Sic semper tyrannus

Not all cowards are bullies, but every last bully you'll ever meet, without exception and straight down to the bone, is most assuredly a coward.

We all know a bully when we see one: he (or she) is small-minded, self-important, generally crude and often sadistic. They hate themselves and are loved by few, and they lack the intellectual depth or strength of character to take on any but those they perceive as weak. They thrive in small ponds and wilt in the glare of rational thought or a more substantial opponent. It doesn't take much to steal a smaller kid's marbles. It doesn't take much to shame someone for being poor when you've lived your whole life over a safety net. It doesn't take much to get someone to kiss your ass when you control her means of supporting herself. And yet, in spite of the obvious ease with which they achieve their objectives, bullies always seem disproportionately pleased with themselves, as though they've just accomplished an impressive feat. Such is the feeble perspective of the bully.

The most famous bully in my area code, of course, is our newly re-elected cretin of a governor, Paul LePage. LePage is famous for many things: bluster, sanctimony, "plain-spokenness," and all around dick-wagging. He doesn't negotiate, doesn't compromise, and basically doesn't give a shit about what anybody thinks unless they embrace his top-heavy agenda. To my knowledge, Paul LePage has never lost an election, and god did I want him to lose this one, for the obvious reason that he's driving the state at breakneck pace back to the nineteenth century, but mostly because I was hoping that, for once in his miserable life, somebody -- in this case Maine voters -- would essentially whack him on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper and say "Bad dog." Because that's what a bully needs: he needs to get his nose bloodied. And perhaps that little bit of perspective might have prompted him to wake up the next day and, oh, I don't know, reevaluate a few things, and maybe stop being quite such a douchebag of a human being. But that didn't happen, so now we'll never know. We'll just never know.

My favorite local bar is managed by a junkyard dog. She's a classic bully: she intimidates the staff, she manipulates their schedules if they piss her off, and if she wants them to quit, she simply limits their hours to the extent that there's no way they could make enough money there to feed themselves and keep roofs over their heads. I've watched her run roughshod over the staff there for a few years now. Recently she and I had a minor run-in, a disagreement from which I was content to simply walk away rather than endure a full-blown argument (after all, it's simply unkind to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person). Because she lacks the stones to address her frustration to me directly, she instead resorted to messing with my girlfriend, who works at the bar, punishing her by reducing her schedule, week by week, from full-time to, now, about half-time. She's taken her off nearly all the lucrative shifts. The junkyard dog is giving my girlfriend the shaft because she's mad at me and, because she's a coward, she can't confront me directly.

My girlfriend is one of the good ones. Patrons and co-workers alike are fond of her. She works hard, she's knowledgable and attentive, and she is possessed of a personality that is both appealing and genuine. Beyond all that, she simply does her job and doesn't complain about it. She was doing her job tending bar a couple weeks ago when I went in there with my laptop, ordered a sandwich and a few drinks, and sat quietly with my headphones on, typing away and listening to my music. In other words, I was a customer, one who spent about forty dollars on what was a slow Saturday afternoon. Two days later, through a proxy, the junkyard dog relayed a directive to my girlfriend that it wasn't appropriate for me to be in there "hanging out" with her while she worked. Never mind that I was a paying customer, never mind that we didn't interact any more than she did with any other customer, never mind that she was, without fail, doing her job. The junkyard dog saw what she thought was a loose thread and, because she's simple and mean, she just had to tug on it to see how much she could unravel.

Nobody deserves to be bullied, particularly at work, but for a manager to aggressively alienate a good employee seems pretty stupid to me. To also alienate a long-time customer who has spent a lot of money in your establishment, well that just seems like a pretty fucking stupid business practice. Not that my presence, or even my money, amounts to much in the grand scheme of things, but I can tell you I haven't been in there since, and I don't see myself going back anytime soon. Which is harsh buds for me because, in our crumbling little backwater, it's slim pickings when it comes to bars. But such is life.

I lost a job once as the result of a bully. He came into the company where I'd worked for five years and started stirring up shit, creating little rifts and cliques, effectively marginalizing anybody he felt he could easily intimidate. We were a small company that had grown exponentially in a few short years, and that success was the fruit of hard work by good people, people who had more than earned the right to feel secure in their jobs. But the boss was both paranoid and a coward, and so he brought in his own junkyard dog in the person of the guy he was fucking at the time. It's always a dangerous game when you give the junkyard dog the run of the place, but when your enforcer is also the person who lays his head on the adjacent pillow every night, well, that's a mess nobody's going to want to clean up. For months I watched the staff suffer mostly in silence -- mostly, except for the ones who came to me. And when I'd seen and heard enough, I rolled up a newspaper and I whacked him, hard, right on his little piggy snout. The consequences were foreseeable and, ultimately, pretty devastating for me personally. But I'd do it again in a heartbeat. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, all it takes for iniquity to thrive is for good men do nothing. And the shame of having done nothing is not a shame I relish bearing.

If there's a point to this rant, it's this: that in spite of the fact that the bully will often win out in the end, it's still worthwhile to step up and stand up to him or her. You may lose your job or get your teeth kicked in, or you may end up with four more years of a mean-spirited ignoramus running your state, but it still feels goddamned good to know you were the one who said, "Enough." In the end, the simple truth is that a bully is as fragile as a Faberge egg. Take your whacks, and sooner or later you'll knock the tyrant off the wall, and neither all the king's horses nor all the king's men could ever hope to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Little White Scar

There's a quarter-inch long scar on the knuckle at the base of my left thumb. It's been there since the summer of 1996, when I sliced it with a Stanley knife trying to trim a notch in a piece of clapboard I had to replace on an old farmhouse I was painting. The rotted piece I removed had stretched beneath a second-story window, and I'd already climbed down from the ladder three times to trim the notch in the new piece the right way: on a makeshift workbench on the ground, not against a rung of a wobbly ladder sixteen feet in the air. But still it didn't quite fit, and there are only so many times a stubborn man will climb down a ladder to do the same simple fucking thing before he decides he's not making that roundtrip again. And so, muttering and sputtering an entirely inappropriate accusation at the piece of clapboard, I pulled out the knife and yanked the blade neatly through the notch and right into my thumb.

You see the future in moments like these. Granted, it's only a split second into the future, but you do see it, in vivid technicolor, as the little voice in your head implores you not to do the thing you are most definitely about to do, and it's always this premonitory flash that plays on a recurring loop in your head as, suddenly almost unreasonably calm, you slowly descend the ladder and dig around in the toolbox for something resembling a bandaid. The best you can do is a roll of black electrical tape, which does the trick both because it stops the bleeding and because it looks ridiculous in proportion to the stupid thing you just did.

I bring this up because, for the last two days, that tiny white scar, for no good reason at all, has itched like a motherfucker. This is nothing new, of course: the half-dozen memorable scars I carry around have all, from time to time, made minor nuisances of themselves, demanding my attention for a few days, casting my mind back to the circumstances of their respective arrivals. A scar is like a pin in a wall map, showing a place you've been, and when someone points to it you invariably find yourself nodding and saying something like, "Ah, yes: Istanbul." Every scar tells a story, and when one itches, you're hard pressed not to scratch it.

The skin is the largest organ of the human body, and by virtue of its surface area and proximity to the booby-trapped, indifferent world, it is the most easily and apparently scarred. Your skin, however, is by no means the only vulnerable organ you possess, and the scars you carry in your heart and mind are no less insistent when they start to tingle. All those non-fatal wounds suffered over the duration of your life leave their marks in a place only you can see, and just like that thin white scar at the base of my thumb, sometimes the itch comes out of absolutely nowhere and lingers while I rehash and reflect. Ah, yes, fucking Istanbul.

Sometimes a cut is deep and broad enough that it scrapes against the scars that came before it, cross-hatching them with fresh abrasions that compel them all to sting at once. This is what we talk about when we talk about despair, and unless you're very strong or unusually lucky, it will almost invariably land you in a place from which you can see no escape, leaving you very much like a turtle on its back in the middle of a busy highway. Once you've been there and made it back, the truth is, nobody wants to hear about the stretches when some or all of it comes flooding back, haunting your sleep and your daydreams alike. Your friends were there, they saw the worst of it and, frankly, why would they want to watch the second act if it's just going to be a mashup of scenes from the notorious first?

Which is part of why I spend so much time alone, keeping my own counsel, or deftly muting it with a twelve-pack of cheap beer. As much as it's managed to fuck me pretty remarkably over the last forty-five years, I am nonetheless rather fond of my mind's finer attributes. Whether your mind is a vintage Montblanc or a blunt and broken Crayola, it is still, in the end, the single greatest resource that will ever be available to you. When you find yourself in times of trouble, don't just let it be: use your fucking head.

And so today, at the tail end of a week of relentless dreams about a girl who was never there, I sit beside the living room window, glaring at the grey, unpromising spring, scratching with freshly cut nails at an itch that won't go away, knowing full well you can pull the pin out of the map, but that doesn't change where you've been.

Forty-five With a Bullet

For no reason whatsoever I woke up at five o'clock this morning and found myself inexplicably throwing back the covers and rolling out of bed. Three minutes later I stood shivering in my kitchen, sipping a glass of orange juice and staring out the window at streetlights muted by the low-hanging exhaust of chimneys spewing incessantly in the arctic pre-dawn. It looked remarkably like Armageddon. "Happy birthday," I whispered.

This is probably the case for most people, particularly as we get older, but I don't remember much about most of the forty-four birthdays I've had before today. I mean, of course I remember the last few -- I'm not that fucking old -- but it gets harder and harder to pinpoint the details of any given birthday. I remember turning seventeen because that night my girlfriend surprised me with a warm bed rather than the rear compartment of her mom's hatchback -- her sister's family were out of town, so we had the run of the place for the night. It was an awful lot like being a grown-up couple rather than a pair of fumbling, horny teenagers (which we were, we just weren't humping within inches of the spare tire for once). That night she also gave me Stetson cologne: who could forget that?

A few years after that I turned twenty-one, as was the custom of the time, but that one doesn't stand out for the reason you might think. It was my junior year of college, and my buddies and I had returned to campus from Christmas break the night before my twenty-first, everyone with an assortment of beer and liquor in tow. I can't tell you what I drank that night other than to say I drank all of it, and the next day I didn't manage to peel myself off my mattress until four in the afternoon. I had a hangover my buddy Peaches would classify as an existential crisis, and the last thing in the world I wanted to put in my body was booze. Or food. Or oxygen. That evening as I clung to what was left of my life, my pal Josh showed up in my dorm room, listened patiently to my feeble pleas to be left alone so I could just die, then said, "Fuck that. You're twenty-one, we're getting drunk." So he drove me to the store, stuffed some money in my hand and sent me inside to purchase the devil's elixir, which we did indeed drink until we were drunk, thus confirming that legends aren't born, they're made, often by other legends.

The next thirteen birthdays were a blur. Then came 2004, when my daughter, who was eight at the time, announced that she wanted to make me lunch for my birthday. When she asked what my favorite food is, I replied (of course), "Sandwiches." I suspect most of my friends are familiar with my feelings about sandwiches, but for those not in the know, here goes: I believe making someone an excellent sandwich is one of the truly great gestures one person can offer another. Depending on my mood, I put it either just behind or just ahead of donating a kidney. The girl of my dreams, if she exists, will almost certainly appear out of nowhere holding a freshly made sandwich and say, "Here." If ever I needed proof that I got immeasurably lucky with the kid who ended up being my daughter, Braden showed up on my thirty-fifth birthday and made me the best sandwich I've ever had. Somewhere out there is an eighteen-year-old knucklehead who has no idea how fortunate he's going to be someday.

It's stunning to me that Braden made me that sandwich ten years ago. Ten years -- ten years, man! And that's the proof of middle age, isn't it? That a decade passes like that. No matter what age you are, time is always slipping through your fingers. When you're young, the illusion that you'll live forever arises in part from the fact that you can still feel the texture of the fabric as it slides between your thumb and forefinger. The older you get, the more that fabric feels like bittersweet, shiny polyester.

And yet we go on. There's a lot of Samuel Beckett rattling around in my head today, which is strange because I haven't read Beckett in -- dare I say -- a couple decades. I admit, the last couple weeks I've felt a tad glum about turning forty-five, and I suppose it's as simple as, all of a sudden, I'm starting to feel my age. Nine months ago, I was counting the cash drawer at work, and I found a wheat penny. I used to collect coins, and so it's just a long-standing habit to flip a wheat penny over and check the date, which I did -- except, this time, I couldn't make it out. I tried holding it at different angles to the light, tried holding it closer, then at arm's length, but no matter what I did, I couldn't see the numbers. Everyone in my family, including my daughter, has been wearing glasses for years. Mine were the last eyes standing. Until this past year: the year I got old.

I said as much to my buddy Hank a few months ago, and without skipping a beat, he scoffed. "Old?" Hank said. "Fuck that. This is the year you got good." Hank has standing to scoff at a sentiment like this: he was there for the worst of it, having watched from the front row as I stuffed myself down the rabbit hole in 2010, and never once leaving his seat while I burned up nearly every last chip of collective goodwill during the two years it took me to pull myself out of that particular abyss. After witnessing all that, seeing me entirely back on my feet must seem like a bit of a miracle to him. And the thing about the appearance of a miracle is that it makes every other miracle seem possible. Including living forever. Including living happily ever after. And quite possibly including bifocals. So it goes. Happy birthday.

25 Photographs

Last weekend, five months almost to the day after I first took up residence here in the cozy Bear Lair, I hung some pictures on the wall.

There's no significance to the anniversary itself -- if not for the fact that I know I moved in over the Fourth of July weekend, I wouldn't have even known it was sort of an anniversary. It's the five months that resonates: five months of living in a place without particularly personalizing it. The first few weeks I lived here, there wasn't a single day when I climbed the stairs to my apartment after work and didn't have the faint inkling I'd find a note on the door telling me I couldn't live here anymore. This is what a prolonged stretch of living in the margins does to a person: you find yourself looking over your shoulder long after the danger has passed. I spent a year like that before I finally lost my house a couple years back. Walking down the one-way street that terminates directly across the street from my former driveway, I would look for signs that the bank had finally sent someone to lock the place down: no-trespassing signs on the lawn, maybe some yellow tape across the doors, or a small fleet of sheriff's cars parked around the perimeter. I remember one evening as I came within sight of the house, the first thing I noticed was that the outside light, which I left on perpetually, was out, and my first thought was that the electric company had finally cut the power (I wasn't paying for that, either). It turned out to be a blown bulb and, ironically enough, I had a whole drawer full of fresh bulbs, which felt like a win. When the end finally did come, it was relatively benign: my friend Snuggles drove by and, seeing the notices taped to the doors and windows, called to give me the news I'd been expecting for what felt like forever. By then I was occupying a friend's empty apartment while he wintered in Puerto Rico, so I was fortunate enough to have a roof over my head. Still, it stung. I felt the ambivalence of someone whose bandaid has finally been ripped off, but who also knows he left behind more than enough to lament. As it happens, that was also the day I found out the girl I'd been pining for, the one who'd sent me off the rails, was dating a gay German physicist baker. The bandaid ripping was rampant. It wasn't my best day ever.

The pictures line the left-hand wall of the long entry hallway of the apartment. The first one you come to when you walk through the door is a framed diptych from the year I coached Braden's rec-league soccer team when she was in the first grade. When we went to sign up Braden for soccer, I casually jotted my name under "assistant coach," foolishly expecting they already had all the coaches they could ever want (what the hell did I know about rec leagues?). A week later, Braden's mother called me at work to inform me that Braden had come home from school with the game and practice schedule, at the top of which was my name after the word "coach." I remember thinking, "Aw, what the fuck is this?" But I showed up and took my medicine for the girl's sake. And you know what? It was fantastic. Eight little girls in teal t-shirts and shinguards bumbling around the field in clusters wherever the ball happened to be -- well, except the goalie, who was usually crouched in the goal mouth drawing pictures in the sand -- and me, an out-of-shape thirty-something egging them pointlessly on. The most common occurrence in sporting events featuring kids that age is the incidental injury: the kick to the knee, ball to the stomach or face, or the unexpected rough tumble, and those were the moments I truly shined as a coach. I've always been of the opinion that the worst thing you can do when a kid takes a digger is act like it was a big deal, because, let's face it, more often than not it really isn't, and whether it is or it isn't, the kid's potential to get hysterical is directly proportional to the extent to which the adult in charge gets hysterical. This is where I perfected my pain diversion technique: get the kid's attention, and then get her to start smacking her elbow with her other hand, then nod and say, "Better, right?" I won't say it works every time, but it definitely works more often than not. In the two photos featuring my soccer team and me, the girls are draped all over me, smiles on every face. I'd say we did okay.

There's a smattering of Braden-as-a-toddler and Braden-as-a-little-lady photos: one of her crawling that is almost certainly the first record of her mugging for the camera; another one of her on her belly in our apartment in Portland, which is a little weird because she was walking by then (although I like the composition of that one, because it shows the bottom shelf of one of our bookcases: big art books of Muench and Klimt and Modigliani, all of which are now long gone); Braden wearing some sort of headband and a perfectly beatific smile; and one of the girl wearing a quilted robe and playing peekaboo one night when she stayed with my folks. There are also two pics from when she was even younger than that, maybe no more than six or eight weeks old. We were living in Portland then and frequently took the kids to Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth. In one pic I'm standing on the rocks above the ocean holding the newborn, a big smile on my face and a full head of hair on my head. In the other it's me and the baby, my head turned toward Braden's brother Julian, who appears to have just said something profound. The sun's getting ready to set. That was a fine evening for our little family.

There are satisfying moments of continuity: Braden in a fancy dress and me in a tie, mock-dipping her in preparation for our first father-daughter Valentine's dance; and the two of us six years later, both dressed to the nines (my tie even matching her dress, if you can believe that), dining at her step-father's short-lived restaurant the night of our final father-daughter Valentine's dance. We went to every one of them from kindergarten through sixth grade, and the one thing I'll never forget about the last one is that, unlike all the rest, she eschewed the allure of running around with her pals and, instead, stayed on the dance floor with her dad until the lights went up. Ladies and gentlemen, that right there is a girl with heart.

I could share with you the whole litany, give you some background on every one: the snowman photo from a late-winter freak storm in 1996; the belly laugh pic with missing teeth at her friend's birthday party the summer before second grade; the school photos in which she looks like a different person every single year. But I'll wrap it up now. At the very end of the line, encroaching upon the living room so that I can see them from where I now sit if I crane my neck, there's the matched set of Braden and her brother Julian from the year they turned two and five, respectively. I know this because in the photos they are each posing beside an oversized rendering of the number that corresponds to their ages. The photos are tacky in the way those wispy profile-over-the-shoulder senior photos from the 80s were tacky. But they also make me smile every time I look at them because, whoever that photographer was, he or she made magic that day: those kids are both wearing their best ever faces in those photos. And that's good stuff.

Just above those pics sits Braden's senior photo, which was shot by one of her friends. It's a close-up, head and shoulders, her body turned away, head turned back toward the camera. It's an artful photo, well shot by her friend but also well posed by Braden, who has always seemed to have a knack for showing the camera what she wants it to see. She is looking back, but her momentum is carrying her in the other direction.

Which almost certainly explains why that was the last picture I finally hung on the wall.

The Inimitable Worm

Writing is a lonely racket. It kinda has to be, if you're doing it right. There's you, and the palette on which you're spraying your brilliance -- laptop, yellow legal pad, vintage Olivetti, whatever -- and the cranky, capricious, perverted worm in your brain that offers up the words but also enjoys shifting gears without warning between your mother tongue and the language of some long lost tribe, then grows surly with impatience at your inability to translate. That is what one would call a genuine mindfuck.

In the last two days, I've left my apartment for exactly ninety minutes: I joined my parents for Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant here in town, then came straight back home and planted my ass in the chair. Now, truth be told, yesterday I did, off and on, partake of a pleasant distraction: there was a Modern Family marathon on one of the cable channels, and I'm not ashamed to admit I watched a few episodes. If you've never seen it, do yourself a favor and check it out. It is sneaky fucking funny, in part because the cast is phenomenal (timing is a dish they serve cold, every time), but also because the directing and editing are brilliant. And it's sneaky touching. There's a scene where the patriarch of the family, played by Ed O'Neill (of Married, With Children infamy), offhandedly assuages his gay son's partner's newfound insecurities regarding the son's former boyfriend, whom everyone in the family seems to adore. "There's gotta be something there I don't see," the father says. "He didn't exactly bring out the best in Mitchell. Not like you do." There's no design to it, he's just making conversation. And yet it does the trick, and it's kind of a beautiful moment. So go watch Modern Family.

When I haven't been watching Modern Family or sleeping or gazing at my Bettie Page snow globe, I've been working on an essay I hope someplace with a bit more reach than my little blog might publish. It's going to be pretty lengthy when it's done -- I'm maybe a third of the way through, and it's already at about 2200 words (3500 words is probably the high end of average). For a variety of reasons, I've had occasion of late to think about (to steal from Nobel laureate Alice Munro, quite possibly the only Canadian I'll ever admire) the progress of love. Recently I've witnessed a handful of friends going through tumultuous and, in most cases, unexpected endings to their relationships. It's painful to watch because these people are my friends and I hate to see them suffer the rough strife of divorce. It's also tough because I've done all that and so I'm well versed in the tales we tell ourselves while we still believe there's something we can salvage. I don't know how many stages there are to the end of a long-term relationship, but I do know the worst of them repeat, and goddamn doesn't that suck. How many times did I go through my day thinking, "I can do this," only to get home and spend a sleepless night chewing on the inside of my cheek from abject frustration? It calls to mind Hemingway's line from The Sun Also Rises: "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."

All of which got me thinking about my own history of relationships. We could debate the semantics of what constitutes a relationship -- I know I've been guilty of underestimating a time or two in the past. There was the woman I reluctantly hooked up with a handful of times who, probably to this day, considers me not only an ex-boyfriend, but an ex-boyfriend who treated her badly. Believe me, that's her creative fantasy. Not to toot my own horn, because this is only admirable up to a very fine point, but I don't lie to women to get laid: if it is what it is and no more than that, I don't allow any illusions to linger. In other words, I won't lie to you, so don't lie to yourself. Ah, well, sometimes you can't win. Then there's the rare converse, the lovely pretend girlfriend I had for a while, who was absolutely anything but pretend and deserved more, but took me as I was. There's a lesson for you: it is always better to be with a person who doesn't judge you based on how shitty she feels about herself. The pretend girlfriend was a keeper. I hope there's some excellent guy doing just that.

Anyway, the essay isn't about the implacable one or the one who took me as I am. It's about the ones who left an indelible mark. For the purposes of the essay, there were five: the first girl I kissed, the first one I slept with, the college girlfriend, the mother of my child, and the one who completely undid me. It's about the ways I came to be with them in the first place, and about the ways each relationship ended. I have to say, it's been nice recalling the sweet stuff. It makes you feel like less of a schmuck when you can put into words some of the whys and the wherefores. You always feel like a schmuck when it crashes and burns not by your choice, and that's because in the slow descent toward death you see all the shitty things about the other person, and you can't help but wonder what the hell is wrong with you that you didn't see how shitty that person could be right from the outset. It's a despicable side-effect of rough strife. If you're lucky, you shake it off in short order and move on somewhat the wiser.

So you may be wondering, since I claim to have been working on this awesome essay, why am I spending the latter part of my night writing a blog about it rather than continuing to work on the essay itself? Well, because it's a little bit overwhelming, both the good stuff and the bad. In places there's a depth of history that can lead quite easily to pitfalls and dead-ends. There are betrayals that still sting, and the memories of my own missteps that still make me cringe. And in its eminently perverse way, the worm in my brain decided to start offering up the story in Portuguese, which is a gorgeous language but not one I'm equipped to follow. I'll tell ya, if I didn't need it so badly, I'd squeeze the life out of that worm here and now. Instead, I'll take it to bed, and hope tomorrow he wakes up ready to tell his tale, and spouting nothing but beautiful English.

The Good Liar

It was December 31, 1996. Some friends were hosting a New Year's Eve party, and I offered to stay home with our eighteen month old daughter so that her mother, the Prevaricator, could have a rare night out with good pals. We were at the tail end of a fairly miserable year, but better than the year before, which made it seem like we were moving incrementally forward, and anything I could do to help the cause seemed worth the effort. My best friend from college lived in the apartment upstairs from us, and of late he'd been feeling pretty down: he was sort of perpetually alone and in no danger of rectifying the situation, but in the last couple months he and the Prevaricator had formed a bit of a connection, and so I felt pretty good being the guy who stayed home on New Year's Eve and sent his two best friends off into the night to a fun, mellow party. At the very least, since the Prevaricator didn't drink, I thought she could drive dear old Mattie home after he'd drowned his recurring sorrows.

Somehow I got the Little One to sleep at a halfway decent hour -- no small feat in those days -- and camped out on the couch with some lame TV for a few hours until, just before midnight, I picked up the phone and dialed the party, intending to wish my beloved a very happy new year as the clock struck 1997. Eventually, after a handful of truncated exchanges with drunken revelers, the phone made its way into the hands of my friend Mike, the party's host, who drunkenly suggested that Mattie and the Prevaricator had already left, or perhaps never been there at all. Like a dummy, I remember thinking, "Aw, she's on her way home to her feller." I stretched back out on the couch and waited.

It was well after two when I saw his headlights splash the wall as he turned in to the driveway. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. The Prevaricator slipped in like a flat-footed, legally blind ninja, bumping into at least five things on her way to the bedroom, where she inexplicably changed her clothes, and then just as stealthily slipped back out the door and climbed the stairs to Mattie's apartment.

I spent the next three and a half months being alternately vigilant and accusatory. My accusations were met with such ferocious indignation from the Prevaricator, most of the rest of my non-vigilant, non-accusatory waking moments were dominated by self-flagellation: how dare I accuse her of such a thing! What a dick I was!

Mattie's dad bought him a house that spring, and in late April we had a dude day at the new house to install the basketball hoop his daddy had bought him. Mattie lacked the ability to screw in so much as a lightbulb, so he was beyond helpless when it came to attaching a basketball hoop to the house his father had bought for him. The friends gathered and we got to it. At one point Mattie had to make a run to the store, and I chose that moment to reconnoiter. It wasn't tricky: until very recently he'd lived right upstairs from me and we'd hung out all the time, so I'd had occasion to take note of the box of condoms he kept in his medicine cabinet. That particular box was long gone by that day in April, replaced by a different brand of twelve-pack that was down to just two, nestled optimistically beside a brand-new twelve-pack. I remember even then taking a moment to consider the possibility that I was wrong. Because that's what you do when the worst case scenario has crawled into your lap and nestled in like it has a right. But he was my best friend: there was only one reason in the world he wouldn't have told me he'd been fucking someone.

When Mattie came back, we shot free throws to determine the teams, and then we played two-on-two all afternoon. I was like a man on fire: I never lost. Christ, these were some of my closest friends, and I don't even remember who was my teammate. I just know I wouldn't lose. Until the afternoon began to fade and a couple of the guys had to go home to their lives, and I ended up with Mattie on my team. Suddenly, my still crisp passes were hitting him in the face instead of in the hands. We had every chance to win that game. I made sure we didn't. Poor Mattie: a brand new basketball hoop, and he'd lost every game. Then there was me: I'd won them all, save one. Hadn't I?

At home, the Prevaricator and the Little One met me at the door with smiles and kisses. I took a chair and peeled off my sneakers and socks, then looked her in the eye and said, "I'm going to ask you this one last time, and I swear I'll never ask you again." I asked, she bristled indignantly as ever, and I put up my hand and said, "Okay." Without another word I stood and limped into the bathroom, turned on the shower, undressed and, with a sigh months in the making, stepped under the spray. A minute later there she was on the other side of the curtain, uttering quite possibly the only honest words she has ever spoken to me: "It's true."

All of this happened long ago. In an ordinary life you'd write it off and move on. But ours has been an extraordinary life, because we're fortunate to have a daughter we both adore. This daughter we share is more than worthy of our adoration: if I lived another hundred years, the world would be hard pressed to offer anyone I'd favor above my daughter. The downside is that I continue to have to interact with the Prevaricator, who, to put it kindly, is a remarkable case of arrested development. To be fair, the combination of a broken home made whole by the odd dichotomy of the ever forgiving mother and the by-the-book step-father, plus a wholly inappropriate sexual relationship with her thirty-year-old history teacher when she was fifteen, almost certainly rendered someone like her incapable of dealing with the world. You always think you're the one who's going to fix them, right? Hence the concept of hubris.

This morning the Prevaricator called to say she was going to be an hour late picking up the Little One at my place. That's not a big deal: in sixteen years, she's probably had to make that call at least twenty times. Every parent of a broken home has had to make that call. Except that this time she led with a specific excuse, and also the husky, ethereal voice of someone still lying in a bed she doesn't yet want to leave. She had car trouble, she claimed. I could have just left it there, as though I imagined that her shitty car were capable of the rarest of car troubles, the sort that you know for sure will be resolved in an hour on a Sunday morning. But I let her dig -- because she's going to see me as the dick oppressor either way, so I might as well fuel the fantasy. She drove down a dirt road last night, she said, and might have put a hole in her muffler. (She makes it painfully easy to be crass, by the way, but I won't bite.) Long story short: perpetual liars will always believe that the reason they give you, if it's even remotely plausible, is the true reason for their actions. They believe it, and therefore you should too.

And that's fine, I get it: the Prevaricator is a broken little girl, and I failed to fix her, and so every broken-little-girl moment that presents itself is, at least in part, mine to bear. But goddamn does that shit take a toll, man.

Recently a friend made a comment in response to some offhand joke I'd made about drunken sex. He used that tragic modern catch-phrase, "fear of intimacy," and he wasn't entirely off-base, but he missed his mark by a significant matter of degrees: saying I have fear of intimacy is like saying someone whose legs have been crushed under the wheels of a runaway dump truck has fear of Michelin tires. I was never a physics major, but I believe in a version of Hooke's law, which states that an applied force will yield a linear-elastic response. A dump truck will crush your legs, and a Prevaricator will crush your heart. Sometimes you know too well that the force exerted is guaranteed to exceed the stiffness of the spring. Generally the reason you know that is that the spring has just been obliterated by said force.

Let this be the lesson, then: A life of perpetual lies is born of a single lie, the one the liar tells herself over and over again: that it's not about her, it's about the person she's lying to, who can't handle the truth. And while it's often true that honesty comes with its own peculiar consequences, the consequence of perpetual lying is that you become a shittier person with every lie you tell. Also, the more you lie, the harder it is to remember what actually happened, and that is one of the ways in which people go crazy. And not for nothing, but you can't fight crazy. You're stupid to even try.

Howdy Neighbor, or A Nightwalker on Elm Street

Here's your playlist for today:

Best of Jill Hives - Guided By Voices (live in Austin)
Devil with the Green Eyes - Matthew Sweet (for all you green-eyed she-devils out there)
Almost Crimes - Broken Social Scene ("We've got love, and hate, it's the only way.")
Love Me Or Leave Me - Nina Simone (Excellent advice.)
Photobooth - Death Cab for Cutie (Because some relationships are just plain shitty. But at least you have pictures.)
I Will Survive - Cake (Funny cover.)
Total Eclipse of the Heart - The Dan Band (Very funny cover. And for-fucking-ever really is going to start tonight.)
Girl in the War - Josh Ritter (No comment.)
Anybody Wanna Take Me Home - Ryan Adams (Been there.)
Lover in the Snow - Rivers Cuomo (This song makes me think about what it might be like to find out your de facto wife has been fucking your best friend. Yeah, it's pretty much like that.)
Something I Can Never Have - Nine Inch Nails (A sleeper from Pretty Hate Machine, for true fans.)
The Perfect Song - The National ("I'm looking out the window, sittin' there, sittin' there just fuckin' drinkin'.")
66 - Afghan Whigs ("You walked in, just like smoke, with a little come on, come on, come on in your walk.")
Free - The Martinis (Nod to freedom, whatever that means.)
Fatal Wound - Uncle Tupelo (Nod to fatal wounds.)
Place to Be - Nick Drake (Nod to Nick Drake, and the weakness of the palest blue.)
Dear Chicago - Ryan Adams ("I've been thinking some of suicide, but there's bars out here for miles.")
Femme Fatale - Velvet Underground ("You're written in her book, you're number thirty-seven, have a look." I miss Lou Reed already.)

This morning when I left my apartment building to grab a cup of coffee, I stumbled upon a flier sitting on the ground outside the front door. I glanced around and noticed more copies wedged under people's windshield wipers. At first glance it appeared to be just an ordinary sheet of copier paper, with an unfamiliar URL printed across the bottom and three grainy black and white photos of a pretty blonde running down the right hand side. Then I noticed what was clearly the intended message, in oversized bold font: "FYI Your neighbor {name withheld, by me, not by the helpful informer} is a PROSTITUTE!" (Emphases his, or hers.) This announcement prompted me to look more closely at the rest of the flier, and, sure enough, it turned out to be a printout from the "female escorts" section of an online personals page. There you have it, then: one of my neighbors is a prostitute. Thankfully, it's not one of the old ladies who sit in the lobby in their bathrobes, swapping disappointments.

I've never met the woman in question -- I haven't met any of my neighbors, actually, not even the old ladies in their bathrobes. I haven't met her, but I've seen her around. She has a young daughter of indeterminate age, maybe pre-school, maybe kindergarten, maybe just a bit older. For a brief time it looked like she had a boyfriend, as I saw her walking hand-in-hand with a guy a few times. Beyond that, she just seems young and sort of pretty and kind of dumb (in her ad she offers a "100% Satisfaction Guarenty" -- plus I've heard her speak). And she has sex for money.

But that's not the story, or at least it's not the part of the story that I find compelling. No, the real story is who made and distributed those fliers, and why? That's the question that intrigues me. I suppose it could have been some nosy, self-appointed moral crusader who takes it upon him- or herself to let everyone else know what's good for them (and apparently living in proximity to a prostitute is not good for you). Or -- and this is the only one that delights me -- maybe it's one of her competitors. I can tell you, from having done some impressively exhaustive research, there are a lot of female escorts in this zip code. They're decidedly similar: same heavy make-up jobs, same series of revealing outfits, same poses in their photos, painfully similar grammar and spelling skills. So how do you set yourself apart in a tight market? Why, eliminate the competition, of course. Obviously, the most likely scenario is that it was a guy, some jilted dickhead who, sadly, knows where she's vulnerable and was bitter enough to act on it. And so he told her neighbors what she does for a living, which is a pretty shitty thing to do, if you ask me. I've said and done some pretty lousy things in the wake of bad breakups, but that's a bit much, even for me.

Which takes me to my topic for today: relationships. I've had occasion of late to think a lot about relationships, and I suppose the playlist above, which was plucked from several hours of iTunes shuffle time, is reflective of those ruminations. I've seen too many friends lately going through circumstances that fall on the spectrum between aggravating at the better extreme and devastating at the other. The best of the bad has reminded me why I prefer being single (and more than once I've said so, out loud, to the person venting his frustrations). The worst of it has stirred up, from a deep, dank place, a host of unpleasant memories.

Relationships fail for a vast array of reasons, but more often than not the way in which they ultimately blow apart is that one of the two participants starts to behave like kind of an asshole. They pull away, lie, blame the other person for everything that's wrong. Honestly, it's pretty grotesque. And yet it seems inevitable, doesn't it?

I'd like to state for the record that I am not, nor do I consider myself in any way, an expert on relationships. I am, however, a bit of an aficionado. I had a relationship once that, it's fair to say, bestowed upon me a double-major in batshit crazy and whatever is the opposite of logic, with a minor in lingering self-doubt. It was a perfect microcosm of the prominent stereotype that suggests that men are rational and reasonable while women are emotional and, well, crazy. I don't happen to believe in this stereotype generally: I think rational people, regardless of gender, are rational, and irrational people just fucking suck. The most stunning example of our specific disconnect, hers and mine, was the way in which she could somehow justify the shitty things she did by asserting I was too this or too that, and in the next breath insist that I wasn't entitled to blame the way in which I reacted (back then, a lot of yelling and some pretty choice curse words) on anything she did. She practiced a sort of Alice in Wonderland logic, which works like this: I wasn't angry because she'd been fucking my best friend, I was angry because I was just angry, and I needed to not be that way. Curioser and curioser.

Sins on all sides, though. We were both unhappy, we just played it out in different ways. She wanted to close her eyes and not open them until everything felt alright again, while I didn't want to close my eyes for even a second until I'd fixed the whole goddamned thing. That's who we were -- who are now, in fact. Except that she's still out there looking for love, while I'm content with the notion that I probably won't love any of them, so instead I'll love as many of them as I can and leave it at that. And for better or worse, I'll tell you this: my way makes it a hell of a lot easier to waste an entire day listening to music, drinking beer and writing a blog. At no point did anyone ask me if I wanted to go to the container store. And for that I am grateful.

Hope you liked the playlist. I'm going to go get to know my neighbors.