September 2003 Archives

i had dinner with damara tonight.

i first met her in the student union at the university of michigan. she was there for a national co-op conference and i was about to move to santa cruz, where she lived. i remember that moment vividly. finding her in a vast, empty hall. exactly the person i needed to meet.

she invited me to crash when i came to visit the following week. a month later, i ended up living with her and twenty-four others in her big co-op victorian on top of beach hill. we shopped, ate, cleaned, and decided everything together. done by concensus. my life at twenty.

now i'm thirty-one. damara is a lawyer. but despite her warnings of looking old she looks as i remember her. and speaks and sounds and reacts as i remember her. which is all good. she was my guardian angel back then, lifting me from the miserable michigan winter to the beauty of santa cruz. getting me drunk when i turned twenty-one on long island ice teas. me and her and jila-la-la stumbling down the street arm in arm. playing trash softball. being young.

we eat sushi and rehash the past five years since we last saw each other. reminisce over the rest of our old housemates. remembering old stories and telling some new ones. damara says, "you're lucky. that's what i remember about you."

and i am. i have the most fantastic luck. it just isn't always good.

~ ~ ~

jeez. post some pie fight pictures and all of a sudden you've got non-stop traffic from the ultimate messy directory.

uh.

i guess i'd just like to say, "welcome, but please clean up after yourselves." and i may regret this, but do you want to tell me about it? mess is not my thing, really, but hey. i like a good story.

kathrin irons numbers onto her jersey for vollyball. lisa comes home, her arms wrecked from climbing at the gym. i'm home from dinner with rachel, her mom, and ed. the first real meal i've gotten down since thursday. stomach's been acting up. i've been trying to put some things to bed that weren't feeling tired. things that want to stay up and cry and kick and wail. quiet, please, they're napping now, these things. it took forever to get them down. since april. since november.

we sit on the sofa, lisa, kathrin, and me, watching charlie sheen on a sitcom. laughing at how the commercials are funnier than the shows. just dumb television. happy to have something to distract us from our weight. we fit, the three of us. i look around the room. max the poodle flopped on his bed, kathrin and lisa smiling and sad at the same time. i laugh cause i'm smiling and sad.

charlie sheen jabbers about seagulls while my mind wanders to the emails i sent saturday. i opened up a little. wrote people i haven't felt able to. people i've been afraid of. cheryl had said, "what you wanted was family" and all these tiny cogs clicked into place. not that i didn't know that i wanted a family someday, but i didn't match that vague need with what i lost in last year's relationship disaster. and they fit perfectly. last year i found my family, my ability to make family, to be husband and father, and lost it to circumstances none of us forsaw. and now i don't know. i've still got that ability. that's not lost. i still have that need, even if i'm not ready to look at it. so now what? send some emails and say you're sorry and what? what can you say?

there's a tragically hip song i quote often;

"there's no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and yea, the human tragedy consists in the necessity of living with the consequences under pressure."

and fuck it. you just do the best you can. and apologize when that's not very good.

i retreat to my room to fold laundry and listen to neil young. i haven't put harvest moon in since april.

neil sings, "i never saw a woman look finer // i used to order just to watch her float across the floor." and i turn it down a little. things are sleeping. let's let them rest.

it's almost yom kippur, so i'd like to say i'm sorry. for the things i've done this year to hurt you. whether i meant to or not. whether i knew about it or not. i'm sorry. i hope you'll forgive me because i forgive you.

my almost-friend wrote this poem on her blog.

"and what's just a memory to you now
feels like everything I have"

all i can say about that is that i know exactly what she's talking about.

~ ~ ~

i finally got introduced to Michael Tilson Thomas today. he shook my hand and asked me how long i'd been at the symphony for.

since March, i said.

it was a brief conversation.

~ ~ ~

earlier today, joycie and i borrowed my bosses car to do a costco run for the engineers who are helping us record Mahler 4. my boss had been having trouble with it and i said, on the way out, that it would be typical for us to get to costco, buy all this stuff, and have the car not start.

which is exactly what happened. and man was it hot. and we had to run back and forth to the pay phone calling my boss and AAA and his wife and in between wiggling this wire or thumping that hot piece of metal (wearing my new clothes no less!). finally, i turn to joyce and say, you know, sometimes you just can't fight fate. you just have to take it. she agrees, and turns the key one last time.

which is when the engine catches.

so maybe that's a bigger message for me (and us?). sometimes the only way things will work is if you stop pushing.

there's an Eels song, P.S. You Rock My World, that goes:

Laying in bed tonight I was thinking
and listening to all the dogs
and the sirens and the shots
And how a careful man tries to dodge the bullets
While a happy man takes a walk

And maybe it's time to live

Maybe it's time to live.

even if everything i have is just a memory to you.

we had our housewarming party this weekend. at the dump. that's what we call our flat; the dump.

seems we all moved in here post relationship.

we had an afternoon bbq, 'cause our neighbors don't like the loud nights. i think there were people here from at least eight different countries. brasil, korea, france, japan, germany, india, turkey, portugal... not bad. we drank a lot of beer.

this is the dullest blog post i've ever written.

you should skip reading this one.

time just takes more time than i thought.

at the bar, a johnny cash song comes on the jukebox.

i raise my glass and say to stacy, "to johnny." the guy at the table next to us overhears and raises his glass too. "to johnny." his table responds, all raising their beers. and the table next to them and the one beside that as well. i quietly propose a toast and the whole bar joins in. all of 'em--the hipsters and the fratkids and the locals and debutantes--all of them raise their glasses to salute the man in black on the eve of his passing.

i'm not sure there's a more distinguished measure of success in the history of man. as my friend rico says, "johnny cash is dead and now the world kicks ass that much less."

and as a bachelor living with two attractive women, i'd like to salute john ritter, too. he wasn't johnny cash, but fifty-four is too young to go.

there was a little girl, named Pesye, born in Kalerka, in the Ukraine. a town which no longer exists. her father was a tailor and a jew. she and her family and their livestock lived in a small home consisting of just a few rooms. at the time, she was the youngest of six.