We can't quit. It's like a joke. It's like a dimenovel story about any fool-woman in a torturous relationship. This is how I feel about torture. He invites me out to do things because he knows there's no one else who can hold conversation like I can, there's no woman he could hang out with now who he wouldn't, at some point, become embarrassed of or frustrated with (limited intelligence-wise). We go out to the cheap theatre. We obsessively watch, discuss, recommend films. We try to teach other but the other is usually too stubborn. He invites me out for pitchers at the pizza place with a couple of his friends I have never met, one of them is apparently a comic genius but a rather small-town condescending kind of fellow. The other is training as a sommelier, which I have an active interest in, and so I'm perfectly delightful. I step out for a smoke and meet a really nice girl who works for a non-profit healthcare organization. I introduce myself as a failed writer with an expressed interest in grant-writing. She writes down her email on a hotel key card envelope and we shake hands, all this in front of Smug, who asks me about her immediately. I don't know why he asks, other than that she's attractive. He's the one who taught me how to network. He invites me out for a smoke and we go to the back, where no one ever goes, and he puts his face close to mine. We end up kissing. I knew it. No resisting. I'm unbearable. We tell each other we like each other. It feels good.

We go to a show at another bar and all of the usual local luminaries are there. I see my editor from the weekly and his wife, he toasts me informally on the success of the issue finally getting out. I compliment one of his pieces. Although I have met her before, his wife is amazing-looking. She's like Theda Bara with a long neck and a bob. Her nose is like Jordanian royalty. What a creature. Too bad she's painful to speak to. I see one of the fellows from the band I got into the issue, and he gives me a hug. He is recently engaged, and his fiancee is there, showing off her rock. I congratulate her. She has a lovely home.

Smug is bored so we finish our drinks in the next room, face to face. I apologize for the way I've acted recently; he apologizes. He tries to explain some things. He says the last time he masturbated he ended up thinking about me. I told him I masturbated today in the bathroom at the auto shop while my truck was being serviced. I said, I didn't mean to care about you this much. I said, I can't help but thinking there's a reason we're so compelled to each other, and I touched the scar on his forehead. He said he had a nightmare about our baby. He could see inside its ear and its face looked like his face. He said, it's because we're supposed to learn things from each other. We shouldn't torment each other anymore, but we probably will. He will probably throw another tantrum. I will probably lock myself in the bathroom crying again. I will probably tremble. I don't know what we'll do when I go back to Texas, or anywhere. I'm not thinking about that. I can't help myself. He's sleazy and disgusting, his hometown nickname is "Dirty." I always date guys with the worst nicknames. He excused himself to go to the restroom and came back, smoking a cigarette. With his greasy curls matted to his head, his uneven, coarse facial hair, and his Vince Gallo-style rust-colored, fake Members Only jacket, he looked absolutely dreamy. What's my fucking problem. He was visibly charmed by the fact that I went to the movies by myself Thursday night. He doesn't know what to do about me.

Okay. Okay. All right all right all right. It's getting to the point. It's getting the point where it sounds like I should be doing mounds of blow and screwing guys in squalid bathrooms at bars. You can think of that scene of Sharon Stone in the nightclub in Basic Instinct, but really with a little pyramid of urine-soaked tissue beneath you. I typically listen to more electronic music in the winter, which makes no sense, but it's been a pretty obviously sustained addiction now. Easily since December of last year. I can't quit.

I want to go back to Texas. I can't wait to go back to Texas. Even if I don't stay, even if I get a job somewhere weird and small, I will still have a glorious damned spring.

I want a book deal and a literary agent. I can do this. I know now that I can do this. Not to say that after my first national publication I am totally inflated, rather, I am driven. I know now I can handle this shit. This is what I'm going to be doing.

My body has been unpleasant, in part because of stress, I'm sure. Smug and I started dating again, for about five days. It didn't last. The first two days were great, the third went South, then Saturday the evening was bookended by two completely separate fights about equally obnoxious things that actually weren't my fault. His behavior. We were in some bitches' house to watch the fight and they didn't even acknowledge me. It was hostility. It wasn't perceived anything. When I asked him about this, he got defensive and told me I was being a smalltown cunt. Just the opposite. I walked away and drove myself home.

Do you know what I really need ? A young, very sexy boy. Who boffs like crazy, goes out like 3-4 nights a week. I'm aware these are things I have mostly grown out of, but those are the things I seek to amuse myself. I don't have to always go out with him, but when I want to go out, he should want to go out, too. Without hesitation. Especially if we're in a place as fucking boring as this.

The men in the 27-36 age bracket are not grownups. Most of them do not have established careers. They're not even close; they're just overgrown versions of their 23-year-old selves. They're just lazier, fatter, balder, hairier, meaner, more entitled, etc. I'm just tired of settling. I've never been this attractive in my life. Why do my suitors get uglier ? This is absurd.

I want to date someone stupider than I am. In dating older men, they often desire a woman of comparable intelligence, but can't stand her when they realize she doesn't worship them. This has always been the problem. If I were dating younger men, sure, my physical insecurities might flare up again, but then again, they might look up to me, or treasure me. I'm not sure if any of these theories are valid. In keeping with that promise I made myself, I will just do what men do. Date hot bimbos in their early twenties until it becomes socially offensive and I'm compelled to marry someone my own age. Do what the men do.

We were at work until 530 this morning working against the deadline. While waiting to proof corrections, we curled up on the sofa like chicklets at a slumber party and watched the beginning of Limits of Control. My editor gave me an Arthur Russell biography to review for the website. We were slap-happy, sharing a mug of green tea and a chocolate bar, a cigarette. Not sure what to do, but lingering like little couriers, dawdling till the next assignment. It somehow didn't feel abusive. I'm indebted, frankly. What more do you want to know ? I can't really say anything bad.

You're a rocker, you're a slag, you're a teacher, you're a politician, and I'm a scribbler. We have lots in life. I got just what I came out here to find. A good toe-hold.

Halloween is never fun for me. I don't know if that impression has been made, but I honestly haven't enjoyed one at least since 2005. And I think that one was only fun because it was three days of friends in town, an onslaught of parties, no real costumes, all culminating in our going to see Gogol Bordello while I was pantless, dressed like what was supposed to be a Roman slaveboy. The things I did at twenty-one.

Last night, after fretting all day and half-heartedly attempting to cheer myself up, Smug finally called me and invited me over to his house. I purchased a bottle of wine of which he hardly partook. We watched Candyman on the computer and at one point I warmly turned to him and said it was turning out to be a really good Halloween. The burden of some stressful news sent him over the edge early on, before I was even around, and a moment of sentimentality from me ( and not even directed at him ) lead to brief kissing. And whilst kissing, he broke up with me.

The normal stages: I got mean. I told him I didn't have any feelings for him. He embarrassed me. He was going to get back together with his ex and never have the courage to leave town. He was stupider than me, his stunts were bush league. He's a failure, a flake.

But then I realized how futile and unbecomingly desperate it is to argue yourself out of a breakup twice. So I shut myself in his bathroom and sobbed like a saint, murmuring, "I wish I never met you," and other such nothings. He cried too, a little bit. He was at times a self-absorbed asshole. He said that he had felt like he was in love with me, but his real-life dilemmae have blocked any further capability of romantic love. He felt like he was being unfair to me, because I'd expressed that I was growing feelings for him.

Okay: which was bullshit. I mean, of course I probably loved him somehow, but the thing I have learned is that I at least know when it is that I love totally and when I am just loving for the sake of love, which happens often. I like being in love; it becomes me. I like having men around to worship and dote, I like having sex whenever I want to with someone I care about, I like pampering someone who deserves it. But I know the damned difference between sincere heartbreak and hurt pride, being duped, feeling like somebody's mark taken out, some sweet rube girl at the mercy of a feelingless Binx Bolling; hell, maybe I am Binx Bolling. Anyhow, brother: that wasn't love. That was just feeling like a chump. It was being rejected by the first person you've liked in quite a long while, and someone that you knew you were kind of just settling for to pass the time, and even though they simply won't do for the longhaul, they undo before you. That's what smarts your cheek and makes you want to lock yourself in a vehicle you can't drive and call up every man who still loves you and actually knows. Though I only called one, and he was the perfect one to talk to.

There's a whole new element to this relationship business that I've developed with age. On one hand, I feel like the caliber of men I attract has decreased enough for me to be a little concerned: maybe I'm not as hot as I previously was, maybe I'm too picky, maybe I'm just old news and my social currency has wavered. But really, I know that I carry myself with sexual agency, amusing intelligence, politeness and certainly, above all things, an emotional composure I was sorely lacking as a flailing twenty-year-old beer-spitting thing. And I will continue to age well, as my parents are aging well. I know what I deserve and what I need and these shouldn't be mutually exclusive things. So why is it that all of my exes are such sexy lively things and every guy I meet is like a pale flicker of their handsomeness and vitality? In many cases, I would be embarrassed to bring some round the others, honestly. And embarrassment, in any capacity, is grounds for immediate dispatch. You simply cannot ever be embarrassed of your partner. It's horrible.

But having lived these few months with an old maid, I know I could not become one. I thrive on the companionship and affection. I need a sounding board for my ideas and paranoid delusions, if left alone I will be in significant danger of convincing myself that I'm right all of the time. And then I will be so insufferable and disgusting absolutely no one will want me. I'm never going to get fat or sloppy because I'm too vain, but I'm sure I could become mighty annoying in my lonesomeness.

The best advice I've received so far is from the publisher-friend at work. We don't work in the same office but we've found ways of passive communication and so forth. One day this week I woke with such a profound desire to see him and when I entered the building he walked out of the door of the first office and met me in the hallway, while I shook my umbrella. We're psychically connected like that. I do actually believe that our souls, if we have any left, are akin. He said so first, actually. I asked him if he and his wife would adopt me. He said it should be easy to adopt a twenty-five-year-old, he'd look into it. He says I remind him a lot of himself. I feel compelled to tell him anything. He assured me that I won't be alone forever, but with my isolating, diesel-powered intensity, it's best for me to wring it all out during my twenties. Basically, he says I have no business pretending I want to be in a serious relationship until I'm in my thirties. And then I should find someone whose personality is my complement ( my ex, for instance—which was the very problem at the time, his being ready to live like married people and my fear thereof ) and settle down. I believe everything he says; he told me jokingly that he was my everything. He's a good person. When we drunkenly walked the streets of Nashville I could feel his wedding ring pressing boldly into my fingers.

And all that being said, I like suffering. It also becomes me.

Today, to the day, is the year anniversary of my breakup. The worst of my life. I still don't know. I drove around today in the cold slashing rain, insisting subconsciously, silently, almost robotically on listening to the most emotionally wrought and intimate music my truck had to offer. Much of it was from this time. I had no control of my wrist as it flicked each number on the box, each sadder than the last. I tried to work on my article but it was tepid. Arthur Russell makes me think of him. Curtis Mayfield makes me think of him. Boards of Canada's entire corpus makes me think of him. I had a life with someone who was beautiful and I ruined it all by myself. I don't know if I've enjoyed being tough ever since. Something about this music makes me instinctually want to crawl onto my sofa, armed with a goblet of brandy with lemon and sugar. Leave the house only once a week. Smoke too many clove cigarettes indoors and watch nothing but 90s erotic thrillers. Scott Walker while napping. Totally vacant of any self worth, deservedly. Cracking up only to the point of a normal, well-adjusted person's development of a sense of humor. I will never love anyone the way that I loved you. And that still wasn't even enough.

Sure, in all likelihood I perversely enjoyed the devastation. My only regrets involved the usual: friend-abuse. I don't do that shit anymore, that's for sure. How am I ever going to forget him. That lovely coasting cygnet of a man. Everything I get I deserve. I almost want to vomit at the truth of this, and the pain. Today I went to the doctor for the last time and they said my pregnancy has definitely passed. A gift replaced to the hands of its giver.

I'm on the beat again tonight. This little spooky blues band from Seattle. Smug and I had a good conversation last night. The girls at work had been getting at me, telling me I've got to be forward about my secret sprawling sexuality. I dreaded telling him, because it's worse than being gay. No one except the whole of France believes the things I believe, and I don't want a fey Frenchman. I want an American boy who's a natural expert at football and a good dogowner. So the conversation went down, and we struck a fairly sexist compromise: I can still make out with girls. When I told Red she said, "What would Dan Savage say to that, now ?" And I knew exactly what he would say. I suppose that's lame. I don't think I'll struggle quite as much as before. As Smug said, "I think I've got that shit on lockdown." And that, right there, that confidence, is what I want more than anything.

Deficit. Hungry for junk. Just hungry. I need my ladyfriends. Red and I talk on the phone almost too much. We talk nearly every day in some capacity. I daydream about Austin. I know I was holed up in the flower-teemed guest bedroom of my parents' place all summer, but if you looked in my dreams you would see me at the greatest endless danceparty wearing naught but a bikini and a pair of sunglasses. What a laughable child I am. In real life, I sunbathed semiweekly and my body looked good. I did yoga in the Texas backyard one hundred-plus degree afternoon weather. I thought today if there was a way I could only summer in Austin, like an ancient fake tradition of pallid, bromide New Englanders. It is truly the only place I want to be in the summertime. Everyone is gorgeous. There's a lake and a frozen pond. You can drink and picnic. You can walk, ride a bike or the bus. Everyone is so nice. No one ever says anything. Nothing of value. "Things are great." 

I think I'm not actually an editor, I'm just a scribbler. I'm the detective. I lie and make two-point-five million facial expressions. Every time I move it's just a diversion. I'm behind the scenes. I straighten the bottles but I don't clean up messes, only my own. I have the single golden-egg profound thought. You provide the velvet pillow. I keep an ego in my shirtpocket, like a handkerchief. But I want to stack it below your ego, a cornerstone. You can be the public persona. I want to be the curious genius.

He's okay with this because he says I must have always been this way. It's not like I'm trying something new. I suppose it's funny to wake up from a playdate-long dream of drunklife only to understand that your destiny is in fact the only talent you've ever had.

But I've got to get dressed for this thing. This weekend there is a party on a boat that floats down the city-river. The biggest thing Hamtown is missing is a river, or any centralized body of water. Water of dying Industry. And I'm sure it would outflame the Cuyahoga because everything is putrid in our city. And yet I think about it almost daily. I've never been in a position where my worldliness depended actually on that city. Shaking an old man's hand and talking football. The city where my grandparents lived. Don't ever deny your Southernness, because someone will fetishize you for it one day. When I was hanging out with the band Smug studied me forever while we talked about drunk friends and impossibly forgotten parties. He sat back and said, "You are Southern. Must be what I like about you." That Midwestern twat.

I have always loved Midwestern twats.

I think living in cold houses has a natural detriment to my spirit. I wake up with this small coal of fear, perhaps of knowing that this man doesn't have any feelings for me. All I wanted were some feelings. And I long for the deep companionship and simple desire to enjoy each other's company that I had in my last relationship. It was effortless, and this one is at times like a fucking hourly-wage job. There's more warmth in an exchange of two text messages with my ex than hours of sofa-sitting with my boyfriend. I cannot stop talking. I need a drink, and I can't drink for a week.

I'm not in pain, but I'm starting to get angrier than I want to be. Maybe I should have gone out of town after all ? I could be sidling up to the money man. I watched one of his movies and I couldn't help but notice he and his ex were playing a couple and using perhaps eerily accurate descriptors of their real-life relationship. I have no problems being a stranger, I have no problems lacking allies, having nothing to prove, drifting in and out of this ingrown universe just long enough to leave a thumbprint, incite conversation, or at least sidelong-glance intrigue. I have a problem, I suppose, with smalltown cinéma-vérité. I have a problem being hungry for violent love. It might be the weather.

It's almost past fall already. It has rained the entire time I've lived in this state, it seems. It's cold and rainy every day, which seems like the wrong kind of weather for this region. We're not maritime, it doesn't make sense.

I thought things between my boyfriend and I were questionable, so when I went to Nashville last weekend for business it was a welcome diversion. I never doubted that he still had feelings for me, but he was already loafing around in sweatpants and farting into the mattress while watching football. I wondered why all of the intrigue and seduction had vanished so quickly. It wasn't supposed to happen within a matter of weeks, right ? So the trip was a blessing. We spent most of the first day up hanging around Memphis, our boss showing us most of the noteworthy sights. We got into Nashville late Thursday and Friday was spent meeting with the head historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame and then me catching a cab in the rain to make an author panel and meet a few writers with my immediate supervisor. It was another drab and wet day, as if it had followed me out there.

That evening was the big author banquet. There were cocktails beforehand, and I was hit on by a young gawky writer who seemed a little too Ivy League for my tastes. I accidentally ignored Brad Gooch, so I had to backpedal and pat his shoulder and compliment his recent biography on Flannery O'Connor. He's a really stunning gay. Used to be a male model. I stood trapped in an extremely awkward conversation with a young writer and we had nothing to say to each other. I fumbled through as best as I could and he didn't turn away embarrassed for me, so I suppose that's a good sign. I drank wine all through the dinner, the keynote speaker was pleasantly short and they thanked our editor personally, which was quite a surprise. My supervisor and I had our picture taken by a lady from the Nashville society papers I assume because we looked like sweet rich girls.

Afterwards we went to a weird venue with our business team, hung out on the Gibson Guitar bus, and after I excused myself to secret another whiskey I ran into a drunk lonely girl in the alley and my editor popped up right behind her. He wanted us all to go to the honkytonks, and the peer pressure mounted in the van on the way over, so that all but two of us made it out. I bonded with the associate publisher, I think we fell in friendlove or something therelike. He's married, but we walked around arm in arm or holding hands. We stumbled in at 330 and there was no funny business. We went out for drinks the next night to a posh bar with an old friend of mine. I embarrassed myself with a great feat of hubris that was so expected and hysterical I had to tell my supervisor the next day. You see, "I happen to have this natural charm."

One of my reviews was in the print version of the city weekly so I got paid twice, I think. I got my check yesterday and it was more than expected. I would love to keep doing at least one review a week, but since I came back from Nashville with a sinus infection I felt like I should stay away from the bars for a while. Of course, until early Tuesday morning when I discovered some rather disheartening news. I forced my boyfriend to take me drinking that night. We went to this douche bar, but it was littered with antiques and high booths, and as it was a Tuesday night it wasn't too loud or crowded and we just talked to each other like interested parties and I decided I really liked him. He extended he legs up on the booth seat, sprawled out like a lion. He looked princely and smug and I liked it. We talked about sports, just the two of us. Everything will be well, and I'm not afraid, and convicted in my responsibility. But I'm one of those girls now. This is the last song that I write.

I hate Octobers now. They have been over all horrible the past few years, and I don't care. None of us can even afford our Halloween. I don't see the point anymore. Sprinting away from a bad situation. Holding my dignity between my knees. He says "You don't try very much, brilliant shit just rolls off your brain." That is not a trick I learned from you. I don't know quite where I got it from. Due to my sense of humor and composure, she said I was her hero. She said I've reached new heights. I'm steel.

Be a professional. I should go to the bookstore today and read lit mags. I should go buy a light jacket. It's raining again, but it's colder now, so it's not as uncomfortable as before, walking into a din of mosquitoes on the way to the front door. The man who lives across the street is a bit creepy. He has that blue collar alcoholic look to him, very thin and sunburned, narrow facial expressions, drives a weird towncar really slowly with his sunglasses on the end of his nose, peering at everything. He lives with his parents who are elderly. I don't know why he's living with them, when the father is clearly spry enough to tend to his own yardwork. Fallen on hard times, I guess. Like the rest of us. Except the rest of us don't smoke a cigarette on their front stoop around the time I drive in from work, and shout awkward complimentary things about my cowboy boots and not remove his eyes from me while I walk up to the door. "You working long, girl.I didn't think any job was that good!" 

My first freelance gig this week. For the local, liberal free weekly paper. I met the culture and entertainment editor a few weeks ago and decided to pitch an idea at the last minute. He was pleased with the results and the fast turnaround, so he'll be giving me semi-regular assignments. Says he can't pay too much for the blog publications but he'll get me in free to the shows I review and give me $15 for drinks. I care more about the journalism experience and the publication / exposure than getting paid. Though if my reviews go into print I think I make a little scratch. It would be nice to make a little bit of pocket change seeing as how I'm working two jobs and all. This is me taking advantage of being in a small town, being somehow connected to everyone and everyone hungry enough for something new that you can just sort of amateurishly step in and try your hand. In my fantasy I'm one half of a power couple. In reality I'm beginning to think that my boyfriend doesn't like me very much.  It's mostly impossible to tell. He's smug. He shifts between being overly affectionate and basically ignoring me. He says he has no energy to hold me but then he turns over and tries to sleep with me. I just don't remember what it's like when a man is actually falling in love with me normalstyle. In the month we've been seeing each other it's like we've reactivated all of the crummy things we hated about being in relationships in the first place. We're already griping. He's already made awkward jokes in public. I hope that I get to go to the book festivals these next two consecutive weekends. It might actually be nice to be away from him. All of his buddies have long distance girlfriends. I wonder if that's what he's after.

I had a long conversation with his friend who we watch the football games with. He's a criminal defense attorney. We talked about child pornography and Roman Polanski. He's wickedly smart but the way he talks sounds like he's delivering Wayne Campbell's lines. It was hard at first for me to decide if he was serious. He says he's excellent at detecting lying. I asked him if, in turn, he was a good liar. He said that he could be. He explained to me very rudimentary things I didn't know, for instance that federal crimes are most often associated with interstate commerce. And I said, "Like the Mann Act." He put down his beer and said, "Why, yes, the Mann Act is a perfect example." 

What I like the most is that the boy is a complete autodidact. Everything he knows about filmmaking, the books he reads, the things he knows about acting and technique, his writing, his vocabulary, everything he does is self-taught. He went to undergrad for about three semesters. He sounds just as pretentious as anybody. He's not well traveled and doesn't speak a foreign language, but the fact that he's built himself up entirely amazes me. It's like what I've been looking for. I told him so, and he just kind of cut his eyes at me like I was embarrassing myself. Maybe I was.

A friend, to avoid confusion, calls him No. 2. But maybe it's actually Boyfriend Number Five: The Filmmaker. We'll see how long this lasts. My supervisor leaned in the office today and said that I'd almost beaten her at the three week mark. The editor seemed fake-impressed and asked me why it is I do the things I do and I said simply, "I'm about a mover." 

The truth is, since I don't have feelings anymore, I've got this one down to a silence. As I told him, "I'm playing this one extra cool." If I squint and think too hard then something is out of place but then I realize that it's just being older, you don't feel things the way you did before. Some of the gunpowder has been used up. I might hate his movies. He says he likes smart girls. I have to navigate his hometown friend group and his exgirlfriend just the way the new bitch had to navigate past me when I was an especially ruthless and scrutinizing self-imagined local scene princess. Is it good luck to eat your eyelashes when they fall out ? The best part is, I ain't got shit to lose. I'm not worried about a thing. I've realized at the very least, it's a shrewd time to receive a boyfriend when you aren't gainfully employed.

Multiple record-listening parties. Pretending I know what I'm saying. Lonely music men with trembling hands and business cards. My number is twenty. I'm working and thinking, actually, as a music critic. I failed to schmooze properly while in attendance at last week's three consecutive schmoozing events. I do think I was poised enough to catch the eye of the money man. And boy, did he smell nice.

No. 2 has that asshole in him. He has that self-significance, that shit-eating actor's face. I can never read him or predict his reactions. I think he hates women a little bit, but likes having a girl around. He wants to dote on someone but not actually be responsible for their feelings. The mix he made me was good, and so different than other boyfriend mixes. It's like we've both aced relationship class and we're just kind of coasting and enjoying the partying part. Neither of us have expressed any seriousness whatsoever. I am falling in love a bit with Jerry Lee Lewis. Like a fool, I identify a lot with him. I think some people have an earnest desire to be morally upright and kind, giving folk, but instead just wrestle their evil until it breaks through every now and again. I do believe that some people just have the devil in the them, and that's me, and I don't even believe in the devil.

I love it when men tell me I'm fearless. I love that I am totally transient. Every day I wake up and love that I am not living your life. And when I was closest to living your life, I evicted myself, not out of cowardice or fear, but knowing exactly how miserable it would make me. I said the other day at work that I wanted to have four husbands. They might not be legal marriages, but I think I've figured out how it is exactly I'm going to pull it off. You may think you're really gangster and that no one can get it more right than the way you do it. You should know baby that you are laughable, a fucking phony. I am the truth, and I hustle that shit. I've never realized it before but I can fucking hustle, and it makes me feel good, and that's the biggest difference between us. I am a thousand years old, but for my youthful exuberance. I've said for years I was a twelve year old boy. I am a total popfreak. And you ain't never gonna be my girl.

Dirty revelations:

1. Last night I thought I looked beautiful without make up for probably the first time in my life. At least since I was a child. And by child I mean actual pre-pubescent.

2. I did the right thing by ending my relationship last year. No matter how much it hurts, there are times when I have the facts laid in front of me. Irrefutable evidence. An easy to love, easygoing man is just not enough.

3. I predict that it will be another year before all of the crazy has passed. I've done a lot of work in one, but I'm still too emotionally aggressive. I'm still a little too poisonous, and I imagine I won't have another significant relationship until this has been handled, and I stop terrifying people.

4. I just want to be fucking touched. I'm aware that's the saddest thing I've ever said.

5. A Letter to Three Wives is an amazing film. It's up there with Mildred Pierce or Laura in terms of fascinating stone-cold female characters lacking melodrama or schmaltz and plots of mysterious circumstances.

I don't have any reasons. I don't have anything at all. I was happy enough the other day. I suppose this is what happens when I'm not working.

Now I am lonely in such a different way than ever before. As I moved, someone asked me to be their music muse for life, and I have done such a poor job in keeping that up. I enjoy spending all of my time working and reading, I'm feeling more confident about my dormant talents, like being a writer-for-hire. My mind keeps drifting to men, and I am starting to realize they must be my fatal flaw. I'm doing the most fulfilling work of my life, and I'm still blabbering about men. I'm still trying very hard to remember what it is like to be spooned. I'm a joke person at work, a dancing gorilla. It's taken me a while to charm to younger, sweeter, greener girls but I think they've gotten past thinking I'm old and creepy and some kind of washed up circus performer. I know what my next tattoo will be and I'm just having trouble deciding where to put it. I'm a stickler about that sort of thing, I don't want anything on my arms, and I'm afraid if I ever move back to Texas anything I get on my shoulders will be rapidly expunged by the sun. Because it will. How hilarious that Austinites are so frivolously decorated in ink while they live in the most unforgiving, desert-strength sunshine. Red once said, "Like San Francisco with a tan, and more tattoos." At least in some places.

Other amazing quotables from Red:

"No more gin and candy !" 
"You look like you're going to a Kennedy funeral." *

(*That was, of course, before Senator Kennedy passed. That's been nearly the greatest compliment someone has paid me, to date.) Lately I have been calling upon all of my resources, as it were. Everyone I've ever known remotely or otherwise for help. That's been a rather pleasant exercise in stalwart friendships. And my Hamsickness has taken a different turn, I care less for the pettiness and fear of old boyfriends and I'm more or less just eager to be around good, long-term friends who crack me up more easily than anyone else. I don't think I'll ever live there again, but I'll admit I'm comforted by being so close by. I miss Red so much, though; we fell in love too late. But I've said that before.

(A lover-friend told me someone said I was "Gil Elvgren hot," which is exactly right, if you don't mind my being superficial. That was also an excellent compliment.) I need a good camera. I left my camera somewhere in a box of things, because I take images for granted, I've already learned to eccentrically avoid the lens in hopes that I'll become a celebrity out of sheer self-manufactured elusiveness. It helps to live in a weird half-place as I do. Last night we went to a reading at the public library, a very famous author who lives here, and we played Exquisite Cadaver by writing on honeydew melons. You know who's weird ? Small town people with culture. They are fucking wack. They think they're all geniuses but their every single utterance sounds exactly like some drivel from a self-serious freshman intro to philosophy course. It's cute, though. And I'm a prick, because I'm either going to be doing yoga with these people at the free class on Tuesday nights or end up exactly like them, in my batty gardening hat at the local Friday night "cultural event" directly quoting from the latest Derrida text we've discussed in the book club / knitting circle on Monday night. The scene from The Third Man where they discover Joseph Cotton writes Western dime novels.

I have said that I would sincerely convert to Judaism, if needed, to marry. But I will amend that to convey that I could never marry an Orthodox Jew. The sabbath depresses me. It's quiet and weird. My housemate just sleeps, watches TV, or reads. The sky is apocalyptically dark today in hopes of rain. I just want to sneak away and go shopping, or sit at a bookstore, anywhere there is light and other humans and sounds. The music in my room is sending this cruel ripple through the peace and observance of the day. How can you go without listening to music ? I don't care. I'm making myself sick listening to mixes my exboyfriend made me during our courtship, over three years ago. They're all exactly fucking legendary. They still kind of make me feel the same way. That's been the problem this whole time. Keith Carradine said something in a television show about not being privileged to date because he'd already had one exceedingly beautiful relationship. I am not beyond thinking that is my very affliction.

"Kuntmasta Flex." Can't stop listening to the Wild Cub mixes. I wish I had them all summer long, instead of just now at the end of my pointless joyride. Last night whilst drunken yard-sitting, I claimed I am not as Southern as I portend to be, which is of course the opposite of what I portray on any given day. There are certain things, but my ladyfriend argued that I am, though I'm crasser and more open about the less savory items of my personal exploits than she. And of course I think she's up there with the pearl-fingering, fake-smiling, cake-making kind of traditional Southern girl, except with a good solid brain and career ambition. I take my lessons from her on most points of etiquette. We took drunk family portraits in the yard with the lapdog and everything.

I am almost done packing. I move in three days to a place which I have never been. Somehow I'm not exactly afraid. Lady assures me that I'm good at making friends, and I move quickly. I like this assertion but I'm not so sure. I hope this is just the beginning of many beginnings. As in, this is one move into the house of the Future and there can be many more strange moves and strange futures. I have claimed recently, soberly, candidly, with my index finger of authority pointing in the air a motion of heed: 

"I am going to be rich." 
"I am going to be hot forever." 

I don't know who says these kinds of things. It is true that I never fully realize how beautiful my mother is until we're out in public together. Then it sort of hits me when I see people respond to her. This is a good sign for my vain future, I think. I told the eighteen-year-old kid that he could be my master. I think the scariest certainty is that I'm beginning to feel ill at ease with my lovelessness. I think I would actually like to fall in love, as if to supplant some void, but I hope that this minor discomfiture is simply because I've got nothing else really going for me yet. The job should quash this. The job should be my new boyfriend. I'm afraid I said things last night that will lead my Lady to send me a carepackage with her spare Plan B pill. I hate being a hapless whore. But I love it.

The truth is, I have never not loved someone, and that someone intensely. I stare for endless hours of photos of my exes as if trying to remember what it was like when I cared for someone with so much desperation I wanted to tear their hair out, or throw myself in to a fire, or something that felt like feeling. I told a story of relationship violence today, one I never tell, and it felt like a distracted recitation from an abandoned Altman script. It was like someone else was telling it, there wasn't any pain or embarrassment associated with it, and my memory of loving someone that passionately has completely dissipated. My voice just kind of trailed off and I looked into the distance like I had forgotten the words. An expression that might have been mistaken for reflection. I just have not met anyone really remarkable at all. And of course there is still open flesh from when the last tether was torn out. And I do not know what, or if there is anything I can do about that one. More penance. Penance every day. Give me another fresh asshole with women issues and we'll see about him later.

There's a disgusting and most amusing habit I have where I potentially contract out marriages between myself and certain worthy gentlemen. Mostly because I suppose I believe that's what marriage means to me. So I have these friends who are great, who I have fucked or will fuck, who make laugh and make me feel great and who have lovely brains and similar interests to myself and seem to have promising careers. Sometimes, though not often, I am about ready to make good on one of these halfhearted proposals. I mean them when I say them. I think these men understand me, I think they know exactly what kind of animal I am. I fear that the only men who match me in drive and wherewithal are major mindfucking assholes on whom I will burn out quickly and the kind sweet supportive love-forever boys, as my record proves, struggle with motivation and are practically upwardly paralyzed. I don't know what I'm going to do, probably marry one of these friend-fellows, but I am definitely not dealing with any dick. And frankly I have no idea how any man has consented to being my boyfriend anyhow. I just don't really see how anyone could mistake me for some kind of proper partner. I found a photograph of Bianca Jagger, Liza Minelli and Jackie O all on the same settee. If I had a fireplace, I would frame it and put that shit on my mantle.

 I suppose my priorities have changed, when I spend my last fifteen bucks on a lit mag instead of booze or smokes or cheap jewelry or something. And then with a flashback to a younger time, when I snorted up a rail of crushed speed off of a sushi plate at a friend's house, in what was to be one of those fake-legendary nights that ends in me going home to my dorm room long past daylight, probably crying at some point. But I remember the quiet grad student who watched me probably in horror while I talked jagged-up drivel about god knows what I didn't fucking know, and she just a normal complacent midwestern girl without a car who was lured to this tragic undergrad afterparty from a faculty party under probably false pretenses. Having to walk home later, once bored with our bingeing. 

Last night started off really nice, a Lynchian scene at an empty, plush-carpeted bar where I'm dancing by myself, alone and stoned on the dancefloor to various selections from Hall & Oates. My companion of course meets some dudes and of course wants to go hang out with them even though they're nice but unattractive and weird. I didn't get any creepy vibe from them, even though I told her we shouldn't hang out with them. Every time we're together it's trouble, except this time it wasn't trouble. It was just another small town bad idea. Like the time Tomcat and I, even though I was in the throes of a chest cold, closed down the bar with this delightfully outgoing Columbus couple and go to their house for some cocktails only to have the husband pass out face-first on the bathroom floor with a pocketful of pills while their child slept in a room nearby. Sometimes my mistaken fucking existence is like a Barry Hannah short story, though usually less funny. I did score a good T shirt out of the whole thing, just a white thing with various test prints on it from their digital T shirt printer. It's absurd, really. I drunk dialed a fellow I'm not necessarily close with, but whom I can't seem to leave alone. He doesn't mind, excepting the fact it was 3 AM. He's got something about me figured out, I know not what. We slept together once and it was horrible. I don't remember most of it, I was on the warpath then. He said wise and intimidating things about me. He doesn't take sex seriously and always embraced me at public events afterwards. I suppose those are credentials enough for me to esteem someone worthy of an intimate friendship. Moreover, his brain is delicious. 

I'm becoming rather innocently obsessed with Mary Kay Fualaau née Letourneau. She is some living Twin Peaks shit and I'm crazy about it. I just wish I could have a conversation with her. Maybe I'll write her a letter. The fucking hairstylist won't leave me alone still. He seems to think we need to have a "conversation" about "what happened" and rework our "friendship" all of which is completely fictitious and unnecessary and if I were face to face with him I would probably give him a piece of my mind and impugn his delusions about me and his pathetic life with various creative insults unmerciful. I can't fucking stand weak men. I will fucking behead them. What a disgrace to your gender. He even announced that he made me yet a 4th unsolicited mix. He is in seventh grade. 

I find traditional expressions get the job done just fine. My ladyfriend called me at two in the morning this past weekend and left a lengthy drunken voicemail about how we needed to start telephoning each other;  she deemed it the "new lady thing to do." She knows that I'm a sucker for her instruction and if she claims it's a Proper Lady Thing then by god I'll buy it. We have talked once. I hope she means it. I hope we codependently call each other weekly or even like every three days to freak out about face moisturizer or whine about men. I have friends who do that for each other and it seems like a rather tender way to conduct a long-distance friendship. In part because I constantly need her coaching. In part because I get the feeling neither of us have been this close to another woman as adults in a mighty long time. It's so nice it's practically scary, and we're probably both a little upset to have to leave it, just after we've found it. There will be many more nighttime curbs to cry on in affluent neighborhoods, more piles of lawn clippings to pee on while singing hits from Andy Williams, more late night swims, 2 AM cake donuts, indulgent afternoon gin cocktails, "night cheese," greasy tacos at picnic tables, Bonnie Raitt records while putting on make up. When you read your poems I wished you read the one about me. 

I need to get the fuck out of here. I feel like I should burn this town to the ground when I leave. There is so much fucking trash. I can't stop messing with dudes. I went to Austin for a yard party and realized everything I do for fun here is like a sick game that could get my ass killed. The latest one was a twenty-one year old boxer. He's so precious but I think I just broke his heart. I'm not exacting revenge. I just can't stop myself. Now I have a fever and a sinus infection and my clothes are damp and my hair is matted to my face and it feels like I'm going deaf. I still love my ex boyfriend more than any man in the fucking world, he's the only one I've learned not to abuse. I'm acting like I'm twenty again. Is this the last of it. This shit has got to stop. Except when I was twenty I loved more than ever probably in my whole life. Now the loving I do is like a sad little secret I whisper only in one person's ear, as if I should be ashamed. It's the life I lead of which I should be ashamed. I've gotten everything backwards. I called one of my favorite people by the wrong name twice. My brain was drooling out of my ear. The past three nights have been bacchanalian, screaming at the moon. No wonder I'm bed-ridden, sin-riddled, stinking of sex. This girl told stories the other night about a meth head girl being owned by two Mexican gangs, passed back and forth, tattooed involuntarily, up to her face. East Texas is the scariest fucking place on earth. I want this fever to break. I never want to leave the house again, until I leave town. I think some men are punkass bitches who deserve to be humiliated. I'm glad to do it. I think everyone here is a child. I wish I knew if I was supposed to be with him or not. Instead I will cross the land like a four-legged creature. sucking dry the hearts of men and passing on with blood on my tongue, scraps of meat still in my fingernails. I don't know who I am torturing everyone for. I don't remember what is the opposite of confidence. Am I destroying everyone for you ? A thousand frivolous sacrifices about which you cannot stand to hear ?

 A circus of brown men desiring me. This is like a dream I had at fifteen. Such a "cultural" experience. And how bored I am with being worshipped. Jesus and Truly. I don't know how it's happened; I wonder if really don't have any feelings. This half-worries me. One of my coworkers is completely insane. She's obnoxious and insecure and socially needy, probably bipolar. Yeah, sure sounds like someone you know. She's obsessed with me in some aspect that I can't quite gauge. Humiliated me in public, even though I was one of two people to attend her birthday party. Even though I sat up late in the night trying to cheer her up by getting my ass humiliated in dominoes by her obese lesbian latina roommate and nervous underage stoner roommate while they made fun of me in ghetto slang I'm too overeducated to understand. She accosted me and told me I was behaving like a child. She told me she recognized my sister today, and didn't think we looked much alike but remarked, "Her butt is like yours, but smaller." 

I will not conceal the fact that it does please me to have the alpha ass.

A poem was written for me in Spanish over text message today. It wasn't bad as those things go, but I feel like that very thing has occurred over and over again this summer. I'm a White Queen. White Queen Bitch. It's boring to be fetishized, but I'm enjoying learning about the experience. I can't say I really ever wanted this. And most of all, the person I desire the most, the person who sends me into fits of schoolchild jealousy and desperate panting flirtation is my eighteen-year-old Mexican coworker. I don't know if I could actually bring myself to sleep with a child or not, but I want him for myself. I really do. Very predatory. I think I'm just in love with his name. It's like the name of a Catholic saint in the year 1200. I'm pretending to set him up with my sister while also pressing my tits against him at any given opportunity.

I am, for the most part, baffled by latin men. I will submit that they are infatuated with being infatuated. Sex has such a religious devotion behind it, an almost affected intensity, which makes it enjoyable to the layperson ( ha ) but paradoxically not taken very seriously by the player. For this reason, they make practically ideal sexual partners for me. The act itself is the sacred ritual, and everything else is pleasant but unnecessary, or for the most part, forgettable. I am definitely shallow enough to enjoy the very game of seduction and even one further, the game of being fake-infatuated with someone. But for whatever reason I'm not so into it when someone else is the dominant player and I'm just sort of the pretend-victim. I guess if I liked them more, or were more profoundly attracted to them, or not just explicitly out for the acquisition of unannyoing sex. [ Who is this fucking demon talking ? ]

I gave my phone number to someone tonight who's name is Zamfir or something. He had eyes like Baby's older brother, who I was obsessed with in ninth grade. An ex-marine coworker came in to "check his schedule," replete in sleevless T shirt, crew cut and dip packed almost neatly in his lower lip and slipped me a piece of paper with his phone number on it. He invited me to a concert. I don't even know what the fuck we would talk about. Dr. Nicaragua was pretty amusing, we had a great dinner, the wine was actually delicious and he knocked his glass over with one swift gesture. That didn't embarrass me, I think I just hate academics. I find it really cumbersome to talk to them, especially if they have neurotic breakdown the likes of which I should, on a first date. That was ridiculous. I think I just need to get me an attorney. I've given this a lot of thought and I think that's the man for me. A fucking attorney. And until I find one, I will pathologically fuck whichever sort of person whenever I get the itch. This is my life, and I'm a vain asshole who wants hardly more than to age well, be a genius, get lots of money and fuck when I want to. That's probably the most accurate thing I've ever said. I look like a child in my new license photo. Miraculous, after all of this stupid fucking living.

The Sounds of Last Summer. Some songs that I will never listen to again, and this is all right. I regret to announce I am officially a Texas Citizen, I finally got a state-appropriate driver's license. Sorry, I didn't mean to be a traitor. But considering I don't and will not have my own address for the next several months, I had to use my folks', and my old ID had expired, as most things must expire.

For about a week, or a night, or something, I was quasi-dating this hairstylist I met through my only friend in town, sadly, my own hairstylist. He's pretty noticeably attractive, and at first we had many things in common. Then he got to where he was a little too into me, and I called things off. Basically he's over-preened. He's one of those men who's a clueless peacock; they're so fucking infatuated with themselves out of insecurity. And he just worshipped me because I have a comparably banal hipster-taste in music and knew who Mike Giant is. Oh, and I'm hot. When I got weird towards him, he would tell me how hot it was that I was weird. The entire time my mind is racing with thoughts of, "Go to fucking Austin and meet ten of me, please, and then leave me alone." It's like in all of his thirtysomething years he'd never met a cool smart girl. Maybe this is an abject possibility, though he's lived in every major city in Texas. So after a bad night of drinking for me, easily the worst I've had in three years, and one I have no intention of replicating ever again simply because I'm far too old for this shit, he gets drunk one night and sends me a series of text messages, each one creepier than the last. I eventually bring down the hammer of "Let this shit go," and he keeps text-stalking me. The last two I received, in the middle of the night, were "I know what's going on I just want you anyway I can have you," and finally, at 430 AM, "It's all good, the more you don't give a shit the more I want you." 

I woke up rather terrified, as in all my fucking-with-guys years I've never had anyone get this creepy on me. I contacted our mutual friend and told her that she needed it make it clear to him that he won't be seeing me or hearing from me again, due to this behavior. I spent an entire day in jittery fear, knowing he might confront me at work or something, but I haven't heard anything since. I'm hoping this is really the end. I do realize that in my day I have probably sent drunken texts as horrifying as these, and as a young woman I sat in the dark thinking how I could get a restraining order, and I want to thank the recipients of such messages of mine that they didn't so readily condemn me the way that I have this man. However, it's definitely not a situation I plan on getting into again. Cheers.

This is my Summer of Seconds. He was the second guy I've dated who has had their throat tattooed. The Other: tonight I have a date with a post-doc in statistics. My Second Mathematician. And I'm not sure what to expect, as he picked me up at work like a silly little shopgirl, and I practically chortled when he asked me if I was seeing anyone, geek that I am. He's Nicaraguan, I think. He speaks English with an unplaceable accent, like French or German. I have no idea what he's after, but we're going to the most obnoxiously expensive restaurant in town, at his insistence. I plan on paying for myself, thanks, because I don't want to feel like I owe someone sex who I'm not into. And yes, I do feel that way when a man drops $100 on a meal, sorry. Call me old fucking fashioned.

I watched La Notte and it was my first Antonioni. I liked it, it's a plot with which I am very familiar, you know, practically every story I wrote between highschool and college was about how a fucking drunkass party can change your life or give you some existential crisis, and trite as it is, I'm a sucker for that kind of story. Amusingly, I realize just now at this moment maybe that's why my fiction has been dead in the water for a couple years now, as I have grown to realize that I don't really believe that parties and zaniness and drunken situations actually have the power to alter anything about your life. They did when I was twenty, yes: when I tried to throw you off of a balcony, when I put my head through a window, when I was clocked in the face and slumped against the wall, when I viciously seduced women, when I would have you clandestinely pick me up outside at three in the morning. It's different now. I just don't want to get arrested.

But more crticially speaking, I liked the film but in comparison to say, a Fellini picture with similar plot points, I didn't really appreciate how reserved, morally erect and penisve the main characters were. I don't know if this is childish or irresponsible of me, but I'm not really interested in beautiful people being uprightly moral all the time. I want to see them fall, for fuck's sake, and then manage the consequences, if there are any, which is such a sad and real joke of life. I could watch Marcello Mostrianni tie his shoes for hours, don't get me wrong, and I was weirdly disappointed with how aged and mannish Jeanne Moreau looked. The finale was fantastic, though. It had all of the intense sap that I usually seek to extract from Woody Allen films. So yeah, I like that.

I need to go outside before the rain. And it's been nearly a year, and I won't listen to your songs anymore. It's like these days I can sweat anything out, sweat it all out.

Nope. Still not working for me. No man is good enough, and I don't care. You may be very sweet and good-looking and fun as hell but when it comes down to it, I just can't let you take this more seriously than needed. Don't bring the heavy to my party, I will kick you out the door. I guess I'm just saying the wrong thing. At least this time we haven't slept together, thank GOD I exercised some restraint in the area in which I normally utterly fail. I'm not one to refuse fleshly delights, but last night my body physically disallowed any hanky panky. It was a strange and nearly foreign feeling.

My flirtation behavior has a very vindictive nature. It's definitely an impure process. Return to the obsession.

Yesterday was a perfect self-day. I had a short shift and work and came home, blew off babysitting to do yoga in the backyard and go to the pool for a couple hours to read and sunsoak. Overheard the hot gay lifeguards' chatter. The water felt a disgusting, an oily 95 degrees, though, and this is one thing I hate and I'm desperate to hit up the springs on my next trip to ATX. Some bands from there were playing in town last night and I forewarned everyone that I probably wouldn't know a soul. Upon walking in, I knew basically everyone playing. It wasn't like being the popular girl in school but rather an isolated and lonely sensation. I can't really explain. I guess I secretly hate it when proximities shrink and constrict me; I'd rather not see old friends everywhere I go than be lost among the drudergy of the crowd. I know that this seems inconsistent with my seemingly socially needy behaviors, but I'm a runner, kids. I'm a transient. I can't stop yet.

Upon the urging of a friend, I contacted an old teacher acquaintance who is probably the closest thing in my fantasy-addled brain to a Love of My Life. Even my parents know / knew about this infatuation. Also: it was obvious. He's from the state I'm about to move to, and so I wrote to get some location advice. Turns out his hometown is the place where I'll be working, a small and rather obscure township, and although I've only received a clunky overly-formal response from him, I do have a flame of hope that this will reignite our intellectual foreplay. But I can't be sure, and I don't count on anything. Also, I'm sure he's gotten married in the five years since I've seen him. Or at least I imagine he has. But I still identify him as the closest thing to the creature I need in my life, as far as I can tell. I'm a child and know very little, but this I imagine is fairly close to fact. The first time I felt so sexually charged over a purely conversational encounter that I went directly to my highschool sweetheart's bed to slake that desire, and felt no guilt or absolutely anything at all.

I have also reacquainted myself with a friend from my dreadful suburban preadolescence. He's slipped in and out of my life ever since, and it's remarkable and refreshing how well our personal philosophies are almost carbon-copy of each other. He's called me a woman with the heart of a lion. He's aggressively normal and almost frattish in appearance, and that's one of things I enjoy about him the most. Also, he's the person I had my first sincere sexual exploratory experience with, at the age of 12, he put his fingers in my tiny snatch. And after all this time, he contacts me because he, also living at home during grad school, ran into our 7th grade homeroom teacher who actually inquired after me, even though every day we sat together making crass jokes and fondling each other and she just kind of amusingly let us, horny children that we were. I guess that means she liked me. I've morbidly asked after some mutual friends from that time and that miserable, false-hearted world, and ended up obsessing over an old  female friend's blog about her lame and faith-based existence. She's been married for 3 years, has a seven-month old, a totally unadventerous life, and looks to be about 7 years older than me. None of this is a surprise. Perhaps I just enjoy schadenfreude more than most, and at the expense of everyone. I have nothing in my life, but still it's fucking better than yours.

Mother and I broke it down to the fact that I'm noticeably more confident outside of relationships. And unfortuately or not, that's how I scored my trophy boyfriends. ( No, you are not one of my trophy boyfriends. )  I was some other being, some self-sustained, thankless and unanswerable creature. My ex and I even had a conversation about it when we were breaking up, how I was such a fearless and composed womanchild at 21, else he would have never taken me seriously, a confidence that corroded over the 2 1/2 years of our relationship until by the end, at 24 I was a house on fire, a collapsed, emotionally consumptive wretch. For this reason I have declared Love my poison, and I will take no more of it. And this is not mere cynicism, this is the most rationally awake I've been ever. I'm at peace with my misanthropy. And so on.

Last night we drank beers in the park and talked until too late at night. He said something like, "I want this to be like Say Anything, where I'm like your date for the rest of the summer." I babysat today and then went out with him and another friend to pick up a pitbull puppy he was planning to adopt. The whole affair was about an hour out of town, and when we got to the place, the dogs were malnourished, flea-ridden and dehydrated. The men who lived in the trailer there could barely make eye contact with me, one of them, a relative of another friend, was an ex-con. The others seemed socially inept and quietly but pathologically violent. They all emptied out of the house with beers in hand to watch us inspect the dogs, like it was some form of entertainment. I was never so silent in my life. It was a situation where we would have preferred not to have encountered the dogs, but had no choice but to rescue them. We took the two remaining puppies back to this girl's house and bathed them and had a beer in the backyard. I held one of the puppies in my arms the entire ride back, she hid her face in my armpit. I was given the task of naming the poor shocked, strange and timid thing. Like a broken-over fawn: wobbly legs, distended stomach and limp tail. I named her Vida. I don't know why men like him like me sometimes. He asked for my eyes when I'm dead. Everything that happens to him has a meaning that he's willing to talk about. Sometimes I feel the same way. He said I can see the dog whenever I want; it's my dog, too. This summer is starting to feel like ten summers in one. He reminds me of two people in one. He said if we could put my brain in his body we'd become a god. You know what I mean; you know what's going on here. Beers in a car, driving through the country, brilliant landscape, terrifying objects. Good country people I will never ever see again.

Friday, a night of such bombast and legend it needed not be followed by a national holiday. So I hardly celebrated one. We met up at this awful bar and I self-consciously dressed in indecent hipster regalia, kind of afraid it was a bad idea but not really concerned. The whole crew arrived and we walked down to this benefit show for a local tattoo studio that had been ridiculously burgled ( they took the artists' book ?! ) and it was packed the fuck out. Initially afraid that this community has absolutely zero coolness to offer me, it was rather thrilling to encounter a venue that kind of hilariously represented my two lives: tiny, shitty sweaty punk club inside and vast, gravel open-air dog-friendly lot outside. I spied a rather charming portrait of Vincent Gallo above the bar and wanted it immediately. My male companion actually cuts the hair of the artist and very thoughtfully introduced us, where I procured the painting from him for a mere sum of $50. The artist, a archetypal Jewish hipster with a fan-blade mullet and old school hi-tops, drove me to my truck where I could safely store the painting. He asked me about my tattoo and whilst showing him ( outside of the bar ) my smallboob fell out ( that never happens; I swear ! ) and I just sort of shrugged and left him alone the rest of the night. He ended up being a bit of a dolt and absolute turd, so I can only imagine the genius in the Gallo portrait was purely incidental. At the afterparty I stuffed my face with pizza rolls, made out with a gorgeous female pitbull in front of everyone, and busted my chin whilst performing drunk yoga, a favorite and totally ill-advised pastime of mine. I got into it with my father over the phone in the wee hours, in an aggressively overblown misunderstanding. Fact: living with your parents when you have been supporting yourself and living on your own for years is horrible. I woke the next morning safely stored on a friend's sofa, with surprise bruises, bitemarks, and a bit of a swollen chin. Had I not fought with my father, the night would have been ideal.

So I have this problem where I loathe all of the vaguely dorky guys I date and consider them completely below my standards, even if they're geniuses or trilingual or published or reliably financially-sustained men. They could never be my boyfriend. But sometimes the very hot, "cool" guys like me and if I'm drunk enough I can pass myself off as a rad chick and not a neurotic self-loathing mess. ( In truth, sometimes they like that, too. ) So when I land the Cool Guy, I'm totally disarmed and shuffling around my bedroom like an adolescent geek, questioning their every text message for some kind of slanguage subtext that I'm not understanding because I'm just not cool enough to comprehend. I'm still not currently "into" guys but I will always enjoy being chased by a hot guy. So that's what I'm doing. Engaging in some kind of worrisome flirtation with someone who is way too cool for me, and trouble to boot. I'm okay with the trouble part ( he has kids, weird ex sitch ) because that makes him ultimately unattainable so I can't do anything stupid like fall for him and ruin the rest of my life by staying in this god-forsaken crypt of suburban banality. But I can have a summer romance, if that can even happen, considering he also he's a bit of a lothario ( some story about him sleeping with the coat-check girl in the the coat-check room at their hotel ? ) But I always find that to be an interesting challenge. And jesusgod, how I love moving new places. I do, I just do.

I bought The Second Sex today upon finding out that Simone de Beauvoir was a pedophile. Delicious. I picked it up years ago so this will be the second go-round, even if I'm too old for it. And I realized that I'm too old for Hubert Selby, Jr. I tried, I really tried but I just can't do that shit. Missed my window. It just made me want to watch Heavy Traffic in silent horror. It's going to be a longer summer than planned and I'm barely making any money. But I've found some of the fun, dammit, just like they said I would.

I never want to be a mother, ever, and I'm pretty sure it's because my mother is a fucking asshole.

She is probably also why I drink. I would attest to that in court. Maybe I am a Jew ? Italian ? Irish ? Probably the latte(st)r. Once I told her I was going to get a dog and name it after her; it was sort of a family joke. Now I think I mean the subtext of the thing that she was half -offended by, at the time.

I would say I was Russian, but I think the literary Russians drink because of their fathers. That also, true in its own way.

I am twenty-five and feel the same.