Mea culpa * with an asterisk

Okay, okay. It was Coyote. In the Conservatory. With a Monkey Wrench. I did it. I skewed the poll. I am a shameless dog. It was indefensible. Give me the chair. (The Chair might not like this idea... ed.)

However, I can't help suspecting that others may have been working, albeit less diligently than I, to load the results also. Perhaps others with sick, voyeuristic fantasies. I'm just sayin'.

And without sinking into whining self-justification too far, I wish to add that this tawdry confession has an asterisk.

I'll resort to the toxicity model. I think we may agree that the Muse's relationship with M had elements of the toxic sort. For that reason, I felt the need to introduce a little further social engineering into our already-suspect results. If a relationship is toxic, it stands to reason that when it ends, one needs time to detox. We speak of strong emotions here. I am baffled that others would advocate trading in one relationship for another right away. It smacks of trying to kick, well, smack, by switching immediately to crack or crystal meth. We'll save the whole methadone debate for another time. What I am saying, people, is that even if you hop from one drug to another in an effort to avoid the withdrawal symptoms -- in my books, necessary withdrawal symptoms -- the cumulative emotional/psychic payback when you finally hit the wall and have to stop is going to be overwhelming.

Like so many other things, you can do this when you're a dumb yet resilient teenager. But as you get older, there are things you just don't want to get into anymore. They hurt too much, for too little gain.

What the Muse is doing right now -- assuming the Dude thing stays strictly platonic, as advertised -- is getting her head back on straight after a life-altering experience. Takes time, people. Takes time. And sometimes the things that one most ardently seeks -- say, a satisfactory relationship -- come most naturally when one finally stops looking so darn hard for 'em. It is essential to lose that underlying anxiety that drives one to overvalue lousy relationships as if they were actually worth something, and so lose other, better potentials. Try to force the process, and you're back on that badbadbad mainline. I speak not just of relationships, but of whole lives.

Of course, there's always the question of whether I actually know what I'm talking about. We coyotes are notoriously unreliable narrators.