journal entry october 10

What big changes can happen in a week. I purchased a house. I closed on it to be exact. That required a 20% down payment from my personal finances to avoid private mortgage insurance (PMI). That occurred on Friday. When I went to the bank and teller, a young black woman beamed at me and offered much congratulations. I'd like to think she was impressed by my ability to pull more than 45 thousand dollars out of an account, draft it into a cashier's check, and hand it over for a home. That's one thing, that I'm sure separates me from a lot of people. My ability to save money, in general, most surely does. But now I'm spending it, and spending it fast. I have solicited the work of a few friends. One will do the painting and related fixes. The other will be doing a punch-list of fixes. One trip to Lowe's had me drop 1300 dollars on paint and related other supplies. The best part of the experience was how the cash register sort of blanked out at the check out process so that another associate had to dig into the computer system to see if the transaction went through. It did. Now I have a printed out image of the receipt, not a regular one that is printed at the point of sale device. 

Sunday had me saying hello to a very intriguing and beautiful woman who works at a grocery store I frequent. She had smiled at me and waved a few times one Friday evening as she was getting off work. I talked to her briefly then, kept it work-related, and didn't pursue anything else. Then, subsequent visits later I didn't see her and began to think of her. I ran into her a Thursday and got cold feet. But this time I said hello and she beamed back a smile and a 'hi, how are you.' I ended the conversation at the reply and kept on shopping as she was working with a colleague in the produce section. Trying to keep things tidy, terse, not too gushy. Keep your cool kid. Give too much away and she'll realize you're a dork and move on. That's a bit of the old me. The new me has a house and some added feeling of having made it, confidence, a place of my own, a way to impress the ladies. Yep, that's it. 

Then there was this other, much younger, kinda nerdy, still very interesting girl running the register at the pet store. We talked and she kept the conversation going. My body language was much less repressed, and well, it was intoxicating as well. But everything like this comes in pairs, and that's how life presents itself to me as forks in roads, choices to make, nothing is ever existing in solitude to be happened upon. I meet women in pairs, in systems of encounters, and I have to discover what the meaning of said encounter means. I'm not sure how other men integrate sexual attraction and their means of pursuit. Mine is a little too analytical, and then papered over with some retroactive romanticism. Contrived, yes to me it is, but maybe it looks romantic form the outside. We'll see. I am going to chase down said woman at the grocery store. She's the full package, no doubt. I'll take whatever crazy she may possess, and ride that wild pony into the sunset. 

Or not. 

You never know. It could be a bust. She may be smiling and waving at a lot of guys. I have no clue. Maybe she has a sort of dying, fallow relationship. I don't know. The fact that I don't have one, and if she doesn't have one, both could present themselves as red flags. I know this. I've been called many things for not chasing hard enough. I can only hope that she and I could find common ground. Maybe I can get her to talk. Maybe I'll find ways to keep stuff interesting, but all I can say for now is I didn't really sleep, and the situation, house, her, and all has been on my mind. 

journal entry october 3

I have in mind the practice of journaling and the use of this space for such a task. I do this only because I've let this area lie fallow this year in particular though it's not the first year that such a state has occurred. We have our busy days. The last time this happened I was in the midst of a relationship and a new job that had me gainfully employed in a steel mill that was at full tilt during the shale oil boom in the early 2010s.

Those booms have busted with the fluctuation of so many market dynamics. When numbers stop going up the economics change as do demands and so go the production schedules. They lie fallow like this blog, unpeopled, forgotten, unproductive, gone for a while. 

We're in the midst of a building boom otherwise. It appears that here it's in medical research and healthcare in general. To build an eleven storey high-rise dedicated to neuroscience reveals the possibilities in it and the deep pockets of a certain Midwest private college that is a homonym with "wash you." I'd be credulous not to believe that they'd be diving deep into the brain-computer interface, and sacrificing a lot of animals to that cause. We'll see. They tell me the basement is full of wash outs and pens for housing the scientific chattel for such an operation. In essence they'll be defining the human apart from the animals they're destroying while blurring the lines between humans and computers, and if futurist Youtube videos are any indicator then the novel materials they're implanting in the brain become like some fungal hyphae to which our dendrites migrate and grow on. Strange days indeed. 

I'm alone. So fucking alone. And it's all my fault. I beat this yelping, bleating, dying, retreating little shit of a dog too much. It's me in time, reliving a past that is gone, but which I let echo through me to this day. Motherly rejection is a chronic attitude, and as much as I get chided and chide myself over what it has made me it has a very real impact on my day-to-day. I avoid most everyone aside from while I'm working. I end the day and retreat to my kennel, like the abused cur to which auto-abusive self-identity has led. Sad really. My last resort is to show off my new house.

On Friday, October 7, 2022 I hand over a cashiers check and get handed the keys to my new house and its adjacent garage. It fits me, tucked between two larger homes and ducking, half-hidden behind a street-front tree. But it's a gem all its own with a lot of endearing qualities. It has plenty of rehabilitative potential and like on the front mentioned above I intend to put the love and care into this house that could and should be put in to me to make me better, reform me, at least show the world, in spite of my behavior, that I'm a decent man, a worthy man, not a scared man, fighting for his life against an invisible enemy in his midst. Dramatic, this is, yes, but I have literary license, so buzz off. 

I am fighting a flea infestation that I'm certain the cat I'm watching has brought into the house. Just when I think I have it under control I pull another off his fur with the comb, give him another dose of Capstar, and check my pant legs for clingers-on. When I think of clingers-on I think of a certain girl who is a bartender whom I fell for so many years ago when she was just a little girl server at this same bar, the bar that I rarely visit because of her and the conflicted feelings I get when I wrestle my demons in her presence. It's a sad little histrionic firework show that I put on. I should apologize to her for that, or maybe at least find a way to explain my situation to her without sounding like I'm doing such a thing in such a clunky manner. She's keen to keep others around in our presence these days. I had a brief one-on-one experience with her and it was intoxicating to feel that I could have conversations with her, something she makes harder and harder for me to accomplish these days. And that's ok. From her perspective, over there in the thicket of her ego, I'm just a freakish little shit that is from my thicket just being difficult to understand. Understanding, that one thing that women seem to want to master in the men they keep around. Otherwise, quantity unknown, kick it to the curb like the demon seed itself. The one cynical observation that came from all of this, one that I mentioned to a thinking kid with whom I was working, is that women are used to being in control. They don't normally cede it, not all. Women go through puberty first and mature first, so when the dating scene begins they tend to control the psychological space. Guys run on simple attraction, and run into the barbed wire that women place up simply to measure their interest. It's rather coarse and asymmetrical when it comes to sexual relations. But it's a millennia-old practice baked into our very DNA, and I'm pissing on that long-roaring fire like a doofus. So be it. 

I hate nothing more than being public, be discussed in the public, being judged by others, being seen. I tend to hide all of my intentions. I'm ashamed of having my motives known. I normally say my piece and retreat for a while because I see my saying anything in such a manner to be a burden upon the other I'm saying it to. And so to this poor young bartender who just turned 30, I am sorry for wasting your time all these years. I wasted mine too. And all I learned throughout is that I have hang ups larger than my love for you can seem to hurdle. So you can accept the guy standing on the other side of the wall that I place before himself before he even got to your walls or forget him altogether. My god it hurts when she doesn't see or pay attention to me. And every time I try to take control of that emotion, to distance myself from that very potential, I end up alienating her. It's the quiet little war we wage. And I realize now that the majority of this journal is about me and some girl whose name has not been mentioned, nor will it. 

Peace. 5:27 am Monday, October 3, 2022.

book idea

Harlequin romance novel involving a single, male veterinarian administering euthanasia to various pet owner's pets, the subsequent vulnerable stage in the owners' lives, and the inevitable dissolution of this brief relationship. 

dropping the oreo

I've mentioned this event here and to others in the past. It's the one that I place as the focal point of my behavioral illness, the one where I preemptively reject others out of an overemphasized fear of them rejecting me. It started when I was maybe three or four, following my mother around the house like the momma's boy that I was. One of her daily routines as a stay-at-home mom was to go downstairs and smoke a joint or part of one on a green high chair/barstool near the laundry area in our unfinished basement. As she went, so went I, close behind. This pissed her off to no end. And she'd belt out an audible 'fuck' as I was no more than a foot from her towering leg. I was a clingy little shit. And the research bears out that when we're deprived of love and affection our pursuit of this thing kicks into overdrive. I suspect that's what was driving me--the paradoxical reaction to being shunned by being more clingy, desperate, and needy for affection. 

I suppose one of my mother's diversions at that time was to feed me a ready-to-hand sweet, so that I could be preoccupied while she descended to the basement for her routine joint. She had handed me a cookie, and Oreo cookie to be precise. Nevertheless, with cookie in hand I followed her down. As I descended the last short flight of stairs, she spotted me and belted out her audible 'fuck.' I never got near her in these instances. I stayed on the stairs maybe because I was told. But I do specifically remember doing one thing, one action, which would forever define my relationship with others for the rest of my life. I dropped the Oreo. I dropped it to feel sorry for myself. I dropped it to deprive myself of something sweet, coveted, tasty, desired. I actively took control of my sadness and I've been doing so ever since. 

I only bring this up because I normally go through an obsessive self-audit to determine what I did wrong and what I can do to remedy the situation. I've gone to my doctor seeking psychological advice. This was in reference to another motherly mental health sabotage, potty training. I needed help getting over the fear of urinating in public, something that has gotten increasingly worse since my mid-20s and on. It keeps me at home, picking public places carefully, and finding ways to manage and avoid the triggers associated with 'choking at the bowl.' That being said, the drugs the psychologist put me on didn't help. She did point me toward attachment styles as a way of self-knowledge about my ailment. Point taken. But in this situation I was dealing with a very specific behavior of not pursuing what, in retrospect, are obvious signs of interest by interesting other women in my midst. I had done this in 2018 to a girl bagging groceries at a Schnuck's where my great aunt shopped. I had completely rationalized her away as too young, too different from me, too dangerously independent to be with, and so I destroyed that opportunity the way I always do--through inaction. I did the same here recently when I went to a grocery store I frequent and one of the stockers was off the clock shopping on a Friday night. She smiled at me a few times. I even asked her a question, "where's the coffee?" but rarely did I make much eye contact. I saw her in the parking lot and I smiled and she waved, then I didn't see her again at that store, at least not until I went on a Thursday evening. I choked, shopped right next to her as she did her job, and not once did I acknowledge her or ask any questions. She wasn't looking at me, nor was I looking at her. It feels like I have done my best to destroy another opportunity, another woman reaching out through space and time, by not following up, making eye contact, smiling, talking, showing interest or enthusiasm. I was dropping the Oreo. 

This form of self-sabotage stems from a familiarity, a veritable identity with loneliness. I do things to ensure that I remain that way, and more specifically to remain sulking and pouting about my loneliness. To be fair, when a girl reaches out and smiles the likelihood that I'll have something normal and confident to say are slim. I'm blindsided and at best I prefer to retreat and watch her from a distance, size her up, psych myself up, and maybe begin to imagine us together before I can try for myself. I've done that one too, and it pretty much ended as one would expect. I lack the follow-through to go past 'hi.' I don't ask for numbers. I rarely ask out, especially not in person, and I when I do I am greeted with something vicious, cutting, rejecting. And maybe that's just what I want, rejection. It's what I know. It's all I know. Deep inside I see my happiness as an illusion. My relationship to truth is through cynicism and solitude. I'm not a cheerleader for any cause because that emotion is not something I feel genuinely. I can offer support for those in sadness because it is something that I do know. I help others because I care. But if I see a girl who I'm attracted to or find at least attractive or interesting I clam up and hide my emotions utterly. I'm dropping the Oreo.

contemporary communication contexts

We're zealously pursuing expressions of authenticity while interacting with each other through advertising platforms.

He's 45

 He's 45. He's watching his best memories through the rear view mirror. 

Reality is a bunch of moving circles

Another obviously hair-brained idea thought by me while watching too many 'actual' science videos chased down with California-new-agey-quantum-physics-misused videos is this.

Reality boils down to an inordinate amount of wave forms. 

No, that's it. We all know this. Eminent scientists past and present know this. That -stein, this -berg, there - dinger. Many pounds of chalk on many more pounds of slate working out equations in classrooms on campuses in states near the crashing of the sea waves, waves, as far as I can see. Goodbye wave. Wave goodbye. Oscillations low and high.

Trust me. I'm heading somewhere. It's just over that hill.

Light is waves. Sound is waves. Matter is atoms is fundamental particles is waves. Reality is waves.

Let's begin.

Behind the surface, the membrane, the interface, the--whatever analogy you prefer--of our three dimensional universe are countless geometrically perfect circles rolling along according to conditions I haven't bullshitted into existence in a polydimensional plane of the larger universe, which unfolds into our three-dimensional reality-based universe through a zero-point contact within our universe. Silently rolling away in directions inconceivable to us these circles define reality.

Our experience is waves. We experience highs, sometimes lows. We think of most things in terms of their relationship oppositional experiences. White is not all the other colors, but it most certainly is not black. Silence is not noise is maybe just some imperceptible wave. There I saw her. I asked her out. She didn't respond. She stood there, drunk, waving. 'Hi!' she said, always flanked by one or two people. Where am I on this wave? I'm gonna crash. There's more to come I'm sure. It's just a flurry of waves. I need to consult the circles tracing the waves of my existence. 

Each circle is a nearly infinite number of points, but each has enough points to trace out a circle, which, in turn, rolls along a path that each point traces into the reality of so many things in our universe. 

I'll come back to this. My brain is hurting. Thinking makes me tired sometimes. My focus is draining. I'm old and unfortunately I'm waving good bye more than hello.