He sat in the car, unable to move, his will gone. She drifted away from him on delirious winds. He checked out, went away. Don’t know how long he sat there. Shadows moving in the house. Had to go. Started the car and drove away. Wanted to just drive until the ocean washed up against the windows. Found himself in the apartment instead. Couldn’t sleep in the bed. Wasn’t his somehow. Curled up in the chair. Uncomfortable. Went to the bed anyway. Fitful and snarling. Someone else in the room. Dreamed of new gods searching for him, hiding behind jeweled doors.
All posts in Life
Friday Night
The film ends and the lights come up on a single empty wine glass and utter silence.
Story of the Ghost
Despite the grief this whole saga caused me, this has recently been filed under Amusing Anecdote.
I typically do not discuss my relationships here, since I don’t believe it is fair to discuss the details of some other life without their permission. But I think I can make an exception here because this person doesn’t actually exist.
A couple months ago I was contacted by someone on my MySpace friends list, wanting to get to know me a bit more. I had a tendancy to add people to my friends list for no good reason. So I had some people on there I didn’t really know very well. So I started having a conversation with this woman, Chassity, and it turned out we had a great deal in common. We had phone conversations that lasted hours and hours. We really seemed to be hitting it off.
After about a month or so, we decided to meet for coffee. This precipitated a series of debacles in Chassity’s life that I won’t go into now because it would take too long. Anyhow, we weren’t able to meet. I was disappointed, but understanding. She said we could have dinner the following week, which didn’t happen. From that point on, whenever I brought up the topic of meeting for coffee or whatever, I would get no response. Somehow, despite wanting desperately to meet me, she never had a single spare hour in which we could meet. So I eventually gave up on the idea and we communicated less and less frequently.
A few weeks ago I was contacted by one of Chassity’s MySpace friends. Her friend hadn’t heard from Chassity in a while, she didn’t return emails and her home phone had been disconnected. Her friend thought that surely she would respond to me. By now our online relationship had become the stuff of legend amongst all of her MySpace friends. So I wrote an email, checking in on this mysterious woman. Of course, I received no reply. Her phone was indeed disconnected. Since her friend seemed really worried, I called up the radio station where Chassity had worked for the past eight years. No one there had ever heard of her. The receptionist, the radio personnel, her “boss”… none of them knew her name or description.
I felt the floor drop away from me as I entered some other realm. I wrote this guy I knew had met her in person because Chassity talked about hanging out with him, watching a movie. He said they had never met. I reported this all back to her worried friend. Then she said, “Well, YOU’VE met her in person, right?” I explained Chassity and I had never met. Her friend thought this rather odd because Chassity had given a detailed account of when we met at a goth club.
I was completely floored. Who was this person? Why had she fabricated this completely fictional life and deceived all of her friends online? Not just me, but at least 20 people. What did she have to gain from this?
I wanted to see if anything she had told me was true. Chassity had claimed to have performed in a play produced by a local theater group. I contacted the theater to find out more about the play. They had never produced the play she described nor did they recognize her. For whatever reason, she made up this play, described to me the plot and her role in it. Just like that, without missing a beat. But why?
What was true and what was a lie? The performance she gave was Oscar worthy. The nuances and tedious details of her daily workday… why would someone take the trouble to concoct all of that? For a while this really intrigued me. I wanted to know what had motivated this person to lie so convincingly about her life to so many people.
But then I got angry. I had trusted this person. We had discussed at great length the value of being genuine and how I had been burned so many times by fake people. She insisted she was real. She said her friends doubted *my* existence, that *I* sounded too good to be true. Everything we talked about, the emails, the long conversations, the discussions about spirituality, art, movies, video games, they did not add up to someone who was a liar. It still doesn’t add up.
After this roller coaster of feelings I rode with Chassity, I am left with this waking dream lesson: The person who is genuinely attracted to me and interested in me as a person does not exist. Chassity is the last in a long line of women who either vanish or only want me for something in particular, discarding me when they are done. I have seen little evidence that there is any other kind of woman.
So if you happen to see this person, chances are you don’t know her. Chances are that no one does. Chances are this isn’t her at all.
Theme Song
Salome continues to haunt me from the day I heard it. For me, Salome isn’t a woman in particular, but the sentiment of lost love, a relationship disillusioned by reasons inexplicable and shifting.
While the original Old 97s version is good, I’ve come to prefer the cover by Ryan and his friends on “Passing For Normal.”
Salome, uncross your heart
I know what goes on inside it’s over before it starts
Well I’ll stay all night, I’ll wait right here
Full moon might work magic, girl but I won’t disappear.
And I’m tired of makin’ friends.
And I’m tired of makin’ time.
And I’m sick to death of love.
And I’m sick to death of tryin’.
And it’s easier for you
Yeah it’s easier for you.
And it’s easier for you
Yeah it’s easier for you.
Salome, untie my hands
Well I’ll find another lady
And you’ll wreck another man.
It’s over now, and so are we
My blood’s turned to dirt girl
You broke every part of me
And I’m tired of makin’ friends.
And I’m tired of makin’ time.
And I’m sick to death of love.
And I’m sick to death of tryin’.
And it’s easier for you.
Yeah it’s easier for you.
Ghosts
Moments ago my bedroom window closed, apparently of its own accord, nearly crushing Neeka who was on the window sill at the time. I went to examine it and found that it was somehow latched shut, locking it closed. I undid the latch, but was unable to open the window again. It is as though the window is welded shut, though I do not see what could be preventing it from opening.
If I even imagine I see that pale little Japanese boy or that freaky girl who makes the clicking noise, I am going to end up sleeping under Nate’s bed across the street.
Torn
I fear nothing
Besides myself
Please don’t touch me
Love like an infant trying to stand up
Am I two souls
One hard, one whole
Am I real
I don’t want to feel anything
Anymore
I feel nothing
Besides this pain
Please don’t watch me
Love like an infant
Scared and crawling
– Toad the Wet Sprocket
Here’s a Thought
Prince Charming is a shoe salesman, with a whole truckload of glass slippers “just for you.”
Panic
The existential dread continues to build as I pass through the dark heart of June. I sense that a single carefully placed charged of stress will be enough to bring the bridge down, cutting me off from the mainland. Hopelessness advances on all fronts, a shadow army with a goal I cannot imagine. Phone calls constantly incoming, missiles that light up my threat board. The grocery store an incomprehensible maze of choices, the cereal aisle, especially, a gallery of terror. Outside my apartment I meet a bare-chested tattooed man, breaking the cycle momentarily. He promises strangeness from the days that have become the same day. Inside there are gnats everywhere. My Inbox has been empty all day. I can hear it snoring, conserving its energy for Monday when it will rear up, unhinge its jaw and roar, furnace-like.
The Representative from Reft has the Floor
It taxes my patience to essentially live my life in the third person, a condition to be discussed, a matter for seers to ponder. And now a toll is exacted in the only currency of this country: time. Through a thick window pass the stars of another world’s night and this glimpse is meant to suffice? Tell the beggars to feed their fucking bellies with postcards of fine meals. Even as walls are soluble under the unceasing drip of water, so too do Tower walls fail when met by the constant edge of my will. And where others do fail to act, I would trod emboldened, laying waste to chaff, piercing hearts with silver.
-R
Epic Action Dream
The dream still lingers in my memory despite the fact I didn’t write it down immediately after waking.
I and another person (my sister perhaps) were being held hostage by a gang of terrorists. They kept us under heavy guard inside a warehouse. We seemed to have freedom of movement inside the warehouse as we could wander about all we liked. I had all my cats with me and I spent a great deal of time making sure they didn’t run away. There was a young girl being held hostage as well and I hung out with her for a while. She had a pet ferret that had given birth in a hole in the wall beside one of the huge warehouse doors. I asked if perhaps I could have one of the baby ferrets. She said they’d be ready for adoption in about a year. At one point my cat Moriarty grabbed her ferret by the scruff of the neck and ran off with it. We got the ferret away unharmed. They were just playing, I guess.
The guards came to collect us and take us to a banquet hall where we would be executed by a firing squad. I stood at the head table, surrounded by men with machine guns. A huge door opened at the end of the hall and figures clad in grey camo gear walked in. One of the guards near me wondered who they were. I informed him they were ninjas armed with uzis. A battle between my captors and the ninjas ensued. I took that opportunity to slip out the back.
I found myself in the backstage area of a large theater. I ducked around crates, dangling ropes, scrims and backdrops. One of the guards was hunting me. I made my way past a very long series of backdrops and sheets, thinking my pursuer would lose track of me. I looked back to see that an opening had been blown through the scrims, making a sort of long corridor of curtains. At the far end was an immense genie with a rotund belly, lying on the ground. I realized that the genie had farted and created the corridor.
The camera then pulled out of first person to third person, revealing that I had become an animated character much like Aladdin or the Prince of Persia. I leaped out of the corridor and into the ocean where I was immediately swallowed by a fish only slightly larger than I. The fish spat me up on the shore of an island.
That’s all I remember.