Antagonistic. My Impulse. The Good Gig. Confession. Fairy Tale. Strippers. Our Parents.

…I’m feeling antagonistic toward you today.
It’s been growing for some time and now its reached a bursting point.
You’re changing the way I write. Not in general--don’t let me flatter you--just here. This place.

This morning I type: Girls I Know; Girls, I Know; Girls: I Know.

Then it occurs: this is potentially offensive, the use of the word girls. As opposed to women. Or ladies. Or whatever you call them.

Remember the old days, when I’d talk about dating?
Remember the old days when I was unabashed?
Undercareful?
Risked alienation all the time?

Now I’m too aware of you for that.
And so I’m angry with you.

Of course, a good counselor would tell me you didn’t do anything to me.
Own your problem, the counselor would tell me. It is, after all, yours.

Mine.

…Still, you’re changing the way I write.
No, ok, fine, I’m changing the way I write.
You’re making me…I mean, I am… choosing to censor myself.

What I fear in a relationship, it is when she tries to take control of me. Or when I think she tries to take control.

I might seem to bend, before I realize what is going on, but then when I decide that is what is up, I revolt.

This has been every relationship I’ve had.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. The common denominator, it’s me.

…My impulse, it’s the same as always, it’s to make you walk.
I can’t walk myself.
I’ve never had the guts to face that responsibility.

I can make you want to go.

And the funny thing, not that it’s funny, it’s that when you do, I’ll go around feeling abandoned.

Because I’d rather see myself that way than see myself as one who abandons. In my world, any pain is better than guilt.

You think I’m much different than your last boyfriend, your ex-husband? Or if you’re the rare boy that reads this blog, that I’m much different than you are or have been?

You know I’m not.
You know exactly what I’m talking about.

What we’re really talking about, it’s that cliché of the fear of intimacy.

…But it’s a good gig, what we’ve got going here.
I listen to you and you listen to me.
That trade off.

All that quasi-affirmation of which we never got enough.

All the ways we begin to try to please our audiences.
Don’t go.

But we’ll wear on each other.
Tire of each other.
Get bored.

You put in that cd, and you realize, as much as I like this music, this is the last time, ever, I’ll want to hear it.

…My first wife, I never told you I was married twice, but the first one, she’s the good one, the mother of our child, the things she referenced as reasons to go, they were the things that brought her to me to begin with. The exact same three. The counselor, that last ditch effort, he noted that.

It didn’t matter.
I was telling her to walk. I thought it was good advice. In fact, it was.

This is what we do.
Hook up. Unhook. Marry. Divorce. Remarry. Redivorce. This long but not infinite dance.
Hoping halfway through that the fiddler calls for a switch.

…What I was thinking, it was: let’s have a different kind of love, the kind where you always like me just as I am, and vice versa, not just where you don’t get tired of my misuse of the semi-colon (I always dressed that way), but one in which the things you could have seen from the start and finally really see don’t bother you.

And don’t get bored.
And, you know, don’t get quit reading.

All that affirmation we never got.
Those tapeworms in our hearts.
The impossibility of enough nutrient.

…My second wife, the one I never used to tell people about, that two year intensity we called marriage, she became a dancer.

I’ve never been much for strip clubs. I take seduction too seriously to involve money. But I know the scene, have witnessed other men in it, have witnesses it through some very young me some long time ago, and after my second wife begin to dance, I got to know the scene much better.

What the men buy, most of them, it’s the illusion of connection. The good dancers, that’s what they sell; it’s not their bodies; it’s not their nudity; not the way they move; those things are peripheral. What they sell to most of those men, it’s the idea of some deeper connection, the kind she could never make to the customers before, the customers after, the kind he imagines her making only to him.

I wrote about it in “You Marry a Stripper”. I wrote that story years before I even knew the woman that I would marry that would become a dancer. These self fulfilling prophecies.

The men that get into money trouble in dance clubs, they are the ones who start to really believe in the connection.

And the dancers that get into a different kind of trouble, they’re the ones that start to believe in that connection as well.

…What we do, you and I, we dance for each other.

What we want, it’s not really love, it’s audience.
Which we confuse with love.
Which we confuse with acceptance.

L Cohen writes:
Cover up your face with soap, there, now you're Santa Claus. And you've got a gift for anyone who will give you his applause.

…I change the way I write so as not to lose you.
But once I perceive the need for change, it’s already lost.
It may be that I lost you, but it is certain that you lost me.

This is the trick that I play on myself.
Close to some one, I find reasons to distrust.
Tired of some voice, I find reasons to alienate.

I say, There is the door, this is the path.
I say, Go on now.
For real, I say, go.

…What I wonder about my father, it is if he ever decided to change.
What I wonder it is if he ever examined himself, if he ever knew something was wrong, if he ever tired to figure out what and why and how to change it.

I hope he didn’t. That wish, it’s for some difference.

When we think about our parents, we try to think about the things that will give us real hope of not turning out precisely as they did.

Good luck, right?