the bad place

by A.


Greetings, slackfans. It’s me again, A. The slackmistress talked me into writing another guest slack last night at a coworker’s (L’s) birthday party. Strangely enough, it was the same coworker whose birthday party I wrote about in my very first guest slack. So here I am, exactly three years later, bringing you a very different bit of slacking.

“Will you do me a favor?” asked the slackmistress. “Sure, anything,” I slurred after polishing off my third gimlet. “Will you write me a slack article?” she asked. “You’re kidding, right?” I replied. She wasn’t kidding. And what’s more, she reminded me that I had just agreed to do “anything”, and even under the loosest definition of “anything”, “anything” probably includes writing a slack article.

The slack is not my medium. When I first started dating the slackmistress, she informed me that she had a website, an online journal she’d been running for years, and that if we continued to date I would almost certainly end up with bits of my life spattered across the internet. I was fine with that, but I don’t keep a journal myself and I don’t blog. I have a livejournal account, but I haven’t posted anything in over a year. I felt like airing my grievances with work and life on a public forum was bringing out the worst in me. When I look at my life, it seems like it should be pretty good, and yet somehow all I did on livejournal was bitch.

The slack is not my medium. It’s not my burden to bear. I’m not the one who made a deal with myself to write an article every Sunday. These are all thoughts that went through my head immediately after I realized I’d been duped. Then I started our third argument in as many days. And by argument, I don’t actually mean yelling and screaming. As the slackmistress has mentioned on several occasions, I’m a non-confrontational guy. I consider it one of my greatest strengths and one of my biggest flaws. It’s helped me get through countless messy situations by speaking rationally about what the problems are, but it also stretched what should have been a two year high school relationship into an eight year marriage. I don’t like to rock the boat, but at least I’ve wizened enough with age to realize that sometimes the boat needs rocking. But did this boat need rocking? Why are we arguing again?

It’s been a rough year for the slackmistress. More than even she is likely to let on. She’s gone through two dry staffing seasons, some bad representation, major jaw surgery, braces, a slew of medications with a slew of side-effects, her second three-legged dog died, and she was sued (and emerged victorious, though poorer). The slackmistress today is slackmistress 2.5. She’s a completely different person than she was two years ago, both physically and mentally. And while I’ve tried to stand by her and share the bad times as well as the good, I’ve had nothing but good fortune. I’ve had a third series optioned by Cartoon Network, my current series is doing amazingly well in the ratings and we’ve had more shows ordered with no end currently in sight, we’re finally going to get some merchandising and promotion, and I’ve been to two panels at two different comic book conventions, I have a great house, an amazing dog, and a great girlfriend. So yeah, sometimes I feel bad that the slackmistress hasn’t been in on my good fortune. And I know she does too.

“Pity is not a good thing in a relationship,” she said the night before. We were on the phone and I’d said again that I was sorry she was feeling down because none of the pilots she and J. had been up for had gone. She has a point. Pity is not good for a relationship. Neither does jealousy, I thought but did not say. I’d already put myself in an awkward situation by saying “we’re going to L’s party in a limo around eight if you want to come.” The “we’re” was the sticking word, as it hadn’t included the slackmistress. “I feel like I’m not part of your weekend plans,” she’d said during a second call. “Well, that’s up to you,” I replied, “I want you to come, but you don’t have to.”

Friday and Saturday of this week, the slackmistress was helping a friend who’d just been through some surgery in Bel Air. I knew she’d been feeling a bit down already, and I knew she’d be absolutely burnt out after crawling through hours and hours of L.A. traffic in hundred degree weather. “I’d love to see you at L’s party,” I wrote on a note I left on her chair, “but that doesn’t mean you have to come, or even that it’s a good idea.” But to my surprise she did come. She spent nine hours running around for her friend, drove all the way back, showered, put on makeup, and then drove to the party. That’s hard core.

“Will you write me a slack article?” she asked. “You’re kidding, right?” I replied. She wasn’t kidding. “I was taking care of S. all day and I drove down here to come to the party,” she said. We were surrounded by friends and what seemed like most of LA’s thirty-something gay population, but I began to develop tunnel vision. She’s guilting me into it. “We’re in a bad place,” I said. I felt a tear roll down my cheek. Somehow the birthday party had turned into one of the shittiest moments in recent memory.

It wasn’t long before we excused ourselves from the party (vanished is probably a more appropriate term), and spent the half hour car ride home laying the blame for whatever problems we were having on ourselves instead of each other. Finally, we both had some water and crashed.

As I walked to Toluca Lake to get my car this morning, a thousand questions ran through my head. When does the landscape of a relationship become so alien that you can’t survive there anymore? Is that what’s happening? Am I overreacting? Do all relationships plateau after the first three years, only able to survive beyond that on a diet of apathy and codependency? Is she unhappy because I’m happy? Am I unhappy because she’s unhappy? Is it a coincidence that things started to go sour when we started living together?

My first relationship ever was long term. What should have ended in two years dragged on kicking and screaming for eight and left me nearly destitute living in a one bedroom apartment sleeping next to a mummified turtle. The slackmistress hates it when I mention her and my ex-wife in the same sentence. I’m not sure why, as there really is no comparison. My ex-wife was a parasite who got me to put her through two colleges, buy her a house, a car, and eight years worth of food and living expenses while she watched The People’s Court and scheduled sex with me once every other Saturday, responding to my attempts to better things by threatening suicide. Clearly I’m not stupid enough to put up with that again. The slackmistress is everything my ex wife was not. She’s talented, witty, motivated, funny, sexy, energetic, and genuinely smart.

My biggest issue, my biggest fear, is that she’s throwing it all away. I feel like she was dealt a two and a seven instead of the pair of aces she wanted, so she’s just going to fold and go home. I call bullshit. The slackmistress is better than moping around the house day after day wondering what to do with her life. The screenwriting, dog rescuing, power lifting slackmistress of old would do what she’s got to do. I’m calling you out, slackmistress. It’s time to shit or get off the pot. You say you want to write more, so write more. You’ve got me this Sunday, but next Sunday’s all you.