and if we fail to see the good...

"Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable."  — Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

I think I'll be just fine, regardless.

I only quote books I've read. Sometimes I fold the pages over like a triangle to keep track of the places where something's struck me in the gut. This book wasn't the best book I've ever read, but none of them probably are. But I noticed that there were good parts, and I kept going.  I'm glad that I do that, but still wonder now and then whether I've spent too much time on a book, and whether I'm really loving it enough. Sometimes I have to love the bad ones more so that I know I've given it my best or that I didn't give up for the wrong reasons.

I just finished Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, and had I not made it through one or three so so stories, I wouldn't have read Teddy, the last and best story. That one earned a couple of paper triangles, and I'm even considering underlining some lines just in case I forget what I thought was important at the time.

The nice thing about reading is that you can learn without getting hurt or hurting anyone else. Even so, there's something to be said about living. I have a lot of practice, and with any luck all of these little paper triangles will amount to something I'll feel in the end was worthwhile. Underline.

damn.

"I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good that way." -- J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

I hardly ever say I love you to anyone anymore. My step-mother. Once in a while a cat. I said it to my father the other day, but he didn't remember the next day that I had even been there. That would almost be sad, except I don't think it was a waste.

I've been looking forward to November. It's like a convergence of sorts, where the past meets the present and the future all at once. Today marks the future I'd been thinking about all year, and really I'm not all that far away from where I was. At least less far than I thought I needed to be to be happy with the present. Mostly. I thought for a while I needed to be doing something different than I was last year to get o.k.

That was stupid. I had to be o.k. before I could go anywhere.

Yesterday someone said they're not leaving, because I haven't given them a reason. This didn't really make me feel better, even if the intent was there. I mean, my mom left and I was five. I can't remember whether I gave her a reason to leave, nevermind stay. This isn't a sob story (though it's real). It's just an example, and a poor one at that. I don't need a therapist to tell me it couldn't have been my fault. I'm just saying it's really difficult to love people selflessly. I'm not sure it's even possible. Maybe that makes it hard for me to say it. I'm going to try, though, and when I succeed I'm really going to mean it. Otherwise, what's the point?

Still, I wonder if we're all looking for reasons not to love each other, or if we're clinging to the reasons we do love each other, and whether either one is right.

oh my.

I've been dreaming a lot lately about animals. I had a dream the night before last that I saw a crocodile in the lake where I was swimming for the better part of the summer. It didn't attack. It sort of looked like a blob at first, then it swam away. About a week before that, I dreamt that a spider bit me, and my foot truly hurt when I woke up. A couple of weeks before that I dreamed that a hummingbird landed on my hand. I was a little fearful that it would cut me with its beak, or maybe attack, but it just zoomed in, landed on my hand, hopped off and hovered, then flew away. It was green, if I remember correctly.

There was another week that I dreamt my cat Lucky was in two pieces. He wasn't bleeding or anything, and besides the obvious separation of front and rear, he was acting pretty normal. I told my roommate about it in the dream and asked her if I should call the vet, but she rolled her eyes like I was making a big deal out of nothing.

I did check on the dream meanings for the other animals, but I decided to skip the one about Lucky. If it means anything, I don't think I want to know what it is. Plus I don't think they'll have an entry for "cat in two pieces".

putting her together.

My feet are the shape of my father's feet. I don't think they're pretty, but they prefer summer, and I prefer to go without socks or shoes. My father never goes without shoes. It took him 55 years to put on a pair of sneakers rather than men's loafers. Even to mow the lawn. I've inherited the bite and jaw of my grandmother on my mother's side, but my father's lips and brow line. My nose is a mix of my mother's and my father's.

I went to a family funeral for my dad's step-father a few weeks ago, and I noticed that I have the same gap between my two front teeth as my grandmother and both of her daughters. My youngest aunt had hers closed, but you can still tell it was there. None of the women or their daughters on that side of the family wear their hair its natural color. I like reds and browns. Some of them like browns and blonds. It's a mixed bag, but never gray. They're a pretty bunch, too. My grandmother always accepted the gray, for as long as I've known her, anyway. There was a luncheon after the service. She looked pleased with the turnout, her three sons and two daughters turned mothers and fathers all gathered in the church basement. I don't know if she saw what I saw, and I know she could never feel what I feel, as one of the daughters of a legacy that she began when she married the man who carried the torch for the women and the wine. Her first husband.

There's a story of a man who lived in a two-room house. It was told to me when I was barely 16, by a friend's father. My friend's father was a shop kid turned husband, father and handyman. He went to trade school and learned auto body, wore leather jackets and boots and drank beer with his friends after school. He met his wife, and she liked bad boys, and they started a family. I met his daughter in the ninth grade, and she had the kind of parents you could talk to. Her mother told me she had been on a date with my father's brother in high school. Her father told me the story of the man in the two-room house. The man in the two room house went to church every Sunday. He lived alone, and on each Seventh day, as he walked home from Mass he stopped at the package store and bought a case of beer.

When you walked through the door of the two-room house, he told me, there was a pile of empty beer cans on the floor. A path from the door to the couch was the only part of the carpet you could see, according to Herb.

Years later, my great-grandmother died; I never knew her. My father called me to tell me, should I have seen the obituary and made the connection, though she lived just across the Fifth Street bridge, not far from where I had been living for six or so years. He didn't go to the funeral. And he told me about her husband.

He lived in a two-room house, on Eighth Street. He died of a heart-attack on the shitter among a pile of beer cans, through which a path was cut from the door to the couch. My grandmother had married his son. She had five children with him, and left him while the youngest girl was just 14. It took her so long, I think sometimes, and I wish she'd have had the foresight to save the other four kids from the beatings, the yelling; the sight of their father with other women. Just a few weeks ago, I learned that my father was always at the neighbors' house, the Fosters. Incidentally, their son's kid taught me how to play guitar.

According to my father's most recent account of the grandfather I never knew - except on some occasions when I was small that he showed up on our doorstep with a blond bombshell to ask my father for money - he was a philanderer. A philanderer because he could be. He was the best-looking man in town, my dad claims. And a raging alcoholic. Once in a while he would call my father and ask him to meet him at K-mart restaurant for a coffee. My step-mother was in college at the time, so she was never home. He'd pile my sister and I in the car, and we would stay in the toy aisle while they talked. I still don't know what about.

He died of liver disease several years ago. Some of his kids went to the funeral, some didn't. They fought a lot about it, I remember.

And now there's my father. He asked me to drive him to my grandmother's house last year. He quit drinking for the occasion, which could be viewed as a step in the right direction. He couldn't drink in front of me - he rarely does unless the vodka's concealed in a Coke can or a glass of lemonade. Instead, about an hour into the trip he started shaking. He said he was cold. He got in the backseat and covered himself with his jacket and laid down, shivering. We made it to the house about two hours later, and he could barely stand.

My grandmother and her husband - my father's step-father - were elated to have company. They made lunch. We sat while my father barely picked at the sandwiches, and ate about three spoonfuls of corn chowder, which she made especially for me. Good thing, because he got up from the table, went into the bathroom and threw it up. He came back and said he wasn't hungry, he was feeling sick and slouched down on the couch, still shaking, but worse. My grandmother paid no notice, and made no comment. She just kept smiling, and asked me whether I'd had enough to eat. I looked at my father across the room, and one of his eyes was drifting to the side, the other straight ahead. He went outside on the porch with my grandfather after lunch.

I talked to my grandmother a little about her divorce. She said she never wanted it. That my grandfather left. She said she picked up the pieces the best she could, met a wonderful second husband, and got on with hers and my aunt's life. She said she was just happy that her family turned out so well, and that everything worked out for the best. I felt like retching myself at that moment. And I realized how poorly loved my father was and is. That no one's going to take the leap and help him get out of this horrible Thomas family saga, and that he's probably going to continue on the same path as his father, and his father, and who knows before that. They don't leave much of a mark on this earth, except for maybe the legend of the man in the two-room house. A legend because that's how it was first told to me.

It's so real now, as my father stumbles into the bathroom some nights and falls down, cracking his skull on the side of the sink, or sometimes the toilet. It may very well turn out to be his story, and they won't print it in the obituary, but we'll know. And maybe one of the neighbors kids will know it, since they've been letting him walk their Basset Hound around the park out of pity, and maybe they'll tell it to someone who'll know my someday daughter. That part remains to be seen, since I'm committed to the idea that I'll have no someday daughter. Because of all of this. Because I love my father, and I've only ever been with anyone who acts like him, except for the parts where they tell me all of the things he should be telling me now. That I'm beautiful and smart, and they're proud of me, and they'll be there for me. But they're still like him.

I'm leaving that behind. I'm leaving a lot of things behind me, because if I keep them in front of me, it's only to punish myself for not being loveable enough to make him take exception to the family rule.

Even considering the history, I think maybe if I had a brother, he would remind me of my father. Maybe he would act more like a father than my own and I wouldn't have to do things this way anymore. If that means that I haven't lost hope, then I'm satisfied for now. With so far to go, and me without my waders. I do like the feel of the ground beneath my bare feet.

My father always wears shoes.

are magnets, all my friends are words

I haven't been writing much, here or anywhere. I've been reading a lot, playing some music, but only stuff I like, and I've been on the road a bit. It feels good, like I'm doing things and standing still at the same time.

I have to stay still for just a while. I'm jotting down ideas here and there, but I'll get back to them when I'm ready to move. That's not to say I'm frozen. I'm just standing in one place long enough to finally appreciate what's all around me, good and bad. It's been a lot to take in, and I'm holding my ground. Metaphors aside, I just need some time during which nothing happens.

So to answer the question, "Where have you been?" I've been right here, back to where I started, over to where it's going to end for all of us one day, and back here again. I do feel a big purge coming, and not of the vomitous sort. Just hold tight. 

"As quiet as it was on the outside, it was very loud on the inside." -This Book Will Save Your Life, A.M. Homes.

i am not a veterinarian.

It's been two weeks, and sometimes when I look out my kitchen window to the corner across the street where the telephone pole marks the spot, I can still see the dog, lying there limp and resigned to leave its environs without the usual use of its once agile legs.

It was a Saturday night, and I was just about to take a shower before I left for Cambridge to see Marcellus Hall play a show at TT the Bears. I heard a screech of tires on the pavement, a thud, and then desperate, piercing yelps for more than thirty seconds, and they've lasted over a week. I don't know for how much longer I'll hear them, but they were howling with the last bit of fight it had. It may be a while yet.

I ran outside, bare feet and frantic, with my green sweatpants on and an ugly maroon sweater. The dog was lying there panting, and a few cars had lined up along the road. I was scared for the dog, but he wasn't moving set aside the fast rise and fall of his chest, yet I couldn't bring myself to go to him. The girl who was driving the car he had run into was on my side of the street. I asked her if she was o.k., and she said she didn't see it - that she just heard it and stopped. I offered her some water, because I didn't know what else to say. She said no thank you, and I yelled over to whom appeared to be her boyfriend, who had my then begun to pet the dog and tell it to be calm. I said that I didn't know who to call, and he said maybe the police.

I bolted up the stairs to grab the phone, even though he probably had a phone. I just wanted to do something. The police said yes, they would be right there, dear, and thank you for the call. I went back outside. The girl's boyfriend called out the phone number on Rudy's tag; I tried to call the owner, but was connected to voice mail three times and I gave up. I didn't leave a message, because I wouldn't want to get that sort of information in a voicemail. Meantime, the police arrived blue lights, no sirens. The officer walked around and lifted the dog by its upper body to carry it over to the corner.

I cringed when I saw how its lower body and hind legs dangled beneath it without any sign of movement as the officer carried him for about ten feet, for which the time hung suspended. I wondered why the dog didn't whimper or whine, knowing it's spine was twisted and probably at that point severed. To think of it makes me feel nauseated, knowing that its lean, black body became nothing more than a shell in a matter of seconds.

I've never felt even a splinter in any of my bones, but I can feel my own body's fragility when I picture the dog from the inside out, and my stomach turns and my abdomen quivers like my very own spleen is going to rupture at any moment, or maybe my spinal cord will just sever all on its own. I have this feeling a lot lately, and it's overwhelming at best.

It died soon after, right there on the side of the road. I was already upstairs, because after 10 minutes I finally figured out that nothing I could do would make it feel better. That doesn't make me inadequate, or a failure. It just makes me not a veterinarian.

Not then, but later, my eyes filled up like wells, regardless of how far I'd driven to get to where I was going.

I didn't know the dog, but I knew someone had to have loved it, and I could feel that too. And I felt like everyone and everything you love will inevitably get hurt, no matter how big a fence you build around them. And that sometimes when they do, you're not going to be qualified to make them feel better.

I've been quiet lately, or at least my fragile little burned fingers have been. I've been tending without any formal training or expertise a fire that can't be quenched, and though the blisters are healing, the sensation is only slowly returning. But it is.

A side note: as I was writing the first sentence - the first thought outside of email I've been able to complete in nearly three weeks - my mother called. My grandfather had a massive stroke last night and died at five this morning. I hope they have plenty of wood to split wherever he's gone, because at 89 he was still splitting enough wood over the course of a year to heat the house for the the next in its entirety. It's a fairly simple life if you can cut a road in your heart for simple things.

answers the question.

"Is this really what you wanted,
To listen to a song
That makes you feel
Haunted?" -Chris Leo

Happiness. No one's going to drop by with a silver platter and hand it to me. This is not news. And sometimes when I've got a hold of it, someone's going to come by with a hacksaw and start cutting my hands off until I let go. Believe it or not, that's where hope comes in. I'm not sure if I have a whole lot left. That's the long and short of it. Sometimes it costs you. I've been spending it like it's cool money, and inflation's getting me down.

I turned 35 this week. I didn't do anything special, but I was still happy to be alive. Tired, but alive. Days have been better, it's true. Yet, days have been darker.

About darker. I'm terrified of winter.  Last winter turned me on my side. It took until three weeks ago to get upright again, and it took a lot. I let him pull the rug out one more time, except this time the fall wasn't too far, since I was already down. I was exhausted. Hurt and less hopeful. And I came to an end that I've been hoping to dodge with him. The one where my heart's broken, and the potential for everything turning out fine was gone. You can't maintain a relationship that kills you, because then you'd be dead inside and one person holds all of the cards. Awkward isn't the word. But that's the name he's been giving it.

Awkward is when you don't know how to say the right thing nicely, or when you say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or when you don't know how to act when you see your ex so you look at the floor and try to make small talk. That's not how it went down. Even I bought it, but I knew all along I wasn't going to be able to buy it forever.

"Think of it as a bad dream," is not the same as sorry, and it's certainly not awkward. The words are too calculated to amount to that, and wishing someone nightmares isn't my idea of "It's not you, it's me." Seems to me they say, "I've lured you in, and now I'm going to reel you out, hook in your mouth and bleeding." And I said it was for the last time. It was. Yet, I kept hoping we'd turn up awkward and roses.

And yes, that hope is gone. Yet, I'm out of bed in the morning, even though the rain says I can stay under cover. Thankfully, I woke up with a different hope for better things.

Things that I know I can reach without that wobbly, rusty ladder someone placed in front of me to make me think they must be true.