Tuesdays...

...begin an hour early some weeks. This Tuesday is going to return to the pattern established, however. I'm going to get up and shower and run to the bus and catch it and go to work and hate it and go to that house-ity-house and watch Buffy and things will be better after I get off work.

Perhaps they'll even remember to pay me?

I bought some truly astounding pants today. I would put them on, but the cat is firmly attached to my lap, claws out and all, and I don't want to disturb her.

...Upon some fragile reflection, there are some things I wanted to talk about, but I seem to have forgotten precisely what they were. Thus, rather than expounding further about nothing and nothing-in-particular, I shall go off and pretend that I've actually got something to say.

Some nights just seem so empty, you know, when you've had a good time and had to end it sooner than you would have liked.

But that's an entire other tale, and better saved for another time.

"It's a wonderful idea, but it doesn't work."

So says Poe's dead father?

Goodness...

I wonder, really, when I'm going to have to come to terms with the issues presented by my father, or, more accurately, the lack of his presence. I'm fairly sure I'm not trying to replace him in the boys I choose to have relationships with. None of them are much like him, and none have been his precise opposite.

I do have some memories of him, good and bad, and I think I remember when I stopped believing in him. Not in the sense of disbelieving Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but in the sense of having no faith. Yet there's something so untouchable about it all, as though it happened to someone else, not to me. I grew up with my mother and a man who happened to marry her and tried, on and off, very hard to be a parent to me. I don't think it was his fault that I wouldn't respond, or didn't love him, or whatever happened.

I stopped believing in my father on the first Christmas he didn't come to his parent's house for Christmas Eve. There were presents there that my grandmother said were from him, but there was something lacking, something false in them. They weren't the sort of presents he would have given me. He gave me books and silly things, knick-knacks and whatsits and tapes of music by people my mother didn't really approve of. He didn't give me clothes. My mother told me later, rather disparagingly, that his mother had probably gotten them and he hadn't actually gotten me a thing. It seemed to ring more truly to me than the pretty story my grandmother had given me. I don't remember how old I was, just as I don't remember how old I was when he gave me my first copy of 'The Hobbit'. Younger than seven and older than four, I think. Perhaps a little older, but I think it was before I started grade school.

I remember sitting at Farrell's the day (my birthday?) he gave me the Barry Louis Polisar and Tickle Tune Typhoon tapes. My mother hated that first one. She thought it was just awful.

I remember being so frightened by the Sweeney Todd albums he played at his apartment in Greenwood. I remember Dallas and her caffeine-free diet Cokes near Greenlake. I remember Pauline and Sarah and feeling sorry for this little girl, my age to the day, whose mother insisted that she was fat and threw away the little candies we bought at the gas station.

Really, what could one Tootsie Pop do?

I don't have any solutions yet, really, not to anything, and I don't want someone else's. That wouldn't be proper for a girl who believes firmly in making her own decisions.

In all honesty, I don't think about him very often. He was such a non-presence (except when I looked in the mirror)for most of my life that I eventually basically wrote him out of it.

But I know that somewhere, hidden deeper than I can see most of the time, there are some Issues that I'm going to have to Deal With at some Point.

That's all right, though. I don't mind. Keeps me humble, in a way.

Waking life?

I dreamed of living in a society where Christianity was outlawed. You by and large had to be pagan or risk being removed from your family and taken by the law enforcement agencies, so it wasn't really an improvement from the current state of affairs. Somewhat reminiscent of a modern Roman Empire, perhaps? For some reason I was worried (perhaps some member of my family was Christian or some other such thing. Perhaps it was a friend?), though as I reassured myself in the dream, I had no particular religion registered, and I did more things that fair well qualified as pagan than not. I don't know about licking the blood from my friends' wounds, however, that may have just been my mysterious way of showing I cared. I also had, or had at least borrowed, a digital camera and was using it to take pictures of things. I had a purple toy cat with wings that I photographed, and dolphin-creatures in a pool, and my friends, and an aging actress with whom we happened to visit.

It was an interesting dream. Now I must go and get dressed so as to make it to the bus safely.

Oh, and I'm discovering that German music appeals to me a great deal. I very much wish that our cd burner actually worked. As it is, I shall be forced to make a rather expensive visit to MusicWerks whenever I next get a paycheque...or perhaps the one after that, as the next one really ought to be devoted to rent.

As you were, men, as you were.

Begin again when you know the words.

Again, a day of days and things and quiet madness while creeping into street corners.
There are things I love, and things I do not, but most people don't understand which is which.

I wonder what possessed me to write of my father as though he were no longer counted among the living. It's not as though he died or anything. He's not that old.