ROAD JOURNAL: Sour Gut @ Love

1. GUT It is 1am in Syracuse NY as I write this, and I've been here five days already, and we are behind in our work.  We are behind for several reasons: burned out maybe, losing some of our organization, but also I've been sick for three nights.  Gut-sick with a mystery disease.  Maybe it's just a bad road constipation -- maybe it is an ulcer, or stones -- I've woke up each night from pain, and while I can't say I have felt great pain in my life, this is up there for me: a throbbing, gnawing gut-wrench to make you dream of being beaten, and wake up to the product of that beating, mysteriously true, like those scary Victiorian demons sitting on the chests of sleeping victims.  Because I've done those things one does on the road to turn around a sinking constitution, because tonight my visit came again despite these crucifixes, and because I am old enough to start the whispering, Is this it then?  Am I one of those insanely unlikely sick people?  What rot have I done to myself with mistreating myself?  And you can go down a list, because you are awake now anyway: I've been radiated.  It's the cell towers.  I've done some amazing work abusing myself, and now my gut is gone.  The anxiety I perpetrate has finally done it to me, and haven't I asked for it?  I probably have an impacted colon, and just like the King, I'll be dead on a toilet -- he Graceland, me the Econolodge -- because of all this, I'm in a foul mood.  And this is all silly.  I've probably eaten too much steak.  I've probably drunk too much coffee.  And I'm away from home.
-- That and I know people dealing with physical pain, both family and friends, and I feel ashamed to be calling down such high-falutin curses on myself over a stomach ache.  Wake a boy from Econolodge sleep, he'll get apocalyptic.  Five days, and more out here, with little sleep, and pain, and loneliness, and one can get dramatic.  And romantic.  And purple shall be my prose.
2. LOVE Can you come to the conclusion loving people is the easiest thing, and really you could fall in love twenty or more times, but maybe it is the right time two out of those twenty?  And of that ten percent, I mean the ten percent of the reciprocated ten percent, (as there must be many more who just couldn't go there with you), so one percent: one percent of your possible romantic possibilities the time was right, (and ripe), and she needed some part of you right then, and you definitely needed some part of her, (and all her parts preferably), and if, of this one percent, you fail: if you fail as a one-percenter does it hurt more than if you succeed?
-- Here's what I mean:  Here you are, and this is the ONE that needs YOU; the body chemicals, the biology, the psychology; the hard-earned experience, (or lack of), be you nineteen, thirty, or sixty years old, it has aligned, and so this person, and yourself, are incapable of not anchoring one to the other -- you had no choice, you're struck, you're dumb, you've drunk the nectar, and now it's fini.  Accomplished.  If you do what this other person clearly needs you to do for them, right then in life, a day is coming when, like the upgraded foundation we just built to a sixty year old radio tower, this person has been reconstituted by what part of you assisted in what part of them was lacking, they are stronger via you, you via they -- what now?  Falling out of love isn't necessarily failure.  Sometimes it is mission accomplished.  You've run out of new tricks.  Pairing up isn't about survival anymore, but experience.  Tribes of monkeys we are, but we are not.  These women don't need us, not how I like to think my grandmother needed my grandfather.  So you can, in matters of the heart, provide someone experience, new experience, and what when they have mastered you?  There are so many other people to meet.  Can you blame them?  I hope they haven't blamed me.  And that, that is success!  You've each shared some good training from your different tribes, and now, So long, Cutie.  I know this will break with anyone who has had children, (as I haven't), who will tell me this is the experience to change the balance, but I know too many people who made children who broke off, grew out of, the relationship that done the deed.  People call it failure, maybe it is the success: We did this, we made some good kids, they'll survive, and, again: So long, Cutie.  Or they stick to the "success" of a warm, comfy, recognizable holding pattern of that old relationship.
-- And don't get me wrong, that holding pattern might be gold compared to the failure I'm talking about, which is: have you ever met the person, your one-percenter, who has some thing you need, and holds you at arm's length, sometimes violently: here is where you see what is commonly, and lamely, called a destructive relationship.  By destructive I think the chickens mean unproductive -- pure emotional foreplay, sometimes for years, which lists as it's side effects masturbatory repeats of the same old fighting -- as in, let's use me for an example, (err, not that this is me..), let's say I meet one of my one-percenters, now I know I'm not salvageable, I'm exactly who I am going to be forever, but this hot thing right here, well she needs some part of me, some strong part of me, and knowing that one day she will master it, and even if we stay together, that mastery is the end really of me, maybe I do everything wrong to not let her completely get that part of me from me.  Maybe I see how long she'll try to pull me in.  Maybe I don't even know I'm doing it.  Maybe when the day comes when she's given up, I walk away sick, tired, and heartbroken, but babe, you didn't get "it".  And maybe "You/Me" can survive easier with this coward's retreat, knowing she might still think of you years from now, and not have the answer to you, and love can be alive.  But you must give up ever really knowing that person to maintain this distance from them, which, really, half the women don't want you to know them that well despite what they say.  What does this leave you with?  The push and pull, over and again, whatever started the seduction replayed until it breaks off it's track.  It's a sad pattern.  Not sure which is the better road.  But here is my thing: the old days, a woman was married off, and she did her best to learn how to be a woman, a mother, a wife.  Tough work all of it.  Keep it, I'll tie rebar; I'll write jokes and take pictures of myself.  But these girls today are like Bruce Wayne; if you think you are the end of their road, don't be silly, man -- maybe you are, just don't ask about the other ninjas they trained with before you, who thought the same thing.  So you're just a trainer in the origin story.  Why do I think this?   It's only my experience, I can't get above me, unfortunately -- so here I am, down in the ditch, and I meet you, and damn, I think you're a one-percenter, so I know this is going to have a shelf-life, but damn I'm going to stretch that out for as long as you'll let me.  I'm not going to be just some ordinary karate master, I'm Ras Al Ghul.  Let me teach you my tricks.
-- So either way sucks, but the way of considering each love a holiday can mean: I cut a groove in you forever, and you to me, and we're strong for it.  Sickly maybe.  But strong.  And now I will commense regretting not saving this for some other writing.
3. THE DAY AFTER This above what I wrote early this morning, awake, in pain, I can't hardly remember.  I wrote it, I can't promise you I agree with myself -- but I have to post it, because the quick at a sitting mini-essay I put down is kind of wild, so let it go, it's only words after all.  It's a stone wall between the plowed field of non-fiction, and the forest of make believe.  Maybe I was in a bizarre mood, but I plucked words to go with it.