FreeCell 26 July 1998

I keep composing and decomposing letters and email and casual stilettos of conversation in my head, have since last night really. Fighting it with distractions isn't working, LandLord knows I've tried - novels, sleep, mailing list thrashes, solitaire, bean dip, no matter what the little words keep reforming.

I've been sitting here just now trying to do everything except write this. But I know - from vast and stupid personal experience - that sending out bitter messages and unanswerable questions would do nothing but make it all worse. If I don't talk about this to someone, though, that's what's going to happen. So here I am.

Here's the poorly-thought-out deal. There's a bar near where I live now. I've been going there more and less steadily (and leaving even less so) for about ... god, four years now. At first I lived further away, but it was a place where people from SFNet - a BBS that had coin-operated computer tables in the cafes in the city - would hang out. I can still remember how shocking and ever so criminal I felt the first time that we had been there until closing *every night of a whole weekend*! Heh. Now it's almost the other way around.

In any case, now I live closer, and I know the owner and the staff, and SFNet has vanished in the Internet sea but it's become just my neighborhood bar. No big deal, a place to go where the music is louder than I can get away with in this apartment, the beer is on tap, and someone else cleans up at the end of the night. A nice place to sit and read the paper to round out the day.

Anna works there. We got to know each other just by talking, and very gradually realized that these were becoming much more interesting conversations than the usual mill. And damn if that didn't make the other person start to seem interesting too. I started to develop something of a crush on her; to my complete amazement, she did on me as well. Sort of.

Now everything implied in those two little words has played itself out, and I'm living in the debris. I asked her the other day if she wasn't talking to me these days because she just didn't want to, or because she thought I didn't want to talk to her. She said that she thought I was the one who didn't want to hear from her, and though I haven't really said so, she took the fact of asking to imply that that wasn't the case. Which it's not. Mostly. Sort of.

Because I'm still there and she's still there and maybe we're exchanging small talk, but mostly she's still hanging out with Mitch and I'm here, crush damaged and delusional but still somehow intact, and I'm trying to figure out why, exactly. Why the person who said, nothing personal but I'm not looking for a relationship, has exchanged for another person and from all appearances gotten right into one of those R things. And that's a dumb question, because, duh, people are wrong sometimes, or they rethink, or they don't even know. But I still want an answer.

See, even more than the general sense of having been the inferior model that got traded in, what's making me so sad about all of it is the why, and that it's just a taste of what's to come. Because I know that part of what happened - whether small or large - is that ... ah, no good way to put this. The sex was not so good. Mostly because of me. Because I was unable. And yes, it was usually after drinking too much and all of that, and the circumstances confined the possible experiences, but even so. I don't know, maybe this sounds trivial or pitiful or typical or whatever. But, time isn't going to go backwards, and this kind of problem is just going to get worse.

And what I keep thinking is that this half-assed brief encounter was it. The last one. It's too entirely plausible. I'm not a very social person anyways, mostly I only know the people I work with, and I'm something of a doddering old fart compared to most of them. I've seen it myself, something about how men in this country are socialized - or not socialized - makes it all too easy for them to just quietly slip into the background and away...

So I sit there, getting drunk which does not help a sentimental inclination at all, and I see Anna, and I see my future, and I'm not there. And all the fine work trying to persuade myself to get into shape and be comfortable with my own company and BLA bla bla, it's just hollow noise compared to that absence. Time's gone too fast, and it's going to take too long.

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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