Working at the subrocket until 4am is killing me slowly. I rather like the calm outside early in the morning - especially this time of year when it's bitter cold, but the atmosphere of this fucking bar is slowly eating away at me. I wonder for how long I could subsist without employment, or to at least take a month to fucking rest.

As I write I eat the remains of a sandwich I began four hours ago, sipping a warm beer, and smoking my fifteenth cigarette of the evening. It's all I have to count tonight. Klepto girl stopped by around 10pm and had a beer with her friend Jeral. She was really cute, though I wasn't attracted to her at all in the way I'd hoped. I'm gauging my magnetism to women now like I did when I was nineteen - by pure potential energy and lust. Perhaps I've done too much to be excited by petty encounters but a woman's gotta set a spark in me, surprise me, or take me off guard. Knowing what's coming next is just boring.

I spoke with a man at the bar for a while during the quiet part of the evening and noticed he was writing quite a bit in this black bound book. He said his girlfriend had given it to him and I chuckled (always a cynic). He caught my laugh with a keen glance and said that they'd broken up nearly a year ago but he kept the book more for utilitarian value (it was beautifully bound, with thick white paper) than sentimentality. As we talked, he turned a page and a picture fell out. It was of a very pretty blond woman standing on the edge of a body of water. He grabbed it up and slipped it back into the book quickly, perhaps thinking (or hoping) that I didn't notice. I did.

That action told me a lot about him. That he was fooling himself into believing that his book was not sentimental, that he was holding on to something and unwilling to let me (a stranger even) see what he was hiding. He's holding on to the past and I truly felt sorry for him. I think he knew. The dynamic of our conversation changed when that picture fell out - it obviously wasn't of his present girlfriend, if he had one.

Holding on to bullshit sentimentality never gets you far. You're always living in the past. I've never attached much baggage to things, knowing how quickly they disappear. It's a good thing ChI left when she did, I suppose, because I was starting to have doubts about my feelings for her. I always felt a strong attraction to her both physically and personally, but I was reluctant to become emotionally attached. Once I felt the precursors to emotional release coming I backed away - I didn't even say goodbye when she left. I stopped by later to pick up the cryptic, erotic letter she wrote.

Dean