Chasing snakes.

I flat out lied to my ex today.

I know. I have been complaining about him forever. Trying to move past all the dislike and creepiness I feel in his presence. Put my best foot forward and remember I love my children. But today, that high road wasn’t anywhere with in my reach. No map to get there. No GPS to even locate it.

So, I lied.

The lie might seem small, in the reality of the world. No one will die. No one will be disappointed or have their life ruined by a terrible secret. It is completely on me. Complete avoidance because I can’t believe him capable of any request being anything but manipulation.

The lie? That I was already in town, did not want my children brought to my house by a third party because I was already on my way, and that no, I did not want to have dinner with him (and presumably his wife, and his mother since they will be there) because I already had plans, thanks anyway.

The truth? I didn’t want to be in his presence for any amount of time that would require more conversation than “Where are the backpacks?” and “Baseball is at 2pm.” I didn’t want it with him. I didn’t want it from his mother. I definitely didn’t want it from his wife. I was completely okay with it meaning I did not have an extra hour with my kids if it meant I did not have to endure that. I am just not that strong.

For the record, today, in my past life, would have been Corned Beef and Cabbage Dinner Day. I don’t particularly like corned beef and cabbage. Actually, unless the corned beef is cold served on rye with horseradish, I don’t like it at all. Boiled potatoes and soggy cabbage rate even lower.

But each year, for the 11 years of the days before St Patrick’s Day that my ex and I were together, this day was special. It was the day he cooked. It was the day the pot boiled all day. It was the day family and friends came over and ate the crap boiled tradition with us. It was as day he stayed sober until right before everyone arrived, and then got drunk fast, on Irish-type coffee in mock ethnic participation of some sort. There is not a drop of Irish in either one of us, so it is actually pretty funny.

I know from his first ex wife that the boiled dinner at this time of year was a tradition for them, too. I don’t know if their tradition turned into the same melancholy drunkfest mine always did with him after everyone went home, but for me, it was just one more on the list on the many evenings spent like that.

Until the invitation arrived, I hadn’t remembered it at all. I have not had that dinner in four years, and I don’t remember ever missing it. So as the invite via text message dinged my phone, the entire history of the ritual came flooding back. It hit me in the back of the head like a two-by-four. Why would he invite me? What was the game? Was there even a chance this invite was legit, and not some way to throw me? Could he not have remembered any of the terrible stuff? And just be having crap boiled dinner? And thought, since I was picking up the kids anyway, to throw me an invite to be polite?

So I lied.

I don’t have any desire to be in the middle of my old world. I left it. I don’t want to go back. I don’t like boiled cabbage and potatoes, and I hated each and every one of those dinners and did them over and over again anyway. I think I was insane. I am not insane anymore. I don’t ever want to be again.

So this lie was for me. So that I could write this all down in the time I could have been eating corned beef. This lie, to do something for myself, and not give any other explanation, is so much better than the lie I told myself for so long that everything was fine in that smelly, boiling pot I called home. I am good with it, because maybe it wasn’t a lie after all. I mean, I did have plans after all. I just didn’t know it when I said no.

Stairs

I have been writing, “working” on short stories, works of fiction that buzz through my head, full of really cool characters and great back stories. I know these guys intimately. They live in my dreams, haunt my days, talk to me like schizophrenic voices in my head, and manage to stay ever so slightly out of reach as I try to put on paper their very nature, as if taunting me to define them. Defining is the problem. There is a small part of me that doesn’t want them defined. What would happen if I managed to capture their essence in words, and let it flow across the paper in beautifully structured sentences that reach the muses’ ears with delight ? What if with that , the characters had voices and bodies and realities of their own to live, defying the logic of fiction at all? Becoming real for everyone, and not just for me.

So instead, I have been tackling the stair right in from of me, ignoring the voices, letting them stew in their own reluctance to show themselves, and just moving forward with what I can.

Always moving forward. Tiny little steps at a time.

My son has me worried, because he is an amazingly bright kid who is simply shutting down when it comes to language arts and social studies. It is not because he can’t do it; he is still testing way above level in all the things they test you on. He just doesn’t care. I can’t even find fault in his logic behind the not caring, because, in a weird way, I totally agree with him. He says that understanding what happened in the past hasn’t really helped the present much. We keep making the same mistakes, even though we know the outcome of having made the mistakes before. He thinks if we never learned that lesson from our forefathers, maybe would should just stop listening to them. And writing about them? Um. Why? The history doesn’t change, and in his world, the present is hard enough to deal with without having to pay for other people’s crap that they got wrong. He should not have to have someone else decide what is important to him. This is a constant theme, about if things already aren’t fair in life, why bother caring about a bunch of dead people and how they were an influence. In his head, the entire history of California fits in one 370-page book, and, if he were to count actual individuals, there are only maybe 100 listed. One hundred. That’s it. One hundred important people in a 1000 years of history. What the hell chance does a ten year old who can’t even get his dad’s attention have of making any difference? So, he avoids it, and does math instead. Math doesn’t change. Math is a constant. Math solves problems. Math makes no judgments. Math explains the Universe. And his universe is spinning, math is his stationary point to focus on.

This confounds me, and saddens me at the same time. Here I am trying to eliminate absolutes and think in terms of freedom and creativity, and all my son wants is structure and routine. Something tangible and real. That ever elusive quality of something just outside of your grasp. We want what we want to be real. We want what we want when we want it. We want our worlds to show up solidly and keep us from floating away. We want the same thing. Just to tackle the stair in front of us, move forward with what we can.

So I am stepping back and trying to understand my own personal history, and history in general, and trying to understand why the recording of it on paper is important. I am also slowing down enough to help my son understand that stability does not mean things never change. That learning how to be in the world does not mean you never move forward, but that it might just mean you choose a different path. And moving forward means the step right in front of us. Me, maybe it means letting the characters just be there for a while until they tell me their stories. Him, maybe it means telling his own story while still knowing he has a rock that is stationary. Maybe it means I write his story and let us both enjoy that facets of creativity that may bring. Maybe it means I need to embrace his never-changing chaos so he can understand my fluid stability. Both are overwhelming if you feel like you are spinning all alone.

The stair right in front of me. It’s not that big if I only look right here. And it has some really amazing characters already willing to talk.

Are you done with that fantasy? Because I have a casserole to bake.

I have been thinking about two articles I read yesterday. Combined, they make a whole lot of sense.

The first, one about potential in a partner, came from match.com (yes, I read this shit, sue me). Partner potential, is just that, potential. It is not fact. It is not even real hope. It is just what humans do when trying to see the good in people they somehow became attracted to. That cute guy who may made eye contact while getting his change at the grocery store? Potential. The guy in the office with the bad haircut, but thoughtful blue eyes? Potential. The hot dad with the wedding ring tan line and obnoxious daughter in your son’s class? Potential.

Since I spend way too much time reading into things, my first thought was “I never do this!” Who am I kidding? I do this all the time. I spend much of the time in my own head inventing the future I want to have with men I have never even talked to, much less dated. (Creativity is sometimes a burden I have to carry. The same thing that makes it so I can write this blog is also what makes it so I have complex fantasies about the FedEx guy. It has its perks.) But it also makes me more susceptible to having real life people that have zero potential become fixations. I ignore red flags. I confuse lust with love. I ascribe positive characteristics that just aren’t there. I read texts and emails as if they are personal love notes full of desire. There is no way a guy can win at this, and be a real person. But that’s okay. Each of these things can be contributed to the potential I see in the object of my attraction to be the man of my dreams..

Well, dream on, because here is the topic of the second article (the one I think I wanna start living by): Unless you can close the deal, potential is shit.

It was harsh. It said that being nice, seeing people as nice, acting nice in all situations is bullshit. It gets you nothing. Potential means that you *may* get good results, but unless you *are* getting good results, you have done NOTHING. Wow, what a kick in the head. I mean, I am a nice person (when I am not acting like a bitch). I do nice things. I keep a nice house and have nice kids. I am also fucking delusional, but I like my happy little world. People know me here.

So the two articles related because I tend to think of men I am attracted to as “nice” but since they are not “closing the deal”, nice means jack. I think of myself as nice, but unless I am nice AND can help a guy with yard work, balance his checkbook, play nice with his former in-laws, and can deal with football play-offs without losing my shit, nice just got me nothing. Yeah, beautiful girls will get a guy to take her home, but if she can’t stand his socks on the floor when he is tired, that might be an issue later on down the road.

As for nice men? Flirt with me in the grocery store? Okay, that was fun, but since you didn’t ask how to contact me to flirt again your “potential” meter was high, but your “close” meter was broken. Guy that danced with me and bought me drinks, but left with someone else? Same thing. It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy myself. Getting a cute guy to buy you drinks while out dancing is awesome. What it does mean is that right there is where it needs to stop, at least in my head. Accepting that is hard, me being a single woman who actually enjoys sex, and wants monogamy. But the flip side of that is that if I only see potential, and I waste tons of my time, and maybe some of theirs, creating a universe in which no one could possibly live happily.

Wanna live happily? Good, me too. That is a damn nice thought, but what do you bring to the table that makes that happen? I am not saying I need to have a bikini ready body and an ever ready sex drive, while always having good beverages and baseball stats memorized. But I should be offering something more than “nice”. It also means that I need to stop believing that just because a guy has a penis and I have a vagina, we are a perfect match. Long term, more than that is necessary. Close the deal, be the guy I want to be with so I can be the girl you want to be with. Putting it into practice will be harder, but starting with making my own potential into someone I would want to date is a good step. Letting go of the fantasies might take some work. Except for the ones about Peirce Brosnan and Liam Hemsworth, I am keeping those. They have potential, right?

It is harder than it looks.

These are my short stories. I had them published in a 101-word contest that happens annually. Writing a complete short story within the confines on 101 words is challenging, especially to someone like me who likes to write and write and write, expaining things over and over and over, forever and ever and ever (got it?). Every time I have remembered to enter, I have been fortunate to have at least one story published. In 1999 I won the contest. In 2009 and 2011 I had all three that were entered (three is the limit) published. Here they are. Read. Enjoy. Share.

Listed by year
Then the link to the published site.
Then the title and each story

1999:
Link to 1999 Story

Memories
She remembered the way he tasted. Salty. Warm. Of coffee and brandy and toothpaste and cigarettes. She remembered his coal-black hair falling in his eyes. Short and slightly curled above the ears. She knew his eyes. The color of new jeans just washed and damp. Damp, the way his hands were as they touched her face and shoulders and neck and breasts and stomach and back, and between her legs. She remembered every moment. Every detail. Every movement. She remembered. She knew him. Even as she identified him as number three in the rape suspect line-up.

__________

2005:
Link to the 2005 Story

Poetic Justice
A friend of 20-plus years borrowed $500 two years ago Halloween. Having never known her to be a welsher, it was an easy check to write. Until today, I thought she was dead. Turns out she is living in Pismo Beach, and hosting her own Web site and beach blog on self-help and financial independence. She always wanted to be a writer. I guess she writes fiction. She has a link on her site to paralegal services. I wonder if I should use them to sue her. I wonder if she remembers how she spent the money.

__________

2009:
Link to the 2009 Stories

Freeze Frame
The last painting hung, as always, on the south wall, corridor 6, gallery 17. The curators removing exhibits took down other paintings, placed them in sleeves, then crates. What remained, proving the painting had not been alone, were faint square and rectangular scuffs that ringed the room. It was as it always had been; paintings coming, going, enhancing the last painting’s beauty by their meager presence. The last painting’s perspective never changed. It only saw the north wall, the velvet stanchions, the admirers. It longed to be stolen, taken to a home in some no-extradition country, just to change the view.

Young Innocence, Old Guilt
“Mom, can I tell you a joke?” “Sure, honey.” “Why did the barbeque cross the road?” “I don’t know, why?” “To get to the CHICKEN!” I laughed again, thinking it was just as funny this time. My sweet 4 year old crawled up on my lap. “Mom, when is dad getting here?” It was Wednesday night, 30 minutes past the scheduled pick up time. “I don’t know, babe.” I did know. It was why I’d left. He called at 7:30, after bedtime. I’m sure he would explain. “Hello.” I could smell the brandy before the first word was said.

Family Style
My ex-husband’s mother, and her charming, but unrealistic spouse invited me, and her grandchildren, to spend Christmas Eve at their house. Having spent every holiday there, being offered punch and English toffee, for the past 10 years, you might think I would have been delighted at the prospect. But here, in the sanctity of the house my children and I rented alone in May, away from alcohol-induced tirades, and words seething with cruelty and humiliation, we have a new tradition. It’s called happiness. I have been told they are inviting everyone, including the new fiancé. I’ve heard she likes punch.

__________

2011:
Link to the 2011 Stories

The Closet

For my eighth birthday, my mom bought me a new pair of purple Converse All-Stars. My old shoes were worn, and too small. I put the old shoes in the trash. I found them today, in boxes in her closet, with one-hundred-fifty other pairs. I’d moved out when I was eighteen, escaping, leaving behind everything I was now sorting, plus twenty-five years more. The 42-year-old in me wondered how my mother’s hoarding had gotten so bad. The eight-year-old in me touched every pair on the shelf, searching for the purple birthday shoes.


The Loss

The week before had been joyous, until the ultrasound showed that the baby’s heart had stopped beating. She’d been unable to call him from the doctor’s office, she had said, shaking, and the nurse had called instead. He remained calm. Two days and a stillbirth later, she had taken her few packed possessions and left the hospital. “I’m going. I can’t come home until the bedroom is an office again.” It had come down to a choice between flying elephants and pastel crayon scribbles. Sitting on stacked paint cans in what would have eventually been the nursery, his emotions overwhelmed him.


The List

Her current partner, a sweet man with sparkly green eyes, knew a thing or two about sex, but lacked a little in the erotica department. A future “erotic memoir” entrant, but only just. She wanted the tingly feeling on the surface of her skin, just because the object of her longings was in the room. Tingling not from touch, but from knowing. Desire. Warmth deep at the core, that a person knew you, even if you never met. She wrote his name down as the last on the list, sighed, and then added the next number and left the line blank.


__________

2012:
Link to the 2012 Stories

About Face

I knew you didn’t expect me to go. Not after all this time. As you sat there. Staring. I knew I wouldn’t save you. Couldn’t save you. You didn’t want to be saved. Not really. And I had long since thought saving you was beyond my ability. It was true. I could only save one life. The life would be mine. If I could get it right. I knew the bottle in my hand would be mourned. Not by me. So I spilled the amber liquid. Purposefully. On the sidewalk. And I, for the first time in years, walked away. Sober.


By a Hair

She’d cut her hair “flapper” short, dyed it fuchsia, when the vomiting first started, grateful no one had to hold back her hair over the toilet. She’d shaved it completely when the tufts left after chemo reminded her of a neglected Chia-pet, and kept it that way, alternately choosing to wear a Santa hat or bunny ears as the season dictated. Her reward, on the last day of her life, was a little girl of 7, also baldly fighting cancer, using her head as a canvas with colorful body-paint crayons as the pair laughed, sitting by the koi pond.


__________

2013:
Link to the 2013 Story

Ground Up
It wasn’t enough, that casual piece of affection, given daily in the form of a perfect foam heart on top of his latte. Maybe “enough” would have been an extra stamp on his frequent drink card, or a free mini-scone. But having given all that at one time or another, it still wasn’t enough for him to read her badge correctly. So when he spoke while taking his change, “Jordy” came out as “Judy” and her whole world fell apart. In the reality of completely unreturned love, Jordy quit her job, went home, and smashed all of her coffee mugs.

A single tight screw.

Every year since the New Year’s Day I was 17, I have touched my feet to the sand of a beach. I landed at various beaches on the California coast, no matter the weather, no matter the company. It is a required ritual.

There are rules for this beach excursion.

1) I MUST touch the water. It can be with my hand. It should be with my toes. One year, as I fell while running toward the surf, it was with my face. This was not pretty, and I don’t recommend it, but it counted, and as I sulked back to my car for a towel that year, I knew I would not have to go near the surf again right away, rule one accomplished.

2) I MUST make a wish. This is not a New Year’s Day rule; this is a beach rule, but since I am at the beach, I have to do it today, too. I will write my wish in the sand with my finger, or an old piece of driftwood, or a baseball bat I happen to be carrying (story for another time), close enough to the surf that within a few waves, the written message will be washed out with the tide. I will watch until this happens, so I practice patience. I never waste my wish on something I can’t have, like immediate world peace, or a million dollars from the sky. Those will be flat-out ignored by the universe, and since I only get one wish per beach visit with no take-backs, I should put them to good use.

I do wish for something outside of myself that I need a little help with. The Universe listens to those. A little help with my monthly expenses (in whatever form that it comes in), a man who is nice to me (also, in whatever form it comes in), satisfaction at work (whatever form, can you see the theme?) are all good things to ask for. Peace in my life, happiness for my kids, a bikini that makes my tits and ass look good, are all good choices. As an aside, since I get one of these wishes EVERY time I go to the beach, I try to make a habit of it. Go on my way home from work every Thursday, or on the full moon, or on the slack tide. Just do it. And I don’t get to think that driving to the beach and sitting in my car counts. I mean, watching the sunset is nice and all, but I need to make a wish in the sand. And I don’t go all Scrooge and not walk the extra 25 feet because I am lazy.

3) On New Year’s Day I MUST bring something along with me that I need to part with, or something that symbolizes something I need to part with. I will be throwing it into the water, and not getting it back, so I need to be realistic. This can be something easy to get rid of, like a love letter from a guy who broke my heart in April but I haven’t been able to burn, ripped into tiny pieces. Or, it can be something difficult to get rid of, like a wedding cake topper (also a story for another time). If symbolically I just need to transfer my thoughts to a piece of paper (or a rock) so I can throw it in and have it actually go away with the surf (while not having people look at me like I am crazy to throw “X” in) (like a wedding cake top), without some other unfortunate soul finding it, that works, too. I would NOT throw in my ex’s grandmother’s engagement ring. I would sell that shit. But a picture of the ring, taken as I box it up to send to the buyer, is perfect.

I think creatively here. I have thrown in a penny from a particular year to represent getting rid of financial dependence. I have thrown in a piece of tissue paper that represented frailty (Yeah, dumping that frail shit is fine!). One year, I threw in a bisque ceramic lovebirds-sitting-on-a-heart figurine that looked remarkable like something you would see at a wedding. (Cliff over China Cove. It arced perfectly. It sorta bounced on the rocks twice before shattering and hitting the crashing surf. The sound it made was musical, boing, boing, ching-crash, sploosh. It was awesome!) I don’t think I need to tell you what that represented.

This year I threw in a sheet metal screw that had been sticking out of my dining room ceiling since I purchased the house three years ago. I am thinking it represented procrastination and moving towards having my house (and my life) in a not-so-fixer-up state.

4) I MUST go. No excuses. Raining? Bring an umbrella or a trash bag. (I keep this in my car, just in case) Windy? I have seen Wizard of Oz. And it will NEVER get that bad in California. And I am not afraid of houses or red shoes. Boyfriend wants to watch football? Perfect, I am probably throwing in one of his torn t-shirts or crap DVDs anyway. Living a little ways from the beach? I have 24 hours here, start driving. I went to the beach one year when they actually had a high-surf advisory and the beach was “closed”, having driven three hours from Sacramento. So, um, yeah, whatever. Go. If I can take my 13-day old newborn to the beach in a Moby, I figure any other time should be cake.


I have taken my kids with me since they were born. They have touched the sand and, since now old enough to understand their eclectic mom’s ritual, have also thrown in items and made wishes. My son, remembering being sick on candy right before Christmas, threw in peppermint TicTacs, hoping for no illness this year. My daughter, ever the indecisive, could not pick something and finally settled for a rock, and made a wish to be better at making decisions.

I like that they get this ritual, and have decided to join me, because this year I actually gave them the opt-out option. I also like that I have a ritual at all that I have never skipped as an adult, because sometimes, in my head, it made all the difference in setting my tone for the year.

Remember the screw and the procrastination wish? That I posted this in one day might mean it is working already.

Loaded

**This is the disclaimer. Below, though true, contains some graphic language and adult content. If you don’t want to read it, stop now, leave this blog, and find your happy place.**

Tonight is Sunday. So that means I picked up my children from their visitation weekend with their father. My ex has remarried, and if you go back and read other posts to this blog, it describes for you my feelings about the relationship, the breakup, and where I am now, so that won’t be covered here. What I am telling you about is my ex-husband’s wife, and the feelings I have about her, as they relate to my former relationship, and what, if there was a wish I had for her, I would tell her.

She came up to me tonight with one word. Sorry. I have heard this word out of her mouth before, and like before I started to ignore it. Two years ago she had called me a fucking cunt in front of my children in a public tirade directed at me while her whole family watched, and followed it up with a cruel email to me sent from my ex’s email account telling me that I deserved to have my first son die. Not her shining moment, and actually sealed my view of her as vile pretty solidly for all eternity. Having heard her call me a bitch several times since, call my daughter a bitch (just like her mom), and be nasty mean to my son, I am not really convinced of her repentance, and the apologies that have come since then are moot and unbelieved. Tonight, I told her exactly why she would always be vile to me, actually even using the word “vile” to describe her to her face, for having pushed the only two buttons I had, so completely, that there really was no hope of her recovery from that, apology and forgiveness or not.

But I also starting thinking about how trapped and desperate she might be to still be apologizing to me. It has to be coming from my ex, who has previously blamed his and my inability to communicate on my unwillingness to interact with his wife. He blamed her for causing the problem to begin with. Whatever, he is delusional. No, not enough to feel sorry for her, but just enough for me to understand where she probably is in her relationship with my ex at this point, if history and timing follow similar patterns.

She is just over 4 years into her relationship with him. At the four-year mark, I had a baby. A not quite one-year-old amazing daughter who laughed and could make you smile any time. I was breast-feeding still, and she didn’t sleep much, but my ex and I had started to return our sex life back to normal.

Normal for us though had been a minimum of daily, and usually twice or more most days. Our sex was often one sided, with him achieving orgasm much more often than I did, and was consistently rough and demanding, wherever in the house we happened to be. I am not a prude, or even afraid to admit that I enjoy frequent and sometimes rough sex. I also like a balance, and that was most often achieved in the middle of the night with quiet, gentler sex where I could get off more slowly, or felt okay to use one of the toys we owned on myself once he fell back to sleep. So the rougher daily sex was a mental compromise.

This was also the point in our relationship where large amounts of pornography entered our world. I always knew my ex liked porn. He showed it to me periodically, still photography pictures of women and men, fucking, using toys, whatever. I knew he viewed more that he didn’t show me, and never really questioned it, thinking to myself that if it turned him on and I was getting off, no big deal, right? I was delusional and very codependent, with his alcoholism, his physical needs of both sex and housewife duties, his complete dislike for being a father when it interfered with my ability to take care of him, and with the verbal and emotional abuse from him that went with my own sick need to want to please him. Ignoring some photos in the face of all that was actually pretty easy.

Back to the pornography. He had been drinking one night, not unusual, and wanted sex. My daughter had miraculously fallen asleep before nine, and he and I were messing around on the computer, sending each other horny instant messages from keyboards that were literally two feet away from each other, while also surfing the internet and reading emails. He sent me a “come sit on my lap” type message, probably with the words fuck and slut in the text, and I went over and did what he asked. He was in his office chair, and I had removed the bottom half of my clothing enroute (the two whole feet away) and sat down, letting him penetrate me as I faced away from him. I was enjoying the position, and was feeling the momentum, when he reached around me to the computer and showed me a close up of a woman’s vagina with what looked like a shiny metal dildo sticking out from where her pretty manicured nails had her spread apart. As our sex got more intense, he zoomed out of the picture, slowly, one small step at a time, until finally, at his own climax, he was zoomed all the way out. The shiny metal object wasn’t a dildo after all. It was the barrel of a gun.

He held me there until I climaxed and I knew, without a doubt, that the pornography had crossed over. This was no longer about sex and excitement, this was about total and complete control. That was what excited him, and I was expected to comply. And in my sick little world, I did. I wanted him so badly, wanted my family to work so badly, wanted to feel loved so badly, that the verbal, and now emotional abuse, seemed normal.

The pornography got much worse after that, with periods where even he knew it was sick and over the top, and would stop. These were usually during his brief periods of sobriety, but even then I never again was placed in a position of shock like that first time. I was easily able to divert it to other sex or other positions so that I did not have to participate in the viewing. I could simply ignore it. And I did ignore it, letting myself believe that if I wasn’t watching it, it wasn’t really happening. I didn’t pay any attention that it was really twisted behavior about power.

So what does that have to do with my ex’s current wife? Maybe nothing. Maybe just my remembrance of where I was, and my gratitude to not be there now, and knowledge that I will never be there again with him or anyone else for that matter. But maybe it was her under-her-breath comment after I had just told her that she was vile when she said, in a voice not meant for me to hear, “You have no idea.”

The woman-I-used-to-be heard her and projected that maybe she was lost inside the relationship just like I was. Just like his first ex-wife was. There is a small part of me that wishes I cared about her at all, in that woman-to-woman way, so I could warn her, maybe. Or maybe not. I can’t judge their relationship, and don’t want to try. I am just planning on going back to ignoring her, and healing myself. I hope I am wrong, and that the fucked up stuff isn’t happening to her and she really is just a mean fucking bitch. And I hope that if it is, she gets out. I can’t help her, and I won’t, because I can only save myself. And I honestly don’t like her enough do anything about it. But I hope she realizes that apologizing any more won’t change anything about my past, or her future, and that I do have some idea, I heard her, even if I don’t ever show it. Power and control under the roof of sick men is like that, and figures out, if she need to, that she doesn’t need to have a gun sticking out of her vagina before knowing things are seriously wrong. No apology required.

Along for the ride.

I love amusement parks. Well, I love everything except the lines. And the price. And the stupid people who push scared kids on rides, and then get mad at them when the puke. And terrible food. And not enough bathrooms. Okay, I hate amusement parks. I love scary rides.

I had a conversation yesterday with a friend about their love of a particular southern California amusement park, and why I didn’t like it. I mean, I love the rides, just not everything else. Even the joy that kids feel in that kind of magical place doesn’t outweigh my total dislike for spending that much money to be commercially ignored.

But that is not what I am writing about though. What I have spinning in my head is why I like scary rides, and which amusement things I don’t like at all.

Roller coasters: love. The anticipation on the way up, the initial heart-in-your-throat drop, the coasting through twists and turns, ups and downs, all are perfect in my world. It is like falling in love. And even though you have to get off, maybe head over to the slow moving train, or get sucked into thinking the bumper cars might not be so bad, the smile that I feel after being on the roller coaster sticks with me. It might even blind me to the crap I am about to get into, but the initial ride is always amazing.

High Drop Rides: love. The closed space, the strapped in, the freefall, the speed, the take your breath away moment of total terror, it is heaven. It is a journey into the unknown, the drop off the edge risky part of life. So many people won’t go on these rides because the fall scares the fuck out of them. They have no idea what they are missing, because these rides, even though they are petrifying, are usually the best views, from the highest points, and unless you are there, you never see them. Okay, so even the thought of the fall can be a little overwhelming, but what an experience.

Whirl and hurls: love. These rides start slow, build momentum, and become crazy and fun, and mellow out as you adapt to them. Some even let you control the spin, with ways to tilt and lean, and you get to make the ride totally your own. If you get in a car with someone you like, you can get them to lean with you. Okay, so sometimes they take control and move against you, or complain that the way you are doing it makes them feel sick and would you please stop, or sometimes they vomit on your shoes, but mostly, you get to have a ride that leaves you laughing and a little buzzed, and happy.

Mirror mazes and “fun houses”: fucking hate them. This is the only “scary” amusement I stay the hell away from. Walls in your way, running into cleverly disguised posts that should have been doors, seeing yourself in broken pieces of warped mirrors that have handprints and snot on them, not being able to get the fuck off when you are done, yeah, that sucks ass. I have zero interest in this kind of scary. It is too much like real life, and unlike the other rides I mentioned, there is no fucking time limit on how long the nightmare is going to last. You can wander around fruitlessly for hours, days, weeks. It is terrifying, and there is no way out. Others are getting out, why the hell can’t you? That laughing they are doing just sounds demented, and very very far away. I am sure it is really sadistic clowns just waiting to jump out at me and eat my face. I see only half images, and dark spaces, and wobbly floors, and flickery yellow lights, with no fucking end in sight. It bites.

I guess that makes me sound schizophrenic, but not really. I want all the thrill, and a way to know that the thrill will have a safe conclusion, and not stuck to figure it out alone. After a scary ride that I love, the happy little boat ride sounds fine because it is just a way to reflect on the awesomeness that just happened, and plan the next ride. The fucking maze, if I ever get out of, just makes me tired, and want to sit on the bench and cry. Fuck the exciting rides too, I just wanna go home. So if you are reading this, please help me talk my way out of the maze if you see me in there. Come in and hold my hand, and then come ride the double-out-and-back with me. I promise not to puke on your shoes.