April 13th, 2987,

Weather: Passable
Mood: Relieved
Music: Prokofiev - Dance of the Knights is still ringing in my ears although Stevie Nicks - Planets of the Universe is playing on my MePod

Hello Journal,
It's me,
It's been a while since we talked
About life and stuff...

Time doesn't actually care about these arbitrary circles that we make it wrap around, does it?

Like, a day is just a day, right? It doesn't matter if it's the same day of the year, it's not actually the same day, right? Because otherwise, I'd have just about worn some of these days out from living them so many times.

There's an old religious holiday that passed the other weekend. Due to a certain woman's obsession with the old human religions, I was married on that day once, centuries ago.

I still remember that day: the long, drawn-out words of the little candy preacher that she'd made for the church: "Hell seized a corpse and met God. Hell seized Earth and encountered Heaven..." and on like that, quoting Bonnie's favorite theologian. When the Easter service was over and the wedding service had begun, I remember her walking down the aisle in a minimalist white dress, on the arm of some friend of hers from another kingdom, tears on her cheek.

I remember waiting nervously in the wings of the chapel in a black skirt-suit with black hose; looking up at the arched, poured-concrete roof and wondering, with that greasy feeling in my stomach, whether I was about to royally fuck up.

I royally fucked up, of course, marrying Bonnie. Every time I've ever worn black hose it's turned out for the worse, in fact. They're like, not my good luck charm.

Easter was also the day I got back together with Bonnie centuries later, and I think we broke up again almost exactly a year later, so I would have been pretty low and possibly strung out on Easter of that year.

Hell, there's more. I think I got low on Easter a few years ago after I broke up with Ash the Enchanter on the day they call Ash Wednesday. I think I may have done some blue that Easter.

My memory is as fucked as Sir Howell's.

So yeah, if it really were the same day every year, it'd be worn out by now, like old jeans. But it's not, because nothing happened this year. I had a good Easter. I had lunch with the band, and then I went up to Foxham's office to ask him something. He let me borrow another book, and we talked an hour about time and memory and a dozen other things... hence the rant I just went on, of course. It was oddly comforting, just talking about life and things.

I'd marry him, I really would, but he's married to a typewriter and a manuscript and having a passionless affair with an older fox named Vixy, and I have my eye on someone else.

And you know, there's the fact that he's a smallish woodland animal. Glob, when I think of him, I think of his mind.

But I'm stalling. I had a hella bad time at the party, but it was alright, because I had an okay time afterwards.

I arrived, or as Cardi would say, I arrove at the party on my rented carpet, which labored like a pack animal under Melissa's weight and mine.

The sun was down, and the Chinese lamps were up. We were fashionably late, which is, like, five minutes before unfashionably late. Fucking late is five minutes after that. Funny thing, for a lazy problem student, I've never actually been fucking late to class.

They'd set up a wide square and laid down wooden panels to make a kind of dance floor. Most of the Knights were already there, in rented tuxedos, wedding dresses dyed pink or tie-dyed (this was the year after tie-dye had been back in fashion, for future reference), and a few were in very nice clothing. Maybe two dozen rando students were there too; most of them better were dressed than most of us.

I'd settled on the tuxedo, myself. It's way fucking cool, my tuxedo: it has skinny, pointy peaked lapels and a big red rose embroidered on the left breast pocket, and I like the way it emphasizes my hips and bust without making me look big. Knowing that it was technically a white-tie event, I wore a scarlet bow tie. Take that, formal fashion. I'd put a streak of white in my hair with spray-on dye and then pinned it up rather nicely, considering I haven't been to a formal thing in decades. I wore my uniform boots with the spurs-they're black and look a lot like dress shoes.

Melissa had bothered to put on some kinda hideous polka-dotted dress/shorts thing she calls a "romper" for her "pity date" with me, so we were already mismatched.

A band was setting up on a raised platform at one end-unfortunately, not Marceline and The Thieves. Man, next time it'll have to be us: I'd avoid this whole mess that way. Anyways, it looks like some kinda small jazz group. I didn't even know we had one.

In the center of the dance floor, a few knights had gathered around Death. They were talking about battles, and from what I overheard he was laughing and talking like he'd been at all the same ones.

Had he? Is he literally death itself? Jeez, my head gets more fucked up the more I think about that guy. I'm morbidly fascinated to say the least. Anyways, he was dressed like a Mexican bandito from a Western movie, if that bandito were going to officiate a formal wedding. He had on a white tuxedo with a white bow-tie, that big white hat he wears that's almost a sombrero, black cowboy boots with big jingo-bob spurs not unlike mine, and a pair of fucking ammo belts, the kind that go to an M60. Yeah, that's Death for you.

I wondered if I was liable to walk into his invisible bus. I decided on a few likely spots and made a mental note not to walk through them.

The last few Knights arrived (with the exception of a Sir Weathersham, who was attending to an issue with her family away to the south). Sir Howell called the first dance. It was a jazz waltz like that schmaltzy Shostakovich number that Bonnie always wanted to dance to.

Dancing with Melissa was painful. She didn't just step on my toes, she moved in, like, a different time signature. Every four beats (of the three-beat dance) she tread (treaded? trod?) on one toe or the other. And she told me I did it fucking wrong!

And let me go on a bit about Melissa: this woman constantly puts down her boyfriend because he (gasp!) wants other women. She's also convinced that anyone who likes tits must want her. And she talks about how she would naturally treat a man like a king, if only a man would let her do that.

Fuck. First off, from everything I've heard, Chad or whatever he's called wants other women and he doesn't sleep with them. That's called, like, fidelity. If he didn't want other women, how would you know he was faithful? Maybe he was actually a massive cheater on the inside, but didn't like anyone else enough to cheat.

Secondly, she's... she's Melissa Bankley, an acquired taste, I'm sure. I like tits more than the next person. I like a three-dimensional personality even more. Did you know the most attractive normal human I ever met was also a chess champion?

Third, who fucking wants to be treated as royalty? I am literally a queen (if only by being the only subject) and I don't want people to grovel and serve me. I'm not crippled, I can get my own damn red paint and coffee, thank you very much. Even Bonnie doesn't really want that, as much as she lets it happen. Is that what men want? I mean, it would explain some things, but I don't think it's true.

Four, which is it? Are you so attractive that everyone wants you, or are you so starved for male attention that you'll grovel not even to a specific man but just some man?

So I expressed attraction (fake attraction, of course) to the great sex goddess Melissa, so now I'm fair game and she gets to use me to get back at her terrible boyfriend or something. I was wrong, this has nothing to do with pity. This is pure fucking histrionic personality disorder. I've seen it plenty of times.

I'm done.

After four or... three? agonizing dances, we agreed to mingle and dance with other partners for a dance or two. I made a beeline for Death. I dunno, he gives me that feeling in my non-existent stomach. Viscera, I guess, but whatever it's called, it's sometimes a good sign.

So I cut in with him when the band struck up the next number. Things went all right untill I asked him "Hey, can I see you sometime?"

"You got to be exclusive to see Death, baby," he said, "I don't like prior attachments." He literally walked away from me on the dance floor. My fucking bassist literally left me standing on the dance floor because I arrived with a girl I didn't even want to see. I mean, I've had worse but that's fucking cold.

In retrospect, only a few people really looked over and noticed what was happening, but it felt like every eye on the dance floor was suddenly pointed at me like a compass. I looked around feverishly, looking for some face that was at least on the sympathetic side of apathy. For a few tense moments I saw nothing of the sort.

Then I saw Susan, sitting alone away from the dance floor, crying.

I walked over to her, leaving the sinking ship of a dance behind.

"What's the matter?" I asked, or something like that.

She looked up, her face all wet and red. "I've waited two hours for this guy from health class."

I got over next to her and put my hand on her shoulder to try and comfort her.

"Sue, Sue... listen, I've been there. There are thousands of guys out there."

She got frantic and started ranting. "And girls too and listen, they've all stood me up and dumped me and I think it's just me and at this point... and... at this point I..." and she trailed off, looking like she was about to bawl.

"Sue, we're both nervous wrecks," I said, getting her arm over my shoulder and helping her up. "Let's get inside somewhere.

So we went inside the garrison and found the Knights' rec room. I'd never been in before. There was a pool table and a fussball table and probably some video games hooked up to the TV, but we both just kinda collapsed onto the less nasty couch.

She pulled herself together a little. "I'm sorry I'm such a basket case over this. It just all piles up, you know?"

"It does. And never be sorry for that," I said.

"Oh, jeez," she said, adding up on the pads of her fingers and almost starting to cry again. "It must be five years since my last stable relationship."

I slid down in the couch and tried to get comfortable-not easy if you're used to being able to hover for months at a time. "You're lucky if you get one of those in twenty or thirty years," I said, then realized that it really wasn't helping.

She divided on her fingers, which was something to see. "You must have had plenty in your time, then."

"Was I very lucky? Eh, probably not. I've had tons of relationships, some stable, some not; maybe two or three good ones, but not all the good ones were stable." I looked over at the bald, muscular barbarian woman in a black flamenco dress sitting next to me, and realized she was looking at me with fascination.

"You don't really want to hear me talk about... you do?" I asked and answered. "Well, my first love was named Josephine..."

(To be continued)

Sorry about the months and months of delay. I've been working a summer job that ate up most of my time and all of my energy and left me feeling deader than Marceline. Rest assured that, now that I'm getting back into school mode, you'll see plenty of updates.

- JMS