Official alcoholic beverage of my breakup: YES. My bedroom setup in the new house is choice � I have a little table with the socialists� old TV and a VCR on it, and it stays tucked against the wall during the day but at night I pull it out, move it close to the bed, and tuck myself up to combat the fearful what-will-my-life-be-like insomnia with a stack of movies and a cluster of bottles. It is comforting to fix my eyes on pictures on the screen, imaginary people I don�t know and who will never believe bad things about me, someone else�s narrative, something that doesn�t hurt. I try to stop thinking and I get drunk and I pass out with the lights on until the poor old bod shudders awake sometime between four-thirty and six and then I get up and get on with it. Yeah, the guy who accused me of cheating on him and being generally dissatisfied has, as of last Thursday, been online dating for "a couple weeks" and I�m living on coffee and vodka and Bridgeport IPA and Tums, huddled up in bed every night and out of habit � I just realized it this morning and wanted to give myself a long understanding hug and slap my sorry disgusting face off at the same time � staying only on half of it, saving half for him. That is how I�m living. (This is not what I deserve.)

Official food of my breakup: n/a. I�m just being honest here, so don�t give me the anorexia hand-wringing jive. It�s not a big deal, this is how I respond to big stress. Usually it goes on for two or three weeks, a month max, and then I have a small private nervous collapse, sleep for sixteen hours, and wake up and eat a bacon cheeseburger and a plateful of fries. I am trying to do better though, to force myself to eat a few things, because I really want to go running and if I did it now or today, I�d pass out. Yesterday I had a banana, a plum, some Wheat Thins, and some zucchini, and today I�ve already had a piece of coffee cake from someone�s going-away party. And beer has carbs. As long as I don�t look like I�m losing it, as long as I can talk without my voice breaking the majority of the time, I consider myself to be not a lost cause.

Also, another album you don�t want to be listening to when you�re in my state of mind is "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Make a note. Also, the Mary Lou Lord cd in question is the same one that has on it "He�d Be A Diamond," a song I used to like a lot and that before this nuclear winter blew in could perhaps have been the theme song for the maybe-after-a-few-months-of-respective-shit-getting-together-etc. conversations that Todd and I had been having for a while there. Which, in retrospect: what the *fuck* was that all about, if he was already telling his friends that in my diary I�d eviscerated him and hung him out to dry, that I�d "sandwiched" the breakup night between two "dates" with his designated successor (this accusation gets more offensive almost every time I think about it), that everything I said about my feelings for him came out as lies? I�m ashamed of myself for having wanted a reconciliation and wanted him back, and I feel like I want to die for having sent my long e-mail to him on Friday morning, how could I have been such a credulous asshole? I acted like the world champ of sucker chumps, and after a few months or whatever when the bruises heal, I know I�ll have to struggle with this in more than an intellectual way: how am I ever going to say anything again, to anyone, like what I said to him last Friday, how am I going to make myself vulnerable enough to say what I want after he tore down the sky for me like that? You have no idea the things I said, you can�t possibly. Just thinking about his response, I feel ruined in every sense of the word, I feel like garbage. How could you do that to a person to whom fourteen hours later you will send another e-mail asking her to call you no matter how late it is, saying that you need an opportunity to convey to her a thing you have the audacity to call tenderness? I told Karen this morning, tenderness with a side of bile does not sound very appetizing to me. I would rather starve, or, even in this unfamiliar and inhospitable landscape, set to providing for myself.

I may be saying that I don�t ever want to talk to him again.

And I mean that, if I mean that, not in the angry, I-hate-you-you-bastard way, just in the way in which everything�s been burned and salted right down to the sense of potentiality � including, because of how he hears them, any words I would say to him, and who am I if my language is broken: people once lived here, and they were happy and did stuff together and enjoyed each other�s company, and these people and this place were points in an ongoing history (that�s mostly what I mean by potentiality). But now there is no more Here.

Ha, imagine how little self-respect I�d have to have to ask him to burn me replacement copies of my cds that were stolen. (Am I starting to get closer to being angry?) Who am I if my language is broken, but also: Why would he have tenderness in the first place for someone whose actions are so objectionable and whose character causes such revulsion? This is another tricky riddle � if it had been I who dumped him, and I honestly thought that the night before that and the night after he�d been out with some Miss Lady and the association was a going concern, I would certainly not send him a pleading late-night e-mail that contained the word "tenderness." If he�d kept up a diary like mine and I stumbled across it (read: if despite my promise to him, I looked for it and read it and lied about that by omission for months) and I read Word One suggesting that he thought I was stringing him along or populating the bench, one of two things would have happened. Either I would have gone to him right away and said, "Listen, I know I shouldn�t have snooped, but I did and I�m sorry, and now I�ve found this and we have to talk about it because not only is it 100% bullshit but the fact that you�re suspicious is eating me up, I love you madly and we need to clear this up once and for all" or my judgment would have been swift and final and, again, devoid of anything like tenderness. His opposite instincts in this regard are something I don�t understand and probably never will.

I wish I could finish, I�ve actually got some of what I want to say outlined on a piece of paper, but I just got very busy here and I need to post what I�ve got if only not to be distracted by the fact of its being in progress. More as soon as I can.