RE-CHRISTENING

The quote from Alfred Jarry above is the inspiration for my blog house-cleaning today. I was originally going to cut out ALL of my links-- every single last one of them. If I'd had the balls to pull it off, I'm sure it would've been as radical as my accidental deletion of my Archives for the past two years. But would it have been as liberating?

Maybe... which is why I am contemplating finishing the job and losing all of the links by year's end. Even the blogs I really like, or the music sites that I cannot go one day without... they might be gone by 2005.

Why am I doing this? Because I'm no longer the person I was when I started this thing. I'm also thinking of getting rid of the Comments section, but that might be the one thing that I end up keeping-- I've never had a problem with people commenting on my blog. If anything, people have a problem with my reactions to their comments, which is why some people stopped making them a long time ago.

They felt that it was a trap, and they were right.

I don't have the problem of people leaving stupid comments or spam in my Comments box, simply because in the past I took such commenters to task for their sentiments quite openly on my blog. Nowadays only a select few bother to comment, which used to be a bad thing in my book. I see this as a good thing now, because the handful of folks who are considerate enough to let me know what they are thinking are all females whose respective blogs I adore. And let's face it-- some people should never comment, even if they have the right to do so.

I'm trying to redirect my blog energy because I have spent so much of my blogging being negative. I am finding this compulsion to be willfully insolent waning in me. This means that there is hope for me yet. I first noticed the change when I deleted my Archives-- I didn't mean to do it, I was just trying out new templates. But it was probably the best thing I could've ever done, because it set me free.

As a kid, I used to do this pretentious ritual where I'd destroy my writings, either by burning them or burying them. After a while, I learned to give them away to people who appreciated them, but I look back on it and see that it was actually an important routine for me. At the time, I was trying to be a bad-ass, showing people that I didn't give a fuck, that I could torch a poem that I'd spent hours composing just because I could. It was a literary display of machismo, if there is such a thing: "Look at me, I don't need no stinking papers to valdiate me!"

But when I killed off two years and half a million words on accident and didn't flinch... it was startling. It made me re-think everything. It helped me to write kinder entries, to post more compassionate blogs. It made me realize what an ass I've been, wallowing in the muck and the mire.

I still like the muck and the mire, as much as a pig relishes his slop. But I don't have to be so down and dirty all of the time. The love of a good woman, as cheesy as it sounds, also plays a big role-- I am happier than I have been in years, now that I am with Eve again. I don't deny the impact she is having on me. I've been in denial of how much I really needed her, how much it hurt me when she seemingly turned her back on the life she was capable of having just to be secure with a man she didn't really love.

That's why my posts in the first two years of this blog were unsentimental and unsparing, lacking empathy for those who lead with their hearts and not their heads. Any chance to ridicule those whose passions had consumed them was a chance for me to assert (in my own mind) a dominance over the things in my life that I had no control over.

I am no longer addicted to other people's misery, and I am finding it hard to stay interested in my own issues. I know I can be an evil bastard-- so why am I devoting so much blog time to proving it?

I will never lose my hypersensitivity. I stil get pissed off when people dismiss me glibly, and I can still make it rain when I feel like I've been wronged for no reason. But I don't expect to be perfect, and I don't expect changes to take effect overnight.

I haven't posted on Craig's List Rants and Raves in a month. I read it all the time, but I stopped posting hateful shit. Then, I just stopped posting on that board altogether. But I still read it, to remind myself of where my mentality was, where it can be if I lose momentum and focus... it's a guilty pleasure, what can I say?

It all pales in comparison to the emotions I share with Eve. She is so giving, so loving... it's hard to believe that we were at odds with each other not so long ago. Last night, she bought me a pack of cigarettes and a pizza. She knew I was broke, so she willingly did this for me. It's not the fact that she bought me smoke and food that has me all dewey-eyed-- it's the fact that I didn't ask her to do it, that she didn't have to do it and yet she did anyway.

Tonight, it's my turn to buy dinner and cancer sticks. She will play modest and refuse, but there's no stopping the reciprocation.

CHEESE ALERT: We sat on the couch, watching The Simpsons and exchanging tender kisses, each one softer than the last, our eyes closed in unison, the perfume of her delicate breath caressing the curve of my cheekbones, my fingers navigating a course through her thick mane, my lips planting wet flags of affection on the nape of her neck...

I got it bad, don't I?

It's about time.

Don't get me wrong-- we still keep up the pretense of being 'just friends'. I mentioned the Latina girl at my work that I'd had a crush on earlier this year, how she no longer works here, how I didn't get a chance to see her on her last day, how I suspect she left the job in a hurry due to unwanted advances from executives, how she gave me her phone number even though we couldn't understand each other's languages...

Eve told me to write her a speech and call her. I said "Sounds like a plan." But I know that I won't, and I think she knows it also. Eve likes to give me shit about that kind of stuff because, like a little girl who laughs when her daddy bumps her head against the wall, she likes taking the piss out of me. And, like the clown that I am, I play up that possibility.

However, if I actually did call Liz, and if I told Eve about it, she would be hurt. Terribly hurt. This is the main lesson I have learned after all this time.

We make each other laugh. She calls me a "vampire" and I call her a "werewolf"; I nag her about parallel parking, she gets on my case about my bad luck with automobiles; I tell her shocking anecdotes about my childhood, and she pretends that she is shocked to hear it; and we both play this game where we find funny-looking people on the street and say to each other "That's your girlfriend/boyfriend" just to see the other's reaction.

Sickening, isn't it? The Old Me would be ripping the New Me another asshole by now, going off about how I am selling myself short by investing my identity in someone else, playing into the co-dependence of a relationship, using it as a crutch because I cannot bear to stand alone...

Only thing is, I have never had a problem with going it alone. In fact, it's high time I switched gears and tried working with someone for a while. It might do me some good. No man is an island, or so the saying goes...

In short, I don't need a lot of links and a bunch of bells and whistles to make me feel good about myself anymore. I don't need a dozen comments waiting for me when I log on during my shift. That stuff never mattered-- it was the writing that got me through the tough moments, not the number of hits I received.

Everything else is trivia, but at the core is my soul. No banners can advertise that for me, no one link will bring that to the fore, no template change can take the place of tapping into the raw nerve that drives everything that I do...

And, if you decide that it's not worth commenting over, I won't hold it against you anymore.

Let me make a toast: to Love, and its power. May everyone in this life get at least one chance to feel it.