you should never pick a fight with an angry woman in a bar, chances are she's riding hard on adreline and nausea, she's had a lot of tequila in a concerted effort to get rip roaring drunk, but the usual combination of tequila and frenet cannot exactly reroute the twin rivers of grief and rage.

So a guy walks up to a girl at the bar, there is a competent Irish bar band derivitave of Springsteen, but we are here to see a French band derivative of Thin Lizzy, the manchild is angry, I gather he's been stood up from the invective he's spewing into his cell phone.

There I am in full regalia, secretly heartbroken and rapidly phasing into rage, all in black, spackled and lipsticked, fully ready to be drunk and ornery. But for that nagging sobriety, so I decide that I can still be ornery, and you really don't want to meet me in a crowd, I don't like to be touched. I can carve a sphere of invisibility with my gigantic purse, and the snark, the snark was quick and sharp and deadly and I was, am itching for a fight and all I got was some drunken frat boy transfixed by his alleged beauty who called me out for not accepting his proffered drink. Well you can imagine. I have no appetite, I have eaten a few slices of turkey and a ruefully swallowed a bit of cottage cheese, I take ten steps and think I might puke some indespenible organ, I am operating on a dose of righteous bile, and the heartening rage which proves that I am not dead.

So the frat boy, an estimated 8-10 years my junior all full of piss and vinegar, but because he is fundamentally souless he cannot even begin to compete. He calls me names after I decline his offer for a drink, he makes comments designed to impugn to degradate, but when you have just had your heart freshly ripped from your chest all bets are off, all I have to do is point my vitriol, bare a little tooth like I might otherwise bare a bit of leg, I tell him he does not really want to fuck with me right now, he doesn't want to listen, he wants to prove his prowess, and he thinks he can do it by insulting my backside so I tell him out of my front side, that he really doesn't want to rumble with me, I am just waiting for my double tequila, all I want to do is dance to the derivative french band but if you and your button down shirt are itching for a motherfucking fight I am going to lay you down with hands and fists and then I might possibly hate fuck you to death, because I am in that kind of mood and I wish I was drunk, but I am still sober as a judge.

I said all of that - except the part of about hate fucking, I think I will be a little more selective about that - at least I hope so. But there is the very real part who would hate fuck him to death, or maybe that's just the anger, or maybe the tequila is finally taking effect.

I was pretty tonight, defiantly so, but no amount of trickery can disguise the saddness I carry in my eyes, heartache is tatooed across my eyelids, I might as well be branded damaged goods, truth in advertising and all that. No sleep, no food, no explanation, just the ringing silence of my cell phone, just me and the sweet familiarity of loneliness, just me and only me hunkering down with my molten meteorite and my righteous indignation and the indifference I plan to cultivate tomorrow or the day after, that is if I can stop from weeping from the darkness of my bed, that is if I can divert the ache from my chest to somebody else's neglected slurry.

This is life, this is my life, unlucky in love, fortunate. Not unraveling, reveling in family and friends, ever hopeful, ever hopeful, fists of fury intact.

and then just like that he is gone, all I have to do is fill our water glasses and say you should go. And he does.

I could tantalize myself with a bright ray of hope, but history has taught me that is about as effective as whistling in the wind, better to gird for the inevitable, the mourning and the misplaced anger. He says it's not me, well I know better. It's been five years since a man has told me that he loved me, I am but a spent shell casing. I am not afraid of being alone, I know the drill. It's the promise that I will miss, the promise of the intangible something that surpasses, that simply surpasses. It's the falling asleep hand in hand.

do I give up now? Pardon me if I wail, if I drop to my knees in supplication, but just how often do I render up my heart and soul, I am telling you in confidence that I am running out of love, my blood is running thin and I am shaking, and I am this close to running out to bury myself prematurely in liquor and cigarettes, because I would very much like to be done now. OK, OK I get it, it's not my lot, no lover, no partner, no child of a union. Just me, toute seule, until I up and flee. To someplace lonesome, someplace lovelorn and bereft, hot enough to evaporate tears.

oh god, tomorrow is going to hurt like hell.

All of the queries and the non responses, and do we speak again or have we spoken volumes already. I am already doing a mental inventory, is there anything there that I need back. Can I close the door though my heart is screaming run, run, run back, beg, borrow and steal, fuck him once more until he turns blue and I turn scarlet. All of that tedious excuse making. All the half jokes, all of those punch lines lost, and now I find I am one once again.

I am not angry, I am only heartbroken, and sad for him and sad for what we might have been. It's a good thing that the heart is such a resilient muscle, they might find me weeks later shattered into a thousand pieces in the bathtub with my heart still throbbing in the water gone cold encased in scar tissue.

my ex-husband says I ought to get to bed now, but there is a part of me already out the door, it's mild out and I am walking past the windows lit by the restless, I am turning the key in the ignition and driving onto the thoroughfare. I'll get lost in the oblivious traffic, I'll heed the rules until I am out of sight, then I will step on the gas pedal and ride the meridian.

but none of that matters tonight, because tomorrow is still going to hurt like hell, and the day after and the day after, until he starts to blur a little at the edges and his songs get replaced by my songs, and I gravitate and conquer the middle of my bed again, forget his phone number, masturbate like mad to forget the sex, slough off my love skin. Soon enough they'll stop saying Emma looks so happy and in love, soon enough the stuff of cities will swallow the phyiscal remants. And what is left I will keep close to my chest when I am not busy willfully forgetting, I might remember, I will remember, I will remember and my heart will buckle, as it does for those whom I loved before. So welcome then, my engineer, to my pantheon, stay quiet as marble, you and your aquiline nose will be right at home here.

The leaves are changing, it's a lot like getting caught with your pants down. Indian Summer has rolled onto her capacious belly, and Nature heeds her natural rhythms while the rest of us are still paddling upriver, fronds in our hair and the last of summer still on our shoulders.

Like on Sunday, a pack of us savages in canoes, soggy sandwiches and lukewarm wine in dry bags and spiders in my hair, the engineer barking instructions from the helm, not that I can steer as I claimed I could, not that I think there is anything wrong with paddling backward, not that there is anything wrong with getting nowhere fast. If only every obstacle was a rope swing, even if the current is deceptively fast beneath that torpid, lazy surface. And cold.

The city is settling into it's due, now. All summer wrapped in fogs, and come September out she shimmies, out we spill, into the deepening evening, all without our coats on, on the beach and on the bridges, we all go purple in September, purple in prose and in nose, it's the last pink wines of the season, it's beaujolais, it's harvest, the holidays loom large, it's winter and rain and rain and some more rain, it's my engineer maybe moving far from me. But between now and then there is still what is left of September, scraps of days, a few errant tennis balls before the rushing dusk, a modicum of love, a measured bit of hope, a dollop of sadness and a dash of despair, and maybe if I am lucky a bucket of oysters when the tide is high.

Life goes on and you hit all of the relevant plot points, you sleep, you wake, you fumble and mumble, sometimes you show up late to work (who am I kidding)show up always late, but sometimes a little extra late with sex all over my skin.

I might be shamefacedly late, but I glow and I gloat.

where do all the all old songs go to die, all those old anthems just as casually cast aside, do they go off to haunt the dust fairies of newly remembered and far off memories. Our unbidden, unwanted skeletons of girl's past, girls who were sillier and girls who once swore like sailors and girls who get enfolded into the tide, with a sideways smile and a velvet mile of regret, farewell my crimson tongue, till the morrow ma chere, so it goes, so I roll.

and all of the old songs lazily orbit the moon, and there are rings and things, lovely rings of dust and ambrosia and stones unformed, and I am once again pulling on my imaginary cigarette, imagining myself as a latter day Murrow -- how to contend with my undeniable feminism - by that I mean I can't escape the lunar pull, and I can't escape the blood in my underthings. That is until my body throws itself into categorical revolt and I can't tell my tides from my risings and all has gone very calm and detached, so if this is this and that is that then this is what and so it goes and so on... except for the part that screams well no - not really.

yeah, so well I am all tied up and fricassied and deliberately vague and all that. Also getting willfully and deliberately drunk. Hi! Internets! See a pattern! Have half a mind to delete this drivel.


But then there are the unexpected joys, there is that patch of redwoods in Larkspur, there is that unexpected phone call. There is being unexpectedly loved. There is that sweet voice in an unexpected message. And there is you, and by you I mean me, me getting older, my unfurling strung up a flag pole, me and my gnashed for hard earned independence, me humming along to everyone else's soundtrack, there on the sidewalk feeling unratified.

And then there is the other me, the me with headphones on, who should be colliding with her pillow, the one that wants to go and go, the one who is smashing through languages and time zones, the one whose body is timelessly twenty-five, the one who is happily oblivious to the lateness of the hour, that girl there, loose in her joints and free in her hips, just like I was before, when I used to dance in the mirror.

And now, well now - I just sit in front of the screen and marvel and the time passed, and I don't dance so much anymore.

Maybe tomorrow.