Allan Thorne’s blog

Waiting for the end of the world

 

He sat in the bar and drank because that was all that was left to do.  It was a winter afternoon and the light had gone.  The first office workers were getting out on the street looking for cabs, waiting for busses, trying to go home.  A few drifted into the bar needing fortification against the grind.  That wasn't his problem though.  He had left work early.  He was sitting in the bar drinking because all other actions at this time were, in his opinion, useless.  He wondered if this was what it had felt like in Germany in the nineteen thirties, everyday the darkness growing deeper everyday the nightmare becoming more tangible.

 

 It was his curse to be smart.  He read books and newspapers and he could see that things were not going well. Of course few people could see that yet most still believed in the system.  Most still believed that wiser heads were at the controls that there was nothing to worry about.

 

It was his curse to have no capacity for belief, belief in god or a plan or a hope for a happy ending.  Things were not going to turn out well despite what most people might hope. The world was going to hell in a hand basket and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.  He felt as helpless as a man trying to board up the windows of a beachfront home in the face of a tidal wave.

 

Between the smarts and the skepticism he had to be careful whom he talked to. If he told people what he knew they would just laugh and think him a fool or worse a crackpot. What would be the point in the end any way?  The wave was coming across the sea and it would sweep all of them away whether they believed it would or not.

 

The man ordered another drink and thought  "Well at least there is a little more time, a few more evenings of drinking, a few more big meals to be eaten before we find ourselves living under a bridge waiting for the rat heads in the old tin can to come to a boil.”   When it came to that at least he would have his memories.  He could lie down in his rags and his hunger and dream of roast beef and red wine and naked women fresh from the bath.

 

The waitress asked him if he wanted another drink and he said yes even though he couldn't afford it.  The money wouldn't save him and it would be worthless soon anyway so why not buy a memory while he still could.

 

He had been waiting for the end of the world for at least fifty years. It hadn't happened yet but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t.

 

There were the duck and cover drills, which started when he was in first grade. He was told to go into the hall and put his head under his coat. He was warned not to look at the flash. There was a filmstrip that went with the exercise with a cheerful sound track and animated characters.  He had been hearing regular tests of the emergency broadcast system most of his life but they had all been just, "Tests".

 

He remembered helping his mother and father tear up sheets for bandages, fill jugs with water, and barricade a corner of the basement as a fallout shelter against an atomic strike against New York a hundred miles away. Castro had acquired atomic weapons from the Russians and we were getting ready to invade Cuba to disarm him.

 

In the early seventies there were annual race riots in the cities, government troops were firing into crowds of unarmed students, and people had started to notice that the environment was falling apart.  At the time he thought his phone was tapped and he and his friends seriously talked about aliens from another planet showing up to take the faithful away to paradise. As it turned out that was just the drugs talking. (The Drug Years) When he went to college the Club of Rome report had just been issued. He spent the next few years contemplating Malthusian collapse.

 

 After college he moved to Utah to live amongst the Mormons, which didn't help matters much. They were into storing food for the coming end of civilization. They liked to have a lot of ammunition on hand as well. He lived down the street from a business called the Survival Shop.

 

There was inflation, stagflation, and the stock market crash of the Nineteen-eighties. He saw the price of an ounce of silver top fifty dollars and the price of gold push six hundred an ounce. He bought gold as Russian troops massed along the border of Poland. He figured if they were seriously going to try and hold the eastern European countries by force risking in the process, nuclear war the price of gold would double.  As he was leaving the shop with his life savings reduced to three little gold bricks the door alarm short-circuited and the doorframe caught on fire. It was a sign, but he didn't understand what it meant. The Russians stood down. The Berlin Wall fell and the price of gold dropped like a stone. 

 

As the years passed he bought guns. He bought more gold. He bought bags of rice and beans. He kept the guns in a closet. He still had the gold in the back of his freezer. The beans and rice got bugs in them and he threw them out. Some of his friends are still waiting for the aliens. They call them angels now. The environment continues to decline. Specialized species die out every day, but the weed species were going strong. Can you make a viable ecology out of zebra mussels, kudzu, blackberry bushes, rats, pigeons, and cockroaches? It seemed to him that we would find out probably sooner than latter.

 

 

Lunch With Walter

 

Most recently he had been thinking about the economy as a result of a lunch with his friend Walter.  Actually it was more than just a lunch it was more like a weekly seminar in despair.  Walter spent his time reading the financial page and surfing the web trying to figure out what would prompt the onset of the next financial collapse. He could never get out of Walter whether it would be a massive devaluation or a rip-roaring hyperinflation.  Either way when it was all over we would be back to a pure barter economy because the money would be NO DAMN GOOD!!!!

 

 He wondered why he listens to Walter. It was upsetting but still it was more interesting than talking about sex. And Walter seemed to get so much pleasure getting it off his chest. It was the least he could do to let him sound off.

 

Lately a lot of the things Walter had been talking about were beginning to happen. The financial press reported on these incidents as if they were isolated anomalies rather than symptoms of a deeper malaise, as Walter would have it.  Still it was one thing to bullshit about an economic collapse, it was another to actually see the whole house of cards starting to shake.

 

The other day it had really grabbed him by the throat that civilization, as he had known it might be on the verge of coming to an end.  He knew a guy who had lived through the last depression in the thirties as a child.  This guy’s mother had gotten in the habit of picking through other people’s garbage and the habit stuck with her long after the need for it was over.   She went dumpster diving through the fifties and sixties until she was too frail to do it anymore.  This guy was only slightly less scared.  The guy had made millions of dollars in his life but wouldn’t spend more than twenty bucks for dinner.   That was the legacy we were going to leave our children this deep, deep, fear of scarcity.  It was a damn shame

 

He ordered another drink.  There had been a day when he had made plans to survive the end of the world.  But it was clear to him that survival was a young man’s game and he was no longer young.  Everybody has to die some day he thought.  He wouldn’t be happy about it but at least he had lived.  Walter had pointed out how absurd it would be for two million people in the greater Seattle area to try living in the woods.  The sewage alone would make things intolerable very quickly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dentist Appointment

 

 

Nobody likes em!  Well maybe a few but they are sick, sick, sick.  I got off to particularly bad start with dentists.  My adult teeth were very large for my jaw.  As they started to come in they got all crooked in my mouth.  The dentist advised pulling some of my baby teeth prematurely to make room for the new teeth coming in.  The dentist was an old school kind of guy.  He didn’t have much feeling for children.  He came up behind me and told me to hold my mouth open. He got a hold of my head.  Then in one swooping motion he swung around and stabbed me with the needle.  I had no idea what was coming.  It was terrifying.

 

My teeth were soft and I rarely had a dental exam that didn’t turn up a cavity or two or three.  Once I was out on my own I stopped going to the dentist all together except when my teeth started hurting.  My back molars started aching when I was in my twenties.  I thought it might be my wisdom teeth coming in so I went to have them removed. Anesthetic technology had improved a good deal.  The doctor gave me an injection.  Once it started to work he could have sawed my head off and I would not have complained.  He went into my mouth and I could hear him scraping around through the bones of my jaw.  I thought he was just having a look.  Then, blang! I heard the tooth hit the stainless steel bowl.  He had been cutting away and I hadn’t felt a thing.   The doctor gave me a prescription for some painkillers and sent me on my way.  I felt so good I didn’t bother to fill the prescription.  About a half hour after I got home the injection wore off.  It wore off fast.  One minute I was feeling fine.  Ten minutes later I feet like someone had beaten my face with a two by four.  All I could do was lie in bed moaning.  Anne, my wife had to go out and get the prescription filled.  It seemed to take forever.  It was probably the worst pain I have ever been in, so far...

 

For a week after I looked like Howdy Dowdy.  Howdy Doody was a puppet on a kids show back in the early days of television.  He had huge red freckled cheeks.  I felt terrible all the time.  When the swelling finally went down my back teeth started aching again.  It turned out that the aching was caused by pits in my gum between my back teeth that filled up with food and got infected, my back teeth ache to this day.  I have to floss out the pits two or three times a day.  I am never without floss.  You can tell I have been around by the pieces of dental floss I leave behind like Hennery James Olmos in The Blade Runner with his origami animals.

 

Recently there has been a lively debate whether or not we, as a nation, should torture our enemies to get information out of them.  I have never been officially tortured but I did try and have a back tooth drilled out and filled by a Pakistani dentist in Beverly Hills one time.  For some reason the Novocain they gave me had no effect.  As soon as they started drilling it hurt like hell.  The doctor would give me another shot and we would try again with the same results.  It was like I hadn’t got a shot at all.  After an hour of trying the dentist just wanted to get rid of me.  My shirt was soaking wet from sweat. And I was glad to be out of there.  If a cop had been in the dentist office I would gladly have signed a confession to get the pain to stop.

 

Now I am in my fifties.  All my dental sins have come back to haunt me.  I have had several crowns put on and two root canals.  I go to a Japanese woman dentist who specializes in people like me who can’t stand dentists.  She wanted me to get my teeth cleaned four times a year as my gums were receding.  I just wasn’t willing to spend that much money on my teeth.  The hygienist was always giving me a hard time about it.  Finally I said to the hygienist that she and I were pursuing dispirit goals.  I wanted the last tooth in my head to fall out and chook me to death, while she wanted me to go to my grave with a full set of beautifully white teeth.  She has left me alone since.

 

My sons both had to wear braces.  This is almost a modern right of passage.  In former times we would have held the young man down and cut into the skin of his chest or remove his foreskin with a sharp piece if flint as an initiation to manhood.  Now we make them wear a wire contraption in their mouth for years at a time, which limits their ability to eat various foods, periodically causes then pain and embarrasses them continuously.  In the end you get a set of straight teeth that will stay that way as long as you wear your retainer, daily.  Straight teeth mark you as a member of a class of people who can afford to waste money on such things.  It is amazing how much financial sacrifice parent who cannot, in fact, afford the expense of orthodontia will endure to give their children this class marker.  Straight teeth fool your prospective mate into thinking at some deep biological level that you have a superior gene set, that you will be a better mate than most.  Boy will he or she be surprised when junior’s teeth start coming in.  What a train wreck!

 

 A couple of weeks ago I was lying almost upside down with a rubber wedge in between my teeth a dental dam stretched over my mouth and a sexy pair of dark glasses over my eyes to shield me from the bright lights having a root canal.  I had been there a long time.  It occurred to me that I was having an experience that said something profound about life. 

 

What the hell is this talk about intelligent design anyway?  What is so intelligent about the design of teeth?  We have a hard time getting along without them yet they give us so much trouble.  Why couldn’t we be built like sharks that loose old teeth and grow new ones to replace them all through out their lives.  That sounds like an,  “Intelligent design.”

 

What is the point of pain anyway, especially dental pain?  What the hell does dental pain teach me?   What the hell does dental pain do to keep me safe?   Why do we suffer?  If god is in control, if god loves us, why do we suffer?  I have never heard a satisfying answer to this question.  It’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in god.  I seems so obvious to me that we live in an arbitrary, amoral universe.  Why can’t people see that?

 

I was getting excited. Having your feet above your head for long periods of time leads to this sort of thing. The doctor returned with the X ray.  She says she is having trouble finding the third root.  She is small, young, and cute.  When she sets back to work I can feel her small, firm, breast press against the top of my head.  I stop thinking about the existence and/or nature of god.

 

 

 

 

Spank Your Monkey if You Must

But Never Spank Your Cat

 

 

 

When I was a hippie back in seventy-one or two Ann and I lived in two rooms in a large house that had been subdivided into apartments in Denver.  The rooms were on the second floor.  You could come in through the front door, pass the manager’s room, and go up the main stairway or you could come in the back.  There was a stairway attached to the back of the house that ended at a landing outside our kitchen door.  The kitchen door faced east. Next to the door in the south wall was a window that looked out on an alley and the roof of the building across the alley.

 

We had an old American flag that we used as a drape in that window until one day some cops came to our door and made us take it down.  Those were the times.  The police were as interested n unpatriotic acts as they were in dope dealing.

 

We owned a female cat we had gotten from a friend who had rescued her from a bunch of little girls at a summer camp where he had worked the previous summer. She was a very shy cat, sort of a ghost cat.  We owned this cat for years and no one we knew ever saw her.

 

It was the middle of a hot summer night.  I was awakened by chittering sounds in the kitchen.  I had left the kitchen window open to let in some air and another cat had come in through the window.  Our cat was talking to the stranger. When I came into the kitchen the intruder slipped back out the window and around the corner of the building to the landing.  I thought that would be the last of him so I lowered the window so that it was only open an inch or two and went back to bed.

 

I had barely settled down when the noise started up again.  The intruder had come back. Now I was mad.  I grabbed a broom as I came into the kitchen.  I could see the strange cat crouched by the sink.  I took a swat at him with the broom.  The strange cat leaped for the window he had come in but in his panic didn’t allow for the fact that I had partially closed the window.  He slammed against the glass, pushed off the sill, landed on the sink, dropped to the floor and launched himself at the window again with the same results.  Around and around he went crashing into the window jumping back to the sink than down to the floor and then trying to leap out the window but hitting the glass instead. 

 

I stood back in shock and horror.  Finally the strange cat fell to the floor exhausted. I went to the window and opened it all the way.  The cat waited for me to get out of the way then leaped out the window with all his remaining strength.  He must have been trying to reach the building across the ally but he hit some phone lines half way there.  The wires sent him tumbling straight down about twenty feet into the alley.  True to from he landed on his feet.  He didn’t seem hurt by the fall as he made off at top speed.

 

I returned to bed amazed by what I had seen and feeling guilty at the panic I had caused. That cat had obviously thought I was trying to kill him when all I wanted was for him to go away.

 

I am not a quick learner.  I often make the same mistake over and over again.  Often I do not recognize that two situations that look different are actually at some deep level the same.  I think they are different but they are not so I end up with the same unfortunate results.

 

Two or three years later Ann and I were living in a different house.  We had gotten another cat.  The new cat was everything the old cat was not noisy bold and demanding.  We were sleeping on a waterbed at the time.  In my sleep I became aware that my head was washing back and forth rhythmically.  As I slowly came to consciousness I realized that the waterbed was actually moving.  I opened my eyes and was confronted by the source of the disturbance our new cat who had taken a piss on the bed no more than a foot away from my head and was busily trying to bury it in the loose sheets.

 

I was outraged.  It is one thing for a cat to piss outside it’d designated area and quite another to have one piss right in front of your face.  Apparently the cat didn’t think anything of it.  She didn’t run away and I had no problem getting hold of her.   I held her up in front of my face and yelled, “bad cat,” at her.  She didn’t seem to care.  So I decided to up the anti and give her a spanking.  Holding her in one hand I swatted her butt with the other.  That did the trick. In a split second that smug disinterested cat was transformed into a living buzz saw that clawed it’s way up my arm and over my shoulder and away.  I gave chase bare-assed into the living room where she ran under the couch.  Once again I went for the broom to drive her out of there but she had made a clean get away by the time I got back.  By the time I got done changing the sheets and bandaging up my hand and arm I was almost calm enough to go back to sleep. 

 

I don’t know why she peed on the bed in the first place but she never did it again.  As for me well I have given up spanking cats for my own safety as much as theirs.  Cats just don’t understand corporal punishment.  The resent it way too much.

The Bonds of Life

 

 

 

The bonds of life are forged

In blood and sweat,

Piss, and shit,

tears, and cum and snot.

 

Warm sticky fluids

Sweet or bitter as the case maybe

But always salty

Like the Devonian seas

From which we crawled so long ago.

 

I was there in the beginning

In the fever sweat of conception,

In the blood and tears of birthing.

I have wiped your snotty noses

And cleaned your shitty asses

And changed a pissy diaper or two

In the time since.

 

And you are mine now as I am yours,

My son's, your father.

Our fluids flow together

As water flows into water

And passes on down to the sea.

 

 

 

Honey love

 

 

 

You lie there sleeping my beautiful boy.

All is soft.

My heart flows over you, warm and golden

And so sweet as to bring a tear,

In a way that could never happen if you were awake.

Hard and awake defending the boarders of yourself

On guard, probing, vigilant.

Ah but this is why I love you,

Tough and wary as you are,

And this is the price of that love,

That I can only caress you as you sleep

With my honey love

And hope some of the sweetness

Will ooze into your dreams.

 

 

 

I Kiss The Future

 

 

 

After the gross matter that bore my name

Has dissipated, the molecules

Of flesh and bone dissolved.

 

 

When my face is unknown,

And my name forgotten,

When my whispered words of love are lost

In the static of the radio,

In the hum of the light,

In the hiss of a bus on a rainy night.

 

 

I will come to you my future child

In the warm breeze of spring

And kiss the back of your neck

In that sweat spot that your

Grandfather (my son) would never let me kiss.

 

 

Max

 

 

I walked away and broke your heart

Though you were young

And did not know the name

But the heart needs no words

And a heart never forgets a hurt

But gives back blow for blow

So now you break my heart and justice is served

And the balance of misery restored

 

 

 

 

 

Remember Me

 

 

 

A goldfish died today.

You cried.

That is the way of it.

Everything living must die.

The mist of sadness and loss

Grows deeper with each passing year.

But still their is living to do.

A snow flake falls on the silent sea

And that is all there is to it.

 

 

This one brutal truth

I give you.

Straight and hard

Remember me for this.

 

 

 

 

If Only You Knew

 

 

 

A child cries like it's the end of the world

Not knowing that he has a lifetime of

Pain, disappointment, heartbreak, and death

Ahead of him.

 

 

 

 

A Very Important Message I Could Not Understand

 

 

The other day

My new born son

Tried to tell me about oblivion.

 

An experience

That was fresh in his mind

He having only recently

Arrived in the world.

He waved his arms

And crooned at me arching his back

And stretching his neck

Staring at me with an intensity

Out of all proportion to his size.

 

 Well he may know about oblivion,

But he doesn't know much about language

And by the time he finds out about the one

He will have forgotten about the other. 

 

I will just have to go and find out

About oblivion for myself

When the time comes,

But I love him for the effort

He made to save me the trouble anyway.

 

 

 

 

Why I Continue to Feed My Kids

 

 

In a moment of weakness

I let my sorrow show

And my son saw it and told me

That everything would be alright

That I could always live with him

When there was nowhere left for me to go.

He said I was a cool dad,

something worth keeping.

and gave me a hug.

 

 

 

The Simple Pleasures

 

 

I saw a father

Carrying his son

On his shoulders

Up a ramp

To see a ball game

 

 

 

I remember the times

I have carried you

up hills and steep ways.

 

 

At the time I resented

The extra weight

But now I long

For the press

Of your thighs

On my shoulder

Your tiny hands

On my brow.

 

 

 

Now I know

What a rare privilege

It was to carry you,

What a blessing

Your weight was

On my shoulders

 

 

Sept. 1995

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calls Um Like You Sees Um

 

 

My son orders

A vanilla non-fat latte.

 

“If you weren’t my son

I’d say you were a homosexual”

I say.

 

“If you weren’t my father

I’d say shut the fuck up!”

He says.

 

 

An Unpleasant Truth

 

 

 

They made friends at the age of eight.

Ten years on,

One is graduating from high school,

Heading for college.

 

The other,

Is fresh out of a

Juvenile psychiatric ward

Heavily medicated and headed for hell.

 

My son wants to save his friend.

When I point out that this is

Probably a long shot

He gets mad and calls me a terrible person.

 

Life is a tight wire walk

Over the flames of madness and disaster

Many people fall.

 

I was only trying to point this out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waiting for Redemption

 

 

 

He sits across from me

Avoiding my eyes

Talking to anyone but me.

 

There was a time,

When he was young,

When he sat at the table

Pencil in hand

Looking at me expectantly

Waiting for the answer

Waiting to take notes

On what ever tripe

I had to hand him.

 

It is hard but it is just

Every icon must

be thrown down

And trampled in the mud

Before it can be seen for what it is.

 

I must be content waiting

For him to find me again.

Pick me up,

Wash off the mud,

And see if there isn't something there

Of value after all.

 

 

 

 

Bad Dates:

 

 

 

A Scary Date

 

 

In the town of Poulsbo, where I lived for a while there was a little theatre, the Elmo Theatre.     (The School of Hard Knocks)   When I say little I mean it could hold thirty-five people tops.  There were three chairs on one side of the aisle and two seats on the other side.  The lady who sold you a ticket at the window on the street would step through a doorway and sell you a candy bar at the concession stand just inside the door.

 

Several years latter in high school I was interested in a young woman, Lauren Feld.  She was a very cool, very elegant, and very intelligent girl.   Lauren Feld   read literature; she sang in the choir, she was good looking in sixties, girl from London, sort of way.  I was intrigued by her but also intimidated.

 

I heard that Midnight Cowboy was playing at the Elmo.  I had seen this movie and I thought it was something that Lauren would enjoy.  I could shoe her this weird little theatre and the drive up and back would give us a chance to talk. It seemed like the perfect date.  I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked Lauren to go with me to the movie.  She accepted.  I got my parents car for the night and I was off to the races.

 

Everything went beautifully.  We were hitting on all eight cylinders as they say at least until we got back in the car and started home.  I asked Lauren what she thought of the movie.  It was as if she had seen an entirely different movie than the one I had.  Her interpretation as to what had happened in the movie was entirely different from mine.  All my fears came roaring back.  It seemed best to stay quiet.  I was in the presence of a mind that was very different from mine.  No point in revealing to Lauren what a boob I was.  I was never so happy to see a woman get out of my car.  Well actually that’s not completely true.  (See below.)

 

 

An Evening of Academic Terror

 

 

 

After the first paragraph I knew we were in trouble. The lecturer had sighted two obscure modern philosophers I had never heard of and used at least twenty bits of jargon that I could not define. This was obviously a lecture aimed at the inner circle. We had been caught close to the front, practically the first row. I casually looked behind me but there was no polite way out. I counted the lecturer's notes there were at least twenty pages of them. I look around again to see how many are here to actually listen to this turgid crap (a few maybe). Some of her students, maybe a real intellectual or two, the rest, like me, people trying to fill an empty evening trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

 

She was a little bird like thing. Short-cropped hair an elegant black jacket, the collar turned up, the sleeves rolled. She talked fast, made jokes, told stories in different voices. She never actually made eye contact with anyone. Occasionally she would look up into the corners of the room with the intense sparkling eyes of a fanatic. Some of the pictures in the show had been hung very high and I turned to see if she was looking at one I had missed but no. Perhaps she was talking to the angels.

 

 

 

She said these works were about non-meaning.  It's queer she said. (In a Victorian sense.)

Animals become, plants become, fish (and you know what they smell like...) Inanimate objects become animated and want to fuck you or something. Teapots don't pour tea they pour cum.

 

 

He's queer she said. (Not in so many words). He draws muscle men in tutus. He hangs big cocks on everything. There are no naked women only naked boys kissing or drooling cum down the canvas. The gay agenda she seemed to say is to violate all categories, to stand all meaning on its head or better yet destroy all meaning. Nothing is what it appears to be nothing refers to what it should.

 

 

I'm queer she implied (with much winking and a finger aside the nose.) There are precious few female images in the work and no lesbian images. (Later I found a juicy pussy, one the good professor must have missed, in the top corner of one of his pictures. Just one, no more.) I looked around to see how many of the audience were here just to support their saphonic sister.  But it was hard to say as half the audience had been talked into a stupor and catatonic people, whether gay or straight, look pretty much alike.

 

 

 

I took the opportunity presented by this lack of attention to ease my date slowly toward the outside rear of the pack. Ten minutes of shuffling and we were free. We scampered around the corner like guilty school children, giggling madly. Twenty minutes later we snuck back to see how the lecture was doing the professor had the audience, reduced to a few stragglers in front of one of the pictures pointing out a smear of paint which she merrily said reminded her of smeared shit.

 

The artist sure could draw, and he was no slouch as a painter either. I can't help but think that he would have been horrified by this evening of academic terrorism and would have left after the first ten minutes to go home and paint or screw or play with his cat.

 

 

You Can Be Too Happy

 

 

When I separated from my wife  (The End of a Marriage) I put an ad in the paper hoping to meet a woman who was in the arts in someway.   A woman named Margie answered my ad.  She was a photographer and a set designer for the local opera company.  We made a date to meet and go for a walk.  The day of the date it was raining like hell.  I had to make a choice between looking cool and arty and being comfortable.  I decided on comfort.  I put on a fleece jacket, an anorak, a pair of hiking boots, and a felt hat.  I looked like your typical middle aged, middle class, old Seattle hippie.

 

When we met Margie was all in black.  It was raining so hard she wanted to go to a bar.  I had brought some of my photo.  Margie showed me her photos.  I told her my story. I was nervous and when I am nervous I tend to giggle.  I was trying to be funny and engaging. She told me hers story.  Her last boyfriend had shot himself.  I thought she was attractive and as the meeting wound down asked her if she would like to go out on another date.  She looked at me and said.  “I don’t know.  I think you are just to cheerful for me.”  It was like getting slapped.  My humor is nothing more than a thin film of light over a deep pool of despair and loneliness.  I spent the last few minutes of our meeting trying to reassure her that I was just as depressed as the next guy but to no avail.  She would have none of it.  I’ll tell you being rejected because I was too cheerful was galling.

 

 

Several weeks later I was talking about going to the movies with an old girlfriend who I was seeing socially.  It was just after the holidays.  She was feeling down and wanted to see something light and cheerful.  Generally I am not interested in cheerful movies.  They always seem artificial and contrived.  In any event a cheerful movie looses nothing by being seen on a small screen so I tend to rent cheerful movies and save my money for epic movies that require a big screen to be really appreciated.  Nonetheless I agreed to go and we got in the car.   Half way to the theatre, with out much thought I said, “I don’t need to see cheerful movies.  People say I’m too cheerful as it is.”  I had forgotten that I had not told her about my date.  She thought this comment was aimed at her.  That it was a snide comment about the state of her mental health.  She got mad.  And once mad there was no way of mollifying her.  I turned the car around and was going to take her back home but she insisted I drive her to the movies.  She was going whether I came along or not.  I dropped her at the show and that was the last I ever saw of her.

 

I see Margie all the time at art shows and gallery openings.  We really did have a lot in common.  Part of me is sorry that I blew the chance to be with her.  Part of me is thankful.  I could have ended up dead like her last boyfriend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philosophy and Hotdogs

A poem I found at a hotdog stand

 

 

It is nine thirty on a Sunday morning.

I go to Home Depot to buy a wrench.

On my way out I stop at the coffee stand.

 

The attendant is young, tall, and beautiful.

 

Me-  “Is it too early for a hotdog?”

 

Her-  “Is it ever too early for a hotdog?”

 

Me-  “Well if they are still frozen, yes.”

 

Her-  “It’s never too early for a hotdog.”

 

Me-  “My god we are descending into philosophy and it isn’t even ten AM yet.”

 

Her-  “It’s never too early for philosophy.”

 

Me-  “It is usually to late.”

 

She hands me my hotdog and looks directly at me with unearthly pale blue eyes.

 

Her-  “Do you know where the condiments are?”

 

Me-  “Yes I practically live here.  My joke is that I am in an experiment to see if a human

           can live on hotdogs alone. It’s for NASA, The Manned Mission to Mars.”

 

Her-  “It seems to be working so far.”

 

Several minutes later, driving away, I think

If I were thirty years younger and a foot taller

I would be in love.