i didn't even know what misery i was living in-literally- what was causing it only barely conscious that i was waiting for someone to come along and take me out of it until he dumped his ipod into my itunes and it was so clear to me in that killers song i always loved that i really was "waiting on some beautiful boy to save (me) from (my) own" ways/fate/whatever/anything/everything. i thought this boy would do that, could do that, and then circumstances presented themselves so that i had to SAVE MYSELF. how many years ago i sat at the rosebud's bar reaching my hand skyward, waiting to be called on until my sweet handsome bartender looked up and i said: SAVE ME! and he said: save yourself! and i thought "i'm not drowning, i'm waving" and years and years and years and years later, it's still sooooooooooo like me to say i'm waving or really to actually BE WAVING as i drown like the titanic, UNRAISABLE! i can't let anyone save me, love me, fill in the ____________ me. i can only have me and then some.

"this is what you get when you mess with love..." i don't know, is that even what it says in that radiohead song? when i mess with it, or something like it, or what i think is it anyway, i almost always almost disappear. right down to skin and bones and dry dust nothing. i think maybe that's what happens when i'm aiming for the wrong thing and getting it or sometimes even not getting it, just the energy of the wanting and the aiming for something short of love because it's all that's available to me, the obsession burns everything else right up. then there's those long in between times where there's no dates, no love, no nothing like that, just a full fat life all bloating up in front of me. in the in between times, i eat love, i guess. it's pretty freaking sweet.

(i wish for a minute i could lose myself sometimes.)

I guess in the end it's about buying time and ultimately, I can't afford to buy any right now because I danced my way through my past miseries into a handsome debt and now have no reserves whatsoever. I can't afford to buy any time and I can't afford to spend any money like a soothing balm to cover the immensely intense pain I am about to feel either. In the dream my dog just looks at me and says: "I don't know why you people get so upset about death."

A long, long time ago, I found a cartoon on a post card which was just stick figures, but oh so good. One of them was lying on the floor kicking and screaming WHY?! over and over and the other just looks up and says: "Well, we come into this world alone and we go out of it alone, so I figure in between we're going to have to spend some time alone." I really got that, but I guess I wasn't banking on spending quite so much of it alone. Maybe that's why losing things is so hard. Or maybe it's hard for everyone. Maybe it's even harder to lose things in front of a bunch of people or just even one person. I don't know.

At the end of "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" one of the characters has an epiphany about her cat and his role in her life over which I totally teared up, not because it was so much a revelation to me, but because I have known this the whole time of knowing my cats (and my dog too). She says: "...I take measure of how the ridiculous, superfluous cats who wander through our lives with all the placidity and indifference of an imbecile are in fact the happy guardians of life's good and joyful moments, and of it's happy web, even beneath the canopy of misfortune." And I am so lucky to have and have had such amazing guardians. This sweet mostly toothless cat who stands up on his hind legs and puts his paws all the way around my neck to hug me; who will come from the farthest corners of the house and the deepest sleep to comfort me if he hears me cry; who for some unknown reason really responds to the words: "Oh, my baby! Oh thank you, Steve!" when his name is Ozzie, this amazing orange angel...how in the world will I survive without him?

ugh. love. i don't really know what it is. not even now. every time i think i do, it turns out not. is it really just about a magic moment or three and then working to string them out into a whole lifetime? sometimes it's like i realize i'm having a feeling and finally, it's a GOOD ONE, and if it's a good one, it must be love, right? i'm often falling into something and i still don't know what it is. last night i saw a bunch of people i used to know and that i hadn't seen in a really, really long time and that i also used to think were so gorgeously handsome and beautiful and i don't know if it was them or me or if i can even apply the "caesar costanza" philosophy to any of it, but a bunch of the shine had worn right off of them and i wondered what i ever saw in them in the first place.

in the beginning, there was me believing i needed to be punished for god only knows what and that metastasized into something else, which morphed into another thing entirely which then took total control just like any other disease and coloured every single thing in my path. but there were people around who either some how got it or didn't care and there was lynda barry in the free entertainment weekly paper doing a cartoon that was like publishing my actual life sometimes...well, more often than not. so years and years later, when i'm not so dyed through with the disease and dysfunction, i'm able to see things in a whole other way and these cartoons are my way of saying that and also saying to anyone who might be on either side of it, that it's okay. this was the first one, still my favourite. everything i cartoon about has happened to me, but is not necessarily still happening, or maybe didn't happen yesterday either.

right now i'm liberally applying the dog whisperer/george costanza philosophy of "it's not you, it's me" to everything and it's working out just great so far. it seems that ever since i was practically born, i've been sending out the wrong messages to everyone. i don't even mostly know that i'm sending messages, but i guess i am and they seem to be vastly different from what i'd like. i can still see the 12 year old version of billy p. down in the math lab standing next to the filing cabinet staring at me while he was pretending to sharpen his pencil, mouthing the words "i love you" over and over again. and sadly, the words weren't greeted with the thrill he might have imagined or even desired, only my horror because i didn't want him to be in love with me. i was trying to be nice. nice does not = love, at least not always, but it seems to end up there if i'm the one doing it.