I hate my phone.

I think the hate started back in February. I'd been carrying the damn thing everywhere I went for months, cursing myself for my inability to risk missing a call from her. One night I accidentally left the phone in the basement when I went to bed.

The next morning I saw that I'd missed an incoming message.

I'd lugged that damn thing around for at least a month since the last text message, and now I had nothing to show for it but a stupid blinking red light.

Blink blink. Ha ha. Blink blink. You suck. Blink blink. You lose.

I sent off a response, apologizing for missing the message, then got nothing for another month. Though you can be sure that my phone never left my side again, I began to loathe it and what it stood for. It became a little silver monument to my aloneness, a testimony to my fears and failures.

There was a day, not too long ago, when I really thought my phone would ring. I'd asked for a favor. For a chance to say goodbye before she left again. I was sure that it wasn't too much to ask for. I was sure that she'd call.

When my phone finally rang, late in the afternoon, my heart leapt and my breathing stopped. I snatched my phone up and looked at the screen.

It was my cousin Mike.

I may never forgive him for calling me on that particular day, but I know that the phone is my true enemy.

These days my phone plays a different kind of game with me. These days it rings a lot. My friends call. My sisters call. I don't know if people are checking up on me or what. I did endure a pretty hard blow after all.

These days when my phone rings, my heart leaps, and my breathing stops, and I snatch up the phone, and I look at the screen.

TrainGirl calling from her new home.

My sister telling me about her new deck.

CoffeeDude calling from Rich O's.

MisunderstoodGirl calling me all drunk.

VigilanteGirl discussing plans for the night.

These days, when my phone rings, I don't get excited. These days, when my phone rings, it scares the shit out of me. Every time I move to look at that screen I know I'm not ready for what could be displayed there. I seriously doubt that I'll ever be ready.

My phone knows this too. It knows that every time it rings, I'll be afraid.

Afraid of what I'll hear, but mostly afraid of what I'll say.

And afraid that the progress I've made over the past couple of weeks, the good mood that inexplicably continues to permeate my being even as I write this entry, that it all will be shattered the instant I see her name on the screen and realize that I've just been fooling myself once again.

The point I wanted to make here is that when you call me the reason that I sound grouchy isn't because of you. It's because I'm irritated with my stupid phone playing this mind game with me and getting me all worked up over nothing.

Okay, go here and read the opening sentence.

Done? Good. Now read the second and third full paragraphs.

Done? Okay.

I wish I could express what I've been going through half as well as this lady can.

(update: Okay, after quite a few private messages, and a bit of reading, I'll grudgingly admit that some of my stuff has been decent. Thanks to those of you that gave me encouragement.

That first sentence really did grab me though.)

Back in the olden days, after the dinosaurs died off, but before video games, I was a toddler.

One of the toys I had was this little play workbench where you had all these differently shaped holes and matching pegs. The idea was to put the pegs into the holes with the matching shape.

With me so far?

Doing it correctly required almost zero effort, and it got very boring very quickly.

So I remember trying to cheat. Trying to fit the star-shaped peg into the oval hole, or whatever.

It never worked, but I had more fun trying and failing than I ever had doing it correctly.

Remember, I was a toddler. It didn't take much to amuse me.

What got me thinking about that old toy was an e-mail conversation I had with one of my readers the other day.

We were talking about soulmates and perfect matches and bullshit like that, and she told me she felt like her heart was a round hole in a world full of square pegs.

Whoa.

That's pretty deep right there.

Tonight, I missed her.

I thought for a while that my good mood was coming to an end, but then I realized that the reason I missed her was that I wanted to share my continuing good mood with her. Never mind how impossible that would be. Kind of like a snowflake wanting to spend a day at the beach with a magnifying glass.

VigilanteGirl got her hair cut. I guess that her boss and I are the only ones who noticed. Bonus points for me!

Today is MisunderstoodGirl's birthday, so I broke a long-standing tradition by going out on a Tuesday night. I also broke a recent vow by going to this Mac & Cheese bar to help her ring in her new year.

To drink, I had a couple of Newcastles. The first one came in a glass that was encrusted with at least 1/8 inch of frost. The second one I had the girl pour into the old glass.

In attendance tonight besides MisunderstoodGirl, RealTrainGirl, and me, were about a half-dozen people that I didn't (and still don't) know. One girl was fairly hot.

MisunderstoodGirl talked me into taking a sip of this Jager Bomb or some such. A sip is all it took for me to know that I wouldn't be finishing it. There's still just one person in the world that I'll drink a shot with, and she's in Washington state, and she's named Holly.

Hi Holly!

Anyway, I figure that since I'm to the point of feeling nostalgic it's about time for me to be shit upon again so I can go back to being irritated.

Now it's 11:30 and I know it'll take me another several hours to unwind enough to sleep. This phone sits here taunting me but I will control myself. There's nothing to say anyway.

(response to message)

A year and a half ago I complimented you.

Big mistake.

The compliment on your game was deserved, but I'm afraid that you may have read too much into it.

I'm not in love with you.

You are not allowed to suck my dick.

You know, every gay person I've talked to, male or female, has professed to being much happier once they finally came out of the closet.

I suggest that you do the same. I can tell that your secret is eating away at you. It doesn't have to. It's the year 2005, people are much more accepting now.

But honesty about your gender identification will only get you so far. I myself am straight, and there's nothing that you can do about it. You'll just have to settle for a lesser man.

So, climb to the top of the Space Needle and shout out I LOVE BIG GIANT COCKS for all the world to hear. There's somebody out there willing to let you slobber greedily at his genitals.

That somebody is just not me.

Was this what you meant when you complained that I never wrote about you?

Not much of a quiz really, but what other category should I put this in?

The other day I added this page to list some of the strange search strings that lead people to my site.

What I failed to anticipate was that, by listing these gems, I was skewing the search engine results.

So now, for example, if someone googles i like to smell my own butt it's pretty likely that this site will be one of the first ones returned.

This is completely unfair to those people who are desperately seeking other autoanalolfactory perverts and only finding me.

So what I've done is, I've added a META tag in the file obscure.shtml to prevent well-behaved search robots from archiving that page.

Now, once the already archived versions of the page expire from the search sites, the perverts will be free to search, unimpeded, for things like eating human testicles and happy crotch.

Man I'm tired.

My early morning excitement has gradually been overtaken and surpassed by the realization that there is virtually no scenario I can imagine wherein all this ends well.

I just noticed that I've used the word wherein three times in two days. I really need to buy a thesaurus.

Anyway, to die in my sleep has always seemed like one of the worst ways to go. A life should be experienced, and that should include the end of a life. To go out in a plane crash, or a fire, or a shooting, to feel something right up to and including the last moments of life - that's how I want to go.

I don't want to go to sleep one night and just never wake up. I want to SCREAM my last breath.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this - it just doesn't seem right to let things fade away. Some things deserve a grand exit. Some things deserve closure. Some things do not deserve to be pushed aside so they can fade over time and eventually be forgotten completely.

Abrupt topic shift here...

After work today I met up with RealTrainGirl at Rich O's. I had an NABC Bourbondaddy. After a while MisunderstoodGirl and GreenBeerDude came in. Tomorrow is MisunderstoodGirl's birthday, and they're going to this Mac & Cheese's bar that I don't really like. I don't know if I'm going or not. I don't like the bar and it's a Tuesday night. It's Amazing Race night, and I have to work Wednesday. We'll see.

Oh yeah, Roger told me that Rich O's will have Newcastle on tap for a while! I'd like to be able to figure out a way to convince him to carry it all the time but he thinks it competes with one of their NABC beers. I think the only similarity is the alcohol content. I'm very much looking forward to being able end my sessions with Newcastle for the next few weekends.

Another abrupt topic shift here...

I'm feeling a little guilty about this past weekend. I have no reason to feel this way, but a lack of reason has never stopped me before. It's not like I'm going to do anything about it - it's just an observation.

Man I'm tired.

...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
- Sherlock Holmes

This is one of those entries that will probably make sense only to me. That's okay though, it is my 'blog.

Of all the questions I've had scratching away at my brain over the past year or so, I've managed to find the answers to most of them. Sometimes the answer surprised me, sometimes it disappointed me, sometimes it made me happy. But always always always it provided a huge sense of relief.

Just being able to know - to no longer have to guess - I'm not sure that I can describe how freeing it's been for me.

Of course nothing is ever perfect. I haven't been able to find the answers to several questions. Either the answers are hidden, or I'm just not looking in the correct place. Either way, these remaining questions still scratch and pick inside me.

Thinking about these unanswered questions, I've realized that they're all related. They all lead to the same thing. They all lead to same master question that, if answered, would explain everything.

Of all of the types of questions you hear about, this is the toughest kind. It's not who, what, where, when, or how. This is a why question.

I started my quest for the answer to this question a long time ago. I've examined, and discarded, an awful lot of possible answers.

I got down to four possibilities, and I realized that I was getting close to the truth.

Theory T.B. just doesn't hold up to close inspection. There is not enough luck (good or bad) in the universe to allow T.B. to answer this question. Until last month T.B. was one of the leading contenders, but it's pretty much out of the race now.

Theory C.I. at first seems a little more promising. It would explain everything that's happened, BUT it would not explain those things that have not happened. C.I. should produce results that are much more random than what's been observed, yet all the results so far have been greatly skewed to the negative. For C.I. to be the answer there should have been some good in there too.

This morning I awoke to the realization that I'd narrowed the possibilities down to two.

I am sooooo close.

The first of the final contenders is theory E.G.. It is actually an extension of theory T.B.. Theory E.G. would explain the uncanny precision of what I've observed - especially what I've observed over the last month or two.

Finally, I have theory F.A. to consider. I'm extremely familiar with this concept because (a) it's one of my biggest fears, and (b) it's the explanation for the questions several people have asked about my actions.

Neither of these remaining theories have any real evidence against them. Looked at objectively, they seem to be equally possible answers - except for one thing. Theory E.G. just doesn't feel right. It requires too much effort, too much animosity, too much evil. It could be the answer, but I just don't think so.

So that leaves theory F.A. as the most likely answer. I don't have to like it, but I think this just might be the answer I've been looking for. No matter how hard I try, I just cannot find any substantial fault with it. It would be a hell of a coincidence, and a total fuckwad of a situation, but I cannot simply dismiss it because I don't like it.

Anyway, the really nice thing about getting down to these two possibilities, the thing that had me springing out of bed at 4:00 AM to write this entry, the thing that I never ever ever EVER thought would happen, is that (get this, it's important) whichever proves to be the real answer, it will mean that it's not all my fault.

This is just so huge that I'll probably have another one of those days - unseen since November - wherein I cannot stop grinning and giggling.

At this point, I don't care what the answer is. I'd still like to know, but it's no longer imperative for me to find the answer. I may find it some day. People do generally have big mouths after all.

This morning I got Burger King breakfast for me and VigilanteGirl. I ordered the same thing I've always ordered - two Croissanwhatevers with sausage egg and cheese, and an order of hash browns.

I didn't even finish the first Croissanwhatever. I think my stomach is shrinking or something.

Early in the afternoon I tried to mow my yard. It's dried out enough but the temperature outside was about 60 and I'd guess that the wind chill was about minus 342. I only got the front yard mowed before I gave up.

Got a call from TrainGirl!

She had, as I'd figured, already heard about MiddleNameGuy's passing. We just did a little bit of catching up. She says she's happy where she's at, and she sounded happy, but then again she always sounded happy to me. She also asked that question I hate but it didn't bother me, coming from her.

I complained a little to her that Rich O's has lost a lot of its appeal to me. Most of the women that used to frequent the place have either moved out of state or are going to other bars. There are a few leftovers from the old days, like TallLady and Bubbles, but for the most part the women that have been coming into Rich O's lately are so LOUD that they get irritating very quickly. At least my old female friends could hold their alcohol.

The only other thing I've done today is play pool.