culture that sees people - specifically me - as disposable commodities. I'm aware that I am far from alone in this complaint, but it seems a terrible way to run an economy, insisting upon overtraining and then giving jobs to the unqualified because they work for peanuts.

The department manager pops by, perhaps expecting me to have some deeper emotional reaction to the filling box on my desk. "I'm not the disgruntling type," I assure her brightly. In retort, she and my supervisor try to get me take a plant in my cubical.

"Oh no, that's not mine. It's [coworker]'s."

"You could take it anyway, spruce up your apartment."

I refuse again. They laid off my coworker. They could deal with her plant now, especially since I shouldn't have anything else dependent on me for survival until I find a job.

Driving home, I am not hit by overwhelming terror, though I can't manage to listen to music or NPR over the static in my head. I do, at one point, single out a cloud and say, "Okay, I'm not looking at the door that closed. Now where is the window that opened for me?" I don't think cumulus clouds respond to these petitions though, or perhaps they are just piled down with them and can't mind single petitioners.

I am barely inside the door to my apartment before I am checking to see about getting on unemployment. I intend to be jobless for the shortest time possible, but I will not be letting my apartment and lifestyle be yanked away because of some penny-pinching bureaucrat I will never meet. Apparently, as I have worked in the past week and it wasn't in fast food, I am not eligible for another week.

Then I sit, get comfortable, make myself some tea, and send out applications. In the course of two hours, I've sent out 36, some to genuinely promising jobs for which I am uniquely qualified. Obviously, schools are not hiring quite yet, but I worried I would be stuck with something terribly menial. I may get a reprieve to justify how terrified I am not.

I figure, I have about a month before I've eaten away at all my savings. Unemployment - should it come through - will keep me afloat another couple weeks. This isn't an eventuality I want to exploit. I would much rather be gainfully employed, but might be able to breathe until August should nothing come through. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090618.php 24 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

Sitting in the den of Jess's house, my stomach full of fried chicken, corn on the cob, biscuits, and salad that her friend Loren made simply for the pleasure of cooking for us, I feel more content than I have in a long while, at least since Melanie left for the summer. Loren and Jess bring down a cake to celebrate Jess's mother birthday. The moment freezes for me. Everyone is happy, even Finn who the Icy-Hot pack on his back that he describes as "being crawled on by slugs" and Rosie who twisted a muscle in her neck and has a hot water bottle hunchback. Z and Mark, Jess's parents who Loren exclusively refers to as "mom" and "pop", are home from their motorcycle tour around Canada. They barely noticed the dinner party we are having on their porch, which we refer to as "the Big Kids' Table". Loren is grinning almost nonstop and has been since she started cooking, even as she ordered us in small tasks to help her. Jess is, if anything, more excited to have her parents home than she was to have the house to herself. I am just trying to take it all in, to acknowledge the commonplace holiness of the moment without tainting the flavor of the chocolate brownie cake with preemptive nostalgia.

Before the others came downstairs, while I was still clearing dishes from our dinner, Z and Mark stopped me and asked about me. Who I was, where I came from, what I did, and so on. I stuttered out responses, my subtext screaming, "Approve of me and see how good I am, because I think your daughter is a fantastic and rare person and want every reason to stick around." They seemed to tacitly accept my presence in their house before they knew I had a name.

I thought, upon realizing my abandonment issues, I would have to battle like the dickens, but instead I just shrug and the issues retreat. "Oh, I feel a certain way… hmm… and that is because of my abandonment issues, isn't it? Well then. You can go away now, I see you for what you are." They don't always go away, but at least the return to their corner to sneer at me rather than using me as their meat puppet. I don't want another Band-Aid to my problems, but I don't think these moments with Jess and her friends qualify. Melanie has been saying how I deserve to have friends like this, how I deserve to feel happy and like I belong somewhere. I just thought she was being sweet. But there is something to the idea that I can be around nurturing people who aren't going to leave. I'm trying not to project my issues in a widening gyre of new acquaintances. I've been estranged from positive company for so long - at least positive company that didn't actively and loudly hate other members of my positive company for mirroring their own insecurities - that I am not used to it. But I have begun the process believing that the other shoe isn't going to drop, that this might be good and getting better. I think Jess would like nothing more than for me to know I belong here.

My issues are insidious, masquerading as a need for comfort and routine. Jess and I exchange emails as we work and she invited me over to her house to observe the evolving story of her role playing world. My urge was to decline, to go home and ignore the world until I had to leave again for work the next morning, to clean, write, and be alone. While I couldn't convince myself that watching role playing would be worth it, I couldn't argue that spending some time with Jess would be more than worth stepping outside my weekday comfort zone. I beat my insecurity a little each day.

It has been suggested that part of my issues may come from the fact that my parents' marriage has almost never been anything but rocky, but it feels like a psychiatric cliché to try to pin this on them, as though their marrying poorly - though it blessed them with three sons - could be the root cause of what has plagued us all in small ways. That I spent my adolescence trying to love one girl or another because I didn't feel loved enough at home (this was never the case, incidentally. I always felt very appreciated and had a familial niche I enjoyed). This, it is supposed, caused me to further begrudged that I did not get the opportunity for a dorm experience in college because it didn't allow me to figure out how to live with a community of people to whom I was not related until meeting Emily. Perhaps this is a part of it but I am not the sort who believes these kinds of issues stem neatly from one event or cause - I'm a writer, I can't believe in bad storytelling. I didn't get left at a mall as a child, I wasn't especially bothered by the thought of my parents divorcing (I recall wishing they would because they might be happy apart). Perhaps I have relationship related trust issues from them, but not abandonment (not that these two are wholly discrete).

Most importantly, I love my family, even as I tease them. I recall a moment when I was in college, driving to be with my then girlfriend and stuck in traffic. I was suddenly struck with the profound realization that my parents were people, something that seems obvious. But it meant, rather than seeing them as "parents" exclusively, rather than sticking a label over their faces and not looking deeper, I had an epiphanic awareness that they had whole histories and lives connected to mine but also unique in the world and beautiful. It was a transformative moment, watching the red light turn green again, and was the instant when I knew that I loved and understood my family as people and not simply actors I was categorically required to love.

Realizing how often I've stuck out relationships (or tainted them) because of abandonment issues has made me love Melanie even more, incidentally, because our relationship has never been about that and she's never given me reasons to fall into old patterns of which I was not really aware until now. She is just peachiness personified. This time apart is an excellent excuse to grow and learn and deal with those things that seem to terribly unimportant when we are together, but which actually need to be confronted and dealt with.

Over cake, Jess teases her mother for being the sort to take pictures of cardboard cut-outs, interesting signs, and hundreds of photos of flowers.

"How many pictures of flowers do you need?" Jess protests.

"Well, that one is of me smelling the flower," Z explains. "So I can look at it and remember smelling the flower."

"But we have those flowers in the yard! They don't smell any different because they are in Canada," Jess replies.

To provide material evidence to her argument, Jess disappears upstairs and returns with three binders full of photos. "This is all for one trip! That lasted a week!" But she is laughing, as are we all. It feels wholesome, no matter what is privately occurring with each of the people present, how sullied they may feel simply by surviving in the world. I feel like I am watching a family and that I am Cousin Olivering my way into it. Even without Melanie, this month has been one of the best I can remember. I feel like I am in a really good place, cutting loose attachments I was uselessly clinging to and accepting good people and situations into my life. I feel on the edge of something wonderful, a kind of perpetual Christmas Eve, but I haven't gotten anyone else anything.

When I get home, I check the links to Jess's blogs she sent me and promptly I write her a letter, telling her that we need to have a serious conversation. After establishing that I am not upset with her for her "emoness", she offers to meet me Thursday night, before she goes out dancing. And I am heartened, because I now feel that there is something I can give her in exchange for all she has given me, all the memories I now have - even if I could have found them in my yard, little everyday miracles. While it's never the same, I understand her emotional position right now in an unenviable way, and I will do what I can to make her feel understood and loved, as you do with family. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090616.php 20 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

Jess slides her hands around me in the dark. Our faces are so close that I can see her clearly, the light of the kitchen behind us glimmering off her glasses. She touches the chain around my neck and then slides the clasp to the back. "Melanie's thinking of you!" she says brightly.

I breathe again. "Actually, I hope she isn't right now. She has a seventeen hour flight ahead of her to Kyoto, so I hope she is passed out. She is welcome to be dreaming of me."

She smirks. "Then she is dreaming of you."

We return to the kitchen, where Rachel and her friend Dylan are hashing out exactly how they will indicate a vampire biting someone in future Buffy live action role playing game. There was a time, though I would prefer not to indicate how recently, that I would have given a dismissive grunt to all of this talk. My few experiences with LARPing backed up pejorative stereotypes, but I am hardly one to cast stones at the geekery of others, especially when they are enjoying themselves more in an hour of role playing than I do in a week of living normally.

Simultaneously, Jess and I state that lipstick would be an ideal way to indicate biting without involving teeth (though still with the drawback of close contact) and Finn tries to encourage his idea that a vampire able to touch its chin to a major artery has put you in a thrall and killed you. I wonder aloud if we can put lipstick on the vampires' chins as a compromise.

I came over to play a game called Morton's List, which Jess introduced me to by calling it "like truth or dare". I gently indicated that, while she is welcomed to my every truth, I might wish to sit out dares involving her. The lion's share of my crush on her is back to friendly affection, but I didn't care to be confronted with the typical dares one gets. Fortunately, truth or dare is only the vaguest corollary to Morton's List. Morton's is more like role playing, only you are the character and you actually are bound to do the quests. There could be suggestions that well transcended being risqué, but there is a Morality Clause one can exercise for quests to which one might legitimately refrain; a vegan's quest to eat bacon can be nullified or modified so as to keep their morals in tact. From what I could discover beforehand - and shame on any game that does not have a Wikipedia entry - there are 360 quests one can go on, though some (despite logic and statistics) are harder to get. The quests are assigned by two rolls of a thirty sided die, so getting a 30-30 should be as likely as any other. Given that I am capable of multiplying numbers, I'm honestly a little fuzzy on why there are not 900 potential quests, but there aren't. The other members of the Inner Circle - which the players become upon taking the oath - and the discretion of the randomly selected game master can further sway the quests, as I discovered.

After a meal of cranberry chicken which Jess smoked up the whole house to make and a conversation where Finn tried to convince us he was a Republican until Rachel systematically deconstructed his belief system ending in, "So you are saying you are a Republican not because you remotely share a single value with them, but you believe this is how you will take over the world?" (to which Jess teased, "He always finds a way to be the center of attention"), we got to the game. Jess read out the rules, varying her accent throughout the English speaking world depending on the sentence, which I will summarize as follows: "You are bored or you wouldn't be playing. This is the end to boredom, but you have to promise to do what the book tells you. Perhaps it is destiny, perhaps it is just fun. Now promise or I will hit you."

"How does the Morality Clause work?" Finn asks.

"That's easy, you don't have morality," I reply, smiling. "Don't worry about it."

Turning back to Jess, she grins and says, "See, it is like you were always here!"

Finn fakes a pout and says he does, but doesn't expand.

We put our hands together in the center of the table, taking the oath and becoming the Inner Circle for the next hour, no matter what foolishness the book commands.

After all touching the die to imbue it with our energy, Finn rubbing it against his head for luck and me whispering to it that it had best not do Finn's bidding, Jess - our game master - rolls it twice and begins reading, describing explosions in the sky.

"Morton's wants fireworks?" Dylan asks.

"But we live in New York. There are no legal fireworks within the border," I argue. It isn't that I have any issue with fireworks, but I am morally opposed to driving to Pennsylvania without more preparation.

"Are you thinking Anarchists' Cookbook?" Finn suggests to Dylan, a wolf's grin on his face. I know that I am not thinking this as all. "It's easy enough to mix up some chemicals…"

"Or sparklers?" Jess says quickly. "I think we have some sparklers in the house, maybe."

Jess and I search through her basement, her chanting, "If I were sparklers, where would I be?" We return empty handed. Dylan and Finn are discussing what they remember from the Anarchists' Cookbook as Jess suggests we start a fire in the nice, safe fire pit on her back porch. Then, to spite us, the rain starts.

"Does rain nullify our quest?" I ask our game master.

"Absolutely not. It just modifies it." I see a glint in Jess's eyes that could spell trouble. She returns to the basement to find lighter fluid and Dylan begins searching the kitchen for a grocery bag.

Wordlessly, because I am bound to this quest and I couldn't prod Jess to call it on account of rain, I pull a plastic bag from my messenger bag and hand it over. I don't really want to know how it is about to be used and can only laugh a little when I hear the word "torch".

Jess is already drawing a heart in lighter fluid on the concrete of the garage when I get down there. She flicks her barbecue lighter and blue flame dances around the perimeter of it and die down.

Dylan lights the plastic bag wrapped around the end of a stick off the dying flame. It ignites, which isn't surprising. However, tendrils of flame drip from it, making a vvvvvvppppt sound as they fall to the ground. Kids, please do not try this at home.

A car containing Loren appears. I dart into the rain and stand outside her window until she rolls it down. "We're playing with fire!" I exclaim.

"I see that. Good for you."

After drawing another flaming heart and utterly failing to set the outline of a crow on fire like in the eponymous movie, we label this quest accomplished and spend five minutes finding moral objections to anything we felt the rain or our coziness prohibited (the best being hanging out at an emergency room and making friends with the nurses). Rachel repeatedly suggests that we go out and play in the rain, up to and including mud wrestling, but the List would not accommodate her whims, nor would we until the hour was up.

Eventually, Jess interpreted a quest to mean they had to do a Firefly live action role play, led by Finn. I get out the Tiny Beast to take notes on them for my book.

"You aren't playing?" Finn asks.

"No, I thought I would just watch..."

"You are still bound by your oath for another fifteen minutes," Jess reminds me.

End to boredom indeed. "Then I guess I am playing."

Finn is dressed in leather and zippers, the kind of outfit that I would dress one of my fictional vampires in only to have them killed because it constrains movement. When he later claims that he has been known to be playing videogames while hanging upside down from the rafter in his home, I consider it equivalent, style other comfort or utility. But, the moment he starts his game, he is transformed and the outfit seems perfect for him to be a captain and the storyteller. The time passes quickly and, even as my character - the protagonist from a future sequel titled Always Darkest - erodes from how she began, I end up having quite a bit of fun.

Rachel and Dylan head home, because he only just graduated from high school and has a curfew that must be enforced on such a stormy night. Jess says she has to be in bed by midnight, but Jess, Loren, Finn, and I are still talking half an hour later. Jess invites us all to spend the night - something the other two take as a given. It is more concern for how early she intends to leave than propriety that drives me out into the rain, though I send her a message when I get home, telling her that it is her right to insist I stay over should I ever be acting too bullheaded about the weather. It wouldn't do to lose the game when I've just discovered how fun it is to commit to playing. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090614.php 18 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

(Before beginning this entry, I should note that I am not upset with anyone described below, even if you think I ought to be. However, in confronting my issues as I must, these situations should be described.)

Melanie had warned me, upon seeing a picture of Jess, that I had better keep a "tongue length" away from my new friend, ostensibly owning to her resemblance to my celebrity crush, Felicia Day. When I tell Jess this, she laughs and I stick my tongue out, emphasizing that we have a table length in addition to my tongue. But I am abashed to admit that Melanie is not wrong to make this vague threat.

When I return from watching Jess and her friends role play, I ask Melanie to get on Skype and I spend the next two hours sobbing out my confession. Melanie will later say that it was almost cruel to see what a short leash I keep myself on to honor my fidelity to her, referring to this as my "choke chain". I call it a crush, which feels more apt when I realize how it is crushing me to harbor it. I hate being in this position. I hate knowing that I am in any way treating Melanie as Emily treated me at the end, though I make my feelings overt, talking about them to ease the pressure accumulating within my chest. Keeping them a secret from her seems more sinful than having them at all. It isn't that I expect Melanie will dump me for being infatuated with someone, but I do feel that I owe Melanie the option of anger at my truth.

"How long have you had this crush?" Melanie asks, calmly.

I pause, realizing this is not a question I was asking myself. "A day or so... but time moves a lot more slowly without you. It feels like a month." Jess has most certainly been my friend for a lot longer than a week, no matter what lies time tries to tell us, as though feelings can be parses out in segments of night and day.

Throughout the conversation, Melanie never even frowns except to pity me for the pain I'm in. When I call her on this, she fakes crying to meet my expectations, which renews the flood coming out of my eyes and into a nearby paper towel. She states that her composure is because she knows that she wins and that I won't do anything that would hurt her.

I want this crush on Jess to stop because it threatens the personal mythology I hold close. I am a faithful boyfriend who is worthy of my amazing girlfriend. I am the one whose head wouldn't turn in a roomful of naked women. I am not the one whose heart drifts because his girlfriend is indulging in some educational adventure thirteen time zones away. I am not one to prize convenience over commitment, loving the one you are with rather than waiting for the one you love. My mantra has been that I would rather not be with Melanie than be with anyone else. The way parts of my brain are spinning seems to contradict this.

At Jess's, I took out my tarot cards and twice did a reading for myself. I almost never use my cards, the Phantasmagoria Theatre deck, not because they are inaccurate and silly but because they are so accurate (and silly) that I have to begin giving credence to concepts like fate. Both readings ended with me totally alone, having hurt both the women concerned. And, honestly, I'm not sure which scares me worse, hurting others or ending up alone.

When I tell Melanie I would be wrecked were she to confess having the kinds of feelings I do for someone else, she brings up my abandonment issues and says that she isn't scared of losing me because she won't let that happen. While she has been through breakups, including one that made her feel lost in herself for a few months, they haven't marked her as mine have me (whether or not I am consciously aware). Ever leaving Melanie, especially like this, would cripple her worldview that world can be bright and good to her, that cynicism can give way to delight. She threatens to become a bag/cat lady and torment me to the end of my days with trash and kitten corpses should I dump her, trying to defuse the situation with humor as I would. Knowing how tenaciously dedicated she is to our happiness should make things feel better.

When it doesn't, I realize that this was only part of the confession I have to make to be unburdened; that I have to tell Jess much as I would prefer not to. I want her as my best friend and I cannot fall into the sitcom pretense of cloistered emotions for dramatic effect. Plus, I feel I am rather transparent, so I would be shocked were she not at least casually aware already. As confessions go, there are worse ones than "I think you are so awesome that I get a little tingly, but don't worry. I won't do anything because I love my girlfriend."

I would feel even more awful should it turn out that this infatuation presents an insurmountable barrier in our early relationship. Even with the tiny amount of time I've known her, she puts me at ease. I adore her in a way I have not in a while, a sort of instant kinship as though we've shared a life before. I even like her friends, both as an extension of her and independently. Melanie says it is like in high school, when you feel cared about and purposeful with a group of people, something I have only had occasional flickerings of since my own time in school (though these groupings were tellingly extinguished by one party pushing others away to pursue ill-advised intimacy with one). Jess has begun to represent something greater than herself, she is a community of friends into which I could slip, she is a new world of possibilities.

I feel betrayed by my head, by its willingness to bring me to harm because it was given certain cues. It is as though my innate conditioning has been manipulated, like those birds that cuddle up with a stuffed predator because a speaker inside is playing the cries of a baby bird. I should be more evolved than this, but it is just as easy to trip my circuits.

In essence, I am forced to realize that I am subconsciously projecting my abandonment issues onto Jess not simple because she is my type (sweet, adorable, friendly, funny, attractive, intelligent, geeky) but because she is available. She lives twenty-five minutes away, she won't leave for other countries for months at a time. While she is a crucial component of it, the crush really isn't about Jess. Once I realize this aloud, the weight of the crush lifts, unfortunately replaced with the mortification that I couldn't fully process all of this until I'd told Jess that I had a crush on her.

Despite this, Jess seems to take this all well, saying that, as long as nothing more than my confession happens - and it won't - there is no issue between us, which I dearly hope she means and which all of her behavior after acts to affirm. From my writing, I think she has begun to tender Melanie as a friend she hasn't met and she certainly likes the idea of my relationship with Melanie well enough to want to preserve it.

I am further embarrassed by the sudden clarity of my realization, springing fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head (armor and all) within five minutes. Even if I stated I had abandonment issues prior, this attraction to Jess (that never goes below her neck) is what finally makes it concrete. All my misery last summer was too abstract, self-improvement without admitting what I most needed to improve. I struggled and grew, but wasn't aware of the core of why I needed to. I said I was getting over the trauma of being dumped by Emily, but the underlying issues were barely affected.

Despite what the above might imply, I can't wholly blame Emily, as is facile and false, though she was my first real experience with someone leaving for months at a time. She led me believe from the outset that she was the one who would stay with me forever, even as she found excuse after excuse to spend increasing time away from the life we were supposed to be building. Even as, every time she mentioned another competition or decided she needed to train with additional coaches, I heard the echo of her telling me how she escaped from her ex-boyfriend by training as many hours a day as she could. I very nearly married her because I had convinced myself that she would stay with me, even as she had already left and had yet to tell me. For that alone, I need to conquer this phobia, so I never again let it be the deciding factor in my life.

But Emily was not the source. I asked my mother why she imagines I have abandonment issues, since she might remember some trauma in my infancy, some Eriksonian crisis I missed, but she cannot remember anything before my foolishness with Emily. I recall my bad behavior and controlling urges because I thought my high-school-to-college girlfriend Kate would leave me, because her predecessor Jen did. Even Jen isn't the source, though is a contributor in a small way still. I've taken enough psychology classes that I want to pin this on something more primordial, but perhaps it is just the accumulation of bits of baggage from dashed adolescent affection.

But I am unequivocal on the fact that this isn't their issue, it is mine. All those times feeling a distance when someone returned to me, I was the one who was yards away, not them. I was saying, "You left me. You will leave again. And one of these times, you aren't going to come back, so why should I keep giving myself to you?" I need them - both partners and friends - to prove to me that they won't make that final departure, leaving me alone, and will be prickly until sufficiently reminded. Even as I let someone go with ease, I was occasionally annoyed by their return and wouldn't acknowledge why. How dare you do this to me, my demeanor asked. How dare you leave and think I could forgive you immediately. I don't know why being alone is the most horrible thing my brain can conceive, I certainly manage well on my own. But I am a little more invested with each return, and I lose a little more every time I am left waving at tail lights.

My fear of abandonment extends past romantic relationships, plainly. One look no further than my resentment at those friends who just picked up and left without explaining themselves or succumbed so deeply to their own fears and worries that they cast me off just as surely as those who are states away. I read recently that friends have a seven year half-life, that every seven years, half of those people who one was friends with vanish and need to be replenished. And, as has been a passive struggle throughout my writing, I have tried to stake these people to the ground so they couldn't leave or cling to the shreds of what was once a friendship because it used to be something I wanted. But you can't will nature to reverse and I am coming to accept that it is natural for people to drift out of my life, one of my first steps to facing my fear of abandonment.

It is also telling who is immune. Hannah is leaving in a week for a six year stint in the Navy, but my issues are not riled up. She said proper goodbyes, she said she cares about me and will keep in contact, and she has implied that she will visit. Boot camp in Chicago means nothing more than that she is not currently here, but not that she left. She will not cease to be my friend and is not abandoning me as much as exploring what her life most needs. (This is not to say that I didn't freak out a little when first she announced her decision and misplaced why I was doing so.)

A small part of this reinvigoration of my issues, to my shame, is that I needlessly worry it is only a matter of time before Melanie decides that I was just a phase where she found someone closer to her intellectual level, but not someone she shows off to her friends. I fret that she will change in a way that she will want something else in her life than me. She misunderstood and thought I meant that I considered myself static, which couldn't be further from the truth. But the fact remains that, in my past three significant relationships, time apart meant that they grew away from me. They realized, in an absence of my breath of the back of their necks as I help them, that they wanted different breaths there or none at all. That, in breathing the same air as them, I was suffocating them. Of course, Melanie doesn't at all agree and would fondly but firmly tell me I was being stupid and should stop saying such things when she can't kiss me to shut me up.

I am disappointed because I truly thought I was over this, as everything had been so wonderful. Instead, it turns out that Melanie's presence soothes but does not obviate my issues, so I am in for yet another summer battling with my core neurosis. But it is as if, knowing the monster's name, I can now fight it off. I have seen how insidious it is, how easily I am its prey, but it relies on my not realizing any of this. If I can label my behavior as maladaptive and shatter my ignorance, I can crush it first. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090607.php 16 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

We meet again to make good on the promise of Infinite Fries. While I don't hunger for the mélange of salt and fat that is about to be coursing through my veins, I am ravenous to know more about Jess, to further justify why I like her so well and consider her a good friend despite having spent a single hour in her presence.

"How are you holding up with Melanie gone?" she asks as we sit down. I hesitate for a moment, trying to recall if I had mentioned Melanie's exodus to her. But I must have, as an explanation for why I had been seeking company… unless she has started reading what I write.

"I'm doing about as well as can be expected. I am not just sitting at my house, being asocial and moping. I'm making new friends," I say.

"It's real pretty, what you write about her. And sad," she says, drawling the words so that come out as "real purty". It's an affection I quite like, reminding me - perhaps intentionally - of Jewel Staite's character Kaylee Frye on Firefly. And I like her better for having read what I've written, as I explain myself much better in writing than I ever could aloud.

I prod out little facts about her throughout the meal, such as her last name, number of family members, and the beginnings of her history. (She has a Facebook group started by her college friends and dedicated to how awesome she is, she is acting as Cecily in a community theater production of The Importance of Being Earnest being directed by her mother, she wears as many rings as she has fingers.) We talk fondly in pitch, if not in content, like we are two old friends with selective amnesia, catching up.

I see no reason to hide any part of myself or, at that, things she is going to read anyway. I tell her outright that Melanie and I have nominated her the replacement Hannah, not that we are expecting her to fit those exact shoes but that we see her as a mutual close friend (albeit one Melanie will not meet for another two and a half months). The only remediable deficit is that we will need to teach her to make Hannah's pumpkin bread (to which Hannah graciously gave me the recipe when I last saw her), once I perfect making it on my own. Jess seems, if anything, eager for the challenge of our friendship. She may feel less so when I begin referring to her as my filthy assistant, ala Spider Jerusalem.

We have no trouble passing the time between the beginning of our meal and of the bad movie (The Haunting in Connecticut) we are going to watch only to mock. The hour slips by, greased by refills of soda and fries.

We take her car - named Glinda because it magically has so few miles on it and is purple - rather than separating for the four miles to the theater. I smell the car and ask, with a twinge of worry, "Do you smoke?"

"Oh, no. My friend does and I gave him a ride. Finn," she explains, though there is something in this I can't quite read. "I should tell him not to smoke in here."

We arrive at the theater early, and it is delightfully vacant, giving us hope that we will be able to ridicule the film at full volume. In the meantime, we talk more, having no end of topics at our disposal, as everything persists in its newness.

"I've already written about you, you know," I tell her.

"Can I read it?"

I pull out my mini-notebook that Melanie refers to at the Tiny Beast and hand it over. I generally find people reading what I write in front of me as an unnerving experience, exponentially so when they are reading about themselves and might need to scold me into making corrections, and wish to get that potential awkwardness out of the way as quickly as possible. I had already warned her that I was going to write about her. Jess smirks and outright laughs a few times as she reads and then asks if she can read on beyond what is specifically about her. She, if anything, seems flattered by my written attention.

During the movie, we jump at each other during the scary parts and in the midst of our teasing (spoiler alert: a mix of formaldehyde fire and demonic possession cure cancer). Our contact is playful and chaste, but affectionate. Aside from Melanie and the departing Hannah, I do not feel that I have people in my life with whom I can safely cuddle up and mock horror movies, and avidly welcome Jess's addition.

After the movie, we sit in her car for a long time, just looking at each other and talking like we've had decades apart. Again, I don't want the night to end, but there is no natural way to keep it extended. I've gotten a few more hours to get to know her, and that should be gift enough for me.

But it isn't.

"What are you doing tomorrow?" I ask.

"My friends and I are doing role playing at my house, actually…" she says as though this prospect is deeply embarrassing. From what I already know about her, I'm aware that she is the organizer and facilitator of role playing, that she very much wishes to spend a Saturday night doing precisely this but has been conditioned to state so apologetically.

"Would it be okay if I came and watched? I am stuck on the sequel to my book and there are people role playing in it. My only experience with role playing is a book about the vampire killings in Florida in the 90s."

"Yeah," she grins, "That would be fine."

When I arrive the next day, her house is bigger than I expected, which is to say that it is larger than the house in which I grew up. I mentally calculate how many of my apartments could fit in there and stop counting at a dozen.

I knock on her door and, when she doesn't immediately answer, poke at the shrubs around her porch to give myself an excuse to peek through the picture window and study her habitat. Hearing footsteps, I return to the door and smile as though I wasn't spying.

She gives me a quick tour of the house, pointing up and down stairways, until it ends in her bedroom.

Her friend Finn is there, sitting at her computer. For a fraction of a second, I am disappointed, as I had hoped to have a little unadulterated Jess interaction prior to the arrival of more people, but it evanesces upon eye contact with Finn. In my gentle cyber stalking of Jess, I noted that Finn and I had mutual acquaintances, giving me additional in-roads into Jess's social circle, albeit highly tenuous ones. He steps up from the computer and it is almost like he, too, wants to go for the hug. "I've heard a lot about you!" he assures me, though it isn't terrifying when he says it.

I've heard very little about him - he is her friend, he smokes - but I will remedy this. He has short black hair and wears a tight black Under Armour shirt over jeans, seeming physically fit with a touch of quiet frenzy.

I hand Jess a copy of the comic my writing was in, though caution that I will need it back despite finding my involvement in it less than ideal (aspects of my story, including the ending, were changed prior to publication). She, in turn, gives me some graphic novels I'd never heard of before but am instantly certain I will like. I also give her a CD I made, titled "Jazmina Mix", an intentional distortion of her college nickname, which she promptly puts in the computer and Finn begins to rip.

"Oh, no…" I immediately protest, from a corner of her room, where I am inspecting her books and copious unicorn décor (she collects My Little Ponies and has ninety-eight). "There's no need… I mean…" because I am already embarrassed as to the content of the disc. While I started out just loading it with songs I like, I quickly fell into the conceit of making it tell a kind of story, one that I don't know that I want to have shared with Finn quite yet. One that, in fact, I am now not sure I should be sharing with Jess. (My friend Kate's first experience with music came from Les Misérables, so she assumed that all recordings were from musicals. Before realizing the truth, she had mentally sketched out a rock opera to justify her brother's Grateful Dead tapes. I have since tried to make mixes in this spirit.) Eris comes to my aid, however, making it impossible to both rip and listen to the CD. Jess orders Finn away from her computer with his cursed fingers and I am free of discomfiture.

We go down to her screened-in porch, where the game will commence in hours. Finn initial talks to us, mostly to interject a question about this or that bit of Jess's world. Jess's game composes five or six books and binders, elaborate maps she has sketched on antiqued parchment, a whole book of herbs and their magical properties that she handwrote out. I've written a novel with less background than she has for this game.

I mentioned this, explaining how my fantasy universe operates on consensus beliefs, so things exist because people believe they do and that magic tends to be a bad idea as it attracts disbelief. Finn stares at me with disconcerting concentration.

"Jess?" I ask, a little worried by this reaction.

"No, that's good, he's pleased. Finn had a similar idea in a game, so it's good to hear it independently stated."

Finn reminds me, in his occasionally startled gestures and jovial intensity, of a love child of Conor and Emily. I am more than willing to favor people simply for reminding me of someone I already like. He puts headphones in to absorb the minutia of the campaign before him and his place in it, briefly breaking out in dance when The Black-Eyed Peas play. Jess and I talk in low tones, using our geeky equivalence language, saying that he is the Xander to her Willow, meaning that there are infrequent bursts of attraction residual from when they dated in high school. He disappeared for several year without a word, then reappeared and resumed a friendship with her.

"He might be listening to us now," she says, eyeing him. "He's been known to pretend he was listening to his music and then repeat a whole conversation at a later time."

"Well, don't look at him then! He will feel the magnetism of our eyes." It's such a bad habit, remembering conversations and repeating them later.

The doorbell rings and Jess goes to answer it. I sit for a moment longer, then decide I don't care to watch Finn read. I follow after, wordlessly, as Jess lets a short blonde woman into the house. Before I can be introduced or noticed, the woman - Rachel - asks Jess for something alcoholic to ease the ravages of a bad day. Rachel is tiny with bleached hair and a grass green dress that spills around her when she crouches to look at something near the floor.

Jess disappears into another room and reappears in a moment, holding a glass full of a tan, milky liquid. Then Rachel turns to me, takes a sip, and says appreciatively, "Our Jess is a trained bartender. Did you know that?"

I look to Jess, who gives a half smile. "I did not!" For the rest of the evening, Jess will periodically disappear to bring someone a highball glass of amaretto sour and remind them that they are welcome to crash at her house.

The alcohol loosening Rachel's tension, we return to the porch and Finn, who does not seem to have noticed our absence. With the addition of this woman, Finn rejoins the conversation, which spirals into his knowing my younger brother (and, he claims, anyone who spent time in the Dutchess Community College lounge in the last eight years) and Jess, Finn, and I all speaking favorably of a forty-something mutual acquaintance. As Jess resumes sorting her world, Rachel begins plinking out M&Ms from a dispenser at the center of the table and offers me some.

"No thanks, I don't like them much. They last forever, though. The military puts them in MREs," I say.

Finn brightens. "MREs? I love them! Do you like them?"

"Not really, from what I've had."

"I was going to be in the air force, until I got knifed in a bar fight."

"You were in a bar fight?" Rachel asks.

"Not exactly," Finn explains. "See, what happened was that I was in a bar in the city. A guy was going to stab someone else, stumbled, and shoved the knife into me to catch his balance."

Rachel further probes into his story and it spins out extravagantly. According to Finn, the military released him from any obligations. "And I was good, too. Graduated ROTC early, perfect scores in every test they gave me at West Point. I even made a dual prop helicopter do a barrel roll. The captain bet me it couldn't be done, but I took it up. If it can be flown, I can do a barrel roll in it."

Rachel is suitably awed. I just smirk, especially when he tells her that his doctor unofficially prescribed cigarettes to soothe the damage from his punctured lung, which is apparently otherwise treated with an ephedrine rescue inhaler. I think better of asking to see the scar.

With them, even ordering Chinese food takes on an air of theatricality.

"Lots of white rice. Could you italicize that?" Finn asks Jess.

"I already wrote it. I could underline it, though."

"Do that, then give it an exclamation mark. And then another, but with a smiley face under it," he orders.

"Now it looks like the exclamation point is underlined."

"Good!"

I find an odd comfort in Jess and her friends (especially Rachel and Finn), as this is a group dynamic I had been seeking. Even as more people are added to the mix throughout the night, I never feel that symptomatic pause and tension that has driven me from my enjoyment of activities (from sitting at a coffee house to a wedding) in the past. I don't have to find my level because there is never a moment I do not feel I am at it. I love them a little for that.

Over dinner, I cannot even act as an observer, as I want to quiz everyone present (including Pink Rachel - owing to the streaks in her hair - and her boyfriend Andrew) as to their interrelationships and lives, through I do this more by listening than actively prodding them with my fork.

This, I gather, is Jess's idea of a party. Her parents, with whom she lives, are out touring Canada on motorcycles and she feels the need to make full use of her freedom. Rachel mentions something about Jess being out past her curfew, despite being in her mid-twenties and a college graduate. The sincerity in both their tones suggests this is not, strictly, a joke between them.

Because of all this, I am surprised when she suggests how serious a prior romantic relationship was.

"You were going to get married?" I ask.

"Well, apparently not like you. We didn't have a date or a dress, but it was implied we were moving in that direction. Then… we weren't anymore."

"Ouch, that's lousy," I say, but am further intrigued and store this fact away with her bartending skills.

After dinner, everyone corrals down to the screened-in porch and I get out the Tiny Beast to take notes on their role playing, since this wasn't simply my excuse to see Jess again as soon as possible. I really am hideously stuck on my book and, while I have plenty of good ideas and actions until the end of Red Hook sketched out, I don't feel it is currently strong enough to continue.

The group, now six or seven people, begins to plot out how they will proceed in the game. Blonde Rachel has wrapped herself in a blanket for warmth and incorporated this accessory into her ghostly character. Then, quickly, things degrade into a conversation about the sexual spectrum which Jess interrupts with, "There can be sex in the game, guys! There isn't, but it could definitely happen!" They settle and game in earnest.

The evening chills further and I ask Jess if she might lend me something to wear. She brings me to her bedroom and pulls a blue hoodie from a plastic bin. On the sleeves are brightly colored dragons and it smells delightfully of her, which is to say, of the fabric softener and detergent her parents use, since she has not yet worn this. As I return to their game, I feel cuddled up and warm, as though my new friend is hugging me whenever the breeze catches the scent of the shirt. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20090606.php 12 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

I want everybody to take seat and get comfortable. Sometimes this section of Xenex tends to lean towards the humorous, but not today. This is super serious, people. It's like Wailing Caverns multiplied by a dozen. When humanity falls, this information will remain on the lips of shamans who will whisper it into the ears of children before trussing them up towards the stars to be baptized by Thor's mighty hammer.

There's really no way to say this delicately, so you'll just have to forgive my brashness. David Carradine was killed by the alien souls of Heaven's Gate members because his shellacked penis operated the hyper space drive unit needed to achieve a safe passage to the Zeta system.

Come on, you apes. You want to live forever?

Did I stutter?

This, I imagine, is how Deep Throat felt. This information is too big, though. It's too important to the survival of not only the species but of the very planet. It's like eating a really long banana. I mean you could try to just cram it in and hope for the best or you can slowly take it in, let it sit there for a moment. Now look at me, you're doing so good taking this information in. I'm very proud…

Fellatio humor, I feel like a low rent Kenneth Starr.

In 1997, while the rest of us were fighting giant fucking lizards, a group called Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide in order to escape the earth, which they saw in its last days. Well, we showed them; those of us that hung around fought back the lizard invasion. To this day the rally call "I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!" brings a tear to my eye.

Anyway imagine their surprise when they went into outer space, adrift in the various crap we've thrown up there, and discovered their ship didn't have its hyper space drive unit.

Heaven Gate members wore arm badges that read "Away Team". Go look it up.

Maybe it didn't happen this way. Maybe this is a way for the writer in me to cope with the idea that one of the most underrated actors in the history of television died in an unnecessary way. This is up there with Hunter S. Thompson in shit that no one saw coming. Honestly. Ride on, Cowboy.

Your Moment of Pure Fucking Insanity

"Under these circumstances we cannot be sure that he committed suicide but he may have died from masturbation." -Bangkok Police Official (I wish I was creative enough to make this up.)

Your Musical Moment to Travel to The Stars With Provided By Weezer On an island in the sun. We'll be playing and having fun. And it makes me feel so fine. I can't control my brain. We'll run away together. We'll spend some time forever. We'll never feel bad anymore. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/justify/carradine.php 11 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

Prepare yourself for the prequel to end all prequels. I blame comic books. Technically, the idea of an Aliens/Predator crossover came from Dark Horse. You see, kids, when the idea of making a bucket load of money comes into play… well, adults tend to put out crazy ideas. Let's make Freddy vs. Jason. Batman and Superman should be in a movie together. The proposal becomes so big that the people involved never stop and wonder if they should. You built your knowledge on what came before and now you're going to market and sell it. I call this the rape of the modern world. Granted, it didn't help when Danny Glover came across that alien skull in the ever underestimated Predator II, ever since nerds have been asking when Hollywood would ever decide to make that long awaited Alien vs. Predator movie. The wait is over, dear nerds. Much like your mother descending from the kitchen with a bowl of macaroni and a slice of bread, the fourth wall of nerd-dom is about to be smashed to pieces. Granted, this movie came out in 2004 so the macaroni is like five years old.

Mr. Black: Gentlemen to evil! For those of you keeping score that's both a Simpsons and Millennium reference.

Who is your father and what does he do? Well Lance Hendrickson is a billionaire business mogul who happens to discover a pyramid in the middle of the Arctic. We're going to need a montage as we assemble our team. Can we get a nerdy white guy? Now get that Italian actor with no actual acting ability. Okay, now we need a hot chick, done. Let's add a spiky hair blonde girl for the sole purpose of luring Stevehen in, done and done. Really, it doesn't matter because, as it happens, this team wanders into a Predator hunting rite of passage. All their expertise - half of the team granted has no expertise - matters not as they are systematically torn apart by Aliens and Predators. Somehow the hot chick manages to spear an Alien, which leads to her becoming accepted into the rank and file of the Predators. There's a big explosion and the Predator ship takes off, leaving the sole human to likely freeze to death. In the end, we're treated to an image of a Predator having an alien explode from his chest.

First we make the babies, then you make the pancakes.

Well, here's my fucking problem with this whole debacle. At one point, Lance Hendrickson goes ape shit insane on a Predator. The Predator scans his body and decides to take pity on the cancer-ridden billionaire. Okay, so we've established that the Predators are capable of scanning bodies. Why they don't scan the body of their colleague and thus end the idea of a sequel is beyond any explanation I could grant here.

Alas, it grew enough of an audience to warrant a sequel. Of what I can remember of that film, there was a hospital, some homeless people got killed and there was just an hour of too much movie for my liking.

You Should Look Out For

1. Flares! Look at all the flares!
2. If there's ever a door that reads "Only the chosen ones can enter." Well, best not to enter. However, if someone ever asks if you are a God, you say YES.
3. When knocked to the ground, Aliens begin the process of break dancing.
The professional climber takes five minutes to get up onto a ledge. What the hell?
4. Despite what this movie suggests, guns and condoms are not even remotely related. Please remove the gun from my penis now.

I've heard this speech before. My dad broke his leg seven hundred feet from the summit of Mount Rainer. He was like you. He wouldn't go back or let us stop. We reached the top and he opened a bottle of champagne. I had my first drink with my dad at 14,400 feet. On the way down, he developed a blood clot in his leg that traveled to his lung. He suffered for four hours before dying twenty minutes from the base.