For an arch-enemy, he bobs and weaves a lot when it comes to conflict. But make no mistake, he is my arch-enemy.

When first I met Journalman, I was 20, in my first of two junior years at college. He was 18, and played in a band with a girl who quickly became one of my best friends. They had brought the band up to college from their small-town high school to the south. He had also dated another good friend of ours, an impossibly beautiful, not quite so impossibly innocent girl. They had traumatized one another in that high school way.

He was an arrogant little prick.

He was actually just a Journalboy, really.

I was dating another arrogant prick, this one a few years my senior. They are both Aquarians. In a way, my relationship with Journalboy/Journalman can be seen as a study in the gender differences in astrology.

But more on that another time.

My boyfriend was a mechanical engineering major from the panhandle of Florida. I’m from Long Island. He cooked three-course meals for us nearly every evening, almost always requiring at least two sticks of butter, and drank two quarts of malt liquor before going to bed each night. We’ll call him the Hillbilly Gourmet.

Shortly after meeting Journalboy, my relationship with the Hillbilly Gourmet began to crumble. We’d been dating for almost two years, and our affair taught me the first of many valuable lessons in my study of the relationship arts: that the more fantastic the romance is (and I mean fantastic in the sense that means “of the realm of fantasy”), the bigger and fatter the hamfist of reality’s going to hit you one day.

One day I realized that the fact that he’d scared all of my friends away did not mean that our love was one like no other; it just meant that he was a frightened, psychologically abusive little fuck. Or, as I wrote in my diary at the time, “possession’s so erotic, except when you try to leave the house.”

One day, as I was walking across the fine arts quad at school, I saw Journalboy sitting with his acoustic guitar. I don’t recall how it happened, but he started to play for me. He played “Birthday Boy,” by Ween. Now, the fact that he’d played a Ween song was no great shakes. They were big money college rock at the time, and they were coming to town very soon.

But that song. It’s on an album that the Hillbilly Gourmet and I had discovered together, in that way that only a couple in love can discover an album together. We bought it together, and heard it together for the first time. We figured out what some of the stuff meant together, and laughed till we cried about the stupider songs. But “Birthday Boy” is not a stupid song.

“The last time I saw you, I was holding your hand/ and I couldn’t wait for you to leave/ I knew right then that it was over and done/ and I couldn’t believe that I was free/ Help me now, I’m going down/ and I don’t know if I’ll be OK/ I’ll be around/ I’ll be in town/ if you need a place to stay.”

Such simple words to describe exactly what I was feeling at the very moment that Journalboy played that song for me. I am not ashamed to admit that this exact moment was one of two things that crystallized for me my need to be free from the Hillbilly Gourmet. What I am a little ashamed to admit, however, is that the other thing was the movie Singles.

Gimme a break -- I was a 20-year-old girl, and Bridget Fonda was just so darned human.

I would be 21 before I fully extricated myself from the H.G. In between the time when I made the decision, and the time we actually split, I moved out and started smoking pot again. Just before we actually broke up, I got the chance to interview Ween for the radio station. Journalboy asked me if he could ride down to the concert with the H.G. and I. I told him that we were leaving very early, so that I could do an interview. He said he didn’t mind leaving early; I suspected immediately that he’d somehow managed to weasel himself backstage with us, but I coalesced. He promised he’d be quiet.

In case you’re wondering, I did not at any point see Journalboy as a white knight sent from Storybook Farms to save me. My relationship with the H.G. had effectively blocked my own personal entrance to that ephemeral place. I was all young feminist angst and newly hatched independent spirit at this point. Sure, of course, I would have fucked Journalboy, in the blinking of an unadorned lash. But I fucked a lot of people back then, mascara-wearing or not. That would have just been a petty release. He was just peripheral, as he has somehow remained, changing the wind around me, making my life more interesting in subtle and unconscious ways.

This does not sit well with me.

I like control.

Meanwhile, back in the past -- we arrived backstage with a Styrofoam container full of fried alligator. Ween used to always ask for people to bring them ffood and, at the time, I was working at a seafood restaurant, and I was right on in my assumption that they’d never had gator. Dean Ween was stoned and unfriendly, but Gene was great. He got flustered when I asked him how he could write such goofy songs, and then come up with something as lovely as “Birthday Boy.” Journalboy and the Hillbilly Gourmet politely kept quiet.

At the end of the show (during which someone passed the band a nitrous-filled balloon, and a couple in front of me practically conceived a child during “LLMLYP”), Gene came out alone with his acoustic guitar and did “Birthday Boy.”

I guess he may have been working my action. I’ll never know, because I had to drive some Aquarian ass home. As I recall, the three of us hardly spoke at all in the ride back to Journalboy's dorm.

As I think about it now, it confounds me that Journalboy is still in my life. After the H.G. and I split, problems arose in the ranks of Journalboy’s band. The feelings between he and my friend became increasingly ugly and, for the first time in my life -- I honestly believe this -- I allowed myself to actively despise someone. I had always been too unsure of myself to try to mmake anyone else feel uncomfortable. But I unleashed that demon on Journalboy, heckling him at his shows, talking shit about him to my slightly older, and therefore more socially entrenched friends.

It wasn’t that hard. Like I said, he was an arrogant little prick.

Recently, during the first of our many truces, Journalboy told me that he blamed me, at least partially for a reputation he was still trying to live down.

As if I could have known there was a person under there. I'll get you, my pretty, and your Commonplace, too