8763 Wonderland

We all hear voices, a friend of mine wrote recently, we’re just not supposed to listen to them.

Six months ago, quaking under the twin burdens of physical illness and a work ethic that requires constant waking enslavement to my keyboard, I stated listening to the voices in my head. (Before you start thinking that I’ve really flipped my barge understand that I am talking in metaphor, okay? Thank you.)

The voices started telling me that the last two years of my seven year relationship with my putative wife, Jill, had been a complete and utter disaster. In many respects that was true but this is not the place for recriminations. We both screwed up the relationship on a maddening multitude of levels. We were a burning bridge waiting for someone to hand us a can of gasoline.

“We could not have continued on the way we were,” Jill wrote to me last night, “and unfortunately neither one of us could fully communicate it, or constructively deal with it. Maybe now we can.”

As severely as I hurt her, Jill continued, what I did to her woke her “out of a really bad place.”

The what in “what I did to her” was the conversion of a weekend tryst with another woman into a six-month shack-up. As if that wasn’t enough, I then began blindly flailing at Jill in an exercise that I am somewhat renowned for: burning bridges.

I realized early on what a mistake I made with the other woman — again, no recriminations — but it was too easy to just soldier on what with everything else that went down in my life over the last six months: the publication and promotion of Long Time Money and Lots of Cocaine, the Lori Scheirer debacle, magazine assignments, and sometimes demanding work on a feature documentary about Johnny Bragg and Johnnie Ray.

I even created a fictional alter ego, Trace, to help guide me through what is sometimes described as a mid-life crisis. The Trace stories were workshopped through the Craigs List Writers Forum, which was where I met the woman who was suddenly encamped — at my invitation — in my home … if you want to call a suite in the Glendale Extended Stays a home. Hell, it’s bigger than most studio apartments so don’t give me shit about that, alright?

“When I decide to push you away,” Dr. Gregory House says in an episode of the Fox TV drama “House”, “I hope there’s a small person standing behind you so you fall down and hurt your hand.”

“House” is Jill’s favorite television show. She had been urging me to watch it in the months before our split but I wasn’t interested. Until now. Now I’m hooked. In fact, I just bought the First Season DVD.

“I was taking a walk one day,” Jill told me not too long ago, “and I started thinking ‘Why do I like this character (Greg House) so much? He’s brilliant at his occupation but as a doctor he has no bedside manner, he’s antisocial, he’s a narcissist, he pops pills, he can’t tolerate stupidity, he can be cruel, people hate him, and he’s self-destructive, but he has a good side. And he’s in love with a woman who loves him, too, but can’t tolerate being around him.’”

Yep. I know this guy. All too well.

As I write this there’s a ladybug crawling on my keyboard. Do you suppose that has any symbolic value?

Shit.

It just flew out the window.

There’s symbolism for you.

POST MORTEM

Lindsay Wincherauk, co-author of Seed’s Sketchy Relationship Theories – A Guide to the Perils of Dating (How not to become a bar regular) offers his gruesome dissection on the mid-life lapse of yours truly.

Lindsay calls this piece “Living Autopsy: Wallowing in My Gaping Character Flaws”:

I actually find myself open to my voices. I encourage them to sing out to me.

I feel they serve a higher purpose in my life. Give direction. Occasionally they lead me astray, down a dark path of despair. Those are the voices I try to shut out, as for the others, they provide a calming influence and I feel it would be unwise to shut them out, provided adverse consequences doesn?t supervene.

As for ?Wallowing…,? a seven year assumed marriage could not possibly be all bad, there had to be times when the oppressive heat from the burning bridge was only a flicker at best. No one with a sane mind would attempt to endure continual relationship strife. (I do understand only the last two years had been a living hell).

With the insertion of ?Jill? into the equation, the odds of two people not traveling down the path of relationship self-destruction increase tenfold. Lucid intervals surely would have intervened, freeing both of you from your retreating bliss.

What I don?t understand is now that your relationship has splintered apart: why do you feel the necessity to communicate your need to discover what went wrong? After all, it is easy to fire-off a malapropos statement in the heat of the moment that you will undoubtedly regret, only creating a bigger wedge between the two of you.

Would it not be best if you cut the chord and counted your loses, learned from the deceit, forgave yourself and retreated to a place of coping? That way you could stop punishing one another.

As for your offending actions: they were pre-meditated, that makes them the worst kind of infidelity.

Let us make something perfectly clear: nobody cheats by accident. It is never a mistake. Can you imagine? “Honey, I was walking down the street and I tripped and next thing you know I was having sex. It was an accident.”

Tripping is an accident, cheating is … CHEATING. It is that cut and dried.

You?ve even eliminated the oft-used excuse of alcohol or other substances as accomplices in your indiscretion. At least you never spoke of them. The fact is you mapped out the course, got on the phone, or, on-line and took the leap shows that your love-bond with Jill was only a reflection in your rear-view mirror at best. In fact long before you consummated your tryst you had violated her trust and ventured down a highway with no off-ramps to the tumultuous past.

I truly believe if it was ?meant-to-be? or a ?true love? you would have not allowed your character to weaken, that temptation would have not been part of the equation. The fact that your character did weaken and temptation prevailed, shows to me that despite of your love for Jill – now is not the time. Not only not the time when it comes to Jill, but, anyone in general. You must get your house in order before you subject anyone else to your life struggles and come to terms with your mid-life crisis.

In a sense: Save Yourself First.

Without question Jill does love you. In a sense it is her curse. I?m sure she loves your creativity, your passion for life, your unwavering drive and commitment to your craft. And I am certain that you love her as well, despite your insidious indiscretions. The thing is she likely realizes that she can?t save you and the same things that draws her to you are the things that ultimately drive her away.

You are either not ready, scared, or have a history of sabotaging yourself. Whatever the case, what I suggest is if you truly love her, break free, quit subjecting each other to heartache. Evict the cancerous intruders from your inner redoubts, before you connect again

This may be a monumental undertaking, however, if you want your future love quests to be heavenly instead of a repeat of the past, a definite necessity. If you find the courage to do this, who knows the flames may subside and Jill may come back. That is of course if it was meant to be.

One last thing: If you ever again have the urge to stray. KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. The guilt belongs to only you.

Sorry, one more one last thing: If you find yourself connected again to Jill or anyone else for that matter and you can?t contain yourself: Get A Hooker. That way it will only be sex.

“Insidious indiscretion”? Damn. I cannot say that I agree with everything Lindsay writes but there are ugly echoes of the truth here.

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