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Michael considered fate at 03:43   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

A lot of time I'm at a loss for words when I come here, staring at the blank screen and a blinking cursor, but on occasion - and this is rare at best - I have something brewing that is so important that I won't even write about it. It sits in my head festering for days, or weeks even, and it finally comes out in a big glob of a mess onto the screen, like a a baby being burped over someone's shoulder. This is the problem with it: it's usually a mess. Thoughts, spending too much time in my head, tend to get all balled up and twisted and convoluted and by the time it sees the light of day no one can recognize it from a rubics cube and it just sounds like a bunch of nonsense.

Honestly, I'm mostly spewing a bunch of nonsense on here.

But awhile back I took a break from thinking about this one girl I've been thinking an awful lot about for going on a good year and a half now. I had sort of just hit a wall - couldn't extend the scar any farther, it's healing process to a point where there was no scab to pick at anymore. So for a few weeks I left it completely alone in the back of my mind. There it sat and festered. This is what I call brewing. A nice dark roast that's slowly percolated and drips down into a deeo dark concentrated form. Just add sugar and stir. Bitter, black coffee - like living life, it gives you the jitters and makes your eyes wide open to the world.

She was bitter black coffee to me for an entire half a year.

It all started honestly enough when I met her in a bar in a small town in Maine called Portland. It's actually the biggest town in Maine at 65,000 but to give most folks a good idea of what we're dealing with I can't call it a city really. It's more like a backwater of civilization - running water, rock shows, and some crazy bars but still out of the way enough that the darker seeds of America have not shown up and ruined it yet. Portland is sort of like your little nephew - younger, more sweetly niave, but geniunely curious about the world. And here it was in this town, of all towns (and to sound a bit cliche, of all the gin joints in all the world..) that I would set eyes on this creature of tantilizing aura, so delicious a buffet of visual delights as I cannot even describe to you. Flashing a smile that was a real geniune smile, as I stood there at the end of the bar, waiting in light right after her.. watching her get her gin and tonic, stir.. sip.. smile. Ahh..

It was one of those moments - a moment that happens a million times in a million bars a million times a day I suppose, I'm just too niave or hopeful to believe it. Even still, I never expected to actually talk to her.. but I did, as it happened. We talked for quite awhile and then strolled through the cobblestoned streets in the twinkling darkness of an August evening. We drank PBR out of a pitcher and smiled and somewhere during this time is when I figured out why art is so beautiful and why we, as humans, will always try to create more of it. It's the closest we can come to describing these character defining moments without literally bleeding on the canvas.

And for six months I felt like a walking piece of art, as troubled and turmoiled as I might have been. There were times when I couldn't catch my own tail, running around in circles confused as a young and overbred yellow lab. But somehow, regardless of all the retardedness on my part, I amazed myself over and over again with the sort of person I could be. Fuck, I was hypnotized.

For me it wasn't about turning on the charm but about turning on the integrity and being a person I knew I could be, but just never had a need for before. When the shit really hit the fan the first time - when I fucked up and said something retarded like "It doesn't even bother me that we haven't had sex yet" - I knew I'd fucked up before the words even left my mouth. I realized there was no way that I could truly explain something like that - how do you tell someone that you, after getting completely drunk with them at a beer festival (to which you scammed extra tickets for her friend weeks before, just so she could come because you knew she'd end up wanting to go in the end) and being so retardedly drunk that you danced in the parking lot with the car doors open and classic rock playing on the stereo - how do you tell someone that when they came up to bed with you and fell asleep in your arms as you stared at the ceiling with the stupidest grin on your face as you've ever had in your life - how do you tell that person that the experience was so unearthly that you honestly didn't think about sex even once the entire night - how do you tell someone this without sounding exactly like you were thinking about sex the whole night?? Can't be done.

Retardedly, I tried. It suffered in the translation like my posts do when I'm trying to puke up a furball of a theory about how to tell my asshole from my elbow.

This is significant for two reasons. For one, I actually wanted in my heart of hearts to treat this person with the utmost respect and dignity that I could muster, and that two, I thought that being my absolute complete self - as opposed to some posturing, self-assured, or otherwise gesturing asshole - was the better choice for once. These are positive changes to make, I think. The sort of growth from young adulthood to true philosopher that somehow never comes across in the literature like you would think it would.. once you've experienced it for yourself. All of a sudden, out of the blue, I was my own role model.

This can't be a bad thing. I started running in ernest, going to the gym, and remembering to brush my teeth twice a day. I cut back on coffee and spent more quiet nights reading at home. I started remembering, caring about, and looking forward to other people's birthdays and anniversaries. I cooked myself fresh vegetables. I ate tons of fruit. And somehow, during all of this, I remembered to party hard and often and I felt as good as I've ever felt, perhaps.

If I had it to do over again I would, of course, but that doesn't stop me from cursing bad 80's movies with matthew broderick or john cusack every once in awhile. The kind where the nice guy always gets the girl in the end, the jock finds himself, and the nerdy guy gets a friend. In my worse moments I curse them for their incredible hypocrisy, writing a movie with a ludicrous ending that would never happen in real life - but in the end I'm just whining. It's all the art we can muster: slightly better, more interesting, more fantastic, and more beautiful than real life because that's what we want to leave behind. The fantasy. The epitaph that says "Holy shit, when I was living life, man, I lived life and goddamnit did the earth glow radiantly".

Well I don't know how great it really was because a lot of it blurred together it went so fast. Long dinners, rock shows, and russian ballet.. Folk music festivals, dancing, and beer expos.. homemade pea soup and tea on the couch and card games at the bar.. and the best chocolate brownies I've had in years, delivered freshly baked and still warm. Maybe I remember things a little better than they really were and it's just the nostalgia talking, or maybe, just maybe, the earth really did glow radiantly that fall.

Who knows. Right now I'm still waiting for history to rewrite itself.