OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND OTHER DEAD HISTORIES: How Memories Build Up Oceans Around Man's Worldless Islands

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

- H.P. Lovecraft,
"The Call of Cthulhu"
[Full text avail. here]

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It fell out of a book, a paperback volume of the works of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet.

The photograph, of this bloated, unkempt, drug-distorted 19-year-old, had probably been used as an impromptu bookmark years ago. I can't remember the last time I sat down and read Donne's "Meditation XVII," can't remember the last time I read the words No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... or what inspired me to use such a foul image as a placeholder.

There is nothing quite like cleaning one's apartment and finding, buried within the bindings of a Cavalier religious writer, the graven image of oneself as a young addict. I sat on the corner of my bed and held the photograph in both hands, not as one cradles a child but as one would hold the putrid remnants of an aborted, rotten fetus.

1998* was such a rotten year, for both wine and life.

Memories, yes, memories can indeed flow like tears. It's why I've systematically destroyed most records of that infernal year, broken most of the ties that bind me to that time. Some things are best cast to the wind like dead leaves, left to fall where they may...

How I stared into the snide, fat face of the kid I used to be! That demonic child, framed in his own Victory-sign forming fists, did peyote with sorority girls on dares, bought intoxicating widgets off Aryan Brotherhood members and Mexican gangsters and sold, at profit, unspeakable products. That vile thing once got off on taking the virginity of Good Catholic illegal immigrant daughters without so much as a care about legality, or, well, whether or not Big Brothers Cholo would mark him for death.

That... person ... a marginal human being, with very little real conscience ... earned every bad thing that happened to him back then. The kid I was lived off of three things - pleasure, power, and the manipulation of everything in between.

And memories, yes, memories can swell in the brain like rivers when visual stimuli break the dams of time. Even good memories, funny stories, from 1998 somehow seem to be nothing more than tragic comedy...

* * * *

GREELEY, Colo. (ZP) -- Crackhead Jim wanted more tinfoil. He didn't knock. Just walked right in.

Basketcase junkies rarely knock, once you show them even the slightest courtesy, once they've been invited into a place. Like Hollywood vampires, crackheads generally wait for that first invitation into a dwelling, that first sign of human weakness, only to choose their comings and goings afterwards as if personal boundaries don't exist.

Crackhead Jim needed tinfoil to help him hide from his probation officer and the all-knowing, all-invasive Grov'ment Agents. They were always watching him, using their spy satellites to track him. Jim said that he'd stabbed a guy in a grocery store parking lot, some gangland Vato who'd called him a dirty nigger, a few days prior – he'd avoided them then, but, well, he'd used up all of his tinfoil wrapping his body in radar-jamming armor.

“Jada” was in the shower, the tiny studio's bathroom door wide open, her wet ebony nakedness barely a feminine contrast against the whitewashed walls. I was contently reading old Justice League comics on the toilet, shitting away three or four forty-once bottles of Olde English 800 and probably a good two or three grams of pristine Mexican blow.

I hollered back at Jim, told him that we were out of foil. He asked if he could take some wire coat hangers, our bags of garbage. He'd dig through them, sell back the recyclables, and have enough money for more tinfoil of his own – and enough money to score one or two tiny viles of rock to get him through the day.

Jim lived in 4B, two apartments down from the pre-op transsexual from Denver, across the hall from the skanky waitress from Omaha, Nebraska, the one who constantly inquired as to whether or not Jada and I were interested in a threesome. She'd already pulled a train with the two frat boys across from me...

And Jim, well, never robbed us. We were the only ones he never seemed to steal from. Jada and I, being junkies ourselves, were nice to him. Because of that common bond, and the steady supply of tinfoil and old aluminum cans and malt liquor bottles, we were probably the only tenants who actually got along in that run-down former sorority house.

From the toilet I carefully watched the junkie through the open door. Jada's tips from dancing were in her purse, right on the tiny table we used for meals. I watched and reached for the heaviest thing I could find – a shaving mug. I'd hate to think I'd have been forced to kill ol' Jim but, well, cold cash is worth more than a warm corpse to a junkie.

Jada'd picked up two private parties in a VIP room that weekend, Mormon businessmen who'd paid for all-nude lap dances, tipped well, and only tried to fingerbang her twice. Being good LDS boys, she'd racked up close to two grand – shamed at violating their faith by staring at a naked black woman, they'd dared not waste their sinning money on equally forbidden booze or soft drinks.

Jim, thankfully, ignored Jada's purse and her housegirl earnings. He was too immersed in gathering up all of the empty booze bottles we'd left lying around on the floor the previous night. He cleaned every scrap of trash up off that studio apartment's floor. He moved fast and furious and, without so much as a thank you, he waved and headed back to his apartment, back to feed his pet rat and to continue trying to remember way back, way back to when he was that young rhythm guitarist out of Washington, D.C.

Jada heard the door shut as Jim left. With one quick jerk, the kind of awkward motion that coke addicts make when they're still high, she pulled the shower curtain open, popping one corner of the plastic loose. Tiny black pearls rolled off her breasts, down onto her still soapy belly and crotch, down towards the fiberglass below her, down into a cold Colorado drainpipe. She yelled something incoherent, some fake hootchie squeal, feigned disgust at how one day Jim would OD and we'd be the first to smell his rotting corpse.

I put down my comic book, wiped my ass, flushed, and hopped into the shower with her. I reached for the tiny plastic bag on the back of the toilet. Jada squealed again, begged me not to drop the precious powdered elixir, to not let half of her Mormon tips wash down the drain.

In one night, we'd already moved into our stash of sacred, emergencies-only Angel Dust. I put a pinch on the tip of my tongue, pulled her into me, and let her tongue work loose the dust's sacred, hypnotic magic. I almost dropped the baggie, almost let that most precious earning wash away as that rush of invulnerability hit...

Crackhead Jim, at least, was smart enough to not fall in love with another junkie. He had his tinfoil and conspiracy theories and memories of those performances with Sam Cooke and Sammy Davis, with Sinatra and Aretha and Marvin...

That crackhead, at least, played music with legends. I only ended up getting played - and then stabbed - by my cokehead stripper fiancée.

And, as strange as it may sound, that's one of the most normal stories I can tell from that period in my life. For some reason, that one moment is burned into my mind like a brand, every detail as vivid as a Polaroid snapshot.

It only took looking at that old photograph of myself to resurrect that moment like Lazarus from the crypt. Needless to say, it wasn't all that pleasurable of a resurrection...

1998 was a rotten year, for both wine and life.

* * * *

BACK IN OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I crumpled up the photograph, tossed it like a baseball towards the trash bag by the bedroom door. The past is, well, the past; there's no sense in dwelling on that which one cannot change.

I was in the middle of cleaning my apartment, in the middle of throwing out all sorts of things and dusting and vacuuming and making the bed - life waits for no photograph, no dream or nightmare from the past, cares not for tragic comedy or pointless wallowing.

No man is an island - of course, Mr. Donne. If we were, we'd all sink like Atlantis under the weight of our own memories.

I clicked on the sweeper and watched as the past's dust disappeared from the carpet.

- # # # -

* - Heh. Even in flashbacks, I can get the year wrong. The first draft of this post listed 1997. My ten-year clean date, by the way, is Aug. 1.

IT'S OKAY TO HAVE SQUASH ON YOUR MIND, EVEN WHEN YOU'RE NAKED: Having a Head Like a Slingshot Can Lead to a Different Sort of Question

BUTLER COUNTY, Ohio (ZP) -- I planted my Doc Martens into the muddy bottom of Four Mile Creek, water up past my thighs, the smell of rotting woodland flora drifting up with the water.

Just past dawn on a Sunday morning. I ate about a dozen spiders on the trails out to the creek, their overnight works unseen as I walked, the first hiker of the day accidentally ending both arachnid lives and perfect architecture.

I loved every moment of my ten-mile hike, a veritable pig in the pokeberries, but I really came to just wallow away in the mud.

Even the leeches that fed off my legs, the ones who were probably left drunk from a holiday weekend's worth of Jello Shots and Irish Car Bombs and Cuervo, were tolerated.

The mushy mush at the bottom of the creek, at least, washes away easily, and won't require a long shower afterwards, just to get the stink of its perfume out of my nostrils.

No laptop. No cell phone. No MySpace or Facebook profile messages to sweat.

No text messages or voicemails or IMs.

And no weird looks from guys I don't know, no looks from strange drunk women who think they know me, or from younger women who read me, who thought I was something that I'm not...

Just me, baby. Just me.

* * * *

I must've been smiling. I don't smile much, but I think I felt those muscles a-twitchin' and strainin', the laugh-lines filling in the crow's feet.

I hate my smile, think its one of my least charming features. I only smile, usually when nobody else is around, when I can get away with it. And I usually smile the most when I can get away from everyone but myself.

There's just something seductive about solitude in a wilderness that makes trudging through the mud just so much fun.

* * * *

I crank out two hundred push-ups, four sets of 50, as Captain Marvel and Superman battle above Metropolis, as the pair fought over Lex Luthor's supposed turn into a legitimate presidential candidate.

Yup.

It's 5:07 a.m. on a Sunday, and I'm watching Justice League Unlimited Season 1 DVDs while I sweat and groan and stretch.

The scene hits at Push-up No. 74. One of the greatest battles in the history of animated comic book adaptations.

Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal. Once more popular than the Man of Steel himself, back in the 1940s, the Captain gets suckered by Big Blue, chumped in anticlimactic fashion, reverted to Billy Batson with one of Marvel's own mystical lightning bolts.

"Dude, Supes is vulnerable to magic, " I say out loud. "Marvel's a kid empowered by magic."

"That's so... unrealistic."

I flip over on my back as the episode credits roll and the theme music plays. I start my crunches, slow and painful, the ol' groin strained once more from one worthless night of sex - with someone I don't even like.

"I'm either the world's nerdiest chach, or the chachiest nerd," a stray thought bellows. "I re-pulled my groin in a spite fuck, and now I'm watching cartoons and thinking about the Power of Shazam!"

* * * *

I start laughing, distracted by another singular thought bouncing around my mind like a supervillian from the Dark Knight's fist. It involves The Question, an old Charlton Comics character sucked up by DC when it acquired the line back in the 1980s.

Comics legend Steve Ditko may be best known as the co-creator of the Spider-Man mythos, but The Question has always been a personal favorite of mine. Alan Moore supposedly based his Rorschach character, in the classic Watchmen limited series, off of Ditko's Question.

"Hmmm. Rorschach.

"Rors-CHACH. Heh. Now that's fucking funny. Never noticed that."

I stop at Crunch No. 42, get up, put on another episode of JLU, one of my favorites. I start laughing again, hit the deck, and start another set of crunches, as the Jeffrey Combs - voiced version of the Question spins conspiracy theories to another character, the Huntress.

A different sort of question pops into my mind, an ancient question that carries my brain back to Moore's limited series, back into ancient Rome, back into...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Fuck, dude. Who really does watch the watchmen?

"Hell, I don't think Mrs. Perfect would know Alan Moore from Mandy Moore...

"What the fuck was I thinking?"

The same guys, I assume, who do crunches as the asscrack of dawn while watching superhero cartoons, thinking about bad sex and Alan Moore and Captain Marvel's decline into obscurity since the 1940s.

The same guys, I assume, who like to get up before sunrise just to hump like Jarhead Infantry through a nature reserve, who take a digital camera to snap photos of flora and fauna, who're just looking to get all down and dirty in a creek.

Hell. Four Mile Creek's been better to me than most of the women I've been involved with.

* * * *

Yep.

I'm a strange one.

A social butterfly of a loner, a hermit who loves disappearing into crowds of people, who occasionally has to remind himself that humanity does indeed have some worth as a species beyond the abstract.

When I was a kid, I used to hate the way my mind works - I always felt ashamed that my brain, with its supposedly High IQ and damned - near - photographic long-term recall, made me a freak of nature.

Growing up in virtual isolation on a Virginia farm, with grandparents whose library collection included hundreds of foreign language dictionaries, NATO manuals, and UN and State Dept. publications, probably didn't help that feeling much.

But now I embrace my eccentricity like a warm blanket on a cold night. I'm constantly fascinated by how my own thought processes work, how my neurons fire inside of my skull, and by the way those abstract visions interact with my surroundings.

As I waded through the muddy water of Four Mile Creek, I suddenly remembered what it was like, for example, to do the same thing when I was a kid, how simple of a pleasure playing in dirty water is, how much energy crackles up from dark water.

I found a deep spot in the creek, and, fully clothed, fell back into the murky depths, the water sucking me down into its bosom, the guppies and tadpoles parting to accept my body into their commune.

As I fell, I noticed that I had an audience.

I caught a glimpse of a woman clad in a black micro-mini and white knee-high stockings ducking behind a tree as I hit the water. My heart raced, and only instinct reminded me to close my eyes or risk losing yet another pair of pricey, disposable contact lenses.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The goddamn mosquitoes and some emo chick. Who the fuck goes hiking in a skirt and knee-highs?"

I sank to the bottom and thought about DJ Shadow's "Midnight in a Perfect World [VIDEO]," a song off of his Endtroducing... album, for some reason.

Don't ask me. No clue where that one came from. Probably something about the flow of the beats he sampled and the feel of the water and the sight of a scenester - looking chick hiding behind a tree.

I think about the weirdest shit sometimes.

Think. It's what I do best, really.

And sometimes, I even scare myself.

* * * *

One of the most intriguing things I've ever been told, by anybody, occurred a dozen or so months ago, just a few miles from my mud hole along Four Mile Creek, during a full moon.

A woman and I were sprawled out on a blanket, mostly covered by this ratty comforter I used to carry in the back of my pickup. We'd just finished off a bottle of iced tea, a midnight picnic of vegan eggplant wraps and roasted squash.

I smelled like, well, one would expect a librarian to smell like after spending all day moving dozens of pallets of steel shelving back and forth across a construction site.

But my fellow moonwatcher smelled perfect.

She smelled of every mile of air she'd just traveled, smelled of the rental SUV, smelled of JFK International in New York and a connection in Reagan National in Washington and of leather luggage...

And the smell of squash and eggplant was on her breath, too, rich in onions and fresh basil and citrus aromas.

I'd looked up at the moon and told her that she smelled wonderful.

There is no way to describe the face she made. Even the moon seemed to read disgust in her face, disappearing behind black clouds to hide from an outburst from a very passionate woman.

"Man, you're just fucking insane sometimes. Man of fucking mystery."

And then she told me to never change. And all was good with the world. Hadn't really figured on hooking up with a friend that night. That's what we were - just friends. Just happened.

Sometimes, knowing how to cook for a vegan can get a guy into trouble.

Now, every time I smell squash and eggplant together, I think about being naked, beneath a full moon, covered in a ratty comforter that fell apart three months ago.

And every time I see or hear a reference to Ditko's The Question, one of my favorite men of fucking mystery, I think of feature dancers and showgirls and burlesque performers.

If there are bigger comic nerds to be found outside of librarianship, they'll almost certainly be found taking their clothes off inside of strip clubs.

* * * *

As I came back up from my impromptu bath in the creek, memories of her face that night mingled with the lingering beats of DJ Shadow, the visions of Captain Marvel and Superman duking it out, and the taste of polluted creek water.

I took a deep breath and kept on grinning my normally hidden smile.

Ain't nothing wrong with being a Man of Fucking Mystery. Just ask anybody who grew up reading comic books. I felt just like The Question Sunday morning, hidden behind a faceless mask, clad in matching blue fedora and trench coat.

The woman in the black mini had come from behind the tree, was hollering something from the bank and pointing at the ground.

After pounding the water from my ear canals, I learned that she was trying to tell me that my cell phone had been vibrating, that she'd stopped it from slipping off of the rock and into the water, and that she wanted to know if she could bum one of my Marlboro Mediums.

Yes, I'm a chain smoker. And I hike ten miles, bring along my cell even when there's barely a signal. Do push-ups and chin-ups and sometimes dig homemade vegan food.

I'm weird, a Man of Fucking Mystery, even to myself.

I wade back to the young woman, the Watcher's watcher. She perches herself on a stump, facing me, knees drawn up to her chin.

I offered her a cigarette, introduced myself, lit the cigarette for her. I told her that she didn't have to hide behind trees or fee bad for just watching.

She smiled and blew smoke from her nose, down across her knees. Said she hadn't meant to watch, but, well, the sight of some random guy falling backwards into a creek reminded her of something from a movie.

It was weird. So she watched. My phone rang and she saw smokes on the shore. Gave her an opportunity to say something, to spark a conversation.

And then she told me her story.

* * * *

A second-year undergrad, 20-years-old, hung over from drinking in her dorm room with another second-year undergrad. The guy had wanted to fuck - hence the free jug of wine he'd brought to her room. Not really that attracted to the guy, she blew him instead, spit the semen into her roommate's empty bottom bunk.

She blew the guy to get him to leave her alone, to simply get him to leave her space and to never come back. She'd only asked him over out of boredom - and nothing screams boredom to a 20-year-old dorm rat like a Labor Day Weekend with no money to travel.

She tells me that she came out to the nature reserve to think, to recover. She'd been drinking bottles of Fiji to get the taste out of her mouth. She didn't know if she should feel bad or not. She'd blown guys in high school, gone down on frat boys at parties, but she'd never blown a guy just to get him to go away.

She stopped, looked at me.

I have no clue why I'm telling you this. I don't even know you.

To ease her embarrassment, I tell her a story. I tell her about The Man of Fucking Mystery legend, the hook-up with Mrs. Perfect who was anything but, of watching Justice League Unlimited and doing 200 push-ups.

"You're weird. Weirder than me."

She clarified - I was kinda creepy weird and kinda intriguing weird, a good mix that often inspires her to walk up to random people and strike up conversations.

She took off her little backpack, opened it up, and pulled out two big plastic containers of overpriced mineral water. And I drank one to wash away the taste of dirty creek water. She drank the other to wash away the semen taste.

Ritual cleansing sometimes requires strange conversations, where answers sometimes involve a different sort of Question.

- # # # -

SEX, LIES, & MISTAKEN TATTOOS: Waking Up (Next to the Wrong Person) is So Hard to Do...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- So... ahem.

Where do I even begin?

When I fuck up, I fuck up.

* * * *

Last Saturday, I awoke to my first weekend sunrise back in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

Fresh from vacation, rested, feeling like my old, youthful self - cockhard reckless, in fact - the way I used to feel before the librarian days.

The first thing I noticed, opening my eyes, was the four-alarm hangover. And then came the fuzzy memory, the conscious awareness of cottonmouth and the lingering taste of jello shots 'til Last Call.

It's been a while since I just let loose on the ol' college town, in any one-horse town for that matter, east of the Mississippi. Out west, despite ending a relationship, I realized that, well, I'm still under 30, still in my prime, and, well, I really need to just let work stay at work, chill out a bit.

Almost all of my furniture shipped off to the new apartment, everything save for the bed and a lamp and a desk, the lack of any kind of window covering lit up my bedroom like a thousand fireworks. The room glowed yellow and hot, the sounds of High Street traffic and bustling car show attendees echoing off the bare walls and the freshly puttied nail holes.

Despite the slight headache, there seemed to be no harm done. The world had still spun on its axis, the sun still ready and willing to bitchslap the drunkenness right out of me.

And then I stretched.

As soon as I felt the naked body in bed next to me, I knew I'd done something very, very stupid.

A quick lift of a sheet, a hand slid carefully along the mattress, confirmed the sex part.

That, and the three polyurethane condoms hanging off the lamp.

* * * *

A quick pick of the alcohol-impaired brain revealed that there were four possible suspects.

No. 1 , a woman I'd been sorta seeing before I'd gotten ill, a woman who'd just broken up with the guy she'd been seeing after I went AWOL. I remembered that I'd spent four or five hours hanging out with her, taking shots, and chatting it up.

But she probably knows better. And, nope, no latex allergy.

Suspect No. 2, a waitress from a restaurant I frequent for lunch. I'd run into her on my way to a bar, gave her my number. Once, she and I almost had an oops experience, the time I gave her a ride back to her apartment and we sorta started slow dancing. Every time she went through a nasty break-up, she turned extra flirty, laid it on so thick that Ray Charles could spot her interest from outer space.

Checked the cell phone. No random text messages, no Dayton area code in the recent calls list. So... No. 2 became a long shot.

No. 3? A recent high school graduate who, while taking a smoke break from the non-smoking pubs, gave me a hug, one of those drunken gropes that many younger women think conveys some sort of sexuality. I used to tutor her best friend, and she, like so many 18-year-olds right before college, was both heavily intoxicated and overly flirtatious.

Hell, there's not enough booze in the world for me to accidentally go home with someone that young and inexperienced. I may be a bastard, at times, but I'm not a total fucking bastard. Seriously. I'm too old to fake an orgasm while worrying about permanently scarring some fragile, naive ego.

The fourth candidate, a dead-ringer for Suspect No. 1, physically, was a stretch. I almost laughed out loud for even considering it. At some point, well past legal and physical sobriety limits, I thought I'd run into a sorta ex of mine from nearby Hamilton, a woman with a kid, an ex-con boyfriend, and more than a few problems with Adderall and... er ... sanity.

"Pfft. Nah. I'm not that stupid."

My imagination had gone apeshit, too, because I remembered talking to her, outside of my apartment, inviting her in to keep her histrionics out of plain view of the old neighbors and...

"Tequila's playing tricks on ya, Dude. "Chase" lives in Kentucky. It's been more than a year.

"And she's, like, married now."

I finally gave up on the guessing game, rolled over, gingerly, to try to find some answers. I carefully lifted the arm draped across me, untangled my legs from hers, eased my thigh from beneath her hips.

* * * *

Mystery Woman had scored both pillows, thus explaining at least the physical pain in my neck. Her face was partially wedged between the two, raven hair obscuring the remainder of her exposed face.

The list of suspects was, however, cut in half.

No teenagers and no waitress. A wonderful relief.

Gingerly, I parted the hair on the woman's face, hoping that I'd find some unknown variable, some fifth candidate.

Nope.

I checked for ink. Both remaining suspects sport visible tattoos of the same type of reptile, but only one has matching artwork, by the same skin artist, on her lower back.

"Oh fuck. I know that tramp stamp."

With one peak beneath the sheets, my heart collapsed, an emotional aneurysm tearing through my gut, drunken one-night shame making the whole thing a ménage à trois.

"Aw, goddammit."

Nothing screams a Grade-A Fuck-Up quite like waking up next to a psychotic (meds and all) woman, almost two years between conversations, recently married to the ex-con father of her child.

The only relief?

As I slowly pieced together the remnants of the previous night, I remembered a conversation about their open marriage, the fact that their relationship was Jerry Springer perfect in its layers of all sorts of deviancy.

At least I won't have to worry about going toe-to-toe with a guy with five years of prison under his belt.

* * * *

I knew returning to Ohio would be difficult. I knew I'd be depressed for a week or so, bummed out by the fact that my family's on the other side of the country, the whole "Tonya" thing ending, even the lack of, well, diversified scenery.

I even knew getting back into the grind at work would help feed into my self-wallowing, the lingering demons that haunt the back of my brain, voices that whisper sweet nothings about my need to, possibly, get the fuck out of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

I knew I'd, sure, go on a bender, drink a bit more than usual, enjoy the last vestiges of undergrad-free summer in this college town. I figured I'd slip up, maybe end up accidentally going home with a female friend one night, figured the sense of loneliness and isolation would drive me, momentarily, into the arms of some local 20-something, home for the summer, or some grad student, or possibly even some female faculty member.

But I never, ever thought I'd fuck up like this.

I haven't done something this damned stupid in at least 10 years, since I proposed to my ex-fiancee, the cokehead stripper, while on a bender in 1997.

As soon as I realized who I was sleeping beside me, I quietly slipped out of my own bed, tip-toed across my near-empty bedroom, and puked into a landlord-ready sink.

And jello shots ain't pretty at nine in the morning. There was some hint of Jager in there, too.

* * * *

Rather than link to the half-dozen or so posts I wrote in 2005 and 2006 about my experiences with one of Hamilton Fucking Ohio's Finest, I figure I'll just sum my previous experiences with "Chase" in a few lines:

I hung out with Chase's brother a while back, my last attempt to regain my punker chops, to form a hardcore band. I liked Chase. Chase liked me.

Chase neglected to tell me, well, that she sorta had a kid and the baby's daddy (her new groom) was in jail. She also sorta, kinda forgot to tell me that her Suicide Girl thing wasn't an act (she's on five doctor-prescribed medications) or that she had just a tiny substance abuse problem (Speed and Pot. Great combo.)

Boy tries breaking it off gently. Boy gets blamed for girl's problems by mutual friends. Boy remembers why he quit playing in hardcore bands. Girl then, well, quasi-stalks boy, because boy used to date adult video performer and girl wants to jump her. Boy dodges girl for more than a year, even quits shopping in Hamilton when girl follows boy into store, forgetting her toddler in her car in the middle of summer...

Dear Lord.

Honestly, I don't know what else to write. I could go on, but I'd probably just have to puke again...

* * * *

After vomiting, I cooked up my first post-hookup escape in almost a decade, an escape from my own apartment, the librarian on the run from the psychotic aspiring writer/part-time college student/full-time stripper from Kentucky.

My plan was simple. Keep on moving out of the old apartment, and pray that she'd leave before while I was over at the new place unpacking. Simple, clean, efficient.

I don't think I've loaded so many boxes of clothes, dishes, toiletries, or anything else, so quickly and quietly in my entire life. Almost every remaining box in my old apartment's living room was out the door and into the back of the truck in under an hour.

I left a note on the bed, right next to her, explaining that I had to be out of my apartment by the end of the day (a lie), would be back late that night, (a bold-faced lie) and that I enjoyed seeing her again (holy hell, I used to be so good at this when I was 19.)

Unloaded the boxes slowly, went for coffee, even checked out every vegetable stand alongside every road in Oxford.

Two hours. In two hours' time, she should've been gone, out the door, back towards the ex-con hubby and the Kentucky border.

* * * *

I waited an extra hour.

As opened the door to my apartment, I caught the silhouette of a woman, pulling on her tight skinny jeans.

Aw, Goddammit.

"Chase" had waited. She wanted to talk.

She wanted me to know that the night before had been a huge mistake.

That was true.

She also claimed that, somehow, my lifeforce had drawn her up to a friend's bachelorette party, that I seduced her at the Circle K with black magic, and that I'd taken advantage of her accidental Xanax overdose, told her how much like Winona Ryder she looked to get in her pants, and that I'd somehow used tarot cards to bewitch her.

Aside from the fact that, well, she's addicted to Xanax and does, indeed, look exactly like Beetle Juice era Winona, the rest is completely batshit.

She even pointed out how disgusted she was with herself, not for going home with an almost-blacked-out drunk dude who'd once threatened her with a restraining order, but for having sex with a guy who has also slept with fuckin' Mexicans and black bitches.

Let me say, for the record, that I plan on shooting myself in the face if I ever get so drunk, so stupid, as to go home with a psychotic White Supremacist Wiccan Winona Clone ever again.

Ironically, the numerous jello shots that led to such a revelation were made by a Mexican-American bartender buddy of mine.

* * * *

Despite my supposed unwanted seduction, my alluring chi or whatever else she could could pin on me, "Chase" wanted to go to breakfast. More accurately, she wanted me to take her to breakfast, to pick up the tab, payment for my sins.

And we talked about all sorts of things, important things, like the latest issue of Cosmo and her breast implants, how her husband was almost off the probationary phase of his sentence, how her mother was nailed for dealing meth, how she didn't regret having sex with me because I've had sex with famous people before and...

Did I mention that I plan to go all Ernest Hemingway, plan to suck on buckshot, should I ever, ever do something this stupid again???

... And she even mentioned that we wouldn't be able to hang out anymore once she moved to Nevada to become a famous showgirl.

As "Chase" chattered away on the benches outside Bagel and Deli, knee tucked under her chin, staring off into space, I only paid attention to one phrase.

Moving to Nevada.

Thank you, all that is Holy in the Goddamn Universe.

- # # # -

NOTE - For some reason, I missed an edit earlier. "Chase" is moving to Nevada, not Florida. Male library colleagues in the Sunshine State can breathe easy. Clark County? Sorry. You're fucked.