I always hated in it high school would people would act like they weren’t in any clique with the implication that they were above all that. Most of the people that are not in cliques don’t transcend them, they just don’t fit into any of them. Not because they’re unique snowpetals, but rather because no group would have them. Being outside cliques is typically being on the outside looking in and not above looking down.

That being said… well… I sometimes do disparate groups of people that I hang out with. And it’s not being on the outside looking in, exactly, but it’s also not looking down from above. Mostly, it’s inconvenient as hell. A significant portion of my friends loathe country music and think that anyone that likes it is a backwood bumpkin (though they always carve out an exception when they find out about my fondness for it… I’m a credit to my people, I suppose). Another portion of my friends thinks that anyone that likes anime just never grew up. My love of college football is a great source of lubricated conversation with some and for others it is emblematic of all that is wrong with this country. I mean, these aren’t just disparate interests, they’re disparate people.

I am not someone that is particularly interested in vindicating my interests and the identity that these interests represents. If someone hates country music, I don’t go saying, “Oh yeah? Well it’s among the few actual grown-up music forms out there that isn’t hung up on being dumped in high school or getting laid like a drunk frat boy.” I just keep my mouth shut or if it’s something that’s going to come out, I soft-pedal it. Same goes for anime, sports, or whatever else.

This was particularly true when it came to female-types when I was younger. One weekend I was headed out to Ephesus for an anime convention. I was staying with my friend and love interest Sally. Sally did not have a very high opinion of anime people, so I didn’t tell her why I was in town. But I didn’t have any other good excuse. So I was real clandestine about it. And a little playful. I claimed that I was on a fact-finding mission (a term in regular use back then primarily in reference to WMDs in Iraq). There was a little town north of Ephesus with a funny name and I was going to find out how the locals pronounced it. It was, of course, ludicrous, which lead to playful questions about why I was really there and my being all mysterious and crap.

I had to do the same for my friend Rick, who also didn’t like anime. Rick was suspicious that I was there to see a country music show and was wondering if it was something that he would be interested in. I wasn’t as inclined to be as playful as Rick and so when the “fact-finding mission” schtick wore thin, I just said that I was visiting some friends.

After that weekend, I started using fact-finding missions as an excuse any time I was doing something that didn’t fit in with what the other person would be remotely interested (or was something they were hostile to). The truth is that I was being overly self-conscious and I knew it, but I didn’t care. It became a source of amusement for all involved and sometimes a way of just saying that it was something I didn’t want to or shouldn’t talk about (such as when I used to explain the fact I was dressed in a shirt and tie for a dentist or anesthesiologist appointment.

Incidentally, I will be out of town again soon on a fact-finding mission in my old stomping grounds in Estacado. Details to be released eventually.

Back when I was in high school, I was driving a bunch of people home from a party. This included drunk teenagers. Underage teenagers. There were so many of them that they were laying on top of one another. Forget seatbelt laws. One of the little pricks in the back decided that it would be a hilarious time to use some flashy-thing he got that emitted a flashing blue light. I wanted to throttle him before I dropped him off.

—-

Web wrote a post a while back about LED Abuse, a subject that has taken a particularly importance to me in recent weeks.

The offending electronic right now is a power-splitter adapter for my car. It’s a neat device that I got at a good price. It even has a USB port, which I am presently putting on cell phone duties. The problem is that the LED on that sucker lights the whole car at night. It’s not as bright as the overhead light, but it’s much sharper. I thought that was bad, but it’s gotten worse. Now the light is going out. This would be good news, but until it burns out it’s basically flashing off and on. Off and on. Off and on.

When you’re driving, when you see a flashing blue light, this is cause for a heart attack. I wonder if I could sue…

Some people laughed at Kevin Costner testifying before congress that he had a solid way to separate the oil from the water in the gulf. They’re not so much laughing now.

It makes me think of my former boss, Calvin. Calvin was an inventor that made most of his money off the patents. Well, he made money off of engineering and fabrication, but the only reason people hired him to build things was because he was the only person that could make his inventions. Though a man of many flaws, he was (is) a genius.

One of the things that he had been working on was a mechanism to prevent flooding in Colosse. Colosse is particularly prone to flooding, particularly when a hurricane or tropical storm hits. He claims to have figured out a system that, if implemented, would prevent the vast majority of flooding in the city. Furthermore, he wasn’t actually looking to make any money off this invention. He was trying to work through his alma mater, Southern Tech University, and all of the proceeds would have gone to their engineering department. While it’s possible that his plan would not have worked, he very much believed that it would.

But over and over again, he found that nobody (except Southern Tech) was really interested in his ideas. Then-mayor Ron Washington was mostly just interested in digging more ditches and other things that, according to Calvin, only really worked when the flood was never going to be a real problem. It’s all somewhat beyond me, but outside Southern Tech nobody gave it a hearing despite there being millions upon millions of dollars at stake and the city still recovering from Hurricane Adrianne.

Maybe it would have been better if he had been trying to make money off of it because they he might have lobbied Mayor Washington with money (as the contractors for the ditches were surely doing) and that might have worked. Maybe there was some devastating technical flaw that made it unworkable despite the various simulations and tests that were run. Maybe he’s just the wrong messenger, being something of a nut in some respects. Maybe if its website actually worked. Who knows?

When I was a freshman, it was a tradition at Mayne High School to have a junior or senior come by homeroom and explain various things about high school life and whatnot. The girl they had come by our homeroom was Connie Tucker, though I only vaguely remembered her name. There were certain girls that had particular appeals and Connie instantly struck a very particular nerve. I was awestruck. I would remember her for some time to come, though in a school of four thousand and with her being two grades ahead of me it’s not like I came across her with any regularity. But I remembered her that entire year.

Flash forward to the next year and I was thoroughly engrossed in the Camelot BBS. What you would see at Camelot is a burst of activity from one school or another and typically people in the same grade or of the same ethnicity. For instance, Mayne High School’s substantial Christian Asian community was well represented. Corinth High School’s Class of 1997 also had a cluster of people. Basically one person would find the BBS and then tell their friends and they would all go on, meet new people, and talk about their school life in what today would just be texting. In addition to the aforementioned clusters, there was one from a certain group of people from Mayne High School Class of Two Years Before Me. You know where this is going.

It started with an upperclassperson I actually knew through family friends. I didn’t know her very well, but I remembered her from an Episcopal Youth Church retreat. She wore an exceptional amount of lipstick. So through her and by simple exposure I got to know a few of the upperclassfolk including someone named Con Woman. Con Woman was, of course, Connie Tucker. I discovered this by looking at the class yearbook in the library. That was about the only time I ever entered the school library and when they saw me they knew to bring the book out.

What was particularly liberating about it was that, upon finding out, I told her in our next conversation. I was very straightforward with it. She was the upperclassperson in my homeroom, I was taken aback by her beauty, and I remembered her going forward even though I never actually met her. By most accounts, this would have scared somebody off. But it didn’t. She was tremendously flattered and bizarrely unaccustomed to such flattery. It was inexplicable to me then that she did not have huge amounts of male attention (just as it is inexplicable to me now that she is unmarried). Rather than scaring her off, our communication went forward more voluminously.

It wasn’t but a couple weeks before Miss Lipstick and another friend of hers were asking me why I hadn’t asked her out. The first answer was that it had never occurred to me. She was a senior and I was a sophomore. She was utterly gorgeous and I was overweight. Yeah, I had some self-esteem issues. The weight had started coming off (enough so that Andrea Carmine didn’t know what I was talking about when I referred to myself as fat but not enough that to say that I was “thin”) but to the extent that had happened I hadn’t really incorporated it into my self-image yet. The second reason, which Miss Lipstick understood, was that she was about to go off to college.

Even so, it was a rare opportunity for me to actually express how I felt about somebody. Yeah, there was the initial attraction, but that was only part of it. The attraction I felt for her as a fish was in part based on her appearance but also based on certain intangibles in her manner, her speech, and overall presence. But talking to her in our late night Camelot chat sessions, I had found out that she was everything that my mind had built her up to be. When her birthday rolled around, I gave her a card and some flowers. When my birthday rolled around, she actually stopped by my house, met my mother, and gave me balloons and a card.

A month after that she was off to Muscogea State University to become an engineer and life went on. We would meet up sometimes when she came back into town. She always gave me time and attention at Camelot BBS parties that she attended when she was in town. We have stayed in touch. She got a boyfriend at MSU and I started dating Julianne. There was a brief period where her relationship was on the rocks and I was on the outs with Evangeline that things almost opened up and I almost finally asked her out, but things never worked out. The timing wasn’t right and she ended up getting back with the guy.

That we never dated is somewhat beside the point, though. In fact, whether she would have even said yes is equally beside the point. The important thing that she provided was the first instance in my life where I had a crush on someone and things did not go seriously, seriously wrong. I didn’t keep my mouth shut and stew as I so often did. She didn’t run the hell away when I expressed my feelings. If she thought that I was just a kid that she would never consider dating, she was extraordinarily gracious about it. We didn’t briefly go out and have me absolutely positively screw everything up which I absolutely would have done at the time due to my inexperience, immaturity, and social ineptitude. It was the first case where my amorous emotions were not the enemy. It wasn’t as big a step as Julianne was a year or so later, but it was huge at the time.

The subject of gifted and talented programs has been coming up, which reminds me of the story of Lamar Heston and the Superstars program. The Superstars program was a Southfield-Mayne Regional School District invention that took the brightest kids from each of the district’s elementary schools and, once a week, bussed them out to take an afternoon of classes together. West Oak Elementary School had four slots, two for boys and two for girls.

My older brothers are both in the same grade. There was no way that two brothers were going to be chosen for the two slots, so Mom didn’t expect both to get in. She wouldn’t have been surprised if neither got in. She was a bit surprised that of the two Truman boys it was the lower-achieving Oliver that got in rather than Mitch. Ollie was an achiever, but not in any standout sort of way. Indeed, the reason that he was in the same grade as his younger brother was that he was held back a year (for maturity rather than academic reasons, but still). That, however, wasn’t nearly as much of a surprise as the inclusion of Lamar Heston.

The main thing that you need to know about Lamar Heston is that the last time I saw him, two years ago, he worked at Wendy’s. And not because he was a Rick Rosner, not in a position of authority, and not because of any temporary setback. He wasn’t a terrible student, but he had some pretty serious behavioral and attitudinal problems. To say the least. Not only was he working at Wendy’s in his mid-30’s but nobody I know that knows him is surprised that he is working at Wendy’s in his mid-30’s.

Mom was baffled. She was actually somewhat indifferent to her kids getting into the Superstars program because she was concerned about our being too sheltered. But why Ollie over Mitch? And why the hell Lamar? The answer was pretty simple and you have probably already figured it out. Mitch was perfectly behaved and Ollie was a chatterbox with an attention problem. Oh, and Lamar was a disciplinary nightmare. Why the hell should the teacher put up with Ollie and (to a much, much greater extent) Lamar if she doesn’t have to? Lamar was black and possibly the only black kid there and there was nobody in the Superstars program that was going to single him out as undeserving of being there.

The next year Mitch and a similarly bright student were invited into the Superstars program. Mom declined.

When I was going through, they actually had three boys and three girls. The main reason being is that they couldn’t just accept the Weatherby Brothers and they couldn’t pick between the identical twins.

My second sorta-date with KK was going to be a simple night in. She had mentioned never having seen (but wanting to see) Fight Club, which I had on DVD. I only realized when I got home from work that day that my TV wasn’t set up. At all. Despite having lived there for over six months, I’d never so much as plugged it in. So I spent the entire two hours waiting for her arrival scrambling to get everything in place.

Of course, we only made it about halfway through the movie.

In addition to her never having seen that movie, the other reason that we decided to spend the evening in (ostensibly, anyway) was that she was a really, really busy person. It was something of a challenge to get any time with her. In the sense that I was busy, too, this was not a bad thing. Having weekend nights open was also a blessing because she couldn’t attend the live music shows that were a staple of my free time. She was under 21, and though she had a fake ID, she did not want to flash it all around town for it to be discovered.

After a little while, though, it became kind of frustrating. There was another romantic interest at the time and the thing with KK had the disadvantage of not letting me pursue that without the advantage of actually having someone to spend time with. It was hard to pin the blame on her since the reason she was so unavailable was - or so I thought - a combination of work and school. But it was kind of inconvenient. Despite our small collection of aborted viewings of Fight Club, I found that I didn’t even know her all that well.

It all came to a head when I messaged her and her sister happened to be at the computer. KK was, it seemed, at her new job. I expressed surprise that she’d the Queen Bee, her employer at the time, and the sis said she hadn’t but had simply taken on another job because Queen Bee wasn’t giving her enough hours. Kudos to her work ethic, but it was hard to see that as anything but the end of the line for us. There wasn’t enough time before. Then the sister made a comment. “Larry is pissed cause he was already upset at not getting any time with her.”

Larry? I knew her brothers and her sisters names and none of them were Larry. I asked who Larry was and then, of all times, the Internet decided to disconnect. By the time I got back online, the IM account was offline.

It was another couple of days before I caught up with KK. It was during that time I realized that I didn’t know her phone number and that was weird. I mean, up until that point it was fine because I don’t like talking on the phone anyway and besides she was never home (and had no cell). But it was still odd. Nor did I know her address, though, since she met up wherever we were going to meet.

Anyway, when I caught up with her, we more-or-less ended it. Having nothing to lose at that point, I told her, “Hey, who is Larry?”

She said, all too immediately, “I gotta go” and logged off immediately.

A few months later, she had turned 21 and we happened to cross paths at a music show at The Stockpile. I walked up and said hello to her. She was immediately extremely nervous. She was with somebody. He introduced himself as Larry. Their behavior throughout the night confirmed what I already knew.

When I got home that night, I recapped in my minds the events of the evening and of the short-lived relationship a few months before.

Huh. I had been used for sex.

Then I thought of another way of looking at it.

Heeeey! I had been used for sex.

Interestingly enough, the revelation of Larry actually broke our radio silence. After that, we started IMing each other again. Or maybe just seeing me again made her want to re-establish contact. We never really talked about Larry or our past. It ended up as it had began: a partnership of complaining about jobs, talking about current events, and the tedia of our days.

When I was a younger lad, I knew this girl named Cheryl Krater. She was nothing to write home about it. She was pretty chunky, mean as an ox, and curiously and unbelievably somewhat popular.

I never really understood it. She wasn’t even mean in a charismatic way. She was mean in a just plain mean way. She thought she was better than everyone except her friends, but somehow she ran with the “in” crowd and always had a lot of people around her (rarely boys, though).

When I was in high school, there was a girl named Candace Lambert. Candace’s date to the prom (who was a mildly overweight schlub and nothing to brag about and beneath the generally affable Candace - the picture at the top of this post is a crude approximation of their respective presence and the mismatch) was unceremoniously arrested. Though he got out in time to go to prom, she had to scramble for a date at the last minute. He refused to go with her because, he told people, she was kind of a “b*tch about the whole thing”. I don’t know if she succeeded in finding another date or not.

Then of course, there was my high school friend Mick. Mick was a self-centered, racist, uncharismatic oaf. When it came time for prom, he never did get a date. He ended up watching rentals with his parents that night.

I mention Mick, Candace, and Cheryl because they all tie in with the last job I ever had in Colosse at a company called Bregna.

I had been unemployed for nearly five months by that point. All that time, there’d been an employer that I was pretty sure would hire me. I was always reluctant to ever mention it to anybody because I could imagine them thinking that I was unserious about my job hunt if there was a job for the taking. I didn’t have to keep quiet among IT people, though. They all knew of Bregna.

Bregna would have hired me because they always had a deficit of employees. They always had a deficit of employees because they scare them off like an old lady in a witch hat does preschoolers. By some estimations, nearly one in three IT people in the Colosse area (a very large pool of people) worked for Bregna at one time or another or at least resigned themselves to interviewing there.

To say that they’re anal is an understatement. I had worked for odd people before. Bregna was a category unto itself, though. Bregna monitors just about everything you do. Every four months you have to do an in-depth self-appraisal and if your appraisal is insufficient, you will be canned.

It’s as steril as the IMF headquarters in the Mission Impossible movie.

Here’s the thing, though: They pay. They pay well, all things considered. I needed something that pays well, if only for a little while.

So I decided to apply for a job with Bregna. My roommate turned in a referral (to give you an idea of how desperate they are for warm bodies, they give him $1500 if I work there for over four months) and then… nothing. I call them back and ask the status, they say they’ll call me and then… nothing.

I didn’t feel rejected or anything. It took them a whopping 5 interviews and six weeks to hire my roommate. But when I talked to my roommate Karl about it, he said that I’d have to pester them.

So I would have to beg for a job I have absolutely no excitement for with a company that I knew would make me miserable.

That’s what got me thinking about Candace, Cheryl, and Mick. The only analogy I could come up with was putting myself in Candace’s shoes, where you have high standards (which she did, her date notwithstanding) but because of a certain situation, she had to lower them drastically to find someone. Then I think of Mick, who never lowered his expectation and watched videos on prom night.

I think of myself in Candace’s shoes, scrambling for a date - any date! - and having to lower my expectations and taking back the guy who had a stint in jail or spending the night at home watching videos.

Then I thought of Cheryl.

It felt like I’d been dumped right before prom, and that I had to find a date - any date! - to avoid digging into my savings when unemployment runs out. The only people I could get a job with is Bregna, the only date I could get is the guy that went to jail. The alternative was brokedness and watching videos on prom night. It felt like I was reduced to asking Cheryl Krater, that annoying wench of a girl (and anyone that knows me knows I don’t use those words loosely), to go to prom with me to avoid the fate of Mick.

But I did anyway. I applied. Again.

But having applied, having not heard back, and being informed that I was going to need to pester them, made me feel like I had reduced myself to asking out Cheryl Krater and to which she responded, “You know I will probably go with you to prom,” followed by, “But you’re going to have to beg.”

In a long discussion with Phi about the whole Phoebe Prince mess, the subject of friendships in the lower echelons of high school popularity. He commented that when he was younger he had friendships but no group of friends. It’s a distinction that I hadn’t actually put a whole lot of thought into. Thinking about my own experience, it’s not exactly true for me, but it’s at least as true or not.

I didn’t have a dearth of friends. I was fortunate to go to a school with over 4,000 students where simply numbers suggested that you would find someone you were compatible with. I actually did better than that, having at least someone I was friendly with in each class. Sometimes a group of people. Were they friends? Not exactly. But we were at least friendly acquaintances. Don’t get me wrong, I had genuine friends, too. Not a large number, but I never really wanted a large number.

And there were sort of groups. There was a group of us that would get to school at an ungawdly hour of the morning so that we could get a good parking space. My best friend Clint also had some friends that I was very friendly with. Andrea Carmine and that gang. But these were casual and makeshift groups and while I was friendly with them, with the exception of The Early Bird Club, the connection was pretty weak and through a bilateral friendship. I was friends with one of them and so I got to know them. The only way it would go beyond that is if I had a class with them and I rarely did (it was, after all, a school of 4,000). Never a group big enough and close enough that I would have a natural destination when entering a classroom or the lunchroom or whatever.

So when it came to actual groups, I was not hugely successful. Unless I had an ambassador conduits like Clint or Andrea, I had a lot of trouble breaking in. It’s pretty frustrating to look back on. Mostly because I really had no one but myself to blame. I didn’t have the social confidence yet I would eventually acquire. I lacked drive. I was a little too comfortable by myself.

Beyond that, I also failed to realize how to lay groundwork for group activities. I never participated in any extracurricular activities. I disliked Mayne High School with a passion and didn’t want to contribute to it in the slightest. I didn’t fully realize the social implications of that. Further, I segregated myself by declining to be in honors classes. I lost touch with a whole lot of the friendships I had made before the tracking began. I retouched base with them at the High School Reunion and was reminded of what I had missed out on. Besides honors students, the most natural fit was oddly band. It was Clint’s friends from band that I got along with the most. The problem was that I wasn’t the least bit musical.

I have a lot of regrets about my socialization in high school. I see so many missed opportunities. Since making friends was difficult, since I had more robust social life apart from the school, and since I didn’t need a whole lot of friends most of the time, I just didn’t extend the effort I could have. Most of the time this didn’t matter, but I look back and shake my head at the times it did. Most particularly, I had no one to sit with at lunch. I don’t know how exactly it happened, but it seemed that every semester I would end up tossed with the 1/3 of the school that I didn’t know. That’s a mild exaggeration as I did have a couple good semesters with Clint and I made do a couple other semesters, but when there are 1,300 people in the cafeteria at any given lunch period, there’s no excuse for ever sitting alone. Or having to sit with a group of people that you really don’t like but are there.

All of this made it so strange that at my high school reunion, I ended up sitting at a random table, introducing myself to a group of people that I didn’t know, and made three friends. When we parted ways I told them that I wish I had known them back in the day. My bad.

When I was growing up, there was the annual ritual of buying school supplies. They included the typical things such as pencils and papers. The big buy, however, was the binder. Each year we got one because they only lasted a year. They actually lasted less than a year, but we made do with the misaligned claws and torn pockets because we couldn’t convince our parents to buy a new one in March. And we didn’t want to. By that time we usually got attached to it. It was the one school supply that was also a fashion statement. I can’t remember what the girls got as they did not yet exist to me until about the fourth grade, but the boys would get He-Man or Thundercats or Batman or something like it and it defined us.

In the fourth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Nelson that I had such a crush on that I faked bad vision in order to get attention from her. Just about all the boys had crushes on her. Best. Behaved. Class. Ever.

Anyhow, that year my binder fell apart before the fall semester was even over. I probably could have convinced Mom to get me a new one, but either I feared I would get in trouble or I decided to get creative. So what I did was take all of the binders from years past, take some duct tape to them, and create the Mega-Binder. Actually, I created two because I had so many. I gave the second to my neighbor and periodic friend Toby Crowell. He was as excited as I was about having the two biggest binders in school.

We showed the binders to everybody in sight and they all thought it was pretty cool. At least the boys did, and their opinions were the one that counted. At some point a couple days in I showed Mrs. Nelson. Normally one of the nicest, kindest, warmest teachers I ever had… she blew a gasket. Before I knew it she was screaming at me in front of the whole class about how of course she had noticed it and had been biting her tongue but if I really wanted to know what she thought about it she thought that it was an absolutely grotesque example of our wasteful consumer society and of class inequality where some boys would buy five binders and tear them apart while there were young boys in this country that couldn’t even afford one good binder.

I didn’t really understand what the inequality between our elementary school classes had much to do with anything and as far as I knew everybody could afford school supplies. I didn’t really understand what she was talking about at all except for that she was obviously real mad about something some class was doing wrong. What I really didn’t understand was that she didn’t understand that they were used and otherwise discarded binders save for the fact that I couldn’t bear to throw anything away because it seemed so wasteful. Not able to understand much of anything, I just tried not to cry. I can’t recall how successful I was or was not.

The binder never saw the light of day again. Toby had heard what happened and he threw his out. I couldn’t, though. It seemed wasteful.

I’ve never been remarkably good at pool. I’m not terrible so much as terribly mediocre. And that’s for an amateur. Put me up against someone that knows how to play and I’m doomed.

Kendra Hofstadter was no amateur and she was far from mediocre. In fact, she had previously won a statewide pool contest and scored third-place in the national-regional contest. She and I met online somewhere and before long we were talking on a daily basis. Back then, when I met someone online outside of the personals, I typically left it up to them to agitate for a meet. The psychology here was I guess analogous to “game”. It allowed me to come to the meeting from a position of relative strength and a little confidence. I got away with it in part because, however socially awkward I can be in person, I was a skilled online conversationalist (make of that what you will).

And so it went with Kendra. It didn’t take three weeks before she started agitating for a meeting. She was somewhat backhanded about it, too. Less asking if I would be interested in meeting and more pouting that I apparently had no interest in doing so. For reasons that escape me, I told her that I would probably be stopping by at such-and-such after work and if she wanted to she could stop by as well. Maybe we could shoot some pool and I could beat the state champion, I said. Except that I knew she wasn’t 21 and wouldn’t be able to. I figured I would shrug it off and put things back a couple of weeks. As it happened, I had a date that Friday night. I figured that it wouldn’t take but a date or two for me to screw that up and then I’d have Kendra in the bullpen. That’s the best I can do in assembling a rationale.

It didn’t work, though. She said that she would see me there. She mentioned the 21 thing, wondered if I made the suggestion on purpose (busted!), but said “no worries” because she had a fake ID.

And so we met at a bar and it turned out that she knew the bar better than I did. The bartender knew her by name. Well, by the wrong name, “Kay”. Her “fake ID” was her sister Kelly’s. They looked noticeably different or at least I thought so. They both did, however, have a cleft chin that probably served to distract. Kelly was a touch heavier than Kendra and their hair color was different, but if you assume that hair color changes on women and a little bit of lost weight as well as relative indifference on the part of the ID checkers, I could see how she could pass with such confidence. To avoid confusion, she went by “K.K.” or “K” or “Kay.”

I noted that they seemed to know her there. She said that this was one of her prime pool hangouts. She took me to a trophy case where there was a plaque with the name “K. K. Hofstadter” on it three times. That was when she told me about the state championship and regional bronze. She asked me if I had any interest in playing. I told her I wasn’t very good but that I lose with an entertaining style.

And so we played. I geared up to lose with entertaining style, but I was actually on a bit of a roll. Much to my shock, I won the first game. She asked if I wanted to play again. I told her that no, I had just beaten one of the all-time greats and that I would retire with my perfect record against state champions in tact. She laughed more than my joke was worth. Then she looked at me like a coward instead of a comedian. So I figured that I hadn’t actually used my entertaining loser guise yet and why not. I didn’t really have time for any guise the second game as she completely and utterly destroyed me. I can’t say whether I had a good game or a bad game because while I only sank two balls, I only had five turns.

I laughed it off. “Best two out of three?” she said.

I wasn’t so good on the third game, but neither was she. And… I won. I took the reigning state champion best out of three.

I chose to ignore the overwhelming likelihood that she let me win.

One of my earliest crushes was to a girl named Clementine Giovanni. Clementine was a tall, slender girl that was really pretty for a fifth grader in the eyes of a fifth grader. She was the first girl I ever asked to “go with me” and, of course, the first girl to shoot me down.

Mom, ever-present and all-knowing, knew about all of this despite my never having told her. I know that she knows because she would tell other people about it. This girl that I had a crush on that {in Mom’s mocking tone} didn’t even know [I] was alive! Fortunately, she didn’t tell people of this until I was well good and past it. Even so, I felt the need to object.

“Mau-aummmm… she knew I was alive. She just didn’t care…”

That was an exaggeration. She knew I was alive and moreso than any of the other rejections I got before I ever got a yes, she was really nice about it. I made it kinda easy on her, slipping a note into her desk and accepting, without confrontation the little note that she wrote back. I didn’t even ask if she would go out with me when she was no longer going out with the guy she was going out with, even though that was a standard question at the time. Not sure we talked after that. Not sure we talked before that. I was that kind of nerd. The only girl I could easily talk to was one that I didn’t find very cute and girl classmates whose moms were friends with my mom. My Mom didn’t know Clementine’s parents very well, which of course made Mom’s ability to know everything all the more eerie.

The guy that she was going out with at the time was a dude named Grick. Grick actually confronted me about it, though not in a very confrontational way. I don’t think they lasted long. He was kind of a nerd himself. We would later be on friendly terms and probably would have been friends if we’d had any classes together. He was the closest thing I had to a friend on my junior high basketball team because we were collectively the non-jock jocks. Clementine herself went on to be quite popular, quite beautiful, and on drill team.

Clementine added me as a friend on Facebook not long after I joined up. She looks almost exactly the same now as she did in high school, which come to think of it is very close to how she looked in elementary school. She has one of those faces and a featureless figure. I was surprised to see that she wasn’t married because she struck me as the type to be married shortly after college. She’s engaged now. Anyway, part of me wants to print out a copy of the friend invitation and send it to Mom.

“See. I told you so!”

I applied for the position at Wildcat on Monster.com. I was relatively certain that I wasn’t going to get it, but at three in the morning I sent off an email that was probably barely coherent saying something to the effect of “Hey, yeah, I got experience with Microsoft Access and I could probably look over an office fleet of computers. If you’re interested, give me a call.”

The next day I turned in some fifteen job applications to Southern Tech University for various tech positions and a couple clerk ones. I had also interviewed twice for a position with Worldtower, a well-respected company in the area that a couple years later would live in infamy, but at the time was was known for extraordinary pay and being an interesting and challenging place to work.

Between the Southern Tech, which would have been a great place to work because I liked the university, and Worldtower, which would have paid me very well and was always hiring entry level people, I didn’t really give Wildcat another thought. In fact, by the next evening when they called, I’d forgotten applying at all. In fact, I was so sure that they were UH that I wasn’t really paying attention when the nice woman started giving me directions and had to ask her to repeat them. I briefly wondered why Sotech had an office on the outskirts of town.

I had night class at the time and my cell phone went off during class. I’d forgotten to turn it off because no one ever really called me at night and the only person who might have was spending the evening with her father, so I was relatively certain she wouldn’t. It being past seven o’clock, it didn’t even occur to me that a potential employer might call.

When Nancy first began speaking to me for some reason I assumed that she was with Southern Tech. It wasn’t until she gave me the address that I realized that there was some strange company with an odd name that for some reason wanted to hire me. My self-esteem on the job hunt was not so high. I’d been unemployed for eight months and nobody was particularly interested in me. It was the equivalent of the wallflower being invited to the senior prom.

I got to the Wildcat offices about fifteen minutes early and was greeted by a very pleasant and nice woman named Edith. Edith gave me the application which I furiously began filling out. When I finished, I was directed to a computer in the back corner office where I took a DOS-based psychological profile program on a 486/25MHz Packard Bell computer that they still use to this day for various tasks.

As soon as I finished it began printing out. After about ten minutes or so of waiting, I was introduced to Calvin and brought into his office for the interview.

“I was looking at your psych profile, and I want you to know that ordinarily I wouldn’t even consider hiring you. It says here that you would spend all day as a social butterfly keeping people from working. It also says that even though you could be detail-oriented, you don’t believe that detail-oriented is a good thing to be. Why don’t you believe that, Mr. Truman?”

I went into self-sale mode. “I think being detail-oriented is important. You have to be able to take your abstract ideas and app-”

“It says here that you don’t think that being detail-oriented is important. Explain to me why.”

“I don’t know why it says I feel that way but I don’t rea-”

“Why would you spend all your time in my office chattering away and not allowing other people to work?”

“I don’t think I would do that at all. I’m really not that social of a per-”

“That’s not what the test says. The test says that all you are going to do is talk and ignore details.”

“I don’t think that test is right…”

“This test was designed by people with PhD’s in psychology. Do you have a PhD is psychology?”

“Well no.”

“Did you lie on the answers? Because if this was designed by experts and the results are wrong, you must have lied.”

“I… uh… well….”

“It says on your job application that you’re willing to work for $10 an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some idiot came in last week wanted $60,000 a year and you’re willing to work for $10 an hour?”

I didn’t mention that the job had advertised for $50,000 a year (which was why I didn’t believe I’d get the job and a reason that I forgot about it promptly after applying because nobody was going to hire me for $50,000 a year). Instead, I just said “I want to work. I’m tired of not working.” I was trying to fake having a work ethic.

“So you’ll take this job for a couple of months until something better comes along and then you’ll leave it and I’ll have to go through all of the trouble of finding someone new?”

“Sir, if I like the job I’ll take less pay to do so. I’ve passed higher paying opportunities before because I liked where I was working.”

“No, the economy is going to pick back up and you’re going to get a better job offer and I’m going to have to find someone else.”

“I really don’t think-”

“Can I be frank with you?”

“Uhhhh, sure.”

“You want to work here so that you can gab away and distract everybody and ignore details so you can just pad your resume and leave. Is there a single reason why I should hire you?”

By this point I was about ready to just walk out the door. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to hire me, so what was the point?

“Do you do drugs?”

“What?”

“You don’t do drugs, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Come with me,” he requested as he took me into the Nancy’s office. He then, with me standing right there, told Nancy to inform me that I got the job and to start Monday at 8am.That’s how I found out that I got the job. When Nancy asked about whether or not I had to take the drug test first, he explained that they were in a crunch and “Mr. Truman has assured me that he does not do drugs. We’ll take his word for it. Set up a test for sometime next week.”

Whenever I mention my ex-girlfriend Julianne, it’s usually not a particularly flattering portrayal. I mention our arguments about money, how much I wanted to leave, how glad I was to have left, how indifferent I have become to being out of her life, and how horrifying I imagine that my life with her would have been. Even the stuff about her after we broken up tends to be mildly more sympathetic to her ex-boyfriend Tony than to her.

I usually stick something in there about how she’s not a bad person. It’s true, that, and it bears repeating. But one thing I don’t believe I mention nearly enough is how, despite whatever problems we had, I am so extraordinarily glad to have had her in my life and she saved me from becoming a much lesser person than I am.

Though like all people I had my fears and insecurities, from the my first date with Julie onward, I knew that if I wanted to get married and have children, I could probably work that out. At first, Julie was the primary candidate for this and I had intended to settle down with her. But even after she left, and even after I was utterly humiliated by Evangeline afterwards, I had a faith and confidence that things could work out in the end that I would otherwise have entirely lacked.

Having gone one’s life without ever having found a “right” person for you can be a haunting dilemma. You wonder if there is something wrong with you. That maybe you’re cursed or you’re an Uncle Rupert sort of guy. Before I met Julie, there seemed to be a category for every kind of girl except the one that was interested in me and would still be interested in me when I became interested in them and after having spent time for me. Of course, it was a huge advance when I was able to get even fleeting interest. But that got old.

Then I met Julie and I discovered that this thing I was hoping for could exist for me. She was actually interested in me (and not in a fleeting way). She was a good person. She was pretty with nothing obviously wrong with her. I did not have to spend all of my time worrying about her leaving me or playing games with me. She was anti-drama and so I learned that things didn’t have to be dramatic. They could be comfortable. I could be myself. And that, when in a stable relationship, I was actually a pretty good boyfriend (I am a terrible boyfriend in an unstable relationship).

That’s not to say that her effect on me was entirely positive. We were so close to being right that I would often go out and try to find someone a lot like her. Or at least someone with whom I had a similar dynamic. Then, once there, I would see patterns starting to re-emerge and I would freak out and then find another person from the Evangeline/Tracey dramold. But I learned from those mistakes (eventually), you can’t learn from mistakes you’re not in a position to make, and I would have been far less likely to be in a position to make thise mistakes had I never known her.

In the end, both when I was with her and afterwards, she was a stabilizing influence. As long as I was with her, it was obvious that I did not have to be alone. When I was no longer with her, it was easier to convince myself that what had happened once could happen again than it had been to convince myself that what seemed to happen to other people could happen to me.

As is the case with a lot of writers, some of the protagonists in my novels share some pretty basic similarities with myself. One of the things I do to prevent them from just being carbon copies of myself is that I outline what the main differences are between the protagonist and me. It’s a very successful technique and helps me create characters that are influenced by the same source but come out the other end quite differently. One of my star characters has a lot of advantages over me. He’s smarter, he’s better looking (well, till the baldness starts to set in), and he has a quick wit that I lack. All of that doesn’t count for much, though, because he never had that stabilizing influence.

It’s actually when I was poindering the significance of that difference that I realize how fortunate I was that I met her. Up until that point, I considered a lot of it to have been wasted time. I still wish I could go back in time and cut our relationship down from four years to two (I gave her the thinnest years of my life!), but on the whole, I’ll take it what I got.

One of the earlier memories of my life is watching Frosty the Snowman on TV at home. I remember when Frosty melted, I started crying uncontrollably. Dad, who was never a fan of his sons crying, tried to tell me that everything would work out. I was not soothed. I continued to cry. And cry. And cry. Even when Santa resurrected Frosty, I just wouldn’t stop crying. I remember trying to explain that even if you came back to life, the whole process of dying is terrible. At leas that is the level of thinking that I retroactively assign to myself.

Anyway, I’m not sure how the next part happened. Mom said something to the effect of, “Something’s wrong, Bill.” Presumably, something other than having witnessed what must have been an extraordinarily painful death of a lovable Christmas icon. Anyway, she asked me to take off my shirt. And sure enough, that’s how they determined that I had chicken pox.

I guess that was the reason for my increased moodiness. I was, on the whole, a pretty happy kid. I didn’t generally cry unless I wanted something or my feelings were hurt (Mom tells me I didn’t cry when I broke my arm). I guess it was somewhat unlikely for me to freak out at the temporary death of an obviously fictional character in a cartoon. Maybe I had a history of being cranky when I was sick when I was younger. Also playing a factor is that if Chicken Pox had been going around my school, Mom would have been one of the first to know about it. So maybe she put two and two together.

I don’t remember much about having Chicken Pox, other than the vague memory of itching. All I remember is the Death of Frosty the Snowman and how I was diagnosed.

Part I: La Courneuve to Midlerth - How we ended up in Midlerth to begin with.

Part II: Moving In - They forgot to put a lock on the door, cannot honor the lease that we signed, but suggest that it’s not their problem.

Part III: Thrice Evicted - They used eviction notices as a form of conversation.

Part IV: 54% - They raised rent 54% over the course of 6 months.

Part V: The Tow Job - They don’t have the time and resources to fix the access gate, but they do have the time and resources to have my roommate’s car towed out of the parking space that we’re paying for due to a civic infraction.

I lived in two apartments in Colosse, excluding the dorm rooms and when I was living in John Fustle’s house for a few months.

The first complex was La Courneuve (”Lacko”). Lacko was in a reasonably nice part of town, but it was itself pretty run down. Very spacious and affordable (1600 sqft for $750/mo), though. It was managed by some Chinese firm that we rarely dealt with. The front office people were… okay. Most of the time we dealt with a thirty-something single mom. It was only when we moved in our next apartment complex that I realized how good they were in retrospect.

Karl and I moved out of Lacko when Dennis skipped town and we needed to get a cheaper place. Well, we didn’t actually need to. In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to stick around. More on that in a minute. We looked at a number of apartments and found Midlerth Estates. Our Midlerth apartment was smaller (1100 sqft), but it was cheaper and had electricity included ($829/mo). The electricity arrangements were temporary, but they said that it would be offset by a decrease in rent.

What we didn’t know until we signed the bottom line was that Midlerth was run by an apartment chain that made Lacko look really good in comparison. To be fair, though, this was something that we should have realized early on.

The first problem was that the apartment we were all set to move into did not have a lock on the front door. It looked like it had been busted into at some point and they hadn’t bothered to fix it and must have just forgotten about it until someone was looking at moving in. This wasn’t as much a problem for us as the next bit, which is that they were not sure when they would be able to fix it (a few days, most likely), but that we could not move in until they did. Even when we said that we were willing to risk it (Karl was unemployed and could stand guard), they said that insurance wouldn’t allow for it.

This created a huge problem for us because we had already agreed to leave the old complex by such-and-such date. We gave ourselves four days to move and if “a few days” meant more than two, what the heck were we supposed to do. They said that was something we had to figure out. This did not strike us as fair because we had a lease saying that the apartment was ours starting on such-and-such plus four. We decided that regardless of what they told us, we were going to move in on the agreed upon date. The doors were unlocked. What, were they going to call the police on us? Looking back, that may have been a fool’s wager. But it worked out.

The next series of problems occurred when they updated their software. For whatever reason, Karl was the primary renter. Since I was better with money, I wrote the checks. This had never been a problem. But suddenly it was. And with no warning, I came back one day and got an eviction notice on my door three days after rent was due. Apparently, their new software couldn’t handle one person being the primary renter and another person writing the checks, so their records did not indicate that our rent had not been paid. As we would come to discover, eviction notices were their primary form of informing you that your rent was past-due.

We got that straightened out and they said that they would take care of it in the future. The next month and there was another eviction notice. We went down there and had the exact same conversation with a new staff. Since the staff had 100% turnover and I didn’t want the next set of underlings to make the same mistake, I spoke to the manager.

We asked that they put my name as the primary renter so that I can write the checks, but they said that they couldn’t do that because we were already under lease.

He basically said that if I didn’t want another eviction notice, I would have to hand-deliver the check and sit with the employees while they inserted it into the computer.
In fact, both Karl and I had to be there, because for some reason he had to sign off on the fact that I was paying his rent. Both Karl and I were working and their office hours were from 10-3:30 M-F. But we managed.

When our lease ended (more on this later), we asked that they put my name down as the primary renter. I explained the situation to the new new new person and she, then the very manager we had talked to before, said that it doesn’t matter who the primary renter is as long as the check is written by a tenant or has the apartment number on it. And no, they couldn’t change the primary renter’s name without signing a new lease. But don’t worry about it, he said, because as long as the rent is paid there will be no eviction notices and we wouldn’t need to be there to make sure it is properly assigned. The next month, we got an eviction notice.

When our lease ended, we had decided to move on. My employer had informed me that it was expected that I move closer to the company* and I wanted a little more space and a little more privacy. So we went month-to-month. And month-to-month, we saw our rent increase. Then, after a couple months, they finally stopped including electricity. Rent did not go down and our electricity provider was… the apartment complex. Their rates meant that we were paying more for electricity in that 1100 sqft apartment than our 1600 sqft** Lacko apartment with one less occupant and better insulation.

And every month except when they hit us with the electricity bill, rent went up. In the six months following the expiration of our lease, our rent+utilities had gone up 54% from $830 to $1280. Despite living in a nicer location, my car had been broken into twice (and it had never been broken into at Lacko). Our access gate was perpetually broken.

Then we crossed the New Years and the firm exceeded what were already low expectations. They had my roommates car towed. He wasn’t parked illegally. He wasn’t in the wrong spot. Rather, his car registration had expired at the end of December. They towed his car on January 2nd. No warning and nothing in the lease (we read) about any of this. As best as we can figure, they got some sort of kickback from the towing agency.

All these years later, it still makes me livid thinking about it. These are people that could not find the time to talk to us about a missing rent check or look through the checks to see if there may be one written by someone that is not the primary renter but whose name is nonetheless on the lease and who wrote the apartment number on the check regardless could nonetheless find time to drop a dime to a towing company to take the car of one of their tenants.

I’d lost my job by that point*** and very shortly after that decided that I was not long for Colosse cause of this girl I met named Clancy that I was pretty sure I was going to marry. Ever since then, I’ve made sure that none of the buildings I’ve rented anything from since is owned by that company. A surprising number are.

* - I had a 30 minute commute to work and a 45 minute commute back, which by Colosse standards was pretty typical. But they didn’t like the fact that it would take me half an hour to get there. They’d given me a raise and said that they expected that to go to better living arrangements.

** - I mention square footage because a bulk of the electricity costs in Colosse is AC. Beyond that, though, we had one fewer occupants (so fewer electronics on at any given time) and insulation at Lacko was ridiculously bad. Though I had no numbers, I was almost certain that our consumption had gone down even as our bill was 50% higher.

*** - Good thing I didn’t move closer to work!

My first close friend of the female persuasion was Andrea Carmine. It was sort of an accident how I became friends with her. Well, it asn’t an accident at all. It was a failed attempt at manipulation.

We were in the same theater class and I developed a crush on her friend Charlene Kopfer. Charlene was tied to Andrea at the hip. Andrea was pretty outgoing and we had a connection in that we both knew a girl named Patty Charles. so I befriended Andrea to get access to Charlene.

Does that ever work? Not for me.

Andrea and I had a surprising amount of chemistry. Her outgoingness and my reservedness complemented one another quite well. It didn’t take long for rumors to start. Almost entirely among people that didn’t like people like us.

When we had to pair off for duets in theater class, I was of course hoping to be paired off with Charlene. However, since she I had yet to get past Andrea to her, it Charlene ended up partnered with Janet, another girl to sort of join our group of four. Andrea and I were spectacular together, earning the only standing ovation from the teacher.

This is unrelated to most of the story, but there was a case where the four of us were going to rehearse outside of school at Charlene’s house. Charlene’s mother was very protective and was uncomfortable with her having “a boy” over (even if there were going to be three girls). Charlene comforted her mother by saying that I was a conservatively dressed kid that drove a minivan for goodness sakes. Mrs. Kopfer was convinced.

At the time, I had longish hair. I’m not sure that Charlene knew this because because I typically saw her in the morning when it was wetted down. And even outside of the mornings, I typically kept it close to my head and tucked away. And while I did drive a minivan to school and to a lot of other places, that was because my folks were uncomfortable with leaving our convertible in a parking lot. On weekends, though, I generally drove the convertible. I have sensitive eyes, so I typically wear sunglasses. And I have a leather jacket. And when I drive the convertible, my otherwise well-placed partially-long hair gets pretty wildly disordered. So when I showed up at their doorstep, Mrs. Kopfer saw a tall, wild-haired hooligan with a leather jacket and sunglasses hop out of a convertible. Charlene was pretty upset with me, which was the most emotion I’d gotten out of her at that point.

Then came the next round of duets and this time I got partnered off with Charlene. It was a disaster. Charlene was completely uninterested in rehearsing at all. She was uninterested in doing much of anything except talking to Andrea and Janet. That she was romantically uninterested in me would be an understatement.

That was fine, though, because my interest in her was dwindling, too. She was quite immature, still hovering a junior high mentality. She never learned her lines and when we finally did our presentation I had to feed her almost every line. She got a “C” for failing to remember her lines. I got a “B-” for failing to feed her the lines with sufficient subtlety.

Unattracted to Andrea and feeling a particular contempt for Charlene, I eventually asked out Janet. She somewhat graciously declined.

Tony and I have gone to more than a couple of Troy Thomason shows together over the years. The funny thing is that we’ve almost always gone in threes.

Back during his first divorce, he was in need of an instant social network. Since somebody in ours had died an unexpected death, there was an opening. When Julianne and I went out, it was frequently to Troy Thomason shows because we just weren’t the kind of people that went out much.

So the three of us went to music shows. It was kind of an awkward thing to be hanging over Julie while Tony’s world was falling apart. But it could have been much more awkward than it was. He really didn’t seem to fear being a third wheel. And Julie and I were spending so much time together (and were missing Walt) we appreciated the company.

Flash forward a year and Julie and Tony are together and I’m the third wheel. This has “awkward” written all over it, but it truly wasn’t. Okay, it was at first. When you’re spending time around an ex-girlfriend, particularly one you were with not long ago, there is the natural inclination to be affectionate. But once I got accustomed to the fact that being affectionate with her was his duty and privelege and not mine, things went swimmingly.

Our visit to Delosa, sadly, involved the third iteration of thirdwheeldom. We had hoped to visit Tony, his wife Lara, and their son Anthony. But since Tony and Lara are getting a divorce, we decided to meet up with Tony at a Troy Thomason show in outer Corinth.

He seems surprisingly sanguine about it. They are apparently on good terms. That he has a son only a bit more than a year old is something of a mixed bag. That’s more child support, but he did at least get a kid of his own in the deal instead of just as a step-parent. Not sure if he’s going to continue to pay child support on his step-kids, as he did for a while after the first divorce.

When Tony broke the news to me, I actually thought of Sheila Tone and how she would point out that his family particulars rarely seem to happen to people in the economic class in which I was raised. Two failed marriages to a single woman almost ten years his senior with a kid in juvey jail.

What’s kind of strange to consider is that he is going to be single now for the first time since he was something like 21, when he married Lara the first time around. In between his marriages to Lara, he dated Julianne.

Several years ago, it was a similar adjustment with Julie. She had been together with my predecessor for a year, me for over four years, and then Tony for another four (or five). Then, suddenly, she was single. And she’s been single ever since. I had always sort of assumed that she would latch on to somebody pretty quickly. Were it not for her contrary example, I would probably assume the same of Tony.

But Tony is overweight, twice-divorced, and has at least one but possibly three kids’ worth of child support to pay. He has a good job and makes good money, but it’s quite the situation to step into. Julie has gained a little weight since I dated her, but she has no children and a good job as well. But she has the emotional scars that he lacks. It’s hard to say what’s more damaging.

For approximately 18 days, Evangeline and I were on cloud nine. It was a tricky road from being in our respective relationships and being together, but there was no reason for it not to happen. If I knew anything, it was that she was not going to be with her boyfriend six months hence. Six weeks was unlikely. Sixteen days? That sounded about right.

She and I made some plans for some weekend or another, but they were canceled at the last minute. Since the cancellation was by mutual decree, I wasn’t all that worried about it. I became worried, though, over the next couple days when I hadn’t heard from her. The bits and pieces of information I started getting weren’t good. Some old friends of hers had turned up at the party I was supposed to meet her at. She went with them. So what if she didn’t return my calls. I’ve been known to fall off the radar a time or two.

and yet… I had a theory about what was going on. It was an utterly paranoid theory. Groundless. The culmination of every fear and insecurity that if I’d read it in a book would have felt contrived. And it was, note for note, exactly what happened. Now, for every time this turned out to be the case, there are probably two instances or so where I have drawn up such a worst-case scenario and it turned out to be every bit as groundless as my head was trying to convince my gut that my fears about Eva were.

Then I realize, though in a way I have often known, that while the excuses individually are all acceptable, in the aggregate they paint a pretty significant picture.

And so there is no feeling quite like watching something unfold some way that you don’t want it to. Some way that it’s not supposed to. And you have these paranoid thoughts. And you know they’re paranoid thoughts. The problem is that when you have paranoid tendencies, which I often do, and know it, as I often do, you can’t listen to that part of you telling you what’s happening. You can’t walk away from something because you fear something bad is about to happen. You can’t explain to someone that even though they haven’t left you, haven’t said that they intend to, and haven’t cheated on you (yet), that you’re leaving because you’re sure these things are going to come to pass. But there’s nothing left to do but watch them come to pass.

Actually, you can do just that, if you don’t mind looking crazy. Or you can do what I did, which was calmly explain to her what is about to happen.

“Evangeline, you’re going to leave your boyfriend, but you’re not going to get together with me. You’re going to get together with Jason. And he’s going to destroy you. Again. And not because he’s going to reject your or dump you. Instead, he will leave you twisting in the wind. Wanting to be with you enough to sleep with you, but never enough to commit to you in any tangible way. You may be together or you may not be together, but you won’t be committed in any way that will give you comfort because you will always be afraid he’s going to leave and he will be in a posture to leave at any time. And if I stick around, you’re going to do something like that to me. You’ll hang out with me, waiting for him or waiting for someone like him to wisk you away. I’ve played my hand and lost. And so have you.”

Yet, while I could say this to her (and I did), I couldn’t not watch it unfold. I couldn’t throw away the chance that I could be wrong. Instead, I convinced myself that sticking around was the logical thing to do. I was right about that, logically speaking. Ratios and odds. What I was wrong about was how I went about it (including telling her the above). And I was wrong to underestimate the toll that it would take on me. The doing nothing was the hardest part. And so I did nothing miserably.

But there’s no good way to wait on your fate. Especially when the only control you really have is to bow out. The temptation to overmanage becomes too intense. To display all of your insecurities for all of the world to see undermines your case. To do nothing but what you would be doing anyway makes the most logical sense, but is often more than you can manage. You find yourself on a date with someone that you don’t give the slightest care about and if they like you, you end up pulling them into the same turmoil you’re in. So you don’t do that. Instead, you wait. And wait. And wait.

And the reasons I am told were always good ones. For every missed date, there’s an acceptable excuse. Or an excuse that would be acceptable if it were a one-off occurrence. Excuses that can’t be verified, but also excuses that I can’t mount any real prosecution of. Do I really want to condemn her for taking care of her sick mother (when I do know, for a fact, that her mother has been sick)? Does she really not deserve a little personal downtime in between the marathon of responsibilities she has accorded herself?

But while the excuses are all acceptable in a vacuum, the aggregate paints the picture that you are trying to ignore. I just can’t escape the feeling that if it were important to her, she would make the time. She wouldn’t gain a reputation with my best friend as someone that has the extraordinary ability to be somewhere other than where I was.

You try to convince yourself that it could work out. It’s the only way to motivate yourself. You review the evidence, at least some of which really does point to your favor. Sometimes most of it does. Sometimes every last bit of it does, except for what that voice is telling you. So you shout it down. And besides, if it does work out, you’ll have wasted all of this time investigating worst-case scenarios. If it doesn’t work out, does it really soften the blow. Really? No. So out of pure utilitarianism, you convince yourself you’re paranoid. And you wait.

And then things unfold as you feared they would. And you look back over the timeline, knowing all that you know at that point, and you were surprisingly on target. And at that point, there’s really only one thing that you can say to yourself to give you comfort.

You were right.

Congratulations.

When I was living in Deseret and attempting to quit smoking, one of the tactics I used was to make smoking less and less convenient. So I would put these limits on myself, one of which was to quit smoking at convenient locations. After a while, I made myself go to the park.

My park of choice had this spot in between two rocks that was a really nice kind of out-of-the-way sort of place. Most of the time, I could talk there in solitude. Sometimes someone else would pop up and we’d chat. I try not to refuse smoking-chatter unless I’m just really not in the mood for it or I can tell that I just don’t want to talk to the person (often because I know they’re going to ask for money). But the people I met there were interesting and had interesting things to talk about.

One day I ran across an apparent drug deal. I put it out of my mind, then I was approached by another fellow who asked if there was anything he could get for me. I decided to do my civic duty and call Detective Reedbuck and let him know where a hot-spot was if they didn’t already know about it. When I called him and explained to him what I saw, I got a few minutes of silence followed by an explanation. As far as he knew, there was no drug activity in that park, but if I was talking about where he thought I was talking about, it was a homosexual hook-up spot.

Suddenly, I saw all of my previous encounters there in a whole new light. The guys I met - all guys - and the conversations I had took on a new meaning. That second guy may not have asked what he could “get” for me but rather what he could “do” for me. The talkative university professor was retroactively nervously talkative. The college student who seemed to want to chat but didn’t seem to have much to say… oh, dear.

I never went back to that spot, which was a shame because it was the perfect spot for seclusion. Too perfect, it would turn out.

Kelvin and I should have been best friends. We had many of the same cultural interests and thought in similar ways about similar things. Whenever we were around each other, we got along despite some pretty long odds at times. But while we were friends and still are by the Facebook metric, we never got too close for one major reason: Evangeline.

Kelvin and Evangeline were best friends dating back to Thessolonica High School and there was always the air of more being possible and the frustration of both never being in the same place (emotionally) for it to happen. Ultimately, he became The Friend (in the LJBF manner) with just enough romantic tension (and not just in one direction) to make the friendship uncomfortable at times.

When Eva and I first started hashing things out, she described the various men in her life past and current. When I was looking for potential threats, I looked right past him. I saw him as very little or no threat. The threat I saw, and which was realized was Jason, an ex-boyfriend with whom she never reached closure. As it turned out, when I entered the picture, Kelvin thought the same as me. He was an editor at the Daily Packer, where I was a columnist, and we’d met on a couple of occasions. We both thought to ourselves, I can out-do that chump.

When we met again through Eva, he and I both got along in a mutually condescending sort of way but found ourselves genuinely friends before too long. He made his play for Eva, just as I expected him to, and things didn’t work out for him. I made my play and things blew up in my face as well as he doubtlessly expected. We both knew we were temporarily out of luck when Jason re-emerged, but both waited on the sidelines, friendly as ever, for that to blow up in her face. When it did, it was game-on again.

When Evangeline and I were an us, he could not have been more gracious about it. He waited in the wings dating enough not to be seen as pathetic but seemingly purposefully avoiding anything that he couldn’t get out of at a moment’s notice if he got his shot. I knew what he was doing and I really didn’t care. I knew that Evangeline and I were meant to be together. I also felt, just as he did, that if for whatever reason we were wrong, the By Gawd we hoped that she ended up with the other. We just really liked one another.

When things with Evangeline completely collapsed, she was with Vince, I needed to have absolutely nothing to do with her, and he waited for things with Vince to similarly collapse. I was out of the game at that point. I hired Kelvin to edit my novel and he and I stayed in touch in a way that I refused to with her. Finally, things with Vince did erode and it was, once and for all, Kelvin’s turn.

Then, in an inexplicable way that I still cannot justify, I ruined everything. She was, from my perspective, resigning herself to him. If she was serious about Kelvin, I was prepared to respect that. But while she and he were finally taking the steps they had waited years to, she was inexplicably hanging out with me. Ostensibly, she was helping me figure things out with Dharla, Meghan, or whomever I was thinking about at the time. But… having finally gotten some of that time together that she almost never gave me when we were actually together, things started falling into place as I believed they would if we could ever just get beyond ourselves.

The only thing missing was my heart. I had burned so many times with her that I maintained a guarded pose. I couldn’t let myself go or even explore what was going on (and therefore remained fixed on someone else so unimportant I can’t even remember who they were anymore. She said that she was okay with that and I said that I believed her (after all, she wasn’t saying anything either). And then she cheated on her best friend since high school and I betrayed one of the guys that I held in a level of esteem higher than almost any other. At this point he was reluctant to let his own guard down and by day she tried to pry him open so that she could just get the Permanent Relationship thing done with. At night she was hanging out with me.

The important thing about that period, as far as Evangeline and I were concerned, was all that was left unsaid. We didn’t talk about our failed relationship. She didn’t tell me how sorry she was that things didn’t work out. I didn’t tell her how furious I was with her at all that we had been through and how I blamed her for the vast majority of it. She talked about her work. I talked about my work. She talked about Kelvin. I talked about… whoever. We watched movies. We went out and had coffee. It was like an emaculate room made so by everything being stored, top to bottom, in a closet that nobody dared open for fear that gravity would bring everything tumbling down. I still don’t know how we managed such extraordinary cognitive dissonance. It, like a whole lot of things happening at the time, was completely unlike us both individually or together.

It eventually became too obvious that nothing was going anywhere. We could either confront everything we had been ignoring and watch everything collapse all over again or we could just let things slide indefinitely and prevent either of us from getting on with our lives. It came to a head when she had a pregnancy scare. Even that became absurdly simplified. If she was pregnant, we would partner up because we had to. No discussion was required. Ideal. She wasn’t, of course, and was (it seemed to me) disproportionately distraught over this. It became impossible to see one another without having to hash something out, so we stopped seeing one another. She stopped coming around and I stopped calling her and when we bumped into one another at a music show they were kissing and so that was that. I was cautiously happy for him.

Then, many moons later, word got to her that I was getting married and she felt the sudden need to reach closure with me. To be honest, she was one of the ghosts living in the back of my mind. Unresolved issues with Tracey played a significant role in my failure with Julianne. I could sense some of the same insecurities (questions like “Am I only with Clancy because Evangeline said no?”) at play. So for me, it was the opportunity to clean out that closet. With Clancy, it was important to in a way that it hadn’t been before Maybe, in a best case scenario, she would admit that she was wrong and stupid and I would be magnanimous and we could maintain a friendship and all that happened between us would not all be wrong. And that chapter of my life would finally be closed and not a minute too soon. That was what I was looking for. Ostensibly, she was looking for the same. But shortly after we cleared the air, her goal shifted. She was looking prevent my wedding from occurring.

Long story short, she failed. Telling the one person that had up until that point had near-complete power over me “no” took a lot out of me. I wasn’t even able to enjoy getting the upper hand. I wasn’t able to appreciate that, howevermuch I left her with him, I had destroyed Kelvin’s relationship with the love of his life. They hobbled on, but it was hard to imagine them ever rebounding when, in the midst of their relationship, she had decided that somebody else was her soulmate. That the other guy decided otherwise was somewhat beside the point.

Several months later, Evangeline emailed me letting me know how things were between she and Kelvin. To no great surprise, things were not going well. They were, in my estimation, terminally bad. There was also this guy at the theater that she kinda-sorta liked. She asked me what she should do. It took me little time to reply “It doesn’t matter what you do. It’s over. It never was.” Just as she and I never was. Not really.

And with that, I twisted the knife. Kelvin was relegated to the dustbin. I would like to say that I did it as much for him as for her because he was better off in a dead end of a relationship with someone that had never emotionally committed, but my primary loyalty was always to her. As was his. Never to one another. The only solace I can take in it all was that in the end he really was better off without her and that I’m really not sure he ever would have done differently if he had been in my shoes (and there is the distinct possibility that, at one point or another, he had).

I took a trip back to Colosse about six months later. Kelvin and I got together for some beer and live music. We talked about everything except the elephant in the room. Finally, he broke down and said “You heard what happened with Evangeline, right?” I broke down and started to apologize for everything I’d done, but he wouldn’t have any of it. “What else could you have done?”

That he could look at the situation with such a clear perspective was Kelvin to the core. The closing argument to the case that he deserved a lot better than he got from any of us.