Out · Of · Tune

Well, I had a feeling this time would eventually come, and come it has. Today is the last entry on Out of Tune. This journal has come a long way from its initial purpose, winding from a personal journal to a political blog (later outsourced to another site) to a Nationals blog, and then back to a personal journal at last. I was seeking a refuge, I suppose, and a way to share my thoughts with the world, a world that I had generally felt rejected and judged my thoughts. Now that same attitude is beginning to seep into this site as people in my real life continue to stir up drama based on my postings here, thinking for one reason or another that they have a right to moderate what I say, or judging me based on my own thought processes and attempts to muddle through life. For this reason alone, I am moving my personal journal to another site, and will NOT be leaving a forwarding address. The relevant parties will be informed of this update, but for the rest of you, thanks for reading along, and I hope the psychodrama that has pervaded my life for the last year or so has been somewhat entertaining. I'll miss the old site.

Laughingly, Dictionary.com defines Saint Valentine’s Day as “a day for the exchange of tokens of affection”. Okay, sure, that’s probably as much of a textbook definition as you’re going to get, but as I learned yesterday, Valentine’s Day can also be a crossroads, where worlds meet, if only for a moment, before heading off in radically different directions. The difficulty I now face is in gaining the perspective I need to understand just what happened yesterday and what it means for the next few months of my life.

It’s no mystery that I’ve been more than a little confused and in flux since September; this journal has mostly been dedicated to documenting that fact and the progress that I’ve been attempting to make since settling on this road way back when. Some of that confusion and progress reached its logical conclusion yesterday when, after a week or so of arguing over the nature of our relationship and whether it was going to be a friendship or something more, Kirsten and I decided to go our separate ways in our personal lives. Circumstances, of course, will force us to interact as business partners, as it were, but we have agreed that the time has come to back off of friendship or anything that resembles it, as the ramifications of what that means for a separated couple are too much for either of us to deal with right now, especially with all of the other things that we have to figure out when it comes to moving on. I can respect that and feel a certain sort of relief that that portion of life has been lifted for now, allowing things to move along their natural path. So I’m not sure how I feel; of course I’m sad about such a momentous end of an era, but at the same time, I know that it’s something that had to happen and is for the better, ultimately. I think time and perspective will allow me to be more philosophical about things, as I will see what the telescope of time affords, but for now, I’m prosaic.

The second part of the crossroads, which seems much clearer and closer to me today, is my relationship with Kacey. I haven’t really spoken at length about this on the journal before because of mitigating circumstances and a certain desire to keep things between us between us, I do have a few things to say on it today. While, again, time will afford a clearer perspective of where things are going between us, I feel very confident about the direction in which we are heading. I know that we both have a lot of work to do, but our commonalities and the love we have for each other will help us to work together and figure out the things that don’t fit and how to make them work, as well as the things that do work so well. Our Valentine’s Day together is, again, something that I would prefer to keep between us, but I will say that it was very special and fitting of the beginning of a new life leading away from that crossroads and toward whatever is waiting. Kacey, thanks for a great night, and I hope that I was able to make it just as special for you.

And so, philosophizing and examination aside, the rest of the week is going to be fairly hectic. Tonight we have a concert in Vienna and, of course, the weekly Lost ritual afterwards; tomorrow I have to take Lidda Pig back to the vet for a checkup, and Friday night is…well, Friday night. Of course, as busy as I am this week, I’m stepping things back a notch next week because I’m pretty much riding the ragged edge of exhaustion this week and still haven’t managed to finish unpacking or figuring out what I need for my little room, not to mention restarting my writing and being with the pigs, as well as other things. Again, when I started all of this back in September, I never would have guessed that I would eventually reach the point where I would have to slow down on going out and socializing, but there you go. Things go in directions you never would have expected, and sometimes you just have to figure out the best way to adapt.

Okay, now, for a confession: I have been avoiding writing the rest of this Joanna debacle because, well, frankly, it’s embarrassing. Yes, it was a painful incident and shaped who I was for years and even am now, but the pain is not why I’m avoiding it. It’s just because it’s such a mess and, well, like I wrote, embarrassing. I know that it has to be done, that I haven’t come this far just to back away from the ledge, especially when I haven’t even gotten to the hard part of examining my failings and figuring out just what the hell has happened with my mental landscape, but it’s still difficult, all the same. Today I am committed to getting to the point that I meant to get to Monday, and hoping to get this finished by Friday, but we’ll have to see on that one.

All right. At this point I’ve proposed and paid for the ring. I was certainly no stranger to long-distance love. I’m always hearing about how difficult it is, but to me it seemed the best solution at the time: I got all of the good, lovey stuff of a relationship without that messy physical intimacy that frightened me so much, thanks to my attitudes on sex and physicality.

Growing up, sex was a taboo subject. I was quite a bit more adventurous in that regard than your average kid, for reasons that I don’t entirely understand. I wasn’t molested, as the stereotype goes, even though my first exposure to anything sexual was, as I recall, around age 3. I don’t think it can count as molestation if the other party was even younger than you, but these days I wonder just how she knew what it all meant when I myself had no clue. Was she exposed to that stuff by an adult, or did she find it quite by accident? I suppose it doesn’t matter, because she’s moved on and become a mother and seems fairly functioning, and I’ve moved on and dealt with at least the sexual aspects of my personality if not the rest, but I still wonder sometimes. Still, I think that my adventurous nature led me into situations that got me yelled at and punished for my explorations and led to an early association of sex being a bad, dirty thing. I’m not going to point any fingers on that count, because I certainly can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing if I caught my own son experimenting with a neighbor girl, for instance. I would probably do the same thing, in fact.

The point isn’t all that, however, the point is that, through a combination of that reinforcement, self-esteem issues, and bullying, I came to view myself as anything but a sexual person, in fact, quite the opposite, a sexless, undesirable creature that could celebrate the great poetry of romantic love but couldn’t see how that connected with sexual acts.

This all ties, I think, into how I could pursue those relationships while missing potential relationships right in front of me. I have to start this story in eighth grade, at Wilbur S. Pence Middle School, with a girl that I admired from afar named Dana. No one knew how I felt about her – I mean, no one, because I knew I had no chance with this girl. So somehow, some way, at gym one day, this guy named Stoney decides it’d be a brilliant idea to tell her that I have a crush on her and want to go out with her, right in front of my horrified eyes. Her reaction was pretty much what I could have expected: her lips curled up in revulsion as she looked at me, then just shook her head and walked away. Stoney, of course, had a good laugh at our expense because he was obviously out to humiliate one or both of us, and it worked.

Fast forward to April, and the end of the school year is nearing. I’ve been hanging out with a friend, Jason, whom I’ve known for the last year or so, and I’ve actually told him that I like a girl named Shana, with whom I’ve spoken a few times and found interesting. One afternoon, on one of the school’s “field days”, in which students participated in outside events for stupid blue ribbons, the three of us were alone in a hallway near her locker, and Jason asks her, out of the blue, if she would be willing to date me. His intent was certainly not humiliation, but I think genuine interest in trying to get the two of us together, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. I freaked out, sure that rejection and that ever-so-lovely look of revulsion were both on the way, but she surprised both of us by saying maybe, if I asked her out myself, then looked directly at me with a look that I now know meant she would say yes.

My response? Reasoned and thought-out. I laughed it off and scurried away, trying to avoid that eye contact. I still wonder what she thought of that, and it took me years to realize that something could have come from the situation, but my fear of rejection and/or intimacy forced me away from the scene. Those fears would haunt me all the way up to my first marriage, and even beyond that. It was a demon that I had to learn to slay, which I did just last year, but the engagement to Joanna was not the place to do it, as I would eventually learn.

Of course, none of this was anywhere near my consciousness in December of 1995. What was in my consciousness was that I had met my “soul mate” (who was clearly such because she was willing not only to love me but marry me, and it had to be right if she could look past all that was wrong with me to love me), and that I would soon be married to her. This certainly had nothing to do with being the walking wounded and escaping into an unhealthy situation to keep from dealing with that.

And unhealthy it was. Jason once told me that Joanna wasn’t looking for a partner, but rather a “soulless extension of herself”, and he was right. I was supposed to only listen to her music in her truck, and I would not have my own vehicle, listen to my own music, or even choose the food to be eaten for dinner. That was only the beginning of things, too, as I would learn when I eventually visited her, but I was content with it, because if I was willing to sacrifice those things, then it meant I loved her, right?

Anyway, as all things do, the bubble eventually had to burst, and though it didn’t burst in quite the way I mean (that was to come later), things did shift when Lindsay returned from Holiday break. Her return perplexed me to an even greater extent, and to this day I don’t entirely understand her reaction. I kind of understand why she would be shocked to return and learn that the guy she had dumped as not marriage-worthy had not only moved on, but gotten engaged in the time since she had left, but I am still somewhat confused that she was saddened and enraged. If she couldn’t imagine marrying me, then why feel a possessiveness at all? The best Livi could offer me at the time was “that’s the way women are”. But the reaction still mystifies me. Perhaps she regretted her actions? I don’t know. But the important thing is that, when she returned, Joanna began to feel that her territory was being encroached upon. It wasn’t long before the anger and lashing out began, and bridges got burned that never should have burned in the name of something that would never last.

Quick update, this morning's angry update was related to events between Kirsten and I that reached their inevitable conclusion around lunchtime. Everything is fine, things have just changed...I may update on this tomorrow, but I haven't decided yet.

Happy fucking Valentine’s Day, I’m filled with rage!

I thought about writing some long ode to the day of the lover, but the truth be told, I’m not feeling that right now. Oh, there is a time for love, don’t get me wrong, but today it’s about the fact that “I” am back. I think somewhere in the last month-and-a-half or so, I’ve lost sight of the person that I had become, the person who made the decision to make this huge life change. I’m not going into why I think this happened, because I think there were a lot of contributing factors, but I do know that yesterday afternoon something snapped back into place for me after feeling incredibly pathetic and depressed in the morning, and the old/new me came back to the forefront, with a vengeance, and angry on top of that.

Yes, I’ve made my mistakes in the last few months, of course, who wouldn’t, when they’re divorcing and trying to start life anew? No one knows how to deal with that crap at first, and if they say they do, they’re liars. I think it’s only natural to make a lot of mistakes during the process. The problem becomes when you attach your self-worth to whether you make those mistakes or not. That is when the time comes to re-evaluate the decisions that you’ve been making but also to re-evaluate the nature of your friendships and relationships, and that’s something that I’ve been doing for the last 24 hours or so.

Enough of that. I’m supposed to be writing about the details of my horrible past problems and figuring out how those affect me – which will be the next stage of this whole autobiographical journey down Hell’s yellow brick road, once I’m done laying out all these details.

So I believe I left off yesterday with the commencement of the engagement itself. The next memory that I have of that period is Christmas, but I have no idea if that came first. Christmas, of course, was a huge deal for two people who found all of their commonality in religion. Being that we couldn’t be together, we spent some of the evening chatting on IRC while watching the same Mystery Science Theater episode, then spoke on the phone for a bit before going outside at the exact same time to “spend time under the same stars together”, even though we were very far apart. I can’t decide if it was tripe, naiveté, or romantic. Perhaps all of them, or perhaps some combination of any two of them. It’s just impossible to say, but it was one of those memories that later stuck me like a dagger in the heart when things went south, so it’s hard for me to say that it was really a great idea.

Somewhere in there, of course, she picked out the ring, a $400 piece, as I recall, and told me that she had done so. I had saved what I could to that point and managed to scrape together the rest in a hurry before mailing it off to her so she could go and get the ring that I had never seen for the fiancée that I had never seen. None of this struck me as particularly odd, for why would it? I had nothing to compare it to, save my already-strange relationships with Tash and Lindsay, and none of them had gotten to this point (for good reasons, though I had no way of knowing that). It didn’t help that I had no role model relationship in my parents to compare it to, either, so I was just following along with what seemed like the best solution for an online engagement.

More on this tomorrow...I just don't seem to have the time this week.

This is probably going to be an epic entry, given that I’m starting the whole story of Joanna today, as well as documenting the events of this weekend, when the biggest snowstorm of the winter knocked the crap out of the DC metro area. I mostly just wanted to document the date of it, given that the snow will most likely be gone by the end of this week. I probably need to start updating at some point over the weekend, because this Monday morning crap is just wayyyyy too long.

Anyway, Friday night, Kacey and I went to see Boys of Baraka, which, for those not familiar with the documentary, is about a group of 20 middle-school aged boys from Baltimore who are hand-picked to leave the Baltimore public school system and spend two years in Kenya at the Baraka School, where they get a chance to be the boys they are outside of the pressures and influence of the life they’re forced to lead inside Baltimore. It’s a fascinating, touching, and, ultimately, depressing movie that’s worth anyone’s time. I won’t spoiler the story, but things don’t exactly turn out the way you might expect.

Oh, and I also learned the wonders of E Street Cinema for the first time. I’ve always been deeply interested in independent film, and especially the storytelling possibilities that are available when a major studio isn’t breathing down the neck of the moviemaker, and I’m happy to find a theater that shows obscure indie movies as well as some of the larger indie movies.

After the movie we stopped by the Capitol City Brewing Company and had a pretty good dinner; by the time we left, the cold that had been predicted for this weekend had begun to settle upon the city, chilling us to our bones as we tried to get back to the theater and the parking garage. We also learned a lesson about parking in DC that night: just don’t do it. Though the validated parking at the theater is supposed to be $8, we instead got hit with a $22 charge because we got there before 6:00 for a 6:00 showing. Oh, by the way, the theater’s prices go up to regular rates at…6:00. That’s right, the theater hits you for the non-matinee price, while you pay the higher rate for parking. Nice stuff right there.

Anyway, I don’t really have time to get into much of the rest of the weekend, as I’ve been given a new task on top of the task I’m already working on, so I’m just going to dive into the Joanna stuff and hopefully come back later to write about the rest of it. Now then…

About the same time I met Joanna, I also met a small group of dedicated IRCers at JMU, who I connected to through Rowena, otherwise known as Livi. She and her friend Jennifer brought me along for an IRC meet, where I met people from around the country whom I had never even met online. It was an interesting enough get-together, I suppose, and a way to expand my circle of friends, but I only ever really stayed friends with Jennifer and Livi (especially Livi, who was friends with me for the end of the Lindsay debacle and the beginning of the whole Joanna thing, offering me a voice of reason that I should have listened to rather than my own meandering heart, but that’s neither here nor there).

As for Joanna, up until this point I mostly knew her through Jason, who had gone to visit her sometime in October or November and lost his virginity to her, which had been a pretty huge deal for him, obviously, and he had carried on about it for awhile, even though she dumped him shortly thereafter (or he left her, I can’t remember properly). He tried to warn me off of her, but at the time I wasn’t in a very rational frame of mind, and as soon as I met her, I felt like the connection of our Mormonism and my personality were much more than the connection the two of them had felt, and obviously it would be different with me. Little did I know…

Joanna was born Catholic, but later discovered Mormonism through a campus outreach program. She said that she had taken the Book of Mormon home and found that it resonated within her heart. Having never had such an experience, I couldn’t really relate so much, but, being a hopeless romantic, I could of course find some room in my mind to allow for it being the hand of God bringing us together. For a long time afterward I’d think such a prognosis ridiculous, sure that God didn’t exist, and even if She or He did, they would not have bothered to bring such a thing together. These days, I’m not so sure. True, the situation didn’t play out the way either of us expected, but without the avalanche of life changes that the engagement initiated, I can’t be sure that it wasn’t fated to be and end just the way it did.

Anyway, we started talking shortly before the breakup with Lindsay, and of course continued once that happened, with her first taking pity on me for what happened, then increasingly taking my side as she learned just what had happened between us. I was happy to have someone to defend me and counsel me, and once we both learned that we were Mormon, we thought it was a sign that we were meant to be together. Honestly, I can’t completely recreate my thought process on why I decided that Joanna was not only a perfect girlfriend but worthy of marriage, but I made that decision fairly rapidly. I can’t pinpoint the date of proposing, but I do know that I saw Lindsay on what must have been the weekend of December 8-11th, and by the time she returned, around the second week of January, Joanna and I were engaged. Yeah. Incredibly stupid.

I’m not sure if it’s pathetic…no, I’m pretty sure it’s pathetic that the memory of your engagement moment occurred in a computer lab. I can even remember the blue background of the computer screen as I typed the fated words, even if I can’t remember the exact reason I chose to do it or what I was thinking as I did so. I do know that the decision was made that she would choose her ring, and I would send the money for that.

Okay, no more time to write about this today, so more tomorrow…there’s a whole lot more to talk about, believe me.

Not too much to report on from last night…went to a birthday party dinner for Patricia, then came back and changed the rest of the pig cages before settling in for a bit, then going to sleep early. It’s actually nice to have nothing to write about, as far as present-day goes. This weekend is going to be busy enough, especially with the impending snow storm.

Okay, since it’s a Friday, I decided not to dive into the whole Joanna saga, because that’s going to take a week in and of itself…odd that a roughly five-month relationship could end up consuming close to two years of my life, but there’s going to be a lot to cover and I’d rather not start on a Friday. Instead, I thought I’d review my work history from 16 up until this period. I’m still in the phase of evaluating my mental healthy by examining my own life, and I think this is essential, because so many of my early jobs contributed to depression in one form or another. I was so desperate to be doing anything other than what I was doing, and dealing with the general public on a daily basis really hurt my faith in humanity, despite what I might have wanted to feel.

My work history began shortly before I turned 17, when I accepted a job at Dairy Queen at the Valley Mall in Harrisonburg. This Dairy Queen is not only closed down but now demolished, destroyed to make way for an Old Navy and the “new” Simons Valley Mall some time in the last two years. The shop was a dingy little food court restaurant, with a cramped kitchen just big enough to fit two people in peak hours and a small front-end with two registers and lots of ice cream and yogurt machines. I wasn’t enthusiastic about my first job being in food service, but when you’re in high school your options are obviously limited, and I wanted to get out there, get some experience, and, most importantly, make some money. Okay, so I was making the then-minimum wage of $4.25 an hour, but having my own money felt really good, especially since I was paying for my own gas and expected to have to pay for repairs on my car, which was fair enough.

I began work in the kitchen, slinging Ultimate Burgers (a lovely concoction composed of two quarter-pound beef patties, lots of bacon, a ripoff of Big Mac sauce, lettuce, tomato, onions, etc.), chicken baskets, and DQ BBQ (the one decent thing in the whole place) and basically hating life. It’s funny, I usually work well under pressure, but I think it was the never-ending tide of orders that would get to me. I would usually end up cursing most of the night and slamming things around. The worst part of the whole experience was that I was used to being able to have time to think things over and be creative in general, and when it got busy, I was nothing but a cooking machine, an experience I did NOT find pleasant. This was my first experience with the dehumanizing aspect of low-wage jobs, and it wasn’t long before my brain was in full revolt, knowing that I could not do this for the rest of my life. The problem was that, at that point, I had no specific plan beyond “become a writer”, and that certainly wasn’t about to happen for me overnight. So I just hated life and did the best I could.

Somehow I was moved to the front to deal with actual customers, which made for more interesting times. At least here I was able to think, and speak with others, rather than feeling isolated and at the mercy of a beeping screen and faceless orders for more, more, more. It’s funny, for someone who always saw themselves as antisocial, I found myself much more drawn to the social aspects of that part of the job, and I suppose my fundamentalist manager saw something in me there, because it wasn’t too much longer before I was made an “in-charge”, which was basically a simplified term for an assistant manager. My job was to watch over the store, count the money, make the ice cream cakes, etc. etc. Nothing too exciting, but, at 17, I was the youngest they’d ever had, a fact that my friend, Kevin, who not only worked with me but helped me get the job, resented me for. Not only was I an in-charge, his sister also was, and he felt like he deserved a shot at the job as well. So there was an element of psychodrama to the whole job only a few months after being hired.

I did make some good friends, though; chief among them was Monica Smith, a pretty blonde girl who shared the same taste in music and sense of humor and also attended Turner Ashby High at the time. We struck up a pretty instant friendship, and she filled me in on the secret lives behind the faces that I saw in the halls every day. I also learned that she had once been a lot heavier, but had lost a lot of weight after being diagnosed with diabetes in her early teens. I guess that caught up with her later, because she passed away just a few months ago, unfortunately, which really hit me hard. I’m really sad that I never got to see her after the DQ days and never learned the path that her life ended up taking. I will always wonder where things went with her and her boyfriend, and if she was happy in her final days.

I also made friends with a guy named Todd, who later went on to found a few bands and still kicks around the Harrisonburg area as a musician, and a guy named Phil, who shared my affinity for the X-Files.

The DQ job was an interesting one because, while they obviously couldn’t overtly push religion, it was always a factor. The “overall” manager, who ran a different store, was a Pentecostal, as was Lisa, the fundamentalist manager of my store. This wasn’t a problem for most employees, but Todd, Monica, and myself weren’t onto that whole thing at all, and felt like outsiders pretty much from the start. The pinnacle was when Monica bought me the Type O Negative album “Bloody Kisses” for Christmas; the album had two women making out on the cover, not all that shocking to either of us, but when Lisa saw the cover, she apparently had a fit, and wondered how “such a nice guy” like me could possibly listen to a band who had an album cover like that. Oh noes, lesbians!!! So, of course, we all figured that our spinster boss had a little secret in her closet ever after that.

Blah, okay, even I’m bored with the work thing now. I might pursue this a little later, if I’m feeling up to it. Or maybe even continue next Friday. But for now…

Okay, some people apparently thought that my entry yesterday meant that I had sex with Lindsay the first night I met her, but no. What I meant by “I had done it” was that I had made it through the trip and actually met a girl that I “loved”. We were barely able to speak to each other that first night, much less kiss or have sex. So let’s dispel any of those ideas now.

Well, as it turned out, Lidda Pig did not need surgery after all, as him chewing the nail off seemed to have resolved most of the trouble. When Dr. Kirk called, she said the toe seemed to be mending quite well on its own, so all I would have to do is take him back in a week or so to check up on it. Thank god for that, for his own health and for my own financial health, because the surgery was looking to be between 400 and 500 dollars. Someone or something pulled through for us on that one.

Last night I picked up Kacey from her new job in DC, and we made our way back to Fairfax, which took a surprisingly short amount of time. I’ve actually been very surprised at how easy it is in to get in and out of the city in the evening, as compared to what must be a hellish commute in the mornings. We had dinner, then went to pick up Lidda, who was a bit nervous from his day at the vet but otherwise behaved himself on the way home. Spoke to Rob later on in the evening, and caught Lost. Otherwise a fairly quiet night, the kind of night I needed, honestly.

Now, continuing from yesterday…

As I’ve said, most of the weekend is a blur. One of the prominent things that I remember is that I never quite mastered my self-consciousness when speaking to her, so that she never got to see the “real” me. I was constantly fumbling around, wondering if saying the wrong thing might make her hate me, not aware that not saying anything was making her not like me a whole lot more. It was so ridiculous that I was afraid to go to the bathroom in her presence, leading me to avoid taking a crap for the entire weekend. I’m not kidding, either; I got there on Thursday night, and held it straight through to Monday morning.

I do remember the next morning, Friday, when she took me to her morning class. We wandered out onto the frozen campus, breath streaming from our mouths, and stopped at the campus McDonald’s for a couple of hash browns and some coffee. I have no idea why the memory still sticks with me, but there was something about the sight of her crimson lipstick on the coffee cup that was poignant, and stayed with me, even to this day. I don’t know if it was because it was the first really significant time I was spending with someone that I was in love with, or feeling that the mood of the situation wasn’t so great, or my nerves. Some of these things you never really understand. Why do I remember a gum wrapper that I threw in the street when I was 10? What is the significance? I don’t know. Sometimes the mind holds on to things of its own accord, and that lipstick mark was just such a thing.

I don’t remember much of her class, other than feeling really, really out of place. I was used to huge classes at my larger university, and I felt like I was forced into the conversation of this class, even though I wasn’t even a student.

At some point during the weekend I met Sandra (Cones), who would later live with me and Junior in Blacksburg as his fiancée (a part of the story which will come up much later) and feature much larger in my life, and Brian (BWK), who had been one of my online acquaintances. I took my only shower of the weekend (ick) at Jason’s dorm without the benefit of soap or a towel. Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

So of course I sensed problems pretty early on, especially when she sat there and chatted with other men while I was in the same room, waiting to speak to her. I did confront her on it one night, when BWK and I were sitting at the library and she was on the other side of campus for some reason, and she said that things were fine, she was just a little confused. I think that was the night that the two of us fooled around, sort of trying out what we might be like sexually, but didn’t have actual sex. I won’t go into details about that here, but it was more than a little awkward, given that I was still a virgin and very, very self-conscious about my body.

Oh, I also met Jeff (Jophiel), who obviously wanted to be with Lindsay himself, but whom she regarded as a big brother at the time. He was a nice enough guy, but I definitely got the feeling that he would be happy if I were pushed out of the picture on some level, and I suppose he would get his wish on both counts soon enough, though they wouldn’t last, either.

At last, somehow, the weekend ended. I don’t even remember my last moments with her, so awkward and painful it had been. I was a wreck when Dunk and Mojave showed up: I hadn’t been able to shower in days, I was still holding it in, I was despondent because I knew the weekend had gone terribly with her, I felt even worse about my self-image, something I couldn’t have thought possible, and I was sad to be leaving with such a big question mark over the relationship. The drive home was rather silent, though we did get to see Lindsay Hoffman one more time, stopping in at her dorm room at six in the morning to say hi and goodbye again. I should have been seen something in how much easier it was to talk to her compared to the other Lindsay; even after the miserable weekend, and despite how terrible I felt, I was still able to joke and flirt with her. Oh, well. Some hindsight is best left in the past.

I took over driving duties somewhere in West Virginia around eight in the morning while Mojave slept in the back, and took us straight through to my place by mid-morning. Exhausted, I sent Lindsay an email and dropped straight to bed, a black cloud hanging over my head.

For the next few days I didn’t really hear from her at all, a situation that made the dark fear in my heart grow even darker. At last I cornered her on IRC and confronted her on why she was avoiding me and what she thought was going to happen with us. At this point she confessed to me that she was shocked by my weight, somehow having expected me to have the body of a David Bowie or Peter Murphy, ultra-thin, despite the picture that I had sent her months before. She also said that, past that, she could never see herself marrying me, and so saw no reason to continue with the relationship.

I was devastated. Okay, I wasn’t sure if I would have wanted to marry her, but I had already been making plans to move to Illinois to be with her, and actually thought that I loved her. There had been some connections with Tash, but Lindsay was the first person with whom I had truly felt a connection, at least on some level. Don’t get me wrong, she didn’t take having broken up with me well, either, and made some comment about wanting to jump off the top of her building, but that was cold comfort to me. Even colder comfort was learning that one of the people I thought I could trust had encouraged her to follow this course. I never confronted him on it, but I learned through a friend of a friend that he had been the one counseling her on breaking up with me.

It’s hard to go back to that person and understand exactly what I was feeling at the time, because it was just raw emotion. It always sucks to be broken up with, but to have my worst Achilles heel – my weight – be the reason for the breakup…well, it set my self-image back quite a few years, and probably worsened my addiction for quite some time. It felt as though I were rejected for some fundamental part of myself; I had been fat all my life and expected to be that way, to some extent, for the rest of my life, and here it was again, rearing its ugly head. I wondered if I would ever find someone willing to look past the problem. I won’t lie, the cutting returned for awhile there, and I obsessed over every single line in every song that talked about how shitty love was. I was bitter, I was angry, I was impossible to deal with.

Shortly after the breakup, Lindsay went on holiday break, leaving me three weeks without contact with her, hopefully some time to gain perspective on things and figure out just what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life. I decided to recommit myself to my Mormon faith, and began reading the book of Mormon and attending church on a semi-regular basis. School was a distant thought at the time; who the hell could focus on that crap when there were all these other emotional weights knocking the shit out of me? The smart thing would have been to swear off relationships for awhile – ESPECIALLY online relationships – and focus on school, to at least get through that gauntlet and come out better on the other side. But no one ever accused me of doing the smart thing. So it was once more into the breach, my friends, when I met Joanna, who just happened to also be a Mormon, and understood the importance of marriage to a Mormon. Thus would begin the most pathetic portion of my saga of the mid-90s.

Bah, nothing much of note to report from last night other than babysitting, cleaning, and some unpacking. Finally got the DVD player and cable box set up, so that counts for something. It was nice to be able to watch a Simpsons DVD on the big TV rather than the computer, even if Chester voiced his displeasure at the sound several times by climbing his ramp and shaking his head over and over again.

Speaking of the guinea pigs, dropped Lidda Pig (Marshall) off at the vet this morning for his surgery. He didn’t understand why he didn’t get lettuce or fresh hay this morning until I opened the cage and picked him up, at which point he immediately began purring because obviously he was special and he was going to get held…well, not quite. He was quite a bit displeased when I bundled him into the pig carrier and took him off to the vet. I’m quite a bit nervous about the surgery, wondering how his delicate system will handle the anesthesia, but there’s really nothing to be done about it but wait and hope. The surgery is scheduled for 1, and I expect I’ll update here once I know more.

Now then. Continuing yesterday’s work…

Lost in the shuffle of all this was an October trip to Indianapolis, the first time I had been out of the state of Virginia since 1991, when friends from the neighborhood took a road trip to Atlanta to see the Braves play. The Indianapolis trip involved me, my manager at Burger King, and two of his friends, all loaded into a rental van and driving into the “dark heart” of middle America. Okay, not to say that middle America is dark, but if you’ve been to Indiana or Indianapolis, you know exactly what I mean. I was stunned that there was a whole state exactly like the little area where I’d grown up. Oh, the purpose of that trip was to see the Colts play the Bears. This was the first live football game I attended, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, even if we were in nosebleed seats and I later had to tolerate my roommate bringing home a stripper. Ah, memories.

My second trip into Indiana was quite a bit different, with different motives and different circumstances, but even so, seeing the land spread out before me brought back those feelings of anxiety and alien familiarity, of being in a land that is your own but still not quite your own. Dunk and Mojave, of course, had never seen the place before, and marveled at how different it was than anything they had experienced, just how much it fit their movie-driven expectations of middle America. In the meantime, I was in the backseat, my stomach driven by fear and loathing.

I have to admit not remembering which city Melynda (Wisteria) lived in; it was possibly Indianapolis, but I can’t recall now. I don’t think it was, but it hardly mattered. The city looked the same, with trash strewn everywhere on the streets and liquor stores on every corner. We got lost for quite some time before Mojave swallowed his pride and called the woman he had come to visit, finally guiding us toward her small house.

Now, I had barely spoken to Wisteria before we went to her place. She was on at different times from me, and we only just crossed paths, so meeting her was not as momentous as it was for Mojave or even Dunk. For that very reason, I have very little memory of meeting her or hanging out at her place. I know that I called Lindsay somewhere in there to let her know where we were, and we might have had dinner. I know I met her dog Holly, but beyond that, I really have no recollection. We were all riding the ragged edge of exhaustion at that point, having driven 11 hours and still having another two hours (four in Mojave and Dunk’s case) to go.

As such, the trip into Illinois…well, I don’t have much recollection of it, save for Mojave, who had done all of the driving up to that point, hallucinating that there was a house in the middle of the road and swerving to avoid it. At this point I was begging to take over driving duties, but he still refused, claiming that I could not be allowed to drive, as I wasn’t on the insurance policy for the rental car. Of course, I questioned whether the insurance policy would be important if we were all dead, but I was a very different person then, and relented, allowing him to drive us toward…well, whatever awaited us.

I do know that I was surprised that Illinois resembled Indiana so much. I had expected something different from a state that contained Chicago, sort of a Mecca for me at the time, given my Smashing Pumpkins fandom, but I have no idea why; there were still nothing but cornfields and flat ground as far as the eye could see. I don’t exactly recall how long the trip from Melynda to Lindsay actually took, but I do remember that we stopped at one point to let Lindsay and Jason (Tsadkiel) know that we were in Charleston, the town that housed Eastern Illinois University, their alma mater.

EIU was part of a system of Illinois universities including the creatively-named Western Illinois University, all of which had apparently taken parts of a castle and split them up amongst the campuses, providing the campus with a gothic feel that really appealed to me as we pulled into the campus and tried to find Lindsay’s dorm. At last we found the place and pulled into the parking lot, calling her from the dorm call box at the back entrance. We waited, my heart in my throat, as they came down the stairs, the moment finally at hand.

If I close my eyes I can still put myself back there, in that icy parking lot, the snow on the ground all around us, as the door opened and the three of us saw Lindsay and Jason. I can smell the moisture in the air, along with the scent of pine cones; I can hear the wind rustling in those pine trees. It was a much more pivotal moment than I’ve ever suspected, right up until this moment, but it was the moment that showed me just how not ready I was to deal with the idea of intimacy with and acceptance from another person.

I was struck immediately by Lindsay’s appearance. She was everything I could be attracted to at the time: short, she had her light blonde hair cut in a pageboy that ended just blow her ears. A rosary hung on her chest, accentuating her pale neck and skin, glowing ghostly in the parking lot’s lights. She wore thick black boots, the only things visible beneath a black duster that hung down to her ankles, cloaking her tiny, shapely body. She was beautiful, and that fact immediately brought my own insecurities about my appearance and weight to forefront. You probably could have heard the steel shutters of my defense mechanisms dropping shut, because how could someone like this want someone like me?

I think that moment, along with her initial impression of my appearance, killed what could have been there. I believe I could have overcome the appearance issues if I could have just been myself, but given who I was at the time, that was most likely impossible, and likely just as well, because I cannot imagine a world in which that relationship worked out.

I’m pretty sure they tried to entertain us after that, taking us to the dorm’s lounge, Jason showing off his chops on Tekken, but all of us were just too tired and too stressed to be much good for conversation. At last, Mojave and Dunk left, and Jason followed suit not shortly thereafter, leaving Lindsay and I alone, at last.

And we said nothing to each other. I agreed to follow her to her dorm room, where I would be staying for the weekend which was of course against the rules. Luckily, she had stairs that ended just outside her room, so sneaking me in past the RAs wasn’t a problem. I felt privileged, but of course, I had no idea what the hell I was doing, so we mostly just went back to her room, made small talk for a bit, then went straight to bed without even kissing each other.

My God, I had actually done it. Now to figure out just what the hell “it” was going to entail.

Abbreviated, late entry today because I’m really, really busy and interviewing for my job today. Yes, the job is already mine, but I still have to interview for it. And I really, really want the position, so I’m trying to focus on it. I’m just going to dive on into the evaluation stuff.

Okay so now we’re on to Ises – Lindsay. The reason I’m covering this portion of my life by the women I was with is because…well, that’s always the way I’ve thought of that whole 1995-1996 time frame, in different “eras” of girls. Lindsay was the middle child of that period, that’s for sure. I first met her when I was still “with” Tash, and the two of us struck up a pretty immediate friendship because I think I was the first person that she’d met online that was friendly to her and shared a lot of her interests. Of course, in her case, it was an interest in magick, the occult, and vampirism. When I met her, she was sort of skirting the outside edges of goth, but definitely wanted to be a vampire if there was any way she could be. She also reveled in her depression, much the same as I did at the time, and so we could call each other up at any time we were feeling down and share the misery. Great basis for a relationship, but as it ended with Tash, so it started with Lindsay, I suppose.

Another funny thing about her is that she’s the earliest “girlfriend” that I still have emails from. Sometime last year my parents stumbled across an old box of floppy discs from that period. I took them home and started digging through them, eventually discovering a small cache of emails to her and to Joanna (whom I will write about over the next few days). It’s interesting to look at those emails with the benefit of hindsight and see just how far off the tracks of my real personality I went. It offers perspective on keeping a hold on yourself during relationships in the present day.

I won’t deny, also, that I was probably also with Lindsay to avoid dealing with the pain from Tash and/or figuring just what the hell I had done wrong. I never bothered to piece out why I had that breakdown and just why I felt so suicidal over losing someone. I didn’t know any better, so I couldn’t understand that my reaction was totally out of proportion to what I should have been feeling, having never even met her. And I never allowed myself to figure that out because I started repeating the same mistakes with Lindsay, waiting online for her to show up, avoiding classes so that I could talk to her, and sitting on the phone at home for whole nights. Again I felt that sense of desperation if I missed talking to her for whatever reason, as if she might suddenly change her mind and run away. Cling, cling, cling.

About this same time I also happened to meet another girl, “Kaisa” (Lindsay Hoffman), who was a complete newbie to IRC and needed help to get things working. I helped her out and introduced her to #thenorth, striking up a pretty immediate friendship. The nice thing about speaking to this Lindsay was that I never felt any pressure to fit into a mold or do the things that I thought were expected in a relationship. If she happened to be on, we would chat, if not, it was all good. In retrospect, that was the way I needed to be developing relationships, rather than the obsessive, clinging model I had followed with Ises Lindsay and Tash. Of course, I was a little too blind to understand that at the time.

My relationship with Lindsay began in September of 1995, and by November Dunk, Mojave, and I were planning a roadtrip that would run from New York State (Mojave’s stomping grounds) to Wisconsin (where Mojave planned to tour the campus of a major research university in hopes of eventually attending). Along the way, we would meet Lindsay Hoffman in Kentucky, Wisteria in Indiana, and Ises Lindsay and Tsadkiel in Illinois (where I would stay, in Lindsay’s dorm room, which turned out to be less than as thrilling as it sounded).

The road trip happened in early December; Mojave and Dunk showed up as my shift at Burger King (where I worked full-time while attending James Madison) was ending, in the early evening. I introduced them to the wonders of the valley, including rednecks, whom Dunk, being from England, and Mojave, being from India, had had no encounters with. They witnessed the marvels of a southern Wal-Mart and toured the area before we returned to my mother’s place, where we all found a place to sprawl in my bedroom before leaving early the next morning.

The trip itself was a blast, and just what my depressed, Mellon Collie-obsessed self needed. We made plenty of jokes about drinking and driving (Dunk was the only one to drink during the trip, and drank beer pretty much non-stop, given that American beer was so weak compared to the stuff he was used to) and video taped quite a bit of the trip. I have to admit I’d kill to see a copy of that video now, if it even still exists, but I’ve lost track of Mojave, who kept the tape.

We stopped mid-morning in Lexington, Kentucky, to meet Lindsay Hoffman. The city itself was beautiful, still surrounded by the colors of a fading autumn, the orange and red accenting the dominant use of brick buildings in the downtown area. Lindsay was attending Kentucky, and we eventually managed to find her dorm room after a great deal of debate and haggling with the guardian at the front door.

I was stunned to finally meet her; I had seen pictures of her, of course, but nothing could have prepared me for the red-headed beauty that stood before us. The best thing about her was that her sense of humor and intelligence carried over from our online conversations, and our real-life chemistry was even better than online. She admitted that I was quite different than the “pale nerd in a dark room” that she had initially envisioned when we first met, and I think she felt a little of the same things that I did. By the time we drove off, I wondered if I wasn’t going to spend time with the wrong Lindsay, but there was nothing to be done about that.

On we went to Illinois, and…well, not to be clichéd, but a date with destiny. More on that tomorrow.

Not the best weekend on record, but at least it ended on an up note. It all started Friday evening, when I went to pick up Kacey to come back and help with unpacking and straightening my room, I know, hot date material for a Friday night, but that’s how we roll. Anyway, on the way to pick her up Dave called and asked if we’d be able to baby-sit Mikey while they went to see a movie in exchange for dinner. Sure, no problem, but it ended up not exactly happening, for whatever reason. We did end up spending a lot of time with Mikey playing Xbox and they bought us pizza for dinner, but they didn’t go. Of course, that took care of unpacking and cleaning, but that found some of its own time later in the weekend.

Saturday dawned grey and rainy, but who could have told in that cave of a room? It was impossible to even tell if it was day without opening the door. On top of all that, I was feeling like hammered shit for whatever reason, which made me not so great for the ride to Gaithersburg or the cat adoption event. That bummed me out because it was going to be my first time back at the event after a month in which I couldn’t attend, but I was just barely able to stay on my feet. On top of that, the toe that Lidda Pig has been nursing as very, very damaged and requiring surgery? Well, it came off in the night, and I had trouble getting hold of Dr. Kirk all day. Fun, fun, fun. She finally called me back as we were leaving Lakeforest mall that evening, and, as I had thought, there wasn’t really much to be done to prevent infection other than bringing him in Wednesday morning for the already-scheduled surgery. But yeah, Lakeforest Mall, Kacey and I had dinner at the Red Robin there, then hit a few shops in the mall before heading back to her place to watch some South Park.

So not all was bad that day, but, as if to put a cap on such a wonderful day, Kirsten called around 8:00 or so and informed me that, at this point, we are going to owe $9,000 in taxes. Obviously I was ecstatic about this prospect. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, as John said there should be some wiggling room in filing separately, so I’m not as insane as I was Saturday night or yesterday morning. I’m sure there’ll be more to write about on that here in the future.

Yesterday morning I got up at the asscrack of dawn and made my way to my parents place, fighting exhaustion (I had trouble sleeping the night before, for obvious reasons) the whole way. They bought me lunch at El Charro, one of my favorite restaurants, then we went to pick up a few things that I needed for my place…well, I was supposed to be picking up a few things, a trash can and a bin for storing hay, and while we there, my mom and dad were sneaky and also got me a pod coffee system similar to the one that Kirsten and I had, as well as a DVD player to replace the one that broke last month. Some might see that as a simple gesture, but words can’t describe how grateful I was, because both sort of represent some return to normalcy, something that I can gain control over again in my life. I didn’t realize just how out-of-control I was feeling until that happened. I’m in great debt to them for that. Last night I drove home, struggling to stay awake, listening to the Super Bowl on the radio as I whizzed through the darkened 66 corridor. Okay, whizzed might not be such a great description, as at some point I zoned out and “woke up” to realize I was going about 50 or so. I’m probably pretty lucky to have made it home. I intended to drop straight into bed once I got home, but instead I cleaned up a bit, putting hay in the tote and setting up the wicker basket as the trash can, generally just cleaning things up a bit, then dropped into bed, feeling more human but even more exhausted. A weird cap to a weird weekend, but very satisfying. It’s nice to be able to look around the room and not see just boxes and crap lying everywhere. It’s nowhere near perfect yet, but I can kind of see a living space in there somewhere.

Today I intend to begin editing my book again and hoping that my current employer interviews me for my current job and somehow hires me. I’m going to be in a lot of trouble if they don’t. I guess we’ll see how that goes.

Enough of that, though. Now to continue where I left off on Friday, with the story of Tash and my first real “breakdown”. Or breakthrough, as it may be.

I can’t exactly remember the first time I met Tash, or “Polly” as she was known on Efnet at the time. I know I was sitting in some computer lab at James Madison University in the summer of 1995, that’s for certain. I spent a lot of evenings in those computer labs, both by myself and with Randy, jumping on the net to troll chat rooms or check message boards, sometimes both at the same time. We would tag-team chats sometimes, posing as women to lead men on into cybersex, then telling them, at the last possible minute, that we were men. Strange way to get kicks, I admit, but there really wasn’t much better going on in my life that summer. Somewhere in there we also met Tara, Randy’s future wife, but that’s a story best left for another time, and perhaps best left to Randy himself. All I know is that I met Tash in #nirvana on Efnet and spoke to her in private chat for quite some time, discovering a common interest in music, literature, and life in general. She had a similar sense of humor and a gentle compassion that attracted me a great deal, even if I had no idea what she looked like. She eventually led me to a little channel called #thenorth. If I had known then how much that event would change me, I would probably have run away screaming, and perhaps been the better for it, but I didn’t, and so fate continued to work its way through the strands of my life.

I was introduced to a cast of characters, some of whom I would later meet in real life: Dunk, Mojave, Chardonay, Wisteria, Wonky, and more, most of whom resided in northern England, hence the channel room. Tash herself lived on the west end of London, in a place that I later learned was a treatment facility for addicts, though I never got the story of that out of the secretive girl. I never even learned her true age, or what she really looked like, besides a grainy photo of her as a little girl. In many ways, it was like loving a phantom, but love it was, or so I thought. Through her, I became addicted to IRC, because I always wanted to be on when she was on, always wanted to be talking to her. I had never, ever, even thought I had been in love before. I had never kissed a girl as an adult (sure, I had had the usual childhood experimentation, which I will write about in the future in some other capacity, but nothing like this) nor even been on a date, so I was pure naivete, hormones, and desire at that point. I had no idea that loving someone you’d never met, let alone hadn’t even seen a picture of or spoken to, was incredibly risky, unhealthy, and somewhat delusional. It all seemed like a brave new frontier at the time, because, hey, so few people had met people over the Net at that point. How was I to know what was was strange?

Somewhere in there, Randy discovered that he was bisexual, and began chatting with a guy from the University named Gerald. Gerald was also bisexual, and Randy was interested in following through with this, to find out if it was really what he wanted. He convinced me to come along to meet the guy for the first time and…well, as it turns out, he really wasn’t Randy’s type. In fact, Randy sort of distanced himself from the guy after that, and was probably smart for doing so, because Gerald, while a really nice, friendly, funny guy, had his problems. I, being a sucker and desperate for an internet connection while the labs were closed for that August, struck up an immediate friendship with him in hopes of getting to use his computer. It wasn’t long before he gave me a key to the place and had me looking after his dog Crimson in exchange for using his internet access to chat with Tash. My sense of desperation at the thought of not speaking to her should have been another warning sign. Okay, it’s one thing to miss someone that you’re in love with, but it’s quite another thing to feel like you might quite literally die if you don’t speak to them. That was more unhealthiness, all coming straight from me.

But that’s not to say it was all unhealthy obsession. One of my fondest memories of that time was when she attended the Reading Festival, becoming one of the first people to see Foo Fighters live. The first Foo album had just come out at the time, and I was a huge fan, partially because of my affinity for Dave’s drumming and partially because of the Nirvana connection. Not only did she attend that show and fill me in, also sending me a bootleg copy of some of the Foo demos, she also sent me the second CD single, purchased from a music vendor in Camden. We talked about that weekend for a long, long time, and was a fond memory for both of us long after the “relationship” ended (and we had dealings for quite some time afterward, even after the friendship was pretty fatally wounded during the later Joanna debacle).

The whole period could best be forgotten if it hadn’t been the catalyst for my first complete emotional meltdown. Like I said, I’d cut myself before and had trouble dealing with my feelings of being an outcast, but this was the first time…I don’t know. I saw how I was acting over this girl and realized that I was being unhealthy, but I couldn’t let go of her. I couldn’t let go of the idea of her, the ideal of moving to England after going as an exchange student, marrying her, having a family with her. And I knew that this was wrong for someone that I hadn’t even met, but I didn’t know how to deal with the contradiction, certainly not in the way that I do now. I was sure that this was what love was supposed to be, that you were supposed to suffer, but I was just so miserable and didn’t know what to do with myself, so I started crying, true, uncontrollable, emotional crying, for the first time in my life, right there in Gerald’s empty apartment, curling up on his couch in the fetal position. I can draw a clear dividing line at that point: that was the beginning of my true understanding of mental illness and depression.

A few weeks later Tash ended it with me, which sent me spiraling even further into this new depression. I actually don’t really remember the details of the breakup, which is funny given how much I thought I was going to die and/or kill myself at the time. I might have cut myself again following the breakup, I honestly can’t recall. The only thing I can remember her saying is that “this can never work”, and she was right, of course, not that I believed it at the time. We loved each other, and that was all we needed, right? Uh, no. It’s that sort of thing that convinces me that she was much older than I was, but I have no way of knowing for sure. And that, my friends, is very damn disturbing.

Shortly thereafter, I developed a much closer friendship with a new member of the chatroom, Ises. I’ll write more about Lindsay and my developing mental instability tomorrow.

Got a full docket today, and I'm actually feeling kind of spry this morning, so I'm going to get right down to it. Yesterday's main work task was getting people to sign off on the completed process flows that David and I have created so that we (by which I mean I, since I'm pretty sure he's going to be gone soon) will create the detailed process document. I know everyone who reads my journal is fascinated by the boring details of my work, but this basically means that all the people involved in this process agree that we've documented the high-level view of it properly and can now start chasing down exactly how all these actions work, programs involved, and people with whom these groups communicate during the process. At that point it moves from flowchart to document.

Of course, people being what they are, I was only able to get one signature out of three yesterday. I'm hoping today looks a bit better; I'm supposed to meet with one fellow this morning and get his approval on the thing. Of course, that all depends on when David gets here, because I don't have my badge with me. This badge is necessary for moving between floors, which is just a brilliant idea all around.

Anyway, I had to take Lidda Pig to the vet around 7 last night, so I rushed home and finally got started on the hard task of cleaning guinea pig cages. I've found that, in the past, once a week is generally just about right for cleaning their cages, assuming small clean-ups during the week (which I admit I neglect), but for some reason these guys were reeking right after the halfway point of a week and were toxic by last night. Figuring out how the whole cage-cleaning process is going to work in the new place was rather eye-opening, and showed me that I'm going to need a removable shower head to do proper justice to the thing. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there I had a breakdown when I realized just how little I was used to fending for myself...that was an eye-opening experience, one that I think I'm getting over.

The details of cage cleaning aside, I took Lidda to the vet and learned that my worst fears were pretty much true. I originally took him in because the small toe on his front left paw was looking very, very thin and ragged, and at that time the vet discussed the option of amputation, which I had already pretty much assumed would happen. Poor guy...well at least his suffering will be over soon, and it's a relatively minor procedure, they'll just cut off the toe and he should be able to walk just fine. On the other hand, I also need to take some weight off the piggies, per doctor's orders, because they seem to be having some trouble cleaning their hindquarters! So it's exercise and diet time.

I spent the rest of the night working on sorting out my room, given that I was having a complete panic attack about it earlier in the day. It's still not wonderful, but I managed to unpack two boxes and rearrange a bunch of stuff last night. Kacey will be coming over tonight to help me do some more unpacking and sorting, so that should go fairly smoothly over the next few days. Oh, and I finally managed to get online at home last night, so the chances of updating from home have improved substantially, which will help on those long, lonely nights.

I've gotten back into reading lately, slowly but surely; I had let the habit lapse for awhile after reading a lot on the bus and metro from 99 to 2002 or so. I now find that I actually want to make time to read again...I actually finished a book last month, Abarat, and am now tearing through the sixth Harry Potter book.

Okay, getting down to the hard business now. I realized last night that I glossed over quite a bit of the mental problems that I suffered through in high school, so I'm going back to that for a bit. I think the most appropriate indicator of the progress of my mental health from middle to high school was my taste in music, which went from dancy gay europop to heavy metal (thanks to a truck driver at Schwan's Foods, where I illegaly worked from about 13 to 15, but shhhhh) to, of course, grunge. I won't deny it, I had listened to some "college" music before Nirvana hit big, but I was one of those kids for whom Smells Like Teen Spirit was a revelation. Sure, metal allowed me to express my anger, but before Nirvana I had never really considered what that anger might be all about. Now was when I began to figure out that something was wrong with me, but I only had the barest inkling of what it might be. Of course, now I realize that it was a longing for love and validation, but at the time all I could think of was that I was broken, and that caused an enormous amount of pain, which I vented by cutting myself with razors and knives. I think I'm really, really lucky today that I have barely any scars from those days (I guess I was pretty good at what I was doing), but I do still recall, one night, listening to The Cure's Disintegration (and particularly Fascination Street) and pulling a razor across the inside of my forearm.

I think I neglected to mention this because, first of all, the whole thing was a sad affair that was best forgotten, and secondly, I really had no idea what I was so sad about. It was all about isolation and depression to me (I didn't care if music was good, only depressing), and not about understanding just what the hell was going on in my head. Not understanding that and not attempting to cope just made me more isolated because I didn't know how to relate to people my age. Ironically, I now realize that a lot of people my age went through that, but none of us talked about it to each other.

Anyway, college was where this all started to bubble to the surface, then burst forth in a glorious cacophony of insanity and self-mutilation as I began to get something of a grasp on what was troubling me and attempted to fix it in some really half-assed relationships.

Being from a relatively poor family, we couldn't really afford to pay for college, and I wanted to attend James Madison, which was also in my hometown. Staying at home with my parents seemed like a natural choice because I could work a full-time job and go to school full-time. Luckily, I got a grant my first year that not only paid for my schooling and books, but also paid me extra money, which I promptly squandered rather than not work that first year. But still, hey, everything seemed to be proceeding as planned; I had gotten into the school I wanted and was pursuing the major I wanted. It seemed like a natural progression from high school to college to working at some newspaper to selling my book and living this life I had planned. Of course, I didn't count on my issues rearing their heads with such ferocity.

My first year went fairly well; I was on the very edge of not remaining in the Honors program, but I figured that I could pick that up in my second year with a little hard work. Sure, no problem. Then, in the Summer of 95, I discovered IRC, the channel #thenorth, and, more importantly, Natasha Kutchinsky. Little did I know that this was the beginning of the end of my time at JMU.

Had a great night last night...picked up Kacey and we attended what seemed like a non-ending meeting of the Animal Welfare League, in which we voted on the option of a shelter and decided to go forward with a location on Wilkins Avenue in Gaitersburg. Oh, and I also joined, too, partially because I wanted to, and partially to fulfill a promise I made to myself when I started down this journey of self-discovery and transformation: to join at least one group who was making a difference in the community. Of course it helps that I've already been volunteering and enjoy attending the adoption events with Kacey, but there are other motives for joining the group.

Other than that, yesterday was pretty much a blur, as work was fairly busy, and today looks to be no different. The most noteworthy thing I probably did during the day was yesterday's update, and today is more of the same. I have no idea what amount of weight I've lost at this point, as the scale is not yet in my custody! But I will find out soon enough, and be sure to note it here. I should note that I weighed Tuesday evening and it showed me at 83 lost in the evening, to which you can usually add 2 pounds due to weight fluctations. That would put me at 85, but I can't use that as canon just yet.

Regardless, it's time to continue the mental health evaluation portion of the work that I've been doing. I devoted a lot of thought to the following subject because I've heard that dieting as a child can sometimes short-circuit a child's natural weight, but honestly, I don't think it could have made a difference because I was already hooked by the time I had my first diet.

I actually don't have a great recollection of my first diet, but I'm pretty sure it happened sometime between first and second grade, because there is a noticeable weight loss from my first grade school picture to my second grade school picture, and then I jump back up in third. The one that really stands out to me must have happened somewhere around fourth grade or so, when my mother and father took me to a nutrionist and she explained the advantages of eating properly and just how to eat properly, something that I really didn't grasp until that point. I remember her having plastic food of all varieties, and showing me what portion sizes were appropriate, things like that, but I haven't retained a whole lot of the message. It's funny, there are two things that I associate with that period, other than the fact that I know I lost a huge amount of weight and later gained it back: first, that I got the Transformer Metroplex as a reward for attending (good job, mom and dad, seriously, I did learn to associate something positive with eating right); second, that a girl that I had always had a tiny crush on at the time told someone that she might marry me in the future.

At the time I was elated, of course, but this was the beginning of a pattern that would later emerge when it came to me and women: she later elaborated and said that she was telling people that no one had any idea what could happen in the future, that she might even end up married to me (as I was pretty much the most far-fetched example she could come up with). Man, that was devastating. It's not every day you're told that you're possibly the worst example of someone to date, especially when you're only in fourth grade. Harsh!

Of course, my dieting efforts have gone right up until now; I'm sure I tried once in middle school, though middle school through high school weren't quite so bad for me because I was highly active, playing one sport or another regularly, which managed to keep my bad eating habits at least at bay. Don't get me wrong, I was still heavy, but I wasn't enormous, and was pretty mobile, active, and healthy (not to say that I'm not mobile now, but there were a few bad months). High school, while it felt pretty bad at the time, was actually a fairly calm period mentally and emotionally. I discovered that I had an aptitude for writing to go along with my desire to write, and began to practice, practice, practice toward my ultimate goal of becoming a published novelist. Sure, I didn't date or have much of a social life, but at the time I viewed it as a sacrifice in the name of building a better career later in my life. I kind of regret not getting out more or making an effort to look better, but I do know that a lot of the writing education that I built up began with those lonely months at my inherited typewriter.

Graduation was a transition, and the downward slide definitely started in college.

Today I'm going straight into my "work". Yesterday was a really, really bad day emotionally that's probably better off left to the fuzziness of memory, because I'm most likely not going to recall it (for good reason). No need to prolong that agony. I suppose the good and bad thing about all this is that I'm staying busy. Good because it helps to keep my mind occupied; bad because I sometimes feel like I need time to just think about things. It's a double-edged sword, really, but I'm not going to stop going out; for instance, tonight I'm going to the Animal Welfare League of Montgomery County meeting with Kacey, and plan to join the group.

Now, then. Yesterday I was talking about the root of my food addiction in my early childhood, and today I'm going to expand upon it and try to take it up to at least first or second grade, because things didn't blossom into fruition for quite some time.

My mother informed me today that one of my favorite foods as a young child was mashed potatoes and gravy, and I can see that. Even to this day, the idea of licking the beaters before having good mashed potatoes is very appealing to me on an emotional level, because it takes me back to those times when I would watch my mother making the potatoes, and the three of us would sit around the table and have dinner like a normal family. This is what I mean when I talk about the emotional connections to food; sure, the food tastes good, but that's not why it dulls my emotional pain. It is the emotions associated with those foods that do that job, crowding out whatever pain I might be feeling at the time. Often I would get lost in that feeling and unconsciously binge.

Another example, and a trigger food to this day, was the combination of bologna and mayo on plain white bread with a glass of milk. Whenever I was feeling anxious or uneasy, I would make any type of sandwich with any type of bread (okay, maybe more like three or four of these sandwiches), pour a glass of milk (sometimes going back for more), and sit and eat and not think at all, absorbing these feelings. These feelings came from those Saturdays when I would go to my grandmother's house and watch Saturday morning cartoons. Halfway through, my grandmother would make me this combination, and I would eat it while I watched the cartoons, feeling safe and secure. I actually backslid some at the tail end of December, when I began thinking of the long month ahead and the hard work that would have to be done, and found myself going back to this old standby quite a few times. The worst was when I would call someone, hide how I was really feeling, then binge right afterwards. This is why I lost almost nothing in December. It took me a couple of weeks to realize just what the hell I was doing and stopped myself once again.

One of the determining factors of my addiction was the shame of it, and that started very, VERY early. Because I was mocked so much as a child, I learned that wanting to eat excessively was a shameful, terrible thing, and that I was a bad person for doing it. So I learned to hide the ways I went about eating. Everyone wondered just how the hell I was gaining weight when I didn't eat in front of most people, and that was because I was sneaking food, waiting for mom and dad to turn their backs, or sneaking down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to make something or other. This, in turn, made me feel more shameful, which made me want to eat even more to drown out those shameful feelings. Rinse, lather, repeat. It's the classic addictive cycle. My favorite, favorite comfort food at that time was bread rolled up into little balls...I have no idea why that came around, but it did. I would also eat cold hot dogs.

Of course, it wasn't always possible to hide the shame of my addiction because my particular one left very obvious signs (that are still on me to this day), which marked me even further for ostracizing. One of the most traumatic of such signs was when I broke a chair in second grade. I leaned back on the back legs, and the chair couldn't take all my extra weight, and down I went, right in the middle of a lesson. That was the source of a lot of mockery for the rest of that day (and probably that year), and drove me to binge again that night...I don't remember a whole lot about that period, but that, in particular, stands out to me.

You might wonder what my parents were doing about all this, and if they could see what was going on with me, and I think they could, because I went on several diets during my childhood, to varying degrees of success. I'll write more about that tomorrow.

Combination entry today, one to state where I am today, one to begin the work of evaluating the mental landscape of my life. I want to apologize to my parents in advance because a lot of this stuff…well, now that I stand in your shoes and am not even a parent, I know how easy it can be to make the wrong decisions and go down a path you never intended to follow. I don’t hate you for any of the things that happened, and I have got to stop using this stuff as a crutch. Having it out there, understanding it and knowing exactly what happened and how it contributed to who I am today, will help me to do just that.

But first, present day, as it’s always a lovely day. Went and picked up Vinnie and Chester first to bring them to my new basement dwelling, and felt a surge of emotion upon seeing the townhouse again, which soon reduced me to tears. I felt that yesterday, too, and the best way I can explain it is that I start reliving everything that started with my marriage, all the mistakes, all the evil things said and done in both directions, the pain that I’ve caused in pursuing my newer, happier life, and the amount of work I’m going to have to do to regain the self-respect I had just a few months ago. Not to mention that I see that townhouse as the end of a long, descending road, the very bottom of the hill. It’s all too much at once and it overloads my system. I somehow managed to get through that enough to get the two pigs (with Kirsten’s help) loaded into the Xa, and took them back to the house in Ashburn.

The pigs were curious, scared, and more than a little agitated, but I think they’ve settled into their surroundings nicely, as has Lidda, whom I picked up afterwards (well, after getting lost taking a “shortcut” ;) ) and brought back. It was late enough by the time I got him back to shower, send Kacey a message, and collapse into bed.

The morning began…well, with guinea pigs staring at me. I think they like the advantage of having their father right in front of them in the morning, as they can automatically begin the begging process just as my eyes open. I do have to admit that it’s weird waking to total darkness, but I suppose I’ll adjust to it. I’m more concerned about what extended periods without sunlight will do to the guinea pigs, so I think it’s important that I somehow expose them to some sunlight. I’m leaving a light and radio on for them now.

It’s a rainy day, which fits in well enough with my bleak mood. Nothing much more to report, other than trying to figure out a new morning routine. I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of things in no time.

Now, then. Here comes the hard stuff. I actually took some time yesterday and last night to consider what my first topic might cover, and I think the best place to look is figuring out the roods of my addiction. I’ve already figured out that I have certain triggers that can set off a binge; now is the time to figure out how those triggers came to be and what those foods represent to me. Up until now, it’s been about avoidance. I think now I need to pursue those foods and force myself to divorce the food from the feeling. It’s going to be an interesting battle.

I have no idea if most addicts have this, but I know that I have one moment to pinpoint as “the” moment my addiction began. Yes, each of my triggers have a root that I can identify now (well, most of them, I’m still not sure where the pizza one comes from), but this one…well, it’s the grandmother of them all.

I began my life as an unhappy child…well, no, scratch that, I was happy until I started to interact with other children, where I quickly learned that my body size set me apart from others, made me the target of ridicule, long before I had any sort of food addiction. Our family on my mother’s side is prone to being large anyway, and I think that, no matter how thin I get, I will always have a large frame and be a “big” guy. So at that point, even though I really hadn’t packed on any excess pounds, I was still a big kid. This was something that the other economically challenged (read: poor) kids in my neighborhood exploited, no doubt to make themselves feel better about the poverty that they were living in. Regardless, this all relates in two ways: one, I came to believe that I truly was that fat kid, and was always destined to be that fat kid…okay, not in so many words, but I really did begin to think of myself as a “fat person” at this point; two, my addiction began as a direct result of this abuse. I had a lot of different things done to me by neighborhood kids, from beatings to a scratch that I still bear the scar of on my face to getting rocks thrown at me. It was after one such event, though I have no idea which, that I made myself a tuna salad sandwich and thought, and I quote, “I like eating and food.” I think the truth is that I liked it because it helped to bury the pain and shame of the taunts leveled at me.

That is the point where my food addiction began. It didn’t begin with the mindless binging (that would come later), but it laid a foundation for everything that came later. I’ll write more about “what came later” tomorrow.

Not sure what to write about here…the day after moving out for a separation. How, exactly, should one feel about it? It’s funny that one of the first things I think about is how this will allow me to write about deteriorating relationships with much more authority and clarity because, hell, I’ve been there. It’s funny the things that occur to you as you try to sort through the ashes of what went before and imagine building a new, stronger foundation for yourself. I can honestly say that last night, as emotional as I had been all day, was the first time I was actually able to see, with clarity, where my future might be headed. I’m not going to elaborate here because it’s much too early and I’m sure that far too many things will change (by my hand or by the universe) between now and then. Suffice it to say that, for now, I can see the very tip of the iceberg of the happiness I had only imagined back in July.

Random thought, I was listening to the Afghan Whigs’ “Black Love” in the car on Saturday, and the following lyrics really summed up my thought process for the last month or so, especially the questions I’ve been asking myself:

Am I vain? Have I shame?
Are my thoughts of a man
Who can call himself sane?
Do I blame, all my pain
On the wickedness
I have arranged?

Just a random thought. I’m not feeling that way today, thank God. I am actually starting to come to terms with the new person behind my eyes. I’m not quite sure if I like the guy yet, but I’m willing to give him a chance.

I plan to start the work I set out for myself last week very, very soon. If today is slow, I’ll start working on lists and examining my life…things like that. Some of that will be shared here, at least in excerpts.

Oh, and one final note, and I realized that this journal was far more useful for weight loss than I had possibly imagined: I have lost 82 pounds as of this writing (okay, probably more now, but I won’t be able to weigh again until next week). Interesting to see that, on November 21st, I was at 63, so that puts me at close to 20 pounds in a little over two months. I think 120 pounds a year is a respectable pace, but the funny thing is that I lost practically NO weight in December, so a good portion of that loss took place only in January, once I decided to buckle down after the holidays and became a vegetarian. This is, officially, the most weight I’ve lost in a weight loss effort ever. And I know I’m not even close to finished or near the edge of quitting.

Posting this here as a sort of placeholder. I'm going to try to get this creaky old engine back up and running on Monday, with a theme and an actual purpose rather than just as miscellaneous bin for thoughts. As is obvious to anyone who knows me, I am about to enter a period of separation, and during this period I plan to re-evaluate the direction of my life, my own mental states and ways of thinking, my faith and spirituality, and my life goals. During this period I want to craft a vague sort of five-year plan to achieve at least my career goals. Here, then, is the first of what will probably be many lists and timelines evaluating my life to this point. This one is a list of things that I plan to do to achieve this.

• Evaluate Mental Health: Where it's been, where I need it to be.


• Evaluate Physical Health: Is the current plan working, or is a new strategy needed?


• Evaluate Direction of Writing Career: What can be done to make it better? How can I plan things better?


• Evaluate Spirituality: Just what is it that I believe? Is there a faith system that's right for me?


• Evaluate General Needs: What are they? Are they being met?


• Life Goals: What do I want? How do I get there?


• Beliefs: Establish a solid foundation for my belief system.


• Activism and Principles: Am I living those beliefs?


• Life Plan: How to get there from here.

Some of this will be done through this journal, and some will be done in private, based on the severity of what I'm going through at the time. All will be done through writing.

Really, the hurried life...no time to update this past weekend, so I'm going to attempt some sort of update here, though I'm really, really busy at the moment. Had a great Thanksgiving, to say the least. I really appreciate everyone who spent time with me this past weekend and were gracious enough to have me in their homes. Saw Harry Potter on Saturday and really enjoyed it; I think it's definitely the best movie of the lot. Now I'm looking forward to seeing The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Spent yesterday at my folks' place. We had a great Thanksgiving meal, complete with mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, green beans, and, of course, pumpkin pie. Afterwards we ran to Plan 9 (I'm such a shameless music addict), where I picked up Doves - The Last Broadcast, Mark Langean Band's "Bubblegum" (a dark-ass album if ever there was such a thing), and Beatles Anthology 2, which I will copy and pass back to my mother, the consummate Beatles freak. My father and I also had a lot of fun helping his neighbor get his $100 car started in the pouring rain. Tommy...well, Tommy's a "special" guy. The basic gist of the situation was that the car wouldn't start at all, so first they jumped the battery, then when that didn't work, swapped in my mother's battery. The starter turned over, but the fuel pump wasn't working, so I took Tommy and dad to the gas station to load up the gas can and try to prime the pump.

That led to the revelation that it was out of gas, and so we had to fuel it up, but of course, it still wouldn't start, so we had to push it down the incline in their parking lot, nearly bashing into a parked car across the street before we got it settled. The fuel must have moved through the car at that point, because it started. Of course, we took mom's battery out and the damn thing died. Oh, and Tommy couldn't figure out how to get the hood open again at that point, that was a lot of fun.

Eventually the guy got the thing going and drove off it in with a dead inspection and county sticker and no plates. He said he was just going to get gas and would be back, but that was at around 3:30. When I left at 6 he still wasn't back, and he wasn't stopped on the way or at the gas station. Talk about an epic; that's one to tell the kids.

Damn, I thought this week would be slow, but no such luck. Don't really have time to update on much, other than the fact that I'm now at 60+ pounds lost; 63, in fact. I will be posting a before-and-after ASAP, but know for now that I'm in very dangerous territory. I've lost this much before and faltered, only to end up bigger than before I started. I cannot allow that to happen this time. This is my chance, and I know I can make it.

Okay, so it’s taken me ages to get around to this, given all that’s going on at work and everywhere else, but here we go.

Spent yesterday at home, as I think I noted yesterday. I don’t know exactly what the hell I have, but it seems to slowly be going away. It started with a strange pain in the back of my shoulder, right between the shoulder blades, then became a stiffness that went from my shoulders up to the back of my head. Right after that I got really light-headed and dizzy. Then came the congestion, extreme fatigue, and overall malaise. Yesterday I had all of that, all the time…today it’s just the sore neck again. Maybe it’s going back the way it came, I have no idea.

Had a great minor victory today…wearing a shirt that’s now one size smaller than the ones I had been wearing. I realized I was wearing a tent before, and it was time for a change.

Ugh…too busy. More later.

Okay, sitting at the computer, anyway. I've neglected this site for a little bit because of the crap going on at work, and I'm sorry to have done so, considering the intensity of change that I'm undergoing. I realize now that I am undergoing a sort of initiation, a sea change in my consciousness that is altering my perception of everything around me, especially those things that I have done in my life to this point. Kirsten read a section of Deepak Chopra's latest book in which he speaks of the importance of leaving behind the decisions you have made in the past - that the person who made those decisions is now dead, and I think that what I am undergoing is nothing less than a sudden gnosis of that fact. I am able to look back at the good and bad things that I have done and view them with some detachment, knowing, humbly, that they are only parts of a weave that made me who I am today, rather than things that define me. In short, Popeye was the greatest philosopher of all: I am what I am.

I want to do a write-up on a great article I read recently regarding this transformation and, more specifically, the "Dark Night of the Soul", which I know I have been passing through, but I don't really have the time to do so at the moment. I will when I get the chance.