Once again today I found myself with time that is entirely my own, as none of it is required to be devoted to the task of writing my novel.
I’m actually finding myself somewhat at a loss as to what to do with the time. I think the month of plugging away at the story has left me feeling somewhat spent creatively, so I’m not really up to any of my usual creative pastimes such as drawing.
On the other hand, because on most of the days of the past month I found myself actually engaging in something constructive, it feels as though I ought to be doing something constructive, so the fact that I haven’t been doing so is making me feel like more of a slacker than usual.
But I’m sure that I can bear that particular burden.
Having no particular goal to accomplish on any given day, beyond simply surviving it, is, after all, hardly a new experience for me.
Still, even though I’m certain that I will inevitably adapt, the completion of my task has, as the completion of most major undertakings invariably does, left me feeling somewhat empty.
In any case I didn’t accomplish a great deal today. I slept in until after 9, which actually put the number of hours I slept at a solid seven, which is pretty impressive for me during the week.
After getting up I didn’t accomplish much until around 12:30, at which point I ventured briefly out into the world. There was actually a wind advisory for the area throughout most of the day, and I have to say that it really would have been a perfectly lovely day outside if it hadn’t been for the strong and sudden gusts of wind.
Most of the time I’ve spent inside I’ve been able to hear the wind whistling in through the various tiny openings provided by doors and windows.
I had two purposes in venturing out into the big wind.
The first was paying the rent.
It had actually been my hope that in paying the rent I might encounter Kelly, the cute-ish girl who works in the rental office and who told me that I smell REALLY good.
I did, in fact, encounter her, but it was a very brief and utterly unsatisfying encounter.
I have to confess that her face is not one that is really firmly etched in my memory, and when I’m not in her presence it’s difficult for me to recall what she actually looks like.
It doesn’t help that every time I do see her she looks different, though that may be a combination of my imagination and faulty memory.
In any case, when I do see her, I find myself thinking, “THAT’S what she looks like?” Don’t get me wrong; every time I do see her she’s still kind of cute, but it always seems that she’s changed a great deal.
For example, today her hair was very dark and very straight. The last time I saw her in the office it was fairly blonde and rather curly.
In any case, I had gone in with the intention of trying to initiate something more in the way of conversation with her than I usually manage, but as always, the Fates were not with me.
While she was very pleasant, and greeted me with a big smile, she seemed to be incredibly eager to get me out of there as soon as possible.
In fact, she didn’t even let me make it all the way into the office; she came out of the office and greeted me at the entrance (You walk into building and then have to walk several feet before reaching the door to the office on your right).
She took my check from me, asked if there were any problems with my apartment, then whipped around to head back to the office.
Despite the fact that she seemed to be in a hurry to get rid of me (There was someone in the office talking to the Property Manager and the other lady working there, so I assume there was something important going on), I made a lame attempt at engaging her in conversation that only resulted in causing her to pause briefly in her sprint away from me, and which probably made me come off as some sort of weirdo.
When I had encountered her a couple of weeks ago when I was getting my hair cut and she had greeted me, then said, “You don’t know who I am, do you?” I had responded, truthfully, that I did, as I had, by the time she’d asked, figured out who she was.
However, I realized that I may have sounded as though I was simply saying that I knew who she was, and I thought that, when I saw her today, mentioning that I had, in fact, known who she was would be a good way to initiate a conversation.
As she was bolting away, though, my saying, “And I did recognize you; I was just thrown off by the wet hair” probably seemed more than a little strange.
She stopped, confused, said, “That’s okay,” then, awareness dawning, she added, “Oh! Right. I remember.”
Then she continued in her mad dash away from me.
I sighed, thought about how it would have been a lot less bother to either pay the rent by phone or simply drop the check in the after-hours slot, and started on the second leg of my journey into the world.
This was a quick walk over to Safeway to pick up some paprika, as I needed some for a recipe that I’m trying today, and, surprisingly, I did not own any paprika.
There have been times that I’ve begun to suspect that somewhere along the line God ran out of new ideas for people and began repeating Himself.
As I was walking into Safeway I saw a face that I’ve seen many, many times in my life, and yet it was the face of a complete stranger.
The face belonged to an attractive woman who was walking towards one of the useless little shops that, with Safeway as the central point, make up the little shopping plaza across the street from me.
In any case, she was a rather attractive woman, which is a good thing considering how many people there are in the world who have the same features as she does.
I’ve seen several actresses with those features, including a soft-core porn actress named Lauren Hays (Who is, oddly enough, I just discovered by looking her up at IMDb, originally from Fairfax, VA, which is very close to where I live), and countless anonymous women in different cities across the country.
Additionally, I once had a friend who had those exact features.
This was back in Michigan during my drinking days. She wasn’t an especially close friend, and was more or less on the fringes of the circle of friends I had, but she worked at the bar that I, along with my friends, some of whom also worked there, spent most of my time.
Her name was Maria, and she had three (I think) kids, the youngest of which went to the same daycare as my niece Jenni, so she and I frequently talked about Jenni.
I don’t think that there was ever a time that I knew her to not have a boyfriend, though apparently there were a few brief intervals between boyfriends in which she was single.
She had a tendency, after having a few drinks, to spend hours sitting in my lap, and she would frequently squeeze my cheeks and loudly proclaim “I love this face!”
While she was a reasonably attractive woman, it was clear that it was just a meaningless flirtation on her part, so I was never too inclined to try to pursue anything, particularly since she usually engaged in this behavior in full view of whomever she happened to involved with at the time.
In fact, there were a few uncomfortable occasions during which she would become quite amorous with her boyfriend while still sitting on my lap.
It’s worth mentioning as an aside that the majority of my friends back in those days were female, and once we got a few drinks in us we were all rather affectionate, so her propensity to plop herself down on my lap wasn’t really all that unusual, though the “affection” most of us showed each other seldom crossed the friendship barrier.
Well, “seldom” when it came to crossing the friendship barrier with me, at any rate…
But getting back to my main story, beyond the fact that she seemed to be perpetually involved, Maria really wasn’t the sort of person that I could have had an actual relationship with. I suppose saying that she simply “wasn’t my type” is as accurate assessment as any.
Still, she did manage to make me laugh, and one particularly amusing thing that I remember about her is that she often referred to my friends as “The Archies,” and, because of my glasses and my nerdish leanings, she referred to me as Dilton.
(In Archie Comics, for those of you who don’t know, Dilton Doiley was the nerdy egghead of the group)
For my part, not being able to equate her to any other “Archie” character, I referred to her as Midge.
As I said, despite the odd casual familiarity we had with each other, we weren’t especially close, though she does often come to mind, since I see her face so frequently.
In all honesty, most of my friends from those days frequently come to mind. That was a particularly unhealthy time in my life, but despite the fact that our association with each other revolved around our mutual tendency to drink way too much, I did feel a real affection for many of them, and sometimes I miss them.
It’s probably my fault that I’m no longer in touch with them, even though sometimes it seems that they turned their backs on me.
Still, it was circumstances and not any kind of conscious effort to cut them out of my life that led to our disconnect. I did remain in contact with one of them, the person with whom I was, arguably, closest, after I quit drinking, and even after I moved away to Arizona.
In fact, as he sought to escape from the life I had left behind (I wasn’t the only person for whom that time was unhealthy), he decided that he would give Arizona a try.
Once he arrived, though, he discovered that I was still sober, and that I wasn’t especially fun to be around when sober, and that we had very little in common outside of the bar, and we had very little contact with each other.
Still, it’s the nature of life for things to change, and ultimately, despite the fact that at times I do miss them all, the circumstances of my life are very different from when they were part of it, and honestly, I don’t think they would ever fit in my life again.
But, as I often say, whatever; life goes on in its inexorable march to the grave.
In any event, I think I’ve reached the conclusion of today’s entry, and I’ve managed to fill up some of the emptiness, and am well on my way to accomplishing my goal of surviving the day.
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