I still remember this dream. The excitement was palpable.

---

*** Warning! Boring dream description ahead! Proceed at your own risk! ***

There was this house. Can't really say what the house looked like, because it was always changing. Every few minutes all of the walls and siding would sort of slide down into the ground, revealing a completely different house underneath. One minute it would be a castle, the next a log cabin.

After a while, I noticed that there was a huge stadium, and the house was in the center.

Thousands, maybe millions of people had crowded into the stadium to see the house. It was a huge party. A "house-party" you might say. Ha ha.

Apparently, the house was going to run out of new forms to take very soon, and that's why everyone was there. Everybody wanted to see what would happen when that last facade sank into the ground. Everybody wanted to see what the house would look like after its illusions had all been stripped away.

As the house's end neared, the dropping of the veneers sped up considerably. One, two, even three times a second the exterior would slide into the ground and briefly reveal a different house before it too would start to slide.

Near the end, the house became a blur. The very ground shook from the constant falling of the house's exterior. The noise got louder and louder.

At the very end, the house was a white two-story farmhouse. It kind of reminded me of my grandmother's house. It paused in that form for three or four seconds, and the crowd held its breath.

The walls started to slide, revealing...

...nothing.

Those white walls slid into the ground, and when they were gone, there was just a big empty square patch of grass in the middle of a stadium full of people.

Then I woke up.

bewildered
-adjective
1. completely puzzled or confused; perplexed.

That's the best word I can come up with for what I feel when I think about this.

It's just so damn, damn bewildering.

My "crimes" as far as I can tell, have been to (a) get excited about seeing my friend, and then (b) become disappointed when I don't get to see her.

You know what? I can deal with it. I feel bad that she can't, and I feel sad that she won't, and I even feel a little mad about being dismissed like this.

But, mostly, I just feel bewildered.

Now, I absolutely don't want to sound like I'm not accepting blame here. Because I am. I definitely fucked up. I just don't think I fucked up enough to lose my best friend.

I like sitting in my car before work. Weird, perhaps, but it's nice there. It's the closest thing I have anymore to sitting on my swing or in my garage and thinking.

One of these years I'll have to get my swing fixed. It pisses me off that I haven't been able to get anyone to help me with it. I guess I'll have to tackle it myself, and probably manage to burn down my house in the process.

That would suck.

Another thing I've noticed is that I don't really want any distractions when I'm trying to sit and think. It's a little surprising, given the inordinate amount of time I spend glaring at my phone during those times, But I don't think that counts. I love the emails and the texts.

What I've noticed is that my time in my car is a lot more enjoyable if I leave my radio off. And, while I thought it was cool for a while to have Picklepie keeping me company in my garage, he ended up being just as much of a nuisance as a pleasure. I mean, I couldn't really do any serious navel-gazing if I had to stop and pet him every ten seconds.

I dunno. I'm feeling a little writey today.

I need to get something off my chest now.

I think I'm hoping that, by writing this, I'll defuse my emotions a little. I'll imagine that it will be read, and that way I'll be able to make my point without any confrontation.

Speaking of confrontation, I'm pissed.

I thought that things had been exaggerated. I was, after all, being assaulted with false accusations; it didn't seem like much of a stretch to assume that other details were being at least skewed and perhaps even fabricated wholly to better match my accuser's anger.

But now I've heard pretty much the same story from several different sources, and it turns out that there was no exaggeration at all.

She absolutely didn't provoke the situation. And she didn't do anything to move things to where they went. She stayed calm and non-confrontational even as you escalated to threats of physical violence against her.

Seriously, you threatened to beat her face? Why? Because you don't like her?

That's the exact same reasoning that assholes and bullies use. Which one are you? Or maybe you're both?

On what planet did she deserve those threats? Certainly not planet Earth.

Look, you're allowed to dislike a person. Nobody is perfect, and I'd venture that everyone has at least one person that just rubs them the wrong way. Hell, most people I meet rub me the wrong way. But adults don't go around threatening physical violence. Adults don't resort to any form of intimidation at all. Adults simply choose to not interact at all with the people they can't stand. That's a hell of a lot easier, and more civilized, for everyone.

Are you not an adult, is that the problem?

Or are you going to blame alcohol?

Oh, that's original.

I don't expect this particular exercise - writing this entry in this journal at this time on this day - to do any good. But neither do I think it will particularly hurt. I think it will waste time, and that's something that I'm very good at, it seems.

I'm trying to make sense of nonsensical things. Why things are the way that they are. How things are, period. It's like there's a part of me that can understand and accept with cold calculated precision, and another part that can only sob. Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, I sit with my head bowed and my shoulders slumped, and I wait.

I don't know what I wait for. Release from all this, probably. I don't know what this is, maybe it's everything.

I'm angry at myself all the time. For hanging on for too long. For not hanging on long enough. For waiting too long. For not waiting long enough. For closing my eyes to the truth and to the lies. For wondering all the time about the future and regretting all the time about the past, and not spending nearly enough time in the present.

I'll never truly know, none of us can, what would have could have might have happened, if I'd just done a better job of things. If I'd just been a better person in her eyes. I fear, though, that I'll always wonder, and that will be it for me. That will be the rest of my story; a seemingly endless series of ellipses, until it finally and abruptly ends.

Dammit...

I know that it's a cliché for some people that people never change but I think that's bullshit. I know that people can change. I'm living proof, for one thing. There are other proofs, but I don't want to get into that right now.

I've been having a lot of flashbacks lately. Just weird random thoughts and remembrances of times far in the past.

I've remembered taking my stepson to watch fireworks on the day that his sister was born. I've remembered driving through South Dakota as I moved to Seattle. I've remembered my first night of basic training. I've remembered the first time I made love to MixedSignalGirl, and I've remembered the first time I laid eyes on LaptopGirl. I've remembered taking a piss in the middle of the night in the Nevada mountains, and being awestruck by the stars.

All sorts of memories have made their way to the surface of my brain lately.

I don't know why. Not really. I have some theories, though. Maybe I'm suppressing the really important things. The current things. Or maybe I'm focusing on the past because I can no longer imagine a future.

I'm not the same person I was, not twenty years ago, and not four weeks ago. I used to be so full of hope and excitement for the future. I used to think that there was a future.

Now, not so much. Now, I just sit here, and I wait. Every now and then, I breathe. I don't know why. Something to do, I guess.

Fuck it, I'll write something. Nobody's doing any real work here today, anyway.

There's a certain appeal to it. Mainly, I suspect, because it's the easy thing to do. I mean, nothing is always easier than something, right?

Right?

So maybe I'll just do nothing, and then I'll stay like this.

I'll be that guy.

You know that guy - he tried to give himself away, and then when his offer was rejected, he didn't want himself back.

Or something like that. It's hard to write sometimes. I know what I meant, though, even if I'm only rarely able to translate thoughts and feelings into words anymore.

There, I managed to kill ten minutes out of my day by writing this crap.

And the whole process of guesstimation is fraught with guesswork.

When does a dude stop simply acting like an asshole and become an actual asshole? When does a girl with loose morals become a raging whore? When does a child go from misbehaving to being a brat?

These are the kind of questions that we all ask ourselves all the time.

And there are no easy answers.

I've advised several people, over the years when they've been angry or sad, to just hold off a little. To not do anything in the heat of the moment. To take some time to think about what's happened and to consider what they're really dealing with.

It's the person who matters. Not the actions.

And sometimes I take my own advice. And sometimes I take it far too often, and far too many times.

Until something snaps and it no longer matters what kind of person I'm dealing with. The actions become all that matters, because everything else seems like a lie.

And so, here I am. Wherever this is. Nowhere, I suspect.

In a perfect world, I don't think anyone would care about how someone used to be. It should be obvious, after all is said and done, that it's how a person actually is that's more important.

A guy could have been, for example, a real asshole in high school but be a great friend now.

And even more important than how a person is would be how a person will be.

Like, a girl could be a total slut now but eventually she could settle down and be faithful.

There are three problems with all of this.

1. It's not a perfect world.
2. We can't see into the future, so we have to make guesstimations based on present and past behavior.
3. Sometimes past and/or present behavior simply cannot be ignored. See numbers 1 and 2 above.

To summarize, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.