"GOOD MORNING! MY NAME IS, COREY AND I APPLIED FOR A POSITION HERE– JUST THOUGHT I'D POP IN AND INTRODUCE MYSELF!" My aloha belly-flopped on the ears of the twenty-something receptionist peering up at me with bored eyes; somewhere was a life marketed, filled with rooftop parties in Coachella, a buffet of Brazilian Beefcake. Here she was, missing it. Fending off the plucky upbeat charades of another job seeking schmuck. There had been a line of schmendricks all morning, but I was the first genuine schmuck; rocking up to her guard post at the reception desk all Cadillac smiles, not a hair neglected, thinking he could charm his way past the portcullis of her perspicacity and bend her boss's ear; A-levels in try-hard confidence. She had grown accustomed to crushing dreams--even comfortable with it. An easy annual 40k, affording her a decent 15th floor view of the west hills (if you edit out the California refugee traffic), middle of the road, Pinot Noir and boutique food for her Maine coon.

"Well, if you're interested in applying you have to fill out an application—" Stone faced behind glasses older than the Berlin Wall, the words slide out of her disinterested mouth, braised in vocal fry. I run her sentence through the Snark-o-Tron 3000 in my head: 'On our convoluted moebius strip of an online application portal from 1998.' Finding a job was a full-time job.

"I've already applied for a few positions here, actually," I offered, trying to keep the one-sided momentum of the exchange going, " but you know how it is—helps to get in front of people; make an impression," Yucking it up with the facile familiarity that greases the wheels of American industry—Everyone's your best friend until you have to remember their kids' names.

"Apply online," she mutters from the duck-blind of the reception desk, "and if we think you're a good fit for something, we'll be in touch. Thanks for your interest. Have a nice day!" That's corporate for take a hike, Bozo! Get lost! Beat it! Scram! No points for initiative in the millennial Hellscape of eternal awkwardness; duly noted.

"Thanks for your time!" I tossed her a friendly nod, gliding back to the chilly morning air to pound more pavement, dining on sour grapes; 'I wouldn't want to work there anyway.' Would it have gone any better if I had turned up with a stack of resumes, waving a gun around? Old habits of self-recrimination stopped by to visit, kicking up muddy shoes on the coffee table of my mind as I mentally masticated the exchange. Clearly I screwed up somehow. Did I have something between my teeth? A stain on my shirt? Bad breath? 'Best check,' I thought, 'splash a little water on my face. Regroup.' I wandered the spare, neue-brutalist, brushed concrete corridors, its walls populated by nondescript modern art from pseudonymous artists. Passing post-modern open-plan office suites, workers nestled like snipers amongst immortal IKEA office plants that never seem to need watering. Young professionals buzzed around the Kombucha and IPA fountains that replaced water-coolers in this workplace cum adult day-care. The corridor dead-ended into a glass panopticon with downtown views, its vaguely Scandinavian office furniture—fresh from Shanghai—devoid of occupants. No restrooms.

"Are you lost?" Asked a thirty-something Swedish ski-team blonde approaching me with click-click heels.

"Hopelessly," I played a subtle joke to disarm, "I'm just looking for the men's toilets."

"We don't have any," she blurted. "Well, I mean it's unisex and women's only, that's probably why you couldn't find it.” Her pronouncement frosted with buttery glee. I had bumbled into a stunning and brave new world of immutable characteristics cum original sin. No men’s toilets? When did subtle digs at The Man become architectural features? Oi, mate! You got a loisence fer that penis? “Anyway," She directed, pointing a bejeweled finger over my shoulder, "You want to go back down where you came, but hang a left at the living wall. Should see a unisex bathroom on your right, past the cactus."

"You're a life saver! Thanks." She tossed me a laconic smile, then click-clicked on, disappearing into a characterless office suite. Cue Rod Serling's narration over my retracing steps, wondering if the building's annual savings on urinal cakes went to paid yoga sabbaticals in Tahoe.

Another day, another employment prowl. This time armed with a dozen Blue Star doughnuts—top shelf confections, not the cakey doughnut simulacra from the Voodoo tourist trap. Inside the box, along with a dozen assorted delights, the secret weapon—my business cards; a calculated HR trojan horse. Self-promotion is a dish best served with sweets. I buzzed my way up to the sixth floor open plan creative pasture; met another blasé receptionist.

"Delivery?" She surmised, moon-faced eyes darting to my Caviar bag. From hours on internet recon, finding out the HR director's name, trying to make my best guess about her taste in sweets from a forced headshot and a clenched smile. Confectionary psychological operation par excellence; just the right ratio of Jellies to glazes to bear claws.

"Hi, yes. I've got a delivery for Cynthia!" I began, slipping the Blue Star box from the bag, gambling that no one in their right mind could it turn away. "Best doughnuts on this side of town—someone has good taste!" I had shot a commercial with this agency a few years earlier and reckoned pre-selection would work in my favour; like a wedding ring at a singles bar.

"We've been busy with you guys today," she smirked, thumbing the dusky Postmates Guy navel-gazing in the reception area—the only other minority in sight. She made a grasping gesture, "I'll take it to her."

"Thanks! Have a great day!"

Back on the street; dead-drop accomplished—by now they're probably wise to the ruse, doughnut toasting my daring—most deceptions don't come with sweets. Weeks go by. Not even a 'well played,' e-mail or phone call from Cynthia–the joke's on me. Twenty, Twenty-five applications a day. Resumes, E-mails, cold-calls all unrequited. I was coming up bupkis, doing the backstroke in the deep end of the doubt pool. Success. The high clerics of marketing would have us believe the successful kicked back in a problem desert. This is a lie meant to keep the little people invested in that last bastion of American Godhood: Celebrity. When the rich and famous do fall, it is choreographed by PR firms; serotonin technicians harvesting human attention. Real success isn't the absence of problems. It's the transmutation of big problems into smaller problems. Maslow's hierarchy. Once Food, shelter and security were resolved one could sweat out social position, sex, and existential meaning.

Historical reliance on my work speaking for itself insulated me from discomfort with self-promotion—which I believed to be inherently inauthentic. I am the embodiment of the Sigma personality; the hand behind the throne running the operation sub rosa, while the beautiful and charismatic played face. My fatal flaw: Twelve years of sidekick repose; Kato to the Green Arrow; Igor to Dr. Frankenstein. Pushing beyond my native introversion, into public view, once anathema, had grown less daunting a prospect as my professional skills grew and triumphs accumulated. The way forward seemed simple enough. Get in front of people. Be exactly who they need. No one could say I wasn't doing the work. I redoubled my marketing efforts, twice retooled my website, fired off calendars, postcards, pitched specs to brands I admired, cold-called creative directors. I was teaching myself digital marketing and UX design; ate, breathed and exuded purpose. Walking my afternoon beat with the dogs past neighbourhood agencies, I waved to the perfect strangers within, hoping to plant seeds of familiarity from which to build engagement, slipping my professional skills into small talk on the sly. What is the antithesis of love? Not hate, but indifference. Every time and without fail, my ship ran aground on the shoals of indifference island. My tactics seemed sound, all that was needed was to find the right people. Improbable in a population of 653,000, but not impossible. Therein lay the fundamental flaw in my thinking. I had come of age in a proto-internet locus were I only had to compete locally. In a global competition, how does one win the visibility playoffs? Justine came home, through the gauntlet of wriggling dogs, eye-balling me huddled over my Mike Hammer style steamer desk--stewing in job-seeker's malaise.

"Boyfriend, how's it going?" Imagine the ghastly face looking back at her, demoralization creeping in at the margins. In my chagrin the prodigal inner six-year-old, who once hid in closets and self-harmed, returned. If I was sinking in so much time and effort, getting nowhere, then there was something I wasn't doing right. I felt ashamed looking into Justine's eyes at the end of our respective long days only to say—

"I've been at it all day, and I don't have much to show for it. I'm sorry." Universal in my experience of relationships with women lurked an unambiguous law of the jungle: At the first sign that a man couldn't hack it, the clock was ticking.

"You seem really lost, just in general" she added on one of those many nights where she came home to me dining on defeat. It was as much judgement as observation, "people are picking up on your desperation and self doubt," She offered, swirling a glass of wine—of which I'd lost count, "and that's why you're not getting anywhere." I bristled at her Hindenburg degrees of woo woo. Listening to the prosecution argue animus nocendi; I was exuding anti-sociality and the cool kids in the lunch room just knew, under the veneer of my crisp pressed khakis, that I wasn't really one of them; I liked Slayer and playing D&D. I practised in front of mirrors, displayed savvy at the only three interviews I scraped from 300 applications. She couldn't be talking about my performance as a job-seeker—she had no reliable metrics apart from the goings on of our relationship. No, this had to be a projection of her own frustrations. She was talking about us. I buried my face in my hands, cycling a deep breath, taking a beat for consideration.

By my own standards, I had done okay running a business; better than some, worse than others. My professional life kicked off with an Oscar win. I had the feeling that I'd made it back then. Jejune, possessed of the arrogance of youth, falling into the mirror. With the ultimate of ultimates on my resume, who wouldn't want to hire me? More than a decade deep and looking back over the march of time, an Academy Award was in fact a monumental catastrophe for my relationship with expectation. Not only is the unachievable possible, it was possible for me; a shy, lonely kid sans racines. No one should succeed out of the gate; it sours subsequent triumph. The statistical inevitability of failure turns up and I, alone with past glories and present defeats, settle into a Winter of discontentment. I became adapted to loosing. The game had mutated into the ultraviolet; moved to a spectrum I couldn't decipher. I wasn't interested in harvesting 'likes' and 'follows.' There was a sense that I had been exiled from the tribe for my failure to conform to narcissistic protocol.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. A witticism from George Bernard Shaw usually meant to disparage overly critical scholars, but there's another side to the idiom: Sometimes the inability to do doesn't arise out of incapacity. There simply aren't enough opportunities to go around. It was time to cast a wider net, and I was sick of the haughty agency runaround. A stone's throw away for our flat, there was a non-profit photography school that had never offered a cinematography course. I invested a quarter building and testing curriculum, pitched it and they hired me to teach a term as the first ever cinematography instructor on their roster. It was the windfall I needed as much for my sense of purpose as my bank account, but it was short-lived. The school had its financial troubles and eventually went under. That one wasn't on me. Still, I felt even in that instance, where circumstances were simply beyond my control, Justine's feminine calculus had brought her to conclude staying with me meant she would never enjoy the life she desired; with children and means.

"These past few years none of my breaks have lasted long enough for me to get my feet," I whispered to her over the postmortem of my brief stint as a teacher, "there is always some disaster that wrecks the enterprise and I'm cast adrift again." I cleaved to hope that humans were rational beings responding to context. "Human nature is adaptation, but how do you adapt to a game that feels rigged?" The real question cowered behind my teeth: How do I adapt to a game that feels psychopathic?

"Maybe you need to take some time away, y'know?" Justine's exasperation was taking hold. Still gripping her shoes and handbag she'd hardly had time to settle in before I had ambushed her with my troubles. "Think about what else you can do. You have all these skills—there has to be something, you just haven't thought of it yet." Stepping back, taking time to regroup was the correct move on its face. Her case was a sensible one, but I couldn't see how not landing stable employment within an industry I had sunk 16 years into, warranted the confidence I could be hired to do anything else? "It doesn't matter what you end up doing for work."

"Oh, I’m afraid it does. To me,” a man's occupation is his penis. His whole sense of worth and value is derived from what he can produce. Women tended to shun men of lesser means. Status was the currency of the realm. "Women are Human beings, Men are Human doings."

"You'll always be a DP."

There are seemingly innocuous incidents that incite unimaginable shifts in the momentum of human affairs: Archduke Franz Ferdinand is shot by a Serbian Terrorist on a quiet street in 1914. Buddy Holly, sick of wearing the same ripe outfit on a Midwest tour, convinces Valens and Richardson to pitch in for a charter plane instead of bussing to Minnesota; worth a king’s ransom for a day at the laundromat. Far up in the nose of a B-29 bomber, Kermit Behan couldn't make out Kokura for coconuts through the cirrus soup of a cold 1945 day. Nagasaki paid in blood for Fujin's grace. ‘You’ll always be a DP.’ In the ecosystem of my being, a flippant, placating, throwaway remark--perhaps meant to console more so than chide, sets me fundamentally at odds with the one I love, digging my heels in on principle. How could she be with me for years and not understand the thousands of hours invested in climbing to the top of a craggy promontory, in a notoriously tough line of work, to taste of the satisfaction that against the odds I had arrived at the top of my game? Now I was slipping off. Grasping bare rock until my fingernails tore. The devaluation of what being a DP (Director of Photography) meant to me, by someone with whom I'd been intimate, was beyond my ken.

She of all people should have been able to empathise. When I first met her, she was sleeping on a secondhand mattress at the top of a fourth floor studio walk-up, having recently graduated from pitching a tent in her sister’s back yard. Behind her, a year plus doing non-profit work in Guatemala, where her dreams of serving the public good were torpedoed by a noxious cocktail of graft and naked avarice. She drove a Mad Max wreck on wheels that was always breaking down. Bald tyres. No breaks to speak of, let alone suspension. Plant-life thrived between the water seals. A greenhouse bouquet that just had to be mould. If I ever hazarded a suggestion that maybe she should sell the damned rust-bucket, I could expect to meet only whirling dervish intransigence.

"Oh my God! No! I took two road-trips across the country with Thea In that car! It got me through High School and College! My Dad bought it for me and I've had it a long time!" She always smiled when she was exasperated, it encouraged me to keep pushing.

"But you hate your dad..." I criticised, recalling a blistering argument that ensued when I asked the wrong questions about her family. Shouted out of her flat, I took a block long stroll amongst the Taylor street heroin addicts— it seemed safer. You want to know everything you can about a woman's relationship with her father, because in the absence of self-knowledge, that's how she's going to regard you.

"THAT DOESN’T MATTER! It’s my piece of shit car!" Between the laughter, Justine put her foot down, "I'm not ready for a new car. I know it's stupid. Please, leave it alone!"

"Okay then, my love... Suit yourself... But I'll remember this when you harangue me about whatever hill I choose to die on." Alinskyesque recriminations. The stuff of many a lover's quarrel.

"Hmm..." She stopped, cocking her head in consideration, "I've never heard that expression before... Where's it come from?"

"Old military analogy for the futility of attacking, en force, an enemy entrenched on high ground. By the time your men get to the top, they're so exhausted they can't rout the defenders. Defeat is inevitable."

"It's more than that, isn't it? You'd be consciously making the choice to fight a battle that can't be won."

This is why I was madly in love with Justine—Her Betty Page looks, and unconventional charter school education were icing on the cake. Our fencing always got at the truth and it was never personal. I didn’t judge her for being barely above broke, living on food stamps, and working a hostess shift at a sushi dive in the Methtastic part of town. Like a moth to flame, I was drawn to her humour, her joie de vivre, her love of reading and ideas, her tolerance of my unconventional worldview. I accepted her as she was, on her own individual merits as a human being. I had dated women who’d been on the cover of Vogue, sampled the menu of fleshly delights, witnessed le petite mort in cultural panoply. Sex wasn't always worth feigning interest in the endless social dramas of a woman's umwelt. Without the intellectual dimension, I was soon bored of even the most exquisite curves. Life would present curves of its own; ups and downs. I wanted a woman who could handle that; who I could build with; who I could trust in a storm. I had watched my parents build wealth over decades of strife and sacrifice. Even when at odds emotionally, sleeping in separate rooms for 20 years, they pulled against the exigencies of life, from the same side of the rope, out of commitment to the higher principle of the family. That's what men and women were meant to do together; find each other in the darkness and create something together that didn't exist before; a home, children, a nation, legacy. Justine didn't come from that example. Her family unit hadn't survived into her thirties like mine had. Her expectations of the family and what it meant to be in a partnership were moulded by fragmentation. The first duty of every adult is to reconcile the world with his or her inner trauma.

After two years together she had left the hostess job behind and was well on the path to becoming a schoolteacher. We had debated the merits of staying in Portland, speculating that greener pastures were to be had in rural Washington. I wondered what I'd do there. Inasmuch as my job prospects in Portland seemed dismal, at least I had unstable but definite contract work with production companies there. I wasn't unemployed, just freelance. All I needed was something to fill the gaps. Justine had a clear trajectory to realize a future as an educator; a two year commitment, a certain number of hours as a paraeducator, a certain degree of graduate school. We agreed that we would invest two years focusing on shoring up our respective halves of the relationship—she would focus on her schooling and career path. I would focus on stabilizing my freelance business, or better yet, clawing my way into another full-time agency position. I had done it before.

In spaghetti western technicolor, a man pushes past the swinging doors of a saloon. Cardsharps and cowboys congeal in the sudden dead air, Quietly sizing him up over hands of well worn cards. An iconic American idiom unwavering in decades of collective consciousness. The gunslinger is the quintessential outsider, drifting in from the arcane natural order of the plains to upset the assumed way of things. In Autumn of 2010 I came to Portland to stay, and within three months landed a full-time position at an agency that had been together since Moses. Human nature is adaptation. When acceptance into the tribe is paramount, unhealthy situations become normalized—we adapt to abuse. Brad was the owner's brother, a scraggy, towheaded gunnif who had spent his entire life in his brother's shadow. Finally, he had managed to earn a long coveted brotherly confidence and the orbiting company clique clamored for his princely approval. I had managed to impress his brother and the production team with my skill-set, but gullible and a touch crackers when it came to social dynamics, I turned up for work with all the situational awareness of the blind. Brad resented my presence; my mere appearance had stolen his thunder and he sought to undermine me at every turn. On a two camera show he would always take the master angle, the best lenses, the best supports and the only Assistant Camerman available, leaving me to make do with the leftovers; squeaking in an afterthought B-angle at his sufferance. He didn't think I had any business being on his set, evinced through the chortling contempt by every toady in his orbit. Staging a picture in a Seattle car-park under the sign for "B level," He later captioned the photo "the B-team" just because I was front-and-centre in frame. I wanted so badly to be accepted—oblivious to the point of autism—I didn't catch the joke.

Perhaps motivated by a healthy fear of the alternative—unemployment, I held the line against Brad's bullying for over a year. 'Show value. Earn respect. Carve out a place in the tribe,' I thought. Maybe I deserved better, but I felt lucky to have a full-time position. The sophomoric antics of one pint-sized schmuck could only derail me from my purpose if I allowed it. There were knights and soldiers in my bloodline whose shades would be shamed were I to call it quits. There was naught to do but soldier on.

One Spring day after commuting in on the backroads behind the falls, passing the elderly woman who waved at me every morning and picked up litter from the wooded road, I arrived at the office, poured my customary cup of coffee, and reported to my workstation ready to tackle a day of colour-grading stock footage.

"Hey Corey, would you come up to conference-one for a sec?" Sam's voice on the intercom. Wednesdays were hectic. No doubt there were additions to my workload that needed discussing. I ambled upstairs, coffee in hand to the boardroom to plop down across from Sam, the man who'd hired me. My only real ally at the agency, Sam had asked me to be a leader on the production team; to set an example for the younger guys who routinely clowned around. It had only given Brad more reason to hate me.

"What's new, Sam? How's the baby?" Sam had recently become a Dad I had already filmed his son for stock footage a month or two back. That was a good sign, once you had been around someone's family, especially their children, you were in. It was a primordial trust between human beings, evidence that you had passed the litmus test.

"Corey, I'm afraid we're gonna have to let you go." A sledgehammer to the solar plexus would have been more tolerable, "You're free to finish out the day, if you want."

"I'm sorry, this is unexpected," I sucked air through clenched teeth, nausea crept in on the margins of my awareness. I tried to cloak my discomfort in a forced chuckle, "—I haven't even had a performance review. Is there a problem with how I'm executing my duties?"

"I'm really not at liberty to say. If you don't want to finish out the day, please clear out your station and turn in your laptop." My mind in free-fall: All the late nights, last one out of the office, babysitting render overtime. Putting in late solo hours when the other guys wanted to go out drinking. Triple-prepped camera packages for the next day's shooting. The long days on set in terrible weather. Putting up with Brad's bluster... I had earned my place. Why were they firing me?

"I understand that you're not legally bound to tell me anything—Oregon is a Hire-at-will state. I would have thought, at the very least, as a friend you could tell me something that would make this go down easier."

"I'm sorry. I can't," Whatever happened to gentleman's honour? I bit my tongue trying not to throttle him in his chair.

"Fine. But I'm not leaving without a severance. You can't just spring this on a guy from left field. I'm not walking out of here without a cheque for time owed and severance pay." An hour later I was back on the street, cheque in hand. Bridges burned. I called Amber, the woman I was seeing at the time.

"Hello?" She was 42 going on 22, a quality she chalked up to her Cherokee genes. Washington born, but with a California chickie sensuality I found intoxicating. A mane of Wonder Woman hair with Natalie wood's eyes.

"Amber, love..." I sighed, pushing my bewilderment through pursed lips in the chill March air, "I don't know how to tell you this, In fact I'm a bit perplexed by it—"

"Just say it, babe. Whatever it is, It'll be fine. We'll figure it out." Trust. It was the glue that bound people to each other, wasn't it?

"I've been fired," It felt surreal to even say it.

"What? How? Why?" A pregnant pause hovered in the air, even over the phone I could hear her stomach twisting itself into knots.

"I haven't the foggiest," I was certain Amber could hear my loser's shrug even over the phone. I listened to her breathing, could see her lips tighten, her cheeks redden, fingers seeking something to strangle. "I don't know how this happened, and I don't know what to do."

Masculinity is the shadow cast by feminine desire; it moves as feminine desires move. If tomorrow all the women in the world decided they were only attracted to men who could do headstands, then academies of head-standing would mushroom in every major city. An economy of headstand coaches would appear overnight. Women's demands of men were so often contradictory: Be tough, capable and stoic. Be vulnerable and emotionally available. She wants you to be exactly what she needs you to be in the moment and she wants you to just get it—whatever her needs without having do to any of the work of communicating it to you. Living up to such bifurcated expectations is the fundamental test of male competence. You should just know exactly what to do at all times. You should just know exactly what she needs at all times. Otherwise she doesn't feel seen and if she doesn't feel seen she doesn't feel loved and she can't trust your competence.

"I expect a man to have enough competence to keep his job and be able to pay for things. If you can't do that, I'll find someone who can. We're through. Your shit'll be behind the boat in the driveway. You can pick it up while I'm at work." Dumped, just like that. No doubt, she already had my replacement in mind.

Once I knew a man who on the weekdays would rise at 5:00 am shower, shave, put on his best suit, kiss his kids, grab a yogurt from the fridge, drive to a park on the other side of town and sleep in his car for eight hours. At 6:00 pm he drove back, to his million dollar house in the foothills, stepped past the threshold and regaled his wife with the day's made-up corporate bloodsports. He laid it out for me over one Saturday chess game in front of the cafe; he had lost his lucrative position as a financial analyst for a large bank three months earlier. He was keeping up the appearances of going to work because he didn't have the stomach to tell his wife he'd been laid off.

"Don't ever get married," He chortled, setting up a bishop in fianchetto, closing off my textbook d4 pawn opening, "sometimes you get to be the stud, other times you're the workhorse. Either way, you're still a horse and women of our generation aren't interested in building with you. They want you to show up with six in the bank, the house, the car, the job," He fetched a cigarette from the worn pocket of his Father's Korean War era Eisenhower and lit it, non-smoking laws be damned, " they don't care about the depths of your soul, or about your pain. They hang out at the finish line and get with the winners." He did eventually tell his wife the truth. She left, as much for his lie by omission as his loss of status. In the aftermath of the divorce he sold their million dollar consumerist edifice, using the proceeds to set up a trust for his kids. He then drove south, first to New Mexico, then beyond to give benefaction to the vultures of the Sonoran wastes. I imagined him picking a point, some distant Anasazi ruin, throwing himself towards it at breakneck speed, bleeding out at the soul level; a Peckinpah antihero who's just pulled off one last heist. Wounds heal, the human personality reforms itself around the scar tissue, but scars become hardened to re-traumatization; to reopen them hurts far more than the rudimental wound.

A night among many, one of our Friday Chautauquas—really an excuse for underage drinking and half-baked philosophy. I crawled onto the roof of the house in search of quiet air, a crow's nest above the smokers crowding the balcony, rooftop icebergs emerging from the sea of maple, cedar and ash. The blonde from whom I'd been stealing glances all night, emerged from the window, tenuously negotiating the canted craftsman roof to crouch beside me, all legs and nerves.

"Hi," She began, playing with her sun-kissed hair luminescent in the full moon, asking permission to join me with large eyes behind John Lennon glasses.

"Hi," I smiled back opening my posture to her, inviting her to sit and take in the air.

"I liked your talk on Nietzsche."

"Thanks. To be honest, I wasn't sure it would go over with this crowd—battling nihilism? I mean with that much cocaine around..." I left the tail of the joke to her imaginings. She erupted into a storm of giggles. I could always tell a woman's genuine laugh from a pretender; it was in the resistance; how much she struggled to keep it from overwhelming her projection of face. "Looks like nervous laughter to me," playful sarcastic fencing, "That's not your cocaine, I hope?"

"Of course not!" Blushing was getting the better of her. "It's really not, I swear." I didn't care one way or the other, really. It was just a way to break the ice.

"I'll take you at your word then," now the coup de grace, "because if we keep this up, you'll laugh yourself right off the roof!" Now we were both howling, the smokers below throwing bewildered gazes back. Our giggling settled, autonomic breath returned. We let a beat pass, each wondering who would speak next. She ran her fingers through her hair. "I'm Corey," Surrendering, I offered her a hand which she took and never gave back.

"I'm Whitney." Middle-class American girl from a quiet suburb. Lacrosse in the Summers, Cross-Country Skiing in the Winters; not on the debate team—too unassuming and reserved for that melee. An intellectual at heart, but playing the athlete to show up on someone's social radar at home. Not a father, he was more like her, heady and bookish. A big sister, maybe; someone who tended to soak up the family's accolades. "You were talking about the moral duty to resist Nihilism and the whole time I was thinking: What if people do have souls, and we make promises to do certain things before we're corporeal, but once we're alive we forget about the promise we made and all the pain we experience in life is because we're off course, right? Not following through on the promise we made to ourselves?"

"I'm intrigued by that, Whitney. How would we know when we'd finally stepped on the right path? How does someone get to that point?"

"Like... a car crash, maybe? Suddenly you're a paraplegic and your life is turned upside-down. The problem is you're relying on the randomness of the universe to set it all right again... I'm not sure it works. Actually, it sounds like wishful thinking."

"Not at all. A car crash isn't random—it may seem that way, but underlying it is mathematical probability. Every time you get in the car, every move you make throws new probabilities. Murphy's Law: What can happen, will. It's statistically certain you will have a car accident at some point, but you can't know when. Anything else can pull you away--maybe you decided not to drive one day, and take the bus. The bus could have an accident—"

"And no one lives long enough to experience every possibility. Fuck. I can't decide if that's a relief or how agoraphobia starts," She mused. I smiled back at her.

"So, this is the part where I ask you to drop everything and run off to Bali with me." Before she could offer a reply, a howling excitement rushed up from below. The voice of one of the partygoers rose over telltale scrambling.

"Police! Everybody out!" Tension shot through Whitney's hand, still gripping mine.

"You're not of age?" I ventured a guess at the source of her distress. She shook her head.

"Next April," she volunteered. She was a shade under a year younger than me. What was the difference? We were equal in intellectual curiosity, physical maturity. We were on our own in the big bad world, paying rent, bills. The Split-hair absurdity wasn't lost on either of us.

"Do you trust me?" She nodded, brushing hair out of her eyes with her free hand, her other squeezing mine. We rose to our feet, leaning against the listing rooftop. I hoped I was right about her athletic background, leading her along the rooftop around the back of the house, trusting the landlord had kept up the hundred-year-old shingles. Police blue and reds snowballed in the driveway, bored cops descending on a routine party bust, hyenas on a fresh kill. We reached the back of the house. Old lots built unnecessarily close together in the wide expanse of naked land; the next rooftop within jumping distance.

"We're going to jump to the next roof, okay?" I pointed out the path, "Then down to that shed over there."

"Fine. What about you?"

"I'm legal, but I'm not leaving you here; something about moral duty." She smirked, letting go of my hand for the first time, backed up then took a three step leap across the gap to the next roof. I followed, landing on cat-like fours. We dropped to the tin roof of the shed, sounding a calamitous bang in the night, then down to the cool grass of some stranger's back yard behind the fence and out of the view of any overly observant cops.

"That was fun," I exhaled, over my shoulder, brushing the dust off of my leather jacket. I didn't see Whitney coming. She attacked me with her lips, shoving me against the corrugated shed wall, kissing me like the world was on fire and the flames were already licking at her heels. I untucked her shirt, palmed the luminal skin over her hipbones, all sense of place evaporating; we were wholly focused on the geography of each other's bodies; claiming territory for our empires of desire.

"Hey!" The shout from somewhere in my periphery. Whitney broke off the kissing. I zeroed in on a bulldog of a grandmother leaning out of a sliding glass door overlooking the house's back garden. "You kids, take it somewhere else! Before I call the police!" Our giggles returned with a vengeance.

"So sorry madam," I managed to blurt out, "full moon and all that." We tumbled out of her back gate, and into the alleyway, a mess of laughter and disheveled clothing, only to fall into each other again, into playful swaying kisses under a wide open summer night sky. "Hey Whit!" Now another girl's voice, shouting down the alleyway from the lowered back window of a car, "Put your toy away and get over here! We're leaving!"

"Dammit!" she whispered between kisses, "It's my stupid sister... I live in Loveland, so... Yeah, I should go. I don't want to, but I should—" Her stalling cut short by honk-honk impatience, trailed by a spritz of giggles from the car. "See you again?" She fluffed her hair, tucking in her Motörhead shirt, re-zipping selvedge jeans, settling them back on captivating hips.

"I'd like that." I watched her go, turning now and then to steal a glance as she backpedaled towards the car, slim hands in even slimmer pockets, "I'll think about what you said—about keeping promises to myself," I shouted after her. She grinned, disappeared into the car's open back door, disappearing behind the fence as her sister hit the gas. I think about Whitney often, catching glimpses of her in the face of others. The probabilities that governed our collision; the chances that we would meet again, at the next Chautauqua. I wondered what could have happened if I had been more selfish; guided her by the hips again, back into the space of my body where she fit perfectly, asked her to stay; told her I'd drive her back home anytime she was ready. Would our primal flame still burn as brightly as it did that night? Would we still fall into each other like beasts? Or would the ordeals of life have worn us down, affection souring in the steady march of entropy? Intimacy often seemed insane to bother with; inevitable staleness just over the horizon, settling in when two people have been together just a little too long.

Status and confidence; the prerequisites for feminine desire. Competence was maintenance. Whitney's handling of matters had made that clear. "Why aren't you doing better at life?" Justine now seemed to shout from the silent frustration of her cold shoulders, holed up in the bedroom night after night, seeking answers at the bottom of a wine bottle. As if everything is in a man's favour; we can pluck plums from the tree of opportunity with casual whimsy. Perhaps that was the experience at the upper stratum of the Pareto distribution--those who had the right combination of charisma, contacts and pedigree. It certainly wasn't mine. As far as many of the women who had come and gone in my life seemed concerned, Men led lives of easy old's boys club privilege. If a man was failing, falling short of his potential, it was because something was wrong with him; he was lazy, shortsighted. It never occurred to them that individual mileage may vary.

Censure ricocheted in my inner ramblings. Laudable days gone by the wayside soured even grief. Five years earlier I had sipped coffee with John J. Campbell, discussing pulling focus on a new show. We always called it a "show" in the business, whatever the format: Feature films, television series and documentaries. John had made his bones as Gus Van Sant's DP on My Own Private Idaho, a seminal film in my adolescent James Dean ramblings. Soft-spoken and erudite, behind a white beard and under a weathered Corleone hat, we engaged as men of philosophy and culture who had strong opinions on the correct use of Zeiss Ultra Speed Primes and the semiotics of Stedicam blocking. By the end of the hour, he wanted me as his focus technician, but within 24 hours I lost the position to a guy fresh in town from LA who owned a RED Epic and promised the producers a steal. There were no hard feelings. The other guy had chutzpah and resources I hadn't. It was just the nature of the business; never personal. Things always came down to what the bean-counters preferred. At least back then I could expect an interview. I'd been sat across from a person in a position to hire me—who was actually qualified to hire me, not the HR ditz who had never touched a professional camera. In the years since, things had changed, taken a turn for the offhand. Billy Corgan’s immortal lyrics sounded a siren call, "The world is a vampire! Sent to drain!"

I was exhausted with the fruitless job search. Alienated from Justine's silent bedroom brooding, the desolation of our home deepened with every failure on my end. I grew sick of the pressure of both our expectations, or her only emerging from the bedroom to open another bottle of wine, fill another glass. Was this silent cantering between bed and bar alcoholism? The elephantine word barely belonged in my brain. How could I be in love with an alcoholic? What had I willfully ignored in the inaugural years of our relationship?

"Nobody owes me a job, Justine. I don't understand what you want from me." "I want you to get angry. Angry enough to do something!" She grasped the wine bottle by the neck with one hand like a cudgel, cupped the glass by the bulb delicately in the other; duality in flesh. "Oh, I am far past angry. I'm demoralized. I know you're frustrated with me. I know that things aren't going according to plan and I am sorry for my part in that. Right now, I need you to stop riding me so hard. I care about our relationship. I want to continue having a relationship with you, but in order for that to happen, I need you to focus on your own stuff—that means your work and schooling. Please, give me the space to sort out mine. That was the agreement we made."
I remembered long hot summers washing cars, fixing bikes and mowing lawns. I was making money and girls noticed. So did my second-wave feminist mother, taking me aside one day to transmit dating advice to the sex-obsessed space between my thirteen year-old ears.
"A woman should always have her own money and be willing to pay her own way. She wants you to pay for everything? I don't care how pretty she is, she'll only ruin you. Let her be someone else's problem: Get rid of her." In the absence of self-knowledge, people are little more than replication machines, copying whatever survival demands normalization to. What normalized for me was my parents relationship to money. They both worked prestigious jobs but they lived off of my Dad's income, banking my Mother's, letting interest accumulate and making angel investments. By the time I was just hitting my teens, we were wealthy. It was also a different time. They were already making six figures at 25. At the same age, I felt flush with cash at 40,000. The economic reality I had been raised to partake in no longer existed, casualties of the wages of empire: Cronyist graft, corporate outsourcing, madcap speculation, a state swollen with unfunded liabilities, military adventurism and governments that would tax breathing if they could get away with it. I adjusted my expectations accordingly.

When Justine decided on a career in education a year earlier, I supported her wholeheartedly. Footing the bill for her Master's and shouldering all of the household expenses was beyond my personal means. We could attain a comfortable existence, but we would both have to work; a tacit understanding that was the cornerstone of our relationship. Reciprocity, each paying our own way. She was second generation from Finnish immigrants, and drew on her background for a sense of Intrepid daring against the odds. Having some Scandinavian blood of my own, I understood that side of her; but having spent time there, I also understood the Scandinavian fetish for consensus—a going along to get along adaptation to the demands of the Nordic climate. I didn't subscribe to a deterministic universe, but wondered if epigenetic influences pull the strings behind our motivations and reactions to stimulus. I looked for it in myself, the disparate parts of me that were often in conflict with each other as well as the outside world. A UN-in-miniature existed in my genes; whispering, playing angles, all trying to fulfill the biological imperative: Surviving long enough to replicate themselves through sex. My Scandinavian genes wanted a consensus. My Anglo-Saxon genes wanted freedom from consensus. My African genes felt insecure and persecuted. My Germanic genes wanted to invade Poland. My Polynesian genes just wanted to surf, and my Jewish genes were neurotic about it all.

Justine was quickly hired as a para-educator. It was so easy for her to get interviews and job offers. When something comes easily we can fall into the trap of assuming it must be just as easy for others. Blind to permutations of circumstance, one can grow to resent another's apparent inability to get with the programme. To my mind, someone who had time to come home every night, watch The Kardashians and drink wine in bed, couldn't be suffering from an excess of responsibility. I saw only Maudlin wallowing, signal flares of depression, kindled by sexual semiotics: A given woman might cheer a politician's wage-gap call-and-response by day, while by night tweeting articles to her girlfriends lamenting the dearth of marriageable men—"marriageable" meaning high status. To "marry down" signals her lower status to the circle of girlfriends with whom she remains ipso facto in cold-war competition. Ideological contradiction manifesting cognitive dissonance; heat waves in Winter.

One can overestimate another person's ability to handle the increasing complexity of life. Justine's Master's would only entail two three-hour nights a week with homework done at her discretion. Being freelance, my schedule allowed flexibility. I took on everything else behind the scenes. She could always come home to a spotless home, usually a cooked meal, fed and walked animals. I didn't see any of it as gendered work; there wasn't time for arbitrary distinctions. It was simply what needed to be done. When business was up, I only needed five shoots a month to cover expenses, but business was deteriorating; a serviceable stream of work slowed a trickle. I delivered food to make ends meet, took on freelance consulting, taught at the photography school, took what shoots trickled down from on high. Mostly, I looked for other work; a lateral move to something stable but was getting exactly nowhere. Justine picked up a hostess shift—one night a week. We both knew it was only a matter of time before she felt overburdened.
She snatched her little black book from the recesses of a faux crocodile skin workbag. Her whole life was in that book; plans, contingencies, hopes and dreams. Lists of places to visit, restaurants for date nights—a dwindling refuge from the increasing stress of our shared life. At the top of every month she sat at the dinette, drawing out a calendar. Every day had a list, a choreographed plan of steps and milestones. She brought the worry worn book over to me, brandishing it like a police badge.

"This is my five-year plan: Job. Grad school. Married. Babies," Her arm dropped, book in hand. It slapped on her thigh with crisp finality in the live air of the room, "With the way things are going, I don't see how that's going to happen!" I listened, keeping the wolves of my frustration from entering the fray and tearing her to pieces; essential Zen. She became hazy in the mood lighting of our living room, my eyes were misty with tears.

Nature doesn't care about our goals. Human beings are adapted to the pressures of Darwinian selection. In a state of nature, where the division of labour was biologically delineated, man and woman—each of equal worth and value—complemented each other; plugged the gaps in the other's deficiencies. Presenting a united front against the megacosmic forces that edited maladaptation from the species, was essential for survival. Industrialization presented opportunities for human self-actualisation, but the genetic firmware adapted to harsh primordial reality, largely hadn't caught up to the the 21st century. We stew in conflict between the biologically determined and the ideological. Never far from my mind was the possibility that the circumstances and bloodlines that facilitated my birth may not have been possible in a state of nature; that the vast majority of presently existing humans were mutations, adapted to worker drone servitude in the modern era, unable to reconcile paleolithic programming. It's all well and good to have goals in the abstract, but the problem is: Until the goal is achieved one remains in a state of failure. Failure tends to breed anxiety and doubt. Human history is littered with the bones of those who became slaves to the plan. Guy de Lusignon's Frankish Crusaders marched East to break Salah ad-Din's seige of Tiberias, harassed by Saracen mounted archers the whole way, driven like cattle by these men of the desert who knew the terrain far better. In desperate need to water his horses—overburdened with cavalry plate, and mailed knights, Guy de Lusingon pushed forward according to plan, only to find a large Saracen army blocking access to the Springs of Kafr Hattin. The Franks had failed to adapt to the changing pressures of terrain and tactics. The trap was sprung. They were surrounded, feasting on annihilation.

"Girlfriend, I don't think you'll be happy until I do exactly what you want me to do, exactly how you think I ought to do it. Then you'll still be cross with me because I failed to stand up for myself. If I can't stand up to you, I plant a seed of doubt in your mind that I'll reliably stand up to others. Either way, I fail your competency test." We do what we must do, or we don’t. Everything else is just humans being stupid and exaggerating things.

Justine retreated to her bedroom bacchanalia without a word. More and more of her free time was spent there, marinating in regret and resentment. Conflict was a natural part of any relationship, yet being at odds with her felt like the Earth's poles had shifted. Nauseating shame simmered inside me; I was letting her down. She had placed all her hopes in me because I had won her confidence. My position in life was stronger when we met; I had more to be confident about. The ground had shifted under my feet, rattling that sense of confidence. What if I'd fooled her doubt, even on accident? Proven that she had made an investment in the wrong man? They were trying to pass laws against that in more unhinged parts of the world. I could play the role of the dutiful husband in foot-shuffling, sad-sack "yes, dear" compliance, but that never made a woman happy. The tell lay in the eyes of the married men around me, living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, thinking to themselves 'this was the price of winning.' The price was too high—their wife's attraction. That quintessence diverted to clandestine business trip rendezvous with more primally exciting men.

Young and stupid, I felt the chin-wagging girl-power independence of women I'd known let me off the hook; all I had to do was make a good life for myself. A woman would come along who was doing the same and we would merge our respective fiefdoms into an empire. Such was the marketed promise of Feminism; everyone given carte blanche to make it; everyone accountable. Attaining adulthood, amassing sexual and emotional entanglements, exposed the lie. It seemed that a woman's careerism was the first thing to go by the wayside when a man of acceptable status came into the picture. None of these behaviours were conscious, no grand masculine or feminine conspiracy operated in the bedrooms of the nation. These were subconscious, primal nudges informed by a time when human beings lived closer to nature’s quixotic frenzy; old wiring adapted to a primordial order that no longer existed; Humans on autopilot.

Justine kept a battered copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on her bookshelf, a mass market paperback edition—the one with the pink cover. Pages were worn, notes crammed into the margins; in the heated conflict that filled our living room in 2018 it was clear to me she hadn't understood it. The book was an autobiographical account of a man whose radical individualist anti-sociality, led him to 28 sessions of electroshock therapy. The goal being to erase this separatist personality and return him to functional utility in productive society—and by extension to his wife's desire for male provision. In subsequent years he became aware of his old personality reasserting itself, an entity he called Phaedrus. At the core of the work lay an existentialist meditation on man's relationship to utility; was he man or mule? A cog in the machine valued only for what he could produce for others or a human being? What happens when one makes the mistake of buying into the essential mystic hubris that come along with posession an ounce of self-esteem: Believing he's destined for something greater?

I'd been back home in Portland a week, maybe two. Running the checklist. Making certain I had accounted for everything. Awaiting news from my driver that he had linked up with Margot and picked up my storage. Seemed simple enough, but that clashed with his radio silence. 30 boxes and a Les Paul guitar. It sounded like a bad Country song. I watched Justine sleeping naked beside me. Her sable hair cascading down china-doll porcelain skin luminous in the moonlight. The woman could sleep through a 50 kiloton nuclear blast. I ran my fingers over goosebumps on my skin, an artifact of exploding head syndrome—an ideated yawp that floods through the awareness just before waking, with a start, at oh-dark-thirty. It sometimes sounded like our dogs were barking. I wetted my lips, trying to rescue my dreams from the fog of conscious awareness. I don't know which was more futile. Something about a citadel of sand, the face of a sphinx weathered under unceasing high winds, faceless slender leather skinned creatures without eyes. They explored my Frank Herbert Desert robes with neotenous hands, hundreds of tiny bells jingling about their wrists, they whistled pop tunes through lamprey mouths, and tried to sell me CDs.

Rolling back onto my right side, bracing for a volcanic soreness that erupted from my pelvis. Whatever it was that had made itself known in Margot's shower wasn't showing any signs of settling down. Pushing the pain beneath the surface punctuated by a pneumatic hiss through my teeth, I heaved myself out of our bed, immediately stepping on one of our dogs. He woke as suddenly as I had, his ears folding back, his tail giving me a knowing flick as I apologized. The closest any human will ever come to unconditional love is the love of a dog. Naked, I knelt down in the moonlight, stroking his scruff, pushing through the simmering pain in my backside. He placed one beefy paw on my hand, licking it reassuringly. We named him Huckleberry Finn, Justine's idea. Most of our first year together, in 2016, went to weekly visits at the humane society, searching for a dog. It wasn't long before the staff knew us on a first name basis, even going so far as to set aside, from prying pedestrian eyes, dogs that might suit us.

You can tell a lot about a person through considering their taste in dogs, if they like dogs much at all. Justine was dead set on a Pit bull Terrier or an American Staffordshire. I wondered if owning a Pit bull was a reflection of how a person sees herself; Maybe not the best looking, but sweet on the inside, vulnerable. The misunderstood vagabond of American folklore in canine form. There was something to the underdog spirit Pit bulls embodied. They were the dogs of wayfaring strangers, and earth mothers. Suppressing my canine Jim Crowism, I attempted to adopt an open mind for the sake of my girlfriend's tastes. On some level I found her hankering for Pit bulls disappointing, she would be just another Portland Punk Rock Girl with a Pit-mix. It seemed clichéd; unimaginative even. She had regaled me of stories from her anarchist twenties. I knew the type; crusty conformists to their non-conformism. Punk Rock revolutionary khaki; the ripped black jeans, the tattoos, the gauged ears; chelsea cuts drenched in improbable manic-pixie manic panic. A Pit bull would complete the look—right out of central casting. By my reckoning, Punk wasn’t a look, it was a state-of-mind. I worried about such a dog living up to its notoriously bloodthirsty reputation—one thing when the owner is a pretty All-American female and can coax an iota of leniency. Quite another when my swarthy shade combined with such a breed might engender flashes of Michael Vick. They say it's not the dog, it's the owner, but that wouldn't do me any favours. I wanted a herding dog. It's what I was used to, preferring their energy, grace, and most-of-all their intelligence. It simply would not do to have a stupid or violent dog, so I let my bowwow-bigot flag fly. What would my dog preferences say about me? I thought, driving the two of us to one of our weekly dates to the Humane Society, That I was Loyal? Hard-working? Obsessive to the point of obstinacy? Perhaps a bit eccentric. Smart. Easily trained…

Once, We lay in Justine's bed, above the Speakeasy on SE Taylor, looking at Humane Society dogs. Her cooing over Pit-mixes each met my grumbling "meh." She paused on a photo of a Spaniel with one lip curled in Bronx cheer. The dog was actually sneering at the photographer.

"Now that dog just looks like an asshole." I could barely push the words out of my mouth before we erupted into convulsions of howling laughter. We were two fully realized human beings, with different preferences, and we found pleasure in our differences. Months dropped off the calendar as we searched. The way it would typically go, we'd take a stroll through the dog pods: Green, Blue, Yellow and Red. Each pod contained a given number of kennels, most a temporary home to a dog. A cursory meeting with each, seeing how they reacted to us through the kennel, yielded a short list of dogs we wanted to meet privately. Heather, the affable volunteer at the Humane Society, found our playful energy infectious; taking us into her hands each Thursday we turned up at the shelter.

"I fight my co-workers for you guys every time you come in," she exclaimed, taking us back to one of the private meeting rooms in Green Pod. We had picked out a four year old Australian Kelpie named Hurley. She sat us down in the pod, "I'm really excited for you guys to meet him. He's such a great dog." She was back through the door almost as fast as she had brought us in, "I'll be right back with him. Just sit tight." Justine beamed, her eyes glowed with excitement. Moments ago we had cruised by his kennel, and knew immediately we fancied a meeting.

"I have a really good feeling about this!" Justine was bouncy with anticipation, "Did you see how sweet he was? So responsive! I think he likes me," On the other side of the glass Heather was returning, Hurley in tow. As they entered he stopped in the doorway, tail wagging his whole body. He shuddered, let fly a cannonade of staccato howls, and wriggled his way up to us, acquainting himself with our scent, then proceeding to inspect the perimeter of the room. Heather gave us the rundown: He had been picked up as a stray, no ID, a little malnourished. He probably had people at one point but they hadn't neutered him—it may have been a bad situation and he likely ran away. He ate from our hands. The degree to which Justine was daydreaming the moment we would find our dog flew under my radar. As with all things, I was methodical. looking for every sign that the dog could be trained, conditioned, and trusted. Running thought-experiments about acclimating him to our new flat, calculating scheduling and walks. It didn't occur to me to just be present and enjoy the moment.

"I want to try something," Justine sprang up, treat in hand, "Hurley!" He came trotting over to her, attentive, thousand-yard stare, tail high and wagging. "Okay. Hurley, Roll over!" Hurley flattened himself on the ground, and executed a flawless barbecue roll. Justine covered her mouth, blushing "Oh my God! Did you see that? He's our dog!" There was nothing more to it. It was done. "We'll take him." I caught tears gathering in Heather's eyes as I said it, excitement washing over her and maybe a little bit of relief.

Later, we sat in front of Hurley's Kennel. The papers were being drawn up elsewhere. Hurley, soon to be Huckleberry Finn, contemplated us from the kennel.

"You wanna go home with us?" Justine said excited, "you wanna come home with us, Bubba?" He cocked his head at the word "home." Something he still does to this day. "You're gonna go home! Go home! With us." He sat, gracing us with his thousand yard stare, responding to Justine's elation with a Wag-Wag of understanding. She squeezed my arm, "He's our dog! He's so perfect!" Her face was wet with tears, "I must look like a crazy person. I'm such a mess right now. He's our dog!" Through all my numerous relationships I never took seriously the possibility of starting a family. I always felt secretly unlovable and kept one foot pointed at the door, expecting the axe to drop sooner or later; for lovers to become enemies. I'd had one other dog with a woman, and lost that dog to her before I moved to Portland. I was taking a huge step onto the tightrope of trust, and I hadn't communicated that to Justine. Having a dog with someone again was another risk taken; another connection I could lose; another way I could be hurt if things went pear shaped. I offered nothing of those thoughts in that moment, keeping them to myself in the inner sanctum of my being; a place defined by the solemn and private masculine--a habit that opened me up to allegations of emotional unavailability by others, to the projections of their fears. It hardly seemed necessary to make such a grave admission. Sat, on the floor of green-pod, waiting to adopt Huck on a wet mid-October day, as the remnants of a Japanese Typhoon slammed into the coast, life seemed possible. We called the day our "day of yes."

Earlier that same day, I had bought a new car with the insurance settlement from my accident a month earlier. A gaggle of underwriters, who I'd never met, ruled that I was not at fault. Damn right I wasn't at fault; I'd been sat at a red light when it happened. A couple in a Honda Civic blew a combination "right turn only" and "stop" sign at the cross street, T-boning a Mini Cooper in the oncoming lane. The Cooper's airbags deployed, stunning the middle-aged driver, and she hit me head on. Three cars totaled. It's true what they say when a crisis unfolds before you. Time dilates. Horrified, I watched the Cooper swerve under the impact and accelerate towards me, the driver blinded and stunned by a deployed airbag. In expanded time, I'm able to judge how fast she's approaching, with eternity to contemplate the inevitable collision. I see my car give way like the a bellows of an accordion, my knees exploding from the impact. Ever the eternal pessimist—blessed with that uniquely Jewish way of metastasizing a skinned elbow into a gunshot wound.

The Cooper plowed into me, throwing my car back, face-planting me into my airbag. Shaken but unscathed, I clambered out of my car and crossed the mixed debris field on unsteady feet. Possessed, I marched up to the Honda civic, seeing red, jumped-up on adrenaline and testosterone; on vicious autopilot.

"The fuck were you thinking!" I raged at the Honda, "That was a right turn only plus a stop sign you just blew!" I was pacing now, like a caged Lion, "Fuck you in a rush to go nowhere shmucks! You fucking imbeciles! I can't stand you egoistic knuckle-dragging creeps! Driving like you're the only motherfuckers on the road!" Behind the shattered glass the couple just stared back at me, through a haze of shock and fear. Neither one was even in their mid-twenties. Both twiggy and pallid in that way only vegans can be. The woman had been driving. The car was brand new. Temporary tags tacked to pristine glass. They were probably on a joy ride down from Seattle, basking in a frenzy of post adolescent possibility.

Nausea oozed in my guts; the adrenaline abandoning me. I dropped to debris strewn tarmac next to their car, a puddle of frayed nerves and heaving breaths. Marinating in horror. I felt like a beast. Like I had betrayed part of myself, proven that just under my veneer of civility lurked that half-mad, half-black part I was always in conflict with; the wild savage some secretly feared. I must have loomed monstrous over two people vulnerable in post-accident shock; bloodlust pouring from my mouth. Frothing rage emerging from nowhere. I hoped they didn't hear me, that the shock of the impact had dulled their senses; that the pure fury unleashed on them would feel indistinct from a dream. An uncertain amount of time passed while I stared at my shoes, my breath heaving-to, slowing to baseline. The distinct tang of urine invaded my flared nostrils. The twiggy woman was standing over me; she had peed herself. She was beautiful, gazing down at me with geisha eyes.

"I am so sorry," I rasped, shaking my head, recomposed to my usual gentility "I am so ashamed of my behaviour just now—" I wasn't sure what had rattled me more, the crash or my startling reaction to it. "Are you okay?"

"Nothing's broken," Inside It was a different story. I didn't know I was capable of such hysterics. It was only when the pain shot through my wrists that I realized my fists had been clenched. "Thank you for asking. You okay?"

"Same," she bit her lip, hoping I wouldn’t notice the stench of urine, "We were fighting," she thumbed her boyfriend still in the car, still bathing in shock, "I wasn't watching the road--we're not from around here. Just down for the weekend y'know?" she said, wrapping her arms around model slim hips.

"Forget it. Looks like we were the lucky ones anyway," I nodded to the crushed Cooper. A woman was climbing out of it, running a bloody hand through a shock of brown hair. She wrenched open the back door, calling to someone in the back seat.

"Graham! Graham!" She climbed into the wreck, leaving a sanguine handprint on the Cooper's silver fuselage, the rest of what she shouted unintelligible from within its oily black of the interior. "Maybe, stay with your boyfriend and catch your breath," I placed a hand on her shoulder, she didn't flinch. Surprising. I wouldn’t have blamed her if he had. "I'll see to it," I started for the cooper, turned back to the young woman, "I'm really sorry I acted that way. Completely improper." She threw me the briefest of 'it's fine' hand waves, uncoiling her arms and rubbing her almond eyes with one clammy palm. I returned my focus to the evolving crisis around the Cooper, the sounds of panic rising as I drew closer. A crowd had gathered. The middle-aged woman was lifting a small boy out of the back seat. The boy was bleeding from a gash on his forehead, but was otherwise okay. His clear blue eyes settled on me, I nodded. The woman turned to me, then to the couple by the Honda.

"What the fuck is wrong with them!" She started towards the couple on unsteady legs, ready to throw them a tongue lashing something fierce. "Where'd you learn how to drive, you assholes!" I stepped in front of her, stopping her power-gait in its tracks, hands aloft.

"Ma'am, I've berated them enough for the both of us and it didn't help me feel any better. Let’s check on your son?" Leading her back to the cooper, she glanced at Graham, then at the car. She exploded into tears, dropping into a swaying motion. It looked like she was dancing a slow hug-and-sway with grief.

"Oh God!" she exclaimed, through her fingers, "It's a 2006," she meant the car, "I'm never going to find one of these again—not in this colour!" Her eyes again found the young couple, acquired missile lock, "could kill that stupid bitch..." she locked back on to me, "did you see what happened? Oh, you were in the SAAB weren't you? I hit you," she grabbed my arm, "bitch hit me and I hit you and—" she shifted from bitter to bright, "are you okay? You're okay right? Graham!" Caterwauling panic and dissociation. I lead her to the sidewalk, catching a glimpse of the damage to my own car as I passed. Yep, Total loss… A money-pit anyway; always breaking down; stealing my options. I had paid cash for it after three months at my agency job. When they laid me off—with no warning or explanation, I held onto it out of a sense of fear that all I had poured into rebuilding it would be for waste if I let it go. I gambled that the sporadic, unpredictable expense would somehow be more manageable than the guaranteed burden of a monthly note on a new car.

"Julie!" A forty-something man appeared as we approached the sidewalk. Julie's husband. She somehow had the presence of mind to call him between fits of anguish and dissociation—they had been just about home when the crash happened. The couple stood, assessing the damage to their car. In the warm tones of magic hour I sat under the gnarled limbs of an Alder tree, waiting for the police to arrive. I felt breath on my cheek looking over past a growing headache. It was Graham, a gout of blood running down one brow, who had come to sit next to me. He had been forgotten in his parents' fuming over the totaled Cooper. He was holding Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker, complete with the green lightsaber.

"D'you like Star Wars?"

I smiled at him, amazed that he appeared unfazed before I remembered to chalk it up to shock. "I love Star Wars. Very much. Three of my favourite movies, really." Star Wars ended in 1983. I was there. Here I was, worried about keeping a solemn pact to proclaim my nerd-cred, even to a child. I chuckled at the absurdity.

"There's six. An' they're makin' a new one," He really was a different generation. I pointed to the toy.

"Can I see who you have there?"

"Luke Skywalker's my favorite," Graham declared.

"Me too. How old are you, Graham?"

"Six."

"I wasn't even half your age when my parents took me to the movies to see Return of the Jedi. You know Luke fighting the Rancor Dom in Jabba's Palace?” He nodded, “It's my earliest memory," Who cares? I had never been a natural with kids. They seemed so hard to relate to; pure emotion, unimpressed by subtlety, nuance or complexity. Unimpeded by reason. They were pure humanity. Sometimes thinking maybe I was just too vain to throttle things back to child speed, then remembering I’d hated when adults laid on the baby-talk. To me, it was odd that we had all been children once, but some of us couldn't remember how we liked be connected to when we were little. At six, I was usually on my own entertaining myself. "You have any brothers or sisters, Graham?" He shook his head, emphatically 'no.' "Neither do I." I watched his parents simmer over the wreck, talking animatedly. "It's just a car for fuck's sake," I muttered under my breath, judging from afar, forgetting for a moment Graham's virgin ears. Justine always said I would be a great dad.

"You wanna see him?" Graham was holding Jedi Knight Luke at me. I realized that I owned both the 1983 and 1997 versions myself.

"Sure," I took Luke with trembling hands, making that iconic FIZZ-WAAHMMM sound of a lightsaber ignition. I watched Graham watch his parents argue over the wrecked Cooper. Julie's husband was pacing, distraught. Whatever invective Julie was spewing through a face fire-engine-red with embarrassment wasn't helping. Neither broke their futile squabbling long enough to look up and see if their son was nearby, to ask if he was okay. This was a story I knew all too well. Parents wrapped up in the tangled web of status and material entombment. I was convinced being an only child somehow stunted my growth. Other people I knew with siblings seemed to have a better handle on life; to get on easier in the world. They knew how to claim space, how to self-advocate. I would hear the endless refrain, "oh, you're so lucky to be an only child! You never have to share things, you get your own room," which was ridiculous to me—the assertion that my upbringing was happier because I got more stuff. "Maybe," I once said to a girl who had been gushing her envy over my only child status, "but I have no one to talk to."

The fury I vented on the young couple echoed in my mind. In the blink of an eye I imagined Graham at my age, chasing the white whale of success; impaling himself again and again on the sword of self-imposed expectations just so that others—his parents—would finally see him. Berating a young couple, in town for a holiday, over an accident because things inside him were falling to pieces under an avalanche of failures; wondering when to shrug it all off and walk away. A slice of someone else’s life catalyzed inner reflection. My own parents were neither neglectful nor cruel, just uninterested. I lost a bike at a park once, and the next day there was a new even better one. Other kids had either NES or Sega Genesis; I had both. Every material desire was satisfied, whether I asked for it or not. What I wasn’t allowed were my own preferences. What should have been a natural human battle for Individuation may as well have been The Somme; the mere assertion of my own tastes so often met with “don’t be selfish!” or “try thinking of other people from time to time!” I watched others move forward in life, getting ahead. They showed no outward signs of deference to the whims or others. They identified their desires and grasped, unapologetically. Suppression transfigured my un-met hankering into rage—mostly turned on myself. When I was Graham’s age, I would lock myself in my massive walk-in closet, filled with the envy of other children and I would hit myself as hard as I possibly could with one tiny closed fist. When the dust settled, my ears ringing, I would emerge calm, collected and unsuspected. Such was my penance for individuation.

The crash had breached some barrier in me, brought me face-to-face with that deprivation; That I just wanted to have a day where nothing went wrong, where I wasn’t running myself ragged to measure up or meet anyone’s expectations. I wanted to hug the kid, clutch him to me; tell him that he was seen and heard, but it wasn't my place and I wouldn't lie. Mark Twain was right: History doesn't repeat, but it does sometimes rhyme. Dusk gathered, the shadows crept. It was soon time for Graham to rejoin his parents, claim his space. I couldn't be sure what the right move was—I spent my childhood playing referee for mine.

"I think your Mum and Dad need you to be their hero right now," I suggested, handing Luke back. It was nice meeting you Graham." Graham would be nine now. Time flies. I wonder if his parents finally see him.

"K. Bye." He waved, and ran back to them. Simple as that. As soon as he appeared in their umwelt, they stopped bickering. I pulled out my phone. I'd been sat on it awkwardly. I called Justine, who was just a few blocks away putting together our new home.

"Girlfriend," I always called her ‘girlfriend’ and she always called me ‘boyfriend.’ It was an inside joke that I doubted would change when we married. "I have some bad news... There's been an accident—"

Huckleberry Finn gazed up at me from his spot on the floor. It was highly irregular, him being in the bedroom late at night. Usually he slept in the living room with his sister. Each night, since I returned from wrangling my storage in Colorado, I would wake with a start and there was Huck, on the cold hardwood floor, leaning against my side of the bed, gazing at me with dinner plate eyes. I rose from the bed and Huck shifted on his haunches, keeping me in his field-of-view.

"Where are you going?" My rising woke Justine who offered me a sleepy challenge from the bed her naked back still turned towards me.

"Huck's in here again," I leaned down to place a hand on his head, wincing at the pain in my pelvis. "I'm going to check on Luna. Grab some water," My grunt had already given me away.

"He knows something's wrong." I let her remark hang in the air along with the truth. We both knew she was right, but I didn't know what I could do about it. “I’ve seen you writhing around in pain night after night, and frankly it’s keeping me up too.” No disagreement took root in my mind, but the facts were the facts: I was barely making ends meet as it was; what would it cost me to see a doctor out-of-pocket? If it was something serious a doctor was only going to tell me that I needed treatment I couldn’t afford. Every time I’d managed to crawl my way back into the black something would come out of left-field and slap me back down into the red. We needed answers, yes. I also needed time.

“I hear you, girlfriend. Just don’t know what to do right now. I’m on the razor’s edge as it is.” Huck sidled over to keep me in view—wherever I was going, he would be right behind me. Justine left it there. Huck followed me out into the living room, where I sat in my reading chair, pain burning through me, moonlight cascading in from the drapes, highlighting on the windowsills a thin coat of ash from the previous summer’s wildfires— I had never been able to fully scrub it clean. Huck watched me with dinner plate eyes. “If I just land a few bids soon, I can at least see a doctor,” Huck gave me a wag-wag, a tacit agreement between gentleman that I was doing what I could, seeing the situation for what it was. I was running myself ragged. Everything I made evaporated to living expenses. Living itself seemed like a luxury. For the first time, in a long time, I wept.

Walking the dogs, late at night, ransacking my last nerve for answers, stalling in the chill night air as I didn't want to return to the three-dog-night state of our home, I called Margot. She was one of the few women I could talk to openly about women; she was self-assured, never taking my observations as personal slight. Harder was the confession of my employment woes.

"I don't know how to say this," I told her despondently, "but some would chalk up my employment troubles to discrimination. I have to wonder if that’s possible," Discrimination. The word tasted like feces on my lips, "I don't want to start down that line of thinking; into that quagmire of abdication of personal responsibility—it's always a trap,”

Still, I couldn’t deny the empirical evidence of my senses. Justine had no problems landing interviews. She never complained of being blown off or rejected. It seemed people were beating down her door with opportunities. In fact all of the women I knew were doing extremely well. They seemed to shift from opportunity to opportunity without a care in the world. There was no hand-wringing over whether or not to leave the $40,000/year social media marketing position at company X for the $40,000/year digital content producer role at company Y—just because company Y had better staff retreats. They seemed to glide through the métier ecosystem, confident they were being looked out for. I didn’t begrudge anyone their success (slay, queen), but If I was facing discrimination, a notion I didn’t want coexisting with my other thoughts, what sort of discrimination was I facing? Was I the wrong colour? The wrong gender? Was there too little activism demonstrated in my portfolio? If we were all competing on a level playing-field and I was giving it my all then why was I coming up the also-ran? The hiring calculus couldn’t be based upon merit. Not anymore. If it was, I could be slightly more confident of my own outcomes. Something else was present in the hiring calculus, fouling the gears.

“I never wanted to be the type of person who blames others for his failings,” I continued to Margot, by heart pounding in my chest. I had never expressed racialised concerns to anyone; It wasn’t how I thought of myself, “but I really have tried everything. I’m just not getting anywhere. I don’t want any special treatment or to be a peg in anyone’s quota. I just want someone to look at my qualifications, see that I’m a solid candidate for the job, and make me an offer. All other attributes should be off the table.”

"Yeah, I've never heard you talk like this and it's kinda freaking me out," Margot pointed out, "You've always managed to kick ass with the film stuff. They should be tripping over themselves to hire you. It's weird hearing things aren't going well all of a sudden."

The problem with contemporary American socio-understanding, at least as far as I could parse it, was that for all of their openness to experience and general politeness, Americans lacked imagination. They tended to categorize everything—especially people, who were placed in lanes with an attenuated set of group attributes. I didn’t see this is a moral failing so much as an adaptation to a multicultural environment. Human beings are always seeking easy ways to process the world. Synthesizing high-resolution variety to low-resolution blocks for easy processing made sense. Like most things, It wasn’t personal. People ran their lane. America was no place for individuals who didn’t belong squarely in any lane to begin with, and wouldn’t take being relegated to one—except outside the race; something I found to be out of alignment with the storied Hollywood American mythos of freaks carving out a place for themselves.

Some fights were political, most were philosophical masquerading as political—something I’d learned from my weekly conversations with Hunter S. Thompson many years earlier. How was anyone to tell the difference? The philosophical had apparently lost ground to the political, something my own struggle was not. I regarded politics with all the delight of garbage rotting in the sun. As far I was concerned, there were two sorts of people in the world: Those wanting to be left the Hell alone, and those who wouldn't. I placed myself firmly in the former camp—to use the term ironically; a strict adherence to individualism had long kept me out of the political maelstrom. I never cared much for either side and especially despised identitarian ideologues of every stripe. Group averages were insufficient to judge individuals. Merit had always been paramount to me. I wanted others to see that before anything else; before skin colour, gender, or any other immutable characteristic I hadn’t the opportunity to choose. It didn't matter to me if it was blue-hair and pussy-hats, or bedsheets and burning crosses; to me each were equally dubious—no mere mortal can claim the moral high ground. I had even less use for hypocrites, particularly people condemning the system, whilst enjoying its fruit.

"You would think,” I groaned to Margot, “they lay on the diversity rhetoric rather thick, but you go into these agencies, look around and you know they're not walking their talk; It's all—"

"A huge circle-jerk?"

"I was going to say self-congratulatory, vacuous virtue signaling, but—in a nutshell—yes.” I let a beat pass while Huck ambled into a bush, commencing his bombing run. Luna, frightened by the noise of the street, pressed into my knees, “For instance: Agency called me about a job last month, mind you I’d heard nothing from these people in five years, but out of the blue they ring me up about a commercial ‘oh your content is so great and we really enjoy working with you’, the girl’s laying it on thick, but nevertheless I’m thinking ‘brilliant. Maybe this is a sign things are getting back on track.’ As it turned out, the only reason they’d called was the client wanted a diverse crew; creative director thought having a person-of-colour as DP would be a feather in her cap.”

“That’s gross,” Margot said lighting a cigarette on the other end of the phone, “did you take the job?”

“Self-esteem usually doesn’t survive contact with desperation. I bid on the job, put together a treatment. They ghosted me. I asked for too much, according to the client. Now that’s complete bullshit because I asked for market rates, so not only am I merely a diversity hire to these people, I’m also not supposed to be competent enough to ask for market rates. I’m supposed to do the same work as everyone else for less. Double-standard, much?”

The more I talked about it, the easier it was to talk about. I had always been a private man, adhering to the motion that it was better to keep silent and be thought a fool, then to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt. No one ever asked for my opinion, least of all the woke crowd I now found myself lambasting. I would overhear their conversation on set, speaking to each other like parents ignoring the child in the room who might be listening and critiquing their remarks; assuming that I either agreed with them, or had no thoughts of my own. I could speak up, interject my opinion—I needed no permission, but I was there to work, not chin-wag about politics.

“Even if these people are fully committed to their ideology,” I continued to Margot over the phone, “there’s simply so much money on the line they can’t take risks on people like me which speaks to an inherent prejudice at the core of their moral framework. If this was good old fashioned exclusion it wouldn’t feel so personal. That they bang on the way they do about progressive politics, while acting this way, makes it so much worse.”

“I hear you! That sucks, and I am so sorry! So what are you going to do? That’s all that really matters.” She was right. All the analysis in the world didn’t mean much if I was unprepared to act on my convictions. I tended to remain safely in the macro of things; cogitating, planning, observing, lacking something in the follow through.

“There are a few people here who’ve always treated me with respect. I’ll continue working with them, of course. Apart from that, I have no idea. I don’t know.” Speaking aloud, bringing the problems from the abstract into the visceral was enabling me to let go. My raison d’être lay in the work. For ages there had been nothing else that fulfilled me. I was slim on family. All of my romantic relationships had failed. Work was the one place where I felt a sense of meaning. Maybe now it was time to find new meaning in the ashes. Justine wanted me to come to that realization for her, because it’s what she needed in order to feel seen. I needed to come to that realization because it was true.

Individuals are, without recourse, crushed by the momentum of gargantuan social forces and it wasn’t personal. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by sheer incompetence. There was no cabal of creative directors giving each other secret handshakes by the IPA fountain. It showed up in people, who’d never walked a mile in my shoes, claiming to be my advocates. The splash damage of seemingly well-intentioned ideology, in concert with the simple fact that most Americans do not receive any formal education in logic or moral philosophy. The a priori assumptions that undergird their progressivism—that certain groups come from a prescribed set of disadvantages and were therefore inherently less competent by virtue of those circumstances. Individuals cannot be judged by group averages. Any such individual, who demonstrated competence and thereby bucked the attributes of their “marginalized” group, was inherently a threat to the fundaments of the progressive, social justice clique and would be kept out, almost instinctively. In the Nietzschean will to power dialectics that drive American politics, ideology invariably exists only to serve itself and those of the in-group who subscribe to it.

The fear of blacklisting ever at the forefront of my mind, I had been so afraid to speak openly about these experiences. The Portland echo chamber was viciously intolerant of anyone critical of their moralist gospel. Indifference became my emotional defense. Resistance, manifested by cool dispassion towards my chosen craft coagulated in that awareness. Steven Pressfield argued, in The War of Art, that the key to producing a work is the overcoming of subconscious resistance. I wanted no part of the cynical pseudo-activism of an industry that was only using that activism to make more money, knowing it would be quickly abandoned when public sentiments shifted as they always did. To my mind, implementing change simply involved doing so; living one’s values; no muss, no fuss, no attention seeking, or virtue signaling. 'Be the change you want to see in the world.’ It was plastered on many a car bumper around Portland. Despite Ghandi’s questionable activities with young girls, and his liberal use of the term 'nigger,' a good idea from a terrible person is still a good idea.

"What does Justine think about this?"

"I don't think she sees it as valid. Compared to her students who come from disadvantaged minority backgrounds, she seems to think because I obviously don't share that background, I wouldn't face discrimination."

"Hmm... Well, I've always said people in this country don't know how to handle someone like you."

"I've never wanted to believe you. I was desperate to find a way to prove you were full of shit," All I could do was sigh, "You know, a few years back—before I moved here, actually... I was getting a massage from this woman who was a friend of my ex's. Full-tilt New Age, into crystals, chakras the whole thing. Whatever, I don't care; if it blows your hair back, good on you, right?"

"Right, yeah."

"Anyway, she's working on my chest, that locking diaphragm problem I've had was really playing up my Asthma, and so she's got her fingers really working me—.”

"Mmm, really working you with her fingers, yeah—"

"Shuddup, I'm getting to the point. So she says to me 'your breath is sacred, Corey. Don't let the white man steal your breath.'"

"The fuck? Oh my God!"

"And the whole time I'm thinking: What on Earth does she mean? Don’t let the white man steal my breath? That’s ridiculous—like someone’s thrown a slave net over my lungs or something? To say nothing of the fact that’s not how the Atlantic slave trade happened; Europeans did not go into the African interior with slave nets—Hell, until the invention of Quinine in the 19th century, they couldn’t even go into inland Africa without dropping dead of malaria within 30 days! No, Africans conquered other Africans, sold the vanquished to Muslim slavers, who then resold some of them to ships bound for The Americas. The Irish were enslaved here. There were Blacks in The Americas who themselves owned slaves. There were Blacks who fought for the Confederacy. History is damned complex. Never mind the fact that I'm part white—huge digression. Point being: There aren’t arcane, prejudices stealing my breath. I have asthma and I am not a moron. I will not play pawn for the wizards of wokitude to use to feel better about themselves; the holier than thou faux-moralism of these people, with their bastardized New Age moral systems, showing others the Golden Path when they're not even living consistently with their own values… It’s creepy."

"Welcome to the West Coast."

The only way to win was to walk away. I had known this since I was five; when the other kids are being assholes or the game isn’t fun anymore, take your toys and go home. We become adults and we suppress many of the essential boundaries we develop as children. That doesn’t mean let your inner child run the show, but he’s not wrong about everything. Now and again, he just might save your skin. After over a year and a half on the job beat, I finally found myself sat across someone for an interview. It wasn't for anything remotely like what I had done in the past, but it was honest good-ol' hard work and they gave me the time of day. A truck driving route, schlepping wine for a local distributor. 30 hours a week of pants-on-fire driving and manual labour.

I started the day after the interview, bright-eyed and bushy tailed. One month dropped from the calendar. Then two, then three, all the while the pain in my pelvis mounting, sucking down 3000 Milligrams of painkillers a day just to get through. I was clawing my way back into the black, insurance and doctors on the horizon. Justine still spent her nights and weekends alone in the bedroom, talking to her sister, watching shows, drinking wine. We barely spoke. The pain was so bad at night that my tossing and turning kept her up—I moved over to the living room sofa semi-permanently, thinking it would help if she at least was able to get a good night's sleep and not work at a deficit. I couldn't remember the last time she touched me.

I rose from my reading chair, moving into the kitchen, letting out a grunt of pain, putting the kettle on. Making the fatal mistake of glancing over to the sink, its usual clean surface, now looking like 1945 Dresden. I cursed under my breath, unaware Justine had come into the dining room behind me to fetch that little black book from her faux crocodile skin workbag.

"What is it?" She asked, somewhere between tired and tense. I had stopped attempting to analyze the kinesics behind her words. There comes a point in any protracted conflict where psychology won’t help you. Only moral philosophy will. What is right? What is wrong? What is good what is evil? What is force? What is chosen? To be hardened against the corrosive effects of repetitive negative engagements. Having boundaries is the only way be corrosion proof.

"Oh, just the kitchen. I'm tired of cleaning it. Girlfriend, I miss when we had Reset Saturdays. Y'know, take care of things that need doing around here, cooking for the week, errands… It might help us get back on track--feel like a household again. Maybe we can start walking the dogs together; I’d like that. Obviously, I'll clean throughout the week—it's what I do—."

"I don't care about having a clean house. It doesn't matter to me. It's not important," Jesus Christ... Just because something isn't important to you doesn't make it objectively unimportant...

"Ok, I hear that. What’s wrong? What do you need?" That was always our question—instead of asking 'what can I do?' putting the onus on the other person, it invited one to take ownership of his or her own feelings.

"I need to not be working two jobs, while I'm in grad school. I need you to make more."

Shit, I‘ve been working three and half shit jobs and half a job I love just to keep my half of this relationship afloat. My hackles were already on the rise. I held my emotional picket-line, tried to focus on holding space. There wasn’t much to be gained from a skirmish. "Girlfriend, I know it took a long time, but I've got 30 hours a week driving the wine truck, I'm still delivering food, taking any shoot that comes up... I thought we were doing fine. Better than before," Her gaze soured, I thought wrong.

"I don't have anything left to give,” Justine was simmering to a boil. Every solitary breath that passed my lips was just making things worse, “I am tired, and empty and exhausted."

"I hear you. I don't know what else to say, except I see that and I hear you."

“I don’t feel heard," and I don't feel seen.

Hearing someone out is one thing. Inciting the feeling within her that she’s been heard seemed beyond anyone’s ability. I could just stand there, nodding and offering noncommittal grunts and “mm-hms” at her. But then I wouldn’t be showing up in the conversation. I would be lying as much by omission as by my grunting pretense. To show that I truly heard her in this instance required an act of self-erasure. I could promise to think about what she said, buy time and space, but I would have to make good on that promise by coming back at a later time with action. I didn’t want to lie, or manipulate, or erase. I needed her to see that I was hearing her through my action; running myself ragged trying to solve the problem of our finances, but didn’t know how to beyond what fruitless avenues I had already traversed; and it bothered me that my efforts had gone unseen. She wanted to feel heard and I wanted to feel seen. Desires so simple and yet not so simple. I had always believed that, while others could knowingly or unwittingly take actions that enkindled feelings within us, our feelings were ultimately our own responsibility. We could share those feelings with our partners—we must, but our expectations in the wake of that sharing must be grounded. Looking back over the gnarled branches of my entanglements I saw too many instances where women used the mere expression of a feeling, not as a statement of fact to be considered on its own merits, but as tools to nudge, or goad. Like sappers digging beneath the curtain walls that guarded my heart; they felt like manipulations—immune to outflanking or riposte. Once acknowledged, the feeling then became implicitly my responsibility which, when carried along with my own feelings, became untenable. I learned early on in life that my feelings were my own responsibility, that my job was to un-fuck myself as quickly as possible in the heat of a negative emotion and get back to a state of utility; I learned this from my mother and it was reinforced by the women in my life who needed me to be an instrument of their desires. ‘I don’t know where to put my feelings!’ an ex of mine used to say when admonishing me for ‘emotional unavailability.’ What had given her the notion their rightful place was on my back? My youthful exuberance fading, all I could ever muster in reply, with the rise and fall of my shrugging shoulders was to say: ‘In their proper context.’ That’s what was expected of me; and I loathed double-standards.

My mental rooks reported to the front lines of my defenses; a blistering torrent of exasperation arose in my chest, collapsed into a singularity, bending everything in that instance. I imagined myself ranting internally at Justine from within the space of my mind:

You know, it takes me three consecutive 12 hour days to do what you do in five 8 hour days? I drive a 1-ton van loaded with one-hundred 35 pound cases of wine—fragile glass bottles costing, in some instances, thousands of dollars in loss to the company if I break a case. I load up to six cases at a time on a tiny hand truck—that's 175 pounds of dead, fragile, expensive weight that all are counting on to arrive safe and correct so business will run smoothly for just one more day. I have to start my run by 7 am, so I can park in the truck zones before they expire at poor city-planning 'o clock. I have to get the product to the customers on time. I have to deal with receivers who are judge, jury, and executioner over anything I bring in and routinely make me haul product back to the warehouse if they don't like the colour shirt I'm wearing that day. I battle traffic, angry customers berating me for being a fraction of a minute late, shoving their Boomer fingers in my face and treating me like garbage. Then I go back to the warehouse and spend four more hours picking and schlepping the next day's product for my run—tired, sore, and bloody from whatever the hell is going on inside my pelvis; and do I come home and make you deal with my exquisite pain? Do I unload the day's frustrations on you? No. I cook dinner, often for both of us. I clean the kitchen. I clean the house. I run back out to the store, if you need me to. I walk the dogs. I ask you about your day, and I listen to you tell me about all the puerile mean-girls machiavellianism; about the infantile petty politics of the henhouse that is public school, and then after all that is said and done, I maybe get to fall asleep in front of my computer job hunting, or watch a movie that I really want you to see but you have no passing interest in. I let you go back into the bedroom with a bottle of wine and watch The Kardashians because you tell me you need "to decompress," and I respect that—even if I feel lonely. And on my days off, I deliver food to people who don't tip, women who scream in hysterical shock and fear; slamming the door in my face because they didn’t expect my high-yellow ass on the front doorstep with their food— I laugh it off and handle it with grace because I believe in professionalism in the face of stupidity, even if it makes me sick to my soul. If it’s a cold one in Hell and I actually book a shoot, I cram whatever prep I need into the gaps left by everything else. I fly 50 pounds of camera and get to feel valued, like myself again for ten precious hours before coming home to a huge mess and your bad attitude. I can't remember the last time you gave me a compliment, showed me any appreciation or consideration, or touched me, or kissed me, offered a begrudging handjob, let alone fucked me—the last time I brought that up you said you didn't want me bleeding on you... And you have the nerve to stand there and tell me that I'm not pulling my weight? That I'm making you do all the work when you fly a desk on the taxpayers involuntary sufferance? Taxed by your paper-shuffling, make-work job; now and again talking down whatever gangbanger mini-me edition thinks it's dope to chuck a chair through a glass window—once in a blue moon. But I don’t want to discount your emotional labour! How troglodytic of me to overlook that epidemic social crisis, so utterly debilitating that every night must end at the bottom of a $7 bottle of cheap Cab; feeling sorry for yourself because the man you share a home with has a mind of his own. So what if he’s honest with you, doesn’t call you names, doesn’t fuck other women, never hits you, shows interest in and supports you in the ways that he can. All I'm asking you to do is wash the fucking dishes once in awhile—at the very least the ones you used, maybe clean the bathroom every other week so I'm not the only one doing it. I’ve moved Heaven and Earth for you. Show some appreciation, maybe even act like you like me. If that's too much to ask, then at the very least: Get the fuck out of my way, so I can focus on what needs to be done. Because I’m a human being, who’s doing the best he can, and has earned better than this.

Time resumes its normal shape; that silent gulf hanging in the air between us. I pull in a Marianas trench deep breath, and push it back out again. I am a human being. To internalize that, to have that not be just my opinion, or my truth but the truth, objectively and incontrovertibly. Not a human doing. Not a broken, swaybacked workhorse. Knowing that what I needed was real understanding, real intimacy, real desire, and those are not things one can negotiate.

"You know what, Justine? Forget it. I'll just do what needs doing—you needn't concern yourself." Pregnant with silence, she slipped around the corner; back to the bedroom of her discontent. With all due respect to Mr. Corgan, but the world is the world. We live in it and make our way in contest with nature as best we can. Resentment, expectation; those are the vampires, sent to drain and their hunger is insatiable.