NOTE: As I mentally deconstruct the demise of my marriage, I am publishing a series of short essays about things that happened, the way I felt, and so on. It's intended to illustrate my mental state at the time, and provide a kind of chronicle of my emotional state, hopefully helping me not make the same mistakes in future relationships.

Originally, I didn't wanna write more than nine of these -- I felt that was a good solid number, one that had popped up in my life with Yuri many times, and about as much blathering on about myself as I felt comfortable doing. Since then, with the encouragement of some really wonderful women who've stood by me (thank you Marsha and Ana), I've relented and decided to keep writing these pieces until the energy is gone.

5/19/03 4:30 PM:

Thursday night, I left karaoke in Santa Monica early, because the Lakers getting knocked out of the playoffs cast a pall over the only person I knew. I wandered down Crenshaw instead of taking Western off the 10 freeway and pulled in front of Project Blowed, the hip hop educational workshop where I spent three years, working the door and generally trying to organize some of the confusion.

I got the idea I should swing by after running into Trey Lowk, an "OG" from the underground hip hop scene here in LA. I never thought he paid much attention to me, but when we bumped into one another at an after hours spot called the Kotton Club, he seemed really happy to see me. "You should swing by the Blowed," he told me, "because you're family, you helped start that."

I honestly believed most of the people at the Blowed hated my guts because I was a smart college kid who had options and never wanted to smoke weed, but as time goes on I am finding I was held in higher regard than the nonchalant attitudes would imply. So I found myself pulling my white Monte Carlo into a parking space, leaning my fedora forward on my head and wading into a sea of bodies, most concentrated in circles, all concentrated on rhymes.

I ran into a lot of people I knew -- Trey, this really cool brother Orah, some of the Hip Hop Kclan, Riddlore, Aceyalone, and of course the owner of the spot, Ben Caldwell. What stood out to me so much was how little things seemed to have changed in the decade-plus since the Blowed started. If I pulled out Aceyalone's brilliant Capitol Records album All Balls Don't Bounce and held it up next to him just this Thursday night, it the Kangol-style cap and Carheartt sweatshirt would make me think I'd travelled back in time. Orah's headwrap, Ben's gray hair crinkled under his canvas baseball cap.

As I drove home about a half hour later (it was mostly teenagers rhyming, and few teenagers are interesting freestyle), I thought about how people really don't change. I mean, I'm more than I was ten years ago, but I still believe the same basic things, i still have the same basic slant towards the world. The only thing that's different is my control over it. That's not a substantive change, but a quantitative one. I talk only when I need to say something, not just to inundate the world with my opinion as I did those many years ago. I wasn't compelled to leap into every "cipher" of rhymers and illustrate my prowess. It doesn't change a single rhyme in my head, nor take away a single word I've thought. The changes in people (for the most part) are changes in degree, not consistency.

When I thought about the lack of change in people I'd known for ten years, as well as the relatively small difference in change in myself, I started thinking about my soon-to-be-ex-wife Yuri. She once accused me of never really dealing with pain, either shunting it off into rage or suppressing it completely. What I didn't notice (because I didn't want to notice, truthfully) was that she'd been doing this "turtle" act with pain her whole life. Growing up, her brother systematically subjected her to psychological and physical torture. Her response? Curl up in a ball and wait for it to be over. Her mother and father fought endlessly, eventually separating. Her response? Hide in drugs and gymnastics. When things got rough for me and I was unable to open myself to her through the frustration I was feeling, her response was to retreat to the front of the house, dive into her garden, and basically run away from me. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Yuri called me out for not opening myself up to her, but she never recognized the ways I did. The fact that I felt enough trust in her to even discuss my dark side, attitudes and concepts that make polite society blush, wasn't discernable to her. She said that having to approach me physically when I raged against the machine was making her jump through hoops, despite her having full knowledge that I reacted that way and needed that kind of response (told her maybe our fourth week together, and periodically after that). She says that I forced her outside of her boundaries, made her break vows she'd made to herself before we met about how much she would let somebody else affect her. She somehow doesn't see that I volunteered to alter myself, beyond my comfort zone, by accepting numerous idiosyncracies (some of which I won't disclose out of respect to her) which would make a less committed brother blanch.

There are people who change -- I had a point (prior to ten years ago) where I changed. There was, however, a mechanism for change -- my rites of passage -- as well as an overwhelming desire for that change. Together, they created the possibility of a new me, a different me. I'm in therapy now, and I want to heal, which holds the promise of an even different and newer me. The people at Project Blowed didn't have a mechanism for change (let alone the desire -- "world famous in Leimert Park" is good enough for many), because western society doesn't exactly install either the mechanism or the desire in us. We have to seek out external mechanisms for change and bring them inside, and we have to want it more than virtually anything else. I've been resting on my laurels far too long, and I'm not as good as I thought I was, so I was unable to change soon enough to save my marriage.

Yuri told me she's going to go to therapy. In the same way she doubts I can stick to a schedule of household maintenance, I doubt she'll submit to such a mechanism of change. Turtling is so comfortable for her, so reflexive, that I can't see her switching from it, not burying herself in work and other people's lives. The problem for me is that the signs were there -- she told me about running from her problems and hiding behind whatever was convenient. I operated under the belief that she'd made a committment to me, which she did not, and that such a committment would overrule her flight response. In that she made a committment to an artificial structure -- "us" -- when it failed her, her flight response seems to have given her an out and all the requisite justifications.

I don't know any of that for a fact, I'm conjecturing based on her responses, but it seems to fit the evidence pretty well.

No, my anger is that I didn't see it coming, that I wasn't a third as smart as I'd sold myself as. The people who've hurt or disappointed or betrayed me were always gonna do so, they practically announce it the day we meet. I just have to get better at listening.