Fall 1992. When I was still “with” him. Whatever the fuck that meant to him.

WTF?

I didn’t hear this today. I think I heard it yesterday or the evening prior. I’m just now getting around to sharing it, unless I wrote about it previously and have now forgot. We just got back from a trip to western New York over Labor Day weekend and I’m now fighting Thea’s cold and I had way too many carbs over the weekend and my brain’s kinda foggy.

So. Christine. This other woman. Possibly Lana. Two definites so far, and he only fucked one of them because the other didn’t want him. Lana may have been a second fuck, and the third pursuit. While he was still with me.

And I am supposed to feel guilty about fucking around AFTER he did and in order to work through a rape? While he was off being Creepy Stalker Fuckaround Dude and partying while I was getting my ass kicked? He’d already stuck it in God knows who when he came to my basic training graduation!

What the fuck? What the fuck did he think we were going to do if we’d stayed together? Was he going to stay in Tipton County after we married? Was I going to be off by myself busting my ass and missing him while he was back home sticking his dick in every hole that would sit still long enough? On my benefits?

Wow. He wanted to be the stereotypical Army wife, huh? Right the fuck on.

I guess I better not make a public announcement of my next possible career move, then. He’d really be trying to get back into my good graces. Lower enlisted in the military don’t make shit compared to what just may be coming up.

Sucks to be him, too, because I would have been happy to support him.

More’s the pity for me, I suppose.

Right. So. Western New York. So guess where I went. I had never seen Niagara Falls, and we visited there. I have also never seen Canada in real life, and I could see it right across the Niagara River. Unfortunately we could not walk across this time as Matt’s been able to do in the past, thanks to those stupid-ass new Homeland Security rules. I got lots of pictures though. We stayed with Matt’s great-aunts just south of Buffalo, too. Very nice place. Would run for half a million easily here, but it’s only about $100k there, they told him. Nice big house, in-ground pool, apartment over the garage (studio, really, but with mini-kitchen and full bath), and God you should see that kitchen.

One of ‘em, at least, is a retired teacher, and of course she had an opinion about Thea being homeschooled, and of course the opinion was not good. And Matt had told them ahead of time that I was low-carbing and that neither Thea nor I liked onions. So what was our last dinner meal there? Some kind of grain and cheese casserole (literally whole grain–some trendy kind of “ancient wheat”, apparently), and a salad with onions and green peppers in it. I was a good girl and didn’t complain. At least not there and then. Actually, as the weekend wore on, carbs crept more and more into my diet, and here I sit tonight contemplating getting back on the wagon and I’m not looking forward to how my body will react. The first few days are always a bitch. What tremendous hostesses, I tell ya. If I’d been allergic to wheat, would they have left it out, I wonder? If I kept kosher, would pork have been on offer?

Oh well. Still a nice weekend for all that.

I intend to put up photos and make the account of this past weekend more of an actual story of the weekend but no promises. Maybe if my wits sharpen up.

Oh, and I’m doing PostCrossing now. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it. But it looks like fun.

OK so Johnny’s written back, which tells me he hasn’t written me off. Good. I hate losing friends. I guess if we steer away from politics it’ll be all right. Christine, though, I don’t know what’s up there. After I emailed her going “the problem is that you were with Craig while he and I were still an item” she sort of disappeared. I wrote her earlier today explaining that I’m not mad at her anymore, although I was for a long time, I just want to know what happened so that I can set things right in my own mind. Also, the more truth I know about what Craig’s been up to–or, at least, the more other-sides-of-the-story I can gather to get a more complete picture–the less likely it will be that I will try to re-open the door he slammed shut in my face. And that may very well become an issue in the future. He’s come back into my life to fuck with me once; there’s nothing saying he couldn’t try again in another twenty years. If he hasn’t changed for the better in the almost two decades he’s had already, there’s no more hope for him and therefore no point in me letting him back in.

I’ve had some more time to think this shit over and here’s what I’ve got so far. I could be completely off the beam, but I’ll never know because even before he dumped me, he wouldn’t talk to me. So this is an intellectual exercise more than anything.

It looks, to me, like he was trying to salvage his life. He told me he moved to WA because it was his mother’s idea. However. He told me about beating the mother of his alleged child in Nashville. But he didn’t tell me about the knife incident last September. Furthermore he referred to the event, especially the way the newspaper covered it, as “humiliating.” Oh. I see. So it’s not humiliating to beat up the woman you supposed was your child’s mother, nor to almost kill the neighbor she was boinking at the time, nor to serve prison time for the assaults, but it’s humiliating to simply pull a knife on someone and plead off? How, exactly, does that work again?

He was so deadly angry about it, too, the one time we really discussed it. Like if I’d been right there in the room he’d have beat the shit out of me.

Yeah. That hints to me that he didn’t have a record in WA, at least not an adult one, so when he went back he saw it as starting over. Nobody there knew what a fuckup he was except his mom and maybe his brother, and his brother went and died on him, and his mom eventually moved to the South. He got to have his clean slate. He was very insistent, later in our so-called “relationship” (post-fight), that more than anything he wants to get the rest of his life right. So he must have had that as his focus for a while. He wouldn’t have just suddenly decided it was a good idea.

It wouldn’t have had to be his mom’s idea for him to make the move to WA. Maybe it was, but it didn’t have to be.

I might have been part of that grand plan of his to fix his life. He said back in July that he’d known where I was for a year. He’s not real good at estimating time periods; he’d once told me he and I had been together for over a year too, which wasn’t strictly true. (Unless he thought of our friendship prior to hooking up as part of the relationship. That’s really a matter of opinion, though.) But if he’s right and it was a year, I wonder what was going through his head then, as he and that last girlfriend were still together then–I think. Maybe not. Maybe that’s when he dumped her. I don’t know.

But after the knife incident and the newspaper story, maybe he got desperate. Maybe he thought he’d better straighten the fuck up and go for someone who hadn’t been on the drugs and hadn’t been fucking around all that time–I mean, I mention publicly from time to time that I’m going through a dry spell. Maybe he thought it would benefit the both of us, since he could see I thought of my life as a mess as well. Bonus: When he still thought he was Ori’s dad, he was amazed at how much Ori grounded him, gave him something to live for. Maybe he figured that with me and Thea as an instant family, he’d have that again and wouldn’t go psycho anymore. Because surely I would not cheat on him again as I had in the past. I mean, for almost eight years I’ve been in close proximity with a man for whom I once had an intense physical attraction, and I haven’t fucked him in over three years. That’s a pretty good sign, right?

Then I found out about the knife incident.

Maybe it wasn’t that I became bad. Maybe it was that I knew he was still bad. I said a few days ago that one of the reasons I freaked out over it was that it was so recent. I don’t know how aware he is of that. He did know I wasn’t freaking out over stuff that happened back in the nineties. So maybe he’d figured it out already.

Maybe his big attraction to Farah is that she doesn’t know. Maybe he told her to ignore anything I wrote to her because I was just bitter. If she doesn’t know, then it’s all still good from his perspective. She was his ace in the hole.

I’m still not clear just how he was testing me, though, or how I failed. That part is never going to make sense to me unless he explains it, and he’s washed his hands of me, so an explanation is not forthcoming, I don’t think.

I kind of feel sorry for him now, to tell you the truth. If whoever he winds up with HAS to be ignorant of his past in order to love him, at least as far as he’s concerned… what kind of a life is that? What if she accidentally finds out about him–what’s he going to do then? It was an accident in my case too. It is not my fault the information was out there for me to stumble over, you know?

Yeah, I’m still assuming stuff and I could still be completely wrong and it could have been an elaborate plan to fuck with my head because of the breakup in ’92. I really don’t know. And again, I won’t know unless he tells me.

I’m just sad that any of this had to happen at all. For fuck’s sake, serial killers serving life in prison have groupies writing to them. I’m pretty sure not all the groupies have police records either. What makes him think nobody is going to love him unless he lies? Or what makes him think getting back at me at this late date is going to undo what happened in ’92? Either way you look at it, this whole summer was a waste in terms of what went down between me and him.

I’m still not totally sorry it happened; there were things I needed to process and finally deal with from back then. I suppose it’s too much to ask that I get it all dealt with, but some progress is better than none.

And, I guess, in my own way, I still love him. And that’s okay too. But it’s going to have to be more of the agape type and more at a distance, for my own emotional safety.

It is what it is.

That just ain’t gonna work, bra’…

I’m not sure if I can save all the work I’ve done with this first glove. I’m going to guess probably not.

It’s a good thing we got this yarn on clearance… I’m only out maybe a dollar. Still. Grumble…

I have been incredibly busy today. Not so much around the house. More like on this site. After Matt got home I really got into the groove and I’ve moved a whole bunch of stuff around and compiled. I want stuff together in one place where if there’s ever gossip, and people ever come over here to mock me from the anonymity of their keyboards, at least I’ve told my side of the story.

I suppose some perverse part of me wants also to show Wonder Boy, “Hey dummy, we had it good here. You should have been a bit more patient with me, IF you are right and I’m wrong and you really did have feelings for me.” Except you and I both know how much good that will do.

He just lets the nasty stuff out to play a bit too often for my comfort level. First the ugliness right after I found that newspaper article online, and now more ugliness that seems almost completely out of place. That doesn’t tell me he started out loving me and then changed his mind. Sorry. If that’s the message he wanted to convey he was going about it all wrong. Message not received. Please re-send.

Besides. “Always is a long time.” He kept saying that to me. AFTER the first blowup. Doesn’t look like a real long time to me. Unless he meant “I will always hate you, Dana.”

If that’s it, it would have been nice to have the truth. Either way you look at it, he lied to me.

Thea’s cold has settled into her chest and it’s so awful at times that she has to stop and catch her breath. She’s still up at midnight because her cough won’t let her sleep. This is after her dose of cold medicine and two cups of that Gypsy Cold Care herbal tea. There is no way we are going where we wanted to go if she’s going to be that bad off. First off, we won’t get enough sleep. Second off, this visit involves elderly women. Little kids with nasty colds around elderly women are not a terribly good idea.

We’re putting off suggesting postponing the trip, however. Thea will have a fit. No good for the cough.

I got my recipe/meal planning software and am thrilled with it. Also, there are nifty little bits and pieces that make my food geek all fucking ecstatic. Like, there’s this one area where you input ingredients that are not already in the software, like processed foods or whatever (for instance, if there’s a whey powder brand I use in low-carb recipes, I could sit here and input it into my software so I could then use it in recipes). And one folder in the ingredients list says Ethnic Foods. Guess which ethnicities they have in there? Just six: Alaska Native, Apache, Navajo, Northern Plains Indians, Shoshone Bannock, and Southwest!

I said to Matt, “Wonder what the ethnicities of the people developing the software happen to be?” Hahahahaha. How fucking awesome. Want to know the nutritional profile of walrus oil? Just ask. It’s in there!

I am gonna be able to do so much more with this than Accu-Chef. Schweeeeeeet.

Did I mention Christine signed my guestbook at Classmates.com the other day? She sure did. I sent her a message suggesting that she might contact Craig since clearly he’d lost interest in me again. That was during the latest silent treatment but before Farah answered the phone. Who knows whether Christine’s even got a gold account to read the email… it was more a slap at her than at him. Stupid cow.

You know, but I can’t help hurting from all this. It is still not as bad as I’ve had relationship fallouts be in the past, but it’s still no picnic, and I’ll be glad when I get past this. I don’t think it will take that long and I feel stupid saying anything about it but hey, this is my journal so fucking deal.

I cheer myself up with David Tennant yumminess. Like this.

I am mentally circling around attempting a portrait of him myself. I want sooo bad to get better at pencil rendering and I’m sooo afraid I won’t be able to pull it off. I think I might just become obsessive about the revival series characters for a while and draw them a whole lot and we’ll see what happens. The cool part is there’s a wide variety of faces I could possibly choose from, across all sorts of races and ethnicities, and I have the means to do one fuck of a lot of screen-capturing for reference material. Go me, innit? Alllllriiiiiight…

Ain’t even bovvered!

His trip was he was angry that I told others about the article. I wonder about that. I wonder if he would have still been angry had I simply gone to him about it without saying anything to anyone else.

I’m betting maybe he would have been. At that point it would have been a snooping accusation and he’d have gone on to “test” me anyway, whatever the hell that means.

Is he ashamed? Is he capable of feeling shame?

He spoke of unconditional love. Both wanting it and offering it. But he was not offering it. There were conditions attached and I was not meeting those. And he didn’t seem to want to hear me telling him that I still loved him and that’s why the story disturbed me so badly. Or that I loved him and that’s why his behavior was hurting me.

Does he honestly think I’d have given a shit if I hadn’t loved him? First time he threatened me (to be clear: only with relationship/emotional consequences, no violence otherwise), I’d have been like, “OK, bye then.” It was only because I loved him and couldn’t stand the thought of losing him that he could get his hooks into me at all.

I don’t suppose he considered… Naaah. That’d take empathy, and he’s in short supply.

In fact, the only reason I speak of love in the past tense now is that I loved someone who didn’t exist. He set up this illusion and I was loving the illusion. Hence the past tense references. I didn’t just suddenly decide he was suddenly a piece of shit where he had not been previously. The actual Craig is a conniving piece of shit, from the best evidence I can gather at this time. The Craig I loved was a mirage. He’s dead. If you can call something dead that never existed.

I said something like that back right before the first fight, when he was already acting weird… He was hurt to read it. Well? Let’s just go ahead and prove me right already.

He’s trying to make me out to be this angry ungrateful person. Well, let’s see. I was happy nearly every time we talked on the phone, because talking with him made me happy. I was happy most times we texted or emailed back and forth, because those things made me happy too. Only times he saw me unhappy were before he contacted me in April, and when I found out my mother sold my grandparents’ house, and if I was talking about something upsetting, and if he was playing fuck-me games with my head. He speaks of my anger as part of my nature. No, it’s situational.

As for gratitude, what am I supposed to be thankful for that I haven’t thanked him already? First I thanked him for trusting me again, which he at least was putting on the act that he did, in the beginning. Then I thanked him for finding me that web design job. I’m not clear what else I’m supposed to thank him for. Lying to me about when he’d contact me and then making weasel arguments to justify it? Sneaking around behind my back? All the names he’s no doubt been calling me from behind a closed Facebook profile or in bed with Farah at night? Relegating me to the trash heap now?

Yeah, thanks dude. Thanks so much, I’m so grateful. There. That one’s shot down too.

But let’s get back to the shame thing. What is the shame thing? There were clues there too. The big trigger for the meltdown was his criminal behavior. Is he ashamed of that? I could believe it if he’d only done it once or twice. But I was something of a goody two-shoes in high school, if you didn’t count me sneaking him into my room at night and stuff in a similar vein. Didn’t drink, didn’t party, none of that. Even now, after everything, you could say I’m being virtuous because I’ve gone through a three-years-and-counting dry spell and I’m trying to make the best of things with my little girl’s dad. And Craig said as much about the latter, too, that it was “honorable.” So there was a great deal of admiration of me in the beginning, or so he acted it out. Then wham, I was “bad” to him. Instant fall from grace. The thought that “honorable” old me would find out about his dishonor may have been more than he could take.

Did he ever once ask me whether I could accept that he’s had a hard life, not be ashamed of him and not be embarrassed for his sake… but simply accept him for who he is?

Bite your tongue.

The insulting thing is that there was lots of evidence I would have accepted him. He told me about a lot of that shit the night we opened up to one another and told of our lives since the breakup. Did I recoil from him? No. Did I judge? No. I simply listened.

What? Was he drunk and now he doesn’t remember?

This whole thing is bullshit. Not only has his whole act been just that… a total sham… but he’s erected this strawman in place of me, and judges me on the strawman’s traits–stuff I haven’t even done to him, or stuff that wasn’t half as bad as he thought it was.

And that’s why I go back to thinking this was all a setup. He’s a smart guy. I can’t believe he would be that dense. He did say the years of doing drugs seems to have fucked with his brain, and maybe that’s it and he is that dense these days. (If that’s it, I wish he’d have figured it out sooner.) But it seems too easy, too pat an answer at this point. So I don’t buy it.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing all this ’cause it won’t make a difference. I can’t tell you how many different ways I’ve tried writing to him and telling him how I feel. I even did this huge multipart text message over the weekend all but begging him to help me straighten things out between us. Ignored. I guess another test failed. I don’t even have any clue how.

I wonder how I was supposed to pass the “test” with Farah answering the phone. Yell at her? Something like “Hey you bitch, get away from my man!” Was I not supposed to hang up the first time? What?

It’s an interesting puzzle and I wouldn’t mind teasing it out… I get the feeling that’s not going to happen, though.

So, yeah. I’m gonna be nice and cold and bitchy and stuff now. As I have told him many times, it’s a defense mechanism. The harder I get on the outside, the less the hooks dig in… the less the bullshit seeps in… the better I retain my own integrity and get on with things.

This, at bottom, is really all just a huge waste of time. If it had a point, if it was going to get somewhere, then maybe not, but he’s made up his mind.

The bitch is, I may never know why.

But yes. For the record. I ain’t proud. If I had photos of all my exes I’d put together a photo collage and you’d see just how not proud I am. I never made fun of Craig for his braces. Or Marc for his weight. Or Jeremy for having more hair on his back than he did on the top of his head. I’ve dated asthmatics and dudes with hearing aids–and did more than date ‘em, if you know what I mean. I married an E-4 in the Army, and those are not exactly sugar daddies. The main reason I left Mike after he committed his crimes was that he’d put me in the position of having to turn his stupid ass in. I might have been willing to try again otherwise. I’d already told him I wanted marital counseling about a month prior to that when he was making noises about divorce. Criminal record? My brother has a goddamn criminal record. Probably most of it juvie, but who cares? A record’s a record. Do you see me disowning him? He was my roommate for a while. Smoked pot in my apartment, too. Bitch, please.

So, the shame… What’s the shame? If it’s there? I don’t get it. Main reason I freaked out over the knife incident was that it was so recent and I didn’t know what precipitated it. (Still don’t know. Can only guess.) If it’d been a story from 1993, say for instance, I wouldn’t have freaked so much. People change. Sometimes for the worse–but sometimes for the better. I get it. I do. Even with homicide, most people who’ve done that only have one or two murders in them, and they’re pretty much ordinary people otherwise.

Not like I didn’t tell him about stuff I did that would have netted me the death penalty in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia, and would certainly net me societal disapproval in many places in our own country. Shame? Why the shame?

So there you go. A big fat zero, no clue what is going on here and let me tell you something: I tried. For a month and a half solid, I tried to figure out what was going on, and practically begged him to help me.

He can talk all the bullshit he wants about tests, but in the end, he made the conscious decision I wasn’t going to pass any of them. If he even set any to begin with.

Sad waste too. He had more of what he claimed to want from me than he believed he did.

I hope he gets real help someday. I really do. I don’t think he believes he needs it though, so the chances of that are slim to none.

I feel remarkably calm for someone who just got her ass handed to her in the love department yesterday. I was expecting to be devastated if things didn’t work out with Craig but I think the past two months have been an exercise in Stupid Me beating up on Sensible Me and trying to muzzle her. On some level, I knew things weren’t on the up-and-up. That is not sour grapes; I really did. Tried to chalk it up to new-relationship growing pains. I keep forgetting these things are supposed to be really easy in the beginning. If it’s as difficult from the start as my thing was with C, it’s likely doomed. And you might as well assume it’s doomed and move on. A relationship isn’t scrap metal. You can’t salvage it and save the good parts for later.

I won’t lie and say I’m not also grieving on some level. There was enough awesomeness between me and him back then that I can’t help wondering what might have been. But it’s sobering to realize that the relationship going bad had a lot more to do with him than I had previously believed.

I was trying to deal with the emotional aftermath of a rape. He was just screwing around.

I wonder if he’d thought I was going to be his gravy train once I got through Army training? I don’t know whether or not I wish I knew. It is probably best left alone. I’d almost be willing to lay money, though; I’m more accurate when I assume the worst about him than when I assume the best.

That’s pretty pathetic.

Unexpected activity in that vein today but I’ll take it elsewhere. I’ve got an idea how to handle all that mess after I rearrange things on this site.

Fun weekend in the offing that will involve seeing an old friend again, visiting some of Matt’s family, and possibly going swimming in a pool. O_O Haven’t done that in a while… hope the chlorine doesn’t make me sick. Last time we were around stuff like that was at this indoor water park near Sandusky, and the chemicals gave me a migraine. At least this time it’s in open air so maybe it won’t be so bad.

Anyway, Thea needed a swimsuit, which involved a run out to Target. You should have seen that child horsing around in front of the dressing room mirror. Sample:

And she was relatively still there. Wanted to catch her jumping around but I had bad timing.

Stupid Lundi (I’m guessing) peed under the coffee table today. Guess who’s going to have to get the carpet shampooer out and deal with the living room. Even then I don’t know that it will solve the problem. The next step is going to be tearing up the carpet and calling bulk pickup. And good goddamn riddance because I’m sick of cat messes. I just got done cleaning up the basement and I’ve been scooping their litter most nights and she’s still pulling this shit. I’ve got a little bit left on a debt I’m paying off and then it will be saving-up-for-the-vet time. Lundi will be first to go. If they don’t find crystals in her urine I will be shocked beyond belief. That, or she’s dumber than I gave her credit for.

I started work on fingerless gloves yesterday from a Patons pattern book. The first one is completed up to the top of the hand part, and the thumb gusset is finished. Now I have to do the individual fingers. The pattern is actually for regular gloves, but I have a thing for fingerless and they seem to be really in vogue right now. This will make up for the disappointment that was the previous set of mitts I finished earlier this week. And there is cabling. Oh Lord, yes. Here’s a photo, although the color rendition sucks:

I never thought of Post-It notes as a knitting tool, but they’ve been such a tremendous help getting through this pattern, and it’s fun! And quick! I want to do a whole bunch more of these. I’ve got a bunch of skeins of Patons Classic Wool in a tub just begging me to knit them. All righty then, heeeeere we go.