Personal Journal

Garbage Entry 2

So now I’m just pissed off. I acknowledge that you’re here, reading. But I’m explaining myself to you, and goddamnit that’s for you to figure things out, not me to narrate an autobiography.

I miss being wanted by her. I hate cookie-cutter intercourse – I’m not some depraved maniac who stages scenes like a director of some movie. I like it to be languid and free-flowing, and when we… When she’s acquiesced to intercourse, even if she tried to put her soul into it, it’s failed for her, and for me to a slightly lesser degree (but I doubt she knows it; I am a concealer of things hurtful, far better than anyone would ever surmise about me).

Now, there’s a good thing and a bad thing about all this.
The bad thing, straight away, is that I fantasize about a nameless, faceless “someone”. Someone who would find me attractive, some encounter of mutual seduction. And I’m about to go on a 2 month trip to Maryland knowing that I would like to be tempted. Knowing that if I put my mind to it, I could fulfill that fantasy.
No, I won’t, and it’s debateable whether the mettle of my soul would even allow me to pursue that dishonest path. The pain is in the wanting, just as the Buddhists would say. And I’m going to have to live with this for at least 5 weeks (at which time, let’s hope, absence will have made Jean a little more desirous of me). That kind of pain borne of deprivation, that’s the kind I don’t endure well. I shall, but it will make my days a touch more distasteful than I would prefer.
The good news is that I see in this deprivation great source material for the story about Cathy that I wanted to write. Cathy, the woman who I coveted so intensely during college that I actually talked about it with another man… And so, I’ve been wanting to capture that feeling of longing for something beyond reach, and I think I’ll have a great opportunity to approach it while I’m out there on the road.

Onto my trip.
I leave Sunday, for Columbia Maryland, corporate headquarters.
This is, without doubt, the kind of opportunity that can change the course of a career. I fell backwards into it, like most people find themselves with undeserved opportunities: I knew the right people, and with Dilbert-ian grace, I’ve managed to do nothing and look like a minor genius in so doing for the past 4 years, and I’ve massaged the bureaucratic strings enough that they yield the minor candies of the piñata when the moon is right.

So here I go into the seat of power, the DC metro area. I have a simple job. Write an assembly procedure, ISO9000 standard. Simpe stuff. See-jane-run kind of stuff.

I haven’t gone on a “business trip” since the days when they sent me out with 70-ton tank and an M-16. There was no per diem on such a trip.

I’m excited, of course. And now that it’s a few days away, I admit it. I’m scared. I’m scared of becoming depressed sitting alone in a hotel room for hours at a time. Of not having a home to come back to. Of bein in an alien world of corporate big-wigs who have unspoken litmus tests or ideosynchracies that must be augured from the birds. I’m scared of having to spend more time with the mechanics I’m going with than I can stomach (they are a hard-drinking, strip-club attending, bunch of louts, which is why I managed to get myself in a separate hotel from them).

I’m going to miss my cats most. When you have 14 cats, you get used to always having their eyes on you. One of them is always trying to see what you’re doing, seeing if now is a good time for them to get some of your attention. A pair of months without cats, I can’t imagine. I will worry about Jean, who lacks a certain bit of self-assurance such that she’s going to enable herself to be miserable when it’s unnecessary. I told her not to call me and speak to me with the heavy edge of sadness in her voice – that I won’t deal with that pathos well at all. No lamentations.

I’m not a career-oriented person, but I’ve got a windfall, and my career of treading water, I need to exert myself for this and I think the next 20 years are going to benefit tremendously from this.

Sunday I fly. I hate flying, you know.
I’ll put that one thought into another journal entry perhaps today.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn