I hadn't yet told HORSE GIRL my saga of romantic anxiety with THE LITTLE RED-HAIRED GIRL (TLRHG)

To recap: the whole twist to my situation with TLRHG has been her relationship with her real boyfriend in the face of whatever bond her and I share. I have laid in wait for her to break things off with him for what seems like years, for my much-deserved chance at her love.

Since she came back a few months ago from an extended trip abroad, I pushed the whole thing out of my mind. She calls quite a bit and we have hung out, but I am reserved with her. Especially since meeting HORSE GIRL, and realizing that romance isn't synonymous with useless (though oddly stimulating) drama, it has been easy for me to withhold the outpouring of affection which had previously felt so natural for me to inflict upon the TLRHG.

When we've hung out in recent weeks she often questioningly declares, "I feel like something's wrong?" I explained that the way I used to treat her pained and drained me.

She said she missed the way I used to treat her.

Days later we went to a yoga class together. I stared at her a lot when she wasn't looking, but for the most part I was stoic. Before dropping me off at my truck, where we met up before going to yoga, she announced she had finally broken up with her boyfriend: the event I had yearned and pined and even cried for. Her bumbled attempts to tell me how she felt about the situation in regards to me were a dramatic, feminine, endearing mess.

When she drove away, I sat in my car for 10 or 15 minutes, sobbing and inexplicably asking god (whom I rarely ask shit of) why he or she would time things so poorly, so dramatically. But actually, I understood: this would determine whether I followed the path of wisdom and realism through life, or the path of capricious idealism, as I always have. God was giving me a chance to either do something good for myself or live out a romantic fantasy that may or may not be worth anything save a frivolous bolt of intense electricity that would inevitably leave me scorched.

I was incapacitated with confusion for the next few days and felt close to resentful for her even telling me she'd broken up with her boyfriend. I wished I didn't know. I wanted to talk to HORSE GIRL about it, but couldn't bring myself to. I didn't want to seem like I was toying with her, or that I was flaky.

Dramatic days later, I was still confused, but felt very good about being committed to HORSE GIRL and ceased worrying about TLRHG.

In correspondences with my dramatic confidant, KAROLINA, I detailed my trials and told her how much I adored HORSE GIRL. A few days after TLRHG's announcement, I wrote to Karolina, and expounded on my situation and my conclusion. The last words of the letter read: "I have no idea what's going on in my heart, my head or my life; but I'm happy and at least I'm not pining for THE LITTLE RED-HAIRED GIRL any more."

And then I accidentally sent it HORSE GIRL.

Like a stupid motherfucker. Like a stupid, stupid, dumbass.

The letter wasn't incriminating, but it was not the way I wanted her to first hear of TLRHG. I wanted to lay in bed and talk mutually about what we may have gone through before we met: "There was this wonderful woman I was so in love with…" I wanted to say, while laying on my back with her under the cool stroke of a ceiling fan. But instead the situation is thrust on her roughly and impersonally by Microsoft.

HORSE GIRL was not very upset, but she was concerned at what she thought was an expression of my apathy toward our relationship. I tried to explain to her that I meant it more as an expression of freedom.

We cleared it up. But I've come away with the belief that god, or the devil, or Mother Nature, or whoever controls the patterns of the universe, is a mischievous cunt. And it endears him/her to me even more: I have a lot of respect for a good prank.

God, wherever you are: good one, dude.

But I feel especially resolute in my decision as of this weekend:

FRIDAY July 28: There's a strange phenomenon that goes with becoming close to someone very fast; moments of awkwardness, misunderstanding or frustration that force you to notice how you don't really know each other. We'd talked about that a lot that week and planned to paint and talk late into that Friday evening, out on her farm, where it is so quiet that if you hold your breath you can hear an approaching car's radio from miles away. The night sky is overwhelming in Lithia, as it should be everywhere, but isn't. The starry sky in Lithia looks like a piece of black cheesecloth in front of a 100 watt lightbulb.

HORSE GIRL took off her clothes, we got so stoned we couldn't talk, and I painted her in the blessed silence of Bum-fuck Florida and our drug-dulled brains. On HORSE GIRL'S farm, everything is different from what I'm used to: it's comfortable and relaxing. It feels like a vacation.

SATURDAY July 29: I planned to accomplish plenty on Saturday, but when we woke up, HORSE GIRL and I wanted mushrooms. One of the hazards and benefits of hanging out in the country is that mushrooms are always an option. If I lived out in the country I would blow my mind on them every day of every muggy Florida summer.

After washing her father's car, we persuaded her brother to take us into one of the many cow pastures in the surrounding area. HORSE GIRL and I were to drive in her car, separately from her brother, and leave for Tampa directly from the fields, while HORSE GIRL'S BROTHER returned to the farm to do chores.

Before leaving for the fields, the three of us stood in the kitchen next to an entire room full of bottled water left over from the ill-conceived Y2K drama, and said goodbye to their parents. Their parents asked questions.

"Where are you guys going?" asked their mom, reading at the breakfast with dad. I'd seen dad sitting around their house in his ball cap often but he had yet to recognize my presence, I'd never heard him talk. When they asked us questions, silence was our answer.

The three of us, the future trippers of America, fought hard not to reflexively look to each other's eyes for support, but we couldn't muster up an answer to their question for several pregnant seconds, so she asked again, "So…where are you guys going?"

"To hell if we're not careful." stalled HORSE GIRL'S BROTHER.

Looking like she might hit her brother, HORSE GIRL finally spouted with authority, "We're going to the store…while we're out we can return those videos for you." It was a good distracting ploy, dragging them away from the suspicious issue at hand. It gave me the feeling that I had picked a good woman who knows how to work a lie.

But if they were my kids, I'd know they were up to something drug related. Their parents are either naïve or trusting: they bought the whole slowly-formed, weak fabrication, even when they couldn't figure out why in the world we were taking separate cars to the store.

I hadn't actually gone out and picked mushrooms for several years, as I'm afraid of being shot in the ass with a rifle full of rock-salt, or having to ask my parents to bail me out when I'm arrested for trespassing at the age of 26. My hairline is more receded than my father's, but I have fought for them to treat me like a grown-up for years. Being arrested for picking mushrooms would set my cause back decades, so I usually just buy mushrooms from the hippies.

But out in the vast countryside, on all those lost acres, the odds are against getting caught and I trusted that HORSE GIRL and HER BROTHER knew the land. So, we wound our way through a residential neighborhood, jumped a barbed wire fence and walked with our noses to the cow flop in a small muggy forest.

Picking shrooms reminds me of my childhood, taking live seashells on Sanibel Island, except that, in the case of mushroom hunting, I'm only harming myself, as opposed to murdering hundreds of helpless sea creatures. Part of the fun of mushrooms, aside from the glee of the impending kook-out, is the hunt: I can't help but exclaim when I find a remarkably big shroom sticking from a pile of dry cow dung.

This sounds pathetic, but it gets better.

We came away with almost a pound of mushrooms and after preparing a lunch of garlic and yogurt baked fish with avocados and cottage cheese for myself and HORSE GIRL, we boiled the mushrooms into a viscous, vomitous tea, saving a little bag of caps in the freezer for another day.

Mushroom tea is a cow shit milkshake. It is a glass of saliva and topsoil. We mixed ours with iced tea and sugar, drank almost a pint each (still leaving us with almost a gallon) and headed to north Tampa to raid some of the private swimming pools at the apartment complexes in the student ghetto near USF.

Before we even got in the car I was sweating and on edge and feeling awkward with the initial rush. But during the ride, I leveled myself out by focusing on the future: the pool. Water saves me. It was fucking hot outside and the pool's comfort and lack of gravity would be a near utopian experience under the mushroom spell. We arrived and reveled in the unnatural-blue beauty of the pool. Then I realized I had left my shorts at home, miles away and the increasing intensity of mushrooms threatened to keep us from driving again for a few hours.

HORSE GIRL was wearing a pair of shorts I'd given her and she offered to give them back to me and swim in her overalls (she has over a dozen pairs of overalls in her wardrobe). I may have actually bullied her into giving me the shorts, but I couldn't tell if I was being pushy or merely self-conscious in the wake of the tea.

It was only HORSE GIRL and I at the pool, but still, when we found the bathrooms were locked, modest-me hid around a corner to change. HORSE GIRL laughed at my reservations about changing around her, but the pool is also located on a major Tampa highway and I didn't want to blind any of those drivers with the white of my ass, and cause them to swerve into on coming traffic. Especially since an incident like that would probably be written about in THE PAPER and I'd have to deal with my co-workers laughing at me for weeks about my being a "blinding ass" or something.

Changing in the bushes was difficult as my vision vibrated like an earthquake and I couldn't figure out how to get my white and pink legs, with their strange, orange leg hair, into the big holes in the shorts. As I fumbled, very cautious not to expose myself to the road, I noticed my cloud-white ass was peaking around a corner; exposed to an area of the apartment complex I hadn't taken into account: children and mothers with strollers were taking weekend walks. I stumbled frantically in the mass of my shorts and somehow got them up and on and into the pool where HORSE GIRL and I enacted some kind of making-out water ballet for the next hour or so, before returning to my apartment in Seminole Heights.

At home we rolled around and played music and drew. Around 8 p.m. we got a six pack and sat in the THE FRIENDSHIP GARDEN, staring at the storm brewing through the thick trees which encircle the garden and allow us to do illicit things away from those driving by on the street. The storm grew in intensity: there was no rain yet, but a beautiful breeze came in, lightning danced and the Earth rumbled like the sound of a monster truck rally, muted and relaxed by distance. We walked to Hillsborough High School and watched the storm, unobstructed and panoramic, laying on our backs in the middle of the field in front of the giant stained glass windows of the high school.

The storm grew menacing but the breeze felt more and more like a faintly damp caress; a needed break from the unfair heat of the day. Lightning detonated behind imposing clouds, illuminating them for miles. Bare bolts ripped the sky. We felt the guttural growl of thunder in our backs as we lay in the grass.

The huge storm eventually passed without rain and we went back to my apartment and drank more beer and made out for hours until passing out around 3:30 a.m. I awoke on Sunday, feeling golden, but she had already left to go feed her animals in Lithia.

SUNDAY, July 30: Sunday morning I smoked myself into oblivion and set on some chores of my own. When I got in my truck to leave, a long vine, at least three feet long, had crept under my truck and wrapped itself loosely around my break pedal during the night. I had never seen such an aggressive plant and I wondered where it was trying to take my truck.

I needed to buy many things but every store had a horrible line. To avoid the lines, I stole everything I needed: a toothbrush, a computer piece, a book, and a 3yd. by 3yd. piece of fabric. As if stealing wouldn't seem immature to my parents if they had to bail me out. "Well, son," dad might say, "It's a shame you got caught, but everybody steals once in a while."

I returned home from stealing to an email from Paul Tough, former editor of Harper's magazine and current editor of Open Letters, accepting the piece I wrote about my bad ecstasy trip.

Later that evening Paul Tough called me at home to talk about my writing. He was very complimentary and impressed with COMMONPLACE and it made a world of difference in regards to how I feel about my writing. My friends tell me it shouldn't matter who likes my stuff, or if anyone likes it.

But fuck that: it makes me feel very happy and validated. And the happier I get, the more boring my life will become.