Tonight, once again, I’m being a rotten girlfriend. D is playing a show at Sky Bar in 20 minutes, but I won’t be there; I’ll be doing somet fairly pointless stuff here at home, listening to Yo La Tengo, enjoying how absorbed I can get in writing, reading, retreating. This pains me — Georgia wouldn’t treat Ira this way, for heaven’s sake — but also feels sort of liberating in a way that probably doesn’t make sense to him, even though he’ll say tomorrow that it’s OK, he had a good time, he doesn’t hold it against me. When I turn it around and imagine my getting up on stage (yeah, right) or putting my creative exploits out there, and my extremely significant other doesn’t bother to show up — yeah. It makes me feel smaller than ever.

I will be there when he plays the Middle East in a couple of Mondays. Even though I wish the band did more of D’s songs (with lyrics that invite reflection and venture beyond the women-are-evil mode, and with melodic structures that I haven’t heard 8 million times), I want them to get asked back to play that room, and who knows, maybe adding one more hand to be stamped will tip the scales.

For now, these occasional evenings of my own are kind of crazy essential. Cohabitating with the mister is straight-up exhilirating, yeah. But. Still I love having the house to myself now and then. Not to mention that I can sit in his comfy desk chair.

However. As much as I keep reminding myself about all the things I’m deep-down-viscera-grateful for, the overarching ugliness has kept hanging out, overstaying its welcome, month over month. Making me miss (oh GOD how I miss) Serzone (that supposed liver-destroyer). Serzone and bupropion together — that was the money mixture. I think I could deal with Serzone’s black-label adverse hepatic events my doctor warned me about, or at least roll the dice and see what might or might not transpire. His substitutive combos and cocktails, the awful narcoleptic Trazodone and ugly Remeron, put me in a coma-like state that, while banishing insomnia and ensuring corpselike sleep, kept on zombifying me during waking hours. I complained. He thinned it down to bupropion only. It’s OK. It’s better than nothing. I’m not knocking it. Just, if only I could salt it with Serzone again — it sounds so lame, so helpless or excuse-making — it was a good chemical, probably the best chemical I’ve yet encountered.

Chanson de cette nuit? Shivaree, “Close My Eyes.”