Life During Realtime

Because I wrote things once upon a time.  Welcome back, BR.net!

Last call now I’m out of time
And I don’t got no valentine
Singled out, now I stand alone
The underdog in a modern world…
–American Hi-Fi, “The Art Of Losing”

Oh, Cupid.I look at the sky, cloudless, beautiful, a postcard of a 75-degree day, and all I can think of is death, death, death.  Well, perhaps not death.  I do still have some living to do and bacon grinders to invent before I shuffle off this mortal coil.  (Not to mention punching Dick Cheney in the face.)

But I look at the sky this time of year and I see the same thing I’ve seen every year for years: I see a flotilla of arrows falling from the sky like hail or one of those other scary white things from the sky I see on the Weather Channel sometimes.  And I see this happen this time of year and I brace myself for impact and I close my eyes.

And then I don’t feel anything.

And then I still don’t feel anything.

And then I look up.  Maybe I’ve hallucinated the arrows.  Maybe a rogue wind has knocked them off course.  It’s even possible I’m dreaming all this, like the ice cream ATM or the time I got to punch Dick Cheney in the face.  But nope.

I look up and people all around me are being struck.  Some of them seem to be running away but it doesn’t matter; arrow between the L4 and L5.  Some of them seem to be so simple-minded as to not be able to comprehend what has struck them or why it is.  They usually seem to be able to stagger towards someone of the same Quaker Oatsed mind and the deal is done.  Some get struck by several arrows and it just seems to make them stronger.

Everybody starts staggering off the battlefield.

I start running towards arrows, thinking that will be the way to get this to work.  They pivot around me.  I drop back, trying to be the one who just lets everything happen.  They pivot around me.

And then I look up, and the sky is beautiful, cloudless.  Empty.

And I am still out here.

Oh, when I was young, I used to have a good head of vitriol and Righteous Anger about these arrows that refused to poison and destroy me.  But if you beat your head against a brick wall long enough, at some point it stops being the brick wall’s fault.  Why did Suzie ever think Calvin was going to change?  What made Charlie Brown think Lucy was going to let him kick the football?

All the instructional stuff I learned from my youth wasn’t really in the books: all the stuff that was going to stick with me into adulthood and beyond was all the microcosms of exclusion that we got marketed to as fun games.  Dodgeball.  Musical chairs.  Couples-only skate at the roller rink.*

(*Readers 25 and under, ask your folks what a skate rink was.  And fuck you.  I keed. I’d put a smileyface here but it’d just ruin the parenthesis.)

Now at the time I thought these were the things that kept me away from the evil and godless science and math books and I loved them to the nth, but really they were all the warning flares I failed to heed.  Exclusion, exclusion, standing there watching.  You can run for your life back and forth all you want.  You can have a strategy or not have a strategy and try to depend on your keener instincts to save you at the moment of crisis.

Nah.

In the end, you are standing off to the side, and the spotlight’s on them.  And I got news for you, kid: there’s always a them.  You will cease to be kid and there will be a them.  You may cease to have a fully functioning brain and your roommate who served in Desert Storm & Iraqi Freedom will have some 84-year-old skank coming over for the weekend and when her teeth start coming out you get on that walker and ride, fella.

People will believe they need to get in a spot every week, and sometimes several times, to avoid hell.  But that’s a falsehood.  Hell, like heaven, is constituted by the real estate between your ears.  And as I call up memories all I can do is see the endless loop of the two paths.  The ones I don’t want want me.  The ones I want don’t want me.  There is no third loop.  It’s a Mobius strip of them being angry and crying, of me breaking shit and drinking myself to sleep, of them sending messages saying “Well, you didn’t act that upset”, of me facepalming, of them moving on, of me not moving on, of them not moving on, of me not moving on…etc.  All I know is this is the time of the year I see my hands the most, as the full arsenal of head scratching, self-slaps, facepalms, using them as a shield to scream into, and finally of throwing them into the air in a f-it-we’re-done-here.  And I do feel bad for myself, I do.

But all my female friends, I don’t know how they do it.  Put up with me, rather.  I suspect they find me entertaining for reasons beyond my reckoning, namely one-liners and too much music trivia knowledge.  But I know they’re there for me any time things get really bad, and it flummoxes me that apparently only three or four of them can find a guy to appreciate them.  Oh, for the soft glissade of the romcom in media world where one minute we’re holding each other up through tears and then SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKKKKKKKKKKKK the arrow goes through both of us, cue the laugh track, three way-too-sarcastic kids, laugh track, bumbling but well-meaning neighbor, laugh track and KT Tunstall.

But of course, this is not the life I live.  I keep getting the feeling I’m the only person who’s seen their friends in a different light at some point and been like “But ho!  The loophole!  At long last, I have found you!”  It seems to be the easiest thing in the world; you already get along.  If you could be with that person who SO Totally Already Gets You, why, hell, carve out that 8:30 timeslot on Tuesdays and get the popcorn ready.  But it just doesn’t seem to go that way, at least for me.  Everyone who stimulates your neurons wants nothing to do with your underrcarriage, and vice versa, and even the handful of times you can somehow combine those elements in the beaker you’re pretty much counting down the seconds until the fucking thing explodes and gives you a free ACME makeover.

I suppose the big question at the end of the day is why the fuck are you doing this to yourself, Super Genius?  If all you feel about this whole enterprise at the end of the day is self-loathing exacerbated by Hallmark Day and you give everybody the did-you-just-yell-out-You-LIE!-in-the-middle-of-my-fucking-address?! side glare that happens to be lucky enough to have met somebody and you sleep alone and sometimes you drink too much to temporarily ignore the fact you sleep alone, what’s the point?  Why not just hang it up?

Simple.

I know it’s out there.  I’ve seen the arrows, even if I for the life of me can’t figure out how to get hit by them.

I still remember the feeling of being the center of some woman’s universe, of excited looks over surprise presents, inside jokes, a shoulder to cuddle into during a movie, and the biggest, nastiest, most awesome drug in the history of mankind: a French kiss from a woman delivered with feeling out in public just because.

I know how it felt to wake up invincible, and the merest text message could put a stupid grin on my face.

And to quote Mos directly, I ain’t no perfect man.  I’m trying to do the best that I can with what it is I have.  But there’s no perfect woman, either.  This is not an issue.  Because there IS a woman who’s perfect for me.  I just haven’t met her yet.  And there’s still that corner of me that thinks I’m going to (bigger than the hyperdelusional shadow that thinks ZOMG she’s looking at me RIGHT NOW and far bigger than the speck that not only thinks the previous but thinks it’s going to be Marisa Miller).

So that’s the point.  A life without love isn’t as satisfying, but it’s still worth living.   You live in this side of the battlefield so you find someone else to take the hill with.  And soon spring will…be sprung? and I will be filled with hope, glee, and outright joy, and even well into summer should things continue this way that long.  This – all of this — will pass.  It’s going to or the cover of Newsweek awaits.

And no matter what, at the end of the day I am still blessed with the name Darkness.

Of course I believe in a thing called love.

And until it gets here, I suppose I’ll be waiting and watching the skies.

I’m going to get hit.

I know this. And furthermore HOLY FUCK INCOMING