pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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POCKETBOOKS AND RGS

320.

Just when I think I am past my RGS (residual Ginger shit), it comes back around and blindsides me. This time it was news from our hairdresser, who jokes about needing to change towns every so many years because it gets too dang complicated making sure that he doesn�t schedule exes back to back.

The Ginger graduates in May and will finally be off campus and out of town and I cannot tell you how happy I will be when I know that my chances of running into her and that rat Dickboy will finally be nil.

Eddie said he knew we�d lost the Ginger when she came into the salon in full het make-up with a pocketbook. (That would be the same Ginger who, for the first year we were together way back in 1995, took to wearing only black jeans with a big ol' wallet in her back pocket and either a black or a solid-colored T-shirt with a breast pocket and who shaved her head. She still looked like a high femme though. Don't know how she did it.)

She's a serious LARPer who moves through the world by creating characters she then embodies though, so it makes sense that she would dress the role. Eddie says she's following some man to "Montana or Wyoming or some other gawdforsaken place in the middle of nowhere when she graduates in May."

... Quirky prep-schooled Ginger amongst the cowboys. Oh sweet Jesus. What will they do with the red-headed ice princess?

And does this mean that Dickboy is divorced?

If there is a gawd�and I�m not saying there is (although how would we know?)�then please lord jesusfuckinghchrist holy father goddess mother hail spiderwoman saint teresa hail mary full of grace (now say �Fulluvgrayse� again in honor of John Waters and Pecker), please let the Ginger and Dickboy move to Montana, where my bestgrrrl is currently exiled. And please let them walk down the same street at the same time and encounter each other.

Call me an ass, but the possibility of the Ginger and Dickboy�s history following them out West, particularly if the married-when-he-had-an-affair-with-my-wife Dickboy will continue to teach women�s studies, appeals to me.

So it�s 1:30 AM and I can't fall asleep. We're in the middle of a big thunderstorm and it sounds like giants are bowling in the sky.

I just returned from the wimmin�s bar, where a bunch of us watched the NCAA final four games. Was there since 7 PM�well, actually, make that 7:30 (even though the first game started at 7) because�reason number 29 why I won�t date Operagrrl even though she persists in trying to convince me to do just that�it took Err a good 25 minutes to finally walk out her door after I arrived (ostensibly to pick her up so that we could get good seats before the games began). (She drives like the stereotypical little old lady too.)

Pottergrrrl�s daughter called just as I was leaving my house to head over to Operagrrl's, said she was in town and her mom asked her to deliver my stuff that was at her house and pick up her mom�s stuff that was at my house, so I told her to meet me at the dyke bar but tell her boyfriend he best leave his baseball cap with one boy holding two girls� hands in the car if he comes in with her.

And let's be real, I clearly have more than a little not-yet-residual unresolved Pottergrrrl shit too because, when her daughter hugged me and said �I am so unhappy about this, writergrrrl. I really like you and think y'all are perfect for each other,� I had a really hard time not bursting into tears.

Went out to the courtyard to stare at the stars for a minute and regroup, but wound up watching some very young very drunk grrrls load water pistols in the fountain then proceed to douse each other. Then a really drunk grrrl threw her cigarette butt in the fountain before jumping in herself. And then the lot of them got kicked out for being so rowdy.

It's weird and a little numbing to share such intense, intimate lovemaking with someone, to be so good together for eight months of mostly sex-filled weekends, with so much depth and closeness and unbridled passion, only to be slammed in the face with the reality that we are now a couple of grocery bags filled with stuff that we left at each other's houses.

And I still don't understand what happened.

�

Now it�s 2:15 AM and I have GOT to go to bed. Went to sleep at 4 Saturday night and got up at 8:30, so you�d think I�d be exhausted right now. Sigh.

I hate insomnia.

I've been reading through a year-and-a-half�s worth of diaryland blog entries trying to figure out if Geraldine the designer (who just replied to my I-need-a-distraction personal ad on Craigslist) is the same designer who replied to my match.com ad last year.

I WISH I could remember that woman's name because I'm worried she is the same woman who started talking about what we'd do when we moved in together the first (and only) time we ever met for coffee, a woman who wouldn�t stop calling and e-mailing me to say things like �But you might grow to be attracted to me one day, writergrrrl.� Ugh. I hope this isn't her. (And I will certainly ask for a picture.)

Meanwhile, I will, predictably, end with a poem, which I pulled from an old diaryland entry:

IN BLACKWATER WOODS
By Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,

whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:

to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

As the commercial says, I don�t have march madness; I have march sadness. And a sad little deflated ego that barely managed to talk to wimmin after pottergrrrl�s daughter left tonight because all I could hear in my head was her admonition to look in the mirror and see what she sees and recognize how ugly and unattractive I really am.

Asshole.

11:43 p.m. - 2006-4-7

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