**

**

That one afternoon I ditched work with my parallel-universe husband seems to have supercharged my writer batteries. I went home that weekend and cranked out a fully-formed article for an ex-fundamentalist Web site that got published a week later, garnering rave reviews. To my delight, one visitor called my prose “delicious;” another wanted to know if I was writing a book. During the following week and a half, I finished a particularly long and involved assignment from Matador that required me to rewrite the same travel story for three different markets. (That’s the project that had previously stymied me.) Not to mention the post I published on this blog, two days after we played hooky. We’re talking about a total of at least 7000 words right there, in the space of less than two weeks. Well over twenty pages!

Say what you will, Dan is like a match to my creative fire. And not in the angst-ridden sense of so many of my past muses, inspiring morosely poetic ruminations about perennial longing. No, I feel motivated and empowered to pursue my dreams with all the more gusto. I want to finish as well as start multiple projects. I want to leave behind the soul-sapping grind of pay-the-bills phone work, and just write all day long.

I wish I could do the same for him. At last count, his workshop languished abandoned; he hadn’t played a music gig in ages. In the meantime, he struggles mightily with his left-brain homework, on the road to becoming a productive member of society and pulling his own weight.

I want to say: Let’s run away together — to some sunny place, somewhere by a crashing foreign sea — and create beautiful things. Let’s live a bold, courageous, and impractical life, while we still have the time. Let’s not strain against the grain of our natures just because other people told us it was the grownup and responsible thing to do. But above all, dearest man, whatever you do, whatever you decide, don’t believe — as I did for so many years — that the world doesn’t want your gifts.

Have I ever mentioned that Dan’s first major was Creative Writing?

**

He is on an extended leave of absence after a death in the family. The one day he did appear, right after it happened, I wanted to put my arms around him, but I reined myself in, as I always do. I have never so much as hugged Dan (despite the fact that I hug practically everyone there, even the enormous gentleman with compromised hygiene) — nor have I even friended him on Facebook. This, my darling readers, has been my way of attempting to respect some semblance of boundaries. It was never my intention to seduce another woman’s husband, after all. This insubordinate love took root with all the tenacity of a morning glory, despite my best intentions.

I miss him terribly. I’m restless and impatient, looking over the shoulders of my colleagues, wading through the repetitive tedium of scripts and rebuttals, barely tolerating the inevitable abuse. I have neither the time nor the energy for the usual psychic vampires who come around to feed off my (now somewhat diminished) excitement and joie de vie. Did he miss me as much, while I was gone? His performance plummeted — coincidentally or not — to rock bottom during those five weeks. He thought they were going to fire him. (The week after I came back, he hit the top twenty.)

I still haven’t had a decent opportunity since that day to fess up, to pull a Shasta, and see what transpires (and I mean other than my irrevocable consignment, in the eyes of All Who are Good and Righteous, to hell). Given my history and my self-image, not to mention the hard data, it’s difficult to be optimistic. But I’ve gone over all that already.

And now I have no idea when I’ll see him again.

**

In the past, the only man I ever knew about who wanted to forsake all others — including his wife — for me was a morbidly obese theatre actor aptly named Karl Bacon. He was married to my friend Maureen, a sweet, bonny Irish lass with naturally red hair. I was stunned when he confessed his undying desire for me later, after they were divorced (and unbeknownst to his current girlfriend), because he had always been insufferably pompous and diffident around me. I had always wondered, frankly, what a wonderful woman like Maureen saw in this unattractive character. He was testy, to say the least, with most people; to her he was occasionally abusive. Apparently he would also have jettisoned her without a second thought upon my cue.

Needless to say, he was never the remotest temptation.

**

Liz, that pretty blonde alpha female from my wedding dream, who is married with a young toddler but who seems, at times, to covet Dan, appears to have attached herself to our old friend Ted in Dan’s absence.

I am more than a little relieved by this. Women like Liz have perpetually bested me; they seem to be able to get whatever they want, and sooner rather than later. Few men can resist the queen bee, and I fear that if Liz truly set her sights on Dan, he’d be hard pressed (no pun intended) to resist. But may I say, emphatically, that she can have Ted, with my sincere blessing. If she’s bored with her unglamorous domestic life, and shopping for an affair, he’d make a stellar candidate. Not only does she fall within his favorite physical demographic, her marital status makes her ideal for his distinctly noncommittal purposes.

The reason I bring up this TMZ-grade gossip is that my ongoing unease with Liz provided the occasion for a thoroughly lucid moment the other day. When I halted my anxious beta-female thought processes for a moment, the honest question arose: so what if she did manage to seduce Dan? Even go so far as to break up his marriage? He does ask after her when she’s not around.

On the other hand, what if Dan’s ultimate response to me were that he loves Mai, and knows they are meant to be together — forever?

What could I really do about it? Any of it?

Sure, it’s painful to lose out one more time to the sought-after blonde every man wants – that will always rub salt in old wounds. Thanks to Cheyenne and her precious ilk, it’s a built-in trigger for some pretty intense and unpleasant feelings.

But in the grander scheme of things, if Dan truly doesn’t feel the way I do, it’s not like I can make him. Any more than Mai can make him not love me (regardless of whether she invokes the attendant rights of her position).

“If it’s right,” a friend of author Diane Conway once told her, “nothing you can do can screw it up. If it’s wrong, nothing you can do can fix it.” (Clearly this friend was not an evangelical of the there-is-no-right-person school.) I don’t know what gives me the impression that this is far from over, regardless of how long Dan is gone. Oh, I’ll keep meeting people; I’ll even date if I feel like it. I was prepared for Dan to have all but forgotten me after my long hiatus…but when I saw the naked joy on his blushing face, I knew that that just wasn’t the case.

If you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink, you can’t expect to lead a horse away from water, and make him not thirst.

Or to quote Dan’s man Warren Zevon, They say love conquers all/you can’t start it like a car/you can’t stop it with a gun.

***

This week I dreamt about Ron and Stephanie — the widower of interest I mentioned in a previous post, and the (beautiful, slender, younger) girl friend who captured his heart on the sly. Like the wedding dream involving Dan, this is one that lingers in my mind for days.

I am casually visiting the two of them, and get left alone with Ron for a bit when Stephanie has to run some kind of work-related errand.

I make lighthearted reference to the fact that Stephanie has snapped Ron up before the rest of us could even have a shot. I have no agenda at this point; they’re engaged, I accept that, and I wish them nothing but the best. But I do nevertheless imply, impishly, that I would have liked a chance myself, and punctuate this flirty (but hardly serious) jibe with a wink and a grin.

The unanticipated force of Ron’s reaction astonishes me. Looking stricken, he flushes a deep crimson, and starts to stammer about how maybe things won’t work out with Stephanie after all. He’s backtracking like crazy, as if I’ve just given him a game-changing piece of information.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I’m no longer the jilted “Jen,” I’m the “Angelina” — the irresistible, potentially homewrecking temptress — and not just to a Karl Bacon. (If anything, Stephanie should be the Angelina.)

I have no desire to steal Ron away from Stephanie, but you could sure knock me over with a feather. This has never happened before. I’ve just expressed an interest in someone, however belatedly, and it’s given him an honest-to-god life crisis! I’m too desirable, instead of too pathetic!

When I see Stephanie soon thereafter, I inform her that Ron has provided me with some much-needed practice at humiliation-free confessions — although for obvious reasons I leave out the bulk of Ron’s response. I am aware, in the back of my mind (even as I’m dreaming), that Dan is next, and that the “real thing” will be much harder…though not as hard as it might have been without this overwhelmingly positive reinforcement.

I wake up feeling far more confident than usual about my feminine appeal, and far less certain that revealing the extent of my feelings to Dan would be a huge and characteristic AlienBaby crash-and-burn.

**

Writing this post at the neighborhood coffeehouse, from which I’ve composed a majority of posts over the past four years, I relish the afternoon sunlight streaming in the open garage door. Brendan has gone to Australia with his doctor girlfriend; I hope they’re having a great time. A former “girl crush” of mine, a gorgeous bisexual yoga teacher with multicolor hair, not quite thirty, who knew me back at the studio, chats with me at my table for a few minutes. In parting, she offers me a free class, as her guest, and kisses me on the lips. The entire two percent of me with lesbian tendencies is tickled to death. Once again, I feel yards more attractive.

I intend to find a place like this, somewhere across the globe — a sunny, social spot for coffee and writing where the locals gather, a home away from home. I don’t need much else. It’s amazing how little I require to be happy. I would be even happier sharing this blessed simplicity with someone with whom I feel I belong, someone who feels more like home than any location ever has.

I intend to get there — I believe I will get there — with or without him.

But I do seem to be a hell of a lot more productive under the influence of certain individuals.

That jolt when you first laid eyes on each other, that instantaneous feeling of recognition, that ease that flows between you as if you’ve known each other since you were five aside…he could easily have turned out to be critical, or unkind, or just boring. He could have had values and dreams utterly incompatible with yours. Or you could have discovered that you were infatuated with his haircut, or his waistline, or any number of other superficial and impermanent details. He could have disrespected you in some way, cut you down or invalidated your experience, the way so many men have. He could have been disappointing the way you’re so used to being disappointed.

There are a million ways to become disenchanted, especially when you’re looking for ways to become disenchanted. Especially when there’s a lot at stake, when the continuation of life in its current, sanctioned, socially respectable form depends upon your ability to be disenchanted. But the biggest thing you can find wrong with him is his sometimes lowbrow humor. That, and the fact that he has no ass. His jokes about the fact that he has no ass are hysterical.

**

You can hardly believe yourself, when you look at your situation in terms of the cold, hard facts. And almost no one else believes you, either. You have cried wolf so many times, with your foolish obsessions and your self-defeating behaviors, that everyone who knows you well, including you, is tired of seeing you be stupid and blind, of seeing you fail. Your oldest girl friend doesn’t even have to say anything; you can tell by the look on her face that she doesn’t want to talk about it. She knows what a blunderer you are. She’s watched you do this for thirty years. But this time you’ve really taken the cake. You’ve crossed a new line. You’ve hit a new low.

You can see it like a scientist. You can assess facts and probabilities. Nothing about this looks promising. All the data is on the side of the marriage, and you, you arrogant interloper, are barely a factor. Who the hell do you think you are? Your history seems to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are a know-nothing and a fuckwit when it comes to relationships. In the solitary lab of your nocturnal afterthoughts, you posit theories that discourage action. You formulate rational escapes.

**

Of course, there’s another big thing you believe you know, but it’s not something you can prove…so why should you trust yourself this time? No one else does, not anymore, not after all your epic fucking up. Well, no one except maybe your best girl friend from college, to whom you’ve told everything. She’s one person who has never stopped trusting your competence to navigate your way through the world. She says, “This time feels different.” Shown his photo online, she exclaims, “Oh, I love him!” (About Sonny she said, “He is certainly a handsome man.”)

What you know is the two of you together. The entire world can scream wrong, wrong, wrong, and only you know that nothing has ever felt quite this right. He doesn’t frighten you. He doesn’t carelessly hurt you. He doesn’t minimize or compete with you. You feel safe with him. You feel seen. You can’t even find the lifelong, gargantuan self-consciousness that has made you bumble like Don Knotts in the presence of most of your acute infatuations. You don’t worry about how you look. You feel as if you could say something completely inane — even fart audibly — and it wouldn’t be the end of the world. You realize, while walking through downtown by his side, that you could walk anywhere in the world with him, through chaotic Moroccan markets or along the Baltic Sea, and it would be all right, because beside him feels like where you belong.

When you see one another, you both light up and smile; it’s spontaneous and irrepressible, and you wonder if your feelings are being broadcast to everyone. Surely your frequent outbursts of boisterous, shared laughter are a dead giveaway. You find yourself, like the woman in Song of Songs, almost wishing he wert as thy brother, so that you could embrace and kiss him and yea, thou shouldst not be despised. He wants what you want out of life, something you knew even before you asked him, but has had to back-burner his dreams — because he has a mortgage, and because he is a man, and men need to make a good living.

**

Elephant magazine posts a very timely article to Facebook that makes you break down in sobs of incredulous gratitude. It’s one yoga teacher’s autobiographical testimony about mustering the courage to say yes to love, even when your situation seems like a cruel cosmic joke, even when it seems more impossible than any of the other impossible things you’ve attempted.

Shasta Townsend was at a wedding when she met him.

Suddenly there he was. Looking up into the clear blue sky, the sun hit my eyes and then there he was. His face backlit so he actually appeared to be glowing. He was a jolt of electricity. He was a magnetic force. He was a stranger I felt I had known for a long time or in another life. He smiled and said his name.

I can’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember if I stood up from my seat or remained where I was. I don’t remember what I said. I must have introduced myself in return. I looked up and all stopped except for his face. There was a remembrance at the back of my mind of this man and yet we had never met before.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it. Shasta immediately shut down, of course. She didn’t want this to be so. She wanted to stay in her comfort zone, and go on with life as she knew it. As she writes,

How many missed chances have we all experienced? How much has humanity suffered because of what appeared to be circumstances that we could not overcome or personal fears that kept us locked in our own prison? How much of our depression, addictions, sorrow and even warring has been created from denying our heart’s deepest longing – be it love, passion, grace, freedom, purpose? How many of us have turned away from the deep well of knowing to return to the surface of suffering because we thought that was expected of us or simply because we didn’t believe we deserved any better?

I felt it in that moment. I saw the possibility of love, truth and desire and then quickly pulled away. We could not be. We would not be. How could we possibly be together? It was a cosmic joke for we were both in other relationships for one thing and secondly, I was not ready to love like this.

I spent years denying my desire and deep connection to this man. We became friends, a sweet torture. He married someone else. I became engaged to another and addicted to sleeping pills, partying and self-loathing.

Her soul-connection man married someone else.

Maybe this man was contentedly committed to a woman he felt lucky to be with — the way your friend is. Maybe Shasta’s girlfriends scolded her, If you love this man, why would you want to destroy his happiness? the way Hugh Laurie memorably scolded Rachel in that episode of Friends. Maybe she realized the deck was stacked against her, which is why she didn’t act, why she instead tried to anesthetize herself, the way you did last fall with alcohol, food, and DVDs, until you got so sick you could barely eat, and certainly couldn’t drink or venture out to a Redbox.

But that isn’t the end of the story. After the point seemed moot, Shasta finally broke her silence.

In a tequila-induced haze I told him how I felt. Not the proudest moment of my life but probably one of the most important. Something within me was ready to be vulnerable even if it was a little too late.

It turns out I was not too late. That man is now my husband and is one of my greatest teachers. Love and marriage is not easy and continues to be a journey ever deeper into vulnerability, trust and transparency but I now know the power of an intimate and loving relationship as a way to experience my own beauty, truth and potential…

Love wants its way with you. Love is the most powerful energy the universe. It is far more powerful than fear, hate or shame. Love took over. It occupied, crucified and then rarefied me. After all the denial it persevered and I finally gave myself to it though it has been and continues to be a journey of allowing, surrendering and opening the flesh deeper.

**

You write an emotional, private appeal to Shasta via her public page, and hope to God she writes back, because apart from your best girl friend from college, she’s the only one you feel you can talk to completely openly about this. She understands firsthand what you’re going through. She understands the obstacles and taboos and mountains of reasons not to act. She understands the fears: that you will lose your beloved friend, that you will humiliate yourself, that you’re good enough for a fling, but nothing else; or, on the other hand, that your life will radically change forever, that you will be given more than your habitually solitary self can handle, more than even a sweet, lost, drug-addled kid could give you. She understands that unshakable sense of having met the love of your life, even if he didn’t come along neatly and cleanly, the way he was supposed to.

**

You wake up thinking about your grandmother Ella at the end of her life. In her nursing home, she spent most days drugged up and dreaming. Consciousness must have been as painful as the cancer when she did awaken, realizing that her opportunities for participating in life were over, that she could only look back from a gurney. Incoherently, she urged you over and over again to “close the gate.” She must have been talking about something that happened on the farm, some sin of omission from the distant past that still haunted her.

What will haunt you? you wonder. Life is lived forward, and few of us, if any, are psychic. You couldn’t have known ahead of time that in 2009 you’d be weeping over your childhood buddy, the one who loved you more than any other man ever did, because he was dead at 41 from lymphoma. It’s only 1986, after all, and you have your whole life and the wide world in front of you, and you’ve known Jonathan since the first grade. Why would you want him, when there’s a universe of possibilities out there, over six billion people? There are plenty of fish in the sea.

And you tell yourself this for the next twenty-five years.

**

You listen repeatedly, morning and night, to a song by Del Amitri* about a man and a woman on a long drive: she’s at the wheel, and not about to turn the car around, even though they’re heading into the middle of nowhere. Their conversation skirts around the elephant in the car, which may or may not be an abortion she’s just had. (A “kid” was involved in “the thing we’ve done.”) But it’s the chorus that provides the goosebumps, a lovely, melancholy arrangement of minor-chord, folk-rock-ballad sound, Springsteen by way of Scotland. The lyrics are simple but powerful, and pierce right through to the heart of your (voiceless) dilemma:

When you’re driving with the brakes on,

When you’re swimming with your boots on,

It’s hard to say you love someone,

And it’s hard to say you don’t.

______________

* a terrific live version is on YouTube here.

I began my last post writing about the news of Iris’s passing and the course-altering impact it had on me. It was only because of her that I began working my way through the book at all. This month I was confronted with the untimely deaths of not one but two wonderful young men under the age of thirty. One was the son of my friend Peg from work. He and I had never met, but she always spoke of him with glowing pride, and as if they were best friends. Kirby was an accomplished exhibition skydiver, killed when a practice landing went wrong. He was all of 27.

The other was the son of Lynn, a woman from whom I rented a room eight years ago when I needed to escape from my apartment (situated over two ex-cons who fought loudly and violently). I lived for a year with Lynn and her then-teenage son in a small two-story 1930s house in West City Park. Lynn ran an almost entirely sustainable household: we recycled everything, flushed sparingly, composted, and hung our wash out to dry. Her son Mike was a tousle-haired, good-looking blue-eyed boy with an easygoing and affable manner. He provided a welcome counterpoint to his mom, who could be anxious and high-strung. Unfailingly polite and even-tempered, at sixteen he looked and acted years older. When we met for the first time, I think we were both a little taken aback and even a touch infatuated; there was a shyness and a subtle embarrassment between us as we shook hands and made conversation. Later we would become familiar and comfortable with each other, watching DVDs and eating our respective dinners on the living room couch. We both became addicted to the first season of 24, making dates to watch this or that episode together when he was home.

So it was a cold shock to hear that Mike, now 23 (the same age as Sam, I realized with an odd feeling), had suffered a massive asthma attack while working on a remote farm in New Mexico, miles from a hospital, and had not reached adequate help in time. It can’t be, I thought. Not Mike. Not Lynn’s beautiful blue-eyed boy.

**

But it was true. It was all true. And I attended two memorial services in the span of just two weeks.

Both of which were strikingly similar — and unexpectedly celebratory. Both featured slide shows set to music and abundant anecdotes supplied by friends and relatives. More impressively, what emerged about both Kirby and Mike was that they were tremendously admired by their friends, family, and peers as leaders who pursued their passions courageously and encouraged others to do the same. Kirby jumped out of airplanes on a weekly basis; Mike rode rapids, hiked mountains, and traveled out of the country alone at the age of eighteen. Laughter competed with tears as participants told hilarious tales of one-liners and pranks perpetrated by each of these mischievous boys. It occurred to me that Kirby and Mike would probably have liked each other very much.

More than ever, I was reminded of the old carpe diem, seize the day. “I’d rather die in the pursuit of my dreams than live without them,” I told a work friend after Kirby’s service. Even if I never get where I want to go, I have to believe that I’m moving toward it. I have to keep taking small steps every day, or at least every week. The black cloud of depression that used to engulf me held within it a sense of just biding time until the end, of having given up hope. It was while living with Lynn and Mike, full of despair one night about my poverty and my lack of achievement  — feeling stuck in my dead-end job, living in someone else’s house — that I very nearly downed a cocktail of painkillers and muscle relaxants. It may have been my lowest point in a twenty-five-year period of low points. (Mike was a bright spot in that dark time.)

Cynics would say I’m fooling myself in order to feel better…but which is preferable, honestly?

**

Self-belief and courage are more than half the battle, or so saith Julia Cameron. Through The Artist’s Way (and thanks to another departed friend with a zest for life, Iris) I am in the process of recovering both. As our astute friend from Down Under predicted I might, I have been further distancing myself from my family of origin in an act of (artistic) self-preservation. My “morning pages” — the three pages I now write every morning without fail — have revealed the extent to which I’ve let the dread of their inevitable disapproval thwart my every aspiration. (A mock article in The Onion perfectly encapsulated my adult life rather pathetically with the headline “Man Waiting Until Parents Die Before Doing A Single Thing That Makes Him Happy.” It may sound like a gross exaggeration, but it was one more harsh wake-up call. My chronic underachievement and chronic singlehood do keep me under their radar.)

Another thing that has come up again and again in my morning pages is rage toward my mother, much of it having to do with the shame I inherited from her regarding my sexuality, particularly my decidedly robust appetite for men. Watching Black Swan, I both laughed and shuddered with recognition at Nina’s frilly little-girly bedroom, full of dolls and stuffed animals. My mother, like the unhinged Barbara Hershey character, would have loved to keep me in that room, metaphorically speaking, for the rest of my natural life. “What happened to my sweet girl?” I will love Darren Aronofsky forever for understanding the infantilizing that young women endure at the hands of overprotective and/or religious mothers, the parental (and sometimes cultural) mandate to remain thin-blooded Virgins at the expense of their vital, juicy Whores.

**

Now that I’ve mentioned both the phrase carpe diem and my robust appetites, I suppose it’s only natural that I should arrive at one of my favorite subjects: men, and my ongoing quest for The One. Because a great deal has been happening there as well.

I might start off by mentioning that one of my Artist’s Way activities (and quite possibly my favorite to date) was to make a “dream collage.” Using travel and lifestyle magazines purchased from a nearby thrift store, I cut out dozens of photos, including pictures of gorgeous sunny places in Europe and on the Mediterranean, happy couples (including an appealing man feeding a normal-sized woman in a disheveled bed), a woman meditating by the sea, another woman riding a bicycle in France, and of course some seriously tasty men (including a wryly smiling Johnny Depp). Most of the men were anonymous models from the pages of a Details fashion spread; I didn’t recognize them. When they were all arranged in a visually pleasing manner on a black posterboard, I sighed contentedly. The images gave me joy. And hope.

Around that same time I found myself wondering how my old friend Eli, the beautiful doctoral grad student, was doing — and whether he was still with that visually impaired girlfriend of his or not. Things had not been going well for them when I’d seen him several months ago. They were fighting; she wasn’t meeting his needs, if you know what I mean; he had gained quite a bit of weight in his lower body. He was wearing his straight brown hair long and pulled into a slick ponytail, which with the added bootyliciousness made him decidedly less attractive to me (although he still had “such a pretty face,” as they often say about heavier women patronizingly). Thinking of him now, I considered whether, even in his more hefty state, I might possibly offer him some relief…if Jessica had finally driven him away by continuing to starve him of what he was really hungry for. I did care about him, after all, and he was still far from unattractive. Even if he weren’t the One, I might be okay with some good old-fashioned friendly tomfoolery. I had needs, too. I proceeded to entertain a few possible scenarios in my head.

Exactly two days later I got a text from Eli out of the blue. “I was just wondering how you were. Want to meet for lunch this week?”

He always does this. I don’t know how he knows.

**

We set a date for Friday noon. On Monday, for my weekly “artist date,” I dressed up in a special-occasion velvet top and matching scarf just for the hell of it, and walked down to my old neighborhood to check out an art gallery I’d never visited. When I tried the door, it was locked. Walking away down the street, I heard someone call out after me. “Hey!”

A wiry brunet with disheveled hair, roughly my age, was grinning at me from the doorway. He had big sleepy brown eyes and a scruffy beard and was dressed in a holey, paint-spattered sweatshirt and jeans. His look fell somewhere between “homeless” and “adorable.” I turned back and came into the gallery.

The artist’s name was Nick, and he was clearly a gifted painter. His large acrylic canvases were abstract and expressionistic, layering a variety of brushstrokes in a skilled interplay of color and form reminiscent of de Kooning. I knew Greg, my GBF (gay boyfriend), a talented abstract painter himself, would love them. I wound up talking to Nick for almost two hours. He had been living very much on the edge lately, having no other means of income, but seemed utterly confident that he was going to make it. He mentioned that he was also a writer, so I wound up divulging my own artistic aspirations. He showed me some of the paintings he had in back, and was floored when I mentioned Jesus at the wedding in Cana while viewing a painting he hadn’t yet told me featured the Sangre de Christo (Blood of Christ) mountains.

The whole space was practically vibrating with a sort of breathless and intoxicated energy. I found myself giggling a lot. Nick kept apologizing for talking too much, and said that I had a way of drawing him out. My eyes darted surreptitiously over his spare, compact frame when he looked away; he was just the sort of lean, hard, and veiny that makes my mouth water. I wanted to just sink my teeth into him, devour him on the spot. (My “scenarios” that night certainly didn’t lack for excitement.)

When I brought Greg back with me the following week (and yes, he did love those paintings), he was abruptly called away by a friend with a broken leg who needed assistance. Nick and I were left alone for about an hour. “Is he your boyfriend?” Nick asked, as if he dreaded the answer.

I could have danced for joy at the tone and the nature of the question. For once in my life, I could tell a guy I actually liked was interested! I was more than happy to inform him that Greg was gay and my best friend.

Greg called me from the car while Nick and I were talking — I didn’t hear the phone ring — and left me a message that made me laugh uproariously in front of Nick. “I’m on my way back now,” he said, “unless you two are having sex.” I didn’t tell Nick why I was doubled over. He looked a little crestfallen.

I haven’t been back to see Nick since that night, but I friended him on Facebook. I don’t think either he or the gallery has a phone; he’s that poor. If I want to see him, I have to go over there. And as I mentioned, I’ve had other things going on…

**

Eli and I met at my favorite nearby Thai restaurant. Walking in the door, I spotted him — his fine hair shorn to a far more flattering length, a day’s stubble on his face. He looked a lot sexier than last time, if still uncharacteristically thick.

Eli had two big pieces of news: first, that he had given up on his history Ph.D, and quit his ten-year amended and revised (and at this point loathed) dissertation. Second, that he was finished with Jessica. The relationship was good and dead. The love was gone, and they both knew it. He hadn’t officially ended it yet, however, because he still had “a lot of projects to finish around the house.”

Eli didn’t understand why this made me erupt into helpless laughter. He looked almost wounded until I explained that I found his sense of responsibility unbelievable. He had already filled me in on his current “job” taking care of his elderly grandmother, for which his family offered to pay — offending him in the process. He didn’t see why he should be paid for doing something he was already glad to do for his family. (Do you recall my mentioning that he also looks after his disabled mother?) Honestly, Eli is like no man I’ve ever met. He’s a caretaker, effortlessly assuming the role traditionally expected of the women in a family (on pain of being considered “selfish” otherwise). Of course I didn’t know any of this about him last year, when I jumped to conclude that he was exactly the kind of arrogant misanthrope I knew all too well.

Over Pad Thai and Panang curry, I listened while Eli further unburdened himself. He was having a crisis about having to enter the “real world” job market now and find some soul-crushing administrative or customer service position he really didn’t want. I argued on behalf of creative entrepreneurship and unconventional vocations; Eli felt he had to make decent money “because I want to travel.” This revelation made me pause for a second. No, he still wants to live here, I told myself. His family is here. He was very clear about that. Aloud, I maintained that there were all kinds of ways to travel on the cheap, and reminded him about my stay at Centro.

Toward the end of the meal I started talking more about my own life, actually gushing a bit (as is my wont these days) about my sunnier lease on life since the twenty-five-year cloud cover lifted — how learning to practice the art of simple presence and silence the torturous mental chatter had been so instrumental to my healing.

“Now you sound like Eckhart Tolle,” said Eli with a smile.

“You’ve read Tolle?” I gasped.

He had. In Cairo, during grad school. He had been in the midst of a painful breakup and undergoing chemotherapy (did I mention Eli successfully fought cancer, in his 20s, in a foreign country?) when he picked up a copy of Practicing the Power of Now at an English-language bookstore. And he began to try to practice it. “I got to the point where I did have these moments of incredibly vivid perception and clarity,” he recalled. “I remember gazing at something purple, and having nothing in mind but this really amazing…purple.” He chuckled. “It was like being on drugs or something.”

Privately picking my jaw up off the floor, I mused that I was beginning to feel like a Jane Austen character. Could this diffident skeptic who seemed so prickly and elitist at first blush (and whom I had written off a year ago, for all of Elizabeth Bennet’s reasons) be my Mr. Darcy, after all?

**

We parted ways with a customary noncommittal and platonic hug that gave no intimation of what more intimate contact might feel like. Shortly thereafter, I met up with Greg at our favorite coffeehouse for an impromptu debrief, and he came up with a brilliant unconventional career for Eli: leading history tours abroad. Greg’s roommate had gone on such a tour; apparently there was good money to be made at it. It sounded perfect: what a great way to combine Eli’s love of history, travel, and teaching with his foreign language skills! “And you could go along, of course,” Greg joked with an implicit wink and a nudge. Probably already envisioning our wedding. How I do love Greg. He’ll say out loud things I haven’t yet dared to think. It’s wonderful to have a friend who can both read your mind and be one hundred percent on your side. (Not to mention switch gears on short notice.)

A few days later I finally got around to buying a glue stick to affix those magazine images to the posterboard permanently. As I was pasting up photos of Rome and Sardinia and Athos and couples strolling in the surf, I reached for one of the male models, an intense-looking brunet with penetrating blue eyes and seductively parted lips. Looking at him again as if for the first time, I stopped dead. And then erupted into incredulous laughter.

Who do you suppose he looked like?

**

Eli and I exchanged a few emails in the days after that. In my last message, I informed him of Greg’s brilliant idea, and added, “If you like that, wait’ll you hear about my foolproof fitness plan.”

It was a teaser, and I feared he might have taken it the wrong way when I hadn’t heard back from him in almost three weeks. Was he affronted by my suggestion that he needed a fitness plan, or did he grasp the hidden innuendo and decide not to pursue it? Did he even think of me that way?

**

The morning after I finished writing all of this, I received an email from Eli. He had just unearthed an earlier message from me that had gotten buried in his spam folder. He apologized for not responding and asked me how I was doing. He must never have gotten the email about Greg’s Wonderful Plan For His Life either.

I don’t know what to do now, especially now that my schedule has settled down and I have time to visit Nick or turn more attention to Eli. I guess the risk you take with every choice or action — the risk I try to avoid — is making a mistake. But what’s the alternative? Stay in my room like a hermit? I’ve been there and done that. I have the spirits of two bold, adventurous young men haunting me with carpe diems…and two men who are very much alive prompting me to step out.

Contemplating my years of solitude and monastic simplicity, I was reminded of a Rumi poem I love, which reads very differently to me at this particular moment:

Someone who goes with a half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more, who’s not himself
longed for by anyone else.

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.
It says, Live.

I’ll share a favorite scene from Chapter One, set during the Becker family’s first summer vacation dinner at the pensione (inexpensive rooming house) in Paraggi, Italy. Mom is in the middle of saying a typical (i.e. very long) grace.

**

In my heart I said, “Please, oh please, don’t let Lucrezia come to our table to ask if we want wine with dinner while Mom is praying!”

Lucrezia was the owner’s daughter. When she cleaned the rooms with her mother they both wore blue housecoats over their day clothes. At night she was the pensione’s waitress. She wore a white apron over her black pleated skirt. Her starched apron strings hung down to the hemline behind. Lucrezia wore her silver crucifix outside of her white blouse when she served us our dinner. It made her look very Roman Catholic.

Lucrezia was standing at our table. “Vino? Rosso–? Bianco–?” she said.

“Please, Lord!” I prayed.

Mom kept right on praying.

“Vino?”

Couldn’t she see we were praying? Would Mom interrupt the prayer and look up?

“We thank Thee for this food and we pray for those who live and work in this pensione that they might come to know Thee as their personal Savior…”

“Vino?”

Mom opened her eyes, looked up sorrowfully, blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light, then smiled ruefully at Lucrezia. Poor girl, she didn’t know the Lord. In fact, here we were praying, and she didn’t even wait until we were done. Probably she didn’t even notice. I guess she thought we were staring at our food while Mom talked to herself with her eyes shut. We had pity for Lucrezia and all the unsaved Italians. Roman Catholics thought they knew the Lord, but they worshipped Mary, not Jesus; they did not trust Him as their personal Savior but tried to merit salvation by works. I knew they were lost, but, just the same, I wished we didn’t have to pray in front of them.

“Vino?” Lucrezia was starting to really wonder what was going on. She tried English. “Wine? Red…White…Yes?” She smiled. Mom smiled too. Mom’s smile was full of compassion.

“No, Lucrezia, no, we won’t be having any alcohol to drink.”

“No wine.”

“No, thank you, we’re Christians, just some water please.”

“Acqua minerale?”

“No, just natural water…acqua naturale.”

It was Lucrezia’s turn to look sorrowful and to smile wistfully. Mom took her smile to be an expression of longing to know the Truth. I knew Lucrezia just felt sorry for people who drank tepid tap water at dinner when a hundred and fifty lira would buy a bottle of Chianti or Orvieto.

When Lucrezia walked away, we bowed our heads to finish our interrupted prayer. “And, Lord, we pray for dear little Lucrezia. We pray that You will give one of us an opportunity to share Your love with her and an opportunity to witness to her. In Jesus’ precious name we pray. Amen.”

I love how Calvin’s mother says “we’re Christians,” in characteristic evangelical insider way, like they and only they own the word — as if “you unsaved pagan Catholics obviously don’t know anything about it.” Schaeffer nails it.

**

I may never accept Jesus as my personal Savior, but I’ve found a Salvador.

Well, Salvador is his name, anyway…a sweet, round, 37-year-old Mexicano divorced father of two who works for a Spanish language network and broadcasts our baseball games on the radio en Español. We met via a free online dating site. I’m not at all sure he’s The One — I’m kind of disinclined to think so — but he possesses just the sort of crazy creative and risk-taking mindset that’s generally been missing among my circle of close friends and associates. Only Meg Ferris, that globetrotting writing coach who showed up at my yard sale last year, hatches anything like the sort of “harebrained” schemes Salvador comes up with — and makes work. This is a man who got himself an interview with George Lucas’s creative team in Los Angeles simply by setting up an attention-grabbing Web site.

He claims to have no expectations about us, and I believe he’s sincere. “Perhaps I am here to help you now,” he said at our lunch meeting, “and then, someday, you will have an answer I need.” Salvador was raised Catholic but has become enamored of Buddhism and Eastern spirituality. He teaches martial arts to kids in his spare time. (I can almost imagine him punctuating his sage observations with “young grasshopper.”)

I’m glad, at any rate, to have found a new friend with his breed of unrepentant cojones. Wasn’t I just saying I had no idea how to break out of the box?

**

A separate foray into the online dating world, this time for a Match.com free trial, has yielded equally interesting results. A gentleman my age, whose photo and profile I had skipped right over while perusing my daily matches, sent me a message. It was so warm, witty, and complimentary, I felt compelled to respond. But first I clicked on his profile to get a better look.

What I read there got me a little scared.

Not creepy scared, but scared in a way that Jason’s and Salvador’s and some of the other guys’ profiles hadn’t, because they essentially gave me a list of interests and what-I’m-looking-fors that more or less fit me or didn’t. (Online dating thus far has been like looking through a catalog and picking out the style and color that suits me best. The list approach, again.)

William’s profile struck a different chord. And not because of his vocabulary or his writing skills, which were excellent. Not because he was a law student focusing on international human rights law. Not because he was nice-looking in a supporting-actor kind of way, or because he’d rather watch a foreign film than climb a fourteener. What came through his carefully chosen words was a good-humored generosity, authenticity, and lack of ego. Here was an educated man who didn’t take himself so deadly seriously, who admitted to not having all the answers or all the confidence in the world, and who felt a strong sense of responsibility toward (and interconnectedness with) other human beings. His sense of humor was not unlike my own. (My best friend of twenty-three years, listening to me read his “In My Own Words” section, exclaimed, “But that’s you!”) I wish I could paraphrase a sentence or two for you here, but he took down his profile when his paid month expired.

After several rounds of increasingly personal email exchanges, William and I chatted amiably on the phone for over an hour. We have yet to meet. He’s leaving for Nigeria on a school-related mission next week and will be gone for three weeks.

I’m almost too freaked out to meet him, to tell you the truth.

Like me, he has deeply conservative parents, who hail from the same state as my mom. And Sam. His trip has become somewhat controversial: the faculty advisor who backed him for this Nigeria project just got fired. (Apparently the University doesn’t want its law students inserting themselves into the affairs of third world countries.) I’m inspired and humbled by his humanitarian passion and commitment, which goes way beyond the often ineffectual rallying and canvassing that wonky political progressives like Eli and I do on weekends, however well-intentioned. Talk about walking the talk.

I think: could he be…? Do I deserve…? I don’t dare finish the sentence.

Suddenly I’m not so sure I’m ready for prime time.

**

On the same day that I read William’s first, flirty message, a yoga friend posts a call on Facebook for interested parties who might like to get coached for free in the “Calling In The One” process. Rebecca has just finished Katherine Woodward Thomas’s relationship-coach training, and some of her friends in the program need “practicum” guinea pigs with whom to complete their certification.

Within 24 hours of responding to Rebecca, I am talking with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in California. Just like that. And for free.

You tell me that’s not one hell of a coincidence, amigos.

After our introductory phone session, however, I find myself awash in ambivalence.

**

At work, a tall, slim young trainee with jet-black hair and tattoo “sleeves” is looking at me. I noticed him his very first day: he resembles a young “Camelot”-era Robert Goulet, at his peak of tastiness, when they were saying he might be the next Elvis, before the cheeseball ’70s moustache and the Greatest Hits 8-tracks. I meet his gaze; he holds it for a provocative moment with his deep-set brown eyes, then looks away. I flush. We exchange furtive glances throughout the shift. One of us seems always to be sneaking a peek at the other through the cheerful, hefty matron sitting between us.

Suddenly the call center seems full of delectable young men again. A lean but muscular half-Asian with creme-caramel skin and huge hazel eyes whose name is really Sam (honestly!) makes me forget to breathe when he goes out of his way to introduce himself in the parking lot. He’s no taller than I am, but he has the torso of Apollo and the face of a Filipino matinee idol. Mama Maria.

I suppose there have been a few lovelies around in the past few months, but these latest afternoon delights are actually giving an eye to this tired old broad. Why, I have no idea. I think I look kind of fat and mousy at the moment. Go figure.

But it all comes surging back, all the forgotten intoxication and hunger. In between calls, somewhere in my graphic imagination, I’m nuzzling the tender brown nape of Apollo’s neck and running my fingers all over his taut, smooth, inconspicuously magnificent body. I’m pulling Young Robert down the stairwell to G3, the parking level where no one ever goes on foot, and pushing him up against the wall, thrusting my tongue between his lips, pressing into him. I get lightheaded with lust; my knees weaken. Not enough blood is getting to my brain or my feet, and…hello, may I please speak with Jane Smith?

**

I talk things out with Jeannie, my closest girlfriend in town. I’m beating myself up and working myself into a state of despair for being “superficial” and apparently losing my newly acquired, less visually-oriented perspective. I don’t have any impulse whatsoever to drag sweet, eager, decidedly stout Salvador, reeking of cologne (I hate cologne), down a stairwell, as swell as he is and as much as he seems to dig me.

I tell Jeannie that I don’t expect the guys who inspire lust in me to be the same ones who are good for me. Probably quite the opposite. But now I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to give up the hunger.

Jeannie, a counselor by trade, gently suggests that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. If I’m not turned on by someone, I shouldn’t force myself just on principle. Sam #1 didn’t elicit from me the same Greek-god comparisons as Sam #2, but we still had an intense, undeniable, potently pheremonal chemistry that made me want to eat him alive. With a spoon. Every day, if possible.

Who says you can’t love the right guy AND feel “the hunger?” she muses.

I start to feel a little more hopeful.

I think it’s great that you’re so sexual, adds Jeannie. I love that about you. Maybe what you need right now is to have a fling. Maybe you want to have a little sumpin’-sumpin’ with one of these youngsters before you get serious and look for something real. Have you talked to Beth about these feelings?

Of course I haven’t. Not yet. It may have been our decision to work together, after all, and the renewed prospect of successfully “Calling In The One,” that triggered this little midlife crisis.

**.

I struggle to complete my “homework” — not for Beth, but for Salvador. His questions for me are: what, exactly, do I want to write? And where do I want to be?

Finally I email him an answer. I don’t know! Frank Schaeffer makes me want to write a novel. But I’m not even sure I can do it; I’ve never managed to write a sustained work of fiction. (Of course, at the time, neither had Schaeffer.) I know I can do something like a personal travelogue competently and love it, and I can meet deadlines when I’m doing expository-type writing, so there’s that…but do I want to live abroad, or just travel? Where on earth do I belong?

“Don’t worry, just be patient, even a tree can’t speed up to grow,” he writes back. “Step by step. You need to relax, be quiet so you can start listening.”

Probably excellent advice all around.

**

My assignment from Beth has me stymied as well. I’m supposed to set an “anchoring” intention for love, in my own words. And answer the question: who would I need to be, to call in the love I desire?

All that comes to mind now, for the latter question, is: Someone else!

Jeannie, who dearly loves me and always sees the absolute best in me (you’re brilliant, you’re beautiful, you’re hilarious, et cetera), genuinely believes that these mouth-watering boys are a viable, if temporary, option, but you and I know that I’m only a legend in my own mind. When it comes to initiating anything with anyone who inspires that kind of unbridled lust, I’ve historically managed to project all of the allure of a skunk at a picnic. Out of dozens of fantasy partners, I’ve managed to snag only two or three (Lord only knows how) and pull them over into the reality of my bedroom.

The clincher of course is that the fantasies — to be brutally honest now — have nearly always proven to be better than the reality. Not to diss anybody, but just because something looks like a Porsche doesn’t mean it drives like one. When your nose is pushed up against the glass like the Little Match Girl, however, whatever’s going on inside is an imagined paradise. In the mating dance I’ve generally been a wallflower with two left feet, so I’m prone to thinking I’m going to miss something somewhere (the greener-grass syndrome) no matter what.

But the fevered imaginations of those who, like me, live too much in their heads can really short-circuit actual experience. (Case in point: the strange phenomenon of fans wanting to literally check out of life on Earth and go live in James Cameron’s Avatar universe.) Not everything is what it appears to be. Jeannie, a fellow vegetarian who makes a lot more money than I do, likes to take us out to the kind of candlelit restaurants that have white tablecloths and $20 entrees, where we’re routinely disappointed by the risotto al funghi. Conversely, we’ll sometimes wind up at a tiny storefront with plastic flowers on the table in a dingy strip mall on one of the ugliest thoroughfares in town, and slurp the best coconut curry soup anyone has ever concocted for a mere $4.95.

If there have been any pleasant surprises along the road of amore, it’s how the physical intimacy with Sam just kept improving. I went from not being sure I wanted to get him naked to wanting to keep him that way all the time.

So maybe what I need to do first and foremost is to let go of the stubborn and thoroughly unfounded belief that I understand anything at all about how this mating business works, and embrace my own unknowing.

Maybe “who I need to be” is just someone with a beginner’s mind.

**

I emailed an apology to Sam last week, for unintentionally contributing to his stress before he left. Doc had urged me not to do so, emphatic that I was not at fault, but right now what I need from Doc is an apology that has not been forthcoming. Sometimes you just have to bite the damn bullet and say you’re sorry. I realized I needed to trust my own intuition on this. Maybe I’m done with external guides.

After over ten years of therapy, I left therapy, with, I imagine, a greater awareness of my issues, and perhaps a greater ability to cope — but no life-altering changes. Now, after three years of coaching, I think it’s time to terminate (even if Doc and I patch things up, which we will, eventually), because while I’ve acquired a few more useful tools (e.g. Doc’s much-touted Voice Dialogue), I’m still mired in much of the same stuck-ness regarding work, money, goals, and (dare I say?) dreams.

“No one really understands what causes change,” says my girlfriend Jeannie, who holds a Master’s in counseling. I grew up with stories of miraculous conversions, and responded to the altar call more than once; in college, I met strident objectivists, fervent Hegelians, and condescending nihilists; within my more recent yoga circle, acolytes gushed about the life-changing wisdom and practices of Yogi Bhajan or Swami Kaleshwar; and Doc was always giving me some new binaural CD to alter my brainwaves. Everyone thought they had the answer, the secret to making life make sense and work for them, and they wanted me to see the light, too. But at the end of the day, watching certain behaviors and struggles continue, regardless of held beliefs to the contrary, I would wonder: what really rewrites our scripts?

What impresses me most about the past few months, regarding my brief but powerful encounter with Sam, is that a profound change occurred in my basic makeup — the kind of change that one can spend years in counseling and not have happen. Internal obstacles that had stood like imposing concrete walls for a lifetime collapsed as if made of poorly glued toothpicks. Big love, it seems, can effect big change. It was love for my atheist best friend, after all, that was pivotal in collapsing my fundamentalist faith in high school — because if everything the “Christians” told me was true, then everything she thought or felt was illegitimate, and not to be trusted.

Sometimes a relationship forces a sort of ultimatum, where you have to choose between a dearly beloved person and your attachment to a certain way of believing or being. Just ask any formerly homophobic PFLAG parent.

**

But speaking of PFLAG, I’ve become a tormented paranoid in the absence of any new information about Sam, coupled with the offhand tidbits and speculations I hear from other people.

I hadn’t mentioned it before, but Rob, Sam’s buddy, prefers men. A number of people assumed that Sam was gay because of their close association. And I did sometimes wonder if Rob harbored feelings for Sam, especially given the truly weird and uncomfortable dynamic between the three of us. But sometime after a conversation with a mutual friend from work, who had thought Sam had been planning to go to Las Vegas for some kind of Hunter S. Thompson adventure, and who had believed him to be questioning his sexuality, I started going slightly crazy with jealous, fear-riddled doubts about nearly everything I believed to be true. Did Sam and Rob have a “thing,” unbeknownst to me? Did Sam really go to the middle east, or did he just not want to tell me where he was actually going? Was the conversation he had with Rob in front of me, about what to tell people regarding his job, staged for my sake?

Rob and I have never related very well, as you know, but over the past six months I’ve watched him transform from a gangly kid with bony knees and nerd glasses into a suave, handsome, vaguely Machiavellian character (now a supervisor), with a hip, flattering wardrobe in just the right color palette. It’s as if he finally got that queer eye for the queer guy. He’s growing his beard out until Sam comes back — which does not reassure me that he isn’t in love with my erstwhile boyfriend — and currently looks kind of like a redheaded Charlton Heston in his Ben-Hur galley-slave incarnation. (Maybe I’m guilty of gross stereotyping, but I do take small comfort in the fact that Sam’s wardrobe consisted entirely of jeans and T-shirts, without any regard to what colors might flatter him.) It does make me wonder for whom Rob made himself so pretty.

It would certainly be ironic, and a rather sad commentary on “straight” guys, wouldn’t it, if the man who ruined me for other men turned out to be not that into women. One of the major differences with Sam was that I never felt the least bit objectified or depersonalized: he always seemed to be making love to me, as a person, and not just playing and getting off with a handy female body (eyes slightly glazed over). In my doubt-ridden moments, of course, I wonder if that meant he liked me so much personally that he made an exception for me. That it was all just an experiment, and one he decided to end without telling me. (Then again, I seem to remember Sam grabbing my broad German-frau booty on more than one occasion, as if he really liked it.)

So I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything to any of these speculations. Oftentimes when one latches onto a specific hypothesis, the mind starts to fill in the blanks, and suddenly the circumstances and facts seem to support it. In other words, we find what we’re looking for. And I’m definitely more inclined to believe something is true if it makes me feel bad.

It makes me feel bad, to think about Sam being secretly involved with Rob. Cold, and somehow not good enough. Afraid that he lied to me. And very, very foolish.

**

The other part of that hypothetical scenario is just as disturbing, because it thrusts Sam more deeply into a world I was actually happy to see him leave. Having to give him up completely was a little easier if I could frame his departure as something he needed to do for the sake of his own physical and mental well-being. Of late I’ve been listening to trip-hop band Massive Attack, notably this early hit –

Midnight rockers, city slickers
Gunmen and maniacs
All are featured on the freak show
And I can’t do nothin’ ‘bout that, no, no
But if you hurt what’s mine
I’ll sure as hell retaliate

You can free the world, you can free my mind
Just as long as my baby’s safe from harm tonight

I love that chorus precisely because it seems to be saying: go ahead, be rebels, be revolutionaries, insist on expanding my mind like Timothy Leary, just don’t let anything bad happen to my baby. Which is pretty much where I’m at. But more on that presently.

I do realize that no American can be entirely safe from harm hanging out in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a different kind of gambling than the kind Sam ostensibly left behind. He was so annoyed when his friends got upset and cried about his voluntary “deployment”…I wasn’t the only one whose fretting for his safety inspired his wrath. He might have been overwhelmed by his own mixed emotions, and unable to deal with all of ours. Maybe it’s difficult for a lifelong outsider to cope with a sudden explosion of concern. “He probably has problems receiving,” was Doc’s comment.

I hope he was telling us the truth, at least, about where he was going. In an earlier post I know I speculated about whether he had gone back to his parents’ home to “fade away” — one of my more dire scenarios — but I have a dozen of them. In some versions, he’s losing his life, in others just his mind (my counselor girlfriend started musing about schizophrenia), and in still others he just wants to get away from me, that crazy, needy woman who cried when she couldn’t reach him on the phone for a couple of days. Sam was a pleaser who took care of people; maybe he didn’t have the heart to tell me he wanted to break up with me.

I hate that I’m not sure, now, where he is. I hate that I’m obsessing about all these crazy-making things. In the end, I know Sam has to attend to his necessities, whatever they may be, and they may be legion, and take up most of his time, but I also know I deserve some kind of communication — even if it’s just a breakup fuck-you emailed from an all-male Libertarian meth compound in Reno. We briefly shared a reality, a private universe — what was for me, at times, a kind of paradise — which has since been assailed by every manner and variety of doubt imaginable. The darkest part about living in perennial uncertainty, depending upon neither Jesus nor Ayn Rand nor Swami Kaleshwar to tell you what’s what, is that you can start to doubt your own judgment, even your own experience.

And my only partner in this particular experience has vanished, leaving me to my freakouts and conspiracy theories.

**

On a different note, I was remembering calling Rick one Sunday afternoon in May to find out if he wanted to meet that evening. He told me he’d spent Saturday night out drinking with Sam. Apropos of nothing, he asked if I was religious at all, and mentioned that Sam was Catholic. “I’m not really into self-improvement,” he joked, “like a lot of the other people at work.” He seemed reluctant to make plans with me that night. I caught the unexpected vibe that he wanted to nudge me toward Sam, as if he thought the two of us would be more compatible than he and I were. (I even wondered if he knew something I didn’t, e.g. that Sam had taken notice of me.) I was vaguely irritated by this unspoken intimation, thinking at the time that I had no interest in Sam, and every interest in Rick. But of course Rick turned out to be right. He and Sam would become buddies, Rick would get sent back to jail…and the rest you know.

**

There’s another phrase my mother would love: Rick would get sent back to jail. I once noted, during the days of Rick, that I’ve had better luck, sexually and otherwise, with men who are current or former users of illegal substances. For many people, certainly the mainstream of society, this signals a serious character flaw or psychological dysfunction on my part as well as theirs. I would have judged myself harshly for this too, during my first two or three decades, having been effectively programmed by my parents, Ronald Reagan, and After School Specials to fear and loathe non-FDA-approved mind-altering chemicals and the freaks who supposedly ingested them.

Use always equals addiction, and addiction is always equated with personal weakness, a lack of the ability to cope with life that the “well-adjusted” and responsible citizenry allegedly have. But as you may have noticed, I no longer buy that we live and act in a vacuum where we can triumphantly master the universe through our personal will (as much as that goes against our national mythology). As you may have noticed, I find the cultural frameworks around us deeply dysfunctional themselves. Both James Baldwin and Jiddu Krishnamurti, men whose writings I turn to like a compass (maybe there’s at least a couple of guides I trust) pointed out that there’s nothing particularly healthy about being well-adjusted in a sick society. Maybe it’s not so incongruous that Buddhist master and Shambhala founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a raging alcoholic.

**

Statistics can be interesting. Two-thirds of attendees at Alcoholics Anonymous are men. An extensive American study found that over one third of the male population has been dependent on alcohol or drugs at some stage of their lives. The figure for women was exactly half that. Alcohol and drug abuse were strongly associated with an increased suicide rate in men.

From this I do not conclude that men are somehow weaker than women, any more than I conclude that higher incarceration rates indicate moral inferiority among minorities. I believe instead that this is merely indicative of what both my own personal observations and independent studies (about addiction, Western culture, and men) have led me to conclude: that males of the species possessing any sensitivity or impulse toward authenticity whatsoever simply cannot “adjust” to Western patriarchal capitalist culture and its demands without explicit damage to their mental and emotional well-being. Damage that, given no opportunity to heal (or even be acknowledged), often leads them to seek release, escape, or at least some form of anaesthesia. This subject could be a thesis in itself, but I’m not going to make one of this post. (Suggested reading: The Hazards of Being Male by Herb Goldberg, anything by Warren Farrell,  Stiffed by Susan Faludi…not to mention my oft-quoted Carol Gilligan favorite.)

I don’t recoil from things like drug addiction or attempted suicide as if they were contagious diseases or shameful personal failings. I actually consider them to be symptoms of a sick society. Much like the inordinate rate of depression in American women.

**

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz…

Those are, of course, the opening lines to Allen Ginsberg’s notorious paroxysm of a poem, “Howl,” his heaving tribute to the Beat generation.

My favorite minds of my own generation, like Damien Moreau and Tony DeRocca, were great admirers of William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg’s lifetime friend (and onetime lover) and the Beat least palatable to the general public, who wrote bannable book after bannable book.

These days, for Sam and the intelligent rebels of his generation, old Bill seems to have been replaced by the more contemporary Hunter S. Thompson, but the two men had more than a few things in common. Both were vociferously pro-drug, pro-gun, and anti-government; both yearned for a return to a (somewhat romanticized) frontier society; both were known for the anarchic subjectivity of their hallucinatory prose: Burroughs for his autobiographical “routines” featuring alter ego William Lee, and Thompson for his “gonzo” journalism that inserted him into the story as a central character. Both found the values and modus operandi of the American system corrupt and destructive to human beings. “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,” said Burroughs, “the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.”  “In a nation run by swine,” wrote Thompson, “all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.”

Academic David Savran wrote an interesting book (another for the reading list) ten years ago called Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. He has quite a bit to say about Burroughs and the Beats, and the effect of this postwar consumer culture on white guys in general (who are supposed to be the powerful ones), most of which is too dense and layered to go into here. He quotes Norman Mailer, who (in his essay “The White Negro”) talks about the (Beat) hipster as “postmodernist subject,” “the fragmented, decentered, ephemeral subject of late capitalism” — a male essentially stripped of history, continuity, meaning, or identity, and basically lost in the supermarket, so to speak (to borrow from a band Sam and I both like).

Analyzing “Howl,” Savran asserts quite graphically that “the ‘best minds,’ having introjected the god (‘Moloch,’ or American industrial capitalism), attempt to exorcise him by allowing themselves masochistically to be penetrated, adulterated, maddened, befouled — in short, feminized — by various sharp metallic objects, drugs, poisons, and cocks. Grisly variations upon the subjects of postwar commodity culture, they are sickened and destroyed by that which they compulsively and helplessly consume.”

I’d agree with Savran that mind-altering substances can “feminize” men, in a sense,  but not in the masochistic and unnecessarily degrading way he (and perhaps Ginsberg) seems to mean here. Breaking down boundaries and inhibitions, drugs allow for a fuller range of emotion, perception, sense, color…almost exactly the opposite of that “flattening of voice” that Carol Gilligan watched happen in young boys as they became socialized for elementary school. Drugs not only bring relief from pain, but they can also, at least temporarily, open up shut-down capacities and faculties and enable a richer experience, a whole other spectrum of aliveness.

**

I am thinking again of Tony, that self-proclaimed hermit who wrote like a belligerent and even misogynistic version of the rock critic Lester Bangs — with a lot of sound and fury — but in person he came across as fragile, as if he might dissolve like spun sugar if you handled him too hard. He was a disturbing sort of handsome, intense and bony, with long, grey-streaked curls, and always seemed to be watching me with smoldering dark eyes. For a long time I averted my gaze uncomfortably from those smoldering dark eyes. But when I finally turned mine his way, he literally, visibly flinched, as if my focused attention physically hurt him. He would eventually push me away with violent protestations.

It was for Tony’s sake, for Damien’s sake, for Sonny’s and unknowingly for Sam’s sake that I tackled my independent studies in sociology, as well as for my own. These were highly intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive men, after all; it didn’t make sufficient sense to me to conclude that their affinity for chemicals and my affinity for them just meant that we were all similarly pathological (compared to some normative and faceless John Q. Public) and leave it at that. Maybe we are all misfits in a system where “fitting in” is its own kind of pathological. Of course there’s always a choice involved, but it’s naive to say that the alternative to being high is preferable to being high. Maybe one can’t blame society for all of one’s ills, but neither can one take personal responsibility for everything that’s wrong with our collective picture.

The 12-step Serenity Prayer says it all, actually, when it invokes one’s deity of choice to “grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” It recognizes that we are neither the masters of the universe nor its hapless pawns; we are fumbling along somewhere in between.

And god help us.

**

The wallpaper on my laptop is a photo of Sam, my only photo of Sam, but it wasn’t taken by me or by anyone I know.  It’s an arty black-and-white shot that somehow wound up being appropriated from one of Sam’s former Internet presences (he wiped out all online Sammage because of thefts like this) and is for sale on a stock photo site. In the shot, his head is down, his brow propped against one wrist; he looks like a man at the end of his rope. So far it’s been used in print ads about addiction and mental illness, and has even made an appearance on a national TV talk show. It seems oddly appropriate that Sam’s image has been turned into a public signifier for stigmatized, tormented outsiders. I feel a pang every time I see it.

Sam’s retreat into silence may forever be a mystery to me, I may wonder ever after what was really going on with this young man who made me so very happy so very briefly, but regardless, he will always be the man who changed me. Sam changed me, in ways that no book, no counselor, no guide, no religion, no system, no theory, no practice, and no drug — prescribed or otherwise — has ever done.

I will always love him for that.

Now if I could just go on without him.

And I’m already exhausted, between the tremendous internal pressure I’m feeling (increasing as the days go by) and the strenous efforts I’m making for hours every day to brainstorm possibilities and contact possible allies and research possible leads. Now that I’m finally open to anything and everything, opportunities don’t seem to be just magically appearing, the way the rah-rah intention people promise they will. It’s stressing me out.

I’m trying to just walk through it, breathe through it.

**

Although I’ve resolved to blow this cow town, I’m still looking for short-term work (doing things I would never have considered in the past, like cold-call fundraising) in an effort to ease my mounting financial worries. I will be completely cleaned out of every last dime in my existing bank accounts if I stay here through the month of June without working, and that’s barring any and all unforseen or emergency expenses. As it is, I hope to be here only through May. Then, perhaps (in the least desirable case scenario), I’ll have to load my pared-down belongings into someone else’s car (obtained through one of those companies that lets you drive cars cross-country for other people) and roadtrip back to my kinfolk’s state on the East coast, hopefully with enough money left in my pocket for gas, food, and cheap motel lodging.

There was a time when such a prospect would have driven me to leap out of a tenth story window. Now, however, being in this curious place of having released just about everything to which I was formerly so attached — including my beloved 1973 VW Beetle — dying along with my former life seems redundant and unnecessary.

My best friend back “home,” bless her heart, is busy trying to line up a place for me to stay other than at my fundamentalist parents’ house, but I really would rather avoid that eventuality altogether. Today a longtime friend called to tell me that an always cheerful and caring former co-worker of ours, only a few years my senior, had collapsed at work with a massive blood clot to the heart. (She’s currently in intensive care and in need of a heart transplant. Visitors and calls are being discouraged.)

**

I haven’t seen Rachel in years, but this couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Or to a man sweeter than her husband, who lost his younger sister to suicide many years ago. Talk about devastating loss…

Suddenly it’s thrown into even sharper relief, how fragile these bodies of ours are, and how little time we have on this mad, whirling planet to do what we will.

When I feel pangs in my legs (I’m a prime candidate for clots myself) and the odd palpitations from my idiosyncratic little heart murmur, I have weird intimations of my own demise. Nate Fisher of Six Feet Under may have been a fictional character, but he was a kindred spirit: I always appreciated and identified with the way he grappled with his own mortality, ultimately to be dispatched by AVM (yet another circulatory disorder) at the age of forty. I honestly don’t think I have the constitution for longevity, either, and like our friend Russ, half expect not to complete another decade. So I’m no longer unconcerned about wasting time.

Going back to where I came from smacks of wasting time. As does staying here. I’ve been treading water in this place for a long, long while, feeling like I don’t quite belong…but waiting, hoping, for years, for certain outcomes that never turned out.

All of a sudden — with my growing discontent egged on by online self-helpers and coaches who essentially contradict the laissez-faire spiritual teachings (about non-striving and such) I tried for so long to embrace — I find that certain long-suppressed (not necessarily “reasonable” or feasible) wishes and longings of mine have re-emerged, clamoring at maximum volume, with an urgency that won’t allow me a day’s rest or a minute’s peace. I’m casting my nets wildly in every direction, driven to tears by internalized drill sergeants who hammer and hammer and don’t care that I’m doing the best I can with no fucking clue of what I’m doing. As if my life were riding on my ability to spin gold from straw alone and overnight. Where’s that fool Rumplestiltskin when you need him?

I’m looking for a way, and I needed it yesterday.

**

Today I heard back from the American University of Paris. They won’t accept applications from foreign workers who don’t have their work papers in order. Yesterday I was on the phone for forty-five minutes with my aforementioned friend Talia, who is an associate professor there and would be happy to put me up in her spare room, but she was as discouraging as the University about coming over without the proper work visa (which is apparently a bureaucratic nightmare to obtain). France is tough. Italy, from what I’ve been able to find out, is equally tough. Apparently the entire EU has tightened up its immigration laws a lot in the past few years. You used to be able to cross over to Switzerland for a couple of hours after your 90-day no-visa visit to Italy was up, and then come back for another 90 days. No more.

There are still some shortcuts available. If you’re a student, you can obtain a student visa and work up to 20 hours a week legally (of course there are also some under-the-table cash jobs around, like au pair). If you’re an entrepreneur planning on starting a business over there, they make it much easier for you to get your working papers. If you’re in a highly skilled, high-demand field like IT and get hired by a European employer, they also pretty much wave you through. I’ve read on blogs that Ireland’s immigration authorities don’t care that much about illegal Americans, so some employers (particularly in the tourism and food and beverage industries) don’t care that much, either.

I’m definitely leaning toward Ireland, but then again, I was already. Surprised? I thought not. Every time I listen to Damo now I feel this deep if irrational conviction that I need to go over there, with an inexplicable certainty that “soul-honoring,” mythically inclined authors like David Whyte and John O’Donohue and Thomas Moore would encourage me to trust. (Are any of you readers in Ireland? Need somebody to tutor your kids or hoe your garden? Wash your car? Write your dissertation? My email is right there on the sidebar. Seriously. Help me out.)

My highly skeptical friend Karl, probably the biggest pessimist I have ever met, tried to dissuade me from my mad notions by reminding me of the global recession and how difficult it is to find jobs anywhere — but I still managed to find out that he has a good friend in Dublin, and got him to agree to put us in touch. I didn’t try to enroll him in my crazy scheme, I just asked him for a favor. (You have to choose your battles.)

There are some volunteer opportunities over there with Simon Communities for the homeless, as well as with an international Catholic group assisting the disabled…they give you room and board for your troubles, and a tiny spending allowance of 50-65 euros per week. Frankly, I’m not so keen on going that route. I was a VISTA volunteer when I first came out here, so I’ve been there and done that. And twenty years of living on a shoestring has gotten pretty dang old. A girl needs non-holey socks and underwear, for crying out loud. Besides which, keeping basic cell phone service could eat up at least one-quarter of a month’s stipend.

Yahoo has a decent-paying Web editor job over there (and I bet they help Yanks get their legal ducks in a row), but you have to be fluent in at least one European language besides English, and even my strongest secondary language, Spanish, isn’t very good. I don’t think I could fake it. Should I apply anyway? Lord knows, I’ve been searching everywhere for jobs for which I might be qualified, through international recruiters and international job sites and even EU government sites. I spent five hours Saturday updating my profile on Monster.com (making very clear my desire to relocate) and doing just this kind of research. Today I was online for at least another four, clicking around and brainstorming, while also lining up possible buyers for what’s left of my poor VW and setting up a job interview at Telefund (ugh).

I’m effing wiped. And I’ll wake up tomorrow in a cold sweat and do it all over again.

**

Last Friday I started reading through my 2006 Italy diaries again. And I thought, damn, these are pretty good. I had the time of my life, really, living those singular experiences and then translating them to the page to share with my closest friends. In many ways, I felt like I was doing what I was meant to do. I loved it. Sonny even said to me (and I forget this, but it makes me pause and wonder whether he loved me more unselfishly than I loved him) that I should remind myself of that more expansive time, and try to get back to the feeling of what it was like.

So bittersweet: both being with him and being over there were wonderful, but mutually exclusive, dreams come true. He told me he was happy I found someone to laugh and love with — meaning that ultimately rejecting English s.o.b. — the memory of which makes me want to cry my eyes out for another hundred years or so.

(Cough.) Moving on…

Anyway, this is one case where internet research quickly became demoralizing. My coach recommended that I look into travel writing, so I started doing some searching, and turned up innumerable articles and blogs that basically all conclude “Don’t expect to be Rick Steves” or “Don’t expect to make a living at this.” My scarcity prejudices were heartily and repeatedly reinforced. The world and the Web are overflowing with wannabe travel writers, and there’s no demand and no market for all of you. The best thing to do, apparently, is to write those little 200-400 word “shorts” for magazines and Web sites at $25-50 a pop, and hope for the best, but keep your day job.

So fuck me, I guess.

**

But speaking of fucking me — on a lighter note — a quite young man (23, to be exact) I’ve known for several months seemed to be pitching me totally unexpected vibes the other day. I found myself perspiring a little, and feeling very Anne Bancroft. He’s an attractively geeky, bespectacled vegan philosophy student with a self-deprecating sense of humor who (now that I recall) once tried to buy me a drink at the coffeehouse/bar where we both sometimes hang out. I was on my way out at the time, but now I’m sorry I didn’t take him up on it. Damn.

Given that I could have a stroke tomorrow, and that I may wind up moving back to my birthplace or a whole other country within the next couple of months, maybe a little carpe diem is in order. Or should I say carpe vegan? Seize the vegan! (I just put a really filthy joke about eating meat here and then thought better of it. You can make up your own.) I haven’t laid a hand on anybody since you-know-who. I haven’t really wanted anybody, other than that impossible Brit. But Dexter (I’ll call him that, it seems to fit) really is pretty hot, in his skinny, brainy hipster sort of way. And he’s so fricking young! I’m absolutely floored, if that was actual electricity I felt crackling in the air. I don’t know that he’s not spoken for, but he was complaining that women don’t exactly flock to philosophy majors. (He should have gone to my college.) Holy crap, how many more years do I expect to be able to attract snackable young things like that? What am I waiting for?

What do you think? Shall I invite him over for some quinoa pasta and fill him up with organic wine? Steal up behind him as he’s looking around my apartment and nuzzle his slender neck, murmuring Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

**

Looking around this apartment myself, I imagine I’ll start my possession eliminations with things like the television, which is all but useless without a digital converter box. The hardest thing to let go will be books and CDs, but they’ve got to be scaled back if I’m going to ship them cross-country or stuff them in a car. Scanning the kitchen, it makes me vaguely anxious to think about having to start over from scratch after how long it took to build up a decent stock of spices and secondhand dishes and utensils…but that’s assuming I’ll always be as poor as I have been.

It’s strange to consider that just six months ago I was still trying to acquire things for this apartment, to turn it into an inviting place where I would hopefully entertain a certain more-than-friend, eventually. I got art for the walls, and a desk, and a baker’s rack for the kitchen, and a new comforter and duvet (all, I should add, with a little help from my friends). I do love this space, it’s one of the nicest and brightest I’ve ever lived in on my tiny budget. If I were going to spend my life in one room, like Emily Dickinson, I might stay here. But I also know I can’t stay here forever, and it seems like Big Change Time is now or never.

The voices of pessimism start in, and tell me that things will get worse rather than better…that I’ll be lonely…that I’ll miss my friends…that I’ll be sorry. And I can’t tell those voices that I know they’re wrong. But I’ve let them hold me in suspended animation for far too long.

**

This evening I waved from the steps as the pleasant young couple who had just given me three hundred dollars for my rusty and problem-ridden Beetle pulled out into the street: he driving, having just gotten the motor running again, and she following in their battered pickup. They crossed the intersection, and I watched as they disappeared up the hill, the unmistakable put-put-put-put of the VW engine fading away for good.

I have had a recurring dream that I’ve somehow wound up somewhere very, very far away with that car — usually my state of origin — and I start to panic about not being able to get it back home (here) in its dilapidated condition. One time it rolled down an incline into a lake, and I was trying to pull it out of the mud even as it sank! Such symbol-laden dreams, telling of anxious, encumbering attachments to things that don’t last, and the lifelong horror I’ve had of getting stuck back in New England with my fervently religious family. I would wake up depressed and fearful every time.

Now my most dreaded relinquishings are becoming easy. After the job, after the community, after the man, the car is a piece of cake. Nonattachment will be forced upon you, whether you like it or not, and when it comes…

Well, maybe you’ll sleep better, after all.

The first is a regular column with a nationally-based Web site that provides news, entertainment, and opinion articles specific to particular cities. It pays based on numbers of hits per page (which, in my city, isn’t much yet). The second is an informal contract job helping my Kundalini teacher rewrite the copy on his Web site — for pay. The last, which is only in the talking stages right now, is a blogging position with a popular local online magazine that probably won’t pay me a dime but would look great on a resume.

All of this transpired in less than a week.

**

Give me a sign, I had begged, just days before, of The Universe or The Gods or Whoever might be listening. Or as Tracy Chapman once put it, Give me one reason to stay here.

As you know, I recently lost my job. And with it, my spiritual home, my cherished community. I don’t own a house. I don’t have a family of my own. I’m not in a relationship. I love someone, but we’re not together, and may never be. Even my beloved little vintage Volkswagen has given up the ghost. I have friends here…but I have friends all over the United States.

I found myself wondering if all of this were itself an indication that I should take my ball and go home — wherever home is. Maybe I’d need to find a new one. Or fly to places unknown.

**

“You should come!” my beautiful Indian girlfriend Samira had said.

She and her bite-sized boyfriend Ken were preparing to embark upon a series of globetrotting travels of indefinite duration: first to India, then Indonesia and Thailand and Vietnam and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Nepal — not necessarily in that order. When she told me they were leaving, I cried. I love them both so much; I love being with them; traveling abroad with them would undoubtedly be a delight, even it meant being a bit of a third wheel.

After Samira made the suggestion, I found myself thinking about it in my most desperate moments — much like I entertain thoughts of suicide — as another way of leaving behind everything I’ve cared about for so long. Rushing headlong into the unknown, as it were.

Paying for such a splurge with next to no money would, after all, necessarily require maxing out credit cards I’d have no hope of ever paying off. Then I really would have to kill myself.

**

I’ve lived vicariously through Samira and Ken, through their obstacle-ridden but ultimately triumphant love story. It was only nine months ago that I was sharing a picnic with Samira in the park and listening to her fatalistic pronouncements about her feelings for Ken. “I don’t know why I even think about it,” she was sighing. “It’s never going to happen.”

She had met Ken in a teacher training, while attempting to struggle her way through an unhappy arranged marriage. Their friendship, and her growing attraction to her new friend, only increased her internal conflict. Now, a year later, she was going through a bitter divorce. Ken still had no inkling of her true feelings. Knowing Ken the way I did, I strongly suspected that he’d be over the moon to discover that this gorgeous creature was even thinking about him. But Samira wouldn’t believe it for a minute. Her “sensible” voice, the voice of self-preservation (informed by damaged self-esteem), kept arguing that he couldn’t possibly be interested in her. Ever the incorrigible romantic, I kept urging her to spend more time with him.

When they finally kissed, one night after sharing some wine, and Samira told me about it the next day, I literally jumped up and down.

Their love has only grown since. They’ve traveled and taught classes together and visited each others’ families in other states. Their happiness has been my happiness. And yet Samira almost talked herself out of the whole thing with her voice of so-called “reason.” So I have to take some credit, for always being such a damned fool.

**

The fantasy of taking off with these two felt to me like the second-choice Make-A-Wish of a terminally ill woman. People grieving major losses in life have been known to make similarly impetuous and haphazard leaps. It’s how I wound up out here in the first place. (And found myself depressed, lonely, and bored for a long time after, so I don’t believe a change of scenery is necessarily the magic cure.)

But the question persisted: should I leave? Move back East? Move further West? Is there anything left for me here? Whether I stayed or went, it seemed I risked missing something. Whether I stayed or went, I would still be dying little by little every day.

So I asked for some indication that I was in the right place. Here, now.

**

I look at my page on the Web site, and the feeling is indescribable. There’s my face, there’s my title, those are my words. Suddenly I have a public media presence. Suddenly, to the world outside, I’m somebody. I may not be Arianna Huffington, or the late Molly Ivins — not yet, anyway! — but I’m out there. And now two other people right here in the area are interested in making use of my gifts.

My high school obsession Damien Moreau wrote for Slate magazine years ago, and co-authored an award-winning screenplay. I always envied that ability to successfully make an impact, and a name for oneself, in the world; much of my overwhelming desire for Damien may have actually been envy. Seeing him acting on the stage in high school, and in independent films years later, I felt an ineffable yearning, like that of a groupie with pretensions to playing lead guitar. For centuries women denied professions did have to live through their men, so this confusion of desire and envy is probably nothing unique.

My own mother never particularly modeled or encouraged feminine achievement, and from my earliest years I felt instinctively that my accomplishments were less important to everyone than my brother’s. Men were the true masters of the world; I could only be elevated by association.

Jung was one of the first to point out how we seek out in others the missing or disowned parts of ourselves…when what we need to do, for the sake of wholeness, is to own our own capacities  — our own inner masters of the world.

**

An odd thing is happening. For the first time in a long time, I can look at the world without the dark filter of unworthiness and insecurity that has been coloring my every perception. My unspoken mantra for the past few months has been I’m not good enough, and much of how I’ve interpreted what has or hasn’t happened to me has supported that hypothesis. Naturally.

That mantra places you in a space of fear, a space of extreme neediness, where your very right to be alive can be challenged by how others react to you. I‘ve become extremely sensitive to what I perceive as my status as a community pariah; people who were once a large part of my life seem to have backed away, as if I suddenly contracted the Ebola virus by leaving the studio. Lord only knows what they’re thinking. (I will say that I used to believe that everyone who left there the way I did must have done something absolutely awful; the pure-intentioned, divinely inspired owner could do no wrong. Now I realize that those conclusions were most likely unjust…as unjust as the accusations that I was “negative” or “toxic.”)

A beautiful young man I dearly loved confessed to me once that he was close to suicide over the conviction that his ex-girlfriend’s circle of friends was gossiping cruelly about him. He was confused at the time about his sexual orientation, and for him, their damning judgments (or what he perceived to be their damning judgments) seemed an accurate assessment of his fitness to live. My emphatic insistence that he was a worthy and wonderful being fell on deaf ears. Obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about. He was fatally flawed, not good enough.

That mantra, that assumption, has also informed my reactions regarding a certain gentleman’s doings (and not-doings). In that space of unworthiness, everything is personal, and rife with evidence of my unworthiness (and inferiority, compared to other women). In that space of unworthiness, I’m desperate for him to validate me. Pretty soon, that’s all I know, and all I can feel. And that kind of dreadful anxiety leads in the exact opposite direction from any kind of love.

Without that dark filter, I can see myself as deserving…talented…even amazing. Without that dark filter, suddenly I feel like he’s missing out. How much better would Sonny’s life be with me in it? How is he, anyway? Is he okay? Maybe he’s having a hard time himself. Maybe he’s listening to the Smiths because he’s feeling as bad as I do when I listen to the Smiths.

When he’s not master of the world — or of me — he becomes human-sized again. He becomes my warm-eyed, affable friend in scuffed cowboy boots who has no more of a clue than any of the rest of us. (He’d be the first to tell you he has no more of a clue than any of the rest of us.) It’s not his job to validate me. It’s not my job to validate him. But I do remember why I love him.

**

Everything looks different when the proportions change. It’s as if we’ve been little children, looking up at others as the giants grownups seem to be when we’re knee-high. As toddlers, we really do live at the mercy and the whims of the giants. As adults, perhaps the most important thing we can remind ourselves is that there are no giants anymore.

Coming off the preschool autopilot, all of a sudden you’ve got to be a grownup and take some responsibility for yourself. I’ve said before, in not so many words, that I’m frequently a chickenshit when confronted with an honest-to-goodness opportunity. Hopefully writing this regular column will be the beginning of the end of some of that, career-wise…but as far as my gentleman friend goes — if he is, in fact, nervous, I’m petrified. Let’s not forget who couldn’t answer the damn phone.

If we did somehow manage to meet, it’s quite possible, based on past experience, that we could wind up at my place, or his, and if we wound up at my place, or his, it’s quite possible, based on past experience, that we’d be having more than tea (knock wood, no pun intended)…but what then? Honestly, we’re both like a couple of wild animals skittish about nets. I can’t project all of my historic ambivalence onto him, however convenient that may be. I should know by now that it’s not his job to carry everything I won’t own.

Way back when, I turned him onto Hesse’s classic about a wandering artist who makes love to every woman he meets and never settles down, and he loved it. I knew he would; I did. There’s something expansive and exhilirating about that total freedom, access to the endless variety of beauty, rapturous intimacy without routine or risk. (Don’t think that such scenarios appeal only to men, even if they’re more likely to act them out.) At the end of the day, Sonny and I are both just a couple of gregarious, warmhearted, lovable, imaginative, curious, restless, moody, passionate, sensual, ambivalent commitment-phobes. I told you he was my soul brother!!!

Dear God, I do love that man. Regardless of how fucked up either of us may be, at least in this lifetime. So sue me. Maybe we’ll get it right in 2095.

**

“Keep writing,” my coach friend advises when I ask him what I should do. I share with Samira and Ken what’s been happening, and Samira says that it sounds like things are starting to “come into alignment” for me.

I still wake up in the morning nervous that I have no real income (people keep asking me “Did you find a job yet???”), still feeling the wordless longing I’ve had for as long as I can remember. It’s hard not to reach for the usual strategies — poring over not-even-vaguely-intriguing listings of hateful-but-necessary jobs, and attaching to palliative fantasies about rolling around deliriously happily ever after in bed with my yummy but MIA kindred spirit. Having nothing but time, without the usual distractions of a job and a social hive, really does force you to confront yourself, much like a silent retreat at a monastery does. You realize how much you project into the future, hoping for something exciting or gratifying, or dwell on the past, remembering something exciting or gratifying. Anything not to feel your present discomfort! Linda, my coworker at the studio, used to say she would go crazy if she weren’t busy all the time. I think most of us prefer to be occupied like that.

Unease aside, perhaps this is a time to trust and relax, despite my skeptic’s inclination to think I have to earn every possible desired gain by the sweat of my brow (and even then, often not). Because, frankly, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that I’m doing what I love, what I do best, and finally getting some recognition for it. I’ve read literally hundreds of testimonies from people for whom things began to turn around once they started moving in the direction of their true talents. Why not for me? Stranger things have happened.

As for that other matter…who knows. Would either of us carrot-chasers ever want to belong to a club that would have us as a member?

What do you say, Sonny? We could book ourselves in at the Y…WCA…

I like it here, can I stay…and do you have a vacancy for a back-scrubber?

Then, as necessity dawns, dread. Pulse-quickening fear. Ripples of anxiety burning through my gut like a sulphurous acid. What will I do today? What will I do tomorrow? How will I live? And what, exactly, do I have to live for?

I want to go back to sleep, but the adrenaline won’t let me relax. My racing thoughts are running a familiar track. Going over and over the abysmal loop about the little girl whose dreams never seemed to come true, who grew old alone, destitute, scarcely having lived life, as the world’s ecosystem and economy disintegrated around her.

At that point the only course of action seems clear. And it ain’t sending out résumés.

**

49:49:2. These numbers popped into my head the other day. My coach friend has pressed me to talk about my “dreams,” has encouraged me to run wild with my imagination, and I’ve had trouble explaining why this prodding feels so cruel to me. I might elaborate now that my life often seems to me to have consisted of 49 percent daydreams, 49 percent suffering, and 2 percent actual living.

You see, from the time I was a very young child, I have always been able to vividly imagine the way I would like things to be. And I typically suffered (from feelings ranging in intensity from mere disappointment to heartbreak and total despair) when what actually happened around me — nearly all of the time — was radically different from what I envisioned. (Woody Allen dealt with this conflict between imagination and reality brilliantly in The Purple Rose of Cairo.) Those rare times when there was a match, or more accurately a near-match, between what I wanted and what really occurred, make up the other 2 percent. Some might call me lucky for ever hitting that 2 percent. Some might say, “Welcome to the real world, sweetheart!” Then there are those who would fault me, like the Christians with their mustard seeds, for not having faith enough.

I wonder, in response: how can a young child who believes in Santa Claus and the resurrection not have faith enough?

So I can’t help but react viscerally when asked about my dreams. Especially at times like these, when everyone wants to know what I intend to do with my life. If I could even tell you, friends, would it matter? At 41, is the question even still relevant?

All this historic angst resurfaces when the routines and relationships and duties that have defined me and paid my way for a time are completely stripped away, and I’m left with the pressing immediate question of survival — but also the perennial (and still unresolved) question of life purpose. While the clock keeps ticking.

**

“Unknown” called again on my cell yesterday. “Unknown” has been calling me a lot lately.

If I pick up, I know I’ll most likely hear Officer Frank Lipinsky from the Fraternal Order of Police or Sargeant George Dodd from Disabled Veterans of America or Something Somebody Something from the Society for Blind Homeless Mormon Puppies making a persistent guilt appeal to me for money I don’t have.

If I don’t pick up, I can pretend it’s Sonny (to borrow an old alias of his), calling to see how I’m doing, if I’m okay, if I want to meet somewhere. He’s blocked his number because he’s not completely sure he’ll be ready to talk to me if I pick up. He didn’t respond electronically, after all, when I replied to his brief expression of concern with a heartfelt plea to stay connected.

So I don’t pick up. As usual, there’s no message.

You see how my imagination works?

**

I honestly don’t know what I mean to this man, now, if I mean much of anything to him anymore. I only know what he’s meant to me, and if you’ve been reading me attentively for a while, I don’t have to tell you. He did liberate himself, at last, from the clutches of one of those Fascinating Women who look supermodel-pretty from a short distance, but when you get close to them you see the perpetual discontent drawing down the corners of their mouths (rendering them oddly plain), and hear the chronic disapproval dripping from their voices. I extended her the benefit of the doubt way past its expiration date because I honestly believed she was contributing to Sonny’s happiness.

When it’s quiet at night I think I can hear the dull thwack of him rebounding off of half a dozen headboards around the city. I know the opportunities are there, attractive and ruby-ripe for the picking, and he’s definitely got the appetite (as well as some of the attributes) of a young Warren Beatty. Now that he doesn’t have to behave, he’ll probably be making up for lost time. (I once likened his pleasure-loving nature to that of a five-year-old boy left alone with a tub of ice cream.)

It’s all right, folks; I don’t own him. I know I’ve never had any claim to him in the slightest. None of us ever really do, even if we decide to play by the rules and stand up in front of a person of the cloth or the law and repeat after him or her. We made that stuff up to create a safe boundary, to protect our vulnerability, to not have to relive the irrecoverable losses of our helpless childhoods. The fact is that people are born free, and if what they really need to do isn’t what we would have them do…well, if we love them enough to want them to follow their bliss, we’ve got to let them go. (Once in a while, as happened for the fortunate Joseph Campbell and his wife, two people decide that being together is folllowing their bliss.) From almost the very beginning, three years ago, I knew I’d found a soul brother I would have to wish the best, even if he wound up breaking my heart into a million bleeding pieces.

You may not want me to feel the way I do about Sonny, either, but that’s what I’ve elected to do with my freedom.

**

A friend and I go to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Brad Pitt, comely as he is, has never been my favorite actor, but the film is deeply affecting because it’s essentially about change, and, ultimately, loss.

The title character, a man aging in reverse, weathers everything that happens to him with a sort of melancholy equanimity. Raised in a home for the elderly, he becomes used to seeing his companions vanish and new ones take their place. When Benjamin, in his wizened early twenties, finally comes to know the father who abandoned him at birth, he brings the fatally ill man out to the lake where he was happiest. One of the film’s most memorable quotes occurs as son and dying father watch the sun rise over the lake: “You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

I don’t know about you, but at twice his age I’m still having trouble with that.

Benjamin knows, too, when to exit stage right, when his lifelong love Daisy is obviously not open to being with him — first at a smoky, boozy dancers’ after-show party in New York City where she is surrounded by male admirers (he walks away), and later after a crippling injury in Paris robs her of her livelihood and her pride (she sends him away).

Eventually they will “meet in the middle,” when he has grown substantially younger physically and she has grown substantially older emotionally. Of course Benjamin has no way of knowing if their time will ever come; that’s one thing that makes his surrender to the inexorable conditions of the present all the more admirable.

I can let my time at the studio go, the way Benjamin let his father go: mad as a mad dog at the way things went, swearing and cursing the fates, yet knowing when the end is the end.

But Sonny…I can’t go there. Not now. I can only hope for Benjamin’s equanimity, the gracious exit stage right after seeing the crowded room and the competition (and, perhaps, the injury). The time isn’t right; we aren’t welcome.

Maybe someday.

**

Like Benjamin, my life’s trajectory has been shaped more by haphazard coincidences and personal connections than by some grand overarching plan. His early years were played out on small stages: a house, a tugboat, a hotel — while mine were equally circumscribed by classrooms, kitchens, bookstores, and coffeeshops. I was 38 when I left the country for the first time and traveled to Italy. (That was my “2 percent“ year, the year of exceptions, the year I met Sonny. I could write an entire post on that spring, broad and sunny with possibility like the early years of life.) I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone who knows exactly what she wants to become from childhood and spends her life pursuing that path. My ideas kept changing: today, a nurse; tomorrow, an artist; the day after, a veterinarian; or, on second thought, maybe an actress; a mother; a pilot; a poet.

The only constants along the way, truthfully, were a burning desire for approval, and an even fiercer desire to be loved by those who elicited my own affections.

Which is funny, really, given the way things have turned out. As if everything that has happened since was meant to teach me that in order to maintain my integrity I might have to relinquish those very fundamental desires. Just as an example, I can introduce you to a few people at my former job who definitely don’t approve of me (!), but I didn’t submit to their bullying in order to be liked — did I?!

As for the second part…well, I’ve discovered along the way that it’s true what the otherwise astringent Christian mystic Anthony DeMello postulated: that the human spirit needs to love more than it needs to be loved. (He identified our two basic existential needs as to love and to be free.) For sure, not getting what you were after from the people you think you love will inevitably teach you the meaning of “unconditional.”

**

A fairly random, heart-driven existence, with no great accomplishments to cite: this has been my résumé, much like that of the curious Mr. Button. I only wish that I were aging in reverse right now. My chronic pain has been intensifying recently, perhaps as a response to all the new stresses. A friend of a friend who does Network Spinal Analysis has just told me that I’ve stored multiple traumas, both physical and emotional, in my spine, and that the blockages are cutting off my healthy nervous system functioning. (This is also, apparently, the reason why I’ve spent so much time in the overstimulated state of fight-or-flight.) It could be treated, if I had several hundred dollars to spend, but right now I’m more likely to be treating every dollar like a plank in my life raft, and seeing what I can cut out of my grocery bill.

The uncertainty and anxiety of poverty and unemployment in dismal economic times, the specter of encroaching physical breakdown and even disability, the prospect of being forced to give up my home and return to the bleak Northeast to live stifled within my relatives’ claustrophobic closet of millennial Puritanism… all of these things have driven me, in recent days, to the handrail of George Bailey’s bridge, staring at the water, wild-eyed. (Where’s that paunchy, bulb-nosed angel when you need him?)

**

Which is where we began. TAKAHO, my best friend from college always says: Tie A Knot And Hang On. I know my body can’t withstand another bruising stint in food service. The prospect of cubicles and fluorescents and sales calls gives me waves of existential nausea. I don’t even know whether I should put the yoga studio on my résumé, or how to talk about what happened there. The mere thought of paging or clicking through classifieds and job boards, attempting to find a round hole I can try to force my square peg into, is enough to make me break into a sweat.

The world of cold, hard survival is no place for choosy daydreamers.

And yet…the little girl still daydreams. Of kindred spirits and of giving help, of creating, of contributing, of having enough.

What she needs right now, frankly, is a miracle.

**

Sonny once wrote to me, “ask and you shall receive” — the irony of which was utterly lost on him. It’s a thing I have only found true, myself, that lucky 2 percent of the time. It’s hard to hear that particular Bible verse quoted, at any rate, when part of you is convinced Jesus fast-forwarded through all your fervent, begging childhood messages, including that one about Grandma’s cancer. Nevertheless, like those raving Secret people, I try to visualize the checks coming in (from where?) and to imagine fortuitous meetings and life-altering chance encounters. We can’t all be Forrest Gump, but poet David Whyte has mapped his life that way in the past, and he’s not exactly a member of the rah-rah manifestation crowd. The angel intervened when George Bailey was at the end of his rope and out of ideas (except for a very permanent solution to a temporary problem). If ever I needed a freakish coincidence, the time is now.

So I’ll refrain from drinking bleach for the moment, and let myself surrender and fall. As if there really are forces working in my favor. Even if the forces amount to nothing more than my belief that forces are working in my favor. I just don’t know. Maybe, sometimes, you simply have to trust that the net will appear.

As Benjamin’s adoptive mother Queenie was fond of saying, you never know what’s comin’ for you.

This particular Shakespearean tragedy’s protagonist has been called the first real existential (anti)hero in literature, with his anguished vacillations and the crushing burden of responsibility he feels, trapped within his profoundly lonely dilemma, lacking divine guidance or any other means of moral support. A “perennial student,” as one of my college professors called him, Hamlet suffers from that most modern of disorders, overthinking. You can imagine why I might be interested in reading about that.

For the bulk of the play, too, he falls back on passive-aggressive tactics rather than instigating any kind of confrontation. (Not that I can identify with that!) When we meet him, he’s muttering double-edged responses rife with undetected hostility to the cheerful queries of his loathed uncle-turned-stepfather. Why the cloudy countenance, Hamlet? asks uncle. “Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun (son),” Hamlet snarls. Later, Hamlet uses a traveling troupe of entertainers to act out his father’s murder, publicly demonstrating to his uncle I know what you did while leaving everyone else in the room clueless. Only when all hell has broken loose and his own death is imminent and absolutely certain does he act directly and decisively. Consequences don’t matter anymore; the game’s over.

**

You may remember these lines from one of the play’s most famous monologues:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

The fact that most of us aren’t operating under the terrifying onus to personally avenge a murder, vigilante-style, doesn’t mean that Hamlet has nothing in common with us. Au contraire. It’s far too easy to lose one’s resolve and be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought whenever one considers embarking upon an insecure venture or risk of any magnitude. The more one thinks, the more spooked one can become. There are always a million possibilities for failure, for unintended consequences, for doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. Second-guessing can turn into ninth- or tenth-guessing, and suddenly one is completely paralyzed. An acquaintance of mine who now lives abroad with her Portuguese boyfriend and organizes writers’ trips to Paris and Rome recently wrote in her email newsletter, “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” I guess she would be one to know about that.

Of course, as a friend recently put it (regarding a work-related confrontation that did not go well), sometimes we’re “not eager to touch the stove again.” Like the proverbial rat in the cage who just got a painful electric shock, maybe we’re reluctant to step on that lever one more time — no matter how badly we want the cheese. After a lifetime of the “thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to,” actually, we may be tempted to just lie down on the floor and whimper like the dogs in Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness experiments.

**

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. T.S. Eliot’s poem became an immediate favorite of mine the first time I read it in high school. J. Alfred Prufrock, whose name alone is not exactly that of a hero but more like that of a comical character out of P.G. Wodehouse, stands vacillating in his upstairs hall, wondering Do I dare disturb the universe? He frets and fusses and makes dozens of “visions and revisions” before going downstairs for “the taking of a toast and tea” — where he loses his resolve. A somewhat clownish figure like Brazil’s Sam Lowry (whom I talked about in this post), with a head full of impractical dreams and longings, he is all too aware of how he must appear to other people. (“But how his arms and legs are thin!”) More like Polonius, Hamlet’s resident fool, than its title character, he is, perhaps (to quote from another earlier post), too small for what brings him alive.

Alas, poor Prufrock, I know him well. As a fellow clown, I’ll let him wear this little red nose I’ve got that honks when you squeeze it. The kids love it! Once we’ve done our Kabbalah homework and burned off that desire to receive for the self alone, we won’t feel so sorry for ourselves…

I do remember being a little shocked when I read somewhere that the J. Alfred Prufrock poem was a favorite of Monica Lewinsky’s. Then again, who said she was stupid? Intelligence and judgment aren’t the same thing. No, what strikes me as so incongruous is that she exhibited a confident recklessness so utterly contrary to that character, and utterly foreign to anyone remotely like him. This chubby, giggly kid fresh out of school flashed her thong at not just some sought-after schmoe like the most popular guy in her senior class, but at the leader of the free world. She (as well as the rest of the country, and maybe the planet) might have benefited from some overthinking in this case (!), but I’ve got to hand it to her for sheer unmitigated chutzpah. She may forever live on in infamy, but she sure didn’t allow herself to be paralyzed by the prospect. That’s probably a weird thing to admire, but methinks Hamlet could have used some of that quality a bit earlier in the play.

**

Ah, where is that happy medium? Is there one? I could, for example, go crashing into one of my staff meetings like a baby elephant, flattening everything in sight; I could sit and wait and say nothing, trusting or at least hoping that things will work themselves out. Sometimes delicacy and forbearance are warranted in times of upheaval. I’m reminded of a book written by a widow that we used to carry in the grief section of the bookstore where I worked — Don’t Ask for the Dead Man’s Golf Clubs. Obviously, she had encountered some staggering obtuseness from acquaintances so preoccupied with their individual agendas that they lost all sensitivity and respectfulness regarding the situation, all awareness of her needs and feelings. I never want to be that person. I’ve been told, however, and by more than one individual, that I actually err too much on the side of the needs and feelings of others, that I defer to the point of virtual nonexistence. Hell, I’ve run down the wrong side of the field clutching the ball, and bounced the rival team’s touchdown triumphantly in the end zone. (Rabbi Berg and his Kabbalists, of course, would say this is a good thing.)

The problem for me and Prufrock and Hamlet and all our existential kin is that we just don’t have a clue what the right course of action might be, or when to take it. There are pitfalls at every step…contingencies…unforseen complications…wild cards…timing may be of the essence…what was true yesterday may not be true today…and there’s no one else on whom to pin responsibility but ourselves. My mother reads the Bible and prays, and trusts that whatever does or doesn’t happen is her interventionist God’s will. (As Dana Carvey’s church lady used to say, how convenient.) The ancient Greeks had a whole pantheon of gods to intervene in their affairs, and occasionally during a drama one would pull a deus ex machina and make a cameo.

(Hey, gimme a deus ex machina over here! No, seriously!)

Much of what we believe as human beings seems to me to be an effort to insulate ourselves from a lack of control over our surroundings. I often think of what poet David Whyte said about the way people talk about “enlightenment” — he opined that very often you could just as easily substitute the word “safety.” Lord knows, much of this strenuous soul-searching I’ve done over the years has been performed in the hope of attaining relief (safety?) from suffering and determining what, exactly, is in my power. All those manifesting gurus are so, so very seductive to me because they promise that the sky’s the limit — yet they can also enrage me with their blithe assessments of other people’s disappointments. (Oh, I’ve had faith, mister. About two hundred times. I’ll show you the scars to prove it.) If you think I’m a cynic, well, remember that inside every cynic is a romantic idealist beaten to within an inch of her life.

Verily, gentle reader, if my dearest wishes came true tomorrow, I would drop down on my knees and give thanks unto any deity you chose. I would believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Tinkerbell. You could tell me the moon was made of cottage cheese, and I’d believe you. Virginia Woolf was extremely astute to have a character in To the Lighthouse surmise that the prickly intellectual in her company must never have gotten to go to the circus. What are we, after all, but children walking around sad because we didn’t get any candy? It may be no more complicated than that. I don’t think I’m any more complicated than that.

**

But back to the question of action vs. paralysis. These are not the only choices; I seem to have overlooked the proverbial “third way.” Now, there certainly would have been far less of a drama to watch if Hamlet had stepped back with zen-like serenity and let his uncle the king work out his own karma, but it’s possible the latter would have promptly hanged himself with his own rope (literally or figuratively), the way the McCain-Palin campaign has in recent weeks with no help from a calm and smiling Obama.

The one spiritual teaching to which I keep returning, over and over again, is the one about nonresistance. It’s the Tao, the wisdom of water, which yields in all gentleness to whatever is in its path, and always flows downhill. We all know you can’t push the river — but good luck stopping it! Perhaps the wisest ones among us have learned to cease the tiresome and anxious struggle for control, and to simply accept whatever happens to be here. (Without all that stressful obsessing, who knows — the “right” course of action might become clearer.)

While this may seem counterintuitive to both the existentialist and the born-again Christian (not to mention the Secret disciple), it may be the most appropriate response to the most accurate assessment of our condition as humans. We are likely not the omnipotent creators of every facet of our experience. It’s doubtful that we’re ever going to be totally “safe,” and Jesus is probably not going to appear in the bathroom mirror and tell us His Plan while we floss. We definitely don’t have power over other people and their choices — nor should we. What we do have a say about is whether we’re going to resist or reject the way things stand (and fret over it endlessly) or whether we can surround whatever-is like water, and go with the flow.

Dude.

Really, that may be why surfers are like that. They spend a lot of time in the water, riding the waves.

Now there’s an adaptation for you. Hamlet, Prince of Malibu.