Me and my...

...shadow...



It's another one of those Saturday nights. With the concerns about immediate disaster lifted (as I said before, thanks to a great friend and not my fershlugginer* clients), I have spent much of today attempting to get work done. When, that is, the cat wasn't bugging me. He doesn't seem to like the various kinds of food I've been giving him and has come in every half-hour to demand that I open yet another can for him.

Of course I'll do that. Who else do I have to show any love to?

Yes, this is one of those bitter, lonely entries that make you -- and me -- cringe. Nobody likes self-pity or whining and, in this case at least, that includes the self-pitying whiner.

I've been thinking a lot about God, a dangerous subject. I have to wonder why this Supreme Being (in whom I believe in some fashion) decided to show me exactly what I needed to make me feel I had a reason to be here, and then cunningly contrived to keep it forever beyond my reach.

If I allowed myself to use personal experience to define the whole God-thing, I'd have a pretty twisted vision of Him (or Her, or It). I regularly send up little messages asking for some help for friends who are in a bad way, and those often seem to be answered. I have to conclude God must have a pollster Up There, and when popular opinion shifts in favor of any given person, positive action is taken. So it's not my request that does the trick; it's that I am one of many people asking for the same thing.

Conversely, when I ask for things for myself ("let her mean what she promised me, let her be who she claimed to be") I am, to use the vernacular, SOL. Or FUBAR. Or Tango Uniform.

PARENTHETICAL THOUGHT: If those of you who know about the dung that has been hitting my personal fan are guessing that someone has been showing up in my sleep again, you're right. I haven't heard from her in many moons, try not to think of her in my waking hours, yet she is a relentless nocturnal visitor. I have yet to figure out which is worse: good dreams about her or bad ones.

I'm coming to realize, as never before, that I am at heart a social animal. A social animal who is given minimal opportunity to socialize.

Maybe all God wants from me is work. I don't know. I'd hate to think that my sole function in this life is to churn out the crap I produce for my clients.

ANOTHER PARENTHETICAL THOUGHT: I know it's not all crap. Some of it is damn good. But as each month's unsold magazines are yanked off the store shelves and returned to the publisher, I am once again irrelevant. Until, that is, the next month's issues are displayed, when I become marginal, one of those who fill the white spaces between ads.

I'm making no sense tonight. Perhaps it is time to wrap myself in the arms of Mr J Beam and try to forget that another week has gone by, another lonely week in which all I have managed to do is survive. I have made no one happy. No one has made me happy (at least in the sense I'm concerned with at the moment).

Who the hell cares? There are bigger worries in the world. And I know damn well she is getting her adoration elsewhere. That it centered around her most superficial attributes and doesn't involve actually caring about her well-being apparently matters to her not at all.

It's supposed to rain tonight. I hope it does. I have no desire to go anywhere I can go, anyway. The rain will give me the excuse I need.

Even music brings no solace tonight.

If there is anything worse in life than caring about those who don't even want to know I exist, I can't imagine it.

The cat wants me to care. So I do....

Having him here is far, far better than having nothing at all to care about.

* One of my favorite MAD magazine words from the 1950s and '60s, along with "Axolotl" and "Veeblefetzer."