Youtube link to audiobook of Chapter 17 and the rest of the book!

Chapter 17

Life is just one damned thing after another

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

From:

Subject:  Entropy

To:

Lori, do you roll with it? I have begun to roll with it. Whatever it may be at any time that it feels it must be. I acknowledge, I accept, I embrace. I do not become overshadowed by its omnipotence. I instead become one with it. For it is a force meant to guide, not suppress. And I am finding that by being one with that force, I indeed … am the force. And I am, in essence, my own compass in the seemingly random and directionless realm of being. So I ask again, Lori. Do you roll with it? You’re very close, my friend.

Be water….

Rutherford

Lori’s energy levels had fallen. She was dragging herself through the long days, and she was falling face-first onto her neglected, squalid bedcovers in the early evenings. She wasn’t convinced that only the tiresome hours spent studying were draining her.  She believed that it had more to do with the ongoing game of seedy seduction played out like a cat and mouse team in an early Saturday morning kid’s cartoon.

Every fifteen to twenty minutes, every day, Lori would walk with Haitian zombie-like glassy eyes to her computer.  She would click on the mouse to have the pointer open her e-mail inbox, and she would invariably find two, sometimes three, messages from Nick sent seconds apart from one another. Each harbored the same general adolescent inanity, each was invasively personal, and yet at the same time each was perversely distant.  

“Any messages today?” Marta would ask over the phone.  Lori could picture her stabbing, smiling blue eyes glaring knowingly on the other end of the receiver. She would wait quietly but anxiously for her fill of vicarious indulgence.

Marta was one of the few people that Lori felt she could discuss her smoky, charcoal black secret with in the absence of any real judgment. Marta had her own demonic possession and war-torn troops of heartless incubi to battle, drawn as she had been to her European versions of the shamelessly unavailable, or just the downright mean. The proverbial nice guy had always been upstaged by the intoxicating power of the elusive in Marta’s life, and the beautiful brunette often found herself frustrated and alone.

Time and time again she was sucked into the web of several regular vagabonds in her life, such as the arrogant, commitment-phobic Swiss guy who would periodically toss her a crumb before shoving the whole pie in her face …

“Thanks for taking me out,” Marta had said one day in a quaint little outdoor cafe, nudging her hash browns and bacon with her fork. 

“Well, I’m just sorry it’s been so long since we last did this,” Thomas said. “But something just … keeps making me reluctant to approach you. You know? To be with you.”

Marta had felt her stomach tighten. “What do you mean?”

He threw his napkin down on his plate. “I don’t know,” he said, sighing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t know, Marta.”

“What don’t you know?” Looking deep into his eyes, she had begun to blindly carve the edges of a poached egg with her butter knife. “What?”

“I …” he started. “I love you.”

She blushed and looked down at the sheared egg white on her plate. She pushed the pieces together and started to stack them while she tried to absorb what he had just told her. Her heart had been beating furiously in her chest, her palms beady with sweat.

“But …” he said. “I’m not in love with you.”

She stared into his eyes again and felt the color drain from her face. She scooped up the napkin that lay on her lap and tossed it down on the table. “Thank you for the brunch,” she said, rising to leave. “You may now go and screw yourself.” 

And there was the shady Internet-obsessed Italian who occasionally surfaced for air like a porpoise before diving deep and out of reach into the sea for weeks or months.  Marta would find him “on-line” at all hours of the day, sending and receiving instant messages to and from a myriad of hypothetical girls or guys whose relationships to him would forever remain a mystery to her. 

She forwarded a series of instant messenger interactions to Lori.

MatteoS:  let’s meet 

MatteoS:  pretty pleaseeeeeeeeeeee 

MatteoS:  with cherries on top 🙂 

MatteoS:  ignoring me?

MartaG:  Umm … thought you were pissed at me 

MatteoS:  i always am. you don’t want to meet me 

MatteoS:  lol 

MartaG:  I almost forget what you look like? 

MatteoS:  you know what I look like 🙂 and I sure know what you look like.and smell like 🙂 

MartaG:  You’re in heat, aren’t you? 

MatteoS:  when I think about you I am 🙂 

MatteoS:  not kidding marta

MartaG:  Okaaaaaay 

MatteoS:  ok what? 

MatteoS:  am I annoying you

MartaG:  What do you think? 

MartaG:  First, you aren’t talking to me, and now you are hot for me?  What gives? 

MatteoS:  i asked you out twice and you said you would call but never did

MartaG:  That’s not how I remember it.   

MatteoS:  well that is the way it was 

MatteoS:  i was so looking forward to seeing you again.  

MartaG: I had told you that I had a funeral to go to back in Italy. You aren’t very understanding 

MatteoS:  and the time before that? 

MartaG:  I don’t recall a time before that 

MatteoS:  anyway. i have to admit i miss you. a lot 

MartaG:  Are you pulling my leg? 

MatteoS:  no marta

MatteoS:  i get all hot and steamy just thinking about how well we kiss together 

MatteoS:  but you know that already

MartaG:  Well, ya! 

MatteoS:  but it is like pulling teeth trying to hook up with you 

MartaG:  Deep down I miss you too, but can’t just see each other in person twice a year! 

MartaG:  Don’t you ever crave more? 

MartaG:  Matteo?

MartaG:  Matteo? Are you still there?

After apparently not putting out to Matteo’s satisfaction one evening because Marta claimed she needed time to get to know him better as a person, he began avoiding her by not sending her his usual instant messages at times when she could plainly see that he was “on line.” Then one special evening, the silence broke with an expression of concern on Matteo’s part over not having heard from Marta for so long. His heartfelt display of attention and sincerity was immediately followed by a request to see her again. Marta realized that perhaps it was she who wronged him. Perhaps she wasn’t as available to him as she could have been, or should have been. She eagerly accepted his invitation, and then found herself twiddling her thumbs alone in her apartment and staring angrily at her quiet phone on the Tuesday night they were tentatively scheduled to see one another. Then she faced another month or so of Internet silence before Matteo returned once more to ask her point blank in an instant message why she “blew him off.” Her reply was that she was heavily engrossed in filing her nails and she would appreciate it if he would go screw himself. 

Whereas Marta’s reasons for being innkeeper of her own Moron Motel were unclear, Lori believed that the darkness she herself was drawn to may have been some kind of an attempt to conquer a modern-day reincarnation of lost tainted loves and old-time bullies.  Nick Warren seemed to be the Hell-selected envoy of everything in her life that had gone wrong, everything in her life she never forgave herself for allowing to go wrong.  Nothing came closer to the truth than her friend Angela’s drunkenly spewed philosophy to Natalie on that one grim New Year’s eve: “You’ve got to stop letting the dickheads run and ruin your life. You keep inviting the dickheads in; I keep inviting the dickheads in. ‘Cause they remind us of all those other dickheads who were there before them. And we think we can change them and we try to change them because we never had the chance to change the other dickheads and by having a new dickhead to change we’re being given another chance.”

She started to read a message from Rutherford.

From:

Subject:  foot odor

To:

“Woe to them be that not believe, for thy bed be waft with a foul pox; no light doth hath them for a road when cleaved in twain, an enemy of God, nor a fixture bearing the hands of angels shall be the place to set their towels when damp.”

What do you think? For the last couple of days I’ve been reading the Bible and the Koran … and I’ve concluded that as long as you write stuff with weird words like “hath” and “thou” and “doth,” you’re bound to get some followers. In a word, I’m thinking of founding a new religion. I just need to find a group of people to hate. Hatred is an interesting theme in these books, incidentally. In the Bible, the Egyptians and the Romans are the bad guys, and in the Koran you only have to read about two pages before it mentions that the Jews are wicked.

“Woe be it to the children born of the foot of the Alps, for they are unbelievers, and doth barter a wedge of raclette for twice the market price and giggle. God hates them for this!”

Let me know if you want to join my cult…

Rutherford

Lori’s phone rang.

“Hey.  It’s me.”

“Hey,” Lori said.

“What are you doing now?”

“Studying.”

“Did you get my last e-mail?” Nick asked.

“No. I haven’t had the chance to check. Why? What does it say?” 

“Read it,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Guess I better let you get back to studying now,” he said.

“All right.”

“Bye.”  He quickly hung up the phone.

From:  Nick Warren 

u warm?

Lori stared long and hard at his message, just one of the many hollow, echoing cries of superficiality that she found herself completely unable to ignore.  She wondered when this was all going to come to an end. And she wondered how she would feel when, in fact, it finally did.

From: Lori  

for THIS you called me?

From:  

yeah i wanted to know if u were getting warm?

Lori paused. She knew that this would only come to an end when she made it come to an end. Yet what kind of an ending did she want? How was she going to make it happen? More importantly, did she really want it to happen? Did she really want it to end? 

From:  Lori

(stay tuned for chapter 18…)

Here is a link to a real-life illustration of a challenging relationship dynamic, entitled “Reeling.”

And here are some other interesting and pertinent links:

DeMars Coaching – YouTube (DeMars Coaching)

Surviving Narcissism – YouTube (Dr. Les Carter)

NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone – YouTube (NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone)

Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc – YouTube (Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc)

DoctorRamani – YouTube (DoctorRamani)