Wednesday, October 31, 2001

I signed for that National November Writing Month challenge. You have to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which people have calculated to be 1,666 words a day. Every three days you should have completed 5,000 words. It starts tomorrow on November 1 and ends on November 30.

I decided to work on the Following in the Dark novel, only because I've been kicking around this novel idea since 1998 and haven't ever written anything for it except a few odd lines here and there. I'm going to start it from scratch and just keep writing and hopefully I'll get 50,000 words of it completed. I think it might be longer than 50,000 words but who knows.

God, I'm nervous. I dont' know if I can do this but I feel compelled to do it just so I can start writing my novel instead of just talking about writing it. I don't think I can even hand write it because I don't really have time to type. I've been thinking I need to buy a little baby laptop but I can't decide what kind to get. I'd get a real laptop if I could get more than a 2 hour battery usage time, but the technology isn't there yet. Those baby laptops have at least an 8 hour battery life span and they're so small you can bring them anywhere and type.

I am looking forward to doing this writing challenge and whatever happens, at least I'll have my novel started.

Sunday, October 28, 2001

I saw a preview of the musical version of James Joyce's 'The Dead" yesterday. I am an avid theatre goer, attending at least over a dozen plays a year. This new play is very good. I rarely cry at theatre performances. The actors have to really be very good to get me to cry and I teared up at least three times in this play. Part of me wonders if I am still emotinally raw because of September 11. I don't know and I'm not sure I'll ever know. It's just very unusual for me to cry at theatre.

I was surprised by how touching this play was and I am tempted to reread Joyce's short story. There were some very raw moments in this play. And by raw moments I mean, moments that are so true to emotion that it's almost embarrassing to watch. Very few playwrights show how life as how it really is sometimes; so painful that it sometimes feel like you got decked right in your stomach, where you hysterical and unreasonable, where afterwards you sit and wonder how you could have acted that way. And the actors let us see it all.

When I tear up at a play, for me it's a combination of great playwriting and a very good performance. I don't believe you can have one without the other.

Other thoughts floating through my mind. I've been watching TV sports today. When I was into my tennis craze in junior hight and practicing my strokes in front of a mirror, I thought Jimmy Connors was so cute. I was flipping channels and he was playing a match with John McEnroe. And much to my surprise, I thought he was still cute. I felt like I was 13 again for the briefest of second. Speaking of boys, Jim Haslett also looks very good looking to me. He reminds me of this guy that I dated in 1999 with his reddish blonde hair and soft voice and every time I see him, I think cute.

I've also been watching the baseball games and I've decided that Kurt Schilling is also very cute in teddy bear kind of way. I also like his story of how he came back and has become the great pitcher he is today. My A's have lost and now the Yankees are playing the Diamondbacks. My best friend from NYC says I should be rooting for the Yankees to win since it would be good for a city that will be mourning for a very long time. I like the Diamondbacks. I don't like them when they're playing the Giants because I am also Giants fan, just because I live her in SF. But for the world series, I like the Diamondbacks. I think they're a very good team, much better than the Yankees on paper. But you can't count the Yankees out just yet. They have so much experience playing in the post season, but it would be nice to have another team win the world series this year.

Thursday, October 25, 2001

I really want to rewrite my Hot Day in Dallas story over and I'm thinking that a four part flash fiction story might work. Four parts to the story, all written in 2000 words or less or 1000, I think the more concise the scene is the better, so it would be like images on
on top of the other, but still creating a story.

No title yet but I've got subtitles for the four parts.

1) Right Between the Eyes - January
2) Reality - April
3) Expectations - August
4) Past History – March

Here's a few lines I wrote part 1.

***********************************
Right Between the Eyes - January

I got to know him before I ever met him through that wonderful modern invention called email. In my estimation, he was smart. His emails were always grammatically correct, worded correctly and polite, so polite. Each time I asked him a question he always had an answer that sounded good, even though I knew that he was sometimes totally full of it. If you were going to be totally fully of it, I think you should at least sound like you know what you’re talking about. Sometimes attitude is everything, even in an email. And Marshall definitely wrote like he had an attitude.

He was in my Dallas office and to me he was a new species of person. I didn’t know anyone from Texas, let alone a Texas male. My head was full of images of cowboys, Lee Harvey Oswald, LBJ, and George Bush Sr. I could imagine him wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat, tight jeans and rattlesnake skin cowboy boots. I pictured him tall with a handlebar mustache or some kind of facial hair. He’d like his women busty with big blonde hairsprayed to death hair, a big toothy grin and the IQ of a loyal puppy dog. He'd walk with a swagger and be bow-legged like he'd spent all his life on horse. I couldn't wait to meet my walking and breathing stereotype.

***********************************

My asian art history class went on a field trip to the Asian Art History Museum in Golden Gate Park before it closed. For our assignment, we were supposed to pick out a piece of artwork we liked and then write a diary entry of two or more pages double spaced from either the point of view of the artist creating the artwork or the point of view of a viewer at the time when the artwork was created.

This was a fun story to write, even though it was an assignment. The name of the artwork is the title of the piece.

Lintel – Reddish sandstone, Angkor Wat or early Bayon period – 12th Century CE Cambodia

Today the art school faculty is reviewing my work. I worked long and hard on my masterpiece and if I am lucky, they will choose my lintel for one of the great temples. Perhaps they may even use it at the great temple Angkor Wat. Although we are far away from the capital and north of the Dangrek Mountains, many works from our school are on temple walls. If they pick my lintel, I will be able to leave the school and apply to work at one of the great temples to be a full time stone carver. To be a temple stone carver at the age of 25 is unheard of, but I am confident of my own abilities. My father would be proud to have a son who is a stone carver, since I am the only son who does not own farm the land. I have dreamt of being a temple stone carver all my life and this lintel is my masterpiece.

I spent many months carving out the sandstone and even more months picking out what story from the Ramayana to depict. My mother told me many stories in my youth of the great monkey king Hanuman and his exploits and he is my favorite god and hero. Hanuman had to be on my lintel.

Reading the Ramayana repeatedly, I decided my favorite scene was the one with Kumbharkarna, evil King Ravana’s brother and King Hanuman. In this scene Kumbharkarna the demon, who is also called “Jug Ears because of his giant ears, is surrounded by Hanuman’s fighting monkey soldiers. The evil god cannot escape and he swallows two of the monkey soldiers but they escape out of his giant ears. I prayed nightly to Hanuman for inspiration and blessings and I hope I have captured the great Monkey King’s bravery and spirit.

In my design, I placed King Hanuman on the right side of the stone since I wanted to show him commanding his army. On his head, I gave him a crown, not a fancy crown, but a simple battle crown. I depicted Hanuman and his monkey soldiers wearing battle dhotis and necklaces of round beads. To show my prowess with stone carving, I carved each monkey’s dhoti with parallel lines. To carve such detail is difficult and I spent many days on these dhotis.

I gave the monkeys a uniform war bib in the shape of the letter ‘V’. On each bib, I carved circles to match the round beads of their necklaces, knowing my art teachers will appreciate the repetition of the circle forms.

I repeated the round curves with the serpentine arm and leg shapes of the monkey legion. I carved the monkeys bodies to be curving like a vine and if you step back from the piece, you can see their curvilinear shape and how they almost entwine.

I placed Kumbharkarna on the left directly opposite Hanuman and dressed him in ceremonial clothes for two reasons. One, Kumbharkarna is a king and should be attired as such and two, I wanted to show the demon god dressed in fancy clothes to reflect his arrogance and disregard for the power of Hanuman’s army. I carved Kumbharkarna‘s dhoti with many more parallel lines than the simple battle dhotis worn by the monkeys. I also gave Kumbharkarna a more intricately carved crown than Hanuman. Again, I liked the contrast between the two kings; Hanuman wearing a simple battle crown and the arrogant Kumbharkarna wearing a ceremonial crown, showing how he thought he could easily defeat his monkey foes with little or no effort. Kumbharkarna is also wearing ceremonial jewelry, which repeats his misplaced confidence in his ability to defeat Hanuman, not to mention my stone carving abilities.

I carved the figure of Kumbharkarna to almost the height of the stone to show the difference in size between him and the monkey legion. It looks very dramatic to see the giant King Kumbharkarna surrounded and immobilized by the monkeys who are as only as short as his leg. I also made Kumbharkarna very wide to further emphasize the size discrepancy between him and the monkeys.

Stepping back yesterday after I finished to admire my own art, I marveled at how the monkeys were so uniform in size and shape. I carved the stone down so the figures stick out from the flat surface. The monkeys look alive, almost three-dimensional. Their arms and legs are round and life like; it looks like someone placed the monkeys sideways in the stone.

I am nervous. I think my art is good but is it good enough for a temple. I don’t know. Praying at my shrine to Hanuman, I asked him to bless my lintel. I also prayed to the great god Vishnu to grant me his favors today. It will be up to the art faculty to decide whether I have captured the spirit of this Ramayana scene.

Wednesday, October 24, 2001

My friend Judy's dad died last Wednesday. They discovered an inoperable brain tumor in mid August. The familiy knew he didn't have long to live, but I think they thought he would last until early next year. Brain tumors are like that; quick and painless. Judy's dad died in his sleep.

My ex mother-in-law, whom I dearly loved, died like that. Brain tumor diagnosis one day and three months later she was gone. Even the doctors at Stanford couldn't do a thing for her. Poor Lou.

She asked my ex-husband about me, you know. Asked my ex in her last dying days, about me and about how I was. Lou even told me ex how much she loved me. She was a great mom-in-law. I was really touched by her gesture, since I hadn't seen in her in five years.

The last time I saw Judy's dad, we were in Vermont and watching Monday Night football. He was a big New England Patriots fan and was lamenting about his team. He had gone up the day before to Canada to buy Molson beer and we were drinking beer, talking about football and watching the game. He was such a sweet man. Sort of high handed in his own way, but then I think all old dads are high handed. And boy did he love his Big Band music, the music of his youth Judy said.

Losing a parent is so hard, even though you're expecting them to die. My dad was in the hospital for two years before he finally moved on. Towards the end, I couldn't even go and see him. He was wasting away to nothing, paralyzed from the waist down and in pain, and just getting sicker and more depressed as the two years wore on. My family was relieved when he finally left since he was depressed and in pain, but it was still hard, very hard.
My friend Patti, from my writing group, is into writing flash fiction. I had to write one page story for a writing class I was in during the Fall 2000, so I think this qualifies as flash fiction.

Flash Fiction – Maggie and The Crying Freeman

It's late she thought, looking at her watch, almost midnight. Maggie stared at her notes again to see if there was anything she might have overlooked. Five killings were done assassin style. The victims were all males, between the ages of 30 and 50, found in dumpsters in the Mission district in San Francisco with their hands and feet tied and a note pinned to their chest which read, "The people have spoken and made their judgment. The accused has been punished in the manner befitting the crime". The note was signed "The Crying Freeman" and under the signature the killer had drawn tears as if he was sorry for the killing. Each victim was shot in the head at close range from behind. Each man had been wearing an expensive suit, had carried a briefcase, laptop, PDA and a cellphone. Each had held a top position at their respective dot com companies and they all lived in the mission.

Other than that, there was no apparent connection between each man. Maggie put her pen down and stared out of her hotel window gazing at the lights of the city flickering in the darkness. The Crying Freeman was a comic book character she’d found out. However, the murders were nothing like the comic books. If this was a copycat murder, she mused, then the assassin would use the same killing metho, but he didn't. Maggie leaned her head back and closed her eyes and thought about all the murders she had helped solved over her twenty-five year career as private investigator; not one resembled this case. She thought about the young kid she had interviewed at the comic book store. The killer must be a regular at the comic bookstore she thought and wrote a note to herself to question the employees again.

Suddenly there was a loud knock at the door. Maggie started and looked at the clock wondering who it could be at this late hour. She stood up, went over to her bag on the bed, and got out her gun. She looked through the chambers making sure it was loaded and then put the gun in the holster at her side. She put her jacket on and then went to the door and opened it.

"Maggie, Hi, I’m Oscar, the guy you interviewed today at Al's Comic Books."

"Oh yeah, hi, how are you?" Maggie wondered why he was here.

"Good. Listen, I know it's late, but you told me to come by your hotel if I remember anything and I have. Can I come in?" Maggie looked at the kid again. He wasn't a kid actually, she thought and guessed his age to about late 20's. There was something very sweet and eager about him.

"Sure come in" she said, "I was just go over my notes again." Maggie closed the door, undid the chain, opened the door again and gestured for Oscar to come in. She saw the kid's eyes look around the room and widen as he walked in. Her room was a big suite with a desk and a living room.

"Why don't we sit on the couch and you can tell me what you remembered", Maggie said walking over to the sofa and noticed out of the corner of her eye, Oscar fumbling for something in his jacket. She turned around and put her hand on her gun under her jacket, watching him. All of a sudden, the hair on her neck started rising. She caught a brief glimpse of the gun in his hand.

Maggie pulled her own gun out and yelled, "Drop it", cocking her gun. Oscar started for a second but didn't drop his gun.

"I said drop the gun or I'll shoot", Maggie yelled. Oscar stared at her and the gun. Maggie saw a tears roll down Oscar's cheek and thought to herself that he wasn't prepared for her having a gun and that she had caught him off guard.

"Why are you doing this?" Maggie asked, "Who the hell are you?" There was a long silence in the room.

"I said, who the hell are you.”

"I am the Crying Freeman," he said simply. Oscar lifted his gun and before Maggie could shoot, he shot himself in the mouth.

Dropping her hands to her side, Maggie wiped her brow. She felt her hands clammy with sweat and noticed that her blouse was also wet. She saw a small book that must have fallen out of his jacket. Maggie reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the rubber gloves she always carried with her, and put them on. Then she bent down, picked up the book, and flipped through the pages. There was a page for each victim, with their names, what comic books they bought, where they worked, where they lived, how they looked. They were all comic book shop customers she thought, that's the connection.

She saw another page. It read, "I am the Crying Freeman. It is my duty to rid San Francisco of those people who are responsible for its demise. I have been ordered to kill all those work in dot com companies." Maggie shook her head, went over to the phone called the police.


Tuesday, October 23, 2001

God, all this talk about anthrax. Who knows what to believe? I feel like I'm listening to the Y2K doomsayers again and Y2K never happend. People are so paranoid right now, even the experts. They're saying that these early cases of anthrax are just test cases and that we can expect a mass attack. Why do they do this? It's scary!!! They're talking about spraying biological and chemical weapons on money, on food, in our water supply, etc.

Whoever is doing this, I think they are very serious. But I believe in karma and it's really, really bad karma what they're doing and I think karma will take care of these people down the road. But until down the road comes, I'm afraid of what will happen to me, to my family and friends and to my country.

I honestly don't know what to believe. I'm listening to a guy who's scaring me about biological and chemical weapons and in the same breath, he's hawking his book about biological terror for $20. There's something not right about that somehow.

Thursday, October 18, 2001

Here's a first draft, mistakes and all, of my "Crazy Eddie" story. I have 14 handwritten pages more of this story but they're not typed up yet.

I came here to his barren place, to shed any sense of normalcy I had left. That’s what happens I’ve read, when you’re in a traumatic event, they say you lose any sense of your life, your routine. And since I’m the kind of person, who likes to take things to their logical conclusion, although in this case, it seems, their logical extreme, I packed up, put all my stuff in storage, bought a camper and came here. I like the dessert, I always have. There is no one out here but sand, cactus and nocturnal animals, especially in the summer when the temperature goes up over a 100 degrees. The guy at the ranger station gave me a strange look when I bought my camping permit and warned me about the heat of the dessert. I smiled and told him I grew up in this area and I liked the heat. He smiled and shook his head and handed over the permit. He was right about the heat though. It is hot here. Most times I stay in my camper and it feels like I’m in an oven and I’m roasting. I sit with the window open and fan myself. Some days I just have to sit there and not move, because even fanning myself makes me sweat. At night it gets so cold and then I feel like I’m sitting in an icebox. I try not to turn on the heat or any use any electricity so I can conserve my energy supplies. The less supplies I use, the less frequently I have to go into town for supplies. I am so into my own isolation I don’t even like seeing or hearing other people. Every night I lie in my bed with all my blankets on and wearing every single piece of clothing I own and still I’m cold. It’s hard to sleep when you’re cold. Not that it matters, I can’t sleep anyway so I don’t really mind. I’m afraid to sleep. Every time I doze off the memories start – the sounds, the smells – they call, come back and I have to relive the whole thing again, like it wasn’t bad enough the first time. I can still see him lying there – smell the liquor that seemed to always be oozing out of his pores. He always smelled like stale cigarettes and cheap booze, that sickening stench you smell when you first walk into bars. He was lying there in that unnatural position, all sprawled on the floor, spread eagle, lying in his own pool of blood. God only knows how long he was in that position. I didn’t come home that night till really late and that’s how I found him. I don’t remember much after that. I was told by the cops that my next door neighbor called them when she heard me screaming over and over again. When they got there fifteen minutes later, I was still screaming. They tried to get me to stop but I wouldn’t. Finally one of them slapped me real hard and only then did I stop screaming. Then they said I fainted from the shock. Next thing I know I’m sitting in a hospital bed and it’s three days later. The cops came and interviewed me later and asked me if I remembered anything. I told them what I saw when I came in. Then they asked me if I knew about my boyfriend’s gambling debts and I said I knew he gambled at the bar but that was all I knew. The cops told me that my boyfriend Eddie, good old Eddie, had over $50,000 in gambling debts and when he couldn’t pay, they decided that they would teach him a lesson and kill him. Some lesson. I knew Eddie was trouble but I didn’t know he was that much trouble. Since it’s too hot to do anything during the day, I sit in my chair and I go over how we met in my head, over and over again. Like I’m trying to find the key to a door that might unlock why we even started going out.

I met Eddie on a Monday night. I was in my favorite bar having a drink at 10 pm when Eddie walked in. I don’t usually drink on Monday nights but I had a hard day at work. I was at work till 8 pm that night, helping my boss with her presentation that he waited to do till the last minute. I hate when he does that, waiting to prepare a presentation till the night before. You’d think I get used to it by now, since it’s been his pattern for the last two years, but I still keep thinking he might one day do something a little different. Fat chance. So there I am sitting at the bar having a conversation with Mark the bartender and Jeanne, a woman I had met the bar on a different occasion. I was a regular at that bar. I wasn’t exactly a resident, not like some of the people there, but I guess I was there often enough. Next thing I know this guy sits down at the empty bar stool next to me and joins our conversation. I took one look at him and I could feel myself licking my chops inside. The man was gorgeous. He had wavy dark blonde hair, hazel green eyes and a cute mustache and goatee. Everything about him screamed either construction worker or some other kind of manual laborer. I had a flashback of a coworker’s construction worker pinup calendar and I knew I was lost forever. I had never dated a guy like that before. Some of my friends had dated blue-collar type workers and I remember them saying they liked it. Not for very long, but they liked dating them.

Now Eddie wasn’t the most intelligent guy I had ever met in my life, but he could hold his own in a conversation, if you didn’t get too deep. Eddie had a lot of opinions on many things and he watched the news. Eddie was an electrician and it was interesting to hear him talk about all the things he could install. The rest of the night went by in a blur to me. Eddie sitting there, smoking and drinking screwdrivers, and me smoking and drinking light beer. We managed to talk all night till the bar closed, about what, I don’t remember. And then I remember Eddie driving me home, which was kind of funny since I only lived three blocks from the bar and it was a safe neighborhood. But Eddie insisted, and I found myself giving in. I must have really had a lot to drink that night because my next memory is of Eddie and me groping each other in my hallway and tearing each other’s clothes off. That was two years ago. Six months after that Eddie moved in. I didn’t want him to move in, but he insisted and I gave in again. I can’t stand when a man nags me, and Eddie was a constant nagger when he wanted something. Most of the time I just give in so I don’t have to hear the nagging.

I don’t know why I have go over and over again in my mind how Eddie and I met. I dated Eddie because he looked good period. He looked like he was out of a male pinup calendar and I never dated anyone that looked that good before. Eddie had other qualities but his looks were his best quality. There wasn’t anything that strange about him. So he drank a lot, so did I. He was kind of secretive about his life and his stuff, but not in a bad way. He was just secretive. And sometimes I think I didn’t care to know what his past was like. Some days it was enough for me that we had great sex, that I liked to watch him walk around my apartment naked and that I liked the fact that he fixed things around the house. I never saw Eddie as anything permanent and I don’t think he saw me as the love of his life. He told me he wanted to marry me, but Eddie told me a lot of things he wanted to do and never did. I knew Eddie gambled. He told me but he said it was just a hobby, not anything serious.

I keep thinking to myself there must have been something about Eddie’s behavior that should have been a tip off that one day I would find him lying in a pool of blood in my apartment, but I can’t find what that tip off was.
I am currently working on a story that I'm calling "Crazy Eddie". It's about a woman who comes home to find her boyfriend shot dead and lying in a pool of blood in their apartment. The story is told from the woman's point of view and tells her story, how she met the guy, what their life was life and what happens after she discovers her boyfriend's body.

It's an odd story but I'm kind of into writing it. I have no idea what is going to happen at the end of the story. Right now she's living in a camper in the Joshua Tree National Park, near LA, alone and drinking and going over and over in her head the murder, her life, Eddie and her life with Eddie. To her, Eddie was a little crazy but in a good way. He drank too much, gambled at the horse track more than he should have and didn't have a steady job. But, he loved her and in his own way took care of her and supported her.

Sometimes I wonder who the crazy person in the relationship is? The one who's doing all the wrong things or the one who is with the person doing all the wrong things. All the people who write biographies about married couples say that you can never tell what's going in a relationship between two people from outside of the relationship. Only the two people actually in the relationship know what's going on and they couldn't explain to someone else, let alone themselves. The biographers say all marriages and for that matter, any relationship btween two people, is complicated. People hook up together and consequently stay together for all sorts of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with love. I've also read somewhere that people decide to be in a relationshp on the basis of 1) opportunity and 2) incentive.

My female character thinks the key to understanding her dilemna is to understand all that's come before. She believes in the existence of a "magical key" that will unlook the door to answers about Eddie and their life together.

I'm not sure if she'll find the key yet. I have to keep writing the story to find out. I hope she finds the "key" to her life. Wouldn't it be great if we all could find the "key" to our lives?

I'm not sure there is a key though. I'm not sure certain events and experiences can ever be explaind properly. Some events just happen in one's life and there's no rhyme or reason for it and certainly no keyl

Monday, October 15, 2001

I ran into someone from my past while getting coffee on Sunday. It's been about 10 years since I've seen him and I was shocked by how he had aged. Gone was the strapping young enthusiastic happy canadian boy in his 20's and in his place was an older, greying around the temples somewhat bitter and tired older man.

Running into him, I wonder if I have aged as much as he has. I can't tell. Too me I look almost exactly the same, maybe a lot heavier, a little more wrinkled, but still the same. And I am more secure, more confident and happier than I was when I met this young man, so for me aging has been good in some ways. Not that I like aging. I hate it and I fight it every step of the way and spend way too much on time and money on ways to hold back the clock. But other than the physical ravages of aging, emotionally, intellectually, psychically, psychologically I feel so much better than I did in my youth.

Sometimes in unexpected moments, I mourn my past, but those times are few, so as not to even occur as an exclamation point in any moment of my life.

After we had parted, I wished that I could meld my personality back then to my personality now. I was so different in my 20's than I am now. I can't even tell if anything of me back then has survived, although I'm sure something has. I want the best of both worlds, but I don't know if that's possible anymore.

I was in a seminar where the leader said we live in an "either or" world. We're either this or that. He said that this either or thinking is just a mental construct and that we can live live in "and" world. We can be this and that and everything in between. I used to believe him, at least for the time, when I was in that seminar. But now, I'm not so sure. Can I still be who I was in my 20's and still be who I am in my 30's? Is there a compromise somewhere? I guess I shall have to find out.

Friday, October 12, 2001

So much as happened since my last post, which coincidentally were two days before the WTC/Pentagon attacks. I not only had to deal with the terror and fear the September 11 incidents engendered, but my best friend Amy had a relapse in her brain cancer and was put into a nursing home. Twin tragedies for me, like the twin World Trade Center Towers in flame.

I suppose I shall write about it more sometime, but right now I'm still in processing mode.

They say disasters come in three or is it pairs? I'm not really sure which. But here's a semi-disaster. I tracked my first love down on the Internet. On a whim, I typed his name into Google and found the website for a film production company he just started. I also found a review of some commercial/industrials films he produced and they said he was brilliant and cutting edge. There was a picture of him and he looked exactly the same as I remembered him. He doesn't look like he's aged at all. I don't why I consider this a semi-disaster, but somehow I do. Part of me really wants to get in touch with him and reconnect and the other part says now. I mean, do I really want to hear what a great life he's having, do I want to see a picture of wife and kids? For me, maybe it's enough to just know that he's alive and doing well. I don't know.

Then there's that small part of me that say the past is dust and besides, he was the one who walked out on me, walked out on our friendship, hung up on me after I told him I was living with a man, much to my surprise since by that point in our relationship we were nothing more than very, very good friends.

Men keep saying they don't understand women, well as a woman, I don't understand men or anyone who would walk out without explanation on a deep love and friendship. As you can tell, I still haven't quite gotten over his walking out on me. I want to get over it but to get over it, I have to understand it and I don't understand it all. I have a half written play about what would happen if were to meet years later by accident. I thought that I wrote about us meeting, I could speculate on why he walked out on me. That play was hard to finish because I wanted to write what was true, but I don't think I'll ever find out the truth.

And do you know what is the most absurd bit in this whole situation? He probably doesn't even remembe what happened. The incident doesn't even occur as a miniscule blip on his consciousness. Whereas in my life, I have speculated on it off and on, obsessed, paid thousands of dollars worth in therapy and group work to try and figure it out and I still haven't come to an explanation that makes sense.

My friends tell me that love doesn't make sense, that love can turn bitter, can turn into hatred and make people do mean things in the name of love. And I guess that's the part I don't understand. Love is supposed to expand you, to make you want to do good things, at least that's what it's done for me. It's never made me that mean, perhaps cruel for a few minutes but never mean. I've never said or did anything I couldn't take back. In fact, I've been accused of holding back my punches in the name of love. I've never wanted my love to hurt people, at least not consciously.

Speaking of love, many of my friends have an urge to merge, to couple, to want to have children. I've had the opposite reaction. I have, for the time being, lost my urge to couple and to have children. If my city is ever attacked, I think I will do better by myself because I know how to do that. I don't how to survive in a couple. And as for children, I don't know if I want to bring children into the world right now.

What future would a child of mine to have? I support our government's current response to terrorism. I don't think we were left with a choice. Whether we attacked or not, we still would have been attacked. The Taliban left us with very few choices. The problem is this war will take a long time, longer than four years, maybe even longer than eight years, no one knows. All I know is we will all be living with this war for a very long time and I just don't know if I want to bring children into this kind of world.

Speaking of the war, the peaceniks bug me, only because they complain about our government's actions but don't offer any workable solutions of their own. In this current world we live in, you can't just complain without offering a solution because then it's a waste of everyone's precious time. I support their right to protest, which is a freedom our country was founded on, I just wish their protests had some kind of relevancy. The peaceniks, I fear are in danger of protesting themselves into irrelevancy and that would be sad because their voices do need to be heard. But, they'll never be heard if they don't start making sense.

It is hard not to live in fear right now about what the future will bring, and it takes every bit of control I have to not freak out, but I know I cannot do that. If we all do that, then the terrorists have won. So I write and I keep writing and I obsess about small things like finding my first love's website, because these small things keep me grounded, keep me in control, make me want to keep going on. And perhaps at this point, to keep going on, is all that counts right now.