So guess who I heard from last week, just completely out of the blue? Why, none other than Ellen, a woman who sorta suddenly first came into my life about half a decade ago and caused a lot of havoc back then, and who I haven't heard from in years and years. A little backstory, for those who need it...

Most of you know of course that I used to be active in the US poetry-slam community, and that this included regular performances and tours in other US cities. (It was these trips, in fact, that eventually inspired the annual international trips I now go on.) And my domestic touring back then included not only brand-new destinations but also a number of visits to my alma mater, the University of Missouri at Columbia, including two performances in 1997, one in 2000, and one in 2002. And it's always a surreal thing to go visit your old college campus again, of course, but especially surreal in my case, because: 1) I spent eight years there as an undergraduate, so have both all these good and bad memories wrapped up about the place; and 2) it is of course always a quite different thing to be there as the semi-famous touring writer instead of the undergraduate schmuck, and this also flavors what kinds of experiences you have while physically in town.

And I have indeed had surreal experiences each time I've visited Mizzou as an alum, including getting taken to a post-bar party at an apartment where I used to live, and which still had furniture that I owned as an undergraduate; and having a petting session inside the dome of the administration building, a sorta fabled off-limits area of campus where members of secret societies have been signing their names since the early 1800s; and getting fired from a Chicago job via telephone in the middle of one of these trips; and it just goes on and on. And yet another one of these surreal experiences was during my 2000 visit, when I was introduced to this student named Ellen who was a mutual friend of the person I was staying with (who was in fact my old buddy Wade, who lives in Los Angeles now and has visited me in Chicago several times since).

I don't remember a lot of the details about the weekend, frankly, because of all the years that have passed and all the drugs I was on while there; but I'll always remember how overwhelmed I felt by Ellen when I first met her, of this bubbly and sexy and intelligent and extroverted cutie who for some reason wanted to spend all this time with me while I was there. And so I just sort of fell for Ellen in this hard way because of it; and I remember, for example, asking her to marry me at some point in the weekend and actually being half-serious about it. And then we communicated a couple of times by email and phone, and met up for a meal once in St. Louis during one of my holidays down there, and then in typical fashion for those situations just eventually lost touch with each other, to the point that four or five years had gone by and I hadn't heard anything about her situation.

So now it turns out that she just recently moved to Chicago herself, to attend massage school and to simply get the fuck out of St. Louis, where she had been living; and she's over on the west side right now, staying with an old friend until she can get her own place, and working at a club in River North and making her first adjustments into Life In The Big City. And so she dropped me a line out of the blue the other day, and asked if I wanted to get together soon; and after some email tag we finally found a free afternoon, last Friday in fact, and we ended up hanging out for three or four hours and just shooting the shit again.

It was certainly a trip to see Ellen again, to be sure, because all those things that I loved so much about her in the first place are still there - she's still just as bubbly and outgoing, still as sexy (and even more so, actually, for reasons I'll get into in a bit), still as intelligent. But my own thoughts, however, regarding dating and attraction and the opposite sex, have changed so much in the last five years, that I'm now perceiving all these traits of Ellen in a different way, and thinking about her in a different way. Because let's face facts - like a whole lot of other people, when I was younger I had more problems succinctly determining what I wanted from relationships than I do now. I can't deny, for example, that I am just biologically one of those people who fall for others really easily, and really hard - that I love the concept of love, if not love itself, and can become quite infatuated with others who exhibit traits I find lovely.

What has changed quite a bit, though, is how I deal with such infatuations, even though I still get them just as often as I ever did. Decades of dating teaches one an important lesson, which is that dating is hard, and sometimes not appropriate in certain situations; better maybe in some cases to just remain close friends with someone, especially with just that extra bit of intimacy that comes with both of you knowing that you're attracted to the other. When I was younger I used to mistake that strong reaction I can have to certain people with a decision that it'd be a good idea to try to date that person, when often that wasn't the case - when we had too conflicting of personalities, or were in clashing points in our lives, or sometimes weren't actually looking for a relationship at all, but tricked ourselves into thinking we wanted one. And I'm at an age and point of maturity in my life where I see this subject in a different way now, a more complex one that acknowledges the power of strong emotional reactions but separates it from the automatic association with romance.

Not to mention that I was a more lovesick person when I first met Ellen five years ago; it had been almost a decade, after all, since I had been in a long-term relationship, and I was feeling awfully forlorn about it quite a bit back then. Frankly, it had been so long that I often wondered if I even had the capabilities as an adult to actually be in a long-term relationship again; if I possessed the mature sense of discipline, compromise, patience and other skills necessary for a monogamous romantic affair. And so this was also part of how I interacted with women back then as well, with a lot of pining over love and a lot of wondering if she could be The One or if she could be The One, etc.

Then, of course, W. came into my life, who I did end up dating for a year in 2001 and 2002. And sure, that relationship ended rather messily, but our year together did definitively prove that I had what it takes as an adult to be in a long-term romantic situation. (In fact, I discovered that I have infinite more patience for my partner's mistakes than I would've ever guessed I have.) And just that knowledge was enough to significantly drop my pining for a long-term relationship; and then of course I actually went through one for a year, and was reminded of how much goddamn fucking work and compromise and headaches and frustrations and arguments actually go into one, and why I went so long last time before getting into one again. So I'm in no hurry to get back into something serious with a person again, frankly; and I'm feeling very happy about that decision, and am in no mood to change that anytime soon.

And then of course has been this tricky realization I've made over the last several years - that what I had mistaken for romantic pining in my youth was often in fact a simple sense of horniness. And this is always such an awful mistake to make, and one so many of us do in our youth, because suddenly it's six weeks later, after you've had all this sex in every damn position you can think of, and you're suddenly no longer horny and realize that you don't really want to put in the work necessary to have a romantic relationship with this person. And in some cases you then leave this poor partner there, who had been thinking this whole time that they actually were getting into something serious and long-term. And so ever since writing Slut Summer in 2002, I've had a new attitude about all of this as well; I'm better now at differentiating romantic feelings from horniness, and now in those situations specifically seek casual partners who are in the same frame of mind, so that we can simply have six weeks of unbelievably mindblowing sex and then say goodbye at the end and stay friends.

So all of these things influence how I see Ellen now, five years after I spent time with her in the first place. And then there's this really weird thing, that in the years since we've seen each other, Ellen has picked up the facial features and haircut that now make her the spitting image of my ex W. And so that's kind of freaky, looking at this woman and in some situations it being so uncanny, but then Ellen actually acting in almost the exact opposite way than my ex does - so effusive, so outgoing, so chatty, with all these subtle signs in her conversation of just how much this woman reads and thinks about the world. And that's good, frankly, because it allows Ellen to firmly be her own unique person in my mind while I'm hanging out with her, instead of a reflection of my ex.

It's my hope that Ellen and I get to spend time together regularly this winter; she did just move here, after all, and is going through some of the freakouts I did when moving here myself in 1994, and it's certainly true that I'm in need of friends these days, and would love having someone around who I could simply shoot the shit with regularly. So we'll see, I guess, if something like that pans out, and I'll continue to get a chance to spend time with her. It's certainly an entirely unexpected situation, to be sure, and one I'm very glad has happened. And time will tell the rest, I guess.

And some random notes, while I'm here...

--Here's some cool news - the city has decided to give Wabash in the Loop a complete makeover, including installing a bunch of neon lights actually inside the girders of the overhead el tracks, constructing self-irrigating planters all the way down the street, and redoing the entrances of all the train stops. And this of course will then match the overhaul of State Street the city has done over the past decade, back into a busy shopping area full of young, hip stores; and the revitalization of the north Loop back into a theatre district again, and all the bars and restaurants that come with such a thing; and the rezoning of the Loop so that people can now live in it, which has brought a plethora of new condo constructions in the last year and is rapidly changing the entire look of downtown.

So I'm all for this overhaul of Wabash, and could actually see it (if done right) being a perfect place for a whole new string of cool hipster bars and clubs, for providing entertainment for all those new people moving into all those new condos. And man, I know it's way out of my price league, but how cool would it be to snag a space down in such an overhaul for the arts center I'm trying to open? A Loop address, and a 312 phone number, and all that extra money and attention from the tourist audience (and finally, something slightly underground and cool for tourists to do in the Loop while on vacation), etc etc. I wouldn't need a big space, just 1,200 feet or so, but I know already that such a space in the Loop would be just so much more ridiculously expensive than I could afford. Sigh!

--"TONIGHT! On a very special LAW & ORDER! There's a GUNFIGHT! In a COURTROOM! During a NAZI TRIAL!!!" Can you TELL it's SWEEPS month again in AMERICA?!

--Attention, old Mizzou chums - yet another old Mizzou chum has tracked me down recently. Why, it's Shara Packman, in fact, who's now in North Carolina and teaching Classics in this very interesting magnet-school-type situation. And here's her blog, if you feel like dropping her a line and saying hi. This all reminds me, by the way, that I've been threatening for years to put together a sorta 'alterna-reunion' for Mizzou artists and slackers at one of these upcoming Homecoming weekends soon. I just thought that would always be fun, to put a reunion together based on focal points that don't usually receive attention from an alumni association - the local indie-rock bar (like Shattered in our case), the local record store (Streetside), the local pizza place (Shakespeare's), the college radio station (KCOU). I still think it'd be fun to organize such a reunion weekend, and I don't think it would take too terribly much work - just set up a blog, sign people up as contributors as they contact you, have them post entries about what they're doing now and whether they'll be attending.

Then get all those Mizzou alterna-alums to spread the word about the blog to the 20 or 30 old college people they know, which hopefully wouldn't overlap too badly and eventually get out to a whole bunch of people; and then of course you could contact the radio station's current staff, for example, about putting up reunion people who are too broke for hotels, or don't want to bother, or want to spend the weekend hanging out with current undergraduates, etc. In fact, if KCOU was smart about it, they'd put together a whole weekend of events for these alum, and hit them up for money the whole time, seeing how many of them now have good-paying corporate jobs, lots of connections in the music and media industries, etc. So, you know, maybe 2006? I'm still thinking about it!

--Did I tell you, by the way, that I finally found out who wrote the "Evan Chan" 2001 murder-mystery online game? This was one of the first and most complex viral campaigns on the web, designed to promote Spielberg's movie A.I.; it was just hugely complicated, and inspired this giant collective fan club who tried to solve it together, which the creators found out about and starting fucking with during the game, etc. Anyway, it was Sean Stewart, a mid-career science-fiction author, who was behind the game's grand design, which confirms my suspicion that someone with a narrative background (like a novelist) was behind it. And hell, if Sean Stewart can get a job writing some grandly complicated videogame plot, I can get a job writing a grandly complicated videogame plot. So more on this later, but for now I'm officially hanging my shingle and looking for business, in the world of viral-campaign and videogame writing. Please drop me a line if you're at an agency and want to know more!