I am sitting here, in a house that is not my own, writing down my thoughts on a computer that’s not my own. My buddy Jeff is sleeping next to his lovely wife, I can hear a television that has been left on overtop the sound of water trickling in their aquarium. Other than that its kind of quiet, which is fitting due to the time. I find it both funny and scary that I am here right now, or rather that at some point today, somewhere, I made the decision to come here. It started off with a phone call. Then an indecisive pause on my part, and somehow I found myself here, right now. It’s the decisions one makes that allow things like this to happen. Keep that in mind.
I tried explaining it all, and by all I mean the universe, or at least the universe according to me, to Ely the other night and it may or may not have worked out the way I had hoped. I found it oddly intriguing how at some point in his life he decided to want to drink and then further along he decided he liked Absinthe and further along called me to hang out and the even further along decided to go to Shane’s for the evening that led us to a universal conversation. Me, well at some point I decided to smoke, and so on and so on and then, there I was standing opposite of him while he waved his arms around all crazy talking about something and then something else and so on.
Of course everything is uneven, we’re dealing with me here, the same me who can fall in and out of love as he sees fit simply because there’s nobody standing close enough to love me back. But why not try, if even for a little bit, to decide to choose adventure, or friends or whatever instead of choosing to sit at home and read a book?
So that’s what I did, Jeff asked me if I wanted to come over and after an indecisive pause I said ok. I stopped for cigarettes, listened to some music, and at one point drove alongside a train, all with my windows rolled down letting a very cool evening breeze blow through my car, giving me the comforting reminder that fall is just around the corner now, a fall that’ll include a new birthday for me and a new birthday for my friend Tim, just one day before mine. It will be my 24th fall.
I wonder if Tim is going to come back in town for his birthday, you see he doesn’t live here anymore, because I really hope he does. Maybe we can get something going, or maybe not. Good times are guaranteed to be had by all even if nothing in and of itself gets going and we just sit around and talk about stuff. I love those things. When he came into town last I gave him a hug and told him to tell his girlfriend that I love her and man I got in my car and lost it. There’s a specific comfort only friends can provide.
I go looking sometimes for this comfort, one time, the night after Tim went back to Murfreesboro, I in a rather upset mood because for one I had to say goodbye to my friend and his girlfriend who is also a friend for the second time in about two weeks and for two because once again my complete lack of charm with the ladies brought me into a phone conversation with an ambiguously married girl’s maybe husband, I was sitting there working on a fiction story that was going pretty good when I suddenly saw red and punched the LCD panel on my laptop. The cracks immediately looked like spider webs or better yet breaking ice as they immediately went from the end of my fist to all four corners of the monitor.
“What could help me satiate this rage and this desolation?” I asked myself.
A phone call and thirty minutes later I was standing outside of my old work place, watching my old coworker friends drinking on the clock. It was the comfort I was looking for, but in my own little way I managed to take my melancholic mood and combine it with their heightened sense of euphoria or whatever it is when people drink and managed to somehow start a fight. I remember how it all started with me making this statement:
“No, dude, you see, the thing is, life isn’t about work or anything else constructive like that, life is pain and misery and suffering and grief and death. But it’s not all bad because alongside all of those things which are definite, there’s also these small tiny beautiful moments, and these moments although brief and rare, they make all that other crap ok. “
Yeah, it was over.
Some people were called out, a car was struck by a beer bottle, I almost got up twice to step in front of a couple of people but I didn’t because nothing of what was being said concerned me. I said my peace and started an event that had been waiting to come out for along time. It was necessary, and it was life. I thought for a second that it was one of those inspired moments I was talking about but even if it was, it wasn’t my moment but someone else’s. Later on, after everyone hugged and love was professed, a girl walked up to the payphone and asked if she missed the party.
“We put the beer bong up about thirty minutes ago.”
That’s what I told her and while she sort of laughed and stuck a quarter in the phone, she had no idea that it was true.
*******
I am obsessed here recently about decisions and consequences. Anyone close enough to me is probably sick and tired of hearing about it by now, but I can’t seem to get over it really. I am starting to see how things I have done in the past are affecting me now.
*******
Like, I hate my job, can’t stand it. And this past Saturday I was there, at this job I hate from six in the morning til seven that evening. And I knew that I had made more plans with Ely for that night. Not sure really what the idea was or the plans, I left it up to him, but as I drove home I was thinking that I was too tired to hang out at all. But once again after a phone conversation and an indecisive pause I decided to sleep for a bit and then call him after I woke back up about four hours later, and I only managed to sleep about an hour because I played some Rook with my family, and then more family showed up and I played some Rook with them and when I finally got to sleep a bit I was worried I wouldn’t wake back up in time but my little brother, he took care of me by screaming triumphant praise for himself because he had done something in a videogame and so I showered and showed up at the arranged meeting place early, the meeting place being the same place that someone, overcome with so much emotion decided to throw a beer bottle into someone else’s car and then dare him to say something because come on, it’s only a car. I saw Shane and The Jackal and Ms. Anne Jones, Ms. Anne Jones being a girl I would much later in the night pledge my undying love for and say that our shared relationship would be the alpha relationship that all other relationships would be compared to but then would immediately take it back when I realized that nobody laughed after I said it, only to say it once more and take it back for the same reasons, but Shane The Jackal and Ms. Anne Jones were walking out and I got to sit in that parking lot and tell Shane how even though I lived in the same area code my entire life, minus the three or four months I spent in Virginia six or seven months ago, the college I will hopefully be attending is trying to peg me with out of state tuition.
A girl showed up I didn’t know, and then would kind of sort of get to know later and talked for a bit and left and then Ely shows up and after sitting around telling stories and talking to Shane for over an hour we leave for a party. And the party didn’t last too long, for me at least, because after watching Ely kick the ceiling and then declare he would never do it again, and then do it twice more in the span of thirty seconds, I asked the host if it would be ok if I tried out Day of Defeat Source and he told me ok and after pissing around in it for awhile and dodging an incoming fire cracker, when I walked back down the party was almost over save for a myself and Ely and the host and the girl who showed up in the parking lot before and we set about ending the night in the right way, with conversation and as I talked and then listened and waited impatiently for my chance to talk again and then listening and so on and after the girl said that I, of course, was into the whole thing simply because I think of myself as a writer and this was material that I realized that she was right. And I loved the entire thought of that night and told an almost passed out Ely so on the way back to his place. I love the chance encounters with strangers, and how, especially in this case, alcohol was involved because people’s inhibitions were dropped and how maybe someone said something they wouldn’t have said sober only to add to the heightened sense of awkward friendship that was going around. I told Ely that too.
I am sitting here now, after recently looking at these new stranger’s Myspace pages, still at my friend Jeff’s house, while he and his wife are sleeping, me having to keep pressing the backspace key because I am not used to this keyboard and the way I keep accidentally hitting caps instead of enter, and I am trying to figure out if you can get the same kind of comfort from strangers that you can from your friends. I honestly think while intimate talks with strangers and intimate talks with friends are both comforting, there’s a big difference but I don’t know what that difference is. Maybe three days from now, while I am working at a job I hate I will figure that difference out but won’t have a computer near me at all or will forget, not that either matters because the answer will not come to me now, not that I need it, but wow, sometimes things can get confusing.
And there’s a cat at my feet sleeping that looks a lot like one of Amanda and Tim’s cats and that makes me smile.
wes
