Sunday, January 30, 2011

You are wrong about me

You were wrong about me. I cannot say how but I know you were. Sometimes I feel like I have to believe that or I will dissolve and sometimes I just believe it.

I made my money this month. I felt the fear and I withstood it. I won my money back because I'm good enough at it to do that, and I made some dollars from coaching and made my money. I keep turning up. You think I wasn't worth anything and however little I am worth, I keep turning up.

You were wrong about me because you misunderstood who I am. I am humble and I don't think that's a sin. You think you should have pride when there's nothing to be proud of. You think the abstract means more than who we really are, and I never will. I never will, and I have to be happy with that.

You were wrong about me. I am happy with who you are because I'm adaptable. I'll take goodness from wherever I find it and make what I can of it. You think that goodness is not enough, that it's not worth nurturing. You're wrong. I'm not ever changing my mind about this. You're wrong and I don't have to share your belief that people are not worthwhile.

You are wrong about me because I'm trying. I'm willing to fail and I do, God knows I do. You should have loved me. If you had, you would have had everything you wanted. I'm like that. I'm like a well you could have drawn water from if you only knew how. You think there's a secret; there isn't. You are wrong about that too.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

How I stopped loving him

There is nothing worse in this life than falling out of love with someone. It has only ever really happened to me once because I work hard to keep loving people I love--something inside me does not want to let go of it and ticks away forever, trying hard to see the things I loved and make them worth more.

It is hard too, for me at least, not to be loved by someone who once loved me. "Hard" does not begin to cover it. It feels like a terrible sickness that I cannot shake off. It feels as though I have been diminished to a point, as though my worth has been drained to nothing. It has happened to me often in the past few years: either I have stopped being loved or the person who loves me has stopped feeling I am worth showing any love to. From my point of view, it feels the same, whichever is the case. The worst of it is, I need to cure that sickness before I feel as though there is none of me left. I need to be loved: it is the fuel of my existence. I cannot help that; I cannot rationalise it away. It is so deeply part of who I am that it is almost the only thing I am sure about that is true about me. Everything else I have lied to myself about, sacrificed, changed or traded. But that remains.

But once I had a love that died. I couldn't see the good in him any more and I found him too hard to love. It wasn't really his fault. He lost his way and became confused. I have wanted to love him again: that same thing ticks away inside me, but I find that I have too much contempt for him even to want to be with him.

He was always inclined to be a whiny child. His marriage broke up after only a few years because he was unable to love his wife. He treated her badly because he had such a lack of understanding of his own worth. Feeling unworthy of love makes it hard to love others. It was not wholly his fault, of course, but part of becoming a man, for him, was to absolve his wife of blame and accept responsibility. Really, that was the time in his life when he became responsible, stopped blaming others for how his life was, stopped feeling bitter for what he did not have, and started to recognise what he did.

Simply, he abandoned the poisons in his life, stopped thinking he was a special case and found what there was to love in himself. He became confident and aware, capable and unafraid. It was then that I began to love him. I cherished him, took care of him, believed in him. You would have liked him. He is very personable and generous. His wife found she liked him, and they reconciled.

He was very content. Although he didn't love his work, it didn't get him down the way it would have done before, and the rest of his life was enough compensation for that. He was able to focus on the thing that mattered to him: writing, and although what he was writing was not very good, he felt good about it. And, ultimately, that is what matters, because we must please ourselves if we are to please anybody.

When they had a child, he felt fulfilled, that he had found a way of life that gave him what he wanted. But from that point, things began to sour for him. His wife found things in his life that she didn't like and she changed in ways that made life harder enough that his contentment slowly eroded. Some say having children changes a woman, that her all-encompassing love for the child leaves too little for her man. I suppose that may be true, and when you are someone who needs love, losing it can be tough. Still, he was resilient, and made changes to help him cope with that. They changed countries and he found a great job. His relationship was not perfect: it became easier to be frustrated with what his wife lacked and harder to focus on what she had--what she had diminished a little, and sometimes a little is enough, if it is the right little.

But at that point, he could still have been content, but he made a bad choice, a ruinous choice, which he could not have understood at the time was as bad as it turned out to be. It seemed right. At that time, he still had a quality that I loved in him: he would do what he thought was right, not inflexibly but steadfastly.

But it was terrible for him. He had, without knowing it, become sick. Suddenly, he found himself isolated, lonely and hopeless, and too sick to cope. His ability to focus on the right thing disappeared. He couldn't think how to improve his life, to make the right choices. For someone like him, who enjoys being around people, the worst thing to do would be to separate himself from them. But he couldn't help that. He had to work to support his growing family, and his focus on them, on making life work for them, made it impossible to find the energy to make life for himself.

He became broken, trapped in a cycle of mania and depression, alienated and deeply lonely. His wife withdrew her love for him. With three young children, she had nothing left for him. Were he still the confident, resilient man he had been, he would have been big enough to weather that, to maintain their relationship by his own goodness, by having enough heart for both of them. He failed in that; he didn't even try. I became unable to love him too.

If flowers could beg for water, they would take it from anywhere. They would seek it out. And he did. He sought love, and found it. Because he did not go outside, and had no belief that he was at all attractive, physically or personally, he could not--and would not, in any case--find it with a local woman. He did not have the capability anyway: he felt he should spend what time he could with his wife, housebound herself by motherhood, and try, with the few resources he had, to make a relationship that would at least sustain them until... well, it's hard to say until what.

He was desperate to be home, to be somewhere that didn't feel alien and unkind, to have people in his life he felt were at least not hostile to him. I wonder whether he should not have simply done that, left her and the children and tried at least to recover himself, his sanity, his wellbeing. Would it have been a worse outcome?

But he found love. A parched, foolish love that would never have had any attraction for him were he whole, but easy for an onlooker to misunderstand. And it would have been easy to surrender it if it had not been the only love he felt in his life.

It probably seems odd to most people to love and be loved by someone you do not ever meet, who possibly is not even real. I mean, I know how fucking odd his life became! I don't need telling. I am rational enough to know how a thing is, even if in the heat of the moment it seems another way.

And I genuinely believe there is no sin in it. A person cannot help who they are, what they consist in. Particularly not a simple, gentle person like him. There is enough to hate him for without hating him for needing to be loved, when I know that he was so close to dying, and needed love to be able to hope to flourish.

That slipped away though, strangely enough because she was jealous of his life, jealous that he wanted to love his wife. But it didn't help his life any for her to be gone, his relationship with his wife was too broken, trapped in a cycle of contempt and frustration, each unable to be better for the other, each unable to be the first to say, stop.

I cannot talk about the last few months of his marriage and the months afterwards because he has already sung that song and the people he wanted to hear it let it fall on deaf ears. That left him crushed, hollow, almost without self esteem. I do not think anyone intends that to happen to you; they simply cannot love you any more and that isn't something they can help. I wish I had been able to love him then. He needed me. I suppose I can say that I cared enough about him to try to help him recover from what had ailed him, and was successful in that. It seemed so prosaic to have been sick, to have an organic cause for the depression, the confusion, the sadness.

But what good did it do him? The damage was done. He had become someone whom the people he needed, desired most to love him did not love. And when you are not able to say, I am loveable, because you simply do not believe it, you cannot find a way to make that all right.

I could talk about other things that make me despise him: how he lost his livelihood because he was stupid, how he has become a bad father and a worse friend, how he has become so insensitive that even people he thinks are happy with him cannot even stand to be with him, feel he is not worth time or effort, but I have already given enough reasons not to love him. I know that without love, he has no reason to be, and I feel sorry about that, but how can I feel that anyone can love him if I can't, when I know I am capable of love, albeit a small, withered love that no one, except him, wants.

Friday, January 21, 2011


I have lost 500 dollars today. It is everything I won this month. It is so lonely to sit here and lose. But I'm a loser. That's what I do best. I fail at everything. Even when I think I'm winning, I lose and lose and lose. It doesn't matter how hard I try.

I am stuck with it because I have no way to make money. Soon I won't be able to pay the rent. I am stuck having to try to make a living in a place with no living for me. What else can I do? I have to try to make a life in a place where life escapes me, where when I thought I had a little bit of joy, the girlfriend I loved dumped me. And worse, thinks I am such a loser it wasn't even worth trying to work out.

Here's my life. I raise KK, and a guy shoves QQ. He hits a fourcard flush. The guy who sucks out on me is a complete arsehole. I know him. He laughed afterwards. Why wouldn't he? Winners get to laugh at losers.

It is going to be very hard to fire up tables tomorrow. Some days it's hard even to get out of bed, to force myself to live my pointless life of losing.

On another table, I yet again lose with QQ in a 70/30. I have probably had 50 70/30s today. I should win 35. I imagine I've won 3.

Here's my life. Tell me, would you live it:
NL Holdem $100(BB) Poker Stars Game#56296220951

ARFO777 ($2,025)
yedckol ($1,260)
BeesonZ ($1,785)
lonnieboy ($2,565)
Parvatti ($1,925)
sbw_75 ($1,115)
t bone 2526 ($925)
DeathCardSix ($705)
FR Vessant ($1,195)

ARFO777 posts (SB) $50
yedckol posts (BB) $100

Dealt to FR Vessant Qc Qd
fold, fold, fold, fold, fold,
DeathCardSix raises to $705 (AI)
FR Vessant raises to $1,195 (AI)
fold, fold,
FLOP ($1,560) 5c 8d 5s
TURN ($1,560) 5c 8d 5s Ah
RIVER ($1,560) 5c 8d 5s Ah Kd
DeathCardSix shows Ad 3d
(Pre 32%, Flop 17.2%, Turn 95.5%)

FR Vessant shows Qc Qd
(Pre 68%, Flop 82.8%, Turn 4.5%)

DeathCardSix wins $1,560

The weird thing is, I won that tournament. I came back from 480 chips and I won it. Mad. It's basically the only one I did win, but crazy that I choose a hand to illustrate how rotten things are, and it's from a tourney I beat against the odds.

Pity life isn't like that.

Friday, January 14, 2011


When you kill wasps, they freeze in place. It seems a pity to do that to their long lithe bodies, to make them as static as I am. But they are so heedless, what else can you do? The world has so much in it you cannot reason with. Sometimes I wonder whether I am just not sane because I want the world to be.

You know, we have massive ingenuity. When it comes to finding ways to hurt each other, to kill or maim, we are extremely capable. But we did not ever find a way to communicate with wasps, to say to them that we would not hurt you if you simply lived your lives away from us.

Wasps are built so that the thing they have for protecting themselves and their family is the thing that brings their demise. We would not hate wasps if they had no sting.


I feel guilty for neglecting the children. Some of the time it feels like I have forgotten how to love anyone. I feel like I have numbed myself.

But other times I am ferociously stinging myself and I've forgotten what I was protecting myself from, or whether I was just in a fury, punishing myself, and what for, really?

What else can you do but spin around in circles when all you want is someone to love but you are no good at loving anyone at all?

Wanting to is not enough, obviously.


So, sometimes I think, you have the chance. You could cut yourself loose of it, shed your casing. But I don't know how. What wasp ever lost his sting?

I wanted to be able to bathe in being wanted for a while, and feel the muddy accretion slide away. I know it doesn't work like that but sometimes you suspend disbelief, have faith and miracles happen.

Or not. I froze the wasps to their nest and I could hear a howling wind. I knew it was my soul, hurting for what I've done. Or haven't done.