mike and kathleen are so happy. i can’t begrudge them that, i really am glad for them. but…fuck.

i don’t really have the energy right now to talk about it.

what is love? ’tis not hereafter;
present mirth hath present laughter;
what’s to come is still unsure:
in delay there lies no plenty;
then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
youth’s a stuff will not endure.

i sit alone for hours at a time and listen to music. and think.

my particular music choice is related to the focus of my thoughts and varies from night to night, ranging from essentially harmless to tear-your-eyes-out depressing.

—

two of my best friends married each other on saturday.

the rules of good friendship dictate that i should be excited and happy because two people i love are excited and happy. hell, i even have selfish reasons to look forward to this; the apartment they’re moving into is literally 50 feet from my place and they want me to hang out regularly.

instead i spent friday night (and the first 9 hours of saturday morning) sitting alone in my cold bedroom while conor oberst reminded me exactly why it was mike and kathleen and not me looking forward to a beautiful day and the promise of a life together – not a perfect life, not without troubles, but not alone. never alone.

so then i fell like that girl from a balance beam
a gymnasium of eyes, all were holding on to me
i lifted one foot to cross the other and i felt myself slipping
it was a small mistake – sometimes that’s all it takes

it didn’t help that i had agreed to drive four friends to the wedding. two happy pairs of friends. the drive was tolerable because matt and i had a lot of catching up to do – but even that turned into an explanation of why our party of five wasn’t a party of six. you’d think they’d never met an unhappy single person before.

shit, i’m like some sort of late-thirties single woman. always the bridesmaid, never the bride! fuck that.

i’m picking mike and kathleen up from the airport when they get back from their honeymoon on monday. from the newark airport. two hours away. if i didn’t know better i’d think i was a terminal masochist.

—

which begs a question. to quote john cusack’s character in high fidelity: which came first, the music or the misery?

was i drawn to bright eyes because something he said spoke to my apprehension over having to face yet another wedding and somehow made me feel less alone – like someone else was there, too, and had been there all along – or was i in such a bad mood at the wedding (and since) because i had spent so much time the previous night listening to some whiny little bitch crying about how much life sucks?

if you hate the taste of wine
why do you drink it till you’re blind?
and if you swear that there’s no truth and who cares
how come you say it like you’re right?
why are you scared to dream of God
when it’s salvation that you want?

if i can blame my melancholy on conor oberst, then maybe that will mean that the conscious decision to listen to something more uplifting is tantamount to my conquest of my personal demons.

—

but even i know it’s bullshit to try to blame my own fucked-up state of mind on a musician. it just makes me feel less guilty about being so caught up in a fleeting and relatively insignificant facet of my life.

now a mother takes loans out, sends her kids off to colleges
her family’s reduced to names on a shopping list
while a coroner kneels beneath a great, wooden crucifix
he knows there’s worse things than being alone

—

regardless. i’m tired of talking about it, tired of thinking about it. time to deal with it.

and we’ll just keep working on the problem we know we’ll never solve
of love’s uneven remainder, our lives are fractions of a whole
but if the world could remain within a frame, like a painting on a wall
i think we’d see the beauty then, and stand staring in awe
at our still lives posed
like a bowl of oranges
like a story told
by the fault lines and the soil

—

so long, bright eyes. time for some… hmm… well, fuck it, let’s go all-out.

oh yoshimi, they don’t believe me
but you won’t let those robots eat me
yoshimi, they don’t believe me
but you won’t let those robots defeat me

i’m going to be in a very strange mood tomorrow.

it’s actually a big problem. i do stupid things when i’m driving. i get really angry, really easily, and sometimes it makes me do pointless and dangerous things.

a few years ago, i was driving in the left lane of a one-way, two-lane street near campus and the right lane was closed ahead. most of the other drivers were content taking turns merging into the open lane, but the man behind the darkened windows of the enormous black escalade on my right decided to try to squeeze in ahead of me. i tried to force him out by sticking really close to the car in front, but he managed to get halfway into my lane.

logic would dictate that, when driving in west philadelphia, one should avoid escalating confrontations with other drivers over trivial matters, particularly the drivers of extremely large, intimidating vehicles with windows dark enough to conceal everything inside. but he took MY TURN, and i was pissed, and i was going to take it back.

so i created my own lane out of the remaining half of the left side of 34th street and several feet of sidewalk and maneuvered back into my rightful place in the zipper formation. i outsqueezed the squeezer. i was proud.

five seconds later, i reached the red light ahead.

i’m not sure which shocked me more: the terrifyingly large man climbing out of the driver’s side door of the suv that now dominated my rear-view mirror and rushing towards me, or the fact that i was genuinely pleased that i had beaten him badly enough that he was ready to factor the vehicles out of the fight. am i really that much of an asshole? i spent an exhilarating few seconds enjoying my victory.

but all that ended when he reached my window and began punching the glass, menacingly but not hard enough to break it, and informing me and everyone else within thirty or forty feet that i was about to get my motherfucking ass kicked. mustering all of my wit and bravado, i cracked open the window, and said: “um.”

then the light changed and i sped off.

i make a lot of these short-lived enemies while i’m driving. it’s not that i’m a bad driver; i don’t do things that could harm other people. but i do take pride in identifying assholes on the road and, just for a moment, in the most impersonal way possible, making them hate me — or rather, making them hate a faceless and nameless entity wrapped in a white ’04 buick. it’s a thrill i don’t often find elsewhere.

some of my most intense and most satisfying relationships take place on the road.

—

it works in both directions.

i saw you following me, all the way from youngstown to somewhere between cleveland and toledo. normally i get sort of irritated when people try to stay right behind me for long stretches of time — usually they just want to drive as fast as me (very fast) without risking getting pulled over — but i wasn’t speeding when you came around the really loud moving van and tucked in comfortably behind me.

you stayed with me when i had to accelerate a little to get around the guy with the outdated political stickers all over the back of his car, and again when those two asshats who were clearly racing each other passed us on both sides and the one on the right tried to cut across three lanes in front of me but had to hit his brakes. it was like i was driving for us both. all the traffic and every obstacle and construction zone — we were friends and allies in a very hostile environment, and we stuck together.

i looked forward to what would take place when we inevitably stopped for gas together. we’d pull up to opposite sides of the same pump, coyly half-avoiding each other at first but finding excuses to peek around the corner. you’d be wearing a broken social scene t-shirt; i’d compliment it, wondering if you could possibly have heard the song i’d been playing at high volume, over and over for the last hour. you’d ask if i’ve heard that they’ve started recording a new album (i have), and why it is that canada comes up with great supergroups like bss and the new pornographers while the states churn out acts like tinted windows (a band of decent pedigree, but inexplicably fronted by taylor fucking hanson). i would laugh.

but we wouldn’t talk for long. i wouldn’t ask your name, and you wouldn’t volunteer it. our place is on the road.

—

instead, as we neared toledo, i passed those two cars on the right, knowing perfectly well that there was no space for you to merge in behind me. maybe i was tired of being happy with the flow of traffic, tired of the speed limit, tired of you. maybe i need to fly past people on all sides, alone and angry and free. contentment is so much more comfortable than happiness.

i always fuck these things up.

—

you know it’s time…