A D Journal 2012

   It always comes to this (at least since I started a daily journal back in 1980), this time of year, looking back and then ahead, as if I could possibly make sense of what transpired over the last year and could in any way predict what might come next. Last year on this day, I did exactly that, and what I predicted for 2012 could not have lived up to what actually transpired – for good or bad, or the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I was so busy mourning the mysterious death of my colleague at the office, I could not have foreseen the death of my uncle, the last of the Sarti clan that helped raise me, or even the more predictable resignation of the boss at the annex office, let alone the hurricane that swept through the main office, leaving behind a landscape of devastation worse than any Sandy produced. To say no one went unscathed is unfair and too much of an exaggeration. But it would be apt to claim she touched nearly everybody’s life in t...

   As the year concludes, I keep thinking about the change of priorities poem from 2003, and some of the other poems posted – the “gilt frames” and the “trickling up” and some of the things she said to me early on about her past, about how jealous her husband had been, always suspicious of her cheating on him when she claimed she never did, and how on she met that little woman on some cruise who taught her what she needed, perhaps paving the way for a way of life that she was already inclined to do, finding the code that opened it all up for her, allowing her to become one of the privileged with an entourage, she becoming part of that class of people she had previously hated. All of this is simply speculation, guess work based on clues that might or might not be real, a path of bread crumbs she has spread behind her in a series of poems. There are so many gaps in her official history, such as the period after she gave up teaching and before she took to the sea with the b...

    GA and Horsey are driving our former temporary boss nuts. He’s old school news and hates bloggers. Using are then-new writer, he went after them in the spring, and utterly failed to put them in their place. That prompted both of them – especially GA – to come back at him, humiliating him at a time when I think he was trying to show off for her, when he was playing mentor to her. Both bloggers know way too much about what goes on inside our office, and even now when she is no longer working for us, they hint about things even I don’t know about. GA, who I occasionally talk to, won’t tell me who her source is – but it is clearly someone who is deep in the secrets of our office and is willing to spill them. Our former temporary boss is desperate to get even with them, but has been hesitant to put himself out front, perhaps fearing what the bloggers might post about him. He isn’t the upfront kind of guy and prefers to work behind a curtain of his writers, as if t...

  Contest time, and as usual, I’m the person who has to put the whole thing together, and it is a problem since she is one of our best writers, and I’m not sure which stories of hers I should submit. So, I asked our former temporary boss about it. He still talks to her even though she has left for other jobs, but rarely mentions her to me except to repeat the same spiel she’s fed the two office gossips about her great plans to move up – yet when it came to telling him the important things, she did not – such as when she resigned and he found out from others in the office. I think he’s still hurt about that, only he doesn’t blame her. He blames the owner for being so cheap, and the conditions under which such a creative genius like her has to work (with the rest of us non-genius types chugging along unrecognized as well.) Since she is no longer with the company, I asked him if he would select which of her stories we should submit to the various contests. I assumed he would...

  I met his wife, a savvy, not-to-be-fooled kind of a woman, who eyed me oddly, as if she guessed more about what went on in our office over the last year than she let on. She looked around as if taking mental photographs of the place, where each person sat, the lay of the land, the corner office politics with the male owner dominating on the third floor and the female owner dominating on the first, with everything else a kind of limbo where the rest of us survived – our boss ruling from her corner office although without the same sense of fear the owners conveyed. His wife, perhaps even guessing her husband’s role in the whole thing, bringing with her a sense of relief that the ghost of the past would not suddenly pop up and have even more tension to the scene. It is possible she had some here before, but I suspect not, certainly not when the ghost still worked here, other wise her husband might well have gone out of his mind watching those worlds collide. He seemed a li...

  Over the last few weeks, I’ve made mention of her Facebook account. This is one of the odd things about this whole situation, how for some reason I have access to it again, after having been shut out of it months ago. I found out she unblocked me quite by accident when I was on a mutual friend’s site and saw a post from her. Why on earth did she unblock me? Is this a trap or some kind of test? We’re not friends on Facebook. So, I don’t have access to the inner details as I once did when she boasted to one of her family members about having a romantic liaison with someone she was tutoring, or the invitation to some old friend to “come see me sometime.” The front page of people’s Facebook pages tends to be very generic, which is possibly why she feels safe unblocking me – nothing to be gained by accessing it. Yet, it is the principle, why unblock me when there is no reason to, unless she wants access to my Facebook – which is nearly as generic as hers. But even then, ...

  The scanned generic Christmas card she posted from the neighboring mayor surprised me. It was the first political thing I’ve seen her post on her personal Facebook account, suggesting maybe she’s finally taken her role as the Virgin Mayor’s PR person seriously, and is trying to mend fences between the two mayors. It is even odder because the post is wedged between two or three posts of her cat. Although she could not resist making a snide remark, as if the bridges she burned while working as a writer for us aren’t easily repaired. But all this is like reading tea leaves, not knowing what goes on among the brain trust who operates in the Virgin Mayor’s shadow, that pack of political opportunists who are trying to gauge whether the Virgin Mayor is really a Titanic, and when if at all, they should make for the life boats before other people do. It is hugely difficult to move from our side of the editorial fence to the other side, serving one master rather than the genera...

   I wonder if her posting pictures of her cat on Facebook has any relationship to the death of my cat, Tiny Tug, or merely a coincidence? She has had her cat since she lived with her husband. I like to think she might be sympathetic over my loss, and this is her way of expressing it. But I’ve been mistaken before. Her last few poems suggest that she is going through intense loneliness. I got this same sense during the summer when she posted pictures of herself on the beach, not with her lover, but with her brother. I’m still stunned by her 2003 poem if he actually means what I take it to mean, how much she has exposed herself on the assumption that people who read it might actually get what she means. She has couched it cleverly enough to give her plausible deniability later if the wrong people confront her about it (again assuming I have the interpretation correct, which as my previous journal entries show I’ve struggled with a number of different interpretat...

  The poem she posted today about game playing largely speaks for itself, less densely packed with obscure references than the poem she posted from 2003, yet it feels oddly connected, as if she is once again sending a message to someone for a particular purpose I can’t completely ascertain. The poem depicts her frustration with the rules of love and relationships. In it, she outlines her pet peeves and why she will likely spend her life alone. It almost seems like a declaration of independence, and yet says a lot more when taken in context of the last half dozen poems which deal with close relationships, bad advice and undependable people she has allowed into her life. The poem highlights how ludicrous rules of dating seem to her, and how they seem to get into the way of legitimate romance. It is difficult from the poem to tell just whom it is directed towards, if anyone. Possibly it is just frustration with some romance that has gotten bogged down in ritual. It sounds as i...

  I’m still trying to figure out why she posted the 2003 poem about changing priorities, and what she was trying to convey, and to whom? What exactly did that little old lady on the cruise ship teach her? All of it is pure speculation, of course, and much of what I get from the poem contradicts what she told me earlier this year, especially when it comes to her husband and the band. She said her husband always accused her of cheating on him, but she never did. She said she was disgusted by the members of the band, who were always been misogynistic around her. The poem implies that the old lady steered in a new direction at that time when she was with her husband and the band, and perhaps she has always been open to the idea of using any means possible to advance her career. But in 2003 the situation changed somewhat. The poem’s opening talks about some people being one play ahead of other people, having advantages when it comes to satisfying demands. She is not part o...

  She posted one of her most thought-provoking poems to date, somewhat remote in tone, yet raising a number of possible interpretations. It is impossible to say for certain whether she wrote the poem back in 2003 or wrote in currently looking back at most of the most significant moments of her life. I tend to believe the former but based only on circumstantial evidence such as the different in type style from her usual posts, and how similar the type is to other poems she had reprinted from an archive of poems she wrote and posted in the early 2000s to which I lack access. Of all the poems she has written to date (with perhaps the exception of Trickle Up which she removed), this is among the most honest, and therefore painful, and possibly painful for her to write. Why she chose to post this poem now may well have to do with what transpired back then. As is the case today, she was in 2003 trying to reinvent herself. Back then, at age 24, she envisioned herself as attain...

  He called. He still only guesses that the owner dislikes him, but not why, still bitter at being denied the job he was promised, and thinks that’s because the owner dislikes him, too. We don’t talk about her when he calls, although her presence is everywhere like a haunting spirit neither of us can get rid of, and he doesn’t want to. We chit chat about everything but her, going round it as if we were circling a black hole, one false move and we both get sucked up into it. I dare not ask if he saw her picture in the magazine in which she is posing as if fighting with a professional boxer, what he might have thought about it, did he wish he was the boxer she posed with? Her last few posts and some Facebook messages seemed aimed at people who are giving her advice, in one message she saying, “even mentors are human,” as if disparaging them. Although he was her mentor in our office, I can’t believe she meant him in these. He’s too dedicated to her. He would lay down and l...

  She took down her poem about stepping out of her comfort zone from her poetry blog, and then posted it again on her Facebook page, and coupled with the Facebook post about mentor’s being human, it seems as if sending a message. A week later, she replaced the poem she removed from her blog with a longer poem that says pretty much the same thing but with an added cavate suggesting no matter how hard she works or sage advice she gets, she won’t get what she wants without another more important ingredient: luck. In some ways, she seems to be trying to convince herself that her methods are acceptable partly because being noble doesn’t result in anything – at least, not anything she desires. The poem is divided into several parts, the first of which deals with her everyday struggles and her determination to distinguish between her ambitions as opposed to what other people are telling her what she ought to do. The second par deals with what is noble as opposed to what gets her...

The condition of our former temporary boss shocked me. He looked old and haggard, a slight yellowish tint to his skin that suggest some inner condition still too early to diagnosis, an ailment just making itself a home in him that might later express itself more meanly. He might have looked this way for months, escaping my notice because I talked to him over the telephone but rarely saw him. Her name did not come up; we had so much else to talk about. Superstorms like Sandy left as much human wreckage as it did flooded streets, perhaps explaining how down and out he seemed. He seemed more bitter than usual, focused particularly on the two owners. He felt their open hostility towards him, especially from the male owner who seemed to go out of his way to disrespect him. “They’re afraid of me,” he told me over dinner last night. “They don’t want to give me too much power.” The male owner and he had been sniping at each other for months. But he has seemed most lost sinc...

   In those last few moments all I could do was call his name; all he could do was purr, a ritual we’d engaged in since his birth in early 1999, a call and response that had tied our lives together in a way only undying love could, and here he was dying, and I had to let him go. No human or animal had ever attached itself to me the way this cat had, he needing me so utterly, I could do nothing but reciprocate – love for love, need for need, call and response. Even as I stood with him in the vet’s office, I knew this was the final act in a year full of such pain, of doubt about what has been and what was bound to come, full of life’s deceptions to which I contributed my share, an appropriate conclusion to a conflict I had tried to keep remote, separate from those things I cared deeply about, trying not to be cynical about everything – the office and the strange people who struggled there meaningless at moments like these. My fingers stroked his fur even as the vet eased...

    Her latest poem continues a theme of struggle that she began again after her brief moment in her poem about lulls, an continues on about lost opportunities, no longer just an impish little tease, but a serious struggle. The poem again depicts two separate characters, the speaker who is clearly bitter about the kind of advice those close to her have been giving her and expresses a distinct skepticism about what a person can actually attain through concepts such as hard work and facing down one’s fears. The poem has two parts, the first stanza repeating the advice she has had to tolerate over the years, from people who are so-called wise, a series of cliches that are supposed to help put a person’s feet firmly on the road to success. The second stanza challenges those presumptions and paints her world and how it defies those old maxims. The first part are the typical lectures people get, a peptalk, someone preaching about life, and how she ought to challenge hersel...