A few words about monsters:
They are everywhere. The occupy every corner of our lives. They live in our walk-in closets and under the rows of overturned coffee mugs on our kitchen shelves. They are big and they are small, but I have a suspicion that the smaller ones are the nastiest. They are the fastest, the best at hiding, the hardest to find. They can hide for years, with little need for food or water. The shell of a sunflower seed will do, and a drop of water from a leaking pipe.
Our parents label the most obvious monsters for us:
Pedophiles
Kidnappers
People who drive to fast through the neighborhood
Bigfoot
that sort of thing.
They don't tell us about:
Coffee
Sweat shops
Military Industrialism
Heartbreak
among others. But that last one, heartbreak, is what this blog is all about.
Breaking up with your girlfriend and living in a trailer in her yard.
This is not a self-help blog. There is no structure here, and no reason anybody should listen to my advice. I have not, after all, found a way to compose, maintain, and live in a succesful healthy relationship. Yet. But maybe something, somewhere within, will make sense to you. And even if it is just one chapter, one paragraph, even one sentence, then this whole thing will have been worth writing.
My girlfriend and I. Broke up. C'est la vie.
But wait-
It really is a longer and more beautiful story than that. A story full of everything you would expect, and some things that you would not. Maybe you will understand some of it, and maybe there are parts that will make you shake your head, your fists, and shout “What the fuck!” at nobody in particular. But I'm not going to just write it down. It's here, the story of our love, but its buried and bundled and coded and mixed up. Because that is what love is, when you leave the pot on the flame. Evaporation of everything but its most basic elements. Which aren't very basic at all.
I'm bummed out, but I also realize that it is suddenly possible to act out any number of verses of Bob Dylan songs, and that excites me greatly. Also excited about finding a girlfriend who drinks coffee. And maybe a writer. We could spend nights without electricity, in front of a fire, writing furiously and then making love on the floor, waking in the morning to the ancient romantic glow of embers .
The trailer is small but incredibly comfortable, like a womb. Whenever I get depressed, I just pretend that I am on some incredibly long journey through space, and that my space comrades have died trying to repair some part or another, and that Earth was as far behind as it had ever been for any other man. What could be more depressing than that? I mean, at least in my situation I can roll out of bed and drive to Jack in the Box for a malt and some fries.
