Love is affliction

I frequent places in the city, and there I find women. Women are everywhere, but every once in a while you find one that smacks into you like a truck. Cailey is her name. The long red hair. That shapely ass. Those dark eyes. Her thin, petite frame. That pale skin. Smitten.

Smitten and it feels like I'm bitten. Smitten like a kitten in yarn. Smitten like a man named Fritz in a biergarten.

I work up my courage. Some of it comes from a weed brownie. I approach her and ask why a certain generic floss was discontinued. She just explains what I already know. She looks at the floss display, perplexed. I'm looking at her. I see that her hair band is Underarmor brand. I bet she works out. She looks good, not flashy, no, naturally beautiful. So natural. Beautifully so.

I make light of the fact that I just talked to her about floss for a minute or two and thank her for the conversation. I move on to my next situation. Then comes the opening of the Winter Olympics. The store is teeming with promotional people. Even the store employees are involved. I spy Cailey in front of a dairy end display. She has shot glasses of orange juice to sample. I circle around, thwarted by fear. I head down the liquor aisle and notice that a baby's bottle of formula has spilled on the ground. Now's my chance. I approach Cailey. I tell her that there's a spill in the liquor aisle. It looks like eggnog. She gets on her walkie-talkie and her voice spills out over the store's intercom. I smile in approval. She seems encouraged and smiles back, our little aside about the situation. I ask her if her samples have liquor in them because so many of the others do. She assures me they don't. I ask her why there are so many promotional people in the store. She offers an explanation. I'm looking at her deeply, smiling benignly. Her eyes perhaps communicate interest. They've opened wider. I've seen this look before. Goddamn it always gets me. Goddamn.

I introduce myself. "My name is Jason by the way." "Cailey," she replies. I see her name tag. Cailey McMillan. This is so perfect. I soak up the moment. I hope that it will never end. But it does, as they all must do. But she gave me that look, damn it, she gave me that look!

That look is what? It's maybe something women do, perhaps unconsciously to curry attention, sometimes to indicate interest, but the two bleed together as they've always have since these women were children and the distinction between seriousness and play were consciously undetectable. So maybe I was wrong. I ask her out, and she tells me she has a boyfriend. I almost collapse in front of the dog chew bones that she's stocking. I am weak. I am blushing. She is too. We share an autonomic response, quietly. I say goodbye, and vow to talk to her once more but lose my composure every goddamn time I see her.

Maybe it's for the better. I'm so damn shy. I wish I could see her in the middle of nowhere so that others weren't watching, so that I didn't have to turn my little script into a public speech. I see her and I'm devastated, alone, observing my own court-sanctioned restraining order. I go home, cover myself in my sheets, close my eyes, and sleep off the devastation that only I visit upon myself with the mere butterfly kiss of an encounter. I am compassion and fatigue rolled into one. I am prepared at any moment to dive on a grenade to save her. I am not there when she's amidst me. My self, that mental apparatus that assumes a cockpit between my ears, gets obliterated in her presence. I am porous. I have no boundaries. I am simply nervous responses and delayed hormonal saturation gradients bobbing up and down upon a skeleton in her midst. I am lost.

I want to hold her body close to mine, always from behind. I want to kiss her on the ear and whisper something sweet in there. I want to run my hands across her shoulders and slide my fingers onto her scalp from the back of her head. I want to breath heavy on her most sensitive places and I want to speak sensitive things into her most sacred of selves. I want to protect her, care for her, love her, listen to hear, learn from her, become everything she'd ever want me to be for her. And I'd do it all for her because, hell, for the simple reason I don't want to exist. She'd kill me if not completely at least temporarily in that I could be reborn amidst her in a moment of affection, attention, and love.

Love is affliction, to me it is. I am burdened by emotions too strong to contain. And as hard as I try to maintain my composure it becomes a clear sign of my interest in others that I am pained when they are not near me or don't desire to be. I wilt like a flower that has been uprooted because I am.  I'm uprooted by the sheer joy and the shock of a desire too strong to contain, so strong indeed that this stationary flower would risk being uprooted to be near the source of its pain.

The truth is like a fart

The truth is like a fart. It isn't healthy to hold it in. And when you let it out you risk alienating those around you.

The mouth expels lies. The anus excretes truth.

Computer Psychotherapy

"This astonishing--one is very tempted to say "perceptive"--response from the computer, is of course, preprogrammed. But, then, so are the responses of human psychotherapists. In a time when more and more people in our society seem to be in need of psychiatric counseling, and when time-sharing of computers is widespread, I can even imagine the development of a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminal, something like arrays of large telephone booths, in which, for a few dollars a session, we are able to talk to an attentive, tested and largely nondirective psychotherapist. Ensuring the confidentiality of the psychiatric dialogue is one of several important steps to be worked out."  (p. 285)

From "Broca's Brain" by Carl Sagan

Asking Cailey out

Friday comes around. I work the 10-hour shift at the coke plant, 7 to 5. We have a good day, nothing too hard, a brisk morning followed by a lazy afternoon. The boss is in a bad mood, so we can't leave early. I head home. The plan is to cook the ex- a meal and take her to the midnight movie-- "Night of the Creeps." Her joke is that we have 'joint custody' over this event. It's also a night I know the red-haired girl is working at the store. Things get complicated. This, I know. I research some pasta primavera recipes, resort to inventing one of my own, take my shower, take a few big gulps of the old tequila and head out the door. Her car is there. I've discerned it's the BMW with the Euro-style front plates. My heart races. I am lost in the produce aisle. My pattern is toroid as I double back for items I've forgotten. My vision has changed. I've had this before, the 6th grade, during a fist fight with another kid named Jason. The colors are saturated. The action is slow, detached. I perceive my actions as mechanical. I scan the aisles. Every time I hear cans being placed on shelves I think it's her. My heart races. I circle the store, collecting all the night's ingredients: import pasta and tomato puree, some basil, a zucchini, portabellas, wine, red pepper, a head of broccoli. It will be a good meal if I can just stay focused. I see a stock cart of boxes. I pass by it, looking down each adjacent aisle. She's not around. I circle back for a loaf of french bread and see my reflection in the mirror behind the bread shelf. I can see my heart beating in the bluish skin underneath my eyes. I look old, thin, afraid. My hair is short. The graying is obvious. I head back through the store for one more look. I see one of the other workers chatting to someone unseen in the greeting card aisle. I walk that way. She comes through fast with a box, startling me. Our eyes meet. I smile, say hi, and apologize for blocking her path as I clutch my hand basket close to my body . "No worries," she says. She's heading down the pet aisle. I'm on auto pilot. I make my move. I'm walking up behind her. She's wearing jeans. I take a brief glimpse at her ass, and it looks good. I feel both desire and shame. I walk up close to her as she pulls out dog chew bones and hangs them on their racks. My heart is racing. I'm blushing. I blurt it out. "Would you like to go out sometime?" The fear on my face is obvious. I smell of adrenaline and last decade's cologne. She smiles at me. "I have a boyfriend." I stare at the shelf. My voice is weak. "They all do." She laughs curtly. Her service training shows. She's blushing a bit. "Ok, goodbye." I make a feeble gesture of a wave, turn, and head to the check out. It's over. My 6 months of agonizing over how to approach Cailey McMillan ends the most obvious way it could. I make my motives known, and discover her unavailability to me. She's already in a relationship, one that doesn't include me. The dinner was a hit. The wine was even better. I go to the midnight movie. I drink two tall boys at the show. I'm high on two caffeine pills. I've been up since 4 am the day before. The movie is surprisingly good. Russ from European Vacation is the protagonist. His love interest reminds me of Cailey. I take Helen back to her place, drink a rum drink, and fuck the everloving shit out of her. My wounds heal. I am still a man. Fade to black.

Reality TV

Soon reality TV will consist of footage from American reels of liberated concentration camps narrated by voiceovers of gay men making smarmy comments about fashion sense as skeletal survivors lay shirtless and the dead are bulldozed into shallow trenches and lime is spread over them.