Love Day

You should always carry personal holidays with you.

We already do, mostly: birthdays, anniversaries, days that we remember a friend or relative who died. What about other personal holidays? Some friends celebrate "Gotcha Day," the day that they adopted each of their rescue dogs.

For me, I remember the first time I fell in love.  It was 1984, and I was sixteen. I'm older now, and maybe so is she, if she's made it so far. We kept in touch for a few years, but I lost track of her eventually. She probably doesn't wear her hair so long anymore, or wear berets quite as often, but I doubt she's any taller than she was back then. I'm good at finding people, but she happens to have a ridiculously common name - so common that when a movie about a girl with her name came out in 2009, the producers held a publicity event that gathered together dozens of women with that same name.

In retrospect, maybe it was just a teenage infatuation with a girl who flirted with me at a Model United Nations. But it was a life-changing event, and the feelings it generated have provided the standard by which I have measured such things since then. Every year since then, I have commemorated the day I met and fell in love with Beth Cooper. Wherever she is, whatever she's doing, I wish her well.

What personal holidays do you carry with you?

Poem: Double Dig

This is my second published work. It first appeared in the Spring-Summer 2017 edition of Word Fountain, the Literary Magazine of the Osterhout Free Library (https://wordfountain.net/) Some thoughts and background follow the poem.

UPDATE, 7/5/2017: You can hear me read this poem on the Word Fountain site here.

Double Dig

Break the surface with the pitchfork

shave off the sod with the spade

Five feet wide, fifteen feet long

Dig out the first row

one foot down, one foot long

put it in the wheelbarrow

Add compost to the trench

loosen the soil with the fork

try not to think about you

Dig out the second row

toss it into the first trench

incorporate air into the bed

increase porosity, improve drainage

think about the work

and not about all those years

all those "I love you"s

work the soil

the roots will dig even deeper

the weeds will pull out easier

focus on the work

not on all those hours, all those nights

the long drives, the moving van

study sessions and open mics

the sun is hot, halfway done

keep the rows even or the last one will be too big

Keep digging. Keep moving.

There will be rest after the work is done

after the soil from the wheelbarrow is tipped into the last trench

after the excess air is squeezed out with the digging board

I remember every word of every story

every line of every poem

Tomorrow the seedlings will go in

the seeds will be planted

but now, dig the soil

double dig, two layers down

Dig the garden, and forget about you

there will be time for remembering later

*********************************

This was, in a sense, a poem that wrote itself.

I've long wanted to do a piece on the subject of gardening as violence. Gardening is an extremely violent act. To start a garden you must first kill whatever is already growing in the place you want to garden: cut down trees, tear out vines, rip up or smother sod. Then you break the soil and work it into a condition ready for planting. Sometimes this just involves digging or doing a double-dig, as described in the poem, a back-breaking but ultimately rewarding technique. Many times this is interrupted by the need to hack away at roots or pry out boulders. In addition to breaking the soil, you should also amend it by adding compost - dead and rotted once-living things. Once the garden is dug, the rest is fairly easy - for a vegetable garden, anyway. Whoever wrote "I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden" must never have tried their hand at rose gardening, which involves all of the above plus flesh (and clothing) -ripping thorns.

I already had posted a poem of decomposition and decay making compost ("Coffee for Roses," here), so that was not eligible for submission. I decided to focus instead on the act of digging the garden. But then what? Would I use it as a metaphor for digging into the past to bring forth the future? Maybe a meditation on memories of past gardens conjured up? My grandmother's garden, or my first garden in Newark, Delaware? The garden I was digging as the siege at Waco was taking place? Or the one I was working on during the Oklahoma City Bombing?

I decided to do a poem about the things you think about when you are digging a garden. OK, fine, what are those? It was still too early to dig a garden, so I would have to imagine. I put myself in a meditative state and imagined all the actions needed to dig the garden: gather the tools, get the digging board., roll out the wheelbarrow, loosen the soil, begin the digging. The repetitive motions, always kept to a minimum to reduce exertion. Dig out the first row, move the soil to a wheelbarrow, loosen the second layer down, work in the compost. What am I thinking of?

Thoughts of past gardens, green beans in my grandmother's garden, a compound in flames, a building pancaking down on top of a nursery, her...

Wait, what?

Her. I was thinking of her.

Not mine. Never mine. But she was my muse. I loved her intensely, even though she never gave a damn about me, except for how she could use me, what I could do for her. Very nearly an imaginary creature from the first time I came across her personal ad online to the time that I met her in person, almost entirely by accident, a year later. She disappeared a year after that, and I brought her back a year later, and began two years of doing things together, of being there for her, until I outlived my usefulness.

No.

I had already written so much about her. For her. Inspired by her. Even inspired by the way she cut me off in the end. Couldn't I just write something that wasn't about her?

I tried to put her out of my mind. Refocus. What else would I be thinking about?

No good. Now I wasn't just thinking about her, I was thinking about not thinking about her, which was the same as thinking about thinking about her. The more I tried not to think about her, the more she intruded on my thoughts. Our entire history rolled past me, over and over again: that first glimpse of her in-between presentations on fiction and non-fiction writing, the study sessions at Starbucks, the open mics, driving a moving truck for her, hours spent shopping or just driving her around, holding her hand because someone had made her feel miserable, hours spent at the hospital as her mother lay dying, the way she ended it all, the way there had never really been anything to end all along.

So was the poem ruined? Was it a lost cause?

No. If she was the thing I was thinking about when I tried to imagine what I'd think about while gardening, then that's where the poem would go, too.

I wrote down the lines as quickly as I could, trying not to let the sense of intrusion on my thoughts slip away like a bad dream. I polished it and edited it, then submitted it for consideration. A few weeks later I learned it had been accepted.

Will this be the last poem about her, or inspired by her, or influenced by her? We'll see.

I really doubt it, though. 

Poem: Love anyway

Love anyway

You stand there like a clown in a spotlight without a broom
because you love her
more than you can say,
more than you have ever loved anyone else,
more than anyone has ever loved anyone else,
and she does not love you

She loves him
and he has no poetry in his soul

But love her anyway
even if she will never love you

Because the opposite of love is not hate
the opposite of love is not indifference
the opposite of love is resentment
bitterness and anger for being denied that which you know you deserve
that which is given freely to one so undeserving

Love becomes you in a way resentment does not
love is not the answer
love isn't even the question
love simply is

Love her anyway
because you love her
and whether she loves you or not
or continues to love him
him, the one with no poetry in his soul.
you will have loved greatly and grandly and without hope of reward
and the universe will have become a better place for it

So take off the greasepaint
and the shabby hat
forget the broom
step out of the spotlight
put aside the resentment
and love her anyway


This is the fifth version (at least) of this poem. I first read it on January 31, 2014 at the Kick Out the Bottom poetry reading at Embassy Vinyl in Scranton (just a few hours after a major rewrite at work over lunch) and then presented it again on February 20, 2014 at the Third Thursday Open Mic Poetry Night at the Vintage in Scranton, with the line "the opposite of love is not apathy" changed to "the opposite of love is not indifference."

As with most of my poems, this came from several sources. I originally came up with the line "I love you and you love him and he has no poetry in his soul" back in November of 2013, but didn't take it anywhere. In early January I tried to come up with the saddest image I could think of that could be used as the basis of a poem, and I thought of the old Emmett Kelly Jr. "sweeping up the spotlight" routine. For those who don't know, Emmett Kelly Jr. was a very famous hobo clown back in the 1970's who would end his performances with a bit in which he used a broom to sweep up the spotlight. Sometimes this was played for laughs, as he would chase multiple spotlights across the stage as they grew and shrank, appeared and disappeared. But sometimes this was played for pure pathos: he would sweep at the edges of the spotlight, making it smaller and smaller, until it finally disappeared and the show was over. This made me cry when I was a kid. How much sadder, I thought, if he went out to do this routine and realized he had forgotten his broom?

So I pictured a pathetic, lovelorn sap, standing there broken-hearted, hoping to garner some sympathy for his plight, realizing he had screwed up his opportunity to do this and just looked like even more of a fool.

Good, good. But where was this going? What did I want to say?

Poems in the "Waaah, my heart is broken, life sucks" genre are a dime a dozen. Less than that: go to most poetry open mics and you won't even have to pay a dime to hear numerous poems with this same message. If every person who ever had their heart broken gave in to misery and despair and just curled up and died, the human race would be in immediate danger of extinction. But most people get over it. The pain dulls, they move on, maybe they find some sort of happiness with someone else. Well, hooray for that, but was that really what I wanted to say? "Ehhh, you'll get over it?"

No. I realized I had something else to say. If you really love somebody - love them on a level beyond just wanting to get laid, beyond infatuation or lust, but really love them - then it almost doesn't matter if they love you in return. Your feelings for them aren't conditioned on reciprocation. Your love exists on a level the best word for which would be Platonic - if that word were not already being used to refer to another type of relationship entirely. And this is dangerous territory, because it sounds like its delusional, or steeped in denial, or simply stalker-ish. But it isn't intended as any of these things. The message is simply: if you truly love someone and they don't love you in return, you love them anyway - and go on with your life. Don't wallow in darkness and misery and despair, writing bad poetry about how your suffering is beyond anything anyone else can understand. Love them anyway, and get on with it. 

And so I wrote this.

In the present tense

A few weeks ago I was re-reading "Catching Fire," the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy. I was musing on how there was very little suspense in the story, since we know the main character, who is narrating the story, survives. (This is not always the case; stories like "American Beauty" and, I believe, "The Lovely Bones" are narrated by dead characters.) But then I realized that the story is being told not just in the first person but also in the present tense. This ups the ante a bit: we are not looking at the actions from some point after they have happened, but from an ever-shifting now. Anything can happen in that now. The narrator can die and hand off the narration duties to another character - or continue as a dead narrator.

I finished that book and set it aside, amazed that I had gone though it once - and its predecessor numerous times - without noticing the tense of the story. How many other stories are out there like that?, I wondered. Not many, to my recollection. I immediately picked up my 28-year-old copy of "Brightness Falls from the Air" by the pseudonymous James Tiptree Jr. - actually Alice Seldon.  I'd been meaning to re-read that story for a while. I opened it up, began reading - and realized that it, too, was written in the present tense.

In between these two events I decided to see what would happen if I rewrote "Sunset and Shadow" in the present tense.  This story was really an exercise in "show, don't tell": I wanted to put the reader on the bridge with those two characters, seeing and feeling what they were seeing and feeling, not knowing at any moment what would happen the next. Having a first-person narration in the past tense lets you believe that everything will work out for the best, that the narrator will make it to some point where they can tell this story in retrospect. This isn't always the case, but when a first-person past-tense story ends with, say, the narrator dying, I always feel cheated. Placing the narration in the present tense increases the tension, and increases the stakes for the characters and the reader. Anything can happen.

(Nabokov wrote Lolita as a memoir, told in the first person by Humpbert Humpbert. But Humpbert's memoir is wrapped in a psychologist's report, which places Humbert's memoir into a nested past tense and provides the reader with information to which Humpbert was not privy, and which completely undermines Humpbert's reliability as a narrator.)

So I rewrote the story and read it for my writing group a week after I had read the past-tense version. I didn't tell them what I had changed, nor did we get a chance to discuss the story, but a few members noted that they heard a big difference, even if they couldn't quite tell what it was.

But now you know. Here's the story again, converted into the present tense. If you've never read it before - well, I hope you enjoy it. If you have read it before, let me know what you think of the two versions.

Sunset and Shadow
copyright 2013 Harold Jenkins

We get together early on a Saturday afternoon in late January in a bookstore in Wilkes-Barre.  Seeing Lori in person after all our conversations online is something of a shock, finally realizing just how far apart we are in age. She is small and pixie-ish, with bleached white hair and eyes so dark they might be black. Her skin is pale and her face is alive and shining.  She is dressed in a sort of Salvation Army chic, in a green prairie skirt and frilly cream blouse that hide her tiny figure, wrapped in a black wool jacket with shoulder pads that would look preposterous on anyone else. A black beret and a scarf that might be a keffiyeh round out the ensemble, and she wears chunky black boots that aren't just for show - they can easily hold up to the snow and ice outside.  I know she is a brilliant writer even from what she had put in her ad, and the stories I've found on her blog confirm this. She has the appearance of a giddy little girl, but her writing displays a darkness and maturity that say there is much more to her.

I wonder how I look to her: A man in his early forties, stocky but not quite fat, hair and beard and moustache all showing traces of gray. Blue-gray eyes behind lenses that, if you look at them just right, reveal themselves as multifocals. Looking almost like a college professor, although I haven't been involved in academia since a brief stint in grad school more than twenty years ago. I think I look close enough to the photos I posted on my site, as she does to hers. But I really don't know what she sees with those big, dark eyes.

We drink hot chai and talk about writing, and our favorite authors, and our biggest influences. I ask her about school but she doesn't want to talk about it much. She pries a few stories from me about my days in college, a quarter of a century ago.

We have been talking for well over an hour and haven't made any plans for the rest of the day. When she excuses herself to use the bathroom I order a strawberry parfait, something that looks like one of the things she has posted to her blog. After Lori returns to our table one of the staff brings it over in a tall glass with two long spoons. Lori is surprised and delighted by the dessert. After that we wander the bookstore for a while, pointing out books and authors to each other. I find an annotated edition of one of her favorite books and offer to buy it for her, but she takes it from me and insists she will pay for it herself. Fine, I say, taking the other copy from the shelf, laughing. Now we will both have one.

We exit the bookstore holding our identical purchases and step into the icy late-afternoon air.  I suggest we could drive around and continue our conversation. A glance at the clouds smeared across the western sky gives me an idea. The sun will be setting in an hour or so, and I know a spot where it will put on a beautiful display. For a moment I think she might not want to go, or might want to take her own car, wherever her car is. But she agrees and we both get into mine.

The sun is dipping behind the clouds as we drive. We are heading west, so the sun is mostly in front of us. Even through my sunglasses I can see the sun-dogs forming, mock suns positioned on either side of the real one, produced by the sort of ice crystals present in certain clouds. I point them out to Lori, and she pulls out her phone - wrapped in a Hello Kitty case - and takes a picture. Her thumbs fly as she types something on to the screen in a way I can't even begin to emulate. And then she does something else - posts the picture online, to her blog or Facebook or somewhere. I feel the generation gap yawning between us.

I have to maneuver a bit to get where I want us to be, but finally we get there. It is a steel truss bridge, more than seventy years old but still safe and sturdy enough to bear the traffic that crosses it. I had made it collapse once, in one of my stories, plunging dozens of cars and their drivers into the river below. We writers wield such power.

"Here?" she asks, as we park in a dirt lot at one end of the bridge. Her tone says she isn't afraid, just curious.

"Not here," I reply. "On the bridge. About halfway across we'll have a great view of the sunset."

She gets out of the car, pushing her beret down on her head with one hand and clutching her book with the other. The bag crackles like it is threatening to shatter. I am glad we are both dressed for the weather. It gets cold on the bridge in winter. Cold, and windy.

As we step onto the walkway Lori looks up, then around. "You've taken pictures here," she says. She clutches her newly-purchased book in its bag and holds her Hello Kitty phone in the other hand. "The ice on the river, and the shadows on the ice."

"Yep," I say. I posted those photos half a year before I met her online. She has done her homework, reading my old blogs.

We walk out two hundred and fifty feet, or so - I've always been bad at estimating distances. Cars pass us once in a while, clattering and banging over the deck plates of the bridge, but the drivers don't even notice us.

The sun hasn't started its show yet.

"Here is good," I say. Across the deck and through the girders and cables we can see downriver . The Susquehanna flows from east to west along this stretch, so we have a relatively clear view of the sunset. The sun is sinking behind an old, disused railroad bridge and over the trees and rolling hills that edge one bank. The scene is reflected in the river below, where water flows between great broken sheets of ice.

But none of that is what I want to show her.

"There," I say, looking but not pointing. "Above the sun. Do you see that patch of light pointing straight up, almost like a candle flame? Unless I'm reading the clouds wrong, that's going to stretch out into a sun pillar."

She looks at the bright white blur on the western horizon. The sun moves lower and lower behind the clouds. As the minutes pass the column of light above the sun stretches up, and up, looking like a biblical pillar of fire. It gradually deepens to orange and then red as the sun sinks lower on the horizon.

Lori slides the handle of the bag from the bookstore over her wrist, raises her Hello Kitty camera and snaps a few more pictures. "I've never seen that before," she says.

"Most people haven't," I reply, and immediately realize I have relegated her to the realm of "most people." "Sun pillars aren't that common, so they don't happen with every sunset. And we're all so busy, how often do you get to watch a sunset?" I say, trying to recover.

"'How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?'" she says, quoting The Sheltering Sky. "'Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.'" Or maybe she is quoting Brandon Lee's quote of The Sheltering Sky. He was dead shortly after that interview.

"There's something else," I say. "Turn around. Look east."

A beautiful soft pink glow stretches across the eastern sky, just above the horizon. Above it, the sky is only a little darker than it had been a few minutes ago. Below it, the sky is a dark blue-gray above the cold Susquehanna.

"What is that?" Lori asks, raising her phone to take another picture.

"It's called the Belt of Venus," I tell her. "The pink glow is the light of every sunset that's happening just beyond the horizon. The sunlight reddens as it passes through the thickest part of the atmosphere. We're seeing that red sunlight reflected back at us."

"And the dark part?"

"That's the shadow of the Earth. The Earth is casting a shadow through its own atmosphere. It'll rise, higher and higher, and become night."

She taps some more information into her phone. I find that habit almost annoying. I want her to be here now, but she is busy sharing each moment with the world.

I've been standing beside her, on her left as we watched the sunset, on her right when we turned to watch the light show in the east. But as we watch and talk, I move behind her.

Lori is short, nearly a  foot shorter than me. I place my hands on her shoulders, on those ridiculous shoulder pads, Then I gradually slide them across so I am hugging her from behind, each hand on her opposite shoulder.

We stand like that in silence for a few minutes. A car drives past.  I barely notice it.  The wind blows a bit from behind us, but I shield Lori from the chill. We watch the colors in the eastern sky rise and begin to darken and fade.

"So what would you like to do next?" I ask.

She turns to face me, breaking my hold. She puts her phone back in her coat pocket, but the book in its crinkly green bag still hangs from her wrist. She looks up at me, her nearly-black eyes looking into mine.

Lori reaches up and clutches the lapels of my black longcoat. She tugs me down gently, stands on the toes of her boots, and kisses me on the cheek.

"You're very sweet," she says. Continuing to stare at me, she adds "Thank you for the sunset, and the shadow. But I have to go now."

I am dumbstruck. Crestfallen. And a million other words that only apply in such a situation. Finally I speak. "I'll drive you back to the bookstore, if that's what you want."

She smiles and shakes her head. "I have a ride."

The car that drove past us is stopped at the end of the bridge, next to mine.

"Goodbye," she says. She releases her grip on my coat and slides her hands slowly down my chest, stopping briefly to take my hands in hers. Then she lets go, turns, and walks briskly to the waiting vehicle.

Lori gets to the end of the bridge, opens the door to the waiting car, and gets in. I can't tell if she looks back at me. Maybe she waves.

The car drives off and I am left alone on the bridge, as the last traces of sunset fade from the sky.

(There may be one other version of this story, a wacky alternate ending based on a mishearing of what was happening at the end. But I'll leave that for another day.)

Fiction: Sunset and Shadow

Sunset and Shadow
copyright 2013 by Harold Jenkins

We met on the internet. Well, I met her on the internet by way of her personal ad, though it was some time before I found her blog and we began chatting online.  We hit it off, as far as I could tell, but it took a few weeks of getting-to-know-you conversations before she agreed to meet face to face.

We got together early on a Saturday afternoon in a bookstore in Wilkes-Barre.  Seeing Lori in person was something of a shock, finally realizing just how far apart we were in age. She was small and pixie-ish, with bleached white hair and eyes so dark they might have been black. Her skin was pale and her face was alive and shining.  She dressed in a sort of Salvation Army chic, in a green prairie skirt and frilly cream blouse that hid her tiny figure, wrapped in a black wool jacket with shoulder pads that would have looked preposterous on anyone else. A black beret and a scarf that might have been a keffiyeh rounded out the ensemble, and she wore chunky black boots that weren't just for show - they could easily hold up to the snow and ice outside.  I knew she was a brilliant writer even from what she had put in her ad, and the stories I found on her blog confirmed this. She had the appearance of a giddy little girl, but her writing displayed a darkness and maturity that said there was much more to her.

I wondered how I looked to her: A man in his early forties, stocky but not quite fat, hair and beard and moustache all showing traces of gray. Blue-gray eyes behind lenses that, if you looked at them just right, revealed themselves as multifocals. Looking almost like a college professor, although I hadn't been involved in academia since a brief stint in grad school more than twenty years ago. I thought I looked close enough to the photos I had posted on my site, as she did to hers. But I really don't know what she saw with those big, dark eyes.

We drank hot chai and talked about writing, and our favorite authors, and our biggest influences. I asked her about school but she didn't want to talk about it much. She pried a few stories from me about my days in college, a quarter of a century earlier.

We had been talking for well over an hour and hadn't made any plans for the rest of the day. When she excused herself to use the bathroom I ordered a strawberry parfait, something that looked like one of the things she had posted to her blog. After Lori returned to our table one of the staff brought it over in a tall glass with two long spoons. Lori was surprised and delighted by the dessert. After that we wandered the bookstore for a while, pointing out books and authors to each other. I found an annotated edition of one of her favorite books and offered to buy it for her, but she took it from me and insisted she would pay for it herself. Fine, I said, taking the other copy from the shelf, laughing. Now we would both have one.

We exited the bookstore holding our identical purchases and stepped into the icy late-afternoon air.  I suggested we could drive around and continue our conversation. A glance at the clouds smeared across the western sky gave me an idea. The sun would be setting in an hour or so, and I knew a spot where it would put on a beautiful display. For a moment I thought she might not want to go, or might want to take her own car, wherever her car was. But she agreed and we both got into mine.

The sun was dipping behind the clouds as we drove. We were heading west, so the sun was mostly in front of us. Even through my sunglasses I could see the sun-dogs forming, mock suns positioned on either side of the real one, produced by the sort of ice crystals present in certain clouds. I pointed them out to Lori, and she pulled out her phone - wrapped in a Hello Kitty case - and took a picture. Her thumbs flew as she typed something on to the screen in a way I can't even begin to emulate. And then she did something else - posted the picture online, to her blog or Facebook or somewhere. I felt the generation gap yawning between us.

I had to maneuver a bit to get where I wanted us to be, but finally we got there. It was a steel truss bridge, more than seventy years old but still safe and sturdy enough to bear the traffic that crossed it. I had made it collapse once, in one of my stories, plunging dozens of cars and their drivers into the river below. We writers wield such power.

"Here?" she asked, as we parked in a dirt lot at one end of the bridge. Her tone said she wasn't afraid, just curious.

"Not here," I replied. "On the bridge. About halfway across we'll have a great view of the sunset."

She got out of the car, pushing her beret down on her head with one hand and clutching her book with the other. The bag crackled like it was threatening to shatter. I was glad we were both dressed for the weather. It got cold on the bridge in winter. Cold, and windy.

As we stepped onto the walkway Lori looked up, then around. "You've taken pictures here," she said. She was clutching her newly-purchased book in its bag and held her Hello Kitty phone in the other hand. "The ice on the river, and the shadows on the ice."

"Yep," I said. I had posted those photos half a year before I met her online. She had been doing her homework, reading my old blogs.

We walked out two hundred and fifty feet, or so - I've always been bad at estimating distances. Cars passed us once in a while, clattering and banging over the deck plates of the bridge, but the drivers didn't even notice us.

The sun hadn't started its show yet.

"Here is good," I said. Across the deck and through the girders and cables we could see downriver . The Susquehanna flowed from east to west along this stretch, so we had a relatively clear view of the sunset. The sun was sinking behind an old, disused railroad bridge and over the trees and rolling hills that edged one bank. The scene was reflected in the river below, where water flowed between great broken sheets of ice.

But none of that was what I wanted to show her.

"There," I said, looking but not pointing. "Above the sun. Do you see that patch of light pointing straight up, almost like a candle flame? Unless I'm reading the clouds wrong, that's going to stretch out into a sun pillar."

She looked at the bright white blur on the western horizon. The sun moved lower and lower behind the clouds. As the minutes passed the column of light above the sun stretched up, and up, looking like a biblical pillar of fire. It gradually deepened to orange and then red as the sun sank lower on the horizon.

Lori slid the handle of the bag from the bookstore over her wrist, raised her Hello Kitty camera and snapped a few more pictures. "I've never seen that before," she said.

"Most people haven't," I replied, and immediately realized I had relegated her to the realm of "most people." "Sun pillars aren't that common, so they don't happen with every sunset. And we're all so busy, how often do you get to watch a sunset?" I said, trying to recover.

"'How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?'" she said, quoting The Sheltering Sky. "'Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.'" Or maybe she was quoting Brandon Lee's quote of The Sheltering Sky. He was dead shortly after that interview.

"There's something else," I said. "Turn around. Look east."

A beautiful soft pink glow stretched across the eastern sky, just above the horizon. Above it, the sky was only a little darker than it had been a few minutes ago. Below it, the sky was a dark blue-gray above the cold Susquehanna.

"What is that?" Lori asked, raising her phone to take another picture.

"It's called the Belt of Venus," I told her. "The pink glow is the light of every sunset that's happening just beyond the horizon. The sunlight reddens as it passes through the thickest part of the atmosphere. We're seeing that red sunlight reflected back at us."

"And the dark part?"

"That's the shadow of the Earth. The Earth is casting a shadow through its own atmosphere. It'll rise, higher and higher, and become night."

She tapped some more information into her phone. I found that habit almost annoying. I wanted her to be here now, but she was busy sharing each moment with the world.

I'd been standing beside her, on her left as we watched the sunset, on her right when we turned to watch the light show in the east. But as we watched and talked, I had moved behind her.

Lori was short, nearly a  foot shorter than me. I placed my hands on her shoulders, on those ridiculous shoulder pads, Then I gradually slid them across so I was hugging her from behind, each hand on her opposite shoulder.

We stood like that in silence for a few minutes. A car drove past.  I barely noticed it.  The wind blew a bit from behind us, but I shielded Lori from the chill. We watched the colors in the eastern sky rise and begin to darken and fade.

"So what would you like to do next?" I asked.

She turned to face me, breaking my hold. She put her phone back in her coat pocket, but the book in its crinkly green bag still hung from her wrist. She looked up at me, her nearly-black eyes looking into mine.

Lori reached up and clutched the lapels of my black longcoat. She tugged me down gently, stood on the toes of her boots, and kissed me on the cheek.

"You're very sweet," she said. Continuing to stare at me, she said "Thank you for the sunset, and the shadow. But I have to go now."

I was dumbstruck. Crestfallen. And a million other words that only apply in such a situation. Finally I spoke. "I'll drive you back to the bookstore, if that's what you want."

She smiled and shook her head. "I have a ride."

The car that had driven past us was stopped at the end of the bridge, next to mine.

"Goodbye," she said. She released her grip on my coat and slid her hands slowly down my chest, stopping briefly to take my hands in hers. Then she let go, turned, and walked briskly to the waiting vehicle.

Lori got to the end of the bridge, opened the door to the waiting car, and got in. I couldn't tell if she looked back at me. Maybe she waved.

The car drove off and I was left alone on the bridge, as the last traces of sunset faded from the sky.

**************************

This is at least version eight of this story. The original was scribbled out in a little blue notebook as I waited to meet some friends for dinner.

The characters are based on real people, though the narrator is considerably prettied up from his real-life counterpart. The female character is a composite of many women I have known. It wasn't until after I had written the second draft with its detailed description of her appearance that I realized whose face I was seeing as I described her. (Someone I knew briefly in college, many years ago.)

All the locations and phenomena described in this story are real. In a previous draft I had detailed location information, but even now there's enough that you could probably get to the right spot on the right bridge from what I've said.

Sun dogs: I don't have any pictures of sun dogs that I've posted to my blog, partly because getting the whole effect requires a wide-angle lens. Here are some good images online:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog
http://www.meteoros.de/arten/ee02e.htm
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/parhelia.htm

Sun pillar: http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2006/04/untold-tales-sun-pillar.html
(this is a sun pillar at sunrise, so the sequence would be reversed for sunset)

The Belt of Venus: http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2009/02/susquehanna-at-sunset-february-13-2009.html
(taken from the location referenced in the story)

Ice on the river, shadows on the ice, and the railroad bridge:
http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2009/02/another-susquehanna-panorama.html
http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2009/02/susquehanna-panorama-february-5-2009.html
http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-from-susquehanna-river-february-5.html
(also from the locations referenced in the story)

Some shots of the river and the bridge itself, including some junked antique cars mentioned in an earlier draft:
http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2010/01/susquehanna-and-moon-january-27-2010.html

As another sees us

I used to play a game as a kid. As my mom would drive us through Nanticoke on the way to my grandmother's or the grocery store or somewhere else, I would look out the window at people on the street. More often than not, the people would suddenly look at me, even if they had originally been looking somewhere else entirely. For more than a few moments, I would be looking at them looking at me. I wondered about these people on the street: who were they, where had they come from, where were they going, what were they thinking, who had they last talked to, what had they had for lunch, how were they feeling? And eventually I developed a game where I would look at a person and project myself into their consciousness, scan their thoughts and their feelings, and see the world through their eyes. See myself through their eyes.

It was all an exercise of imagination, of course. No one can really do that. But I gave myself a few seconds to conjure up a backstory for these people on the street and try to picture how they saw the world. How they saw me.

(I still do this, sometimes, though it's a lot more dangerous when I'm driving. And most of the people I scan on the streets I immediately tag as "insane" or "criminal," neither of which is anything I can work with.)

Believe it or not, I tend to be a very private person. I only let a few people into my innermost world. And usually my reaction on seeing their reaction is the same thing that Lenny on The Simpsons said when a wall of his house collapsed, revealing him sitting at his kitchen table in his underwear eating beans out of a can: "Please don't tell anyone how I live."

In recent weeks I have been trying to reach out to a few people, to try to expand into the Big Wide World. And I think a few of these burgeoning relationships have been derailed by the ugly reality of the schedule I live by: four, or five, or more consecutive nights of work, all but one of them twelve hours long with an hour's commute tacked onto both the beginning and the end, followed by several daytime hours of incoherent exhaustion and several more hours of blissful unconsciousness, with the whole shebang followed by three or four days off, one of which is a "recovery day", all of which are lived in a semi-nocturnal state. And that's a best-case scenario: most weeks I do not know for sure if I am working on a given night until a few hours before the start of that day's shift, and I do not know if I will be required to work overtime until a few hours before the end of the rotation, and even then, scheduled overtime may be cancelled up to a few hours prior to the start of the shift.

I tell people that on days I am scheduled to work I am "non-existent," and this is almost literally true. On those days, just about everything that makes me me is tucked away in cabinets and crevices inside my mind for safe keeping and later unpackaging.

And it gets worse: I have several non-overlapping groups of friends, and they have learned over the years that they may go weeks or even months without seeing or hearing from me, because during those weeks and months I will be somewhere else. In the past this meant I would be off with some other group of friends, but lately it has come to mean that I am probably off hiding somewhere, trying not to spend money I don't have.

For some strange reason, some people have a hard time coming to grips with this fractional existence, and often decide that they'd rather take up with someone who has a more stable 9-to-5 work week with weekends off. Or, at least, that they'd rather not try to fight their way through my unpredictable and highly unstable schedule, and decide not to get involved at all.

Seeing my schedule through their eyes has made me look at it in a new way. No longer is it a just a pain and an annoyance, but now I see it as a deterrent to forming any sort of new long-term relationships. In that sense, I'm glad this is all going away no later than December. I sincerely hope that whatever I find down the road will be more conducive to success in this arena.

'Cause I'm really hating this schedule these days.


OK Go: This Too Shall Pass (marching band version)


Title reference: "As Another Sees Us", short story by Harlan Ellison about a group of astronauts being observed by a colonial life-form made up of millions of tiny insect-like aliens.

Tapestry revisited

I was thinking about a post that I wrote the other day. This is actually a post that had been rolling around in my head for more than a few years, with essentially the same arguments and conclusions as presented here. My thinking on this subject has been pretty consistent.

But a thought occurred to me: what if, instead of having the ability to change my own decisions, I had the ability to change decisions made by others?

Oh, hell, that's a whole different question. As much as I draw a blank when trying to come up with a list of things that I would have done differently (and there are a few, on further reflection), that's how powerfully the floodgates open when it comes to picking out decisions made by others that I'd like to see done differently.

Some of these are serious - if those two guys hadn't decided to burn down the apartment building, if 90% of the nursing staff hadn't been in the habit of taking smoke breaks together - but frankly, most of what I can think of involves women (and, in my earlier days, girls.) I would love to be able to set down with a dozen or so of them now and say, "Remember back in 1987 when you..." or "Having now seen how badly things worked out with Person X and Person Y, have you ever wondered..." or "If you realized (X) all those years ago, what might you have done differently?"

If I were to hop in a hypothetical time machine / persuasion amplifier to tweak all those decisions and actions made by women in my life that I feel could have been made better, or at least made better from my point of view, I think I would have to be very judicious in how many changes I might make. Or else things could get very complicated, very fast.

Some people don't need any hypothetical gadgetry to get this stuff done, at least not in the here and now. Some people are far more persuasive than others, and are able to bend, almost manipulate, the wills of others to actions that correspond to their own best interests.

So what decisions in the past would you have others make differently? If you could meet face-to-face with people whose decisions you would like to have been made differently, would you tell them? I am wondering what people might say to me that they would have liked me to do differently. How many things have I done that could have had more positive outcomes for others that I'm not even aware of? Could people even muster this level of honesty? And would people be willing to hear such things without becoming defensive?

I'm going to have to think about this. Asking this question of my friends - and directing it at myself - may provide me with dinnertime conversation topics for a long time to come.

Final cookie push

Sugar Cookie dough is made and chilling.

Bird's Nests are about to be made.

Coffee filters are being repurposed after having sat on a shelf for more than ten years since the introduction of "permanent" filters.

Got a taste of the future today and...maybe things won't be so bad. Maybe.

Disappointment is feeling quite proud of yourself for having discovered something that would make an absolutely perfect surprise gift for your nephews - and then finding out it's the top item on their Christmas list. Well, that's not a bad thing. And it means that I'm well-attuned to the things that they might want. I just feel less clever.

To the girl with the Oscar Wilde tattoo

I love you, though I never met you
And I will remember you, though I never knew you.


Rest in peace, child.


"We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free." - Oscar Wilde, The Young King

What I've been up to these last four weeks

For the past four weeks I have been almost obsessively researching the details of the life and death of a beautiful, charming, talented, promising girl whose life ended at age nineteen, not long after she became involved in the world of hardcore pornography. But she didn't die in some back alley or anonymous hotel room in the sleazier parts of Southern California. Her official place of death was a hospital not far from where she grew up, less than seventy miles from where I am sitting.

I won't tell you how I found out about her. Not yet. I won't tell you about how, within twenty-four hours of finding her under half of her pseudonym, finding her whole pseudonym, and then finding out that she was dead, I was able to work out her real identity.

She was a creature of the Internet age. Aside from her obituary, I could find no other public record of her - no graduation notices, honor roll listings, team affiliations, arrest notices. But I was able to find tons of online ephemera - Flickr photo sets, MySpace mentions, even a beautifully-edited home video collage of her that was posted more than a year before she died. I have seen pictures of her father, who appears exactly as she described him. I have read her sister's blog, which is where I found the video collage. I have seen the tattoo that her brother had placed over his heart days after her death in remembrance of her. All this stuff is freely available online, for all the world to see.

I have dug into her fiance, "with whom she resided", as the obituary states. It wasn't our fault, she was out of our control, she was with him. He is a child, a skaterat. Two years older than her. Both of them were technically adults. Ask anyone over forty when "adulthood" begins. (I'm still waiting to exit adolescence, myself. )

He has a MySpace page - or several, I can't tell - with a tribute to her. Touching, beautiful, posted nearly a month after she died. Using words that were not his own. Using words that he copied from another MySpace tribute to her by another person, written the day after she died.

In the wee hours of the morning today, Mother's Day, I found out something else.

Her fiance has another MySpace page with almost no content. I wasn't sure it was him until I found a picture - one of the only two pictures on that site - of the two of them kissing. It was her. It was him.

Very little information on that site. But one thing that may be key.

And this comment:


She was pregnant.

Twenty days later, she was dead.

Why did she die? This question has haunted me these four weeks. I think maybe it's because I think that if I could find that out, I could turn that information around into something that could prevent future deaths. Or maybe it's something else.

I have heard, third-hand, that the manner of her death was an overdose. Was she just a girl who partied too hard one day and never woke up? Or was it a suicide, brought on by guilt over the things she had said and done, or regret over the choices she had made, or despair over the damage the things she had done at age nineteen had done to her future?

Or is there a third possibility?

Why Pregnant Women Are Targeted - ABC News
Murder: The Leading Cause of Death for Pregnant Women

I am not accusing anyone of anything at this point. I doubt enough material evidence exists, or ever existed, to make a case for my suspicions. And maybe I am just projecting who I want this girl to be onto the manner in which she died. I don't want her to be someone who died of suicide. I don't want her to be someone who died of stupidity. If an explanation exists that makes her death not be her fault, I'm going to grasp at that.

I don't know where I'm going with this. What I've described here is just a sketch, a skeletal outline of what I've done, what I've learned. I have given other people other pieces. Someday I may collate and synthesize everything - or almost everything - together into one big post and leave it at that, for some other random person on the Internet to follow-up on. No statute of limitations exists on murder.

The first anniversary of her death is two and a half months from now. We'll see if there are any anniversary notices in her hometown newspaper - and if so, who places them.

I pray that some good can come of all this.

More music

I was doing some more poking around YouTube, looking for more videos by my favorite female Alternative musicians. While Sophie B. Hawkins doesn't quite count as Alternative, the Alternative Rock scene presented women in musical roles like nothing before or since (except, maybe, Country and/or Bluegrass.) So I went off on a jag searching for videos by these women. Some of the ones I viewed this evening:

Kate Bush - "Running Up That Hill":


Kate Bush, like REM and The Cure, really predates what became known as "Alternative Music"; her music might also be classified as "Art Rock", though its best classification is "Kate Bush." This can be thought of as the "dance" version of this video, because it features the Godlike Kate Bush dancing, dancing like she's made of water - which, in fact, she is, mostly. I couldn't find the "performance" version, which is the one I remember from 22 years ago, but this one is much better. To see more of Kate dancing, watch the video for "Sat In Your Lap" - but be prepared to lose your mind.

(On a personal note, this song is crosslinked in my memory to the Doctor Who serial "The Pleasure Hive", which was airing for the first time on my local PBS channel at the same time that this video came out. Coincidentally, some scenes from this version of the video strongly resemble scenes from the climax of that story.)

I bounced around to other videos. "Rid of Me" by P.J. (Polly Jean) Harvey - again, not the version I saw on MTV, but it gets the point across. "Bull In The Heather" by Sonic Youth - every version I could locate has atrocious sound, but, hell, Sonic Youth has a video collection out on DVD - I bought it for this video alone.

And then, of course, there is Hole.


This is Hole's dark, edgy cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman" from the movie The Crow II: City of Angels. This video helps us to remember that Courtney Love hasn't always been skanky and burned-out and scary-looking. Once she was skanky and talented and gorgeous.

And speaking of gorgeous, who is the beautiful woman dancing and singing and playing bass alongside Courtney Love? Hole aficionados will know that this song came out after bassist Kristen (or was it Kirsten? I've seen it both ways) Pfaff quit the band and died of a heroin overdose. The bassist role was picked up by the lovely Melissa Auf der Maur, who later went on to play bass for the Smashing Pumpkins after D'arcy Wretzky's departure.

(from A Billy Corgan Christmas, CMJ Magazine, December 2000)

Which led me to the final video of this entry: Smashing Pumpkins' "Stand Inside Your Love".

This is post-Pumpkins Pumpkins: D'arcy and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain were both gone; James Iha was still there, and Melissa Auf der Maur (I love her name; it means "off the wall!") on bass and some guy whose name I've never looked up on drums*. Visually and musically, it is related to the post-Jimmy pre-Melissa album Adore, as can be seen by comparing it to the video for "Ava Adore", though SIYL features a less Nosferatuesque vibe.

This song is why I rail against the dollar-a-download no-more-albums paradigm that is emerging in music. Once I made myself an MP3 compilation CD by dumping a bunch of CDs onto my hard drive and then recording all of them as one disc containing hundreds of MP3s. And one day while coming back through the Poconos on Route 80 after visiting some friends in New Jersey, I heard "Stand Inside Your Love" for the first time. What the hell is that?, I asked, and played the song again, and again. That's the Smashing Pumpkins, I thought, but I've never heard this song before.

It took some digging to locate the song on one of the albums - either Machina or the Greatest Hits album. Even though this song was released as a single, I never heard it get any airplay. But because I had the entire album, with all its songs, I also had this one. The only way I actually heard it was by accidentally listening to the entire album. If I were the sort of person to be downloading music, I might not download something I had never heard before. Might I have foolishly considered this some random filler track and passed it by?

*According to the Wikipedia entry on this song, Jimmy Chamberlain was back with the band for this album, Machina/The Machines of God. But that doesn't look like him in the video. And while the drums are good, they're not Jimmy Chamberlain good. But what do I know? Besides, this is Wikipedia, so at least some part of the entry is guaranteed to be false.

Damn, Wish I Was Your Lover

I was just poking around on YouTube looking for a video that I plan to post on January 28th. It's related to yesterday's post, and January 28th is significant to the singer-songwriter. (You now have more than enough clues to identify the song, or at least the singer, especially if you have the Life In Hell 2008 Calendar.)

Anyway. Thinking of, and watching, and hearing this song put me in mind to some other drum-and-bass-heavy songs by female singer-songwriters. In particular, "Damn, Wish I Was Your Lover" by the gorgeous and talented Sophie B. Hawkins. Here is the ultra-sexxxay version of the video, as (allegedly) posted by Sophie B. herself:



I remember this version, or at least parts thereof, from back in the days when MTV still showed the occasional music video. It may have been intercut with this version, which is less sexxxay, but makes certain points about Sophie B.'s sexuality somewhat less opaque. Maybe. None of this is intended to detract from the fact that this is a damn fine song.

And if you're into the drums and the bass and the female singer-songwriters, here's Fiona Apple with "Sleep to Dream". (She's a little too skinny and strung-out looking for my tastes, but, hey, like I would ever have a chance with either of these women?)



Enjoy!

Private Name, Private Number

I have a friend with whom I used to be close about ten years ago. Closer that we are now, anyway. She has an unlisted phone number. Those times when she used to call me the Caller ID would indicate "PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER."

We've kept in touch off and on through the years. Mostly this consists of me leaving a message on her phone, and her returning a message to my phone some time later. We've actually talked directly a time or two recently, mostly in the context of my job situation. (From her recent messages, I gather that her job situation isn't all that different.)

The phone at my house is very nice. It's one of those where you have a single base station and up to eight cordless receivers. Very convenient for when you have a house with a limited number of modular outlets and you don't feel like rewiring everything.

The big drawback of this phone is a fluke in the caller ID system: it only maintains the record of the most recent call from any given number. So a crazy person could be calling your house morning and night every 7.42 minutes, and you wouldn't know about it if you weren't there to get the calls - all the caller ID would indicate would be the most recent call.

My most recent call from my friend was shortly after I got my job at the plant. At least, that's the last time she left a message. There have been a few other "PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER" calls since then - which I noticed one at a time, of course - but no additional messages. Assuming these were from her, I've returned calls and left messages on her phone, trying to find out what the calls were about. No luck yet.

The other day I was at the house and the phone rang. I checked the caller ID and saw the message "PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER". I quickly picked up, hoping it was her.

There was a pause at the other end. Then a click, a whirr, and a voice spoke out: "This is an important message for Senior Citizens. If you are age 65 or older, you may be eligible for insurance at reduced rates..."

I hung up.

I signed up for both the state and national "DO NOT CALL" lists over a month ago. While I am not supposed to see the registry take full effect until sometime in November, I have noticed a dropoff in solicitor calls, both in terms of messages left and calls indicated on the caller ID. I know there are certain exceptions, but I don't think this call fell under these categories. So can phone solicitors do an end-run around the DO NOT CALL list by making their calls from unlisted numbers?

I don't know. I hope not. Because if they do, I might just assume that every one of those calls is a call from my friend, my friend with a Private Name, Private Number.

My Personal Ad: Still looking for my other half...

I was just talking with a friend who recently created a MySpace page. He told me that he decided to do it after another friend had created a MySpace page simply by copying the text of his Match.com personal ad profile. It seemed to work - he immediately started getting hits and responses, and from real flesh-and-blood people, not just the sort of predatory phonies who plague every MySpace user.

I decided that's a great idea, and I could go it one better. I've mentioned my Match.com ad here before, but now I'm going to reprint much of my profile information, both here and on my MySpace site. (I actually just revised and updated my profile yesterday!) For more details, visit my Match.com ad (username is databoyechom).

About me and who I'm looking for:

Over the years I've learned something about myself: I socialize better with children and animals than I do with "adults." At parties I tend to drift away from "grown-up" conversations and begin playing with the hosts' pets. Kids find me fascinating in the way drivers find a car wreck fascinating. I appreciate kids for their innocence - well, I've known a few malicious kids, and I try to steer them in the right direction if I can - and for their enormous potential. And kids appreciate me because I do something most other adults can't be bothered to do: I pay attention to them.

This stuff carries over into romantic relationships. I'm looking for someone who, in the immortal words of Dee-light's song "Groove Is In The Heart", is "not vicious or malicious, just de-lovely and de-licious." I'm looking for someone who is still in a state of becoming - who isn't set in her ways, refusing to explore new places or ideas, but has an adventurous streak, and a desire for personal growth. Being willing and able to give good backrubs is a big plus, too!

And what can I bring to the party? Other than a ridiculously broad trivial knowledge, I can bring one important thing: I will pay attention to you. I hope you will do the same.

My ideal house - well, I've found it, I've bought it, and I'm rehabbing it, making it suitable for the 21st century while retaining the character of the early 20th when it was built. "Casual" best describes my clothing, though I tend more towards "nice" jeans, henleys, and Oxford shoes than khakis and "tennis shoes" (we call them "sneakers" 'round these parts, ma'am.) And my sense of humor could best be described as "wry", but more often is described as "twisted"...a consequence of being raised on Monty Python and MAD Magazine. So, there. That's for starters. I can tell you more; all you have to do is ask.

I'm looking for someone who is gentle, kind, adventurous, daring, naive, intellectual, honest, thoughtful, happy, yet at the same time incomplete (because if your life is already complete, what possible role can I play in it?). Someone who has a child-like sense of wonder about the world but the worldly wisdom that comes only from hard experience. Someone who wants to have adventures and do things, but isn't maniacal about taking risks for risk's sake alone. (In my first personal ad I said something like "somewhat young, somewhat pretty and somewhat sane." I think it was somewhat more clever than that, though.)

I've also come to realize that I'm most attracted to artists, musicians, and writers. If you're not one of these, don't worry; but if you are, you may be in a better position to understand and relate to me.

I'd rather be able to meet someone who is at most only a few hours' drive away from me, which opens up half of Pennsylvania, all of New Jersey, much of New York, most of Delaware, and parts of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. (all places that I visit from time to time.)

***
Much of the stuff above was written quite a while ago and is still valid. But I guess there are a few things I should add, now that I have the space:

I'm looking to date. To go out, have a good time, meet someone that I can connect with on any number of levels, maybe even consider going further to something more serious. But first I'd like to date. I'm not looking to become an instant father. I'm not here to make up for the sins and failings of those who have come before me, and I'm not here to try to fill the shoes of someone who's moved on. I'm me. I hope you get to know who that person is.

Well, I hope that gives you a sense of who I am. There's a lot more about me on my blog, which is a sort of autobiography in a million parts. If you're interested, I'll point you there, and you can learn much, much more.

I hope this has caught your attention. If you've made it this far, you may very well be the sort of woman I'm looking for. Get in touch, and we'll talk!


In my own words
for fun:
I enjoy traveling with good friends, gardening, stargazing, nature-watching, dancing, carousing, reading, cooking, and blogging. Give me a wink or an e-mail and I'll send you a link to my blog!

my job:
I work in a DVD Manufacturing facility. I used to have a management position in our DVD Authoring department, but corporate changes pushed many of us in different directions. Looking to make better use of my Physics degree and 17 years in industry.

my ethnicity:
I'm actually more pinkish-tan than "white".

my religion:
My stock answer is "Jesuit-trained semi-agnostic lapsed Catholic." I'm not as lapsed as some of my friends, but I still feel that the Church has some issues it's gotta work out someday. Ask, and I'll tell more.

my education:
I double majored in Physics and Philosophy. Isn't that weird? But If you knew me, it would make perfect sense. I also did one semester of graduate school in Physics - the most horrible and humiliating six months of my life.

favorite hot spots:
It's been waaay too long since I've been to Tink's in Scranton...and the Amber Indian restaurant in Moosic is one of this area's best-kept secrets! Just tried Kildare's for the first time and liked it, and I love the BIG Margaritas at Don Pablo's!

favorite things:
Working compost into the soil in spring...wandering blindly through my back yard with my eyes aimed at the stars...finding a book I've always wanted to buy in the bargain section of a bookstore...and good conversation that makes the world go away!

last read:
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Damn, that woman can write! I'm currently reading "American Sideshow", a series of vignettes and mini-biographies of sideshow performers from the last 200 years or so. Also New Scientist, Newsweek, MAD...

So. Whaddya think?

Bella who?

I've had a MySpace account for a while now, nearly sixteen months. I started it so I could leave comments on my friends' MySpace accounts - many social networking sites require you to be a member to comment on other members' sites, which is how they artificially inflate their membership numbers. I also set it up as yet another way to direct potential readers to my blog - my real blog.

If you go to my MySpace site you'll see I don't have many "friends" there. All - well, almost all - of the names listed there are people I've met in person, or know through their blogs. I do not "collect" friends on MySpace like other people do. If you're a stranger and you send me a friend request - well, there will need to be a compelling reason for me to accept it.

Most of the friend requests I get each day aren't from real people at all. They are from alleged women with slutty, sexy member pictures and almost-identical pages that had very little content aside from links to other pages that promised even sluttier and sexier pictures. I've never clicked on those links, but I know the sort of sites that they lead to. Most of the time I give these false friends a quick look and then delete the requests - or, if I feel like it, report them to MySpace.

The other day I saw these subject lines in my Hotmail inbox:

- Gloria would like to be added as one of your friends!
- Allie would like to be added as one of your friends!
- Bella would like to be added as one of your friends!
- Melva would like to be added as one of your friends!
- Ines would like to be added as one of your friends!
- Ursula would like to be added as one of your friends!

Fakes, all fakes! I thought. But one of the names caught my eye. Bella? I had seen that name recently. Twice.

Once was on the DeviantArt site of a local blogger whose blog I had stumbled across while searching for bloggers from Nanticoke - while she goes by the name "Jennafer" on her Blogspot blog, |verbal·suicide|, she uses the name "jezzabella" on her DeviantArt site.

The other is a site I traced back through my SiteMeter References page: the LiveJournal site for Regina, who goes by the LiveJournal username "bellatella".

Was one of them the "Bella" who sent me a friend request? I don't know. When I tried to open the request I was greeted with the message "This Profile No Longer Exists." Coincidentally, the MySpace link for Jennafer/jezzabella points to a site that says "Invalid Friend ID. This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted." So it could have been her, if her site were closed or deleted after she sent me the request. Or maybe it was just a random, fake, false friend. Who knows? Who can tell?

An addition to my Match.com ad

One of the things I did last night before a malicious program ended my ability to do anything with that computer was make a long-overdue addition to my Match.com ad. I inserted this sentence:

I've also come to realize that I'm most attracted to artists, musicians, and writers. If you're not one of these, don't worry; but if you are, you may be in a better position to understand and relate to me.

So have I just limited my options? I don't know. But I felt like this was something that needed to be said.

Waiting

A chance encounter with a very friendly waitress on New Year's Eve got me thinking about two other women I have gotten to know through their positions as waitresses.

It was back in 1990, in Newark, Delaware, after I had dropped out of grad school at the University of Delaware and started working for a solar cell manufacturer. One of my friends from the grad program was seeing a woman named Genie. We all continued to hang out together even after I was no longer going to school. That summer she picked up a job at a new coffee shop, the Café Americain. (It was attached to a video store and was trying to play on the name of Rick's place from Casablanca.)

The coffee shop was OK. I never spent much time in the video store - I didn't have a VCR, and DVD players were still years in the future. (Seven years, to be exact, and now they've been around for ten. Weird.) Possibly the first time I ever went in there was when I was trying to get in touch with Genie. I don't remember what it was for, I just remember riding my bike up to the place, chaining it to the steps outside, and going in looking for Genie. She wasn't there, but a pretty dark-haired bright-eyed girl was. I asked about Genie, she told me she wouldn't be in until later, and I asked if she could pass along my message. She told me yes, gave me a little smile, and the espresso machine she was filling exploded.

Well, it didn't really explode. But something happened, and the high-pressure water that is forced through the coffee grounds in an espresso machine did so while the basket was still partly opened. Damp coffee grounds shot everywhere as I was headed for the door.

I offered to stay and help clean up the mess, since I felt somehow responsible, but she shooed me away with a laugh.

I would be back.

Her name was Jessica Wolvek. She was a student at the University and worked most afternoons at the Café. I would stop in on my way home from work to get a hazelnut coffee and a cherry cheese croissant. Sometimes there were other people in the Café. Sometimes it was just me. Those times, she and I would spend a long time just talking. About...stuff. Coffee. Croissants. Relationships. Her nickname and how she got it. Life. The Universe. Everything.

Some days she wasn't there. Some of the time there was a pretty, thin, young, quiet redhead there instead. Very young - still in High School. Her name was Rejoyce Soukup. She and Jessica were friends, I think, at least through work. I would talk to her sometimes, though our conversations were not as far-reaching as with Jessica. I did learn from her, however, that the infrared signature of eggplant plants matches the infrared signature of marijuana plants, at least as far as DEA helicopters could tell in the early '90's. So that was interesting.

In time things started to change and go away. One day the Café stopped carrying the cherry cheese croissants. Then they stopped serving hazelnut coffee. After a while Jessica and Rejoyce were no longer working there, and I no longer had any reason at all to go there. Eventually the Café went out of business. Nothing ever stays the same.

Early in the morning of the first day of 2007 I found myself online and completely wound up. My mind was mulling over auld acquaintances that should not be forgot and ne'er brought to mind. I thought about Jessica and Rejoyce. Where are they now, and what are they up to?

Jessica I have looked up in the past, around the time that I discovered traces of Rindi online. Looking her up again produced fewer hits, but one was recent and quite definitely her. Jessica is now a professional flower arranger in New York City. That sounds pretty amazing. Good luck with it, kiddo. If you need flowers arranged and you live in The Big Apple, get in touch with her. Tell her I sent you!

Rejoyce should have been at least as easy to find, but her name doesn't appear anywhere I could find it as a single unit. I found her first and last names mentioned individually on a blog by a guy in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan. I wasn't sure it was her until I saw a reference to Newark, Delaware and some good close-up photos. It's been almost 17 years, and I do have a touch of prospagnosia prosopagnosia, but I'm pretty sure that's her in the pictures. So the answer to "Where is she now?" is, for the moment, "Kyrgyzstan"!

It was gratifying to see that these two women who I knew so long ago are still both around and about and are both doing things that they love. Good luck to them both!

A day without posting

I missed my first day of posting in I don't know how long. And you know what? That's OK.

My friends came into town early this afternoon and we did quite a bit of running around. We spent a while at my house, where my friends were a bit, shall we say, amazed at the number of relics of my grandmother's life - and of her extended family's lives - that remain in the house. At some point these things will be dealt with. But I'm not about to, say, rent a dumpster and throw out all my grandmother's old stuff, or my mother's or aunt's or uncles' stuff, or a whole bunch of religious paintings just because they're old and belonged to someone else. Some things are worth holding onto for more than just their resale value.

We ate at the same Italian resturant that my friend and I ate at last week. Didn't run into the same cute waitress. Oh, well.

We then went down to the Poconos and met with some mutual friends from college. All their kids played together for a few hours, exhausting the adults and alternately amusing and terrifying the animals.

A note on the weather: It's just freaky to be having the warm temperatures we're experiencing this Winter. No accumulations of snow beyond a few dustings so far. Kids in T-shirts riding skateboards outside of my new house on Christmas Eve. Cherry Blossoms are already opening in Washington, D.C. And today the soil outside of my friends' house smelled of earthworms! Earthworms, active the first week of January? I'm starting to feel like I should be mowing the lawn or painting my garage or doing cement work on the grapevine wall and sidewalk. Is this just a fluke, or a preview of things to come?

After a long while it was time for everyone to head off to their respective beds. I lingered for a bit, but eventually got my butt back to my car and started the 70-mile journey back to my house. It's a 20-mile distance as the crow flies - if the crow can lift itself over some fairly substantial mountains. My Tercel is light and nimble but unfortunately is still a ground vehicle. I got home a little after midnight and had to deal with the effects of my computer being stuck partway through a spyware-removal procedure for the entire day. Several ungraceful reboots later, here we are.

It's late now, or early, depending on your point of view. In any case, I am tired and will be going to bed soon!

Long week

This was my first week back at work since before Christmas, and we certainly hit the ground running - on the bounce, as Heinlein put it. Even though it was just a four-day week, I feel like I did more this week than I had in several months combined. Now I'm tired.

Some friends are coming in tomorrow for an after-Christmas visit. I hope I have time to take them around town - rumors are swirling that Diamond's Candy Shoppe may be closing sometime soon, and I want them to see the place while it's still there. Maybe we'll have dinner at the same restaurant where I ate with a friend last Sunday. Better make sure my oatmeal-colored shirt is out of the wash!

Happy New Year's Eve!

Today a friend of mine stopped by partway through his seven-hour drive back home from visiting with his family for the holidays. He got the nickel tour of my new house, which includes the bright blue porch, the Christmas tree, the lamps from Target, the original paintings (by me) fun-tacked here and there throughout the house, the basement (forgot to show him the coal bin or present him with a souvenir lump of coal), the attic, and everything in-between.

Before he went on his way we stopped at a local Italian restaurant for lunch - my treat, since today is his birthday. While we were there we were waited on by a cute enthusiastic waitress* whose fingers were completely unencumbered by rings. She was extra-friendly and super-chatty, and really, really liked the color of my shirt ("I love that color!" she cooed, "It's like - oatmeal!") and stroked my arm several times while enthusing over it. So I reacted to her the way I always do in situations like this.

"So, any big plans for New Year's Eve?" I utterly failed to ask.

"No, no. Another one at home all by myself!" she did not have the opportunity to respond.

"How tragic!" I did not retort. "Me, too! Say, maybe...ummm...if you'd like..." I might have stammered, if the conversation had taken place at all.

Bah. Humbug.

It's been a rough year. Ashes died in April after a long, lingering illness. I lost another uncle in May, also after a long illness. Minnie died in October after a brief but devastating illness. Some of my friends are having even rougher times. And I myself have suffered some losses that I haven't told you about.

But it hasn't been all bad. I got to see Ireland one more time, and London as well. I finally bought my grandmother's house at the end of May. I got to meet Adam Felber and a bunch of my fellow Felbernauts back in September. A new cat came into my life at the same time Minnie was leaving. I passed out candy and toys for my first Halloween at my new house, and I decorated my own Christmas tree and my own front porch for the first time. An old friend of mine had a baby, almost unexpectedly, while another friend and his wife had a baby after many years of trying. I talked to someone I've wanted to talk to for years. And I've met some people who I hope to get to know better as time goes by.

Life goes on, with or without our consent.

Another year is ending. Another year is beginning.

Good luck to us all.

*Note to me: Shannon. Remember that. Her name is Shannon. Like the airport.