” I’m sorry, but I’m afraid my fall slash winter season is booked.”

” I would like my session done in my home. It is small dark and usually in a state of disenchantment.”

  Disenchantment. I’m gonna have to remember that one.

 Now think back to the list of the worst moments in your life.  Good. Good.

Now pick one of those worst moments and try to bring it back to life. Yesss. Yesss.

Try to remember every detail, the weather, the smells, good, good…

       Yes, I can see how that might not help too much.

        Sounds like therapy can undo all the progress we achieve with alcohol.

      I’ve always taken comfort in the idea that depression eats away at the

      part of the brain that recognizes depression.  A sort of voluntary trade off of

     brain processing speed and reality perception for blissful giddiness.  Kind of a

     “been there done that” to the whole despondency thing.

Looks like I’m at another turning point in my life.  Well, that sounds way too dramatic for what it really is.  Breaking up with the girl I’m living with.  Me moving in with my mom and brother, her moving back in with her husband.

   She sure has been pulling the strange behavior lately.  The nose bleeding thing. Apparently she can reach such a state of sadness that her nose begins to gush blood.  She definitely arranges the bloody tissues on top of the waste basket to achieve maximum coverage as a naive movie director might.

   She called Friday night. I told her where I was going and invited her to go show up if she liked.  Immediately I regretted the statement, but she saved me by saying she got a new tattoo and shouldn’t be driving as she intended to get some beer and drink at the apartment.  My destination was my old neighbor from next door to my old roommate’s place.

   About an hour later Tabitha called and asked, ” So, should I park across the street?”.

  ” What? Oh, um, so you’re coming here?”

 ” Yeah, oh I guess you didn’t understand our last conversation where I said I was going to come over, so should I park in the driveway or across the street or does it matter?”.

  Well, of course it matters.  Everyone knows you don’t just go parking anywhere on a residential street.  What about the residential street mines?  Huh?  Do you want your fucking car to explode in a ball of fire?  Stupid psycho.

  Well, now James you shouldn’t be so mean. The girl obviously loves you and you’re breaking her heart and being quite cruel about it.

  Who the hell was that?  Where the?  What was that, some impersonation of conscience?  Was that supposed to be what someone else might say?  I don’t know and I don’t fucking care, okay you dumbass!

   I trying to interpret my actions or make excuses, however you want to word it, one idea I’ve had is that I don’t have much time or energy for people, so with what energy and willingness I do have, I guess I should be spending it with my kids.

  If life is about collecting little stars and little coins and little smiley faces and time spent with lovers or girlfriends or whatever earn us stars, well my friends I feel like the red carpet on oscar night.  Been there, done that, an eighteen wheeler full of t-shirts crashed in my front yard, been selling them on ebay for the past six years.

   I guess that’s the good guy excuse for breaking our social contract.

  The terrible possibility is that I just didn’t feel like moving my stuff all the way to Irving.  Wait, it gets much worse.

   This is very terrible, but when I called her the day before we got busted by her husband, It was planned I show up at her house again in the morning, but I expressed to her my fear of us getting caught and what it would do to her and how if she was to get a divorce I would rather my name not be involved and I wouldn’t want her kids to hear I was the reason their lives turned to insta-shit overnight.

  But she got all weepy saying it sounds like I’m pulling away and having regrets. At that moment I think I may have lost all respect for her and decided to make her life hell as her deserved punishment.  When we were laying in bed the next morning I looked at the clock and made a comment about her husband showing up soon.  About forty minutes later, he did.  At that moment, as I was holding the bathroom door closed preparing my nerves for the sound of gunfire, I think I was overwhelmed by the feeling of disgust for her.   I lost more respect for her as I could feel how he felt.  It actually kind of grossed me out.   It sounds terrible, but I thought, ” ewww, what a nasty slut”.  Am I right?  Isn’t that terrible?   I felt terrible for thinking it, so I pushed the idea down.  However, I could feel it didn’t go down very far.

   Then there’s the aspect of my guilty feelings.   Surely the most asshole thing I could have done was say, minutes after us getting caught and her kicked out of her home, something like, ” You knowwwww… I don’t really want to be with you anymore, sorry, it’s just that I could never trust a woman that would do something like that.”  Which wouldn’t have been true, as I can’t seem to shake the belief that she would never cheat on me.  Yet, still, I did feel obligated to act like I wanted to try to see if maybe we could work something out.  Truthfully, I didn’t calculate a zero percent changce of us being happy together.  

   According to her, the biggest obstacle to our relationship was my old roommate, but my testimony shows I simply refused to cut off all ties with my ex roommate, whom I’ve known for years and with whom I’d lived for the past year with no romantic relationship, just because she’s a female who Tabitha thought I found to be attractive.  Nope, there were just way too many assumptions going into the should have been a reality show cohabitation, on her part.

   At this time I’m not really sure if I don’t want a girlfriend or if I just… no, I’m pretty sure I don’t want a girlfriend.  I also don’t know any girls I would feel comfortable with having a just sex relationship with.  As soon as I have sex with a girl, I think I would desire to not talk to them for a few weeks as a display of my desire for freedom, which I think is an irritatingly juvenile attitude, and since I can’t stand to watch me act that way, I’ll have to avoid the whole thing altogether.

    Surely it’s a mix of unknown ratios of these perspectives and maybe more I haven’t thought of yet or haven’t remembered on this writing.  Obviously I can’t seem to, as she put it, “screw my head on right”.  And obviously she is, as I put it, ” a blend of the worst parts of a snooty soccer mom, a hateful baptist preacher’s wife, and a psycho high school sophmore that murders cheerleaders.”. Okay, I didn’t really say that to her, but there it is. 

  Now, as she and I are beginning to move things out of the apartment, and my feelings of guilt begin to fade and my feelings of uncertainty about my life stay where they’ve always been, I keep asking myself the same old question, ” When am I going to do more paintings?”.