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I've known for some time that anyone you let get close to you will inevitably hurt you. I don't believe that they do it maliciously, or even know they're doing it, but that doesn't make it not hurt. They're inside your defenses, and sometimes even the slightest action can have repercussions that are completely disproportionate.
I've known this, but I keep letting people in. I don't think I forget how much it hurts; I can barely breathe right now. I think I'm looking for a connection that, though close, never quite gets made. Something to tell me that I'm not some freakish outsider freak, that there is somebody out there who does think like I do. I mean, I've gotten pretty reconciled, I think, to the being alone part. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as it used to. That elusive connection, though, even for a moment, would be nice.
I realize this is pretty discombobulated and fucked up, but so am I right now.
So, there.
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Something Jerry said has been bugging me all weekend, and I finally realized why. Tad Williams wrote a series called The Dragonbone Chair, or something like that. If you bought the hardbound version, it was a trilogy. However, if you went paperback, it was four books, because the last book was too long to bind as a paperback. That has always greatly amused me, because as far as I can tell, the only reason they didn't print the hardbound copy as two books and just make it a quadrilogy is because at the end of book two, he said that the next one was going to be the last book. I wonder how many times his editor called him and said, "Are you positive there's nothing you can trim? What about the ending? Everybody knows he's going to get the girl. You don't actually have to spell it out for them." My point is, I can just see, ten years from now, going to Barnes & Noble and seeing The Wheel of Time: Book 12, volume 15 on the shelves.
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Just finished reading Knife of Dreams (book 11, if you're counting in order, and not counting the prequel book, which I haven't read anyway). I must, in all fairness admit that I was pleasantly surprised. The last couple of books seemed very repetitive and mind-crushingly, soul-numbingly full of nothing happening. Not so here! Ha ha! I'm not going to tell you what happened, because Jerry the only one I know that's read it, but I will tell you something encouraging. It was more than one thing! I'm beginning to think he might be able to wrap this up in fewer than fifteen books. Multiple things actually happened! It was a virtual tour de force of stuff! Happening! This may be the first book in the series in which there are fewer loose ends at the completion of the book than at the start.
Granted, some of the things we knew were going to happen. Some because they were prophesied seven thousand pages ago, and some because they were just obvious. But still. They had to happen so that we could move on.
I know I seem sarcastic, but this series has had so much potential, and done a pretty piss-poor job of living up to it until now, that I was just excessively impressed. Good stuff.
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The strike team had kept a low profile. Fritz had no identikit profiles on any of them. He hoped that lack wouldn't cost him.
He was moving in now, to neutralize the situation and apprehend the suspects. They were, he thought, having their last meeting before planting the virus. The big parade and gathering was not for some time yet, and they would not have wanted to plant the virus too far ahead of time, for fear of incomplete results. Fritz came upon the strike team, to apprehend them; then he would radio other operatives to let them know the placement of the virus. Plans sure are swell, aren't they?
--
He had created a world in which any road she took led back to him. That world was not real, in the normal sense of real. In the "normal sense of real" real world, he came back to her. Fritz came upon the strike team, and he saw Jane Doe. And he hesitated.
--
The virus entered the water supply, dooming the human population of Earth. Fritz lay on the floor, his breathing shallow. He was still trying to assimilate what he had seen, to get past the shock of seeing her again, when he died.
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The clouds, heavy and low, reached down with thin droplet fingers to feel the earth; the earth sent its buildings of concrete and steel, grey grey grey, back as emissaries. Grey coming down, and grey rising to meet it. Like a pornographic movie shot before color film had become available, the sky and the earth caressed each other like familiar lovers who, for all the time they'd been together, still enjoyed the raw physical contact of touching, exploring each other.
Fritz stared out his window, absorbed in the rhythmic caresses. His forehead was pressed against his apartment window; his shoulder jammed into the wall in the window alcove. Both his forehead and shoulder seemed to be supporting a lot of weight, but his feet didn't buy that for a second. Emptiness, he surmised, might possibly be the heaviest substance known to man. Not that man knew all that much, obviously. For example, what attracted one person to someone else? Mere chemistry or coincidence? If mankind knew that, love might have been solved long ago. Were love that simple, Fritz might have been looking in, rather than out. His weight and the lifeless apartment behind Fritz showed that he, at least, had ceded to love its exalted enigmatic status. It was a battle he no longer cared to fight. He was so tired, and he needed his energy for other things. So Fritz's apartment stayed lifeless, almost unlived in; the one person who could have resuscitated it was gone.
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Good things might happen to me this week. But I'm not getting my hopes up. See how good I am? On an unrelated note, I'm reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. It's a dangerous thing for me to read. Dangerous in the 'dropping a match into the gas tank to make sure it's empty' way. I also read a good H. G. Wells story, The Door in the Wall, today, thanks to this entry by the Accordion Guy. Very poignant, I thought. It did, however, bring to mind one of my oldest dilemmas. Is it better to try to enjoy the things that you have or to try to chase something else? I know plenty of people who would have been very happy with the positions and life Wallace had. I also know plenty of people who would have gone through that door every chance they had gotten. I'd probably still be standing there looking at the door. Nearly every paper that I wrote in college had the same theme: Ignorance is Bliss. The punchline is, of course, that nobody knows that until it's too late. My baseline, my normal state seems to be a tad too alert, too self-conscious to reach that state. Unless - and that's a big unless - there are extenuating circumstances. Chemically lowered inhibitions (alcohol), love (romantic, or friendshiply love), or escapism (reading, mostly) seem to do well for me, by themselves or in combinations. But all my legal matters will have been resolved soon, and I am aware of a rising crescendo that is driving me to.. something. I haven't been able to find a suitable outlet for it yet, but I have as of yet been constrained in my search. I am feeling well, physically and mentally, and I am aware that I am about to enter a new phase of my life. Things will be different.
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