By the way, thanks to everyone who reads this blog and comments on it. I’m not so sure I would read this stuff if one of my friends was putting it out; you all are very good to me. Okay, here goes….

The first part of this is a post I wrote but never published about three weeks ago [i.e. sometime in June]. The second part is about a dream I had on July 2nd. The third part has my thoughts on what to make of it all. I imagine the first two parts might make me seem like a hopeless sort of fellow, a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac. Maybe that’s true, but I hope that by the end you’ll see that I’m really trying to be reasonable!

This post is really long, so I won’t be hurt if you don’t read it. But it does detail one of the most profound challenges in my life — a puzzle I have yet to solve, if it is indeed solvable. Should you choose to undertake to comprehend the most knotted enigma in Josh Hansen’s heart, I wish you all luck!

I. A Difficult Experience

One of the hardest experiences of my life happened early in 2007 when it become clear that my wildly-inflated hopes of dating my friend Susan were ill-founded. At the time I maintained a blog just for my family, and I wrote a lot about my feelings there. But I’ve never mentioned it on this blog; in fact, since two years ago I’ve hardly mentioned it at all to anybody. And so, in the spirit of my recent post on trying to develop greater emotional openness, here are some thoughts about an experience I still can’t seem to figure out.

To me, Susan was beyond amazing. Very few are the times in my life when I’ve felt such joy simply spending time with someone, yet this was the case with her. She was basically everything I had ever dreamed of — she was smart, kind, fun, full of thoughtful faith. And did I mention she was beautiful? I fell, and I fell hard, maybe sort of like that time when I was a kid and I jumped up to get the monkey bars but missed and just landed on my back on the ground, knocked out for a few seconds. Except it was actually me, myself, that fell this time, not just my body, and it took me a lot longer to come back to a sort of dazed consciousness.

We did things together — studied, shopped, ate food, went on dates — and I guess I started to get ideas that weren’t exactly supported by the “facts on the ground.” So soon came the bitter anguish of hopes unfulfilled, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I had never felt that sort of disappointment before, because I had never quite wanted anything so much or from such a deep and hidden part of my heart — from the place where you tuck your most vulnerable dreams away to protect them from unnecessary harm. I started writing poetry. I wrote a quasi-autobiographical short story. I struggled to come to terms and, eventually, and in spite of my friends’ and family’s support, I just went numb.

I became subtly bitter over the ensuing months. I never outright just said, “I hate my life, how could this happen to me?” or whatever. But I became kind of moody and fatalistic. It seems strange that that happened, since I’d endured heartbreaks in the past. Maybe this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I don’t know.

Susan was very sweet and patient with me as I tried to bring my vision of things into line with reality. Soon I went off to Spain and was happily distracted by an international adventure there. But I could never really stop looking back and wishing that things had been different. I was sad, and simply couldn’t figure out how to get un-sad. And I still feel that way, a bit. It certainly has diminished over time, and I only occasionally reflect on it now. Yet I still wish it had been different. I still can’t seem to get over “what might have been.”

For the record, there really wasn’t any notable fault on Susan’s part. In fact, what got me thinking about Susan tonight was hearing this song, the lyrics of which she gave to me as a sort of benediction on our friendship, summing things up positively. She was very thoughtful, but just sort of got some tough luck (or something) running into this guy who was so ready to latch his heart onto an impossible dream.

I wonder why it’s still a big deal for me, and why I’ve felt so frozen in place for the last two years. Am I still holding on to something? Have I not mustered a bona fide forgiveness in my heart? Or is it just that I will always be haunted by the dream, until I find a waking reality brighter than those Siren memories?

II. The Dream

This is a dream I recorded after waking up on July 2nd:

Last night, a striking dream. I was at a tilled field belonging to Susan’s family. Her parents were there, and Susan and some of her siblings, and a lot of their friends were there. It was some kind of party. I drove my truck there, but I felt like I just showed up, since Susan didn’t seem to have invited me.

Her dad and her mom each in turn came over to me to talk with me and to have me help harvest something. I never talked to Susan, but kept glancing over at her, seeing that she saw me. But I had some time with her parents.

Eventually, as I completed the task her parents had for me [maybe it had something to do with asparagus? something weird like that], it became clear that my time was past and I was no longer particularly welcome. I saw another guy with Susan. It felt like her parents had arranged things that way, so that potential suitors and competitors would not overlap. But it hurt to see her with the other fellow.

Her parents liked me. Brittany Johnson (what was she doing there??) pointed out that Susan’s dad came over to me to talk to me [somehow meaning that he thought I was a cool guy]. But even though I apparently found favor with her parents, that guaranteed nothing from Susan herself. (It’s the dating system, not courtship or courting, that’s the reigning regime these days, after all.)

Knowing that Susan is returning from her mission next month seems to have me thinking about her again, strangely. Actually, she seems to be on my mind often. I know there is still a secret hope within me of something working out. I try to kill it, but I’m not succeeding as that imaginary reality seems so much nicer than actual reality.

I guess I’m still in love with her. Or, at least, with a memory of her. And, though I have invested in relationships with other girls since, I have not yet been “in love” again….

I am still a prisoner of these feelings. I do at an emotional level wish something would come about, but at a mental level I don’t know if I really want that, and I am quite confident that it won’t happen. Oh God, please help me to move forward. Bless me to fall in love with somebody who will love me in return. Or help me to be able to choose to love.

Maybe, when she gets back, I’ll see her and realize she’s not that great, or at least not for me.That would be good. But maybe, if I see her again, I’ll just remember how much I like her. That would be terrible.

This is ridiculous! I’m stuck in the past. I moved on, but my heart didn’t. Where are you, my heart? Somewhere lost at sea.

III. What To Make Of It

Funny how in the first part I said I only occasionally reflected on Susan, but in the second part I said she was often on my mind. I think part of the problem is that maybe a week and a half ago I was doing a little bit of cleaning (gasp!) and I found my old planner from around that time. Looking through it brought back a lot of old memories, some rather painful, including a tragic poem I wrote on one of the planner pages. That put her in my thoughts again.

Overall, I think I am too “woe is me!” and not enough “it’s time to get on with life.” Does it really make sense not to let go of an old hope until finding a better one to replace it, if that old hope was actually quite hopeless? How did I become so doggedly Romantic (in the 19th century literary and philosophical movement sense, not in the modern meaning) about things?

In terms of a search algorithm [zone-out time, everybody], keeping Susan as my ideal and not exploring other promising opportunities that fall short of that ideal is like having a bogus, impossible-to-beat Best Solution So Far. A bad BSSF would render your whole search worthless. Of course, it would also make the search extremely easy, since you’re already convinced you have the best so you don’t try as hard to top it. [okay, I'm done talking about algorithms.]

Anyway, if I was Susan and I read this post, I would be disturbed by the fact that some guy was still thinking so much about me. Well, I’m disturbed by that fact, too! But really, this post makes it seem a lot worse than it is. I’m not obsessed with her. I honestly don’t think about her that often — just occasional “Man, I wish that had worked out” or “Hey, she’s coming home in August”. It’s more like I brushed up against a rose, and I still carry one of its thorns in my side — a slightly-painful reminder of a beautiful person, drifting through my memories.

[Note: reading this again as I go to finally post it, I realize that at the time I wrote it I had Susan on my mind an unusual amount. Since then she's gone ought of my thoughts again just as she came. Such is capricious memory. -Josh]

Then cleaning inspections come along, or maybe just a random cleaning urge. That’s when it’s time to collect the garbage — to deallocate the space taken up by stale old useless objects in order to make room for new useless objects! So I go through the heap, one object at a time, and when I come upon something that isn’t being used any more, I either shred it, recycle it, or trash it. Thus the garbage is collected, the heap size is decreased, and I can happily continue allocating space for random stuff with abandon.

The main problem with this system is that I always have a huge heap of stuff on the floor, and I have to spend time sorting through it every once in a while. But boy it’s easy to use!

More conscientious people probably manage space manually, thus keeping their heap size down (to the point of nonexistence, even) and avoiding the need to do periodic garbage collection. The danger there is the memory leak — if no system of periodic garbage collection exists, allocated space will just go on being used even if it’s forgotten about.

But my metaphor is now way overextended. Ah, but we did just pass our inspection. Go GCMM!

Three Degrees of Josh: How much I trust people determines what treatment they get. I made the cheesy graphic all by myself!

I think the “Who the heck are you?” section has grown a little bit recently. But the main change is that the yellow circle has grown considerably at the expense of the green circle. Some of the bogus reasons I give yellow-circlers when I’m down:

• “I was tired”
• “I just felt really irritable all day.”

Some of the real reasons that I rarely discuss are:

• plain old depression with no apparent cause
• “doubt traps” in which I obsess over reconciling some particular church doctrine with some seemingly-irreconcilable observation¹
• panic attacks (much less common these days, thankfully, but still occasionally rearing their ugly, irrational head)
• loneliness
• lack of pizza [ha ha, it's a joke]

I almost never talk about Mom’s suicide, or about my shorter-than-usual mission experience. It’s all rather silly, given the amazing family and friends I have who would be thrilled to support me should I ever give them the chance. Surely this also deprives others struggling in similar ways (especially the pizza-deprived, who need as much support as they can get) from the realization that they’re not alone in their frustrations.

I wonder how I can open up and stop acting like I have to hide my past and my present, at the expense of my future.

Notes

1. In spite of my firm belief in the following theorem: there exist no two contradictory propositions that cannot be wholly reconciled by a previously-unconsidered third proposition.

Ah, the good old HBLL atrium. Sorry, this picture was the best one I had.

In a nod to my friend Emily’s recent post, I’m going to describe something interesting I observed in the Harold B. Lee library last night.

There I was on the first floor of the atrium, the big, three-story glass enclosure with trees and ferns and seats for studying. All was peaceful, I was happily being semi-productive, and in comes this couple. They sit down in the armchairs about 35 feet from me. They started talking, pretty quietly, but in the coffin-quiet of the library late on Saturday night I could hear just about every word. And it was quite the conversation to overhear.

It was a DTR. An agonizing, lopsided DTR. For the uninitiated, DTR is BYU/Provo/Orem/lots of other places-speak for “Define The Relationship”¹. This guy was a manly man, with a deep bass voice that carried far. The girl started trying to explain why she had wanted to talk. She was just about to get to it when a text message or something came in on her phone, so to stall she went off on some tangent. Just do it! I was thinking, though I’m certainly guilty of the avoid-the-point-of-the-conversation-by-talking-about-something-else thing.

Anyway, when she finally got around to, it was some blather about how she just thought maybe like there was maybe perhaps possibly something he was looking for, but she didn’t have to offer… and how glad she was they were friends, but… and how this and that and, oh! how strange! but she was just thinking…. As she tried explaining what was going on without actually explaining what was going on, the guy responded with these perplexed, bass-rumbly questions that she answered with equal vagueness. On about the third approach she decided this method was doomed to failure, so she set out to use a radical new approach: the honest truth! (gasp!)

“So, okay, I’m just gonna be really honest with you. We’ve been doing all this stuff together and it’s been lots of fun, from how you were treating me at the party I could tell you were way more into it than I was, so I thought I should talk to you about it.” I don’t remember her exact words, and it was still really vague, but the dude started to sort of get the hint. His string of follow-up questions and almost pleading were still in that deep bass voice, but now it was sort of gravelly and strained, like he wanted to keep the emotion out of his voice but couldn’t manage it. Been there. Done that. I started to really feel sorry for the guy, because he was clearly in deep and was taking it like a heavy blow.

Dang, what can you do in that situation? You’ve fallen deeply in love with someone who will never love you back, in your mind the relationship is what you hope it can someday become. In other words, your perception is totally disconnected from reality. And the other person has no clue, or maybe suspects but doesn’t want to just come out and say, “Hey, I’m not interested!” Anyway, I was really tempted to go over to the couple in the throes of non-relationship and say to the guy, “Dude, I’m sorry, that’s rough. But it’s obviously going nowhere. Let go!” I guess that’s because I wish somebody had done that for me the last time I was in his shoes. She had the wisdom to eventually tell me very clearly to move on, but the heartbreaker last night seemed to not yet understand the importance of a clean break.

That was rough for him. It was rough for me, back about two years ago. Maybe it’s a bad sign that I haven’t really been in love since.

Notes

1. I’ve been in the BYU bubble for a long time now and don’t really know how widespread the use of this term is. It clearly goes beyond BYU (see 1, 2, 3) though I mainly see it in sites that seem to be overtly Christian — probably an indication that the DTR corresponds to groups that practice more traditional types of dating, like we LDS and other socially conservative people

The Kid watched as blood seeped into his shirt, spreading warm and sticky under the star on his chest. No, this wasn’t okay, he thought. It wasn’t his time. He had to do something. With a lurch, he reached to the top of the piano and slowly — wheezingly, dizzily — he pulled himself up.

Some patrons had left a few mugs of beer on top of the piano in their hurry to escape the gunfight. The sheriff grabbed one of these with a shaky hand and chugged it, half expecting to see streams of the amber fluid leaking out of the bullet holes in his belly. But instead his vision cleared, and his mind, too. He grabbed another mug and gulped it down, then another, each one revitalizing, rejuvenating. As he drained the last one, he flung the mug down to shatter on the floor right where the grave digger stood.

“It’s time to settle this,” the sheriff said steadily, and he lunged at the other man, fist in the air, and sunk his weathered knuckles square in the grave digger’s nose. The man staggered back, stunned.

“Ya know yer outnumbered, sheriff. We got ten times as many on my side of the law than on yor’n, and most o’ them are on their way here right now.”

The Kid pulled out his revolver, spun the magazine, and cocked the hammer, pointing it at the grave digger. For a moment he hesitated, unsure of the justice of the action. But the town was in utter chaos, a deputy dead and an outlaw killed, too. “Yeah, I know. But I ain’t gonna jus’ roll over ‘n’ die without a fight.” So he pulled the trigger.

The bullet’s impact shoved the grave digger jarringly back a few feet, making a loud bwang sound like a gong. To the sheriff’s surprise, the grave digger not only stayed on his feet, he started reloading his Remington. “Never leave home without an iron plate under yer shirt, ‘s what I always say,” the old man said.

The sheriff fired again, but this time the grave digger dodged the shot with unexpected speed and returned fire, pumping four bullets into the sheriff’s lead-riddled body. The sheriff grabbed a tequila from a nearby table and practically flung it down his own throat, but the grave digger shot him again, negating the effect of the burning alcohol.

“You can’t last forever, sheriff,” the grave digger mocked. “One more shot and yer dead!” The grave digger prepared to fire, the sheriff trembling with the fear of death.

“¡Ay ay, no lo mates, hombre!” came the voice of Pepito the diputado from out of nowhere. The little mexicano with the big sombrero leaped in front of the sheriff, and the grave digger’s bullet struck him in the shoulder, ricocheting off the bone. Pepito hardly seemed to notice, and he rushed at the grave digger, grabbing the man’s gun and throwing it behind the bar counter, then pummeling him with punch after punch. Soon the grave digger was on the ground, not even fighting back anymore.

At the entrance to the saloon, the swinging doors swung in and two ragged characters walked through. The tall one carried in a howitzer, and set it firing on all others in the room. The grave digger took a bullet, and he died where he lay on the floor. Somehow the big gun missed the sheriff, and its shot at Pepito simply whizzed through his sombrero, flinging it off his head. But the other man, the short one, rushed up to Pepito and stabbed him with a rusty puñal, and Pepito breathed his last.

The two newcomers turned towards the sheriff, the Apache Kid. The tall one was ready to unleash his howitzer on the doomed officer of the law. “It’s time for new management in this town, sheriff. You done a poor job an’ we citizens won’t stand for it.” He laughed triumphantly, but before he could fire his weapon the short man, standing behind him, tossed a lit stick of dynamite onto the floor in front of the sheriff.

The sheriff kicked the dynamite over to the tall man, who kicked it to the short one. The short man kicked it to the sheriff, and on it went like a hot potato until finally it exploded, launching the tall man with a crash out the window and onto the dusty road.

“It’s just you and me now, sheriff,” the short man said unnecessarily. “I’m glad to see the other fool go,” he said, gesturing to the shattered glass window. “‘Cause I’m not like those other outlaws. I’m a solo operator and I report to nobody but me.”

That’s when the sheriff understood. “So you’re the renegade! I wondered who it was amidst all the chaos.” The short man nodded, glad to be recognized. “So what’re you gonna do now?” the sheriff asked.

The renegade stood there for a second as if trying to suppress some great burst of laughter, but he couldn’t do it. He laughed a loud and terrifying laugh that the sheriff hadn’t heard the likes of since he put the Finuccis in jail for running the salt mine gang. But before the short man knew it the sheriff had him Pepper-boxed, Springfielded, and Delengered, and with a punch to the face he laid the renegade out cold.

The sheriff breathed a sigh of relief, surveying the pile of bodies around him and the wreckage strewn through the saloon. Too bad they killed the gravedigger, he thought, ’cause there’s gonna be a lotta work to do. And the player piano stilled played “Maple Leaf Rag” as the sheriff sat down and poured himself one more drink.

Note: this story is based on the four rounds of a game titled “Bang!^W” that I played with my friends tonight. I was the renegade three times, but on the fourth round I was the sheriff’s deputy and my name was most definitely Pepito. In the game, all forms of alcohol have a rejuvenative effect, ironically.

Shakespeare and Co Antiquarian Books. (Click for larger image.)

Paris Wall Newspaper
January 1st 2004

Some people call me
the Don Quixote
of the Latin Quarter
because my head
is so far up in the
clouds that I can
imagine all of us are
angels in paradise,
and instead of
being a bonafide
bookseller I am more
like a frustrated

novelist store has
rooms like chapters
in a novel and the
fact is Tolstoi and
Doestoyevski are
more real to me than
my next door neighb-
ors and even stranger
is the fact that even
before I was born
Dostoyevski wrote
the story of my life in
a book called ‘The
Idiot’ and ever since
reading it I have been
search for the

heroine, a girl
called Nastasia
Filipovna. One
hundred years
ago my bookstore
was a wine shop
hidden from the
Seine by an annex
of the Hotel Dieu
hospital which has
since been demolis-
-hed & replaced by
a garden. And

further back in
the year 1600
our whole building
was a monastery
called La Maison
du Mustier. In
medieval times
each monastery
had a frere lampier
whose duty was to
light the lamps at
night. I have been
doing this for fifty
years now it is
my daughter’s
turn.
GW

I must also, as a matter of conscience, defend Kent. Based on many years as his roommate I can state without hesitation that his integrity in all matters thermal is unsurpassed. Though he is natively a South Dakotan, his time amongst the heat-lovers of California and Arizona made him aware of the devastating effects of cold on the unsuspecting and unprepared. To impugn the honor of Kent in this matter of utmost importance is insulting to his memory (may he and Dayna live on in peace!) and to his friends from every clime.

And one more thing, most important of all: knowing the accusations of hypocrisy that I will invite by so doing, I say that my esteemed, hypokinesthetized roommate must cease seeking the motes in the eyes around him until he has removed the beam from his own icy iris. Perhaps he himself turned down the thermostat in a desperate bid for attention. He’s crying out for help, help when his world is turning all wintry and fifty-degrees-ish. Come back from the edge, Gabe — it doesn’t have to be this way!

Notes

1. Washington State, that is.

The thought of being by himself on Christmas day had never really bothered him much. No, it wasn’t the lack of gifts and bustle, or of Bing Crosby and Bedford Falls, that troubled the man. It was something else, something as hard to pin down as why his ramen and pea soup hadn’t tasted right at dinner — adjusting for the fact that, after all, it was made from ramen and frozen peas.

He could have spent the day with his friend’s family. It would have been fun. But somehow the comforts of a quiet apartment and a cozy, worn old sofa held him in their thrall. He’d expected as much, ever since waking up at almost noon and eating his first meal at two or three o’clock. And it was alright, he thought, because, unlike most people, he thrived on aloneness.

His self-imposed hermitude contrasted strangely with Monday’s enthusiasm for home, family, and friends. The canceled flight hardly dimmed his spirits. After all, it was Christmas! He’d find a way home. But Tuesday at the bus station, with its seemingly-pointless delays and uncomfortably different clientèle, ground down his patience, and, gradually, the process of getting to Washington made him wish more and more that he could just stay in Utah to ride out the holidays in travel-free peace. Leaving behind an endless supply of free pizza (shocking, really), he fled the bus station and returned to Provo.

Yes, there had been a dinner that night, and friends to be with; and yes, the party on Wednesday (Christmas Eve) warmed his heart and filled his stomach; but the pendulum had already swung the other way, and on Christmas he found himself alone.

Alone. On Christmas day. He never thought he’d care.

The snow had all but stopped now, drifting down to earth like a disappointment, and the heater finally fell silent, too. Watching the flakes fall in front of a cloudy, glowing night sky, he contemplated one more attempt to fly home tomorrow. He expected that when (or if) he finally got there, he’d snap out of it, want to be a person again. But he didn’t want to want to.

Oh, and, by the way, the celery seeds ruined the soup.

Note: This is mostly autobiographical. However, on Christmas night I did get to chat with some friends online and go over to Diane’s for a little while. The outcome of return attempt #3 is, of course, still pending, but I think I’ll probably feel a little more like being elsewhere once I’ve actually succeeded in getting there.

Winter Storm Warning
Spokane Area (Washington)
URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SPOKANE WA
1038 PM PST WED DEC 24 2008
...SNOW STORM THROUGH CHRISTMAS DAY...
.A SIGNIFICANT WINTER STORM IS BRINGING HEAVY SNOW TO MUCH OF THE
INLAND NORTHWEST TONIGHT INTO CHRISTMAS DAY. THE HEAVIEST SNOW
WILL DEVELOP DURING THE EVENING AND SPREAD ACROSS EASTERN
WASHINGTON INTO NORTHERN IDAHO BY EARLY CHRISTMAS MORNING.
IDZ002-WAZ036-251300-
/O.CON.KOTX.WS.W.0012.000000T0000Z-081225T2000Z/
COEUR D`ALENE AREA-SPOKANE AREA-
INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS...COEUR D`ALENE...POST FALLS...
HAYDEN...SPOKANE...CHENEY...DAVENPORT...ROCKFORD
1038 PM PST WED DEC 24 2008
...WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 12 PM PST
THURSDAY...
A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 12 PM PST
THURSDAY.
STORM TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 8 TO 10 INCHES ARE EXPECTED IN
THE SPOKANE AND COEUR D`ALENE AREAS BY LATE MORNING ON CHRISTMAS
DAY. LIGHT SNOW HAS INTENSIFIED THIS EVENING...WITH OVERNIGHT
ACCUMULATIONS OF 5 TO 7 INCHES EXPECTED. THE SNOW WILL DECREASE
BY DAWN... BUT SNOW SHOWERS WITH AN ADDITIONAL INCH OR TWO
ACCUMULATION WILL LINGER INTO CHRISTMAS MORNING.
TRAVEL ON CHRISTMAS MORNING WILL LIKELY BE DIFFICULT. HOLIDAY
TRAVELERS SHOULD PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE WEATHER.
A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR HEAVY SNOW MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER
CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW
ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS. ONLY TRAVEL IN AN
EMERGENCY. IF YOU MUST...KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT...FOOD...AND
WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.
THIS WARNING INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS...COEUR D`ALENE...
POST FALLS...HAYDEN...SPOKANE...CHENEY...DAVENPORT...ROCKFORD.
$$

See the original warning.