Tyler suggested I apologize to Trudy Richardson

And who is Tyler? A name tag of a Trader Joe's associate, with smooth and easy youthful toffee complexion. But I am beyond apology, with the corporate office, with HUD. You've viewed this all before, but not that I complimented Tyler on being a nice young man. What am I then? A pretentious bigot, or merely alienated? Both? For the sake of even handedness, white Presbyterian managers were little better than their minority counterparts, and the beat goes on, shellshocked, my decency tainted beyond recovery. I can fit the woman I am now like a sleeve over her past in her junior year, crashing then, looking out of the window of university apartment alone, no more nursing students, no more Lee from the South suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma. I only have the barest trace memory of what happened to Lee, and could not understand at the time why she did not withdraw from school, given how stricken she was. She did withdraw and I received a summary end conversation of her fate but cannot quite recall it, though her devoted sweetheart Bob stays with me, why, I don't know. Geek. Beatles hair, owl rim glasses, engineer, Jerry had been fired and I crashed, and transferring in no way unraveled that, but beneath the surface, for all my wasted and now ashen investment in the Old Cricket, the turbulence was something else. Self-hatred, a deeper knowledge that I would not succeed, wouldn't be happy, wouldn't live for a husband, wouldn't ever conquer my slovenly peasant genetic make up, regardless of what Irish wizardry I thought I'd bought into, but on thinking about it, beneath the surface of my spastic body positively longing for hard and dangerous sex, I was never really liberal, just an exterminator held in abeyance.

One thing that never plagued me back then, however, despite the riff of domestic violence with my vamping mother, was battle fatigue, and other than my breaking heart for my cats, this is what I own now. Emotional exhaustion, a commonality with my father, from a well spring of different sources. Pass a certain point, whatever that point is, nothing quite ever repairs it, even a sales clerk with the admonishment not to beat myself up, not that I've been entirely inert today, but my education? My intelligence? Pointless at this point, resources exhausted. Move on to what exactly?