“No you see, I was just *second guessing* myself”

From: Julia
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 7:07 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject:

I know I should have answered this sooner, but you know my propensity for saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, so I thought it would be better if I thought about it for a while before I answered it.

It’s not a mean email at all. It’s important that we be truthful with one another.

I think you’re right about the intensity being different for us. These feelings seem to be much more intense for you, due in part to any number of circumstances:

1) you don’t do things halfway and tend to feel really hard
2) I think there has been some projection going on on both our parts
3) I have to force myself to stop thinking about certain things at certain points whereas you do not
4) etc, etc.

You say your life is unfinished and that I checked out of that kind of life (for my suburban bliss, har har) but, I don’t agree with that bit. I certainly don’t feel my life is finished, or that the fact of mortgages and matrimony are things that make it finished in any way. Those things are not even requirements on the road to a life being finished, to me. But, I remember thinking that they were, before I had either. But it isn’t true. I am still Julia, with all sorts of weirdness and incomplete parts. Mortgages and matrimony do not complete me. And you have your adventures, but I have my sorts of adventures too that would bore you to tears but that are important to me (see number two above), such as that I am falling in blissful puppy-love with this dog we are fostering but I can’t possibly keep her but my little heart is going to get torn out when someone adopts her, etc., and I have *all sorts* of drama and angst regarding my yard which you would laugh at but which has become a huge deal in my life (it’s all about problems and solutions, which is what all our dramas are about, so what do the specifics really matter?). I’m not growing up. I’m just doing different sets of problems and solutions than you are. I’m just as emotionally tied up in mine. Part of what I like about you is that you are so open and honest about yours, and it’s nice to think of them instead of my own. And that feeling is tied to the warm feelings I already have for you, so. You are more than an escape for me. I genuinely care about you, even if you aren’t telling me all the gritty bits of your adventures.

I think you want to see how I feel about you as one thing or another, friend-love or love-love, when it is just what it is. I started to realize that your feelings were more intense and overwhelming over the past few weeks here when suddenly nothing was okay anymore. I also think your love for me is not as much love for me as it is for the idea in your head of me, which, even though we communicate almost every single day, we don’t see each other and talk to each other and watch each other’s stupid mannerisms that always become so annoying at about the three-month point in a relationship. There are some content filters between what we see of each other. On my end more than yours. I feel like you love the me you knew three years ago. Which, I mean, part of that is still me, but whole new sets of circumstances have come along and changed me. I’m not saying I’m a different person, I’m just saying some of the stuff I would do then, wouldn’t feel like the things I would spontaneously do anymore. (Like for instance, I hardly ever drink anymore because I just feel sick when I do, which is a pretty big change.) And you try to resist seeing this by saying things like, Julia you are Growing Up and “assigning yourself” a life in Cincinnati. When in reality, I chose these things. I chose to get married, I chose to buy a house and have three dogs and yard drama. I chose them because I wanted them. I feel like you think I was pressured into doing these things against my will, or that I just did them because someone expected me to and now I live with the consequences of wrong decisions. I don’t feel that way at all. I have drama and angst sometimes and think I would have done things differently, but shit, everyone has that. I can count on, like, two fingers the number of decisions I have made in my life that I have never second-guessed. My mistake has come in talking to you during times of second-guessing. I think you were clinging to that and thinking that it was all there was, that every day I regret what my life is now.

When, to tell you the truth, I am actually pretty happy right now. I mean, I have the odd episode of mind-numbing depression and angst, but overall. I am a pretty content person.

I feel like I can’t tell you much about the happiness because you
1) feel hurt by it because you aren’t here sharing it in some way
2) think it’s boring and suburban and everything you hated when you were growing up in the suburbs
3) think I’ve sold out
4) are bored by it
5) think I’m faking being happy when I’m really not.

So I filter out the happy because I don’t want to miscommunicate with you on those points above, and cause some sort of chaos.

I *do* love even your bad habits and general wretchedness, but I don’t think it’s the *kind* of love you are needing. I don’t think it’s the kind of love that is necessary for you to feel. And this makes me sad, because I feel like my feelings for you are not enough. They just are what they are. I wish it could be that anyone’s love would be enough for anyone else, but it just doesn’t work that way.

It has made me so sad from the get-go of this thing that the way you feel about me causes you pain. And I have tried to do all I can to make that not be so, but by its very nature, that is impossible. And that makes me so so sad, Six. I never want to be someone who hurts you. I want to be someone who makes you feel *better* because you are loved the whole way, the whole you, not just the bits I like.

So. If you need to not talk to me for a while, I can understand that, even though I feel sad about it. I don’t want loving me to hurt you. That is the very last thing I want. I should have told you some of this some time ago but it wasn’t really clear to me what needed clarifying and what didn’t, since this has been so weird from the start. I wish I could be more to you than a friend who talks about zany antics and the weather, because I so completely value our connection. I don’t like the thought of you cutting yourself off from me :( (I wish I could make that little AIM sad frown because it is the most expressive one, sad and worried and kicked puppy-dog at the same time) but if that is something you need to do in order to feel sane and quit drinking yourself into a stupor then I think it is important that you do it.

I feel sad. I want to hug you and have a cry before you go off and stop talking to me for a while and come back and be my zany antics and the weather friend.

I hope you read this, anyway.

hugs hugs hugs,

Julia

Julia Knows Not

From: Julia
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:08 AM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: worried

[...]

I don’t think that married or committedly monogamous people should share *everything* with their partner. I don’t want to know everything about M___. I don’t want him to know everything about me. If there is a girl at work with whom he communicates the way I communicate with you, I honestly have zero problem with it.

[...]

From:  Julia
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 6:03 PM
To: Six Sheep  
Subject: RE: Hello, I have no computers
 
[...]

Dear heart, I wish my love for you alone could heal you, because there is enough of it flowing in all directions in and out of my heart right at this moment
 
[...]

________________

From: Julia
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:08 AM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: worried

[...]

I don’t think that married or committedly monogamous people should share *everything* with their partner. I don’t want to know everything about M___. I don’t want him to know everything about me. If there is a girl at work with whom he communicates the way I communicate with you, I honestly have zero problem with it.

[...]

From:  Julia
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 6:03 PM
To: Six Sheep  
Subject: RE: Hello, I have no computers
 
[...]

Dear heart, I wish my love for you alone could heal you, because there is enough of it flowing in all directions in and out of my heart right at this moment
 
[...]

________________

From: Julia
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:08 AM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: worried

[...]

I don’t think that married or committedly monogamous people should share *everything* with their partner. I don’t want to know everything about M___. I don’t want him to know everything about me. If there is a girl at work with whom he communicates the way I communicate with you, I honestly have zero problem with it.

[...]

From:  Julia
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 6:03 PM
To: Six Sheep  
Subject: RE: Hello, I have no computers
 
[...]

Dear heart, I wish my love for you alone could heal you, because there is enough of it flowing in all directions in and out of my heart right at this moment
 
[...]

________________

From: Julia
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:08 AM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: worried

[...]

I don’t think that married or committedly monogamous people should share *everything* with their partner. I don’t want to know everything about M___. I don’t want him to know everything about me. If there is a girl at work with whom he communicates the way I communicate with you, I honestly have zero problem with it.

[...]

From:  Julia
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 6:03 PM
To: Six Sheep  
Subject: RE: Hello, I have no computers
 
[...]

Dear heart,

Julia’s Little Dreams

From: Julia  
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 1:12 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: ok, you.

Okay.
 
It’s raining here too. Hard. Also there seems to be something on fire a few blocks north, because there is thick brown smoke going up into the low gray sky. I don’t smell anything yet.
 
I don’t want to break your heart and I’m trying to navigate this flood the best way I can so as not to do that. But there are so many slippery rocks around that it takes care and attention to detail to not step on one and fall down and get swooshed away in all this. And to tell you the truth, I ain’t all that hot at the whole attention to detail thing. It makes me a kind of lousy proofreader. But you know, it pays the bills and all. Sort of.
 
Your dreams are nice dreams, and I have dreams like that too. Inappropriately. For a married woman to think of these things is supposed to be wrong, I know. But, I don’t feel too badly about it in one way because I’m not acting on those dreams. If I were to do that, everything I’ve done to try to have a somewhat sort of normal life where the only bad things that happen are things I can handle, will all go away. I need this kind of stability because even inside this, I think about killing myself an awful lot, and I get depressed with a degree of frequency that I know is not so good. I know that if I stepped outside this stability and outside of pretty much knowing what each day will be like aside from the small pitfalls of burst tires and overdrawn checking accounts and breaking up dogfights, then, I don’t think I can really handle that. It took me a real long time to figure it out but what I need is routine because I can’t really handle changes. Like it might look like I can handle them, but I really can’t.
 
The reason I *do* feel badly about it is that you know about it. You know that I have those little dreams. Which, as it were, I ought not to have mentioned. Because it hurt you. Which I hate.
 
See, you are Six, and you excel at shaking up the status quo, because you *do* things. Maybe you are afraid of change too but sometimes I think, you feel you have to go attack change and fuck it up before it fucks you up. Or maybe not. I don’t really know. I just know that you’re not like anyone else I’ve ever, ever known, and in addition to caring about *you* as *you*, I also have all these enormous, nebulous ideas in my head about what you represent to me. Which complicates matters.
 
Also it surprises me that you like me. I don’t mean surprises me as in, oh, I didn’t know that, I mean surprises me as in, why on earth would someone as wildly creative and imaginative and intelligent as you are like someone like me, because to me, I’m just the taste inside my mouth when there’s nothing in it. I’m nothing special. I do some creative stuff but it’s nothing special, I mostly think, nothing outside what your average B art student would do. I am not wildly good at anything. I know in my head that being wildly good at something is not a requirement for someone to be liked, but, I still think that way and feel that way.
 
I have thought before about what it could be like if I left M___ and went to you. Which, I never should have let on to you that I thought about that, because it is making things complicated between you and I. But I hate it when I can sense that you’re really unhappy and I can’t do *shit* about it, so I try to make you feel better by letting you know that even if you’re unhappy you got somebody far away who cares so much about you (which you know, I thought, it would make you feel better to let you know that because so many people don’t got that and even if they do they don’t always know it). I shouldn’t tell you how much I care about you because it opens up these cans of worms and you get upset and I get upset and all I really needed was this simplicity of being married to someone and loving him but also loving you too, in my secret head and heart, without ever really, truly intending to destroy what I have in favor of what could be. I don’t want to jerk you around. I like you a whole whole lot and I daydream sometimes about being with you but I can’t do it and so I’m just going to say that so there’s no jerking around. You don’t deserve to be jerked around by a married chick who only daydreams about things and won’t ever do them. That is not fair to you.
 
There’s reasons I won’t act on my secret dreams of bein with Six, and one of them is that even though M___ and I have our problems, I love him a whole lot. If you want to know the other reasons I can tell you but they’re probably pretty mundane. But if you want to know, I can tell you.
 
In an ideal world, stuff would be different. But it’s not an ideal world. It’s the real one I have to live in.
 
As for the subject of What I Want From You: I want something utterly impossible. I want you to stop hurting, always. I know that is a silly impossible thing to want but we don’t want the people we care about to be hurtin’ now do we. I can’t make that happen though. From you, I want nothing. If it makes you happier to quit sending me stories and funny emails because talking to me hurts you and makes you sad, then you should stop. I would be very sad about it but if it made you happier then that’s what I want.
 
What I really want is for stuff to just go back to the way it was where we had the feelings and the dreams and such but we just wrote and lived and everything over top of them. Without them coming out. But with each of us just consciously knowing now that they are there but not to be acted on. That’s what I want.
 
Is that possible, do you think? I feel that all this is unfair to you. And I’m sorry.

My Endless Ruminations about Sex & Intimacy

From: Six Sheep
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 2:36 PM
To: Julia
Subject: Dies Irae Again

“When I think of you watching WW2 documentaries before you go to sleep I think of the guy in The Wall watching all those war films while slouched in that awful green seventies naugahide chair with the cigarette hanging in his hand with the ash of almighty doom on it and his face unshaven and his face a flat mask of dulled stupor and all the awfulness of that.” – Julia, 11/1/2005

When I was in kindergarten, I would walk to kindergarten from my house. It was about six blocks away, the school. My memories from when I was little are always strange because I couldn’t see. I was literally legally blind. Nobody knew this until first grade, however. I dunno, I got around it somehow. I knew the way to school. I could see well enough to read. What else is there to kindergarten, really. It’s just bundling up, putting your things in the backpack and then going to your little desk. They tell you how to do the rest.

The next time I am in my mother’s house I will retrieve pictures of myself from those days. If you saw them Julia, you would never love another man again. That little boy was the head of heaven’s honor roll. I am smiling, always smiling. I have hair that covers my ears. I’m the prettiest thing on four wheels. I’m wearing shirts that say things like “Have an AWESOME Day” on them. That was my mission, at age 5, having an awesome day.

I had a blue quilt on my bed. It is much like the quilt I have on my bed now.

I had a pretty bitchin’ Hot Wheels. I rode my Hot Wheels far, far beyond the point where I should’ve been riding it. I think I rode it until I was in about fourth grade – about the time my parents got divorced. I remember the little plastic wheel was split in two, so that there were actually two front wheels to the Hot Wheels, moving more or less together. I think the only reason I stopped pedaling it around is because I couldn’t fit in it anymore.

I had a lot of sexual experiences when I was a little boy. These are not quite in the order that I have told them to you. I will attempt to tell them to you now as they actually happened. I have been truthful with about two other people on the planet about this. One of them was definitely a therapist.

The first and original experience is of course with Wendy the neighbor girl, as you have heard before.

After that year, we moved to Iowa and I had to start first grade at a new school. I didn’t have any friends there. I also had these glasses that were thick, ridiculous and bifocals. I was wearing bifocals at age six, that’s how awful my eyes were at that age.

I really only had one friend at that time and his name was [deleted] and he was the person I did a number of sexual things with when I was seven or eight.

Regardless what adults think about children, I’m convinced that most of them are doing sexual things in secret. I was perfectly capable of having erections doing things with them when I was that age. I did whatever I wanted to with my erection with that other boy and it felt nice and it was our secret. Having secrets from my parents and everyone else seemed perfectly natural at that point in my life. I didn’t just have penis secrets, I had all kinds of secrets, like the time I took the iron pyrite out of Heidi’s desk and took it home and put it in a film canister under my bed and took it out only when I’d been sent to my room for doing something bad.

He was my babysitter, believe it or not. He was four and a half years older than I was. I was about eight and he was about twelve. He was gorgeous also fyi, although I didn’t know that then, because I didn’t have any inklings of attraction towards one gender or the other. I did, however, know what felt good. I don’t think I could have an orgasm. I don’t remember having any, anyway. I just remember being naked with him in bed, and then when it was over we’d both put our clothes on and do something else, like Legos or building a backyard fort or something. It was not romantic or affectionate, I didn’t drape my arm over his chest afterwards and lay my head on him and nap there. It was very neat and mechanical. Not passionless at all, by any means. But very, eh, succinct and to the point. As I imagine a lot of boysex is, really.

That happened like a dozen times when I was little. Then, it just stopped happening. Really neither of us said anything to each other about ending it. I think he discovered girls. I think that’s what it was, he got to be in junior high and then it ended.

I know I do not think of sexual relationships the way most people do. I have tried to figure out why this is. I’m not a person that usually cares about why. I am the kind of person that appreciates the wtf factor of life, and prides himself on not picking things apart to the point where all the mystery and fire is gone from them. Sex seems to be very holy for most Americans. They seem to have a purity hangup about it. There are two sides of the purity coin. On one side is the person that keeps things bleached and starched and scrubs the dust and hair out from underneath the letters on his keyboard with one of those micro-vacuums and uses dental polish and has a very square and perfectly green lawn. On the other side is the person that finds purity by becoming something that is utterly corrupted. I see them going into Libby’s dildo store all the time and buying purple wigs, fishnets and whips. That is their purity, being as trashy as they possibly can be. They dye their hair and pierce things and get tattoos and attempt to go as far into whatever thing their mothers labeled “dirty” as they can possibly go.

I do not have a purity hangup. Sex for me is something you do with somebody you like. It is fun and it feels good. It is a physical activity. It is like having ice cream with someone that you don’t mind sharing spoons with.

Now don’t get the impression that I don’t have any understanding of intimacy or love. I think I have a pretty robust understanding of both of those things. That’s how I am able to say that for me, sex is separate from love or intimacy. Love I think is something that can happen between any two people, if they can appreciate the beauty of each other. Intimacy exists separately from that. Intimacy is when you know that the person that you are talking to you is on your side, and understands you, as you are sitting mumbling and whispering to each other during a play, and each of you still have enough brain bandwidth to be enjoying the play and talking at the same time, because you know the other person’s verbal shortcuts and general subject matter and mannerisms to be able to interpret their schtick on the fly and play along with them. Intimacy is when you know why they are doing something, better than they do. Intimacy is when you know exactly what they want to hear, and you say it just at that moment they want to hear it. Intimacy is when their lame jokes are completely hilarious to you, and to nobody else. Intimacy is you and them against the rest of the world. Intimacy is a private and special world, that is to be kept locked away in a box on the top shelf and kept until the 18,000th time they come into your store. Then on that 18,001th time, you say, well – you’ve been coming here so long. I have something special for you, today. Here it is. I’ve kept this just for you.

I can have love and sex with a person and not have any intimacy with them, and I can have intimacy with someone whom I’ve never had sex or love with. It’s the intimacy that’s the hardest to get. The others are usually pretty easy.

These kinds of thoughts are definitely relevant, during this week in my life. I am going to go get a salad.

No Saints No Sinners

From: Alice
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 12:18 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Alice where are you

In case you’re curious I talked to my mom, and she
said she won’t give me a check because she doesn’t
know if or when she could pay it back, she told me
to [deleted]

“Six Sheep”
wrote:

Your mother is an adult woman. I can understand having money problems, but the thing about money problems is that they’re just part of being an adult and having bills you’re responsible for. We all have things we have to pay for out here. Between her and her husband they should be able to support themselves in that little apartment up there, it can’t be that much rent. There are not children in that house. She should definitely not be borrowing money from you, and making you take out loans and things. Nobody else I know has to take their student loan money and lend it to their own mothers, it’s not appropriate for her to ask for that.

You need to confront her and make her come up with some portion of the money. If she had been able to handle her own difficulties, you wouldn’t be stressing out about this right now. If she has borrowed money from you, she is responsible for paying it back. Your mother should not be putting you in situations where you have to run down to the paycheck advance place just because she can’t manage her own money problems.

If you go to your mother and make the case, she will see that you are serious. She should learn that she needs to handle her financial matters herself and not have to rely on you for money. If it means she has to go without heat or cable, she has to go without heat or cable. That’s life.

My main concern here, Alice, is that if you don’t draw a line at some point over this, you will just end up having to deal with it again in the future. You need to a put a foot down about this or it will come back to bite you again. Managing things like this and confronting them is kinda what you call preventative maintenance. It is difficult to do in the short term, but it will make things easier down the road. That will mean less stress for you. That’s my goal in this.

I’m sorry work is being such an absolute bitch this week and making it impossible for me to get on aim and etc. I’m also sorry I didn’t answer my phone messages until this morning. I was asleep, my brain was pretty much blown out like a candle. I do care about you, babe. I want to see your mom out of your finances, you have other things to worry about.

Good luck, ok. I think I can get on aim soon here, I have to straighten a class out but I think I can. So hang tight.

From: Alice
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 2:56 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Alice where are you

And, by the way, in case I didn’t make it clear I AGREE WITH EVERY SINGLE THING you say in this email, okay? I really really do, except for “If you go to your mother and make the case, she will see that you are serious”. I made the case. She knows I’m serious. So serious that she offered all the money she has: 5 dollars. Right now she is at work, and she is going to tell me when she will be able to get money, when she comes back. She’s also already sold and pawned everything remotely valuable in her home a long time ago, but I will ask her again tonight. Please understand how that still does not help my cat and me right now. :(

— “Six Sheep”
Six Sheep wrote:

Alice, I do think I understand the situation. You need money, and your mother owes you money. I am not berating you for that, I don’t think its your fault. I think your mother needs to take some responsibility, here.

If that means that she needs to go to the paycheck advance place and get money, well, I think she needs to do that. I don’t think you are doing anything wrong, or you have failed here in some way. I think your mom has shorted you and now it’s her turn to help out. Okay? I don’t think you are the bad guy here. Your mom is out of line, not you.

I know it’s a gripe to carry the cat around, and if there was a way I could get out of here and help with that, I would. but I don’t make that decision today, The Company does.

You are definitely not alone. You are never alone. Maybe I am trying to “solve” or “fix” this problem and not telling you I care enough. But I do, I very much do. I want to do something nice for you to get the stress out. Maybe do up my bathroom with the candlabras and relaxing music and you can come over and soak in epsom salts, and I’ll bring you a little cheesecake or something. Or we’ll use the Arby’s coupons or something.

You are an important and strong person and baby I do not want to see you all sad and stressed like this. But we will work it out. We always do.

Don’t sell your books at Powell’s. We’ll work it out some other way, hold onto your books, you love those books.

From: Alice
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2005 11:03 AM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Alice where are you

Oh man I need a cucumber

My Mother Throwing Paper Airplanes Into The Storm

[undated]

Six, I worry about you being all alone. No one does well alone all the time. That can cause depression! You need some family around to cheer you up, bake you cookies, make you laugh. The human soul needs companionship….but then having studied Psychology, you know that. You have so much creative energy, too, that oppressing it can cause you to be depressed, too. And (tssk-tssk) living in Portland (drip-drip) can cause depression…….

I know!…..why don’t you CALL YOUR MOM!….then at least, she won’t be depressed! tssk-tssk……..

Or, advice from Mom – go to AA, because your alcoholism only fuels your depression/rage…some people can’t drink to be happy because drinking makes them sad, and sadder…..or start painting (it’s cheap), or go to the library (it’s free), I just read through an art book about [deleted], somehow I missed ever knowing about [deleted]….from my “era”, too, duh, Anyway, she did some angry work and then some rather moving work….I enjoyed the book….from the library. You have a lot to give, Six, and that doesn’t cost anything, giving, thinking about someone else [...]

Let me tell you a story, everyone loves (?) my stories: One sunny Sunday afternoon in the Spring of 1971, I was in [deleted] visiting my grandparents. I was alone because my husband was off sitting in SE Asia while the Conflict continued. Anyway, I was out driving around in my ‘65 Mustang, four speed on the floor, going for a Coke, but probably was truthfully going out for a cigarette. (cool) I stopped at the stop sign on main street and my cousin Larry sped past me in his blue 1966 Corvette, a very “hot” car. He had the acellerator to the floor and he was headed south out of town at about 90 miles an hour. Now my cousin Larry was two years older than me, tall, fair haired, handsome….he and I were a better sibling match than my sister and I….in H.S. girls always wanted to know if Larry was my brother. (He was a [deleted], too).

Larry had returned from his time in Vietnam just the Fall before, shortly after your Dad was “sent over.” Larry was in the Air Force, a military cop, assigned to patroling the perimeter of the US base at DaNang….(you can look up DaNang sometime, it was a hell-hole). Every day, he patrolled the perimeter…..every night, the perimeter was “gassed/burned” with Agent Orange – to keep down the vegetation and the varmits from infiltrating the line, so to speak. Two months after Larry returned from Vietnam, after his coming home party (I was there), after being assigned to the Florida Keys as an Honor Guard (he was very handsome), after collapsing in a parade, Larry was diagnosed with testicular cancer which had spread to his lymph nodes. Surgery was performed and Larry was medically discharged.

The next six months he was in and out of the VA hospital, and went from being a handsome, young 23 year old to a rotted out corpse that in the coffin looked like a 80 year old shell of a man. I went to the funeral alone about two weeks before your Dad came home, August 1971. We were young, these things weren’t suppose to be happening to us. There was an honor guard that escorted the coffin, stood silent and at attention at the cemetary after firing a 21 gun salute. That is the saddest sound in the world, a 21 gun salute!

So, whenever I have, during the trials of my life, felt like I was “up against” the melancoly, the depressing, the hard to handle events of my life….I think of Larry, that Spring day in 1971 when I saw him driving that pretty blue Corvette, trying to outrun the shortness of his life and the day I heard the 21 gun salute for him and I know that he would have gladly faced all the “pains” of living if he would have gotten the chance. And that I’m being somewhat stupid about being sad by comparison even for a day.

On a shorter note, [deleted]. Got an e-mail today from [deleted], sounds like she had a lonely Sunday….so best write her….it’s so sweet…when she writes an e-mail (I’ve seen her do this) she types with the hunt-and-peck method, takes her forever.

Love you Six, very much,
I’m always here for you,
your MOM

The Man I Fear May End Up President

[Shamelessly taken from the New York Times.  All The News That's Fit To Steal. -ss] 

America’s Mayor Goes to America

By MATT BAI
Published: September 9, 2007

There are at least half a dozen reasons that a lot of political prognosticators, including many inside his own party, will tell you that Rudolph Giuliani will never be the Republican nominee for president, no matter what the polls say. They are, in no particular order:

1. As New York’s mayor, he was pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-gay rights.

2. He has demonstrated an odd propensity over the years for publicly dressing up in women’s clothing, proof of which is now readily available online, including a disturbing clip of Donald Trump nuzzling the mayor’s bosom.

3. He once endorsed Mario Cuomo for governor.

4. Once, while mayor, he holed up for months at the apartment of a gay couple who were close friends of his. Try explaining that one at Bob Jones University.

5. He has divorced two times; the last time, he broke the news to his family on national television. His two children don’t seem inclined to vote for him, let alone nominate him for Father of the Year.

6. Presidential politics is said to be largely about warmth and likability, and these aren’t words that leap to mind with Giuliani. His former political ally, Ed Koch, once felt moved to write a book titled “Giuliani: Nasty Man.” It sold well.

And yet here we are, just past Labor Day, when presidential campaigns become tangible affairs, and Rudy Giuliani isn’t showing any signs of fading. In fact, he continues to lead the rest of the Republican field in just about every national poll (followed closely by Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney), taking advantage of a fractious party flailing for direction in the era after George W. Bush. While Giuliani trails Romney in the critical early states of New Hampshire (where Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, is basically a local) and Iowa (where Romney seems willing to spend much of his estimated $250 million fortune to win over every churchgoing farmer in the state, if that’s what it takes), a bevy of polls show Rudy cleaning up in large, delegate-rich states on the coasts.

Giuliani’s campaign, like his resurrected political career, is built atop the rubble of the twin towers; his appeal is firmly rooted in the visual images of Sept. 11, 2001, and the policy dilemmas that grew from it. As Ken Mehlman, the former Republican Party chairman, explained it to me recently, elections can either be “squishy” or “crunchy.” Squishy elections, like the one in 2000, are ones where the candidates attempt to blur the differences among them on major issues and run, instead, on more ethereal attributes like character and authenticity, the kind of traits best demonstrated by sipping beers or emoting on “Oprah.” Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t stand much chance in a squishy election. But 2008, Mehlman theorizes, may be a crunchy year, where the nominees of both parties present sharp contrasts on hard philosophical questions, starting with how to view the threat of Islamic terrorism and what course to take in Iraq. And Giuliani is well positioned for such debate, having defined himself, in the public mind, as the unflinching foe of a radical and dangerous ideology. To many, he remains the Churchillian figure who strode up lower Broadway covered in a fine dust of plaster, removing the air filter from his face long enough to rally his panicked city.

The logic of Giuliani’s pitch to voters on terrorism will feel familiar to anyone who paid close attention to his political ascent. When he first won office in 1993, New York was widely considered a city beyond governance, an uncontrollable metropolis where violent crime, entrenched bureaucracy and swollen welfare rolls were accepted as the grim but unshakable realities of urban decline. Rudy ran as a real S.O.B., the guy who had the steel to restore order and sanity where no one else could or would. Whatever you think of Giuliani personally, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t succeed; crime and the welfare rolls plummeted for the first time in decades, while jobs and neighborhoods came back. Giuliani maintained an uneasy détente with the overwhelmingly liberal pool of voters who had chosen him for the job. He did the dirty work that made their city, at long last, livable and safe, the things their political correctness would never allow them to openly countenance. For their part, New Yorkers made a show of disdaining him at dinner parties for his bullying ways and pitiless programs, but they slept better knowing that Rudy was wrestling the city’s myriad demons.

Now Giuliani is running to become that same kind of president. In Giuliani’s view, we live in a dark time, caught up in the opening stages of a war with Islamic radicals that may span a few decades and several continents before it’s won. A president has to be willing to be the bad guy, to do the things that may make even his allies uncomfortable, and to do them with ruthless efficiency. So you wouldn’t want to have a beer with me, Rudy seems to be saying. So even my own kids don’t want to have a beer with me. But whom do you really want staring down the terrorists — me, or one of these other guys? Do you want someone squeezable, or would you rather hire the single-minded enforcer who had the testicular fortitude to tame New York?

Giuliani’s presidential campaign brings to mind that famous scene from “A Few Good Men,” in which Jack Nicholson lectures a boyish Tom Cruise on the practical realities inherent in protecting freedom. In Giuliani’s telling, only a thin wall separates innocent Americans from the violent apostles of a brutal and repressive ideology. You want me on that wall, Rudy would have us believe. You need me on that wall.

Inevitably, presidential campaigns take on the peculiar personalities of the candidates themselves. Bill Clinton’s aides worked without sleep and always behind schedule. George W. Bush’s team couldn’t conceal their Texan arrogance. Giuliani’s campaign staff is remarkably — almost unnervingly — disciplined. His campaign appearances inevitably begin and end on time. Each day of campaigning has a theme (“trial lawyers are bad,” “adoption is good,” etc.), to which the candidate lashes himself without fail, while high-powered surrogates back in Washington issue carefully timed statements backing him up. The campaign is unusually guarded with routine information, giving out only Giuliani’s public schedule, and almost no one associated with the campaign will talk to a reporter without a press aide listening in on the line.

When I first managed to track down Giuliani on the western edge of Iowa in mid-July, I was more impressed than I expected to be. In the abstract, after all, it’s hard to imagine the slashing mayor of New York getting on famously with the people of Sloan, Iowa, a one-strip farming town of about 1,000 people. (Motto: “A Good Place to Grow.”) But Rudy out of his element turns out to be a surprisingly deft campaigner. Ever the prosecutor, he retains a talent for explaining complex concepts, flipping his round spectacles on and off his face for emphasis and rubbing his forehead as if deep in thought. He has a penchant for talking to voters as if he were their tough-love therapist, frequently invoking words like “reality” and “denial.” Vowing to end illegal immigration during one town-hall meeting in Iowa, Giuliani told the crowd, “Every other country does it, and we can do it.” Then he clutched his heart and spoke softly. “It’s O.K. to do it.” You could almost hear a collective sigh among the Iowans, who didn’t consider themselves bigots just because they wanted to seal the borders, and who now felt validated by America’s mayor. They lined up for autographs.

Didn’t You And Alice Just Break Up?

Session Start (Sixsheep:Alice): Sat Dec 10 15:32:53 2005
Sixsheep: there you are
Alice: yes
Alice: I’ve been wanting to get ahld of you
Sixsheep: it took me an hour to get home.  traffic is messed up.
Alice: I’m sorry for the scarry message but i really was scared
Alice: oh no :(
Alice: I wanna see you
Sixsheep: did you get some sleep
Alice: eventually, i think i fell asleep after 6:30a,
Alice: m
Alice: but my jaw is tightly clenched
Alice: because of my meds….:(
Sixsheep: yeah I was thinking it was your medicine.
Alice: i havent been taking it regularly., and ive been wanting to take it during the day but havent because i keep forgetting
Alice: i think maybe i need to take pills twice a day instead of taking both at the same time
Sixsheep: its very important to take medicine like that regularly
Alice: it isnt supose to have withdrawl effects but i cant stop yawning
Sixsheep: you might want to tell the doctor about the jaw clenching because they can give you stuff for that
Alice: and i am so hungry….my money still hasnt posted to my account.  i need a new bank account, im so sick of getting screwed by this one
Alice: what ank account should i use
Sixsheep: usbank
Sixsheep: it’s so much better than other banks
Alice: god i feel like such a fag
Alice: all broke and shit
Sixsheep: hey babe
Sixsheep: tomorrow Libby is working and she owes me about 110 or so
Sixsheep: I told her tomorrow I would take 50 from her at work
Sixsheep: but if you go pick it up you can have it
Alice: i have 50 cents, and i need 0 of it to get diwgo cat food this afternoon
Alice: well i can pay you back :(:(:(
Sixsheep: I have something, that I want you to do, to pay me back.
Alice: i just, i mean, i dont want to be borrowng money from you just  because  my mom borrowed money from me it makes me feel so sleazy….she said she would give me money next week
Sixsheep: yes well.
Sixsheep: we’ll worry about that next week then, don’t worry about it now.
Alice: okay but i hope you believe me, i know i have wilingly taken your money before but this timne i just feel so upset about it because I am not poor and I do have money
Alice: its just that my mom is poor and she took it
Alice: what do you want me to do
Sixsheep: I want you to tell your mother that, in the future, you will not be her personal bank.
Sixsheep: and don’t worry because tonight is funtime :)
Sixsheep: bette davis movies are here
Alice: yayy
Sixsheep: also firewood
Alice: im so hungry
Sixsheep: oh the rent broadway soundtrack downloaded
Alice: YAY
Alice: I LIKE RENT
Alice: whoops caps
Sixsheep: my hard drive is too massive
Sixsheep: You have your own folder on my HD now
Sixsheep: it is called Alice’s Stuff
Sixsheep: I should make a server out of it
Alice: hopefully soon i cant get my own toothbrush
Sixsheep: wrong winda
Alice: iul
Sixsheep: oic
Alice: when you commin to get me
Sixsheep: I felt my man titty just now
Sixsheep: I am gettin some
Alice: wtf
Sixsheep: you should feel it
Sixsheep: pectoral
Sixsheep: muscles
Alice: ew
Sixsheep: muscles are not ew
Sixsheep: :(
Alice: aww im sorry
Sixsheep: I am going to be VERY HOT
Sixsheep: and then take my shirt off in the summer and you can be like oh wow that’s my man
Sixsheep: should I come get you now???  do you want food what should we eat
Alice: ye syes
Sixsheep: do you want spaghetti I feel like making spaghetti
Alice: hold on
Sixsheep: I wonder if I have any pasta
Alice: hmmm no
Alice: im not sure
Sixsheep: well I think that is what you are gettin missy!!
Sixsheep: because I’m hungry and I want beefy spag
Alice: :(
Sixsheep: do u want ……
Sixsheep: teriyaki beef thai noodle??
Alice: no i dunno lets just get something together
Sixsheep: yeah alright.  maybe potatoes.  I dunno I am in a cookin mood
Sixsheep: alright, I was going to shower again but I’ll just come get you instead
Sixsheep: hold on a sec
Alice: hol don hold on
Alice: I’m not at home okaty
Sixsheep: oh
Sixsheep: well where are you at
Alice: im at the office
Alice: i can leave at any time i tihkn
Alice: but id feel bad
Alice: i mean i dunno
Sixsheep: oh well when can you leave
Alice: i was suppose to work til  but then we found i have more aid, some im working til 5 then i think
Sixsheep: ok
Alice: or :30
Sixsheep: well I can go to the grocery in the meantime
Alice: you could just come meet me at montgomery and then i could leave with you
Alice: noooo i wanna come
Sixsheep: woman
Sixsheep: make a decision
Sixsheep: I wonder if there’s a traffic cam
Sixsheep: I could see what traffic looks like
Sixsheep: because it is so messed up it could take me until 5 to get up there anyways
Sixsheep: ugh it is pretty messed
Alice: what do you mean
Sixsheep: alright look can you be at montgomery at 5pm
Alice: okay come now then and avoid traffic
Alice: yes
Alice: course
Alice: wanna call when you are almost here?
Alice: just to make sure
Sixsheep: okay but be there promptly because it’s gonna take forever to get to my house and I am starvin
Alice: okay me too
Sixsheep: yeah I’ll call
Alice: okay leave now
Sixsheep: just be there
Alice: okay
Sixsheep: :)
Alice: :)
*** “Alice” signed off at Sat Dec 10 16:53:21 2005.
Session Close (Alice): Sat Dec 10 18::13 2005