If I Would Have Handed In My Resignation When I WANTED To....

...I would only have a week and a half to go instead of 2 1/2 weeks. That would have helped this crapstorm of a day go by just a little better. Had a client in crisis all day long today. She's off her meds and sees nothing wrong with it. Handling her was like handling a landmine.

But this morning didn't help. Remember telling you about DeeDee and how I watched her all through High School make out with all the guys brave enough to ask her out? In my eyes, they were the cool ones. She had a Captain of the football team, a strapping brickhouse of a teenager. She had the Thug King, a ratlike fellow who commanded Mucho Respect. She had the Smouldering Italian. She had me at "Hi!", but that was all. I reconciled this at the time. I was happy with my cowardice. I even became a friend of her many boyfriends, thereby profiting from the status she brought among us. But I never was as cool as they. Never as sexy as they. Never captured DeeDee's body like they did. Never was the object of her desire as they were.

There was another girl, shortly after DeeDee, for whom I pined. After I'd made the escape to church, there was a young lady who's apartment shared my apartment's hallway. Before I knew it, I loved her. I denied it to myself because I was supposed to be God's Rising Star, holy and pious and sanctified. She? She was an unregenerate sinner. Until the day she started asking about church. Until the day she went to a congregation in another town and began calling herself 'saved'. Until she wanted to come to my church and even ride with me in my car. We became exclusive riding partners. She would be waiting and ready to go. She would even get me to go to events that I didn't want to go to. She became known as Alan's Friend.

You know how churches get. They all had us paired, whether she wanted it or not. But I did. I didn't want to formerly ask her, but I took advantage of my time with her. I enjoyed the association with her. I enjoyed the sheer normalcy and belonging of being half of a couple. And her, I liked her. She was amazing. She was strong and funny. I had seen her at her 'worst' and now I was seeing her at her 'best'. She used as much energy she'd put into being chaotic and undisciplined as she did in becoming a zealot for our God. She would make any young aspiring Christian man proud. And she did that very thing when she married the church organist.

I was not the church organist.

So let me try to relate to you what it feels like for a young man to be supplanted by another man. To the loser comes a sense of shrinkage. The chest deflates. The jaws sag. The ears seem to hang low. It becomes hard to lift your eyes from the ground, as if the shelter of a good cave or rock could be found there if you just searched long enough.

Then another dimension comes along. The one that begins to highlight the glaring perfections of your rival. You begin to realize how much more muscular that other one is than you. How much taller. How much more open and confident that one is. How popular. How advantaged. How superior. Every virtue of theirs is a deficit of yours.

Then the powerlessness sets in. You can't change your height. Your attempts to come out of your shell are met with an ouroboros of fear that you at once curse and love. You need safety more than you need to transform and you hate yourself for it, but you love yourself much more because no one else is watching out for you like you are. So you huddle in foetal and you refuse to deal anymore. You find solace in someone else's dreams. You read someone else's lives. And you wait until you're Good Enough.

The next thing you know, you're Forty and you want to know...where did my life go? What happened??

Me? I'm a recovering foetus. I wanted those dreams so badly that I tried stuff. I worked on my body. I adopted a vision. I found a mentor. I took a profession. I developed a talent. I produced creativity. Most days I feel good. This blog is full of my good days.

But this morning I had a bad one. Like a slingshot bullet, I jetted back to those bad old days. The trigger was very easy and very innocent.

Saidy found some new blogs.

Let's laugh now, because as a defense mechanism, it's great! In one fell swoop, I can turn a big sob-story into satire. And, heck yes, I would rather laugh than cry.

So yeh, I climbed high on a pedestal of admiration and praise. For a time, I was the Football Captain. In my own mind, I took some significance that didn't belong to me, and now this is what I get for being greedy.

So I learned this morning that there's a dude out there telling people about his Married Sexlife! How cool is that? Well, no, it's not what you'd think you'd like to have as a guy, but dang--he did it, right? He got married. He made the commitment. And he's having sex--after a fashion.

And I learned also this morning that there's a dude living the single guy life that it seems I'd like to have had, if it weren't for the religious detour I took--a detour that I don't even regret! But still, in this world's eyes, and maybe even in Saidy's eyes, his is the more normal life. The more compatible. He freely cusses. He even appears to be a very normal shade of white. And so, for reasons either good or bad, self-protecting or self-defeating, here I stand on the outskirts again, looking in at all the cool people gettin' it on.

OH! You thought I was making it all up? That my stories of dysfunction and angst were a tool of entertainment? That really I'm this saavy, secure guy who's a genius and is a marvel at inventing the torture of some fictional commit-o-phobe! That the inside wretch couldn't possibly match the outside dude. That I only typed that I can't get up the beef enough to ask a girl out, but in reality, I'm this romance novelist with a girl in every city.

Nope.

I'm just me.

Just me.

Me at 3/09/2004 10:02:00 PM

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