'As though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.'

I'm reading a book in which the main character sometimes faints. I had forgotten I used to faint; I had no blood pressure in the old days. That was before spending a few years in the company of Gauloises Bleues, which helped rectify the situation somewhat. Perhaps my taste for bacon and pancetta helped a bit, as well. At any rate, sometime within the last five years I triumphantly entered the 'normal' range, and it was a happy, happy day, whichever day it was.

I remember one egregious incident. I was at college, it was autumn and still terribly hot, and our library's air conditioning either didn't exist or didn't work on the higher floors. I was somewhere back in a stuffy corner in a stuffy carrel. Lack of air circulation seems always to have been the necessary-and-sufficient catalyst.

At any rate, I started to feel less than hardy, sussed the source of the problem, and headed downstairs to the main lobby which, while hot, had at least a high ceiling, an open floor plan, and doors to the outside opening every once in a while. I chose the cluster of armchairs in front of the circulation desk and opened a book. Things had apparently progressed during the descent down the stairs, and my eyes were as unable to focus as my spine was to maintain the weight of my torso in the traditional vertical attitude of chair-users worldwide. I felt more than capable of conquering my inclinations toward unconsciousness, however, and positioned myself sideways across the chair, with my legs bent over one arm and my back resting on the other arm much in the manner of a back-and-backrest situation. I congratulated myself on my forethought as regards energy conservation and smiled at the librarian in the sort of robust and healthy manner as would befit a person in no immediate danger of passing out, and I cracked the book.

With the pressure taken off physical exertion such as sitting upright, I felt certain I could rally my mind to come back into play, so I held the book in front of me and focused on focusing. When I couldn't focus my eyes I employed my customary routine of abandoning the senses and solely focusing my diminishing mental faculties, and I thus recited a couple familiar poems in my head, concentration of any sort being a good last-ditch bulwark against unconsciousness. When it quickly became clear that even that task was now beyond my capabilities, and that that meant the possibility of sudden unconsciousness was growing ever likelier, I laid the book across my chest, to suggest a deliberate and pleasant nap to anyone who might pass by, and organized my legs, shoes, and hair to confirm the diagnosis with the remaining bits of thought I could muster as the light around me constricted to a pinprick.

But fainting cannot be entirely controlled, it turned out then, before, and subsequently. Whenever that precise point at which I completely ceded control after so many deliberate countermeasures, it seems I did not pass imperceptibly into that gentle twilight, but rather fell out the entrance side of the armchair, with the book going with me for the ride. I awoke with a squadron of firemen and EMTs circled around me, and a hook-and-ladder, not to mention the Fire Chief's special fire-chief car, outside the library, despite the unfortunate landing having taken place on the first floor of the library, just up a few stairs from the parking lot, and a scant few paces' walk from the main door.

--And directly in front of the circulation desk and the student librarian who may well have been scarred forever.

I am very grateful for being as old as I am now for so many reasons. But one of the things I most look forward to with regard to being older still is having ailments that make sense, that are typical and mundane and entirely predictable. Me, I either have Victorian pseudoailments such as fainting and vertigo, or ridiculously grandiose trauma-type ones. I have a solid tolerance for the latter type, I think, but anyway they go away or they don't and you don't have to incorporate them into your life or explain them to curious bystanders unless you feel inclined to. Either you bear the obvious marks or you don't - and if you don't, revelation is based on intimacy. A bum knee, sciatica, dermatitis, bursitis, colitis, rhinitis, allergies, migraine, high blood pressure, diabetes, bad arches, a cumin intolerance: these make sense, and friends will always accept demurrals or explanations based on them. But anything along the lines of 'Don't mind me; I'm just going to recite a few disconnected stanzas of Yeats and the preamble to the Constitution and just one or two bars of the Gettysburg Address and if I can't think of that then Molly Bloom's soliloquy or disconnected fragments of advertising jingles I can't help but remember forever to stave off a fainting spell I don't particularly care to indulge' is likely to meet with tremendous disrespect in any quarter. And for good reason: it's stupid. And it's more irritating to me than it is to you!

Silence, Exile, and Cunning

I have aborted many posts and left several others unfinished. This situation is not unlike having a (semiliterate) monkey sitting on my shoulder and intermittently offering up his idiosyncratic editorial suggestions by means of shrieks, cackles, head-batting, and hair-pulling. It is of course absurd, as it is all in my head. Or at least the concern about the monkey is in my head; he is really there. It is simply a matter, therefore, of figuring out how not to notice the shrieks and jabs, and of getting on with a proper rant if that is what I wish to do - whether I fear an articulation of my frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes will be taken not as frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes but rather Existential Angst, or not.

Here, then, ladies and gentlemen (and those of you who fall wildly outside the bounds of either category), in an attempt to rid myself its spell, is an explanation of the basis for my recent silence:

You all no doubt remember the exboyfriend: he of the pitying emails; the (misinformedly, but no matter) disparaging or condescending remarks; the absurd nostalgic reminiscences; the inapt, sesquipedalian, purported compliments gleaned through a reckless and foolhardy combination of thesaurus, ignorance, and overconfidence. If you don't, I do, so fret not.

As stated in an earlier post, he brought it to my attention that not only was he in his reading imbuing my posts with a grave, tragic, and positively Dickensian tone or subtext or metatext that they in no way had while still in my cute little brain or on my even cuter little screen, but also scrutinizing the timestamps of the posts for Clues as to my (grave, tragic) state of mind! Now, I admit to getting a cheap kick out of every flight under the radar I can manage, and the cheaper the flight, the headier the kick, so I had already earned some Skybus miles by changing the timestamp to that of various locales when the fancy struck.

But, dear friends, allow me to say that I really hadn't thought anyone would ever look at that. Really. Sure, there was some amount of 'ambiguation' in there, but that was more than balanced by the sheer girlish fun of being able to click on 'Vanuatu.' Not to mention 'Moosejaw.' When is it not fun to click on Moosejaw? And when, in addition, was the last time you, or anyone in your circle, anyone you can think of, noticed the time a posting was posted on any blog? I have read thousands upon thousands of blog entries on topics from politics to perfume to push-up bras to peacock husbandry, and never once did I notice at what time of day the writer lambasted Bush or Clinton or the dumbed-down Shalimar.

So, we have that problem: the Internet isn't private, so I don't care if the exboyfriend or my mother or former husband reads it. What troubles me is that there is an ex-something giving it a close, and erroneous, reading. Now, I don't write this in any way like a diary. I may be short on editing, which is a similarity between the two, but if I had a diary, I would never write about either Brigitte Bardot or John Calvin in it. Really. You can trust me on that, as well. That being the case, I don't feel ill that someone out of the past is getting an uninvited and unwelcome view into the depths of my psyche -- because the depths of my psyche are never on here, if I even have any depths in that psyche at all.

It is, rather, that everyone else can read it and 'get' it somehow: laugh along with me, or snort knowingly and superciliously, disagree, and then write me a vitriol-laden missive declaring the merits of lobster-buggering, muscle shirts, and Chinese knockoffs of 'Tuscan' furniture -- all the while knowing quite well that I was drying my fingernail polish, not slitting my wrists, while writing my half of the preposterous argument. The only person who doesn't is, regrettably, someone whom I regret dating. I was speaking with a friend at length last night about this, because it is making me angry that I am able to be angered by it, and from that conversation I think that last sentence is the crux of it. Perhaps.

Why? Because I got over it. I was sad, cried a bit, felt a loss, missed the endearing text messages for a while -- and then didn't. That, gentle reader, should be the end of the story. It was the end of the story, for heaven's sake. Normally, with whatever sort of loss, you feel it, you embrace it, you experience it for as long as it takes, and then you do something else: the Reckoning. Logic steps in and you evaluate everything. You get dispassionate, objective, and forward-looking.

Let's say you just got fired from a great job. The pay was super, you loved the people you worked with, and it was a not-terrible commute. Obviously, that's quite a loss. But after the late-night crying jags, or the whiskey- or pound-cake binges, or whatever serves the purpose in your case, have done their job, you realize you always hated the lighting, that you were never truly challenged, that the color scheme kept you on edge all day, that you are well-rid of Paul and his incessant nose-clearing, and that the benefits package was dismal at best.

And I think once a sane person gets to that stage, not only can he no longer find the former object of affection as charming as before, but he can, moreover, muster only a modicum of interest in the comings and goings and overall emotional state of the ex. A consequence of this reality in my case was that I had no feelings whatsoever about the exboyfriend reading the blog, except the same vague hope as with anyone else that he might find bits of it amusing.

Then came the emails after the gloriously apathetic hiatus. And then came my terse responses. And then came proof of their lack of efficacy.

All of that was enough to make me regret yet more having been involved with this person. That regret was pushed to at least the third power by the tooth-grittingly noxious email iteration of purportedly flattering attributes gleaned from abusing a thesaurus. Then, my dears, after the late-night Scrabble dig (again, erroneous, but, as is the case with so much, the things we don't know about are often freakishly coextensive with the things we don't know about), came one more accursed Benediction. And that, although I did write a direct, clear, terse, and explicit email in response, shut me up and shut me down, as far as the blog was concerned.

But why? Because, look (alright, fine, I will get personal), we broke up because he is in some substantive ways disturbingly immature. Somewhere past the point at which I stopped thinking of him and being capable of wishing him either ill or well, he gave birth to a new self that felt the need to wish Peace upon me at every turn. I am well aware that peace is a good thing, and I have friends who close utterly everything with 'peace,' but they are typing it while wearing Birkenstocks and/or a black tab-collar shirt. In other words, they wish everybody peace, and they simply cannot help themselves. There are many more problems with his use of the word in this context than I can go into in an already-too-long blog entry, but another one involves an equally unnerving religious association, and that is that when I read it, I cannot help thinking, not of a normal guy offering normal well-wishes, but of a whole congregation of Methodists or Presbyterians shaking hands at the end of service while in unison reciting 'Peace be with you,' 'And also with you.' It is appropriate then, most particularly so if heartfelt, but the idea of shaking hands with a boyfriend, lover, or husband, before going to sleep, or upon meeting for a date, or as we leave for work, and uttering that -- well, it makes me grimace every time. And I cannot wrest this image from my mind.


Gratuituous Pretty Thing, because this is tooooo long:

(MMMMM, sparkly...)

(Yet filled with REAL HUMAN HAIR!)

Nor can I forget the condescending tone in which he first began to wish me Peace. The later versions may have been less wordy and less patently offensive, but they are still no less incongruous nor less unnecessary, unwarranted, or unwanted. For there are two problems: one is the very easy 'We Were Done and I Was Done with the Getting-Done Part so I Am Done with Difficult Feelings about You and thus Well-Stocked on Peace, Thanks All the Same' and the other is that, for all my overblown rhetoric and ability to conjure verbal storms over a chipped nail or newly-wobbly heel, I simply have had a sufficient number of sufficiently harrowing experiences to have vast, vast reserves of equanimity upon which to draw: I do not need anyone, even if he is not an exboyfriend, munificently to bestow it upon me in order to dwell in it, because I have seen things that are serious, and therefore I can tell when things are not.

However, it does get a bit more prickly once we consider the fact that he is an exboyfriend. And he is an exboyfriend whom I am no longer with for various reasons, none of which reflect well on him. And, as stated earlier, I was many months ago past the point where rekindling glowy feelings was possible: I remain in the 'objective' phase that, once having been attained, sticks with one forever. Things, therefore, that might have seemed nice at the time cannot help but be tinged with the overall regret about the whole thing. For lack of a better word, the whole thing seems decidedly icky (apologies to everyone), and knowing what I know of him now I cannot but see that him doing the things that the 'old' him I cared for was doing at the time.

And that him, and my difficult feelings about that him, was the reason I said No and left. And for that him unctuously to wish me 'peace' as though he were my priest, or as though such a damaged psyche had any to spare to be tossing around to others, is offensive in the extreme. Additionally, as you already know, I have a position or two as regards decorum, and such an act is indecorous as could be. If you willfully and deliberately hurt someone, apologies can sometimes be great, can make a difference under the right circumstances. Some things, such as murder, are patently too horrific for an apology to serve any purpose, but for many other things they can be welcome and utile. But to disrupt someone's peace by being a cad, and then, months after she has regained her usual tranquil state to wish her 'peace' once again repeatedly and condescendingly, is rude, base, puerile, and noxious.

So, I do hope I did this with enough lack of detail not to be horrible myself, but at the same time with enough vigour to have it serve as the necessary-and-sufficient catharsis that will allow me to begin once again prating on about inane and insubstantial things with a level of ardour, passion, and confidence equalling that of Margaret Thatcher's hairdressers for the last forty years.