I'm a Gemini.  Desperately trying to differentiate.  I flirt and my attempts to flirt are failing, so I redouble my intuitive tactics, aggressively.  Until you become just my friend, and until that friendship rekindles a hope that my standoffishness is making you like me.  First I tease and try to be witty and insulting, then I ask random questions, inquiring hungrily into the personality, I unburden and let show my own personality, tell you my favorite bands, ask about yours.  I don't ask desperate, psychologically taxing personal questions of people I'm not attracted to, or ask about their past.  I turn at a 45 degree angle and pretend they don't exist.  People I'm attracted to, very easily I get enthusiastic and they don't have to win me.  Then as I recognize my desperate attempts at flirting or trying to woo them with wit, uniqueness, quirkiness, that I'm not usual, with my words... I start to give up and try to get personal, ask personal questions, have the type of conversations I like in spite of them, even usurping their own ability to do something other than answer my questions.  Like whether a personality is important.  Earlier in my life, my randomness, my wit would soften people toward me as they realized I was not only harmless but sweet and interesting.  It would soften men who otherwise would see me as desperately entering their space.  Now as I try to observe and find the key to stop myself, I try to point out the root of my behaviors, or how I am aggressively bringing them myself, saying this is me without their asking.  And not asking about them unless it is personal and I want to compare to mine or what I want to know.  I am, I don't do.  I contemplate all day what I am and whether I am affecting anyone, or anyone I want to affect, simply with my personhood. 

I stand on the subway a jagged edge and posture with hands in pockets.  Men in black coats, depressing 30 plus women in their hasty slit rouge, under eye slits, long poofy down coats rather than the trim ones that cut off at the waist, with places to go.  I classify people endlessly.  Catching the lean professional men I like, erverything trimmed and nothing to spare, Gumby like silhouette of fitted peacoat or general black coat, slim cut pants, a line of a scarf perhaps, black sensibly cut hair or floppy, tall and slim like a knife.  The hipster men tall and cutting the same silhouette but with different clothing.  Attractive men are in such a uniform class because of fashion in life, they stand out between the cantankerous women in their floor length coats, huffing to sit down with their bags, they complain when there is an announcement and in the bathroom they sing, hum, use a cell phone, and complane, the shady worker like men too old for ]their Tims out of style baggy pants and Eskimo hooded down coats, with their legs and arms maximally apart, staring around like a warning sign to women.  Suspiciously dressed like it's 1996 or perhaps putting the Carhartt to its original use.  We wear black now, not the colorful mustard yellow and lime green Peter Pan collar 60s inspired coats of my college.  Our dilemmas are not obvious.  The subway is a sloping tile off white with periwinkle seats and in it we don't appear reserved, but at angles, clashing with each other.  Who caves?  Who provides space.  We don't seem obviously lost in thought, not me, not the pretty girl with the braided weave and nose ring who smiles and says sorry when someone takes her space.  I want her to summon her bravery, but not at me practicing masculine behaviors.  Not the tall kempt man who turns his face and body away when I glance at him.  Granted that I glance with a wide eyed, sudden look.  And away like I'm imitating an awkward bird.  We sit spread out and not.  I wonder if our minds are in important, significant places, I have no way to judge someone's depth and pathos like someone else might.  I believe their depth comes from their unavoidable duties, those that give them character, their family, their sons, the strictures of poverty, the people to whom we must give our love and time.  The people who we owe selflessness confer humanity on us.  It is not an errand, it is me rushing to pick up my son who is failing in school and in an after school program because I have to stay at work to keep him in school.  But, I can't see this.  I hear Russian women, rudely sitting with their bags by my thigh, soliciting with concern if the person on the other line ate because they just made aladye which are fresh in the refrigerator, once they wake up from their nap they should go and get it.  I wonder if my humanity comes from what I lack and what I aspire to.  Perhaps my lack of actually doing anything really just emphasizes my insignificance. 

I wonder if I'm as personable as I felt I was in college.  Or if my self oriented personality traits such as uniqueness or different thought process really make me at all worthy or interesting if I don't create anything with it. 

I don't know if its worth it. To assert myself and the pain of achievement. The world's judgment of my products but at this point I am not incurring the kind of risk that generates stagnant or frozen fear. I want to be something else and I thrash against ideal circumstances. Biddy like I seem to be curling into a plastic bag toting leather jacket shrew. I need help with my bags. But yet I still go to dance at parties. Wait patiently behind the jagged corners of men spreading their weight maximally to close in groups of women. It lacks excitement. The promise of emails the Ricky's smell of wigs and weaves. Most beauty and counterculture came from people robbed of a childhood. I don't know if a grinding desire for ego validation is juice for creativity. Less a pain than a tearing. A constant muscle hunger and stretching out of the head toward others. I can say that what I could do to change my day is undefined. Depends on who I must become now or later 

Come Armageddon, come Armageddon, come sings morrissey. I have to make meaning of this life because this life has not amounted to achievement or memory. Have I broken through routine? Who knows if I can emerge beyond what is handed to me. Beyond the egos search. My ego enters the bowery poetry club and looks for validation or binding. I enter establishments and sliding walls of people face perpendicular or backward. I'm going to sit at another rectangular counter as at a 45 degree angle men and women in conversation turn in curlicues, at the wooden table responsible to each other and each others feelings unveiled. We make room for others or else walk in continuous sliding doors of people moving somewhere. I imagine that relationships and children and blood bonds are obligation that pushes us to pain and satisfaction. Satisfaction seems to come from obstacles. The pain and the risk threshold of climbing mountains and providing for our demanding children. I am at that point where providing for my basic needs is still an accomplishment.

I can't feel my friends or my closest people.  If they don't pay sufficient lip service I tear them apart.  I find myself tearing maternal and paternal figures apart who are more resilient.  Because I pay them.  I tell them they aren't responsive, they aren't walking their talk, or whatever.  I tear the few apart that I choose to take care of me.  They are a scant few.  Friends don't need that burden.  Only if they bear down and assume an intimacy untoward, like some introverts do.  Expecting you to open like a clam shell.  If you don't soften your belly for me, if you prove inadequate and cold I will tear you apart if you're standing continuously in one place.  It is windy outside and I can't sleep without a sense of emotional security.  That I'm okay.  We're okay.  It isn't brokered, words that color the perspective, the way we see the world is intoxicating and all permeating, and a way to redirect that perspective, even to recharge by feeling like milk fed sleepy puppy.  Which I need to venture out, like the attachment theory three year old, every four hours.  Then propelled by nostalgia for the freewheeling countercultural times, that come with leaky roofs, open bathroom doors, artistic penury, squats and communal childhood.  I venture out briefly at night into the possibility of a driving artistic passion, to hang out with artists who are hipsters who spend the days crafting their style on mood boards.  Rather than my friends and their emotional honesty, their cynicism, their openness, introversion lack of satisfaction... we are who we hang out with.  The artistic life in its monastic purpose is the tonic for my daily lack of propulsion, the artistic life is propelled by the outward interest of creation, the mission, the seeking, which must be recharged on a daily basis, and the inward editing, adjusting, the philosophy of editing which must be to refine the message of the piece or something.  Or to redirect it, of integrity.  To live with integrity is a risk, whatever this integrity is.  I know that the exchange of money means that our artistry is commodified.  My writing is shaped by what he wants for his website and what he wants is listicles about the 90s or pizza cakes or shoes because what the audience wants is a reflection of themselves and human lives and what they already knew... our writing is about you discovering yourself.  Or you remembering something funny.  Much like humor is sensitive to the room, web pieces depend obviously on the generosity of readers.  Katherine Anne Porter's careful and biting, pitiless examination of humanity and its ugliness had a less obvious connection to the generosity of the passing reader's attention span and more of a link to the publisher or editor.  The editor's one judgment, rather than the statistician's, determined what the people want to entertain themselves with.  Our integrity and artistic freedom, if we were to freelance, is less free than if our role was specifically defined as the guy who optimizes page views with logistic regressions, the guy who is given the option of being an influencer.  The owner can set the price, bargain with our desperation to create and live with the integrity of creation, though living interrupts creation, the preoccupation with living and balance interrupts output and the form and beauty of the output.  Output is a noble sacrifice to a beautiful and healthy life.  Noble in the sense that it is the perfect chip to gamble away the possibility of failure or the potential of love.  Wilder than the monastic existence, the creative's is the bare wire that must ping with all emotion and carefully and analytically absorb all human evidence in the world around it, analytically produce insight on humans and what it means to be this one type.  On this beautiful blue ball, focusing on humans and their little fears.  Why focus on them?  The selfish thought comes back, because I am important, and I want to embody what's important, and all I see is humans.  So I will talk about humans.  It is self righteous to talk about topics without a personal touch, or to exalt animals or current events above people, even if current events swallow us up and make it less important to be a people.  People who created things and did it well had a reason I can't assume.  Artists since 1910 are invested in making their words and intentions impenetrable.  Intentions ruin the immediacy of the art. 

You and they are the most vital to me when they're taking care of me.  The bookends of my life.  Fear is a protective instinct.  If I can imagine myself exposed to the worst, myself and the dragon in the bathroom as such, or in the hero's journey, the confrontation with the ultimate evil... you can tell me that Ebola is for the time being in Africa and we are not yet subject to the luxury of the decaying.  We are intact.  The family where the child looks pie-eyed at the idea of time and frailty.  Half the time the child looks out the window seasick, car sick and imagines the scenario of being exposed to the ultimate elements.  Until reassured.  The child will spout grim ideas about themselves, that perhaps they don't feel or love.  Until given an idea otherwise.  That perhaps they are the spawn that sets their family in a maelstrom and can only create emotional typhoons to mimic feeling.  Other than that is a font of need, validation, mistaking others for a teat.  The Jewish family is built on the model of the endless sacrifice, and the endlessly ungrateful beneficiary.  Since the giving, the sacrifice, the self deprivation is endless, the beneficiary has nothing to compare it to in their own lives other than to expect it....

I am saying this and SLC calls me.  Sarah.  Some odd metaphor that those uncomfortable kids, my tribe, or were once kids and now get married surreptitiously in a barn against all our hopes that they scale trees, become Nora Ephron, decorate Dubai with street art, our discomfort binds us.  The reminder of the comfort that I had, having time to become something, is a check in.  To see if I've become anything.  Whether it is even possible based on those vague parameters.  Maybe what we have in common are the itchy expectations and perennial disturbances of middle class youth, everything is fine within the middle class community, we have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, we hope we will become something big... we forcibly stand away from our peers and create mystery outside of adolescent group dynamics.  Spend time endowing the escape or our explorations of past music, past books, with the vague danger of their parties.  The moment we fly the coop becomes an erotic preoccupation.  Perhaps the limitations of who we will be and whether we can buy a wheel of party cheese with that never sinks in because...  The future becomes the fetish.  The bounds outside the walls of suburban adolescent hierarchies.  I think the imaginations of future SLC kids were dominated by that. 

I can't listen to Next to Normal.  I find it "triggering."  The nagging sense that one ought to be happy with one's basic (food shelter) and secondary (love family) needs met.  This guilt fuels middle class anxiety ("I should be happy but I am... discontented").  The stagnancy, of material contentment.  But, still this woman suffers the alienation of a different emotional compass, crushing lows and annoying manias.  Which psychiatry wants to control for the sake of her life, but has no idea how to normalize into something livable, rather than numb.  I've had friends who told me that the numbing effect of experiencing a median of their high low emotions is not a way to live life.  And this woman constantly threatens to dip down in suburban calm, stagnation, and meaninglessness.  With material wealth, children, all the shallow meaning signifiers, a woman feels no right to be uncomfortable.  Suffocated by the warmth of the house, the polyester blazers, the quiet of the street at night.  The pathlessness of making it and still being mentally ill.  She sings that "everything is perfect, nothing's real."  Apparently in "the mountains," running free she could whip herself into a frenzy and be close to collapsing from the low point and convince herself that riding her emotions was "real."  Rather than safety which is not worth its salt.  I think that whatever struggles she experienced in the mountains were mainly emotional and just as unreal.  Problems whipped up by brain chemistry rather than bein a menace to south central while drinkin your juice in tha hood. 

I need more markers of warmth and security than the suburban schools, their white walls with one strip of blue ringing bell precisely at 7:30 am and the hazy future promise, the abundant possibility of leaving and the path set free.  The well appointed floors of our houses, they are willing to shuttle us to soccer practice, to therapy, to occupy our mind,  maybe the bright future is what makes the isolation of the nuclear family on its tucked away street, which makes sense for the children to play on a patch of land, while the constant state of parental sacrifice and childlike bringing up is in motion.  What meaning does the isolation take on?  The prosperity and mediocrity?

I am afraid of coldness and ingratitude.  The Hyde.  My Hyde that will do what?  That I know will retire when needed.  That won't man up.  I'm afraid I was hurt maybe and didn't know it.  But this doesn't compensate for selfishness.  The brand of selfishness and egotism that stuck with the child who got what it wanted from the endlessness of care, the lack of reciprocation, and it stuck because it's true and not an excuse.  The excess of love and the expression of love can hobble a person for a while.  I dislike how easily I sever connections, but would need to bathe in the amniotic fluid of someone's promises of security preferably hers, and how I don't pay for what I get.  I see what I am.  I'm in this phase where I blame others.  The twin forces of nostalgia and inability to do anything with the Hyde of psychopath and emotionless abuser bring Hyde back in.  To live hemmed in by 9 to 5, unable to pursue large risks, hungry for precisely maternal affection from anyone when remotely displaced from the feeling of security and that everything's going to be ok.  I suck out emotional empathy from others.  Am not able to provide it.  Because I am Joe Schmoe.  Understandable.  And have faith in vindication, my own vindication.  The twin forces of coldness and child hurt apparently drive the fear and the ugliness.  In this world that exacts the basic responsibility from me. 

I am here in the downward portion of the rollercoaster.  Where am I going is a daily question.  A victimizing question that removes agency.  As though it's not me that controls where I'm going.  Options are limited, the future is limited and not nebulous.  My great buddies are marrying in unassuming barns retiring to Rhinebeck rather than making butter sculptures of Nixon across the country.  Rather than what?  The awe inspiring senior or older brother trailblazing in Russia, who did we admire?  When will I push toward some sort of fearful cheap coffee based prospect and bite back my pride for the sake of the illusory dharma?  The dharma of counting pennies or maybe not ever breaking in any way.  Or worse, being the one.  Or not the one.  No good.  Not knowing how to even start driving.  Should I be excited about the future?  People are calling me ma'am and helping me with my bags.  Will the desire to live a rich life and being generally lazy to learn all there is about a craft dampen any hope that I can be great... at something?  Without reflexively thinking dream on bitch... or reflexively wanting to change the word great because of that aching hubris and that fear.  And what is stopping... the nightly wandering into this or that expensive food establishment or ramparted street with definitely Cafe Habana hidden and Back Forty West facing me like an American dull wall.  Will there be anything left over to say once the endless me and needling search dies down and the business must be attended... the cakes made, I watch the truffle dealer child move boxes and hide from competitors, rich fish eggs floating on the website alternated with dill crackers of gravlax.  He is young, authentic, strangely specific, full of potential, a wunderkind with time to change.  The kid takes to the cobbled streets and works the unglamorous 60 hours, or has the gauche rich family, or something the camera can't display by tagging him "truffle don."  Teflon truffle don.