(This is part of a series of notebook entries that clearly I could never have posted under the ever watchful gaze of my cyber nanny. The reason is self evident)
I don't know where her voice ends and the dreams begin, after having talked to her on the phone at night, nodding off with her still in my ears and her shape in my vision.
She always sends me pictures that ooze into me and stir up something I did not know could be stirred.
Like someone with a stick stirring up coals to a fire I assumed long dead, her shape floating up with the sparks, her voice as sweet as the songs she sings, and as devastating, leaving me to clutch my pillows, leaving me vacant when I wake and realize she's no there with me, just as mirage I see on the ceiling as I open my eyes, a mist that dissipates with daylight, leaving me stirred and cooked.
"Lucky you don't look your age," she tells me during one our late night clandestine phone calls, a complement though with my birthday looming but a month away, I fell that old, especially connected with her, robbing the cradle as they say, her being a mere 42, though I suspect she knows more about life than I ever will, a carnal knowledge (as if File Under Carnal Knowledge) to which I remain a mere infant, her voice so soothing, I ache to rub if over me like sacred oil, to which i could never tire, or tire when she sings. I even look at the old videos of her on stage, waiting to step in to do her part, or when she sang locally, dressed in a tight black dress, so young, so vibrant, I feel old just trying to keep up with all the thoughts that run through my head, few of which I dare to share.
Technically Indian summer doesn't come until after the first freeze.
But we had a deep chill and then near 90 over the last few days. So, this may well have been Indian summer as a new string of showers brings us into the cold. -- not yet snow like that Halloween in 2011 when still leaf laden trees in our back yard cracked and fell leaving a brutal landscape I could not clear till the following spring -- eye surgery leaving me half blind and prohibited from any heavy labor.
it was a vulnerable time, too, partly because I had to travel to surgery alone in the back of a bumpy cab which got lost on the way to the hospital.
I held the resentment against my wife as deeply into spring as the broken tree limbs.
The death of Uncle Pete in early 2012 added to this sense of my mortality and perhaps made me vulnerable to what later happened.
I was 59 going into 60, an age I always thought of as old and suddenly someone admired me, and I went ahead over heels.
Now, after other surgeries associated with old age some of those feelings still linger in me --. the good and bad times, the intensely positive and equally negative things I did or said or thought.
Time has caught up with me, each new decade bringing me closer to that shore for a sailing from which there is no return. I feel my mortality even more actually now as I did then and the chill after Indian summer only makes my bones hurt more, envisioning the black sails of that ship destined to take me away.
She shocks me again when she tells me how much she liked the feel of being a man, strapped up once where she learned the power of being on the other side, part of some test of will in which she got to be what she normally isn't, not quite boating so much as expressing her awe, defying the old logic of what is a woman's place when then she got to feel how potent a force she can be with a little help from her friends, and a strapped on device that is much more than mere envy, my mind struggling to envision how she must have looked, poised above the woman (I think) ready to take the plunge, her awesome eyes filled with the look of awe, being what she could not have imagined herself being -- a man.
She takes me back to school like I was back then, when I had to hold my books up against me to hide how I felt about my pretty science teacher, only now not sitting with book bag in the back of her class, but with a camera and pad, jotting down all I was supposed to collect, stirred up to a froth just listening to her even when she's not talking to me at all, not quite yet as intense as I felt all those years ago, but close, getting closer, a stiff reaction to a lesson only she knew how to teach, though like back then, it is not the lesson I am listen to by to the sound of her voice, the movement of her lips, hips and all the rest, no school boy should be playing attention to.
(I have several references to the book I gave her, but never got around to actually writing or posting a poem from that material)
I gave her the the book because she said she didn't know how to do what she was hired to do, thought both of us knew better, how good a writer she was, having already proven her worth for months, and still, I had this book that might help her, so, as if a religious ceremony, I handed it to her, never thinking of the consequence until last night when she texted me to tell me how much she was into me, even though I am three decades older than she is, and never once imaged we would end up like this -- though I must admit that even half blind, even with a private patch over my other eye, I admired her, the sleek figure seated at the desk near the window, or across the meeting table from me, her gaze thick with potential I might only guess about, and now I wonder what comes next.
She went to the park again yesterday, and most likely, by herself,
although it always difficult to nail something down when she posts a photo of
herself on Facebook.
She could be using a timer to take a picture of herself or
has someone else taking of her.
Nearly all the photos I have seen of her over the last year
have been self portraits -- such as the one she recently posted in her mother’s
kitchen (I surmise that it was her mother’s kitchen since her brother made some
comment under the posting in that regard.)
Outdoors, however, is a mixed bag, such as the one taken of
her eating lunch (most likely from a food truck) while sitting on some rocks (the
background showing a number of residential buildings, none of which I recognize
from around here, although she could be anywhere with anybody, and I’d have no
clue from my vantage point – merely looking at what she posts.)
Work photos are different in that she is often depicted in a
group.
Her most recent two photos, however, clearly show her in a
local park, needing no view of the New York Skyline to recognize which park.
This all seems odd to be that she would be all by herself on
a weekend, perhaps defying my jealousy when I envision her constantly being
with one of her admirers.
She’s changed her hair style, long, jet black with bangs
which make her look younger and incredibly innocent.
She turns 35 this week.
The outdoors highlights her makeup more and does not emphasize
her more attractive features such as her amazing eyes.
But none of these posts are accidental, and I suspect each
photo is a message to someone, perhaps to her late lover with the implication, “See,
what you’ve given up.”Although some
photos seem to be part of self-promotion, and increase the sense that she feels
isolated.
This sense of loneliness seems to support the theme of her recent
poems
I am, of course, puzzled by why she’s not gone farther than
she has, since she has so much talent.
But that is one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Less worried about what goes one behind her stare, than falling into the depths where I can't breathe.
So, I hold my breath and clutch my pencil, and wait as her head turns towards someone else, and I can breathe again.
Not long, those eyes always turn back if not at me then at the general direction of where i am.
And I stop breathing until it passes, like some search light from some prisoner of war movie with me seeking to go undetected, me seeking to keep my head above the death of her stare, me seeking to keep from downing, an already drenched dog, an already lost cause, trapped in the solitary of my own mind and scared I might never escape
Tim, the former Hometown writer from a few years ago, is
recruiting current and former writers from our company, to help work on R’s
campaign, in an all too similar way our poet friend tried to use our company to
help RR’s attempt to bring down the congressman and his allies.
This continues to raise questions as to whether she is
connected to R’s campaign now or was acting as a provocateur during her
employment with us – a secret agent who was simply following marching orders.
GA, the hometown blogger, says she has proof that Tim is
working for the R campaign, of which I have no doubt since when he worked for
us, his stories tended to be pro old Hometown as opposed to the progressives,
and since leaving our employ, he has served as PR and other duties for some of
the most hard core democrats in the state, although he told me he’s not working
for R, but merely helping out.
All this stuff raises serious ethical questions about the
role we in media play, and how underhanded politics can operate in its attempt
to corrupt us.
The problem for our poet if she is working for R now, is
that she has already been compromised with too many players already aware of
how she’s operated behind the scenes to risk sending her out into the field to
work without a lot of alarms going off.
I suspect A – our poet’s bar-hopping buddy and our former
Hometown writer – will serve in that role, leaving the question of where our
poet fits in.
It’s hard to tell whether the Virgin Mayor and his crew of
cutthroats got any use of her when she called around the county looking to dig
up dirt on the Virgin Mayor’s enemies. She was never a political guru the way
Tim was and may have been – as Paul Simon might have put it – faking it.
But with Hometown up for grabs, it is a put up or shut up moment
for her. If she is operating as their agent, then she is going to have to prove
her worth, and to demonstrate whether or not she really is a political player.
Tim never mentioned her by name when he mentioned the list
of current and former employees who he’d approached, either a deliberate misdirection
or he simply didn’t see her as living up to the part.
Tim knows his stuff after having spent years hobnobbing with
political bigwigs, letting them give him drink and cocaine and most likely the
women that come along with such affiliations.
Unfortunately, Tim tends to self-destruct. As a writer, he
spent too much time socializing with these political heavyweights and showed up
at functions drunk or near drunk, yet someone is loved enough by the powers
that be as for them to keep giving him second chances – such as representing a
woman who is vying to become governor, right up to the point that he got busted
for pot possession during a DWI stop.
He eventually crawled back to this part of the world where
he apparently hopes to resurrect his career by helping R become mayor, compromising
our company’s integrity in the process.
This idea of manipulating our company by our poet and by
others to achieve political ends suggests a connection between her and them
which may not exist.
I think she would love to be considered an insider, and yet,
her intelligence and her personal sense of worth defies her simply being used.
Although, she did drink RR’s Kool Aid, and I’m wondering if
she even believed it back then or was simply jockeying for position, using RR –
as The Small Man suggested – as protection until she can trickle up to someone
better.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever really know if she served other
people while working for us, or simply did what she always does wherever she’s
worked in the past, a lone operative seeking new stepping stones to climb.
I like to think, like Pinocchio, I like to think no strings control me, yet each time my cell phone rings I jump, do whatever I am supposed to do, expected to do, even when I'm scared to do it, like the messages she texted me to meet her for some grand opening, when I assume she doesn't want to see any more of me, my whole body jerking with the expectation that she does, and I go even though I'm all the way home, and park so many blocks away I could have walked, getting there to find she is surprised to see me, telling me she thought she was texting somebody else, me, sagging don in a corner like an unused puppet, desperate to have her fingers pluck at my string to stir me to life again.
After more than a year, many of the events that took place
have blended together in one large smear of memory that even my daily journal
struggles to make sense of.
My poetry journal tends to reflect many of the incidents
better – at least in their emotional impact yet doesn’t really give details any
more than her poetry blog does her experiences.
I can probably break down the whole thing into periods, such
as that melting pot of memory just after her first text back in March 2012 –
not exactly a happy period, but less contentious, when I suspected I was being
manipulated – “I’m really into you,” she said – to that period when I had
fallen out of grace and she had moved on to our former temporary boss, and
eventually the owner, though to lay out what happened in any kind of chronological
order was beyond me even then, and now impossible to break out except for how I
might have felt, such as the realization at some point in early May 2012 that
everything was over, and I unwisely did not accept it, making matters worse.
I had no real way to understand what was transpiring, and
even now, it seems like a fog out of which particularly things appear more
clearly than others, though without any logical sense.
If there was a rime or reason, I spent the better part of
the last year trying to find it, and still do not believe I fully understand
what transpired, coming up with various theories, some of which may be true,
although most only scratching the surface of a complex personality I may never
fully comprehend, a soul that switches shells too often to pin down.
Part of all this was the fog I walked around in, both during
the good times and especially the bad, though the most vivid moments were those
with extreme emotions, most often negative, but not always – the boat ride,
even the time at the diner (although her angry poem had me banging my own head
against a brick wall or stabbing the back of my hand with a fork.)
Over the whole of it, I wrote a lot in my poetry journal, only
a portion of which actually made it into my blog (thanks to my cyber nanny) and
which I’ve recently gone back to in an attempt to reassemble events, though
poetry is not reality, and there are moments of confusion that made recovering memory
impossible.
As I said, some moments stand out even out of the fog, such
as those times at the bars, the first kiss, my seeking advice from our temporary
boss, then sabotaging him out of jealousy.
Abandoning her at the bar stands out vividly and so even my
poetry notebook has such painful recollections, I’ll never forget it, the smell
of the place, the look on couple at the bar next to us, my jealousy at the
attention she gave the bartender, my stupid mistake of bringing her a card and
candy, which she hated (not yet wise enough to know she dislikes such ostentatious
symbolic gestures the way many intelligent people hate Hallmark cards.)
All this comes ahead of the one year anniversary of perhaps
my biggest and most painful blunder, when I texted her on her birthday and got
bushwacked by her brother, father, mother in law and such, the text of which I
copied into my journal verbatim, still painful to read, and yet a lesson in
humility – and the aftermath, the quick sand and compassion poems in which she
seemed to show mercy on me, despite may clear violation of her space.
It is a lesson well if painfully learned, with the full
knowledge that I most likely will never speak to her again, not even – or perhaps
especially – to offer happy wishes she’ll never believe or accept.
My journals – regular journal, poetry journal and the other
odd journals I tend to keep – served as solace for me, where I could write my
way out of the pain and stupidity, a record of my own foolishness as well as an
exploration into her, one of the still great mysteries of the universe.
Her poetry and her music have served as an inspiration for
me, a challenge to understand the first, and the immense pleasure of listening
to the second. These are true treasures, ones that will eventually she will
eventually cease, though I know I will return again and again to them, if not
for comfort, then to better understand what it is that happened to both of us
over this period of our lives.
This division of feeling I fell and yet can't divide or decide which is which and which I ought to feel at which moment, my imagination painting unreal portraits of what should be, not so much disappointed by the reality when it comes, but deeply awed.
I am unworthy to receive this, and this message vibrates inside me until I can't.
Things stirred up yet not quite enough to explode, like a hornets' nest I have stuck part of myself into only to get stung, confusing one sensation for another until i can't tell which is which and find myself aching for something I can't achieve, like a driver in a Mercedes with a flat tire on the side of highway with no spare, envying the men speeding by me, each having a clear destination and how to get there.
One of the persistent misperceptions I had back when all
this started more than a year ago had to do with my belief that she was much
more in control of all of us than she actually was – and the misbelief that somehow,
she wanted power over others, not just me, but all men, when in fact she did on
one level, but was also victim to circumstance.
She had no other options but to play the hand she got dealt
and to use those tools that seem to have worked for her in the past, even if
ultimately in each case, what she did never got her what she wanted.
The concept of power and powerlessness still appears to be
the primary elements of her life, seeking one while trying to avoid the other.
In our society, men use women while we paint it as if they
are manipulating us, and for someone like her with all her talents, she
struggled from the start to keep from being used, and in this regard, needed to
become powerful enough, and thus appears to need to use others before they
could use her.
This is something of a false dichotomy since there are other
options for most people, which may not be available to her in her use or be
used mode.
I keep thinking back to that time when she was still teaching
and her friend’s boyfriend kept hitting on her, and how eventually she gave in
to him, only to open the flood gates to his belief that he was entitled to her,
resulting in his eventually raping her.
This loss of personal control didn’t just resonate in her in
the way it might have other victims, but also made her realize just how other people
– in particular men – still possessed power over her, even to the point of
violence.
Until then, she apparently assumed she could keep things
together, keep control, and in a panic, she fled what might have been a
promising career.
Since then, I suspect, she’s been conflicted, not just over
her personal issues like her eating disorder, but also how to retain control of
her life, resorting perhaps to that lesson that old lady on the cruise taught her
-- which seemed to confirm that if you don’t use other people they use her.
In truth, she still scares me, because I’m just conscious
enough to sense when I’m being manipulated, yet at the same time, I let it
happen, giving into some childhood fantasy about letting things go and giving
control to other people.
Even at the height of our short interaction, I knew the
whole thing had to end badly, and kept telling myself the momentary joy was worth
the inevitable pain.
But I refused to surrender to her need for control
completely – and if I had, things might have turned out differently, allowing
me to fall into that unique club of those who love her from afar – such as our
temporary boss, her husband and others.
I mistook her lust for power as a threat, rather than what
it really is – a means of survival.
Looking back over the year, I see just how little real
control she has and how many things haunt her, causing her to wake up early
with a hamster wheel of panicked thinking.
I’m sure some day, she will come to realize how much real
power she has, and how she doesn’t have to live in a world of use or be used.
Of course, I still don’t know how much she got used when it
came to our office, whether RR tried to pull her strings to get his agenda.
Most likely, she simply followed a pattern of behavior she learned perhaps all
the way back in high school, when she found a way to escape being seen as a
dork, perhaps living up to that old Police song as girl student and teacher,
which set the foundation for later conquests – all of which ultimately got her
nowhere.
Most likely, I will never see her again – which is probably
a good thing – since as with back then, I still feel she is in control, and I’m
still conflicted, wanting on one hand to surrender everything to her, while on
the other hand desperate to retain my own identity.
In some ways, she does not yet know how powerful she really
is. While she wields sexuality like a sword, she has much more to offer, and
much power influence over others in more positive ways – seeing her teach
taught me that, reading her writing both in what she did for our company as
well as what she posts in her blog shows a vital force inside her that would be
completely awesome if she ever manages to harness it, a non-threatening force
that still draws people to her, even when – such as in my case – these people
are scared to give themselves up completely to her.
True love seems to have escaped her, not because she lacks
anything, but because to achieve it, a man (or woman) must be willing to
surrender to her. So far, nobody really has.
I'm not the man I was when I was a boy, when I was able to convince all the girls in the theater where I worked to spend some time in the balcony with me, needing no stiff drink to keep me firm, only the feel of a breast I snuck with early caress, some telling me I was going too far even as they let me, age having worn me down like water dripping on a stone, shaping me into a shadow of who I was and what I am capable of.
This not for lack of desire, perhaps made worse for the intensity of it, feeling as if i don't deserve that which i ache for, and so cannot live up to it, when the whole thing falls into my lap, needing it, aching for it, only to disappoint myself at that critical juncture when I can't give her all that she deserves, a stone ground down into sand.
She corrected me in her latest video, intentionally or not, making it clear that she had not purchased a new camera, but rather and app for her phone which basically keeps track of her movements, something akin to the more old fashioned dolly used in movies and tv to pan along with a character in a scene.
She apparently planned to use this visual toy before this, but a forecast of rain dissuaded her.
Her video blog has replaced the print blog I followed for several years, and she clearly has a talent for it, and she is so photogenic, she can’t help but attract viewers.
She is also growing into the medium, having learned how to speak to the camera, not a hard lesson for her who has spent so much time on stage and as a performer – although the earliest efforts on this blog were basically a series of long shots, of her walking her dog or a study of nature in an urban environment, followed by a few videos narrated via text. So, by the time her of current video, she seems unintimidated, even giddy when talking to her audience.
Structure is something she seems to be still working out, crafting her own model as an organizational tool – especially in regard to her horse and travel pieces.
As I noted in an earlier journal piece, films tend to use two basic structures, one designed for storytelling, the other to use image as metaphor. The better film projects use aspects of both.
Her videos seem to have adopted a documentary format – which can use any structure – and it is clear that she is using her photographic skills to create some clever imagery.
Some of this might seem like a flash back to things she’s done in the past, especially in regard to her horseback riding, which she had engaged in when living upstate well over a decade ago, and she clearly retains the love of it.
There are no real lessons in these videos. She seems more focused on conveying her joy and her experience, using the video media to allow her audience to get some joy from that experience as well.
This differs sharply from the calculated motives of commercial films. She is not selling anything, or attempting to manipulate, which helps make each of these mini films a delightful nugget I can watch nearly as often as I listen to her music, feel good pieces that allows me and others to share in her experiences of joy – delightful change from the sometimes cryptic poetry she used to post, although to tell the truth, I more than miss the effort of trying to figure out what she meant.
She scares the bejesus out of me, and always has, even before we met off hours, even before I let her down -- not just out of practice, but out of time, this old-fashioned sense of morality (whipped into me by countless nuns) at odds with my desires, and perhaps is the reason for my inability, being judged by my peers in a bedroom rather than in a court of law, raising the most basic question: Who do you love?
Needing to prove something I clearly cannot prove, and so relinquish the battlefield to men more worthy than I, this odd dream crushed like week-old flowers, the sweet scent made sour by my inability.
These are the times when wise men know when to walk away, when down deep, I know I'm not wise, and not even smart enough to know when I'm licked, fighting some petty demon inside myself against whom I always lose.
I was so scared my teeth chattered the whole ride north, and
my hands shook as I tried at each traffic light to text her back.
“Where are you?” she repeatedly texted, and I replied with a
street by street report, each time I stopped.
My whole body shook in expectation of what might happen when
I finally arrived.
As stirred up from those few drinks we had, and the kiss I
stole when she drove me up the hill before my walk home, a kiss that stirred
her up, too, I later learned, when she reported her need to find another man to
fulfill the promise I never kept, a promise I knew I would have to keep this
time.
I got scared, too out of practice for far too long, fasting
as I had fasted does not make the hear grown fonder, a matter I soon discovered
to be all too true when I got there, unable to do what I had come to do,
needing desperately for it to b real, when all I could offer was a touch,
inside/out, not what she said she needed when I asked her once if she was gay,
and she said how she loved that but also definitely needed a man.
Needed that one thing that defines manhood.
Or are we destined for something else, something inadequate,
unable to fulfil what we promised and ultimately let down even ourselves, even
when we feel intense need, the humiliation carried out on our shoulders when we
leave the field of battle, conquered by my own fear and sense of inadequacy,
knowing well this will influence the future, and turn all that seemed promising
into a massive disappointment, as it indeed did.
(Over the last year I have avoided posting things about one particular moment in 2012 which I still cringe about, yet wrote a lot about in my journals at the time. I'm still a bit humiliated and so might never post the actual journal entries. but these three poems from 2012 and 2013 more or less reflect that painful moment)
Poem journal early May 2012
I should have brought a bicycle pump and used that to
inflate my deflated ego after having driven all the way from one part of the
county to the other in anticipation of something that never happened, that
could not happen, out of practice, maybe made inevitable by my impatience, inside
me spilling over with impatience, brain steaming with passion that my body
refuses to participate in, flattened down deep inside when I should have pumped
it up somehow, just pressuring it so it won't let me down.
When the English talk about stiff upper lip they might have
been this since it's easier to stiffen a lip than to Pump Up the Volume and
this is so so sad
Poems from July 2013:
When you're in the middle of it and the plumbing breaks down, you can't just call a plumber to put it all right.
too little use for too long left the pipes full of rust.
So i had to improvise, putting fingers were the pipes out to go, not all satisfying for either of us,
desperate after so long to pump it all up only not to be able, like a flat tire stuck stiff with a rusty nail,
No matter how much you pump it up, it just won't go
though even then, the feel of it, the grit of passion that even a finger can provide, a fond memory anyway.
I had pictured it for so long before I got to try that when the pin prick deflated the balloon, I felt crushed, thinking that I'm better than this, I really am, and then remember what you said about other men and how surprised I would be if I knew how many other deflated balloons there3 were, and the kind of men for whom you'd not imagine it happening to.
Love, of course, isn't all this, and yet with this, there might be no way to get that, me, shaken and stilly, wondering why I'd not brought along a ca of tire inflator to fill the balloon, searching in my mind for that tiny, tiny hole, the pin pricked, or worse, wounded me as deeply as a dagger through my heart.
What is it that you regret move -- the first kiss, the last kiss or the missing in between?
Or not simply surrendering from the start, used and lusting, taking everything in stride, losing it when you needed it to come together, smashing my head against a brick wall or a work into the back of my hand
The ever bumbling Shakespearian clown, not red nose, but a whole face red, wearing white sneakers the way an old man would, a senior citizen with stiff cane and a wandering eye.
What do you regret most, the damage done in the name of love, the petty jealousy, the not so brave heard that sells inner rage like snake oil, claiming it as love?
or that moment, as fleeting as it was, when her eyes glistened and her lips shove, the moment before a kiss.
