When I get tired, my walls start cracking. Those things we all erect to shove emotions to the back while we go about our day. It's survival.

Some people, their walls are like chain-link fences. Everything oozes out in some form or other. Projection, hatred, displacement. Anxiety, breakdowns, depression. Psychosomatic illnesses as the body manifests what the mind will not.

I took one of my best friends out to dinner tonight. He's turning forty-one tomorrow, a ripe old man, I tease him. I was early. I'm usually early, if not precisely on time. I have a sort of natural hold on how things flow, time-wise.

Today was not the case. What I expected for Friday rush hour in Los Angeles was... nothing. Freeways were clear. I arrived a good hour and some change early. Which meant wandering the Little Tokyo loop. Things are a little spaced out, so there's room to roam.

I was startled and disturbed straight out of the gate, as I went to leave the "mall" they have over on 4th and Alameda, and an old Japanese woman walked straight into a glass wall next to the glass door. I didn't see her impact, but I heard the sickening thunk, turned in time to see her stagger over, nearly fall. It wasn't a gentle, slow impact, it was something that she wasn't expecting. She wasn't a tottering old lady, she had to have been moving at a decent speed to cause that sort of reaction, that noise.

Reminded me of the birds on my high school campus, flying into the reflective second story windows, breaking their necks, in the middle of class, then lying dead, rotting in the sun on the awning below, until a janitor noticed and removed their bodies.

She looked so startled, so old.

It left me in my thoughts as they have been of late. That wondering of the future, of how we age, of death and how our idea the world changes as people leave it. How that woman was once a young girl, playing around her mother's feet in the kitchen. Loves, losses, deaths, traveling to another country, grandchildren... So few years left, so many changes to the world around her as time shoves her out.

I picked a street that looked familiar and walked up it, going to the main plaza.

I had one of those moments, they come less frequently now, fortunately, where I felt so low. Not emotionally low, but very insecure. It was the exhaustion. Feeling fat, feeling greasy, feeling a mess, unable to meet the eyes of the people around me. Anxious about going into stores. Sitting there, going "fuck, really? You're the same weight you were when you were 18, you've got better hair, less oily skin, and you're spazzing right now that you think you're fat and people don't want you to go shopping in their stores? During a recession??"

Tried to bring myself out of it. Tried to catch myself in reflections, remind myself that I hadn't suddenly morphed into some seahag-hosebeast-thing in the last hour. It worked, mildly. Not enough. And I didn't have the energy enough to fight it. I pretty much hit the point where I knew as soon as I got some food and some sleep, I'd be fine, and if I felt crummy for the next thirty minutes to an hour, that'd be okay.

As for the few queries that came my way about the navy guy...

We went out last night.

He picked me up from my apartment, wearing... mmm... wearing a black blazer, nice black scarf, gray v-neck sweater, jeans that fit him so nicely... and friggin' blue hi-tops. Him and his ghetto shoes. Everything else looked so good and I looked at his feet and I told him that he came so close to perfection, but the shoes needed to go.

Shoes are how I continue to socially distribute men. You see a guy, good posture, good movement, which carries over into his actual looks. So an okay guy with good posture and movement becomes an attractive guy. A good looking guy with bad posture and movement, becomes a very unattractive guy.

So you get one that just might pass that test. Or maybe he's sitting down, not moving, can't check his posture too well. But he dresses like you would like, so you think that, yeah, this guy could be on my social level, we could have a conversation, he could be desirable.

Look at the shoes. I cannot count how many times I've seen a good looking guy, dressed well, then checked the shoes and gone, "Oh. That's a nerd that someone else dressed." Or you get a guy in a nice button-up, nice jeans, but you find he's wearing cowboy boots. Some guys do this to compensate for height, and that's fine. But you just might have picked yourself up a country music-listenin' rodeo king. Or again, standard button-up, nice jeans, white sneakers. White. Sneakers. If he's not a nurse and not at the gym, he should not be wearing white sneakers. That's dance-club-r&b-ghettolicious. Much like the tan CAT boots. If you're not driving a John Deere or working a construction site, tan CAT boots are not what you should be wearing.

Shoes seem to be the last thing a guy thinks about when he's choosing his wardrobe. Most guys are "Shoes? Uh, they go on your feet..." and that's as far as it gets. JCPenney, Sears, Payless, they're done. Which is fine. But they're an easy indicator of when someone is having help picking out their clothes, or if someone's in work gear but hasn't bothered to pick up a pair of loafers.

...and this public service announcement...

Anyhow, that was a massive derailment.

So he picks me up, we go over to IKEA, and I help him pick out stuff for his room at my parents' place that he's remodeling. Hit a few other stores, grabbed dinner at an incredibly low-end restaurant that almost felt like we were eating at a restaurant that was about to turn into a Silent Hill landscape, but we were hungry and didn't care.

Afterwards, we came back to my place, he helped me hang this large print I've been meaning to put up for a bit and... I sent him on his way.

I also cancelled my only actual date for the week.

What does this all mean?

Probably many things. We're coming up on the end of March and I've had one sex partner this year, of course, being GV8.

I miss him. I try to tell myself that I don't, that I don't know what my answer would be if he came back, that he's not that special, that he's not so good for me (even though, yes, some of the things he does are not good for me). I keep trying to pretend that my life will continue and I'll grow better and stronger and stop missing him all the time. That time will just gradually blow him away from me, like an image of sand.

I keep trying to focus on how nice it is that I have all this "free" time, how I get to focus on me, get things done, that I'll eventually run across someone else who suits me as well. That it won't bother me, knowing that GV8 never came back, that his rock star lifestyle was more important to him than the rare beauty of what we had.

Wonder how long I'm going to keep looking over my shoulder, watching him recede into the distance of memory.