Official song of my breakup: Mary Lou Lord�s "Lights Are Changing" or Kelly Willis�s "If I Left You," with Iggy Pop�s "Fuckin� Alone" close behind. (For a few days I was driving around with "Strangers Almanac" in the car and I wouldn�t listen to anything else, and frankly that was just masochistic and I knew it, I don�t know what got into me or why I thought I needed to suffer some more. When I took it out and put in the Mary Lou Lord, the pressure drop was so overwhelming that my hands shook for miles, and I thought, even as emotionally cannibalized as I have been lately, that I felt what it could feel like to feel relief.)

Official turning point of my breakup: Last Sunday morning, after the first night in the new house (tried not to think about simultaneous social-event-of-year party to which I�d been disinvited, I was told, partly out of concern for my own safety at the loyally retributive hands of Todd�s friends; there, I have used his name) � during which I watched "The Year of Living Dangerously," briefly considered getting religion or at least re-reading St. Augustine, and drank myself to sleep � I woke up at 5:30: no, make that I was wrung instantaneously awake at 5:30 by a change of consciousness, of orientation to the breakup, that in its sick-making hopeless invasiveness and proprietary colonization of me felt like the opposite of giving birth. Not, of course, that I would know, and, yeah, I�ll explain. Ever since the Friday night of the bourbon-fortified "I�ve been reading your diary for months" call, and yes I now notice myself not saying the name; these things take time, I�ve been walking around in, like, a fugue state of utter disbelief. How can he have read the things I wrote and not see that I think he hung the moon and stars, how can he have been unmoved by all the times I wrote how gaga I was about him � there must be no more waffling on the past tense now � how can he have inferred from the Monitor that I�ve been keeping boys on hold when there is no mention of that and the Monitor was not especially noted for narrative restraint, what could he be calling evidence that I cheated on him when not a shred exists because that never happened, etc. I had been trapped in the worst-nightmare version of a logical discontinuity, also something that felt like a riddle: Me: "I love you and I want to be with you." Him: "I�ve always had a special gift for reading people and being able to tell what they really mean as opposed to what they say, and I can tell you�re lying to me. Also since I can read people so well, I know what they really want, and what you really want isn�t me." Me: "Yes it is. I love you and I want to be with you." Him: "Dish, don�t insult me by lying. At least give me some credit. Let�s be mature adults and why don�t you just admit it." Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe you can�t see this, but that thematic exchange and the sense of This cannot possibly be, except that it is that had me wrapped up in its tentacles seemed to be somehow qualitatively related. I used "logical" and "riddle" and that�s not far wrong, the wordless grasping feeling that the tools I need for understanding exist and are apprehensible but I just keep missing something as I look for them. Like when a word or phrase or whatever is on the tip of your tongue? Like if that were your whole brain and body *except* the tip of your tongue, because, again, I think that I�m onto something with this wordlessness.

Or maybe not. (Note though: this is the first time in weeks that I have felt anything so self-affirmative as being onto something.) I�m at the temp job, typing in a hurry because I�ve given myself a specific slacktime allotment. Anyway. So that was me up until Saturday night, St. Augustine, bottle of Cristallino, here�s looking at me, kid. Sunday morning, though, the thing that got anti-born in me was the total absence of logic, it was keening-screaming-sobbing-mourning � that unfortunately with me just comes out as sobbing � How can he think that about me, how can he not believe me? Minor emphasis, if you�re reading out loud, on "me," and also this word pronounced in the internal k-s-s-m voice with a slightly drawn-out vowel sound, so as to underscore the abjectness of having to say it. It wasn�t about logic anymore � no: there was no logic anymore, no recourse to an externally imposed system. It was just me, flayed and slandered and abandoned. On Saturday night I would have added "for no reason at all" to the end of that sentence, because I do/did love Todd and think he�s the across-the-board aces-est, hence I would never in a million years cheat on him or cultivate other dudes as a backup plan, blah blah blah, you readers know this, let�s move on, but on Sunday morning the *fact* of the discontinuity ceased to matter. I went from fact to impact. Woke up, finished watching movie because I�d passed out during it, got in car to do move stuff and started leaving the usual spate of Um I�m not doing so good so could you please call me messages for the east coast ladies, and then suddenly was overaware of the change having happened, I was looking at myself objectively as if observing a fascinating phenomenon. And then I had two thoughts, one overlapping the other one like sprinters going around a curve. First: This could be a cool idea, maybe as one of my pointless self-distraction projects to use up all the extra time I�m going to have from now on, and also as an interesting way to combine misery and self-deprecation and the creativity that I know can transcend them both (I�m still too sick to my stomach to take earnestness straight), I can keep, like, a record of when things like this happen, when will be the next time I dissolve into a capillary-busting weepfest and when will I finally get angry. Then: I am talking about writing. I am saying that I want to write something personal. That hasn't been taken away from me after all. And, oh man, that was huge, because for a while there I was scared that after the Monitor turned chimera and turned around and bit me in the ass, I would stick to postcards and shopping lists and my haiku games for the rest of my life. Again I was thinking about "After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes For My Childhood." My brain kept looping the "what would my life be like" � that�s a statement and not a question; that there is no question is central to the poem � and I would conjure up all kinds of careers for myself, all kinds of lives and all kinds of new other things that people would have to learn to say about me, you know, what�s-she-like, what-does-she-do, when there was no more writing for me, no more bushels and no more light. It always feels dorky confessing such apocalypticism after the fact, but I�m volatile and that�s the way my brain works, I guess � it gravitates to the worst-case scenario, if only so that it can lay in supplies and brace itself.

(I have more to say but I am typing very very fast, typing against the clock � which by the way I am finding rather exhilarating! � and I have one more thing I want to get to.)

Here is an interesting sidebar. When I woke up on Sunday with the keening-screaming-sobbing-mourning in me, there was an image associated with it that a few minutes later I could shake loose and found was the amazing scene from the end of "An Unforgettable Summer" in which the Bulgarians� k-s-s-m widows swarm Kristin Scott-Thomas in the sheep pen, Pintilie�s instinct for motion and color so true that you feel yourself leaning towards the screen, wanting that truth of it at the same time as recoiling from what�s happening. I also love that scene because it�s the last one in the movie thus feels so *earned* thus as the viewer you are entitled to the feeling of *having*. Again: anyway. Surely you have those strange moments when you first wake up, especially if you�ve been under a lot of stress, where there�s all kinds of weird detritus in your head. (It�s also like moving, all day long you�re unconsciously putting things into your pockets and at the end of the day you have a nailclipper, a tampon, a peppermint, some Canadian coins, a plastic thing that looks like a handle.) I hadn�t thought in a long time about the movie and its jaw-dropper of a final scene, how Kristin Scott-Thomas incidentally combines ravishing and dignified in a way I don�t know if anyone has since Ingrid Bergman (Faye Dunaway might have if she were not actually a cyborg), and, hey, I have a lot of free time and a lot of trouble sleeping, so I rented it for last night. And did I even remember what the movie was about? I mean, that's not what I was thinking of, walking over to Foreign - Romania at Rain City Video, all my mind seemed to hold were the widows and the swarm and the wanting to feel that I could earn something, but the story had to have been up there somewhere, right? Here's why I think so. Kristin Scott-Thomas plays the vivacious and educated wife of a Romanian army officer. He saved her life and then she fell in love with him. All the other army guys are all hubba-hubba and wanting to cut in at the embassy dance. One of them, her husband�s commander, even propositions her within earshot of her husband, and she parries this with grace and her ravishing dignity. She loves her husband and seems to have a physical need, even, to touch him and to be in contact with him. She can't imagine life without him and their family, and when he is transferred to a posting in the scrubby middle of nowhere, she loves everything about the middle of nowhere because it is where she gets to be with him. But he is jealous and can�t imagine what she sees in him, he is but a common military man, and whenever there�s some minor setback he asks her if she�s sorry she married him; for her, the question is so sad and absurd that she can barely say no, she cannot conceive that the man she loves boundlessly could ask such a thing; it is a little bit horrific. Narrative complications ensue.

As they sometimes do.

That�s my new name here, by the way, Dish, again after the name of the diary just because I like it like that. Here in the Dishery I refer to poems as I see fit, sometimes even twice in the same entry. And all you Monitor veterans, this may be odd and I half-wish I could trade places with you for long enough to find out odd how?, because of the nature of this diary you get to match up all the names here with the old pseudonyms, all except for me of course. Which allegation of unfairness or coyness I am not even going to countenance, so save us both some time and don�t write in, OK? I mean no offense by that. I have more to say on the nature of this diary � did you think I�d drop a phrase like that unarmed? � although I may beg your indulgence for a little while until I have time to put right some things that are hinky on the practical tip, but I�ll save the manifesting for soon, right now it�s really just the writing that is important, my writing, the fact of my sitting here and doing that. I think you understand that. Or else you suck. Ha ha, that�s a joke.

Oh I am glad to be back. More to come.

("Disinvited to" or "disinvited from"? And let the record show that although I have never been a Mel Gibson, fan, never � I like to call him by his anagram, Big Lemons � I guess I�d never seen him in anything before he got cocky and one dimensional, before he wasn�t greedy anymore. He was great in that part.)