006

006     so that was almost their last gallery show. they almost did another show at la patisserie again. this time they promised not to do what they did the last time. they put up some stuff the first night but must have gotten carried away too much because when robert came in the next day it was all taken down and put in a corner by the owner. oh well. they were still doing this is it. one more show they did was for a friend of kathy's who ran the art gallery and taught classes at the community college where kathy also taught. this was more of a straight show. they hung up and displayed their art to date in normal fashion. though robert did string some stuff around. he also had cut up kathy's banners - the paper and paint ones - and made collages out of them. they didn't do any performance as such. they were just themselves at opening night, which was a performance in and of itself. after that show and this is it ended they retired. robert went on to the internet and got involved with a semi-legit poetry movement.
    he was hanging out still in la patisserie. the howling frog closed sometime after they had done their show. he was seeing suzanne once in awhile. they'd fuck until they started fighting and then break up again for 6 months or more until the next time. she had been a waitress but she opened her own cafes. the first was the blah blah cafe. but she had trouble with her landlord so that didn't work out. then she opened the roxy cafe which was an old place called roxy hearts. it was in the middle of queertown. she made a good fag hag. the roxy is still open. it's the only 24 hour place in town - except it's closed mondays.
    he was hanging out with his large queer friend, trevor, who is the dark lord because that's sort of how he comes across but not really if you know him to be the sweet lovable puppy dog that his is. also with michael who is just the english guy. he had left the country and gone back to england during around this time but came back and married someone else and stayed though they got divorced. it was the two of them who had come to this is it who robert had told to stay in one spot and just watch but who didn't. and some other people who came and went. those two are still his friends today out of everyone. well, there is one more. a woman he met later on, diane. she's married now and has a little girl. she comes by to see him too once in a while where he presently hangs out. la patisserie is now closed. the owner who left his wife for one of the waitresses didn't pay his taxes or some such.
    he was still living in his house which was supposed to be for him and daniel but daniel wasn't there most of the time. then one day he and rose told him she was pregnant. she went to live with her parents and daniel was left pretty much on the street. he still never came home. soon there was no home for him to come home to. robert decided to get his own place, just him. he told daniel that if he could get it together he could have the house. he did manage to get some people together - one who had a job who signed the lease - and robert moved out and they moved in. within a year his street kid friends trashed the place and he was on the street again. daniel never did get a job to support himself and to keep it going. robert moved to an apartment downtown. it was small. it was an old hotel that was converted into apartments. it didn't have a kitchen, just a kitchen area in the living room. it was ok though. it had a nice view of one of the bridges. it was in a nice neighborhood sort of area just away from actual downtown with all the office buildings. there was a restaurant and a bar downstairs - which is where he now hangs out. they used to be part of the hotel. trevor was going to school at the local state university. robert decided to go too. he applied and was accepted. he was surprised. he never would have gotten in right after high school but now he was older, over 40 now, and schools like older students. he also got financial aid.
    his 40th birthday was a big one. he had grown up believing that when he got older he would understand things better. he was also always being told by others that he would understand things better when he was older. he understood very little - especially about himself. his friend doug was returning from europe and was going to stay with him awhile - this was back when he was moving into the house. they were going to meet in the cafe. robert was in the cafe when he started thinking that he had all his stuff in the new house and that he could spend his first night there. he forgot all about doug and went home. when he got there he was excited. this was the first place that felt like home since he'd left debbi. maybe he could get it together here. he sat in his bedroom and slipped into this sort of semi-awake dream state. he was sitting in his mother's lap. he was in his pajamas. she was doing this little piggie with his toes. he was laughing. she was laughing. he was happy. she was happy. he then flashed to her bedroom and him sitting at the vanity table and her lying in bed and her calling him to her and holding him and calling him tommy. a whole flood of other memories came back to him that he had forgotten as well - some good, some bad. but they all added up that despite everything he and his mother had gone through alone and together, she had loved him - and he loved her. it was the first time in his life that he had felt that. happy birthday. when he came out of this semi-dream he realized that it was his birthday and not only that but it was, considering the 3 hour east coast/west coast time difference, it was to the hour that he was born. it was weird.
    at school he was nervous. what was this going to be like? he had been going to a counselor who had recommended him to the students with disabilities office. they helped him organize himself and his classes. he was also allowed to have extra time taking tests under their supervision. he at first thought about majoring in sociology, which he remembered as being his favorite high school class. he didn't understand people. they were a complete mystery to him. he was no longer doing acid all the time. his last deal was very close to being a disaster. as he was selling hits to people some of them wanted sheets or part of sheets. he collected money to buy 4 sheets. one sheet was going to be free for him. he was also buying from someone he didn't know. so with money that wasn't his he went off with someone he sort of knew who took the money to buy it from someone he wasn't going to meet. it all worked out ok. everybody was happy. he didn't get ripped off. he didn't get busted. but this was too much. he had gotten deeper into this thing that he had intended. he never did it again. he ate the sheet he had gotten out of it and didn't buy any more. well, once more when daniel talked him into buying a sheet for him so he could sell it and make some money and would pay him back. daniel did the deal. he never made money. he never paid him back. and robert had a bunch of acid again. he gave most of it away but ate some too. that was the last he did acid. he once did mushrooms though, years later, at a grateful dead show. it was on their last tour. he pretty much doesn't do drugs anymore - except his meds and toking up when he goes to kathy's house for thanksgiving which he'd been doing since the kids were little, or once in awhile with someone else who happens to be passing around some pot, which isn't very often anymore.
    as well as sociology, he took latin and western civ. he wanted to know about the roots of language and of the society he was living in. as school went on he started taking other things as well - psychology, economics, political science, biology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology. he wanted to learn about everything about people. he finally started falling into history and anthropology as his majors. they seemed more encompassing than just sociology. sociology seemed more concerned with generic groups and how they behaved. anthropology - urban anthropology, which covered the same territory - took in more cultural influences into account. sociology asks, how do people in general behave? anthropology asks, how do these people in particular behave? history was, well - history. he wanted to know where things came from. he took history of people all around the world not just europe. but he took a lot about roman history. for one, he had a crush on the professor, who told him she'd be his advisor. for another, it did lead into our own civilization. rome was modern civilization in the raw. everything was on the surface and out in the open. they had no qualms nor made any excuses for what they did or didn't do. the same things were going on today but hidden under all this christian and psuedo-democratic enlightened bullshit. but studying world history he also realized that people are people and if one looks past the cultural differences there's a lot of common ground in how they organize themselves. there's always the top and the bottom. there's always the inside and the outside. though these are defined differently from culture to culture, they're always there where humans are concerned. and it's been that way since we were apes.
    one thing he liked about going to school now instead of when he was younger was that his professors were his age or younger. they had gone to school back when they were being taught by the world war 2 generation he would have been taught by. they had put up with that bullshit. now here they were, the baby boomers, having spent their lives doing their own research and learning, teaching him.
    he and trevor would meet between classes. in spring term when the weather was nice and the students started wearing less clothing the two of them would watch them. between them both they had everyone covered - robert the girls, the dark lord the boys. robert also got a computer for school. michael helped him buy one since he was clueless. michael is still his main computer tech. right now he's out looking for a new hard drive for him - he hopes. his first computer was a 486 built by a local company right nearby where he lived. he brought it home in a shopping cart. he started figuring it out - slowly. he figured out how to go online and found the internet. he found out that he could put up his own website. he found a program that would write html for him and started designing some pages. the first was we are them - which is still the main page of his site. he then did one about the artchurch. then he made a links list - links to elsewhere. he looked for the weirdest and most radical, from all parts of the spectrum, sites and add them to it. he wanted to do on the net what he and kathy had been doing in galleries and on cable tv - confuse people. confuse them into awareness.
    as part of the software package that came with his computer was a pretty nifty graphics program. it did some pretty cool special effects. he designed some graphics and put them up. but he was mostly busy with school. he wanted to do well. he had to do well to keep the financial aid money coming. part of this was writing papers. he only knew how to write one way - stream of consciousness. just writing on and on about whatever came to mind at the moment. but they wanted something more coherent and organized than that. they wanted sources and footnotes. he was always being marked for his run on sentences. at one time he wanted to write a whole paper that was all one grammatically correct sentence. a friend of his told him if he wrote it in german it could all be one word. but he finally caught on to what was expected and tried to stick to it. he got good grades. his gpa was in the upper 3. somethings. but from time to time he freaked out and couldn't do anything. once, just before finals, the compartments that he kept his various subjects in in his brain collapsed. everything jumbled together. he didn't know which fact belonged to which subject. he was finally able to pull it together enough to take his finals and pass. some years he had to back off to part time. it was all too much. he took one or two incompletes. but he was getting through it.
    part of his problems were still family ones. daniel hooked up with this other girl, heather, and they were living in this warehouse space with a bunch of drug addicts. they themselves were speed freaks. they were shooting up at this point. then she turned up pregnant too. she also went home to her mom and daniel was once again left out of it. robert started wondering just how accidental these pregnancies were. yes, daniel had responsibility but what about his girlfriends? did they really want to get knocked up? he thought that maybe, yes, they did. they got a free ride home. they got social assistance afterward. it wasn't such a bad deal to being on the street. daniel got nothing - except the blame. from this point on he could no longer trust what daniel told him about anything. he would show up at his apartment all fucked up and then get pissed off because robert didn't want to talk with him. but, considering his own start into adult life, robert was always willing to cut him some slack and try to help him. at one point he had bought a van, though he didn't have a license. he got money from some job he managed to hold onto for awhile. he slept in it. then when heather had their son, felix, and she got an apartment he moved in with her. but they started fighting a lot. they also had gotten into heroin. she kicked him out, or he left, depending on whose story one chooses to believe, hers or his. rose had a daughter, by the way. she moved back east with her folks so he hasn't seen much of them. the next time he saw his granddaughter when they had come back to visit she was 12. she played game boy the whole time.
     when his grand son was a toddler robert made arrangements to take him once in awhile for a day or weekend. she was cool with this. but then one day she had nodded off from heroin and her son got out of the apartment. some neighbors saw him wandering around in the parking lot and he was taken away from her. child services contacted robert to see if he was able and willing to take him in. her mother couldn't because she worked. he talked it over with his daughter, who was also going to the same university he was, and they decided that between the two of them they could. he would stay with robert but during the day they would take turns watching him while they each took their classes. it was working out ok until child services called him. his mother had mentioned something about how robert was crazy and had done drugs himself. they came and took his grand son until robert could get a drug evaluation. he went to this one place and filled out some forms. he admitted that he had done drugs but was no longer doing so. he also drank wine once in awhile. he finally talked with this woman who got all over his case about how he was a drug addict and a drunk. she said that normal people only drink a glass of wine with dinner - which was exactly what he had written down, not so much with dinner, but that he had a few glasses of wine a week, less than the 7 glasses normal people were allowed to have with their dinners. he left to find someone else.
    he went to the hospital where he had been seeing a doctor because once when he thought he was coming down with pneumonia again he was told by the school clinic doctor that he had emphysema and had sent him up there. he asked if someone could do a drug evaluation. he was sent to a psychologist who told him that she didn't do that and gave him the name of a place that did but also told him that she would like to start seeing him because he looked very stressed out. he made an appointment with her and went to this other place for the drug evaluation. they were a little more realistic about it and sent their report to child services. he didn't get his grand son back.
    things had been going a little better with rachel. after he moved into the attic apartment and daniel moved in with him she sort of stopped coming by. it might have been a little too weird for her. it was a little too weird for them as well. he hadn't seen her for a couple of years, when he was living in his own apartment and daniel was who knows where doing who knows what, when he decided to call her. she agreed to come down and meet him at the cafe. they began seeing each other again. the only difficult time was when she wore a portland trailblazers jacket one time with the name patton stitched on it. robert got mad. when did this happen? he asked. she said when her mom and ron had gotten married. so much for ron just wanting to be friends with his kids, he thought. they argued about it for awhile. she had wanted the same name as her mom, she said, and then he decided to drop it. it still bothers him though. but a lot of things still bother him.
    as it turns out they did this illegally. the law required anyone to inform parents, custodial parents or not, when they want to change a child's name. he was never informed. he probably would not have allowed it if he was - if he had been given a choice. and he wanted to have had at least been given a choice - even he decided it was ok for the reason that she had stated, wanting the same name her mother had. but the chance that he might have said no was probably why they didn't tell him. after all, who was he? they had their perfect lives, why bring him into it again? hadn't they gotten rid of him? he no longer existed.
    but it all probably doesn't matter. what does matter? maybe she felt that he had deserted her and so his name meant nothing. he still remembers that night tucking her in and her holding him and telling him not to go. in the argument she did say something about him taking her brother away from her - which was just how debbi felt about it. she had called him charles manson luring in kids with drugs and sex. you're not getting my daughter, she had said to him then. that wasn't exactly how it happened. daniel lured himself with drugs and sex. and robert had never asked him to come live with him. he didn't think he could have gotten away with it - not with the terms of the divorce. debbi could have gotten him back by snapping her fingers. she was the custodial parent by law - though she only used the law when it suited her purposes. he noticed she didn't snap her fingers. did she want him back? or, as she said, he was only following in his footsteps and therefore needed to suffer the same fate? permanent exile.
    he's never brought up any of this again. he's afraid of what she might say to him. he does feel guilty about the way things turned out - for both her and her brother. he had been pretty screwed up at the time and he probably could have done a thousand things different. but he didn't. and things hadn't really turned out so bad. even with daniel. would he have run away and become a junkie on the street even if he and debbi had stayed together? he doesn't know. did he send him down that path? he doesn't think so. if anything he was out there for him for a lot longer than what might have been had it gone the other way. but who knows? and for being a junkie on the street he's not doing so bad. he's connected in with the whole street thing. he survives. and if he's not happy, he's smart enough to figure a way out of it. people do. not many, but they do. it's up to him. no one could ever tell him what to do.
    he didn't mind that her mom was her favorite parent. that happens. he understands that part. but to have ron's last name - that kills him. it kills him whenever she sometimes refers to him as her stepfather. he isn't her step-anything. he's her mother's boyfriend/husband - that's it. he's just somebody she was fucking. besides, as far as robert knows, he has his own damn kids. why can't he leave his kids alone? he's never understood that. he'd never move in on someone else's kids. he'd never let them take his name even if he married their mother. so what trip was ron on? and as far as debbi, she offered ron her kids in order to get him probably - part of the deal. kids who were only half hers and who already had a father - as fucked up off in space as that father was, he was still their father.
    whatever.
    families...
    why can't we all just learn to love one another?

    so he began seeing the psychologist. he hadn't seen anyone in awhile. he went back to the county once when he was getting freaked at school. the guy he saw would argue with him. he asked him about him still wearing his wedding ring. he explained how he was wearing it for his kids. he still felt "married" to them. that part of his marriage wasn't over, or would it ever be. he argued with him about that. you're not married to your kids, he told him. it's just a symbol, he answered back. can't someone have a symbol for how much he loves his children? he argued with him about everything he said. the guy was an idiot.
    he was pretty pissed when he went to talk with her. and he knew it. he used an example to tell her about it. once when he was in salem he was on line at the unemployment office. outside, some guy attacked another guy and was hitting him with a large dowel. everyone was standing watching. he ran out to stop him. by the time he got there the guy had stopped. that wasn't the point. the point was that he went to try to help someone without thinking about it. more recently he had been walking home at night. he saw this guy knock another guy to the ground and start kicking him. he kept on walking. if anything he felt like going over and giving the guy a few kicks himself. this is how much i've changed, he told her.
    they talked about a lot of things. he was babbling most of the time. she recommended that he try some meds. she said that he was what was called hyper-vigilent. many abused children are. they feel that they have to always be aware of what's going on around them and are over-sensitive to stimuli - like other people's body language and other non-verbal messages. some to the point of being delusional. she basically told him he thought too much about things. he had to agree - even though this is what his family had told him when he was younger. bobby, you think too much. but for some reason the way she said it it made sense. he didn't know why he trusted her, but he did. he took the meds.
    he still didn't believe in the organic model of mental illness - as being the cause. he still went with laing. other people made one crazy. but after time one's thinking follows a particular pattern and gets set into a groove, if one is the one being driven crazy. the brain then starts firing that way and can't stop. then it's organic. then one needs medication to break out of that.
     after awhile he did notice that he started to feel calmer. but not in a drugged out way. his mind was still clear. he could still think. it just wasn't firing around thinking 18 zillion things at once. he thought about what he chose to think about instead of his brain deciding what to think about. he didn't trust his brain. they changed the meds once when he started gaining weight with the first one. he shot up to over 200 pounds. he's still on it - geodon. he was also put on paxil when he started having panic attacks. he started having them for some reason when he came back from visiting his daughter in germany. she was going to school there for a year. that stopped them.
    what art he was doing now was stuff he was putting on his website that he generated with graphic programs. he also had gotten a couple of keyboards - an electric piano with different voices and a drum machine, the other was a synthesizer. he had given his old synthesizer away to someone because he wasn't using it. now he wished he hadn't. it had a very particular sound that his new synthesizer couldn't quite match. oh well. he had a studio program that could mix several tracks of music into mp3s.
    paul had gotten him involved in this movement called ini - international novatrix infinitesimal. it was a visual language poetry movement some guy in italy started. it originated in letterism. so he made some of his art with this in mind - mainly just inserting "ini" into what he was already doing. he began posting some of paul's stuff on his site as well. soon after he had gotten his computer he began emailing with his two old friends who he had managed to keep in contact with all these years - sigrid and mark. he told mark about ini since he was interested in things like this. mark was an accountant by this time though still an artist and poet. he was really into the beats at the time. mark started sending him ini stuff too which he posted. they began calling themselves ini/usa. someone started calling them ini/usa. mark started his own ini/usa site. there was an ini/usa show once at this gallery in portland that paul organized. people from italy sent pieces to be in it. robert did his usual stringing up stuff all over the place. that was poetry, right? why not? he thought so. maybe nobody else did.
    paul went to europe a few times for ini happenings there. robert didn't think any of this was serious, or meant to be taken seriously. mark started sending him altered news articles changing them to be about ini and inists which were pretty funny. so he didn't seem to be taking it too seriously either. but there turned out to be a lot of infighting within the group which included more people than just them over things robert didn't know what. mostly about personalities and who did what to who and when - the usual stuff with groups. he and mark got caught up in this between paul and this other guy, lex, even though it had nothing to do with them. as it happened robert was writing to paul and mark was writing to lex. but he didn't think it was because they had taken sides. perhaps mark felt otherwise. it began affecting their own relationship. robert realized that he'd made a mistake joining in with this ini business. it was another group and a group is a group is a group. he hates groups. ini was a good idea conceptually but it was still just another group. he decided to quit. he told mark about this and he responded by blowing him off for a year. robert never knew what for. he never told him, even after they eventually started writing again. he didn't understand.
    he began thinking that maybe mark wasn't mark at all. this didn't seem like something mark would normally do, but what did he know? he'd been writing to him but hadn't actually seen him for years. maybe he'd been replaced by a cyborg. how could that have happened unless mark was dead? was he dead? robert started thinking so. maybe he was killed by his fellow accountants because he wasn't quite with the team. mark once wrote him that he had gotten shit at work because he wasn't wearing the right sorts of ties. what a lot of pressure to be under everyday - that and then adding up numbers all the time. other people's numbers and getting paid shit for it. it could get to anyone. he'd been there. him being replaced by a cyborg, of course, was absurd. but robert often believes in the absurd. it makes sense irationalogically. he grew up watching twilight zone and outer limits. this was pretty standard stuff for them. robert didn't know what to believe. he didn't know what was possible. he just knew that mark wasn't himself. but, like his wedding ring, maybe him being a cyborg was a symbol for something else. who knows? who cares?
    but whatever...
    along before all this daniel got involved with this other girlfriend, christine. they moved down to southern oregon to live with her father. it wasn't too long before she came up pregnant too. they moved back to portland. she had the baby and got on assistance and they started fighting and broke up. daniel was on the street again. can anyone see a pattern here? she eventually lost her kid to her mother. he doesn't know how this happened. she was apparently still using drugs too and not taking care of him. he's the one robert doesn't get to see, besides the one living on the east coast - but that's different. with this her mother won't allow robert to see him. he doesn't know why. she let him see him for awhile and then stopped.
    oh well - again.
    he had moved again. the owners of the building he was in decided not to accept section 8 anymore. he found an apartment in another building in the same neighborhood. he was now hanging out in the restaurant in his first building - the commodore. the one that used to be a hotel. it was deserted most of the time. he was there alone a lot. he had gotten involved with the waitress who worked there. she and her husband were splitting up but she was still in love with him. he was a speedfreak and had spent all their money on drugs. they lost a business - a pizza joint - because of it. but it didn't work out. she got in a car wreck driving home after they had been out drinking and fighting. he went to visit her a couple of times after that, but it was history. she came back to work for a while but she had found some other guy by then. he last heard that they had gotten married. there was a tv there. robert started watching sports which he never liked before but now they amused him. besides, that was what was always on.
    he also had surgery. he was developing blood clots in his lungs. his doctor gave him a year to live. he could barely walk a block before he had to stop and catch his breath. the surgery was in seattle. his daughter helped him a lot. she drove him back and forth to see the doctor up there. she stayed with him after while he was in the hospital. trevor had lived in seattle for a while then. she stayed with him. they released him and he came back home. he was pretty wiped out. they had opened up his chest to clear out the clots. but he started getting worse and not better. he ended up going to the hospital down here. he had fluid in his chest. they had to drain it. then he was better. he was on oxygen for a time but then started breathing on his own as he got stronger. he quit smoking but started again sometime later. smoking had nothing to do with blood clots was the way he saw it.
    he got two more cats - two black ones. his daughter had gotten a cat and he wanted one. she found him one some people were giving away. he got another one to keep her company. they're molly and alice. alice doesn't like people. she hides when someone comes over - except for his grandson when he comes for the weekend. his mother finally had gotten her act together and had gotten him back. but it happened again recently and he was put in foster care. robert was still allowed his visits this time. and she cleaned up again and got him back again. now they're ok - for now.
     and he reads mysteries.
    his life is pretty boring now, but he isn't bored. he's reached a plateau. he's reached that acid state he was always seeking. he's achieved orbit. he doesn't know if that's a good or bad sign. but it is what it is - and he's pretty happy with it. he had to move again. they tore down the building he was in. the housing people helped with the move and paid his deposits, even for the cats. the building he's in now is on the other side of the freeway, which he now has a view of, from the neighborhood he had been living in.
    he still goes to the commodore though for coffee and breakfast. he knows people over there he likes to see. it's still his neighborhood. it's his daily social therapy. though he doesn't spend as much time out as he used to. he's getting more settled in his home. ever since he started living in his car hanging out in a cafe has been the only stability he had for a long time. it's where he could think and write. it's where he met people. he doesn't need that so much anymore, though when he does meet people it's usually out. his home is his own space.
    michael stops by to see him about once a week more or less. he does massage. before then he was a cook. he fixes his computer when it breaks down. he's built him a couple of computers over the years. they sit and bullshit about everything. they had it figured out before the iraq war that the iraqi army wouldn't stand a chance out on the open battlefield but would give the americans hell in the cities. they could figure this out, why not the administration? they suffer the same arrogance that other empires have suffered thinking they could quash any resistance against them. sort of like the english king thought he could put down this little rebellion in the colonies.
    diane who he knew from la patisserie comes to see him with her daughter. she's a stay at home mom. he gets together with trevor to watch movies. when he can reach him. he doesn't have a phone. trevor's going to school again - a philosophy major - and works in a porn store. he has dinner with the landlord who works in a tile factory making tiles for the stars. he used to be a potter. he sees daniel sporadically - though they're on the outs now because he had come over to use his computer to download something and fucked up his monitor but he won't admit to doing it and robert doesn't want to speak to him again until he hands over some money to pay him back for it. it's a stalemate. rachel he still sees when she's not busy. they still watch movies. she's studying to be a pharmacist. now she's engaged to be married to this guy he met once. he seems nice. he sees kathy a couple times a year - one being thanksgiving which is a odd assortment of collected friends, dope and food. she's still teaching. she has problems with her back. she's had a couple of surgeries too. they're all getting old. her husband is going for his phd.
    he writes to sigrid. she's been sick for a number of years and lives with her mom in canada. she's also a writer. she's written a first person account about hip replacement and a story about a missing person. she's written a number of articles as well. as he was going through some of his old notebooks came across some letters he was writing to her and never sent. one was a long thing about laing and insanity and stuff. some others were about the two of them. he guesses they were writing about what whatever it was between them meant or something. he sort of remembers that. but it all mixes in with the rest of what he was writing. he thinks he wrote a lot with her in mind as the reader. she was sort of his muse - kinda. he hopes that isn't insulting to her. lots of times real women were muses for men writers. he don't know about women writers. do they have male muses? but back then he pretty much didn't have anyone else. he didn't have the friends he would have later - what few of them are left. and even still writers write to someone who's imaginary though sometimes it's based on someone real. he thinks it might have been that he was still kinda in love with her - and still sort of is. not exactly as a lover but not really "platonic" either. somewhere inbetween sort of. a little of both - and something else there's no word for. and not just because she was the girlfriend he never got to fuck - no matter what these memoirs might say. it would have been nice once but time and space have passed them by - among other things. and they both know that. but that distance he thinks made them closer in some ways. they weren't in each other's face and so they avoided that whole thing that happens between people who are physically close. if they had ever "made it" would they have been such long term friends - her being the longest term friend he's got - or would they have burst into flames and burned out on each other? who knows? but where are all the girlfriends he did fuck? he doesn't see any of them around. and yet, here she is. she made going insane a little more fun.
    mark, or the cyborg, on the other hand, has blown him off again after they started writing again. it still seems to be about the same old thing - the problems between paul and lex, even though ini/usa is dead - or should be. they wanted to start a new movement around paul and his art poetry - called lambertism. paul thought it was a joke. he didn't trust either one of them. robert didn't know whether he trusted them either, since neither seemed to want to have anything to do with paul. but lex, who seems to have come up with the idea, seemed serious about it. robert tried getting them to all write to each other since he was the only one writing to everyone and mark and lex weren't writing to paul or he them either. but mark was all secret about it and when robert had done this he got mad saying it was a private discussion and he shouldn't have invited paul into it. this was news to him. he never knew about that and hadn't agreed to anything like that. robert felt that he was the one being being fucked with here and responded to that with, fuck you too. and mark got all offended by that and blew him off. but that's nothing. people say stuff like that to each other all the time - even friends. he does anyway. and what did mark expect his reaction was going to be? but we'll never know this because mark doesn't explain anything, he just stops communicating and goes back into his bubble cyborgworld. but he didn't really communicate that much when he was communicating anyway - which was half the problem. that's why he thinks mark is a cyborg. his reactions and responses were way off. it's like he's studying how people behave by watching them on tv or something, trying to learn how he as a cyborg should behave to be like one of them. and mark the cyborg made his descision. playing head games with lex was more important to him than his frendship with robert. it wasn't the first time he'd been blown off by people for similar reasons. but maybe it was all a joke after all, and the joke was on him. that's nothing new. it's all part of the fiction people believe in to keep their lives ordered and sane.
    oh well - once more.
    no great loss - except he never sent the idiots he was going to.
    people...
    driving him fucking nuts.
    that's why he started we are them.
    some people get it, some people don't.
    they eliminate themselves.
    but he's kicked everybody off his website. no more groups of any kind. that was a mistake. he just links to their own pages if they have any.
    so, it's just me, myself and i in robert's mind.
    that and his many delusions and imaginary friends - and a few real friends though they seem to be getting fewer.
    and that's about it - unless he remembers something else to add. he'll probably work on this forever rewriting it. he's still a virgo after all and everything has to be exactly just so. he's also now rewriting and putting up his notebooks he had been writing while he was going crazy. those are another type of memoirs.
    and he plans on living happily ever after. he hopes other people are too, and that they make it.
    it is possible.
    fight your way through it any way you can.
    the end.

and lex writes: YOU FEEL BETTER NOW? YOU ARE FREE TO DIE

and mark decided to write to him again. we'll see how long that lasts before he gets all offended again.
here's a picture he sent him: