Today I finished entering another journal I found amongst my papers; I’ve been working on this for the past week or so but didn’t want to announce it until I was done.  This is another good one for you Edith historians (ha ha… as if!).  It starts when I first started playing at the Ships Mast open mics with Jeff Ragsdale in 1992, goes into our name-change from "Edith & Jeff" to "Edith & the Marfa Lights" and on through our first few paying gigs.  It begins on 10/12/92; if you want to read the whole thing you can start from there and go forward-forward-forward using the links on the bottom.  It ends on 5/12/93. I started another notebook shortly after that which I already entered awhile back.

When Jeff and I were first playing together, I had just come out of a 10-year relationship and was feeling pretty boy-crazy.  I know y’all think I’m that way ALL the time, and in a way I am, but really there’ve only been a couple of intense boy-crazy phases in my life.  1992 and 1998 I guess.  Anyway, at the time I had a bad crush on Jeff, and I talked a lot about that in this diary I just entered.  We’re still friends now; I had to confess (12 years later!) to be sure he wouldn’t freak out that I’d posted that stuff online.  He was flattered, it wasn’t a problem, so thanks Jeff.  :-) He said he never caught on to the fact that I had feelings for him, because his head was so firmly implanted up his ass (ha ha… his words not mine!).  It’s funny how things work out, but there’s no use going through all those what-if’s at this point.  That was then, this is now.  We’re still friends, and who knows, maybe that wouldn’t be the case if we’d ever dated!

I went straight from that crush into a really really REALLY ill-fated relationship with a guy who I married a couple of years later… he ended up going off his rocker completely and basically chased me out of New York after we broke up.  This notebook goes through the beginning stages of that relationship, when I first met him and we moved in together.  It’s pretty nauseating, I was so head over heels in love with him and really had no clue what a complete monster he’d turn out to be.  It’s painful for me to read that stuff and put myself back in my 1992-shoes.  I really thought he was The One… I wanted to have a baby with him, fer chrissakes.  That was the first and last man I ever felt THAT way about, for sure.  He just never could believe that I really loved him… and I wanted so much to believe it could work out; even when he started railing on me just a few weeks after we met, I didn’t see this as a problem.  I really thought it was my fault or just a misunderstanding; I had no experience in being abused or dealing with a borderline personality.  I’m not saying that to be cruel or out of bitterness; it’s simply the truth.

I’m not revealing his name here by the way — I used to talk about him by name in the early days of my online journal (the word "blog" wasn’t known to me back then) but not anymore, I’m just calling him by his first initial.  I’m keeping his best friend’s name private as well.

I’m smart though, I never let that happen to me again.  Screw that!  The few relationships I’ve had since then (6 months with Mike B.; a year with Ryan; 5 years with John) have all been GOOD and healthy and I’m still friends with all of them even though we’re not "together" anymore.  Why are we not together?  Well, because I believe honesty is the best policy.  I don’t fuck around, literally or figuratively, and I don’t stay in relationships where either party is chronically unhappy.  I learned my lesson the first time I guess.