While My Guitar Gently Weeps

..

It sits pouting in the corner, my guitar, its slender neck pointing into the air like an accusatory finger, or perhaps like a phallic symbol mocking me in my temporary (but still maddening) celibacy. We both miss him, my guitar and me. We both sigh and moan, counting the days until he comes home again. We both long to feel his skilled fingers once again, him playing us both with equal vigor and producing the loveliest of music from each of us.

Only a week without him--that's nothing compared to the years my guitar and I were without him before we knew him, but of course the intensity of being without him could only be felt in cruel contrast to the intensity and pleasure of being with him. I didn't know how much I was missing him until the day he captured me with his blue gaze and dropped a slow, sexy wink. Now I know exactly how much I'm missing him--enough to fill my days with thoughts of him, even as I sternly remind myself to get a grip and knock that shit off, before lapsing back into my bittersweet blue-eyed daydreams minutes later. Enough to fill my nights with dreams, either strange or erotic but always with him here with me and my guitar, right where he belongs.

Only a few days, then my guitar and I will be touched again the way we need to be touched. As much as I love my guitar, though, I'm afraid I must insist--me first!

Envy is for the dead

I saw this interesting idea recently and found it intriguing:

PERSPECTIVE: Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that one does not have value. Jealousy scans for evidence to prove the point - that others will be preferred and rewarded more than you. There is only one alternative - self-value. If you cannot love yourself, you will not believe that you are loved. You will always think it's a mistake or luck. Take your eyes off others and turn the scanner within. Find the seeds of your jealousy, clear the old voices and experiences. Put all the energy into building your personal and emotional security. Then you will be the one others envy, and you can remember the pain and reach out to them.

What is jealousy, exactly, and where in our psyches is it born? It seems that such a natural human emotion can’t be entirely unhealthy. Like anger and fear, it serves some purpose in our sense of well being, perhaps to warn us or to inspire us. And such a complex emotion can't be "simply and clearly" summed up or caused by any one aspect of our personality.

For a man, jealousy over a woman is usually first more related to sex than to anything emotional, but even men do feel jealous when a woman they care about gives her affection and attention and admiration to another man, even if she reserves the sex only for him.

Jealousy defined, first of all, I guess is the unpleasant feeling you experience when you perceive that someone is giving something to someone else that should be given to you. It’s a combination of confusion (that should be mine, why is it being given to someone else?), fear (does it mean that there won’t be enough for me? Am I about to lose something valuable?), pain (related to rejection, I guess, that someone does not consider me as special as I think I am), and anger (result of pain). So these emotions can occur in varying degrees and mixtures, and the whole combination, the jealousy, can occur in varying degrees. Like any other unpleasant emotion, its presence doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem, but the way you handle it can cause huge problems.

As an issue of low self-esteem, I see “envy” as what’s involved rather than jealousy. Perhaps it’s a subtle difference, but to envy someone is to strongly desire what they have—again, it can be a very unpleasant emotion but it doesn’t involve the same elements as jealousy. With envy, there’s no sense that the something the other person has should rightfully belong to you, no sense of confusion why they have it and you don’t, no sense of rejection really. Simply really wanting bad what it is that they have. As it relates to self-esteem, yes, I see envy as an indicator that one doesn’t feel deserving to have it. When we envy someone, we feel we have no choice, all we can do is watch and want. "Eat your heart out," the saying goes. Perhaps we don't feel worthy or capable of setting that as a goal for ourselves, nor do we feel any confidence that we could ever achieve it, so we just...want it.

With jealousy, one definitely feels deserving to have it, that’s the source of the emotion, that feeling that you are worthy of it, that you earned it or deserve it or have a right to it, but it’s being given to someone else. To me, that’s actually an indicator of good self-esteem. Maybe in extreme jealousy, it’s even an indication of too much self-esteem—ego, the feeling that you deserve everything from everybody and anything anyone gives to someone else makes you jealous because it should be yours. In this sort of person, there’s no feeling unworthy of having that thing, it’s just the opposite.

In the matter at hand, I can say I have a super cool life, I can’t complain, and I'm appreciative enough of what I've got, who I am and what I've done that I'm not likely to envy anybody else. If I see something I want, I either set it as a goal for myself or I examine what it is I want and why, and sometimes find that I don't really want it after all. Whatever I would like to have that I can’t have right now, I can quite easily put out of my mind (if I’m left alone and not provoked), or I can put it on the shelf of my heart labeled “Someday I Will Have This, Just Watch and See.” I feel no sense of being unworthy to have it.

And, dear Lord in Heaven, I absolutely never envied Her for what she has. I would sooner convert and become a nun than to step into her shoes. Consider for a moment what has been seen through my eyes. While the relationship may be the most perfect, fulfilling, inspiring, healthy relationship in the history of mankind, consider the small sliver of that relationship I have seen. Two people tossing romantic cliches back and forth to each other, making declarations of love and devotion that sound quite large and impressive but really have no substance when you look close, telling very little about them other than the fact that they both know how to use Google and how to find music on the internet. The slice of relationship I saw, it could have been any two people in love, very generic.

Come now. Do you not know me well enough to know that I would never envy this? Sure, everybody wants love but does this seem like thekind of love you'd expect me to eat myheart out for? (Again, it's very likely the relationship itself is very deep and earth-shakingly good, but I would only be able to envy what I could see, and what I saw was not something I want.) When have you ever known me to be impressed by a cliche?

You know me, I'd get a bigger kick out of subtlety and more flattered by something that seems very understated but is in fact something deeply meaningful to me or to us. I'd be more touched by a very simple gesture than week after week of grandiosity and hyperbole.

You can believe it, or choose not to believe it if your ego requires you to think certain things about my motivations, but if you sincerely think that my motivations were jealousy and envy, you don't know me well at all. Envy, or feelings of being unworthy, were never a factor here.

Jealousy was born when I began to perceive that certain things should be given to me, that I had earned them or that I was led to believe they might be given to me, only to have them yanked out from under my nose and given to someone else. Jealous--yep, I was.

I’m fortunate enough, though, to be emotionally very flexible. I’m pretty good at changing my perspective, developing healthier (and less painful) ways of seeing the world. In short time I no longer felt that what was being given to Her should be given to me. I felt betrayed by certain manipulations and deceptions, sure, but the jealousy part was easy to get over. Love is love, and you can’t fault someone forever for giving it to the person they feel it for. It’s life. It happens. We could have been friends, and that sting of jealousy would have stayed gone. Yes, really, gone. I no longer felt pain to see the lovers, nor any sense that I should have that. I was curious. I wanted to understand.

Of course, some people get an ego boost from inspiring jealousy in others. And certain well-placed words or actions can bring jealousy back from its cold green grave--that feeling of being entitled to have something which is being given to someone else, that feeling of rejection. When jealousy is gone, how do you get it back? You simply get the person to believe again that they should or could have what's there. Being once bitten, the person might be reluctant to believe it this time, so you might even have to go so far as to suggest that not only will you give her that thing she has earned and is worthy of, but that you will no longer give it to the other person at all. Bang, the person is now ready to feel jealous once again when it turns out to be untrue.

Most importantly, the jealousy could have been severely eased or even completely eliminated with just one brief, sensitive, direct conversation--or even just an email--in which you expressed regret at any pain caused but shared your honest intentions and shared some of the reasons things turned out the way they did.

But if inspiring jealousy was your goal, yep, you did it just the right way.

Imagine the hypocrisy of a man who intentionally provokes jealousy in a woman and then criticizes her for feeling it and questions her self esteem. Especially when his own jealous impulses have caused him to do things like this:

[link deleted, because I'm over it now and far too mature to go there again.]

I think I caught something deadly...

I just finished reading a book that has creeped me out more than anything since, I don’t know, Pet Sematary I guess, but this one is not fiction, it’s real! When I told Steve about it, he laughed at me and said, “Uh, where were you in the 90’s?” Okay, so apparently this is an old book and there’s a movie based on it with Dustin Hoffman and everybody knew about this except for me, until now.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.

Come on, y’all, pretend like you never saw Outbreak and you’re just hearing about this Ebola thing for the first time. Oh My God!! Right?? Wow.

What is up with these weird African viruses that can get inside a person and just make him, like, dissolve internally within a couple of weeks until he finally erupts, in impressive geyser-like fashion, with fountains of black blood and vomit? These are viruses (virii?) that incubate only 3-10 days before they kill you, and they have a 90% mortality rate. Which means, if you get this shit onya, you’re toasted. And it ain’t a pleasant way to go.

I’m not going to describe the progress of the disease caused by the Ebola and Marburg viruses; there’s no way I could make it even half as horrifying as it was when I read it. I swear, I could not put this book down, but I felt like I wanted to be wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask while I read it. I must have increased my hand-washing behavior by at least 300% since I began reading this book.

Instead, I turn my thoughts to the concept of a virus itself. This book has made the virus scarier than anything I can remember being scared of in my whole life, and yet so small that millions of them would fit on the dot of this “i”. If five of those teeny tiny little things got in your blood, you’d die a terrible death. Worse, you’d probably know you were going to die many days before the relief of death actually came to you. It would start with a headache…

But the virus himself…is he evil? Does he kill? I’ve heard some people say that the AIDS virus is a tool of righteousness, a moral judgment on gay people, but the HIV virus kills “people” not “gay people.” And these Ebola critters are far far far more deadly than HIV, and you don’t even have to have sex or do anything immoral to catch them. All you have to do is be there with your living cells ready to receive the uninvited guest of a virus or two.

A virus is not really even a living thing, is it? It is a simple structure made of protein that just lies dormant until it bumps up against something alive. It’s like a tiny little chunk of your hair or fingernail. Not alive at all, does nothing, consumes nothing, produces nothing. Until it brushes up against a living cell, and then it grabs hold. It penetrates, and then its sole activity is replication. It can’t reproduce like a living thing, but its only reason for existence is to create as many copies of itself as it can, using the host cell’s reproductive equipment and instructions. In Ebola, it is this zealous, mindless reproductive frenzy that causes the death of the host organism. The virus simply reproduces itself so rapidly and efficiently that it causes every living cell to burst open with thousands more viruses, turning the whole body to jelly and dead blood.

And then, of course, in order for the virus to continue doing what it loves to do, it must find another living host, and what better chance of doing that than to end the whole infection/drama/kill by causing a massive eruption of virus-filled fluid? You see, this virus produces the best biological means for its own spread to another host. Even the “evil” HIV virus doesn’t do that! It would be, like, since AIDS is spread easiest through body fluids during sexual contact, so one symptom created by the virus is unusual horniness, making sexual contact more likely, thereby increasing the virus’s chance of spreading. That not being the case, I think the AIDS virus is not evil. Not even close.

This Ebola fella, though, he might be evil. He freaks me out. I’ll be having bad dreams about him for a while, you watch.

"What's puzzling you is the nature of my game..."

"Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?"

"Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day--and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,--
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more."

For some, villainy comes quite naturally. They were born to wreak havoc on others, taking pleasure in their own ability to cause pain. As we welcome the sweet relief of a villain's departure from our lives, we can rest assured--even the devil gets what he deserves.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.
Write for example: ‘The night is fractured
and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’
The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.

To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.
Hear the vast night, vaster without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.
What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.
The night is fractured and she is not with me.
That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.
My heart looks for her: she is not with me
The same night whitens, in the same branches.

We, from that time, we are not the same.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.
Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.
Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,
and these are the last lines I will write for her.
~Pablo Neruda

Pants on Fire

No human behavior has caused me so much tribulation and pain as lying. I know we all do it, to some extent. Some are really really good at it. I’m not naturally a liar. Not that I never do or never have, but I generally avoid that particular form of manipulation because I’m no good at it. So, since I don’t typically lie, I guess I expect the same from people and therefore am (have been) extremely gullible.

Obviously, being lied to isn’t really a problem unless you believe it. So, for me, learning when not to believe has become a priority. It’s difficult (but not impossible) to spot a liar in someone you don’t know very well. There are body language signals you can watch for and other kinds of signs, but when interacting with a stranger, I find it distracting to focus my attention on trying to remember and notice the signs of a liar. I wind up asking him to repeat himself because I’ve been too busy trying to see if he’s telling the truth to even hear what he said.

In fact, the better you know a person, the easier it is to catch their lies. Specifically, after you've caught them in a lie once, you pay closer attention and watch for the next one (and it will come). You learn their unique “liar language,” the tics and quirks they take on when they practice to deceive.

But regardless of how well you know a person, the most absolute and surefire way to know if a person is lying is if they say something that you know for a fact is not true. Brilliant, right? And it’s not as hard as you might think. All you have to do is know things. Random things. Things that may not seem important at the time; things you wouldn’t imagine the person would lie about, as well as things you think they might lie about. Just know lots of things, and then pay attention to what they say. Not only what they say, but pay attention to what it is they want you to believe. Does it contradict some of the stuff you know to be true? What’s the person’s motivation for wanting you to believe the Untruth—honest mistake, self preservation or sinister manipulation?

Here’s some of the “liar language” I have learned over the years:

1) The classic sign of a liar is failure to make eye contact. Remember Ian, the crazy Englishman whose every word was a falsehood? This eye avoidance was something I noticed right away but dismissed it as a cultural difference or perhaps shyness or insecurity. In the absence of any other signs of shyness, I should have realized he was a bullshit artist from the moment we met. His eyes were constantly darting off to the side, bouncing off my face as he talked, peering at something across the room as though he were myopic.

And my ex-husband the ogre, when he lied, he’d stare at the TV or something, as if he were so disinterested in the conversation he could barely remember what he was saying. If you can't see his eyes, he's lying.
When faced with a false accusation, we face our accuser with full focus and direct eye contact. When denying a true accusation, we angle our bodies away from our accuser and look for means of escape (eyes darting toward the door or glancing at a watch).

2) Mis-spoken or unintelligible words. Ian did this too. Postured as "I’m so shocked and offended by what you’ve suggested that I can’t even think straight or string together a coherent sentence!" But a person who truly has been wrongfully accused will communicate very clearly, wanting to clear up the misunderstanding and make the truth known in no uncertain terms.

3) Predicting your suspicions and being pro-active in defending against them. When he starts explaining something you didn’t ask him about, he’s lying. When you ask a simple, innocent question and find the answer is strangely long and drawn out, filled with explanations you didn’t ask for, he’s lying.

4) People look up and toward their stronger hand when imagining something. They look toward the opposite hand when remembering something. If you watch Clinton’s Monica Lew testimony, you’ll notice his eyes go up and toward the left. For most people, this would indicate that he’s remembering events as they happened, not making them up or concocting a story. Until you remember that Clinton is left-handed...(don’t get me wrong, y’all, I love Bill Clinton and I miss him. But he is a liar. Yeah, like any politician isn’t? Don’t get me started on Bush’s liar language. Okay, here’s Bush’s liar language: is his mouth moving? He’s lying.)

5) Liars will include lots of detail in their stories, to make them more believable, of course. But you’ll notice that no details are included that provide another person’s POV or reactions. Liars tend to avoid details that can easily be proved false.

6) Liars use the following phrases: "You don’t believe me, do you?" or “You gotta believe me! It’s true!” or “Please believe me.” One who is telling the truth expects to be believed. "I can prove it!" Offering to prove something without offering any real proof is a sign of deception, especially when you have not asked for proof.

7) A liar is always happy (relieved) to change the subject.

8) Sudden loss of hearing. Purposely misunderstanding what you said. Asking you to repeat yourself. Repeating your words back to you. These things give liars time to think on their feet.

9) Excessive or inappropriate sarcasm. Some people are more sarcastic than others, but liars seem to use this tool more than most.

10) When phrasing an accusation, say it like this: "I didn’t want to do this, but unless you are honest with me, I have no choice." A liar will respond with "do what?" His concern is about the consequences, what you are threatening to do. He needs to consider his options. An innocent person is not concerned with the options because he has nothing to confess.

11) Using "I would never" as support for the lie. "No, I didn’t sleep with her. I would never do a fat chick." This was one of the ogre’s classic signs—and yes, he did do the fat chick.

12) Prior history of lying. I made the mistake of thinking that if someone has been caught in a lie, they are more likely to tell the truth next time, because of the embarrassment of getting caught lying. Not so. With some people, lying is their natural and preferred way of dealing with people, regardless of how many times they get caught.

Another good piece of advice: when confronting someone, don’t offer up all your evidence at once. Seems really obvious, but I used to make this mistake all the time with my ex. The liar will concoct his story to match your evidence. But you can almost always catch the lie if you withhold some things while he goes into his explanation.

The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk

Benway: "Why not one all-purpose blob? Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

"This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

"This man worked for a carnival, you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Better Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?'

"'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.'

"After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk too, and have crying jags, nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time, day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit.'

"After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous -- (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) -- except for the eyes, you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye on the end of a stalk. "

~William Burroughs