July 19, 2002 | 12:39 AM

This has been such a strange surreal evening.

This has been such a strange surreal day.

This has been such a strange surreal week.

Month.

Year.

Decade.

Life.

I ran into Alex today at a Store 24.

I suppose it�s nothing but fitting considering how life just goes around and round in circles now.

Alex was barefoot and fat and had a bald spot. He looked so much older than the last time I saw him. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin was ruddy and burnt from the sun.

He looked lost. He looked like life had destroyed him. There was a blankness in his face that cut me up.

And as much as I hated the fucker, and feared for my life at his hands, I just felt so god damned sorry for him today.

He�s mentally ill and probably not getting the treatment he needs.

When we saw each other we both froze and stared for a long time. Then I turned around and looked the other way, waiting for him to leave, feeling at once terrified that he would cause a scene and so god damned sad that this is what can happen to people.

Life is such a gift and there is so much opportunity to connect and grow and explore and I just don�t understand how everything can get so horribly fucked up, how people can become so lost and grow hateful and violent and sick and just destroy everything�I include myself in that description.

I remember seeing flashes of the kind of person Alex could have been when I first met him. I remember him buying sunflowers and making Penny and I spaghetti.

And when I think about that, it�s always followed by the memory of his fist making contact with her body. I remember the sounds so clearly. Her screaming and him swearing. And the reverberating sickness that ran through me, and the helplessness and guilt of not being able to make it stop. And it hurts so much to remember that. It hurts so much to have to reconcile the image of a smiling Alex filling a vase with sunflowers with that wild eyed monster beating his girlfriend.

When I think about my ex stepfather it�s the same.

My stepdad told me once that as a kid he used to stand it front of the mirror and make up stand up comedy routines, that his big dream was to be on the tonight show.

And that just kills me. I don�t know why. It breaks my fucking heart into pieces when I think about him, just a kid with his whole life ahead of him, telling jokes to nobody. And that he grew up to be this mess who siphoned off of my mother and now leads this sorry desperate existence. I want to go back in time and change whatever it was that happened to make him turn out the way he did.

Anne Frank wrote (and I�m paraphrasing) that she honestly believed despite everything that people were basically good. And I believe that too. And I wish I knew what perverts that goodness and makes us sick and crazy and hurtful to one another when there is so much more available in this world. And I hate that I feel that happening to me, that I feel like I�m becoming twisted and ruined and that I don�t know how to feel good anymore. That I�m suspicious and mean spirited.

I just want to make the goodness come back. I just want it to be all better.