I’m a bit ashamed that I can’t remember her name. She gave me the album, well, disc, with the above song on it as a gift. She told me I listened to music differently than she did. She had a way of saying things without judgment, apology or explanation. I think everyone should always have someone like that to talk to. I burned my trump easy and cheap on mine.
That song wound up being ironic, not in the way the songwriter had intended. I mean I like the song writer, he writes songs and plays them and sings them and they sound like music, I just think lyrically he tries a little too hard for irony. Everyone should have someone like that they call up and tell to go fuck themselves every now and again, because, otherwise, you wind up telling yourself to go fuck yourself for trying too hard to be ironic and that never works well. Ideally you should call up the person without judgment, apology or explanation, but, I’m thinking, not if you can’t remember her name, her number or how her day began.
Me I’m full of apology, explanation and judgment, sometimes when I just have to get all tom waitified I’m full of rag water and blue ruin, sometimes I’ve been drinking cleaning products all afternoon. I drove up to this Thai place to get some food for a friend who is temporarily housebound and the song from the album that I think the record company was expecting to be a hit came up on the random select on my thumb drive which is to mp3’s what the milky way is to celestial bodies; Ghosts upon the Road.
So I get to the Thai place, a place I am so very grateful for on so many levels, and it is the most crowded I have ever seen it. That is seventy five percent of the tables were full. Still, this town has been eating business’s for what looks like at least a decade and I like the idea of that particular business thriving, I like the idea of mostly full tables, I would have even liked if I were inconvenienced, had to wait in line. So I place my order and sit with one of the kids in the little waiting-for-to-go-orders. I mean one of the Thai kids. It’s all one extended family that own and operate. Sometimes the kids have a table with crayons and paper all over it.
The kid had this rubix cube with numbers instead of colors. We talked, non sequitors, giving our own numbers on the ice skating routine that was on the TV with closed caption. “3.1 for the twisty turn, 7.6 for the smile” he’d say. “8.2 for her coach’s worried look, 2.2 for her shoelaces” I’d say. “Do you like elephants?” he’d say. “Is that seven backwards?” I’d say.
The waitress was a bit harried and though people were being polite she had a look about her that I can only describe as Buddhist Anxiety, a reflective, calm anxiety. Heh. She dropped some chop sticks. I picked them up so she wouldn’t step on them when she ran back. This three top closest to me and the kid stopped her on one of her mad dashes back to the kitchen. They were so polite and apologetic she didn’t understand what they were complaining about. Me either. We both caught the phrase “Is this supposed to be spicy?” Which I read the same way she did, she picked up the plate, apologized and said she would have the cook make it spicier. They apologized again and said that it was too spicy. When she left they bent in towards each other for the type of gossip you expect to be something like “Gooks, fuck em, if you can’t speak American right stay the fuck home” instead it was “Well, it is too spicy. My mouth feels like heck itself. Heck in a hand basket, my goodness.”
Funny. One of the first times I was there I had a long conversation with the lady I think of as the stores mommy about adjusting the menu for the local tastes, both of us careful with one another not to suggest that it’s supposed to be hot and that there is a MacDonald’s across the street. When mommy is there I get the curries and Thai dishes made the way they are supposed to be made, made the way that if she allowed herself to show pride she would be proud of. The dish that was “too spicy” was plain old Pad Thai with a mild peanut sauce and no chili’s.
Because they were so busy and the ice skaters routine was over I nodded to the kid and stepped outside. The place next door has always been a point of curiosity for me; it’s called something like Wild Smoke. The first time I went in there I was expecting either a head shop or cheap cigarettes. Today I went in because in its latest incarnation it’s an E-Juice bar.
Heh. In Portland a while back there was one of the many waves of prudishness trying to shut down strip clubs, and, honestly, my opinion one way or the other is academic, though I cringe at censorship and restraint of trade I also find strip clubs mostly sleazy and exploitive and full of patrons whose hands I will not shake. But some entrepreneur came up with the juice bar concept. The prudish wave had something to do with liquor licenses and other stuff I don’t care about, so this entrepreneur came up with strip clubs that served juice. Because it was a perky blonde (well, blonde today at least) who was all glad to see me and asked what she helped me with I told the juice bar/nekkid pole dancing tale.
Yeah, no, neither one of us were flappable. Hmmm, unflappable, no flapping. Here’s what Wild Smokes E-Juice bar is; a whole bunch of flavored fills for electronic cigarettes, oh, and half the place was still a sort of half ass head shop with a big sign that said “These are waterpipes not B** (yes, they actually used asterisks took me a minute to figure out the B word was bong). So the faux blonde and I had a pretty dang interesting conversation about deregulation and regulations and the potential for fuckery and taxation once the FDA figures out what to make of e-cigs. That’s how I knew she wasn’t a real blonde. Well, that and the dark roots. I know, I know, hair color really doesn’t have squat to do with shit or shit to do with squat unless you’re discussing recessive genes. I’m just saying she was as much fun to talk to as the kid who would have given her a 9.5 for smarts and a 1.0 for not saying bong.
So I get the food, drop a buck in the Dhamasala box, tell the kid I’m giving him 10’s across the board and fire up the mighty adequate jeep. Ghosts upon the road comes back on. It’s actually a silly song that is trying very hard to be earnest and deep. It made me a little sad I couldn’t remember her name, the woman who gave me the gift of the disc. She really was too good for me. I’m not being self-deprecating here, and I sure as hell didn’t insult her by ever saying that and she certainly had flaws. I just mean I didn’t treat her as well as she deserved to be treated, she was good people, pretentious perhaps, but shit fire and fuck biscuits the world could use a lot more people whose pretensions are towards kindness and compassion. She also really liked sex. With me. She didn’t know she liked sex so much and it turns out that she did and so I figure I did enough good to make up for the bad.
I broke up with her for my own principles. My morality regarding monogamy isn’t stoic; it really does have to do with my morality on honesty. I’m also very monogamous, in general I’m very loyal to my team, I’m a team player. However, I think every couple or group should be able to figure who what and where they fuck and I think monogamy as a moral principle for its own sake is bullshit. I’m just not going to come home to my partner after having sex with someone else and lie about it, what’s the point in being in a relationship where you have to lie to keep it working? I don’t think either one of us would have started if the ground rules were marginal emotional attachment and fuck whoever you want and I don’t think anybody ever would start up with the ground rules being “I’m going to go ahead and lie to you when the truth makes me uncomfortable, especially when it involves fucking someone or whether or not I remembered to pick up the medication that keeps you from twitching on the floor and dying. Oh, yeah, and I’m going to be real shitty about it if you lie, like saying you’re sorry but you forgot to set the DVR to tape Apocalypse Now when you didn’t do it on purpose.”
I listened to the whole song as I went about my business. Not only is music a real strong memory cue for me, but, and I think this true for everybody, you think about shit like this when you’ve just finalized a divorce. If I were keeping score my sex life has been more like a baseball game than a basketball game, but, you know, if the score were more on things like the dismount, grace, difficulty, not getting ice in my crack during the routine, I’d be a medalist, maybe not gold.
Hindsight wise this isn’t worth the representation of paper that it’s digitally written on. It’s the foresight piece that has me tippity tapping. Oh, and the immediate present. I liked the kid, I liked talking regulations at a not-a-head-shop, I liked bringing food to my friend. Foresight wise I’m powerful glad to recouping my losses, regaining the pieces cut out from me, re-establishing the solid smiling inner pit-bull that is who haredawg thinks of when he thinks of himself. You know how around this time of year people start posting pictures of their Pomeranians with furry reindeer antlers stuck on their heads and maybe ray-bans? That look those dogs have on their face like “I’m a fucking Pomeranian, I have no discernable dignity and yet this offends the place my dignity would be. I might be five pounds of dust-mop hair ball, but I am a predator and I will eat you. Maybe not today, maybe not next week, but I will eat you and you won’t even see it coming, and if I could work the fucking camera I’d take a picture of me eating you and post it on fucking Facebook. It’d go viral ‘ROFLMAO, that dust mop with the reindeer horns is totally eating that fuckwit with the Nikon. I’m sending this to my mom.’” Oh, wait, tangent --- that’s the look my inner pit-bull has had. Very soon he’s going to look like Herschel again, wearing a PSU hoody of his own volition and smiling like he doesn’t need to eat you for validation.
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