Dream of Consciousness

This is my first Valentine's Day without Jayne in eight years.

Leading up to today, I received an e-mail every morning from FTD florists reminding me that Valentine's Day was just __ days away.

Last night, I got into a debate with a friend of mine about the merits of relationships. He's a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic whose sometimes cynical sense of humor can't camouflage his unshakable faith in the iconography of the modern romantic comedy. He believes in soulmates and destiny and happy endings. He trusts that true love will always find a way. And so he drunkenly lectured me on my own lack of trust in these kinds of fabled notions. He wants to see me believe in love again because he knows that I was once like him -- a hopeless romantic -- and he fears that if I give up on the romantic, all that will be left is the hopelessness, and that there's some greater truth in this that he wants to hide from. He wants to know why I'm not at least sleeping around. I told him that I don't even care enough to do that.

The women I occasionally hang out with all wonder what's wrong with me.

I've been changed so fundamentally that it actually scares me -- I don't believe in anything I used to.

I have a recurring dream about trying to protect Inara from kidnappers.

I have a recurring dream in which Jayne and I sleep together, then she gets up and leaves without saying a word.

Lifetime showed Pretty Woman this afternoon -- because nothing says Valentine's Day like the story of a guy who hires a hooker.

Valentine's Day was number one at the box office this weekend despite almost universally terrible reviews.

There's something I call the Single Howard Theory. It works like this: I used to listen to Howard Stern regularly during the mid-90s, mostly because I thought he was quite a bit more insightful than most people gave him credit for. The really raunchy gags were always damn funny, but it was Stern's general take-no-prisoners approach to his forum that endeared him to me; the man had made himself so famous that he was untouchable and could get away with almost anything, and I really respected him for that. But something happened in 1999 that made me stop listening to Stern for quite some time: He and his wife Alison separated and divorced. At face value, this makes no sense; Stern's divorce changed nothing about his show. It was no ruder, more offensive or more sexually suggestive than it had ever been. But strangely, the way I perceived Stern's material changed. His show felt uglier; his jokes seemed more caustic; his lecherous advances toward women, a show tradition, suddenly made me feel like I needed to take a shower -- they were just, well, creepy. And then I realized what happened: Alison had humanized the monster. It was always easy to swallow Howard because I understood that his character to some extent was just that -- a character. Howard Stern had played a hyper-realized version of himself all those years on the radio, but secretly everyone knew the truth, even if their consciousness didn't always process it: Stern was a loving, devoted family man. He was the guy who'd turned his book and movie, Private Parts, into a love letter to his wife. And now he was single, and suddenly the atrocious on-air behavior that he'd been reveling in for years was happening without a safety net. He now really was the crude, horny, immature middle-aged guy he'd played the part of for years -- and he was free to indulge all the desires, sexual and otherwise, that he'd made a career out of voicing. His stuff just didn't feel funny anymore because it was too real. This is the Single Howard Theory. This is what I fear: that the juvenile, offensive, occasionally misanthropic nature of my writing and my viewpoints has been rendered unpalatable by my breakup with Jayne. I wonder constantly if her presence -- the simple knowledge that she was always there -- somehow humanized me. Both in print and in person.

I'm filled with dread.

Strangely, I look at Inara as the woman in my life these days, one I focus all my energy on, leaving almost no room for anyone else.

The other night, a friend of mine looked at me over a beer and said, "If you take care of Inara and you're a good father to her, she'll be the one and only girl who will never leave you." This almost made me cry.

I'm going to hit the next person who tells me that I just haven't met "the right one."

This is my first Valentine's Day without Jayne in eight years.

I still miss her sometimes.

More than that, I miss myself.