Lipstick, Cigarettes and Wine

I've finally settled on a title for a book I'm writing and now I, five chapters into the thing, have to take it all apart and rewrite the thing because its changed so much.

Why will be explained in a minute or two.

It is insanely sunny out and the air is cool and dry. The first taste of fall I suppose and we are quick forgetting the tropical slop we were enduring just two weeks ago. Air so thick you could just as soon drink it and clothes perennially soaked with sweat, water and gin. We forget so fast as we rush headlong one season into the next and wonder what's around the next corner before we've even figured out what this corner held in store for us.

Some of us, like me, linger at the corners though and try to make sense of what is there and when it doesn't make sense, like it doesn't now, we slip down into our dark morose places and it doesn't matter how fine the weather is.

My two big demons are standing at this corner. Smoking cigarettes and drinking from a bag, they are in their leather jackets and blue jeans and biker boots just waiting for me. Loneliness and Despair. Bullies that have dogged me most of my life and that I have only won a few fights against and that only recently. They know what kind of day it is going to be today and they are primed and ready.

I should be out on a bicycle or off to the hardware store for some bits and pieces to rebuild the house with. Or I should be up on a ladder finishing the track lighting in the kitchen.

But I am none of those things.

What I am is in bed until about ten finishing off one book that has been like swimming in wet concrete but finishing it off anyway because I am exorcising things unfinished. And then I dive into the next book because, hell, I have no one to answer to but myself and when did I get to bed anyway, three a.m?

Just about.

She left. I walked her to her car, kissed her good night and went back inside for a stiff nightcap. Then I thought about her and the other her, the one for whom the book is named. Then I wondered what the fuck to do next like there was something I could do that would make a damn bit of difference.

Short of tying her, the one that the book is not titled after, to a chair and shooting her veins full of sodium pentathol and getting to the bottom of everything there's not a lot I can do. I still can't quite figure her out and it's not the cute mysteries of the human personality. It's that she's so fucking enigmatic that I have no clue one minute to the next where I'm standing.

So I'm spending a lot of good time and a lot of money hunting around for clues in a personality that is like a maze that keeps changing. Like movable office cubes, once you turn away from one blind alley, someone has set up another blind alley behind you, right from where you thought you came from and the game starts anew.

Not that money is the issue. I promised myself I wouldn't care once it was mine to earn and mine to spend and what the fuck do I want with a wad to retire with anyway if I've spent these years miserable in self imposed frugality. Let's just have a little time where we don't save a lot of our paycheck and let's not give a fuck about it for a change. Contrary to my opinion of myself, it, as well as other innocent indulgences, won't make me a bad person.

Just a stupid one for paying Loneliness and Despair to leave me alone for a few hours instead of taking them on face to face like I should.

And maybe if I can get around them, I can get over trying to decode the enigmatic friend and relax and have some fun with her instead of beating myself up trying to be the perfect older companion.

Not so with her after whom the book is titled which is funny because she's so much more complex and intricate and yet I know her so much better or at least think I do. And if I really don't then I know enough to realize that we turned to each other in our mutual pain once and that threw the match into the can of gasoline that was my falling in love with her.

Oops. There I've gone and committed it to print instead of saying it out loud to the walls at three a.m. to hear the sound of it or briefly tapping it into an email just to see what it looks like. Then delete the thing quickly and pray like hell you didn't hit the wrong key because of all the things you've done wrong, this won't be one of them. You will tell her one day and maybe when it's too late or it doesn't matter anymore but you will tell her and you won't put something that important into a fucking email.

And that's why the book has to be rewritten.

Because it's not about work.

And it's not funny although there are parts and characters that will intentionally be and that's fine.

And it's not about a magazine.

It's about me. What I do. What I feel. What I've lost and gained over the last few years and what I am looking for and will or won't find.

And it's about that first kiss. That first hot, wet kiss at 1 in the morning after a long walk that was supposed to let us figure out why we were going to do what we did and think better of it and not do it.

But that didn't happen, did it?

Instead, pressed against a fence we kissed for the first time, an intense taste of lipstick, cigarettes and wine and quiet murmurings of sneaking back in and not waking anyone up.

So I'm going to shower and shave now. Then head down to the hardware store to get the part that will let me run the clothes dryer. Then I'm going to spend the rest of this day with my nose buried in type trying to re-work chapter one and get through a few more pages of the Stephen King book too.

And maybe this evening I'll ask Despair if he's feeling better after the cold cocking I gave him.

Then Loneliness will hit me back.

Only harder.