it's me, and i can't get myself to go away

i need a new capo. my old one relies on an excessively primitive mechanism, namely a plastic flap, to keep it in place, and that flap has been worn down to the degree that it no longer locks it in place. hence, there is a need for a new one. probably a more traditional design, with a metallic body and a sturdier spring action locking contraption. i don't actually know a lot about how these things work.

but i suppose my point is that we frequently fail to look beyond what we think we have. my old d'addario capo, being adequate in its construction for my amateur necessities, wasn't in fact perfect. it was nice and compact, and has a relatively easy mechanism, which i mistook for quality. but now that it is broken, it becomes so easy to see the inadequacies. it never held down the strings in an even fashion. 2 would be held down too tight, 2 too loose and only the middle 2 strings got the right pressure. and it was a bitch to adjust, and made the strings lose their tuning cos it would pinch down too hard.

i saw 'my kid could paint that' at doc today, which is a documentary about a girl name marla olmstead, who at the age of 4, was selling paintings for 5 figure sums out of a new york city gallery. the main drive of the film was, predictably, whether or not she was in fact a prodigy, just a beneficiary of increasingly crazy definitions for what modern art could be, or in fact part of an elaborate fraud. it was shocking how quickly public opinion turned against this precocious little girl when '60 minutes' essentially claimed that her work could not be her own. while most of the ire was directed at her parents, it's almost as if it just took one person (albeit a relatively authoritative source) to throw the first stone, before her entire family became subject to a broad swathe of attack.

i suppose the point is really about fault lines. the idea that cracks lie on the facade of every good thing, which when exposed, leads to much more fault finding. like a scab that you start picking at only to have more of it get pulled up away from your skin, and hence open to another round of picking. what you are left with is a wound not properly healed. better to let everything just fall apart at once and be left with a clean start.

and here i am wondering whether i've been given that. it's hard to tell yourself what to feel when you are resistant to it. so here i am, almost 2 days after the debacle that was friday, and i'm still left with an odd feeling at the pit of my stomach. i tell myself maybe i'm falling ill, but i'm quite immune to self-deception by now.

oh fucking hell it was awful. the only good thing that can come from that is just how impossible it has become to go back to where we were. what is there left to say? "i'm sorry but i get it now"? it's so strange how quickly we went from dinner at the med to my inability now to even contemplate looking her in the eyes ever again. how could i even contemplate a reconciliation?

i'm just afraid of what i might say if she tried to make things better. my well-being probably demands that i ignore any gesture, but i'm not sure whether i'll have it in me. i am so prone to stupidity now. i remember at the start of this entire sequence of events, i told myself that i would eventually look back on this fondly. now i'm not sure how i could.

it's so easy to lose friends when you're trying and fate seems to oblige so cruelly. if only fate would come to my aid in happier times. my consolation though: the lake looked really beautiful today. the water was azure blue, like you would see in television ads for caribbean vacations. there was a low, thick layer of clouds just drifting lazily above, reflecting the blue hue of the lake water to in turn become a dark blue on their undersides. the water was calm by recent trends. but in the time it took for me to finish writing all the above, it became overcast, and it's now merely intimidating.