my careless contagion

The phrase "on a Tuesday," to me, denotes something happening on an ordinary day. Does anything extraordinary happen on a Tuesday? Tuesdays used to be the worst at my old job. If anything bad was going to happen, it would be on a Tuesday. But something wonderful and unexpected happened the first Tuesday in August.  Tuesday was the day Cindy drove by while I was working in her neighborhood and stopped to say hello. I saw her smile and was already in a daze. The whole conversation lasted less than two minutes, but I walked away feeling like a different man. I no longer cared that I was swamped by work, was running out of energy, and was hot and thirsty.  I sent her a text that simply said, "I miss you" the day before. She said she missed me too and thought of me often. She said she couldn't move forward with me at the moment (I know, it was the one downer of the conversation) and I didn't have to wait. How much time did I have to rebut that? When the girl of y...

Living alone again has taught me a few things. It's helped me to remember some things, too, like I'm not bad at taking care of myself, especially when I have enough time. I can make food. I can clean. I can shop for things. Most of my married existence was spent alone anyway, so my skills are not too rusty. Doing laundry is much simpler. It's only a load or two a week.  I can watch whatever I want to watch on TV. I've noticed that I have a hard time watching anything bloody or with a lot of swearing, though. Something in me is bothered by that. I don't know when that started. I enjoy psychological thrillers more than anything else.  Sometimes I sit in my recliner and watch Netflix in my underwear and eat my Haagen Dazs strawberry ice cream (which I think is my new favorite, supplanting pistachio gelato), and it's hard for me to think about the future. I'm simultaneously licking my spoon and licking my wounds.  Let's recount some of my rel...

*"Can't Hardly Wait" by The Replacements. I love this song. It's grammatically incorrect, but that doesn't seem to bother me. It was included on the soundtrack of the 1998 movie of the same name starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. If you've watched a fair number of movies set in high school, you're aware of certain tropes that exist. There's one that I call "That Girl." You know the girl, the one the (usually) shy guy wants to be with. She's amazing; she's out of his league. She's that girl, the one he's pined for forever. She's the one who can elevate his life in ways he can't even imagine. It could change the whole course of his life if he could just get that girl. Somehow, mustering up the courage or doing whatever is necessary to get that girl would change him from being a loser who nobody knows into somebody. My "That Girl" got away, and I let her get away. The year was 1996. It was one of the most...