turns your shine back to rust

it was early and i was tired. i found myself waiting on nothing in particular in the same dark corridor i had found myself the night after losing my virginity and now i was smoking a pointless joint and laughing only half sincerely at a guy who had managed to memorize the abc's backwards imputing little personal comments in there to fill out a sort of iambic pentameter to the whole thing. this wasn't so much the significant part, it was just the part there was. in fact, at the time, my life wasn't so much made up of significants and non-significants, it just sort of was. it was blurbing by with little clouds of chit chat above it from the sunday funny papers. it was better than nothing and i'm glad for it now, but that night, i had a headache and getting stoned wasn't helping. usually it did. i remember when i was younger and any physical ailment could be cured by pot. headache: smoke a joint. sore back: hit the bong. cancer: steamroller hits. aids: shotgun it, walmart bag style. i kept saying over and over in my head, to this kid with the damn abc's song to shut up before i realized i wasn't saying it out loud. if i remembered right i had taken a few diazepams a while earlier and was reduced to wall leaning for security. balance was all i had, and that wasn't much.

that night, earlier, my girlfriend had broken up with me and i was about as upset as, well, any teen boy faced with the reality of no regular sex would be. i didn't love her. i never had. she didn't love me either; it was a mutual agreement to satiate a physical need we both had. we gave it the name only because the idea of either one of us with someone else somehow violated our silent contract. we were human, and that meant jealous, sometimes unstable creatures. so that was the arrangement. sex with each other, no sex with others, everything else was open territory. only, she didn't keep her end. little by little i started suspecting that maybe she was breaking the deal. when you're a kid a deal is all you've got, and if that deal relates to sex, it's all you care about too. and so it was for me. i never spied on her or anything, but she didn't keep it well hidden. i think it had been going on for a while and she just got braver and braver.

in retrospect, i'd like to think that i would have turned down sex form some other source, but the truth is, i don't know. you see, i never had another option. women who discover their sexuality at a young age are in a unique position to get what they want from virtually any male in shouting radios. she was one of those.

so i'd sat her down and told her that all of it was ridiculous, that she needed to tone it down, keep her legs together (a comment i've since learned does not do over well with the female gender) and quit being so easy. she asked if i wanted her to stop being easy with me. i said, that was different, she was girlfriend. she said only because we slept together. i said that was enough. she said it wasn't. i told her i'd give her another chance. she laughed and walked off. i did bong hits.

and that's how i came to find myself leaning against a wall, tired of half sincere laughing and wanting nothing more than a lose brick to fall dead into this fucking scrabble monkey's face. but it didn't. bricks didn't fall that day. they haven't really since either, when i think about it, though not for lack of hoping.

at that point in my life i suppose i'd run the shit-hope theory into the ground and like i said, i was tired. but the damn kid just kept going. every time he finished, he started over. i leaned down, picked up a palm-sized rock and threw it at him. he quieted down after that and i could hear better. hear myself repeating the last two days in my head over and over again. Catching her with that fucking guy, her laying there, no move to put her clothes back on after he'd left, just laying there and chatting with me, like nothing had happened. she even asked me if i wanted to. i didn't. this was the first in a line of didn't want to's in my life and i suspect that most of them are a sort of reflection on that one. she hadn't really done anything wrong, but when you're a kid that doesn't matter. not much does really. what does is that what you wanted isn't what happened. anyway, i don't know why all this came up really, and i'm not sure why i even went into it, but strangely, i feel like there's more to say about all this. so i will, when the time comes.

Anyway, so standing there, watching all this happen in the background of my life I started thinking about sex in general. About it�s hold on me, why it was there. Of course, I knew what all the books said about it, that sex was a drive for everyone and that everyone wanted it, but that aside, what the hell I was doing having just slept with woman twice my age in Vancouver, b.c. or, for that matter, what the hell I was doing there in the first place? I mean, when things go wrong, people have places they go: a certain park, or a playground, or a pond, or into heir room, or into a bottle, but I wasn�t one of those people. I never really had a place. So why, having just broken up with a girl I didn�t really care about had I taken off to Canada for no real reason? Your guess is as good as mine.

Getting back to where it started. The sex disease. The want and need and pull of it. So I did alright, I made it through. Stood there, listening to jackasses I hadn�t met before and one I had and we were talking about where to go, what there was to be done.

This guy, brian walked up, a guy I knew from before, said he got a job driving this old Cadillac from b.c. to seattle. Said the guy�s was paying him ten grand US a trip and we all know what that meaned. He said he could get us a gig doing it too. I wasn�t really interested. The year had been too easy-going, filled with much and little at once. I wasn�t interesting in moving codeine or crank or whatever it was. Seems like poor business, besides, I still had a bit of cash left from eh trip up there. Anyway, I wasn�t all that interested in much these days. My memory was rusting, and rust is heavy. The last thing I needed was more of it. No, I think, thought then it was best to go without remembering. Forgetting was/is the key. Brian also had a few hundred geltabs on him, so I ate a few and decide to go for a walk. I find this nice little park area and laid down, wait for the sunlight to hit. Not the real sun, of course, but the oncoming acid-sun, the sun that rings our brains dry and makes me buzz. Thought is lost and free here. Coming out, you remember only the overall idea, the rest isn�t important. I agree with acid and it agrees with me. At least that day it did, I did.

The trip was mellow, that�s pretty much all I remember about it, a few random other things, I remember fucking Rebecca again before I left and then sort of floating back down home and wondering what the next year would smell like.

I know now, it smelled like the rest, a little more sordid maybe.

So colorful rates the day and I am walking around, the sun has come on and I am walking the Victoria bay area. There is a street musician with a bob Dylan meets john mellencamp sound to him, singing lady sings the blues and I listen for a while, drop a few coins and ponder the best way to drown myself in the sounds of earth. The fairy ride was uneventful and all I can say for sure is that nothing significant happened that trip. Nothing new. I am Murphy. I am Becket�s plaything. And this is all I need right now. To be stark, lonely sitting here, missing someone who isn�t missing me, and won�t. would it be worth missing them if they were missing you?

So I walked, because there is nothing else to do, I watched picnics on the grass by the water, I watched children picking flowers (they shouldn�t have) and carry them to smiling mothers and fathers. I watched hemispheres turn and knew, that right then, none of these people cared about humanity, they were just eating drinking, being merry. Tomorrow they may die. They are right by accident. Most people are.

Life, that day, was the opening bass riff form californication, a gentle bump, like a slip of the hand, like rhythm without knowing it, like soul splattered, filled by daylight but not meant to be, just oracle hours and we�re waiting, we always have been. Answers don�t lie in the sun, but in the waiting itself. I am waiting. And no new tides are coming through. Maybe running is waiting.

When I got back home a few days later, life was the same, it was building and folding and enveloping all of us, everywhere around me. Everything had moved on, I felt like a turn had been reached in my life, the waiting wanting of a thing I didn�t really wait for or want but waited and wanted anyway, but days rolled by. Hardly anyone saw the change. It was the last of the before and the first of the next. Understand?



2003-12-22 | 2:30 p.m.
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