She said, "I don't tolerate mind games."

And her words still skittered across his mind like little black bugs as he walked quickly up the crooked boulevard, past old, brick-red buildings, past cracked windows and empty doorways.

"Well," said he, to the reckless wind in his face, "what might be a mind game to you could be a natural reaction on my part to one of your many, many idiosyncracies. Ever think of THAT?"

Yeah. That's what he should have said to her. But did he?  No.

"Just because you don't TOLERATE mind games, well, that sure as hell doesn't mean you don't PLAY them, now does it?"

Another good one. Woulda knocked her back big time. But did he say it?  No.

The wind howled down on him, a chilly embrace. He turned up his collar and thrust his hands into the pockets of his long jacket as the breeze tore at and tussled his dirty blonde hair.

She sure did smell good. Just before the fight started over . . . over whatever.  She'd sprayed some kind of perfume on, and he'd been hanging around the bathroom door, listening to the buzz of her hair dryer, contemplating the great sex they likely would have been having, oh, right about now.  If only she hadn't . . .

"i don't tolerate mind games . . ." he whined to himself, an angry imitation of her. "if you're gonna pick at me all night with your mind games, then forget it. just go home."

Man that he is, he strode straight for the door, opened it, waited a second or two for her to reconsider her brash ultimatum, and calmly walked out.

The slamming of the door had really been more for the overall effect. An exclamation point on his authority as the MAN in the relationship.  Now, he feared that it made him look childish, petulant.  Impotent.

He could picture her rolling her eyes as he walked off, applying her eyeshadow without even so much as a twitch when the door slammed.  He hated her.

"Put on that mascara," he said to the cold, gathering dark. "Put it on nice and pretty and then go out and screw some poor chump. Bitch."

The wind stopped.  He spotted an empty vodka bottle on the sidewalk. He kicked it off the curb, sent it skidding and rolling across the street.  It didn't break.

"Straddle the cowboy who emptied that bottle over there. I don't care." He chuckled, kept on walking. The wind picked up again.

He crossed a few more blocks in silence. Shades of black began to ink the purple sky. An icy sliver of moon hung over him, like a knife.

He hungered for the sex everybody else in the world was having at this moment.  But since he wasn't actually hard down there, he knew he craved something more ungraspable than a naked tit.

But sex always took his mind off ungraspable things.

She said she didn't tolerate mind games. The People's Republic of Emily does not "tolerate" mind games. Whoop-dee-freaking-doo.

"Oh yeah? But I'M supposed to tolerate your little mood swings, right?"

Whammo!  Another great comeback. Where was it when he needed it?

What had he said?  When she issued her little declaration about mind games, what did he say back to her?  Something that sounded a lot better in the heat of the moment than it did now, in the chill of a black, lonely night.

"Why don't you like mind games? Are you tired of losing?"

That look she gave him then, it shrunk all his internal organs. His mind scrambled back over the entire history of their eight-month long relationship, trying to unearth any victory for him, any loss for her.  No data matched the search request.

As he stood there, gritting his teeth and flaring his cheekbones, all masculine-like, his mind went blank. And before he knew it, he was walking out the door and slamming it, ruining his evening and probably the whole weekend, too.

Now, he shook his wrist out of one coat sleeve and checked his watch. 11:48 p.m.

She'd looked and smelled so good.  Probably had even put on that black thong he got for her back in August.  He couldn't let himself imagine some other guy easing that thing off her hips. He'd go crazy.

A block ahead, he spotted one of technology's dying breeds: a phone booth. As his feet brought him closer to it, he plotted what he would say to her.  How to step inside the phone booth and apologize, without turning into SuperWuss.

"Hey there . . . yeah, I guess I ruined our night, I know . . . I know . . . but I wanted to tell you how good you looked tonight, and how good you smelled, and how I've been wishing we didn't have that stupid fight . . . so what are you doing now? . . . yeah? . . . awwww . . . would you like me to bring you some make-up cookies? . . . some make-up nookie?"

He dug a quarter, two dimes and three pennies out of his pocket, put the quarter and one of the dimes into the slot and dialed her number. He felt warm again now, warm on the inside.

A man apologizes. A man sets things right. That's what a good woman expects a good man to do.  To think she'd probably been sitting around glumly, waiting for him to come around, it pained him.  He hoped she wouldn't be stubborn now, just because it took him four or five hours to call.

He put the receiver to his ear. It rang twice. No answer. Three times. No answer. Six times. No answer, no machine. Nine times. Nothing. Twelve times. Nothing.

She wasn't home.

He stepped back and threw the receiver against the plastic wall of the phone booth. He picked it up and put it to his ear again. Still ringing. Still no answer.

He hung the payphone up and could feel both rage and the bitter wind overwhelming him. Staying sober the past several hours had been a waste of good judgement after all.  He turned back up the boulevard and resumed his walking, anger quickening his pace.

She said, "I don't tolerate mind games."

And the words slithered across his mind like black snakes, hissing and full of poison. A woman knows a million phrases that can magically start an argument. That's one of the most popular.

"I'm not playing mind games, honey. God dammit. I'm just trying to hold onto you, and it's getting harder than hell."

That's what he should have said.  Because that would have been the truth, ladies and jints.  He'd been losing her for weeks

Tonight, she'd slipped free of his grasp, forever. 

The night crashed on him like a wave. The stars winked out.  The wind howled.  The boulevard stretched for blocks and miles and years.  He kept on walking, fading into the night.

He had nowhere to go.



** Thanks for reading, everybody.  I'll have one more post for you in 2006. **

By the way ~ here's a "recent" picture of my bad haircut.  But it was taken two weeks ago and 10 days after the actual cutting, so it's not as horrible as it was. 

I'm going to do something a little different today.  I'm posting a music video.

Whatever writing I do, I'll have to make it fast.  I have to be at work — on assignment — in less than an hour.

In early 2004, a friend of mine practically begged me to check out this singer named Sondre Lerche.  She was a good bit younger than me, so I didn't automatically trust her taste in music.  Besides, I hated the name: Sondre Lerche?  Who??  I didn't even know if it was a male or female singer. 

Finally, she hit me with the line that is bound to work on me every time. "He looks like YOU," she told me.  "Honestly!"

So I caved in.  I read some online reviews of his music — he'd just put out his second CD then, titled, "Two Way Monologue" — and they were overwhelmingly positive.  So then I ordered his CD from Amazon.com and spent that entire summer listening to it, over and over again.

Yeah.  The guy's pretty special.  I even went out and bought his debut CD, "Faces Down," which he put out when he was only 19, and found it equally enjoyable despite it being a bit less sophisticated than "Monologue."

He's a pop star from Norway who has been trying to tap into the US audience, but he's had only modest success so far.  The problem isn't his talent — he's loaded with it — but his approach.  He's not interested in being marketed as an ultra-hip hottie for the teenie-bopper set.  He's more interested in making fun of that approach, and of himself — as you'll see in the video.

But that's part of what makes him so endearing.  The video is for the song "Days That Are Over."  It's a good song for the end of the year, I guess.  It's not my favorite song from that album (not even close, actually) but it's easy enough on the ears and Lerche has made a charming-as-hell video for it.

The video has a nice message in it, once a viewer gets past all the low-rent, but spot-on popular-TV satires.  Watch him spoof game shows, reality shows, cooking shows, American Idol (look for the subtle "dig" at Paula Abdul), boy bands and even David Letterman. 

The message?  I think it says something about trying too hard to be interesting, to impress people, and then realizing that the people who love you only ask that you be yourself.  I don't know why that hits home so powerfully for me, but it does. 

By the way, Lerche is a blogger too.  You can read his blog anytime at:
Punch Lines, from Sondre Lerche

Ok.  Here's the video.  Hope you enjoy it until I return — which will be sooner this time, I promise.

Days That Are Over

I am torn.

Over the past several weeks, it's come clear to me that a few readers care about this blog very much.  Even when I don't write, they leave me comments, send me private messages of encouragement, tell me they miss me.  At least one of them has embarked on a tour of yester-blogs, catching up on entries I posted here before our paths entwined.  Or maybe that's what happens when I go almost three weeks without updating.

Anyway, it means a lot to me.

Here's my confession: I never intended this blog to be a long-running production.

Here's another confession: I still don't.

And one more: I might change my mind.

Add all of those confessions up and we're pretty much back where we started.  Twice already, I've talked about ending this blog ("Beginning the End" and "Down the Rabbit Hole") and even though I've stayed, I've never considered making this blog continuous.  It must end sometime.  Endings are what I write best.

Still, I feel like there are readers here who deserve better.


Other current events:



It snowed last night, on top of the snow and ice that fell last week.  Those of you in the USA know what kind of snow the Midwest, particularly Illinois, got last week.  It seems like most of it fell here.  On me.  We got a foot of it, on top of half an inch of ice and freezing rain.  

Apparently, Jacksonville, IL. wasn’t expecting so much powder so soon.  There’s no road salt anywhere, so the roads have been awful and accidents have been plenty.  Temperatures haven’t gone up sufficiently in the daytime to improve matters.  Whatever does melt, it re-freezes after sundown, making surfaces even more treacherous.

Not that I have to worry about driving on it.  On the same day that all the snow fell, my car died.  I’m just lucky like that.  I turned the key in the ignition and the engine only coughed.  I turned the key again, nothing.  The car died in the garage, so that no more snow can fall on it, nor can mechanics or folks with jumper cables get to it.  More good fortune smirking on me.

I wish that was all.  But there’s more.

Two days before the snow fell, I got tired of my long hair and went to get it shortened.  I got butchered.  The woman cutting my hair was clearly tired, and distracted by radio reports of an impending ice-&-snow storm coming our way.  She told me she lived out in the country, where roads were sure to be closed. “Ain’t no way I’ll be coming to work tomorrow,” she said, a bit cheerfully.  Meanwhile, buzz-buzz-buzz and snip-snip-snip and my mind drifted.  Probably to sex.  Wherever it went, it got back too late.  She spun me around to the mirror and .... well, how do you say it?  Hare Krishna?

I got the Chemo cut.  All I need now is the wristband and the bicycle.

I wore a stocking cap all night at work.  All young and hip at age 37, with my bad-ass stocking cap hiding an even worse-ass haircut.  Yo, dog. Get down with the new me, or get your punk-ass face outta my grill.

The next day, I called a beautician in Springfield and asked if she could maybe do something to make that little tuft of hair atop my head more presentable.  “I look like a Dr. Seuss drawing,” I told her.  She said she had some ideas and we made an appointment for the next afternoon.

So, guess where I was heading the next day, at the moment I put my key in the ignition of my car, turned it and got nothing but a cough.  I'd have to cancel my appointment.  I laid my head on the cold, dead steering wheel and cried.  Really.  I almost cried.

You think I’m embellishing this?  Bite me.

And the SUCK TRAIN just kept on rolling from there.  Tow-truck man couldn’t get to my car, because the narrow little garage is surrounded by snow and ice, because nobody put any road salt down, because the city didn’t have it.  So all weekend, I lived like a shut-in.  Just me and my cat.  I ran out of food Friday night, got tired of eating delivered pizza by Sunday afternoon and spent all of Sunday night nibbling on soup crackers and wondering why nobody ever comes to visit me anymore.

Ok ~ it wasn’t QUITE that bad, but it was uncomfortable enough.  I still haven’t been out, except to my office, only four ice-covered blocks away.  I’ve been having daydreams about the grocery store.  But every time I think of going there, I get all depressed about my new ’do and feel like taking a long, long nap in a dark, dark place.

And then tonight, it snowed again.  It was blowing out of the sky and right in my face as I trudged home, around midnight, laughing at all this accumulated misfortune, to keep from crying.  How does it feel to be the loneliest man in the world?  I can almost tell you.

But then the feeling passes, almost before I can pin it down to text and language.  I’m not the loneliest man.  I’m not even lonely — it just feels like that when elements and circumstances temporarily reduce me.  I’m a spoiled little baby, honestly.  If I had half the integrity of, say, that guy from Little House On the Prairie, I’d take it all in stride.  I’d trek all the way from here to Denver in a blizzard just to buy my daughter some warm winter shoes.  I’d dissasemble my automobile and reassemble it outside the garage, so that a mechanic can finally get to it.  I’d organize my community into a massive shovelling crew, and we’d clear up the streets and walkways ourselves, our ruddy cheeks tanning in the harsh winter sun as we sing Christmas carols to make the work go faster.

But none of that would make my hair grow back, would it?  So go ahead, dog.  BITE ME.

I hope you’re all glad to see me again.