So why, after six months of silence, do I feel the need to start babbling on again in a public forum (a potentially public forum at any rate). I suppose it has to do with my most recent effort to make sense of my life. This isn’t intended to be a wrenching soul-searching endeavor the likes of which everyone hates to be forced into listening. It will probably turn into one. The best laid plans. . .

So, as I said before I’ve moved some 500 miles from my last residence, started living with my girlfriend (Staci) and her two pets (a dog named Leroy and a cat named Milo), and taken a new job that requires me to wake up around six-thirty in the morning rather than sometime before two in the afternoon. I’ve essentially turned my life upside down. Many of the ideas I’d had regarding this arrangement have turned out to be untrue. For instance, combining two similar incomes towards bills, rent, and food has not entitled me to a seemingly inexhaustible font of cash the likes of which can be used to procure both goods and services at a whim. Also, while the great majority of events both special and otherwise that a person may attend does increase almost exponentially when said person leaves work in the afternoon rather than the dead of night the early morning awakening does not really leave this person with a great deal of energy to pursue them. See also: misconceptions about financial abundance.

See, I used to work the evening shift. I’d wake up around, oh, 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning. I’d sip coffee for a good hour or so while reading websites, watching DVDs, or playing World of Warcraft. Then it was off to work, where I’d see folks leaving in the evening announcing plans to go out to eat, to a movie, or just to go home and lay on the couch with their sweethearts watching television. I’d be more than a little jealous, and think “Boy, you sure do get to do a whole lot more when you work day shift.” And I suppose I do, that I just don’t remember it as well because most of the days I don’t do anything more than come home and wait for Staci. That, and I kind of miss being able to slowly sip a couple cups of coffee without having to rush off to work. I’m better off this way. Working at night would make for a pretty miserable relationship.

As for the money issue: I really thought when I decided to move that I’d see a considerable bump in my spending cash. After all, we’d be combining groceries, splitting bills, and chipping in for necessary expenditures. We ought to have more, right? Well. . . maybe, but not nearly as much as I must have expected. I still tend to wind up pretty close to broke at least twice a month. I haven’t exactly been able to just buy whatever I like either (as I thought I might). A couple of times I’ve taken a look at my collections of things and become inexplicably depressive. Now that I’m starting to type this it sounds a bit spoiled in my head. . . but let me explain.

All my conscious life I’ve been obsessed with things: namely the continual acquisition of them. This drive should no doubt be familiar to any of us who grew up feeling socially awkward in the 1980s and 1990s. I used to tape the little product inserts that came in packages of Transformers to my dresser as best to fantasize about finally having all of the parts to one of the “gestalt” robots (I can distinctly recall wanting to collect Superion particularly badly, though I never did. In fact, I never managed to collect all the parts of any of these toys which turns out to be portentous.). I also hung on to the LEGO catalogs, both the large ones that showed every set by theme for the year and the tiny fold-out posters that only gave you a taste. Once I reached a certain age I probably spent almost as much time looking at other things I might buy if I had the money as I did playing with the toys I already had. “If I could just get this entire set,” I’d often think, “that would be great. Think of how much fun that would be.” I never, ever did. Before I could even come close I’d find some new collection of toys that I absolutely had to have.

As I got older, the objects I longed to own changed (though not all that drastically — I bought more LEGO sets during and after college than at any given time in my childhood) but the cyclical nature of my obsession never did. One month I simply had to own all the seasons of Smallville. The next it might be as many different chapters of Final Fantasy I could get to run on the PlayStation 2. I’d run out and get one, spend far too much time looking at places I might buy more, and then forget all about it when I found something new or rediscovered a past obsession. The simple fact is I am addicted to thinking that some complete set of something or other I can buy will make me happier. I’m addicted to finding new collections of things to be obsessed over. A few months ago I took stock on how many first seasons of television shows I had bought and how much it would cost to finish them. In short, it was a lot of money. A lot of money I now don’t want to spend on that. . . It really made me feel awful in a way I cannot adequately explain. I have a few ideas, but nothing concrete. Nothing that makes me say “Aha! So that’s why I felt so awful!”

I thought maybe typing it out this time would help me come to realize it. So far. . . not so much. Some time soon, perhaps.

God damn! November? It’s been six months since I last posted anything here? What happened? I guess I just plumb forgot.

Here’s what I’ve been up to for the past couple of months:

• Moved from Charleston, SC to Richmond, VA.
• Had a very difficult time with a very large, very heavy, very green couch.
• Became a stepfather to my girlfriends two adorable furry children
• Started a new job at a new hospital
• Embarrassed myself, Staci, and her friend Amber at a Sleater Kinney show in Washington, DC.
• Went out to see the movies Land of the Dead, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Batman Begins, Junebug, Thumbsucker, Capote, and Everything Is Illuminated (not necessarily in that order).
• Drove to my family’s cabin in eastern West Virginia twice and to Asheville, NC once.
• Watched the first season of Lost
• Walked the streets of Richmond, VA dressed as a zombie along with several dozen other crazy bastards.
• Mowed the lawn several times, washed the dishes many times, and raked leaves once.
• Fell asleep on the couch watching zombie movies at least three times.
• Woke up every morning next to the woman I love.

(I had intended to have more photos to share, but Flickr is just not cooperating today and I don’t much feel like setting up my own photo gallery. As soon as it starts acting better I’ll get you some visual aids.)

It’s been an awful long while now since I last promised to tell you everything that has been happening. I’m not sure what took me so long, but I’m going to do my best to make things right. See, ladies and gents, I’ve fallen in love. Well, more precisely, I’ve rediscovered a love I knew to be long ago but could not seem to capture it back when it first came to me.

Nigh on two years past I met someone. From the first moment I laid eyes on her I knew something, nothing definite, but something kept drawing my eyes back to her across the hazy, smoke-filled dim of a bar. Pure chance put us together then, as she neither lived nor worked in that town but had merely accompanied friends there that night. My first half-suspected notions were confirmed when we got a chance to speak, though I do not remember precisely how that came to be. I was certainly much too frightened to say anything to her directly. But, it wasn’t until she held me down and kissed me at an afterparty that I finally figured it out.

Despite that thrilling first meeting, it simply wasn’t in the cards that we should be together at the time. Having recently accepted a new job in another state, she was leaving within the next two months or so. It didn’t help matters at all that one of her friends, the closest to an arch-nemesis as I’ve ever had, did not approve of me in the slightest for one reason or another never fully explained logically. So she left, and then I left, and eventually we came to live some 400-odd miles apart.

Which is when things finally came together, even though we were as far apart as ever before.

Time passed, relationships were forged and broken. Hearts were callously mended. Bitterness and cynicism loomed overhead. A correspondence was maintained, strictly in a platonic sense for the most part. And then, towards the end of 2004 she made a realization.

In the aftermath of my most recent relationship implosion I, still fairly sullen, was speaking to a fellow lab rat about finally getting on with my life and the subject of fate and/or destiny came up (in the “love something set it free” sort of variety”). I sighed softly, and said “Well, if there’s anyone out there destined for me, that’d be Staci.” On that very night, within three hours of that statement, Staci had made the first move to reforge what we had never fully started.

(Oh, I seem to have neglected to share her name with you. It’s Staci. Sorry about the excessive “pronounery” back there.)

I’m re-reading this particular e-mail right now to remind myself. It’s not particularly evocative. In fact, it’s downright pedestrian. Just a simple invitation to spend Halloween weekend in her new hometown with no promise whatsoever of anything above friendship. Naturally, I read a good bit more into it than was actually written down.

I re-arranged my work schedule, finagled a day off, and one Friday in late October set my car upon the wide open highway for a long drive to meet my destiny. Though there’s quite a bit more to tell of this story, I think, perhaps I will save it for another day. After all, I’ve done the hard part already: getting started on being open. Knowing me, it’ll be shutting me up that’s the hard part now.