Groan, stomach flu. It’s raining. I won’t be leaving the house today. The temp company is emailing me skills tests now. I just took a typing test and an excel test from a company called Prove It. I guess their stock and trade is to go over abilities and claims on resumes to offer employers some guarantees. I feel poked and prodded in a really childish way, still it’s interesting to find the bottom line. I dreamt last night that I went back to work for Harry at Ryan’s Sports Bar and Grill in the ville. Part of the dream was doing laundry and I discovered that someone had cut my favorite belt in half. What the hell does that mean? More importantly, why do I have a favorite belt?

My once dramatic life offers a curtain call of character:

I caught sight of an ex of mine from five or six years ago, the photographer Jenny, she was working behind a deli counter in a really busy grocery on Sunday. She was swamped so I didn’t say hi, but I suppose I’ll see her there again and see how she is. We broke up in part because she wasn’t really over an ex of hers, Will I think was his name, and I was unsure about our age difference/ability to communicate. I was on the slight rebound from Stephanie II (the geographer not the biologist) and she had rebounded from Will to Mat. Later, when she was really over Will, I was dating Barb already. Drama.

Jenny broke up with Mat to date me. Mat’s parents live up the street from where I live now and he was a good friend of my more recent ex R’s. It took awhile for him to get over feeling competitive with me about Jenny and he always figured R and I were a mismatch. He’s brilliant in political science and was headed down the think-tank path. He’s tightly wound, but I think of him as an essentially good person. I am sure he thinks I am an asshole and only tolerated me because of R. Whatever.

Jenny was a vegetarian when we were together and she liked that I didn’t mind cooking vegetarian for her. After college she went and lived on a commune in southern Missouri, the kind of place that grows haute organic for St. Louis’s green restaurants. At the grocery yesterday she was confidently slicing meat. I guess we all change and at the same time appearances can be deceptive, slicing is not eating.

I look like granola hippie man with my long hair, but I am not really that in any self-identified way so don’t get the wrong idea about me. I can camp, I won’t go out of my way to do it more than once or twice a year, but I can camp. You might talk me into hiking once in awhile. I love float trips, we should plan one for the summer.

I liked the Grateful Dead quite a bit, but I never had any interest in following them around. I thought that most of the jam bands that came after them on the rainbow gathering circuit pretty much sucked, or at the very least were uninteresting due to their uniformity, so the younger generation revoked my “you can pass as a hippie” status when I didn’t fall for FISH. Of course the biggest gap between me and hippie would be that my muscle relaxant of choice has always been booze, in liquidity and legality it boasts much.

I’m not judging. I just want to be clear that that whole hippie thing is just not my total scene, more like an outfit that hangs in my closet. A girl once told me that I lacked the courage of my convictions in that context. What I really lacked was conformity to her assumptions. Like a good little existentialist I realize that identity always overflows the categories in which we try to confine it, however my overflow makes it difficult to get a job – and sometimes to keep a girlfriend. I never have been a happy participant in the “civilize and domesticate” phase of nesting. You’re probably right; it’s a maturity issue.

I suppose I should go buy a suit at goodwill and shave my head. Then again, would I really want to work for someone who doesn’t like the way I look, there’s some convicted courage for you… or some baseline stupidity.

I went out to this pub club thing the other night with Dan and John. John told/warned me that there was a wealthy girl who was going to be there and that she was husband hunting, but that she probably wouldn’t like me because I have long hair. We can deconstruct that exchange from lots of directions, but the same rules apply – I liked the people at the pub club, but my like for them decreases in direct proportion to their conditioned assessment of surfaces. Then again, I am making assumptions of perceived shallowness myself so I best not throw stones. Husband hunter seemed quite nice, but she is not my type nor am I hers.