�Openness presumes you�re standing on common ground. Whether or not you�re standing on common ground � that�s not something you talk about, that�s something you decide.�

� Bernhard Schlink, in �The Circumcision�

This morning I got hit on for the third time in four days, this time by a fuzzy-haired, toothpaste-eschewing guy in line at Vivace. Friday night while I was at the Comet with Vanessa and Popeye, a sixtyish guy who was sporting the Hemingway look (we later named him Captain Jack) ran a thumbnail down my back while I was waiting at the bar, and as I turned to face him, immediately ready to take a swing, he announced in an unexpected tone of friendly confidence, �You should come home with me.� Then Saturday morning at the laundromat, a homeless guy touched my underwear � the ones that were lying on the folding table, you perv � and asked me if I might care to have some wine with him. I had thought that the lack of washer and dryer in the new house was something I could get around, a minor inconvenience in exchange for such a huge yard and kitchen, an office, etc., but now I am not so sure.

I was at Vivace this morning because I had to go to my bank. Yesterday I managed to lose the debit card I only just replaced from losing my wallet several weeks ago, and since I�ve just moved, �for security� said the customer service operator, I had to cancel it and request a new one live and in person. (Also I had to go to the bank because I was informed over the weekend that the miracle worker CPA whom I thought had bailed my ass out a few months ago actually employed some rogue accounting upon which the IRS looks askance. So guess who owes a whole lot more money? That�s me. But I don�t want to get all into that here, or the money thing much if at all except in the abstract, and that is why I am consigning this news flash to the interparenthetical domain.) Both the missing wallet and the missing debit card make no rational sense at all, I mean their disappearance doesn�t; in the first case I was keeping a close eye on my wallet all night because, isn�t this funny, I went to the Uptown last night and the last time I had, last year, I�d lost it, and in the second because I distinctly remember sliding the debit card into my purse after paying for brunch and then I all did was get into a car and go back to my house. In neither case can I conceive of what might have happened. Yet I cannot argue with the reality of the missing articles. So this morning I called my sister at work first thing, and I told her that there was a curse on me and that she had to procure a new wallet for me that would be free of my bad juju, and she knew exactly what I meant � before I even explained! � and promises to get one in the mail post haste. I hope that it will be one small new beginning for me, the end of losing that category of things.

Sometimes it�s hard not to think of the last year or so, and when I get in a mood ever since I came back to Seattle in September of �99, as one long narrative of losing things, and I don�t mean in that mind-expanding Buddhist way, either. After 2002s that have been characterized by various kinds of unrest and turmoil though not without their awfully nice parts, Vanessa and I have vowed to make our respective 2003s so excellent as to beat the band. We�re getting tough, we�re in training, we�re making preparations now so that as the date looms we will be ready to ride the opposite of the shitty wave. In a similar vein, is it possible to resolve to be done with the period of losing and instead to usher in a period of getting, receiving, having? I go so back and forth on the Dale Carnegie shit, Silva mind control, parking-space karma, Nathaniel Branden, make-your-own-luck, Within six months I *will* have a full-time etc. � you know, all that stuff. On the one hand, it can amount to a kind of blaming the victim where you are both the toughloving castigator and the traumatized beleagueree: like, my car was stolen even though I had the Club on it. I got the worst financial advice I could have had, just before the market got worse than even the best adviser could have imagined. Do those things make me a failure at creating my own luck? But on the other hand, I know I have a tendency to let my psychological life go to hell a little at a time � I get impatient, there�s always some *thing* it seems I�d rather be doing than, say, meditating, or even the unsquishy version of same, Taking A Long Hard Look At fill in the blank � until before I know it I�m either catatonic or weeping insensibly, all alone because I�ve withdrawn from my friends out of fear and shame that I have disappointed them, in a thousand pieces on the floor that it�s going to take a long long time to reassemble. So another thing I want to try to do, and feel free to chime in �Well, it is about damn time� is find the middle course, the one that is between the cloying self-congratulation of that �Self-Nurture� book I referred to in the Monitor a few months ago and the needless heedless self-abnegation of the �Self-Torture� joke with which I felt obliged to riposte.

(Made up �beleagueree.� You like? Also, my first impulse was to write �... full-time blah blah blah� but then I thought that might seem eye-rolling or overly hospitable to a bad attitude. Also with �some *thing*� note again prejudice in favor of productivity and checklistism but at least awareness of it, which is progress, right?)

Rebecca and I were talking about this on Saturday night, on the way to and then at the Lawnmowers show at the Sunset. There�s a book called �Simple Abundance� that a small handful of people in the last few years have told me that I need to read, and despite the automatic sneer that self-helpage induces, I am proudly a democrat so I do not feel it is my place to ignore the results of a popular vote. And Rebecca knows the book, so she was telling me about it. And how do I say this nicely? It kind of made me want to be a fascist. First of all, it�s not a book but a program � every day you have to make a list of five things you are grateful for, and you have to keep a thing called a Wish Book, a collage of, I don�t know, images and words and whatever that you come across that for whatever reason has some kind of emotional resonance for you, like if you had a shrink and it was Martha Stewart, and, Rebecca says, the book�s author even admonishes readers, If you have not been faithfully compiling your gratitude lists and keeping your Wish Book, then I can�t do anything to help you. More blame. So no thanks. Plus I�m just leery of the cultcultcult aspect of stuff like that, even the Oprah magazine makes me antsy until I can go listen to some Iggy or something to clear my head. But what to do instead? By looking for some more palatable option, am I not guilty of staying in my comfortable rut? Should I bite the bullet and sacrificially give myself over to the will of the people? Would the humiliation of participating in such a sissified project in fact have such a bracing effect, like saltwater in my nose and mouth, that I�d be forced to fight my way to the surface and swim hard for shore? I don�t know. But I have to do something. It is about damn time.

Lawnmowers were great though the fratty, Hootie-looking crowd weirded me out. Opening bands were a mixed bag. Rebecca also seconded a motion put forth by Vanessa last week at the Mecca, which is that I need to work on my chitchat. Note please that both of these ladies mean the remark only as constructive criticism. Chitchat, small talk, bar banter � it�s not that I can�t do it, it�s that it isn�t reliably there for me, it can get scared away by whatever I�m beating myself up over at any given moment, and then while I�m preoccupied with beating myself up I don�t even notice that I�m not doing it, I lose the ability to take the conversation�s temperature, to taste for seasoning and adjust accordingly. (One of these days I am going to regret the level of candor that I have maybe self-torturingly brought to this new URL, I am going to wish I had never forthcame to this place. Too late now though, isn�t it.) And my friends know that I�m like this, though perhaps they do not understand that in the absence of carefree yuks there is necessarily some degree of lacerating going on, and I think maybe in assuming that they would just accept it I have demanded too much of them. Um um um and yeah. This turns out to be too hard for me to write about just now, I�ve gone all lump-in-throaty and after I�ve been doing so well on the no tears in the office tip, so I�m going to table the subject for the time being. But don�t think for a minute that I�m not thinking about it, and trying to work on it. Another thing that I have had occasion to say many times in the past few weeks is It is hard but I am trying. I have meant this in one particular way but maybe I should take some deep breaths, swallow the lump and blink my eyes, and buckle down to meaning it in more.

But then: when does doing something painful for one�s own good cross the line into self-torture? Maybe my fundamental problem is that I have never been very good at telling the difference.

But then: by putting forth that hypothesis, am I merely making a clever excuse that allows me to avoid doing the hard work? Don�t know, don�t know.

Oh, and by the way, I do not live in Georgetown. I have now been to Georgetown, and it is a wholly separate entity from my neighborhood, demarcated, among other things, by an overpass. I think that the accurate report would be that I live on the very south part of Beacon Hill. Though in a way I wish that I could say I live in Georgetown, because the people who make smug jokes about my neighborhood as if it�s the crack district or as if it�s in the boonies are really starting to piss me off.

This entry is all over the place not in a good way, so I am going to post it now before I get too self conscious about that. Even though I�m still ambivalent about having done so, now that I�ve brought the candor here I want to flex it, steeling myself if necessary through the unaccustomed exertion, and by doing so become unafraid to keep on flexing because I�ll already know I can, and have, and that will be one less thing to be afraid of. My list of things that I want to write about is becoming longer and longer, a bigger and bigger joke, because I never get around to addressing any of them. So I am going to post the entry before that stops being funny and turns into one more thing to slap myself with.

(Crap, too late.)