Honest Conversation Is Overrated
Actual Human Interactions Witnessed Or Overheard
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
#1 asks:despite the fact that he frustrates, I think that I've fallen for him what defines "fallen" in your opinion?3:23 AM I'm looking for real responses here not something contrived
When it comes to gravity, I'm stupid. I don't know how or why it works. I've heard things about the moon, and Newton's apple. I've even fallen down stairs just to see if I could hit my head just right enough to figure it all out. But I still don't know anything about gravity, other than, it works. And, of course, I'm going to liken falling in love to gravity. It's an easy analogy. Both can be explained with graphs and equations. Neither make any damned sense to most people. Still, devotees of science and romance claim that they understand them. Both get you through most of your life, while occasionally knocking you on your ass. Both are bitches. I've never really thought of either one of them having definitions. Gravity is serious. It's something that binds you. Falling is an accident that results in gravity. Here's something I've never been completely honest about. Sora. I was turning twenty-nine. I'd been in stupid with Ben for months, and knew that if I didn't get in a relationship soon, I wasn't going to get over him, the way I never really got over Ryan (and I don't mean I was going to kill him, though that thought certainly crossed my mind on a near-daily basis). So all I wanted for my twenty-ninth birthday was to fall in love with someone else. So when I was asked to do a poetry reading on my birthday, I said sure. Why not? Ben was out of town. Celeste had plans. And I tried not to make big deals out of birthdays, so I invited a few friends to my show in Rhode Island, printed up some books, and grabbed the commuter rail to Providence. There, I met up with my friend Cheerio and blah blah, the show happened. And the show went long. Very long. I'd planned a half hour set, including a reading of my first ever "chapbook", a hand scrawled journal I'd written when I was six. Complete with stick figure drawings, and a count of how many Cherry Cokes I'd had to drink (it's a life long vice). When I realized I'd been going for forty-five minutes, I asked how much longer I had, and the host told me to keep going. SO I went. And, at one hour, I stopped. And the host asked me to do one more piece. So I decided to do my hallucinating while waiting tables poem, which involves me wandering around the venue. And, while wandering, I circled around a pole that had been obstructing my view of a certain section of the audience all night. And on the other side of that pole was Sora. He was staring at me. Like, in a creepy way. STARING. At the end of the night, I was selling books, and talking with Cheerio and Zouzou (no relation to Zuzu, they just have the same phonetic name), when Sora approached me. "HI!" "Hi." "This was my first ever poetry reading. My friends told me it would be something I would really like, but I didn't think it would be for me, but I thought you were really really good, and I wanted to buy your books and see if maybe you had another show coming up somewhere that I could go to and see you again." And then he just smiled. "Uhhh. Thanks. Well, I don't have any other show shows for a month or so, but there's a big slam in Boston next Wednesday to decide who will represent Boston at the National Poetry Slam. I'll be in it. And, no matter who wins, it should be a really good show." "Cool." Stare. Smile. "Here's my Myspace profile, could you send me the info? I'd really like to be there." Stare. Smile. "Sure." Stare. Smile. Walk away. "Wow." Zouzou said. "Yea." I said. "He was a little intense." "A little intense?" Cheerio said? "He wants your dick. Often." And because I am completely oblivious, I said "No. He's just really really into poetry, I guess." Zouzou laughed. "Hon, no. That intense little drama student is completely besmitten with you." I shrugged. "I don't know if I could date someone who was majoring in Drama." "I think you're a little old for college students, anyway," Said Cheerio, who had just cursed me more than either of us could ever possibly know. My new friend Mike offered to drive me back to Ben's apartment (I was catsitting Rufus while Ben was in Virginia), and on the way we discussed "the intense drama student", whose name I didn't have, but whose myspace profile, I did. While we were talking, I turned my cell on, and noticed I had a message. "Hey, Adam, it's Ben. I'm still in Virginia. Anyway, I saw this totally awesome pair of shoes down here that would be completely perfect for you. And I know it's your birthday, and all. Happy birthday, by the way. And I was thinking about getting them for you, but they were really expensive, and I didn't know if I could afford them, or if you could afford them, so I decided not to get them, but I wanted to let you know that I was thinking of you. Happy Birthday." And that's why I needed to not be in love with Ben. A really good friend would have bought me the damned shoes. A moderately good friend would have called, regretted that they couldn't really afford the shoes, but would have bought them, and asked to be reimbursed. A really good friend who was completely broke would have never mentioned the shoes at all, and just called to say Happy Birthday. Ben was none of those things. But I had been in love with him. I didn't really like him very much, but I was in love with him. It turned out that the message was very old, because Ben was already at home in Allston, when Mike and I arrived. And we drank a little. Shit was shot. Ben sprawled out on his bed, and craned his neck in a way that someone had told him accentuated his jawline. And I packed up my stuff, said goodbye, and Mike prepared to drive me back to the apartment I shared with Celeste and Sir Trick. And it would have been a long night, sure. It was a bit past midnight, but I could get in bed by say, twosih, on this now early morning after my birthday, except...except...except Mike's car was not at all where he parked it a scant half hour ago. But right above where he had parked it was the number of a tow truck company. A number Mike dialed while scowling at his phone. Now I could tell you that while he dialed, and spoke, I was thinking only of that strange intense little drama student. That my thoughts were pure or dirty or whatever. But I wasn't thinking of the (I still think) hot guy who'd given me his myspace profile because he wanted to come up to Boston and have me do him. I was thinking of Ben, who had been very direct about how he didn't find me attractive, how he didn't love me in any way. I was thinking of him sprawled out on his bed with his head cocked at a funny angle. How he had called to let me know that I wasn't important enough a part of his life for him to get me a birthday present. How much I loved him, and his stupid goddamned chin.
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The problem with jumping out of a plane and into the middle of an ocean is mainly about perspective.
One: I can't gauge how far away the water is from my point of entrance in the sky. I'm wearing a parachute, but not entirely sure that pulling it is going to do me any favors. Two: The ocean is fucken vast. I don't know for certain that I can't swim to the nearest island, jetty, or continent from this middle point, but I'm probably going to wish I'd packed a raft, and possibly some crackers. Three: How exactly did I get to the point of my life where I'm jumping out of planes to begin with? Into an ocean no less? Which ocean? I've got no idea, which further impedes my perspective problems. Four: I can't see the damned coastline. They tell me distance helps with perspective. You don't write about the shit currently going down in your life, you wait a while. Realize that maybe the problem wasn't the person you've been blaming for the past several months, but, perhaps you. YOU may be the problem. And maybe being left crying in your kitchen wasn't a major moment in your life. Maybe it was no more important than that time you were halfway home from the grocery store before you realized you'd forgotten the toothpicks, which were the whole reason you went to the grocery store in the first place. Allow time to remove you from the events and they somehow seem less important. Or at the very least, less dire. Right? Ryan was dead over five years before I started writing about him. Elvis was a couple years gone. Beckee Krackow was a distant memory. And then I started writing about Ben when he was sitting almost directly behind me in the apartment his parents paid for. We began fighting over the way I was portraying him, and grew incredibly distant, which really didn't help either of our perspectives at all. And then Sora happened. And I'm writing about how in love I am with this person I barely know, who moves into my house somewhere around the third date. And do you know what happens next? No you don't. A computer crashes. An account is hacked. A relationship falters. A friendship is ruined. Many, many people have sex. A job intensifies. A family stops speaking to each other. A fuse is blown. And I'm standing on the edge of a tiny little biplane over God knows what ocean, ripcord in hand, trying to figure out when to jump, and which direction to swim in. Knowing that every direction is uphill, and how the fuck do you swim up hill? Very carefully? No. You swim up hill like your knees are bleeding and your feet are made of sharks. You swim up hill like the crest of that wave can launch you past the horizon. You swim up hill like you took lessons, even though you know you're self-taught at best, ignorant at worst, and...is it just me or does everyone I've ever fucked turn out to be emotionally retarded? What does that say about...where did that metaphor go? The problem with perspective is that I delude myself into seeing things a certain way. I'd known Sora less than two months when we were talking about love. He'd lived with me less than two weeks when he said "This is never going to work. We're impossible." And I held him, and told him he was wrong because I knew he was right, but that knowing the truth wasn't going to make either of us feel any better. And do you see how giant Sora and the ocean are in this entry? Enormous, right? It's as though all of these things I'm finally going to write are going to be about our relationship, and how I got to this point where I was too baffled by our lives together to form a coherent sentence to describe it. I stopped blogging. I threw myself into so many men, I stopped naming them. I let all these emotions wash over me without committing them to paper because of Sora and ocean and...really, it's a false perspective. He's not nearly as important to my story as all these strung together sentences would lead you to believe. He's a dot on a horizon that's going to turn out to be driftwood. And I'll cling to him, untl I realize that all this time I've been able keep my head above water and still touch my feet to the ocean floor. I just couldn't see how shallow the water was around me, so focused on finding the shore as I was. Jim, my roommate Byrne, and several other people in the poetry community seem to have the mistaken impression that I hate all Gay People. "And I don't mean you're self-loathing. It's just other Gay People you hate. I mean, if I were to make a pie chart of The Gay Community where the red part was people you hated, and the black part was people you liked, it'd look like a watermelon."
"To be fair," I replied, "the chart would look exactly the same were you to divvy up the straight people I did and didn't like." But it's Pride Week, and most of the people annoying me are Gay. Here's the thing, I don't like PDA, even when it's hot gay guys groping each other and doing the type of kiss that surrenders to Germans. I don't like the huge rainbows, the Madonna karaoke or the horrible fashion shows with clothes designed by people who should never be given scissors within a hundred yards of curtains or bathmats. When I was invited me to read for Coming Out Day, rather than Pride, at a local spoken word venue, I knew the organizer understood me. Ryan and I had a couple of hilarious conversations about how we hated melodramatic gay people. Which made his choice to kill himself rather than come out to his parents all the funnier. Ok, I didn't find it funny at the time, but it makes me giggle now. Ben and I used to riff on hating stereotypical Gays, too. And that was funny because Ben is as stereotypically Gay as you can get without bursting into Flamer (note, I am not calling him a Flamer...he's just sort of sparky). But it was Sora that I really bonded with on the loving homosexual men, and disliking Gays. And while I may joke about not liking Gays because of their fashion sense, their musical taste, their propensity for PDAs, their coifs, their deliberately screechy octavoices, or their gonorrhea; the truth is none of them seem to know how to kiss properly. Trey kisses like a damp sponge being pressed against your lips and slightly squeezed into your mouth. I met him, as I'm sure you're shocked to know, over The Internet. And his kissing was the only thing I could fault him on, but I haven't called him back. Breezy uses his tongue like a woodpecker searching for ants at the back of my throat. I wouldn't have called him back either, but the thing is, he has this great apartment. I mean, the apartment itself is average. Not furnished very well, devoid of any art, but it's on the water, meaning bay breeze, which, given the current heatwave, is good enough reason for me to continue seeing him. "So you're dating a guy for his apartment." Asterisk said. "I've done worse. I've dated people because I've liked their dog." And while I've never dated someone for their dog (and I do love dogs), I did threaten to break up with someone when their ex-roommate got custody of their awesome cat. But it's not just the apartment. Despite his being the sort of Gay you can see from space even when your eyes are closed and you're facing in the opposite direction, staring into the sun, he looks really good naked, and since he has no roommates, we spend a lot of time naked in various rooms. But we're not dating. I know we're not dating because both of us had sex a few hours before we met up (with other people, natch), and then a few hours after we parted ways. Clem was the guy a few hours earlier, and he received kisses exactly the way a closet case kisses back when they're about to freak out. Our sex didn't really last long. We'd been trying to meet for months. And by we, I mean he. I gave up on him after the first night of his utter wishy-washiness. He wanted to meet. He wanted to bottom. He had the night off, but, horrors, what if someone saw me go into his house and knew I was A Homosexual? What would the neighbors say? (I surmise they'd say "Yawn. He could do better.") Three months and eleven potential meet-ups later, he sent me his address, and I hopped on a bus that connected with another bus, and yet another bus that dropped me off in his neighborhood. We made very small talk before we went into his bedroom, where he closed his shades, turned off all the lights, and took off his clothes. When I tell you he had the tiniest penis I've ever seen, I'm not trying to insult him. As much as I can appreciate a good looking penis, it's not the part of the body I'm most looking for. His ass was assdequate. But barely had he slid his skivvies around his ankles, when he started stuttering. He had one hand on my cock, and said "Your c-c-cock is so big. I can not b-b-bottom for you." Which is flattering, but not at all true. Not even remotely true. So I started putting my clothes back on. "I can jerk you..." "No." "You can't." "You've got a car, right?" In the movie version of my life, I'm smoking a cigarette. Perhaps two cigarettes. "Yes. I have car." Apparently, my cock was also so big he forgot how to use articles in his sentences. "You're giving me a ride home then." And he did, without question. And as soon as he dropped me off at the house, I e-mailed Breezy, and he took care of my Indigo Testicles. And I took care of his. And he took care of mine. And I took care of...you get the idea. When it was finally well past time for sleep, Breezy plopped down beside me on his bed, and grabbed my arms around him. Which is fine. I can be rather cuddly when the mood strikes, much to the chagrin of Sora, and the amusement of Zach. The latter referring to me as a Reverse Teddy Bear. "A big furry thing that never lets go." Breezy was the first guy I've ever thought of as aggressively huggable. Every time I was certain he was asleep, and I tried to move to a more comfortable position, he would wait for me to adjust, and then commandeer both my arms, roll his neck under my chin, and slide his butt up against my cock, which is a pretty surefire way to get me to not move too much for a while. "Where are you going?" He asked when it was time for me to head home, shower, and consider going to work. "Home." "Not yet you're not." And he was correct. Three times. When I got the e-mail from Diego, telling me he would die without a sperm transfusion, I wondered if meeting him was a bit over the top. True, I hadn't been laid since Wednesday afternoon, but it was only Friday afternoon, and I had a show to go to Friday night. But he was insistent that he come over. he was insistent about everything. Kissing too desperate. Mashing of mouths, yanking of head. It was like kissing a fish that kept flopping around to different sides of your face. "Am I too rough?" He asked. "No." You just suck at this. "I am ready to be-" don't say it, don't say it, don't say it "taken by you, Big Boy." Sora developed a sense of dirty talk sometime after the first year or so of our on/off/on/off/off/off/on/whatever dating cycle. I think this goes back to a conversation we had where I mentioned liking when a guy was vocal in bed. But what I meant was guttural, or pleasured, not loquacious and porn talky. But Sora gets away with it because I like him & he has a sexy voice. Diego...Diego doesn't fall into either category. It's not just the bad kissing, the bad porn talk, or the everything else. Diego proved something I suspected, but didn't know for sure. I'm not into black dudes. It's not a racist thing. I cold surely fall in love with someone black, and I can damn sure realize when someone black is hot, but I'm just not into them, precisely the same way I'm not into women. They can get me hard, they can get me interested, but they can't make me come. Diego tried and tried and tried and tried, until Byrne knocked on my door to let me know it was time to go to the show. I don't think he heard what we were doing (and if he's read this far, I'm sure he now regrets it). "What do we do?" Diego asked. "You have not--" "We've got to go." I said. "Sorry, I didn't realize this would take so" epically "long." "I will call you later." He, I hope, lied. "You are such a whore. Again." Dmitri said, when I relayed the stories to him. "Who killed himself this time?" "Ouch. No one. I mean, I'm sure someone, but nobody I know. It's just..." Oh shit. Trey kisses sponge, Breezy woodpecker, Diego cinder block, Clem like a terrified mannequin. Diego is too needy armed, Trey too non-existent. Diego too existent. Clem not enough anything. These ass shaped men trying to fit themselves in my heart slot. And, in theory, the piece should fit. Not perfectly, or even well. But they should drop into the too big space for them, and slide around like the last pretzel in a kiddie pool sized bowl. Everything about Breezy is nearly acceptable except that he isn't Sora. And, fuck. The best thing about having your perfect boyfriend commit suicide a month into your relationship is that you realize pretty quickly that there's no way you can improve upon your relationship or bring things back to the way they were. He's never going to be nearly as responsive, even if you dig him up and put a tape recorder in his chest. He's never going to kiss back, or silently judge you for your horrible necrophilia jokes. Ok, he will always silently judge you for your necrophilia jokes, because silent judgment is one of the few things corpses are good at. But, I digress. Sora is, thank everything, in no way shape or form dead. Nor is he, nor has he ever been perfect, as my friends frequently remind me. But he kisses properly, which is sometimes enough. And we've become accustomed to our cycle of whatever it is we do or don't. And Zach was right about me. I'm just this big, furry thing that never lets go. On my way home from work, I saw two dozen or so people sitting in the bleachers around an empty baseball field. The lights were on, but the dugout was empty, and the field was bare. I thought of you. Waiting for some sorted adventure, some ridiculous snatch of conversation. Any sign of entertaining life.
I went outside, a few minutes later, and there were a few people playing underhand softball. Does there really have to be metaphor everywhere I look? See the game is going on, whether people are watching or not. And people are always watching, whether or not they can see the game. And existentialist metaphor is so dated and boring. Would you like another cookie for your cache? I've been not seeing Sora, and Zach, and an assortment of other supposedly interested parties (I'm not calling Sora or Zach supposedlies...but the rest of them) for months now. The kind of people that obsessively call or IM or e-mail saying how much they want to see you, but none of them have any interest in actually hanging out, they just want you to pay attention to them. Attention and interest are such dissimilar similar words. Interest accrues, attention wanes. The crowd shows up expecting some sort of show or game, but they're easily distracted by other passing shinies. I am tired of games, of faked interest, and attention seekers. This is why I've been macheteing people out of my life. Weed friends. A good way to fall out of friendship with me: e-mail me a link to your suicide note. Don't explain why you are depressed, just mention chasms and blackness and voids and pain. Forget the fact that my first ex actually killed himself, whereas you are just an attention seeking bottom feeder who will call the next day as though nothing was wrong. Threatening suicide is like posting an ad for gay sex on Craigslist. You can't chalk it up to a phase, or drunken experimentation. It's something you either really want, or you're an asshole for doing it. Typing of assholes, this morning I repeatedly woke up on the right side of the bed. It's what was going on around the bed that was wrong. I was having a terrible reaction to a fairly mundane dream, the first time. I woke up to the sound of my landlady's voice outside my window. She wasn't yelling, but she wasn't having a pleasant conversation, either. By the time I got my clothes on, and headed out to the driveway, both she and the upstairs neighbor she was talking with were gone. I was asleep for another two hours when I had another frustrating return to consciousness, and I heard someone pounding on the front storm door (it didn't occur to me until just now that we have no storm door to our apartment, the upstairs apartment has one). I heard her voice again, and waited for her to come in without calling me, so I could take my bad mood out on her. But she didn't come in. As she walked through the driveway I heard her say "I usually hate coming here, but this time, I feel pretty good." And she did her obnoxious twitter laugh. Was she coming to FINALLY fix the washer that broke down in February? Perhaps, install the dishwasher she promised would be set up by Labor Day 2007? Of course not. She was gone when I was calm enough to walk outside, where a police officer told me he and an electrician were cutting off power. As you can probably guess by this post, it wasn't the power to our apartment. "Do you live in Apartment A?" He asked. "Nope." "It's not your unlucky day, then." And he smiled. "Cruella Deville over there," and he pointed to where the landlady's car had been "doesn't like you, though. She thought we were here to cut the downstairs power." I'm really glad I don't understand what goes on in her head. What sort of game she's watching behind those eyes. It is not often that I'm left speechless. I've got words for just about everything. They say certain Inuit tribes have over one hundred and fifty words for snow. The Swahili language has no word for boredom. And, according to various websites and books, there are a variety of languages that don't have a direct translation for love. Which makes me wonder if they're inundated with thousands of words to describe manipulative, lying ex-boyfriends. If not, they can borrow a few of mine.
Thanks to an internet stalker friend, I started a profile on what is, essentially, fagspace. Even the coding is similar to Myspace. So, instantly, I hated it. When I, further, discovered that they have old school AOL-style chatrooms, I contemplated deleting my account all together. And then I started talking with a cute guy, who was Interesting and Interested, and that was all fine, well, and good. Later, while I was putting up some pictures, I got an IM from someone familiar looking. Maybe someone from the poetry scene, or the comic book store. A passing acquaintance. One that I had possibly imagined naked. We were small talking about Boston, and why he hates it, and why I love it, when I asked him why he left. "I'm more of a small town guy." He said. "Too many people in the city know me, or think they know me, and things get really awkward." I decided not tell him "You do look kind of familiar." Damn it, fingers, don't type without consulting my brain. He sighed. (We were chatting via webcam, so I could see him. {Don't judge me! I have three hundred and fortyteen words for fuck off.}) "You probably know me from the clubs. I used to be a gogo dancer." No. "I don't go to clubs. I must have just seen you around." And we small talked, and he asked me if I minded if he friended me. Of course, I didn't. So when the invitation came, I clicked on his profile, and...and then I knew. I can't imagine there are too many inoffensive ways to say "On my bookshelf, I have four DVDs of you getting fucked. Including a birthday orgy scene, where you were, by the way, amazing." So, I'm speechless, because, believe it or not, porn stars intimidate me. Not because of their huge cocks, or perfect asses (I have ninety-twelve hundred words for those...some of them overlap with the words for ex-boyfriends); I am intimidated because I know that they've had better looking, better endowed, paid professionals in their ass. And knowing things like that is much different than imagining things like that, suspecting things like that, or being told things like that. I know exactly what frequency he moans in when he means it. And, if the whole derivation of porn names is true, I know the name of his first pet, and what street he lived on as a kid. And I want to move to that street. I want to find thirtyleven words for the way his bare feet scraped against the cracked pavement, twenty-twodred ways to describe the way the air smelled the first time he noticed his neighbor's cleft chin, surely the trees in his neighborhood have an infinite amount of terms for the way he peeled back their bark with his fingers. Understand, I don't have very many words for love, and none of them describe the way I feel for this guy who's real name I just learned, at all. How (fill in one of the thirtillion words for desperately naive stupidity brought about by the confusions of lust and love here) do you think I am? The word for the way I feel is a lust I am all too not unfamiliar with. And I am acquainted with more variations of the feeling of lust than heterosexual male teenagers have words for breasts. Recently, my lust was called into question by Sora, who never did get a grip on the way I felt about him, so he let me slip between his fingers. As though love and lust were like binary. There is only 0 and 1, there is no 3.14etc. Square roots are right out! And since his language had no direct equivalent for my feelings, he could never hear them quite right. All my explanations were babble and gobbledy-greek. They say that when your ears ring, you are hearing that frequency for the last time in your life. It's the sound of a frayed nerve ending giving out. From that point on, every middle G sharp will sound just a little bit flatter to you. You will probably never notice this. There are fifteen foursand things I would have liked to express each time Sora and I have said goodbye. They all mean something like fuck you and please don't leave. What they boil down to is "I'm sorry that you were never able to be honest with me, though really, I shouldn't be the one apologizing since that isn't my fault; and fault isn't exactly the right word there, but language is weak and cowardly sort of like packing up all your belongings and moving while I was out of state; or the way you only really talked with me when you were drunk; and precisely the way a goodbye e-mail feels the day after you left with my come on your ass and a smile on your lips like nothing was wrong anymore." I don't want to name that feeling after him. He has already infected too much of my vocabulary. His name already too reggaeton. The last thing I said to him, not knowing anything was wrong, was "I love you." May those words ring in his ears until he can never hear them again. A few weeks ago, I cracked one of my teeth. The pain wasn't too bad. But the next day, after some ibuprofen and orajel, I forgot that I hadn't seen the dentist yet, and I split a bag of Smartfood with a friend. One of those white cheddar kernal corpses lodged itself directly into the now open cavity of my back tooth. It fit so painfully perfectly that I couldn't get it out. I miss the late nights in the kitchen. Flicking the lights on during my trek to the bathroom, only to find the cat, sitting in my way. I would reach down to pet her, and she'd gently tilt her head up, and then scratch the blood out of my hand. Then a quick hiss, and she'd be angling for me to pet her again. I fucken hated that cat, and how I always tried to be nice to her, even though I knew she was an ungrateful beast. She even tried to bite me while I was feeding her. I've been playing a lot of Super Smash Brothers on the N64 this week. I switched from Yoshi, because he was always your favorite, to Link, which my roommates refer to as The Cheapest Character. You're a waffle. I'm an iron. You've got my palm prints over every inch of your body. You're delicious in a way you could never be without me. In a way I could never be. The Chinese place across the street has been, literally, turned around in the last week. The door is on the other side, the kitchen and the dining room are switched. I was feeling lightheaded, and sinusy, so I stopped in just for a bowl of miso. The cute guy with the faint accent handed me the miso, and a pair of chopsticks. The playlist on the station I listen to has been mostly the same since you left the first time. Just when a song reminds me pleasantly of you, fucken Loveline comes on. There's no metaphor in this paragraph, it's just a huge fucken pain in the ass how the only station I enjoy listening to, keeps getting interrupted by teenagers who call older men for love and sex advice. Ever since you and I stopped doing whatever it was we weren't doing anymore seeing each other, I've been looking for someone who reminds me nothing of you. Last night, I found him. I mean, I found him before last night, but I didn't know what I'd found. Last night, he came back. You know how you and I sandpapered each other with words until we finally fit comfortably into each other. He and I didn't need the rough tongues. We just fit.
There a hundred things I could blame this on:
The other day, I had to go into work four hours early so that they could install a new heating system (aside: my boss told me I should bring a book with me while they work...Lord knows I wouldn't have been able to find one in the comic BOOK store), only to enter the alarm code for the wrong store. And since no one told me how to deactivate the alarm (including the rude bitch at the alarm company that I called), I couldn't turn it off for ten minutes. Oh, the alarm company made sure the police didn't come, and they didn't even call my boss, but it didn't matter, since I had to call my boss, since no one at the alarm company knew how to clear the alarm so I could enter the code. It could be that my ability to trust a guy has been severely damaged by a couple of years' worth of people telling me they missed me, but then making up or finding excuses not to spend time with me, at the last minute. It could be the amount of times I had to censor myself at work this weekend, like when my coworker said "Man, you can furnish your entire house with Hello Kitty, these days. There are Hello Kitty refrigerators, Hello Kitty beds, Hello Kitty televisions. I had to stop at The Hello Kitty backpack, otherwise my entire house would be this huge, pink space." And I was halfway through saying "Like your mom's gaping vagina." when I noticed there were three kids under ten in the store, so I ended up saying "Like your mom's gaping vacuum cleaner." Or maybe it was that a four year old kid spent the entire time in the store screaming "I want this mommy, I waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant it." while his seven year old brother quietly placed his new baseball cards in his new baseball card sleeves. The scene elevated until the mom decided to throw herself on the grenade, take the little one outside and reprimand him while the older child finished gingerly placing his cards in the sleeves. The woman was not even a foot away from the door, when the seven year old looked up. He looked at me, then at my coworker, then walked deliberately to the door, and opened it to say "Mom, you're such a fucken bitch, how could you leave me alone in there." I guess I would have been okay to use the word vagina. Whatever the reason, I've been super irritable for the last three days. And some of it may be the latest guy I've broken up with. When my roommate first heard I was dating again, he asked "Is this one old enough to drive a car." To which I replied, "This one's old enough to drink. Shit, motherfucker just got out of rehab a month ago." Because I know how to pick 'em. Or, to be fair, I know how to be picked. He didn't want to meet me at work Wednesday because I work in a bar. Fine. He blew me off Thursday because he was afraid my friends and roommates might be drinking, and he didn't want to be tempted. Completely understandable. Friday, he was on his way over, but traffic was bad, so he turned around and went home (he lives about a fifteen minute drive away). Saturday, he really wanted to come after work, but he was just so tired. And today, we talked on the phone for about an hour, and made plans to go out for a late dinner, and then fuck. He called from his supposedly car to let me know that he didn't know if coming over was a good idea, as he was having a spot of indigestion. "Oh, I'm sure it's not indigestion." I said. "You're probably just queefing, you fucken pussy. Don't call me again." And I deleted his number from my phone. I find myself saying and doing these things more often. And while I feel I save these remarks for when they're justified, I'm pretty sure they lose me World's Most Understanding Friend status. But that's fine. I've been slicing off unreliable friends for the last few months, and, apart from this weekend's snarkiness, feeling better for it. But is it fair? I feel like the ridiculousness of the last couple of years has made me extremely impatient and intolerant of peoples' drama. I've moved from Little League Rules, where every player gets an at bat in every inning, to Family Feud tie-breaking round status: one strike and you're out. I'd like to be as zen as I used to be. I want to relearn how to slowcook love, instead of jamming lust in a microwave. I want a cure for my sense of immediacy, and I want it now. And the next time they make the same mistake I tell them not to get caught in cycles. Stop making the same mistakes over and over. Idiots, learn from the past. I am caught in my own cycle making the same past over and etc. Idiot, learn from people's mistakes. Bad sex is a cycle. Different face, different flaw. Same result. Revolving door of disappointment. I'm caught in my past. Repeating the same cycle etc. and over. What I was trying to say the other night was that we're both repeating ourselves. We're both past-locked revolving, and it just isn't working for either of us, but still, I prefer it to the alternative. I'm told I'm good at writing sestinas, villanelles, and pantoums. All these form poems where you have to repeat words, echo lines. It's the way I'm wired, I guess. I keep having the same relationships, sometimes with the same people. Cycle etc. Past idiots caught in repeating flaws. I know better than this. We all know better than this. And I keep telling someone he's not crazy (it's a cycle) because crazy people don't realize they're crazy. But I think I'm over and over wrong. Maybe he is crazy isn't the etc. point. Sometimes knowing you're crazy and not fixing it makes you a more dangerous kind of revolving crazy. None of my recent posts seem overly and overly sane. I am presently moreso single than I've been in a year and half. I'm taking over and over advantage of it, but it's really more that I'm taking over and over disadvantage of it. Nothing is fitting together properly. None of these men have comfortable flaws. And months ago I mentioned that he had ruined sex with other men for me, and I thought I was being hyperbolic. But the past few revolving nights seem to prove that I was being overly honest. I'm tired of you reminding me of Elvis and Ryan etc. etc. Be more dangerous crazy honest with me. I would be more worried about missing you already if I didn't already miss you when we were together. In an IM conversation with Dmitri, I mention that I am catsitting for Ben while he's away, and that I'm in the midst of reorganizing the apartment. Dmitri says "You make such a good wife." Me? A wife? I have a beard, and it's not a woman with self-esteem issues, it's facial hair. Ben is the one who wears eyeliner.
And so it is that I spend the last day of my Ben free time, cataloging a list of my exes in my head. *** Before Jennifer dumped me for my supposed best friend, Scott, she listened to Billy Joel, Phantom of the Opera, Milli Vanilli, Roxette; the music that all the cool kids were listening to in 1989. Before Jennifer admitted that the first time we dated, it had been exclusively to get closer to the little greaseball bastard who played the role of friend when it suited his snobby, rich, not very well-shaped ass, she wore cute white sweaters, was a straight A student, and really wanted to be a writer. After Jennifer dumped me for that whiny little reminder of why the pull out method doesn't work, she abandoned English for Science, starting listening to Sir Mix-A-Lot, Young MC, LL Cool J, and other artists that I would grow to like once the nineties started, but we were twelve and not supposed to be listening to cool music, yet. Sure, she continued to take violin lessons, but everything else changed. After Jennifer crushed my heterosexuality between her fingers in order to date someone that I know for a fact had a smaller dick and intellect, she switched from glasses to contacts, from modest clothes to garish pink sweaters and other Debbie Gibsonesque fashion that caused an entire generation of women to "lose" any photos taken of them from, say 1987-1990. Her beautiful straight hair had teased bangs and clumsy curls. I hated the new Jennifer. Once Jennifer dumped Scott for someone way hotter, way gayer, someone I ended up trysting with nine years later, she put her glasses back on, she kept her interest in science, restraightened her hair, found a moderate stance for her clothes. Once Jennifer realized what a little douche-trucker-hat Scott was, and started dating someone with way more style, and a body that convinced me that male artists tend to be homosexual because, fuck, men are works of art, she started listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sonic Youth, Soul Asylum, bands that wouldn't break on MTV until 1992. Once Jennifer and Scott went the way of Brandon and Dylan, we decided to be friends again. Actually, I never told her we'd stopped being friends, because then I wouldn't have had anyone who wasn't a complete loser to hang out with at lunch. When Jennifer abandoned her poor, soon to be oversexed, tan skinned, boat owning boyfriend for a much older (seventeen!!!) AV geek with bad teeth and halitosis, she got rid of the glasses again, started wearing mostly black, listened to prog rock bands like Dream Theatre, Queensryche, Rush, and early Genesis, and picked up an unplaceable accent that hurt my ears so much that, not only did I stop hanging out with her, I told my parents I wanted to go back to public school. I couldn't be friends with someone who didn't have their own personality. All she ever did was assimilate her taste to her boyfriend's. She would take one, and only one of his traits when they broke off, and reinvent the rest of herself. She kept the complicated love of Jesus that she learned from Chris the Old. Her compassion, and willing to listen to people came from Ryan the Perfect. Her sarcasm and since of humor, I wish I could claim, but actually came from Scott. It wasn't until I started not dating Ben that I realized what she got from me. *** "Did you hear that they're getting rid of Vanilla Coke?" Ben asks, as we wander around the CVS in search of light bulbs. "Yea." I say. "They're gonna replace it with Cherry Vanilla Coke, which is way awesomer, anyway."" "Ewww, dude. Anything with that fake vanilla is so nauseatingly sweet." "I like sweet things." I say. "Like me." I shoot him the You Have Got To Be Fucken Kidding Me Look. He stops looking at the Christmas lights display, shoots me a hurt look. "I'm sweet." "Sometimes." I say. "But you also have that tang of bitterness that I find so hot." "Oh, sweet Christ, you like your men like you like your alcohol. Booooo." He picks up a box of lights. "They don't have any blue lights, ugh." "Are we all set, then?" He frowns as he picks up another box of not blue lights. "Mmmmmm. No. Don't forget to get some sort of munchy thing. We're going to be completely...yea." "At a CVS? I want something substantial." "So get one of those microwavable meals." He says. "Bleurgh. They're so...unnatural." And since when do I give a fuck about something being natural or not? When do I care what type of food goes into my body? Since Ben. I got my occasional nicotine habit from Elvis. From Liam, I learned my appreciation of how absurd sex really is. From Ryan, I got my compassion, and ability to listen to other people's problems. Beckee taught me to be devious. And Jennifer? This is what I'm not sure, did I absorb my habit of adapting my image to fit the people I love from her, or did she get it from me, or was it the one product of our love that survived? I am the subject. Am is happy to be helping. In is the preposition I'm currently stuck with. Love is the real object. See? Ben, David, Dmitri, CSB, Ryan, it doesn't matter who, does it? Fuck who is the object of my desire, desire is the objective.
I've been mocking Ben for lamenting that no one he's attracted to is attracted to him. I haven't met anyone gay or straight who doesn't think he's attractive. Of course, I suffer from the same affliction (the no one I'm attracted to is attracted to me thing, not the everyone thinks I'm attractive thing, I wish). Should have gone for the guy on the T with the staring problem. Dealt with that musician guy from the Lizard Lounge. Dmitri who's far away and already has a boyfriend. Or David, who I'm starting to realize is from another planet. Celeste says "It sucks that Ben led you on for so long." But he never led me on. I led me on. Ben is always direct with what he wants, needs, expects. I'm not. This is why no one ever knows what I want. This is why everything. Trick says, "Ben doesn't deserve you. Go for David." But Trick has never met David. And when I question the accuracy of the word deserve, he recants. Deserving is a stupid word. The bitch that moved into my old apartment and posted a Craigslist ad of my room deserves a snatch full of razor blades and rubbing alcohol. And may the blades be lubricated with leprosy and Hepatitis C. What she gets is an asshole ex-roommate who refuses to be in the same zip code as her, thus not paying his share of the bills. And since that's me, I deserve the heavy backpack grinding away what's left of my spine. I need to relearn the ability to be direct. You there, in front of me in line at the Store 24, you've got a great ass. Clarissa, if you weren't so silently judgmental, you'd be happier and have more long term friends. Celeste, thank you. Ben, I love you, and thank you for putting up with me at my most awkward and freakishly dependent. We need to go see Serenity. We need serenity. Serenity now, goddamnit. I need to relearn the ability to object. I can't work seven nights a week. No, I won't meet you halfway if you live in an abattoir. I'll just leave what you need by the front door. I'm fine. Thanks for not asking. This is as up front as I get. Seven years ago, the only man I ever trusted when he said he loved me, killed himself. I only think of him every time I feel anything like love. So fucken what? Everyone has ashes under their scars. You either get over it or you don't. Either way, life is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. If you don't make a decision, you're stuck on the same boringly inconclusive page for the rest of your life. I only love improbable relationships because they're uncomfortably familiar. I love Ben because I don't know, his voice makes my ears twitch, he's starting to write like breath, he doesn't talk like FM radio, he doesn't act his or anyone else's age. I love him because it feels natural. He deserves better. |
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