November 19, 2005 - Not With A Bang But A Whimper

T.S Eliot sure knew what he was talking about when he posed the above statement in his 1925 poem "The Hollow Men" (full text below). I supposed I used to be more... idealistic... in my comparative youth. My ego believed that when things ended, they ENDED. An explosive confrontation, a stinging rebuke, maybe even a hearty handshake coupled with wishes for a brighter tomorrow; but no longer.

Mel last day at work was Wednesday (1//16) and as of right now she is either on the plane that will take her to South Carolina, or is there already. There was no end to her and I's interaction, not even a real goodbye. A quick "good luck" from me and a few impersonal lines on a company sanctioned Hallmark card and she walked out of work for the last time. Hugs were given to and by others, email addresses exchanged, promises of continual contact all around... except with me. I suppose it drove home just how unimportant I was; how superfluous my presence was to her and... it hurt. Every now and again, I thought I would see a glimmer of genuine interest from her in what I would be saying or doing, and that may not have been incorrect assumption, but it must not have been the majority of the time.

I suppose it is human nature to want that which we cannot have. It is also human nature to have crushes on people we will never be intended to be with. Unrequited love is the stuff stories are written and dreams are built. What was it about her that sparked my interest? Was it the way she would look down and to the left when she was concentrating? Was it the way she would gnaw delicately on that worn Ticonderoga number two pencil?

I don't think so; not anymore. I think it is something far more precarious than that. I think on these people who we fall for before really knowing them, I think it's narcissism. I think we project onto them the qualities we ourselves lack. I think they become the personification of all of our doubts and lacking qualities, and if that is true than god help us. How many of us anchor our ships in other people's harbors as as we view them as being the last hope for a normal life we will ever encounter?

I do like Tess and Dee, but I don't know why and that scares me more than anything in this world. They are both great women who both have great qualities and if I weren't so absorbed with interpreting everything in life I would take that at face value, but I don't. In all reality, I have had a crush to some degree on Tess for about a year or two now, birthed while she was still in a deep committed relationship. Talk about unavailable! But I didn't care, and something inside of me is saying that if at work next week she tells me that she is back with her ex or with someone else, I will still catch myself looking at her and wondering what might impress her.

This scares me. It makes me doubt my own intentions, and leaves them suspect. For the first time in my life, I feel I cannot trust myself.


The Hollow Men

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

November 14, 2005 - The Promised Follow-up

Not much new has been going on here since my last post a few days ago.

Something that I did neglect to mention in the last write up is that Jim and I have purchased yet another another old muscle car. This one is a 1970 Dodge Coronet, burn Orange paint (almost like a blood red metallic) with a black vinyl top and black interior. The engine isn't a big block (a far more desirable engine), but we will be putting a 360 in it, which while not originally offered is superior to the non-original 318 currently in it. We got it off that Terry guy and let me tell you it was a struggle.

Terry has had it for a few years and has always threatened to fix it up and get her on the road, but this past summer he got the 318 running and found that it had a major skip in it and also found that it needed a full floor pan set; Jim theorizes that Terry gave up on it. Well, the night the General blew it's tranny, Terry had basically offered to sell us the car while in the midst of a drunken haze, and the next day recanted and tried to get us to buy a friends Coronet. When Jim had mentioned off hand that he had amassed the majority of the asking price, Terry caved. I won't post the buy-out price, but I will say that it is FAR below what it could be sold for. I'll post some pics when I get good ones in, but suffice to say she should be on the road next spring and a very sturdy daily driver.

On the work front, this Wednesday (11/16) is Mel's last day and this Saturday she is flying out to South Carolina. I am relieved. Don't get me wrong, I dislike that I will never have the ability to mend fences with her, but on the other hand this is as it is supposed to be.

Dee has been very terse with me lately, and for a few moments on Friday I had almost feared she had tracked this blog down and deduced that Dee and she were one and the same, but I am increasingly ruling that out as I do think she would have made mention of it some how.

Tess was not at work today, but when a friend came into work he had a bunch of roses which he put on Tess' desk. When I asked this friend he said that Tess' ex-boyfriend (who does not work with us) had cornered him in the parking lot and gave them to give to Tess. This ex (lets call him... Jason) of hers isn't alright in certain, yet fundamental ways. He has a bit of a history with violence and while I could not imagine him ever striking Tess, he is the kind of person I can see going after Tess' next boyfriend. When Tess and Jason were dating, she would tell me of fights he would get into out of jealousy and such. In fact, he had some major legal issues which required incarceration for a brief few months. I don't know what finally happened to break them up, but Tess used to say how much Jason's actions pissed her off and she did end it with him at one point, but they always got back together again... until now.

Well, I think that's all for now. I will try to post again either this week or weekend at the latest.

November 10, 2005 - FINALLY!

Wow it's been a long time since the last post, hopefully it will not happen again!

Jim and I have Adelphia cable/internet and they have this stupid policy that if you have their internet service and happen to log into their website for whatever reason, it activates a "paperless bill" option so all bills are emailed to you rather than thru the regular snail mail automatically without informing the user it has happened. Jim, like most people, ignore most emails from people claiming to be organizations like Adelphia, eBay and Paypal, as many of them are spam and hackers trying to get you info; so he just would ignore the emails and we ended up getting our cable/internet cut off around November 1st. Even though the full $300 something bill was paid off the first week of this month, Adelphia decided that we could wait until last night to restore service. I would have done a post then, but I was awash in older emails pretty much the entire night. So, as a warning to all Adelphia users who may or may not be reading this, if you EVER log onto the Adelphia website and see no bills have arrived get back on their and disable that accursed option!

On other fronts, work has been bad to alright. My life has gotten a bit of unneeded drama lately. A lady I asked out last fall has quit her job and moved to Hawaii about 2 weeks ago. We worked together for about a year and half, but after I asked her out, we didn't talk for a few weeks. She is quite a bit older than I (mid 50's), but she was a real firecracker physically. She was also a bit of a religious freak that no one else at our place of employment cared to try to get to know. Leshia* and I patched up whatever friendship we may have had in the last weeks she was here in the Pine Tree state. I think asking her out was also an attempt to let her know that not everyone at work thought she was 'different.'

Of course, my luck has a way of getting bad and then repeating itself, so the exact same thing is happening with another girl at work. I've been trying to get over a death that has occurred very recently (August)... so I asked Mel* out a few weeks ago, but unlike Leshia, Mel and I didn't know each other for very long at all and Mel is younger than I (20). Mel made some excuse about not wanting to get involved with any guy as she had plans of moving out to Arizona and besides she said she had a policy about only wanting to date men she knew for a while. What sucks about this (one thing of many) is that Mel and I could have been friends but that was poisoned and she never felt comfortable around me after that and only within the last month or so will actually speak with me. Another thing that hurts more than sucks is that a few days ago I found out she has just entered into a romantic relationship with some guy she really didn't know. Rule #1 for me is that if I ask a woman out and for any reason they lie about why they reject me, I NEVER forgive them! This is all a moot point though as Mel's grandparents in some other state need help and Mel has put in her 2 weeks notice so she can live with them. I regret that she is leaving as I would have liked to TRY to have a friendship, but that will never, and I honestly don't think it could, ever happen.

There are plenty of other fish in the water though, for example there is another co-worker named Dee. Dee* is younger than I with flame red hair. I was never attracted to her, in fact I couldn't stand her for quite a while! She is 20 and has a daughter that she conceived with her former boyfriend. The reason for the kid as explained to me was that she felt it gave her relationship with this guy a sense of permanence; needless to say the pair split. Dee is... well... she's not always the sharpest knife in the drawer. She tries and she does mean well, and sometimes I think I can see some honest to god raw potential in her. Anyhow, a few weeks I was moved into her general vicinity and now she and I have communicate a bit more than ever before. The more I look at her the more I do see that she IS attractive.

Due to my misadventures with Leshia and Mel, I think I'm going to keep this thing a secret. I am already doing that with another co-worker named Tess*. Tess and her sister work with me and Tess was in a really hot and heavy and very complicated relationship with a guy that ended earlier this year. Tess and I have an acquaintanceship that I am reluctant to lose in some naive attempt to take things to a level it can never achieve. Tess is... wow... She's beautiful. In another life she could have been a model and can do far better than I. Her last boyfriend was this tall strapping guy who looked in a sense like Tom Welling from Smallville. I would be a downgrade to major I fear. Besides, she trusts me and I would rather not loose that.

I'll post again pretty soon (I hope)!


* - Names are changed to protect the innocent!