A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pity Party

Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.

~ Annie Besant

So, there I was.  Being all boo-hoo and woe-is-me. Some of you saw what I was trying to get at and came alongside.  Others of you called bullshit.  Maybe not here, to my face.  But you did it just the same.

And then there was Lisa.  A comrade!  A fellow traveler of this lonely road.  Her comment on that post took my breath away.  How common is it to find a first-time reader who leaves such thoughtful, engaging and empathetic words?

My other first thought?  Great.  Another online companion.  Someone with whom I could break the real-life bread of fellowship if only miles and miles didn’t separate us.

Don’t hear that wrong.  Please.  I have many friends that I’ve never met who rock my world.  We chat on the effbooks.  We exchange emails and Christmas cards.  You start Spotify playlists for me.  We get along swimmingly, and I count you as part of a growing list of people I call friends.  And not because Mark Zuckerberg gave me permission to do so.  In fact, I choose not to use the word “virtual”  for you are a real person, with blood and bile and brains that house a tender soul.

And so I naturally wondered if perhaps Lisa was one such online friend and I failed to make the connections.  Only, to my great surprise, it wasn’t just any Lisa.  It was Danira!  She of the Big Fucking Sword!  The Yin to my Yang!  The Gwyneth Paltrow to my Jack Black!

With whom I’ve spent glorious months riding a boat and thwarting the best-laid plans of pirates and leviathans alike.  With whom I’ve ridden horseback upon the winter-ravaged planes of western Immoren stoking the fires of giant war machines.  She who saved my ass in a tavern once, and fought valiantly against an undead librarian while I waited in the hallway perusing books about the restorative-yet-hallucinogenic properties of hooaga leaves.

Dexter Duchovic’s long-lost love had sent a flare over my wreck and rescued me.

We ended up chatting for an hour or so and then agreed to meet up with our respective SOs for coffee before the holidays run out.  And the best part?  She’s relocating from the impossibly faraway north side of town down to my neck of the woods, as the crow flies.  Where her woman-cave awaits, with a mini-fridge and a real table and folding chairs, and possibly a couch for when we get tired and need to crash for a few minutes.  And shelf after shelf of books for mining and tweaking.  And her maniacal cackle as she initiates, upon some stupid adventuring decision, like choosing to lift the lid off some not-so-random and yet completely out-of-place toilet, that rite of all great Dungeon Masters – the Total Party Kill.

Lisa and I, we did what friends do.  To borrow and turn an old phrase, we played ping pong over the abyss of our sorrows.  We laughed amidst the pain.  And we agreed to make it through together . . .

[Flickr photo is by abdul / yunir and is protected]

Black Friday

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

~ Rainer Marie Rilke

Because I despise shopping, and crowds, and I’m broke, I spent most of my day at home yesterday, scouring, as my friend Pamela calls it, “the effbooks.”  Post after post spoke of Thanksgivings surrounded by family and friends, and there seemed to be no end to mobile uploads of pictures filled with smiling faces.  Happy people with other happy people who make them happy.  So much happy.

Back in the early 90s, I too had friends like that.  Fargo, North Dakota.  Newlyweds.  Jobs and nicer cars and babies on the way.  Four couples as tight as though we had a rubber band stretched around us.  We did dinner for no reason at all.  Grilled meat.  Drank pop from two liters that Mark always had to squeeze before putting the lid back on to keep the fizz in.  Talked about stuff big and small and stupid and laughed and cried occasionally.  And sometimes did nothing at all.  Happy. 

And then we packed up that big truck and moved away. 

Maybe if we’d had the effbooks back then things would be different.  We wouldn’t have fallen so far behind or grown older along such tangential paths.  We have the effbooks now, sure, but too much has come and gone.  I see pictures of their beautiful daughter – who I once held in my arms, rocked gently to sleep – as a senior in ballet slippers, and I don’t know her.  Or them.  We were in Fargo last fall.  I made a phone call or four, hoping for a reunion of sorts, a chance for some happy amidst all the sad, a sign that things hadn’t really gotten that bad, or that the gap wasn’t really all that wide, between us.  But people get busy.  Have to live their lives, distractions be damned.  Even as the effbooks told a different story.  Sometimes lies are better; it hurts more seeing the truth.

All these years and there have been other friendships, but none like those.  Where secrets are known and they don’t matter.  No masks that make us look successful or put together well or on top of things.  No smiles that aren’t sincere.  No superimposed agenda or pending deadline.  Back before trivial things became so unimportant and everything had to weigh thousands and thousands of pounds. 

So I took the girls ice skating and made meatloaf and watched a scary movie and played around on the effbooks and started an argument on the effbooks and got teased about how I use . . . too much.  I hung out with my one true friend and the mother of my children.  The one who knows me best and most and refuses to leave me because, well, she just doesn’t do that.  I push and she absorbs and we live and love and I have her when I have nothing else. 

So I know she’ll understand when I admit that I’m still sometimes very lonely . . .  

               [Flickr photo is by glennharper and is protected]

Twenty Seconds of Insane Courage

Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

~ James Conant

Yet another movie has slipped into the multiplex beneath my radar . . .

 

Cheesy?  Probably.  Improbable?  More than likely.  Sleepless in Seattle, only without Tom Hanks, and . . . lions?  Possibly.  Scarlett Johansson!?  You know how I feel about her, right?  What she did to me?!  Yeah . . .

And yet, I will see this movie.  Because it has all the stuff that gets me worked up and emotional.  Struggle.  Triumph.  Cute kids.  And a man being all the things I have never been . . .

Brave.

Daring. 

Courageous. 

Unselfish.

I know.  He’s only a character in a movie.  Like Ray Kinsella.  Jeffrey Weigand. 

Or Burt Farlander . . .  

 

He may be stretching it a bit, though I do really like that scene at the end, on the trampoline.  That’s real.  And maybe I relate to him more than the others after all, because he’s a goofball.  A fuck up.  No matter.  He’s honest. 

And I think of me, at that point in my life, before kids and marriage and apartments and careers, and wonder why I didn’t take more risks.  The kinds of risks that mean something.  Not the “I’ll just spend and not save and we’ll be all right” kinds of risks.  Not the “bridges are made for burning” kinds of risks.  Not risks that are so much like jumping in front of a subway train but more like scaling down a cliff face or trusting the rope or the hand of a friend or throwing my hands in the air as I let go of the tire swing over Pit Lake. 

Oh, I will see this movie.  I will cry a thousand tears of joy and grief and deep heartache and sadness and again with the joy as the credits roll and things have worked out for the best for Matt Damon and his zoo. 

I will remind myself that this is only a movie.  A story, made for a purpose, in which things work out in the end.  Even as I also remind myself that life is like that sometimes . . .

And I will wonder if there are any seconds worth of courage left in me . . .    

[Flickr photo is by miusam-ck and is protected]

Timeline

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

 

 

I awoke this morning tight in the grip of a memory.

I am in a swing.  The wooden one-seater kind, suspended by creaking chains from a shiny, metal, tubular frame.  It is early in the day and I am on a school playground.  Only it seems smaller than most playgrounds I remember from my childhood.  This one is long and slender in design, with porous fencing all about and a sidewalk down the left-hand side with weeds breaking through the cracks between the slabs.  I am alone on the swings; the only other one hangs silently to my right.  No one is on the slide, a bit further to my right.  The sky is blue and blindingly bright and the moon is still visible, nearly full.

I remember the moon because I’m certain that this moment is the first time in my life I noticed that the moon can still be up during the daytime.  Which makes no sense when you’re a kid.  Also?  I see this memory from another – impossible – perspective, perched atop the roof, just above the door leading out from the school to the playground.  Only from this perspective, I can’t see me on the swing.  Or maybe I just didn’t bother to look.

In response to its prodding, I’ve brought this memory front and center in my mind many times throughout my life, and I really don’t understand why.  It’s just there, sometimes when I wake up, other times during the most inane of times, the silliest of circumstances.  I had it in mind when I wrote part of a story a couple years ago, about a playground full of children sucked up by the straw of God.  Most times, it just shows up, unannounced, and I take no significant notice.

Until this morning.  My eyelids were no longer heavy, sleep suddenly the strangest of notions.  And still, there was no big epiphany.  No revelation.  No aha moment.  Just the memory.  And I’m certain it happened to me.  One can’t make up something so garden-variety and cling to it as tightly as I have over all these years.

So I embraced it.  Tried to flesh out the details.  How old am I?  Where is this school?  Am I wearing anything memorable?  Is there a teacher nearby?  What is outside the fence?

What’s frustrating is that I can’t really talk to anyone else about this memory.  I doubt my parents would recall one little playground from those nomadic years.  I imagine they had barely the time to breathe.  And the details aren’t such that they are common to one particular object, like the other day at work when I described for my coworkers a particular car with a sloping rear window that terminated in a point and we searched Google for an hour and finally found it . . .

Not like that at all.  This playground is mine and very specific to me and my perspective.  Even those that would have seen it would have seen it differently than I did, with all the attached emotions and particulars and that moon, dim but present enough to draw my wandering eye and capture my attention for these so many years.

A memory with no context.

And I realize that there are many other memories about my life that are like floaties dropped over the side of the pontoon that are gently yet persistently gliding away, out of reach.  Only not like floaties at all.  These memories are irreplaceable and forever trapped as just some vague and disconnected set of scenes that play over and over upon the big screen of my mind, with no narrator to help me flesh out the meaning.

And now this post is getting to be too much for me on this dreary, stale coffee Monday morning.  I’m thinking of Aristotle and how there are differences between specifics and particulars and also of the nature of memory and how unreliable a monster ours can be and finally of how most of what we consider to be “meaning” is actually some overwrought thing we choose to derive from, or impose upon, our experiences and that meaning is really way too subjective a thing to seriously contemplate.

But I can make a timeline.  That hit me this morning.  So I’m going to visit some office supply store this morning and pick up some yellow legal pads.  And I’m going to give each of my 43 years a couple pages, and I’m going to start jotting down the details of my life.  Where did I live?  Apartment or house?  Pets.  Cars.  Jobs.  The big things at first.  And then, as time goes by, the little things.  The tail on the donkey, only without the blindfold and all that nauseous spinning.  I will try to fit it all into some knowable and confirmable moment in time.

And Thanksgiving is coming up. We always struggle finding things to talk about during dinner, so my new project should provide plenty of entertaining fodder.  I mean, it is all about me after all.  And that damn moon . . .

[Flickr photo is by Lauri Väin and is protected]