The Death of Imagination

So for a while now, I've toyed with the idea of doing a kind of Spotify Wrapped for my hookup app. I wasn't sure who I'd really want to share it with beyond one person, the one who took the top stop on the list of men I'd shtupped. Even though things didn't work out, I thought he'd be amused and maybe a bit touched.

During break, I reached out to him to see if we could FaceTime and got a surprise: He told me he'd be "hanging out with the boyfriend". It hit me like a splash of cold water to the face and tossed my Sniffies Bound idea into the closet. (I may yet dust it off when my one-year anniversary rolls around.) I guess I was holding a bit of a torch for him in spite of myself.

I'd like to be happy for him. He hasn't had great success with relationships. By the time I was his age, I was on my third LTR so I can afford to be generous. But the recency of our intimacy combined with the fact that he only mentioned it in passing makes me want to walk away instead.

Meanwhile, on New Year's Day I was forced to confront the fact that, yes, three years on I'm still in love with BB. Which is fine, it's kind of what I expected, and it's not something that comes up very often. It would be completely fine, honestly, if I could just let go of that tiny bit of hope I can't seem to shake that someday, something might change in the way he feels about it.

Recently I was forced to confront that foolish little hope. He lost his closest companion, his dog Louie, back in November. It was a long time coming and, during that time, I allowed myself to fantasise that when the moment came, it's me he would turn to for solace. Of course, that's not what happened. It was his sister who flew out to help him put poor Louie down and I ended up being unavailable much of the week afterwards.

In theory, he's got a lot more free time now and I could be doing more to create opportunities for us to spend time together. But I realise that I'd still be hoping throughout for some change, some incremental movement toward emotional intimacy. It's just not going to happen. I don't know why I'm struggling so hard to accept that.

So in the meantime, I'm back to my whoring ways. I excused them last year by saying I was making a game of it and seeing how many notches I could rack up simply because it was something I'd never done before. But we're two weeks into 2025 and I've already knocked off 7 guys so clearly I'm not done sowing these oats yet. This isn't sustainable, I know it's dominating my thoughts and harming my nonsexual relationships, yet I'm still afraid of what I might have to deal with if I pause it.

In a slightly different world, I'm beginning today a bit underslept but very satisfied with myself and looking forward to a rendezvous after work. In this one, unfortunately, I'm fighting off a crisis of confidence and dreading more disappointment.

The reason why is really infuriating. About a month ago, I ran into a guy at SoFo. Five years before, I'd tried to hook up with him and got jilted because of a boyfriend he didn't bother to tell me about. Well, the boyfriend is history and he's feeling frisky, so we finally hooked up about a week later. Since then he's been in my DMs sending me nudes, but I held out for a proper date. That date was supposed to have been last night. Tuesday night, I texted him to confirm. I heard nothing back until about 8 this morning when he sent me a half-assed apology coupled with same lame excuse about thinking he'd replied when he hadn't and then getting dead drunk last night (an unsatisfactory explanation which raises more questions than it answers).

I'm pissed, of course, and pissed that I'm pissed. This isn't even a guy I like that much--I was honestly a bit relieved to be able to stay in and do laundry. But coming, as it is, during a dry spell where Hump Day is ignoring me again and Miller Park still hasn't set a date for our next rendezvous, it's yet another blow to my confidence and it takes energy not to start spiralling. I just don't need this.

Most frustratingly, it's distracting me from anticipation of what should be a lovely evening. This is also not someone I'm that into--he has a boyfriend and, based on our previous time together, I've even categorised him as a "bad lay"--but we have common interests and he's been texting me regularly about how much he's looking forward to going for sushi with me. I'd like to respond in kind, but at the back of my mind there's this fear that this will fall through too. Which normally would be NBD, but coming on top of everything else it would really deflate me.

I hate backsliding. I know it's part of every natural process of weaning yourself off anything but it's annoying and frustrating.

Yeah, this is another post about BB. Friday night he joined the rest of us for a bit on the SoFo patio and was showcasing the bitchier side of his personality, as he tends to do in situations like that. But then at one point he kind of apologising, throwing his arm around me and saying something about how I knew he really appreciated me, right? And instead of leaning into the moment, I did what I always seem to do and teased him about finally showing some genuine affection for a change, at which point he took his arm away and said, "I'll never do that again!" Then it was my turn to apologise but it was too late.

Shortly after, he moved to sit on a bench along the wall and all I wanted to do was sit next to him so I could feel him again me again. But I was trapped in conversation with a friend I hadn't seen in a while and, by the time I could get away, BB had decided he'd had enough of SoFo and was heading out to Cellblock. I felt so downcast I considered just going home but it had been a good evening up until then and I didn't want to end it on that note. So I stuck it out and things got better (then they got very weird, but that's another post).

The next day, I was poorly slept and emotional and grappling with the fact that despite everything I'm still in love with his dumb ass. I mean, not anything like I was before, but the gap between where I want to be with him and where I actually am is very palpable and painful. Nothing to do about it, though, than to keep doing what I'm doing--focusing on other relationships and approaching this one with as few expectations as possible--and keep in mind that it's working, despite moments like these.

Well, any hopes I had that yesterday's post would prove cathartic enough to help me move past where I'm currently stuck were sent packing at about 1:30 a.m. this morning when I woke from a brief fitful sleep and returned to obsessively churning the contents of my mind. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I tell myself "You can't brain yourself out of a fundamentally emotional crisis". Braining is what I know how to do best so it's the hammer I keep reaching for.

The frustrating thing is that it did seemed to work at first. I was kind of mopey through lunchtime, but after that I began to perk up at the prospect of the holiday party at work. If clintswan and I hadn't already made plans to go get our tabletop Christmas tree, I probably would've stayed till the end boozing and shmoozing.

My evening might still have ended up the same way regardless, because I'm seeing an emerging pattern and it ain't pretty: I find myself in a good mood and missing BB, so I text. He texts back and I try to extend the chat. I give him opportunities to affirm me (by flirting, by being vulnerable in the hopes of eliciting a sympathetic response, by suggesting getting together) and he doesn't take them. I finally abandon the chat feeling like I've only annoyed him. Lather, rinse, repeat. As I told a good friend later that night, that does not bode well.

But it's not really any fault of his. That's not part of how he views our relationship or part of how he interacts via text (he's much better in person). In terms of what's going on beneath the surface, I'm leaning toward the second explanation in yesterday's second post: I'm having an emotional crisis of confidence and my inability to get BB to respond emotionally how I'd like him to is a big fat finger that keeps poking it.

I got some confirmation of that this morning when I had another crying jag. I started repeating things to myself that I feared were true and the ones which got the strongest response were: I miss Monshu. No one is ever going to love me again like he loved me. I'm going to be alone forever. These fears have been there for a long time (even before he died) but I've done a good job of pushing them away, asking myself things like: Do I even want someone to love me again like loved me? Is it worth doing all that hard work again? Am I really ready to date in any case?

I guess the answer to that last one is "No" if a fairly simple flirtation can unravel me this much. Looking back over the last five years, I note with a bit of bitterness that my two most successful sexual relationships (measured by intensity and longevity) are with two married men. My attempts to date anyone nominally available have mostly come to nothing. (Trust me, I had plenty of time to review the track record while lying there last night not sleeping.) Frustratingly, there's no clear pattern to the failures (beyond the fact that, in each case, communication was a real issue, but that's like saying that the ultimate cause of death was lack of blood to the brain; the story of all good communication is the same).

But I'm tired of this. I'm tired of showing up stag to every gathering. I'm tired of feeling like I constantly have to be the best version of myself or risk alienating someone I want to be with. I'm tired of feeling like I'm begging for sex when all I really want is to be held. I'm so very tired. And I see men my age or older who are also tired, so tired they've given up completely, and that terrifies me. I don't want to be one of those men. I don't want to think the chapter of my memoirs concerning my love life (as opposed to just my sex life) has been closed forever.

And I don't see any alternative to doing what I've already been doing: Putting myself out there, being open to the possibility of a relationship without trying to force it, and not getting too invested in any one prospect. But it goes against my grain. By nature, I'm an obsessive romantic and I doubt I can change that about myself. All I can do is try to practice mindfulness and set myself on the path of no-desire and hope that helps.

And be gentle with myself. I have to say, that's somewhere where clintswan has been a great help. Yesterday evening, as we were driving to the tree lot, I outlined some of what I've just described at length here and he said, "If it helps at all, it's not really 'five years'. Two year of that is pandemic, so it's really three years." We also reaffirmed that, whatever lies ahead in our lives, we'll continue to be there to support each other. ("PLiPs, Platonic Life Partners," as he puts it.) And that is nothing at all to sneeze at.

It is very odd living under a regime of self-imposed scarcity. I'm not forgoing eating out and making my leftovers stretch to four or more meals because I'm trying to save money or because of shortages or because I'm too weak to walk. There's a grocery a block away that fully stocked and staffed and working its usual hours, and I'm simply choosing not to go there.

My reasons for that have subtly shifted over time. When this all began, I suspected I had a bigger-than-average chance of being a carrier, since I'm under 50 (barely) and in good health and up until last Tuesday was going to work somewhere which had six reported cases, so I was most concerned about passing the illness to others (such as my neighbour's mother).

Now, as I hear horror stories from survivors and watch the totals mount, I'm becoming more worried for myself. Based on the best data I can find, my chance of dying could be as low as 1/1000, which is damn god odds. But folks are talking about permanent lung damage and long hospitalisations, both of which are pretty frightening.

Still, part of me thinks, if I have to get sometime, why not now, before cases peak and flood the local hospitals? But I know it's only boredom and frustration which makes acute suffering seem preferable to unending dread. And even if I did have a relatively mild case, it still wouldn't necessarily change much if most of the world is still in waiting.

At least communication is something I don't have to ration. Phone calls, Zoom meetings, PMs, chats, socially-distant strolls, yelled conversations outside--I can basically have as many of these as I want. Yesterday I binged a bit, starting off with a "Virtual Donut Day" through work, followed by a solo stroll, a confab on the back porch, a brief voice chat with Nuphy, and finally a two-hour social videoconference with the Kaffeeklatsch Bears.

The last of these was particularly intense. The tenor was quite different from our previous get-together, where we talked mostly about food and appearance. This time it was all Corona. We traded rumours, speculations, and links to articles. We lamented the cancelled events and the loss of physical intimacy. Three of the participants were in other states and able to give us some outside perspective.

I didn't want to sign off when I did, but I knew I had to if I ever wanted to get to sleep and I wasn't surprised when I didn't sleep soundly and had crazy, potent dreams. I'm hardly surprised that I woke up feeling hungover and struggled to regain my routine. So I may need to impose some scarcity upon myself in this area, too, until I can figure out how best to incorporate it into my new life of hermitude.

I've been kind of monitoring the funeral preparations from something of a remove, since I'm not too invested in how they turn out. I trust my stepmom and my sister to do a good job and play nice and I'm just here for ancillary support. This week, however, is when I started actively avoiding the whole mess.

My stepmom is all over the place. It's exhausting just talking to her. Every call seems to take at least an hour. I spent one of them trying to walk her through the process of resetting Dad's FB password; of course, when I went into work (where I'd left myself logged in), I was able to do it in like 30 seconds. It also took me that long or less to find a picture for the programme that she'd supposedly been searching for for days.

So even though I should've called her Sunday or Monday to confirm details, I didn't. I made a halfhearted attempt to call my sister (who can at least keep a phone call to ten minutes or less when she needs to). She got back to me last night as I was doing some laundry and the exchange was...less than encouraging.

It looks like none of Dad's family is showing up, despite having nearly four weeks' warning. No, scratch that, it's worse: the only one showing up is his brother-in-law, the asshole ultra-Catholic. My last conversation with him ended with him denying the Holocaust. He tried to speak to me at my brother's funeral and I just walked away. If he tries tho approach me again, he's going to regret it.

Then, at the end of the call, my sister chose to share an incident from Sunday that summed up the tension between her and our stepmom. Our mom had bought some of Dad's favourite candies to share at the reception. Sis mentioned this to Stepmom and she fairly had a meltdown about our mother's "interference". "She needs to control every aspect of this," she told me.

Despite this, I've had trouble getting feedback from her when I need it. She seems eager to take my suggestions, which makes me feel like there may be something gendered to her responses: men "help", women "interfere". Sis also says she was enthusiastic about one of her suggestions, telling her it "came from one of your brothers".

I tried to make Sis feel better by reminding her that scattering the ashes will be a separate ceremony and we can do whatever we want. I can't tell if this is a consolation or not. I hate seeing her so frustrated. For the sake of her mental health, she's resigned herself to just going along with what Stepmom wants. After how successfully we navigated M.'s service, I wasn't expecting this.

I'm in some kind of mood today. Part of me just wants to give up on everything and part wants to overcome that but isn't exactly sure how. So very basic things are becoming a struggle.

Seeing Pasillero, for instance. He offered me some time this evening after a planning meeting. I really want to see him and, at the same time, I'm dreading it so that the simple act of making plans to meet took a couple hours. I didn't want to look at my phone and see another message, but I also didn't want to to ignore him.

It wasn't this bad yesterday. What's different about today? All I can think of is FB showing me a picture of Monshu, happy and healthy (albeit secretly already cancerous) from five years ago. That's usually not enough to trigger me, though.

Maybe it's that on top of the book I'm reading, Rebecca Makkai's The great believers. It's excellent, but boy is it ever rough. It follows the protagonist through the breakup of his relationship during the Chicago AIDS crisis in the mid-80s and there are landmines galore. (And not always obvious ones; one of the most wrenching sequences involved an abandoned cat.)

It's hard not to read something like that and not rethink decades of life choices. Unproductively, of course; this is not the kind of mindset which leads to sudden clarity. Maybe if I had someone handy to confide in, it would be different, but LL is back home and the thought of reaching out to someone is just too intimidating right now.

So I took half a Lorazepam last night just to make sure I didn't fret myself awake at 4 a.m. yet again and I guess it worked? I basically slept through but I'm still sleepy at work today and I can't tell how much of that is residual to the medication and how much is that even eight full hours isn't enough to wipe out my recent sleep deficit. At least the stomach upset wasn't as bad as I'd remembered and the dreams were better.

Today is the kind of day which makes me nostalgic for old-school roleplaying: overcast with a front moving in, stirring up the wind and raising the temperature. Yesterday evening I didn't accomplish much but I did talk to Crazy Brother for an hour on the phone about his character, which I think counts as a mitzvah. He's playing an android in a space game so I tried to steer him a bit into metaphysics: If she was built by other androids, why is she programmed to find anyone attractive? (He seems committed to a romance with another player, for some reason.)

This evening will be our last session of The Watch. Several of the players are saying it's the longest campaign they've played in ages--since the early 90s for JB. I just have to smile at that. How long was Unknown Armies, two years? Our next game is going to be a complete change of pace: urban fantasy in a Mexican setting. We'll be joined by dedos which I'm hoping will shake things up a bit.

When itchwoot was in town, I started browsing for something to read in German again and stumbled across Lotte in Weimar, which I'd left half-finished. I'm pushing through slowly--today I just officially crossed 60%--while I focus on other works. I finished off a volume of Albanian short stories from at least a year ago, started a novel from Monica Ali, and read one of my new acquisitions from CAKE. I'm still waiting for it to be consistently warm enough to start on my real summer reading.

Goodreads and the gamification it provides is helping prod me to read even while my pace remains discouragingly slow. In order to have the thrill of some "easy wins", I've started to put books on it I'd mostly finished and then cast aside for months or even years but even those are taking me forever. Like I think was down to the last 60 pages or so of An American childhood when I listed it a month ago and I only managed to reach the end last night. It starts so well but there's no real throughline to it that I can find and her experiences get more mainstream the more she approaches me in age and time.

I've only got 16 pages of the Sansal left. You'd hope that would be an hour's reading at most but, knowing me, I've got another week before I finish that. I thought the Suzan-Lori Parks would be a snappy palate-cleanser (she's primarily known as a playwright so her novel is rich in plot and dialogue) and it still took me weeks. And my progress in A dictionary of Maqiao has just been incremental. This would've been a better read for me closer to when it came out (1996). But it wasn't even translated until 2005 and it was years more before I stumbled across it.

My Italian pal really puts me to shame, finishing a 600+ biography of Frederick Douglass in the same time that I've read less than a hundred pages of The lost universe in addition to all the reading he's done for fun. And English isn't even his native language! I just need to be stronger about hanging up on social media but there are few things out there these days more easily said than done.

Just spent at least half-an-hour trying to get a hold of a doctor at UIC to tell me that I probably wasn't going to die as a consequence of my outpatient procedure yesterday. That was reassuring. What wasn't reassuring was that:

1. The first operator didn't know what to do with my call and forwarded me to the ER, which couldn't help either.
2. The numbers for the surgical team and anaesthesiology went to voicemail and no one got back to me.
3. The pager number for the surgical team rang for minutes without ever being answered.

Eventually, after calling the main number on my discharge instructions again, I did reach an operator who connected me to a nurse who knew how to page the correct doctor. But, damn, I'd hate to have to have gone through all that while feeling significantly worse than I did.

I'm still not 100% but the doc's assurance that I probably just overexerted myself ("Usually I walk a mile during my lunch break." "You didn't do that today, did you?" "Nothing in my discharge instructions said to avoid physical activity.") has at least quieted my anxiety. I guess it's just as well that I'm not meeting Pasillero tonight. Despite our best intentions, I don't think we're at the point that we could limit ourselves to just cuddling.

The prep went better this time. Knowing how slow my body was to react, I started it two hours earlier than instructed with the result that I was actually able to be in bed by 11 p.m. My procedure wasn't scheduled until 11 a.m. which meant I could actually sleep in and take my time heading down to the hospital. I still decided to Lyft there instead of taking CTA, which proved...interesting.

Everything started well. I had a beardy Hispanic driver. His English was weak enough that I considered switching to Spanish, but then I thought that maybe he wanted the practice. I discovered that he was a former hairdresser from Buenos Aires who came here to work at the family restaurant but only did that on weekends. Around the time that I started to feel comfortable with him, he had a contretemps with another driver, who very aggressively prevented him from merging on Lower Wacker.

He rolled down his window at the next stoplight to ask why and they guy accused him of cutting him off. (Maybe he did; I didn't notice.) He kept his cool and seemed earnest about understanding what he did wrong. And if he'd stopped there, I still would have given him a good review. Instead he turned to me afterwards and said, "I don't want to seem racist, but Black people in the US..." I sat there thinking, Goddammit, I was starting to like you. Under different circumstances, I might have challenged him, but I just wanted to get to the hospital and get the day over with, so I left that to Lyft.

(To their credit, they responded to my comments within hours, promising to follow up with the driver and giving me a $15 credit. In fact, that's how I noticed they'd responded at all: The trip from hospital to Nuphy's was gratis and I poked around the app to figure out why.)

I was glad I insisted on having Nuphy meet up with me before the procedure since it made the two-hour wait time much more bearable. The SCM breezed in about 1 p.m., at which point I'd met just about the entire rest of the team: an assisting, a resident, two medical students, the anaesthesiology nurse and doctor, and two OR nurses. (Apparently there was yet another doc present that I don't remember but who talked to me on the phone today.) I was in a good enough mood to joke with them; the pre-op nurse deserves a lot of credit for that.

Waking up was heinous. I didn't expect so much pain and was pounding my fist on the arm of the chair waiting for the Norco to kick in. (Somehow the propofol, Versed, and Fentanyl they'd given me in the OR weren't covering it.) They'd rammed a gauze plug up my bum and I threatened to remove it myself, going so far as to glove up before the nurse begged me to wait for the doctor. It fell out on its own back at Nuphy's, where I took a bath before changing into the fresh underwear I'd brought and heading north for game night.

I was woozy enough to give everyone cause for concern, which made them extra solicitous in a way I found genuinely touching. Big Red asked if I wanted anything to eat so I told him "toast" and requested he bring some of his smoked butter, which he did. Fortuitously, one of the other players baked bread and his boyfriend offered himself up "as a donut cushion". I was totally exhausted before the end of the evening but I still didn't regret joining them.