Back to the dreary weather. It makes my apartment dark, even when I open up the blinds. To take the edge off the solitude--I'm working at home today--I took myself out for a nice breakfast at my favorite coffee shop. Lots of bad stuff in the newspapers, though, about awful crimes and other tragedies. Even as I write this, there are the blaring sirens and horns of the firetrucks zooming by on the street outside...

I shouldn’t be writing here now, but doing work first, but I was anxious to get some things down.

After I finished writing last night, I took a shower before going to bed. The heat of the water was relaxing. I had worked at top concentration out at the office yesterday--I call it "going into hyperspace"-- and I was exhausted, yet wired too. Also, as I stood under the needle spray, I realized that I was inaccurate in a couple of things I said in my last post, “I need both my strippers and my DVDs.”

Firstly, I think the strippers are winning over the DVDs at this point, judging by how much I’ve been writing about the peelers and thinking about my favorite dancer, Lily; I don’t think it’s a draw, as I mistakenly wrote last night. Not that any “victory” is irrevocable in this duel between ecdysiasts and cinema for the heart and mind of Sir Cranky--nor is a “victory” to be desired. The aim to have a life balanced between my different interests. After the pleasant times I had with my uncle and cousins in the last few months, I may also add more family time into the mix of my life.

The second inaccurate thing I believe I wrote last night was that I’m not in love with Lily. Well, I think “in love” is too strong a description, but to say I just “like” her and “enjoy hanging out with her” is too weak. Let’s say I’m "smitten" by her, that’s more on the mark.

When I left her in the club earlier than usual last Friday evening, the reason wasn’t only that I didn’t want to spend more money. As I sat with her, our conversation flagged a few times and that made me uncomfortable. I don’t enjoy silence with people in general, although I can tolerate it when I’m with a friend I’ve known for years. Sometimes the conversation just runs dry and you hang out in companionable quiet. But when I’m sitting with Lily, whom I'm still getting to know, I like to keep up a constant flow of chatter.

Most of the time we talk about her, her work as a dancer, her studies at school, her family background, or about movies or interesting stuff in New York. I don’t have an overwhelming need to talk about myself, as I certainly do enough of that on my blog, but I like to be asked questions about what’s going on in my life too. I’ve told her about my freelance work and my other interests such as movies and books (although I haven’t told her about the blog), and when she doesn’t ask me much about what’s new in those areas I feel she isn’t really interested in me even as a casual club friend. So when the conversation hit a few lulls last Friday, I didn’t really want to want to hang around much longer to see if our time together (other than the lapdancing) would descend into boredom for me.

I would say that I love conversation as much as I love dancers and DVDs.

One of our fellow Blogstreamers asked me in a private message if I’ve ever asked Lily out for a meal. I have in a general way twice (“Maybe I can take you to such-and-such restaurant sometime?”), but she didn’t seem enthusiastic about the idea either time. Because I have gone out to dinner with other dancers in the past, and it’s usually not been very much fun--and I had a six or seven week sexual affair with one, which turned into a total nightmare--it takes a lot for me to jump over the self-protective wall I’ve put up around myself, and feel I trust a dancer enough to ask her out. Stripping is not a regular type of job, and some of the women are genuine flakes. Stripping calls into mind so many complex issues and feelings both for dancers and their admirers. Even the more normal dancers can get warped by the weirdness of it, by exhibiting themselves freely in a society still hampered by a puritanical world view, and by the occasionally cynical act of using their allure to manipulate men’s emotions and lust. So when Lily didn’t seem keen on seeing me outside the club, even for dinner at a special restaurant she’s never been to but would like to visit, I actually felt DEFEATED in my attempt to rise above my anxieties and fears. Not defeated by her, but by circumstances like the job and the difference in our ages.

I have the fear--which came from experiencing just this with the stripper I had the affair with almost eighteen years (but it feels like yesterday, believe me)--that the beautiful surface of a dancer will turn out to hide severe problems that I won’t be able to deal with, and will engulf me.

I already feel engulfed on an ongoing basis by having to deal with my narcissistic mother, who is in her late seventies but whose emotional approach to other people is firmly based in the concept of the childish tantrum, succinctly summed up as: “I WANT THINGS ONLY MY WAY!!!”

Sometimes I wonder if I indulge my emotions by doing this blog, but in truth the blog is similar to what I’ve done for thirty-five years in private diaries and journals as I’ve attempted to get a handle on various things in my life.

I think my passion to put things down in words is in direct inverse proportion to my parents’ secrecy about their inner emotions and past lives.

It’s ironic to think that if I had just stuck to my original plan to visit Lily tomorrow, I wouldn’t be writing all this, but having shown up at the club twice on her scheduled nights and not found her there has brought up once again my complicated feelings for her.

I dreamed last night of going to a gift shop on 34th Street, near Macy’s--a shop that went out of business a couple of years ago--to buy Lily another gift. I had bought her a pretty but inexpensive bracelet for Christmas, which she obviously liked. In the dream, I found a matching headband and earrings that would go with her new hairstyle, and are in her favorite color. I also found a small pin which had changing pictures on it, like those little movable images that used to come as premiums in gumball machines or cereal boxes--except that this pin didn’t simply have an image that flickered back and forth between two positions, but was rather a continuing little movie of New York in the 1940s. I awakened from the dream only to discover it was too early for me to get up, considering when I went to bed, and I also had a slight headache.

As I think about the dream, still feeling achy after breakfast, I realize it was a visualization of what I’m feeling, and what I’ve just been writing about here. The headband and earrings were clearly chosen to give her pleasure, to see her smile, to see her adorn herself in small tokens of my affection. The second gift--the pin which shows images of 1940s New York--is a symbol of myself, as expressed by my interest in history and old films. So I also want to give her the gift of who I am. Accept the gift, Miss Lily, of Sir Cranky, with his own hair (however gray, however thin) freshly cut for a neat and tidy presentation.

When the cocktail waitress noticed and complimented Lily’s new hairstyle last Friday, she then turned to me and said, “Hey, you got yours cut too!” And indeed, I cut it to look swell for Lily...or as swell as a balding, paunchy, middle-aged bookworm can!

I guess underlying my resolve to hang out with other dancers, which I also wrote about in last night’s post, was my anger, disappointment and worry about why Lily was not in the club when she said she would be, and also my anger at myself for feeling foolishly attached to a girl who, for all her good qualities and all the illusions of our being compatible, remains sequestered from me in a nightworld universe I only seem capable of visiting as a customer.

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Anyway, having explicated what’s been on my mind since I was in the shower last night, I’m going to get down to my day’s work. Enjoy your afternoon, and thank you as always for reading.