The Novel in the Works - Waterboy 1

This novel is under renovation I will post the most recent updates as often as my procrastination allows...but it is my new novel and I am working on a rewrite that will do two things.
1. I am aiming this novel at a young adult audience.  It was not written that way to begin with but the market for young adult novels is the only growth sector in print books.
2. To express more clearly the forlorn love of a young woman that shaped much of my life.  A love that is finally far enough in my past that I have a bit of perspective on it.

So these are the changes I'm working on what follows is an amalgamation of the changes I have and have not made.

Waterboy -  

Alright, look, I am not crazy.  I’m not a stalker.  And I’ve never been a freak.  But then again, that’s not what you think I am, is it?  You think I am a hero.  You think I am something special.  It’s not your fault you think all these false things about me - heroic...ha, I’m a coward in chicken’s clothing.  But you would not know that, would you?  Because you’ve never heard the whole story.  Well, now you will.

An, unlike my mother taught me, I’m going to start out on the wrong foot:  

Sometimes I find myself getting arrogant and believing its because I’m smarter than everyone around.  Other times, when I’m feeling down, I think I’m just wired different and will never fit in, or have any friends.  It’s that down angle the doctors like to harp on.  They tell me I’m manic depressive and they want to rewire me with their medication.  Or they tell me I’m schizophrenic.  I can tell that manic depressive, which the younger doctors call bi-polar isn’t as bad.  It’s pretty obvious from the way they talk about it.  They don’t look as sad when they say bi-polar, as they do when they say schizophrenic.  Schizophrenic always comes with the addition of, ‘maybe, possibly’ or some other loop hole for me to get out of.  It’s like, if I just do the right thing, speak the right way, so long as it’s different from what I’ve been doing, maybe the life ending label of schizophrenic won’t be applied to me.  

A long time ago it was just called crazy.  Back then they’d lock the patients up in a looney bin.  I guess it was sort of like how the term shell shock used to be how they described how army guys felt after they got back from war.  Now they use post-traumatic stress syndrome.  I can see what total bullshit it is, all those labels, all that bullshit about my brain being wired wrong.  How if they can just get this or that chemical in my brain balanced everything will be as peachy as apple pie.

You want to know what I think is so funny about it all?  That no one ever seems to ask what’s wrong.  

Well, that’s a little bit of a lie.  Sometimes people ask what’s wrong.  But there’s something fake about the way they ask.  It’s like all they really want to hear is that everything is honky-dory, or some other happy-crappy.  But it’s all bullshit, the way those doctors listen.  It’s like they can wait, but won’t listen.  I read this letter an old indian chief wrote to the president.  The chief was Chief Seattle and he was asking the president to respect his land.  You could tell by the way he wrote the thing that that Chief really knew how to listen.  He could listen to the trees and the brooks and the sort of stuff that gets drowned out in the hustle of the bustle.  I knew when I read about him that, if I could learn to talk to him, earn the respect of him, I’d be alright.  And all the labels the doctors could ever think up to put on me wouldn’t matter, not even a little bit.  

That was the first time I ever got put in a mental institute.  A looney bin.  When I ran away to go find Chief Seattle.  I was thirteen years old and I made it from Orange County California where my family and I lived up to Oregon.  I even made it to the reservation.  When I got there I thought, ‘this is it, I’ve found what I was looking for.’  There was this big show with all these Indian’s dressed up doing their dance and banging their drums.  The bang, bang, boom of the drums hit something down deep in me.  But when I went to talk to the Indian’s they didn’t listen at all.  They took me to see some soft skinned man in an office.  I told him I was looking for someone like Chief Seattle.  But instead of listening this man in a suit just asked questions.  Where was I from?  Where were my parents?  A bunch of crap.  Soon enough my parents had flown up to take me back home.  That soft skinned man in the suit, he was chief.  I googled him later, he’s an Indian alright.  He runs a casino.  

After I got out of the mental institute my parents moved us to Florida.  They said it was going to be better for me down there.  I wouldn’t have to explain why I’d been in a mental institute to anyone.  I knew the real reason though.  My Dad got fired from his job.

I guess all that doesn’t really matter now.  It was before the flood.  Before the infra-structure collapsed.  Back before life got interesting again.

Don’t give me that red, white, and blue crap that life was plenty interesting here in the States before The Flood.  I was about to start my freshman year of high school before everything went down.  And instead of having freshman year with all my old friends back home.  I was in the lowest state in America.  By lowest, of course, I mean...

-

Elevation

I know how to interact with people.  I laugh at all the right places.  Smile when it is necessary, frown if I find something offensive.  But trust, for me, is not something that can be talked out.  There is no sales pitch I’ll ever trust.  What I do trust, in so far as I can trust anything, are my five senses.  I trust what I’ve learned through experience.  And until I’ve known someone long enough to have developed a faith in them and their decision making - I’m not asking that someone put me at the center of their decision making, only that they have a personal philosophy that includes the wellbeing of all people they come into contact with - I cannot be fully at ease with them.

That’s the much shorter, yet more long winded version of this:

“I could use some help with Biology.”  Melindasaid.  You see how I do that?  I introduce her with something as simple as a single sentence now I’m going to twist it around.  Now I’m going to paint her picture.  Now I’m going to tell you who she is.  

She is sex.  

Take a deep breath.  Slow down that throbbing heart.  I know that if you had your way you’d shut down every piece of your mind and just follow that divining rod in your pants into whatever moist place you can find.  But for now, take a deep breath because she is sex.  You know those early notions of sex?  Black stockings with a line down the back.  High heeled shoes with a short skirt, a little fray at the edge of the skirt that sways when she walks.  Take a deep breath, I know you’re getting riled up but it’s not over yet.  She’s French.  What is it about the French?  Somehow I’m convinced that bestial passion is encoded in their Gallic DNA.  Yet that passion has been channeled by romance-language cultures for a thousand years culminating in the grand spectacle of smoke rolling off her lips, cigarette held, not by the strength of her fingers because her fingers are nearly limp, but by some unknowable alchemy the cigarette holds its place.  I don’t even like smokers - but when she does it...Maybe I’m just as blind as the last man she dated.  He was a married man who left his wife and two kids for her.  She got bored with him.  So he killed himself.

Somehow when I got to Florida I had become a nerd.  My nerdification happened somewhere in between not having any friends and finding my only entertainment in books and Florida’s ass-backwards educational system that left an average California student about a year and a half ahead of an advanced Floridian.  It also became the reason Melindapaid any attention to me.

And now, somehow, because I’ve gotten a few grades people think I’m smart.  And sex...I mean Melinda, has asked for help with Biology.

“I just don’t get it.”  She says.  “I’ve got to take this class to graduate but I just don’t see why I should care.  I mean what will I ever need to know about biology.”

“It’s the study of life.”  I say, disbelieving anyone could think that something as basic as biology could not be important underlying that though was a desire to tell Melindaanything she might want to hear - so long as she liked me.  

“Why should I care about cells though?  I don’t want to be a doctor.”

I smiled and realized that the same thing that keeps the beer industry plugging away was going to keep this conversation between her and I alive.  “Biology isn’t about cells.  And it’s not about being a doctor either.  Do you want to know what Biology is really about?”

A small intimate bubble had grown around us, outside the table, booth, and books was another world.  Or maybe I was just imagining it, after all she had me thinking about...

“Biology is sex.  Everything about Biology boils down to that one primary element.  Without sex none of it matters.  I mean think about it, life started on the planet - at a best guess - something like four billion years ago.  Sexual reproduction didn’t start until about 1.2 billion years ago.  In almost three billion years the biggest evolutionary success was developing something called ATP, do you know what ATP is?”

Melindanodded.  I new this would be the perfect spot to try innuendo.  But what do I know about innuendo?  Innuendo takes finesse.  Finesse takes practice and practice I do not have.  Worse yet?  I’d have to try and mix funny in, there is no comfortable way to inject humor into something you’re not comfortable with.  It comes off stilted and awkward.  And like I said, I had no practice, so of course it all felt awkward.  

I realized I’d lost myself in my own thoughts for a few moments too long and was losing Melinda’sattention.  I shook my head to knock the internal dialogue out of it.

“So three billion years it took evolution to come with ATP, without sex.  Every cell in your body uses ATP to generate its energy.  But in the last billion years every life form you’ve ever heard of has evolved from a bunch of single celled life.  All the dinosaurs you’ve ever heard of, the weirdest glowing headed creature at the bottom of the ocean, lions, tigers, and bears...all of them have popped up relatively quickly all because of sex.  Biology is just the study of how all those pairings led to what we see around us now.”

“I don’t know it just doesn’t seem that important.”  

“But we’ll figure it out?”  I asked encouragingly.  

“Yeah we’ll figure it out.”  A wane little smile spread across her lips and her shoulders slumped just a little.  Maybe I should have been annoyed at her.  After all what use is a person who can’t even see fit to educate themselves?  But I wasn’t annoyed.  Not like the silent annoyance my Dad expressed when I was slow to pick something up he thought was easy.  But he was a scientist, a graduate of MIT one of the finest engineering schools in the world.  Me I was just dumb, horny and male enough to stubbornly refuse to give up on Melinda.

-

Late at night the monsters creep out from under my bed.  All day long I know my bed is there, waiting - Brillo-haired devils laying beneath - for my return.  Patience is their motto.  

“He always has to come back to us.”  They say.  

They never bite.  They never scream, they never pounce or...prey - that is what they do.  These devils prey.  They whisper little preys up to my ears.  Words like prayers, but without a prayers bequest.  Paranoia, horror, mistrust: all the sane rational bits of risk management a person must wade through to deal with a hostile world.  Not me, they whisper.  ‘No, not I,’ I whisper back.

Nothing I think is assuredly sane.  And there the devil has me.  

-

‘I hate you.’  I typed.  I didn’t know if anyone was paying attention or not.  I wrote the words anyway.  I could hear them thinking.  Like the soft tick, tick, tick of a mechanical network.  They were out there.  And no, maybe I couldn’t really hear their thoughts.  I just knew They were out there thinking, all I had to do was re-imagine the chatter.

Twice.  Not once, but twice we’ve saved his life.  We kept Bernie from burning himself alive, we kept him from drowning too.  That little bastard should be grateful.  

But I wasn’t grateful.  That’s not what I felt at all.  What I felt was, “I hate you, fuck you, LEAVE ME ALONE.”  

Emotions aren’t a one way street.  Hell they aren’t even a street, sure we label certain emotions with street signs but they’ve got no direction, they don’t follow any tidal flows.  And so my hate was mixed with doubt.  Because why wouldn’t I doubt my hate.  It wasn’t like I could explain my hate.  How the hell could I explain this?  “oh by the way there’s this piece of me, this really big piece actually, because I know deep down in the dark little heart of you, you don’t give a shit about me.  If you gave a shit about me then you’d do something to help alleviate this madness that consumes me.  You’d take a stand with me against Network, if you weren’t such a selfish piece of shit that is.  

No, somehow I don’t think those words would win me many friends out there in Watcherland.

-

“Jesus, what happened to your hand?”

“Nothing.”  I said a little too sharply.  “I slammed it in a door.  Just an accident.”

“Are you going to be okay to study?”  Melindaasked.  

My heart and mind were in a jumble.  Network, that demon in my heart had been tightening his grip on me lately.  That was why I’d taken my fist and pound it like a piston into a cinderblock wall.  That is why my hand was swollen and mangled.  Every time I thought I was free of Him, He found a way to fold me back in.  But Melindawas being kind to me, even if she was playing along with Network, pretending she didn’t already know.  And she was beautiful.  Beauty always helped.  Something about it precludes forgiveness, a forgiveness I had to grow into with everyone.  Everyone but Melinda.  

“It was just a little accident.  I mean it hurts, but I’ll be fine.”  The left side of my lips turned up in a smile.  And I put on an aw-shucks tone of voice I hoped would express embarrassment over my clumsiness, and my desire to drop the subject.  Which had little to do with how I really felt, but I still believed in Network - and even if I didn’t believe to speak of Him was to hand my freedom back over to the mental institutes.  

Melindashrugged.  “Okay.”

We studied.  She’d gotten a C+ on her last test, a B and an A on her most recent homework assignments.  Studying with her was the only time I got out of the house.  All my other time was spent thinking, imaging...wondering if the doctors had maybe been right.

Schizophrenic.  

not 19

My mom told me I wasn't old enough to read Stephen King.  This is how a life long fan is made.

It was the Eye of the Dragon, that I read first.  Some obscure novel with a scaled cover that only the ardent Kingites would know.  I just picked it up off my mother's bookshelf because I liked the texture of the cover and the gleam in the dragons eye.  Don't even remember much about the book but I loved the feel of the cover.

You need to understand something about me and my mother.  In the time which we lived together (not terribly long because once she got remarried to my step-father I pointed my nose west and ran towards a dotting father that I only really knew through spoil-ridden summer vacations.) I was her baby.  The youngest, and a boy.  From what I've seen of the world (limited) mothers get along with son's better, while fathers find their daughters irresistible.  Now I'm not saying that there is anything sexual in this.  I mean it's not like the whole meaning of the universe is wrapped up in gametes making zygotes...is it?  Whether it is or isn't is a question left to those hapless BS'er's also known as Theologians and Philosophers.  For the rest of us let's not splice this bit of pie so thin that we lose all the flavor.  Boys like girls and girls like boys, its just a healthy way to keep the race running.

What I'm getting at is this, my mother dotted on her son.  So when she brought the hammer down, even if the hammer was one of those great big blow up hammers you occasionally see at Ringling Brothers, it knocked me for a loop.  And she brought the hammer down on Stephen King.  I was absolutely, positively, under no circumstances what-so-ever allowed to read that sick and twisted pop-fiction pulpist. She promptly moved all her Stephen King novels (quite a few) up to the top shelf of her bookcase.  Much too high for a seven year old to get at.

Except parents rarely appreciate the ingenuity of a child.  Much less our monkey heritage.  I climbed that bookcase without a hint of remorse and brought down the thickest tome with the name King on it I could find.  In my mind I figured if I was only going to get one chance at reading this guy - and my odds decreased every time I took a new book, I understood this intuitively - I might as well go big.  Which is how a seven year old finds himself reading through a thousand page novel.  And how a fourteen year old finds himself rereading that very same novel, The Stand, a fourth time.  I read every bit of fiction that man wrote.  Quite a lot I might add.  And reading him got me reading other people too.  First Anne Rice, the Robert Heinlein, the next thing I knew I was tracking down Mark Twain, and Papa.  Hell I even dabbled in those Russian depressives Tolstoy and Doestovesky.  Which is really just bragging.

But in all that reading I discovered what authorship really is.  It is an attempt at intimacy.  A guarded and utterly stoic attempt, but an attempt nonetheless.  You see when you write a novel, whether fiction or fact, the inner scape of you is mapped out for all to see.  Or, an analogy Stephen King might prefer, we get to look through someone else's eyes at the collective lake of unconscious creativity we all go fishing in from time to time.

Another bit the King might appreciate: 19, the last blog I made.  I haven't posted in so long because 19 is one of those depth-charge numbers for me.  Why is it a depth-charge number...by that I mean its a number that for nothing better than superstitious mumbo jumbo that any science-fearing believer is ashamed to admit, it's a depth-charge number because I find myself dusting off the cobwebs of all the scattered nonsense I know of numerology when that number comes up.

anyway thanks for listening while I moved past that.

Ladies and Gentlemen

What does it mean to impress people?  Are other peoples opinions important?  The sensible answer is no.  If you are a self-possessed human then you are capable of deciding the difference between right and wrong without the positive or negative feedback of the world surrounding you.  But is that a realistic answer?

If you're a child your parents opinion of you certainly matters.  If you have a boss his or her opinion certainly matters.  If you believe in something greater than yourself then That opinion matters to you.  All these opinions sit outside of our self-possessed little worlds.

What of my own life?  Why have I embarked on this particular diatribe after such a long absence from my blog-sphere of one?  Because all night long at my job waiting tables in a restaurant I felt faced with decision after decision between doing what I am naturally drawn towards or shouldering more than I'm comfortable with.  I worked with a man who is as aggressive an alpha male personality as you will meet.  I'm not saying that the man I worked with tonight is aggressive physically he simply pushes his personality, his wants and desires to the forefront of any interaction.  He doesn't pause long enough to notice another persons reaction because if they aren't as overt in displaying their needs as he is it doesn't register for him.

And what bothers me is that I allowed this forceful personality to entice me into something I felt uncomfortable with from the start.  There I was having a nice smooth night when my co-worker pushes to have us pick up another table outside of our assigned station.  It was my turn in our rotation so the table he wants us to pick up will be mine.  I go along with this because I am inclined to make people happy.  I work in a job where the more I make people happy the better my night goes.  So as a night wears on I settle into this roll more completely before long I'm working as hard for my co-workers as I am for my guests.  The part I play consumes me and I find myself sickened with my attempts to balance my strict code of conduct with the increased workload I shoulder from all my people pleasing.  It rarely works out to be a flattering display of my best sides.  Which, for a person who is already a loner, leaves me feeling adrift.  Moreover this attempt to make people happy that I don't genuinely have any interest in, I just try to please them because it is a part of the flow I'm in at the moment, makes me seem like a fool - or some other derogatory comment - to everyone around who I might actually care about.


    

Worth

I ought to be writing. That's what I promised myself. I was going to come home and work on my novel, but instead I'm here writing to you - no one.

It's love, that's what this is all about, you know...everything. It's about love.

Alright, granted what I just wrote is pedantic. It's all about love. What a fucking cliche, right? But it's the question I ask myself everyday. What do you love? I try to pursue the things I love with single minded vigor.

----------------------------

What a second, let me back up.

You see a long long time ago in a whole other part of the world I promised myself (I promised whatever is inside of myself that I identify as something outside of myself) that my life's dedication was writing. Writing was to be my love. At the time it made a whole lot of sense, after all THE WOMAN, that one woman who stole my shot at a fairy tale love with one fucking syllable - NO, had just spoken those too small letters to me. N - O. I'll never be as crushed as I was by my inability to express what I felt for her. Because I was certain, and I still am, if I had known how to express my heart to her she could never have refused me. So ever since that day I've been practicing, I've been learning, and most of all I've been exploring that place called a heart. I searched in journals. I poked around in stories. I made a thousand words a day my goal and I crushed it. I have written a lot, all in search of finding a way to express a glimmer of what she made me feel.

Sorry for the sour ending, but I haven't done it. I don't even think the words exist anymore. As far as I can tell love, sexual love, is some intangible thing that works on the same level as God, a place that developed so far before language it just doesn't translate.

Yet because of HER I have truly found writing. It's the only place I feel truly at home anymore. And maybe because of Jayme Corbin I'll never get a chance to fall in love the way my heart and head still thinks I'm supposed to, but if it wasn't for Jayme I also wouldn't be sitting here writing this.

---------------------

Love - everything important springs from it, and when my ass is in bed in the morning and the last thing I want to do is roll out from underneath the womb-like warmth, the utter sanctuary that are my covers, its chasing after the things I love that get me to step down onto the cold, cold floor. It makes me go to school. It makes me run. It makes me clean my house. It is the reason I bother even though I don't think I have any reason to bother. I do it all because I loved a woman named Jayme. And maybe, someday, if I figure out a way to do it all just right a woman like her (yes, I still dream about it actually being Jayme) will decide my love is worth her love.

Cheese Whiz

I'm talking about bleu cheese, that strong stuff that walks across you tongue and laughs at measly little flavors like garlic and onions. Yes, cheese. Good old fashioned cheese the sort of romantic notions that can't be expressed any other way than a spread.

I'm always wondering what to say. My mind is always churning through possible words and their likely outcomes. I'm always trying to predict the future by finding that certain phrase that can illicit only one single response. The response I want.

Catch is love, that fucked up intangible emotion refuses to be tied down to anything but the inner most truths of my heart.

See I told you there was some cheese spread coming.

Anyway, love refuses to listen to anything I have to say. The only thing love listens to is my heart and the truth that sits down there in the bottom of it. And love is omniscient. It knows all the little longings my heart aches for, all the meanderings through lust, it knows when I'm focusing my mind intentionally because - this girl is right for me in all the ways my brain wants her to be right for me - and my heart knows when I'm focusing in one girl because I didn't like the fact that I was interested in this other girl.

Of course all this is about a red head that I couldn't actually talk to tonight. And because I couldn't actually talk to her I conceive of myself as missing out on something I could have pulled off in other circumstances. Truth was this girl was so far out my league I don't know why I even wasting my time considering such a thing. She was beautiful and I'm just a goofy looking guy with a bald head and over grown ears. And a thirty year old waiter to boot. But in my egotistical mind I envision a situation where I actually say the right things and woo her into bed, offering her a few days of fantasy while she is on vacation here in Naples. It would never happen, and so my desire becomes torment. A long sad ritual of imagination that I've walked through so many times it feels stale.

Well, I hope I've uplifted you on this Saint Paddy's day.

Face in Full

Jesus I hate days where death gets in my head. Truth is, down in my core, I have never found any purpose to life. It all just seems like a great big waste and if I really let myself think about it a compulsive desire for death consumes me. I could sit here and take you through my existential dilemma, I could tell you all about the utter pointlessness of a life born of nothing but a hodge podge of organic materials. I could tell you about the utter uselessness of being like Gandhi or Charles Bronson, I could tell you that the president is a fool for taking responsibility for so many us, and we are all slackers for not achieving our childhood dream.

You know it's only the pursuit of my childhood dream that keeps me alive. I pursue writing. And yet I don't pursue it either. Maybe when I finally get the nerve to try selling something I've written I'll move away from the dark depressive days that are all the more painful because of how hard I try to hide them from the people around me. The dark days are so many that I have learned not to get too close to anyone for fear that they'd feel obligated to ask me what was wrong - and then I'd have to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. I have this impenetrable belief that, like Medusa, whoever sees the face of my pain will be turned to stone. I don't ever want to leave someone else feeling the way I do.

So quit reading this before I face you in full.

I should be ranting and raving against the morons who think that a snow storm means that Global Warming is a hoax. Even though the science behind this hoax has been clear on one point, lots of changes are going to happen - the most obvious change? more intense weather.

But ranting about the weather isn't whats on my mind today. What is on my mind is a girl.

Let me tell you a story.

All day yesterday, for weeks really, I've had this woman in my head. She is beautiful; a smattering of freckles across her cheeks, the sort of body that does not lend itself to be written poetically about, more pornographic really. Eyes, ears and all the other requisite parts are there too, and I like them all. So she's beautiful, I desire her, I want to get to know more about her, so on and so forth.

The only place I've ever seen her is where she works, an all organic grocery store. Now I am on the green bandwagon, so not only do I see a beautiful woman when I walk into the store but I see someone who has got a similar ethos. I'm not saying that this woman and I are meant to be together or anything. But I really think there is a valid starting point for getting to know one another. At least a more valid starting point than, 'hey you're hot, wanna fuck?' Which seems to work for so many other people.

I go in to this grocery store today with the notion in my head that I'm going to strike up a conversation with this...do I call it an infatuation, or is this love at first sight. I prefer the later, though unless I find a way to do something about my attraction the former is more accurate. But its the finding something to do about it that kills me.

Tangent: Alright so, I've got this mental tripping block in my head. I see the world as one grand conspiracy. Some days I get poetic about it and feel like its a spiritual thing, and that it is really God leading me towards my destiny. But mostly I just feel like the whole world is conspiring to make a practical joke out of me and my life.

So this malicious world would hate to see me succeed in attracting a woman I'm attracted to. They would much rather see me settle for someone who just happened to be passing by. And there is a girl that I'm trying to hang out with right now that, to my mind would be settling. I was planning on calling Passer-by girl tonight so I wouldn't be lonely on my day off from work.

But hanging out with the Passer-by girl was not my number one plan. My plan was to go into that grocery store and be confident and funny, perhaps even whimsical and ask this crush of mine out on a date.

Ah, but the fates intervened. At least that was how it felt. You see Passer-by girl and I had this nice conversation a week or two ago that was enough to make me realize that spending time with her was good. During our conversation we were distracted by a group of young woman making all sorts of noise having a funny light hearted conversation.

One of the girls joking around was a young woman who I've had one of those eye flirtations with. You know what I'm talking about, she and I have prolonged eye contact that seems to be the common conception of attraction. When in truth if I'm really attracted to a girl the last thing I want to do is look her directly in the eye. Love - the attraction part of love - is terrifying. What if this is the one, what if I really do want to be with this girl forever...Jesus that is a heavy place to start. So if I feel a real attraction I become shy. But this little girl, and she is little by every standard except the legal one (I'm pretty certain that the young woman I've made eyes at is eighteen - she is in college after all) is only a passing fancy.

So in my head this Little Fancy has become associated with the Passer-by girl who I'm planning on calling today if my attempt to get the girl I'm really attracted to to hang out with me. And guess who is the first person I see when I walk into the organic grocery store this morning? You guessed it, Little Fancy. Apparently she has gotten a job at the organic grocery store where a girl I am really interested in getting to know better - so interested in getting to know her that I become shy, from fear of the honesty of my feelings.

My head isn't right. And this minor alteration in the world, Little Fancy showing up at a place I'd never expected and because she is associated with Passer-by girl seemed like too much of a coincidence.

I spent time in a mental institute because of the way my brain works. For the rest of my life I'm going to doubt my own thought process. Everything has to pass through logic before I'm allowed to offer it up to the world in my day to day life. At least I try to pass everything through logic. But I've never really been a logical person deep down. There has always seemed to be too much chance in the world for logic to play some great overarching theme. Truth is, my nature leads me to be very superstitious. Numbers mean strange things to me, as do playing cards, it's not uncommon for me to carry a coin with me in case I can't decide between two things. So when I saw Little Fancy I knew it wasn't just coincidence. My head went into a whirl of, 'what does this mean?' And I knew that I would never be able to ask my real crush her name, much less asking her out.

Instead I bought my veggies, didn't say hi to Little Fancy because - even though it wasn't her fault - I was angry at her for screwing up my plan. Then I went to the juice counter where the girl I like so much makes drinks and asked her for a grapefruit juice. I didn't say anything funny, special, or memorable before leaving. When I got out to my car I called Passer-by girl and left a message. Now, if she calls me back I'll be convinced that she's read this passage, and is some sort of psychologist trying to straighten out the mislaid screws in my head.

I know that last bit is nonsense. It's just something my head made up in reaction to my disappointment. But I had the thought and it is going to linger all night long. And if she doesn't call me back I'm certain my head will come up with some explanation for why Watcher wanted it that way to.

God, if you are out there please I've been writing because I thought it was what you wanted me to do. But if expressing my screwed up notions of a world with Watcher in it is going to mean I'm spending the rest of my life without being able to make a real connection, I'd rather be put out of my misery.