It's official.  I think it was official last night.  I just sort of came to terms with it this morning.  I am in a needy state.  I need attention and am dying for affection.  I'm frisky and horny as hell.  I'm post-menstrual... it's probably an artifact of my ovaries screaming, in general. 

Still, needy.  Lonely.  And slightly depressed about all the things I need to do.

Work looms largely.  I've got four days this week to do what I can and take a week off.

Hebrew -- tho it is my love -- also nags at me for attention.  I should be practicing.  At least watching some Israeli movies or something. 

Instead I play Rock Band.  I'm on a timer, so I keep trying to squeeze as much as possible in.  I smoke.  I went to the pub to watch the football game and I had 4 pints of beer.  Light beer, sure, but beer nonetheless.

So, four pints and two bowls later, I'm chattering here.  Pet me, please!  I notice that I respond *too much* when I'm needy, almost like I have to get the last word, except that I'm hoping mine isn't the last.  Too talkative, too aggressive.  I almost told the waitress at the bar that she was beautiful.  Instead I just smiled sweetly and said thank you a lot.  That really gets 'em:  thank you.

Afflictions, we've all got at least one.  I might have a handful, some pretty tame.  Others just won't leave me alone.   For all the searching and hoping, for all the effing effort and sentamentality:  I'm just too fucking angry to love someone.

Sure, we could dig into the child's psyche -- little Shel at four, little Shel at seven, and the twisted activities of my mother.  But after a point, you can't just keep pointing to that, saying yeah, that's my problem, that's where it comes from.

No, after all these years it's up to me.  And I just can't fucking believe that, after all the love and all the effort I've got nothing -- NOTHING -- to show for it.  Shit, I barely have half of my belongings.

I don't have the vestiges of any past relationships, save for what they did to my head, both good and bad.  I don't have children, or shared child committments.  I don't have sweet old lovers who coo at me from afar.  Well, although I do still talk to my high-school honey very infrequently, and at least we're on pretty good terms, my college GF is patently annoying even in print. The one Good Thing I had going which really wasn't such a good thing except in comparison, is cordial but the conversation is tense and overwraught (for me at least) with emotion.  My estranged wife -- she's certifiable and frankly I don't trust her.  The woman who rocked my world after that... well for all the times I broke up with her, I wouldn't expect her to want to talk to me.  And the last one who tried, well I keep just not answering her texts.

So... sure it's me.  Sure, I don't know what I want.  I can ask.  I ask plenty.  And, frighteningly enough, I tend to get what I ask for.  I just do a really shitty job of asking.

When I was with Heidi (formerly known as the one Good Thing) what I really craved was physical affection, cuddling and love.  And I got it, but that was really a ploy to tear me away and the affection was later much harder to come by.

I left Lauren and what I actually said outloud was that I wanted a woman who knew how to use a strap-on.  Boom.  Special delivery.  El and the mind-blowing ride that she took me on was... mind-blowing.  Intense.  Metaphysical.  And too much.  The indistinguishable boundaries between vanilla sex and the spicer stuff was dangerous.  For the first time in 21 years -- since I first had sex with Julie -- I had a flashback.  Except this time I wasn't in the position of the victim, I was the oppressor.  This, really, was the end of our relationship.  I couldn't be initmate with her after that.  It freaked me out that I could find myself in the other position.  I couldn't trust myself.

So... broken.  Bent.  Damaged.  If you can curl yourself around my brokeness, then you should practice ducking, because I'm still upset about the whole thing.  Four year old me is just pissed as hell, and there's no clear way to make it all better.

Except to bang a drum...