Self Respect

I spent the last hour and a half sitting inside my bathtub. I used scalding water but let the last few inches fill up with the opposite. I stepped in and let the heat permeate throughout my bones. I could feel my cheeks turn red as goosebumps climbed from my feet. I read a few short stories and finished a POM glass full of gin and grapefruit. I never thought I'd willingly drink grapefruit after my last bout with it, but when necessity outweighs preference you sometimes have to jump the gun. The fifth one doesn't taste so bad.
Joan Didion has always been in the back of my mind and her short story "Self Respect" forced me to think. I finished it and I sat there, in the tub, letting myself sink to the point where my eyes were the only thing peering out. And I thought. She says: "The tricks that work well on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations within oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no list of good intentions."
Try as you might it's impossible to keep a catalogue of all the lies we tell ourselves just to get by. There's always an illumination, a slight glimmer, of the truth somewhere between the darkness of a lie regardless of who's telling it.
I cooked my first successful steak today and drank half a bottle of wine in honor of all the Bukowski poetry I've been reading when my insomnia reaches its peak. His way with women is somehow charming, but only in the sense that I can understand where he's coming from. He's repugnant, but I don't hate him. Pigeonhole me like all the women he writes about.
Back to Joan though and Self Respect. As I mentioned in my last entry being lost isn't as bad as we let on to be if it means saving our sanity, "there's the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one" because if you look too hard what you find may really be "nothing".