bitter tears and babylon revisited

In an all-too-brief lifetime (1896-1940) of crafting some of the very finest American short fiction, Scott Fitzgerald likely reached his artistic peak with the 1931 story “Babylon Revisited.” Ostensibly about the effect on expatriate Americans following the 1929 financial meltdown and the subsequent Great Depression, Fitzgerald magically recreates the melancholy social atmosphere following the Crash and the oftentimes desperate attempts by the American expatriate community to enjoy the dregs of the decade-long party which has come down to what history now terms the Roaring Twenties.

Perhaps Fitzgerald’s most perceptive and sympathetic  critic, Malcom Cowley, calls Babylon Revisited “a new type of story, more complicated emotionally, with less regret for the past and more dignity in the face of real sorrow. “”At last I am mature,” Fitzgerald said around that time, with Cowley saying that this and other contemporary stories “are so close to his personal tragedy that the emotion is in the events themselves…which have merely to be stated in the barest language.” In this Fitzgerald comes closest to Hemingway’s famous “iceberg principle,” in which three-fourths of story remains below the metaphorical surface, a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understand.”

Babylon Revisited tells the story of one Charlie Wales, a onetime free spending and hard-drinking Parisian-American now paying the moral and practical cost of alcoholism and his onetime tendency to spend money as if it were printed from an inexhaustible supply. “I spoiled this city for myself,” Wales says. “I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and I was gone.”

“The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow,” Fitzgerald writes. “If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.”

And at considerable cost: Wales’ wife died of “heart trouble”  in Paris after he drunkenly and inadvertently locked her out of the house during a post-party snowstorm, and now his young daughter Honoria lives in the custody of his wife’s sister and her own husband. There is much resentment, of course, especially with his former sister-in-law, with which there had always been “an instinctive antipathy between them.” The sister, Marion Peters, bitterly blames Wales for her sister’s death, leaving Wales to become “increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later it would come out, in a word here, a shake of the head there, and some of that distrust would be irrevocably implanted in Honoria.”

That particular thought strikes a bitter chord with any non-custodial parent, of which reluctantly I am one. Typically, I write of and disguise my own enduring pain through allusion and metaphor; I have come to realize that certain types of pain are so deep that they are beyond acknowledgment, far beneath the surface, far beyond even tears. Lately I have begun to wonder if I can even still cry, if the pain has burrowed itself so deep that it can no longer be expressed. It is an unhealthy thing, not being to acknowledge or address your own grief. I know it is, because it leads to hopelessness and a melancholy so intense that even the word depression fails to even begin to describe one’s emotional state. This is my acquaintance with unspoken grief, and, and it has certainly taken its toll during the last eight years. It’s always there, a black veil over my life, leaving me in some ways reluctantly frozen in time, forever seeing and dreaming of the two very young men from which I was once very nearly inseparable.

And as much as Babylon Revisited is a story of moral dissipation, it is also one of the enduring love between parent and child. Little wonder, then, that it affects me so deeply (and so differently than when I first discovered it during my early twenties, shortly before I became a parent myself). I empathize with Wale’s attempts to reclaim custody of his daughter, knowing all the while that my time for such a complete reconciliation is now long since past.

My youngest son and I, Aaron, traded some texts on a recent warm night on the great times we spent together: bookstore and photography trips, Starbucks’ visits and the like. I couldn’t help it; I cried for the first time in what seems like ages. And I needed a good cry in some ways; we all do, I suppose, at one time or another. After all, we can’t keep our emotions bottled up forever.

“I’m afraid we’ve lost the chance to make new memories together,” I said.

‘Don’t think like that,” Aaron said. “There’s plenty of time for that.”

“But you’re so busy. And you’ll be going off to college soon.”

“I know,” Aaron said. “But I sure hope there’s a way.”

“You’re not the only one. You’re all I ever think about.”

And, I must admit, I cried at the conclusion of Babylon Revisited:

He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young anymore, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

Dedicated to Adam and Aaron

“phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust…”

Feeling decidedly old, insecure, passe, and uncool these days, I’ve decided to become as angry as the young Elvis Costello. To wit: have you seen the new iPhone commercial yet? The one where the Strat-wielding dork asks his phone how to play “London Calling?” (doesn’t anyone play by ear anymore?) It’s in Em, idiot wind. Play it in the cowboy chord formation for all I care. And pick up a Tele while yer at it. That’s what Strum played it on.

I suppose that part of me is angry that the music of the Clash is being used to sell offshore-manufactured hardware, even though the song itself is conspicuous in its absence (permission denied to use the actual song, I hopefully assume). After all, I feel very protective of my bands; I always have. And these days I’m feeling very protective of the Clash.

the ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
engines stop running but I have no fear
cause London’s burning and I live by the river

I bought London Calling, the album, as soon as I could locate a copy; I was only fifteen and otherwise much too young to know. If you must know, it wasn’t all that easy then. I lived in a very small town, fresh vinyl was scarce, and I couldn’t exactly order it from Amazon or whatever. I was amazed to find it, actually. And I’ve been living in those grooves for the last thirty-two years.

kick over the wall, ’cause government’s to fall
how can you refuse it?
let fury have the hour, anger can be power
do you know that you can use it?

I texted some Clash lyrics to my sons a few days ago; no reply. This happened once before…I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I wanted to share some music–and a band—that I love and care about so much. I suppose I simply wanted to share something with them. My oldest has always, to his great credit, loved the Clash. I thought at least I would receive a brief acknowledgment from him. But…nothing. I’m sure he was busy. Yes, that must have been it. He’s very busy and I’m becoming more irrelevant with each passing day.

I’ve been beat up
I’ve been thrown out
but I’m not down
no, I’m not down

Well, part of it is true, anyway. Or as Hemingway wrote at the end of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

much too late for goodbye

“I get the feeling that you’re hiding something,” Holly said, “that there’s some part of your life that no one else can reach. You’re dealing with something, something serious, and I don’t know what it is.”

“Maybe it’s just a case of the right person, wrong time,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve told you things that I’ve never mentioned to anyone else.”

“Maybe. Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.” Holly took a drink of her latte and then drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “I just don’t understand you sometimes. If at all.”

“Well, neither do I. Understand myself, I mean. And if I don’t, then I suppose it isn’t fair to expect you to understand me either.”

“Then who are you, anyway?”

“Someone who thought that things would work out for us. Obviously, I was wrong.”

“Don’t put it that way. It’s no one’s fault, you know.”

“Then why do I feel so guilty?”

“Who says that you’re the only one who feels guilty?”

“Fair enough. I had no idea.”

“I’m going to walk over to the counter and pick up a copy of The New York Times,” I said. “It would probably be a good idea if you weren’t here when I got back.”

“I won’t look back,” Holly said. “I’m not sure I could take it.”

“Then don’t. Go with luck and love and the knowledge that someone will always care about you, no matter what.”

“No matter what.”

“Yeah. No matter what.” But even then I knew it was a lie. I knew that I didn’t love her, that I would never love her, and that letting her go was the right and only thing to do.

I’m not even sure if I can love anymore, I said to myself. I don’t know if there’s any love left in me at all.

Holly sipped the last of her latte; the cup made a hollow sound as she placed it back on the table. I didn’t look back when I walked over to the kiosk for my copy of the Times, and I suspect she didn’t look back, either. But I couldn’t concentrate on the paper; all I could think of was the last thing that she said as she was leaving. And the days go by so fast.

meditations from A Moveable Feast

Perhaps it’s common, perhaps it’s not, but I dream a lot of my ex-wife, despite the fact that we shared a volatile relationship which erupted quite frequently into violence both physical and emotional. After all, I’ve now known her for thirty-one years, decades that make it difficult–if not impossible–to banish her entirely from my life.

When I dream, it’s never of the bad times (of which, unfortunately, there were plenty). I dream of the youthful part of us that wanted to build a life together, and how we became parents at a very young age.I dream of houses we built together, of watching them grow over the few months of construction. Most of all, I dream of a house of two small children, their laughter, their joy at learning new things, and above all, their innocence. I dream, I must say, of the father that I used to be.

Although I know it must be true, sometimes I refuse to believe that I am no longer that person, no longer a father who could be counted on, for example to play baseball or basketball right after work. Sometimes I refuse to believe that my two sons have grown and no longer need that kind of father; figuring out the kind of father they do want and need is one of the most important challenges of my life as I know it today.

Perhaps it is only nostalgia, an inability to move on from that part of my life in which I was needed like no other. It’s not, as I know, that simple. But this, as Hemingway wrote, is how it was “in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.” Sometimes I lay awake at night and find myself wishing: if only we were that poor and that young again.

“but she breaks just like a little girl…”

I didn’t know Jennifer very long, or in the end, very well. A few months, maybe, during our second semester at college. She lived in Sullivan Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, with surprisingly large rooms and lovely hardwood floors. Jenn was lovely, too, with blonde hair, hazel eyes, and a throaty, Demi-Moore like voice that I could have listened to for hours. I thought–and perhaps I was right–that I loved her.

We shared a bed one night, early on, chastely. I was content to hold her and talk, and more than that, just listen. It was something I did fairly well at the time; listening, that is. Hopefully, I still do. She talked about her family and her dreams, and seeing into her as I did, I knew every one of those dreams would come true. Of that I had no doubt at all.

One ice cold morning in January I waited for her in the hall after the 9:15 class. I was sitting in the window, in love with the impossibly blue sky, when she walked up to me and gently brushed the side of my face with her lips.

“It’s so bright today,” she said.

“I wish it could be like this forever,” I said.

“Maybe it will.”

“Yeah. Maybe it will.”

I took her hand and we walked out into the cold, parting at the student center to each head for our next class.

“I’ll see you tonight,” she said. And just for a moment I watched her walk away, until she blended into the crowd and I had to turn away and walk to the other side of campus.

That night it snowed, furiously. We met that night outside her dorm, in the cold and blowing snow, with snowball fights breaking out all over campus. Jenn was smiling with both her mouth and her eyes, playful and full of plans. She was all bundled up and in seconds she was part of the fun, laughing and throwing and running and playing, at least for a few moments, the part of a little girl.

I kept up the best I could, but I was without gloves and my coat was as poor as I was. Within a half hour, perhaps, I was cold beyond measure and could no longer feel my hands.

“Go on back to your room and get warm,” Jenn said. “I don’t mind. It’ll all be fine.”

“I don’t want to leave,” I said. “But I’m freezing. I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s fine. We’ll talk later.”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll catch up later.”

And then I watched her run away before she disappeared into the laughter and the darkness.

I tried calling about three hours later. I hate to say it, but I tried calling, off and on, until the stillness of a snow-settled dawn. But Jenn didn’t answer that day, or the next, and I didn’t see her until the spring, in someone’s arms at our favorite pub. I left, then; I had to. But I took with me the memory of a little girl smiling at me and holding my hands as I sat in the window, her hair and face framed by the morning sun.

“when only memory remains”

“Is that the best you can do?” she said.

It was.

I’m not sure what, if anything, we talked about after that. There was, after all, nothing left to say. I had told her everything in my heart for the last ten months, and now with only seven caustic words, I could only wonder if any of it had meant anything at all.

There is no memory of taking her home that night in June, only memories of what came after: sitting alone for hours in my car because I couldn’t face anyone, crying for days, seeing no one, missing her voice and her perfume and her touch. I spent the next four years waiting for a letter that never came, trying to understand and survive in a life without her: a life I never wanted. A life I am still adjusting to now.

“It’s not right anymore,” she once said as I was driving her home just after dark. “It’s supposed to be…perfect.”

“I think perfection is more of an ideal,” I said. “We have to work at this like we would at anything else.”

I mentioned other couples we knew then; told her it probably wasn’t perfect for them, either. I knew they weren’t giving up; I know now that some of them never have.

I’d sooner forget but I remember those nights
Yeah, life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care*

She placed her hand in my hair one night; I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so good, or so loved. One of those small intimacies we all take for granted; one that I’ve known not nearly enough. But most of all I remember the cool, but not cold, September night when I first visited her, the way she walked me back to my car after the visit, the way the moon hung low in the southern sky, the way we kissed, the way I fell in love even before that first kiss. I remember and I must always live with it; I remember because now, after all this time, the memory is all that remains.

*Dire Straits, “Telegraph Road” (from the album Love Over Gold, 1982)

“just yesterday she was here…”

Everyone disappears. Everyone runs. Nothing lasts forever. Sometimes things end before they’ve even begun. And only the few, the very, very few, even bother to say goodbye.

I understand that everyone goes disappearing,
into the greatest grey
that covers over everyday,
and hovers in the distance and the distance and the distance…*

Maybe goodbye is the cruelest word of all. I’m not sure; I just know that there have been many times when I needed to hear it. Without a goodbye you can remain for years–even decades–in the moment of parting, the hurt so fresh it feels that it will never go away.

Sometimes I go out for an errand and forget my phone, and foolishly think I’ll have missed a call by the time I get home. So I pick it up from the table or kitchen counter, power it on, and stare a second in disappointment at the blank screen. It’s funny, I think. Maybe if I stare at it long enough a call will suddenly materialize; maybe the phone will even ring while I hold it in my hand. But it never does. Of course, it never does.

You would think I would go slightly…daft…after a while. Start talking to myself or something. But no: I read, write, listen to music, play guitar, and when I have the nerve and feel like it, even go to the pub. But I’m not going to the pub much these days…

Who knows? Perhaps tomorrow will be different somehow. Perhaps I’ll feel better; I might even feel like going to the pub. But I’ll carry with me memories of all the disappeared. They’re not here, of course, but they’ve never really gone away.

*Counting Crows, “Up All Night” (from the album Hard Candy, 2003)

Meditation At Lagunitas

“All the new thinking is about loss,” wrote Robert  Hass. “In this it resembles all the old thinking.” But what does it really mean to lose, when loss is all that you had to begin with? What happens when you lose everything, lose it all,  when you are only seventeen?

Perhaps we’re all given an equal measure at birth, enough loss to last a lifetime. There are some, of course, who spend their loss too early. They die, embittered and alone.  

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands…frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bared flayed head waiting there, faceless.

You read Rilke aloud, and shiver at his voice inside you. It pulls you into that place where your remaining loss is the only currency left. And you wonder: did you spend your loss too quickly?  Did it silently ebb while you lingered between consciousness and sleep?

There is no way of knowing. In loss, as in love, you find many strange currencies. And for you there is no appeal.

“All the new thinking is about loss,” wrote Robert  Hass. “In this it resembles all the old thinking.” But what does it really mean to lose, when loss is all that you had to begin with? What happens when you lose everything, lose it all,  when you are only seventeen?

Perhaps we’re all given an equal measure at birth, enough loss to last a lifetime. There are some, of course, who spend their loss too early. They die, embittered and alone.  

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands…frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bared flayed head waiting there, faceless.

You read Rilke aloud, and shiver at his voice inside you. It pulls you into that place where your remaining loss is the only currency left. And you wonder: did you spend your loss too quickly?  Did it silently ebb while you lingered between consciousness and sleep?

There is no way of knowing (fallen leaves in the night…who can say which way we’re blowing?). In loss, as in love, you find many strange currencies. And for you there is no appeal.

Time To Be Alone

There’s that old saying that you can’t make anyone else happy until you’re happy with yourself. Actually, you might want to take it even further and say that you’re likely to remain alone until you overcome your own fear of loneliness and learn to be comfortable with the solitude that God has given to you–whether you desire it or not.

Rilke, the writer who has influenced and guided me more than any other (with the possible exception of Hemingway), famously speaks of love as two solitudes which “protect and border and greet each other.” The poet, almost as famously, was known for sweet and lyrical seductions ending abruptly whenever he felt that his precious solitude was threatened (his relationship with Baladine, mother of the painter Balthus, is perhaps the most tragic example). As a writer, photographer, and creative person, I would certainly endorse the need for occasional–even regular–solitude in a relationship. Relationships have a life of their own, of course, and we don’t want, to paraphrase the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, “to be consumed in that overwhelming existence.” Everyone understands, then, that there’s a time to be alone.

I have plenty of time alone these days; sometimes, I think, too much (and of course, sometime I just plain think too much!). The difference between the person I am now and, say, the person I was two years ago, is that I’m learning to be comfortable with my solitude–and occasionally even enjoy it. I’m learning to enjoy my favorite pastimes again, and I’m learning that I don’t have to feel guilty whenever I do (a terrible marriage can do that to you). There’s a small yet definite sense of joy returning to my life, and it’s making my extended periods of solitude tolerable–and sometimes, when I’m lucky, even enjoyable.

Which isn’t to say that I necessarily enjoy coming home to an empty apartment every evening. But in the last few months, I’ve turned a bad situation into a surprising climb back up the career ladder: I’m playing guitar and reading again, and I’m feeling music again with the same intensity I had when I was much younger and everything was still so very, very new. One day soon I’d like to quote a certain song from the Byrds and say that “the world turns all around her.” But it’s been a good day so far…and for right now at least, I guess I’m doing okay in this time to be alone.

There’s that old saying that you can’t make anyone else happy until you’re happy with yourself. Actually, you might want to take it even further and say that you’re likely to remain alone until you overcome your own fear of loneliness and learn to be comfortable with the solitude that God has given to you–whether you desire it or not.

Rilke, the writer who has influenced and guided me more than any other (with the possible exception of Hemingway), famously speaks of love as two solitudes which “protect and border and greet each other.” The poet, almost as famously, was known for sweet and lyrical seductions ending abruptly whenever he felt that his precious solitude was threatened (his relationship with Baladine, mother of the painter Balthus, is perhaps the most tragic example). As a writer, photographer, and creative person, I would certainly endorse the need for occasional–even regular–solitude in a relationship. Relationships have a life of their own, of course, and we don’t want, to paraphrase the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, “to be consumed in that overwhelming existence.” Everyone understands, then, that there’s a time to be alone.

I have plenty of time alone these days; sometimes, I think, too much (and of course, sometime I just plain think too much!). The difference between the person I am now and, say, the person I was two years ago, is that I’m learning to be comfortable with my solitude–and occasionally even enjoy it. I’m learning to enjoy my favorite pastimes again, and I’m learning that I don’t have to feel guilty whenever I do (a terrible marriage can do that to you). There’s a small yet definite sense of joy returning to my life, and it’s making my extended periods of solitude tolerable–and sometimes, when I’m lucky, even enjoyable.

Which isn’t to say that I necessarily enjoy coming home to an empty apartment every evening. But in the last few months, I’ve turned a bad situation into a surprising climb back up the career ladder: I’m playing guitar and reading again, and I’m feeling music again with the same intensity I had when I was much younger and everything was still so very, very new. One day soon I’d like to quote a certain song from the Byrds and say that “the world turns all around her.” But it’s been a good day so far…and for right now at least, I guess I’m doing okay in this time to be alone.

just need a brief new (Penn St.) romance…

August 2, 2009, 4:12 AM

Went out to one of the pubs on South Allen Street tonight: had a good time although I spent most of the evening talking with two married women (Penn St. alumnae), both about thirty-three. They were sweet, though, and at least I had someone to talk with.

“Do you get a lot of pussy that way?” asked Emily as I walked up to the bar with my book of Rilke.

“All the time, babe,” I said. “All the time.”

“Read me your favorite poem.”

“I won’t read it to you. But, be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”

Emily and her friend, bless their hearts, looked stunned.

“Are you a grad student?”

“No. Just a web geek who loves poetry.”

At least  I still have my sense of humor…

Emily gave me a mild dose of speed–a diet pill, really–and although I feel a bit better and more alert than earlier today I’m beginning to get pretty sleepy. It is, after all, after all, after four o’clock in the morning.

Hoping the pubs are open tomorrow, but I doubt it. At least I went out tonight. I would definitely have felt that I missed a good opportunity if I hadn’t gone out earlier tonight. Wish I could have met someone, of course, but I know that there’s only so much you can do about that. All I can do is be friendly and confident and open, and let the rest take care of itself. What more is there to do, really? “I don’t hook up, “at least not anymore. Guess I’m waiting on something that’s sort of a miracle in this day and age. Really: are there any nice and intelligent women left, who just might appreciate the same in a man? I’m beginning to have my doubts, and actually I have for some time now. And unfortunately, I’m not getting any younger …

I kind of dread trying to go to sleep because I’m sleeping on the bare floor in this bare-bones furnished apartment. But it’s okay; I’m somewhat happy, definitely glad to be here and working, and looking forward to possibly meeting someone nice. I told a grad student’s girlfriend tonight that I was through with hook-ups or whatever; that I wanted to meet someone nice. She didn’t seem very encouraging about the quality of women that I might meet here, but I think she understood what I was talking about. I don’t want to take advantage of anyone; I just want to meet someone nice. I do, after all, want to be in a relationship.

Not  sure what I’m going to do tomorrow; I can always work on the apartment. I still have some boxes to unpack and some trash to get rid of. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more energy tomorrow; I felt pretty shitty and lethargic today. I didn’t really get going until about six o’clock, when I finally went out to Starbucks and then later, the pub. I know I can’t get impatient: I must keep telling myself that I have all the time in the world…I don’t, of course, but Lord willing, it will seem as if I do.

6:11 AM

Just slept for an hour so, probably, and just now took a hot shower. Don’t feel too bad at the moment; in fact, if this feeling holds I might actually feel like leaving the apartment this morning. Must be the slight energy boost from the mild speed tablet that Emily gave me last night. That being the case, I wish I had more of them.

Still kind of pleased with myself for overcoming my fatigue and lethargy and going out last night, although nothing at all happened–not even the acquisition of a phone number or anything (although I did give out my personal e-mail address and Facebook account). Strangely, though, I’m okay with that. I’m not looking for another  notch on the bedpost–at least not any more.  It doesn’t prove a damn thing, as I have finally come to realize. The proof is in endurance, respect, and even love. Can’t say for sure if I’ll find it, if it still exists, or even if I deserve it. But I’m here, alive, trying to enjoy and rebuild my life–the right way–with an open mind and an open heart. There are certain things, as I am beginning to understand, that are simply beyond my control…the future is approaching, and as always, there’s no way to know exactly what it holds. But that’s not such a bad thing,is it?

August 2, 2009, 4:12 AM

Went out to one of the pubs on South Allen Street tonight: had a good time although I spent most of the evening talking with two married women (Penn St. alumnae), both about thirty-three. They were sweet, though, and at least I had someone to talk with.

“Do you get a lot of pussy that way?” asked Emily as I walked up to the bar with my book of Rilke.

“All the time, babe,” I said. “All the time.”

“Read me your favorite poem.”

“I won’t read it to you. But, be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”

Emily and her friend, bless their hearts, looked stunned.

“Are you a grad student?”

“No. Just a web geek who loves poetry.”

At least  I still have my sense of humor…

Emily gave me a mild dose of speed–a diet pill, really–and although I feel a bit better and more alert than earlier today I’m beginning to get pretty sleepy. It is, after all, after all, after four o’clock in the morning.

Hoping the pubs are open tomorrow, but I doubt it. At least I went out tonight. I would definitely have felt that I missed a good opportunity if I hadn’t gone out earlier tonight. Wish I could have met someone, of course, but I know that there’s only so much you can do about that. All I can do is be friendly and confident and open, and let the rest take care of itself. What more is there to do, really? “I don’t hook up, “at least not anymore. Guess I’m waiting on something that’s sort of a miracle in this day and age. Really: are there any nice and intelligent women left, who just might appreciate the same in a man? I’m beginning to have my doubts, and actually I have for some time now. And unfortunately, I’m not getting any younger …

I kind of dread trying to go to sleep because I’m sleeping on the bare floor in this bare-bones furnished apartment. But it’s okay; I’m somewhat happy, definitely glad to be here and working, and looking forward to possibly meeting someone nice. I told a grad student’s girlfriend tonight that I was through with hook-ups or whatever; that I wanted to meet someone nice. She didn’t seem very encouraging about the quality of women that I might meet here, but I think she understood what I was talking about. I don’t want to take advantage of anyone; I just want to meet someone nice. I do, after all, want to be in a relationship.

Not  sure what I’m going to do tomorrow; I can always work on the apartment. I still have some boxes to unpack and some trash to get rid of. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more energy tomorrow; I felt pretty shitty and lethargic today. I didn’t really get going until about six o’clock, when I finally went out to Starbucks and then later, the pub. I know I can’t get impatient: I must keep telling myself that I have all the time in the world…I don’t, of course, but Lord willing, it will seem as if I do.

6:11 AM

Just slept for an hour so, probably, and just now took a hot shower. Don’t feel too bad at the moment; in fact, if this feeling holds I might actually feel like leaving the apartment this morning. Must be the slight energy boost from the mild speed tablet that Emily gave me last night. That being the case, I wish I had more of them.

Still kind of pleased with myself for overcoming my fatigue and lethargy and going out last night, although nothing at all happened–not even the acquisition of a phone number or anything (although I did give out my personal e-mail address and Facebook account). Strangely, though, I’m okay with that. I’m not looking for another  notch on the bedpost–at least not any more.  It doesn’t prove a damn thing, as I have finally come to realize. The proof is in endurance, respect, and even love. Can’t say for sure if I’ll find it, if it still exists, or even if I deserve it. But I’m here, alive, trying to enjoy and rebuild my life–the right way–with an open mind and an open heart. There are certain things, as I am beginning to understand, that are simply beyond my control…the future is approaching, and as always, there’s no way to know exactly what it holds. But that’s not such a bad thing,is it?