So, my sister leaves this Saturday... it seems too incredibly fast, and between her schedule and my schedule, we have hardly had any visiting time at all. I'm hoping we can go to the beach tomorrow morning, but I work at the clinic in the evening so we'll see.

Right now she's on a weasel farm, working one of her internships, and I'm at my studio, procrastinating on the writing I keep telling myself to get working on. I'm supposed to be prepping a couple of short stories to send off... pieces that are almost done, but need a couple hours of intense clean-up before I'm satisfied with them. I'm not really sure that any of the journals are accepting right now, it being summer and all, but the least I can do is get them all prepped... pdf form and print form and so forth... and ready to head out when the time comes again. I'm also supposed to be working on my longer piece... but it's hard to know where to start (again). Somewhere, I guess.

But in the meantime, I am brooding about inconsequential things like whether to go to the Bville pride parade this weekend, when I don't believe I've ever had a nice time at the parade. Mostly I just get headaches and heartaches and end up going to a bar and getting too drunk and asking some random dude to play air hockey with me, and letting him win out of gratitude for playing me. It's awfully hard to play air-hockey by oneself.

So, reasons to go to the parade are as follows:

1) It's a good cause. Folks should be recognized as a part of the community and I know lots of young queers (students, co-workers, etc) who have felt a part of something, finally, at the parade.

2) Sometimes, for a few seconds, I imagine that one of the hotties has noticed me and is flirting. Usually she's waving at the person behind me, but for a few absurd seconds, I think I might actually meet someone--maybe a new friend, maybe an amazing sex fiend, maybe instant and rewarding love--before I end up laughing at myself and my ridiculousness. It still can be a nice, if temporary, hope--if somewhat hypocritical, as one will see if they continue reading into the 'cons'.

3) I enjoy costumes. I mean, I really enjoy costumes. All the way, and fully.

4) Sometimes after the parade, there are hula hoops and I can step into the larger ones and swirl them around my hips like the arms of a lover at a dance-party, a happy smirk on my face.

But, reasons not to go to the parade are as follows:

1) I always feel incredibly and inevitably lonely at the parade. Not a part of anything--not noticed, not cared for, not one of them, not hot or slinky or naughty dirty, not gay.

2) I always run into the Bville Ex with her arm around her wife. That is, I would always run into the Bville Ex if I didn't turn around and walk away. Just seeing her instantly turns me beet red with the past running about me, sometimes gives me hives, makes my heart speed up 1000x times, and within ten minutes, gives me a pounding headache.

I want to say that things should be more mellow than that, because last summer we met a few times and talked a little bit. Not nearly enough really, but enough to clear up a couple of docket items on both our sides (although she couldn't bring herself to directly ask me if I had sabotaged her friendship with Natalie, a negligence that no doubt comfortably allows her to continue thinking I was at fault for the end of that particular 'friendship'), and to establish in my mind that a) there are too many things impossible to say that are roadblocks, and that b) she doesn't have anything new to add to the discussion anyways. I realized that if I couldn't meet up with her without crying for a week afterwards, then I really, really shouldn't be meeting with her at all.

And I found some small solace that maybe she actually cared like she had always said she cared when her hands shook while writing down her address. Because I gave her my address (which I've told nobody) and invited her to drop me a note from time to time, and said I'd do the same if she'd give me her address. And so she wrote, hands trembling so badly that her little digits and street name still sits lop-sided on a scratch of paper in my address book. But I haven't written to her at that skewed address, and like so many times before, the reason I haven't written to her is because she hasn't written to me. In fact, she's never done anything I've seriously asked her to do in the hopes of repairing... things. Although she'd be pleased to tell everyone I know that she has.

I feel like I dwell on this. I dwell far, far too much on this story, but I'm not sure any other story has even come close to supplanting it. Other people's stories, sometimes, other stories far, far more disgusting than my own, which only involved a public betrayal and humiliation, a continued game-playing, and my loss of trust in formal education. As I hear about people who have been murdered by people they love (that diver who murdered his wife on a dive and watched her slowly drown and drift away before leisurely making his way to the surface), or betrayed after years of marriage (a woman I met in Alaska was with a coke-addict with a penchant for brawl-fighting, but who was clearly with him to escape, as she couldn't help talking to me, a stranger, for hours about her husband who had cheated on her with her best friend, and then left her, and then come back, and then left her), or felt other small or large pains that left them somehow broken for this world, for part of this world, at least, I realize how simply my story is, how easy it should be to walk away from it and write another story, another thousand stories... but I still dwell on this one.

Perhaps because I'm still here in Bville, and although I want to believe there is a match out there for me, I halfway believe there isn't (arrogant loneliness) and halfway believe that if there were, they would probably treat me like shit anyway (the low self-esteem of the fat/jealous/fragile/poor/crazy + feeling sorry for myself).

Regardless, whenever I see the Bville Ex, I get a headache because my mind inevitably starts chattering on about ugly things. I start thinking about how destructive and barren and self-centered romantic love is. Like it has no use but to destroy--if not us, then the world. Part of me truly believes this... that it's not religion that's the opiate of the masses, but romance.

I mean, I believe in love, fer sho'. Friendship, family, compassion for strangers, to students, for teachers... love strikes me as an amazing force that infinitely builds such intricate, fragile and invisible webs among people, connecting us in ways that are unfathomable and ultimately unknowable. But romance? If there's a point to it, I haven't yet discovered it. It seems entirely, totally self-centered in a way that leaves out, destroys, and prevents the other important webs of interconnection from human to human, to spirit to land, from this country to Iraq to Afghanistan to Russia. I don't think romance is solely responsible, must admit, but I do think it falls into that category that lulls people into self-absorption... like too much soap opera, too many reality shows or twittering or pontificating (or blogging, or drinking).

And while I have this side of me that hates romance, that starts making these stories of bitterness... remembering how I know maybe only one couple over 50 that has shared romantic love for years (my grandparents)... or remembering, contrarily, how a short, intense and beautiful relationship that could have remained just that - a poignant beginning to a friendship, a brief and eerily soulful connection between two people who needed each other for entirely different reasons - became instead so twisted, so painful and revolting and cruel. Well, it makes me think that, long or short, committed or fleeting, romantic love is still more of a source for pain than for joy.

And some get to smugly write it off, literally in this case, as a "love is a bitch, I guess I'm too hot, arrogant and naughty" kind of thing, while others get to have flashes into the darkest crevices of their ridiculous and semi-grotesque brainpan when they run into old Bville Exes with their Wives, who inevitably were connected to you, in a whisper and dried up shrivel of a strand of one of those things that you wish you could feel again... trust, maybe. Something like that.

But I get to thinking about this too: that this story I tell myself, that I feel whenever I walk the Bville parade, is just that... one story. One way among millions of processing information, and I've come also to believe that the way we tell our story is more important than the concrete world we think we negotiate. That actually, there is nothing more than the different stories we tell--fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biological report, Freudian reasoning, nature channel... And I could easily take this one story, this one short story of romance as a bully illusion, and try to think of it differently...

...but I don't really know how.

So, I try instead to think of more even-handed, level stories - between other friends, between me and my other lovers (all of whom have been kind and brilliantly-lit in some way), between strangers I don't even know, people who are not walking down the street watching the crowds or costumes or parade floats or strange lovers holding hands, their stories tight amongst them... not doing these things, not because of fate or chance, bad luck -- or even one silly running-running-running lover who never, ever listened, who never ever put herself out on the line, who couldn't quite believe the best of me, and who only wanted my friendship once she had pushed me irrevocably away... because, as she herself told me, she more frequently wants what she thinks she can't have, than what she thinks she can -- not for any of these reasons, but simply for the reason that they are not allowed to have a parade, a queer lover, a queer past, or any kind of hope to be equally recognized by a system that has ruled the world for centuries now. So, you know, I know technically speaking that my story is not a very compelling one. Is, in fact, one that I should have torched and dodged long ago.

Anyhow, I'm still not sure whether to go to the parade, although I feel like I probably should. There is always the potential for flirting though? Heh.