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

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.

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.