Some days you spring out of bed with a big boner ready to beat the world into submission, other days you wake up already weary from the realization that life is killing you.  And that's no clever turn of a phrase.  Life is the disease that's killing you.  It's the cancer in your marrow. 

Those are the days you feel like the whole world is a cancer ward.  On those days, everything is a slog. (And on days like that — on days like today — I thank God for small mercies, like the fact that Nick Jonas is finally legal and I can now perve on him as hard as want*). 

I don't know, maybe it's not as bad as all that.  In truth, I can't decide whether this has been a wretched week, or just a wretched half-week.  Suddenly, on or around, uh, yesterday, my job started to feel like a bad marriage.  Like a really bad marriage.  Like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf bad.  I obviously can't elaborate, which sucks, because I would like nothing better than to bitch a blue streak right about now. 

Suffice it to say, jobs (and some marriages I've gathered) are a lot like lobster pots. 

Things have been a little stressful at home, too, believe it or not.  I'm feeling the urge to burrow.  It's that time of year (already — oy, it's killing me!  Killing me!) and yet I've just upended my little burrow!  Last weekend I began to realize my moving-in process was going to be a lot longer than I'd originally thought. 

I had hoped I could cozy in quicklike and curl up in a furry little ball before the chill set in, but I now know that what I need — the right area rug (one of those simple unpretentious "Moroccan lattice" style rugs that were EVERYWHERE in '08), an Eames chair, and some sort of large-scale set piece (a frenemy of mine has the perfect antique wooden shutters from somewhere in the Far East, in fact) for one of my walls, for starters — won't be quick in the coming.

And bare walls do not a burrow make.

I was so eager to move in, and so provisionally pleased with the flat, that I didn't stop to consider the next step, and how much therapy it would entail.  Retail therapy, I mean.

And lastly, I will admit to some ripples of late in my romantic affairs. 

I have been carrying out a harmless campaign of flirtation on a lad all the way away in Iowa.  We were facebook friends, in fact — tethered tenuously by the kind of fragile web social networking sites are built on, a connection with another mutual facebook friend (one I had known in the Biblical sense before friending him, so that the whole thing has at least some basis in reality).

Anyway, one thing led to another.  Then came the poems — and not just poems: Cernuda! Lorca! — in Spanish and English! — and suddenly we'd bought him a ticket to Boston. 

Oh, how delightful! you say.  What fun!  And yes, there is that possibility.  Among others.  In our brief discussion before booking his flight he alluded to a past disaster that started out like this, while I for some reason didn't flashback to mine until this morning in the shower.

It was all the way back in 2002 and I was working for NATO and living in the little town of Veszprém (the city where Hungarian queens had been crowned since the days of Giselle of Bavaria), when an Anglified Serb by the name of Željko and I struck up an online flirtation.  It went on, off and on, at a simmer, for several months, and then suddenly he was going to be in Vienna and suggested dropping in on me in my weekend digs in Budapest.

From the moment he stepped out of the taxi it was all wrong.  All wrong.  My smile was wrong (for him). His walk was wrong (for me).  And it got wronger and wronger every moment we were together.  In ways no one could have fathomed beforehand, that were almost too horrific to recall after.

As I tried to remember the details of that hazy night of hell in the shower this morning, I promised myself that I would have a look back at my diary, where I knew I had recorded all the gory details. 

But before I get to that.

I had a delightful dinner with my septuagenarian friend Michael and our fellow gardener (and master gardener at that), B.  And Sully dropped by, too, for a couple of rounds.  We ruled the terrace of Canestaro's on Peterborough until nine!  On a weeknight!  And the talk was saucier than an episode of The Golden Girls, let me tell you.  

At one point I was trying to think of the name of a film I had seen.  Michael had heard that a director's cut of Brazil was showing at Coolidge Corner, and we were talking about Terry Gillliam's other flicks, some of which have been truly irredeemable.  And I was trying to remember the name of the worst of them — it's one that he actually filmed an apology for that plays ahead of the final credits of the straight-to-DVD version.

It turns out it was Tideland as a quick google search of "worst movie terry gilliam" easily revealed.  I never would have thought of it on my own, and I can assure you none of my mates would have remembered it if I had.  And we are all better off for it. 

Not so, says an "article" I stumbled upon this afternoon via yahoo!, sponsored by luminosity.com, that claims that "the right mental workouts can significantly improve our basic cognitive functions".  Like memory, which apparently we start to lose at forty.  And with good reason, I say.

They want you to do fucking brain exercises now.  The luminosity site offers you "brain games" to beef up your neural networks.  I don't even like brain teasers.  And when you think about it, who really likes being teased?  I find crosswords too constricting.  And I get an immediate brain-freeze at the mere sight of Sudoku.  Little boxes with nothing but numbers in them?  Wow.  Yeah. Not exactly my idea of "digits". 

Seriously, it's a quality of life thing.  I mean, if that's what I have to do to maintain my mental acuity, I'll happily shuffle off into oblivion looking for my car keys (and I don't even have a car).

I grow ever more convinced that flat-out forgetting is at least as essential to happiness as misremembering, and quite possibly more so.  Bring it on.

Which brings me back to my diary. 

I searched in vain for the details of the Željko debacle.  It happily so happens that my computer crashed shortly after his visit and I lost about a month's worth of diary that I'd failed to back up (this has happened once or twice over the last fifteen years, and it's always hard at first, but you have to let it go — you can't rewrite the past). 

And while there are several allusions to the traumatic event in entries up to a year later, so exhaustively had I collected the horrors the first time around that I couldn't bear to put them down on paper again, and eventually (sometime around forty, I guess) I forgot a great deal about the whole affair. 

Which, when I discovered that it was lost in the fog of memory, was sort of a relief.  Even if those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, at least we have forgetting the second time around to look forward to.

Not that I have a feeling of foreboding about any of this.  I just hope my young companion (he is at the threshold of his thirties) can cope with my senior moments.  I do so enjoy them myself.
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*And yes, today was that bad.