Current mood:

enthralled

Brilliance
Oh, well played, universe, well fuckin' played.

You guys know how sometimes just understanding something makes you feel smarter? I've detected a pattern and intention that attacks like a force three hurricane that studied under Ra's al Ghul. Things in my life are more interesting than they've ever been, and as I look back and see the sequence of events, I understand how each thing had to happen in that exact order to land me where I am. I don't really know how it ends, but I know for sure that I haven't heard the punchline yet. This has crossed the usual month-long limit for these little episodes of incredible transition and revisitations, and the profound ways it's been playing out definitely merits the time frame. This is art, and it's going to take as long as it needs to.

Like any good surgery, there's not only a chance of complete and utter failure, bankruptcy, and death, but also the chance that it will all come to a sudden and dull stop because I got cold feet at the last moment and stepped out of the pattern. I'm definitely not on the road to doing that last bit, but when you see the doors slam shut on you, the lights dim, and you hear Tobin Bell's voice tell you that he'd like to play a little game, it doesn't matter how many times you've passed his little tests, your pulse starts pounding.

Yes, I'm juggling land mines, and any of them could do a pretty big number on me. This, my friends, is what makes me cackle with maniacal glee. If I may draw your attention to this, I think it would probably put my frame of mind into better perspective. Just takes a minute of your time. Literally, just a minute, unless your connection is bad.

Let's see if I can get things moving for some details. It's a long story, so I'll try to paraphrase.

Er.

Crap, that's definitely not going to suffice. You all don't know who I'd be talking about or our history. It's like saying that The Dark Knight was about a guy who was having trouble at work. I'd have to introduce the characters one by one and get into my (ew) feelings about them. I'll see what I can do to TV-adapt it, but like trying to run The Sopranos on PBS, you're going to miss out on just about everything, and have to presume it's about spaghetti.

See, it began with a warning, and that consisted of a couple of people (who had never met each other) messaging me after years and years of silence. Old playmates, you could call them. They came to me like the ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, except they both represented the past. And they stayed there, because the visits, although promising of emails and more messages, were over in a jiff, and now neither respond to any sort of attempt at contact. I figure "Okay. Creepy, but okay." It really just went along with the theme in my life of people vanishing without a trace or explanation. I hadn't seen it at the time, but my aggravation related to this theme had been given a long, painful trip out my mental door, got dropped on the curb, and was presumed taken out with the trash. Hell, I didn't have a tear to wipe when Amber moved out; I'd accepted that it was a temporary thing before she even moved in. I appreciate people while they're here, and smile for the good time we had when they go. It's just the art of not taking things for granted. She was here, things were fun, she left, things were still good. I don't blow things like that out of proportion.

I also usually don't catch on to foreshadowing, because without having read further into the book, a good writer makes it impossible to tell foreshadowing from flavor text, so you really just need to keep your eyes open and context will come post facto. Not to be confused with compost facto, which can probably be found under "mulch" in the encyclopedia. But foreshadowing, these two visits were, because they were inexplicable (I tried to explic them, I really tried) and simultaneous. I should have known the universe was using that as a prelude to the novel's worth of fascinating personal pugilism to the face.

But it does this from time to time. Whenever anything big happens, as I've probably already mentioned, it involves the following:

1) Unfixable computer hardware malfunction on my computer (happened twice so far this time)
2) Unfixable computer hardware malfunction of somebody else's computer (sorry, Mom, you were the victim of my universal mojo)
3) A major car issue (she shut down at a red light while driving to work last month, but the carnival is still playing)
4) Absolute personal financial bankruptcy (usually resulting from the first three problems, and a good reason to not keep any credit cards that would actually require me to file bankruptcy).
5) Always the final major thing among these five, a career-altering change happens

Well, when I got home that one day to find that my motherboard and processor were shot (and would need a replacement of the RAM because my old stuff became obsolete in the meantime and unusable with anything I would buy), I should have known right then, but it was when I'd already replaced everything, fixed what I needed to, backed things up, and come home to again find everything dead that I got the warning sign that I was looking for. The instant I got the side of my case off to find out what was going on, my phone rang. It was my mother, calling to tell me that the exact same thing had happened to her. The eventual diagnoses were found to be different, but the symptoms were exactly the same...power, a beep, a loading screen, and death.

I won't bother you with the series of interesting events that followed and were involved in determining that my video card suddenly won't display anything higher than 4 bits (WTmotherF causes anything like that?), but I will say that I was intrigued. Game on, I told reality. You want to play? Let's fucking play.

Then, out of the blue, Jill messages me. You all remember Jill?

I sure hope not. That would be creepy as hell. I haven't really talked about her. She was an old friend from back when I worked at Radio Shack, and was the one who introduced me to the awesomeness of government work. Even the shit jobs pay way better than the private-sector shit jobs. I have her to thank for my career, but I never really got the chance to, because she's a world-class flake. Seriously, she would just vanish, ignoring your emails, phone messages, and any other way you tried to get in touch, and she'd be gone for years. Then you'd meet her later at the mall, she's be shocked and delighted, and give you her new number, you'd talk for about a week, and off she'd go.

Well, here she was again, and had a lot to say. In emotional trouble again, because she drew drama to herself and it kicked her ass on a consistent basis. It was part of the reason that she and I never hooked up (I had such a chance to kiss her, and I so very, very passed on it, and used to wonder if I made the right choice...she was just out of a relationship, and was very raw, and even though I think the night would have gone well for me, it wouldn't have been the right thing to do.).

She messaged me on Sunday at first. We talked about old times, caught up on what we're doing, all was good, and I was fully expecting her to be on her way. For the record, she might still be on her way and just taking her time about it, but on Monday, she was upset about something else, and wanted me to tell her what was wrong with her, why she couldn't be with a decent guy, why she couldn't make a relationship last, why her career was in shambles, and why she was never happy.

It just so happened that I was full of tell-people-off energy that I wasn't spending because of concerns about it being counterproductive (another long story that I'm sparing you), and I found myself facing that aggravation again, because she was baiting me. She wanted to hear me tell her off for that behavior that I so deeply, deeply hate, that horribly disrespectful tendency to just up and go, severing any emotional ties that other people might have made in the meantime. But I didn't tell her what she was asking for. No, I went ahead and told her that I was busy, and would tell her some other night. She didn't care for that, and begged a little, but I really was busy.

See, I was already dealing with another massive, jaw-splitting blow that reality had dealt me on the same day she sauntered back into my life. More on that later.

So a few hours later, she's still on, I'm still on, and I just start right into it. I spend about a half hour deconstructing every decision she's ever made, told her why she does what she does, what happens because of it, and every wrong turn she's made. I know, I know, this doesn't ever end well for people, but I went ahead and did it. I cited example after example and pointed out pattern after pattern, because hey, she asked. It's fair game. Shut up, yes it is. She needed to hear it from someone, and the kind of people she hung out with were not ever going to even notice this, much less bring it to her attention and make a compelling argument about it.

I knew at the time that doing that with somebody so deeply immersed in drama was a dangerous act, but anybody who's seen me do what I really do will understand my capacity to put a loving spin on a conversational bitch-slap. When it was all over, she had a good cry, thanked me, and for the record, did not commit suicide. In fact, it's been a few weeks now, and she seems much more optimistic, and has thanked me again for being so honest with her and insightful. She hasn't completely vanished yet. This is another thing that is amiss. Normally words aren't enough to break somebody out of a pattern. I had to put some thought to that while she and I went back to our old flirtatious ways. We might not have had any physical contact of a suggestive nature of any kind (ever), but innuendo was pretty rampant with us. We pretty much used each other as ego support (boys, if you're taking note, girls need to feel desireable, and it's not a crime to promote that feeling within them, it's just when you start involving stationery that the law gets involved), and we continue to do so. It's our way.

But I was keeping my eyes open. I thought, Could this be some sort of twisted-ass reward for helping her understand the problems in her life and following up with her afterward to make sure she internalized it the right way and started making positive steps to correct it? because even my thoughts are sometimes obnoxiously articulate. Maybe this was what the universe wanted me to see, and once she got those changes underway, this would be the focus of the transition that comes with a blown-up computer and a threateningly vague vehicular problem. Maybe this would be what it was building up to, a sort of finalization and conclusion to my buried aggravation toward people who just leave. A reconciliation of sorts.

Well, as it turned out, no. This symphony was just in the opening stages. The term "perfect storm" doesn't apply, because this is far too delicate for a bunch of forces to have just collided and teamed up. This was a note-by-note presentation of something unique, personal, and custom-fitted.

Because the thing that I was busy with when Jill wanted me to explain her life to her (and she knew me well enough to know that I could) was that the real and true source of why I was unable to truly kill my frustration about vanishing people was in the middle of being addressed.

A conversation ten years in the making was taking place. Yes, ten years. More than a third of my life (all of my adult life) was an exercise in settling the unfinished story between myself and my first love. The first woman I said "I love you" to, the first woman I kissed, the first woman I touched in a familiar way, my first lots of things.

I can't tell you, I mean, I really cannot express the complexity of my feelings, because I've been working on them for a decade, and everything I've learned in my adult life was built on top of the roiling mix of pain and grief and love and insecurity and adoration and admiration and loss that was wrapped around a person I'll simply call "L." I chose this letter because "A" would create grammatical confusion when used in a sentence. She was the first one to truly vanish, and the horrible thing was that she drifted back a little bit afterward to talk, and would sound like she wanted to really touch bases, but every time I tried to get a little bit of an explanation as to what happened, she would flutter away again.

Beating Nintendo's "The Karate Kid" is supremely frustrating, but a whole new level of superlative was created in my mind for how frustrating that situation was. I could classify her actions very easily just by putting myself on the outside of the situation, but that was a salve for my brain, not for my heart. I needed closure of some kind, and I needed to at least hear from her that things were as they appeared.

It took me ten goddamned years to get it out of her. She messaged me the same day that Jill did, and we just started talking as the ten years had never passed. The events of the day, family, ourselves, she messaged me with something like "Goodness, William is twelve already?" (quote adjusted for anonymity), and I said something to the effect of "Yeah, he keeps on growin'. We keep telling him to drink more coffee and start smoking, but he doesn't want to listen." We just took it from there, and it was the most natural thing in the world. And then, the next night, she actually dug in her heels and invited me to ask all the questions I needed the answers to. And she gave me the answers. And the balloon of angst deflated, and everything that had been built on top of it began to crumble. I was left with an emotional void in myself, and a stillness I hadn't felt since my teenaged years. I was no longer shutting myself off from the feelings that I had buried with my image of her, the irrational pieces of myself that I had poured cement over to give myself a stronger emotional base.

All the maturity and all the ability to say "fuck it" to life's hardships were gone. My personal insecurities, my irrational fear of failure, my sense of career direction, my social anxieties, my desire to impress people, my need to be better, they all came flooding back. I got back in touch with my fear of losing people, and although that means that I get to face it again and overcome it again, it means that it's now clinging to me and has returned to its old room in my personality. For the first time this millenium, I was able to feel nervous about something.

But the fun with her was just beginning, because, well, you people know how I flirt. Well, she flirts, too. This is good, because it's positive reinforcement from somebody who meant so incredibly disproportionately much to me. First loves, you know how you never really get over them.

So my new worry became my feelings for her, which had to be settled.

Also had to reconcile Jill's new role in my life, if she was staying. How far would things go with her, if they would indeed go at all? Her intentions are...well, hard to read. And I can't ask her, because it's pretty clear that she doesn't know, either. (Another thing to take a note on, boys, is that asking a woman what she's feeling isn't as productive as it sounds, because they're usually still talking it out when you start wondering. That's why they're talking to you, they need to hear things out loud and see how they sound in order to solidify them. If they always knew what they were feeling, married men wouldn't have migraines.)

So spending a half hour telling Jill what's wrong with her life was my release from the intensity of reconciling with L. It worked out perfectly, it all happened sequentially, and was part of setting me up for the next big blow.

Keep in mind that this is the extremely watered-down version, and what you're getting is really just the Reader's Digest version. Even as long as this post is, this is essentially just bullet-pointing the important parts.

So now I'm in touch with my old neuroses (wheeee!), and finding out what kind of future I have with L. We astonished one another with what little detailed we remembered about each other, and what closely guarded personal habits we had (like my defensive tendency to break an intimidate moment because it's getting too intense). She's talking like she'd like to meet up, which would be a fantastic way to introduce a little bit of continuity to the old remnant feelings that won't go away. Most of what I remember about her is based upon an image frozen in time, one that wasn't even very clear, and if I were able to stand in her present, hear her voice, see her with my own eyes, the animal part of me that does all the feeling would be able to put context to what's been drifting around in my head. If something happens, if nothing happens, the best-case scenario still lies in a real-life confrontation to get everything settled in a way that all parts of me can recognize.

And if you say anything along the lines of "What if she hurts you again," I will stab you in the spleen with a wooden pencil. I know that the beginning of this post was a long time ago, but read it again. I don't need the LJ-post equivalent of shouting "Don't go in there!" at the movie screen. If she vanishes again, I now have context. She's explained what happened and why it happened, and if it happens again, I can roll with it, old-school neuroses or not. Nothing would be left unanswered by it.

How sad is it that I have to get aggravated by things that haven't even been said yet? That's my next huge pet peeve, completely freaking obvious questions and observations that have already been addressed. If I tell you that I've been mulling over something for days, I don't care who you are, you are not going to come up with any crucial insight for me in the course of ten seconds. I actually think about things, I don't just hop down to the bar, get drunk, and pretend that I saw something that I saw in the toilet afterward was profound. A lot of that comes from a Particular Person who loved to jump on everything I said and argue about it for the sake of a philosophical cock fight, and the arguments were always bad ones that anybody who thought about what I'd said would never have made. This happened for enough years that I started jumping at conversational ghosts.

But enough about that.

Continuity was the key issue with L. I know this because my father turned fifty last Tuesday. How do those two things have anything to do with each other? Well, he wanted to spend his fiftieth birthday at Disneyland. I used to live a few hours from Disneyland. I spent roundabout ten years in the area, and what I consider my original home town to be is in that area. Good ol' George Air Force Base. I was a military kid, if any of you didn't know. Dad was in the Air Force, and I was raised on a base, one with an extremely safe neighborhood (after all, everybody there was in the armed forces), extremely good prices for food, great entertainment facilities (A buck fifty to see a movie, and a buck for popcorn? Hell yeah!), a great pool with concrete that was always the perfect temperature to lie on after swimming, and everything that a home town can offer a kid. It even had a huge desert for walking in when a kid needed time to commune with nothingness.

Well, it still does, but everything about the place is torn down. The base was shut down a long, long time ago, and all the trees have collapsed and fallen onto and into the dilapidated buildings. There are precisely two unbroken windows on the whole base, except around the golf course, which is still running under private management. The grass is long since dead, and the place is a wrecked ghost town. As we were driving around through it, Dad and I, there was a tragic sense of melancholy that somehow made everything feel better for me. We went to visit it to dabble in old memories, but continuity was the thing. Even as depressing as it was to see my childhood home(s) from an adult perspective for the first time ever, to walk across the old ground by the old parks and marvel at how tiny everything seemed, it was extremely therapeutic. I might be able to talk Mom into posting some of these pictures up.

Other homes in the area (we moved frequently) showed that the world had kept turning without me there. Old stores I loved were gone, old restaurants were replaced. The stretches of sandy wilderness were replaced by condos and strip malls, and the old signs were new, flashy, and uniform to what I was already used to in Sacramento. It was hard to recognize anything at all, and that, too, filled me with a certain peace.

Continuity.

Disneyland was fun, by the way. Getting off the Matterhorn, Dad and I were stopped by Disneyland staff and each handed a little card thing that invited us to stay after for an extra hour after ninety percent of the people had been removed from the park. We just walked right onto Space Mountain, the Jungle Cruise, and, of course, a second tour of Pirates of the Caribbean. Let's hear it for micro-promotions.

Back to the subject at hand, though, I knew that the trip through Continuityville wasn't the end of this little transitional period, because I got a little warning sign before I left.

Does anybody remember William Seretta?

Bullshit, no you don't. None of you knew me back when he was my best friend in high school. 'cept Mom, of course, I don't know if even she remembers him. Well, he messaged me, after I hadn't heard from him in thirteen-ish years. Just out of the blue. He caught my name, made sure it was me, and we shared a few words. He's doing fine, was apparently in the Marine Corps, and now works construction. Hell, I'm willing to say I'm proud of him. But I recognized him for the warning that he was. Amusingly enough, we shared a few words in the first days of October, and then the messages stopped without warning. Ha ha, I said to the universe. Cute. Where are we going with this?

Well, I have a Match.com profile. Every so often (yearly), I would pay the monthly membership fee for one month, send out the emails and winks and whatever, just in case the universe wanted to throw me a bone. Or have me throw somebody else a bone, yar har har, blah. This is called keeping the door open, and it usually placates the people who tell me that I should be looking harder to get a girlfriend. This time, the day after I cancelled my paid membership (relegating me back to the people who can't send emails to people), I got an email. From, like, an actual person. Who was female. I mean, it was literally the next morning that I actually got my first actual email. Cute, universe, you really are fucking with me. Okay. Like Kuzco going over the waterall. Bring it on.

We've been talking. I won't bore you with the details, but I will tell you that I've found it extremely charming that we've had disagreements about literary works (like, fundamental disagreements), but we keep talking in a friendly way. This is new to me. Usually, disagreements mean the end of a conversation (especially since I make points and cite examples, which intimidates the shit out of people, which makes them uncomfortable, which ends the conversation), but this person actually disagreed with me, made a point back, and since it was an email, moved on to the next thing. She likes to argue, is good at it, and doesn't take it personally. Doing!

And here's the fun part that makes me leans back in my seat, laugh, and applaud loudly at how sneaky everything was.

Amber needed to get out of the house so I would have time to deal with all the situations coming to me. Not only that, but she would need to do for completely retarded reasons so that I would accept it without being distracted with the hope that she was actually moving up somehow. Then she had to do something to make me thoroughly annoyed with her, which she was extremely gracious in doing again and again, so she was properly out of my mind.

In order to make all of this work, and to avoid drawing her back into my life, I needed to be free of the urge to respond to her request for a conversation about why I'm not talking to her, and that's where Jill came in. The energy I was going to put into telling off Amber went to Jill, which turned my attention further away, enabling me to focus on L. With my attention on her, I was able to look down every emotional road I could travel, understand what real dangers were there, and put forth a logical solution to either reconciling my feelings, or continuing down the path that I'd thought we were on ten years ago. I also needed my hands free so I could juggle the emotional hand grenades that came with the old memories, and deal with the clingy personal weaknesses that crawled out of that hole and latched onto my face.

In order for all that to happen, my computer needed to die so that I could take my focus off of my games and put it on these events. I would normally just fix the problem, but as a fascinating coincidence, Fallout 3 is coming out at the end of the month, and I can't buy a video card yet, because if it won't run that game screamingly fast, I will want to be able to return it, and most of the time, there's a thirty-day return period. I need, need, need enough time to get the game, see it running at its highest performance mode, and determine whether my video card needs to be replaced. DIRTY PULL, REALITY. Because now, the dinky little replacement card I pulled out of the closet won't play any of the games that would tide me over and take my time and attention away from dealing with this curious series of not-coincidences.

L also brought to light the importance of continuity, which flavored my trip to my old home town, which now has me in a different frame of reference. You see, right now, it's like I had the last ten years of personal development erased, I'm flying a little emotionally blind, and I no longer have the patience I once did. My new beefs got settled, my old beefs got resurrected, and the woman who summarized my dating history for the last five years is out of the picture. My childhood memories are put to rest, my relationship with my father has had some of the kinks worked out of it, he was able to see me as a man, I was able to see him as a person, and I'm closer to my past than I've ever been. Hell, it's like a reset button just got hit. I'm kind of right where I'd be if I'd actually finished college and gotten that degree, just like I wanted to do right out of high school.

I'm at square one. And if anything had happened even slightly out of order in all of that, it wouldn't be anything like this.

Right on time to find out what part this new person from Match.com is going to play. I'm off-balance, wrestling with thought-dead neuroses, and, for the first time in as long as I'm able to remember (and I fucking remember being born, people [sucked, btw, but not as much as you might think] ), I'm unsure of myself.

Brilliant, universe. Truly brilliant orchestration.

But it's not over.

No, no matter how it turns out with her, there are pieces of this masterpiece still unfinished. What will happen when/if L and I have that confrontation? How long until Jill meanders off again? Is this the end of my car troubles? What will happen to my finances to bottom them out (besides a trip to Disneyland, a whole freakin' new computer, Christmas around the corner, birthdays galore, a trip with L in the works...)? Where is my career headed?

I just got an email that's about to start pulling those answers in.

Bring it on.