Tonight Rich O's was about half full. There were, of course, some strangers sitting in the living room area. I ended up grabbing a seat on the loveseat anyway. It was either that or stand.

I had myself a Spezial Rauchbier (760) and sat and listened to the three drunk idiots sitting around me. It actually made me feel a little better about myself, knowing that I was so much cooler than those dorks.

Once the idiots left, I had the brilliant idea of asking the bartender if Baltika 6 was back yet. It's back! Yay! Of course I had one (192).

Nerdlinger and Butterface were sitting at the kiddie table and I had moved to the throne. I spent some time talking with Butterface, who had to look past Nerdlinger to see me. Kind of prophetic I think. I could so steal her if I wanted to, at least for the night. But I'm not that kind of person.

DisgustingMakeoutCouple came in at about the time I ordered my second Baltika (209). Those two really make me uncomfortable, but at least tonight they did a pretty good job of keeping their tongues in their own mouths.

That's it. A pretty boring night. Just what I needed.

The Keys to Your Heart

You are attracted to those who are unbridled, untrammeled, and free. In love, you feel the most alive when your lover is creative and never lets you feel bored. You'd like to your lover to think you are loyal and faithful... that you'll never change. You would be forced to break up with someone who was ruthless, cold-blooded, and sarcastic. Your ideal relationship is lasting. You want a relationship that looks to the future... one you can grow with. Your risk of cheating is zero. You care about society and morality. You would never break a commitment. You think of marriage as something precious. You'll treasure marriage and treat it as sacred. In this moment, you think of love as commitment. Love only works when both people are totally devoted.

What I'd like to know is how can a quiz that asks you a bunch of animal questions gives such accurate results.

Once again, I'm it really sure where I'm going with this. Once again, I should probably wait until I have a couple of beers in me before I write anything. Once again, I'm bored, so I'm going to do this now.

If you've joined me late, I'm clearly insane.

I have the feeling that a part of me must like it, because I keep coming up with new excuses to be this way.

That fact is that, no matter how much I protest, the pain is nearly gone. Whether it's because enough time has passed, or because new evidence has come to light, or because it was stupid from the beginning, it's almost over now. I can feel it leaving me. I can feel myself becoming something again. Not happy. Not even content. I guess I'm just becoming not sad.

Being completely unable to do anything about my problems since this all started, I spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing them. I have a theory as to why I keep coming up with new excuses to be sad. Putting it into words will be the tricky part.

If I'm not sad, then I'm not hoping to become not sad. To become not sad, something should happen. My pain shouldn't just fade away, something should happen that fixes me. Time heals all wounds may be standard words of encouragement, but it just seems like bullshit to me.

Sadness didn't sneak up on me, it exploded all over me. Something happened to make me this way. Is it unreasonable to want something equally dramatic to change things back?

Of course it's unreasonable. But I think it's understandable.

Consider the following:

Once upon a time this wicked witch gave a maiden a poison apple. She ate the apple, and she fell asleep. She slept for twenty years, then she woke up and felt very rested.

Once upon a time a fair maiden was sealed in a castle tower, she waited at the window for her prince to come and rescue her, but then she got tired of waiting and managed to pick the lock on the door and escape.

If I'm trapped, then a rescue is always possible. As soon as I free myself from this mess I'm in, the chance to be rescued is lost forever.

A part of me is clearly not ready to give up the dream of rescue, so I find walls everywhere I look.

A while ago I decided to start trying to bottle things up. I thought it was so I could seem more like a normal person to those who know me. That's what I thought. Now I think that the reason I'm bottling these feelings up is that they're almost gone. I'm not so much locking them up as I'm clinging to them.

I read all these journals, written by all these amazing people. I read for the stories, and for inspiration, and for the humor. I read for several reasons, and I never go away unsatisfied.

What I never expected to see, even after all these months, what I never thought I'd find was a fucking mirror. I certainly wasn't looking for one. And most definitely not one that revealed my own feelings better than I ever could.

I am completely, utterly humbled. I'm reduced to using the same words that I used the first time I looked into this mirror:

Wow. Just, wow.

Just watched one of the janit, er, custodial engineers use a shovel to get the squirrel's body out of the shrubbery. It had managed to run about thirty feet with a smashed head and untold internal injuries.

Now I'm sad.

I'm also wondering, if I ever got to the point where I really needed it, could I count on anyone to step on me and put me out of my misery?

I was standing outside my building today having a smoke and watching this squirrel spaz out.

We have trees all over the place, and the front of the building has ivy growing maybe 50 feet up it. The squirrels will climb the trees, and jump from tree to tree, and jump from the trees to the building.

I don't know what they're up to, but it's entertaining to watch.

Today I figured that this one particular squirrel must have gotten into one of the bottling lines or something because it was obviously under the influence of something. I've never seen a squirrel, never known for their sedentary ways, move so quickly and frantically.

This thing would climb one tree, then jump to the ivy on the side of the building. It would then immediately climb up a little higher and jump to another tree, then climb down to the ground. Then it would climb the first tree again and the pattern would repeat.

One of these circuits took about 10 seconds. I watched about 20 of them.

I'm not really sure what happened. I took my eyes off the squirrel for a second, and I heard it scream.

Did you know that squirrels can scream? Well they can, if they're pissed enough. Or scared enough.

Maybe it misjudged the distance to the tree. Maybe it misjudged how tired it was getting from all the spazzing out it was doing. Maybe a sudden breeze moved the branch. I don't know. What I do know is that the squirrel screamed, and then it fell about 40 feet onto the sidewalk.

The squirrel bounced. I was sickened.

The sound was exactly like you'd hear if you took two pool balls and struck them together. It was the sound of many small bones breaking at the same time. It was the sound of a skull shattering. It was the sound of something dying.

I'd say that I'm pretty normal when it comes to liking animals. If they're cute then I like them. If they have eight legs or beady eyes, well then not so much. So possums and spiders are out, but squirrels are definitely in the like column.

I took a second or two to work up my nerve, then walked to see if the squirrel was alive. I was sure that it would be dead. Hoping that it'd be dead actually. Because if it was alive and hurt as badly as that sickening sound and that horrific bounce indicated, if it was hurt that badly, then I was going to step on it. I was going to kill it and put out of its misery.

I could see the squirrel laying on the sidewalk when I started walking toward it. It hadn't moved. How could it have moved? It was dead. But I had to make sure, and I walked around some bushes that hid the squirrel from my view for a second. I remember wondering how much blood I'd get on my work shoes if I had to step on it and kill it. I wondered if I'd really be able to go through with it.

When I rounded the bushes, the squirrel was gone.

There had been no noise, no rustling of the shrubbery. There had been nothing. It was there one second and then gone the next.

I've heard that some animals, in the last seconds of their life, will often summon every last bit of energy and strength they have and just run. Run to hide, somewhere safe. Run to heal, somewhere warm. Run to die, somewhere private.

I don't know where this squirrel went to die. All I know is that, wherever it went, it went there fast.

It was a spaz right up to the very end.

I didn't watch the final show, but I tivoed it and planned to watch it tonight. Then they went and spoiled it for me on the radio this morning.

For those of you that don't have my 'blog memorized, I just wanted to point out that I wrote this on September 1st.

I got the ordering of the Suzie and Jordis eliminations switched, but otherwise I nailed it.

Yay me!

(response to another message from the same person)

OK but if LG wasnt(sic) there would you be with MSG?

To answer your question: I don't know. LG isn't really here anyway, only her ghost is, and it's been here for so damn long that I can hardly imagine what things would be like without it. I suppose that, if I got some closure, or if I grew up, or if somebody hit me in the face with a baseball bat enough times, there could be a time when I stopped being haunted.

So I don't know. Six months ago I'd have said no, there were too many other problems. Today I'm not so sure. There would certainly be obstacles, just as there have always been obstacles. I actually think that I'd be willing to try. She is a very sweet girl, and she actually cares about me, and she's hot, and she's smart, and she laughs at my jokes...

...and she's not LG.

And that's the problem with hypothetical questions. Reality always comes back and fucks things up.

(response to message)

Dont(sic) you find it funny that your(sic) putting MSG thru the exact same things that LG is putting you thru?

The situations are similar, but that's about it.

I was thinking I'd go over some of the differences between these two situations, but the first (and main) thing I need to say here is that nobody is putting anyone else through anything. Those of us that are hurting here, we are doing this to ourselves. To accuse me of putting someone else through something painful implies that I'm doing it intentionally. That's just not the case. I do everything I can to keep from hurting causing MSG any more pain. I believe that LG would prefer that I didn't hurt either. There's no malice here, in either situation.

(I may write something here that could be seen as disparaging. That is not my intention. I'm just stating the facts as I see them.)

I guess that most obvious difference would have to be the fact that MSG and I had an actual romantic relationship. We tried, more than once, to keep that spark going, but it just became too difficult. Her hang-ups, my baggage - it was just too much. Whatever, it makes a little bit of sense that she'd develop some feelings for me during that time. I am a pretty good guy after all.

LG and I, on the other hand, had nothing more than a friendship that turned out to be mostly one-sided. The fact that nobody at the bar believes that it never went beyond that doesn't make it any less true.

MSG and I have talked dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of times about what was going on between us. This type of open and honest communication has been, and continues to be, one of the cornerstones of what I hope will be a long friendship. I've been honest, at times brutally honest, with her at all times, and she has done the same with me.

LG and I have never talked about any of this at all. For this I mostly blame my own fears. Mostly.

MSG knows pretty much all there is to know about me. She knows me as well as anyone ever has. She knows my strengths and my weaknesses. She knows my hopes and my fears. Her heart has been able to make an informed decision about me and her feelings for me.

Everything that I think I know about LG is based on my emotions and feelings and my own sense of the potential in her. I have very little firsthand knowledge about what kind of person she really is.

MSG wanted to have feelings for someone.

I didn't.

MSG still wants to have these feelings.

I don't.

I'm wondering, why does it feel better to love than it feels to be loved?

Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Aren't we, at our deepest levels, pretty much governed by instinct?

One of my sister's professors once told her that humanity was free of instinct, that humanity always had a choice when it came to deciding how to behave, what to do, how to react to stimuli. That, as human beings, we were governed by what we had learned as we went through life. That, with us, it was all nurture and that nature had become irrelevant.

My sister's professor was an idiot.

We may often seem to be governed by thought and knowledge and reason and experience, but that's just the surface of who we really are. That's just what gets projected out to the rest of the world.

The real person lives inside of us. Our heart and our soul. And there's nothing there but emotion and instinct. That's who we really are.

You ever try to reason with your heart? It's not that it doesn't listen. It simply cannot understand what you're trying to tell it. Reason is the domain of the mind. The heart only understands emotion. Joy. Love. Sorrow. Shit like that.

The more basic the feeling is, the more powerful it is.

Every now and then I have a thought. Sometimes it's just something I ran across in the past, but since I can't really remember running across it before, I think that I came up with it all on my own. Today I wrote something in a PM that was such a thought. Someone had asked whether it was possible to choose whether to fall in love or not. I responded:

There's no choice. Sometimes you can fight it with everything you've got and you still fall. It's like gravity, only stronger.

But I ramble. Back to my original question.

Why do we continue to love, even when we're not loved back? Why do we stay in one-sided relationships? Even worse, why do we stay in abusive relationships?

Because we need to love someone more than we need to be loved by someone.

Don't ask me why this is. I have no idea. I just know that I've done all three.

Let's say that someone loves me. Let's also say that I love someone else. I have a choice to make, and I'm always going to make the same one. I'll hurt the one who loves me, and I'll be hurt by the one I love, and nothing will ever change, and everybody will be miserable forever.

This doesn't make any sense, but sense is the domain of the mind. The mind cannot understand the heart any more than the heart can understand the mind.

---

You know what, I'm really trying here. Trying to emote without emotion. Trying to feel without feelings. I'm trying, and I really don't appreciate my mind telling me how pointless this all is. Maybe pointlessness is the point I'm trying to make. Huh? You ever think of that, you asshole mind, you?

I'm going to stop now.