I have no idea why all of the sudden SoundCloud isn’t embedding correctly. Probably some IT voodoo shit or something. I was going to write, and then I realized the story would sound better off the cuff. Also, Sam Smith is going to get an OBE. Bet.
Tag: grief
Cooking and Cleaning -or- New Hat. Who Dis?
So, here’s the thing about the hat. I am not sure what happened to my original khaki hat that said “The GAP,” but I flipped houses in it so my guess is that it just fell apart. Then, my sister came to visit and left it here. I have conveniently forgotten it for what will be eight years at the end of April.
I normally wear my CIA baseball cap because of what it took to get it. Easy for my friend Zac, not so much for me. Because he works with classified information, he occasionally has to go to different intelligence agencies, and one of them is Langley. If he thinks I can be bought for a baseball cap… Yes. Yes, I can.
I just figured a new look was probably called for. Half my videos I can’t tell the difference when they were made. 🙂
Put on blast
Progress Notes
Blue Bird Circle Clinic for Pediatric Neurology
Name: LANAGAN, Leslie Diane
Staffing Conference
Date: August 25th, 1978
Staffing Physician: Robert S. Zeller, MD
The history and physical of this now 11 and one-half month old girl was reviewed in detail. Although she still manifests a great deal of hypotonia, it appears to have improved from the time of her examination one month ago. She is still, however, hyperreflexic.
Our impression is that of hypotonic cerebral palsy, that is in all probability secondary to insults received during the immediate post-natal period. There is also secondary delayed motor development and she is felt to be functioning in approximately the 6-7 month age range. The parents were counseled in depth and told that we could not predict at this time her future motor function or intellectual capabilities [emphasis mine]. She will be referred to the Infant Stimulation Program in Kilgore, Texas within the next week. We would like to see her in our clinic in six months to evaluate her language and motor development. A letter of our findings and recommendations will be sent to the referring physician, Dr. J.B. Bates, and two copies will be sent to the father.
Sheila Owens, MD
Pediatric Resident
When I was almost one, here is the sum total of my physical accomplishments:
- Does not seem to vocalize to recognition.
- Infant rolls from back to stomach, turns head toward origin of voices or sounds and looks at toys in her hand as she plays.
- She can hold a cube in each hand and picks up a cube from table and side.
- It is difficult to say if she definitely looks for fallen toys.
- Her muscle tone is not wasting.
- The tone is moderately decreased and there is weakness of her lower extremity musculature being unable to support her weight.
- Still unable to sit without support.
- The infant has the appearance of a 5-6 month old baby.
When I finally did start talking, I didn’t look older than that. The harder my mother tried to convince people in the grocery store that she was not, in fact, a ventriloquist was met with derision. Instead of suing the pants off the hospital, my mother helped me strengthen my legs. It’s actually amazing that I can walk as well as I can, and that I’m only partially terrible at it. I continue to misstep all the time, mostly due to balance issues. Physical therapists are the bane of my existence because I say I don’t have enough balance for something and those idiots will let me fall and bruise myself a couple of times before they’ll let me be right. I also bruise easily, and I have no idea where most of them originate, because it happens too frequently to count.
My parents both got sort of lucky. I wasn’t an easy kid, but I wasn’t the worst in terms of medical needs….. until now. I met a spy at The International Spy Museum named Tracy Walder, and she had the same thing. She told me that I was the first person outside of her family that she’d ever met who had it. I don’t know how bad her case is, and whether mine is better or worse.
Therein lies the rub.
I’ve been told that I’m intellectually brilliant my whole life, and yet, I don’t really fit into the whole picture of healthy family, either. I was never allowed to play sports, probably why I was attracted to Meag in the first place. She never read this report, so she had no problem taking me out to the soccer field and kicking the ball around. The best compliment I ever got from her was standing in goal, and out of nowhere I hear her booming voice…. “NICE DROP KICK, SWEETIE!” That fed my ego for like five years. It was one good kick. I’ve never even scored a goal, but I might as well have for what it gave me.
It was the first time I realized that I didn’t need as much protection as I thought, and it was the first time I was wrong about something so huge.
So, if Daniel is right that I do choose a devil du jour to fight, this is it. I’m fighting my own body because I’m not even sure if I’m disabled or not. No one has been any help with this, because my sister found this report with my mother’s things after she passed. She didn’t want me in the “special classes.” I didn’t need them intellectually, but I was the physical class clown whether I liked it or not. It’s the same way at work, because work can be high school (except the bullies are bigger). Don’t think adults are above staring at my alternating isotropia, the thing that makes my brain choose one eye to focus with and the other drifts. As my vision has gotten poorer in my left eye, this has helped somewhat because my brain doesn’t choose it as often.
I made a chef miserable because I didn’t have enough strength in my arms to push an entire potato through a fry cutter. I made an owner miserable because I couldn’t carry a mop and a full bucket of water up two flights of stairs. Both of these things led to me getting fired because obviously I was too stupid to do these things.
Tech was difficult because it was a boys’ club, so I constantly felt pressure to carry around desktops and 21-inch CRT monitors to prove myself. It didn’t get really problematic until I had a cart loaded with 20 that it became too heavy to push…. which leads to another impossible kitchen job. Running loaded carts of food and beverages between Terminal A and Terminal E at the airport. That cart had to weigh 2-300 pounds, and the wheels didn’t help at all. I couldn’t even push it enough to get it going.
I’m having the same identity crisis as Daniel, except that I’m just now finding out what it is. I don’t know what I can do and what I can’t. My passion has been ripped out from under me, because I have the heart of a chef. There is nothing I love more than making dinner for my friends. I can still do that, but it’s nothing compared to the rush of 300 covers a night and you’re winning. I just don’t have any consistency, because sometimes my muscle tone and balance is better than others.
I also don’t see in 3D, so no matter how many times I am shown how something is plated, it is physically impossible for me to see height without other points of reference. This carries over into just about everything. I see the world differently. I am often in my own little world because I have so many insecurities that it’s easier not to engage. My whole life I’ve felt something was wrong, and I’ve been treated with kid gloves. Living in the real world takes an enormous support system, and I’m having to do therapy and medication for all the anxiety those appointments bring me…. which is why I haven’t made them. I’m older. I’m arthritic. Everything feels worse when I fall.
Luckily, I am very small. Therefore, when I fall, it’s easy enough to pick myself up or have someone else give me a hand. I rarely pratfall. It always looks like I’ve really hurt myself. I generally just get bruises, but some have been deep. I also used to rip the knees out of my pants from falling on the sidewalk.
This is also not great at work. Everyone is so concerned, and yet nothing changes.
Add being female and queer to all of that, and it’s just being behind an eight ball I never knew was there. I’m not just queer so I get homophobic comments, and I’m not just female so I get misogynistic comments, I also move weird and fall a lot. And people ask me what the hell I’m looking at all the time.
I’m looking at pictures of beautiful, strong women in my head.
Like Tracy Walder. I’m the only one outside of her family she knows that knows (perhaps) how it feels to be her.
I know we only met for a moment, Tracy, but it was a symphony for me. I hope you felt it, too. Solidarity is the name of the game. You’re the first person like me I’ve met, too.
Leslie D. Lanagan
Diarist in Residence
Put on blast
Paschendale, by The War Daniel
I am going to be writing about very real experiences that ended tragically in suicide in many, not all, but many cases. Don’t read this if that is going to trigger the darkness to rise within you. We don’t need to lose anyone else.
I listen to Iron Maiden A LOT. Almost obsessively, some would argue. And much of that has to do with a quote I heard a long time ago about how music has the ability to take simple words to places that mere words cant go. When you record a song, it’s chordal movement, melody, inflection, tonality, and most importantly the emotion evoked by going from E minor to C to A minor to D minor. God’s saddest chord progression, I always call it. Obviously I learned it from an Iron Maiden song. And so many of their songs, somehow, capture the aesthetic, the horror and the harsh realities of the things we’re asked to do. Take this verse from “Afraid to Shoot Strangers:”
Trying to justify to ourselves the reasons to go
should we live and let live
forget or forgive
But how can we let them go on this way?
A reign of terror, corruption must end
And we know deep down there’s no other way
No trust, no reasoning no more to say.”
It’s a total “what the fuck are we even doing here anyway?”
From “These Colours Don’t Run:”
Far away from the land of our birth
we fly our flag in some foreign earth
we sailed away like our fathers before
These colours don’t run from cold bloody war.”
“I guess we’re doing it for ‘Murka but I don’t know why I’m mad at these people.”
The one that hits me the hardest goes as follows, it’s called “The Longest Day.”
In the gloom, the gathering storm abates
In the ships, gimlet eyes await
The call to arms to hammer at the gates
To blow them wide, throw evil to its fate
All summers long, the drills to build the machine
To turn men from flesh and blood to steel
From paper soldiers to bodies on the beach
From summer sands to Armageddon´s reach
Overlord, your master, not your God
The enemy coast dawning grey with scud
These wretched souls, puking, shaking fear
To take a bullet for those who sent them here
The world’s alight
The cliffs erupt in flame
No escape, remorseless shrapnel rains
Drowning men, no chance for a warrior’s fate
A choking death, enter Hell’s gates
Sliding we go
Only fear on our side
To the edge of the wire
And we rush with the tide
Oh, the water is red
With the blood of the dead
But I’m still alive
Pray to God I survive
How long, on this longest day
‘Til we finally make it through?
Steve Harris, who is a trusted student of the history of war and observer of the human condition couldn’t have written it better if I was sitting there dictating to him.
The anxiety of the training “all summers long.” I can still see my dumbass Marines fucking with a western diamond back rattlesnake and letting them get bitten because I knew it would be a dry bite and I hoped they would learn to be 5% less stupid.
“From paper soldiers to bodies on the beach…” We’re a volunteer military now. The “paper soldiers” Steve is referring to is those poor sods that were drafted into the War. Our paper soldiers now are a reclamation of the phrase to mean those of us to have the guts to sign the line when we weren’t forced. All our choice. And then “Armageddon’s reach” whatever middle eastern hell fate directed us. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. Somalia. Yemen.
I don’t have the space to do a full analysis of these lyrics and the experiences they capture here, but trust me when I say that Steve captured the raw feelings and fears and resolve that you feel.
And perhaps most poignantly, from Paschendale:
Cruelty has a human heart
Every man does play his part
Terror of the men we kill
The human heart is hungry still
I stand my ground for the very last time
Gun is ready as I stand in line
Nervous wait for the whistle to blow
Rush of blood and over we go
You can’t understand war unless you’ve lived it. And it isn’t your fault. We are a volunteer force. This isn’t WWII where my grandfather was drafted, and was eventually discharged for telling his higher ups at one of the prisons why he didn’t shoot someone running for freedom by saying “there’s been enough killing.”
And that was during a time when, even if its war, people were playing by the rules.
Now it’s like Fuck Yo Rules. A box of Lindt chocolates could be an IED. In my time on the ground it wasn’t the guys on fireteams that were the most exposed. It was the logistics guys in their vehicles transporting supplies and such from point A to point B. The enemy did everything it could to blow those vehicles and the brothers and sisters in them to oblivion.
We had a POA for every evolution with a dossier of who would be involved from the turret gunner on down the line. And when those guys got to our side of the world it was a party, because we had thwarted the cocksmokers one more time.
Objectively, I had it easy on the ground. I was almost always in the BAS treating nagging things like back strains and hamstring pulls and the sports medicine like injuries that come from carrying almost your own weight hour after hour. And as such, I don’t have many of the “did you see action” stories.
But you know what I did see? The payoff.
I saw what happened when we got back home and knew we were safe and had time to finally process everything that did, didn’t and almost happened.
We went to our post-deployment screenings 3, 6, and 12 months after we got home. Well that is the ones of us that were home that long. Despite rules to the contrary, a lot of guys were sent back with 9 months of coming back home.
And don’t get me wrong, some of these guys didn’t want to be back home. Because the stereotype of the military wife that just waits on her husband to leave so she can cheat—that’s real and fuck those bitches in the very worst way for it. I hope they get a UTI, Herpes and bitten by a copperhead all at the same time.
The names in my phone are funny. If you’re a person I talk to often and are my closest people, the suffix -hausen is added to your name, i.e. Fuckingstirlhausen, Jennyhausen, Mistihausen, mommyhausen. Princesshausen (for my bestie heather). You get the picture. It’s added because my favorite comedy wrestler Donavan Danhausen adds it to the end of almost everything that is deemed to be cool. Also I’m told its an actual German thing.
There’s also a contingency of people in my phone with “Goddammit” in front of their names. They know precisely who they are. Because for a while it was just constant bad news of our guys winning the fight over there only to come back here and lose the war in the most heart breaking way. It got to a point where my lady at the time wanted my buddies to stop calling me because she knew I was going to be crushed to find out that we’d lost someone else. Because she knew I was going to feel like a steaming pile of triceratops shit because I didn’t reach out. I didn’t take that nagging clue to call them to see what was what. I didn’t call when their marriages ultimately failed.
You may say that this is borrowing grief for its own sake. And to that I humbly suggest you do the following in this order:
Leave my yard by taking a right out of the driveway.
Take the curve around to the main street, making sure to stop at said curve and pay the Molly toll by tossing a dog biscuit to an especially, erm, “hefty” Australian Cattle Dog.
When you get to the stop sign, take another right. Go down to hwy 2744 where the turn off is for that cattle sifter.
Go past that pasture about ¾ of a mile until you get to the pasture where the Santa Gertrudis bulls with their horns in tact still are.
Jump the fence.
Smack a bull on its nose.
When the bull goes to toss you, take the horns up the ass and FUCK OFF.
When someone dies in country, or on the ship or even in the hospital, there’s a suddenness that is almost easier to take, because you know their suffering was minimal. When you lose someone to suicide it is the most gut wrenching passing that can befall your brothers and sisters. Because they lost the hardest war of all: the one at home.
And here is something I haven’t told very many people.
Every single time we lose someone to suicide, I start getting the texts and phone calls that “(you’d) better not be next!
And heretofore I have maintained that promise, for here I am, dear reader, laying myself bare for you on this page.
It is no secret I struggle with alcoholism, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and probably some mental illnesses that don’t have names yet.
There was a time when I called the veteran’s suicide hotline, because I had tried and failed for over 3 months to find a job and just nothing good was coming of it. Because the harsh reality is that so much of what we do in the military that should 1 to 1 translate just doesn’t. Its like we’re speaking not just a foreign language but a dead language.
The biggest challenge I’ve faced since I came home is the struggle to answer the question “who am I now that I’m not HM2 (FMF) Williams the Grumpy Cat anymore?”
Identity.
HM2 Grumpy always had or could find an answer. HM2 Grumpy could anticipate his Flight Surgeons concerns before they ever happened. HM2 Grumpy made sure no one fucked with his Jr guys for things they couldn’t help. HM2 Grumpy knew that he couldn’t pay them more, give them more leave, but we he could do is give them time. So I’m not saying I ever told someone “You need to go to your squadron RIGHT (insert bug eyed meaningful look here) “Yeah Grumps, I think I need to go talk to my Sgt Major about whether I should get a boxer or a pit bull.”
“Good fuck off and don’t come back until tomorrow.”
Now I, like a lot of you reading, am just a guy trying to navigate a world that isn’t sure what to do with us. Sure there’s a fuck ton of forward facing “support for our troops,” but yo, my snake needs rats and my guitars need strings, and my car needs an oil change—help brothas and sistas out. Because that’s what ends up getting us. It’s not even the trauma endured over seas—you can anticipate that. It’s coming home to a largely insouciant audience that gives lip service to being “veteran friendly” but that doesn’t end up translating into anything tangible. And that’s when it happens. When that last vestige of hope falls away. When that guy that was a cousin of an uncle was going to be hiring preferably a veteran welder. And it just doesn’t happen for long enough that you cant take one more drink, or take one more Ambien. You take ALL of the fentanyl and dilauded and whatever else so that the embarrassment and feelings of being a burden will go quiet.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Remember my dears, These Colours Don’t Run. If you can do something for just one or two of our siblings, you will earn their love for life and then who knows how far your one act of kindness can go.
Hopefully far enough for the next graduation, prom, drivers license, one act play, football playoff, singing competition—that one more step down the hill that makes life worth living.
Cruelty has a human heart. But kindness does too.
I would love to take a lot more calls lauding the great works of our brothers and sisters than that gut wrenching call to find out we lost someone else.
Put on blast
Strength and Helsinki
Put on blast
Sunday Morning, Rain is Falling
Put on blast
Show Tunes
Put on blast
In Which the Sun Comes Out
Part One in the “Stories from The Big Yellow House” Series
The yellow house is much yellower now, though in my memory it is not so bright because I’m not there. Neither is anyone else I know, but it was so precious while it existed in my world, and now in my memory. I am glad that The Big Yellow House is so entrenched in my core, because it will never fade.
Because when the Big Yellow House goes, so do my memories of a lot of other people. This entry is for them, and starts with a conversation between Bryn and me regarding our “shared childhood.” Now that we’re older, we both think of each other as children back then. I was 19, so I think that makes her 14 or 15 when we met. She would remember. I can remember everything but her age. 😛
Saying Bryn’s name out loud because she’s one of the, like, three people I would entrust with this conversation at all. Anyone who knew I was talking about it with someone and cared could easily guess all three. That’s because neither of us are the main characters. We were the ones that snuck off to be bad girls.
She wasn’t quite old enough to be bad properly, and I was a computer geek. We just sat and talked, and increasingly listened to jam sessions that were mildly interesting as background music and right now I can think of at least five people who are going to read that sentence and hate my guts. And two who will absolutely fall on the floor laughing and go, “she went there.”
I was never into the banjo. I hated it. Just for the record, but no one asked me… whereas I would say that anyone who learned to play the banjo in The Big Yellow House was clearly trying to isolate me. I am certain that was on purpose (one of the only jokes I will make about my time in The Big Yellow House, because it’s a shame that I can’t. Not right now. Even a decade later, it’s still Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
It’s because I have love for some of the people I met there and still have on my friends list, and some others that are a memory. Still alive, certainly, but with no need or want on either side to reconnect. Actually, that is a lie. I do not know for certain about them. I know for certain about me. I am not willing to do anything to help things along in terms of getting closer. I am reaching out to the people at that house when I was there. I feel that my ramblings might give the impression that I mistook the part for the whole and was trying to say that everything was bad.
This series is a way to say thank you for the things that they gave me while I was also in hell. I haven’t forgotten it, and I don’t want to focus on darkness. I want to bring this into the light, because that’s where they brought me. I cannot regret coming to Portland, because I wouldn’t have wanted a chance to meet Dana and then blown it by not coming back.
I definitely would have met some of these people one time, but they would not have raised me the way that they did. I’m kinder because of them. I’m a better person because of them, even though they knew nothing about me.
For the record, some people believe that I am a liar and I am just crazy. I don’t believe that, but they do. I believe that I can express what I’m feeling better than at least half the world, so my faith in my sanity is fairly sound. However, in my tribe, no one is perfect. It’s just that the more of us there are, the more it’s likely that one of us is all right.
The Big Yellow House will look at my experiences in Portland through the lens of one particular backyard… with two particular young girls… and three particular puppy dogs (Bunce, then Barley, then Maisie in score order). We’ll look at history, both personal and American, interestingly enough. We’ll go to church, where I was basically the youth group (what’s new?). We’ll walk up 36th to Division, then 37th up to Hawthorne so we can go to trivia.
We’ll listen to Outpost at the Block Party. We’ll go to Le Pigeon. We’ll invade the kitchen at Tapalaya and drink at Biddy McGraw’s. But we’ll start with a prayer for ablution. Water is washing over me and my tears are stinging my face. We’ll start with 1997, just a snippet of a memory.
Alex
Alex was one of the first people I met in Oreon, predating the yellow house by quite a few years. She had my heart from day one when there was a party at The Little Gray House, and men were bothering her. She asked if she could be my girlfriend for a second to get them away from her. To know how funny this actually was, you’d have to know Alex and me. She’s a diva, the amazing kind that makes you pray to the voice gods before an audition that you don’t have to follow her. I’m short and I don’t like many people. Enough said about that except to say that “Odd Couple” moment made me think that maybe I had more than one friend in the neighborhood. Alex and her husband have blessed me many times over just by being them. I have told their story before, and was crying so hard in the middle of a Starbucks that my mother thought we should leave so I could calm down. I think she thought I needed Xanax, when in reality it was the best sermon I’ve ever heard, and I will put it up against anyone, anywhere, because the structure ENDS ME to this day. I am sobbing right now just thinking about it.
At Bridgeport, we divided the service up in to different duties. Instead of always having the pastor du jour (our word for having rotating preachers and an alarmingly deep bench- mostly brilliant lesbian preacher’s kids and ordained pastors kicked out of other churches,tbh… theological academician crack) do what we called “the offering pitch,” different people were asked (generally five minutes before… not planned, but useful because people will rarely say no if you don’t give them a chance to think about it).
Greg, Alex’s husband
I’m sorry. This is going to take a minute to get out because I know this story and you don’t. I cannot breathe all the way down, and this happened such a very long time ago. It’s a core memory that is one of my blue orbs hoping to find yellow and avoid red. My emotions are turning inside out.
I can remember about 10 years ago losing my everloving mind with grief as I relayed this story to my mother, where I wailed and she said we should leave Starbucks.
Greg walked to the front of the church and stood in front of the baptismal font. He pointed and he said, “this is where I was baptized.”
Then, he walked to the altar rail and looked toward the windows facing north, and he said, “And this is where I got married.”
This is the part where I am crying so hard I think my heart is going to break. I haven’t been back here in so long, and it was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened in our community. We will never get over it. We had to learn to live with it, our entire church life beginning back over at the Book of Acts, or as I call it, The Gospel of “Holy Shit, What Do We Do Now?”
Greg turned so he was standing behind the Communion table and he said, “this is where I buried my children.”
It was true. Greg and Alex lost their twins, Eleanor and Quinn, to a rare genetic disorder. They were only about two weeks old.
Today I learned that grief makes you cry out louder than you thought you could.
He used the resurrection of the Christ to show us how we resurrected ourselves. That the loss of his and Alex’s twins didn’t go unnoticed because it bonded us. Love poured out for them and back into us.
It was a sermon. And I remember it all. I am absolutely sobbing and it was almost 20 years ago.
The people who visited The Big Yellow House were often more important than its residents.
Over time, the color never faded. It just got brighter, especially with the telling of it. “A little brighter than it used to be” was “it BURNS” by dinner.
I assure you, the people who have also been there share this opinion. In fact, it seemed to shine more every year. As we got older, it got smarter. It remembered our secrets and our lies, told to each other in the dark summer nights filled with beer and conversation.
I was 19 when I met the church at the opera, 20 when I met the church that used to have green carpeting (and is still known that among my crowd… I’m 45), and 21 when I knew that these people were my life.
By 24, I was driving up I-5 feeling like I’d been punked. This had nothing to do with the Big Yellow House and everything to do with the fact that I’d only visited Oregon in the *summer.*
Stay tuned.
Put on blast
Forgetting an Attachment
It’s a double entendre, that title. Earlier today, I talked about fully letting go of Sam. Then, I forgot to add all the tags I normally add so that the readers that normally read me couldn’t find me….. like forgetting to attach a picture to an e-mail when basically all you’ve said in the e-mail is “here’s a picture” and still forgot to send it. Basically, I’m writing another entry to notify my readers that there’s a new entry. The writer reader relationship in the digital age. I hope we’re in love, otherwise this web site is me being Pepe Le Pew. I am not that desperate.
I was amused when I was in Facebook Jail that I watched two women fight over my picture. They weren’t fighting over the right to ask me out. They were fighting over whether kd lang was hotter than me. I didn’t pay attention to the outcome.
Fuck yes I did, are you kidding me? I flat out won. I knew I would. People have called me a better looking kd lang since I cut my hair short back in ’95. I don’t see it, but a hell of a lot of other people do. I think it’s the brown hair and brown eyes, but mostly that’s where it ends…… except that most lesbians my age have the same resting bitch face. Maybe we look like each other in that way that when you live with someone for a long time, people think your facial expressions look alike. Therefore, it’s not even that we look like each other. It’s because we’re from the same tribe.
When I was a kid it was straight person code for “I know you’re a lesbian.” That amused me to no end, and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of it. I also can’t think of a universe in which it’s a good idea to tell you which straight people have said it, but that’s the funniest part of all. God, it sucks to be you.
Now that kd isn’t popular broadly and straight people have lost interest, I don’t get it that often. But put me in a room where everyone and their pets have listened to all her music on repeat since college and I am begging to get away from the attention. A stroke to the ego never hurt anyone, but after a while it gets embarrassing. I love attention to bits, but I microdose.
I actually think that’s why I was always so bubbly whenever Sam was around, because I was alone the rest of the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t off doing my own thing and obsessing over her. It was that by the time she worked all day and put dinner on the table for the week, enough time had gone by that my social battery was recharged. I think it would have been a big shock for her to spend a long time with me to know that I am not bubbly in the slightest. The one thing that would never have changed, and hundreds of people will attest to this because they saw it with Dana for eight years, is the energy for me when Sam walked into a room. Time would just stop.
I had been married to Dana for four years before the accompanist at our church knew we were a couple. This is because Dana wasn’t a singer, and I drove myself to church so that I could sing and she could sleep in. When she walked into the sanctuary, all the joy rushed into my face, and it got warm. The accompanist said she just assumed that Dana and I must not be that close because I was always so happy to see her.
Quite the opposite. When we’d been best friends for three and a half years, we’d learned to talk with our eyes. She was everything I’d ever wanted and more. Neither one of us could breathe and not have the other one feel it. I didn’t tell her for a long time, because I knew I would be playing with fire. That I could destroy the most stable relationship in my life by losing myself to her, even if I was supposed to because relationships are all about compromise.
Our relationship did end, and it was traumatic. But I would go back in time and do it all over, knowing it either could or would end the same way. There are lessons I learned from Dana that she was there to teach me, because she’s the one in my life I felt was capable of doing so. Cooking was an authority I let her own. If we were in a professional kitchen, it was “yes, Chef.” Of course there were a couple of exceptions. Of course there were. But by and large, we were a dynamic team who could turn on a dime because when seconds counted, we could say things with a look. We could anticipate each other’s movements, because we had done it day in and day out for years at our house without missing a beat. It didn’t matter how a pro kitchen was laid out. Improvisation was our forte….. because Dana was loud. (I can’t wait until she sees that line and I hope it lights up her face.)
I didn’t just want any woman, I wanted Dana. It was obvious to everyone from the start, and our relationship lived on hope for quite a while in each of our minds, not knowing exactly how much platonic love had made room for romance while the other one dreamt.
I could have asked her so many times when we were alone, but I did not want to set the ball rolling on an affair, because that’s something that would have changed me and taken me away from who I was. No, if I was going to risk everything, I had to be sure.
I did and I won big. Just Kings full over Aces. To be clear, we did have an affair. We admitted our feelings to each other, and eight hours later, we told the people we were in relationships that we loved them, but that we were too close to each other to make it work with them anymore. They were unsurprised by this knowledge, and yet I apologize for the enormous amount of time it took for me to make my decision, literally and metaphorically. I’d cheated on my then girlfriend for eight hours, but I’d been leaning more on Dana for emotional support than anyone I’d dated for YEARS at that point. The clue phone was stalking me obsessively and I wasn’t picking up. Thank God I eventually did.
It took me two years to get it together, and eight hours for my life to absolutely fall apart. It was traumatic and painful for a higher purpose. We were both in relationships that were just fine. We could have been happy for a lifetime with them, but it wouldn’t be the fit we had. We weren’t breaking up with our significant others because there was anything wrong with them. Tokyo and Los Angeles are both beautiful cities but you’ll be miserable if your partner never wanted to come on the trip.
It wasn’t that they were wrong. They were wrong for us. We wanted cherry blossoms and strong matcha. They wanted Milk Bar.
Dana and I wanted an attachment we’d never forget, and that has been true. It was worth it to find the love of my life for a short time than never to have experienced a love like that at all. I reached out for fantastic, and I found it.
There’s one picture I love of Dana at my sister’s engagement celebration brunch at Brennan’s in Houston. She’s wearing a fabulous outfit, shoes, and jewelry that we spent the day shopping for, just giggling and laughing like we invented it. We’re at one end of the table smiling, and my mother is on the other….. also smiling. At the time, it was my favorite picture we took to display in our house.
Now, it is a beautiful artistic representation of what marriage looks like for me now….. my wife and I on one end of the table smiling, and my mother on the other.
It’s a shame I forgot the attachment.
Put on blast
Salt
One of the things that Sam and I joked about was being polyamorous because she knows I’m dating Rachel Maddow in my head, but Susan is her primary. 😛 And then I told her that I was also dating Helen Mirren. Obviously, I have a very busy inner life and Google Calendar.
My very busy inner life made me happy yesterday, because I laid out everything that was going on with me and why, and my stats boomed. I don’t want to tell you exactly how many because I don’t want to scare Sam by telling her just how many people think she’s an idiot. The 20 shares the post got should give her an indication. I have entries where thousands of people have read them, and yet not one person shared it.
I am enjoying this moment of schadenfreude, but not because I am being vindictive. Quite the opposite. I’m feeling better about myself in a way that is completely separate from anyone I’ve ever dated, not just the last one. When Sam walked out, it only ended a future that didn’t happen. I’m not upset anymore. A three week relationship isn’t worth crying over any longer than necessary. I just don’t know how I feel about a relationship for me anymore.
Maybe I’ll just date people until I die because I am too emotionally intense to limit my emotions to one person. They run so deep it’s scary for both of us. For instance, I told Sam once that even when she’s not with me, she doesn’t leave the room…. and it was so true then that it hurts to remember. But it’s true. Once she got under my skin, I wanted her there in some capacity for life. Married, friends, whatever. That part didn’t matter. I just liked her. Period. I thought she was a good person, and I was wrong, at least in how she treated me. I’m sure she’s wonderful to other people, I just never became her priority. I wasn’t someone that she would do anything for, much less end our relationship in person. I didn’t think of her as my girlfriend, I was more casual than that. But that’s not the message she took home. The message she took home was that I was falling in love with her too fast…. when in reality I was furious that she trashed our potential, not anything we’d already done. I saw pictures of our future and thought, “I want that.” At no time did I say, “I want that tomorrow,” or even a couple of years from now. I thought I didn’t have to worry about all that stuff until her 15-year-old graduated from high school.
I was certainly infatuated, drunk on the spirit of attraction. I also loved her platonically in a way that said, “I’m ok with just being your person. If you need something, call. There is no time in this life where I will not pick up the phone if it’s you.” For Sam, I think she underestimated philia and overestimated eros. Philia is the love that gets ignored. If we lose a friend, it’s not an acceptable form of grief…… even though it happens ALL THE TIME. Love is such a confusing word in English. It should be all Greek to me.
The thing I keep ruminating over is timing. Sam could have asked me to be exclusive so much earlier, and even when I was on said date, she never left me…. even after she broke up with me and I had to try like hell not to lose my shit over a girl when I was supposed to be on a date with someone else. It was so embarrassing. Just one of those “I hope the earth swallows me up” moments.
The other thing that really irritates me is that we had plans for dinner on Monday. When she broke up with me, I said, “I asked you if we could talk about this later and you break up with me?” She said that Monday was too far away. The longer I think about it, the funnier it gets. It’s so easy to be amused by the youngest of four, because I’m the oldest of four and she fucked around and found out. Don’t come at me with your bullshit, you’ll just be windmilling your arms while I have my hand on your forehead.
And by the way, I apologize for sounding like an asshole yesterday by seemingly giving conjecture about Sam being a miserable walking disaster as if I needed it to make myself feel better. I don’t. I just forgot to say that one of her last texts to me was “I’ve been crying for two days, I have a killer headache, and a bloody nose. And none of that matters.” It was unbelievable. Her audacity struck me dumb. You’d rather cry over me than tell me what’s wrong? You can’t wait to sit down together and use your words like a grown-up? Her impatience and jealousy got the better of her. Once you set up a bad pattern, you never get back out of it.
That’s what convinced me to go no contact, not that I thought she was actually going to rush right over and apologize. She sent me an apology text, and that’s like, the same. As my friend Michael said, “it was the reaction of an 18-year-old boy.” I don’t date children.
Stories That Are All True 