This entry brought to you by Brother Thelonious (75) from the North Coast Brewery.

I have a feeling, a near certainty actually, that this entry isn't going to be published. It's not going to be good enough. It's not going to be worthy of the thoughts and feelings driving its creation. So, I figure, maybe I'll just use this as a practice entry. I'll save it in my drafts folder and then some night I'll be drunk or lonely and I'll rewrite it as something worthy of being published.

Or maybe not.

So SassyGirl is back in town for a visit. I wish I could describe here how fucking wonderful it was to see her Tuesday evening, and Wednesday evening. How much I look forward to seeing her tomorrow night at Rich O's. I wish there were some words that I could use to adequately describe how happy I've been to see her. Words that I could use without fear of people reading the wrong feelings into my words. I doubt that such words exist, and if they do, they continue to elude me.

It is just a visit though. I can't let myself get too satisfied with my life. Such as it is. In a few days or maybe a week, everything will go back to the way it's been for months. Me vs. the world.

You know, I used to never have any friends. All I ever had was acquaintances. They came into my life, and they left my life, and I noticed that they'd gone, but I didn't care. Not really.

All of that changed with LaptopGirl. Sure, I may not have been much to her, but she was my friend. And she came into my life, and she left my life, and I definitely noticed. I may have written about it from time to time, how much I fucking noticed. I don't see her anymore. I've seen a girl who looks like her, and sounds like her, a couple of times. But it's not her. It's not my friend. I don't even think that person ever really existed, except in my head. And my heart.

Anyway.

I met SassyGirl about a month after I met LaptopGirl. In this blog, I used to call her RealTrainGirl. That seems like a million years ago. SassyGirl is so much more fitting. Anyway, that time, the relationship was pegged from the start to remain a platonic one. That time, I never had any of those pesky romantic feelings get in the way.

And you know what?

It was wonderful.

Then SassyGirl left, and once again, I fucking noticed. I was sad. But it was okay. She'd said goodbye. We said goodbye to each other. And besides, it was never going to be forever. We'd see each other again.

Like six months later. Like Tuesday evening.

So that was cool. And it will continue to be cool, like I said, for a few more days or maybe a week. Then we'll say our goodbyes again. And it will be okay, because we'll know that it won't be forever.

Now, this next part is going to be a little tough for me to write. Tough because it's a tough subject for me, and tough because I can just about guarantee that it's going to be misinterpreted.

But I've got to write this. If I don't, if I don't then I'm going to explode some night.

The thing is, everybody leaves.

I think that at least a part of me has known this for a long time. Nothing lives up to the expectations originally hinted at or hoped for. Nothing lasts. Nothing.

Ahem.

HatGirl is leaving.

In either fifteen months or in ten months, she is leaving. The deadline varies but its meaning to me and my life - such as it is - is as steady as a rock.

When HatGirl leaves, it's going to destroy me. It's going to destroy me and every bit of the progress I've made since LaptopGirl left. And I think that there's not a thing I can do about it. I could start to pull away right now, but that would not lessen the blow. I could strive to make every day that I have left count, but that would only delay the inevitable.

It's my fault, of course. It's pretty much always my fault.

It's not love, I once wrote, but it's something.

Something that I should have seen coming. Something that I should have nipped in the bud, as they say.

And now, now I find myself unable and/or unwilling to write anything more about this. What else could I say?

HatGirl is leaving. Those three words. Those three fucking words.

They sear my soul.

June 10th through 15th!

Yay!

It's at The Venetian though, so I have serious doubts that there'll be any good beer. Maybe no beer at all. Probably just foo-foo drinks and wine and champagne, and nothing but caviar to eat.

But I'll get by. I always do.

Vegas, baby!

Jordin: Boring but good. (70 points)

Sabrina: She gets prettier each week, and her singing is steady as a rock. She needs to keep working on her depth though. (75 points)

Antonella: Not very good. Bad, in fact. I will miss her because she seems sweet. (25 points)

Haley: Smoldering hot. Sang some song I never heard before. Good but not great. (75 points)

Stephanie: She's back! Yay! Just awesome. (90 points)

LaKisha: Seriously, just give her the the fucking title. I took off 10 points because I'm a little concerned that she can only sing huge songs. (90 points)

Gina: She's fucking awesome. She has horrible luck with that one background singer though. (95 points)

Melinda: I really like Melinda, but tonight she seemed a little too gospelly for my tastes. She's still great though. (85 points)

A couple of days ago I read on The Dilbert Blog that Scott Adams used the Google Alerts service to keep tabs on what people are writing about him.

I'm familiar with the service. I use it myself. Basically, you tell Google what text to watch for, then when the service finds that text, it emails you with a link.

I use it to looks for my own name, my domain name, and the names of some people who are important to me. Scott Adams uses it to look for the words "Scott Adams Dilbert."

The cool thing is, that by typing that last sentence, I've triggered an email to be sent to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. Rich and famous Scott Adams.

That's the cool thing. The fucking cool thing is that, as Scott admits in his own blog, he carries his Blackberry in his pocket.

So, by typing that sentence up there a couple of paragraphs ago, there's a good chance that I've startled Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, and caused him to derail from whatever train of thought he might have been on.

Maybe he was thinking up his next comic. Maybe I messed that up. Maybe, because of me, it won't be nearly as funny as it would have been.

Or maybe, maybe I jolted him from an idea that was sort of funny to one that's absolutely fucking hilarious.

Maybe he'll be so grateful that he'll start paying me to derail his thought train every now and then.

So what if that lottery thing hasn't worked out? I've got a new retirement plan now.

So I suppose there's a chance that the next time you hear from me, I'll be dead.

Anyone, of course, can say that at any time. Nothing in life is guaranteed, not even life itself. Especially not life itself.

I have managed to royally fuck something up. Physically I mean. Something is not only not right, it's downright wrong.

But I don't know what it is. Maybe it's, as I thought this morning, just a pulled muscle in my back. Maybe I slept weird or something. But if that's all it is, well then it's the worst such case of soreness I've ever felt.

Now don't freak out (especially if you're one of my sisters) but today I fell to the floor in pain. Fucking twice. That brings the number of times I've done that in my life to two.

In other words, it fucking hurts.

In more words, a fucking lot.

Specifically, the pain is about halfway down the left side of my back. It hurts like a motherfucker right now, even as I sit here typing this sentence. Ouch.

So I can't help but wonder if maybe it's not just a pulled muscle caused by sleeping weird. I can't help but wonder if it's something worse. Maybe something that will kill me tonight after I (hopefully) drift off to an aspirin-induced slumber. Aspirin and Rogue Smoke (658), I mean.

Earlier tonight, I took a long hot bath. Even though I was at least a little bit afraid and/or certain that I wouldn't be able to get out of the tub when I was finished, it seemed to be worth the risk. The hot water did seem to help, for a while at least.

And it's not like I didn't take any precautions.

I made sure that the phone numbers for my friend Eric and my cousin Jeff were on speed-dial, and that my phone was right next to the tub. So if I couldn't get out of the tub I could call one of them for assistance. Because while I'm sure that my sisters love me and that they would drag my naked carcass out of the tub if necessary, that activity probably wasn't on their wish-list when they started their day.

But the hot water did make me feel a little better, and I did make it out of the tub my myself. I'm fucking Superman, apparently. Wait, that doesn't read right. I am most certainly not fucking Superman. How about I am Superman, apparently. Yeah, that's better.

(SCRIBBLERESQUE PARENTHETICAL ASIDE: I wonder if Supergirl's hymen is as indestructible as the rest of her. That would suck for her, and for any of her boyfriends. Better, I think, would be if she were like that chick on Heroes, where her hymen would just automagically repair itself whenever the need arose.)

Anyway, I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe it's just another sign of old age. All I know for sure is that it fucking hurts to be me right now.

Blake: The stupidest performance I've ever seen in my life. I took off 50 points because he fooled me into liking him a couple of weeks ago. (negative 35 points)

Sanjaya: A good song for him, and a decent performance. No, really. And I'll try not to kill myself for admitting that he did a decent job. (65 points)

Sundance: I'm pretty sure that he was drunk. I'm positive that I wished I was. (10 points)

Chris R: A decent job with a country song. A little twangy at times. (50 points)

Jared: Look! It's the man with no soul! I thought it was funny when Paula advised him to "color-up" his performances. (0 points)

Brandon: This is some kind of sick joke, right? (negative 473 points)

Phil: Good song. Started out crappy, then got kinda sorta better, then finished crappy. (25 points)

Chris S: Sang some strange song, but I liked it, and I thought he did a great job. (80 points)

I have a tiny confession to make now. One that will come as zero surprise to anyone who's been reading my drivel for any length of time.

I don't know what I'm fucking talking about. Or writing about. What the fuck ever.

Luckily, for me, and for you at home, I sometimes have help. Like tonight. Tonight I've been fortunate and privileged enough to have had The Reverend (370), from the Avery Brewing Company, join me for an evening of contemplation and soul searching.

I've had a question on my mind for a couple of years now. Closer to three years actually, but it doesn't matter exactly how long it's been. This question is eternal, and it's been asked by nearly everyone since the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of consciousness.

It's been asked for a long fucking time, in other words.

It's a two-part question actually. The first part is Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

The answer to that question is, of course, fucking yes and yes and yes and fucking yes.

I've written about this before, and it's actually one of the few subjects in which I don't feel like I'm just pulling answers out of my ass.

It's approximately seven hundred gazillion asstillion times better to have loved than to never have loved. Go ahead. Prove me wrong. I dare you to try.

And the really neat thing is, to love and then lose doesn't change a fucking thing. We live to love.

I'll say it again. We live to love.

Losing is, while not quite irrelevant, losing is nothing nothing nothing nothing fucking nothing compared to the loving.

So that's the first part of the two-part question.

The second part of the question is Why is it better?

And, tonight at least, I know the answer. At least as much as someone like me can know the answer.

The answer is actually quite simple.

Because sometimes, like maybe once in a lifetime if you're lucky, you don't lose.

Because sometimes, you get to love and you get to win.

To love is to open yourself to that possibility. To surrender yourself to that possibility of happiness. To allow yourself to have hopes, and dreams, and to imagine just how incredibly wonderful life could be.

If only.

This time.

I could be loved back.

Then I would win.

That hope, that trumps everything else. All of the pain. All of the heartache. All of the disappointment and the depression and the suicidal thoughts.

Hope is what separates us from the animals. Hope is what makes us human. So we keep looking. Even after failure after dismal failure, we keep looking for hope.

And, when we find ourselves in love, we also find the hope that's been buried so deeply within us that we almost forgot it existed. Love unearths it, and breathes new live into it, and resurrects it.

It takes over.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing else exists.

We become hope.

And I can't think of a loftier goal.

Someday, I hope to love and win.

Not a bad night, I suppose. A little irritating at times, but I've already gotten over it.

First thing I did was get something to eat at Wendy's. They have these fancy bread sandwiches, panini or something like that, that are delicious. Especially the steak and mushroom version, which is what I had.

Then I went to The Pub and had a couple Newcastles (3524) and talked to a couple of chicks from Canada, eh.

Oh yeah. I found out something very interesting. But of course I can't write about it. I'll just say that I came within three years of realizing a pretty common male sexual fantasy.

When I left The Pub I was planning to head over to Rich O's and have a Rogue Smoke, but I peeked into the Hard Rock, like I usually do, when I walked by. I was, as usual, looking to see if CoolHairGirl was working. And this time she was!

So instead of going to Rich O's I went in and had a Diet Coke and talked to CoolHairGirl for a while. It turned out that she'd still never made it to The Pub for a Newcastle, so when she got off work I invited her to join me for one.

Then, as I wrote in the previous entry, her boyfriend materialized and he joined us as well. I swear, I didn't even know CoolHairGirl had a boyfriend. Now I feel slightly guilty about some of the thoughts that have been running through my head about CoolHairGirl.

Anyway, I had a Newcastle (3544) and then a couple of Diet Cokes while I talked with CoolHairGirl and PajamaDude.

Plus there was this one chick who I thought might be a friend of my sister. So I went over and asked her. It turned out that I had her name right, and that she did know a girl with the same name as my sister, but it still wasn't the girl I'd thought she was. Still pretty weird.

At 1:00 or so I came home.

I did two things wrong tonight. At least, two that I noticed soon after I did them.

First, PajamaDude asked me what I did.

I've written about this recently. About how I shouldn't identify myself by what I do for a living, because it's too boring.

But I did it anyway.

PajamaDude asked me what I did, and I said that I worked with computers.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

So that was the first mistake.

Later, I was taking a piss, and I realized that I'd identified myself incorrectly. That I'd broken my own rule. So once I got back to the bar I told PajamaDude that I'd been mistaken earlier. That, though I worked with computers for a living, I preferred to consider myself as a writer.

So then he asked me what kinds of things I wrote.

"Mostly drivel," I answered.

"Like what?" he asked.

"Stuff about relationships," I said. "Or the lack thereof."

So that was my second mistake. I mean, I do write about crap like that, but it's hardly ever the main point of my writing.

What I should have said is that I write about things that annoy me.

Like when I invite a hot girl, who I've been interested in for months, out for a beer, and she agrees, but then her boyfriend materializes out of thin air and joins us and turns me into a third wheel.

I should have said that I write about shit like that.

Just a couple of surprises, both of the pleasant variety. So I was worried for nothing.

I got to Rich O's after 9:00. I got a parking spot in the actual Rich O's parking lot, so like a dumbass I thought that maybe it wouldn't be too crowded.

Wrong.

It was packed as fuck. With mostly strangers but quite a few weirdoes as well. Luckily I didn't see any fuckheads or idiots. I did see my cousin Jamie sitting in the loser section when I first walked in. I count him as a stranger.

Inside Rich O's proper, I gave Bubbles some shit for the crowd. It was supposed to be her night to keep the weirdoes away. She said that she didn't get the memo.

Anyway, the first pleasant surprise of the night was that Rogue Smoke was on tap. So I had one of those (530). I stood at the end of the bar for a while, then I moved some dude's jacket so I could sit at the kiddie table, then when the jacket dude left the throne I moved there.

Then it got boring for a while. But then a familiar and lovely shape darkened the doorway. I looked up, and it was HatGirl!

Yay!

So the next couple of hours were fun. Even though one drunk dude stole my seat when I went outside to take a phone call from work, and when I came back in I had to sit on the sofa. It was very nice to see HatGirl, and LuckyFucker seemed to be in a much better mood.

So all was good.

When I was about halfway through my second Rogue Smoke (550) a bit of reality started to sink in. Even though I've been doing my best to ignore and deny it. So I was glad that I could at least tell HatGirl a couple of things that had been on my mind. Then, of course, I apologized to her for dumping my problems onto her shoulders. She can take it though. And now maybe I can be a little less cryptic when I write about how bothered I am by all this.

Anyway.

I'd been kinda sorta halfway expecting to maybe even see SassyGirl last night. I talked to her Sunday, and she and JauntyGirl are slowly but surely making their way back towards Southern Indiana. But they didn't show last night. Oh well.

Once HatGirl and LuckyFucker left I had a Diet Coke and talked to FutureDude for a bit. Then I came home.