My weekend away, while pleasurable and even "fun," was a lesson in the essential comic sadness of life. Here on the west coast anyway, maybe they see it differently back east. I don't know anyone else's heart and barely know my own, but if other people are anything like me (annoyingly likely) then there are an awful lot of people on this planet for whom obsessive longing for the unattainable is the engine that drives the sillier components of their imagination and sparks their most feverish go-nowhere introspections. I am completely powerless to stop desiring things that are emotional dead ends and could only be worked into my life at the expense of things I cherish or think I cherish although it's possible I don't have the faintest idea what it means to cherish something. I know this and still my need jumps out of me. It's grotesque. The thrill of contact, a falsely-perceived connection, grubby one-directional desire, remotest possibilities that seem like sure things for fifteen minutes, or forever, depending on how you look at it.

Every mature and reasonable thing ever uttered about love is false and ridiculous, even the things Karen Carpenter murmured to Richard on those sunny Sunday mornings. I am a fool but it's only when I am at my most foolish that I feel alive. No wonder I feel so alive all the time! Yet this is a problem. The fact that it's the most banal problem ever doesn't help. Help!